8/30/00 11:50 a.m.
Clinton's Safari to Nowhere
Western leaders like Bill Clinton offer no hope for Africa.

By Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, & author of Tocqueville on American Character (St Martin's Press).

resident Clinton's trip to Nigeria, as his earlier trip to several other African countries, has occasioned suggestions that we should try to "save Africa" by guiding the Africans towards democratic capitalism. We should steadfastly avoid this tempting illusion. There is very little that can be done unless we are prepared to abandon many of our most cherished principles about human nature and "good government," and the odds on that are somewhere between slim and none.

We are famously convinced that all people are fundamentally the same — which may be true in the eyes of God or biology — but Africans are quite different from us in profound ways. Their traditional religious beliefs are fatalistic, not activist. Their traditional communities are tribal, intolerant and homogenous, not national, tolerant and multicultural. We abhor corruption, they consider it an unavoidable element of leadership. We cherish human life, they believe it to be Hobbesian in the extreme: nasty, brutal, poor and short. And they act accordingly, as the several wars, and the seemingly endless epidemics of ever-more virulent diseases raging on the Dark Continent abundantly testify.

There is every reason to expect that Africa will slide off the end of the world, ruined by diseases we cannot effectively treat (drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and malaria are killing enormous numbers of Africans, and even taxing major urban hospitals in the United States), by the corruption of their leaders, the intensity of tribal hatreds, and the relentless decay of the infrastructure, even in those few countries that had any worth mentioning.

The president calls on Africans to confront the "embarrassment" of AIDS, but that requires a fundamental change in sexual mores, family structure, and governmental behavior. Since much of Africa is polygamous, chastity is extremely rare, and governments, lacking the resources for even minimal medical care, have systematically understated the gravity of the epidemic and even deceived their people about the nature of the disease: in South Africa, our favorite sub-Saharan nation, President Mbeke vigorously denies that HIV causes AIDS, and East African leaders have touted "native" cures that do not work.

President Clinton promises American support for African democracy, but there is no African democracy in our sense of the term. Most African presidents believe they have been elected for life, and unhesitatingly use terror against political opponents. Even South Africa, the only African country that has received increased American investment over the past decade, respects only the electoral forms of democracy, while maintaining tribal hegemony. After being governed by the white tribe for generations, South Africans have been under the rule of the Qosas since the accession of Nelson Mandela, a high prince of the tribe.

Faced with this grim picture, President Clinton cheerfully tells Nigerian villagers that they can start their own dot-coms and make some money out of it. He need hardly lecture Nigerians about opportunities in the global marketplace, for their wheeler-dealer entrepreneurs have acquired quite a reputation for grabbing at every chance for a quick profit, regardless of the legalities or the niceties of the scheme.

There is no hope for Africa from Western leaders like Bill Clinton, who fly in for a quick photo op, bestow a bit of largesse, and never, ever, insist that their African counterparts live by the now universally recognized standards of transparency and legality that underpin not only the world marketplace, but the civilized world itself. To the shame of the West, we have been sending considerable sums of money to African governments ever since the end of colonialism a half-century ago, even though we knew that money wasn't going to help the poor and miserable, but rather heading into the Western bank accounts and real estate holdings of the rich and arrogant. It is a conscience balm, and like most moral evasions, it ends by making things even worse.

The only hope for Africa is for the industrialized countries to insist that Africans change their culture, and that African leaders be held accountable for their corruption and ineptitude. No aid money should be given to an African government, only directly to the development projects themselves. No African banking institution should be permitted to handle any development money until and unless it proves it can maintain proper standards. And Western leaders should stop pretending that Africa needs only a bit of tweaking here and there to be able to compete effectively; they should read the riot act to every African leader they meet.

Africa is bankrupt in every way, and should be placed in receivership. This is not a democratic process, and we should not pretend that it is. But there is some hope that it can lead to democracy, as it has in Asia, where benevolent dictatorship in countries from Japan (under MacArthur) and Singapore to Korea and Taiwan laid the groundwork for freedom in later generations. The same can be said about Europe, where American occupation imposed democracy on Germany and Italy at the end of World War II.

We need not send colonial governors to Africa; most of the necessary changes can be imposed from a distance by a combination of economic leverage and political suasion. But we do need to be serious. To send an American president, dressed in the robes of a tribal chieftain, to deliver empty homilies, is the worst form of foolishness and hypocrisy.