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chicagotribune.com >> Editorials
The world continues to have its head in the sand about how corruption in African governments dilutes economic growth By Niall Ferguson. Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard. He is the author of "Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order" and the "Lessons for Global Power." Published March 1, 2005 I love Kenya. But I also despair of it. I spent nearly two years of my childhood in Nairobi, and throughout the long, gray years of my Glaswegian youth the memories never left me. The orange dirt roads of Tsavo. The dazzling white beaches of Mombassa. The broiling sun. The pungent rains. It was just a few years after independence when we went there. The "winds of change" that the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had spoken of in 1960 had blown away British rule. Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, was in charge. Every morning the radio played "Harambe, harambe," an exuberant anthem that means "Let's all pull together." Yet traces of the colonial regime lingered on. Just as Kipling loved his Indian ayah, so my sister and I loved Miriam, our Kenyan nanny, who taught us Swahili and how to dance the twist. These and many more memories were rekindled when my wife and I took our children to Kenya for a holiday earlier this year. It was a joy to find Tsavo so little changed. An obliging cow elephant even charged our Land Rover, to the great excitement of my children. The shores south of Diani, though disturbed by the aftereffects of the distant Asian tsunami, were as soothing as ever, the ultrafine sand like ground chalk, the sea absurdly warm. And yet throughout the holiday I was beset by liberal anxiety. As I sipped my sundowner, was I illicitly enjoying a new form of colonial rule--the imperialism of tourism? Was I having, in the immortal words of the Sex Pistols, a "cheap holiday in other people's misery" (actually a rather pricey holiday, but that's another story). Shortly before our departure I had read in manuscript a new and troubling book about the last years of British rule in Kenya, Caroline Elkins'"Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Africa." Though I tried in vain to persuade her to change her title--since the implied parallel with Stalin's monstrous labor camps is wildly inappropriate--I could not quibble with her research. Elkins reveals in all its ugliness the calculated brutality with which the British colonial authorities overreacted to the 1950s uprising known Mau Mau. Not really ideal pre-holiday reading. Thank God for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer! Within days of my return from Kenya, they had, between them, reminded me of the dangers of indulging in liberal guilt. First there was the prime minister hobnobbing with Bono and Bill Gates in Davos, Switzerland. Ever since the Labor Party Conference of 2001, Blair has had a hankering worthy of David Livingstone to do something for Africa. "If what [is] happening in Africa today," he told his well-fed audience, "was happening in any other part of the world, there would be such a scandal and clamor that governments would be falling over themselves to do something about this." As it is, the only people falling over themselves seem to be Blair and Brown, as they vie with one another like a pair of holier-than-thou student politicians to see who can do more to assuage Britain's post-colonial guilt about Africa. Blair has pledged millions toward the World Health Organization's disease-control program. Not to be outdone, Brown flew to Tanzania to announce that Britain would unilaterally pay 10 percent of that country's debt repayments to the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank, which total roughly $6.7 million a year. To trump Blair even further, the chancellor then offered to do the same for 70 other poor countries around the world. That could present British taxpayers with a bill close to $2 billion. Beat that! Variation on an old theme The trouble with all this is that it fails altogether to learn from past experience. What Blair and Brown are proposing are mere variations on an old, familiar theme known as "aid." (As Brown's clever advisers at the British treasury well know, there is no real difference between "debt forgiveness" and handing poor countries a large gift-wrapped check.) But we have been here before. Between 1950 and 1995, Western countries gave away around $1 trillion (in 1985 prices) in aid to poorer countries. But these efforts yielded pitiful results, as New York University economist Bill Easterly has shown, because the recipient countries lacked the political, legal and financial institutions necessary for the money to be used productively. Indeed, much of the money that has poured into poor countries since the 1950s has simply leaked back out--often to bank accounts in Switzerland--as corrupt rulers have stashed their ill-gotten gains abroad. One recent study of 30 sub-Saharan African countries calculated that total capital export for the period 1970 to 1996 was in the region of $187 billion which, when accrued interest is added, implies that Africa's ruling elites had private overseas assets equivalent to 145 percent of the public debts their countries owed. The authors of that study conclude that "roughly 80 cents on every dollar borrowed by African countries flowed back [to the West] as capital flight in the same year." A similar story can be told for aid payments, a large proportion of which are simply stolen. When corruption is the norm Which brings us back to Kenya and to the fundamental problem of African politics: corruption. In recent weeks, two stories have perfectly illustrated just what is wrong with the way Kenya has come to be governed since independence. The first was the response of the authorities in Nairobi to the blunt remarks made by Britian's high commissioner to Kenya, Edward Clay, on the subject of the country's "massive looting and/or grand corruption." Clay was telling it like it is. According to the think tank Transparency International, Kenya is one of the dozen most corrupt countries in the world. But the Kenyan government blew a gasket. "Sir Edward Clay has just behaved as an enemy of this government," declared the country's justice minister. Another spokesman had the temerity to tell the BBC World Service that it was the legacy of British colonial rule that made it so hard for the Kenyan government to tackle graft. The other story that caught my eye concerned the recent violence that flared up in the Kenyan Rift Valley. Just another case of ancient ethnic hatred, in this case between Maasai and Kikuyu? Not quite. As the BBC reported, "The trouble is thought to have started when Maasai herdsmen accused a local Kikuyu politician of diverting a river to irrigate his farm, prompting a water shortage further downstream." Like Brown, I too recently visited Tanzania, where I got to know the son of an opposition politician. For most of his life, his father had been in jail. "You see," he explained to me, "what African politicians find hard to understand about democracy is why, once they have got power, they should have to hand it over to someone else just because of an election." For power means, above all, money. It means being the guy to whom Gordon Brown hands the bulging envelope. Ruling imperfectly So Africa's problem is not, despite appearances, a problem that aid can solve. On the contrary; aid may simply make the problem worse. Africa's real problem is a problem of governance, and it is a problem Kenya exemplifies. Nobody, least of all me, claims that British imperial rule was perfect. Caroline Elkins is not the first historian to expose the dark side of colonialism. But the bottom line is that most sub-Saharan African governments since independence have managed to treat their populations significantly worse than British colonial administrators did. For all its imperfections, the Colonial Civil Service was not corrupt. When money was sent to build railways or schools, British officials did not simply pocket it. That cannot expunge the overkill that characterized the British campaign against Mau Mau. But it serves as a worthwhile reminder that exploitation did not cease with independence. Empires have their faults, no doubt. But independent African governments have often been more exploitative and worse for economic growth. A few more books on that subject would do no harm at all--and might also make holidays in Africa a little easier to enjoy. | |||||||||||
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