Conflicts in Africa – The naked truth

I was in Washington last year. At the World Bank the first question they asked me was “how did you fail?” I responded that we took over a country with 85 per cent of its adult population illiterate. The British ruled us for 43 years. When they left, there were 2 trained engineers and 12 doctors. This is the country we inherited.

When I stepped down there was 91-per-cent literacy and nearly every child was in school. We trained thousands of engineers and doctors and teachers.

In 1988 Tanzania’s per-capita income was $280. Now, in 1998, it is $140. So I asked the World Bank people what went wrong. Because for the last ten years Tanzania has been signing on the dotted line and doing everything the IMF and the World Bank wanted. Enrollment in school has plummeted to 63 per cent and conditions in health and other social services have deteriorated. I asked them again: “what went wrong?” These people just sat there looking at me. Then they asked what could they do? I told them have some humility. Humility — they are so arrogant!

… It seems that independence of the former colonies has suited the interests of the industrial world for bigger profits at less cost. Independence made it cheaper for them to exploit us. We became neo-colonies.

— Julius Nyerere interviewed by Ikaweba Bunting, The Heart of Africa, New Internationalist Magazine, Issue 309, January-February 1999 (Emphasis Added)

[The] theory of comparative advantage … says that a country produces that which it can produce cheaper than any other and sells it to others in exchange for that which they can produce cheaper than us. The invisible hand of the market will of itself sort out any inequities in this system allowing for the appropriately correct level of development to any particular producer. The [European] colonies distorted this view by deciding that Africa’s comparative advantage was its poverty, like we do today with our global brand footwear, clothing etc. As a result in Africa, existing patterns of farming were wiped away and huge plantations of single non-native crops were developed, always with the need of European processing industry in mind. There was a global transfer of foreign plants to facilitate this — tea, coffee, cocoa, rubber etc., The result was the erosion of the soil, forerunner of the desertification evident today. And with the erosion came steadily decreasing quantities of already scarce local food grown on marginal lands by labourers working for pitiful wages. This concentration on a few major cash crops or the extraction of an important mineral source left the countries on independence incredibly vulnerable to dramatic fluctuations in the prices of those commodities on the world market.

Adam Smith also suggested that the market was free within reason. It could never be laissez faire. Indeed he suggested infant economies be protected from the chill winds of the financial gales as we did in our development but prevented in others. The Navigation Acts the were wholly anticompetitive policies — which at that time prevented American colonists from making their own woollen or iron goods, and were like their equivalent today when we [the developed world] impose on a Third World producer of pineapples who wants to sell in the EU a tariff of 9% for fresh fruit, 32 % for tinned pineapples and 42% for pineapple juice — planting the seeds of today’s disparities between Northern and Southern economies.

— Bob Geldof, Why Africa? Bob Geldof Speaks at St. Paul’s Cathedral, DATA.org, April 21, 2004