Herbert W Armstrong

According to a report by the United Nations Children's Fund, published last week, nearly five million African children have died during 1984 and another five million have been disabled or stunted in growth by malnutrition and disease. There was no breakdown given in the number of deaths directly attributable to the prolonged sub-Saharan drought, but it certainly is a major factor. Yet even in "good times" childhood deaths take a tremendous toll on the earth's poorest continent.

In the famine-wracked country of Ethiopia, estimates are still fairly certain that, despite Western food aid, about one million people will die before the current drought/famine cycle runs its course.

Incidentally, Ethiopia's Marxist ruler, President Mengistu Haile Miriam, recently thanked President Chernenko for the Soviet Union's generous "fraternal assistance" in helping Ethiopia during its current national calamity. Mengistu also appealed for more military hardware in prosecuting the multi-front civil war. Other officials in Addis Ababa sharply criticized Western countries for sending too little food aid too late. And in the ultimate twist of irony, Ethiopian officials spurned an offer from South Africa to send 29 doctors plus tons of food and medical supplies. They wouldn't accept any aid from a "racist, imperialist" regime, they said. (Ironically, it was South African military forces who liberated Ethiopia from Italian troops in World War II, the only time Ethiopia had been occupied in its long history. It was never a European colony, so it can't blame its problems on colonialism.)

Africans are now dependent upon foreign sources of food for one out of every five meals; 60 per cent of the sub-Saharan region's 359 million people daily have insufficient food. Nearly all experts believe that Africa will be dependent upon food imports for the interminable future. We are thus very likely into an end-time situation of more or less permanent famines and pestilences (Matt. 24:7). And after the Green Revolution fails in India in a few years (Union Carbide won't be making any more pesticides there), add that overpopulated sub-continent to the food-short list.

Recently the LOS ANGELES TIMES ran an excellent in-depth series of articles for four days (December 16-19, 1984) on "Africa — The Harsh Realities Dim Hope." Here are highlights from that series, written from various parts of Africa by staff writer Charles T. Powers. To begin with are excerpts from the December 16 article datelined Nairobi, Kenya:

The economies of most nations on the continent could serve as case studies of slow collapse. Food production is losing ground to an exploding population.... Poor government is the continent's greatest handicap. Instability is a plague more constant than drought.

In the past five years, there have been violent coup attempts in 12 of Black Africa's 39 countries, eight of them successful. In the quarter-century of the independence era, more than 70 heads of state have been forcibly removed from office. Thirteen have been assassinated. Many of those who remain in power seem intent mainly on enriching themselves....

The population of Black Africa is growing at the rate of 3.1 per cent a year, faster than any region of the world. In some countries, notably Zimbabwe and Kenya, the rate exceeds 4 per cent. Kenya's 19 million people will become 40 million before the year 2000; no one has the slightest idea how Kenya will feed those 40 million on the meager resources now apparent. The present sub­ Saharan African population of 359 million will triple before the year 2020, the World Bank says. The pressure on African cities is building remorselessly. In 1960 there were three cities in Black Africa with a population of more than 500,000. Now there are 28....

Per capita food production has been declining for 20 years, to the point that one person in five is now fed by imported food. Some of the largest declines in food production have taken place in countries with the greatest agricultural potential, such as Nigeria and Zambia. These were countries that once raised enough food to export.

And the hunger in Africa spreads. The World Bank estimates that the number of "severely hungry and malnourished people" increased this year to 100 million. In Liberia, one child in five is stunted. In poorer regions of Zambia, the bank says, "height for age ratios have fallen in all age categories."...

Repressive governments dominate a continent where presidents tend to rule for life unless they shot out of office.... The main concern of too many governments is to stay in power. The focus is on the immediate future. Far-sighted planning in the fields of agriculture, family planning and education is rare. Across Africa, the leading employer remains government — generally wasteful, unproductive, moribund — which puts it at once in the conflicted state of being both the burden and the livelihood of most of the people....

Where African leaders are remembered, they rarely are remembered for their achievements in power, but rather for their struggles to attain it. [Kwame Nkrumah's most famous dictum incidentally, was "seek ye first the political kingdom."]

In his December 17 dispatch, correspondent Powers wrote, this time, from Dayes, Mali:

Why is Africa going hungry? The reason in almost every case...is government.... A common denominator in African food policy is to go for the political expedient, the quick fix: The first concern of most African governments is to provide cheap food for the growing number of urban dwellers who can topple a government at times of extreme dissatisfaction. Official price ceilings on foodstuffs have worked to drive farmers out of business by failing to provide them with a reasonable return — or any return — on the food they produce. Over time, farmers respond by producing only enough for their families....

In 60 per cent of the nations in sub-Saharan Africa, the government has a monopoly on the distribution of fertilizer and seeds.... These government agencies are...frequently out of tune with the needs of the people they are supposed to serve. One month before planting time, farmers may find that no one in the government has remembered to order fertilizer.

Across the continent, governments have failed to develop or enforce conservation policies. In Rwanda, trees are being cut 10 times faster than they are being replaced; in Kenya, five times faster. The vanishing forest cover exacerbates soil erosion and water supply problems. When rain does come to Africa, it usually comes with force. With nothing to hold it back, it floods into rivers, carrying topsoil with it, leaving the land and the people on it ever more vulnerable to drought and famine.

Author Powers does not deal with two other major impediments to food production — tribal tradition and the approach to life of the various peoples. In BLOOD RIVER, one of the best histories of South Africa ever written (published in 1982), author Barbara Villet recounts the story of an Orange Free State farmer, Jaap de Villiers, who is boss to some 300 Sotho and Zulu farmhands. Said the Afrikaner farmer:

A few years ago, there was a famine in Lesotho. We sent up a tractor and a team to show them how to improve their yields. We planted their mealies [corn] and harvested their crop and then left them the tractor to do the same next year. Well, when we went back the next year, they'd done nothing. They told us they still had enough from the previous year and didn't need to plow and plant.

From Monrovia, Liberia, Powers wrote this in the December 18 issue of the TIMES:

Political stability remains an elusive goal.... Power changes hands only by force. In 25 years, only two African presidents, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Amadou Ahidjo of Cameroon, have retired peacefully....

Tribalism remains a dominant political force.... Tribal animosities are the source of frequent bloodshed, some of it...almost genocidal in nature.... It is the major cause of strife in Zimbabwe, where the Ndebele people in the southwest of the country say they were under severe pressure at the hands of government troops, majority Shongas, for much of the last year or so. It has been the root of the horrors of Uganda — where the numerically predominant tribe, the Baganda, have been shut out of power by President Milton Obote....

The assumption almost everywhere (a notable exception being President Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania) is that African presidents are exorbitantly wealthy. And the presidents themselves do nothing to contradict the assumption, but rather act as if great wealth were their right [note Matt. 20:25].... Occasionally, intellectual friends of Africa...suggest that what Africa needs is a new system of government....

The man who must be considered the most distinguished leader in Black Africa remains Nyerere of Tanzania... [who continues to promote] socialist ideals.... It is Nyerere's sincere belief that the world's poor should be subsidized by the world's rich.... After his recent appointment as chairman of the Organization of African Unity, he said that Africa's $150-billion debt was "a great weapon" over the rest of the world. "We should just not pay it," he said.

Journalist Powers concluded his series with a December 19 dispatch from Lagos, Nigeria:

There is a crisis of spirit in Africa today. Twenty-five years after independence swept the continent, the sense of gloom, of ground giving way, is widespread....

A nurse named Felicia works at the polyclinic that receives patients for the main hospital in...the capital city [of one West African nation]. A strong, sad-faced young woman, she spoke after work one day.... "We have no drugs," she said. "No bed sheets. No paper to write down the histories of the patients. The doctors are disgusted. There is no pain-killer, no aspirin. The lights go off and on all day.... The rats are invading us. We have no stretchers.... We have no needles for giving injections, but we have no drugs so it doesn't matter. If we get disposable syringes, we boil them and use them again. When you go to the hospital, if you have to go, you take along your own sheets and pillows and a bucket — just to bathe. There is no hot water, no dressing for wounds."...

Abena Ohenena is a businesswoman who sells...handicrafts and art­work in a shop kept splendidly attractive at enormous effort amid the general decay of [the same city]. Her great fear, she says, is that "I don't see any future for us here, any future for our grandchildren.... Too many people don't want to take the responsibility for what has gone wrong. When in doubt, they bring out the old colonial masters to whip. Well, I can remember that time — there were buses for the people then, and they ran regularly and they were clean. They lighted the street lights at 6 p.m. every evening. The drains were clean and did not smell."...

"They say we have 52 billionaires in the Ivory Coast, and they are all politicians or former politicians," said Joseph Anorna, a 35-year-old businessman in Abidjan, the capital, himself the descendant of an Ivorian political family. "I could take you around Plateau here (a skyscrapered downtown business district), and I'll show you who owns what. In America, you have to get rich to go into politics. In Africa, you go into politics to get rich. This is why you find people who are worried about violence in Africa's future. The ordinary people see these things."...

An Ivorian economist...added..."At independence, the leaders said the white people are exploiting us, so let's change the system. But what happened was that when our own people took power, they set up their own oligarchies, but went on playing the same game with their own rules.... We have this pyramid in Africa with people at the top just taking the cream out of various African countries. Third World leaders are enriching the banks of Switzerland.

"It is time to change. If we don't, it is going to result in instability. The pressure is building up and, one day, it is going to blow.... Decade No.3 in Africa, in my opinion, is going to be very violent."

Weade Kobbah-Wureh, 29, a Liberian journalist, says she blames political instability for a general eroding of authority. "All the reasons they give for staging a coup are acted out by the new regime within months after they take power," she said recently. "It erodes respect for authority, and you see the results in the home, the schools, in social organizations. There is spiritual crisis here. "...

"No, Africa is not making it [said a taxi driver in Accra, Ghana].... Look at Ghana, and what do you see? Nothing. This country is rich. It has gold, diamonds, bauxite, but it is still poor. Why? Because we want to go our own way, by ourselves, and it is not possible."

"Politically, we are not making it [said a journalist in Monrovia, Liberia].... A fundamental fault in Africa is greed.... It starts at the top, and everybody follows, and it spreads like an infection. We have been too greedy and too self-centered."

"No, black Africa is not making it [concluded a university professor, also in Monrovia]. I think one can say that without equivocation.... We saw Africa full of hope in the '60s. Independence was perceived to be the framework for political and economic self-actualization.... Africa is going to require, for one thing, a new style of leadership that will instill a new orientation to government and country, a way of thinking that will permeate the way we work, the way we think about public property, the way we establish public accountability."

Given the appalling state of affairs in Black Africa, one would think that the last thing anyone in his right mind would want is to "liberate" the only viable society south of the Sahara, South Africa. Nevertheless, the push is on, especially in the United States, to try to force the Republic of South Africa to restructure itself as a unitary, "majority rule, one man one vote" government. This ignores the fact that South Africa is in Africa and must be viewed in the context of Africa, not of North America.

If there is any slight ray of hope for Africa, say the experts, it is that, as some of the above comments indicate, there are perceptible beginnings of self-examination underway. Not all aspects of the pre-independence era were bad, for example. Also it is dawning on many that there was too much post-colonial reaction. Many countries adopted various forms of state-controlled economies, partly out of reaction to the capitalism of the Western European societies. But everywhere on the continent, state socialism has failed economically. Hence the growing calls for a "new system of government."

Unrecognized by African leaders and populaces today is the fact that the germs of that "new system" have already been planted. And throughout Africa, God has called and is in the process of education the future “new style leaders” of the continent.

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau