Crawling from the Wreckage (21 page)

Well, I can. It’s called revolution in the streets.

Like Odinga in Kenya, Tsvangirai finally accepted a power-sharing deal brokered by foreign mediators in September 2008. Mugabe remained president and the opposition leader got the post of prime minister, but the all-important control of the security forces was retained by the ruling ZANU-PF party. There has been a slight recovery in Zimbabwe’s devastated economy but foreign
donors are still withholding aid on the assumption that ZANU-PF will just steal it. Tsvangirai has no discernible influence on the government’s conduct, but does not appear to have any better options. Mugabe will not leave power voluntarily—and revolution in the streets does not seem very likely either
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A quarter-century after a million Ethiopians died in the great hunger of 1984–85, the country is heading into another famine. The spring rains failed entirely, and the summer rains were three weeks late. But why is famine stalking Ethiopia again?

The Ethiopian government is authoritarian, but it isn’t incompetent. It gives fertilizer to farmers and teaches best practices. By the late 1990s, the country was self-sufficient in food in good years, and the government had created a strategic food reserve for the bad years.

So why are we back here again? Infant deaths are already over two per ten thousand per day in Somali, the worst-hit region of Ethiopia. (Double that number counts as full-scale famine.) Countrywide, 20 percent of the population already depends on the dwindling flow of foreign food aid, and it will get worse for many months yet. What have the Ethiopians done wrong?

The real answer (which everybody carefully avoids) is that they have had too many babies. Ethiopia’s population at the time of the last famine was forty million. Twenty-five years later, it is eighty million. You can do everything else right—give your farmers new tools and skills, fight erosion, create food reserves—but if you don’t control population growth you are just spitting into the wind.

It is so obvious that this should be the start of every conversation about the country. Even if the coming famine in Ethiopia kills a million people, the population will keep growing. So the next famine, ten or fifteen years from now, will hit a country of a hundred million people, trying to make a living from farming on land where only forty million faced starvation in the 1980s. It is going to get much uglier in Ethiopia.

Yet it’s practically taboo to say that. The whole question of population, instead of being central to the international debate about development,
food and climate change, has been put on ice. The reason, I think, is that the rich countries are secretly embarrassed, and the poor countries are deeply resentful.

Suppose that Ethiopia had been the first country to industrialize. Suppose some mechanical genius in Tigray invented the world’s first steam engine in 1710, the first railways were spreading across the country by the 1830s, and, at the same time, Ethiopian entrepreneurs and imperialists spread all over Africa. By the end of the nineteenth century, Ethiopians would have controlled half of Europe, too. Never mind the improbabilities. The point is that an Ethiopia with such a history would easily be rich enough to support eighty million people now—and if it could not grow enough food for them all, it would import it. Just like Britain (where the industrial revolution actually started) imports food. Money makes everything easy.

In 1710, when Thomas Newcomen devised the first practical steam engine in Devonshire, the population of Britain was seven million. It is now sixty-one million, and they do not live in fear of famine. In fact, they eat very well, even though they currently import more than a third of their food. They got in first, so although they never worried in the slightest about population growth, they got away with it.

Ethiopia has more than four times the land surface of Britain. The rain is less reliable, but a rich Ethiopia would have no trouble feeding its people. The problem is that it got the population growth without the wealth. Stopping the population growth now is extremely difficult, but not doing so means that famine will be a permanent resident in another twenty years.

The problem is well understood. The population of the world’s rich countries has grown about tenfold since the earliest days of the industrial revolution, but for the first half of that period, it grew quite slowly. Many babies died, and there were no cures for most epidemic diseases. Later the death rate dropped, but by then, with people feeling more secure in their lives, the birth rate was dropping, too. In most of the poor countries the population hardly grew at all until the start of the twentieth century. But once the population did start to grow, thanks to basic public-health measures that cut the death rate, it grew faster than it ever did in the rich countries.

Unfortunately, economies don’t grow that fast, so these poorer countries never achieved the level of comfort and security that allows most
people to start reducing their family size spontaneously. At the current rate of growth, Ethiopia’s population will double again, to 160 million people, in just thirty-two years.

You’re thinking: that will never happen. Famine will become normal in Ethiopia well before that. No combination of wise domestic policies, and no amount of foreign aid, can stop it. And you are right.

What applies to Ethiopia applies to many other African countries, including some that do not currently have famines. Uganda, for example, had five million people at independence in 1960. It now has thirty-two million, and at the current growth rate, it will have 130 million by 2050. Uganda is only the size of Oregon.

History is unfair. Conversations between those who got lucky and those left holding the other end of the stick are awkward. But we cannot go on ignoring the elephant in the room. We have to start talking about population again.

Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia are all relatively well-run countries: the institutions of the state still exist, the roads are maintained, more or less, and the power is on in the cities for much of the day. There is another, quite numerous category of African countries that are run extremely badly, by extremely bad people. And for some reason that I simply don’t understand, West Africa has the nastiest regimes and civil wars on the continent
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There have been political horrors in other parts of Africa—the genocidal former regime in Rwanda, the current regime in Zimbabwe, and any Congolese regime you care to name—but the worst regimes seem to arise along the stretch of tropical coastline between Ghana and Senegal.

Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all lived through nightmarish civil wars after long-ruling dictators died or were killed and junior officers seized power. Gambia has been ruled for the past fifteen years by a former army lieutenant, who now imports witch doctors from Guinea to hunt down witches who he believes are trying to kill him. And now Guinea has fallen into the hands of junior officers.

It’s a classic pattern. For fifty years after independence, from 1958 to 2008, Guinea was ruled by just two “big men”: Sékou Touré for twenty-six years and then Lansana Conté for another twenty-four. They and their cronies stole all the money, of course, while over 90 percent of the mineral-rich country’s ten million people continued to live on less than a dollar a day. At least they lived in a relatively safe and orderly poverty.

Then Lansana Conté died late last year—and within hours, a group of young officers broke into the main television station to announce that they were taking over the country. Their leader was an army captain called Moussa “Dadis” Camara, who promised to hold free and fair elections by 2010, and that he would not run for the presidency himself.

Sensible promises, as before 2008 nobody except his own family and his junior officer friends had ever heard of “Dadis” (as he calls himself). He has no experience or qualifications relevant to running a government, but a presidential palace is a nicer place to live in than a barracks, and the pay and perks are much better, too. The experience kind of grows on you, and eventually you ask yourself: why leave?

If a general had taken power after Lansana Conté’s death, he might have kept the promise to hand power over to a democratically elected civilian president, for generals already have comfortable houses, limos and lots of stolen money. However, generals usually don’t have direct command of troops.

That’s why it’s so often the junior officers who seize power in West Africa: they have the troops, and they are not much constrained by traditional ideas of military discipline. They seize power because it’s the only way to change their own lives for the better—and they generally start to quarrel among themselves after a while because they have already broken all the traditional bonds of hierarchy and discipline.

Guinea has now moved on to the next stage of the process. “Dadis” began talking about running for president himself last August. “I have been taken hostage by the people, a part of the people, with some saying that President Dadis cannot be a candidate and others saying President Dadis has to be a candidate,” he told Radio France Internationale. In a burst of frankness, he added that if he did not stand for election another military officer would take over the country.

At that stage, Dadis probably had still had the backing of the other young officers. They were doing very nicely, too, and why would they
complain as long as the supply of girls, drink and drugs kept flowing? But then the civilians got involved.

Various political groups that had opposed Lansana Conté for years now saw democracy being stolen from them again. They held a rally in Conakry’s sports stadium in late September to protest against Dadis’s presidential plans. Lieutenant Abubakar “Toumba” Diakité, another member of the military junta and the head of the presidential guard, was sent to deal with the situation.

He did so by massacring them. His soldiers slaughtered 157 people and raped dozens of women inside the stadium. Twenty women were kidnapped and videotaped for several days while they were being raped and tortured. It is possible that “Toumba” exceeded his instructions; the reaction certainly exceeded his expectations.

The junta denied it all, but the evidence was overwhelming. The African Union, United States, European Union, and the Economic Community of West African States all imposed sanctions on the junta, with
ECOWAS
president Mohamed Ibn Chambas saying bluntly that Guinea’s military rulers were using state power “to repress the population … If the military junta has its way it will impose yet another dictatorship on them.”

The United Nations sent a mission to investigate the massacre, raising the possibility that the International Criminal Court might bring charges against junta members for crimes against humanity. Dadis apparently concluded that it was time to throw Toumba to the wolves.

On December 4, Dadis went to the barracks where Toumba’s troops are based in Conakry: not a wise move, as Toumba shot him in the head and went on the run. Dadis was flown to Morocco for emergency surgery, and the remaining junta members chose “General” Sékouba Konaté to act as front man in his absence.

If things run true to form, the final step in this tragedy will be for Toumba to start an insurgency in the interior of the country, plunging it into a long and horrible civil war of the kind that has ruined several of its neighbours.

This part of Africa seems cursed.

African intellectuals have given a great deal of thought to the question of why their states don’t work as well (to put it mildly) as countries in most
other parts of the world. There is no consensus on the answer, but in the past generation they have been moving towards one. Hence the proposal discussed in the article below
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“Before you put a roof on a house, you need to build the foundations,” South African President Thabo Mbeki reportedly told diplomats at a closed-door summit meeting of the African Union in Ghana last weekend. Some were quick to ridicule the summit’s declared goal of creating a unified African government by 2015; something that won’t happen any time soon—and may never happen—but it would be a very good idea.

“The emergence of such a mighty stabilising force in this strife-torn world should be regarded … not as a shadowy dream of a visionary,” declared Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, almost half a century ago, “but as a practical proposition which the peoples of Africa can and should translate into reality … We must act now. Tomorrow may be too late.”

Nkrumah was pleading for a pan-African government instead of the jigsaw-puzzle of ex-colonies that came into existence as the European imperial powers left Africa. He was asking for the Moon: independence struggles were waged within the borders of each colony, and the leaders who emerged had their power bases within those borders. Wider unity would have dethroned most of those leaders, so it did not happen. But now the unity project is back.

The African Union was created five years ago out of the wreckage of the discredited Organization of African Unity with the goal of making Africa’s rulers accountable. Now it is trying to revive the project for real African unity, and there is no shortage of Africans who argue that it is merely a distraction from urgent and concrete problems like Darfur and Zimbabwe. Maybe they are right, but what if those crises are just symptoms of a deeper African problem?

At the time most African countries gained their independence in the 1960s, they had higher average incomes and better public services than most Asian countries. Kenyans lived better than Malaysians; people in
the Ivory Coast were richer than South Koreans; Zimbabweans were healthier, lived longer and were better-educated than the Chinese. And there were more and worse wars in Asia than in Africa.

Now it’s all dramatically the other way round, but why? Individual Africans are no less intelligent, hard-working or ambitious than individual Asians, so the answer must lie in the system. And the most striking characteristic of that system is the sheer number of independent states within Africa: fifty-three of them, in a continent that has fewer people than either India or China.