The colonial system was not designed to develop the productive capacities of the colonies. The driving motive of colonisation was to extract the continent’s mineral and agricultural raw materials to be shipped to the mother countries for processing into manufactured goods. With this as their only aim, all the colonisers required from the colonised was a steady supply of unskilled labour – all skilled labour was shipped in from the metropole.
There was, however, a demand for local intermediaries such as court interpreters, teachers, medical orderlies and agricultural extension workers, who provided a line of communication between the colonisers and the colonised and transmitted some necessary skills, such as a knowledge of the European languages needed to follow the instructions of the colonialists.
It was out of this group of educated intermediaries that the African nationalist movements emerged. Independence did not bring about economic transformation in Africa as it did in Asia; if anything, it entrenched the economic inequalities inherited from colonialism.
The new black elites merely replaced the former white colonial elites, but the exploitation of the black masses continued, as did the exploitation of Africa’s resources – the copper, gold, bauxite, iron ore, cobalt, coltan, oil, timber, cotton,
coffee, cocoa beans – drawn from the continent and exported.
It is this drive to retain control of the continent’s resources that goes some way towards explaining the fear among nationalist-ruled southern African governments of new-age, people-created parties, such as Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change. They fear that these parties will destroy the neo-colonial system off which they live. It also explains the support by states in the Southern African Development Community for Robert Mugabe’s regime, despite the havoc his actions are causing in neighbouring countries.
Once seen as a progressive and dynamic movement that would deliver Africa
from bondage to modernity and prosperity, African nationalism has turned out
to be a massive disappointment. Half a century after its liberation from
colonialism, Africa has dropped so far down the development scale that
experts refer to Africans as mankind’s Bottom Billion, who can only come out
of the black hole they have dug for themselves through intervention by the
rest of the world.
There is no better illustration of the failure of African nationalism than Zimbabwe under the leadership of Zanu (PF) and Mugabe. In the space of 10 years, 1999-2009, Zimbabwe has shown how an African country can travel from relative prosperity to the status of basket case.
So, what went wrong? What has gone wrong has been the massive mismanagement by Africa’s ruling political elites, with the help of Western powers, of the economic surplus generated in Africa in the past 40 years. As heirs of the colonial state, political elites exploited their strong position in relation to the private sector – which, in Africa, comprises peasant and plantation agriculture, domestic and foreign-owned manufacturing industries and foreign-owned extractive industries – to: Bolster their standards of living to levels comparable with those of the middle and upper classes of the West; Undertake half-hearted, loss-making industrialisation projects that were not supported by the necessary technical and managerial educational development; and; Transfer vast amounts of economic surpluses generated by agriculture and extractive industries, such as oil, diamonds, metals and timber, to developed countries as capital flight, while simultaneously obtaining vast loans from developed countries.
Zimbabwe provides a textbook example of the relationship between the falling standards of living in sub-Saharan Africa and the growing power of political elites. In their struggle against the white minority regime, Zimbabwe’s African nationalists enlisted, in particular, the support of the peasants and agricultural workers who
constitute the majority of the population. During the 1980s, in the first decade of Zimbabwe’s independence, Zanu (PF) made strenuous efforts to uplift these constituencies. But it also set out to crush its former ally, PF Zapu, which it succeeded in doing after a great deal of bloodletting. What remained of PF Zapu was absorbed into Zanu (PF) in 1987. Once it had consolidated its hold on power, the Zanu (PF) political elite proceeded to enrich itself, to the great detriment of the national economy and of the welfare of the population at large.
Such actions have ensured that most Africans in sub-Saharan Africa are poor
and getting poorer. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, sub-Saharan Africa’s fairy godparents, churn out statistics each year that tell the tale of this continuing drop in living standards. This growing impoverishment sparks conflict over shrinking resources. Hence sub-Saharan Africa’s apparently never-ending cycle of violent conflict. In Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?, The World Bank observes: “Despite gains in the second half of the 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa enters the 21st century with many of the world’s poorest countries. Average income per capita is lower than at the end of the 1960s. Incomes, assets and access to essential services are unequally distributed. And the region contains a growing share of the world’s absolute poor, who have little power to influence the allocation of resources.”
These observations have been corroborated by other researchers. This was how the US National Bureau of Economic Research summarised the living conditions of Africans: “Thirty-six per cent of the region’s population lives in economies that in 1995 had not regained the per capita income levels first achieved before 1960. Another six per cent are below levels first achieved by 1970, 41 percent below 1980 levels and 11 percent below 1990 levels. Only 35 million people reside in nations that had higher incomes in 1995 than they had ever reached before.”
This is an edited extract from Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism
Needs Changing by Moeletsi Mbeki (Picador Africa).
The Star (SA)
Post published in: Opinions