False Economy - Alan Beattie [115]
The Europeans were there only to extract, not to build. Compared to colonies like India, the railway and other transport infrastructure they built in Africa were woefully sparse. Nor was it just physical infrastructure of which Africa was relatively deprived. There was nothing close to the extensive and well-organized Indian civil service, which recruited large numbers of locals, with the result that India, whatever other problems it had, at least inherited a functioning state and bureaucracy when it gained independence. Whatever unhelpful effects China's recent activities in Africa have had in terms of propping up unpleasant regimes in Sudan and Angola, some Africans have been prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt in part because they have gotten at least some infrastructure built. In the 1970s, China constructed a railway more than a thousand miles long that connected landlocked Zambia with the Tan-zanian port of Dar es Salaam. Zambia's usual trade route had been blockaded by the minority white regime in Southern Rhodesia. The Chinese helped out when, as a Zambian government minister once said to me, "most of the world was looking the other way."
And if anything, the weak social and legal infrastructure was a more damaging legacy than was the physical. As Western Europe's rapid recovery after the Second World War showed, roads and factories can always be rebuilt as long as there is an invisible framework of education, the rule of law, and a functioning economy to support it. Without them, any amount of investment or aid poured in from outside will struggle to have much impact.
Britain transplanted its own legal and political systems, along with many of its own citizens, into some of its colonies—notably Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. From the beginning, their administrations protected private property, had effective checks on arbitrary government action, and did not put undue barriers in the way of people doing business. They have subsequently done much better than have those where the colonizers made only the barest effort to export the imperial capital's economic and social development.
But lest we start throwing our hands up and concluding that geography and history are destiny after all, let us remember how spectacularly well Botswana did for so long (as we saw in the chapter on oil and diamonds) despite an abysmally poor colonial inheritance of both social and physical infrastructure. Africa has been dealt a poor hand, but for the most part it could have played its cards a great deal better.
Roads and railways are expensive and would often require money from outside in the form of foreign investment or aid. But mobile phone coverage has spread rapidly across Africa, connecting businesses with customers, though many African traders continue to suffer from poor Internet access. And improving ports and border crossings is often mainly a question of finding the political will to take on an entrenched customs bureaucracy that finds delaying trucks an excellent way of extorting bribes and doesn't want to lose it. After the September 11 attacks on the United States, there was much concern expressed that new security measures at ports and borders demanded by Washington would throw sand in the gears of globalization and make it slower and harder to trade. In the event, border crossings on average across the world accelerated. Reformers in countries in Africa and elsewhere made reforms by pointing to an external imperative: the need to meet U.S. security standards. Those countries made choices, and the choices had good consequences.
Creating the conditions for supply chains to lengthen and trade routes to be established is neither easy nor routine. But it can be done. That Africa does not grow cocaine or make much chocolate or coffee owes something to geography and history; yet today it owes more to the inability of its governments to overcome them. Yes, it is entrepreneurial companies that exploit, and even