MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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KEVIN CAREY charts the woes of Africa, hails the latest intervention by the White House and suggests a course of action.
When I was working in Africa, one of my grim pastimes was playing a semi-codified game which involved trying to get supplies overland from A to B without passing through a war zone. As the 1970s turned into the 1980s it seemed to get worse and we felt ever more cut off from the rest of the world. Not even the 1982 attempted coup in Kenya - that much loved ally and military facility of the Western powers - jolted the cosmopolitan consciousness. As we reclaimed our bullet-riddled cars, stolen and then abandoned by the unsuccessful rebels, we felt shut in and rejected.
Shortly afterwards civil war in central Africa wrenched HIV out of its endemically safe environment and, through disastrously re-used surgical implements and women, slashed and ground its way into the biological and social sources of creativity. The disease made its way into urban shantytowns but it did not stop there. As the 1980s advanced HIV gripped the proportionately tiny middle class. Only people with businesses or wages have the money to use prostitutes and the rumours of disease could not halt the customary traffic between men living alone in towns away from their rural families and girls needing money to climb the education ladder. The soldier and the whore is a misleading simplification; HIV has been as dangerous as it has been because a better representation would be the civil servant and the teenage schoolgirl. I do not rate one person above another but Africa desperately needs a middle class to provide bureaucrats, merchants, teachers and health workers and it needs skilled labour to give added value to its raw materials.
Then the Berlin Wall came down, Africa's niche fashion status faded; it had had its chance for a quarter of a century after independence and blown it. Curtains.
There was, of course, Live Aid; we sighed as Bob Geldoff's second-hand lorries inevitably got lost in the sand somewhere between the Emirates and Juba.
There was the Peace Corps sorting out in an exotic environment sexual rejection back home.
And there were missionaries, at every oasis, on the top of every hill with a breeze and the capacity to generate grass. Round they rushed in their 4-wheel-drive land cruisers, putting second-hand clothes on the locals and preaching a Gospel of primary health care and subsistence agriculture, all the while keeping a weather eye on the cargo container schedule bringing their penicillin and pecan ice cream.
Being a pragmatist myself, I preached Western medicine and availed myself of it to its highest standard, knew every decent restaurant South of the Sahara and left the circus when I failed to persuade anyone of importance that the only problem that Africans faced was the problem all people face; they simply didn't have enough money. With that, you see, they could buy things like food, health care and education and there would be plenty of people willing to sell these vital commodities.
Watching Africa from afar in the 1990s I have despaired as it has slipped ever further from the cosmopolitan consciousness. All the more gratifying, then, that President Clinton has dedicated the first month of the year 2000 to Africa with a brave and principled initiative led by Deputy Secretary Holbrook, Vice President Gore and senior figures from Britain and other countries with an interest in Africa.
This benighted continent, with no strategic value, limited economic value geographically confined to a few pockets, intractably obscure civil wars with nothing worth fighting over and no apparent hooks on which to hang any initiative, presents a prospect of hard graft for no return and yet the White House wants to make an effort. Better late than never, one might say, but those who are in any way interested in this venture need to bear in mind that under no conceivable circumstances that we can imagine now would the Republicans do anything similar. This is supererogatory statecraft of the very best kind; but a Republican dominated Congress that won't pay its United Nations bills is hardly likely to welcome the massive bill which will be presented to deal with peace making, peace keeping, economic development and the control of HIV.
Having paid my dues, it is well to note Holbrook's pragmatic gloss on the initiative:
If the Organisation of African Unity's founding fathers could not bring themselves to overturn the political cartography of the Congress of Berlin, there is no point trying again more than 30 years on. Colonialism and precipitate independence, tariff zones and free trade, World Bank and widow's mite aid have all failed so what solutions might there be?
First, all external financial assistance should be tied to demilitarisation except where state armed forces are required to pacify insurrection or defend borders and in those cases assistance should be tied to the acceptance of peace-making and peace keeping instruments.
Most of Africa's wars are territorially and economically pointless and there is no point fighting over the right to govern anything or anybody when you don't know how to govern.
Secondly, as democratic governance is strengthened, administrations carrying out the wishes of legislatures and executives should be international, though based on merit and not the 'Buggins Turn' egalitarian mediocrity of the United Nations.
Thirdly, global institutions such as the World Bank must promote economic models which generate domestic purchasing power at the bottom of economies which will improve local productivity and self sufficiency; the blinkered - or perhaps even selfish - notion that subsistence economies and their educational and social services should be managed as if they were units of the United States must be abandoned. We sent Africa colonialism, Christianity and monetarism and it is a sad duty to enquire which has done most harm but I think it is the last of the three.
Finally, we need to recognise - European political and American economic imperialists alike - that we owe Africa one of the greatest apologies in recorded history and that we owe it massive restitution for our callousness and greed. Holbrook would not be tactless enough to couch it precisely in these terms but his humane and measured remarks bear noble testimony to the thought. In the conventional, unthinking, cliché of the political cycle, President Bill Clinton may be a lame duck but he is a greater force for good in that condition than George Bush Jr is ever likely to be if, in the full pride of his cockerel ascent, he reaches the summit of the dunghill.
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