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The tough love solution for basket-case Africa
Arnold Kransdorff, World Net Daily
September 28, 2007

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57873

When the modern history of Africa is written, economic historians will be asking several uncomfortable questions.

Why, over almost 50 years, did the "Aid Industry" never learn from its own experiences? Even, why did it not learn from the tried and tested experience of every other developed country?

The answers will explain why the developed world has wasted trillions of dollars on the world's biggest investment fiasco - and, puzzling, why it continues to do so.

When aid started in the 1960s, the money was intended to grubstake the continent's development out of the colonial era. Countries were poor but not hungry. Today, African countries remain poor, and much of its population starving.

Now considered as an entitlement, the West's largess totals almost $700 billion, equal to several trillion dollars at today's rates. Equivalent to around seven post-World War II Marshall Plans, this is expected to rise by a further $47 billion by 2010, excluding the billions in unconditional cheap loans from China.

For the naïve Westerner, the reasons for this waste of resources are baffling.

The answers come in a new book entitled "Saving Africa!" by John Hollaway. He explains that Africa has not adapted its survival mechanisms to modern times. Throwing money at it has done little except encourage massive corruption - which Africans now also deem as their right (they call it "rent seeking," which the Ethiopian prime minister publicly let slip in September 2000 was the "centrepiece" of African economies) - and a chronic dependency culture.

Hollaway explains that Africa's main impediments are its topsoil and resident life-threatening diseases. The former leaches easily and gives rise to the continent's historic need to be nomadic, while the latter has necessitated relentless procreation to survive. The result is that indigenous wealth is based on livestock ownership, fecund wives and child numbers. His perceptive answer, puzzlingly never seriously considered outside academia, is to release its land - particularly agricultural land - into private ownership, not as leasehold but freehold. Hollaway explains that leasehold may provide access but it does not bestow ownership, a distinction that seems to have passed everyone by.

Overall, there is private land ownership in some cities but virtually nothing in rural areas except in South Africa, which is busy deciding how it can revert. English-speaking countries have the most while land occupancy in French- and Portuguese-speaking regions is mainly leasehold. Generally, governments of whichever colonial origin can declare arrangements void (as in Zimbabwe), so subsistence farming is all that occurs. Land, he insists, must not be communal, which means that the power of tribal chiefs and governments has to diminish.

Such a move would, unlike cows, wives and offspring, provide a more tradable form of personal wealth that could be used as surety for borrowing and which could eventually replace the traditional form of wealth. Importantly, it would allow individuals to create an investment economy without the need for philanthropy. Where the concept becomes even more practical now is with Africa's huge black diaspora, who could divert some of their accumulating foreign earnings into helping to self-fund this conception, as in Zimbabwe, where exiles are erecting new urban suburbs through black market forex deals that provide local currency at upwards of 45 times (yes, 45) the official exchange rate. In similar fashion, Zimbabwe's political elite buy foreign currency at the official rate. They then stealthily procure black market dollars also to enter the vigorous property market, fully realizing that if they did to urban what they're doing to rural, much of their wealth would disappear.

Even though it's on the back of currency windfalls from imposed economic failure, the triumph of individual avarice over official policy confirms that the lawmakers have perfectly understood freehold's principle and that wider Africa's choice to retain 19th century perceptions of wealth for their electorates is disingenuous.

But how does Africa achieve cultural change, when land to an African politician is perceived as irreversibly communal - and, very conveniently, their source of absolute power? Does the Aid Industry declare that enough is enough and, literally, leave Africa to Charles Darwin? Or do they accede to the continent's very own Oliver "Please, sir, can I have some more" Twist?

Hollaway's answer is to experientially learn from the rest of the developed world as well as China, which has belatedly allowed peasants qualified ownership of their land. All have used individual property rights as the basis of their development by providing a bottom-up source of wealth. Subsistence plots could be bought, sold and consolidated into more commercial operations capable of feeding urban populations. Then, with the means acquired, jobs could be generated. Importantly, the cycle is self-generating and wealth is not dependent on the favor - usually family or tribe-directed - of whoever is top dog.

For his roadmap, Hollaway suggests tough love. Because of Africa's xenophobia, Africans themselves, in particular the continent's black diaspora, have to front the efforts to change their homeland cultures by asking their native governments to adopt freehold policies. In fact, lawmakers would be told that development assistance would be entirely dependent on citizen ownership of land. Possibly using an international agency as their initial operating umbrella, the diaspora and talented locals would be offered opportunities to train in the skills to create a marketplace for land (a central registry, a state-run escrow system, estate agencies, etc.). Incentives would be offered for expatriates to return home, and human nature should then be left to make the best of opportunities. It would be at this stage that aid be resumed.

Pilot projects in suitably peaceful and homogeneous countries such as Mozambique and Burkina Faso would be started. If these worked, a "me too" chant elsewhere in Africa would deafen the dissent of resistant politicians.
Given freehold's success in dozens of other, equally different, cultures, there is a comprehensible sensibility in Hollaway's arguments that needs to be seriously considered and fleshed out further. It won't be a smooth run, but anything is better than more of the same.

White Africa never learned that the pride of ownership is the mother and father of hard work and quicker learning, a confirmation of which comes in the more graphic portrayal by Larry Summers, ex-president of Harvard: "Ownership matters; there has never been a case in recorded history of anybody washing a rented car." Neither did it learn that many people with some money would provide more overall wealth than a few with lots of money. Black Africa has been smugly making the same mistake. Freehold could be a direct path to self-sufficiency, replacing long-dead feudalism. Exchanging the traditional measures of wealth would also reduce the instinctive drive for huge families and the related tragedy of HIV/AIDS. And for well-meaning Gordon Brown, some pop stars, comics and China - all of whom also seem disinclined to experientially learn - further trillions of others' money would not have to be wasted.

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