Africa - a continent of hope and despair

J. Vitarana

Africa has a land mass equal to one-fifth of the world surface and a population of nearly 900 million. Though it has been long considered the ‘Dark Continent’ by Europeans in the 19th Century, it is actually the cradle of human civilization. The earliest known Homo Sapiens started roaming the globe from there long before the human settlements sprang up in the West.

Large African civilisations existed from several millennia before Christ. The Pyramids of Egypt as well as the remnants of the famous ancient Sudanese civilisations are par of the rich cultural heritage of Africa.

Africa’s natural biological resources include large tropical forests, an abundance of animal life, considerable areas of fertile soil, and even larger areas fit for agriculture, crop production or husbandry. Several African countries have a huge potential, not only to produce enough food to feed their own populations, but to become net exporters of agricultural produce, regionally and in world markets.

It has a large share of the world’s mineral resources including coal, petroleum, natural gas, uranium, radium, low-cost thorium, iron ores, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, zinc, tin, bauxite, titanium, antimony, gold, platinum, tantalum, germanium, lithium, phosphates, and diamonds. Africa produces more than 60 metal and mineral products and is a major producer of several of the world’s most important minerals and metals including Gold, PGE’s (Platinum Group elements), Diamonds, Uranium, Manganese, Chromium, Nickel, Bauxite and Cobalt.

Some of the world’s largest reserves of fossil fuels, metallic ores and gems and precious metals are found in Africa. Africa has about 30 per cent of the planet’s mineral reserves, including 30 per cent of bauxite, 40 per cent of gold, 60 per cent of cobalt and manganese, 75 per cent of phosphates and diamonds, 80% of chromes, and 90 per cent of the world’s PGM (Platinum Group Minerals).

Thus Africa is one of the richest continents in terms of natural biological and physical resources. Also it has a huge potential of human resources too, which could be developed and productively engaged.

At the same time is also the poorest continent. Poverty rides high. Africa’s poverty rate of 50 percent is shown to be the same in 1981 and 2005. This is because poverty worsened between 1981 and 1996.

The mean consumption of the poor is lower than any region, at around 70 cents per day in 2005, using the $1.25 poverty line. The number of poor people in Africa doubled in between 1981 and 2005, from 200 to 380 million.

The poverty in Africa had its origins in the slave trade and colonization. For more than four centuries Africa was drained of its human resources. The slave trade that enriched America and the Christian states of Europe de-populated Africa by exporting nearly 20 t0 40 million persons as slaves. The result was a demographic “hollow” in the continent.

As for colonisation European nations competed with one another to colonize the Continent. By 1914 Africa was divided among Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. They were all after African natural wealth, principally its minerals.

These economic interests dominated even the demarcation of state boundaries in Africa. They were ad hoc arrangements made principally with a view of retaining strategically important resource rich areas under their control even after independence. For this purpose tribal and other differences in the region were exploited by the colonial masters. A series of internal wars were unleashed to break off such resource rich regions from the independent countries. Such was the case in Angola and the Congo.

The colonial powers destroyed the indigenous economy in Africa and set up mono-cultural economies that were heavily dependent on foreign planted crops or extractive industries. People were driven from the land and large plantations or extractive industries grabbed most of the land. Poverty was what the colonial powers bequeathed the newly independent nations of Africa.

The pernicious results of colonial rule prevailed even after independence. As Bob Geldof says “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.”

Poverty was then further exacerbated by the policies of the World Bank and the IMF which tried to impose structural adjustment policies ostensibly to develop their economies. The results are disastrous. At the time of independence in the 1960’s Africa was a net food exporter but now it imports more than a quarter of its food needs. As cited earlier poverty has increased. African nations have become more indebted.

The present global food crisis and the financial crisis make matters worse. It will bring more pressure on African countries to honour their debt commitments as the IMF has warned. It is doubtful whether developed countries now saddled with their own economic problems due to recession will contribute even the amounts promised for African debt relief. Even before the advent of the crisis the G8 has failed to deliver its promise of US $ 40 billion debt relief promised at the Scottish Gleneagles Summit in 2005. Christian Aid estimates that Africa has lost $272bn in the past 20 years from being forced to promote trade liberalization as the price for receiving World Bank loans and debt relief. What is required is not just debt relief bur debt cancellation. The lenders would not loose as the above figures quoted from Christian Aid shows.

The challenges facing Africa are enormous. It is obvious that they cannot be overcome by policies hitherto followed. What is required is a new policy, new direction and new commitment. Obviously it should be pro-poor and similar to what is practised in Latin American countries such as Brazil and Venezuela. It needs a new social contract, a new state that empowers the poor and practices broad participatory democracy.

There is no need to be pessimistic. Africa has enough physical and human resources that if properly harnessed and owned, could convert it to a continent of hope instead of being a continent of despair as it is today.