Africa’s Main Problem — Illiberalism Not Debt
Patrick Smith wrote an insightful analysis for BBC News on the trend that keeps Africa in poverty — the continent’s illiberal and anti-democratic governments.
As Smith notes, at the beginning of 2005 British Prime Minister Tony Blair focused on debt relief as a means of lifting African nations out of poverty, but debt relief will do little if not coupled with a liberalizing of African regimes.
In 2005, though, a number of prominent African nations saw liberal democratic advances reversed. Take two African leaders, Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi. Both were appointed by Blair to his Africa Commission, and both were responsible for egregious anti-democratic actions in 2005.
Mapinduzi helped rig Zanzibar’s election in late 2005. Meles initiated a crackdown on opposition members after a disputed election that led to more than 80 deaths and thousands of arrests. According to Smith, Britain is also the largest donor to Yowerie Museveni’s regime in Uganda, who has remained in power for more than 20 years and recently had the leader of the largest opposition party arrested.
As Smith writes,
That raises more awkward questions as 2005, which UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had said would be the year of Africa, draws to a close.
The campaigners in Africa and the West who called for more aid, less debt and fairer trade for Africa and bolstered British government efforts to negotiate a better deal for Africa from the rich countries’ G8 club have won important concessions.
But in most states, regime security trumps the development imperative.
The sad thing is that even the more liberal democratic states in Africa go out of their way to legitimize the illiberal anti-democratic ones. Nothing epitomizes this m ore than the African Union’s decision to hold its January 2006 summit in Khartoum, Sudan despite Sudan’s genocidal war in Darfur.
Source:
Africa’s year of democratic reverses. Patrick Smith, BBC News, December 29, 2005.
The Africa’s Main Problem — Illiberalism Not Debt by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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