Africa’s most pressing need is not for schemes of pan-African unity, writes Stephen Ellis
It is a variety that can grow to enormous size but is not good to eat. Amateur gardeners sometimes used to grow white elephant potatoes so they could win first prize at competitions by presenting these impressive-looking but useless lumps of starch.
Hence, the description of any misguided prestige project as a ”white elephant”. Africa has quite a few of them: hospitals, motorways, power stations, built at taxpayers’ expense to put money in the pockets of building contractors and their government partners. Nobody bothers much whether they will actually work.
Africa now has a new white elephant. It is called the African Union. Announced as a replacement for the discredited Organisation of African Unity, it promises to become another of the dozens of regional or continental groupings that over the past 40 years have been announced with a flourish but failed to achieve their aims. Some African countries have been members of several such groupings simultaneously, even when these more or less contradict each other in their official aims. If there’s a club, join it. It can’t do any harm and maybe some funding will come from somewhere. And it looks like evidence of serious planning. That, at least, has been the apparent reasoning of many governments.
Regional cooperation or integration schemes in Africa have generally been set up with either economic or political objectives. Most African governments understandably want to encourage trade with each other rather than with their former colonial metropoles or with the industrialised world. Many also believe that if they can act in a more integrated way they will develop a more powerful political punch. And if the Europeans can do it with their European Union, why can’t the Africans do the same? The EU, for all its faults, represents a remarkable development for a continent whose constituent powers were formed by hundreds of years of fighting each other.
The EU did not emerge from ringing declarations of intent only. It was built from the bottom upwards, starting in the 1950s with an agreement on nothing more glamorous than coal and steel. Although it has never been the object of real public affection, it has received an enormous boost from the fact that Europeans travel so much. Many of them visit neighbouring countries for holidays or on business and have learned to appreciate some of the good things they have to offer. This gives the politicians and planners some sort of base in public opinion.
There have been so many failed attempts at African regional cooperation that, rather than starting with a comparison with Europe, it would be better to ask what has gone wrong with previous schemes. With few exceptions, the simple answer is a lack of political will. One project after another has been launched amid noble declarations of solidarity, followed by agreement on reducing tariff barriers and such like. Time after time these decisions have not been implemented.
A lack of administrative capacity is part of the reason, but above all it is because the same politicians who will sign up to almost any regional cooperation scheme are scared of the loss of sovereignty that is entailed in putting these ideas into action. All over Africa sovereignty creates jobs and political constituencies that keep politicians in power. Trade with industrialised countries is also at the heart of powerful political lobbies, which create additional reasons for politicians not to boost regional trade.
A close look at African foreign policies confirms the picture. Although they are not devoid of idealism, they are often based on a hard-headed concern to take control of international trade at their neighbours’ expense, rather like rival businesses competing for market share. Hence the West African wars, which are partly about who gets control of the region’s diamonds, or the partition of the Democratic Republic of Congo by neighbouring countries with an eye on its mineral resources. Outside the pockets of industry (in which South Africa is the leader), African countries have largely mercantile economies in which getting control of trade can only be done at someone else’s expense.
Europe was like this in the days of piracy, when the English, Portuguese, Dutch and French would raid each other’s ships in struggles for national commercial supremacy. It was in the process of doing this that they established settlements such as Cape Town, which were to be the seeds of later colonies.
Modern industrial economies, which thrive on endlessly expanding consumer markets and continuous increases in productive efficiency, operate differently. They require a different political environment in which international cooperation becomes not only possible but even necessary. This carries its own problems, to be sure. In the very different economies of Africa, grand cooperation projects, designed at the top with little preparation of public opinion, are almost guaranteed to fail. They score high with supporters of pan-African unity and aid donors, and this can make them attractive at first glance. The new African Union promises to be of this type, since it has been prepared with little public debate and in pursuit of grandiose schemes of unity championed by the governments of Libya and Nigeria.
No one doubts Africa’s need for a diplomatic forum where governments can consult. Most countries find something like this useful. For that matter, NGOs may find it useful to consult on a continental basis as well. But such an organisation would be far more effective if it could be divorced from the populist but unworkable plans for unity that have brought such disrepute to schemes of this type.
Africa’s most pressing need is not for schemes of pan-African unity. It is for real sharing of power between the governors and the governed.
Stephen Ellis is a researcher at the Afrika-studiecentrum, Leiden, the Netherlands. He is co-editor of the journal African Affairs, published by the Royal Africa Society. His latest book, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, has just been released in paperback by New York University Press