MAKING POVERTY HISTORY IN AFRICA BEYOND
DEBT RELIEF AND AID
by Madaki O. Ameh
INTRODUCTION
A
lot has been said and written in recent times about the new found
focus on Africa and its debilitating poverty through the ‘Make Poverty
History’ campaign. The interesting aspect of this new phenomenon is
that the campaign is being championed largely by non Africans, who
appear to be genuinely exasperated at the seemingly intractable
problems of Africa and its never ending poverty. It has been widely
acknowledged that the more other areas of the world progress, the more
Africa retrogresses, and much of the blame has been put on the altar
of the debt crisis, and the fact that a huge chunk of resources
required to put effective development in place is being applied
towards debt service, which continues to grow, no matter the efforts
made towards repayment. This has led many to conclude that the debts
are unsustainable, and in the absence of an outright right off,
African countries will never be able to break even and deliver the
most basic amenities to their people.
These recent efforts and campaigns by good people like Tony Blair,
Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof, have finally culminated in the
announcement of a debt reprieve for 18 countries, 14 of which are in
Africa, with a total relief package of $40 billion. Interestingly,
Nigeria, Africa’s largest debtor nation, is conspicuously missing from
the list of beneficiaries, in spite of the endless trips of President
Olusegun Obasanjo abroad since inception of his administration in
1999, ostensibly to negotiate and secure the much needed debt relief.
Even though we are being told that Nigeria’s case may not be entirely
hopeless, and that there is yet a window of opportunity through a debt
buy back process, the truth is that the international creditor
community has correctly assessed the situation and come to the right
conclusion that Nigeria is capable of paying its debt and should
therefore not be granted a soft landing. If diplomatic efforts
eventually translate to some form of reprieve for Nigeria, it is
almost certain that an outright debt cancellation, as has been touted
in various quarters, including the recent trip by some members of the
National Assembly abroad, will remain a pipe dream.
And this approach by the international community to Nigeria’s debts
may not be altogether unjustified, given the profile of the country as
the seventh largest oil exporter in the world, especially in these
days of consistently high oil prices. The fact that our foreign
reserves have been growing on a daily
basis, a fact which is being made a high point of political
grandstanding, cannot escape the attention of the ever hawkish
creditors, who are genuinely interested in getting some piece of that
action. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, especially at a time
when there is a lot of misplaced patriotism making the rounds, even in
high places, this writer is of the view that an outright debt relief,
of the form being canvassed for African nations, is not the solution
to the development needs of the continent. We therefore need to take
a hard look at ourselves and begin to tell ourselves the truth of why
we are underdeveloped, and continue to retrogress when other parts of
the world are making steady progress.
ORIGINS OF AFRICA’S POVERTY
It
is fanciful to attribute Africa’s debilitating poverty to the era of
the slave trade, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Such positions
have been advocated extensively in writings like Walter Rodney’s
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and several similar materials,
such that many Africans see the prosperity of Europe and America as a
direct result of the exploitation of Africans during the dark days of
slavery and colonialism. However, my take on this is that, rather
than rely on the negative aspects of history as our excuse for current
underdevelopment, our current generation of Africans should be asking
ourselves, why our forefathers decided to sell their children to
slavery in the first place. It is a well known fact that Africans are
probably the first race to be created in the world. To have allowed
the West to overwhelm them, and succeed in persuading our ancestors to
sell their own sons and daughters into slavery speaks volumes of the
sort of perception and world view we had, in spite of the ancient and
well developed civilisations in places like Egypt, the Nok culture,
etc. which abound in history. Also, the fact that other parts of the
world, like China and India with many times more populations than
Africa, who would ordinarily see children as more dispensable, did not
fall for the temptation of exchanging human souls for embarrassing
commodities like gin and mirrors, means that there is a basic ill in
the entire underdevelopment saga which we must all confront with
courage and address fully, if we are to make progress. The basic
lesson we must learn from history, therefore, is not to continue to
blame the West for our woes, but to look genuinely inwards for
enduring solution.
The attitude of African leaders since independence has also not been
any drastic departure from the malaise of their ancestors who sold
their children into slavery. That basic instinct of enslaving others
who are not as privileged as those in authority, still persists in our
societies today. This translates into the larger than life image
public office holders immediately assume as soon as they mount their
high horses and become the lords of those who are
supposed to have elected them into office. It is not unusual
for it to become a big insult to call a politician or public office
holder by name, no matter how insignificant such offices may be. In
Nigeria, as in most other African countries, once one becomes even a
councillor in a local government, his name changes to ‘honourable’, no
matter how dishonourable such a person may be. Not to talk of higher
offices, up to the presidency. This air of superiority and an
all-knowing posturing among African leaders has created
pseudo-messiahs all over Africa, thereby making accountability
impossible, because it is unthinkable to question a man who parades
himself as a demi-god.
Democracy and good governance thrive in the West because their people
have clearly demonstrated a desire to be led right, and over time,
have struggled to entrench this such that it has become their way of
life. The embarrassing questions Tony Blair and his cabinet ministers
had to answer over, practically, all issues before the recently
concluded parliamentary elections in the UK, speaks volumes of the
maturity of democracy in these parts of the world. Before audiences
drawn from different backgrounds, where questions could be asked about
practically anything, these leaders sweated it out and had to answer
everybody, even those who were clearly bitter about a number of their
programmes. The contrary is the case in Nigeria, where presidential
and gubernatorial sessions with the people are usually made up of a
select audience, where questions are pre-arranged and screened, so as
not to ‘embarrass His Excellency’. The reality, however, is that, the
more we embarrass our leaders and demand accountability for the way
they govern us, the better for the entire continent. The aura of
respect and invincibility which we allow to shroud our leaders makes
mediocres out of them, and gives them the unfounded confidence that
they are doing well, even when we all know that they are achieving
nothing.
ERADICATING AFRICA’S POVERTY
The countries which will benefit from the proposed debt relief after
the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland in July 2005 should thank their
stars. But for the relief to be meaningful, the people should enter
into a firm pact with their leaders to ensure that the relief thus
granted should not be viewed as an avenue for a new wave of
irresponsibility and rascality. After all, the dubious debts were
incurred, not for any meaningful development in any of the African
countries, but most of it ended up in foreign bank accounts of corrupt
leaders, which when they die, disappear into those economies,
and so forgiving the debts will mean that
the African leaders who stole the money have taken it for free.
The
solution
to
Africa’s
problems
goes
beyond organising musical
concerts and one million-man marches
to harass the G8 leaders when they meet next month in
Scotland. Much as I agree that the
developed world should do more to help Africa and other less developed
areas of the world, the solution lies more with investment by the West
in good
leadership in African countries,
rather than attraction of pity on the situation in
Africa, which is all too well known. The
danger in the way
the campaign is being pursued is that
it will make Africans to become more objects of scorn and disdain than
it is currently, and whatever reliefs are provided will be done, more
out of pity than any genuine desire to correct the ills of the
continent in an enduring manner.
There is no doubt that
any area of the world is prone to
poverty, if they are governed by bad leaders, and what the West has
going for it is the fact that they have
a comparatively consistent history of
good leadership, due to the structures they have
put
in place, whereas Africa has consistently
bad leadership, and their leaders do as they please, without any
sanctions, as their citizens are always too scared to challenge their
often all-knowing leaders.
Difficult as it may appear, I am
totally against debt relief for African countries in the form being
advocated. I would rather advocate that the debts be frozen at their
current rates, so that they do not continue to compound. The
ascertained debts should thereafter still be paid by the respective
countries into special funds to be managed by the World Bank or other
multi-lateral agencies for provision of infrastructure in the
respective countries, subject to criteria of good governance,
eradication of corruption, democracy, free and fair elections and
respect for the rule of law, among other criteria that may be
developed by the World Bank in association with the G8 countries.
Handled in this way, the debts will translate to compulsory savings
for such countries, with the difference that they will not be
available for irresponsible spending by their leaders, but actually
benefit the citizens through provision of much needed infrastructure.
The danger in an outright debt write off is that the funds currently
being used for debt service, rather than going into the productive
sectors of the economy, will simply disappear into the national
budgets and fund recurrent expenditure on maintenance of bogus
lifestyles of public office holders, as a cursory look at most African
budgets will show. In
Nigeria,
the government has admitted that 85% of the national budget goes into
recurrent expenditure, leaving only 15% for capital expenditure, which
is usually not even spent on any meaningful projects.
It
is therefore clear that debt service is not the real reason for
poverty in Africa, as most African leaders would like the world to
believe, but misplaced priorities in the allocation of even those
resources that are currently available. To do otherwise will be to
grant a soft landing to African leaders, who will soon start gloating
in their new found reprieve, and again siphon the funds outside the
continent, as their greed appears to know no bounds.
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