ACROSS the continent of Africa, for many of the countries that can still dream of economic progress instead of simply hoping to ward off disaster, the most seductive development model lies not in the ripe old West, but rather in the fermenting economies of the Far East.
Hoping to copy blueprints that allowed some Asian countries to leap from poverty to relative prosperity in little more than a generation, more and more African leaders are heading off these days on tours of countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Korea. And along with their economic recipes, these leaders are returning home with authoritarian political notions. These may clash sharply with the Western ideal of democracy, but they have the merit, the leaders say, of being more in tune with traditional African values.
Having flirted in this decade with democracy, one country after another is now seeking to implement a form of government that meets some technical requirements of democracy but in reality is the most formalized kind of pluralism possible: one in which only the most marginal questions of national interest are subject to open debate, and leaders rig their electoral systems, minimizing to virtually nil the chances that they will be voted out of office. In doing so, governments in countries from Ivory Coast to Uganda are invoking the model of the tightly controlled Asian society, with its Confucian notions of sacrifice and obedience.
The pro-Government Ivorian newspaper, Fraternite Matin, carried the strongest recent articulation of this philosophy earlier this month, in a lead editorial that said that the strength of Japan came from a caste system in which "the samurai does not seek to replace the emperor, or to speak in his place." Pursuing this line to its chilling conclusion, the editorialist proposed a formula that would enable this country to develop: "The party member needs to stick to the line and not impose his point of view on superiors; the manager will not exceed his prerogatives and divert the funds of the enterprise for which he has responsibility; the expatriate should not violate any of the rules governing his stay; the cleric, rather than giving political speeches to support one camp or another, should stick to what he can contribute to the spirituality of his flock."
For many experts on Africa, there are many problems with these nose-to-the-grindstone nostrums. Not the least is the fact that they leave unanswered a question that this continent has managed more disastrously than any other: Who will keep an eye on the leaders? "The success of authoritarian governments elsewhere is based on things that African leaders have not paid sufficient attention to," said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Liberian who is the deputy administrator for Africa of the United Nations Development Program. "First there was an emphasis on human resource development. Just look at the high literacy levels in most Asian societies. "Then, Asian governments built strong partnerships with the private sector, which ultimately served as counterweights to authoritarian power. Finally you have a system of ethics: In the Korean example, former heads of state were ultimately arrested because they offended some commonly held values."
Although it may sound new, today's Asian-inspired ideology is far from the continent's first experiment with paternalism, which was in part a legacy of colonialism. Africa's early leaders, from Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda to Ivory Coast's Felix Houphouet-Boigny, all demanded the virtually unquestioned obedience of the population under one-party states, which they justified by talk of Africa's traditional socialist values and its emphasis on consensus.
Rather than help build thriving new nations, however, the lack of accountability built into these political creations favored the emergence of corrupt elites who quickly discovered that controlling the state offered unparalleled opportunities for stealing from it. "What we are seeing today is an exact replay of what happened in the 1960's in the move toward one-party states: Maintaining the formalism of democracy while gutting it of its substance," said Thomas Callaghy, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. "What you end up with is 'crony capitalism,' an extension of the patron-client form of free enterprise, which, in the African case, has always placed the emphasis on the welfare of the patron."
With few checks on this sort of power, Africa will be hard pressed to develop under any economic model. Instead of seeing the kind of accumulation of savings necessary for an industrial takeoff -- the kind of capital accumulation that took place in Asia -- the continent has witnessed an unparalleled flight of capital, as elites bank their earnings in safe havens elsewhere.
According to one United Nations estimate, $200 billion or 90 percent of the sub-Saharan part of the continent's gross domestic product (much of it illicitly earned), was shipped to foreign banks in 1991 alone. In each country, the formula for enrichment differs. In Senegal, World Bank officials have said that Government imports of rice, the staple food, have constituted a major source of unaccounted-for revenue for ruling party leaders for years. In Congo, top officials and their relatives sign deals that mortgage the heavily indebted country's oil earnings years in advance, in exchange for quick cash.
In Kenya, the Government plows ahead with plans to build a major international airport in the President's home town. In military-controlled Nigeria, the Government awards so-called "lifting contracts" to its political friends that amount to little more than gifts of handsome commissions on oil contracts.
Based on realities like these, a confidential report prepared last year by the French Foreign Ministry warned of the "criminalization of sub-Saharan Africa" by its elites. While the ideologues of present-day Africa wish to draw out cultural parallels between the supposedly deferential masses of Asia and hordes of Africans whose salvation, they say, lies in a sort of unquestioning acceptance of a new work ethnic, for many the recent news out of South Korea may inspire other observations.
Reports that two past presidents of that country amassed huge slush funds have led to dramatic confessions of corruption and the arrest of these leaders, along with those of several captains of Korean industry. This can be seen as a consequence of the lack of democracy that prevailed through much of that country's modern history. As much as some proponents of an African resurrection would like to follow Asian models, at least two elements in the recent Korean scandal stick out as inconceivable on this continent.
In the primary capitalism that still prevails in these parts, heads of industry frequently don't have any need to pay bribes to African leaders. As often as not, they are buddies, cousins and sons. Then again, in an environment where courts are subject to political control, Parliaments act as rubber stamps, and presidents stay in power as long as they like, who could get caught?
Source: New Yrk Times
