Smoking guns By Gamal Nkrumah In retrospect, this was not a good year for Africa. The Congolese crisis spun out of control, as the war tearing apart the Democratic Republic of Congo expanded, and neighbouring countries let themselves be dragged into the quagmire. On 7 August, the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania became the target of international terrorism when car-bombs went off killing 224 -- mostly innocent African bystanders -- and maiming and injuring over 5,000. Then, in the aftermath of the 16 December air strikes against Iraq, Washington closed down 40 of its embassies in Africa south of the Sahara. Yet the year kick-started in March with an upbeat and unprecedented tour by US President Bill Clinton to six African countries. The purpose of Clinton's safari, it seemed, was to "define strategies to integrate Africa into the world economy." By the time the year drew to a close, this vision had vanished into thin air. The American president was embroiled in his own scandalous affair on the domestic front, capped by impeachment proceedings, and preoccupied internationally with the ongoing stalemate in the Middle East, as well as with brow-beating Iraq and a host of Islamist regimes into submission. Africa was once again pushed onto the back burner. In all this confusion, a question mark hangs over the precise role of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). When will African leaders face up to the truth about summit meetings? This has been a year of conferences, resolutions and extraordinary summits -- mostly with mixed results. While African leaders met in Burkina Faso to iron out the continent's many disputes, the atmosphere in the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou was tense following the mysterious murder of one of the country's most highly acclaimed journalists, the managing editor of the newspaper L'Indépendant, Nobert Zongo. Outbursts of violent protest rocked the capital, which like many in Africa is threatened by ethnic conflict. In such a context, the grand diplomacy of the OAU looks quite simply out of date. By setting out to resolve all the continent's problems, it ends up doing almost nothing to help with any of them. There is a consensus among African leaders that nothing drastic will happen until the Western countries put their shoulders to the wheel. Yet, ironically, 1998 saw an unprecedented number of African leaders taking the initiative and intervening militarily in their neighbours' affairs -- usually with devastating consequences. Most of these interventions conspicuously lacked popular appeal. A case in point is Zimbabwe's Congolese escapade, which was hugely unpopular at home. For many Africans, the two million famine victims in southern Sudan in 1998 might as well have been Armageddon. Africans themselves are fighting among themselves as never before -- civil wars galore and plenty of cross-border sorties, to cap all the interventions in their own backyards. Over the past year alone, many parts of Africa have witnessed an alarming breakdown of social values, law and order. This is especially the case in the continent's numerous war zones. Civil wars still age in Angola, Burundi, Guinea Bissau, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda. Impoverished Somalia entered its ninth year without central government, and relatively rich South Africa suffered considerable traumas through the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Meanwhile, South African troops moved into the tiny landlocked mountain kingdom of Lesotho to "restore order" in September, while Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war over their ill-defined 1,000 km border. The 7 June coup against Guinea Bissau's President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira was foiled. The coup was staged by Brigadier Ansumane Mane, the small West African country's army chief, who had been sacked on suspicion of smuggling arms to separatists in Senegal's war-torn southern province of Casamance. A stalemate at the heart of Sudanese politics has come to haunt both that country and its African neighbours. In June, the Sudanese people gave their blessings to a new constitution with an approval rate of 97 per cent in a nationwide referendum. Opposition parties dismissed the return to a multi-party system after a nine-year gap as mere window-dressing. Sudan's 400-seat parliament accepted the 2 December resignation of its Speaker Hassan Al-Turabi, who said that he would henceforth work full time for the ruling National Islamic Front, whose monopoly on Sudanese politics is theoretically set to end next year under a law passed on 9 December. A new "political associations" law will come into effect on 1 January, permitting the formation of political groups to contest elections. But Al-Turabi vehemently opposes any clear-cut reference to "political parties," preferring the vaguer term, "political associations." On the face of it, Al-Turabi's largely semantic argument can be dismissed as the rantings of the village elder who has forgotten to take his tablets. But to do so is to do the man's candour a disservice. He is merely voicing what is in fact a growing consensus among African leaders, who increasingly pay lip service to American-instigated rules of "good governance and democracy." The vital question now is how Washington will react to the new Sudanese dispensation. Does Sudan's NIF-run National Congress differ from Uganda's "no-party" democracy? Uganda's Museveni argues that it does, and has persuaded Western powers to garland his version of political freedom with sensational plaudits. Museveni justifies his no-party system of government on the grounds that pluralist politics promote tribalism and sectarianism. His critics, however, claim that the no-party system is nothing other than the old and largely-discredited one-party state favoured by most post-independence rulers across the continent. The proliferation of small arms contributed yet further to the emergence of a culture of violence in Africa. The number of illegal arms circulating in Mozambique has been estimated at some six million, while in South Africa the figure is put at eight million. Cattle rustlers in East Africa now carry rifles and machine guns instead of their traditional weapons. So is there no beacon of light? Yes, perhaps -- though it is a faint one. Nigeria's strongman General Sani Abacha died suddenly of a viagra overdose. His successor, General Abdul-Salam Abu-Bakr, Nigeria's new military ruler, promised to hand over the reigns of government to a civilian administration. As his country teeters on the edge of a political precipice, Abu-Bakr is indeed getting ready to step down. But into what? Formal politics in Nigeria is effectively a vacuum into which either the rising religious and ethnic movements, or worse still, a powerful -- and doubtless uniformed -- dark horse, could easily step. Western powers, and Nigeria's neighbours, are looking on with considerable anxiety. In October, the oil port of Warri went up in flames. The Ijaw and other ethnic groups in the oil-producing regions are fighting the Nigerian government, multinational oil corporations and each other for a bigger slice of the ever shrinking national cake. These are the descendants of the very people who were sensationally -- and falsely -- accused of killing and eating British traders and colonial officials a century ago, when they tried to stop the Royal Niger trading company ruthlessly exploiting the resources of their homeland. Yet that rebellion failed to secure their traditional control of the palm oil industry. It is hard to imagine they will fare any better today. Tumbling international oil prices exacerbated Nigeria's crisis. Other raw material prices are expected to fall further in 1999. The withdrawal of private capital from emerging markets has not yet seriously affected Africa. But as Asia seems unable to shake off recession and an unprecedented tide of social woes, international donor agencies are expected to reduce Africa's share of development and humanitarian assistance even further in 1999. Octogenarian superstar, South African President Nelson Mandela, will step down next year. He has served his people well, and Vice President Thabo Mbeki is well placed to step smoothly into his shoes. The portents of post-apartheid doom have largely been confounded. But the country's multiculturalism runs only skin-deep, and there is a heavy burden of expectation upon its shoulders. This is the country which is supposed to lead the entire continent into the 21st century. If the rainbow nation runs out of steam, then Africa will suffer for it, from Cape Town to Cairo. The continent's septuagenarians, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Kenya's Daniel Arap Moi, are as spirited as ever, and showed no intention in 1998 of stepping down. Not only do they take ever younger brides to make up for the lost years in the anti-colonial liberation struggle, but they indulge in petty imperialistic warfare, albeit on a distressingly parochial scale. Yet Clinton's younger African "best new leaders" seem doomed to do no better. There is a dismal pattern here, which seem intent on repeating itself. Still, after decades of relentless gloom, the African economies are picking up, albeit at a tortuously slow pace. Doomsday has been deferred for Mozambique, too. The southern African country suffered for years from one of Africa's most brutal and devastating civil wars after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975. It is now one of the region's most remarkable economies, growing at an annual rate of 15 per cent. Reconstruction is well under way, and opportunities aplenty are luring foreign investors back into the country. Once an avowedly Marxist state, Mozambique this year successfully negotiated foreign investment deals worth some $5 billion. All in all, it would seem that African governments are wising up. There is little reason to demonise the new breed of African leaders for espousing the half-baked democracy sanctioned by Washington. Nor does it make sense to sentimentalise the post-colonial one-party state either. The current orthodoxy is that good government depends upon good data, without which it is impossible to know whether policies really work or not. Africa still needs aid as much as trade. Given the range and scale of the continent's problems, Washington's duty-busting African Growth and Opportunities initiative is not enough. Trade missions like that undertaken by the US secretary of commerce in December must be backed up by increased humanitarian assistance. This is the point. If people are to listen, it will need saying over and over again.
