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The following articles are from the current issue of the Economist
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LEADERS

Hopeless Africa

AT THE start of the 19th century, Freetown was remote and malarial, but also
a place of hope. This settlement for destitute Africans from England and
former slaves from the Americas had become the main base in west Africa for
enforcing the British act that abolished the slave trade. At the start of
the 21st century, Freetown symbolises failure and despair. The capital of
Sierra Leone may be less brutalised than some other parts of the country,
but its people are nonetheless physically and psychologically scarred by
years of warfare, and this week they had to watch as foreign aid workers
were pulled out. The United Nations' peacekeeping mission had degenerated
into a shambles, calling into question the outside world's readiness to
help end the fighting not just in Sierra Leone but in any of Africa's many
dreadful wars. Indeed, since the difficulties of helping Sierra Leone
seemed so intractable, and since Sierra Leone seemed to epitomise so much
of the rest of Africa, it began to look as though the world might just
give up on the entire continent.

It was in response to accusations of indifference towards Africa that the
UN Security Council, at America's behest, started this year with a "month
of Africa". It went well. AIDS, refugees and wars were all on the agenda,
and there were signs that the new concern was not just a 31-day
wonder. The Clinton administration, for instance, has since pressed ahead
with plans to combat AIDS, doubling its budgetary requests to
Congress. Congress, for its part, is backing a bill that will ease or
abolish trade restrictions for 48 African countries. The World Bank and
other donors showed last month that they were ready to intensify the fight
against malaria, a disease that causes misery in Africa. And the UN has
gone ahead with its peacekeeping plans, sending 8,000 troops to Sierra
Leone and pledging another 5,500, all being well, for Congo.

All, however, is not well. Since January, Mozambique and Madagascar have
been deluged by floods, famine has started to reappear in Ethiopia,
Zimbabwe has succumbed to government-sponsored thuggery, and poverty and
pestilence continue unabated. Most seriously, wars still rage from north
to south and east to west. No one can blame Africans for the weather, but
most of the continent's shortcomings owe less to acts of God than to acts
of man. These acts are not exclusively African-brutality, despotism and
corruption exist everywhere-but African societies, for reasons buried in
their cultures, seem especially susceptible to them (see article
<http://www.economist.com/editorial/justforyou/current/index_sf3364.html>).

Sierra Leone manifests all the continent's worst characteristics. It is an
extreme, but not untypical, example of a state with all the epiphenomena
and none of the institutions of government. It has poverty and disease in
abundance, and riches too: its diamonds sustain the rebels who terrorise
the place. It is unusual only in its brutality: rape, cannibalism and
amputation have been common, with children often among the victims. For
this it can thank, above all, Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader brought into
government in an ill-advised "peace" deal last July.

In itself, Sierra Leone is of no great importance. If it makes any demands
on the world's attention, beyond the simple one of sympathy for its people,
it is as a symbol for Africa. Yet the UN has sent troops to Sierra Leone.
Mr Sankoh wants them out, so that he can plunder and torture at will. He
has therefore done his best to terrify them, and their political masters,
by capturing several hundred. The Security Council, meaning the great
powers who can render it useful or supine, is torn by all the usual
arguments. It agonises that it cannot stand idly by, as it did in Rwanda
in 1994. Moreover, it cannot, after all its fine words in January, turn
its back on Africa. But neither can it keep a peace that does not exist,
nor intervene in every war in every corner of the globe. It must beware of
mission creep, and fight only where it can win. African wars are, above
all, matters for fellow Africans.

Caution versus credibility

There is merit in each of these propositions, though some of them are
contradictory. Fortunately, not all. The proper course for the Security
Council now is to authorise troops to snatch Mr Sankoh and put him on
trial, for recent crimes if not for the ones committed before he was given
an amnesty. The UN must be given enough troops, with enough equipment,
training and sophisticated leadership, to quell the rebels. Realistically,
that means that some of them must be first-world soldiers, drawn at least
initially from the British force already there, with a mandate to
fight. And once any fighting is finished, the UN must stay on in Sierra
Leone, as it is staying on in the Balkans, to wage peace. In short, it
must win.

It must do so, first, for the people of Sierra Leone; second, for the
people of Africa; and, third, for the people of any country similarly
threatened in the future, which is another way of saying for its own
credibility. A Somali warlord, Muhammad Aideed, sent the Americans
scuttling from Africa in 1993. If another thug can with impunity see off
the entire UN, the organisation may as well go out of business. That does
not mean that it should also send troops to Congo: the situation there is
far more complex, and even more dangerous. But if the UN, whose recent
history is littered with meaningless vows of protection in "safe" areas,
is forced by the parsimony or fears of its first-world members to cut and
run in Sierra Leone, warlords everywhere will take it as a licence to act
at will. In Africa especially, nothing would do more to justify despair.


SPECIAL

The heart of the matter

Africa's biggest problems stem from its present leaders. But they were
created by African society and history

FLOODS in Mozambique; threats of famine in Ethiopia (again); mass murder in
Uganda; the implosion of Sierra Leone; and a string of wars across the
continent. The new millennium has brought more disaster than hope to Africa.
Worse, the few candles of hope are flickering weakly.

For a brief moment in the mid-1990s, there were signs of improvement. World
Bank figures showed a clutch of African countries achieving economic growth
rates of more than 6%, enough to lift most of their people out of poverty in
years rather than, as more usually predicted, in decades.

At the same time, multi-party democracy spread across the continent. A new
crop of leaders emerged: Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Yoweri Museveni in
Uganda, Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia. This "new breed" wanted to make life
better for all their people by providing basic health care and education.
They seemed to understand that peace and good government were essential.
Though most of them had been socialists, they embraced the free market.
Democracy and liberalisation seemed to flourish. There was talk of an
"African renaissance".

It was an illusion. The new leaders became embroiled in wars, some with
each other, and the cheerful statistics were the result of good rains and
bad accounting. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole had a growth rate of less
than 3% in that period, which just about kept step with the rate of
population increase. So no one was getting richer.

The figures-not to mention the recent crop of disasters and wars-now
suggest that Africa is losing the battle. All the bottom places in the
world league tables are filled by African countries, and the gap between
them and the rest of the world is widening. According to Paul Collier of
the World Bank, only 15% of Africans today live in "an environment
considered minimally adequate for sustainable growth and development." At
least 45% of Africans live in poverty, and African countries need growth
rates of 7% or more to cut that figure in half in 15 years.

Only three countries in sub-Saharan Africa-Congo-Brazzaville, Angola and
Rwanda-are growing that fast. The first two are oil producers, and oil is
notorious for destroying other economic life forms in Africa. Rwanda's
growth is aid-driven. Last year, sub-Saharan Africa as a whole grew by only
2.5%. Most of these countries cannot do better, says the Economic Commission
for Africa, because, apart from South Africa, Botswana and Mauritius, they
lack the basic structures needed to develop. AIDS deaths are rising,
especially among the young urban middle class who could bring about Africa's
political and economic revival. The next generation will be more numerous,
poorer, less educated and more desperate.

Does Africa have some inherent character flaw that keeps it backward and
incapable of development? Some think so. They believe Africa's wars,
corruption and tribalism are "just the way Africa is", and that African
societies are unable to sustain viable states. In the past, outsiders would
have described Africa's failure in racial terms. Some still do. They are
wrong, but social and cultural factors cannot be discounted.

Others blame the way the rest of the world has treated Africa, citing
exploitation going back to the slave trade and European colonial rule. They
blame cold-war rivalry for propping up greedy dictators in the first 30
years of African independence, and now they trace the continent's failures
to debt, exploitative trading relations and too-strict demands for economic
reform from the IMF and the World Bank.

Neither theory, by itself, can explain why Africa is the way it is. Those
who see the continent as the victim of external forces must accept that
parts of Asia, too, were subject to rapacious colonialists and have, within
a generation after independence, established viable states and successful
economies. Even where they fail, Asian countries do not blame their past
imperial masters. Those, on the other hand, who think Africa is
self-destructing must accept that its failings are not unique. There is
tribalism in Bosnia and Ireland, dictatorship in North Korea, corruption
almost everywhere. In short, Africa's troubles are not exclusive to Africa.
But their combination is.

Nature's bad hand

Africa was weak before the Europeans touched its coasts. Nature is not kind
to it. This may be the birthplace of mankind, but it is hardly surprising
that humans sought other continents to live in. The soils are often poor
and thin, lasting only a few planting seasons. The sun burns and the rain
either does not come at all (Ethiopia) or comes in floods that wash
everything away (Mozambique). The beasts and bugs are big, and they
bite. Diseases fatal to man-and to his crops and animals-thrive.

The few humans who survived in Africa lived in small, hardy, Iron-Age
communities in a huge variety of social organisations speaking thousands of
languages. Most were small kingdoms, deeply conservative; they were geared
to survival in Africa's fickle climate, not to development. When nature
allowed, they tended to celebrate rather than plan for a tomorrow that
might never happen. Today, still, Africans' strongest qualities are
fortitude to the point of fatalism, close family and communal ties,
tolerance and an ability to enjoy life. But their societies are also
distrustful and bad at organisation. Most African businesses are
one-man-bands that rarely survive the death of their founder.

By the mid-19th century, when Europeans began to penetrate the interior,
Africa was reeling from upheavals, caused mostly by the demand for slaves.
In the east, Arab slaving gangs cut deep into central Africa. In the west,
slaving kingdoms and roaming warlords seized millions of men and women for
sale in other parts of Africa and the Americas. In the south, the Mfecane,
a massive movement of fleeing and marauding peoples, wiped out hundreds of
other small communities and produced the Zulu empire. No wonder the
Europeans, using mostlyAfrican troops, found it so easy to take over Africa.
The continent was already exhausted by predatory bands and wars.

The most damaging impact of imperial rule on Africa was neither economic
nor even political. It was psychological. In most places, effective
European rule lasted a couple of generations or less: just long enough to
undermine African societies, institutions and values, but not long enough
to replace them with new ways of life or establish new systems of
government. Colonialism, in short, undermined Africa's self-confidence. A
full 40 years after independence, it still looks to Europe and America for
aid, goods, services and guidance. One example: the East African reported
recently that a white foreigner had been appointed to head the Kenya
Commercial Bank, since "it became clear that the appointment of an
indigenous Kenyan might lead to a run on the bank."

African states were not forged by ethnicity, nationalism and war. They were
simply bequeathed by departing imperial powers who left highly centralised,
authoritarian states to a tiny group of western-educated Africans who
rushed in and took over. Some of those states, such as Congo, were
established by Europeans as businesses to be milked for profit. Their
successors simply continued the practice. Africa has an abundance of
valuable minerals and some good land, attracting outsiders to extract the
raw materials and ignore the rest. Independence often meant little more
than a change in the colour of the faces of the oppressors.

Tribalism at the top

The new rulers made few changes on the surface, except to tweak
constitutions to favour those in power. The African state, as invented by
Europeans, has been neither deconstructed nor reconstituted. In some
places, however-as in Somalia-it has been destroyed. The new elite
proclaimed national unity and denounced tribalism; but they soon found,
like the imperial powers before them, that manipulating tribal affiliation
was essential to preserving power.

It is not just unluckly coincidence that Africa has had such a poor crop of
leaders. Leaders emerge from a society, and they remain a part of it. The
proof of this can be seen every day in the waiting rooms of Africa's
presidential palaces. Slumped on the sofas will be diplomats waiting for an
audience, foreign businessmen-often dodgy ones-looking for a contract, and
members of the president's family or clan in search of money for school fees
or a funeral. Whatever the diary says, most presidents try to satisfy the
family first. The demands of Africa are more powerful than those of the
outside world.

In most countries, a man standing for office tries to demonstrate that he
shares the concerns of the common man. In Africa, a politician has to show
that he has escaped from ordinary life: that he is a "Big Man", powerful
and rich, a benefactor far above the people whose support he seeks. Many
African leaders grew up in dire poverty, and like to demonstrate their
change of circumstances through conspicuous displays of western
wealth. Few African palaces have anything in them made in Africa.

By personalising power, African leaders have undermined rather than boosted
national institutions. The recent apparent spread of democracy in the
continent is often a sham. Traditionally, African societies, with a few
exceptions such as those of the Somalis or the Ibos in Nigeria, were not
very democratic, though many had checks on the powers of the ruler. Today,
only a few countries have a middle class, a body of professionals and
businessmen with an allegiance to a national entity, laws and institutions
which they regard as greater than the ruler or his party. Zimbabwe, which
should have such a middle class, has shown in recent weeks that, apart from
a few brave judges, officials consider their allegiance is owed to the
president, not to the state.

Not only officials think this way. So do most Africans who live, as many
do, at subsistence level in the countryside. Their loyalties are regional
or tribal, and they support the president because he is the big chief. "I
will vote for you when you are president," challengers are sometimes told.

The state and the president are often viewed as the same thing. Most
African presidents make no distinction between their party and the
government, using the panoply of state institutions in their election
campaigns. They do not find it hard to win. Abdou Diouf of Senegal, who
accepted defeat in an election in March, was only the third African
president to do so since independence four decades ago.

So there are elections in Africa, but little democracy. Some rulers, like
Uganda's Mr Museveni, argue that party elections are actually bad for
Africa, because parties divide people along ethnic lines. Aid donors have
finally rejected Mr Museveni's no-party democracy, and are sceptical of
Ethiopia's opposite experiment with parties based on ethnicity. Nor have
other African countries taken up these ideas. The aid donors, whose support
is essential for African rulers, demand multi-party democracy on a western
model. But they have applied it inconsistently. Cynics call it donor
democracy-just enough fair voting and respect for human rights to satisfy
the aid donors. Certainly, there would be few elections in Africa were it
not for outside pressure.

Yet democracy does not have much to offer Africa. Democracies there are no
more stable than dictatorships, and civil wars are just as common. In the
economic sphere, autocracies may find it easier than democracies to keep to
IMF and World Bank conditions such as tight money supply, low inflation and
fewer civil servants. Sudan, an international pariah with no democracy and
no international assistance, is doing as well as anyone these days, with a
current growth rate of more than 7%. Much of Africa is ruled more by
rainfall than politics.

Shell states

The African ruler finds himself trapped. He wants power and control; but
the outside world makes demands about democracy, human rights and good
governance, which weaken his position and could cost him his job. If he
cannot use the treasury as his private bank account and the police as his
private army, he tries to create alternative sources of wealth and power.
This is why more and more African rulers are turning their countries into
shell states.

On the outside, these have all the trappings of a modern state: borders,
flags, ministers, civil services, courts. Inside, they have been hollowed
out. The supreme master of the shell state was Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire,
which was renamed Congo when he was thrown out in 1997. During Mobutu's
35-year rule, Zaire had ministers and a cabinet, ministries and governors,
officials and diplomats. These appeared to make up the structure of a
government. In fact, they were Mobutu's personal networks, through which he
stole the wealth of Congo.

In the early 1990s, the Ministry of Mines in the capital, Kinshasa, was
empty except for one floor. Its officials used their positions for the
perks: an office with a telephone, perhaps a car. During office hours,
however, they engaged in other business. On the top floor, the minister
presided, protected by a couple of soldiers ("A little sweet for us,
please," they would ask each visitor), and a secretary. The waiting room
was packed with Zaireans coming to beg favours, many of them relatives,
and half-a-dozen Europeans clutching bulging briefcases. They were there
to bribe the minister for mining permits. He could keep the money for
himself, unless Mobutu called him to ask for cash; in which case, he would
have to disgorge some of his takings.

If Mobutu thought someone was becoming too powerful, he would sack him or
even jail him. Once back in favour, however, he might be posted to another
lucrative feeding ground. The state treasury probably never saw a cent; the
people were robbed, often directly and brutally, by junior officials,
soldiers and policemen in the street. When Mobutu was under pressure to
democratise in the early 1990s, he urged his unpaid army to go and loot.
They did, destroying what was left of the country's commerce and creating
chaos-which Mobutu promptly used as an excuse to postpone elections and
make his rule indispensable.

Many people blame corruption for Africa's ills. But that suggests rottenness
in a clean system. In parts of Africa, corruption, like an advanced form of
cancer, has taken over the whole body. Liberia, originally founded by freed
American slaves and provided with a constitution modelled on America's, is
a case in point.

There are parts of Liberia that appear to be normal functioning institutions
of a conventional state. Some ministers are not corrupt, and Mr Taylor
himself can talk to visitors well enough about his worthy aims for the
country. The visitors are often impressed. But are they right to be? What is
happening on the surface may be no clue to the way the country is run
behind the scenes. Mr Taylor recently passed a law that gives him the
right to dispose of all "strategic commodities". These are defined as all
mineral resources, all natural forest products, all art, artefacts and
handicrafts, all agricultural and fishery products and anything else the
president chooses to call "strategic". Liberia is, in fact, Charles Taylor
Inc.

In Kenya and Zambia, powerful politicians, not necessarily the presidents,
use their political positions to amass fortunes which they then use for
political ends. They work through hidden networks, with their placemen in
key positions in important ministries. Kenya still has the remains of a
credible civil service, which, though corrupt, still handles the country's
official paperwork. At the same time, a hidden network intervenes and
blocks whatever is inconvenient for the men who are really in
charge. Zambia has such a network too, more powerful than the state.

Outsiders, particularly the aid donors, have great difficulty dealing with
such states. Officially, World Bank and IMF officials judge all countries
on their stated policies and plans. They deal with the appropriate
ministers and officials. In countries such as Kenya and Zambia, however,
that reassuring surface betrays little about the way the country is run.
Presidents Daniel arap Moi and Frederick Chiluba are both adept at saying
what the aid donors want to hear and, to an extent, delivering what the
donors want to see. But time and again, as soon as the donors' attention
has moved on, a different agenda comes into play.

Donors hope that, in the long run, law and good practice will drive out
corruption. But this seems unlikely as long as Africa is getting poorer.
Prices for most of Africa's commodities have fallen unsteadily but
continually since the 1960s, and sub-Saharan Africa is still mainly a
primary producer. For the moment, industrialisation has passed most of the
continent by. Besides, the money accumulated by the politicians and crooks
in Africa is rarely reinvested there. Most of it, like Mobutu's loot, is
either spent on conspicuous consumption or invested in Europe and America.

So how should the world deal with Africa? Aid is ambiguous in its effects.
When disaster strikes, it is hard to refuse to help. But aid also increases
dependency and can deflect recipient governments from the urgency of the
task. In the Horn of Africa, for example, the aid that helps famine victims
also frees money for Eritrea and Ethiopia to spend on fighting each other.
Abolishing debt would help to create a fresh balance- sheet, but for many
countries debt-relief would only benefit Ukrainian arms-dealers.

Can Africa change? Yes, it can. There are instances from all over the
continent that, in the right circumstances, Africans can greatly improve
their lives. Until the floods in March, Mozambique had been growing at 5% a
year since its civil war ended, culminating in nearly 12% growth in
1997-98. Uganda too had growth rates of 7% in the 1990s. But real change
needs something deeper than quick spurts of growth.

More than anything, Africa's people need to regain their self-confidence.
Only then can Africa engage as an equal with the rest of the world, devising
its own economic programmes and development policies. Its people also need
the confidence to trust each other. Only then can they make deals to end
wars and build political institutions: institutions that they actually
believe in.

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