Why Africa is Poor: the result of power-hungry dictators

Mills' hard-hitting book pulls no punches about Africa's condition. The first sentence of the introduction to his book, Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do About It, reads: “The main reason why Africa­’s people are poor is because their leaders have made this choice.” This sentence is repeated in the middle of the book. It is repeated again at the end of Mills’s conclusions. Could this insistent message be plainer? Or will Africa just continue to ignore the lessons of international reform as it suits them?

It reminds me of another book titled Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent. (published in 1990), written by Blaine Harden of the Washington Post. In it he made the following observation:

There are countless reasons to despair for Africa. At the end of the 1980s, per capita income was lower than it was thirty years earlier. Seventy percent of the world’s poorest nations are in Africa. The region is slipping out of the Third World into its own bleak category: the Nth World.

Africa is the most successful producer of babies in recorded history and the world’s least successful producer of food

And, like Greg Mills, Harden blames Africa’s power-hungry dictators for the tragic state of affairs:

As I travelled around Africa, it was the vulnerability of Africans to the depredations of their own leaders that — more than famines and wars and poverty — sickened me most.

If you took a quarter-century worth of His Excellencies the African leader and tossed them in a blender, you would come up with a Big Man who looks like this:

His face is on the money. His photograph hangs in every office in his realm. His ministers wear gold pins with tiny photographs of him on the lapels of their tailored pin-striped suits. He names streets, football stadiums, hospitals, and universities after himself. He carries a silver-inlaid ivory mace, or an ornately carved walking stick or a fly whisk or a chiefly stool. He insists on being called “Doctor” or “conqueror” or “teacher” or “the big elephant” or “the number-one peasant” or “the most popular leader in the world.” His every pronouncement is reported on the front page. He sleeps with the wives and daughters of powerful men in his government. He shuffles ministers without warning, paralyzing policy decisions as he undercuts pretenders to his throne. He scapegoats minorities to shore up popular support. He bans all political parties except the one he controls. He rigs elections. He emasculates the courts. He cows the press. He stifles academia. He goes to church.

(p217, Blaine Harden, Africa – Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, 1993)

Mills’s book should be required reading for every South African cabinet minister, senior (and upcoming) government official, business leader — for everyone interested in the development of what the Economist some years ago called the “hopeless continent”.

Mills also discusses South Africa’s resistance to globalisation and generally Africa’s eagerness to attend the myriad international events to which its leaders are invited, instead of submitting strategic and detailed execution plans at these events.

“Africa has the biggest voting bloc in the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other such organisations,” Mills notes. “But what does it ‘trade’ its vote for? Help for Cuba and the Palestinians, blocking UN managerial reform, and manoeuvring around tougher action on Burma and Iran. None of this does one bit for Africa­ or for Africans outside of the New York diplomats, who revel in such posturing, or those leaders overwrought by their own anti-colonial complexes. Africa is often the subject of these meetings, but its leaders generally miss the point.

“As the collapse of the global trade talks in Geneva in 2008 showed, the WTO was perhaps the worst example. Led by South Africa, 40 African votes were locked together with China, India­ and Brazil, with the aim of resisting European and United States demands for the South American and South Asian giants to open their markets.

“Fine for them, but those same countries had as high — or higher — tariffs on African goods as the EU and U.S. did. If African votes in support of their positions had been exchanged for commitment from those countries to provide duty- and quota-free status to Africa (a small price for them to pay given the limited share Africa would gain in their markets), this position would have made sense . Instead, Africa sold its votes for some form of ‘South-South’ solidarity, without any return to serve its own interests. India, China and Brazil must laugh all the way to Geneva for every WTO session.”

For how much longer does Africa want to be known as the failed continent?

Consider this comment in The Times (UK) by a former Conservative MP and influential columnist, Matthew Parris, responding to the constant squeals from African leaders that the West are trying to recolonise them:

“Great powers aren’t interested in administering wild places any more, still less in settling them; just raping them. Black gangster governments sponsored by self-interested Asian or Western powers could become the central story in 21st-century African history. The continent is in many places run by outfits that resemble gangs rather than governments. You hardly need visit  … the gang’s territory … you simply give it support, munitions, bribes and protection to keep the roads and airports open and it pays you with access to resources. It is when China, then America, and perhaps even Russia or India follow, that the scramble for Africa will truly be resumed.”

Parris wrote that comment in April 2008.

"Yet it is within the power of African governments to make more civilised arrangements. Why don’t they do it?"

Surveying Africa’s record, Mills writes: “In a half-century of independence, Africa has not realised its potential. Instead, its greatest national assets have undermined its prosperity. Africa’s youth, far from being a huge source of talent and energy to be harnessed, are regarded as a destabilising force because they are largely unemployed and uneducated.

The principal problem with African economics is politics, and the choices that leaders make in the interests of their short-term expediency of staying in power and ensuring control."

Far from being the world's breadbasket, Africa's agriculture potential has similarly been squandered. Despite many African states possessing natural advantages, 35 of 48 sub-Saharan economies were net food importers at the end of the 2000s. Africa's share of world agricultural exports has halved since 1970, to under 4 percent.

If Africa's dismal economic performance can be put down to bad choices by African leaders, then we have to ask: Why have they made them?"

When African leaders read what further Mills has to say, they should squirm, because they know it applies to most of them: “Things are highly politicised in the small sense of the word — keeping matters in the party’s ambit, rather than true checks and balances on government.