Last spring, I attended an event about the new positive resource contracts of Liberia, held at Revenue Watch, an international NGO which seeks transparency in the finances of governments with natural resources. During the Q & A, a man got up to congratulate a Liberian official there, and to pray that in his own country, Guinea, the new military government would have the wisdom to follow suit.
No such luck. Guinea, with its huge deposits of bauxite (aluminum), gold and iron, has always hit below its weight. After a hopeful but fitful start, the new President, Captain Moussa Dada Camara, sat by in September as troops went on a rampage slaughtering and raping civilians in the streets. Even the African Union condemned it. This week he seems to have barely survived an assassination attempt, and is currently in Morocco for medical treatment, they say. But according to Reuters, mining giants Anglo Gold Ashanti, Rio Tinto and others have not been affected by the violence. That would be politically stupid.
This parallels the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where chaos continues to flare and subside in the eastern part. The war there, a spillover from the Rwandan genocide more than 15 years ago, has cost five million lives and untold misery as the weak leader, Josef Kabila, son of the former (and also weak) Laurent Kabila, remains unable to bring an enduring stability to the region.
Much has been made of Congo’s free-for-all mining of gold, coltan and other minerals, which are exported through only-too-willing neighbors like Uganda and Rwanda. It’s the classic greed-versus grievance/chicken-and-egg story: do they mine to keep a war going that they believe and have a job fighting in? Or is the war is just an excuse to make money from illegal mining?
What is indisputably true is that parts of Africa (the despotic parts) are witnessing the law of genetics at work: the original hybrid tyrant may have been strong, but the descendants are much weaker and unpredictable. The Big Men of Africa (totally unmourned) are replaced by the Little Big Men: Camara, Bongo II (Gabon), Kabila, and someday, Teodoro Obiang (Equatorial Guinea). The original strong men who held their country together through terror, corruption and tyranny are followed by those who cannot even do that.
The age of the despot is over — those who can muster the violence to seize power rarely have the ability to run a viable economy. Historically those with resources relied on advanced industrial companies to translate it into cash. As the world moves into ever more technological economies, the miserable shrunken dictators (and they are not only in Africa) and their countries remain unhappily stuck in the past.
