Hearts & Minds - Information for ChangeSM Africa Challenge

Facing the Challenges
       Africans show so much remarkable resilience. They have developed an impressive array of coping mechanisms, through family support networks, in an informal economy outside government control. Furthermore, Africans often show incredible emotional strength and optimism, simply making do with the meager resources at hand. But it is not humanly possible for such long-suffering to last forever.

Western Responses
       The world is largely ignoring Africa, or doing the minimum it can to assuage guilt generated by intermittent horror stories broadcast on TV. Due to donor fatigue and budget-cutting pressures, American aid levels -- never particularly generous compared to other Western nations -- have fallen substantially. Following this U.S. lead, many other countries are also slashing aid budgets. Even the U.N. is hard-pressed to mount more than a token presence in most situations.

       Only the French government from time to time still declares an intent to preserve its so-called African chase garde -- private hunting ground. Most countries find this a decidedly mixed blessing: French protection comes at the cost of limitations on sovereignty, including the currency, trade, and foreign relations. The last example was French military intervention in Côte d'Ivoire in 2003.

        In the U.S., particularly, the new policy fad has become investment, not aid. Africa certainly needs responsible foreign investment.  As William Reno, a political scientist, recently documented in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone, foreign commercial interests in Africa are often closely linked to the exploitation of natural resources such as gold, diamonds, timber, oil and rubber. Foreign exchange of these goods is mostly used to purchase arms. This only fuels the devastation of the continent.

       Other predictions for the continent have been just as bleak. For example, the June 13, 1997 issue of the influential New Republic, which devotes an unprecedented five articles to Africa, was less than hopeful about Africa's future. Moderating his earlier dismal prognostications, the pessimistic Robert Kaplan, in The Atlantic in August 1996, advocates support for women's education and similar modest social programs in Africa, but still warns against anything too ambitious.

Guarded Optimism
       This leaves Africa in a difficult predicament. Preyed upon by powerful and unscrupulous forces both from within and without, its future appears uncertain. This author's optimistic predictions for the continent (see, for example, "Debunking Ten Myths about Democracy in Africa," The Washington Quarterly, 1994) have been tempered over the years by the repeated setbacks Africa has suffered. At the time of this writing, barely a year after Sierra Leone held widely-praised free elections, the military has overthrown civilian government in a coup. Democratic Congo-Brazzaville is wracked by pre-election civil violence. Zambia is steadily turning its back on democracy and the 2003 elections were contested by opposition leaders.

       One cannot underestimate the challenges and obstacles Africa faces. Still, Africa holds great opportunity.

       Nearly everyone from the World Bank to the African Unity agrees that bad economic policies, compounded by poor governance and undemocratic political systems, bear most of the blame for the poverty and conflict plaguing the continent. There is also a broad consensus that the modest Western assistance in support of free elections, the spread of civil society and the human rights movement, the promotion of free speech and free enterprise have, on balance, improved the situation.

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