Page 3 of 3 One thing China can't offer
Africa By Bright B Simons,
Evans Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe
Prime
Minister Robert Mugabe's private mansion. In
contravention of United Nations resolutions,
Beijing supplied arms to warring Ethiopia and
Eritrea to the tune of $1 billion.
China
now not only supplies arms to Sudan (as the
country's largest supplier), it has stationed
troops there to protect those oil installations it
has an interest in. If this signals to your mind
the beginning of permanent bases, you would be
right; China already runs electronic listening
posts in Comoros, an archipelago off the
East
African coast.
Now that ideology seems
such a quaint proposition, China is more concerned
with standard-setting, value-transfer and a host
of other "soft power" arrangements that will
highlight both its "peaceful rise" geopolitically
and "natural leadership" of the Third World. So
despite having contributed fewer than a thousand
troops to UN peacekeeping missions, Beijing has,
to date, sent more than 1,600 military delegations
to more than 90 countries, of which 18 are in
Africa, in furtherance of its prioritization of
bilateral, over multilateral, military diplomacy.
Furthermore, it maintains legations in 146
countries and military-diplomatic stations in 103.
As has already been suggested, China's
modernization efforts are directly connected to
its desire to project a global military status,
and Africa, as always, features quite prominently
in this global projection.
The second
point to note is that Africa's armed forces are in
sore need of modernization. According to Ghanaian
social activist Rashid Zuberu, there have been
more than 80 violent or unconstitutional coups in
Africa since the first one in Ghana 40 years ago.
Ninety leaders have been deposed, of whom 25 lost
their lives. Benin endured six coups and 12 heads
of state in its first decade after independence.
Professionalism and rule-based relations with the
civil power and with industry are nearly
non-existent in many countries on the continent,
often making the military merely an extension of
the executive branch.
As in so many other
areas, the civil military industrial system in
much of sub-Saharan Africa is a blank slate
waiting for inscription. Again, as in many other
areas, this makes Africa highly vulnerable to the
import of all kinds of experimental and trial
models. In fact, many of the activities of the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund during
the past few decades were based on experimenting
with imported models from Europe's Marshall Plan
era.
Thus it seems that as China projects
its stature across the globe, value and practice
transfers will form a significant part of that
projection. Africa is almost certainly likely to
become a proving ground for Chinese models of
modernization and development.
In fact,
Africa needs not go far to search for similar
insights into military-industrial
"unproductivity". South Africa, whose
military-industrial complex dates back to the
1940s, has some lessons that China itself might
find useful.
Beginning in 1968, when
Armscor (the Armaments Corp of South Africa) was
formed by legislative charter, that country saw a
remarkable expansion of its defense industries
even in the face of its isolation over its
apartheid system. This isolation, which initially
encouraged decentralization and a healthy reliance
on a competitive private sector, later saw the
state increasingly assume bureaucratic control
over key managerial and technical processes, and
the private sector transformed into parasitical
appendages of the state procurement system.
In the 1970s, South Africa ranked behind
only Israel and Brazil among emerging economies in
arms production and the sophistication of its
output. By the mid-1980s it was supplying
countries such as France, Spain, Morocco and Iraq
as well as African countries such as Zaire and
Malawi, despite international embargoes.
But by the late 1980s, productivity
shortfalls had begun to take their toll, leading
to sector contraction that would see output shrink
by half in 1996. Only a handful of the 2,000
private contractors that were operating in 1984
are still in business. South Africa has only
managed to salvage its defense industry from the
prospect of total ruin through
productivity-motivated restructuring and an
ongoing "rationalization" of resources.
So
to sum up, military modernization does require a
national innovation system that almost always must
involve a healthy relationship between industry
and the military, between civil policymakers and
commercial technocrats, and of course between the
men and women in uniform and the political
classes. But the mere existence of a so-called
military-industrial complex does not necessarily
obviate the importance of productivity and the
judicious use of resources.
If Africa is
to modernize its military, as it must, and
transform it from being a worthless burden on
scarce resources, and engage its positives in a
constructive way to forestall the boredom that is
often channeled into coup-making and other
unhelpful enterprises, it needs to give serious
thought to building a long-term
military-industrial complex in the broader
framework of an institutionally directed
civil-military relationship.
And
certainly, the continent will need to avail itself
to the best strategies successfully implemented
elsewhere. Perhaps in the near future China will
develop some very useful models that can benefit
Africa. The only contention is that this has not
happened yet. For now, China's challenges have
more to teach Africa than its successes.
Bright B Simons is an adjunct
fellow at the Center for Humane Education (Imani).
Evans Lartey is director of development at
Imani, which is a think-tank based in Accra
dedicated to researching economic trends to glean
practical public-policy insights for the benefit
of government, business and civil society in
Ghana. Franklin Cudjoe is the executive
director of Imani.
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