Read Online The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai - Free Book Online

grip of the first generation of African Big Men and their successors loosened, it was not fully freed. Nor was Africa's crisis of leadership over. The relieving of tensions frozen by the Cold War and the end of some regimes threatened the very existence of a number of nation-states. Some collapsed, while, uncertain and threatened, those in charge of such weakened states succumbed to corruption. More and more, African states came to resemble a crumbling house from which both the owner and the onlookers scrambled to escape with whatever could be looted. Citizens became prisoners and refugees within their own borders, denied freedom of speech, movement, assembly, and association, and treated with less respect than foreigners in their own land.
    Governments that felt at risk from a stronger civil society and growing demands both domestically and internationally to open their political systems responded by, in some cases, using ethnicity to set communities against each other. This was the situation in Kenya throughout the 1990s and, on a far more devastating scale, in Rwanda in 1994. No one was safe. Leaders tried to hold on to resources that had become personal fiefdoms.
    Along with the political changes brought about by the end of the Cold War, a new economic consensus emerged that free markets and free societies would reinforce each other and that the integration of the global economy through trade and information sharing (“globalization”)—now unhindered by the long-standing barriers between West and East—would lift poor countries, along with eastern Europe and the nations of the former Soviet Union, out of their economic doldrums.
    Throughout the 1990s, Africa and other poor regions were assisted by donors and encouraged by development agencies toaccept the free trade agenda of the newly formed World Trade Organization. In effect, this meant orienting their economies to increase exports, while further opening their markets to foreign goods. When such largely unregulated liberalization failed to make much of a dent in poverty or spur high rates of growth, however, the IMF, World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department prescribed new measures. In what became known as the Washington Consensus, poor countries were encouraged—in some cases mandated—to further liberalize their policies on trade and the free flow of capital. In order to accelerate GDP growth, nations were urged to continue privatization programs, curtail government functions, and deregulate their industries.
    In the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, some African economies did begin to grow. But by 2001, the number of people in Africa living in extreme poverty had nearly doubled to 316 million, from 164 million twenty years before. 5 And along with international campaigners advocating fair trade and working against debt and poverty, a growing number of economists, among them the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, began to view the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus as neither concerned enough with equity—who benefited from these policies—nor focused sufficiently on the economic sustainability of global GDP growth and its political, social, and environmental ramifications.
    As the twenty-first century began, many African nations had relatively new heads of state. These rulers, a number of whom came to power through coups or civil wars or both, may not have been as oppressive to their peoples as those they succeeded, but they did not usher in the needed revolution in leadership. In 1999, Côte d'Ivoire underwent a military coup followed by a civil war that pitted the north against the south in what was once considered one of Africa's most successful nations (its capital, Abidjan, was long known as the Paris ofAfrica). From the late 1990s to early in the twenty-first century Africa's first “world war” consumed the Democratic Republic of the Congo, eventually including soldiers from nine other African nations. The toll was