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| Opinion |
| My Turn |
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by
Winston C. Msowoya, 24 October 2005
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08:33:41
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Africa’s future still hopeless
Today Africa is virtually free from foreign domination, but yet we still blame imperialism for our own faults. While it is an undeniable fact that some of our woes were inherited from our colonisers, most of today’s problems lie squarely in our hands. Our leaders have failed to deliver the goods after imperialism had been defeated in our continent. The former colonisers sowed the seeds of the subsequent chaos by failing to train a properly educated cadre to run the newly independent states and withdrawing precipitately.
Among the colonisers, the Belgians in the Congo and Portuguese in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau were ruthlessly exploitative of their colonies and repatriated all the profits from the extraction of raw materials instead of building local industry.
When these people left, they took with them many of the installations needed to run the country. Africa has also suffered from the volatility of commodity prices. For instance, Ghana was almost brought low by the collapse of cocoa market dictated by rich nations in the West.
Zambia’s economic downfall was accelerated by declining copper prices, the life-blood of Zambia’s economy. Coffee gluts regularly wiped out investment plans in East Africa. Indeed, the West cannot deny its bloody past or the destructiveness of some of its current policies like rich-country tariffs and farm subsidies which make it hard for African products to compete in international trade.
However, not all countries in Africa were badly managed by the colonisers. Countries such as Ghana and Uganda that faced bright future at independence and enjoyed incomes that were above those in many Asian countries, were racked by subsequent misrule and saw their standards of living virtually collapse.
South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia, all colonised by white minority racists for decades, are unique examples. In all three countries, black nationalists inherited strongest economies that have attracted millions of illegal immigrants in search of jobs.
After a stint of senseless bloody civil wars in Ethiopia and Mozambique, things are beginning to recover for the better. Civil wars, and others, are the contributing factors that attribute to Africa’s backwardness and, not imperialism as most of our journalists and intellectuals want us to believe.
Imperialism in Zimbabwe was defeated 25 years ago when Robert Mugabe inherited the strongest economy in Black Africa. Today, because of Mugabe’s brutal policies, Zimbabwe is poor of the poorest. His corrupt land reforms which have been blindly supported by his counterparts in Southern Africa and fooled the so-called intellectuals and journalists, have seen the nation hit by food shortages never seen before in Zimbabwe. Once the breadbasket of Southern Africa, Zimbabwe is now a destitute, failed state.
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe has produced 3.2 million economic refugees while the former settler regime created half a million political refugees. What a contrast? Unemployment exceeds 85 percent, inflation at more than 130 percent, foreign exchange earnings from agriculture, mining and tourism export have totally collapsed, but all these Mugabe-made woes are blamed on Tony Blair, the architect of $50 billion debt relief for poor nations many of them being in Africa.
In the last elections, Mugabe devouted his whole campaign domonising Blair as if the British Prime Minister was the opposition leader in Zimbabwe.
In Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer pumps about 2.4 million barrels a day that bring $80 million each day into government coffers. In 2004, Nigeria was the fifth largest supplier of crude oil to the US and yet, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians remain trapped in a vicious circle of poverty.
Corruption and mismanagement by the ruling clique and its cohorts are the prime cause of the country’s slippery slope to moral decadence. The last pernicious despot Sani Abacha stole about $1.5 billion — $295 million has so far been repatriated to Nigeria by Swiss Bank. Are we Africans to blame imperialism for Nigeria’s self-destruction?
In a tiny kingdom of darkness, the youthful King Mswati III last year spent $18.3 million constructing eight new palaces for his wives and refurbishing three existing ones. He also blew close to $1 million on new BMWs for his queens and yet, 42.6 percent of adult population is HIV-positive, making Swaziland one of the worst victims of the pandemic in the world.
The last absolute monarch in sub-Sahara Africa, purchased for himself an expensive Maybach car equipped with television and refrigerator at a cost of $650,000 and yet, a third of the kingdom’s population rely on food handouts.
In Malawi things have not changed as expected. In 2000, Bakili Muluzi bought his ministers a fleet of 39 new S-class Mercedes Benzes worth a total of $4 million, the funds were part of British economic aid to Malawi — one of the poorest countries in the World. Muluzi’s successor Bingu wa Mutharika amid fears of devastating food shortages, contemplated buying a $545,000 Limousine for himself, while 64 percent of the population are malnourished and 80 percent of Malawi’s development budget is provided by donors. The poor choices of priorities within our leaders, are also a contributing factor to our failures.
Call me a lackey or a blue-eyed boy of the imperialists, but the fact remains that African leaders lack vision. They are the ones who destroy Africa and we must criticise them with the strongest terms possible wherever things go wrong, turning a blind eye on evil, encourages perpetrators of evil.
We cannot go on blaming Western powers for our own crimes and nobody will embrace us when we ignore ourselves. By supporting the Mugabes just because they are Africans, we are making matters worse because those who are caught in the middle, are Africans themselves. |
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