Africa's Desperation

There has been much talk of an African renaissance in recent years. While for decades, the dominant image of Africa has been that it is poor and helpless.

This image has been deemed inaccurate by both observers and geo-economic analysts. Most people in Africa may rank as poor, but the continent itself is one of the richest in terms of human and natural resources. Far from being helpless and necessarily dependent on foreign help,

Africa pays more money to rich and developed countries than it receives in aid. We need to face up to the uncomfortable realities that Africa the underdeveloped continent may have largely been over the years actually aiding the developed world in its development.

Poverty in Africa stems from the lack of adequate provisions to satisfy the basic human needs of its populations. African nations typically fall toward the bottom of any list measuring small size economic activity, such as income per capita or GDP per capita, despite a wealth of natural resources.

Despite large amounts of arable land, small, individual land holdings are rare. In many nations, the land is subject to tribal ownership and in others, most of the land is often directly or indirectly in the hands of descendants of European settlers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This reality often gives an advantage to one native African group over another and not just Europeans over Africans.

In recent years over US$500 billion has been sent to African nations in the form of direct aid. The consensus is that the money has had little long-term effect.

Most African nations have owed substantial sums of money. However, a large percentage of the money was either invested in weapons or was directly misappropriated by corrupt governments.

Did you know that many African countries continue to pay colonial tax to France since their independence to-date? And, that the amounts estimated by France were so large that the reimbursement of the so called “colonial debt” was close to 40% of some country's budget!

As such, many newly democratic nations in Africa are saddled with debt run-ups by totalitarian regimes. Large debts usually result in little being spent on social services, such as basic utilities, education, pensions, or medical care. In addition, most of the debts currently owed represent only the interest portion on the debts, and far exceeds the amounts that were actually borrowed.

Most African nations are pushing for debt relief, as they are effectively unable to maintain payments on debt without extending the debts payment indefinitely. However, most plans to forgive debt affect only the smallest nations, and large debtor nations are often excluded from such plans.

According to observers, most large sums of money that are in Africa are often used to develop mega-projects when the need is for smaller scale projects.

Corruption is also a major problem in the region, although it is certainly not universal or limited to Africa. Many native groups in Africa believe family relationships are more important than national identity, and people in authority often use nepotism and bribery for the benefit of their extended family group at the expense of their nations.

To be fair, many corrupt governments often do better than authoritarian ones that replace them. Ethiopia is a good case study. Under Haile Selassie, corruption was rife and poverty rampant. However, after his overthrow, corruption was lessened, but then famine and military aggressiveness came to the fore. In any event, corruption both diverts aid money and foreign investment (which is usually sent to offshore banks outside of Africa), and puts a heavy burden on native populations forced to pay bribes to get basic government services.

In summary, foreign aid may not even be helpful in the long run to many African nations. It often encourages them not to tax internal economic activities of multinational corporations within their borders to attract foreign investment.

In addition, most African nations do have wealthy nationals, and foreign aid often allows them to avoid paying more than negligible taxes. As such, wealth redistribution and capital controls are often seen as a more appropriate way for African nations to stabilize funding for their government budgets and smooth out the boom and bust cycles that can often arise in a developing economy. However, this sort of strategy often leads to internal political dissent and capital flight.

The widespread availability of cheap labor has often perpetuated policies that encourage inefficient agricultural and industrial practices, leaving Africa further impoverished.

Education is also a major problem, even in the wealthier nations. Illiteracy rates are high although a good proportion of Africans speak at least two languages and a number speak three (generally their native language, a neighboring or trade language, and a European one).

Higher education is almost unheard of, although certain universities in Egypt and South Africa have excellent reputations. However, some African nations have a paucity of persons with university degrees, and advanced degrees are rare in most areas. As such, the continent, for the most part, lacks scientists, engineers, and even teachers. The seeming parody of aid workers attempting to teach trilingual people English is not entirely untrue.

South Africa under apartheid is an excellent example of how an adverse situation can further degrade. The largely black population earlier wished to learn English (black South Africans saw it as a way to unite themselves as they speak several different native languages).

The greatest mortality in Africa arises from preventable water-borne diseases, which affect infants and young children greater than any other group. The principal cause of these diseases is the regional water crisis, or lack of safe drinking water primarily stemming from mixing sewage and drinking water supplies.

Clean potable water is rare in most of Africa despite the fact that the continent is crossed by several major rivers and contains some of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

Colonialism concentrated on joining the coast with internal territories. As such, nearly none of Africa's roads and railways connect with each other in any meaningful way. Joining Africa's extensive railway network has recently become a priority for African nations outside of southwest Africa, which has an integrated network. Transportation between neighboring coastal settlements is nearly always by sea, no matter the topography of the land in between them.

Even basic services like telecommunications are often treated the same way. For example, phone calls between Ghana and neighboring C?te d'Ivoire once had to be routed through Britain and France.

Although Africa had numerous pre-European overland trade routes, few are suitable for modern transport such as trucks or railways, especially when they cross old European colonial borders.

Despite other hot spots for war, Africa consistently remains among the top places for ongoing conflicts, consisting of both long-standing civil wars (e.g. Somalia) and conflicts between countries. Despite a lack of basic social services or even the basic necessities of life, ironically, military forces are often well-financed and well-equipped.

Civil war usually has the result of totally shutting down all government services. As a result, Africa is full of refugees, who are often deliberately displaced by military forces during a conflict, rather than just having fled from war-torn areas.

The link between climate change and poverty has yet to be fully examined. Climate change is likely to increase the size, frequency, and unpredictability of natural hazards. However, there is nothing natural about the transformation of natural hazards into disasters. The severity of a disaster's impact is dependent on existing levels of vulnerability, the extent of exposure to disaster event and the nature of the hazard.

Africa's economic malaise is self-perpetuating, as it engenders more of the disease, warfare, misgovernment, and corruption that created it in the first place. Other effects of poverty have similar consequences. The most direct consequence of low GDP is Africa's low standard of living and quality of life.

The exploitation of Africa and Africans by the Western world since 1500, made an invaluable and even an indispensable contribution to the building of the economies of three continents (South America, North America and Europe), while products that embodied large quantities of cheap African slave labor, were used by Europe to seriously harm the economy of another continent (Asia).

Africa is still considered the poorest continent on Earth. Almost every second person living in the states of sub-Saharan Africa lives below the poverty line. The 500 years of European slavery and colonialism seriously harmed the African economy, damaged the African societal structures and undermined the psychological self-assurance of Africans.

With the scale of poverty according to the 'Africa Progress Panel of the United Nations' numbering: 61% living on < US$2 a day; 21% on $2-$4 a day; 14% on $4-$20 a day; and 04% on > $20 a day, little doubt is left about the state of affairs. A lack of adequate state capacity is definitely the most hindering factor for African countries in their quests to tackle poverty and development...

Food for thought!