Close-up

Forgotten Africa?

First part of a journey into the center of the African continent. The disheartening macroeconomic analyses, the crisis of development, and the lack of globalization. The reality of the Church and the testimonies of a presence that shares and builds, from Nigeria to Kenya to Uganda. A factor of hope for recovery, a positive example for all

BY RODOLFO CASADEI

A year ago, experts from OECD (the organization of the 29 most industrialized nations) and the ABD (African Bank for Development) launched their umpteenth alarm in the report entitled African Economic Outlook: black Africa is more and more marginal in the world economy and has missed the train of globalization. “Africa’s weight in the world economy,” the report said, “has diminished in the course of the last fifty years to an alarming degree, both in terms of gross domestic product and of exports and investments from abroad. The only sphere in which the continent’s quota continues to increase is its population.” This harsh analysis was accompanied by irrefutable data: between 1950 and 2000, the population of Africa grew from 8% to 13% of the world total, but its gross domestic product decreased from 3.5% to little more than 2%, its exports from 7% to 2%, and foreign investments from 6% to 1%.

Declining gross domestic product and exports
Almost a year later, one of the main reports issued by the World Bank, Global Economic Prospects 2003, brings sub-Saharan Africa’s clinical report up to date, and the declines outweigh the improvements. Investments from abroad have increased dramatically, rising to $6.6 billion, which is almost 4% of all foreign investment in the Third World. But the gross domestic product and exports continue to founder. The former represents, with its $306 billion (an amount inferior to the GDP of Holland, which is $364 billion), barely 1.1% of the world total, while in 2000 (the latest figures available) the latter had gone down even further, reaching the trifling value of 1.4% of the world total. To make this clearer: sub-Saharan Africa, with its 659 million inhabitants, produces a GDP lower than that of Holland, with a population of 16 million. It exports little more than Malaysia, a country with 23 million inhabitants ($92 billion in exports as compared to $88 billion), and takes in foreign investments that amount to just two-thirds the amount invested in South Korea, which has 47 million inhabitants and in 2000 attracted $9.2 billion in investments.

The social and health care situation
The social and health care statistics are even more discouraging than the economic ones. Infant mortality under five years of age is the highest in the world: 172‰ compared with an average of 90‰ for developing countries (6 per thousand in the industrialized countries). In essence, one of every two children under five years old who dies in the world is African; forty years ago, the number was only one child in ten. In the last decade, infant mortality declined significantly in all the poor nations, but in Africa only marginally, from 180 to 172‰. Life expectancy at birth, which in the Third World is, on the average, 64 years, in Africa is just 47, the lowest in the world, because of the high death rate from AIDS (24.5 million of the 40 million AIDS and HIV-positive victims in the world are African) and malnutrition (in 17 African countries, more than 35% of the population is undernourished). Moreover, Africa is the continent most afflicted by wars: one African in five lives in a war zone, and the United Nations Security Council devotes an average of 70% of its time to crises in Africa.

Aid from “industrialized countries”
What are the reasons Africa is now marginal to the world economy? Has the world abandoned Africa or has Africa abandoned the world? Both these are true. It is true that the world has abandoned Africa, because from the mid-1990s, despite interventions in favor of the most deeply indebted countries, the flow of financial aid to Africa has steadily declined, and because subsidies to farmers in Europe and the United States continue to keep African products away from the markets. Aid from industrialized nations to the countries of black Africa decreased from $18.1 billion to $12.5 billion between 1994 and 2000. This decrease has been only partially compensated by the moves made by the HIPC Initiative toward the reduction of foreign debt: twenty African nations are benefiting or will benefit from the commitment of their creditors to cancel $27 billion on paper for servicing the debt, but for now, in practice, this means only an annual savings of $800 million on Africa’s part. Even the “deserving” countries (in terms of macroeconomic policies), like Ghana, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tanzania, have seen their aid decrease between 1999 and 2000. As for the subsidies to European and North American farmers, if these were completely eliminated, the advantage for Africans would be measured in billions of dollars. Merely removing the subsidies given by the United States government to its cotton growers would enable African farmers to increase their income by $250 million.

The inability of governments
But black Africa’s responsibilities for its derailment are no less grave. Robert Longo, an Italian who is one of the authors of African Economic Outlook, explains, “The benefits of globalization have not yet been felt in the African continent, both because its economy is increasingly isolated from that of the rest of the world, and because of the institutional and administrative inability of many governments, and because of the lack of human capital.” Jean-Pail Ngoupandé confirms this analysis. A brilliant intellectual and political expert and the former Prime Minister of the Central African Republic, he says, “Our businessmen go to Asia, and there they realize that the conditions that make development possible are prolonged hard work and quality, which make an economy competitive. They see that there, the government tries to make things easier for businessmen rather than creating complications. They note all the differences with Africa, where the government is corrupt or engages in obfuscation, the human resources are not up to the challenge of globalization, and competitiveness does not exist.” He adds, “Africa has no choice; it has to take a hard look at itself and try to climb onto the globalization train. Otherwise, we shall remain on the margins. I was contested at one of my lectures because I said these things. One of my critics said to me, ‘You maintain that we only account for 1.5% of world trade, but does this maybe keep us from living?’ I answered, ‘No, no one is keeping us from returning to primitive life. But we cannot say, “We want to live just as we please, like when we lived in the bush, but we also want schools and hospitals.”’ These things are produced by industrial society. Either we accept this kind of society, or we go back to the bush. We cannot have both.”