Given the array of adversities that Africa faced at the time of independence, the advances made in the two decades after 1960 were remarkable. In the field of education, school enrolment in black Africa grew faster than in any other developing region. Primary-school enrolment increased from 36 per cent to 63 per cent of the age group; enrolment at secondary level increased from 3 per cent to 13 per cent; universities turned out thousands of graduates each year. A World Bank study published in 1981 observed: ‘The African record is unique: nowhere else has a formal education system been created on so broad a scale in so short a time.’ Similar improvements were recorded in the field of medical care. Child death rates fell from 38 to 25 per thousand; life expectancy increased from 39 to 47 years; the numbers of medical and nursing personnel per capita doubled, despite a large increase in the population. New infrastructures were built at a record-breaking pace: ports, railways, roads and buildings. The number of miles covered by all-weather roads tripled, opening up vast areas of the interior for the first time.
Despite the eruption of military coups, civil strife and political instability, a sense of optimism about Africa’s future prevailed throughout the 1960s. It was still spoken of as a continent with vast potential. The economic record, though not fulfilling earlier hopes, showed modest progress. The average annual increase in gross domestic product for black Africa in the 1960s was 3.9 per cent; taking population growth into account, the per capita increase amounted to 1.3 per cent.
The scale of Africa’s difficulties became clearer, however, when comparisons were made with the world’s developing countries as a whole. The increases in gross domestic product and per capita incomes were lower in black Africa than elsewhere: 3.9 per cent compared to an average of 4.5 per cent; and 1.3 per cent compared to an average of 3.5 per cent. As a group, African economies performed poorly in the 1960s by comparison to Latin America and East Asia. School enrolments, despite the massive increases, were still about half the average for low-income countries, and literacy rates were well below the mean for the developing world. Nevertheless, in retrospect, the 1960s came to be seen as halcyon years.
In the 1970s Africa was struck by a series of calamities. A prolonged drought between 1968 and 1973 had a devastating impact on the Sahel region, a thin strip of semi-arid land south of the Sahara desert stretching across parts of Niger, Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) and Nigeria. In 1972 Mali lost 40 per cent of its cattle and 40 per cent of its food production. In the northern region of Nigeria, where groundnuts were the staple crop, official production dropped from 765,000 tons in 1968–9 to 25,000 tons in 1972–3. Lake Chad shrank to a fraction of its previous size. Areas of eastern and southern Africa too suffered periodically from drought.
In 1973 came the first of the oil shocks. In the wake of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, crude oil prices increased from about $3 a barrel at the beginning of 1973 to more than $12 in 1974. A second shock came in 1979. As a result of events in Iran and Iraq, the price of oil rose from $19 a barrel in April 1979 to $38 in early 1981. All oil-importing states were adversely affected. World Bank estimates in its 1981 study showed that for a sample of eight oil-importing African states – Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia – oil imports as a percentage of export earnings rose from 4.4 per cent in 1970 to 23.2 per cent in 1980. The effect was to put a severe strain on their balance of payments, forcing governments to reduce imports of many essential goods and to raise domestic costs and prices. Agriculture was hit by higher fuel and fertiliser costs and shortages of equipment. Industry suffered similar problems, with many factories operating at low levels for lack of imports. As a result of international recession in the 1970s, mineral producers such as Zambia and Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa) faced a slump in commodity prices; both produced copper at a loss.
But the terms of trade did not deteriorate for everyone. The World Bank noted that, apart from mineral producers, most African countries experienced either favourable or neutral terms of trade in the 1970s. Oil-exporting countries such as Nigeria, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Algeria and Libya made spectacular gains and other primary exporters showed a strong upward trend, mainly as a result of a boom in prices for coffee, cocoa and tea between 1976 and 1978. On average, said the World Bank, African oil importers experienced less deterioration in their terms of trade than did most other oil-importing countries in the world. The main causes of Africa’s growing economic malaise were not external factors, like the increases in oil costs, but internal factors.
The drive for industrialisation, regarded as the key to economic development by most African governments, had encountered severe difficulties. Most import-substitution industries, protected by high tariff barriers and government subsidies, proved economically inefficient. Many required substantial inputs of imported machinery and raw materials, often costing more in foreign exchange than the value of the imported products they were intended to replace. The markets for their products were often too small to achieve economies of scale. In terms of costs, quality and output, they were generally uncompetitive. Private investors, both foreign and domestic, were deterred by numerous obstacles – bureaucratic obstruction, stringent regulations, import licensing, political risk, the shortage of skilled labour and operational hazards like unreliable electricity supplies and malfunctioning telephone systems. Most state corporations in manufacturing, trade, transport and public utilities, launched in the hope that they would become self-financing enterprises, generating further funds for investment and stimulating modernisation, were inefficiently managed, overstaffed, subjected to frequent political meddling and requiring huge government subsidies to keep them afloat. Few countries possessed enough skilled managers to run them effectively. Mali, a poor country even by African standards, set up twenty-three state enterprises after independence, all of which fell into muddle and chaos, accumulating huge deficits; its list of state enterprises included garages, repair shops, metal works, a printing plant, pharmacies and bookshops. Zambia, rich from copper revenues, squandered its fortunes on a host of high-cost, loss-making, inefficient state corporations. Senegal’s parastatal organisations, numbering in all more than one hundred, were estimated to employ four times the manpower they needed. Summarising a series of investigations into parastatal organisations in Benin, Chris Allen, an academic researcher, wrote: ‘The institutions were found to be hierarchical, authoritarian and highly bureaucratic, leading to failure to perform essential tasks, to waste and inefficiency. The personnel, apart from being in many cases unqualified or ill-qualified, tended to be idle, undisciplined, arrogant and above all corrupt, so that fraud as well as inefficiency abounded within the parastatal sector.’ In many countries, state-owned enterprises were simply badly planned from the start. A sympathetic critic of Guinea’s economic policy, Claude Rivière, wrote in exasperation: ‘To set up a cannery without products to can, a textile factory that lacked cotton supplies, a cigarette factory without sufficient locally grown tobacco, and to develop . . . a forest region that had no roads and trucks to carry its output – all of these were gambles taken by utopian idealists and ignoramuses.’
State-owned companies became the centre of a web of corruption. Ministers preyed on parastatal corporations under their control for contributions to political funds and foreign trips and for providing jobs for family, friends and kinsmen. Tenders were often awarded to dubious companies that never delivered goods and services. Project costs were grossly inflated to allow for kickbacks, rendering many projects uneconomical. Company assets were routinely stolen. Payrolls were padded with ‘phantom’ workers – bogus employees. Government-owned banks, a prime target, were obliged to lend large loans to politicians, their wives and associates without any prospect that they would ever be repaid. A report on Uganda’s state-owned bank concluded : ‘To every regime, the Uganda Commercial Bank was a gravy train. New ministers, army officers and parliamentarians would descend upon it and take out huge loans, often with inadequate or non-existent collateral . . . These people saw the loans as rewards for bringing the government to power.’
The initial spurt of industrialisation soon petered out. Manufacturing output in the 1960s, starting from a low base, expanded by 8 per cent a year, outpacing the average for developing countries. In the 1970s manufacturing growth reached only 5 per cent. By the 1980s much of Africa was facing ‘de-industrialisation’. Foreign investors looked to more promising markets in Asia and Latin America. The only segment of industry that continued to attract investment was mining and oil.
The outcome for agriculture was even worse. Agriculture was Africa’s principal economic sector. Four out of every five people were engaged in agriculture. Yet African leaders, with their attention fixed on industrial and manufacturing programmes and other enterprises, regarded the agricultural sector as having secondary importance. It was seen as useful primarily for taxation purposes. The marketing boards set up under colonial rule as monopoly purchasers of agricultural crops provided an invaluable source of revenue. Following Nkrumah’s example, governments set out to obtain a surplus from the agricultural sector in order to finance urban and industrial development, paying farmers for their export crops a fraction of what they received on world markets. They were far more preoccupied with meeting the needs of urban groups that were politically important to them – civil servants, industrial workers and students – than attending to the interests of scattered rural populations. Above all, they were determined to keep down urban costs for fear of political protest. Governments thus paid low prices for food crops to provide urban consumers with cheap food. They also maintained overvalued exchange rates to reduce both the cost of food imports, like wheat, corn and rice favoured by the urban elite, and the cost of other goods they cherished – like cars, household appliances and fashionable attire. The effect was to penalise farmers at every turn. Farm exporters lost income; food producers found it difficult to compete against subsidised imports. Many farmers obtained less than half of the real value of their crops. In some cases, farmers were not paid enough even to cover their costs of production; cocoa producers in Ghana and sisal growers in Tanzania were two examples. A study completed in 1981 showed that rice growers in Mali were paid by the government 63 francs for a kilo of rice that cost them 80 francs to produce.
The agricultural sector was further burdened with inefficient state-run marketing and distribution agencies which operated at a huge cost but provided a poor service. Farmers were frequently paid months in arrears; crops were not collected in time; fertilisers, seeds and pesticides were delivered late; shortages of supplies led to corruption and favouritism. Government support services were both inadequate and overstaffed. The salaries of the Congo-Brazzaville government’s agricultural staff in 1971 exceeded the incomes of 600,000 peasants. Some governments favoured large, capital-intensive farming schemes, subsidising their costs of operations and according them far more favourable treatment than private farmers; but they too suffered from technical and management failures and accumulated heavy losses.
Farming became an increasingly unattractive occupation. Faced with low producer prices, inadequate marketing systems, poor extension services, lack of investment in rural areas and shortages of credit facilities, farmers deserted in droves, some heading for urban areas, some resorting to subsistence agriculture. Farmers considering political action to demand higher prices faced huge risks. Interviewing a wealthy cocoa farmer in Ghana in 1978, Robert Bates, an academic researcher, asked why he did not organise support among his colleagues for higher cocoa prices. ‘He went to his strongbox and produced a packet of documents: licences for his vehicles, import permits for spare parts, titles to his real property and improvements, and the articles of incorporation that exempted him from a major portion of his income taxes. “If I tried to organise resistance to the government’s policies on farm prices,” he said while exhibiting these documents, “I would be called an enemy of the state and I would lose all these.” ’
In a number of individual countries the results were disastrous. Ghana’s cocoa production, which had once formed the basis of the country’s prosperity, fell by half between 1965 and 1979. Nigeria, the world’s largest exporter of groundnuts and palm produce at the time of independence in 1960, all but stopped exports of groundnuts, palm oil, cotton and rubber in the 1970s and depended on food imports costing $2 billion. Zambia, blessed with fertile land, reliable rainfall and huge agricultural potential, self-sufficient in food supplies at independence, was also forced to rely on food imports.
The overall results for agriculture showed most of Africa in a perilous state. In the 1960s the volume of agricultural production increased by 2.3 per cent a year, a level which nearly kept pace with the increase in population of 2.5 per cent a year, but food production in that period grew by only 2.0 per cent a year. Agricultural exports, the main source of foreign exchange earnings, grew on average by 1.9 per cent, or 20 per cent over the decade. In the 1970s, when the population growth rate rose on average to 2.7 per cent a year, the deterioration was more marked. Agricultural production fell from a 2.3 per cent increase to a 1.3 per cent increase a year; food production fell from a 2.0 per cent increase to a 1.5 per cent increase a year; and agricultural exports slumped from a 1.9 per cent increase to a 1.9 per cent decrease, an overall fall of 20 per cent over the decade. It was the fall in export growth that largely accounted for Africa’s growing financial crisis, rather than deteriorating terms of trade. Another major factor contributing to agricultural decline was the generally low productivity of African agriculture. The average output of cereals per acre was only half the world average.
Africa was the only region in the world during the 1960s and 1970s where food production per capita declined. In statistical terms, according to the World Food Council, the fall amounted to 7 per cent in the 1960s and 15 per cent in the 1970s. Of thirty-nine countries in black Africa, only eight reported an increase in agricultural output per capita during the 1970s; twenty-five countries registered a decline in food production per capita. This decline occurred despite vast sums poured into the agricultural sector. Between 1973 and 1980 about $5 billion in aid flowed into agriculture, half of it from the World Bank. The World Bank calculated in 1985 that one-third of its agricultural projects in West Africa and more than one half of its East African projects had failed. To cover food production deficits, relatively wealthy countries like Zambia paid out huge sums on costly food imports; poorer countries relied on food aid. Imports of grains grew by nearly 10 per cent every year from the early 1960s. Food imports in 1979 amounted to 12 million tons. The need to purchase food imports, coupled with the fall in agricultural exports, depleted foreign exchange reserves and contributed to balance of payments crises.
In growing desperation, African governments tried to meet their commitments by borrowing heavily abroad rather than by adopting austerity measures or policy reforms and currency devaluations that would hit the urban elite. During the 1970s oil-importing countries ran up current account deficits which by 1980 reached an average of 9 per cent of their gross domestic product – twice the figure for oil-importing developing countries in general and conspicuously higher than any other region in the world. Current account deficits rose from a modest $1.5 billion in 1970 to $8 billion in 1980. The deficits were covered to some extent by loans and grants from foreign governments and international agencies which tripled between 1970 and 1980; but otherwise African governments borrowed heavily from private banks at a time when interest rates were fast rising. The average interest rate for new commitments climbed from 5.5 per cent in 1977 to 9.3 per cent in 1981.
Between 1970 and 1980, black Africa’s external debts rose from $6 billion to $38 billion. When debt repayments from current earnings became more and more difficult, governments contracted new loans to repay debt in the hope that market conditions would improve. By 1982 external debts had reached $66 billion. A year later they were $86 billion. Some countries ran up debts amounting to 40 per cent or higher of their annual national income. In some cases there was no longer any serious prospect that loans would be repaid. An increasing number of governments were obliged to postpone foreign debt repayments. Arrears in 1982 reached almost $10 billion. Many could not meet debt-servicing costs. Debt-service ratios as a proportion of export earnings rose from 6.5 per cent in 1970 to 28.3 per cent in 1982.
The impact on ordinary life was calamitous. Hospitals and clinics ran short of medicines and equipment; schools lacked textbooks; factories closed through lack of raw materials or spare parts for machinery; shops were plagued by shortages; electricity supplies were erratic; telephone systems broke down; unemployment soared; living standards plummeted.
By comparison to other regions of the world, Africa was dropping further and further behind. Output per person in the 1960s and 1970s rose more slowly than in any other part of the world; in fifteen countries in the 1970s, it actually fell. Life expectancy, despite the improvements, was by far the lowest in the world, still twenty-seven years shorter than in industrialised countries and less than in any other developing region. The African child death rate in 1980 was two-thirds greater than in South Asia, three times higher than in Latin America and twenty-five times higher than in the developed world. The African population was more exposed to endemic diseases like malaria and to other diseases stemming from poor sanitation, malnutrition and poverty. In the field of education, the advances made were still limited: in about one-third of African countries, less than half of the child population received primary education; in only six countries were more than 20 per cent of the age group attending secondary school.
No other country demonstrated the decline of Africa so graphically as Ghana. Once one of the most prosperous tropical countries in the world, it had been reduced by 1980 to a pauper. Its per capita gross domestic product fell by more than 3 per cent a year in the 1970s. Output declined in all major sectors – cocoa, timber, mining and manufacturing. The only sector that flourished was kalabule – the black market. The Ghanaian currency, the cedi, traded on the black market at up to twenty times below the official rate. The purchasing power of a labourer’s wage fell during the 1970s to one-quarter of its previous worth: a loaf of bread now took two days to earn; a yam sufficient for a family meal cost as much as two weeks’ wages. Crime rates soared. Public services disintegrated. According to a World Bank estimate, only one-third of the truck and bus fleet and one-fifth of locomotives were serviceable. Between 1975 and 1981 some 14,000 trained teachers left the government’s education service, many heading abroad. Ghana by 1981 had lost half of all its graduates. When Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings took power for the second time in 1982, he railed at how previous administrations had turned ‘hospitals into graveyards and clinics into death transit camps where men, women and children die daily because of the lack of drugs and basic equipment’.
The picture was not uniformly bleak. Oil-producing countries such as Nigeria, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Algeria and Libya reaped fortunes from the oil bonanza. But the Nigerian example showed how quickly oil wealth could be dissipated. For a brief period its finances were transformed, with annual revenues soaring from $4 billion to $26 billion. But such riches set off a massive spending spree. Patronage politics and corruption reached new heights. Grand industrial projects were launched – an integrated steel complex, an automotive industry, a petrochemical sector. Contracts were signed for new infrastructure – roads, schools, housing, a new capital city at Abuja. Huge salary increases were awarded to public servants. Vast sums were spent on imported consumer goods. Import scams proliferated. Fraud and corruption cost billions of dollars. Meanwhile, export crops were virtually abandoned; subsistence farming was neglected; local manufacturing suffered; inflation soared.
In 1979 Nigeria had a favourable trade balance of $1.4 billion and gross international reserves of $5.8 billion. By 1982 it had a balance of payments deficit of $7.3 billion and gross international reserves were down to $1.9 billion, about one month’s average requirement. Its external debt in 1982 was more than $6 billion. The following year the price of oil fell by 25 per cent; simultaneously Nigeria’s quota of oil production under OPEC agreements was cut, reducing daily output by two-thirds. In 1983–4 Nigeria’s earnings amounted to only half of the revenue it had earned in 1980, far less than its development plans had envisaged. Its external debt now stood at $18 billion. The boom had turned to bust. The collapse in confidence precipitated capital flight. Nigeria was, in effect, bankrupt for the foreseeable future. In his novel Prisoners of Jebs, the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa observed: ‘Of all the countries who had black gold, Nigeria was the only one that had succeeded in doing absolutely nothing with it.’
Botswana provided a rare example of an African state that used its bonanza of mineral riches wisely. At independence in 1966, Botswana, consisting of large areas of desert, with a population of only half a million, was one of the poorest countries in Africa, heavily dependent on British support. But the discovery of rich seams of diamonds shortly after independence transformed its prospects. By 1980 its per capita income had risen to more than $900 a year. Avoiding extravagant expenditure on prestige projects, Seretse Khama invested in infrastructure, health and education and built up substantial reserves. Private businesses were allowed to grow. Corruption hardly existed. In the 1980s per capita income rose to $1,700 a year.
A handful of countries – Kenya, Malawi, Swaziland, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon – developed economies based largely on agriculture that managed to maintain steady growth. Kenya between 1965 and 1989 attained an average rate of per capita increase in gross domestic product of 2 per cent; between the late 1960s and the late 1980s coffee production more than doubled and tea production increased almost fivefold. Malawi, under Hastings Banda’s dictatorship, was often cited as an example of how a country that was listed as one of the poorest in the world, that was small, landlocked, heavily populated and lacking in mineral resources, could still achieve progress both in agriculture and industrial development. The most promising example of all was Côte d’Ivoire. In the first two decades after independence, Côte d’Ivoire’s annual growth in real terms was more than 7 per cent a year, placing it among the top fifteen countries in the world. The results could be seen in the towering office blocks which dominated the skyline of the capital, Abidjan, in the neat plantations stretching for miles over the countryside, and in the thriving market towns inland. So impressive was Côte d’Ivoire’s economic progress that it was termed ‘a miracle’. But even there the miracle faded and fell apart.
The strategy adopted by Félix Houphouët-Boigny from the outset of independence was based on close collaboration with France. He relied on French aid, on French personnel and, above all, on French investment to secure economic prosperity. Indeed, the French presence in Côte d’Ivoire became even more noticeable than it was during the colonial era. The number of French residents rose from 10,000 at independence to 50,000, one of the largest French communities living outside France. French advisers and coopérants were to be found at every level of government, in the presidency, the security services, the military command, ministries and parastatal organisations. Côte d’Ivoire employed the highest number of French teachers and technicians in Africa and sent the highest number of students to French universities.
French businessmen were given every encouragement to invest in Côte d’Ivoire. An investment code offered foreign investors a five-year tax holiday; ten years’ exemption from import duties on capital goods; and no limit to repatriation of profits on capital. A further inducement was Côte d’Ivoire’s continued membership of the French franc zone, under which France guaranteed the convertibility of the local currency. The result was an investment bonanza unmatched anywhere else in black Africa.
Houphouët shrugged off criticism about the extent to which Côte d’Ivoire remained dependent on France. His priority, he insisted, was economic growth, and French assistance was required to secure it. He argued that the need for effective management and organisation overrode all other considerations and he willingly turned to the French to provide it if qualified Ivorians were not available. There was no room, he said, for ‘cut-rate Africanisation’. Even in the 1980s some 12,000 French personnel were still in government service.
He wasted little time on politics. Public debate and political criticism he viewed as impediments to the business of economic development. Not for twenty years were any contested elections held. Houphouët merely arranged for the country’s only political party, Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire, to present a single list of preselected candidates for each constituency. In 1980 he permitted contested elections under a one-party system, but even then his autocratic style hardly changed. Political power was held by a small elite surrounding the president. The party survived mainly as a means of distributing patronage. Yet Houphouët was astute in his use of political power, preferring to draw his critics and opponents into the government system rather than to suppress them, while remaining ever vigilant. ‘I am like the crocodile,’ he once remarked. ‘I sleep with one eye open.’ Amid conditions of political stability, the economy flourished.
The boom in agriculture was phenomenal by any standards. With a huge expansion of cultivated land, cocoa production grew from 104,000 tons in 1960 to nearly 300,000 tons in 1980; coffee production doubled. Food production also increased, at an average rate of 4 per cent a year, a higher rate than population growth. Much of the increase was attributable to smallholders thriving on favourable government prices; by 1975 there were about 450,000 peasants growing cocoa and coffee in south-eastern Côte d’Ivoire. Overall, agricultural production tripled between 1960 and 1980. Côte d’Ivoire overtook Ghana as the world’s largest producer of cocoa; it became Africa’s largest exporter of coffee and a major exporter of pineapples, bananas, palm oil and hardwood.
A similar boom occurred in industrial activity. In 1960 Côte d’Ivoire had almost no industry. Its agricultural exports – coffee, cocoa beans and timber – were exported mostly unprocessed. Primed by French investment, the industrial sector expanded rapidly. Industrial production, mainly by agro-industries and import-substitution enterprises, increased by 11.5 per cent a year in the 1960s and by 10.5 per cent in the 1970s. By 1980 the manufacturing sector consisted of 700 enterprises with a turnover of $3.1 billion, one-third destined for export markets. The government purchased a minority interest in a range of industries but was otherwise content to leave the controlling interest and management in private hands.
The ruling elite profited enormously from the boom. In a remarkably frank speech in 1983, Houphouët boasted how his business activities had earned him ‘billions’ of francs, listing among his achievements that he was the country’s largest producer of pineapples and avocados. He admitted that he operated bank accounts in Switzerland. But he claimed that his wealth had not come ‘from the budget’.
These are the fruits of my labours. One of the banks manages my profits from pineapple production. I have 4 billion in turnover from pineapples. I pay some 50 million francs a month for boxes for pineapples. Boats and planes come to 150 million francs a month. I had two sharp falls two years ago when I reached 3,000 tons of pineapples a month, producing a third of the national total. And I asked a bank to manage all this. I have stopped producing coffee. At one time, it brought in very little, perhaps 100 million francs, but that 100 million is today worth billions. I put all this money into my bank accounts in Switzerland, and that produced a lot of interest. My deposits account for a quarter of the deposits in one of the banks in Abidjan. Would I keep all this money here if I didn’t have confidence in my country? I have confidence in Côte d’Ivoire. There is even a bank which manages my profits in avocados, of which, I think, I am the main producer in Côte d’Ivoire. There is another bank which modestly manages my profits from poultry farming. But these billions, because this all amounts to billions, are in this country.
Despite Houphouët’s claims of propriety, a French investigation disclosed that he kept at least one-tenth of the country’s cocoa export revenues in his personal bank account for distribution to his cronies and supporters. He also ensured that members of his family and clan benefited from tax and tariff exemptions, high-level state jobs, and subsidised credit for their businesses.
The high point of the Côte d’Ivoire boom came in the mid-1970s. A price explosion for cocoa and coffee sent state revenues soaring. Gripped by financial euphoria and gambling that commodity prices would remain high, the government embarked on a string of ambitious development projects such as roads, ports and hydro-electric dams, borrowing heavily to do so. It also launched a network of parastatal corporations aiming to promote agricultural and industrial development. The number of parastatal corporations rose from five in 1960 to eighty-four in 1979. Public spending between 1975 and 1978 tripled. External debt rose from $256 million in 1970 to $4 billion in 1980.
Houphouët’s favourite scheme was to transform his home village in Yamoussoukro into a new capital city, replete with grand buildings. During the 1960s and 1970s Yamoussoukro received more than one-third of total urban investment outside Abidjan. The presidential palace he built there was sometimes referred to as an African version of Versailles. At the entrance stood two gold-painted rams, Houphouët’s personal symbol. Sacred crocodiles were kept in the palace pond, fed daily on live chickens, and a sacred elephant was allowed to wander within the walls. Houphouët also built himself a basilica modelled on St Peter’s in Rome, at a cost of $145 million.
The boom soon turned to bust. In the second half of 1978 prices for cocoa and coffee collapsed. By 1981 cocoa prices had fallen to one-quarter of their peak; coffee prices had halved. In 1979–80 state revenues slumped by more than $1 billion. The government was thus left with a huge foreign debt and declining income. For the first time since independence, Côte d’Ivoire in 1980 had an adverse trade balance and an adverse balance of payments. As a result of higher oil prices and the precipitous decline in cocoa and coffee income, the net barter terms of trade between 1978 and 1982 fell by 40 per cent. To make matters worse, most of the parastatal enterprises accumulated large losses. Run as the private fiefdoms of the ruling elite, their products required huge government subsidies: prices for sugar were three times the world price, prices for rice were twice the world price. In 1980 more than half of public external debt was attributable to ten parastatal organisations. Adding to the squeeze, French firms repatriated huge amounts of profit.
Confounding government expectations, the slide continued. Between 1980 and 1983 state revenues dropped by 65 per cent. External debts in 1982 rose to $4.5 billion. The cost of debt-servicing became unmanageable. Debt service grew from $38.5 million in 1970 to $737 million in 1979 to $996 million in 1982. The ratio of debt servicing to annual exports receipts went from 9 per cent in 1975 to 26 per cent in 1981 to 37 per cent in 1983. In 1984 it approached 60 per cent, forcing the government to reschedule its debts. In 1987 Côte d’Ivoire declared itself insolvent. The ‘miracle’ had been no more than a mirage.
Compounding all the difficulties that Africa faced was an evergrowing population. From a little over 200 million in 1960, the population by 1990 had reached 450 million. On average, African women bore six children. Even with high mortality rates, this meant that Africa’s population was growing by more than 1 million a month. The rate of population increase added to pressures on agricultural production, on urban growth and on government spending. Governments were simply unable to cope with the demand for more schools, more clinics, more housing and more basic services like water supply. Indeed, many were not even able to maintain existing infrastructure.
The impact of population growth on land use was especially damaging. By the 1980s arable land was no longer in plentiful supply. Plots of land were divided until they were too small to sustain the occupants. Peasants thus turned to cultivating more and more marginal land, either in areas of unreliable rainfall or on slopes, increasing the problems of soil erosion and degradation, over-grazing and deforestation. Pasture lands were increasingly broken up for cultivation, with adverse results. Between 1973 and 1988 Africa lost as much as 15 million acres of pasture. In Mali and Niger peasants in the 1970s were cultivating land sixty miles north of the limit set two decades earlier. In northern Ethiopia farmers had to cultivate the steepest slopes, suspending themselves by ropes. Arable land was also scarce throughout North Africa and in areas of West African states with large concentrations of population like Igboland. In Kenya, where only 17 per cent of land was suitable for arable agriculture, peasants spread out increasingly into lowveld areas, producing poor crops even in good years. Fallow periods were shortened, weakening the land’s productive use. Forests and woodlands were stripped for fuelwood, on which Africans largely depended for cooking and heating. Woodlands were also cleared to provide land for cash crops. Côte d’Ivoire possessed 29 million acres of forest in 1960 but only 3.4 million by 1980. Rain forests were decimated to raise revenues from timber exports. The French agronomist René Dumont estimated that 74,000 acres of rain forest disappeared every day. Each year, the long-term potential of agriculture in much of Africa was diminishing.
The scale of the land crisis was illustrated in its starkest form in the Sahel, a region long accustomed to periods of drought and low rainfall. Until the mid-1960s the region was largely self-sufficient in food. During the succession of droughts that struck the region between 1968 and 1973, as many as a quarter of a million people may have died; cattle herds were decimated; vast areas of land deteriorated into desert. At first, the Sahel disaster was attributed mainly to the effects of drought. But subsequent studies suggested that drought was only one aspect of the problem. Long before the drought set in, the region was heading for serious trouble. Because of population pressures, peasants were pushing northwards into pastoral areas, tilling soil that was far too arid for permanent cultivation and driving pastoralists and their herds of livestock into even more arid areas. The overall result was over-grazing, over-cultivation and deforestation on a catastrophic scale. Every year some 80,000 square miles of land deteriorated. Food production failed to keep pace with population growth. In statistical terms, the Sahel populations were increasing at the rate of 2.5 per cent a year, while food production was growing, at best, by 1.0 per cent. When drought struck, they were already living too close to the margin of safety.
A massive international rescue operation was launched in an endeavour to reverse the crisis. In the ten years after the 1968–73 drought, some $7.5 billion of aid was poured into the Sahel region. By the late 1970s international aid reached the level of $40 per person a year, compared to $19 per person for Africa as a whole, and only $6 per person for Asia. The region swarmed with experts, commissions and international agencies. In 1981 Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) received no fewer than 340 aid missions. But all the efforts had little lasting impact. Much of the aid was directed towards towns and cities, often in the form of food aid to keep civil servants, soldiers and the police content. Some aid was squandered by local elites in conspicuous consumption of goods and services. The population continued to grow. The process of ‘desertification’ continued unabated.
By the 1980s a mood of despair about Africa had taken hold. No other area of the world aroused such a sense of foreboding. The sum of its misfortunes was truly daunting. In relentless succession, African states had succumbed to military coups and brutal dictatorships, to periods of great violence and to economic decline and decay. One by one, African leaders had failed to deliver effective programmes to alleviate the plight of their populations. The vast majority of Africans enjoyed neither political rights nor freedoms. More than two-thirds were estimated to live in conditions of extreme poverty. The future was spoken of only in pessimistic terms. ‘Our ancient continent’, Edem Kodjo, the OAU’s secretary-general, told African leaders, ‘is on the brink of disaster, hurtling towards the abyss of confrontation, caught in the grip of violence, sinking into the dark night of bloodshed and death . . . Gone are the smiles, the joys of life.’