GOVERNANCE and the AFRICAN CONDITION Okello Oculi, Ph.D

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW

GOVERNANCE AND THE AFRICAN CONDITION

Okello Oculi, Ph.D Executive Director, AFRICA VISION 525 B7, Ndamela House, Area 3, Garki 500 Tafawa Balewa Way

"If one party has been eating so much, what with many parties? They will finish us!"

The above statement was made by some villagers in Tanzania in response to inquiries on whether or not they would wish to leave the one-party system of government for the call by donor agencies and local opposition elements for a multi-party system of politics. The 1991 Presidential Commission, which was undertaking the nationwide inquiry, was chaired by Chief Justice Francis Nyalila. It reported that 80 per cent of the people favoured the existing one-party rule by Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) - a merger between the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and the Zanzibar and Pemba based Afro- Shirazi Party (ASP) - but recommended a multi-party system since it was favoured by 20 per cent of the people, which the commission considered to be a significant minority. A most weighty part of that minority was Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere who had voluntarily resigned from the presidency in 1985, and become a vehement proponent of multi-party politics.

To appreciate the historical gravity of the views of these villagers, it is necessary to recall that colonial military and bureaucratic dictatorship was the first experience of failed governance all across Africa. Beginning with genocide in Namibia (under German administration) and in French-ruled Niger, Chad, Gabon, Cameroun, Congo Brazzavile and Central African Republic, colonial governance had also seized vast tracks of land, and livestock from local farmers in Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Nyasaland (Malawi), Angola, Mozambique and South Africa: 2 generated 2 famine caused by severe food shortages through the disruption of production for household consumption, and impoverishment producers through collecting high taxes, withholding of surpluses derived from low prices paid to farmers

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW for "cash crops" and what government earned from their sale in the international market. Furthermore, colonial governance utilized forced labour by colonized peoples for constructing roads. railway lines, - in the case of the Belgian Congo, this included Congolese labourers carrying railway engines and wagons on their shoulders from Matadi port to the mainland. There was also forced labour on White Settlers' farms and company mines.' By 1938 the level of malnutrition and disease including yaws was so severe that a British Government Commission reported that Britain could not expect to recruit soldiers from the African and Caribbean colonies to fight in the impending Second World War.

These conditions generated widespread protests ranging from West Africa through Central Africa to East and Southern Africa. In Tanganyika, for example, the colonial government was faced with protests against evictions of villagers from their land in Wameru (1951): riots against officially-sponsored reduction of numbers of cattle owned by herdsmen in Morogoro (1955); resistance in Iringa, Mbulu, Usumbrua (1957), etc. The depth of rejection of anti-people colonial governance was so widespread and protracted that attempts by the leaders of TANU to have a narrowly based and highly disciplined party (which like the Russian Communist Party which seized power in 1917) failed. Instead mass support turned TANU into a nationalist movement. In Uganda, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana. protests against low prices (by refusing to sell cocoa, coffee, and cotton) forced British officials to invent Produce Marketing Boards to act as a depositor of monies earned from the international market into British banks while paying stable but low prices to local farmers. The nationalist struggle in Africa was rooted in mass rejection of failed or anti-people and externally directed development governance. In Rwanda and the Belgian Congo people attacked symbols of their oppressors on the day of independence.

This point deserves emphasis because it had a major influence on post-colonial governance. Except in Congo Kinshasha (where after June 30 1960 Patrice Lumumba was prevented from settling down to govern by military mutinies, secession, a military coup and eventual assassination in January 1961), post-colonial leaders linked the function of government directly to eradiating poverty, providing education and health care to the masses of the people. However, by the mid-1960s, the verdict was almost a uniform report of a second failed governance. Colin Leys was among the earliest to point out that

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Kenyatta had adopted the strategy of shutting out local party leaders and supporters from influencing government policy-making and policy execution. This allowed his government to allocate land (bought from white settlers with a 70 million pounds sterling loan from Britain), to members of Parliament, top civil servants and government ministers while the millions of landless people either went without or received very limited allocations." The landless left rural areas for the slums of Mathari Valley in Nairobi. In Nigeria, the increasingly high revenues earned from oil exports led to widespread corruption, fraud, embezzlement under military and civilian governments while peasant farmers did not receive significant shares of oil revenues as investments for improving their tools of production and food processing; while the middle class exported their share of oil revenues to benefit foreign farmers by importing frozen beef, chicken, wheat, rice, milk and beverages from South American, North American and European Union economies. In 7 Mobutu's Zaire, budget allocations for sectors were embezzled and shared out in declining proportions from top officials in Kinshasha, to regional district and local government administrators. Soldiers and police in rural areas received no salaries and lived by seizing yam, chicken, cassava and other food crops from women going to local markets. Governance became primarily servicing the greed of Mobutu's "entourage" and not "the provision of equitable and equal welfare (education, health, housing, old-age pensions, agricultural inputs, roads, etc), to the people". Under these circumstances local communities could only perish and starve when rains fell and epidemics struck. Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zaire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, sahelian states have been victims.

Several explanations have been provided for post-colonial African elites creating their own version of failed governance. Franz Fanon had in 1961 blamed it on their hunger for consuming what European industrialists have invented out of their sense of mission for creating European material progress. Hayatudeen, President of the Nigerian Economic Group, put it this way in a recent interview with NTA:

"We have never really had a bourgeoisie in this country: people who believe in making money the hard way: rather our business leaders have been appendages of foreigners.”

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A possible contributory factor is that, unlike Korea and China which experienced Japanese settler-colonialism in which large scale industrialization and modern agricultural production was undertaken by the Japanese. fellow oriental people like themselves, and not by Europeans or Americans. This socialized Koreans and the Chinese in Manchuria, with vital self-confidence and the need to use oriental genius, hard work, national cultural values and patriotism to achieve effective public administration, and national industrial takeoff on the basis of self-help and self reliance. In this regard, we would expect Algerians, Zimbabweans. Kenyans, and South African blacks who experienced varying degrees of agricultural and industrial productivity by European settlers would exhibit higher dosages of bourgeoisation.

Whatever the explanatory factors, the failure in governance has produced high levels of frustration, hunger and anger out of mass poverty and unemployment. This has continued to throw out generations of armed robbers whose activities deepen poverty by driving away investment capital through capital flight by the same elite because it has "made the lives of those who run their own investment very unsafe"

It has also forced middle and lower ranks of civil servants into corruption through the use of inefficiencies and irritating red tape as tools for forcing those seeking their official services to resort to bribery as a facilitator and accelerator of action by bureaucrats. Unlike under colonial rule, post-colonial public administration in Africa has gone into spiralling inefficiencies and sluggish performances, non-actions, and non-decisions often as deliberate ways of effecting corruption. The higher ranks of public officials have introduced the notion of bureaucratic suicide and staticide by resorting to "looting". The African Centre for Economic Growth has spelled out the effects of looting thus:

"It usually involves the kind of scams whose figures are so huge that when they are successfully concluded they have macroeconomic implications fairly quickly - they cause banks to collapse. inflation to rise, the exchange rate to decline. The impetus for looting is often political and it happens under the direction or with the acquiescence of important political players in a given country. It often involves, for example, the printing of currency to fund fictitious projects; using public revenues to award enormous contracts to individuals who never supply the goods or the services. The

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primary movers in the companies behind these scams don't just cream off 10 or 20 percent with a cut within that for the higher-ups. In these deals the cut can be as high as 100 percent and most of the cash goes to the higher-ups. These resources fund election campaigns and pay for private militias in many African countries”

The colonial state had the benefit of having higher supervisory authorities based in London, Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, or Madrid which could change key personnel in the colony, review policies, demand and carry out investigations and write reports, and have their directives obeyed and effectively implemented. The post colonial state in Africa lacked such an authority. The Organisation of African Unity, OAU, was emasculated by the dictum of non interference in the internal affairs of member states. Leaders silenced critical voices of the people by either isolating the one party state from the involvement of the people/or party supporters, or, in the case of Tanzania, monopolising policy- making and administration as well as by absorbing trade unions and cooperatives into the party structure and its silencing discipline. There was thereby no external and local supervisory authority and structures. The colonial state also remained focused on efficient, and effective administration for exploiting resources for transfer to the metropolitan country; and undertaking creative social engineering, including inventing new tribal identities and investing in long-term conflicts by implementing programmes of unequal development between regions and social groups; prosecuting agricultural, veterinary and medical research, etc." 13 The failure of governance in post-colonial Africa has in contrast, been profoundly anti-people's welfare through the paralysis of administrative performance and production. Leaders have exhibited non-commitment to internal economic investment and growth by exporting capital out of their countries. The cumulative effect has been that defrauded and embezzled funds from national budgets and incomes have recreated profound levels of state and social weakness similar to that, which enabled Europe's invasions of Africa after 1884 to succeed. The statement below illustrates this weakness thus:

"With a per capita income averaging $315 in 1997, more than 40% of (Africa's) 600 million people live below the poverty line of $1 per day. In many countries 200 out of 1000 children die before the age of 5, and more

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than 250 million people lack access to safe water. More than 200 million have no access to health services."

The degree of disconnection between the rural people and the state is illustrated by studies on governance, which I conducted in three communities in Abia and Osun States in Nigeria. Assembled communities in each state reported not having political contact with elected local, state and federal legislators one year after elections in late 1998 and early 1999; not being aware of budget making activities of all the legislative bodies; having no access to their Local Government Chairmen and no information about, and control over the expenditure of 200 million Naira sent monthly by the federal government to Local Government officials supposedly for the execution of projects at the local level. While each community had very strict social codes over the disbursement of funds collected from households local self-help projects, there was indifference to corruption by Local Government Chairmen because they were perceived as misappropriating "government money", and were, in any case, not from the same village or clan. In Zaire (now DRC), local communities had organized themselves to create social services for themselves and initiated economic development projects, due to the absence of state presence and over three decades of the state's indifference to their plight.

Here again, unlike the colonial state which ensured intensive penetration of rural communities (to collect poll tax, stipulate agricultural crop production and improved husbandry, extract forced labour, etc), the failed post-colonial state has turned whole regions of a country into fallow areas. In North-Central Uganda, for example, roads in Dokolo. Kyoga and Omoro counties (at independence in 1963) had till 2002 not had new roads added to the single muram road built by the colonial Public Works Department with forced local labour; and had virtually returned to a bush track.

The experiences of Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Guinea Bissau/Cape Verde (and in a special way Tanzania's operation of the one-party democratic politics) had by contrast, exemplified contact between political leaders and villagers and the urban unemployed for the imperative of recruiting them for fighting protracted liberation wars. This was premised on the military value of legitimacy; a resource which (following the seizure of power by FRELIMO, in Mozambique and the MPLA in Angola), forced NATO and apartheid- South Africa to resort to state-terrorism (or "Nicaraguazation") to prevent

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW their consolidation of power and establishment of socialist systems. The resultant massacres, destruction of health clinics, schools, ridges, cooperative farms, burning of villages by RENAMO and UNITA in Mozambique and Angola, respectively, were strategically aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the state under the control of FRELIMO and the MPLA as a result of their failure to ensure security and property for rural communities. 15 The ability of MPLA and FRELIMO to nevertheless retain power and win elections against UNITA and RENAMO were testimonies to the strategic value of their investment in intensive involvement of local communities in the politics of liberation struggle and development at the village level for the welfare of the people. In this sense they are not typical of the failed governance which has characterized most of post-colonial African states.

GOVERNANCE AND THE ETHNIC FACTOR

Under colonial failed governance, clans and ethnic communities continue to be the primary sources of social security, even in colonies like Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia where their ancestral attachment to land had been profoundly disrupted as a result of ethnic groups being driven out of ownership (but not labouring on it), by European settlers. Likewise, in post-colonial Africa clans and ethnic communities, unlike the state have not experienced internal suicide and failed governance. In cases where territorial division between ethnic groups had been manipulated by colonial administrators to create uneven development including recruitment into the bureaucracy, (e.g. Chad, Niger, Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania) considerable achievements have been made by ethnic groups to urge the adoption of devices such as affirmative action, quotas, catch-up development programmes, and federal systems of administration, in order to accommodate and mobilize ethnic solidarity for national development. In Nigeria, for example, the creation of states and local governments has in general been used to liberate ethnic minorities from discrimination, injustice, oppression and exploitation by dominant ethnic majorities and ruling groups. In Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda the control and domination of state power by one or a few ethnic groups, has generated counter-ethnic nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and even the 1959 and 1994 genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. In Ethiopia the perception of the death of

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100,000 people from famine in the peripheral provinces of Wollo and Tigre from 1972 to 1973 alone (as a result of the official indifference of an Amhara dominated government to the plight of non-Amharas, including Tigrayans), provoked ethnic mobilisation which culminated in a war by Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and Ethiopian peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)- with assistance from the Eritrean Peoples Liveration Front (EPLF). On seizing power in 1991, the TPLF-dominated government adopted a policy of opening up political space for formerly Amhara-dominated ethnic nationalities by decentralising administration with the use of local languages and non- Amharic alphabets. This was a return to a strategy adopted by Italian authorities in the mid-1930s as a way of winning friends and allies from among non-Amhara groups:

“The Italians, who brought Ethiopia as a whole under their rule in 1936, divided Ethiopia into ethnic regions and introduced ethnic languages as educational and administrative media. They built several schools which used Oromo and other ethnic languages as medium of instruction in the respective regions."

Cultural imprisonment, balkanisation, and denials of means of communication with hostile anti-apartheid international cultures, was anchored by the racist government in South Africa on promoting the development of "bantu languages", thereby, paradoxically, putting post-apartheid South Africa on the most advanced path to linguistic pluralism and liberation.

A less positive case of a return to historical antecedents over the role of ethnic nationalism in Africa is dramatized by the role of mafia groups, mercenaries, small arms dealers in instigating and feeding ethnic conflicts in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo for the purposes of exploiting diamonds, oil, gold, coffee, timber and other natural resources; as well as selling small arms, helicopters, and military services to warring factions and governments. The following statement illustrates the past exploitation of ethnicity in Africa:

"The advent of European trade, beginning with the slave trade, propelled the notorious "tribal" wars that changed the face of pre-colonial state formations and ethnic relations in Africa, beginning from the late 17th century. Warlords, usurpers, adventurers and other new men of power,

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backed by Western and Arab slave trade dealers ravaged the length and breath of the continent in slave raids, destroying established states and building new ones. The slaving and trading wars propelled massive population displacements and forced migrations which continued right down to the 19th century, introduced new notions of 'superior inferior groups based on military strength, new forms of conquest and dominance, and new kin-based safety and security networks in places where extant states were unable to protect their citizens from the ravages of the warring groups."

In 1986 the Sudanese government of Sadiq el-Mahdi initiated a policy of government supplying arms to Baggara Arab tribes for them to attack Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups, the main support base of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Front (SPLA). In Nigeria the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), the Bakassi Boys, The Egbesu Boys in the Niger Delta have been receivers of small arms, 80 per cent of which are illegally brought into Nigeria. The perennial conflicts in Warri in Delta State in 2003 have been linked to guns coming in from Liberia's civil war and "agents, who are often prominent men in their communities," who buy guns and "sell them to the youths" who use them for protecting oil-bunkering activities and extorting rent from oil companies. 1⁹ Libya, Burkina Faso, Guinea as well as Canadian, British, and French companies have been fingered as backers of warring ethnic factions in the Mano River region. British, German, Italian, South Africa and Kenyan interests in oil from southern Sudan has favoured the Arab-dominated military regime in Sudan against ethnic groups in Southern Sudan.

In what Ali Mazrui has likened to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by American- backed Cuban exiles based in Miami in the state of Florida, Ugandan trained and supplied Rwanda Patriotic Front, RPF, invaded Rwanda, provoked a pre-planned 1994 Hutu genocide against the Tutsi, but established political control in Rwanda. Mazrui claims that the "Mobutu regime over-reached itself when it tried to empower remnants of the Hutu interahamwe in refugee camps in Zaire, and strip indigenous Zairean Tutsi of their Zairean citizenship. 20 Nzongola-Ntalaja suggests, however, that Rwanda and Uganda's claims of protecting their security interests by locating troops inside the Congo, was a premeditated international cover for three objectives; namely: (1) seizing power in Kinshasha and turning Congo into a vast empire presumably just as tiny Belgium on the

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW far away European continent had done: (2) with NATO support, overthrowing the Mobutu regime whose corrupt and failed state of over thirty years had outlived its Cold War utility for NATO countries; and (3) looting "gold, diamonds, timber, coffee and tea of eastern Congo". The tools used were the Tutsi ethnic diaspora resident in the Congo (as) fighters in Rwanda's army) and the Hutu militants in refuge camps (as excuses) who.

"contrary to all international norms and conventions... were kept right on the border in refugee camps around the Congolese cities of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira. The international community, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and NGOs, continued to care for the refugees to the tune of $1 million a day, while little or nothing was being done for the victims of the genocide in Rwanda or for the Congolese victims of the refugee influx,”

It has been asserted that in anticipation of the end of the Cold War, the United States government also decided to sacrifice the exclusivist and authoritarian ethnic Americo- Liberian aristocratic regime in Liberia, as well as pre-empt the take over of power by the socialist groups around Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA), by supporting Samuel Doe's military coup of 1980. His own tendency towards a Mobutistic strong-man dictatorship was undermined and stopped by urging him to initiate ethnic reprisals against potential challengers to his rule. This turn of events multiplied inter-ethnic conflicts all across Liberia in horrendous geometric proportions thereby creating armed pluralism which cn be turned into multi-partysm. Ethnicity in Africa has thus become a lethal element when manipulated for intra and inter-state military projects.

THE INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT AND GOVERNANCE

The deepening weakness of post-colonial African states coincided with the march towards the end of the Cold War after 1989 when the Berlin Wall was broken down, thereby losing for Africa the two diplomatic resources of being courted by the NATO countries away from the Warsaw Pact countries; and having alternative ideological capitals in Moscow and Beijing which were closer to African values of the state putting primacy to the welfare of the community rather than on serving the individual. The

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1980s, subsequently, saw a vigorous ideological warfare by the NATO and European Union countries against Africa. The main weapons used were the political and economic concepts of "liberalization", privatization", the retreat of the state from economic ownership, production processing. marketing and fiscal management; "freedom", "multi- party democracy". "the rule of law", "good governance", and "human rights".

At stake were several values. African states had anti-colonial legacies of engaging in economic nationalism by the state through the participation of parastatals in the economy: the protection of local industrial growth by the use of tariff and non-tariff barriers; and the regulation of the use of foreign exchange ad interest rates in the interests of increased economic productivity. That these policies had led to gross abuses such as the misuse and incapacitation of parastatals by their managers for embezzlement, fraud and corruption; did not negate their original strategic objectives. By 1980 Tanzania, for example, had a total of 400 parastatals running the economy, with 108 of them in the agricultural sector alone. In 1976 corruption had forced President Nyerere to state that:

"We have reached a stage where our greatest danger is a new one. The thing which could now most undermine our socialist development would be failure in the battle against corruption, against theft and loss of public money and goods and other abuses of public office"

The second value was the African concept of democracy as a collective debate in the search for a consensus over ensuring access to social welfare for all members of the community. Nyerere expressed the NATO/EU attack on this version of democracy as based on their having in mind:

"not democracy but the two-party system, and the debate conducted between Government Party and the Opposition Party within the parliament building... the two-party system has become the essence of democracy in the West. It is no use telling an Anglo Saxon that when a village of a hundred people have sat and talked together until they agree where a well should be dug they have practised democracy"

While the repression and exclusion of the masses from politics (which had characterised most one-party and military dictatorships in Africa), justified the call for multi-party politics, the real interest of NATO/EU countries was in shifting primary focus to the

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW primacy of the ritual of holding multi-party elections rather than on ensuring the democracy was a means of realising social welfare politics. Elections won with huge election campaign funds, the manipulation of irrational and conflictual racial, religious. ethnic or regional prejudices, and rigging elections, is preferred to focusing on social welfare precisely because it is most likely to favour the coming to power of groups who would benefit from privatization and liberalisation of the economy as favoured by NATO/EU countries, the World Bank and the IMF.

The practical consequences of this ideological warfare have been the imposition of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) and dictates of "Globalization", on African governments. Practical policy measures demanded by SAP have been:

 the devaluation of local currencies so that a country's products become cheaper for those with "hard currencies" to pay less for, while imports into the country become more expensive:  freezing of wages for workers so that local industries have to sell their goods to customers with static and/or declining incomes: thereby failing to retain their workforce and compete with incoming imports;  increase in interest rates so that local producers and investors cannot borrow repayable loans from banks, thereby under-developing the productive capacity of the economy:  removal of subsidies to agriculture and agricultural inputs so that what farmers produce cannot be sold at prices low enough to compete with imported food, and produce less for food as well as local industries thereby increasing hunger and malnutrition in the country for the masses of the people:  reduce government spending on health, education, transportation, housing, thereby repudiating the original goals of the anti-colonial struggle, and undermining political legitimacy.  relaxing import controls thereby ling the local market with subsidized imports which sell at prices lower than local products, consequently forcing factories to close and workers to be thrown into unemployment:  opening the banking sector to multinational banks thereby losing control over which sectors of the economy are to be funded:

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 privatization, thereby allowing foreign investment to come and buy existing national assets rather than establishing new industries: and subsequently, closing production in favour of imports from their subsidiaries abroad:  continue to produce and export cheap raw materials.

The ultimate effect is the weakening of the economic base of national sovereignty. retarding the growth of human resources, political stability, national development, and ultimately military strength.

South Africa makes an instructive case study in assessing the impact of globalisation on intra-African international economic relations. Between June 30, 1995 and March 1999, South Africa conducted negotiations with the European Union over a Trade, Cooperation and Development Agreement. TCDA. The terms of the agreement reached would mean that by 2010 up to 99 percent of South African industrial products will be allowed into the EU market duty free. Only 21 percent of agricultural products were to be allowed in duty free at the commencement of the agreement and "62 percent of South African agricultural products will not actually enter the EU market duty free until 2010". (25) By contrast 34 percent of EU agricultural products would enter the South African market duty free at the commencement of the agreement; while 62 percent of EU industrial products would be so treated.

The impact of the implementation was immediate. EU canned tomatoes, for example, were so highly subsidized that even when import tariffs on it was raised from 23 to 30 percent, it still sold at a price lower than the production cost for South African producers. Consequently:

"South Africa's largest food processing company, Langeberg Foods. was forced to close its major canning plant. Paarl factory, located in the Western Cape. This resulted in 2,500 people losing their jobs."

The President of the National Chamber of Milling called for the imposition of duties on imported EU flour to counter the EU's payment of $103 per ton to its wheat farmers thereby enabling them to sell at lower prices in the South African market.

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South Africa negotiated the free trade agreement with the EU without consulting Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and the SADC countries. This happened despite the following implications of the South Africa - EU FTA on their economics:

 their loss of between 400 to 800 million US dollars annually from imports into South Africa which would have been charged on EU imports and shared:  loss of the South African market to EU goods;  their competing with duty free South African products inside the EU market:  their loss of markets in Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia through dumped EU products reaching these markets through informal cross-border trade.  SADC agricultural exports to South Africa will be replaced by EU.

All of these would lead to local producers closing down and throwing workers into unemployment, as well as the retrenchment of workers in the civil service, and the withdrawal of subsidies to health and education sectors. The resultant deindustrialisation of these countries will contradict the claims for the enhancement of development made for the integration of SADC into the global economy. Moreover, the development dividends expected from regional economic integration will be replaced by economic conflict within SADC.

With the bulk of South Africa's population still excluded from effective participation by its apartheid economic structures, (including lack of access to land), throwing more workers out of employment in SADC countries, will only fuel frustration and violence- proneness in the population. The prospect of violence and instability will drive away potential investments, thereby deepening under-development, lack of job-creation, poverty, and lost of legitimacy for democracy.

THE NEW PARTNERSHIP FOR AFRICA'S DEVELOPMENT, NEPAD

"Historical circumstances now demand of our generation that it solve in a felicitous manner the vital problems that face Africa, most especially the cultural problem. If we do not succeed in this, we will appear in the history

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of the development of our people as the watershed generation that was unable to insure the unified cultural survival of the African continent; the generation which, out of political and intellectual blindness, committed the error fatal to our national future. We will have been the unworthy generation par excellence. The selection of a single language for the continent one which any foreigner, whether French, English, Russian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or others, would have to learn to communicate with any African on our Black Continent would thus obviously lead to a simplification of our intercourse with the outside world. International relations, far from becoming more complicated, would become much easier."

The above was an articulation by Cheik Anta Diop in 1974 of a decision officially adopted in 1959 (Easter) at a convention in Rome of Black writers and artists, and the Federation of African Students in France at a seminar held at Rennes in July 1959. It was animated by the anti-colonial pa-African politics which acquired momentum after the Second World War which contained the disastrous military collapse and colonization of France, Belgium, Holland and Portugal (as colonial oppressors in Africa) by Hitler; as well as the German battering of Britain and her rescue by the United States and Russian military might. Four decades later (2002), a similar call for the reinvention of Africa (and her national development), as a single political space, would be captured in the New Partnership for Africa's Development, NEPAD.

It is noteworthy that the four principal leaders who have spearheaded the NEPAD project came from under severe political crisis in their individual countries. Abdoulaye Wade had, since the 1960s, fought against economic and cultural corruption in Senegal under Leopold Senghor and his anointed successor Abdou Diouf. Abdulazeez Bouteflika had seen Algeria's armed struggle which he had actively served as a teenager and as a Foreign Minister under Hourie Boumedienne, degenerate into protracted fratricide after the cancelled general elections of 1992 which was won by the so-called "Islamic fundamentalists". Olusegun Obasanjo had traveled along "the valley of death" as a condemned "coupist" by General Sani Abacha; whose regime he had openly criticized for its repressive political methods, corruption and making the civil service redundant while the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF, expended vast sums of funds. Thabo Mbeki had come

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW through the horrendous anti-people politics and economic of the apartheid system. It was to be expected that they would agree on the call for an African renaissance.

As a diplomatic initiative, NEPAD seeks to draw the G8 countries into investing 64 billion US dollars annually into Africa's economies: not as aid but as investment partnership. As the initiating partner, African leaders will be expected to assume leadership in policy development and in the execution of its "good governance programmes.

NEPAD's "good political governance" programme is targeted at patronage networks, nepotism, cryonism, corruption and lack of rule of law which have inhibited transparency and accountable public administration in Africa in the last four decades; as well as at authoritarian single-party and military monopoly of opinion, electoral victories and participation in politics. Its "economic good governance" programme seeks to impose common standards in banking operations, tenders and award of contracts; the management of business enterprises, procurement procedures and payments, as a means of enhancing efficiency and eliminating corruption.

Its sectoral policy programmes are to be planned on the basis of trans-territorial political space, so that railway projects, for example, will either cover whole regions or several regions in conception, planning, design and implementation. In the area of education, children of school-going age in high density but poorly serviced regions (like Kano and Lagos in Nigeria), would be trained for productive employment in low density areas like Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique or Eritrea. In the social sector, NEPAD's goals include the reduction of infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015; the enrolment of children of school age by 2015; and the equalization of gender access to education by 2005.

Since social conflict including civil wars and genocide, have led to massive population displacements; disruption of agriculture, commerce and industrial production; maiming and disabling human resources; destruction of infrastructure, and scared away investments. NEPAD puts great emphasis on promoting peace 28 and security.

A new innovation in African diplomacy is that of NEPAD's "Peer Review mechanism process through which African leaders will supervise and interrogate each other's implementation of its economic and political good governance programmes. This is,

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW presumably, to whittle down the protective barriers of the OAU's cardinal law of "non- interference in the internal affairs of member states." It's external dimension will allow African leaders to monitor and censure G8 governments and their multinational corporations over issues such as their promotion of corruption in Africa: non-investment in Africa: discriminatory investment in favoured African states: promotion of electoral fraud and support for repressive governments in Africa.

Critics have admonished the initiators of NEPAD for not engaging African peoples, trade unions. professional groups, students and politicians (including legislators). in the original conception of the project. Olukoshi worries that its "good governance may become a substitute for "democratic governance" with emphasis put on social welfare serving the communal interests of the people. Such a displacement of content would fit with the Structural Adjustment focus of the World Bank and the IMF whose interests are primarily in grooming technocrats who will administer "adjustment" dictates from the Bretton Woods institutions." 29

Some critics expect NEPAD to deal with stipulations by the World Trade Organization. WTO, whic (1) use intellectual property rights to prevent African countries from independently manufacturing their own versions of industrial products such as generic drugs, and the exploitation of pharmaceutical properties of their own native plants and herbs once research organisations in the developed countries have discovered and manufactured products out of them: (2) investment measures which require full repatriation of profits and payment of lower wages in export processing zones than obtain outside them, and agreements on trade in services which allow banks and multinational corporations in G8 countries into African markets, thereby running local banks and businesses into extinction. 30

A major weakness in NEPAD's "Peer Review Mechanism" is the absence of a role for civil society groups in its operation, as well as the absence of a commitment to funding capacity building for African civil society groups for such participation in the same manner as EU governments make budget provision for supporting their own NGOs, including those whose activities are mainly in Africa. The British Ministry of Overseas Development, for example, had by the 1980s, seen a role for British NGOs in creating favourable environments in Africa and elsewhere for British exports to those regions of

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW the world. Cheik Anta Diop would (to paraphrase him), regard NEPAD as merely "better than nothing without African states also surrendering sovereignty in specified areas, let alone establishing a United Stats of Africa (or a Federation of African States), to implement programmes such as an integrated continent-wide hydroelectric power grid, including infrastructures for direct export-marketing of electricity to the EU countries. Nevertheless, NEPAD has been commended as a new thrust in African international relations which abandons lamentation and chooses self-confidence by reaching out for partnership with, not dependence on, the developed economies of the world. Its belief in the developmental powers of capitalist political economy in Africa marks it from colonial governance which located capitalist growth primarily in Europe, and reserved Africa for decay and depletion of her natural resources. In this sense it is a bold search for African power in the 21st century.

GOVERNANCE FAILURE AND SECURITY ISSUES

"Plans formulated in the United States in 1970 to control birth rates are extremely far- reaching and suggest, for example, the idea of putting sterilizing agents into the water supply of cities or household salt, if need be over the objections of local governments."

That conspiracy perspective over American defence policies (by Albert Sauvy in a 1975 publication based in France), was re-echoed in claims by radical groups in the United

States to the effect that the HIV/AIDS virus came out of the American Department of

Defence's laboratories and was first tried out on Haitian illegal immigrants being held in

Florida detention centres. In Nigeria the newly earned national credibility earned by the

National Food and Drugs Administration and Control, NAFDAC, was exploited to douse resistance to polio vaccines among predominantly Moslem populations in Nigeria about

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW claims that polio vaccination of Nigerian children is a secret device for birth control in recipients."

Genetic research in more positive areas of food production and health has confirmed activity in similar lines of scientific research. A report in The Chronicle on Higher

Education, May 8, 1998, p.A19 stated as follows:

"Researchers have announced the first successful use in humans of a

vaccine created by genetically engineering a food crop. In a clinical trial

conducted at the University of Maryland at Baltimore... research subjects

ate raw slices of genetically engineered potatoes and thereby gained

immunity to a common form of diarrhoea. The hope is that edible vaccines

could be grown in many of the developing countries where they would

actually be used, said Regina Rabinovich, head of the Vaccine and

Treatment Evaluation Program at the National Institute of Allergy and

Infectious Diseases which supported the research".

Work in the area of biological warfare involves intensive combinations of highly trained scientific manpower, adequate financial resources, interest by security professionals and policy makers; all of which presuppose capacity by the state and good governance through the ability to supervise its agents and resources, as well generate and sustain a high sense of patriotism. Such lack of capacity became among contributory factors to the inability of African states to protect their citizens from internal and external attacks. The

HIV/AIDS virus has exhibited the peculiar traits of: (1) evolving from its prevalence predominantly among homosexuals in North America and Europe, into a heterosexual scourge when it crossed over into Africa; and (2) being more vigorously and massively dramatized by North American and EU governments and media than horrendous deaths

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW by hundreds of thousands of Africans from famine and starvation in Ethiopia, Angola,

Malawi, etc, and from Charles Taylor supported "merciless and sustained terror and wanton destruction beyond the limits of human endurance", including the cutting off of arms. noses, ears and legs of children and grown-up civilians in 30 Liberia and Sierra

Leone." Njoki Njehu, Executive Director of "50 YEARS IS ENOUGH NETWORK". stated in a Voice of America television interview programme, that 8,000 people in Africa die from

HIV/AIDS everyday (28/8/2003).

Bad governance involving collusion between corrupt African officials and agents of multinational banks and multinational businessmen inflating costs to either export raw cash paid as bribes or accommodate kick-backs for government officials, were also responsible for the accumulation of debts. Between 1985 and 1996 Sub-Saharan African countries paid back over 5 billion U.S. dollars. This had risen to 15 billion U.S. dollars annually by 2002. Debt vulnerability (including inability to pay interests on unpaid interests), gave the IMF power to dictate to African governments unable to pay, Structural

Adjustment measures whose social and economic effects were severely destructive. In

Nigeria, for example, while "in 1990 the numbers of stunted children were 51.9 percent

(for the Northeast). 50.4 percent (for the Northwest), 36.6 percent (for the Southeast) and 35.6 percent (for the Southwest), by 1993 the figures had risen dramatically to

53.4%, 51.4%, 51.3% and 49.1% respectively, reflecting drastic losses of income by retrenched workers in the Southeast and the Southwest, as well as lower access to household food. At least 4 million children in Africa were doing annually from malnutrition as a result of failed governance

At the foundation of the organisation of African Unity, OAU, there was primary focus on collective African military security to be ensured with technological weapons of war

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW being used for defence and conflict management. There was, however, silence over intra- state conflicts and their prevention through detonating social landmines consisting of structurally expressed unequal economic and social d elopment between regions. ethnic, religious, and racial gror, inside individual African countries outside of European-sett countries of Southern Africa. The need to ensure the protection of the territorial integrity and independence of all state of the African continent" necessarily led to setting up. in

1965, of relevant Structures, notably: a Defence Commission with a central command operating under an African Defence Organization"

With failures in governance across Africa, these social landmines began to explode with escalating and spiralling levels of generalized violence against vast numbers of civilian populations, and increasing levels of emphasis on tribal atavism against civilian tribal groups rather than on conflicts between government armed forces and armed combatants of opposition political groups. Whereas in Chad, Niger, Mali. Senegal. Nigeria and Eritrea, regional rebel groups from aggrieved regions primarily fought against government military forces. in Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the

Democratic Republic of Congo, by contrast, genocidal attacks on civilian populations became predominant. Terror against civilian populations through "Operation No Living

Thing" launched by the Revolutionary United Front, RUF, in early February 1999 against the capital of Sierra Leone. Freetown. killed 6.300 civilians in ten days, while 3.000 children were abducted Generalized and random terror against civilians had. by 2,000. driven 330.000 Sierra Leoneans and 125.000 Liberians into refugee camps in Guinea alone. constituting "the largest refugee population in Africa".

The atrocities of the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the Charles Taylor and

Foday Sankoh-led wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, demonstrated a leadership with such

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW profound and seemingly psychotic commitment to hedonistic and anarchistic barbarity, that it negated the essence of politics seen as the organization of public space for realizing the collective good; as well as a total rejection of politics as "the art of the possible" resultant from negotiated accommodation of, and power-sharing with, competing interest groups. Sankoh. Taylor, and leaders of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, for example, repeatedly, broke truces negotiated and agreements signed with the government and returned to more conflict even when it was clear, in the case of Taylor and Sankoh, that victory on the battlefield was unattainable. Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front,

RUF, after stating their goal as seeking to "liberate" Sierra Leoneans from the corruption and oppression of the APC" government, and of conducting "a people's movement for national recovery", resorted to expressing their rejection of the holding of elections by amputating limbs of captured civilians "to see how they will vote". According to a statement issued by the RUF's Political Wing on 15 January 1999:

"A few RUF fighters in the bush went on the rampage and as their own way

of stating their objection to the planned elections, they proceeded on a

campaign to cut off the hands of innocent villagers as a message that no

voting should occur...

We can talk here of cases not of failed governance, but of failed second armed struggles or proposed liberation since they were essentially anti-people.

Within the context of NEPAD. security diplomacy has assumed a political economy of its own If it is not costing Nigeria 10 billion U.S. dollars between 1990 and 1997 in Liberia's conflict alone, a mercenary company. Sandline, was claiming payment of 30 million U.S. dollars for services rendered to the Sierra Leone government. Lord Eric Avebury. Vice

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW

Chair. Parliamentary Human Rights Group of the British House of Lords, stated that

President Charles Taylor had by 1999:

"allowed a South African-based diamond mining and trading company to

set up a cover operation in Monrovia with a subsidiary in Burkina Faso, as

a cover for RUF mining operations...”

A potpourri of diplomatic principles have been at play. Tanzania in 1978/79 invoked the right of hot pursuit" to justify driving Idi Amin out of Tanzanian territory, (which Amin's troops had invaded), and ensuring the non-recurrence of that act of inter-state aggression by driving him out of power. Idi Amin's seeming ulterior motive of seeking to deplete

Tanzania's ability to effectively support liberation struggles in Southern Africa, as well as contributing to the collapse of the East African Community: nor his massacres and violations of human rights Ugandans, were not: invoked. General Olusegun Obasanjo, as

Nigeria's military head of state at the time, publicly condemned Tanzania's action against

Idi Amin as constituting a precedent inimical of peace and inter-state stability in Africa.

On August 11. 2003, Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Joachim Cissano of

Mozambique, and John Kuffour of Ghana. would carry out a diplomatic coup and abduction of President Taylor out of Liberia for the sake of terminating conflict in Liberia and the Mano River region. It would also lead to returning ECOWAS to focusing more on economic development than on fire-brigade administration of conflicts across West

Africa. The principle of Taylor's accountability for the violation of human rights was given suspended lower priority as compared to preventing armed politicians in Liberia from using force, and not. the ballot box, as the route to political power.

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW

Rwanda and Uganda in 1997 put Kabila into power by militarily overthrowing Mobutu

Sese Seko's regime, and settled for inciting, funding and participating in neo-secessionist factional warfare in eastern and north-east Congo, in the name of protecting themselves from their own armed citizens who used Congo's territory and contiguous space for mounting armed incursions into Uganda and Rwanda. Between 1998 and 2002, over three million. Congolese civilians were reported by NGOs and UN investigators to liave died from the conflict and its co-lateral health and socio economic dislocations While the international community, notably, USA, UK. France and other EU may have sought both the removal of Mobutu and placing the long-term politics of Congo on pluralistic multi- armed political groups and factions, these goals were never articulated openly. The issue of the accountability of political and military leaders in Rwanda and Uganda eventually being sanctioned by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for atrocities committed in the Congo by their own armies and armed proxies, as well as for documented participation in looting Congo's natural resources. remain lurking and smouldering in the region's diplomacy.

Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia. Eritrea and Chad intervened unevenly in the defence of

Kabila's government against Rwanda and Uganda, but only inside Congolese territory.

Considering the geographical and population sizes and economic weakness of both

Rwanda and Uganda, their rulers were probably not given the medicine earlier administered to Idi Amin by Tanzania less out of principle than as a result of the invisible

NATO and EU hands known to be behind Kagame and Museveni South Africa intervened militarily in Lesotho to restore a democratically elected government to power. while

Nigeria. Angola and South Africa reversed themselves over Sao Tome and Principe in

2003 by intervening to physically escort a deposed ruler from Nigeria (where he had been

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW at a state visit) back home and to regain a democratically won mandate. The principle of non tolerance for armed seizure of power was honoured here but not in Rwanda after

RPF won.

Chinua Achebe has issued the following question and lament: "We have lost the twentieth century, are we bent on seeing our children also lose the twenty-first? Perhaps the frustrations and anguish over Burundi and Rwanda which fatally exhausted the former

President of Tanzania. Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, and continue to consume the vitality and genius of his successor (as a political star in the global constellation of political leadership and statesmanship) Nelson Mandela, was always driven by their determination to reject an affirmative answer to Achebe's anguish.

CONCLUSION

The African condition should be studied within a comparative diachronic framework which traces the character of governance from (1) the colonial period: (2) the "lost four decades of single party and military dictatorships": (3) the post-Cold War pressures from the Bretton Woods institutions. NATO and EU countries: and (4) the new regenerative renaissance initiatives under NEPAD. The un-stated assumption in this essay is that a significant linkage exists between good economic and political governance and the military capability of African states and their power in the international arena

The analysis departs from the tradition of empirically enumerating Africa's abject economic performances and crushing morale with the use of pounding powers in boulders of statistics on indices of poverty. demography. mortality and prevalence of disease profiles, etc. In its place is an exploration of the character of the movement of

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW change in Africa's condition over time and hints of possible trajectories and initiatives which historical narrative, in her generosity, allows.

AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW

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