Africa underdeveloped in the corruption field too

Madeleine Bunting, writing in The Guardian elaborated on Blair’s comments: “... Africa is dogged by war, conflict and corruption not because of some curious continental incompetence, but because of how the West has preyed upon its vulnerability.” Or, as she quotes one commissioner, “It’s not enough to say Africans are corrupt, but to ask who are corrupting them. It’s not enough to say Africans are stealing money, but to ask who is banking that money.”1

These statements are a welcome recognition of something that many have known for years. There’s a saying among Africans and others that the continent is as “underdeveloped” in the corruption field as it is in most other sectors. Much of this can be traced to slavery, the colonizing period and the Cold War. The corruption came from what is now called the West as far back as the 15th century. Africans are no more innately dishonest than Canadians, nor are they any more given to institutionalized corruption, nepotism or incompetence.

The haunting question about the willful and utter destruction of much of Africa and its invaluable natural and cultural resources and much of the continent’s self-confidence has been posed by Basil Davidson, the pioneering British historian of Africa, in The Black Man’s Burden, a brilliant summing up of his life’s work. Davidson writes about the Ashanti, the kingdom that once controlled most of present-day Ghana:

The kingdom was manifestly a national state on its way to becoming a nation-state in every attribute ascribed to a West European state, even if some of those attributes had yet to achieve maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order and accepted national language.... What might have happened if indigenous development could have continued, and pre-colonial structures had remained free to mature into modern structures, can indeed be anyone’s guess. Suppose the sovereignty of the Asante [a widely used alternative spelling for Ashanti] had not been hijacked.... Could the resultant Asante nation-state have answered to the needs of the twentieth century? Would it have acted as a magnet of progress for its neighbours? Or would it have become a curse and a burden?2

Regrettably history provides no answer. We are left, instead, with a humiliating picture of Africa and Africans, a caricature you might find in a Tarzan movie. How many Westerners realize, or are even capable of imagining, that it took most of the 19th century for the mighty British to overcome the Ashanti, after a series of bitter and closely-contested wars? Ultimately the West African kingdom was undone by superior technology, especially the Enfield rifle and the Maxim machine gun which allowed the British to mow down their opponents. But, it is important to recall, since they do not teach these things in high school, that the British-Ashanti wars were struggles between two proud countries that shared similar concepts of nobility, courage and duty but were separated widely by radically different notions of fair play and ethics.

The Ashanti, who outdid the British in gallantry, thought it proper to allow the enemy to beat an orderly retreat after defeating them in battle. And when mounting sieges of British controlled forts, the Ashanti armies even allowed their mortal enemies to resupply themselves with drinking water. Britain, on the other hand, unilaterally abrogated its treaties and other agreements with the Ashanti, who at several points in the century-long conflict made plain their desire for a peaceful conclusion that would accommodate their enemy’s commercial interests. When the British first captured the Ashanti capital, Kumase, in 1874, its treasures were painstakingly looted, including large stores of gold, sculpture, ivory and royal furniture. Then the city was deliberately burned to the ground. Britain, in its inimitably cavalier way, smashed an African state that Davidson compared favourably with pre-Mejii Japan.

London chose to govern its possessions in a way that obliterated “native” memories of indigenous political culture and accomplishments and deprived the local people of a significant hand in the new forms of administration. Under British rule in Africa, a heavy emphasis was placed on doing things cheaply, even by comparison with other colonial regimes. The notion that Britain was nobly bearing the white man’s burden, doing good works and bringing civilization to a supposedly dark continent is belied by a simple statistic: at the end of World War II, Britain had a mere 1,200 senior colonial officials in all of its African possessions combined, meaning that London had assigned a skeleton crew to run more than a dozen colonies covering nearly 4 million sq km, with a population of 43 million.3 Then, in 1957, barely half a century after wiping out the Ashanti proto-state and imposing colonial rule, an astoundingly fickle Britain changed its mind and “granted” Ghana independence under state structures copied directly from European blueprints.

Why should anyone be surprised that the violent European hijacking of Africa’s political development resulted in misery, corruption and chaos? Few even ask this question.

And, before that was the slave trade with civilized, Christianized Europe and the Americas. The cost of the slave trade in sheer population loss was nothing short of catastrophic and some demographers calculate that if there had not been an Atlantic slave trade, by 1850 the total population of the continent would have been about 70 million, 40 percent higher than the actual population at the time. It is not fashionable today to talk of slavery and colonialism as part of Africa’s problems but when the damaging legacies are examined, we find mass migration and generalized warfare as neighbour was pitted against neighbour and society against society.

Europeans created a thirst for their trade goods and for the quick profit that came from trading in fellow humans which Africans traded for these goods. The ensuing scramble of slavery and then colonization wiped out the intricate social codes that prevailed and left behind a deep sense of uncertainty and fear “that induced a sense of fatalism in society that passed from generation to generation,” writes John Reader in his illuminating survey, Africa: A Biography of a Continent. Economic systems based on respect and trust were transformed into systems controlled by warlords and powerful merchants who obliged chiefs and elites to collect slaves as payment against forced loans.

Theft and corruption took over as kleptocracy became the norm. Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) is the classic example. It was there that King Leopold II of Belgium, who had appropriated the huge colony at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, bragged that his personal domain was “a magnificent African cake.” And Congo, as it was named before it was called Zaire, became synonymous with a succession of cruel and shameless European and American get-rich-quick schemes: from ivory, to tropical hardwoods, rubber and finally copper, cobalt, uranium, diamonds, gold and the rare tech-age mineral, coltan. It was a continuous rape until today of perhaps the richest and one of the largest countries in Africa. By the time Leopold died some 10 million people, half the then population, was dead.4 There is little remorse today for that holocaust; it is not something the West wants to talk about or memorialize. Leopold’s legacy of death is bad enough but worse is that Belgian authorities created a tragic example of governance, essentially teaching the people that authority confers the power and right to steal and, under the late Mobutu Sese Sekou, the corollary that the bigger the title, the bigger the theft. And yet he remained, up to the bitter end, the West’s favourite African puppet.

These were the examples set for Africa to emulate when Western neo-liberals set out in the 1980s to impose economic structural adjustment and political democracy on African nations in a world largely ignorant of its history and racist in its approach to African achievements.

Yet today Africans are beginning to see the contradictions in the West, like the violent quest for oil that has turned the Middle East into a bloodbath of death and corruption; also, in Louisiana and Mississippi, where race and class have been the criteria in dealing with a natural disaster that left behind blacks, who make up most of the poor, to suffer and die.

Africans can look at the looting of public funds by leaders of Western democracies and wonder why their continent is being marked as the most corrupt on Earth, and why Mobutu was any different than his illustrious predecessor, Leopold II, in staking out a personal claim to the wealth of an entire region. Where does the West get off talking about human rights?

As this article set out at the beginning to say, Africa is underdeveloped in the corruption field as well.

There are numerous examples in the last two decades which show how far ahead the developed world is when it comes to corruption, most of this involving leading figures in business and politics:

The US$ multi-trillion dollar Savings and Loan scandal involving all three of former President George Herbert Bush’s sons was the biggest financial scandal of US history and it cost the American taxpayer every cent to pay it back. The scandal was worse in Texas, Florida, California and Colorado. Neil Bush, the son who did not go into politics directly, ran S&L in Colorado, George W. Bush was governor of Texas at the time, Jeb Bush was governor of Florida. At the same time, Ronald Reagan was governor of California. The huge corruption of ordinary peoples’ money began in 1980 in the risky residential housing industry with banks, insurance companies and developers conspiring to impoverish homeowners and enrich the people running the scam. They got away with this because of that period’s fetish for deregulation and the same bad accounting scandals that created the Enron disaster. At the time the investigation began, George H. Bush was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was during his presidency in 1989 that he initiated legislation to bail out the victims using taxpayers money while the wealthy politicians and business people got off scott-free.5

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) which was not a bank in the conventional sense, but a vast stateless, multinational that was supposed to help Third World financial institutions (in fact it had branches in 53 third world countries and 146 around the world) was in reality the playtoy of Saudi and Gulf bankers who used it for years as a front to sell illegal weapons, oil and other commodities, and for laundering drug money. William Casey, President George H. Bush’s head of the CIA, was intimately involved, as was Jimmy Carter’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Bert Lance, whom Carter fired. He got $2.6 million in 1977 from BCCI. The Bush family, father and sons, and key colleagues were closely and financially involved in BCCI, as well as their good friend John Connelly, governor of Texas, as was the Saudi royal family and Salem bin Laden, eldest brother to Osama. As BCCI became more and more corrupt, authorities could no longer ignore its crimes. Britain shut them down in 1991 under 12 million pounds debt. The regulatory Security and Exchange Commission wanted to charge Bush senior for insider trading after he sold over 200,000 shares of the now faltering bank. On July 1, 1992, the entire BCCI operation collapsed and defrauded depositers of US$15 billion. One columnist said it was an example of reverse Robin Hood: “robbing from the poor to save the rich.”6

Canadians, after going through much political shock and awe, are awaiting the outcome of a judicial inquiry into how $100 million was misspent, misused and mismanaged in a questionable programme to promote Canadian unity. It is relatively small by American standards but by no means is it Canada’s first. A combination of politicians, civil servants and advertising executives connived to divert money illegally to businesses, crown corporations and political parties, the major one being the ruling Liberal Party of Canada.

The Enron scandal also touched the Bushes. One of the bankrupt firm’s representatives was James A. Baker who had run five campaigns for Bush and Reagan, had also been Chief of Staff twice in the White House and had run the State Department. Enron and two other giant energy-industry law firms put more than US$450,000 into George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign. Altogether the oil industry gave Bush’s campaign US$2.9 million and only US$325,000 to his opponent Al Gore.7
At a smaller level, when the West goes into Africa in the name of aid, the example for Africans is no better. For example:

The ubiquitous white vehicles that roam the roads and cities of most of the Third World in their thousands with ‘UN’ printed on the side are part of a deal with Japanese automakers for the UN to purchase at a special reduced price. One wonders why every expat aid and development worker must have one of these new air-conditioned four-wheel drive vehicles - as well as a cellphone, a house with pool and maid service, a free trip home every two or three years with their family, danger pay, business class (in some cases first class) travel and business class per diems in four and five star hotels. Scrounging, waste, misuse of program budgets amount to looting by expatriate staff who regularly exchange their American dollars on the black market to buy art and crafts to be sent home in the “diplomatic pouch” breaking the fragile laws of the country in dozens of ways.

Churches are involved as well. Mission societies have their favourite clergy who get the scholarships for their children, trips abroad to conferences and new vehicles and houses which generally end up in the owners’ hands. Bishops and senior clergy inherited from their colonial predecessors lavish lifestyles with huge houses and expensive cars, behaving like diplomats and being bowed and scraped to as though they were mediaeval potentates.

It was the Western system run by these upstanding citizens and their counterparts in Britain and France who kept and fed the Mobutus and Abachas and lesser kleptomaniacs in Africa. It was US pressure that induced the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to offer aid to “their” man in Kinshasa during the third carving up of Africa during the Cold War. The relationship between Zaire and the US has been described by many former ambassadors as a “sick” one. Zaire, the wealthiest country in Africa in terms of resources, had its loans from the IMF rescheduled nine times before 1997 when Mobutu died leaving his country US$14.5 billion in debt and with no means to repay it. He left behind a legacy of civil war which is responsible for the deaths of more than 3.5 million people in the last eight years.

In 1975 Zaire went into an economic crisis that lasted until Mobutu’s departure and death in Morocco. In those 22 years, the country received a total of US$9.3 billion in foreign aid. Leading the way were the IMF and WB. Erwin Blumenthal, a German banker, was sent to Zaire in 1978 to become country director of IMF and to head up the country’s central bank. The IMF said it was concerned about “leakages” that they said threatened their attempts to revive the economy. Blumenthal had been around Africa for 14 years and in the Bundesbank’ foreign office for a long time. He lasted until 1979 before giving up. He was asked to write a report for internal consumption only. It attempts neutrality, but lapses into fury and provides a random list of incidents which occurred during his tenure: furious showdowns with generals, gun-waving soldiers and government officials demanding tens of thousands of dollars in cash; the realization that the Bank of Zaire’s accounts abroad had all been plundered and then falsified; and special accounts in Brussels, Geneva, London and Frankfurt opened by the central bank in the president’s name with no official records to be found.

Blumenthal predicted accurately that the Bank and IMF would reschedule the debts yet again, that Mobutu would dine again in the White House and the embezzlement of funds would continue to build Mobutu lavish houses in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, as well as in Africa. But, the last pages of Blumenthal’s reports are the most embarrassing for the foreign donors because they indicate how many well-placed “friends” and lobbyists Mobutu had in Western capitals who assured his ability to buy support. The names included top Belgian civil servants and journalists on Mobutu’s payroll. Diamonds were sent to the wife of President Valerie Giscard d’Estaing of France in payment for debts.

The Bank and the IMF shrugged off poor Blumenthal’s report saying “there was nothing in it we didn’t already know.” “In any case,” said another Bank official, “what he mentioned was a fraction of what was really going on.” It brought out into the open, but did not end, the cozy arrangement in which the Zaireans knew what the international financiers knew, who in turn knew what the Zaireans knew, yet everyone could continue playing the game of credits, conditions, targets and stand-by arrangements with impunity.8

Who colluded with whom?

As Mobutu’s memory fades, the world turns to Iraq and Saudi Arabia where authoritarian, undemocratic, US allies have built corrupt empires fed on America’s addiction to fossil fuels. The Saudi kings and princes who dine at the White House and the ranch in Crawford, Texas, far more often than Mobutu ever had, are still doing the bidding of the world’s only superpower and playing the same games as Mobutu. The corruption scandals of oil-rich countries in the Middle East are another story but it is so huge as make Africa’s corruption underdeveloped and miniscule in comparison.