Our Floundering Policy in Southern Africa

There are several ways to try to come to grips with the new Administration’s policy toward southern Africa. One can point to new faces, new rhetoric, and some symbolic gestures as signs of change. One can wait for completion of a Presidential Review Memorandum. But after hearing four months of rhetoric in search of a policy, I would advance a more pessimistic and disturbing thesis for consideration. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the major decisions on personnel and issues taken thus far demonstrate an underlying determination to perpetuate the policies of the past--the policies of minimal change and minimal infringement on our economic interests.

We say we seek a peaceful transition to majority rule in Rhodesia. Yet the large majority of present U.S. international policy makers are people working without training in modern historical or cross-cultural analysis. Guided instead by the hoary clichés and ideological assumptions of vested interests, these policy makers have placed the United States well down the road toward insuring precisely the large scale bloody conflict it claims it wants most to avoid.

I hope very much that I am wrong. Like many Americans I was enormously proud and pleased with Secretary Vance’s eloquent address on human rights on April 30. Food, shelter, health, and education should indeed be human rights. International economic aid and other mechanisms should be used to foster such rights and “our strong support [should] go to countries that are working to improve the human condition.”

But on May 2, a State Department letter to a House Member revealed a very different operational model as it reviewed current policy toward South Africa. It stated that using the International Monetary Fund--the international economic arbiter of the non- communist world--as an instrument of change was inappropriate. The IMF "should not be undermined by the injection of noneconomic issues... The IMF is a centerpiece of U.S. international economic and financial policy, with a large responsibility for shaping a free and open international monetary system that is consistent with our own economic philosophy and conducive to our own economic interests. The IMF’s operations have, in fact, been remarkable free of political interference…"

These two State Department productions demonstrate the mixture of idealistic rhetoric, ideological contrivance, and intellectual hypocrisy which goes into policy making. It’s only in textbooks that policy is “formulated” by reasoned, mature judgment based on the sum total of existing evidence. Consider, for example, key southern African issues on which the Carter Administration has demonstrated a policy--Zimbabwe, (the African name for Rhodesia) and Zaire.

Zimbabwe

The State Department and the Congress are now in the process of trying to reach a compromise about the creation and use of the Zimbabwe Development Fund. As explained by Assistant Secretary of State Schaufele (a Kissinger holdover), the Fund is to be launched with a $100 million U.S. contribution, to support a peaceful transition to majority rule. The money would not be available if the transition took place using (further) violence.

Congress rejected the original proposal as undermining its constitutional prerogatives. A compromise policy statement is likely to be the outcome.

The substance of the Administration’s policy, to the extent that it has begun to crystallize, can be drawn from a 17 page memo given by the Administration to a few Congressional offices on April 28. The central conclusion one draws from this State Department paper is that it supports peaceful evolution in Zimbabwe while leaving the present socioeconomic structure largely intact. It speaks of a strong and expanding modern sector with continued white participation, while glossing over substantial income redistribution and African wage increases. This leaves the economy essentially as it is.

What seems appropriate to me is to try to look at the State Department proposal as a poor Zimbabwean would, who has suffered a lifetime of deprivation. The present political economy is precisely what the Africans insist upon restructuring. A solution that does not measure African desires nor meet most or all of African expectations is a prescription for further violence and bloodshed.

Zimbabweans are not accidentally poor whites aspiring to a middle class American consumer existence and willing and able to work with a free enterprise system to get there. And they simply do not think that their conflict “would be a threat to peace and stability in the whole of Africa.” They are increasingly relying on using violence to create something they think is positive.

The State Department proposal argues that it would be economically and politically proper to subsidize a peaceful transition because Zimbabwe will need significant economic aid. But the U.S. will not provide aid if there is a violent transition. Violence is undefined. Would Zimbabwe need no aid in such a transition? In any case, violence is already taking place.

The State Department authors’ concern over the possibility of further violence is mounting to paranoia. It is not simply the implication that U.S. investment might be threatened. Rather, they assert that the only historical choices are between moderation and violence, and that moderation is the only proper choice. But the best students of world history (students like Barrington Moore) have persuasively argued that the costs of moderation have been at least as atrocious as those of revolution, and perhaps a great deal more so. As historical losers who have paid decades of the costs of going without a revolution, Zimbabweans must share those feelings. Do we have the right (or the ability) to impose our norms on their social evolution?

There is as well a pervasive fear of any disorder in the message that the State Department projects. We must maintain “economic security for all so that all will contribute their skills and enthusiasm to development.” That conveys to Zimbabweans that whites should keep their current salaries, maids, and swimming pools. One suspects that blacks would weigh white skills and enthusiasm against their own need for dignity and find the balance quite different.

In sum, the State Department paper ignores the new international economic order debate, and the work of scholars such as Samir Amin and others on unequal exchange, unequal development and other basic world historic processes. Under such a policy, some 105 multinationals would continue to control the modern sector and remit profits. If property is to change hands it would do so by European norms, no matter how its value was originally created. Zimbabwe is viewed, not as a variety of African tribes, but as a unified Anglo-Saxon culture where land tenure rights, obligations, measurement, use, and value are universally agreed upon.

The paper is not, unhappily, some freshman essay in a non-western history course to which one can simply assign a failing grade. It is current U.S. policy, to the extent that we have one. Nowhere in this research or previous AID studies are the truly substantive questions being raised in any historical or cross-cultural frameworks. For instance, how can Zimbabweans deal with foreign capital to their own advantage? How can they carry out a land reform and not create a new black landholding class that perpetuates inequities and stifles development, as is Kenya’s experience?

An optimist could conclude that a few people in the process are beginning to face the more fundamental questions. A dialogue is beginning and much more research will be done. The situation and the policy are likely to evolve. But a realist would look at the inappropriate education of most of the people involved, the superficiality of the media coverage, the way in which the time and attention of most participants is fragmented, the myopic emphasis on political issues instead of economic ones, and the overall non-professionalism of research and analysis that Washington rewards as acceptable. With these perspectives in mind there is less ground for optimism. The tar baby is winning; we are likely to get stuck.

Zaire

The accompanying table, drawn from Administration’s presentations to the Congress, would far more graphically show the total U.S. monetary investment in Zaire if it included IMF allocations, private bank loans, and multinational corporation activities.

The IMF has just announced an $85 million stabilization package, and New York’s Citibank is heading an effort by some 98 U.S. and foreign banks to put together $250 million more during 1977 for yet another loan to try to stave off the bankruptcy of President Mobutu Sese Seko’s government. This, in essence, is U.S. foreign policy toward Zaire. The continuity from Republican to Democratic Administration is essentially unflawed.

American policy toward Zaire has been, in fact, essentially unchanged since this country helped create the present government to end the civil war of the early 1960s. General Mobutu Sese Sekois to stay in power because he is a “moderate” and a consistently of international economic interests. The vast mineral wealth (copper, cobalt, diamonds, etc.) continues to flow overseas, a small bureaucratic and military elite siphon off most of the wealth that stays in the country, and conditions for the poor rural Zairians (about 75 percent of the population) grow steadily worse. It is one of the most anti-human development models in the world; thus, the Carter Administration’s initial efforts at a Zaire policy are instructive.

The multifaceted and deeply rooted economic disintegration in Zaire that resurfaced in 1975 continued unabated as the new administration took office. When Lunda (Katanga) exiles began a civil war in Shaba province in early March, the incompetence of the Zairian government response caused new tremors in Western financial circles.

Washington did not respond to Zaire’s request for more military aid. Indeed, when an Administration witness told Senator Clark that M-60 tanks were part of the previously planned Fiscal Year 1978 military aid package and an uproar ensued, President Carter was able to make another symbolic gesture of caution by withdrawing that part of the package, though not reducing the amount. But Washington was not in any way cutting Zaire’s actual military support, which was coming primarily from Morocco and elsewhere.

The executive branch in recent months has seem preoccupied less with Zaire’s military problems than its economic ones. The State Department is in nearly daily contact with Citibank’s Vice President Hamilton Meserve who appears to be heading the effort of international financiers. There is “reasonable coordination,” a State Department official told the Washington Post. “Our interests are not identical, but they are not opposed and they are not separate.” Fear that Zaire’s bankruptcy would set a precedent seems to outweigh general skepticism about future economic health among all concerned.

The Congress has paid scant attention to Zaire’s economic woes this spring. Its focus has been on the fighting and on potential or actual American military involvement. Principal advocate of diminishing aid has been Congressman Don Bonker (D. Wash.), a second term member of the Africa subcommittee. Bonker sought to cut the entire $30 million in military credit sales on narrow military grounds. (Some $26 million of prior year funds were still unspent and could be used over the next 18 months.) But Congressman Charles Diggs (D. Mich.), subcommittee chair man, pushed through a compromise cut of $15 million, and that prevailed.

In the Senate, a Foreign Relations subcommittee voted, over Senator Humphrey’s and Senator Clark’s apparent objections, to cut $10 million from the $30 million military aid request and add it to economic aid to Zaire. Supposedly this is a signal to President Mobutu to get on with economic reform.

The executive and legislative branches and the international banks are not, fortunately, the only forces at work trying to shape United States policy toward Zaire. The academic community of Zaire specialists has been very active. They argue against the idea that Mobutu can or should be maintained, or that the U.S. should assist him. In a half dozen professional papers, two congressional testimonies, and a briefing, they have reached a nearly unanimous conclusion that stability in this form of society is impossible and is against the long term interests of the majority of Zairians and Americans.

In very summary form, their arguments run in this fashion. The U.S. should stand for principles, not individuals. Mobutu is likely to fall from internal problems within a year or two. U.S. policy should be one of disengagement so that ties with new leaders are easy to build. We don’t have to repeat the Angola debacle; any Zairian government will want aid and trade and have to consider U.S. interests with these in mind. Open-ended support of Mobutu greatly limits the possibility of rapprochement with Angola. A neutral line for the U.S. would pay far more heed to the positions of Nigeria and Tanzania, bend over backwards to prevent even the appearance of further CIA adventurism in Zaire, and begin to recondition the rhetoric, norms, and structures of international corporate activity.

Zaire’s internal flaws are many. The vast maldistribution of wealth and power have been created and sustained by the needs and lures of international capital. The fundamentally selfish political vision of the local elite is largely the product of these forces. Periodic debt rescheduling cannot patch over structural flaws indefinitely; even the World Bank sees a growing resource gap in a less and less viable economy. Corruption and a continuing management crisis undercut reforms. Mobutu is reportedly on Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s wealthiest people. The example set at the highest level is emulated at every lower one.

The central issues are, however, ethical and human. Executive branch portrayals of abuses of political rights are considerably understated. Abuses are pervasive, say the independent specialists. But the core violations of human rights are economic. As a Sojourners piece showed last year (January 1976), the poor rural majority, prey to an urban-guided market and price system, are starving. Any public agency of the U.S. government, according to the standards set by Secretary Vance’s speech on April 30, should oppose actions by the IMF, Citibank, and others to sustain such a status quo. If people in our public process could envision such political choices as a trade off between profits to private U.S. firms and deaths and misery for 16 to 18 million rural Zairians, the core issue would begin to crystallize.

These forces--the multinational banks and corporations, the IMF and World Bank, actors in the legislative and executive branch, the media, and interested private citizens--are thus struggling to perpetuate or redefine U.S. policy toward Zaire and that society’s future. As one tries to gauge the short term prospects for any contestant, it is worth remembering the track record of the State Department in ignoring the perspectives of outside specialists on the Indochina issue and, more recently, regarding Angola. By the design of some and inertia of many, we’re on the losing side, stuck to the tar baby again.

Policy comes from profoundly rooted normative and ideological assumptions, from cultural and political compromise, from the competition of institutional and, economic forces, and from the will, courage, creativity, and integrity of individuals. United States policy toward southern Africa is: unlikely to change swiftly or easily. The forces of custom and culture constrict the possible boundaries of change no matter what the gravity or nature of the issue at hand. For those who seek a more socially responsible core to American policy in Africa, it would appear that far more effort and analysis must go toward under standing how policy is created and how that process itself should be changed.

There is as yet in Washington very little public consciousness of the degree of conflict between generations among foreign policy analysts and how it affects policy. Cross-cultural analysis and area studies training are largely products of academic advances of the 1960s; Americans did virtually no African studies prior to that decade. The nature of historical analysis has undergone basic changes in the last 15 years. Economics is collapsing and a new synthesis is far from visible. The older generation now in power overestimates the difficulty of absorbing these new fruits of scholarship and finds the notion threatening. These people enforce ideological, linguistic, normative, and analytic standards for their young recruits, who must either con form or be shut out of the process.

Washington has institutionalized a system in which new ideas move into the mainstream of the debate with the speed of a glacier. The system certainly needs a corps of people who can shape and mold ideas into political positions that persuade a majority. But it equally needs the iconoclastic and creative individuals who will challenge conventional wisdom with substantive data demonstrating other answers. Washington’s foreign policy establishment, despite its own perceptions, does not have that balance. Vietnam clearly showed that. Each institution of the system needs people in the process doing original work and serving as brokers for the ideas of would-be active citizens elsewhere.

These generic problems are the heart of the United States foreign policy dilemma with the rapid evolution of the events in southern Africa. The parameters of conventional wisdom are confined to analysis and options to maintain the status quo. Stabilization is the basic response to any situation. Thus, when faced with a situation of inevitable change, Washington is unable to articulate more than superficial rhetoric in support of majority rule.

As the State Department’s Zimbabwe paper showed, our policy of change would be the incorporation of more blacks into a white economy, not the creation of a new black economy. In Zaire, it is inconceivable to the U.S. that we should stop supporting Mobutu, because we cannot see (or control) what might come next. In other words, within conventional parameters of debate there is no theoretical basis for any policies beyond the status quo (or those making only incremental change).Surely we should have more faith in our own ability to challenge the unknown and envision a world with human rights for all.

When this article appeared, Guy Gran was a freelance consultant on international economic affairs. His article “Is poverty really inevitable?” appeared in the April issue.