How mineral wealth has impoverished Africa
What scared me most about Congo was not the shouting, stone-throwing crowds, nor the rattle of gunfire, nor the occasional dead body slumped by the side of the road. It was the sight of a boy soldier – he looked no more than twelve, but he might have been a malnourished fifteen – sitting on a step, resting his chin on the barrel of his AK-47.
Teenagers with guns are always terrifying. An older soldier is more likely to ask himself, before shooting you, whether there is any point in doing so. Children are more unpredictable and harder to reason with, especially when drunk or drugged. All this I knew. But the sight of the boy idly pointing an automatic weapon at his own brain made me gasp with anxiety. If he is so careless of his own life, I thought, how careful will he be of mine?
I was in Kinshasa, the bougainvillea-garlanded capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in August 1998. A great war was breaking out, one that would soon suck in most of the countries in central Africa. A rebel army was advancing on the city, and everyone expected them to capture it, probably within days. The Congolese government was in a panic. The regular army was in disarray, and Congo’s president, Laurent Kabila, was recruiting a militia of jobless youths to defend his regime. Thousands of these militiamen were gathered in Kinshasa’s main soccer stadium, drinking beer all day, waving knives, and loudly spoiling for a fight.
Congo’s state radio had told them to kill members of the Tutsi tribe because the rebels were backed by Rwanda, where the government was dominated by Tutsis. “Wherever you see a Rwandan Tutsi, regard him as your enemy,” went one broadcast. It then urged loyal Congolese citizens to “bring a machete, a spear, an arrow, a hoe, spades, rakes, nails, truncheons, electric irons, barbed wire, stones, and the like, in order, dear listeners, to kill the Rwandan Tutsis.” In the prevailing atmosphere of alarm neither mobs nor soldiers made much distinction between Rwandan Tutsis, Congolese Tutsis, and anyone else suspected of supporting the rebels.
The government also accused foreign journalists of “spreading dismay,” of being “less than human” and of somehow being partly responsible for the war. A mob gathered outside the Hotel Memling in the center of Kinshasa, baying for a French radio reporter inside to come out and be lynched. The security forces dragged some BBC journalists from their hotel room and roughed them up for filming from the balcony. A French television crew was put through a mock execution in front of the information ministry. A Reuters cameraman was stripped, beaten, thrown into a cell for several hours, and threatened with death.
I stayed out of trouble, more or less. If I moved around after curfew, I did so only with government permission and in a large armed convoy. During the day, I hired a rusty old car and a driver who knew Kinshasa well. The Belgians had thought the city so picturesque, with its wide boulevards and white walls, that they called it Kinshasa la belle – “Kinshasa the beautiful.” But after four decades of decay, the boulevards were scarred with potholes and strewn with garbage and dead dogs. Locals now referred to their city as Kinshasa la poubelle – “Kinshasa the trash can.” The only new and shiny objects on display were huge posters showing President Kabila’s bowling-ball-shaped head, with the doubtful caption Voici l’homme qu’il faut – “Here is the man we need.”
I had entered Kinshasa by boat, across the Congo River, and was regretting it. I am not a war correspondent. I get no thrill from being shot at. This sets me apart, I suppose, from the large number of foreign correspondents in Africa who spend half their working lives wooing death. The photographers and cameramen, particularly, have to stick up their heads when the bullets are whizzing, or they won’t get good pictures. If the pictures are poor, as the snappers say, you aren’t close enough.
My employer, on the other hand, requires no heroics. Articles in the Economist are anonymous. Economist writers are supposed to aim for objectivity, which means, among other things, not dwelling on our personal experiences. If I spend the night in a ditch ducking shrapnel, there is no chance that the Economist will feature the incident on the front page, so I have no professional incentive to do it. While the real war reporters try to find out where the action is, so they can snap it, I prefer to hang back and talk to people – in the hope of figuring out why they are fighting.
The impression I’ve gained from talking to combatants is that a lot of wars are about economics. Poverty seems to breed war, especially civil war. Rich democracies occasionally use force to settle foreign disputes, but they almost never suffer armed conflict at home. The same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, of middle-income countries. But the poorest one sixth of humanity endures four fifths of the world’s civil wars.1
Africa is worse afflicted than any other continent. In 1999, one African in five lived in a country racked by civil or cross-border war. Ninety percent of the casualties were civilians. Nineteen million Africans were forced to flee their homes. And an estimated 20 million landmines lurked beneath African soil.2
Why is this? The available evidence tends to support the idea that there is a strong link between war and poverty. Researchers at the World Bank, after looking at all the world’s civil wars since 1960 to try to figure out what they had in common, found that poverty and economic stagnation were two of the main risk factors. When income per person doubles, they calculated that the risk of civil war halves. For each percentage point by which the growth rate rises, the risk of conflict falls by a point.3
Poverty and low growth are often symptoms of corrupt, incompetent government, which can give people a reason to rebel. They are also common in immature societies, where people have not yet learned to live together in peace. And it is not hard, as the saying goes, to give a poor man a cause. Neither regular armies nor rebel ones have much trouble recruiting in Africa. For young men with few prospects, a soldier’s pay, or the opportunity to loot a neighboring village, can seem appealing.
A thin young veteran of the Congo war, who said his name was Kaseleka Wabo, explained to me why he fought. I met him in a refugee camp in Tanzania, a 170-kilometer ferry trip from eastern Congo. He mumbled and scratched his face nervously as he spoke. He said he had joined Kabila’s army for the wages and deserted when he stopped receiving them. He switched to fighting with the rebels, who did not pay him at all. He survived by “living off the land.” I don’t think he meant gathering roots and fruit. The United Nations, which ran the camp, kept Wabo apart from other refugees for fear that someone might take revenge on him. He admitted that, while in uniform, he had killed several of his fellow Congolese. “It’s normal,” he said defiantly. “I’d do it again.”
Not only does poverty breed war, but war exacerbates poverty, too. The World Bank estimates that a typical civil war reduces average incomes by 2.2 percent each year.4 In laymen’s terms: if soldiers steal your cows, you have nothing to sell on market day. War even affects African countries that are at peace. Many investors regard the continent as an undifferentiated whole. If Burundi is in flames, they may be wary of setting up safari lodges in neighboring Tanzania, even if Tanzania has been tranquil for decades.
African wars start for all sorts of reasons. During the Cold War, Soviet-backed Marxist regimes fought equally vicious American-backed rebels who claimed to be pro-capitalist, and vice versa. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ideology has more or less ceased to be a motive for war in Africa. New conflicts are more likely to spring from ethnic antagonism or from a tyrant’s desire to distract attention from troubles at home.
However conflicts begin, they are more likely to continue if they are fought on mineral-rich soil, and Africa is fabulously rich in minerals. Diamond mines, for example, give warlords a lucrative reason to keep fighting and often pay for their weapons, too. This makes many African wars particularly intractable. In the 1990s, at least eleven African nations fought over natural resources or the prospect of them. Among these were Angola, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, and Sudan, whose civil wars were all fueled by oil. Rebels fought for control of diamond mines in Sierra Leone, phosphates in Western Sahara, and iron, timber, diamonds, and drugs in Liberia.
Some mineral-rich African countries – South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia, for example – remain peaceful enough for ordinary citizens to benefit from their buried treasure. But on balance Africa’s natural resources have proven more of a curse than a blessing.5
Congo’s war was typical. It began as an aftershock from the genocide in neighboring Rwanda but quickly degenerated into a scramble for loot. The country is huge, weak, and naturally rich. Congolese soil is studded with diamonds and streaked with ores of gold, cobalt, and tantalum. So there is much to steal, and it is easy for any semi-professional fighting force to steal it. Unfortunately for Congo, it is surrounded by smaller, more aggressive countries, which from the mid-1990s set about tearing it apart like jackals around a sick buffalo.
Congo is two-thirds the size of Western Europe and thinly populated. Only about 50 million people live there, although this is a guess. Communication between different regions is tricky. Telephones rarely work, and the bush has swallowed the old colonial roads, although some of the milestones remain, poking out of the undergrowth. Only the Congo river links the western half of the country to the east. The central government in Kinshasa lost control of Congo’s provinces long ago, and the trackless rainforest is lawless.
Congo has a long history of being badly governed. The approximate area we now call Congo was roped together into one state in the nineteenth century by King Leopold II of the Belgians. Leopold never visited Congo but ruled it as his personal fiefdom from his chateau in Laeken. His men enslaved the locals to tap rubber and collect ivory and sliced off slackers’ hands. Leopold’s misrule became such an embarrassment that the Belgian government took Congo off his hands in 1908 and ruled it somewhat less harshly until independence in 1960. Soon after, a young military commander named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power. During a dictatorship that spanned four decades, Mobutu looted the state into paralysis. He was overthrown in 1997, but the story of Congo’s current war begins three years earlier.
In 1994, in tiny neighboring Rwanda, some of the more bloodthirsty leaders of the Hutu tribe tried to exterminate the Tutsis, with whom they lived cheek by jowl. The genocide ended when an army of Tutsis from Uganda seized control of Rwanda and drove thegénocidaires away. Thousands fled into Zaire (as Congo was then called) and hid in the jungle.
From there, they mounted frequent raids on Rwanda. The new Tutsi-led Rwandan government appealed to Mobutu to stop them. Mobutu, who had been friendly with the old Hutu regime, armed and encouraged them instead. In 1996, the Rwandan army invaded eastern Congo, hoping to scatter or kill the génocidaires and set up a buffer zone against future attacks. It was easier than they expected. Congo’s defenses crumbled so quickly that the Rwandans figured they could overthrow Mobutu and replace him with someone more pliable. Uganda, Rwanda’s ally, agreed to help.
They picked Laurent Kabila, a Congolese guerrilla leader whose curriculum vitae included a spell running a brothel in Tanzania. At first, the alliance went smoothly. With Rwandan support, Kabila raised a rebel army in eastern Congo and sent it marching in rubber boots toward Kinshasa. The scruffy rebels and their Rwandan backers met almost no resistance. Only the lack of roads slowed their advance. Some villagers actually paid for transport to help Mobutu’s men flee so that they would go quickly instead of hanging around to loot. In May 1997, Kabila marched into the capital. Joyous crowds greeted his troops, waving palm fronds. Shots were fired, but only in celebration. Few people knew much about Kabila, but they figured that he could not possibly be worse than Mobutu.
They were wrong. Kabila was, if anything, more cruel than Mobutu but lacked his predecessor’s intelligence. He promised elections but never held them. He jailed and tortured suspected opponents. He tried to fine businessmen for breaking unpublished rules and to levy taxes on as yet unrealized profits. He printed money with reckless abandon, and when the governor of Congo’s central bank tried to explain to him why this was a bad idea, he had him locked up. Western governments offered aid, but he treated them with suspicion. Western mining firms came scouting for business but soon wearied of Kabila’s habit of dishonoring contracts.
A toad tries to swallow an elephant
Perhaps Kabila’s greatest mistake, however, was to betray his Rwandan backers. After only a year in power, he allied himself with their enemies, the genocidal Hutu militias who still lurked in eastern Congo. Furious, the Rwandans decided to overthrow their former protégé. They struck with the speed of a coiled cobra, flying troops almost 2,000 kilometers across the jungle in old Soviet transport planes and setting up bases at Kitona and Matadi, not far from Kinshasa. Within days, they had captured the hydroelectric dam that powered the capital and were threatening, with their Congolese rebel allies, to take the capital itself.
That was the situation when I was cowering in Kinshasa. The city would certainly have fallen but for the arrival, at the last minute, of some powerful allies. The armies of Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia arrived with fighter-bombers and relatively well-trained troops. They quickly repelled the rebels and Rwandans and secured the city. The insurgents dispersed, hiding in bushes and backyards. The ill-disciplined Congolese army was given the task of mopping them up. The resultant killings were more or less random.
Anyone with thin features or a long nose, traits associated with Tutsis, was at risk. After decades of intermarriage between Tutsis and other tribes, a long nose was not a reliable indicator of anything, but it was enough to condemn many to death. Young men with dust in their hair were assumed to have acquired it marching through the bush. In a city that had had little or no running water for a month, such reasoning was hardly foolproof, but it was good enough for Kabila’s troops. Those unfortunate enough to be caught looking disheveled were beaten or shot. I saw corpses lying on the crumbling pavement, blackened and charred after being doused with gasoline and set ablaze. One suspected rebel was hurled from a bridge in front of a television camera and machine-gunned as he bobbed in the river below.
After the relief of Kinshasa, the war grew more complex. At one time or another, nine national armies were involved, in alliance with several local rebel groups and militias.
The four armies that mattered were those of Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, and Zimbabwe. The Rwandans and Ugandans fought against Kabila because, they said, he was helping Rwandan and Ugandan rebels. The Angolans supported Kabila because they thought that was the best way of crushing their own rebels. The Zimbabweans had no obvious reason to be involved but said they wanted to defend the legitimate government of Congo against external aggression.
There were other, smaller players: Namibia, Chad, and Burundi all sent troops at one time or another, and Sudan briefly sent some transport planes. Hutu militias fought against the Rwandans. The Mai-Mai, a Congolese warrior cult whose members sometimes charge into battle naked, started off supporting the rebels but then switched sides and started slaughtering Tutsis. Both Rwanda and Uganda backed their own puppet rebel movements. Uganda backed at least two.
Finally, there were mercenaries, the rough and reckless types who show up in every African war. The government hired a small number of eastern Europeans to fly planes and operate complex military hardware. On their days off, they could be seen relaxing by the pool at the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa “wearing nothing but the Y-fronts of their native Ukraine.”6
Confused? So was everyone else. All but the bravest aid workers fled Congo in terror. Outsiders despaired of restoring peace. In 2000, when South Africa first considered sending peacekeepers to Congo, a cartoonist summed up why this might be tricky. A peacekeeper at a road block in Congo sees the tip of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher poking out of a bush. “Halt,” he cries: “Who goes there?” “Congolese Rally for Democracy,” comes the reply. “Hang on a minute,” says the peacekeeper, and he turns to consult a chart of parties to the war, of which seven are listed as “friend,” eight are listed as “foe,” and ten are listed as “not sure.”7
Pillage delays peace
The war reached a stalemate in 1999. Talks in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, produced a peace pact that no one honored. The main stumbling block was that most of the commanders in the field were making fortunes by looting Congo’s mineral wealth.
In the east, the Rwandan and Ugandan armies dug diamonds and cobalt, chopped down trees, slaughtered apes for bushmeat, harvested ivory, and grabbed everything else they could carry away. A bustling diamond market sprang up in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, although Rwanda produced no stones of its own.
In June 2000, Ugandan and Rwandan troops, supposedly allies, came to blows over the spoils. For six days, they blasted each other in the city of Kisangani, destroying much of the town center. In April 2001, a UN report accused Rwanda and Uganda of “the systematic and systemic” exploitation of Congo’s natural wealth, in particular diamonds, copper, cobalt, gold, and coltan, a rare and costly mineral used in the manufacture of mobile telephones and computer-game consoles.
The report alleged that presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda were “on the verge of becoming the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” It did not claim that the presidents were looting Congo themselves but accused them of failing to prevent their associates – including Museveni’s younger brother – from doing so. It called for sanctions on both countries.8 Both presidents denied the allegations.
Kabila’s allies did well out of the war, too. Zimbabwean and Angolan commanders demanded, and were granted, the rights to mine precious minerals in areas they defended. Angola formed a joint oil venture with the Congolese government. South of the town of Mbuji Mayi, Zimbabwean troops guarded a diamond concession worth an estimated $1 billion, which was awarded in 2000 to a firm partly owned by the Zimbabwean ruling party. The costs of Zimbabwe’s military adventure in Congo were borne by Zimbabwean taxpayers. The profits went largely to President Mugabe’s cronies. A UN report in 2002 accused top Zimbabwean officers of the “organised theft” of
Congolese assets.9
Senior officers in all armies ran small patches of Congo as their own private estates. Ordinary soldiers and guerrillas eked out their rations, if they received any, by robbing Congolese villages. Life grew so frightening for Congolese peasants that millions of them abandoned their cassava crops and hid in the bush, subsisting on wild fruit and insects. In the first four years the Congo war caused an estimated 2 million premature deaths, mostly through starvation and disease.10
In January 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated. A bodyguard named Rashidi Kasereka, one of whose jobs was to announce new visitors and to whisper messages in the president’s ear, entered Kabila’s office and asked to speak to him. As Kabila lent forward to listen, Kasereka shot him once through the neck and twice through the stomach. Why he did it, or who put him up to it, is not known: Kasereka was himself killed within minutes.11
Kabila was replaced by his twenty-nine-year-old son Joseph, who showed signs of being less truculent than his father. In July 2002, he signed a peace deal with most of his adversaries, which led to the majority of foreign troops being pulled out of Congo. Even the Rwandans left, although no one would be surprised if they came back. Joseph Kabila created a transitional government and promised eventually to hold elections. Peace, of a sort, returned to about two thirds of the country, but not to eastern Congo, where a confusion of militia groups continued to rape, rob, and occasionally eat hapless villagers.
I visited Bukavu, a stunning lakeside town in eastern Congo, in September 2003. The town itself was quiet, as there was a force of UN peacekeepers encamped by the water’s edge, and the rebel group that ran Bukavu was nominally at peace with the central government in Kinshasa. But in the surrounding hills armed bands plundered unchecked.
I spoke to peasants in nearby villages and heard a hundred variations on the same story. Charlotte, a petite lady with chunky earrings, told me how men with guns had broken into her home and forced her to carry all her belongings – her clothes, her children’s clothes, her cooking pots, her mattress – to their forest hideout. When she protested, one of them broke her wrist. Then two of them raped her. She struggled home, but, she said, “For a long time after that, I felt pain everywhere, in my back, all over. And after two months, another group of armed men came, and stole everything that the first group had missed.”
To avoid a similar fate, most of the villagers I met said they abandoned their huts at night and slept in the forest or in crevices below river banks. But, according to Barhingenga Mujijima, a small farmer, “now that the bandits no longer find anyone to rob in the villages, they’ve started looking in the fields and round about.” Mujijima said he now walked six kilometers from his home to the nearest garrison town every night, where he slept in the street, and then six kilometers back to his fields every morning. This daily trudge left less time and energy for growing food, he said, so he never had enough to eat.
Riches without effort – for the few
Throughout the world, mineral wealth tends to corrupt. Part of the problem is that mines cannot move. If the Chinese government tried to plunder Hong Kong’s financial district, the bankers would simply move to Singapore. Gold and diamonds, by contrast, must be extracted where they are found – meaning that politicians can grab a big slice of miners’ profits without fear that the miners will emigrate.
Governments that depend on natural resources for most of their income are usually venal and despotic. Most oil-rich Gulf states are, and African oligarchies, such as Nigeria, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, have a wretched record, too. But perhaps the country where oil has proven most destructive is Angola.
Angola is the world’s ninth-largest oil producer, but most Angolans are poorer than they were when the stuff was first discovered off the country’s Atlantic coast. Oil fueled a civil war that left Angola scorched and starving, while allowing a tiny elite to grow fantastically rich.
I caught a glimpse of how Angola’s Big Men live in 1999, on a veranda outside the Hotel Panorama in Luanda, the capital. It was the scene of the Miss Luanda beauty contest. On a smooth white stage, a procession of gorgeous women twirled and posed, first in ball gowns, then in swimsuits. Most had big hair, all wore explosively loud make-up. Against a backdrop of softly lit palm trees, they sashayed past the judges in a whirl of pink and blue silk. On a dais to the left stood the prize: a shiny new car.
The audience sported emerald necklaces, Prada handbags, and fat fistfuls of gold rings. One man wore a red crushed-velvet suit over his paunch. There was some excellent fresh lobster on the buffet and as much Cutty Sark whisky as the crowd could drink.
It was night-time, so when I looked past the stage and across the bay below, I could see only a few lights winking in the distance. The air was pleasantly warm, and since I could not see the city, with its sagging shacks and mounds of uncollected trash, it felt as if I were in some gilded resort: Saint Tropez, say, or Mauritius. Daylight spoiled the illusion.
I visited some of Angola’s less fortunate citizens in a nearby refugee camp. I smelt the place before I saw it. Children squatted by the dusty track that led there, tattered shorts around their ankles, faces wincing from diarrhea. When the car I was riding in rounded a dune, I saw ahead a village of drab, khaki tents nestling in the sand.
Twenty-five hundred souls were squeezed into Campo Malanje, a haven for Angolans who had fled from fighting in the hinterland. Most refugees were peasants. UNITA, Angola’s rebel movement, had deliberately driven them off their land and into the cities in the hope that they would become a burden on the government. They arrived with heavy iron hoes and centuries of agricultural know-how. But the camp was crowded, so each family typically had only enough land to grow a few dozen stalks of corn or cassava. Everyone in the camp was hungry, and the sick lay limply on filthy mats outside their tents.
Angola’s civil war started in 1961 as a struggle against Portuguese colonialism. In 1975, the Portuguese left in a hurry, and Angola became a Cold War battlefield. A Marxist group, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), seized power but was challenged by the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Apartheid South Africa, terrified of having a Soviet satellite on its doorstep, sent an army to help UNITA. The United States, equally keen to block Soviet expansion, sent weapons and cash. The MPLA, meanwhile, was supported by thousands of Cuban troops and supplied with arms by the Soviet Union.
When the Cold War ended, Angola should have found peace but did not. A ceasefire was reached in 1991, followed by elections. But when UNITA lost, its leader, Jonas Savimbi, cried foul. The fighting continued, almost without pause, until February 2002, when Savimbi was shot dead. More than a million Angolans died out of a population estimated at 13 million in the late 1990s. An estimated 1.7 million were forced to flee their homes. Many found themselves living for years in places like Campo Malanje.
Why did Angola’s war last so long? A clue can be found by looking at Portugal’s other large African colony, Mozambique. Like Angola, Mozambique endured a bloody anti-colonial war and then, when the Portuguese left, an even bloodier civil war. The country was blasted back into the bronze age as its Soviet-backed government fought anti-communist rebels, armed first by white supremacists from Rhodesia, then by similar folks from South Africa. But unlike Angola’s civil war, Mozambique’s ended shortly after the Cold War did.
Why the difference? It doubtless helped that as apartheid crumbled South Africa, the regional giant, put pressure on both Mozambican parties to make peace. (South African diplomats tried the same in Angola but failed.) It also helped that the Mozambican leaders were more reasonable people than their Angolan counterparts. Savimbi, particularly, was determined not to share power with anyone else. This was a man who had his own lieutenants burned alive, along with their families, if he suspected them of disloyalty.
When he failed to win the presidency of Angola, Savimbi went back to war. A story from his youth, which may be apocryphal but has the ring of truth, casts light on why. Fred Bridgland, a biographer who once admired him, tells how when Savimbi was a boy, he owned a football. The missionaries at his school arranged a match between their students and some white boys from a neighboring town. Savimbi provided the ball, and the white boys brought a Portuguese referee. The white team surged ahead. Savimbi accused the referee of bias, picked up the ball, and stomped off with it, spoiling the match.12
Savimbi’s personality was not, however, the only force that prevented peace from breaking out. The crucial difference between Mozambique and Angola was that Mozambique had nothing much worth stealing.
Angola’s precious curse
A few miles off Angola’s Atlantic coast, oil rigs rise above the waves. Unlike most other structures in Angola, they are in good repair. Smooth steel spars fit neatly into concrete bases. Engineers in hard hats walk briskly about their business. Everything works.
Angola’s oil industry has so little connection to the mainland that it might as well be in another country. Most of the oil is under the sea, so most of the action takes place offshore. The industry accounts for over 90 percent of Angola’s exports but employs only 10,000 people. Western oil firms provide most of the capital and expertise. Expatriate technicians arrive in Luanda and fly straight out to the rigs in helicopters, rarely stopping for long on Angolan soil.
Angola’s offshore wells disgorged 800,000 barrels a day in 2000, and production was expected to double by 2004. Oil accounts for half of GDP and provides the Angolan government with almost all of its taxes. But many ordinary Angolans do not even know that their country has oil. They never see the rigs, and they never see any benefits from the petrodollars, either.
On the contrary, oil kept Angola’s civil war blazing long after the original reasons for fighting were forgotten. Both sides wanted the oil. Ultimately, the government won the war because it already controlled the oil wells and therefore had more money to pay its troops and buy guns. But it did not exactly hurry towards victory, not least because so many politicians grew so wealthy from prolonging the fighting. The war gave them an excuse (“national security”) for secrecy, which made it easy to pocket huge kickbacks on arms deals or simply to funnel oil receipts into offshore accounts. By one estimate, in the late 1990s between a third and a half of public spending in Angola was not properly accounted for.13
UNITA, meanwhile, bought its supplies with diamonds, mined by virtual slaves in areas the rebels controlled. For a while, UNITA grew rich from diamond smuggling, earning an estimated $300 million to $500 million annually. But after the turn of the millennium, a global ban on buying UNITA’s gems began to bite. At the same time, the Angolan army forcibly evacuated peasants from areas where UNITA operated, so that the rebels would have no one to steal food from. By the time the government found and killed Savimbi, his followers were starving. Even the UNITA leaders who negotiated a ceasefire in 2002 were so malnourished that their belts were threaded twice around their waists.
Chasing the spoils of peace
If peace holds, Angola has a chance to recover. But it will not be easy. The country needs honest and benevolent government, but war has allowed a rather different type of leader to rise to the top. Corruption blights almost everything that the state does. New businesses cannot start without paying bribes, nor can goods move through Angolan ports without pay-offs. Even the supply of subsidized textbooks to schoolchildren has been tarnished. Officials have reportedly pocketed the subsidy and sold the books to parents at ten times what they were supposed to charge.14 An anti-corruption commission, established in 1996, has done nothing.
Because the government has no need to raise money from sources other than oil, it has done little or nothing to nurture other parts of the economy. Angola’s coffee plantations withered long ago. So did Angolan industry, apart from oil, diamonds, and the firms that supply oilmen and diamond miners with equipment, hotel beds, and so on.
Since nothing much is made in Angola, everything of value has to be imported. When I first boarded a flight from South Africa to Angola, I had trouble reaching my seat. The big wives of Angola’s Big Men were blocking the aisles with microwave ovens and cramming television sets into the overhead luggage compartments.
Doing business in Angola is tough. Miners and oil firms have to import everything from mechanical diggers to fresh vegetables to keep their expatriate managers happy. If machinery breaks down, it often has to be sent 2,000 kilometers to South Africa to be fixed. Firms have popped up that specialize in moving supplies through Angola’s ports without losing too much to thieves or crooked officials. I visited one such firm, called Global Mining Support Services, run by a hard bunch of former officers of the South African army. The manager, Cobus Viljoen, told me that his diamond-digger clients even wanted their guard dogs flown in from Johannesburg. The local pooches were too scrawny and timid, he said, to be of use.
Despite all these troubles, there were signs, immediately after the ceasefire, that things might be getting better in Angola. Exhausted and hungry rebels surrendered and handed in their weapons. Angola’s roads suddenly became safe from ambushes, which allowed families separated by the war to hop onto rusty minibuses and reunite. Commerce started to flow again. Trucks began carrying corn and peppers from rural areas to coastal cities and fish and electrical goods in the opposite direction. Prices in some towns halved. In Luanda, carjackings suddenly increased, a sign that there was now somewhere to drive the stolen vehicles.
African wars usually end for much the same reasons that wars elsewhere do. Either one side wins, as happened in Angola, or the two sides tire of fighting and try to resolve their differences through dialogue, as happened in Mozambique.
Outsiders can play a useful role. Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, and Ketumile Masire, the former president of Botswana, have both worked tirelessly as neutral intermediaries between warring groups in Burundi and Congo. Western countries sometimes provide an incentive for peace by withholding aid from governments that fight and showering it on those that stop. Such tactics may have helped to persuade Ethiopia and Eritrea to cease shooting in 2000 and Rwanda and Uganda not to go to war with each other in 2001. Campaigners against “blood diamonds” may also have helped by prompting the more reputable parts of the global diamond industry to adopt, in 2003, a system of certificates to keep stones from war zones out of Western jewelery shops.
If they really wanted to, Western governments could probably stop most African wars simply by sending in their own vastly superior armed forces. But they don’t, because however much they may deny it, since the Cold War ended they have had no big strategic interest in Africa. The continent produces little that foreigners cannot buy elsewhere. Voters in rich countries may feel compassion for the starving, but they rarely have strong views about which side deserves their support in any given African war.
Occasionally, when television cameras publicize some particularly awful tragedy, Western consciences are pricked and Western troops are sent to Africa on what are called “humanitarian” missions. President Bill Clinton sent American soldiers to protect food-aid deliveries to Somalia in 1993, but when eighteen were killed and their naked corpses dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, the rest were pulled out. The experience probably helped to persuade the Clinton administration not to dispatch troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda the following year.
With more political will, humanitarian interventions can work. In 2000, a mere 800 British troops turned the tide of Sierra Leone’s ghastly civil war in a matter of days. The Revolutionary United Front, a band of rebels notorious for cutting off hands and slapping their owners’ faces with them, looked set to overrun Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. The British stopped them and, with the help of a larger number of UN peacekeepers, pacified the country. Two years later, Sierra Leone was calm enough to hold an election. But that calm is enforced by up to 17,500 blue helmets, and no one knows what will happen if they leave, which they are bound to do eventually.
For the cold, hard truth is that the world’s great powers no longer want colonies. Although a few controversialists advocate it and a few conspiracy theorists think it is already happening, there is not the slightest chance that Britain or any other Western country will try once more to rule Africa. Western governments are reluctant to sacrifice even a single soldier to resolve the continent’s feuds.
So Africans will have to solve their own problems. Many African leaders realize this, and some have sent troops to try to keep the peace in other African states. Nigeria dispatched soldiers to Sierra Leone and Liberia; South Africa sent some to Burundi. But no African country is powerful enough to impose peace on any but the tiniest neighbor.
To stay peaceful in the long term, countries need governments that serve their citizens instead of robbing them and that can be removed without violence. Not only must these governments be elected; they must be elected under rules that more or less everyone agrees to be fair. Countries need constitutions that provide reasonable protection for all citizens, regardless of whether they support the ruling party. Governments must respect the constitutions under the terms of which they govern and should stand down when they are voted out.
This may sound like a tall order, but it is not impossible. South Africa managed it. In 1991, the last white government, under the presidency of F. W. de Klerk, organized a “Convention for a Democratic South Africa” (CODESA), at which representatives of twenty-five political parties and various anti-apartheid groups hammered out the framework for a new constitution and set a date for all-race elections. No party was excluded – though some ultra-nationalist white parties boycotted the discussions. CODESA’s decisions were binding on government, and de Klerk bowed to them. The intermittent fighting between anti-apartheid guerrillas and the government ceased, and full-scale civil war, which many predicted, was averted.
A similar procedure could help resolve other conflicts, too. Ghanaian scholar George Ayittey argues that big, inclusive national conferences ought to succeed in Africa because they mesh with pre-colonial tradition.
When a crisis erupted in an African village, the chief and the elders would summon a village meeting. There, the issue was debated by the people until a consensus was reached. During the debate, the chief usually made no effort to manipulate the outcome or sway public opinion. Nor were there bazooka-wielding rogues intimidating or instructing people on what they should say. People expressed their ideas openly and freely without fear of arrest.15
Such nation-building conferences can only work, however, if the men with the bazookas agree to participate and to be bound by the decisions that emerge.
And even if rebel leaders agree to make peace, their foot-soldiers are sometimes reluctant to disarm. A freelance photographer called Sven Torfinn once sent me a snap from eastern Congo that encapsulated the difficulty of peace-making. It shows a young Mai-Mai warrior with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. Lashed to the magazine is his only inoffensive possession: a yellow toothbrush. A boy whose only livelihood is his gun may be slow to lay it down.