--------- Begin forwarded message ----------
From: "A.Y. Kamara" <kamara@WIZ.UNI-KASSEL.DE>
To: LEONENET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Watch Out: Globalisation is Re-drawing Africa's Borders
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 15:47:54 +0100
Watch Out: Globalisation is Re-drawing Africa's Borders
January 27, 1998
Felix 'Machi Njoku, PANA Correspondent
DAKAR, Senegal (PANA) - In 1885, European powers assembled in the German
city of Berlin
to carve out chunks of African territories for themselves.
As this century turns the corner, a repeat has been set in motion though
not in the manner of
another daggers-drawn scramble for a continent some prefer to call the
last frontier.
This time, there are no gun powder and rum, no bibles and preachers. In
short, in the place of a
civilising agent, you have a vague phenomenon called globalisation , let
loose on poor countries
even as its minders try to get a true picture of the monster they
created.
The Leviathan seems to have seized the global village and taken its
inhabitants hostage.
Henceforth, the law of the jungle reigns supreme and only the strong can
escape from its
clutches.
The world has learnt as much following ongoing turbulence in the world
Economy.
This has so rattled the famed Asian Tigers of late that African
countries who were told to copy
the Asiatics have almost given up. The brief artificial Afro-Optimism of
the last couple of years
is again giving way to darker pessimism, most manifest in speeches made
by some African
leaders at the beginning of the year.
For instance, in early January, Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings
predicted a tough economic
year for his country, exhorting his people to work extra-hard to counter
external forces which
threaten the country's development.
We cannot yet be sure of the extent to which this (gobalisation) will
affect the inflow of foreign
investment into our economy, or the degree to which the negative aspects
of an increasingly
troubled world economy will impact on us, he said.
Never mind that the west African country is host to one of the world's
largest gold reserves or
that Ashanti Goldfields Company is quoted on the London and New York
stock markets.
Besides, Accra has implemented all the economic and democratic reforms
in the books that
made it the darling of the multilateral finance institutions.
Beyond and above this, serious development economists are not sure if
any African country will
go into the next millennium with the slightest hope of a bright prospect
for the future.
The political, economic and social instability in almost all African
countries south of the Sahara
at this point in time seems to support this theory.
If recent pictures of street battles between soldiers and ordinary folk
in Zimbabwe over the
price on basic commodities do not tell the story, then what would? Is it
the sorry sight of
kid-soldiers in bathroom slippers totting AK-47 rifles in central Africa
or the gory sight of slit
throats in the back streets of Algiers.
In today's Africa, it appears acceptable that any thug can mortgage his
country's meagre
resources for arms and use them to dislodge an elected government from
power in the name of
the free market.
The prospects are frightening and at the same time incomprehensible,
says Achille Mbembe,
Executive Secretary of the Dakar-based Council for the Development of
Social Science
Research.
How are we to characterise these African times we are living in? Mbembe
asked in a lecture on
New Economic Frontiers in Africa he gave at the UN African Institute For
Economic
Development and Planning, also based in the Senegalese capital.
The continent is moving in multiple directions simultaneously and at
varying speeds and levels
that defy characterisation, noted Mbembe, a Cameroonian history
professor.
He said the colonial period was easy to characterise since everyone knew
what the problem
was. After that period, things began to look bad. They became murky in
the 1980s and even
murkier in the 1990s, as the twin effects of political democratisation
and economic
liberalisation began to bite harder. Now it is a dare devil situation.
The conditions imposed on African countries today are more or less
similar to conditions
imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II, Mbembe said.
Given this scenario one begins to wonder if liberalisation was not
supposed to open up the
economy, spread wealth across the broad spectrum of society. Was it not
supposed to improve
the peoples standard of living in an all inclusive political process
where the people themselves
decided who should rule them?.
These have hardly been the case. Privatisation has become a synonym for
corporate greed,
while elections are easily programmed to determine the winner.
At the same time, aid promised to countries implementing political and
economic liberalisation
have failed to materialise. Debts are not being cancelled even in cases
where it is obvious that
the debtor countries can't pay up.
Foreign Private investment, the prime mover of globalisation continues
to skip Africa as if parts
of the continent were leprous. Where they show up, it is to hastily dip
up underground minerals
which are spirited away to the metropolis leaving the countries much
worse than they were
before.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, had cause to question the
morality of rich
countries on some of these issues during a recent visit to Ethiopia,
when he reportedly urged
Western nations and the multilateral finance institutions to cancel
Africa's 235 billion dollars
debt.
In an emotional speech entitled Chains Around Africa: Crisis or Hope for
the New Millennium ,
he told the diplomatic community in Addis Ababa last week the debt
burden could only be
likened to a new form of slavery. Western nations, he said, had the
moral obligation to solve
this crisis induced by the huge debt because of their colonial legacy
which create many
problems that did not previously exist.
He noted that 40 million dollars were being drained from African
everyday in debt servicing
alone, pointing out that for every one dollar given in aid, three
dollars are returned in debt
service. The extent to which the chains of indebtedness was contributing
to the overall problems
of Africa and the sufferings of her people simply cannot be
overestimated, he added.
Analysts are not sure if such calls really make any impact, considering
that Pope John Paul II
made a similar call some years back. Morality and economics do not rob,
they argue. Rather,
what seems to scare the movers of the free market, especially the
Bretton Woods circles, is the
global impact of resistance against adjustment measures as was the case
recently in Zimbabwe.
Some people feel that fear of this imminent time bomb prompted the
reform-minded president of
the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, to initiate his rather belated damage
control operation for a
humane approach to development.
At the last annual general meeting of the bank and the IMF in Hong Kong,
Wolfensohn
acknowledged the bank's past mistakes, saying the time has come to get
back to the dream of
inclusive development.
What we are seeing in the world today is the tragedy of exclusion.
Whether you broach it from
the social or economic or moral perspective, this is a challenge we
cannot afford to ignore, he
said. But we must recognise that we are living with a time bomb and
unless we take action now,
it could explode in our children's faces.
Michel Camdesus, the IMF chief, also spoke about the responsibility of
industrial countries to
help minimise the social and cultural costs of integration into the
global economy.
However, for African countries, these amount to mere lip service when
compared to the
profound crises that would take years of concerted action to reverse.
The issue is that many African economies have been so hard hit that some
of them would simply
be swallowed up by more fortunate neighbours. The economic frontiers of
some states will
encroach into smaller neighbours which would continue shrink, Mbembe
noted in his lecture.
He added: The entanglement of Africa is likely to lead to the
fragmentation of public authority
and the emergence of private indirect government.
Then, the bottom line is that many African countries would revert to the
post-Atlantic slave
trade era where trade by barter would replace monetised economy.
Even so, Mbembe believes that Africans are resilient enough to turn into
themselves and like the
mythical Phoenix, rise again from their ashes.
But wait a minute: There may yet be other eminent companions in the
journey to oblivion if
American writer William Greider's new book on globalistion is to
believed.
He says: One world, ready or not, globalisation is a machine with
skillful hands on board but no
body at the wheels. In fact, the machine has no wheels nor any internal
governor to control the
wheel and direction. It is sustained by its own forward motion, guided
mainly by its own
appetite. And it is accelerating.
--------- End forwarded message ----------
_____________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com
Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]