27th
Ask Michael! The Africa Edition
Africa: what the fuck? AIDS, genocide, massive corruption - I get sweaty just thinking about it. My grasp of the background material is patchy at best, so I got former activist and bon vivant Michael R. to produce this abridged explanation.
Q: Is Africa doomed? Also, what the fuck?
A: Africa is, of course, in very serious crisis, with the situation being particularly egregious in Sub-Saharan Africa, the area most people are talking about when they refer to the crisis in Africa. It is the continent that is home to the majority of those countries classified as Least Developed Countries by the UN (33 of the 49). In concrete terms the LDC label means (1) an annual Gross National Income of less than $750.00 per person (given that this is an average that includes all of the ridiculously rich kleptocrats, the situation for the average person is even worse than that number suggests), (2) a human resource weakness based on deficits in nutrition, health, education and literacy, (3) an economic vulnerability in the form of unstable agricultural production, limited productive economies marked by poor return on exports, the decline of traditional economies and a percentage of the population displaced by disasters. The reality that such a situation is not easily overcome is brought home by the fact that when the UN graduated Cape Verde out of this category in 2007, this marked only the second time this had happened, the first example being Botswana in 1994. The UN has identified civil war, ethnic strife, political corruption in the forms of authoritarian state structures, warlordism and kleptocracy, and the AIDS epidemic as significant contributing factors in many of these countries.
The stats for the latter problem are truly mindboggling: although only slightly more than 10% of the world’s population lives in Sub-Saharan Africa, 68% of adults and almost 90% of children infected with HIV live there. In 2007, 76% of AIDS deaths worldwide occurred in this region (1.6 million of 2.1 million). In the same year, another 1.7 million people in the region were infected, raising the regional total to 22.5 million, 61% of these being women. Not surprisingly, AIDS has created 11.4 million orphans in the region. In the most hard-hit countries of Southern Africa, 15% of adults are infected, with 35% of the world’s people living with HIV concentrated in the sub-region. Southern Africa also accounted for 32% of AIDS death worldwide in 2007.
Add to this the deaths that have occurred as a result of civil war and ethnic conflict. Again the biggest concentration is in Sub-Saharan Africa, with wars occurring in 28 countries since 1980. The greatest part of the responsibility for this situation lies with European colonialism, which created artificial borders that represented imperialism’s interests and not those of the pre-existing African nations. All of Africa’s modern nation-states encompass distinct peoples thrown together in ways certain to create and exacerbate ethnic tensions. Add to this the fact that Europeans were encouraged to settle in these countries, creating race-driven, dominant minority elites. When one considers the ethnic strife that has bubbled below the surface and occasionally flared into the open in the wealthy and stable conditions that mark Québec, it is easy to see why the ethnic stress in the artificial nation-states created by European imperialism, where conditions of extreme poverty and suffering reign, has spiralled into such extreme violence. These are conditions that make those that led to the meltdown of the former Yugoslavia in the ‘90s pale by comparison.
Were these conditions not explosive enough, the effect of the Cold War on Africa can’t be overlooked. During the Cold War, both the US and the USSR armed and supported various military factions throughout the continent. The US alone flooded the region with $1.5 billion worth of weapons, primarily in the form of small arms. Several examples might prove useful in outlining what this means in practice. Angola, for instance, has seen more than 500,000 people killed since 1989. Since the outbreak of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1998, 5.4 million people have died, 47% of them children (although in the DRC children make up only 19% of the population) – the monthly death rate exceeds 4500, and there are 1.5 million internally displaced refugees. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch informs us that in Sierra Leone, since the outbreak of war in 1991, 50,000 people have been killed, and 1 million displaced. More than a quarter of the forces fighting in that war on all sides are child soldiers. During the Rwanda Genocide of 1994, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed in a little over 2 months. And that’s only 4 of the aforementioned 28 countries.
The colonialism that led to this situation also led to economies oriented towards cash-crop plantations and raw material extraction, that is to say, economies geared towards the extraction of wealth with no concern for the indigenous population beyond their role as a pool of cheap labour. When European imperial power began to fade in the post-World War II period (the direct result of the fragmenting and weakening of Europe as a result of two World Wars – perhaps better referred to as the two European Inter-Tribal Wars – and the rise of liberation movements in the Third World), a local elite arose. This elite, almost always drawn from only one of the numerous ethnic groups within the borders of the nation-state, for the most part simply enriched itself by leaving the overall nature of the economy unchanged – hence the kleptocracy moniker.
But this isn’t to say, that the problems in Africa are the result of local graft and corruption; the outcome is embedded in the World Bank/IMF policies forced upon the newly “independent” nations – the Social Adjustment Policies or SAPs. Part of the so-called Washington Consensus (there’s a shock), SAPs oblige recipient countries to structure their economies with a focus on debt repayment and development of interest to the industrialized countries, with the obvious negative impacts in the areas of health, education and on-going development.
In order to receive the aid, these countries are obliged export increasing amounts of what they produce simply to fulfil their debt obligations, and they must do so in a situation in which they find themselves in price wars with other poor nations similarly constrained. As the prices of their goods are pushed down, the country is forced to export even more in an endless cycle of impoverishment – one that is very good for the western consumer. The outcome is one that the American economist J.W. Smith has called “the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth from the periphery to the imperial center in history.” The peacetime part of this equation is not especially clear, given that the policies in question have fuelled a steady stream of food riots and civil wars throughout Africa.
Even the economics of this “transfer” are by their very nature impoverishing. Africa primarily exports undervalued (cheap) raw materials (Oxfam tells us that more than 50% of the export income of an African nations will be derived from a single commodity), while being forced to import comparatively expensive finished products.
The following quote from a 1999 interview with former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere is offers some insight into what this means in practice:
“I was in Washington last year. At the World Bank the first question they asked me was “how did you fail?” I responded that we took over a country with 85 per cent of its adult population illiterate. The British ruled us for 43 years. When they left, there were 2 trained engineers and 12 doctors. This is the country we inherited.
When I stepped down there was 91-per-cent literacy and nearly every child was in school. We trained thousands of engineers and doctors and teachers.
In 1988 Tanzania’s per-capita income was $280. Now, in 1998, it is $140. So I asked the World Bank people what went wrong. Because for the last ten years Tanzania has been signing on the dotted line and doing everything the IMF and the World Bank wanted. Enrolment in school has plummeted to 63 per cent and conditions in health and other social services have deteriorated.”
So, I think it’s fair to say that Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, has long since imploded, and that implosion is the direct result of the conscious policies of the industrialized nations. And lest Canadians start feeling smug and glancing south, they should keep in mind the centrality of our government in imposing identical policies in Haiti, not surprisingly with identical results.
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