In 1998, at the dusk of the century and of his own life, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who had been the first president of Tanzania, met with top-level staff at the World Bank in Washington.
“Why have you failed?” the World Bank experts asked him.
Nyerere answered: “The British Empire left us a country with 85 per cent illiterates, two engineers and 12 doctors. When I left office, we had 9 per cent illiterates and thousands of engineers and doctors. I left office 13 years ago. Then our income per capita was twice what it is today; now we have one-third less children in our schools and public health and social services are in ruins. During these 13 years, Tanzania has done everything that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have demanded.”
And Nyerere passed the question back to the World Bank experts: “Why have you failed?”
Four years ago, I came to London to launch the Jubilee 2000 campaign, calling for the cancellation of debts of the poorest countries. This year, I am here to commemorate Mwalimu Nyerere, who died in 1999, and to continue his fight for justice and peace in Africa. I hope that, in speaking alongside more contemporary voices from Africa, we can provoke moral outrage that will unchain the continent from debt bondage.
Take the situation of my country, Zambia. Its debt stock has remained more or less constant for ten years – $6.8bn in 1988 and $6.8bn in 1998. In that period, despite receiving aid and new loans, Zambia paid $1bn to its western creditors, comprising the World Bank, IMF, regional development banks (42 per cent) and western governments (56 per cent). In 1998 alone, Zambia paid $202m – more than four times as much as it spent on health care, in a country ravaged by HIV/Aids. Yet its debt burden remains the same.
Four years ago, a solution to this debt problem was trumpeted: the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative. It promised “a sustainable exit” from a country’s debt problems.
Today, no serious person considers it a solution at all. Tanzania, as Nyerere explained, had been a “model IMF pupil”. It has just received HIPC debt relief as “recognition by the international community of the progress made in implementing economic reforms and achieving poverty reduction”. The reward? A reduction in annual repayments from $152m to $150m.
To make things worse, the “exit” from debt is inextricably tied to harsh IMF/World Bank conditions. If the moral case for debt relief has been won, why should debt cancellation be embittered by programmes that leave workers unemployed and children hungry?
Few have suffered so greatly and over such an extended period as the African people. They were the victims of the most abominable and most enduring slave trade in the history of mankind. From the 16th century to the mid-19th century, fear and pain pervaded the entire continent from the Sahel to the south and from east to west in a way no war since has been able to do.
When it became less profitable to transport slaves across the ocean, Europe turned to colonialism to use native labour in Africa and elsewhere to exploit industrial raw materials and foodstuffs in the colonies. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 parcelled out Africa to European powers, without regard to natural boundaries or ethnicity, and planted some of the long-term seeds of conflict on the continent. The colonisation of Africa exacted a heavy price in terms of human life and property as the African people resisted this new subjugation.
For Africa, the effects of the cold war lasted beyond decolonisation, as the superpowers of the day fought for spheres of influence, often by proxy, in devastating civil wars such as Angola’s, and kept despots in power such as in the former Zaire.
Now, Africa labours under the the crushing burden of debt. Last year, the British and American governments promised 100 per cent cancellation, but these promises have failed to materialise, becoming bogged down in accounting jargon and bureaucracy.
We must look for an alternative. The United Nations and Jubilee 2000 are calling for independent arbitration: a fairer way to assess debt burdens independently and to negotiate cancellation with equal participation of debtor and creditor, and comprising members from government and civil society. One of the main components of such an approach could be “establishing a debt arbitration process to balance the interest of creditors and sovereign debtors and introduce greater discipline into their relations”.
Corruption has been, and still is, a problem in Africa, but one that has been abetted by western governments. In Zambia, we have an active Jubilee 2000 movement calling for “conditionalities from below” as an alternative to top-down conditions imposed from Washington. These mechanisms can much better monitor funds released from debt cancellation – if, and when, they ever arrive.
Nyerere fought tirelessly for debt cancellation during his lifetime and we continue that fight. The poor cannot afford further excuses and delays.
Dr Kenneth Kaunda, former president of Zambia, will speak at the Jubilee 2000 Nyerere Tribute at Westminster Central Hall, London, 19 April at 7pm. Telephone 020-7739 7000 for tickets
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