7 January 2000 Vol 41 No 1 AFRICA CONFIDENTIAL NORTH AFRICA 3 AFRICA IN 2000 New brooms Algerian President Bouteflika’s Brave new century honeymoon won’t see the end of Dealing with the conflicts from the Atlantic to the Red Sea will Ramadan. In Sudan, the tensions dominate this year’s policy agenda between President Omer’s group and Hassan el Turabi did not The tempo of political and economic change in Africa will speed up in 2000. In six elections, amount to a coup and do not credible opposition parties will vie for power. Heavy pressure is building up on the continent’s indicate a policy change. gerontocracies, especially in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Africa has the world’s youngest voters but its rulers are still among the oldest and demands for a generational shift are growing. Few people CENTRAL AFRICA 5 harbour illusions about the merits of what Malawian political scientist Thandika Mkandawire calls ‘choiceless democracies’. Like Mkandawire, many Africans lament the lack of real policy More rumblings choices between ruling parties and their opponents but fully support the democratisation impetus and Violations of the Lusaka peace its halting progress of the last decade. However much they wriggle, governments are becoming more accord in Congo-Kinshasa are accountable and the kleptocrats’ room for manoeuvre is diminishing. Foreign aid is falling rapidly likely to continue. Major battles on and mainstream private capital is increasingly reluctant to deal with grossly corrupt regimes. the north-east front could trigger a A statistical tally makes the point. In 1999, 32 of the 54 heads of state had been chosen in elections general breakdown of the accord against rivals backed by opposition parties: in 1975, only three had been chosen in that way. In 1999, and might finally drive an already weak President Kabila from power. 40 African states had legislatures chosen in multi-party elections; in 1975, 25 states lacked any form of legislature at all. Sadly, only a minority of governments elected in 1999, such as those of Botswana, Namibia, Niger and South Africa, got there freely and more or less fairly. Yet rigging SOUTHERN AFRICA 6 elections is getting harder. Tunisian President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s 99.4 per cent victory last October looks like a Cold War relic; most regimes south of the Sahara would have trouble selling Decision time such a result to their voters or to foreigners. President Mbeki will drive South Africa's foreign policy harder, Born-again soldiers pushing for reform in the SADC. President Mugabe's ZANU is likely Democracy activists are less pleased to find that born-again soldiers can be another brake on civilian to win the parliamentary elections autocracy and misrule. Nigeria’s General Abdulsalami Abubakar came to power after a ‘cardiac but will face much more opposition. coup’ against Gen. Sani Abacha in June 1998 and oversaw a year-long transition to civilian rule. After Niger’s military ruler, Gen. Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara, was ‘accidentally killed’ in an airport WEST AFRICA 7 shoot-out in April, Major Daouda Mallam Wanké telescoped an election timetable which ended in the credible election in October of President Mamadou Tandja. In Côte d’Ivoire, Gen. Robert Reverse roles Gueï’s coup against President Henri Konan Bédié proved popular, at least among Ivorians suffering from the regime’s xenophobia and economic mismanagement. If Gueï holds open in Nigeria President Obasanjo will elections and hands over before the end of 2000, as he’s being urged to do, he will help redeem the be helped by an oil-fired economy but constrained by the military's image of Africa’s armies. legacy. Gen. Gueï will be pressed However, if he is stopped from handing over or is pushed out, other Francophone soldiers in the to return Côte d'Ivoire to civil rule. region (perhaps Senegal’s and Gabon’s) might be emboldened. A failure by Gueï would expose his own country to further coups and ratchet up the ethnic tensions heightened by Bédié’s policy of EAST AFRICA 9 Ivoirité. The ethnicisation of politics under Bédié has had parallels in many other countries since the multi-party wave began in the early 1990s. Ethnicity is likely to be at the centre of African Cooperation again politics for much of this decade but in a form different from that of the 1960s. Encouraged by Eastern Europe’s ethnic breakdowns and the United States’ new recognition of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda start cultural diversity, ethnicity has broken out everywhere. Like their Serb, Croat, Chechen and East the year having just revived the East African Community. Its Timorese counterparts, African political groups openly use ethnicity as an organising principle. Few ambitious goals are a customs incumbent regimes (save the super-federalists in Ethiopia) will encourage this. Most states, such union, together with common as Nigeria and Zimbabwe, try to quieten ethnic sentiment at the centre under large umbrella political citizenship and currency. parties, while exploiting ethnicity at the grassroots, to garner votes. In extreme cases such as Kenya, the ethnic numbers game overwhelms ideology. There is almost POINTERS 12 no difference between the economic and social aims stated by the ruling Kenya African National Union and by opposition groups such as the Democratic Party, National Development Party and Sudan, Côte d'Ivoire Forum for Democracy-Kenya. The only ideologically distinct party, the Islamic Party of Kenya, is banned. President Daniel arap Moi keeps his minority Kalenjin clique in power by cunningly and Zimbabwe dividing other bigger ethnic groups - successfully for him but disastrously for the economy, 7 January 2000 Africa Confidential Vol 41 No 1 Less debt, more growth World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn, together with internationalist 70 per cent are in Africa, where 3.5 million adults are newly infected anti-debt campaigners, will get joint credit if the Bank and the each year. Only Uganda, with its open and effective AIDS education International Monetary Fund’s Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative campaign, has substantially pushed down the infection rate. makes real progress this year. Most creditor countries have shifted Alongside the human suffering, AIDS cuts agricultural production from outright rejection of debt cancellation (especially Bank and Fund and further limits the narrow supply of technically trained staff. debts) to grudging acceptance. Now both Britain and United States Huge investments in education and health are needed, to catch up President Bill Clinton say they want to write off all their loans to the with recent falls in social spending in most African states, and to deal 41 countries eligible for HIPC status - only six of which have qualified with the far heavier burden of AIDS. Yet most Western countries so far. (apart from Britain, which made huge aid cuts in the past decade) are But Africa’s biggest bilateral creditors, France and Japan, will reducing foreign aid. Promises to support education and health are take a disproportionate hit if the new HIPC plans go through, and are holding up in some areas, but total disbursements are falling sharply. against debt relief; the US Congress also dislikes Clinton’s The Bank will try to fill the gap left by bilateral donors and the reining expansiveness on debt. Western squabbling over ‘burden sharing’ in of the African Development Bank. The World Bank will probably could still scupper the first comprehensive attempt to tackle Africa’s resume major lending to Africa’s giants - Nigeria and South Africa debt burden. This year, only Uganda is likely to benefit from write- - this year, and overshadowing the IMF, following the departure of its offs, both of HIPC’s multilateral debts and Britain’s bilateral debts. Africa-savvy Managing Director, Michel Camdessus, in March. Public support for debt relief has pushed the issue onto the agendas For this year, the IMF projects 5 per cent growth for sub-Saharan of most creditor governments; but the activists’ first achievement was Africa, while the World Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit the World Trade Organisation’s failure to agree on the agenda for a reckon on 4 per cent growth (which the EIU points out would make new round of negotiations, which could have opened rich countries’ Africa the world’s fastest-growing region). The best hopes of growth markets to more African exports. Africa hardly featured in the Uruguay are for Cameroon, Egypt, Mozambique, Tanzania, Tunisia and round of trade negotiations, which ended in 1998. The WTO’s Uganda. Much less likely is an early economic revival in the big Director General, Mike Moore, wants the next round to break down three, Algeria, Nigeria and South Africa. Algeria and Nigeria are the barriers that rich countries put up against poor countries’ exports, still stuck in the political mire, and South Africa’s economic and the rich countries’ attempts to protect their own industries by restructuring is painfully slow. bringing labour and investment laws into the negotiations. Europe, still Africa’s biggest trading partner, is banking on an Expect more fall-out from South Africa’s row with the USA about economic upturn, and Asia’s recovery may continue. But a major the licensing of drugs for treating AIDS. President Thabo Mbeki’s slump in the US stock market could provoke a world economic panic government insists that poor countries which can’t afford proprietary and make its presidential election campaign even more inward- brands should be allowed to manufacture generic versions of the drugs. looking. Private investment flows would decline, as the economic The Clinton administration backed the pharmaceutical companies’ slow-down cuts the prices of raw materials (including oil), bringing opposition to unlicensed copies of their intellectual property.