Africans get together to plan development

Press, 27 November 1980, Page 20

Africans get together to plan development

From the "Economist,” London

Understatement is not an African tradition. So when finance and economic Ministers from nine Central and South African countries —Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi. Mozambique. Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe — meet with aid donors at the Southern African Development Co-ordinating Conference in Maputo this week much will be heard about the “struggle for economic liberation” from South Africa.

In reality, the chances of most of these countries achieving an economic U.D.L from South Africa during this century are remote. Zambians eat South African mealie-meal (maize) porridge with South African cutlery’ off South African china. Migrant workers from Malawi and Mozambique dig for gold on the Witwatersrand. The former British protectorates are an annex to the South African economy. Up to a third of Zimbabwe's trade is

with its white-ruled southern neighbour. But to belabour the obvious is to pummel an. Aunt Sally. The real aim of the conference, obscured by the sincere yet futile > antiapartheid hyperbole, is to persuade national and international donors to contribute nearly St billion in aid for infrastructure projects to improve transport and communications between these nine countries. Zaire, decidedly an odd man out, might’ and ought, to be involved as well. Namibia will be invited to join if and when it achieves independence. Six of the nine participants are landlocked. Their road, rail and air links with each other (and down to the sea) range all the way from inadequate to lousy. The damage this has done to their economies is usually exaggerated. Living standards have lagged in many African countries, as much because of economic mismanagement as because of their poor infrastructure and a severe deterioration in their terms of trade, caused by fluctuations in pimary commodity prices while manufactured goods have followed a slow upward trend and oil prices a fast upward one. All-weather roads, uncongested and deeper ports, telephones that work and the repair of railway lines torn or blown up during Mr lan Smith’s war are needed, but they are not a substitute for

other reforms; for price incentives (like those recently introduced for maize in Zimbabwe) that encourage farmers to grow food crops for market; for a determined attack on bureaucratic sloth, nepotism and corruption; for more stress on primary (and technical) education. But better links between these nine countries will make some of their other economic difficulties easier to solve, particularly the clotted distribution of food from countries customarily in surplus, (e.g. Zimbabwe in maize, Botswana in beef) to those in chronic deficit (Zambia and Zaire). Better links will also make it a bit easier for them to develop a manufacturing base to permit regional import substitution.

At present their trade lines, drawn during a colonial past, are directed toward doing business with overseas industrial countries rather than with one another. Three fifths of Tanzania’s exports go to industrial countries: less than 3 per cent to African counties. For Zambia the breakdown is 80 per cent and 2 per cent.

Such distorted trade patterns serve neither the West’s economic interests nor its political ones. If Southern and Central African countries remain typecast as miners of minerals and growers of cash crops for the developed world, and their economies

in consequence remain handcuffed to very volatile commodity prices, they will not build up the sober, calculating. cost-conscious local business class that has made many developing countries outside Africa into valuable partners for twoway trade. Continued poverty will guarantee that this chunk of Africa remains politically unstable, vulnerable to Soviet penetration. When they turn a hearing ear to aid requests, the World Bank, the E.E.C. Commission, the Commonwealth Secretariat. the United Nations Development Programme, all will need to be tactfully firm in resisting plans ' that carry a prestige rather than a utility label. Proposals for regional transport and communications systems at this meeting (and doubtless for regional health. tourism, electricity and even energy exploration programmes at meetings to come) will falter if the Central and Southern Africans try to run before they can crawl.

The precedents for jointly owned and operated ports, railways, airlines and so on are not reassuring. They

caused East Africans much grief: it is essential that the Southern and Central African countries keep their ambitions as realistically modest as they are now. Free trade areas are not in the Third World a short-cut to rapid development, as the A.S.E.A.N. and Latin American experiments have shown. This still leaves ample scope for joint initiatives. Roads that can be travelled over by car without the tourists acting as shock absorbers promise to do much to increase foreign exchange earnings. Improved transport and communications will help expand both regional and external trade. Looking beyond the Maputo conference's short agenda, many other opportunities for regional planning quickly suggest themselves. Diseases like bilharzia, foot-and-mouth and sleeping sicknes need to be tackled co-operatively. A very big dam that can serve the hydroelectricity needs of two countries, as Kariba was large enough to do when it was built, is better, and less costly, than two big dams that each serve a single economy.