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07/07/2005:

"In search of a better Africa - Historic' debt relief: Who profits?"

by Ken Kopka
MUCH CHEST-THUMPING will accompany this week's announcement by the world's wealthy (G8) nations of a new deal for African debt relief. According to British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown the $40 billion deal will mean 100% write-offs for fourteen African countries, covering their debts to the World Bank, African Development Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

More than a little Puritan guilt drove pre-summit negotiations and the expectation - soon shattered - that the agreement could mean a doubling of aid to Africa. There prevailed a sense, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair pressed United States President George Bush for additional funding, that in one gesture they might fix a sum that would relieve the white conscience of its African burden forever. The fantasy was further fostered by the non-governmental organisations (including Jubilee 2000) and pop stars pressing for the deal.

Like most acts of charity, however, the deal instead looked set to reinforce the symbolism of noble giver and pitiable recipient, and the racist suppositions on which the rich world's dealings with the world's poor have long rested. The question was who stood to profit the most by it.
Full: jamaica-gleaner.com

AFRICA'S PROBLEMS ENORMOUS

Africa, it is easy to argue, needs all of the help that it can get. It loses twelve to 20,000 children daily to preventable disease. Life expectancy there has shrunk to 49 years (in India, it's 63). Forty-three per cent of Africans don't have ready access to safe water; half the continent survives on the equivalent of one US dollar a day. Of course, such figures mask as much or more than they reveal. But that's how Africa has been constructed in the Western imagination - in monolithic terms, as one immense, enduring problem.

The reasons for Africa's plight, meanwhile, remain curiously separated from its history - including in the present G8 exercise - as if Europe's violent seizure and looting of the continent weren't the reason for her woes, the continuity of that exploitation central to their "intractability." The billions that poured out of Africa in the form of diamonds, gold and (crucially) people-from what is aptly termed the period of "primitive accumulation" through the end of the colonial period helped European capitalism to achieve critical mass, to build its splendid cities, culture and "civilisation." In short, they made possible the position from which Europe now dispenses wealth and debt "forgiveness."

Estimates of the number of Africans lost to slavery range between 30 and 200 million persons, a fact routinely ignored when the West assesses Africa's failings. Even Europe's middle classes- "bulwarks of democracy" that they became - rose on the strength of the overwhelming surpluses that flowed to Europe, especially during the most intense period of colonial exploitation (1880-1930).

Less discussed is how Europe left behind a system in its own image: of civil administration oriented to commercial enterprise rather than people; of taxes that continued to force the African peasant into the cash culture of the single export crop. These limited Africans' ability to (re)establish their own forms of governance or evolve new forms compatible with their needs.

The billions continued to pour from Africa - in the form of sanctioned enterprises carried out by colonial successors, elites set up by Europeans or which rose in the destructive vacuum of the colonial departure. (The acts of sabotage by departing colonists are yet another very ugly and largely untold story.) Local manufactures continued to be undermined by the dumping of subsidised European and (increasingly) North American goods, which prevented Africa's economies from developing their own manufacturing.

London bankers helped maintain the continuity in the narrative, making their city the harbour for the funds of tyrants.

All this helped reinforce what is rightly termed a system of dependency in which raw goods flowed from Africa in a largely uninterrupted pattern and returned, if at all, in the form of more expensive finished products - a system from which Africa has found it impossible to escape.

EUROPE AND AFRICAN DEMOCRACY

Whatever lip service Europe and the US pay to democracy, they have found it cheaper to deal with dictators than whole peoples who, through democratically chosen leaders - may reserve the right to satisfy their own needs first or sell their goods and resources to the highest bidder. Real democracy is inimical to economic exploitation.

Without the armies, the murders both routine and compulsive, the imposed and unnatural borders, the ethnic groups played off against each other, the Western military aid to despots that ruined African socialism, no one knows how Africa might have evolved. The disruption of cultural and familial patterns, the endless emigration of skilled labour, all these cripple Africa to this day, contributing-for example, to the current AIDS crisis.

No one has time for history, of course, least of all the investor, whose preoccupation is a fast turnaround on investment. It's such short time frames, rather than cultures or ecosystems, which take generations to nourish, that Africa continues to represent for the West. And at fast investor yields Africa is blindingly proficient. Sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest region, is also its most profitable. According to the World Bank's 2003 Global Development Finance report the region offers "the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any ... in the world.'" (Nation, June 10)

Why would Europe or the US wish this to change?

THE QUICKENING SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

When Bush and Blair sit down to talk about Africa, the conversation is more strategic than humanitarian, much more about what will be taken than what's given. The historic "scramble for Africa" is quickening, not ceasing.

What the G8 officials know, but the symbolism of debt relief obscures is this: Africa is rich. It has two thirds of the world's mineral resources and, to the jaundiced eyes of Washington's neoliberals, who recently announced plans for a world 'peacekeeping' force of African soldiers, an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour. The US already takes more oil from Africa than it does from Saudi Arabia; it is fast becoming dependent on the continent's natural gas.

The G8 agreement is as much about strengthening access to those riches as about the comparatively small sums being yielded to those governments most "deserving" of relief. Central to the jockeying, and to French reluctance to participate in the deal is an ongoing, increasingly successful attempt by the US to push France from West Africa.

DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

Few poor nations can afford to scorn Western aid. And aid, appropriately determined and delivered, brings results.

Some of the 14 countries, no longer as desperate to obtain exchange for debt repayment, may begin refusing requests to store First World toxic waste. Senegal will electrify its countryside.

"Thanks to aid and debt relief, the number of primary school places has increased from three million to eight million" in Uganda the last six years, writes Iain Macwhirter (The Herald June 8). "Africans who have completed primary education are half as likely to get AIDS."

But the puny nature of the sums might make a thoughtful person weep, especially when compared to monies spent on the world's militaries. The $40 billion write-off to be announced this week is dwarfed by the recent $82 billion appropriation for the US government's Iraq war. "For the cost of a couple of stealth bombers," McWhirter notes, "you could provide free primary education for the whole of Africa."

And the impact of the G8 initiative will remain in the fine print. The deals that brought the original loans were contingent on the privatisation of public services and sale of state assets-neoliberalism's worldwide calling cards for disaster.

That monies freed up by debt forgiveness will be translated into health care or public services is unlikely. These have been privatised through much of sub-Saharan Africa under terms of previous agreements. Much of the severity of the African AIDS crisis, says author Helen Epstein (New York Review of Books, July 20, 2000), owes to the fact that countries have been forced to privatise health and have no infrastructure to contend with the present crisis.

Progressive organisations must insist that-given Europe and North America's bloody and exploitive history with Africa-future aid be given in the context of reparations, calibrated to the scope of historic harms and unconditional.

ON AFRICAN DEMOCRACY

Students of the humanitarian narrative of poverty often remark one of its chief distinctions: that of the deserving and undeserving poor. The deserving poor are compliant and keep their hands where the wealthy can see them: out waiting. The undeserving make trouble and complain.

This week's G8 agreement is predicated on the notion that Africa has entered the deserving ranks. "Things are changing on the continent," says Tony Blair's Africa Commission, with the continent's governments "showing a new vision. Africa, at last looks set to deliver."

But the briefest of surveys, such as that undertaken by author Michela Wrong (Observer June 9), shows that even states cited as harbingers of a new African spirit of democracy, like Kenya and Uganda, remain threatened by corruption and autocratic rule. Thirty-two of Africa's 53 countries have experienced violent conflict in the last fifteen years.

One source estimates that such corruption costs Africa US $148 billion per year, and much of this corruption is tied to arms sales. African governments spend US $12 billion annually on arms, most purchased, unsurprisingly, from the G8. British arms sales to Africa have quadrupled since 1999. The G8's 40 billion pound forgiveness is a comparative drop in the bucket next to such sums.

And Western corporations continue to feast on Africa with few calls for the kind of reform routinely urged on Africans. The June 1 London Guardian reports that a US Senate committee has accused Britain's HSBC bank of helping Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obian "move cash form the country's oil revenues into financial 'black holes' in Luxembourg and Cyprus." LIB, another British bank, stands accused of plotting to monopolise Liberian telecommunications and diamonds. Standard Charters, a London "development bank" is accused of providing loans that give it "a stranglehold" over Angolan oil and that country's economy.

Chinese firms-a powerful new force in world economics-are complicating efforts to stem the genocide in Sudan, giving millions to its military leaders to build pipelines. France, already kicked out of Iraq and eager not to be forced completely from the petroleum game, is accused of "encouraging regimes to run up debts" and paying kickbacks to them as part of its "African strategy."

A Different Vision

It will be bad form to mention such issues at the parties they throw for themselves this week in Gleneagles, Scotland, when the G8 heads gather to confirm the new agreements and European youths celebrate the "street power" they have brought to bear on the G8 in bringing forgiveness. (For forty other nations mired in debt misery, including Jamaica, there will be no celebrating.)

The fact that it had to be pointed out to the organisers of the Live 8 concert that there were no Black performers in the line-up for its gala Africa fund-raiser speaks volumes: aiding Africa remains, for the most part, a white fantasy: an orgy of self-congratulation where elite citizens socialise, more satisfying for the donors than recipients.

It's interesting to note that an ethos of shared wealth remains much more alive among the world's poor than the wealthy: survival makes it imperative. One notes it in the words of Ken Wiwa, son of Ken Saro Wiwa, Nigerian playwright executed ten years ago now for his defense of his Ogoni people against the Shell Oil Company's murderous environmental practices.

Wiwa fils, inheritor of Africa's promise, sees both radical change and generosity as necessary to the continent's survival. "The struggle of Africa," he writes, "is the struggle to share resources both within and without the continent." In Scotland this week such a generous vision will be nowhere on display.