Politics
It's good to talk - even better to sell
Published 17 October 2005
Africa is changing fast. Aid and debt relief may help, but mobile phones and trade with China are proving even more vital
A common experience of people travelling to Africa for the first time is the shock of realising it is nothing like the Africa you see on television. From the outside, the future of Africa sometimes seems to depend on western generosity. The close interdependency of aid agencies, journalists and government in Britain gives us a particular view of it: hungry, suffering, dependent. But travel around the continent and a different picture emerges.
Africa is changing fast. Driving those changes are mobile phones and radio stations and China's appetite for raw materials. The G8's agenda of aid and debt relief may, if delivered, play a secondary role. The external driver is China's search for minerals, particularly oil, which pushes up Africa's mineral prices. Cheap Chinese goods are flooding into Africa's markets. China's trade with Africa has increased from $900m (about £500m) in 1990 to nearly $30bn last year - the equivalent of the EU's trade with sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria's oil revenues, for example, will leap to $41bn next year - a third higher than in 2001. A recent study by the Overseas Development Institute shows that if the high oil price is sustained, African oil producers will earn £19bn a year in revenues. That's significantly more than Africa is promised in more aid.
The internal driver is the mobile phone revolution that has transformed business and politics in Africa in the past ten years. In 2001, only 3 per cent of Africans had telephones of any sort. Now there are 50 million mobile-phone users, with numbers growing by 35 per cent a year. The phone companies completely misjudged the market - they thought that only the super-rich would buy mobiles. But it turned out that the people who really needed them were small self-employed businessmen, market women, taxi drivers and the casual workers who keep Africa going. In some areas, beer sales have plummeted as people have invested their meagre earnings in mobile phone cards instead. The pace of life has picked up hugely.
Politically, too, mobile phones are having an immense effect. People no longer have to walk miles to talk to a friend or colleague or to make a business deal (there was no public phone system in Africa before mobile phones and the postal service, where it existed, took days or weeks). The chat programmes on radio stations in most African countries are also enabling ordinary people to express their frustrations and to know that others share their anger about the failures and corruption of their governments. A better-informed population that can listen to its own voices will put governments under pressure. I would even suggest that the Rwandan genocide could not have happened if mobile phones had existed.
Against this background, the promised aid from the west may still play a role. But there is no guarantee that it will happen. The promises were overblown and there is no sign yet that the British government, still in the chair of the G8 and EU till the end of the year, has a coherent plan to take the process forward and persuade the other G8 leaders to deliver. The debt deal was good, but it is small beer and limited to a few countries. Debt repayments have never been the reason African governments have failed to deliver to their people. If the promised aid does materialise, much of it may be given in direct budget support to governments, and that may mean it never reaches the people who really need it. Corruption is one problem, but an even bigger one is the sheer lack of capacity, trained managers and administrators to deliver improvements. This will take time to change.
Will Africa's fractious politics allow that change to happen? Compared to ten years ago, Africa is more peaceful. The wars that then ravaged the continent have now quietened down, largely thanks to regional or external peace missions. But in most cases, the underlying causes have not yet been resolved.
Led by South Africa, African governments have pledged themselves to adhere to higher principles. The African Union (AU), the continent-wide organisation of African states, has set high standards of democracy and human rights, mandating itself to intervene if genocide threatens. Military coups are no longer acceptable. But standards already seem to be slipping. The AU dealt with the crisis in Togo earlier this year by forcing an election, but then accepted its blatantly rigged result without a murmur. When a coup overthrew the government of Mauritania in August, the AU gave up trying to reinstate the elected government after just a few days.
How can outsiders be more involved in Africa? Partnership is the buzzword, but the historical inequality of the relationship between Africa and Europe makes partnership at an institutional level virtually impossible. Today, the relationship is still formulated as being between rich benevolent European - or American - and grateful African recipient. Even among those Europeans most committed to ending poverty in Africa, there is an assumption that African poverty implies African weakness. Rejecting their imperial grand fathers, Europeans want to forget their history in Africa. Africans cannot forget because their present is still conditioned by Europe's imperial past. At some stage it will be possible for Africa to move on - as, indeed, colonised Asia has done - but in the meantime it is vital for Europeans to know and acknowledge their history in Africa.
Give money to Africa, but only as a way of getting more involved with its problems, not to get away from them. Africa is going through hugely profound changes that may not bear fruit for decades. Things may get worse before they get better. It is essential that we don't turn our backs on the continent or despise it as hopeless. Giving aid is ambiguous. It may help at the moment, but it is not the solution, and in the long term it reinforces dependency and could prevent change in Africa.
An important, and often overlooked, principle of engagement is to do no harm. Instead of trying to do things to save Africa, we should concentrate on preventing more damage by ensuring that our banks are not laundering stolen African money, our health service is not denuding its health service of trained staff and our companies are not spreading corruption.
There is no substitute for going to Africa. Don't cruise around on a tourist bus. Spend time in one place, outside the big cities. Welcoming strangers is one of Africa's great qualities. Visitors are treated with time and generosity. But beware, Africa puts human existence in perspective.
It can change your life.
Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society and has spent the past 20 years writing about the continent
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