Africa Continental Shift

By Lisa Beyer

The story going around Kinshasa is that one night late last December, Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko was entertaining a roomful of dinner guests when the television broadcast news of Nicolae Ceausescu's precipitate execution in Bucharest. Mobutu had long counted as a friend the Romanian autarch, who came to power in 1965, as he did. At the sight of that familiar face wreathed in blood, Mobutu abruptly left the room, abandoning his visitors without a word.

Finally, late last month, the authoritarian ruler of Zaire for all but five of its 30 years of independence was ready to speak. As his compatriots -- who had taken to calling their President "Mobutu Sese Sescu" -- crowded around radios and TVs set at full volume, Mobutu gave his answer to the stunning events in Eastern Europe. Reversing positions he had tenaciously reavowed only months before, Mobutu announced that he would allow two parties aside from his to compete for power and would turn the day-to-day running of the government over to a new Prime Minister. "Wisdom comes at 60," Mobutu told reporters, inflating his age by a year. "It is time to let go little by little."

In at least superficially mimicking the revolutions in Europe, Mobutu has lots of company in his own neighborhood. Since February three other one-party regimes in sub-Saharan Africa -- those of Benin, Gabon and the Ivory Coast -- have consented to pluralistic systems. These were radical moves, considering that the leaders of these lands, who with Mobutu have held power for a combined 96 years, had previously put up with virtually no dissent. Tanzania too has said yes in principle to pluralism, and Zambia has promised a referendum to decide the issue.

All these pledges of change, however, may prove more illusory than real. "Establishing a multiparty system is only a step on the way to democracy, not an end in itself," cautions Francis Wodie, leader of the opposition Ivorian Workers' Party.

If Eastern Europe's liberation inspired the shake-ups in Africa's mid-belt, the real detonating force was economics. Each of these African countries overspent badly in the 1970s, suffered plunging commodity prices in the 1980s, and today finds itself flat broke. Desperate for hard currency, each has been forced into structural-readjustment programs, which entail strict and painful austerity measures, in order to obtain loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Throughout the 1980s, political leaders told their constituents that times would be lean for a few years under the belt-tightening policies and would then turn rosy. But their deadlines are long past, and their promises are unfulfilled. According to a World Bank report last year, the gap in per capita income between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the Third World keeps widening. In 1988 the contrast was $330 vs. an average $750 for all developing countries. The nations of black Africa, home to 470 million people, together have the purchasing power of Belgium, a country of only 10 million.

For the impoverished masses, long willing to accord to their rulers the traditional African obeisance to authority, the sense of betrayal has reached a flash point. A wave of strikes and protests prompted by economic grievances has turned political. At the same time, the IMF and the World Bank have begun to press African regimes to liberalize their politics as well as their economies. In its report, the World Bank also admonished that economic restructuring would not "go far, nor will much external aid be forthcoming, unless governance in Africa improves. Leaders must become more accountable to their peoples."

Benin was the first to catch on. Late last year President Mathieu Kerekou found his grip on order slipping as civil servants and teachers, who were not paid for months at a stretch, went on strike, angry students protested in support of the teachers, and workers pressed for higher wages through go-slow campaigns. Allegedly widespread corruption was another sore point.

To assuage the public's irritation, Kerekou in December promised free-market reforms, disavowing the Marxism-Leninism he introduced two years after he came to power in a 1972 military coup. In February he convened a conference of more than 500 participants, including several opposition figures, to draft a new constitution. In effect, the conference engineered a coup, stripping Kerekou of most of his powers and leaving him a figurehead President. His Cabinet of Old Guard stalwarts from the Party of the Popular Revolution was sacked and replaced by a fresh team dominated by modern-minded technocrats and led by new Prime Minister Nicephore Soglo, an antigovernment activist and a former executive at the World Bank. Opposition parties were legalized, and elections were scheduled for next January.

The prescription for Benin's revolution came largely from France, once its colonial master. According to a memo to Kerekou last December, the French ambassador recommended that the government hold a national conference and adopt specific constitutional changes. Kerekou followed the advice almost to the letter. In exchange, Paris has supplied Benin with what one French official called "significant" additional aid. Said Jacques Pelletier, France's Minister for Cooperation and Development: "The wind that is blowing in the east should not stop in the south."

Gabon's metamorphosis was similar. Although once relatively prosperous, Gabon's economy has been battered by falling oil revenues. In February austerity measures aimed at strengthening the government's accounts provoked debilitating strikes and weeks of unrest in the capital of Libreville. Even before the cutbacks took effect, civil servants had not been paid for almost three months.

In March President Omar Bongo, in power since 1967, acceded to popular demands for a Benin-like powwow to chart a new political course. Following its recommendations, Bongo last month ended his Party of Democratic Gabon's 22- year monopoly on power. He also named a new Prime Minister, Casimir Oye- Mba, formerly a prominent banker, whose Cabinet includes six opposition figures.

In the Ivory Coast the weak spot was falling world prices for cocoa, its chief export. The government unveiled plans in mid-February for sweeping income tax increases to offset the public-sector deficit, sparking two months of often violent strikes and street demonstrations. Little used to overt dissent, the government responded with force. Police and soldiers broke up protests using truncheons, tear gas and occasionally live ammunition. One schoolboy was shot dead.

Overnight President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, 85, whom Ivorians had been & conditioned to regard in reverential terms since he took power at independence in 1960, became an object of vilification. Step by step, the government gave ground. Houphouet-Boigny announced that he would relinquish leadership of the party at its congress later this month. Next the tax hikes were scrapped, and finally, two weeks ago, opposition parties were legalized.

None of these developments are a panacea for Africa. Lip service to reform notwithstanding, it remains unclear just how committed these well-entrenched regimes really are to giving up the total control they have enjoyed. The need for foreign aid and the fear of social unrest drove President Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia's leader for 25 years, to embrace the idea of pluralism, but he has yet to schedule a promised popular referendum. In the case of Mobutu and Houphouet-Boigny, their utterances have contained a hint of "Apres moi, le deluge." These old-timers may be calculating that they can stand back, allow chaos to break out as competing factions scuffle for power, then return triumphantly. Mobutu's police did their part to encourage disarray two weeks ago when they fired on people at an unauthorized political rally in Kinshasa, killing two participants.

Deep-seated ethnic animosities pose a threat to stability as these inexperienced countries move toward competitive democracies. Many African leaders have long maintained that if multiple political parties were permitted, they would inevitably form along tribal lines, inviting bitter and perhaps bloody confrontations. The Ivory Coast is home to at least 60 different ethnicities; Zaire has 200. While this argument has often been overblown to justify repression, ethnic and tribal rivalries inevitably complicate the growth of democracy.

Sub-Saharan Africa is ill prepared for democratic government for other reasons as well. These countries lack the critical mass of educated voters that is essential. They have few democratic roots. "There is no concept of a loyal opposition," notes Smith Hempstone, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya. "Dissent is equated with sedition." Most debilitating, though, is their sheer poverty, which makes it extremely difficult for a pluralist political system to thrive. Says Hempstone: "Africa missed the industrial revolution, which formed the basis of modern democracy in the West."

Another American diplomat based in Africa is concerned that with expectations raised by events in Eastern Europe, Western countries will demand < too much of Africa too soon and that desperately needed aid and debt relief will be hitched to an unrealistically rapid schedule of political change. "Are we going to force something else on this continent that's inappropriate?" asks the diplomat. "Must a country have MULTIPARTY stamped on its forehead before the appropriations committee will pony up?"

If the answer is yes, such a policy might ultimately prove as hostile to the development of democracy as have Africa's ruthless dictators. No government, freely elected or not, will survive long if Africa's evident destiny -- to drown in debt -- is not reversed, and that will require enormous assistance from abroad. With its current debt of $135 billion roughly equivalent to its gross national product and its debt-service obligations equal to half its export earnings, sub-Saharan Africa faces an intolerable situation that has produced instability and promises to breed more. If the West really wants to see democracy take root, it must first give a helping hand to the continent's economy.

With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Nairobi