By Claudia Rosett, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, July 6, 2007
When it comes to the utterances of United Nations special advisers, there must be some allowance for gibberish, the institution's mother tongue. But writing recently in Fortune magazine, the guru of U.N. development strategy, economist Jeffrey Sachs, goes too far. In a guest column about how the post-Paul Wolfowitz World Bank should tackle Africa - poster-continent of poverty - he dismisses as irrelevant the vast problem of corruption, and doesn't even mention its cause: repressive and rapacious government.
According to Sachs, "The core problem in Africa is not corruption, but the basic lack of infrastructure and services." For the scarcity of roads, sewers and electricity, he blames not the governments of Africa, but simply a lack of money. "The African governments do not have the fiscal means to invest in what's needed, and that would be true even if Mother Teresa were running the local treasury," he writes.
Really? As it happens, Africa's poorest nations are run not by Mother Teresas, but by and large by dictators, as in Zimbabwe, or by embedded crony bureaucracies bestriding only semifunctional democracies, as in Tanzania.
In healthy democracies, politicians stay in power by hashing out rules that allow people to prosper. If they fail, they tend to get voted out of office. But dictators, as a rule, hold on to power by monopolizing resources and favoring themselves and their cronies, and choking off opportunities for their fellow citizens.
Take, for instance, Africa's oil-rich Republic of Congo, a country with a population of four million, whose dictator, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, has run the show for most of the last 28 years. Relative to its small population, Congo has huge oil earnings, with sales last year totaling more than $3 billion by some estimates. On top of that, Congo receives scores of millions in aid from the World Bank and is home to assorted projects of the U.N. Development Program.
But Congo's people, by World Bank estimates, rank among the poorest in the world. According to a London-based watchdog group, Global Witness, about 70 percent of Congolese live on an income of less than $1 per day. So where does the money go?
That's a question asked repeatedly by Global Witness, which recently obtained a set of credit-card statements belonging to the Congolese president's son, Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso. Still in his 30s, he heads an outfit called Cotrade, which is the marketing arm of Congo's state oil company, SNPC. His card statements emerged in the course of a lawsuit by an investment fund, Caymans-based Kensington International Ltd., which is seeking payment on $100 million of Congo's old sovereign debt. Together with other documents related to the case, the credit charges show the young Sassou-Nguesso with a Paris apartment near the Champs-Elysees and purchases from such designer stores as Louis Vuitton - where last year alone he spent more than $40,000. (He has not replied to an e-mailed request for comment.)
Meanwhile, according to court testimony last September in London, Congo's state oil company has been negotiating to sell China billions worth of oil over the next 15 years. While that's been going on, Congo has slid in the rankings of New York-based Freedom House from the status of "partly free" to "not free," due to "decreased openness and transparency in government."
In the Washington-based Cato Institute's 2006 index of economic freedom, Congo ranks 127th out of 130 countries, along with other African countries, including Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo and Niger. The same gang can be found near the bottom of Berlin-based Transparency International's 2006 index, which ranks countries by perceived corruption.
The truth is that Africa is rolling in resources, including that most important resource of all - people. What's missing is genuine democracy and fair rule of law.
How to get there is a tough problem, but it won't come by way of the U.N. funneling in yet more billions for aid projects while downplaying gross misrule. The answer starts with acknowledging the real problem - repressive government.
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