False Economy - Alan Beattie [28]
Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia's first president after independence was obtained from Britain in 1964, made things worse. He subscribed to the standard African view that Zambia needed to build an industrial base, and that taxes and import tariffs should be used to encourage it. In Zambia's case, as in those of so many other African countries, this meant that the usual risks from possessing natural resources were compounded with a bad policy decision. In effect, the countryside was taxed to pay for the towns. Food prices were strictly controlled and subsidies were handed out to industry. Because the copper miners and their industry were politically powerful, they, too, got favored treatment. The copper mines, having been nationalized from the private company Anglo-American, were given hefty subsidies and their miners well paid.
Give people a big incentive and they will generally react to it. As food prices were held down, hurting farmers selling their surplus produce, a mass decampment ensued from the Zambian countryside to the towns. Shantytowns (or, as the latest iteration of international-development jargon has it, "periurban settlements") are a familiar feature of African cities, where this policy error has been repeated many times. But with the exception of South Africa, where the contrast between the hard pavements of central Johannesburg and the vast sprawl of Soweto reflects a particular history of racial separation, there are few towns that beat the dramatic gap between formal and informal urbanity in the Zambian copper belt.
Ndola, the biggest settlement on the copper belt, is today a small, neat, colonial-era company town of perhaps a dozen blocks square, low bungalows fronted by tidy if scruffy and faded lawns. Around this center sprawl shantytowns of mud, thatch, and occasionally brick, comprising a million and a half desperately poor Zambians. These slum-dwellers spend their lives trying to make a living off the miners, mainly by hawking food, cheap soap, clothes, and trashy plastic toys to them—and, in the case of a distressing number of teenage girls, selling them sex. Drive a couple of hours into the countryside—during which time the roads rapidly give out into deep gullies of dust and mud—and it is largely empty.
It was not as if the country, or Kenneth Kaunda himself, was unaware of how his policies were distorting the economy. Kaunda was by no means a visionary statesman (though he was a long way from the worst of the post-independence African leaders). Nor was he unaware of the dangers of breakneck urbanization. He talked about the issue time and again in the early 1970s, as the high price of metals and the industrialization campaign were drawing thousands every month out of the countryside, and launched a "Go Back to the Land" campaign to control the flood. But rhetorical exhortation was not enough to counter the effect of hard economic incentives. And when it came to actually changing policy, the ideology and political exigency of urban industrial development always won out.
It has become a familiar pattern in Africa: mass urbanization without mass industrialization. By and large, Africa does not do cities well. The farmers left the countryside, but without the increased agricultural productivity that was a feature of European and North American rural depopulation. So there were no increased agricultural surpluses to invest in industrialization, nor could extensive borrowing from abroad create sustainable development. There were, therefore, not enough jobs in factories for them to go to. Those industries that did exist generally did not survive the rapid removal of the tariff walls in the 1980s and 1990s that had earlier protected them from more efficient foreign competition. And too often, controls on food prices simply meant not enough food.
When the bankruptcy of African economies drove them into the arms of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the Washington-based institutions that