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In the Past, was the Future Better? by Mia Couto (II)
Here is the second part of the speech given by Mia Couto for the celebration of the 30 Years of Mozambique's Independence in Switzerland. The first part can be read in my previous posting. I hope my translation is not too bad and misleading, I could never rise to the quality needed to translate such an incredible writer. This text is also compulsory for all those who take an interest in Africa, poverty, aid, national debts and so on. Very eye opening. Strongly recommended. Please take some time to browse my Mia Couto section on the left side of the screen.
Dear Sirs,
Finally, almost none of the developed nations has done what has been stipulated almost 30 years ago by the United Nations: to give 0.7 per cent to external aid. In average, that support isn't higher than 0.25 per cent. As you can see, not only poor countries are not complying with international requirements. Even more serious however is that what is given us in one hand is taken away by the other hand. It is estimated that protectionism and subsidies take away 2050 millions of euros from poor countries. That is, much, much more that the amount of aid given. Besides, subsidies to the agriculture in Europe and the U.S. represent a paradox in the logic imposed on us regarding the regulating mechanisms of the economy. In a word, the prophets of market liberalism are not practicing at home what they preach in public.
And even more serious: it has been proved that 40 per cent of the amount believed to go for aiding poor countries goes to pay international consultants. There are today more expatriates in Africa than during the colonial time. That means that part of the money is been absorbed by the circuit of rich countries. Given this, the actual value of aid decreases from about 0.25 per cent of the budget to less than 0.1 per cent. Not as much is being given as the citizens of rich countries believe after all.
The perpetual cycle of debt
African countries are spending and will indefinitely continue to spend more to pay the debt service than they are investing in health or education. From 1980 to 1990 the total of the sub-Saharan debt more than doubled. In 1995, all the exports of all African countries together were not enough to pay their debt service. The issue for them was not to pay or not but to survive or succumb.
When a decision comes to cancel this debt it will be to late. Someone has already called this debt a "war by other means". This silent aggression is not on TV but is responsible for the death of half a million children each year. This war turns Western philanthropy into an announced failure and will end up by discrediting a noble feeling: solidarity. The most miserable in the continent - those who we suppose international aid goes to - will pay, each year, more than they are getting. The truth is simple: the debt is unplayable. No African country will be able to practice its independence if that burden is not eliminated. With this past, there can be no future.
When the HIPC decided in 1995 to alleviate Mozambique's debt, we celebrated. The announcement of that relief was done with pomp, a prize to celebrate our good behavior. But as it turned out, the celebration was bigger that the reason to. 113 million a year became 100 million. The decrease was, after all, insignificant. To qualify Mozambique had to implement Draconian measures of the Economic Readjustment Program. Those measures had dramatic impact in the country. The so talked about relief ended up not releasing funds that could have made a difference on Mozambique's development. On the other hand, what is required of Mozambique today was not required of European countries. After the Great War, the so-called London Agreement accepted Germany to pay off its accumulated debt to the Ally countries at an annual tax of 3.5 per cent of its income. More than that amount was considered a factor of unacceptable choking. However, even with the mentioned reduction of the HIPC, Mozambique will pay 13.5% of its income. That means we are paying 4 times more than was considered acceptable for Germany, in a situation of global crisis when the price of raw materials are lower than ever.
Give the poor a chance to experiment the same chance
Poor countries need the space to have their own debates and trials, to experiment solutions at their own rhythm. We want the freedom of, for instance, being able to decide what is the best moment to privatize public services. That freedom has been, after all, granted to European countries.
International financial institutions have tested in poor countries formulas that have shown to be disastrous. It seemed simple: like in socialist revenue, a change in the property system would change the whole structure of the economy. They have produced, in easy-to-use packages, the packs of structural readjustment, miraculous formulas that would allow us to develop by jumping steps. The same recipe has been applied on Mozambique. All those programs forced prices up, social services subsidies had to be cut and budgets had to be lowered: today this recipe has resulted in increasing poverty and unemployment. Today the general opinion agrees that those programs didn't work well. Who will pay the poor compensation for that failed experiment?
The case of cashew in Mozambique is now accepted as an illustration of those failures that had catastrophic results. Mozambique's cashew was and still is one of the pillars of exports. In a few years the sector was ruined, 80 per cent of the producing factories closed and thousands of workers lost their jobs. In general, the intervention in agriculture suffered from plain naivety: the idea that interfering with prices would end up resolving everything else. The actual packages to decrease total poverty may be the simple continuation, dressed differently, of the Readjustment Programs that failed before.
Moralize what one can demand from others
Part of what we are asked to do isn't historically doable. The poorer countries have to liberalize their economies in shorter periods of time than was ever demanded of wealthier countries. Sometimes, the condition for the release of funds are the compliance with goals that are totally impossible to reach. We are expected to do in 5 years what took others centuries to achieve. Some European nations that charge us for decentralization are far from complying themselves that process of decentralization.
Some of those who demand clearness, transparency and good governing have supported "coup d'états" in Africa, have sponsored the assassination of leaders and have supported aggressions to regimes under the only pretext of being in the wrong side of the Cold War. Still today that aid that rises as a "moral duty" continues to be politically conditioned. Who is talking for instance of the infamous dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea? In 1994, the U.S. embassy closed and the Americans broke with the regime in Equatorial Guinea for considering the regime of Teodoro Obiang unacceptable. A year later, when important oil resources were found there, the U.S. come back in a rush, accepting what had been intolerable before. Oil is a powerful diluent of dictatorships.
Some voices that have asked for morality from the African regimes have been quiet before the injustice of apartheid. My small country was at least able of rising not only against the powerful South African apartheid but also against the Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. To defend that coherence of principles we lost 17 billion dollars, considering only the direct costs of instability cast against our country. That financial and moral debt will not be included in the accounts of the so-called international community. Similarly the stabilizing war that bled the Mozambican nation for almost twenty years won't be included in those accounts. Today Mozambique is mentioned as if that conflict had had endogenous contours only. But it is necessary never to forget: that war was generated in the womb of apartheid, it was there since the beginning recorded in the so-called strategy of total aggression against neighboring countries to South Africa.
In my country the specter of terrorism did not begin on September 11. Thousands of children have been fearfully looking at the ground they're about to walk on. More that one million anti-personal mines have been planted during the war. Thousands of those devices are still spreading terror in the midst of innocent citizens. How many of the rich countries that have mobilized against terrorism have signed the convention to ban the production of anti-personal mines?
An invitation to simulation
The answer to all this should of course come from poor countries. We should have our own agenda, our own strategy. Forced to survive in the present moment we continue to invest in "sound policies": it's good to privatize, decentralize, comply with the macro-economy pointers. Even knowing that it is nothing but a stage production to please donors. It is more important to blindly obey a stipulated value for inflation than to create conditions favorable to employment. We are producing a social and economical atmosphere to qualify to more aid, instead of creating an atmosphere favorable to our own development.
Trendy words line up in a succession of discardable vocabulary: "local communities", "sustainable development", "civil society", "indigenous peoples", "tribal communities". You can't always understand the real substance of those words. But they lead to a reciprocal game of seduction, an endless theatrical production. Soon enough in our countries - those who are required to loose State weight - Ministries will be created created for Civil Society, NGOs and Sustainability.
2. Dear Friends,
In 1984 I was on my balcony when I saw the arrival of the storm. At the time it didn't have a name, but an enormous wind raised dust from the ground and waves at sea, mixing wind and hail, breaking glasses, rising ceilings, spreading destruction. Afterwords, the phenomenon was given a name, a woman's name as it suits any half important storm. The storm was called DOMOINA. My anguish toward the wreckage was: how are we going to rise again, in plain war and in the midst of utter misery? But internal solidarity put the seed on the ground and harvested the results. The support came from within and the country found the strength to rise. In a short while, the wounds were cured and healed. We are talking here of the cooperation of Mozambique with Europe and the World. But the first issue would be how is Mozambique cooperating with itself? How is development being promoted from the inside? This debate needs to happen inside Africa. It is already blooming with young people who are not satisfied with the saturated words of blaming others whenever the internal situation of the continent is being analyzed. The biggest disaster in Africa is not being poor but having been made poor by the alliance between the outside exploiting hand and the conniving hand inside.
Thirty years of asking for aid creates a mental dependency that annuls the spirit of June 15th. A whole generation of educated people already functions according to who they are going to ask from. We are creating Junhitos, people who dreams themselves domestic and domesticated. The most serious thing is that the spreading of Junhitos is happening inside Mozambique, endogenously and indigenously.
Africa is not other people's continent, a simple moral duty, a matter of diplomatic rhetoric. It is true that it is to Africans to regain their credibility as partners. But Africans can't do it within the actual frame of world governments. Real help would be not to give more but to fight together, Europeans and Africans, to change this web of relationships. We need aid that makes us less dependent on aid, we have to build a dependency progressively less dependent.
For the time being, what we do, donors and receivers, is to play a dual valse that hides an irresolvable agony. In the end, the African continent may have a few more schools, a few more hospitals. But it won't have generated its own resources or developed its own productive forces.
Thirty years ago Mozambicans have defeated a powerful army unleashing a struggle of small guerrilla groups. Today the victories we achieve will still be by means of that guerrilla like persistence. There aren't major solutions, major turn arounds that straighten the Earth's axis. Our sovereignty (and also your sovereignty) lies in this crack, that place in between. What we need is more dialog, more participation and reciprocity of money and commitment control mechanisms. What we need is to become real partners.
I end by confessing to a dream, a desire. The thirty years of Independence are not only a moment already lived. They are a time whose potential will still reveal in full. Our past, since 1975, is a future. A seed that will grow into a tree. We want to have the right to enjoy the shade of that big tree. And we want to share that promise of happiness with our brothers in Switzerland. Because the Swiss have also helped us lay the seeds for that future.