Escaping the Sub-Saharan Quagmire

...There are ways of escaping the African quagmire...

...Those t hat have maintained close ties with their former colonizers are relatively prosperous...

...Economic chaos and political tragedy, however, are not inevitable...

...disastrous experiments in import substitution...

...Uniquely African solutions such as Tanzania's Arusha Declaration and Zaire's Mobutuism have been catastrophes...

...Stability hardly followed...

...Kodjo's dire words did not stop there, for he of course knew that his famous predecessor, DialloTelli, had been murdered, a victim of the tortured politics of Guinea's Marxist "revolution...

...The failure to establish a liberal atmosphere is, as the leader of Uganda's Opposition put it, "Africa's real nightmare...

...Absolute poverty, instead of declining, is likely to gain ground...

...Ungar, who has traveled in Africa for better than 20 years and lived in Kenya and South Africa, makes clear that Africa's desperation cannot be traced to colonialism or "neocolonialism," to capitalist exploitation or a failure to implement "genuinely" African initiatives...

...author, "The Springtime of Freedom" "Africa isdying," EdemKodjo, secretary general of Ihe Organization of African Unity, warned in 1978...

...Second, most African nations should accept the conditions for International Monetary Fund support...

...Despite overpopulation and pervasive corruption, capitalist enclaves such as the Ivory Coast and Kenya have achieved impressive economic records...

...Reviewed by William McCord Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge...

...It remains for young African leaders, perhaps emerging from the new urban classes, to discover and implement them...

...Conditions in the Central African Republic (CAR), one of Ungar's" desperate cases," illustrate his argument...

...It is the world's largest source of essential minerals and has sufficient energy potential, particularly untapped hydroelectric power and oil reserves, to fuel the entire globe (though the tiny state of Arkansas has more oil rigs than all of sub-Saharan Africa...

...now most of the nations must import their meager supplies...

...Nonetheless, some of its now aged or dead statesmen have demonstrated that responsible leadership is not impossible in Africa...

...Ungar hints at three sensible policies that offer hope...

...Attheend of 1977 he revealed that he had converted to Islam, and soon after he replaced the existing political structure wi t h a parliamentary monarchy...

...Jomo Kenyatta set standards of tolerance which Kenyan leaders hopefully will continue to emulate...

...Ungar does not foresee a Communist solution either: The Russians have similarly acted out of ignorance, failing to maintain an African embassy besides one in Pretoria until the late 1950s...

...local elites of varying political faiths that have excessive control over income distribution...

...As for charges of Western imperialist influence, it should be remembered that the KGB, not the CIA, propped up the murderous regimes of Idi Amin in Uganda and Sekou Toure in Guinea...

...If the new leadership took the book's lessons to heart, a beautiful and misunderstood continent might finally begin to fulfill its potential...

...While he begged the French to meet his debts, he accumulated a fleet of five Mercedes Benzes and charged Paris $25 million for t lie lavish coronal ion ceremony he held to crown himself Emperor of ihe "Central African Empire...

...In this fine new book Sanford J. Ungar, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explores the roots of that pessimism...

...First, Africans should reverse their severe neglect of agriculture...

...He describes collapsing cities, neglected farmland, and governments frequently led by illiterate despots...

...Africans generally fed themselves and also exported food before 1960...

...a warped educational system producing far too many frustrated lawyers and too few technical experts...

...corruption...

...Leopold Senghor, the only African president to retire peacefully from office, showed that Senegal could overcome the nightmare...

...Outsiders bringmoney, skills and technological knowledge...

...Still, its people are starving, its 265 miles of paved road have virtually disappeared since independence in 1960, and its primitive telephone system has collapsed...

...The country has now returned to a form of colonialism, with a French inspector general in charge of checking corruption and French troops supporting the fragile political system...

...Although Ghana, Guinea and Zaire— the countries proclaiming "authentic" African programs—are richer than most other regions in natural resources, their economies are in shambles and their people have suffered the worst political oppression...

...Recognizing that coups d'etat or revolutions will soon overtake the heroes and villains of his eloquent book, Ungar wisely chooses to explore the grave problems plaguing all of sub-Saharan Africa...

...The African crisis cries out for skillful statesmen who are willing to abandon violence, accommodate tribal forces, develop participatory institutions, and allow a free press...

...Ethiopia isdevastated by famine, and life expectancy in Gambia is only 36 years...

...Today, the CAR continues to bleed France for half its annual budget and another military man, General Andre-Dieudon-nee, is in power...

...Felix Hou-phouet-Boigny, under intense fire in the Ivory Coast, has proved that reasonable dialogue, rather than violence, is the best path to prosperity...

...Even Julius Nyerere, by candidly if belatedly admitting his mistakes, may have set Tanzania on a more fruitful course...

...festering cities...

...Reasonable solutions are easier to find, though, than individuals capable of implementing them...

...A good first step in their education would be to read Ungar's balanced, unsentimental, yet humane account of Africa's dilemmas...

...2,000 tribal divisions...

...Its soil has the potential to feed the entire continent's population—indeed, could produce 130 times the current yield...

...More than three times the size of theUnited States, it contains only twice as many people spread over seven time zones...

...In 1979 a new French Socialist gov -eminent, revolted by the Emperor's e\cesses, took advantage of his being off on a visit to his friend Muammer Qaddafi of Libya to fly in paratroopers and help depose him...

...Bokassa executed children who would not buy school uniforms from his family factory, gouged out dissenters' eyes, and kept a special "cold room" in his palace to store human bodies until he consumed them...

...Instead of impoverishing the rural sector, crowding unskilled people into urban slums and building useless grandiose dams, African leaders ought to follow China's recent example by encouraging the development of small-scale farms and the light industries that naturally complement them...

...The author offers no panaceas...

...Kenya, ironically the site of the recent UN Decade of Women conference, notwithstanding the widespread practice there of polygamy and female circumcision...

...These include: unceasing population growth...

...The immediate cause of disaster was a small, greedy, inbred tribal clan led by Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who on January 1,1966, took over the country in a military coup and named himself commander in chief of theArmyaswell...

...and South Africa, where a "white tribe" of fanatics makes its last stand...

...If one judged Africa merely in terms of natural endowment, there would seem to be little reason for despair...

...It is a grim, unsettling but not hopeless portrait...

...It is clear that the economy of our continent is lying in ruins...

...The CAR has vast amounts of uranium, diamonds, manganese, and timber, plus enough rich land to feed its population of 2.5 million...

...Ungar also focuses on four areas of particular importance to the United States: Liberia, populated by the descendants of American ex-slaves and the bushmen they exploit, a rare example of a region largely untouched by European colonialism...

...Expatriates also bring a degree of political independence (Kenya's lively and partly foreign-owned press, for example, is in a position to criticize the more egregious actions of the nation's one-party government...

...He puts little trust in American wisdom: Henry Kissinger, for instance, stepped up military aid to Salazar's Portugal not long before Angola and Mozambique wonindependence...

...Even theTanzanian government, recipient of moreaid than any other country in the world, recently admitted its economy has retrogressed over the last decade...

...By creating mixed economies responsive to the free market, cutting consumer subsidies and decreasing costly imports, they could secure much needed loans...

...Nigeria, a major source of oil, whose Army officers once flew to the United States to study a democratic constitution...

...Yet for all this natural abundance per capita income in Africa has raced backward at the rate of 5.4 per cent annual-lysince 1983...

...and an increasing number of fanatic Moslems...

...Bokassa lives in a luxurious French chateau...

...Ungar traces Africa's plight to human failures, cultural obstacles and political errors, rather than toalack of bank credit or generous foreign aid...

...Third, Africans should take full advantage of the talents offered by "aliens"—Asians and Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, 4,000 Israeli technicians in Nigeria, Chinese and North Korean experts in Tanzania, as well as the French in the Ivory Coast and the English in Kenya (whose numbers have vastly expanded since independence...