Africa's formula for success: ingenuous rather than ingenious?

Your 'Formula for Africa's Rapid Growth' article (African Business Aug/Sept issue) posits a proposal which might be termed ingenuous rather than ingenious. Let me explain!

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Western Europe's rapid 19th century industrialisation was a progression from the 18th century triangular trade, with the human traffic removed.

After Europe's loss of much of the productive North and South Americas, attention turned elsewhere, including Africa, to supply at cheap rates through colonisation the raw materials needed for the Industrial Revolution to forge ahead.

The other factors were rural land dispossession and therefore cheap urban labour; coal, in abundance in Europe, to provide steam power; and a hugely inventive capacity.

North America followed after its Civil War in the 1860s, later massively boosted by the addition of oil as a tool for industrialisation.

The Far East's tiger economies achieved much the same thing, from the 1950s onwards, in a similar way, except that they did it in a far more competitive environment with Europe and North America already there. The physically smaller Far East countries also had to buy raw materials on the open market.

The capitalist command-type governments and, dare it be said, the nature of the people themselves, drove rapid industrialisation in a highly productive and energetic way which helped overcome the higher input costs, and achieved in 30 years what it had taken western Europe a century--despite not having colonies, or perhaps because of that fact!

So, why not Africa? My contention, as a European involved with Africa for over 30 years, is that Africans are not yet ready to march into a new economic world, and I advance the following thesis.

Far more than in any other part of the formerly colonised modern world, the African psyche has suffered grievously from that experience.

North, Central and South America and Australasia were overrun by colonists to such an extent that it nearly caused the-extermination of extant communities.

South and South East Asian populations, due to their sheer size and thanks to the climate, withstood the onslaught, indeed often thrived on it, and emerged relatively unscathed.

Africa found itself with its pre-colonial populations extant, but culturally and psychologically damaged, and physically balkanised to the extent that I expect Africa to go on fumbling indecisively, a prey to outside forces and internecine factionalism, for another couple of generations, before beginning to emerge out of its poverty trap.

Nevertheless, Africa could speed the process of emergence from its post-colonial syndrome, but only by adopting the following radical proposition, with its two corollaries.

The proposition is that the new AU sit down and redraw the African political map, first by broadly determining what parts of the continent are good for what kinds of land-based activities, then looking at closer political union regionally, ensuring that all regions so identified have a relatively equal share of resources, productive land, labour, minerals, ports, etc and bearing in mind tribal affiliations. Then Africa could dispense with the present European-imposed map.

In east and southern Africa you would probably end up having South Africa and Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia. Swaziland as one new country; Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe another, and the current East African Community (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda) plus Rwanda/Burundi as a third new country.

Far-fetched? But the three East African Community leaders have just announced they want to speed the process of political federation and union; how sensible!

Eventually Colonel Ghadaffi's and Nkrumah's dream of a united Africa might come true, but it is pointless trying to unite a disparate continent like Africa in one fell swoop.

The regional approach allows a gradual unification, which anyway might not be necessary if the 10 or so new countries prove to be viable propositions, able to stand up and bargain on equal terms with the rest of the world. The AU would probably become another EU, in place of all the current well-meaning and ineffective regional groupings like ECOWAS, COMESA and SADC, which have achieved little that would not have happened without them.

Having largely achieved the above, the first corollary should determine, again through the AU, a timetable to seek the end of aid from the developed world.

Aid may have benefitted political elites and certain individuals from the countries whence aid has sprung from--but little else in 50 years of giving, never mind the huge debt burden under which the continent groans.

The second corollary is that, using its newfound strength, Africa can start bargaining seriously through the WTO and other forums for a more equal dispensation in world trade, something which in its present state (other than South Africa), balkanised and beholden to aid donors, it can not do.

Every year we witness Africa's hand-wringing at world trade forums, but the developed world simply cocks a snook, and who can blame them, when they are only protecting their own interests?

If Africa thinks it can play the colonial guilt card forever, it has surely now learnt otherwise--Nepad is in part recognition of this. Only a strong Africa can truly change its relationship with the rest of the world--the present fractured continent, being a colonial creation, is tailor-made for rich nations to milk, which they do, with varying degrees of connivance by Africa's ruling elites.

I am effectively suggesting the submergence of the post-colonial, petty nationalist state which has been the hallmark of the African political and economic scene since the 1960s, and, let it be said, its curse, as Basil Davidson so eruditely chronicled in his The Curse of African Nationalism into a new, more unified structure. Will the new African please stand up and seize the moment?

You will doubtless see this as more ingenuous than your proposals, in your eyes. It is much more radical, but then I can't see any alternative to drastic surgery!

A D H Leishman, Ngweze, Namibia