Things Still Fall Apart

By Nelio Dorea De Oliveira

Things Still Fall Apart shows that Africa is a neglected and exploited continent. Since it was invaded c.1500 by Europeans, it has accumulated only 1 per cent of the world’s wealth, despite containing 16 per cent of the world’s population and immense natural and human resources.

This collection of memories by a Brazilian economist, from his 20 years working on the continent, explains that this relative stationary situation is caused mostly by political decisions. Political decisions made on behalf of domestic rulers and rich countries; meanwhile, the poor have no voice or power.

The book challenges many historical narratives of the continent and unveils issues such as negative primitive accumulation and the politics of sexuality. The findings of this book reflect the reality of the poor and may be considered alarming and challenging – they need special attention and funding. If not, further stagnation, civil conflicts and migratory waves will persist. As a result, suffering for poor and future costs for rich countries will increase.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839524417

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First published 2022

Copyright © Nelio Dorea De Oliveira 2022

The right of Nelio Dorea De Oliveira to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

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ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-440-0

ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-441-7

Cover design by Kevin Rylands

Internal design by Andrew Easton

Printed and bound in the UK

This book is printed on FSC certified paper

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In homage to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Achebe acknowledges the origins of his title as coming

from

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

*******

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?: How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?

Latin quotation; this sentence is the first of the discourses of the Roman Cicero against Catiline in 63 BC. The phrase is used to this day, when one wants to manifest impatience, disapproval of a fact or attitude that persists, despite being absurd, in the face of a reality that cannot be ignored.

Translation by Nelia Padilha

I have had the pleasure of inviting two experts to contribute with their specific fields to this book:

Dr Lawal Umar – Former ADB Principal Livestock Expert, Nigeria

Chenedu Innocent Okafor – Writer and Publisher, Nigeria.

This book is dedicated to

my parents and my wife

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Hillel Ticktin, my mentor and friend.

I would also like to thank to Dr Paul Thomas and Nelia Padilha for the incentive they provided to write this book.

I’m grateful to Frances Prior-Reeves for her work on the manuscript.

I should also thank the following friends and colleagues who read the draft and provided comments:

Paulo de Moraes Farias, Rogerio Silva de Matos, Linda de Souza, Chinedu Okafor, Umar Lawal, Adriena Nunes-Hanel, Angela Mendes de Almeida, Anna de Oliveira, Trudy de Oliveira, Joe Gebra, Gordon Smith, Inigo e Bego Garayalde, Jonathan Bloch, and Ian Smith.

FOREWORD

Africa is a large and much diversified continent, forgotten by the rest of the world.

It is the size of 1. USA, 2. China, 3. India, 4. Eastern Europe, 5. Germany, 6. Italy, 7. France, 8. Spain, 9. Japan, 10. Portugal, 11. Belgium, 12. Holland, 13. Switzerland and 14. UK (the size of Madagascar), all taken together.

Africa’s 1.3 billion people are sparsely distributed on the land.

However, despite all this potential land, mineral, forests, water and people, Africa has only 1% of the value of the world’s wealth.

This short book is about this paradox.

Because of the size and diversity, it’s difficult to write about Africa. So, my book is focused on some African issues that I have witnessed in different parts of the continent.

Also, I think that the world doesn’t know enough about the continent. In this book, I hope to share as much information as possible to make people aware of the continent’s reality.

My narrative is eclectic, covering my favourite themes, including lesser-known issues and some surprises. As all the social issues are linked, I included in the following essays themes outside Africa and also in different areas of knowledge.

I could only write this because I have worked for the African Development Bank, as an economist, for 17 years. Travelling and meeting different people enlarged my knowledge of African human problems. After retiring from the Bank in 2004, I have continued travelling to the continent, doing research and teaching.

Re-evaluating historical facts and assessing the main actors intervening in Africa are the main objectives of this book. To describe the actors and events faithfully, I present many quotations, as I’ve tried to reproduce the narratives of the original writers as closely as possible.

By the end of the book, the evidence and my interpretation of the facts that I have witnessed on the terrain should provide, I hope, a more realistic view of the suffering of the poor. It may help to build a new agenda for Africa.

It has been a solitary endeavour. I’m happy with the results. I hope that the readers will continue the task of rediscovering Africa and improving the life of the poor.

CONTENTS

I – The Depart to Africa

II – Consciousness and Literature

III – Slavery and Primitive Accumulation

IV – A Modern Inquisition – World Bank and the IMF

V – The New Colonisers: The Multinationals

VI – The Politics of Health and Sexuality

VII – Well-being in Africa. When?

VIII – Why is Africa behind in Agriculture?

IX – The Nature of Ethnic Conflicts in Nigeria

X – The Depart from Africa

THING STILL FALL APART.

QUO USQUE TANDEM?

I – THE DEPART TO AFRICA

A man lives again through his children, the tree he planted, the words he has uttered

Massongo oral tradition

This book is about the memories of my activities in Africa, while working as an economist at the African Development Bank, in conjunction with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, during the period of 1987-2004.

After retiring in 2004, I have consulted with the UNDP, the AfDB, Goldman & Sachs, some consultancies and taught at the University of Tunis. Also, I have continued my research on poverty in Africa.

WHY AFRICA MATTERS TO ME

Africa is a complex continent in slow transition to a possible better human condition. It has political diversity, 54 countries, over 3,000 different ethnic groups/cultures, and immense untapped wealth. In addition, it has many conflicts and too many foreign interventions. All this makes it difficult to assess its direction.

Despite the immensity of the continent and its problems, I’m going to focus only on my activities during the 17 years that I’ve lived there, in Côte d’Ivoire and Tunisia, with my family. I’ve worked in about a dozen countries and visited many.

In 2021, about half a billion of the African people are still living in extreme poverty, or 36% of the population. This book will attempt to explain it and investigate what can be done.

I have always been intrigued by the continent’s human and ecological vulnerability.

During my work as an economist, teaching and researching, I’ve realised that many African historical narratives need to be revisited. The following essays are the results of investigative research and working in the field with a number of local and international organisations.

However, what has given me great pleasure, and taught me the most, was the contact with ordinary people, of all ages and origins, in different African cultures.

The essays present diversified scenarios, mostly focused on the suffering of the African poor. The book’s genesis is my dissatisfaction with the way in which national governments, international organisations, multinationals and some countries treat the ordinary African people.

I would like to humbly say that I am neither an academic economist nor an African historian. I am someone who believes that most of the history of Africa has been manipulated and mythologised to hide the 400 years of extensive exploitation of its human and natural resources. This has impoverished its ordinary people.

Yet, there have been new studies that are correcting old views and some of them will be presented in this memoir. By and large the African continent and its communities have been poorly explained, poorly represented and poorly served in terms of ensuring the betterment of the ordinary people.

Since the 1500s, Africa has hardly been allowed to accumulate wealth. On the contrary, she has been depleted of most of her wealth by slavery, corrupt governments and foreign institutions.

Above all, slavery and colonisation have prevented the development of a capitalist foundation to promote development.

Therefore, Africa missed the ‘great leap forward’ experienced by Western Europe, North America, and some Asian countries.

Some countries in Latin America, such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, jumped onto ‘the bus of growth’, although only for a short journey. Many South American countries have relatively declined. Brazil used to be the 6th GDP, in 2012, surpassing the UK. Today Brazil is the 12th in the league of biggest GDP.

However, in Africa there is a widening gap of wealth between the continent and others, as presented by The Future of Africa, by Dr. Jakkie Cilliers, 2021, which is discussed later.

The ‘golden age’ of capitalism has passed, and Africa has missed the party. Today capitalism has perhaps entered in a period of decline (cf. Hillel Ticktin), despite some bright sparkles in China and in the Gulf.

In the words of Eric Hobsbawm in Age of Extremes (1994, p. 363), ‘Many investors and entrepreneurs discovered that large parts of it (the world) were of no profitable interest to them, unless they could bribe its politicians and civil servants.’ The historian continues, ‘A disproportionately large number of these countries were to be found in the unhappy continent of Africa.’

I agree with Hobsbawm. In my almost 20 years working in Africa, I could note that many of its ordinary citizens were unhappy about living in the continent. Above all, they complained of poor health, education, food, housing and the lack of jobs.

Only African political leaders and their sycophants would disagree with this general sense of unhappiness in the continent, despite the alive music existing in the continent. One of my heroes in the continent was and is the Nigerian Fela Kuti, a great musician and activist. To reveal this sense of unhappiness of the poor is the motivation of this book.

WHAT DO I MEAN BY ‘THE POOR’?

I’m not happy with this expression ‘poor’ used to describe the great part of the African people. I’m aware that many people are not either. It is vague, opaque. So, I need to unpack it. Poverty is a complex human state characterised basically by the lack of jobs and precarious housing, unhealthy food, poor or lack of medical assistance and education.

I don’t agree with the simplistic US$1, 2 or 3 a day to define poverty used by the World Bank and IMF. It is a nonsense! The poor can be seen daily when you walk in any African city or countryside. The World Bank and the IMF is counting them since I have arrived in Africa in 1987. Quo usque tandem Catiline, abusing our patience? No false statistics. Actions, please.

Specifically, in Abidjan or in any African city, in Deux Plateaux, an upmarket area, you can see groups of people living in plots of land in between the middle-class houses. They live perhaps in the same or better than many Africans in the 16th century in their local communities, although some of them have today electricity and a mobile phone.

Generally, the urban poor are migrants from the rural areas or from other countries who move to Abidjan in search of jobs. In Abidjan, just in front of my house, there was a piece of land that was occupied by one or two families from Burkina Fasso. They were dozens of people from an extended family who lived there. They had built a precarious house without electricity or sanitation. And survived, with the men working as cooks, ‘boys’ or watch-men and the women looking for the kids.

Or, sometimes you see in Deux Plateaux a bigger piece of land occupied by several dozens of people in small tin huts. Small shanty towns spread over the city. The population has menial jobs or are unemployed. This is poverty that the government, middle class or international organisations don’t care about. They are invisible for the rich that use them.

Generally in the country side, most of the people are poor. They occupy land that belongs to the State, and live from what they plant with little surplus. As far as I could see, they hardly had infrastructure. Although, now many have a mobile phones. This book tries to make them visible.

From the present attitude of the foreign and African ruling classes, and poor level of consciousness for the people, I can’t see much development happening soon in Africa to improve the poor’s condition. But, it can happen.

The decline of capitalism could put the rich countries in a stronger defensive mode and increase the level of exploitation of the workers inside and outside their countries. Decline is a controversial concept. Decline occurs, according to Hillel Ticktin, ‘when it becomes increasingly difficult for capitalism to deal with its contradictions. Its solutions become increasingly counterproductive. This difficult-to-accumulate capital is reflected in the low productivity. See Critique no 39, 2006.

The concept of decline of capitalism has become more visited, due perhaps to the recent economic crises. In the discussion forum of the 27th Annual Conference of the Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) the theme was ‘Does Capitalism Have a Future?’. The authors Wolfgang Streeck, Craig Calhoun, Polly Toynbee, and Amitai Etzioni discussed capitalism as an evolving historical formation.

One of the themes was that capitalism poses ungovernable contradictions and points to an end of a viable historical formation. See Socio-Economic Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, January 2016, Pages 163–183. It was discussed in 2015 at 27th Annual Conference of the Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) hosted at the London School of Economics.

The discussion presented recent work on capitalism with unmanaged contradictions and thus point to an end of capitalism as a viable historical formation.

In addition the book ‘Does Capitalism Have A Future?’ by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun, also explore the possibility of the collapse of global capitalism.

The long situation of Africa, where a great part of the population are unemployed or in absolute poverty, maybe a situation which results from the declining capitalism reflected in the continent. On top of poor economic performance, we have wars, drug smuggling, like in Guinea Bissau, migrations, and extended informal sectors.

On the political side, decline creates room for the right wing governments, which attempts to squeeze the workers and increase profitability. Trump; Bolsonaro in Brazil; Modi in India; Al-Sisi in Egypt; Ouattara in Côte d’Ivoire – these are the new models based on pro-profit, anti-poor and anti-minorities models.

Although, there have been some expressions of popular discontent in many countries such as Sudan, Nigeria, Angola and South Africa, as we can follow in the media. Interventions of the Bretton Woods institutions or of the multinationals haven’t done much to improve the lives of poor people in Africa, as it will be discussed later. The small African ruling circles live well. The majority of the Africans suffer.

Poverty in Africa needs special attention and funding in order to improve people’s capacity to stand up and build their continent. Otherwise, further