Let me start by saying that I’m no expert on Africa. I’ve barely worked here for 18 months, and the extent of my experience prior to that was a week-long safari in Kenya and lots of phone calls and meetings over the years. Still, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I guess I know slightly more about Africa than people who get all their world information from Fox News Channel.
Contrary to popular belief, the entire continent isn’t riding around in the backs of pickup trucks with machine guns welded on the tops, nor is every child given an AK-47 on their first day in kindergarten. All government officials aren’t corrupt, and not everyone lives in small villages in mud huts.
Are there places where some of this stuff might be true? Sure. Parts of Africa have been struggling with independence for a pretty long time. There has been and will probably continue to be civil wars, as new countries struggle with the transition from oppressed colonies to independent states. For a couple of hundred years Africa was seen as a place where Europeans could come and take what they wanted. When they finally left, they didn’t exactly leave instruction books on how to build democracy from the wreck of oppressed societies..
My only direct experience of Africa is Angola. For thirty years, civil and not-so-civil war raged in this country. The vast majority of the population moved from the small villages and towns to the capital of Luanda, mainly because they were looking for refuge, and they got tired of getting blown up by land mines when they tried to till their fields. Luanda expanded to many times the size that the infrastructure could cope, and the rest of the country’s infrastructure crumbled from neglect.
The various wars in Angola ended 6 years ago, and the rebuilding has begun. Angola is pretty lucky – as a country they produce almost a million barrels of oil every day. At 75 dollars per barrel, and with the country oil company being a 50% shareholder in most operations, well, you do the math.
Still, Angola is like a whole lot of other African countries – there is very little cultural history of self-rule in peacetime, so they struggle. Government officials live in Luanda, so it’s Luanda’s infrastructure that gets worked on first.
The International Monetary Fund has been providing funds for African development for a number of years, and continues to do so. More often than not, countries negotiate extensions of repayment dates or other means of avoiding paying back IMF funding. The IMF places many restrictions on the funding, demanding social and economic change.
Enter the Chinese. Over the past few years, China has been entering Africa in a big way. As the world’s number two consumer of petroleum, they are clearly interested in the security of their energy supply. So, they invest in Africa, hugely, and with no strings attached. They send hundreds of Chinese workers every month Angola – not only engineers and supervisors but also laborers. They are rebuilding roads, rails and communications infrastructure. They paid
frightening sums for offshore oil leases – so much that traditional oil operators just shook their heads wondering how such investments would ever pay out.
Again, I’m no expert, but when you compare the few billion that China paid for it’s leases to the more-than-a-few-billion that the US continues to pour into wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, I’d say they are getting national energy security for a considerable bargain. Next time the Angolan equivalent of Jed Clampett sees bubblin’ crude, who do you think he’s going to call?
I’m probably not the first person to look out the window of an aircraft at the African terrain and see opportunity. There was clearly a reason why just about every European country laid claim to some section of the African turf, and then suffered greatly to keep it (”Oh dear, we’re out of gin AGAIN”). The opportunity of Africa isn’t lost on Africans either, nor is the revolving door of opportunity-seekers arriving from all parts of the globe.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Africans, at least Angolans, it is that they are patient. They have developed the sense of “this too will pass” to a fine art. They know that if they wait long enough, their latest house guests will depart, leaving them to look after their own country.