Looting the Treasury

The continent of Africa is the world's second largest. Within that continent lies 53 separate countries, comprising the whole. The population of the continent is over a billion people. Most of whom live in varying degrees of poverty, despite the developed countries of the world pouring massive amounts of aid dollars into the continent, country by country. The 19th and early- to mid-20th century of African colonization by European countries has long been blamed for the social and political retardation of the continent.

Countries as diverse as France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and Portugal have had a long and rather inglorious history of occupation, all concerned with procuring for themselves and their treasuries the vast natural resources that reside on the Continent. From Morroco, Libya, Swaziland, Burundi, Benin, Rwanda, Egypt, Zanzibar, Algeria, and more, Europe drained the continent of as much of its internal riches as they could. It was quite simply there for the taking. In the process, enslaving the people of Africa to their will.

Not to mention centuries-earlier raids on the continent that gained Europe - with the considerable assistance of Arab traders who themselves enjoyed centuries of black slave labour - millions of African slaves, taken over the oceans to Europe and North America and their geographic holdings to work out their unfortunate lives in misery, on cotton and sugar plantations. Thousands of black Africans died en route to their countries of destination, and on their arrival were considered beasts of burden, and treated in much the same way.

That historical fact is simply another milestone in the inexhaustible history of the cruel and inhumane treatment humans are capable of meting out to one another; another black sinkhole of shame. But is it really the reason that independent African countries have been incapable of governing themselves well and assuring their populations of a decent measure of life's opportunities? White liberal guilt would have it so, but perhaps the facts point elsewhere.

Not to trivialize the unsupportably cruel maltreatment of Africans by Europeans, for it remains what it will always be regarded as, an atrocity of immense proportions. But African leaders have had ample opportunity to demonstrate their measured and considered concern for their countries and their peoples, and they continue to fail, miserably. Religious, sectarian, tribal and political strife continues to prey on the helpless majority.

And one African leader after another has demonstrated the meanest incapacity of governing in the interests of the populations they lead. Tyrants, dictators, monarchies, tribal leaders, they all somehow tend to lose their way once they've ascended to the heady opportunities of ultimate power. They manipulate, and take unto themselves the treasures of their countries - including development and sales of natural resources, and humanitarian funds gifted from abroad.

Gabon's president Omar Bongo Ondimba is merely one of a long list of corrupt leaders who have enriched themselves and their supporters and their families, leaving their vast populations to pick up their own pieces of despair and need. Mr. Bongo and his familial entourage own hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of mansions abroad, and countless fleets of expensive limousines. Payment for which emanates directly from the country's oil-rich treasury.

He and his wife simply write cheques drawn on the Gabon treasury for their luxurious purchases. This conscienceless, entitled plundering of a country's resources is a common enough occurrence in African countries. It's well-known internationally. International humanitarian aid groups that raise millions in the never-ending battle to feed famished African populations know it, and so do countries like France which welcome these kleptocrats.

While African has no monopoly on misgovernance and corruption, of the 53 separate countries on the African continents, fully 50 are states where poverty remains ingrained and is on the rise. This, despite that the developed world has Africa on its mind and has earmarked funds to attempt to ameliorate the desperate living - and dying - conditions for Africans. At one time Asia and India were also countries whose vast populations lived on the desolate knife-edge between life and death.

In the present era, we've seen world poverty on the decline, and both India and China, each country boasting populations equal to the entire continent of Africa, have slowly, over a surprising four decades, lifted their population from certain death to modest prosperity. Yes, there is still massive poverty in the vast countrysides of both countries, but the advances each have made is nothing short of amazing, despite inherent social and political problems in both.

Whereas in Africa the situation continues to fester, year by year; "By the turn of the millennium they were poorer than they had been in 1970", according to Paul Collier, in his recently published "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest countries Are Failing and What Can Be done About It". The analysis and statistical synthesis Mr. Collier brings to his scholarly treatise slams the prevailing finger-pointing at the causative of colonialism.

Instead the conclusion he has reached points directly to internal factors which include rampant corruption, political- and military-coups, ongoing civil wars, the happenstance of geography, and malevolently unconscionable governance. According to Mr. Collier: "We cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change but usually they are defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes."

The African Union itself, the coalition of African countries insisting on their capability to govern well, collectively and singly, has been signally incapable of putting a stop to the ongoing wars in Somalia, in Congo, in Sierra Leone; they've been fairly useless in Sudan, and their continued fractious support of Robert Mugabe's murderous regime has brought them no honour. Their witless lack of courage in directly addressing the countless problems assailing African countries, most of which can be laid at the clay feet of misgovernance is pathetic.

Yet special advocacy groups located within Europe and North America, which have created neat little dynastic corporate entitlements for themselves as African-charity-specific charity businesses, claim African poverty as their bailiwick, and their prescription evolves around catastrophic solutions, solving nothing at all. Doling out aid - food and medicines - here and there in the most desperate areas. They're little band-aids, sops to the conscience of the West. While the work they do does help some of the desperately needy, it's temporary in nature.

Ongoing commitments to Africa in the form of financial aid simply evades the ongoing problems there. The food aid and pharmaceuticals meant to assist, ends up conscripted for sale on the black market, to fill the pockets of local government authorities. Cash assistance goes the same unsavoury trajectory, higher up on the entitlement chain, with bits and pieces of assistance reaching random desperate groups, as the government decrees. Without doing anything to solve the long-term, endemic problems.

Mr. Collier recommends a different, new initiative. To open up regional and international trade that would, he feels, over a length of time, assist local governments with job development to gradually diminish poverty levels. Seems a logical enough, and simple enough initiative. There would still be graft and corruption, but the level would also be dependent on success in encouraging agricultural and technological advances on the ground.

Peculiarly enough, while Western colonialism is a shameful event of history, emerging economic giants like China are looking to Africa - along with some of that continent's Middle East neighbours - for agricultural land-lease. Deals which fatten the bottom line of the countries' leaders, but do nothing to provide either employment or the fruits of labour for indigent, indigenous Africans, since China looks to use their own Chinese labourers as part of the deal.

Can one visualize the vast poverty-stricken and disease-assailed underclass of Africa rising as one in righteous anger over the deliberate neglect they suffer from their sanguine and very wealthy leaders?