Africa did not invent poverty; neither do her leaders hold the patent for ‘kleptocracy'. World history (to say nothing of the present day) is replete with instances of inept thieves in high places. Yet, there is no denying the obvious: in modern times, no other continent has so consistently replicated such a depressing catalogue of governmental failure, social deprivation and economic collapse.

Amidst such depression, it is difficult not to indulge the hunt for scapegoats. A glance at a world map reveals the scars from the Scramble for Africa - hundreds of thousands of miles of artificial borders etched on an unforgiving landscape, borders that dismember homogenous communities while welding explosive aggregates, thereby setting the stage for the subsequent decades of dysfunction. The Fulani people of Western Africa are parcelled out amongst nine or so countries for instance, while some nine hundred and sixty-five ethnic groups are strapped within the mega-states of Nigeria, Congo and Cameroon.

Yet, this is hardly an argument for nine hundred and sixty-five sovereign states. Besides, the scramble for Africa did not start with the European carpetbaggers of the nineteenth century. It started a millennium earlier, in the indigenous land-grabs of the home-grown colonialists, the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai Empires, which grew in the only way possible: by conquering and absorbing communities not their own. It is therefore difficult to knock an ethic which was conventional wisdom worldwide, even more difficult to plead victimisation on account of an ill that victimised the entire world, for land-hunger inspired the World Wars, as well as that war-game set-pieces that are the Gulf Wars.

BORDER LIES
There are two types of borders in Africa today: the interstate borders that separate state from state and the border that runs around the entire continent. There are over seventy interstate borders in Africa. Some of them are highly contentious and are the cause of past, present and future conflicts (the Ogaden and Bakassi for instance). None of these borders are set in concrete, however, and the effect of instability in one state has always led to their breach by unstanchable floods of rebels in their thousands and refugees in their hundreds of thousands. African leaders who would have secure borders had best look therefore, not to border guards, but to their economies, their politics and the welfare of their citizens.

The border that runs around the continent is of worldwide significance, because it protects the lifestyle of the North. Although it is a natural border fortified by formidable oceans and seas, it is not impregnable. In places, only twenty kilometres separate Europe from North Africa and recently, four hundred and fifty-five illegal immigrants did the popular midnight crossing from Morocco to Spain in one go. The pressure of poverty, anarchy and wars on this border will make nonsense of the prosperity of the rest of the world, which makes it imperative that every responsible government in the North keep its eyes on Africa, For both species of borders are lies.

IMMIGRATION CONTROL LIES
Today's communications have brought home the possibilities of life in developed societies into even the most impoverished of homes. The result is an unprecedented pressure to immigrate to the Advanced Nations of the world. To stem this growing tide, the governments of the North have put their trust in increasingly desperate immigration policies. Spain, worried by the half a million illegal immigrants that entered Europe in 2002, budgeted €120.3 million (20 billion pesetas) on the SIVE (Integrated System for External Vigilance) project to secure its African flank; but to the extent that those policies aspire to keep the African at home - without any improvement in his lot - Immigration Control is a lie.

Besides the Wall of Jericho and the Great Wall of China, perhaps the most illustrious wall of history should be the Berlin Wall, whose demise is a fitting epitaph to the lie of Immigration Control. The Berlin Wall was a fiercely policed border that divided a community whose economic and political differences had become a chasm; in time, the chasm swallowed the wall.

Immigration administrators will testify to the inefficacy of the border post. Neither bullets, killer dogs, the risk of a watery death, nor yet the concentration camp-like conditions of border detention facilities will deter migrants, some of who make as much as twenty attempts a month. Spain's four-metre high steel walls in the Spanish Morocco have not insulated her southern borders with Africa and the high-tech monitoring of the twelve-kilometre crossing into Europe does not stanch the regatta of pateras .

The only means of securing a manageable immigration flow between two societies is a minimum content to the economic and social lifestyle in the less developed society. Contrariwise, the surest means of securing a flood of immigrants across borders - irrespective of the lie of Immigration Control - is anarchy in one and peace and prosperity in the other.

Seven in ten of the world's HIV-positive patients are estiimated to be Africans (an estimate that should hopefully wind up the West's birth control crusade for Africa). HIV-free Africans have, among others, endemic malaria to contend with; a disease that kills one million children yearly. Two in three African countries have done time under a military dictator or one-party state. Millions still live under despotic governments, eking out a living on a few US cents per day. One in three Africans will die in their prime, before the age of forty and one in ten African children will not survive their first birthday. These are statistics that have steadily degenerated over the years and none of them can be projected into the future without despair. Africa is sliding into anarchy and the peaceful and prosperous nations of the world should be concerned; as the stock markets fluctuate and the Foot-and-Mouth disease virus insinuates the not-so-hermetic borders of Fortress Europe, it should be clear that poverty, like contagion, is better eradicated than quarantined.

ECONOMIC LIES
Most multinationals operate as though a satellite picture of Earth returns a large African sea in place of the continent. Such corporatiosn would have scores of branches worldwide but none in Africa. There is clearly no sense in peddling computers to the starving, or selling Internet services to the illiterate. Yet, on a planet where every seventh human is an African, how secure is a worldwide prosperity in which Africa is unrepresented? The impact of a retarded Eastern Europe on the EU, and the ease with which the Foot-and-Mouth virus devastated European herds has put the lie to the thesis of stand-alone economic prosperity - and adumbrates the truth about collective security. It is useful to remember that, although left alive and well in Africa and other incubators, Malaria was totally eradicated from Europe in the 1960s. It has now made a reappearance in the European Union, with annual documented cases increasing 430% between 1981 and 1997. If the eradication of smallpox had similarly ignored Africa in 1977, by now it would doubtlessly have broken out again all around the world.

The North transits from the Industrial to the Electronic Age while vast tracts of the world remains in the Stone Age. Globalisation and M&As concentrate more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Today, three billionaires own more than the combined GDP of all the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and their six hundred million peoples put together; and thirty-three of the forty-eight LDCs in the world are in Africa.

THE 'SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL' LIE
The basic criteria for statehood are territory and population. Yet, how much territory, and how many people make a viable state? - Or how long is a piece of string? Liechtenstein, with its 160 square kilometres of territory and thirty two thousand people has managed to secure one of the best living standards for its citizens. Yet, too many African countries err on the side of the diminutive, denying their population the critical mass essential to reverse their precarious situation.

When Kwame Nkrumah indulged his pan-African dreams he was dismissed out-of-hand. It was considered that the things that divided Africa - language, cultures and the selfish ambitions of leaders - were insurmountable. That is just another conventional wisdom which has been lately debunked, as the countries of Europe, faced with the economic models of the twentieth century, surmounted more entrenched obstacles to begin a continental drift together. Kwame Nkrumah's dream petered into a lame Organisation of African Unity, but the argument that welded, and is welding Europe together is neither political nor military; it is economic. The military argument failed in 1945 and were the argument a political one, it would have needed a pedagogue of the stripes, if not the colours, of a Hitler. Yet, in the maelstrom that attended the birth of the EU, no declaiming figure stands out, swinging people into line from soapboxes strewn across Europe. What stands out are the red and blue lines of the economic graphs and projections, promising better salaries, larger malls and cheaper goods.

Those same arguments hold good for Africa today. Holding aside for the moment the question of how, it is clear that the continent must begin to drift together, step by painful step.

THE FUTURE LIES JUST AHEAD
Land-grabs are inspired by many reasons, chief of which is a persistent historical memory of a grander country that will not go away. Whatever may have inspired the present borders within Africa, it is time for the African nation-states to get over the circumstances of their birth. Although the greatest work will still have to be done by Africans (the establishment of old-fashioned honest and responsible leaderships at all levels); there is a major institutional dimension essential for the regeneration of Africa that is in the realm of the entire world.

An Africa International Fund in the spirit of the NEPAD (New Partnership for African Development) is critical to the establishment of infrastructure across the Continent. The centuries-old bleeding of Africa can only be described as a brain and brawn drain. Only a major international capital investment (comprising grant and investment elements) - which will have a knock-on effect on world economy - can reverse the flow. On the moral end it may somewhat assuage the perennial calls for reparations; which have not reduced since the compensation of Nazi victims was agreed. On the financial side it will be the best investment of the Advanced World in its own future. Perhaps a Powell Plan in the spirit of the Marshall.

Many multinationals suspend their Advanced World ethics and standards on their arrival in Africa. Encouraged by malleable national institutions, they do business with the demeanour of brigands, installing obsolete junk for top dollars, entrenching corruption, devastating the environment, and generally carrying on in a manner that would earn them bankruptcies and jail terms in their home countries in the North. With some multinationals far richer than many African states, the institutions of the governments involved are substantially incapable of policing and regulating the multinationals. It is time for the UN to step into the breach with a Business Tribunal for Africa. It is necessary to break the mould and establish organisations that are  South-centric rather than North-oriented. The BTA should implement a simple, intelligible code of business that eschews corrupt practices, sanctions-busting, and the like - and enforces it with the clout of a War Crimes Tribunal.

Since the category ‘Least Developed Country' was established with a list of twenty-four nations in 1971, that parade of the poorest of the poor has proliferated to forty-eight. Clearly we must be getting something wrong in the international effort to reduce poverty. Only one country, Botswana, has been able to graduate from its ranks. Material transformation is a difficult, but not impossible task. There is a temptation for outsiders to adopt an ‘Africa should pull itself together' attitude. Yet in a milieu in which rapacious despots were foisted on ravaged nations and sustained for decades by client super-powers; in a world where troops of bandits - aka 'freedom fighters' - with access to war gems are supplied with the weaponry and firepower to murder populations and unseat governments, good and bad alike, it is an attitude that is both idle and dishonest. It is time for the Advanced Nations of the world, not to set aside enlightened self-interest for a change, but to continue to indulge it, by materially supporting the reinvention of Africa. The continent is twenty percent of the land space of Earth. It is time it was empowered to earn its rent, and to keep its wages.

© 2001 Chuma Nwokolo, Jr.