Mahmood Mamdani's open letter to Blair

[Mark Pavlick]

>
>Misrule Britannia
>
>It's good news that Tony Blair wants to help heal the scars of 
>Africa, says Mahmood Mandani, but first he needs to realise how they 
>got there.
>
>Mahmood Mandani
>Guardian
>
>Friday February 8, 2002
>
>As you spend your second morning in Africa, Mr Blair, I hope you 
>are beginning to recognise one fact above all else: the predicament 
>of Africa is a consequence of failed policies. A turnaround will 
>require a new policy consensus, not just more cash.
>
>Your recognition that "mutual interest and self-interest 
>increasingly walk hand in hand" is surely the beginning of political 
>wisdom in a globalised world. Just as sure, however, is the need to 
>recognise that oneness is not sameness. True, places such as Rwanda, 
>Congo, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone symbolise the current African 
>crisis, but each is an outcome of a blend of
>processes: some specific, others illustrating a shared African 
>history and relationship with the rest of the world. The time is 
>right to draw lessons from both action and inaction, in Rwanda and 
>Sierra Leone.
>
>The lesson of action in Sierra Leone is no different from the 
>conclusion drawn by the UN commander in Rwanda: a few thousand 
>well-armed and disciplined UN troops would have prevented massacres 
>from turning into a genocide. That lesson, Mr Blair, needs to be 
>etched in our historical memories: zero tolerance for terrorists, 
>for those who target civilians and the infrastructure of civilian 
>life.
>
>But just as many in Africa have been quick to note the difference 
>between the shift of British policy in Sierra Leone and continuing 
>western indifference to developments in the African Great Lakes 
>(Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda); they have also noted the 
>difference in the British response to recent developments in 
>Zimbabwe and Zambia.
>
>  What, many Africans ask, is the difference between the stolen 
>election in  Zambia and the election that may be stolen in Zimbabwe? 
>Why heightened  British concern for Zimbabwe and cold indifference 
>to Zambia? Could British preoccupation with one previous colony, and 
>not another, reflect a narrow concern for the future of British 
>"kith and kin" in Zimbabwe?
>
>It may be wise to take into account African sensibilities and apply 
>the same standards to Zambia and Zimbabwe. You are right to speak of 
>the need to come to terms with "failed states" before they fester. 
>But to really tackle this problem, you must understand its genesis. 
>The ethnic conflicts in the Great Lakes, as in many other places, 
>are not between the resource-rich and the
>resource-poor; they are between those who have a right of 
>citizenship and those who don't.
>
>The sad fact is that the form of citizenship which exists in 
>contemporary Africa has been bequeathed by the colonial experience. 
>The idea that  citizenship for Africans should be a group and not an 
>individual right, and that only members of those groups recognised 
>as indigenous should be granted citizenship, is an idea whose 
>vintage goes no farther than the colonial
>period. The plain fact, Mr Blair, is that before colonialism 
>ethnicity was a cultural identity. It was not a political identity, 
>the basis of belonging to a political community.
>
>The core political legacy of British "indirect rule" in Africa was 
>the absence of a modern state. Britain ruled its middle African 
>colonies through a range of "native authorities", each of which 
>dispensed with the rule of  law in the name of "tradition". The 
>colonial fiction was that African tradition, particularly political 
>tradition, was ethnic. The result was to disenfranchise those 
>considered ethnically not indigenous to an area, even if they were 
>born there.
>
>The social legacy of indirect rule, meanwhile, was the absence of a 
>national intelligentsia. When Frederick Lugard, the British colonial 
>administrator, moved from India to Nigeria, he was determined that 
>Britain's new African colonies would be immunised against "the 
>Indian disease", by which he meant the creation of a westernised 
>native intelligentsia. The sober fact is
>that it was not the colonial interlude, but nationalist 
>independence, that laid the basis of a university-educated 
>intelligentsia in middle Africa.
>
>Despite current belief, the story of independent Africa is not one 
>of unremitting decline. The first two decades of independence were 
>decades of moderate progress. Between 1967 and 1980 more than a 
>dozen African countries registered a growth rate of 6%. This 
>included not only mineral-rich countries such as Gabon, Congo, 
>Nigeria and Botswana but also countries
>such as Egypt, Kenya and Ivory Coast. To be sure, there was a 
>downside. That was the failure to transform agriculture, and thus to 
>bring the vast majority of the population into the development 
>process. This shortcoming in economic policy went alongside and was 
>sustained by a political authoritarianism.
>
>This downside provided an opening for a dogmatic assault by 
>the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank calling for 
>so-called structural adjustment at the height of the cold war. 
>Whether intended or not, its effect was to scupper the 
>state-building project undertaken with modest success by nationalism.
>
>Structural adjustment called for an all-round and drastic reduction 
>in state involvement. Growth up to 1980 had been sustained mainly by 
>domestic savings: close to a third of African countries had savings 
>rates higher than 25% by 1980. Today, the rate of savings is closer 
>to 10%. The difference is larger than the entire aid flow to the 
>continent.
>
>The assault on social expenditure - including university funding - 
>combined with an emphasis on importing expatriate intellectuals 
>through technical assistance programmes. Together, the two 
>devastated the national intelligentsias, the most competitive of 
>whom fled to the west. No wonder there are more expatriates in 
>Africa today than in the heyday of colonialism.
>
>Finally, there was the promotion of non-governmental organisations 
>(NGOs).  Said to be a measure to bolster democracy in newly 
>independent Africa, this initiative ended up undermining whatever 
>democratic traditions had been built up in civil society. If truth 
>be told, the proliferation of NGOs has been central to the creation 
>of a begging-bowl public culture. Contemporary  Africa has not been 
>ignored; it has been wronged. What Africa needs immediately is not a 
>pile of cash, but a changed policy context.
>
>Without a consensus on a policy shift, there will be no way ahead. 
>You are right, Mr Blair, to think that contemporary Africa shares 
>the dilemma of Afghanistan: it is a victim of the cold war and the 
>subsequent self-righteous walking away by western powers. As in 
>Afghanistan, in Africa the prerequisite to recovery will be the 
>construction of state independence.
>To achieve this, we need to shed the cold-war dogmatism designed to 
>trim the state and liberate the market - whose one consequence has 
>been to contribute to state collapse throughout Africa.
>
>Recognise that history gives us only two ways of building a public 
>power: through waging war and through the provision of social 
>services. By undercutting the role of the state as a provider of 
>social services, structural adjustment turned the relationship 
>between the state and the population into one of naked coercion 
>through security and armed services.
>
>Recognise also that without an active state role, the historically 
>weak classes in Africa - entrepreneurs and intellectuals - will not 
>thrive. Before you increase aid, you may consider sharply curtailing 
>technical assistance - that self-motivated subsidy given by western 
>countries to their own largely unemployable cadre and passed off as 
>aid. Employ African technical personnel on projects in Africa and 
>hold them accountable to  African constituencies, not just to donors.
>
>Finally, you should stop promoting a non-accountable NGO culture and 
>try to strengthen local democracy instead.
>
>It is true, Mr Blair, that Africans must determine their own 
>destiny. But Africans must first have the chance to shape their 
>destiny - an enabling policy context - before they can be held 
>responsible for it.
>
>Mahmood Mandani is director of the Institute of African Studies at
>Columbia University.

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