by Daud Ed Osman
Monday, August 4, 2014
In July 2009 when President Obama visited Africa, he conveyed an important message to African leaders that captures the crux of African malaise that defied many brilliant political and economic theories and squandered billions of scarce resources. He delivered that message in the presence of Ghanaian lawmakers, it said, "Africa doesn't need strong men, it needs strong institutions."
It seems, the African leaders attending next weeks African summit in Washington didn't heed his advice and instead they are coming to the conference defiant, with much weaker institutions, where the likes of Boko Haram can kidnap hundreds of teenage girls without impunity and what is more, lack of any credible effort to control corruption and end patrimonial state.
Nonetheless, the issue is not whether these disparately needed reforms are doable, but whether these strong and wealthy leaders are willing to do the right thing, which is to make the state institutions stronger, less corrupt, better financed and to make them more efficient, effective, transparent and accountable to the public.
Two weeks ago I had a chance to visit a friend of mine who lives in South Sea district in Nairobi. I noticed the residential area in that part of the city has much narrower streets than other parts of the city. The streets consist of two lanes and both lanes are used as parking space and it is difficult for a small car to pass in between these cars. However, to my surprise I notice a black hummer parked at one end of the street and I asked my self how did this car get in there and how does it able to get out. I was told that the owner is young fellow from South Sudan who besides the Hummer also owns BMW and Mercedes. My Somali-Kenyan friend laughed and told me he knows the guy and he doesn’t own any other property other than these three fancy car.
At that moment I remembered Professor Ali Mazrui’s diagnosis of African problem, which he divided into two stages; pre-colonial tragedy of “deficit greed” and post colonial crisis of “abundant acquisitiveness.” He went further by saying “Africa’s economic tragedy has been this basic transition from the inadequate acquisitiveness of pre-colonial culture to the greedy consumption of the post-colonial era.”
For the last forty years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been pressuring the African states to implement Neoliberal Policies that doesn’t address the need or the priority of these states and their population and doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground. Thus, the result has been a more disaster, deterioration of all the economic indicators with more deficits, mounting debts, aid dependency, disastrous privatization of state enterprises, diminishing quality of living, weakening state institutions, and wealthier autocrats.
The African summit next week could be successful, if the agenda is to reframe, redefine and balance what professor Mazrui termed “profit motive” and “prestige motive.” The intention of the “Washington consensus” and Neoliberal policies in the past was to incentivize the “profit motive” to create market economies but it turned out to create “ethnic monopolies and unleashed “prestige motive” that created a culture of acquiring not more productive enterprises but more Maserati, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis.
If African Statesmen (two African women Presidents are dealing with Ebola epidemic in their countries and are not attending he summit) and their host President Obama are able to achieve any good thing from the African summit it is make this “profit motive” and “prestige motive” to serve the public interest, not the private interest of view politician and their cronies.
Daud Ed Osman
Can be reached at: [email protected]