Black Africa after its 72nd coup

Press, 9 August 1985, Page 16

Black Africa after its 72nd coup

From ‘The Economist,’ London

Wicked and wretched are two words the Western world has too often had call to use for, respectively, the rulers and the ruled in Uganda. The coup there on July 27 was Africa’s 72nd since Ghana became the first bit of Europe's black empires to achieve independence in 1957; 13 heads of State have been assassinated in those 28 years; at least 12 wars have been fought on the continent. As ruled by Idi Amin from 1971 to 1979, Uganda was a horror-State where 300,000 people were slaughtered, often in stomach-turning ways. Life was little better under Mr Milton Obote, who led Uganda twice — after independence from Britain in 1962 until Amin’s coup, and from 1980 after a rigged election until he was sent packing to Kenya last month by Okello and

Okello, removal agents. The rise of General Tito Okello to be chairman of Uganda’s ruling military council on the back of Brigadier Basilio Okello and his 10th Brigade — Acholis all — demonstrates, yet again, that in Africa power comes from the barrel of a gun and the blood of the tribe. No observer of Africa has doubted that for years past. Hence “wicked,” hence “wretched,” hence, despair. Africa need not have become the Sad Sack of continents. Much of its land is fertile, its resources are rich, its people are in principle no less capable of the craft of government than most others. Old ways — tribalism, greed, casual regard for human life — die harder than humans do. Yet Africans and Westers do not have to spend the next century shuddering at

Africa’s awfulness. The alternative requires nationbuilding. That is not impossible in Africa. It has happened in Kenya, in Ivory Coast, in Tanzania despite Mr Nyerere’s economic failure; and to some extent in Zambia and three or four other tentative new countries. The craft of nation-building in Africa needs leaders who understand the usefulness of coalition politics in barely bound together groups of tribes. It needs politicians economically realistic enough to recognise that peasants can count even if they cannot read, and will not break their backs for others’ stomachs without being given price incentives. It needs societies in which people can hope to rise and create businesses even if they are not favourites of the politicians currently in power. That the job still has to be done is nobody’s fault and everybody’s.

Bncons, French, Germans, Portuguese, Belgians, Dutch and Spaniards fought each other a bit and Africans more, and by the end of the nineteenth century had claimed much of the continent. From it they extracted diamonds, gold, other riches of the earth — and protected markets. To rule the place while they did this, they exploited the tribal divisions they had found when they arrived. In this half-century they gave up power, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes violently, but in the end completely, save for the white minority in South Africa. That Afrikanerland is Africa’s most prosperous State, into which black Africans still immigrate to get better paid jobs despite the miseries of apartheid, maddens those who long to see sustained economic achievement in black Africa. The faults that stand in the way of this are not in Africa’s

stars but in Africa’s politicians. As it was never good enough for whites in Africa to complain about the ineptitude of blacks who had been denied education and administrative experience, so it is no longer good enough for black Africans to complain that the continent’s troubles are all the legacy of whites. The first steps in any long journey are intimidating. But if black Africa does not set out on that journey it will fall even further behind the rest of the world. Africa has been doing that for two decades. Contrary to polite wishful thinking, it can go on doing it. If it does, the result will be a continent strewn with starving people, terrorised people, hopeless people. A result now all too clearly imaginable for African countries not to put one foot, at last, in front of the other. Copyright — The Economist.