Why Africa stays poor: and why it doesn't have to.

The images are so familiar that we have become all but inured to them: starving African children outlined against a broad expense of empty sky; ragged, impoverished families huddled together on a stony steppe. They could be Biafrans in 1968, Sahelians in 1973, or Ethiopians in 1985. The most recent pictures are from Somalia, a barren stretch of East African coastland that juts into the Indian Ocean. Once a consolation prize in the Cold War (the real trophy in the Horn was Ethiopia, a richer and more populous nation), Somalia has since disintegrated into fiefdoms of grizzled warlords armed with Kalashnikovs and AK-47s. Now 2,000 Somalis die every day from hunger and its attendant diseases, and reports from elsewhere in Africa suggest that Somalia is only the beginning; according to the United Nations, 20 million to 60 million people are at risk of starvation throughout the eastern and southern parts of the continent.

The news out of Africa has been so grim for so long that the continent seems hopeless, its problems ineradicable. Yet this perception - though it has been reinforced by endless images of famine, disease, and warfare - is both untrue and unnecessarily fatalistic. There are some good reasons, I will argue, for hoping that Africa's next 30 years will be better than the last three decades.

It must first be acknowledged, however, that Africa is in a dismal state. Though statistics cannot convey the miseries of living in a shantytown outside Lagos, or the hardships of wresting a subsistence from the leeched landscape of the Sahel, they can suggest the dimensions of Africa's problems. In the 1980s, per capita African gross national product declined by nearly 25 percent. African farmers produce 20 percent less food today than they did in 1970, and there are twice as many mouths to feed. (At its current rate, Africa's population will reach nearly three billion by the year 2050.) Direct private investment in Africa constitutes 2 percent of the world's total, and experts predict that much of that miniscule figure will be siphoned off as Eastern Europe and Asia rebuild. One French diplomat has written: "Economically speaking, if the entire black Africa, with the exception of South Africa, were to disappear in a flood, the global cataclysm would be approximately nonexistent."

By the late 1980s, most of Africa's states were facing outright financial ruin. The 1990 World Bank annual development report listed 27 African countries among the world's 40 poorest. It seemed to matter very little what path to economic growth these countries were ostensibly pursuing; political scientist Crawford Young argued as much in his book Ideology and Development in Africa. "Does ideology matter?" he asked. "My reading of the evidence does not lead to a single unambiguous conclusion." "Socialist" Zambia, Tanzania, and Ghana; or "capitalist" Zaire, Kenya, and Nigeria; the still verdant Congo or the desertified Mali - by 1990, all were mired in economic and political stagnation.

Africa's troubles are not just economic. Civil war and ethnic strife have erupted in over a dozen African countries. Liberia and Somalia have followed Chad and Mozambique into Hobbesian anarchy. Even Kenya and the Ivory Coast - long touted as the two "success" stories of black Africa - have been jolted by a series of anti-government demonstrations. Meanwhile, the AIDS pandemic looms over Africa like a modern-day bubonic plague; the World Health Organization estimates that the disease will kill 20 percent of Africa's working adults by 1996, including disproportionate numbers of the educated and successful. Perhaps the most sobering aspect of the AIDS crisis is the attitude of resignation that many Africans seem to have taken toward it. In a continent where 12,000 children die every day of hunger and hunger-related causes, that attitude is depressingly easy to understand: what to us is some horrific medieval plague to them is simply one more deadly infectious disease.

In the West, newspaper editors came up with the term compassion fatigue to describe their audiences' reactions to Africa's problems (and, one suspects, to justify their meager coverage of them). A famine in Mozambique, civil war in the Sudan, a slaughter of innocents in Burundi, chaos in Zaire and elsewhere - in the post-Band Aid era, the litany of Africa's woes was buried in the back pages of the press. The impression to be gleaned from this coverage was that Africa's problems were monolithic, insurmountable, and utterly alien - and therefore, presumably, not of pressing concern to us.

Though examples of African success are admittedly few, they provide much-needed evidence that the continent's current woes are not insurmountable. A few African countries made it through the 1980s with their economies and political systems reasonably intact: the Gambia and Botswana are islands of democracy; the Cameroon's economy grew by 8 percent per year through much of the decade; and Mauritius' economy grew by over 5 percent per head. And though Africa's problems seem nearly universal, they are far from monolithic.

Zambia provides an instructive example of the continent's shifting fortunes. In 1964, when Zambia achieved independence under the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda, it was one of Africa's brightest prospects, with a highly developed infrastructure and abundant copper reserves that gave it some of the highest income levels on the continent. Kaunda himself was genial and charming, his political rhetoric an eloquent blend of socialism, pacifism, and pan-Africanism. Zambia became one of the world's largest per capita recipients of foreign aid. However, from 1965 to 1988, Zambia's average annual rate of growth was minus 2.1 percent, and today it is one of the poorest countries in the world - ranked eighteenth from the bottom in per capita GNP.

Belying his oft-proclaimed "humanistic philosophy," Kaunda officially declared Zambia a one-party state in 1972. Under the infamous Emergency Powers Act - a holdover from the colonial era - he regularly had dissenters jailed, beaten, or sent into exile. Kaunda also came to enjoy a life-style that few Zambians could have imagined, playing golf several times a week on a course adjoining his presidential estate and stocking his private zoo with peacocks and deer.

It was not, however, the gap between his professed idealism and his actual politics that brought Kaunda down - after all, any number of governments have survived telling more risible lies. Nor were Zambia's problems the result of outside pressures, though Zambia respected the African trade embargo against South Africa at considerable cost to its own economy. Rather, Kaunda's downfall was the result of economic policies that eventually boxed him in - policies that left him unable to fulfill the social contract he had established with his urban population.

Kaunda relied upon his nation's copper reserves to create a huge bureaucracy; at one point, nearly 40 percent of Zambia's wage earners received their checks from the government. At the same time, Kaunda poured money into the cities at the expense of the countryside. Schools, medical facilities, and subsidized housing were all available to the urban population; farmers had to make do with rigged, artificially low prices for their produce.

The economic consequences were as devastating as they were predictable. The rural poor moved to urban areas, where they came to rely upon subsidized food as part of the social contract; declining food production forced the government to spend an ever-greater percentage of its earnings on imported grain. Zambia borrowed heavily in the 1970s and early 1980s on the strength of its copper reserves and used the money to support urban consumption, to import food, and to keep afloat its bloated civil service. But as copper reserves dwindled and international commodity prices dipped, the government could no longer afford its part of the social contract. In 1990, rioting erupted in several cities, forcing Kaunda to allow elections. The results were overwhelming: in Kaunda's home seat of Nchanga, the vote went 20,680 for his opponent to only 637 votes for Kaunda himself.

In Zaire, Zambia's giant neighbor to the north, the pro-democracy opponents of President Mobutu Sese Seko have had a far rougher time of it. Mobutu has ruled Zaire since 1965, when he seized power in a CIA-sponsored coup after the conflicts of Zaire's early years. It is frequently claimed that, whatever Mobutu's sins, he at least brought unity to a war-torn country; in fact, the government in place at the time had already made peace with all but one minor rebel group when Mobutu staged his coup. If Mobutu brought unity to Zaire, it is a unity born of Zairians' near-universal hatred of his regime.

Under Mobutu, Zaire's economy fell through the floor. In 1990, per capita annual income was $170; real wages had plummeted to one-tenth their 1960 levels. In Mobutu's 27 years in power, not a single hospital has been built. The road net-work that linked Zaire together in 1960 has crumbled; the country is larger than the United States east of the Mississippi, yet there are now fewer miles of paved roads in all of Zaire than there are in Toledo, Ohio. Only 3 percent of the central government's budget goes to health and education; 23 percent goes to the military, and 50 percent to lining the pockets of Mobutu and his ruling elite. Mobutu Sese Seko - his adopted name means "the cock that leaves no hen untouched" - has accumulated a dozen French and Belgian chateaux, a Spanish castle, and a 32-bedroom Swiss billion. His net worth is variously estimated at $3 billion to $7 billion. Meanwhile, one out of every two children born in Zaire dies before the age of five.

Mobutu pillaged his country with scarcely a murmur of dissent from his Western sponsors - particularly the United States. There were two reasons for this: first, Zaire is an important supplier of minerals, including industrial diamonds, copper, and cobalt (needed for the alloys used in military air, craft); and second, Mobutu allowed his country to be used as a base for covert American military and diplomatic expeditions into Angola and Chad. His stature as one of America's most important assets in the region was underlined in 1988 when Mobutu became Africa's first head of state to meet with President George Bush.

In 1990 and continuing through most of 1991, pro-democracy agitators put Mobutu on the defensive. Led by the popular long-time dissident Etienne Tshisekedi, they forced him to convene a national conference on the future of the country's leader, ship. Mobutu did all he could to disrupt the proceedings of the conference; in the ensuing riots, scores of people in various cities were killed by the military. Mobutu himself fled to a luxury yacht cruising the Congo River but retained control of the elite army troops and his security forces. Meanwhile, Zaire's economy and its political institutions have collapsed.

During the Cold War, diplomats and politicians in the West frequently justified their support for Mobutu by arguing that the alternative was a return to the chaos of Zaire's early years. This argument is founded, as I've indicated, on a willful mis-reading of history; it ignores the fact that the situation in Zaire was well past its crisis point when Mobutu took power, and it also implies that Western support for Mobutu was motivated, at least in part, by a humanitarian concern for Zairians. "We care," the diplomats seemed to be saying, "that Zairians not be forced to suffer again the internecine warfare that accompanied the birth of their nation." But since the confrontation between the national conference and Mobutu reached a stalemate, the West has done almost nothing to help resolve the situation; in the absence of Cold War exigencies, we seem to have lost interest in the country. What remains, as political scientist Rene Lemarchand has written, "is a country teetering on the brink of chaos - a devastated economy, an empty treasury, a peasant sector reduced to subsistence agriculture, an urban population at the edge of starvation, and hundreds of thousands of unemployed youth for whom life has nothing to offer." For years, we heard from our politicians and diplomats that it was "Mobutu or chaos." Now it is both.

Finally, there is Uganda, once known as the "pearl" of East Africa. No longer. The rolling green hills and fertile soil that so pleased the colonialists are still there, but since the 1971 coup that brought Idi Amin to power the country has lurched from one disaster to the next, bloodier one. Consider: there are half a million internally displaced people and over a quarter-million foreign refugees living in Uganda; it is probably the one country most hard-hit by AIDS in the world; its economy is in a shambles, with tea and other agricultural exports down to one-fifth or one-tenth of 1970 levels; and it has suffered from more or less continuous political unrest and warfare. Even by African standards, Uganda is a basket case.

The reasons for this startling decline are complicated. Before 1963, Uganda boasted a flourishing economy, a well-trained populace, extraordinarily fertile land, and a highly developed infrastructure. Makerere University was one of the best in Africa, and Kampala was among Africa's most cosmopolitan cities. For several years after its independence, Uganda seemed poised to fulfill the immense potential that was perceived for it. The economy flourished under the moderate leadership of Prime Minister Milton Obote, and with the kabaka, or king, of Buganda assuming the largely ceremonial role of president, the political situation seemed remarkably stable.

In fact, however, Uganda was built on the most fractured of foundations. Buganda was only one (albeit the principal one) of several traditional kingdoms the British had lumped together into one protectorate; and with independence came not only heightened ethnic rivalries but also religious, regional, and ideological tensions. To be sure, the challenges to nation-building represented by these divisions were to be found throughout the continent: the jigsaw puzzle of national boundaries the colonial powers left behind bore little relationship to pre-existing ethnic or linguistic identities. But in Uganda, these divisions were never overcome. No central authority ever managed to impose a national identity on the disparate groups competing for power, and the result was that no one group or party was ever seen as legitimate. The tensions within the polity could be submerged, but they could never be resolved.

Uganda's political history probably reached its nadir during the eight-year reign of Idi Amin, the notoriously brutal army sergeant turned international buffoon. But Uganda's problems neither began nor ended with Amin. Obote, Uganda's first prime minister, had spent most of his time in office trying to contain the forces that were tearing the country apart. In 1966, for example, be ousted the kabaka under pressure from radical youth groups in the capital; to keep the army happy, he tripled its share of the nation's budget. That did not prevent factions from developing within it, and eventually one of them - led by Amin - secured the patronage of Great Britain and Israel, who were dissatisfied with Obote's growing radicalism.

Amin's 1971 coup brought an end to Uganda's economic growth. During his bloody rule, coffee, tea, and cotton production fell to one-third their earlier levels, and industrial performance dropped 85 percent. Amin was finally overthrown in 1979, after an attempted invasion of Tanzania turned into a rout of the Ugandan army by the better-trained, better-led Tanzanian troops. But a succession of leaders proved unable to stop the anarchy that had characterized Amin's final years, and the economy continued to sputter. Under Uganda's current leader, Yoweri Museveni, there has been a modest economic recovery, and aid from the major donor nations has also begun to trickle in. But though a semblance of order prevails, it seems only a matter of time before the next political tremors erupt.

Are there any observations to be made, any lessons to be distilled, from the divergent experiences of these three countries? The first is that it pays not to live near one of Africa's hot spots. Zambia respected the boycott against South Africa at enormous cost to its own economy. Other countries, particularly Mozambique and Angola, endured South African-sponsored terrorism and civil war that effectively blocked any possibility of their own development. And though guerrilla movements in these countries have now acquired a momentum of their own, support from the apartheid regime was critical in launching them. Much the same could be said of the Libyans in Chad and the Ethiopians in Djibouti.

The second observation to be made is that it was the misfortune of certain African nations to come of age during the intellectual heyday of a certain kind of nondemocratic socialism. It is true that, with few exceptions, Soviet and Chinese ties to Africa were always considerably weaker than the cold warriors would have had us believe. Thus, Herman Cohen, the outgoing American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, has now blamed European left-wingers for implementing in Africa "the biggest socialist fantasies that they weren't able to implement in their own countries." But Cohen's is a simplistic rendering of history - a piece of Reaganite revisionism. African countries like Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia "went" socialist not from any affection for the leaden Stalinists (Soviet advisers were despised wherever they went), nor from European left-wingers' denunciations of their own bourgeoisie (we should be so lucky, thought the Africans), but for complex reasons of their own. Socialism represented the opposite of capitalism, the system of Africa's colonizers. It offered a blue-print for social and political mobilization that seemed more coherent and plausible to some African leaders, and, with its hazy vision of a utopian future, it fed into a hallowed conception of Africa's past-a vision of a prelapsarian (read: precolonial) Eden whose traditions contained all the promises of Western political thought but none of its painful contradictions.

Nothing, alas, could have been more impractical for these fledgling nations. To work at all, socialism requires an educated bureaucracy and a vigorous, disciplined central government - precisely the conditions that did not exist in post-colonial Africa. After 30 years, the verdict is unequivocal: capitalism's record is mixed, but socialism - at least of the sort practiced by Kaunda in Zambia, Nyerere in Tanzania, or Nkrumah in Ghana - has been an utter failure.

The third observation to be made is that it was disastrous for Africa to come of age during the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union helped to install and maintain tyrants whose records are a blot upon the human race. America's support for Mobutu in Zaire and the Soviets' for Mengistu in Ethiopia may (or may not) have been justified by the superpowers' national-security needs, but the price that ordinary Zairians and Ethiopians paid for that security lies beneath the gravestones of countless children. It is important to be blunt about this: we have a moral duty to acknowledge how much of our own putative security has been purchased with the blood of others.

A fourth observation concerns the extent of corruption in Africa. From the governor who pockets half the state's budget for public works to the nurse at the local clinic who demands a bribe before changing a bandage, corruption is so deeply entrenched and so endemic that it requires all explanation. Peter Wanyande, a Kenyan political scientist at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, suggests that corruption flourishes in Africa in part because there are few institutions aside from the state through which the gifted and the capable can rise. But in contrast to the tribe or the extended family, the state remains an abstraction, commanding neither loyalty nor affection. The dispensation of favors and the profitable manipulation of alliances thus become the modus vivendi for Africans on the make. In Nigeria, in Zaire, and increasingly in Kenya, corruption is not so much the grease that keeps the wheel turning as it is the wheel itself.

This is not to justify the flagrant abuses of a Mobutu but, rather, to put them into context. The powerful in Africa steal because they can; the poor steal to survive. Corruption in Africa, then, was born of the structural weaknesses of African political and civil society, and it is now a cause as well as a consequence of African poverty.

A fifth observation is that, like the former Yugoslavia, many African countries are still wrestling with the demon of tribalism (a polluted term, no doubt, but more accurate than its euphemisms). Tribal conflicts simmer in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, and Zaire, and they have boiled over in Chad and the Sudan. Tribalism hurts countries not only when blood is spilt; the energy expended on keeping the peace between rival ethnic groups represents a considerable distraction from the business of economic, political, and cultural development.

The culminating lesson is that, in Africa as elsewhere, the prerogatives of history are impossible to deny. Lumped arbitrarily into geographic units at the Berlin Conference of 1885 and launched toward independence 80 years later in entities that corresponded in no way to African realities or experience, the continent has limped behind the rest of the world - not because Africans are stupid or lazy or incapable of collective action, but because they are caught in structures that negate their strengths and frustrate their efforts. Africans remain poor because the states in which they live are artificial constructs, unmoored to the societies or people they govern, largely free of any constraint from civil institutions, and subject all too often to fracture along the substantive divisions of class, religion, and ethnicity.

Are there any grounds for hope, any reasons to believe, that Africa will do better in its next 30 years than it has in the last three decades? Certainly, there has been a veritable sea-change in African attitudes toward development. Nigerian statesman Olusagen Obasanjo is among the most eloquent:

I believe that for us in Africa, our salvation lies in

our own hands and nowhere else. Only we can be

the architects of our future; as we have been the architects

of our misfortune by and large for the past

quarter of a century.

Then, too, some countries - most notably Ghana - have embarked on ambitious economic restructuring programs to eliminate waste, corruption, and mismanagement and to encourage private industry. The World Bank has been the driving force behind much of this movement, and there is, naturally, considerable debate about how fair these programs are and whether or not they will work. To a certain extent, the programs represent a recolonization of Africa by Western technocrats. This is not necessarily bad, some argue: at the helms of central banks, it is better to have the gnomes of Zurich than the kleptocrats of Kinshasa. But these programs also represent the third or fourth generation of development initiatives sponsored by the World Bank, and they share with the Bank's earlier initiatives a refusal to acknowledge the political environments in which they operate. In fact, economic policies prescribed with little regard for such realities may exacerbate - as they have in the past - both the political and the economic problems confronting Africans. This is an age-old criticism of the Bank, but one that, despite an abundance of evidence, it seems constitutionally incapable of attending. The Bank's charter, argue its defenders, is properly economic and deliberately apolitical. Zairians - who have seen the results of such "aid" in the Mercedes-Benzes driven by the political elite through that country's corroded streets - might be excused for wondering whether the intention has not been improperly political and deliberately uneconomic. Their president could, after all, pay off the country's entire national debt.

The end of the Cold War ought to be a tremendous spur to African political and economic development; the West no longer needs to support dictators simply because they happen to be our dictators. Smith Hempstone, the American ambassador to Kenya and a conservative of long standing, has not hesitated to agitate on behalf of Kenya's fledgling democrats, even though he has irked Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi considerably in doing so. Significantly, in the past three years, a half-dozen African countries have followed Eastern Europe into democracy, and another dozen or so are struggling to achieve it. It is no exaggeration to say that the democracy movement represents the most important political shift in Africa since independence. It is clear, moreover, that the democracy movement has far deeper roots than many observers could have imagined. "Throughout the continent, independent political and social forces have emerged to challenge moribund, authoritarian-patrimonial regimes of many varieties," says Peter Lewis. "The result has been a succession of movements pressing for fundamental political change" At every level of government, indigenous institutions are evolving as a response to popular demands. The shape and future direction of these institutions are still difficult to determine; all that can now be said is that they belong to Africa in a way that the pre-fab parliaments and constitutions left behind by the colonialists never did. Kwame Nkrumah's famous injunction - "Seek ye first the political kingdom" - is at last being realized.

The news out of Africa has been grim for so long that one hesitates to conclude on a dispiriting note. However, the battle between democratic and despotic governments in Africa is by no means won: in Togo, for example, the former dictator is back on his throne, and in Kenya, President Daniel arap Moi seems to have survived the recent election. Moreover, the United States continues to send the bulk of its economic assistance to tyrannical regimes. Randall Robinson, executive director of Trans-Africa, points out that, in the last fiscal year, the United States gave $130 million to Kenya, Zaire, and Malawi - "states where there is massive corruption, broad repression, and little if any appreciation of democratic values." On the other hand, countries like Benin, Botswana, and Namibia, which are now fully democratic, received just $30 million. (Namibia, with the most liberal and democratic constitution on the continent, received $500,000.)

What is to be done? Let me conclude by listing several things the West can and should be doing to help Africa. I use the word should advisedly - not to insist on Western culpability but, rather, on Western responsibility, which should derive from a decent regard for humankind.

First, Western nations - particularly the United States - can send more aid more selectively. The U.S. budget for all of sub-Saharan Africa is about $800 million, roughly one-third of what we give to better, off (but more "strategic") countries such as Egypt or Pakistan. We ought, furthermore, to be giving our aid to those countries which are making genuine political and economic reforms; whatever else aid does, it bestows official approval on a Third World country's government. There's no longer any reason (if there ever was) for the United States to support tyrants.

The largest incentive the West can offer Africa's reformers is the prospect of debt relief. Compared to Latin America's debt burden, Africa's has been ignored. The numbers involved are much smaller and don't pose a threat to the world banking system; yet, according to the Economist, Africa's burden is 50 percent greater as a percentage of gross domestic product than Latin America's, and the continent remains "profoundly, unsustainably indebted." Swapping debt for political and economic reform is one of the best and least costly ways for the West to help out.

Second, there should be more contact between Africa and the West: more student exchanges, more artistic conferences, more sister-cities and business conventions, and more professional colloquia. Ties between newspapers, universities, and community or religious groups should be strengthened. The West can and must find a way to encourage the institutions of African civil society; their continuing development represents the best hope for the continent's future.

Third, the early-warning system that is supposed to signal the potential for famine in Africa needs to be strengthened. Cobbled together by the United Nations after the Sahelian famine of the mid-1970s, it has not been an effective agency; it predicted major famine-related deaths in 1991, and when these failed to materialize, it lost much of its credibility. It needs a better intelligence network on the ground and more effective links to the wider community of Africanist scholars, diplomats, and journalists.

Fourth, U.N. troops ought to be empowered as a peace, making force, not just as peace-keepers. As in the case of Somalia and Yugoslavia, difficult decisions about the conflicting claims of various groups and issues of international law and human rights will need to be addressed. At what point does a regime so violate the accepted standards of international law that it forfeits its claims to sovereignty? How feasible or desirable is direct intervention in another country's affairs? What price is the West willing to pay to save the innocent victims of a murderous regime? My bias here is plain.

Finally, the press could do a far better job than it has covering African issues. It is one of the sadder ironies of our time that famines in Africa only make headlines when thousands have already died. Unlike earthquakes or typhoons, famines can be spotted months and even years in advance - when the rains fail, crops wither, and prices for grain shoot up. All these things take time and can be monitored. Given their pervasive influence, the media have a moral responsibility to alert the world to the potential of famine and to agitate aggressively, if need be, to ensure that the matter is attended to before people die.

Beyond the issue of famine, however, is the more mundane issue of poverty. In its quiet way, poverty - of the day-to-day sort that millions of Africans are mired in-is more destructive than the occasional spectacular famine. Every day, some 12,000 children in Africa die because their parents are too poor to buy them the food or medicine they require. Though the press duly takes note of Africa's rebellions, civil wars, coups d'etats, and corruption, the biggest story in Africa - the quiet struggle of ordinary people to survive against grim odds - has hardly been told at all. The media should find a way to bring this story home. In its global ramifications, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world is certainly one of the most important stories of our time - and yet, it is being largely ignored.

David Aronson grew up in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast and spent a year in Zaire on a fellowship. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of Florida and is currently working on a book about Zaire.