Africa's misery stems from human failings

IN THE past month, as the former dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin, was slowly slipping towards an unmourned death in Saudi Arabia, I had the opportunity to meet two of the new generation of African leaders, President Mbeki of South Africa and President Obasanjo of Nigeria.

Thabo Mbeki is a small, dapper man who favours elegantly cut western suits and who speaks softly - and surprisingly for the democratically elected leader of Africa’s richest country, almost with a degree of shyness. President Obasanjo, on the other hand, is a bigger and louder figure, much more animated in his speech. He favours the elaborately colourful traditional Nigerian cloth dress.

But in their very different ways, these two men from the two most powerful black African states personify both the hope and the hopelessness of Africa a generation after Amin was forced from power and some 50 years after the imperial powers began to get out of Africa on the breath of the winds of change.

FIRST, the good news. Thabo Mbeki is a democrat in a country which has made the painful transition from white minority rule. He lives in the shadow of Mandela, and that is enough to keep most men honest. Meanwhile, in Nigeria - a country impossibly split between Muslim north and Christian south - President Obasanjo’s very existence is proof that military dictatorships (from which Nigeria suffered for years) do not work. They impoverish their countries, feed corruption and lead to the military being hated as parasites and brutalisers. As far as the good news is concerned, that’s about it. Almost everything else these days across Africa looks bleak.

For weeks, Obasanjo has promised 1,300 peace-keepers to go to Liberia as part of a west African force to stop the country’s civil war, which has raged on and off since 1990. The problem, as the president explained it to me, was that his men could not get into Liberia without outside assistance. He means the kind of big transport planes that the Americans use. When I pressed him on this, he said a previous peace-keeping role in the Nineties had cost 1,000 Nigerian lives and billions of dollars while Nigeria had not received any debt relief from rich western countries. The result is that peacekeepers which were talked about in June and said to be ready to go in July, by early August still had not set off.

I asked the president whether under such circumstances there were African solutions to Africa’s problems. The British had brought order to Sierra Leone and the French brought order to Cote D’Ivoire. It might take the Americans to bring order to Liberia.

President Obasanjo replied that he never claimed there were African solutions to all Africa’s problems.

Well, fine. Except that at the other end of the continent, in Zimbabwe, that is exactly what is being claimed. President Mbeki of South Africa (assisted by President Obasanjo) is supposed to be helping solve the problems of Zimbabwe, which are said to be "internal matters" and a problem for Zimbabweans themselves.

When I talked to President Mbeki, he claimed that talks were going on between the Mugabe government and the opposition. The opposition - (who you might think would know) - denied strongly that any talks were taking place. Meanwhile, President Mbeki presides over a country where AIDS and TB are devastating the most productive young people in a relentless plague made worse by the inability or unwillingness of the government to provide the latest drugs and healthcare advice to those who are suffering.

And so, 50 years after de-colonisation began, Africa is a continent of biblical misery. The root cause is human incompetence rather than acts of God or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The famines in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe are largely the creation of men. The destruction of the Congo, of Sierra Leone and Liberia, were all fuelled by greed for diamonds and other resources. Those of us on the outside see Africa as the face of a starving child, an AIDS mother or a drug-addled teenage thug with a Kalashnikov.

For us, too, there is a simple, almost biblical choice. We can pass by, shrug our shoulders and say that Africa is hopeless. Or we can do what we can. I suggest that despite the air of hopelessness, we have no choice but to do what we can.

INCIDENTALLY, when it comes to Africa’s variety, nothing quite prepared me for an interview with a tall black man with an African name I had to interview live on BBC News24 a year or so ago.

"What part of Africa do you come from?" I said as he sat down in the studio.

"Peckham," he replied, in an impeccable Sarf London accent. As Pliny wrote: Out of Africa, always something new.

Gavin Esler is a presenter on BBC2’s Newsnight.