17 Mar 2009 |
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Adebowale Oriku Calm before the storm. Or is it a tempest? Possibly a tsunami. What is being reported about the arrival of economic cataclysm on Africa’s shores could simply be stretched, by the imagination, to compare with the touchdown of watery juggernaut on the shores of Indonesia and Thailand in the 2004 tsunami. The warning is portentous, dire. It is official: Africa is going to be hit soon, and hit hard, by the global financial crisis, and the continent’s case is going to be quite a bitch. Before now, leaders of some African countries, including Nigeria, had been eminently confident that Africa would buck the downtrend. To cover their lack of grasp of the dismal science, some of the more volubly hollow Nigerian commentators had even said something about divine providence giving a hand, providing support for the already tumbledown and crudely cash-and-carry Nigerian economy. But the parrotcry is dying down now, for the cluckers are about to take lessons practical lessons in political economy. Generally speaking, African economy has never given anyone a cause to whoop. Even in the best of times, South Africa (after apartheid) was only a median economy – still is. Just as its neighbour Botswana. Botswana has not been doing badly at all, what with its minerals, political stability, and relatively fiscally disciplined leaders and population. De Beers, the powerful diamond consortium, has been the linchpin of Botswana’s growth for as long as anyone can recall, but last month the company suspended its mining operations, announcing with regret that it would scale down production by some 50 percent. The global economic influenza has achieved what actuarial predictions never did: that De Beers was walking a tight-rope by believing so much in Botswana, beyond exploiting it for minerals. South Africa - Africa’s foremost economy - is also in for a rough time. In the last few months, annual gold production has lost traction by some 13 percent. This is a strong indicator for what is to come. Although South Africa possesses reasonably varied industries, providing services and producing goods, the country is still what may be described as Krugerrand economy. Just as Nigeria might use oil to measure its economic health, South Africa would use, well, if not gold, then gold standard. Apart from enjoying some measure of economic growth in the last dozen years or so, South Africa has also divvied up its interest within a cross-section of African countries. For instance, South African business men corral a significant stake in the mobile telecommunications industry in Nigeria. And outside of the continent, the country commands some clout. It is the only African country among the G20 nations. It generates almost half of Africa’s GDP, and the heft of its economy per capita can be compared to what California’s economy is to that of the remaining 49 American states, it subsumes a third of Africa’s gross continental product. But now South African economy has been badly hit, it shrank by 1.8 percent in the last quarter of last year. And, well, Nigeria. Only some months ago, the price of oil peaked at about 140 dollars per barrel, but now it is sliding into the 30s. Nigeria’s economy is topheavy with oil, really it has no basis, no footing, at all in any other thing. And instead of sensibly ploughing oil revenue into other areas of the economy, Nigeria’s robber-leaders stand on airy stilts fattening themselves on the oil they are scooping from the heavens like a kind of manna. Or National Cake. And if Nigeria’s thoughtless leaders think the so-called foreign reserves are going to be any of any use, they will be in for a shock, because owing to the terribly infectious nature of the crisis, there is now a negative transvaluation of capital stowed abroad. Intimations of what is to come have been felt in other African countries too. After Kenya almost tipped itself into civil war last year in the wake of its elections, tourism revenues have been cut by almost half. Zambia, once known for its surfeit of copper, is suffering too - has actually been suffering for some time - copper price is now down by about 62 percent, with consequent job losses. Africa is in for a rough ride indeed. Western countries are not too keen these days to hand anything out, seeing the problems they are grappling with themselves. Barack Obama has begun to flipflop, has done an about-face really, concerning his pre-election promise to double US aid to developing countries. Actually, it’s been noticed that Obama has been reticent in even mentioning the word Africa, for some reason it’s still not yet part of his presidential vocabulary. Outside the African continent, economists have been intrigued by the confidence displayed by a lot of African bureaucrats, with amazed solemnity and bated breath they have been listening to the braggadocio that the continent is immune, that somehow African economies have inoculated themselves against the credit-crunch pandemic. It was like the confidence that Japan seemed to have - or was vicariously wished on it by the whole world, including envious America - in the 1970s and early 80s, before its economy imploded. But that was Japan, and if such a forward-looking, go-getting country like Japan could almost be grounded as it happened in the late 1980s and early 90s, one should wonder where African countries got their confidence from. This is really foolhappiness at its most ludicrous. A reckless lack of forethought, an act of vain and woolly present-mindedness. You don’t need to be a Nobel Laureate in Economics to see the signs, they are writ stark. In spite of what has recently been recorded as growth, and considerable as it seems, the generic economic balance sheet of Africa has never truly been balanced, it’s always been on the skew-whiff. What we’ve been doing is scraping along. But when you look closely, you’d see that there are reasons some bureaucrats in Nigeria have been waxing cocky about how the country will be able to escape economic recession. This is a possibility, in so far as what has been predicted for Africa is depression and not recession, what has been forecast is wholesale bust. Now this may be an accurate prediction - maybe not. Even in the best of times, it’s easy to project a slump in African economies. Most African countries thrive on deficit, I mean deficit spending. Apart from being a mirror of selfish, juvenile reasoning, the Panglossian cheeriness implicit in the belief that we are fiscally shockproof in Africa bespeaks a semi-aware smugness that African leaders and policymakers always rejoice in, an attitude that feeds on the civic immaturity of the majority of its population. For instance, Nigeria’s misrulers know that however bad things get, people whose faces there’ve been grinding in the dust for years might only grin, or at best gripe, and bear it – a condition immortalised by Fela’s ‘Suffering and Smiling.’ People have talked about the resilience of Nigerians, about our ability to adapt to extremes, but for most of the time this is not so much resilience as hardened resignation. A lot of Africans have never known a better life than the barest, the abject one. You don’t miss a quality of life you never had. The African pundits who have said the continent is exempt know this. They know that the meaning and effect of any crunch will be lost on its people. Flashback to Nigeria, circa 1988, when Ibrahim Babangida was busy - with friends and cohorts - clobbering the moribund horse of the Nigerian economy, but blethering about how surprised he was that Nigerians were still even able to draw breath. The situation is a thousand times worse now, yet people are still living through it. We are indeed capable of heroic suffering, helotic suffering. Finally, there is the matter of lack of accountability. If Nigerian leaders, for instance, knew that they would be held by the scruff of the neck to explain why they had promised what they could not - and did not intend to - deliver, they would think twice before making hollow, harebrained projections. Or even if they would be held responsible for such a tangential thing as not preparing people’s mind for the rainy day, they would also pause before making such careless pronouncements as the country being in a safe economic harbour. There has been a debate here whether the Prime Minister Gordon Brown should apologise for not warning people beforehand of the imminent economic slowdown. Not that he is responsible for the problems, but as Finance Minister for ten years and Prime minister for some months they think he has a lot to answer for. Answer not, of course, in the way making a confession of stealing money from the treasury, but for his inability to foresee the current state of affair with any clarity. Last week, the opposition leader, David Cameron, playing the oneupmanship hand, apologised - on behalf of his party - to British people for being unwittingly complicit in not giving them enough information about where the economy was heading to. The fact that our rulers do not bother with such niceties can also be partly blamed on the ruled, us, we are too fatefully cosy even to feel the steepest economic lift-drop.
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