India in Africa
For all of the talk about China and its potentially deleterious impact on Africa, there is another potential player in African affairs from the east. India may well provide a useful foil to China, and perhaps even will present a somewhat less predatory visage.
Having a diversity of options can only help African leaders to make the best choices for their people, though bidding wars can also fuel the very greed that has fueled big man kleptocracies in the past. What this reveals is that there are two factors in modern African destabilization; disruptive influences from without and lousy leadership from within. Perhaps the new interest from Asia, coupled with a cultivation of interest from the west, will allow a new era of opportunity to ,open across Africa.
April 8th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[…] It appears that India’s engagement with Africa has the potential to yield fruit. Indian officials have announced “duty free preferential market exports” from developing nations, including 34 in Africa. While Africans have every right to be skeptical of any such deals with the outside world, this deal appears to represent a vital moment for African engagement with the global economy. […]
April 11th, 2008 at 4:30 am
The interconnection between lousy leadership and disruptive influences from without seems to be understated. In Africa lousy leadership commenced with the peddling of influence from without. Commencing with the transnational mining and drilling companies’ desire to only do business with those governments that would provide them preferential rights over mineral and oil resources, they degenerated into direct intervention by foreign powers to stop governments which were not amenable to their views on the world stage.
This is what opened the door for lousy leadership in Africa. Zimbabwe is a case in point. The Western Powers supported the rise of Mugabe over Nkomo and what do they have today? A wilely and cunning leader who will stop at nothing to maintain his supremacy in his country.
The civil service in place in most African countries was very idealistic and a part of the decolonization process. The influence of corrupt foreign business ownership and the dominant powers has made a non-sense of what was once a strong and efficient civil service in most African countries. Behind the scenes, civil servants who are directly involved in policy decision-making process are bribed into making decisions that favour interests other than the ones they represent.
The leadership problem in Africa cannot be reigned in without the major powers relenting in their ever present desire to be in the thick of affairs in Africa. All the talk about autocratic leadership has much to do with the powers that provide the weapons of suppression of the masses to these autocratic governments in the first place.
If only the rest of the world will come to the understanding that with crumbling of colonization in Africa, Africans earned the right to be at the table and to speak for themselves half the problem of Africa would be out of the door.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Francis –
I agree with much of what you say, and while in this post it might not be clear, if you look back on my body of work here, at the FPA’s South Africa Blog, and elsewhere, I think you’ll find that I hardly understate how damaging outside forces have been in Africa. That said, the reality is that Africa will never exist in pure isolation and would not want to. Therefore if an outside force such as India offers more options to African nations, leaders, and the like, that can only be a good thing. Better more options to choose from than having to settle for the scraps that are left.
dc