Africa’s Political Skeletons – Part Two By Baba Galleh Jallow As indicated in the last installment, no colonial power anticipated that African countries would become independent as early as they did. The thinking in colonial Britain and France both before and immediately after 1945 was that it would take at least fifty years for Africa to be ready for self-rule. There were indications especially after 1945 that the colonial powers were beginning to accept the fact of eventual African independence and that they were determined to coordinate this effort. No European country believed that Africa was ready for self-rule at the time it attained independence. Indeed, it was a common statement in colonial circles that Africans could not rule themselves and that it would be a disastrous mistake to grant them independence at that point in time. This statement was considered a gross insult by the nationalist leaders who saw it as a continuation of the old idea of Africa as a dark continent of uncivilized savages. Whatever the motives for colonial skepticism over Africa’s readiness for independence, the fact remains that some of the predictions made by colonial authorities – especially the prediction that Africans would mess up within a few years of independence – have proven to be unfortunately accurate. Within a decade of attaining independence, nearly all the new nation states were in severe political and economic crises. One party states had been imposed in many countries, the new economies were in perennial crises as unemployment and poverty shot up, and military coups and civil wars had become a common sight across the continent. But while African governments were largely to blame for these crises, there were other factors both within the new nation states but especially within the international system that severely limited Africa’s choices. African independence was not attained in a vacuum and one should consider both internal and external factors that impinged on the range of choices had and choices made in order to put our current predicaments in proper context. True, Africa had more going for it than against it at the dawn of independence; but the obstacles to growth and development were nonetheless formidable. For one thing, it was clear that no African colony had a sufficient number of sufficiently educated people to assume the most important administrative positions in the new nation states. Unlike the colonial entities, the new nation states needed to have a much more enlarged administrative machinery. Africa needed well qualified government ministers and trained ministry staff, judges, lawyers, legislators, doctors, nurses, directors, teachers, local government administrators and other officers and professionals that it simply did not have. While there were relatively sizeable educated publics in the new countries, these were not enough to fill the needs of independent nation statehood. It was to his credit that Kwame Nkrumah was one of the few independence leaders who both recognized this problem and dealt with it in a practical manner. During the struggle for independence in Ghana between the founding of his Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1949 and the attainment of internal self-rule in 1952, Nkrumah’s policy was “Positive Action,” which translated into a series of protests, strikes and demonstrations against colonial rule and represented a totally confrontational attitude towards the colonial authorities. Once internal self-rule was achieved and Kwame named Leader of Government Business then Prime Minister in 1952, he shifted political gears, dropping his confrontational policy of Positive Action and adopting a collaborative policy of “Tactical Action.” He now significantly toned down his anti-colonial, anti-imperial rhetoric and adopted what has been called a “softy-softy” approach in his dealings with Britain. He not only needed to convince the British Government that Africans were capable of ruling themselves. Equally important, he needed to make sure that the 800 or so British expatriates working in the Gold Coast administration did not abruptly pack up and leave. That would have severely crippled the emergent country’s administrative machinery. So he offered these expatriates competitive salary and benefits packages and reassured them at every opportunity that their jobs were secure and that they were welcome to stay. In the end, only about 20 of the 800 expatriates left the country before independence was granted in March 1957. In the interim, the CPP government was able to train a lot of Ghanaians to take over from the European expatriates. This assured the survival of his civil service. Unfortunately, however, Nkrumah was neither immune to the problems of the international system nor to the personal weaknesses of Africa’s new political leadership, a topic we will return to later in this series. In other parts of the continent where governments did not have the foresight to tackle this serious problem of manpower shortage, the new nation states became saddled with inefficient administrative systems and expended enormous resources in the hiring of expatriate civil servants and professionals to help run their countries. It is important to note at this point however, that shortage of trained civil servants and other professionals did not mean shortage of political-cum-leadership talent; or indeed shortage of human resources. Indeed, Africa was rich in its diversity of political talent and had millions of young people whose mental energies could have been exploited and deployed in the service of the new nations. Sadly, neither the political talent nor the wider human resources of African countries were exploited in a way that enhanced the proper development of the new nation states. We will return to this subject later. While Africa had some of the largest mineral deposits in the world in the 1960s, the new nation states did not have the capacity to exploit this wealth without external assistance. It was after all Africa’s wealth that brought about the European scramble for and colonization of the continent. But because colonialism did not develop the local expertise and technological infrastructure needed to exploit these resources on the ground, the new African countries had to depend on their former colonizers for financial help. In a lot of cases, this help was not too hard to come by because the Europeans had much to gain from it. However, the historical record shows that the vast amounts of money pumped into the continent often went straight into the private pockets of the leaders while corruption within administrations consumed the rest. Almost all African countries are much poorer today than they were in 1960 when the continent could feed itself many times over. One unfortunate fact of African history is that independence was attained at the height of the ideological cold war between communism and capitalism; communism championed by the former Soviet Union and her allies and capitalism by the United States and her allies. This meant that Africa instantly became an ideological battleground, like Latin America and other parts of the former colonized world. The Cold War politics of global ideological containment meant that so long as a government declared itself in support of one of the two ideological camps, it became the recipient of all kinds of financial and military support from the leaders of that camp. Unfortunately, African leaders used the threat of capitalist or communist infiltration to justify brutal crackdowns on dissenting voices and opposition parties in their countries. Newspapers and journalists who were at the forefront of the anti-colonial struggle now found themselves marginalized, jailed, or shut down under the pretext of being communist or capitalist saboteurs and stooges. In this way, some of Africa’s best and brightest minds were silenced and the intellectual resources of the continent carelessly wasted in the name of communism and capitalism. The free marketplace of ideas that enabled every successful nation to develop was given no space to flourish as single party regimes were installed across the continent, soon to be overthrown by military dictatorships that were even less qualified for the tasks at hand. African leaders became increasingly concerned only about lining their pockets and the perpetuation of their powers and neglected the all-important task of nurturing the new nation-states. The results are not lost upon any sane person today. ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to: [log in to unmask] ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤