Many of us know that some African leaders and key ministers are selected and sustained in power by donors. There is enough written evidence to back up this statement. The leaders – especially those who are power hungry or vulnerable either because they come from minority tribes or for other shortcomings – in return, go out of their way to show gratitude to their sponsors at the expense of the people.
First, they hire foreign advisors most of them very young who come in to test their new ideas. Lacking experience and knowledge about the general conditions and culture of the people, they give advice that mostly has very little or no practical value. The donors also groom carefully selected Africans who take orders from western capitals or the young advisors. Meanwhile, the well educated and experienced staff is pushed aside, marginalized, forced into early retirement or get out of the country.
Second, leaders are very happy and boastful when their economic growth programs, drawn up by foreigners in the first place, receive the endorsement of the donor community. They brag about rapid economic growth, low inflation, export diversification, privatization to foreign companies of public enterprises, liberalization of markets and prices, labor flexibility, retrenchment of civil servants, removal of subsidies and introduction of user charges especially in education and health. Government’s intervention in the economy is drastically reduced to give full reign to the market and individual freedom as the engine of economic growth.
Third, leaders go out of their way to show that they have strong support of powerful leaders and nations. Often you see in the local newspapers a picture of an African leader posing with a leader from the sponsoring donor country without a text telling the readers what the two leaders discussed. The African leaders usually advise that what was discussed was of a strictly confidential and security nature that it cannot be disclosed to the public. In some cases no discussions take place at all – only a picture is taken by the Presidential cameraman when the two leaders meet in a corridor where they are attending a conference and shake hands or meet very briefly at the request of the African leader!
More often than not, donors pursue their own interest in African countries – interests that sometimes conflict with Africa’s needs and aspirations. And when this goes very far and there is public resentment, the donors find it morally difficult to continue supporting the same regime. They begin to criticize the government for ignoring its people and for being corrupt and ultimately create conditions for the regime to go because ultimately public opinion matters.
When Augusto Pinochet came to power in Chile in 1973 he had full foreign backing at the political and economic levels. Professors from the department of economics at Chicago University in the United States led by the late Professor Milton Freedman together with Chilean economists who had been trained at the same university – the Chicago boys – advised the government to abandon socialism and embrace capitalism driven by market forces and individual freedom. The advice led to severe recessions with serious human and political consequences. Ultimately Pinochet dismissed the entire group of the Chicago boys and replaced it with a more pragmatic set of economic advisors. However, the violation of human rights and income inequalities accompanied by demands for change forced the donors to abandon Pinochet who was replaced after a referendum and national elections.
In Uganda, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) under the leadership of President Yoweri Museveni has received overwhelming political and economic support from the donor community since 1987. In return, the government has shown gratitude by adopting the “Washington Consensus” or structural adjustment. Uganda has since been advised by foreign experts and a selected cadre of Ugandans – the Washington Consensus Boys – operating from the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank.
Under the Washington Consensus, Uganda’s public assets have been completely privatized mostly to foreigners, the economy liberalized, exports diversified, labor flexibility introduced giving employers the power to hire and fire as they see fit, and government role in the economy minimized.
The result is what the donors have termed an – economic success story. The donors have used rapid economic growth, low inflation and per capita income to demonstrate that Uganda is indeed an economic success story. For more than twenty years – since 1986 – the donor community and the government have remained silent about the quality of life, human rights, environment and climate change in Uganda. All of them have deteriorated.
It is increasingly becoming morally difficult for the donors to continue supporting a government that has presided over a young so-called democracy at gun point and population in a country where 30 percent go to bed hungry, 33 percent are mentally sick in part because of stress and eating nutritionally inferior food stuffs dominated by cassava, maize and plantains, 40 percent of children under five who are undernourished, 12 percent of infants who are born underweight because their mothers are under-nourished, up to 80 percent of the children in primary schools who are dropping out of school largely because they are hungry, where alcohol, crime, violence, functional illiteracy and diseases such as trachoma especially among children which contributes to blindness, poor sanitation and hygiene, overcrowding in mushrooming slums, floods and droughts are all rising steeply. It has been estimated that if environmental degradation is not checked most of Uganda will have turned into a desert within 100 years.
The government will have no choice but to drop the Washington Consensus Boys who have been advising the government for over twenty years and undertake major economic, social and environmental reforms or the increasing crying of the people will drive it out of office with or without donor support.
In a world increasingly becoming a village through transport and communications technology, the shortcomings of the NRM regime cannot be hidden any more and the donors will find it increasingly difficult to rationalize business as usual.
It would be in the donors’ and government’s interests to take preventive measures because curative arrangements are very costly.
Before concluding, let us examine how a strongly donor supported government was removed from power by the people. This is the Ethiopian government under Emperor Haile Selassie.
Haile Selassie engineered the removal of Lij Yasu from the throne and replaced him with his aunt Zauditu who was in turn removed and Haile Selassie was crowned King Ras Tafari in 1928. He was removed from power by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and was returned to power from exile in Britain in 1941 with donor support.
The emperor brought in American and European experts to train the security forces and develop the country. He aggressively centralized the government and refused to relinquish any authority to any governing body. And he built his prestige and reputation as the father of African independence.
As time passed, the signs of backwardness particularly in rural areas, corruption and inefficiency began to show through the crying of the people who were poor, illiterate, sick and hungry especially during the famine of 1972-73. The emperor increasingly looked to the United States for civilian and military assistance.
Ethiopians who returned from their studies in Europe and America as well as young Europeans and Americans visiting or working in Ethiopia were shocked by the level of mass poverty.
The economic deterioration and famine – lack of jobs, food shortages, rising prices and low wages – generated forces that cracked the imperial government and the emperor’s hold onto power. Civilian protest and unrest mostly by students, teachers and workers who were later joined by civil servants did not go unnoticed by segments in the armed forces. Privates and NCOs stationed in the neglected southern part of rural Ethiopia mutinied because their demands had not been met. Sensing a chance to seize power, the soldiers of the elite units stationed near Addis Ababa, the capital, demanded economic and political reforms.
Because of strong public opinion against the imperial regime, there was nothing the donors could do to save the emperor – the so-called father of African independence. Instead his western backers began to complain that Haile Selassie’s autocratic style made him a flawed leader as emperor of Ethiopia. In this environment, the armed forces moved in and deposed the emperor in 1974. He died mysteriously like Lij Yasu and Zauditu before him.
Current and future leaders in Africa and my beloved Uganda should learn from this lesson that no matter how strongly you are supported militarily and economically by donors, they will abandon you once they realize that the population has turned against you.
Those who knew the popularity of Mobutu Sese Seko among European powers were completely surprised when they abandoned him and could not even allow him entry into their countries where the wealth he had looted from the Congolese people is alleged to have been hidden. The message is loud and clear – no body is immune.