introduce:
AFRICA - The Western world’s garbage dump, the depository of Capitalism’s hazardous waste.
Could the crocodile save our lives?
by Dr.
Opoku Agyeman
“Every year, the international financial system kills more people than World War II” the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said recently. Quoting the economist Susan George, the mayor said “since 1981 between I5 to 20 million people have died unnecessarily each year because Third World governments have to cut back on clean water and health programmes”.
Dr. Opoku Agyeman echoes the same sentiments in this wide-ranging piece.
In an era when Africa is at the mercy of the straitjackets of privatization and reliance on direct foreign investments imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, the 47 countries of the sub-Saharan region attracted in 1995 a mere 3%, while the East Asian and Pacific region got as much as 59% of the flow of direct foreign investment into the “developing world”.
The overall prospects in this new century are that, according to the World Bank, every other part of the world will experience a decline in poverty with the exception of Africa “where things will only get worse”.
Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that one middling European power, France, has considered “whole groups of [African] states” as its private domain, or that Africa is now increasingly thought of in the West as fit to serve as the Western world’s garbage dump — as the most suitable depository of the West’s hazardous waste.
These dismal realities have prompted a number of misplaced diagnoses and false prescriptions, such as the one calling for the West’s recolonization of Africa. Thus, William Pfaff concludes, from what he calls “honest and dispassionate discussion" of the “immense human tragedy” of Africa for which "the Western countries bear a grave responsibility and which will worsen if not addressed”, that “much of Africa needs, to put it plainly, what one could call a disinterested neo-colonialism.”
Echoing this view, Paul Johnson declares that “altruistic revival of colonialism” is the only way out of the African's "present miseries. He continues: “We are witnessing today a revival of colonialism albeit in a new form. It is a trend that should be encouraged ... on practical as well as moral grounds. There simply is no alternative in nations where governments have crumbled and the most basic conditions for civilized life have disappeared...”
The illogic and absurdity of this prescription, given the deleterious impact on Africa of its interactions with Europe over the centuries, are not difficult to unravel. lndeed, they emerge in Pfaff's own expatiation on the subject:
“The history of the continent since the great wave
of decolonization in the late 1950s include a shameful series of self-interested
foreign interventions and ruthless exploitation of indigenous African confliets,
with deliberate instigation or intensification of wars in Katanga, Ethiopia,
Eritrea, Angola and Somalia..
‘The historical record is complex, but it seems fair
to say that when the Europeans first came to Africa there were coherent,
functioning societies of varying degrees of sophistication, some of great
political subtlety and artistic accomplishment; all possessing their own
integrity and integrated into the natural environment of the continent.
This was destroyed by colonialism. What followed was exploitation on the
one hand, including the atrocious trade in slaves Colonialism lasted
long enough to destroy the pre-existing social and political institutions,
but not long enough to put anything solid and lasting in their place.”
Africa v Asia
Then, too, consider what has come out of the new hyper-brutal stage of colonialism imposed on Africa by the IMF and the World Bank.
The return of colonialism “in a new form” that Paul Johnson celebrated in the title of his essay, Colonialism is Back, and Not a Moment Too Soon, has been underway since 1980 and has managed since to rope 43 African countries into its net, forcing them to endure the conditionalities and impositions that have resulted in massive “negative transfer” of capital from Africa’s underdeveloped economies to the industrialized countries of the West.
Wrote J. Berry Riddell: “There can he little doubt that the effects of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAl’s) in Africa have led to worsened conditions. Poverty has increased, and it no longer sounds radical to describe the process taking place in many countries as underdevelopment. The quality of life has declined as prices have risen, as infrastructures have crumbled, as services have deteriorated, and as employment opportunities have been reduced.”
It is remarkable how relentlessly the dialectic of European super-ordinary and African sub-ordinary has played itself out over the last 500 years on every issue, and in every place.
Equally remarkable is the fact that the depredations wrought upon Africa by the West are not totally explicable in terms of the scourge of rampaging capitalism. That there has been far more at work in the West’s disposition toward Africa is borne out in any comparison between Africa and Asia.
In the post-World War II era, the West, principally the US, targeted Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan for massive capital flows, as well as privileged access to the massive US market, in a calculated design to help them develop into “showcases” of capitalism.
The vaunted East Asian tigers commitment to “export-led
growth” would not have been possible without this access to the US market.
The point needs to be made emphatically that no African
country received this kind of favour in the framework of the West’s Cold
War strategic calculations. The finished or semi-finished products of the
African countries that embarked upon in the I 960s were met with cascading
tariffs at Western ports.
Overall, by early 1997, international banks had forked over $367 billion to borrowers in Asia, up 20% from the previous year, according to the Bank for International Settlements which co-ordinates the world’s central banks.
Six months later, the borrowings had swelled to $389 billion, a sum, he it noted, that excludes a large amount of lending to Hong Kong and Singapore. The massive inflow represented, in the words of Lawrence Lindsday, “the greatest financial binge in world history”, and one that was accompanied, significantly and revealingly, by interest rate mark-ups that “were unusually low.”
And when, in spite of all this stupendous international
capitalist largesse, financial crises of overwhelming proportions rumbled
abruptly and stunningly across Asia in the period between the end of 1997
and January 1998, causing the collapse of currencies and the crumbling
of stock markets, this prompted some $100 billion in a new round of
Western pledges for the resuscitation of the Southeast
Asian region.
With Africa, global capitalism has been concerned to show a one and only face of brutal imperialistic exploitation and degradation by way of the overthrow or assassination of purposeful radical nationalist leaders, from Nkrumah to Lumumba, in the name of anti-Communism; the sponsorship of counter-revolutionary guerrillas for the purpose of wrecking souls and development — plans in such places as Angola and Mozambique; the imposition of strangulating austerities and punishing interest rate charges on loans by the IMF and the World Bank; and the installation of puppet regimes, the proven foes of African advancement. President Charles de Gaulle’s defence minister, Messner, boasted in 1969 that France could send a paratroop regiment to any African state within 24 hours. Indeed, by that time, France had already intervened in 1964 in Gabon, in 1968 in Chad, and before that in Mauritania, all in the service of bolstering puppet regimes besieged by popular uprising. It would repeat the same propensity in June 1990, sending in reinforcements to Gabon to buttress the dictatorial regime of Omar Bongo.
Not to he undone, the US rallied to the support of the Mobuto regime when the masses rose up against it, both in 1977 and 1978, providing logistical support alongside French legionnaires and Belgian paratroops. Revealingly, President Reagan welcomed Mobutu Sese Seko, “the predatory boss of the Zairean kleptocracy”, to the White House, hailing him as “a voice of good sense and good will.”
If there is anything more astonishing than the persistence and the unchangeability of the West’s predatory attitude toward Africa, it is the changelessness, the constancy, of the Africans’ childlike belief in the good intentions and willingness of the West to help in Africa’s development, in spite of the grim details of Africa-Europe relations over the last half-millennium. This attitude flies in the face of a vital Pan-Africanist truth a IC Ayi-Kwei Armah, the Ghanaian author and poet:
“Spring water flowing to the desert; where you flow there is no regeneration. The desert takes. The desert knows no giving. To the giving water of your flowing, it is not in the nature of the desert to return anything but destruction. Spring water flowing to the desert, your future is extinction."
Weaning the African mind away from what amounts to an infantile trust in the West’s benefaction is the crucial first step toward repositioning Africa to take its place as a mature actor in global affairs. The next step is to look inward to Africa for solutions to Africa’s problems by Africans themselves, on the basis of Pan-African ideology and strategies.
Unquestionably, there are fundamental flaws in the African nation states,” as they are presently constituted, that necessitate that they die and he resurrected through metamorphic federalist engineering, rather than being retained on the pretence that they are legitimate, wholesome entities and actors engaged in some credible developmental endeavour.
If the concern is about the lack of capability on the
part of each African state to fulfil the basic needs and expectations of
its citizens; if the agony
is over the wrenching realities of the humiliation,
impotence and contempt afflicted on all Africans by the victimizing history
of the last 500 years, which no African country, shackled and enfeebled
as it is, by the forces of neo-colonialism, can repair; then the only logical
thing left is to make the “zero assumption” that, in today’s world of dangerous
power politics where the powerful has no patience for feebleness of mind
and resolve, Africa lacks a nation-state of redemptive capabilities.
Such an assumption leads logically to the acknowledgement
of a desperate need to establish a substantial power base in Africa through
federalist engineering.
The case of Ghana, which is typical, demonstrates
that remaining as a separate “nation-state not integrated politically and
economically with the other African states and pursuing a policy of “beneficent
linkage” to the capitalist West, is the path onto death. The $450m annual
revenue Ghana generates through the export of cocoa beans is not even enough
to service the interest on its $4bn debt.
And, now, the Mars Chocolate Company has announced the latest instalment of good and exciting news from the capitalist world: the company intends to substitute a genetic alternative for cocoa beans in its manufacturing of chocolate bars!
Dr. Opoku Agyemanis a professor of political science at the Montclair State University. New Jersey, USA.
New African, (London) Nr. 388, September 2000 S. 26, 27.