Success story
Aldan Hartley
The Bush
Jam briefly in London and I have been asked to talk about Africa at Policy Exchange, a 'centre-right' think-tank in Westminster. This group has published a highly readable report entitled Lion Cubs? Lessons _from Africa's Success Stories. The chapters describe the 'successes' of four nations: Tanzania, Botswana, Rwanda and Mozambique. As a Kenyan, I am at a loss to know what to say to the audience about this. To me, Botswana is the trust-fund baby of Africa, oozing with diamonds and platinum. It's hardly an economic miracle. I'm afraid Rwandans have 'succeeded' so far only in taking a breather from chopping each other up. They need to go a bit more than a year without massacring a village to prove they're peaceful. I wish Mozambique luck, but frankly it's no Kenya, surely the only true 'success' story of recent years across the whole of Africa.
Kenya had a gradual transition from dictatorship during the 1990s, culminating in peaceful elections 14 months ago. We're capitalists (and the new government has clamped down on corruption). We're friends to the West in the fight against terrorism. We're the only African nation with a responsible foreign policy (brokering peace in Sudan and Somalia, and speaking out strongly against Mugabe). Kenya is a pleasant, blessed country, in the way that somewhere like Gabon could never hope to be with or without the oil. We even have the best beer. This hasn't helped us yet.
But then I am reminded of my old friend General Mojo Matau, South African chief of military intelligence. Mojo, you might recall, is my former Umkhonto weSizwe drinking chum who, when I met him a few months ago in Johannesburg, said how much he admired Mugabe for his actions against the white farmers. On the next beer, I asked him if he thought South Africa — the so-called engine of growth in Africa — regarded Kenya as its main counterpart in East Africa. 'No,' was his reply. Tanzania was South Africa's partner in the region, thanks to the support it gave to the ANC during the 'armed struggle' against apartheid. Economics evidently had nothing to do with it.
Tanzania and Mengistu's Ethiopia, together with other democratic mentors — East Germany, the USSR, Cuba, Sweden — were, as you know, the ANC's big supporters. But Tanzania has always been the darling of major Western states like Britain and of course charities and ill-run agencies of the United Nations. Unaccountably, this love has rubbed off even on conservative Westerners. The reason is their adoration of the socialist `Mwalimu' Nyerere. It is a cult that lingers beyond the grave for Nyerere, who talked of 'self-reliance' yet borrowed more than any other African state. He promised universal primary education and free health care, whereupon schools and hospitals collapsed and 'Mwalimu' slunk off to die in a private London clinic. By contrast last year Kenya did succeed in providing universal primary schooling for free.
Tanzania — and I use it purely as one example — gets a blank cheque even today because it's still a politically correct hole into which the Sussex University development lunatics toss taxpayers' money. Don't worry about Dar es Salaam's troops machine-gunning civilians in Zanzibar, oh no. Kenya, on the other hand, was always unashamedly capitalist, which is bad. Instead of Maoist tunics, our leaders have always worn pinstriped suits with roses in their buttonholes. This is bad. It's better if you wear khaki: Uganda's Museveni, Ethiopia's Meles and Eritrea's Issayas continue to do what they know best, which is fight wars and liquidate the opposition, and they get to be praised as the 'African Renaissance'.
Kenyans aspire to be rich. But Africans are not allowed to be rich: then they are dubbed 'corrupt'. When Kenya became the biggest flower and horticulture exporter in the world, the Guardian launched investigations into exploitative labour practices. Action Aid is currently advertising for a Kenya Country Director who must 'work with poor and marginalised people to eradicate poverty by overcoming the injustice and inequality that cause it'. I've heard this apparently includes encouraging 'indigenous rights' groups to pursue land reform against big farmers who produce so much wealth for Kenya. Question: does this remind you of another African country beginning with 'Z'?
The new development buzzword is 'poverty alleviation'. In Tanzania there's lots of poverty, thanks to the legacy of Nyerere, who made Tanzania the third poorest economy in the world without even fighting a war on his own soil. Until recently, Kenya wasn't given a free lunch at the aid table for a decade, so we've got lots of poor too. But what we in Kenya realise is that getting down to private business is what will save Africa, more than 'poverty alleviation'. Business, profits and private money are regarded as dirty by the development gurus and even sometimes by kindly conservatives who regard Africa as a home for charitable donations.
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