“We are all Africans now”

Thabo Mbeki’s speech on the launch of the new post-apartheid South African constitution in 1996 proclaimed: “I am an African” . Perhaps, given the resourcefulness that Africa has given to the world and the natural and human resources that have been stolen from the continent over the last few hundred years “we are all Africans now”. From Africa we have the blues, the roots of jazz, Malian singing, Senegalese guitar, most of the brighter plants in gardens around the world, many of the minerals that power our cars and mobile phones. From Africa we took slaves, we have taken gold and platinum, we continue to take foods for Northern supermarkets, we sign sports stars to soccer and basketball teams. African athletes compete and win at the highest levels. And yet most of Africa is poorer now than it was fifty years ago. In that time some three trillion US dollars of aid have gone to Africa.
Business has been central to Africa’s development for centuries, and there are questions that must be asked of its role now and then if we are to understand where to go next. This book and its stories is a contribution to understanding the role of business in Africa, specifically in relationship to the role that business has and hasn’t played in Africa’s underdevelopment. Africa must determine its own future, but it cannot do so unless the outside world and its Diasporas pay more attention to the issues. So, this book is directed to Africans and those who live outside the continent and I make no apology for being someone who lives outside Africa and is delighted to work with people in and out of Africa on this set of think-pieces.
2005 saw a renewed interest in development and Africa, both from inside and outside the continent. We hope that this set of articles on corporate citizenship and Africa are a useful contribution to the growing scholarly interest in a subject has received significant attention elsewhere around the world in the last few years. 2005 saw the publication of Our Common Interest , the Commission for Africa’s Report chaired by the British Prime Minister with representatives from across Africa. This led to Africa being a specific focus at that summer’s G8 Summit at Gleneagles in Scotland, and, amongst other initiatives, the USA agreeing to reform its aid budgets to poor countries. This was prior to hurricanes Rita and Katrina that later in the year hit the Southern States of the US exposing significant levels of poverty and neglect within the world’s richest country. The G8 meeting was preceded by Live8 which was seen globally by some three billion people, and represented the world’s largest single event. Thirty million people signed a petition to the G8 leaders. As this book goes to press discussions are taking place on reform of the United Nations, and one of the issues is how Africa could be better represented on the Security Council and other UN bodies.
The University of South Africa held the first academic conference on corporate responsibility in the continent in July 2005 attracting scholars from across Africa , and shortly afterwards a special edition of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship appeared on the theme of Corporate Citizenship in Africa to be followed early in 2006 by this book. The African Institute for Corporate Citizenship has been operating out of Johannesburg for some years and a number of universities in South Africa have been offering electives on corporate citizenship as part of MBA courses. In 2003 the Sustainability Institute at Stellenbosch University offered a week’s course on corporate citizenship as part of an MPhil in Sustainable Development which is also open to the general public .
Much of the literature on Africa has been problem-focussed, seeing Africa either as a moral dilemma for the rest of the world or as a waste of good aid money poured down the drain. But, there was also a growing desire to develop a better understanding of the world’s second largest continent and to celebrate the life of its people, literature, poetry, music, sport and social structures. Better and more scholarly research is obviously one of the answers, but so too is changing media perceptions outside Africa so that its richness is reflected on television screens around the world. As Wayne Visser related in the introduction to this book the scholarly research on corporate citizenship on Africa has been biased towards certain business sectors and towards South Africa. Our Common Interest pointed out that Africa is different, that Africa’s development must follow a different path because of its history. For instance a snapshot of Africa in 2005 tells us that:

• Most people in Africa have never received or made a telephone call, but that now 75% of all telephones are mobile phones;
• 9 out of 10 Africans are proud to be African (whereas less than 4 out of 10 British people are proud to be British);
• Railway lines in Africa tended to be built to bring raw materials to ports for export to Europe, rather than connecting centres of populations as elsewhere in the world;
• The boundaries of many countries were set by European colonial powers with little regard for geography, local communities or resource distribution;
• Agriculture in many African countries is still determined by exports to the rest of the world often in commodities such as coffee, sugar and cocoa which have volatile prices;
• The largest growth in trade in the last five years has not been inter-African, or to North America, or to Europe, or to Japan but to China;
• Banks outside Africa hold some $80bn in assets stolen from Africans by their leaders;
• For every $2 Africa receives in aid it pays $1 in debt repayments;
• One million South Africans live in the UK;
• There are more African scientists and engineers working in the US than in the whole of Africa;
• Trade with the world has fallen from 6% in 1980 to 2% in 2005.

Many of these items are corporate citizenship issues. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Africa is still the bread basket and the open mine for the world.

So, let’s focus on the solutions. Our Common Interest called for a dramatic increase in overseas aid coupled with improvements in internal governance, and these too were the basis of the US new aid programme. Overseas debt amounts to the same amount as that stolen over the years by corrupt leaders in complicity with business and banks around the world. Rooting out ‘systemic rot’ is at the heart of the problem: systemic rot in Africa and in global trade rules and in the way we all see Africa. The report says on corporate citizenship issues: “The international community has a role to play in maintaining high standards of governance. If it does so in its own activities – and demands it in activities of its private sector agents, like the multinational companies in developing countries – then it will be better positioned to encourage similar high standards in the way African countries manage the cash from their natural resources.”

The Report says that business has a significant role to play:

• by understanding its own history in Africa;
• by fostering peace and conflict resolution;
• by acknowledging the role that business can play in promoting health care and education;
• by recognising that agricultural subsidies in the US, Europe and Japan help keep African farmers poor;
• by the wealth extracted by business over many years has damaged personal relations between men and women and this coupled with poverty, lack of education and health care has caused the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world.

The key recommendations of Our Common Interest concern capacity building and accountability in Africa, strengthening civil society institutions, rooting out corruption, preventing and managing conflict, providing basic education and health services coupled to clean water and sanitation, giving Africa the capacity to trade through changing subsidies and tariff barriers, and by giving more targeted aid based on projects that actually work.
It is strange, given the fact that we have noted the comparative dearth of scholarly work on Africa from within Africa, that neither Our Common Interest nor the UN Millennium Development Goals contain a reference to the need for greater vocational and tertiary education. At the moment those lucky enough to gain a good tertiary education or train in a profession in Africa often tend to seek work in the US or Europe. Two strategies are needed; one to build many more universities across Africa and fund them with endowments that will last for decades; and second, is to devise a way of getting Africa’s professional Diasporas back to Africa – for ever or for a year or five. In 2003 Africa’s 5 million Diasporas remitted back home some $45bn which is nearly a quarter of some African countries’ GDPs, and only just second to FDI and external funding as sources of revenue .
Various commentators have pointed out that despite the best efforts of Europeans and white South Africans to ignore or destroy traditional ethnic, tribal and local allegiances these flourish across Africa providing support, love, help, investment, networks, nourishment, communication systems and entrepreneurship. If, as Wolfgang Sachs said many years ago, that enterprise is as everyday for everybody as conversation then there is no lack of it in any part of Africa . One issue is lack of access to title, money and markets that keeps Africans poor. It is this issue that Hernado do Soto addresses in The Mysteries of Capital: Why Capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else . Africans do not suffer from a lack of some forms of social capital but they have not been able to develop inter-African trade networks to any great extent and they have not been able to break entrenched colonial trading relations. But capitalism, or open markets as it is now called after the end of the Cold War, is not everything that Africa needs. More than anything it needs integrity and dignity. As Amartya Sen says in Development As Freedom development can have many faces and growing economic enterprises is but one form of development . De Soto argues that Western models of growth feature ownership of assets and property rights and Sen points out that it is possible to have these features as well as greatly enhanced levels of health, wellbeing and social prosperity within non-democratic political systems – witness Cuba and China which have very high rates of literacy and numeracy and low levels of infant mortality and malnutrition.
One of the companies that has profited most from Africa is Shell, and its charitable arm, the Shell Foundation, has a prescription for ‘pro-poor’ developmental enterprise with five principles :

• Owned by poor people, sells to poor people, employs poor people;
• Long term viability of assisted enterprises and not permanently dependant on subsidy;
• Financially viable business propositions that can scale up using local resources;
• The application of the business model: risk assessment, market knowledge, customer facing and low cost production;
• MNCs can offer ‘value creating resources . . . if assessed and deployed appropriately can add enormous social value’.

Some would argue that it is former colonial powers and since then MNCs that have kept local producers and workers poor because to do otherwise would be to deny MNCs their profit margins. Perhaps, and this is reflected in the renewed interest in corporate citizenship globally and recently in Africa, MNCs have seen the wind of change, as they did immediately prior to the fall of apartheid in South Africa, and are now able to see the benefits for themselves of stable political regimes, educated and conflict-free local communities and local markets for their products through pro-poor enterprise development. As the Shell Foundation says: ‘Donors (of charitable support or aid) are encouraged to enter into new arrangements with big business in order to enlist its support in ‘re-engineering’ the international development supply chain via the injection of business thinking along its entire supply chain.’
On a slightly more radical note the International Business Leaders Forum advocates exactly this. Many of its members are already attempting do put into practise these principles :

• Apply the highest international standards in workplace ethics, health and standards;
• Employ and upgrade local people;
• Develop locally needed and useful products and services;
• Add value to exports locally;
• Enhance local supply chains;
• Support local education institutions;
• Support and work with civil society organisations that promote development in health, human rights, education and enterprise;
• Work to increase ‘positive inward investment’;
• ‘Promote better international trade terms and access to markets’.

In The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs makes the point that we now know enough about economics, technology and trade to end poverty in our lifetime . Not that there is necessarily agreement between him and de Soto and Sen on all points, but they would all support the Make Poverty History campaign around the world which saw millions of people wearing rubber bracelets with that logo inscribed on them, because, perhaps in their naivety, they thought it was possible to achieve this goal. If, as I know it was, sniffed at by some people in Africa, particularly in South Africa, it must be remembered that in order to change the current trade rules there must be an understanding of history and there must be moral outrage about the current situation. As Tony Blair said: ‘The developed world has a moral duty as well as a powerful motive of self-interest to assist Africa . . . . A changed Africa could change the face of the world’. Or as Nelson Mandela put it on a higher moral tone: ‘Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of humans.’
The challenge for the corporate citizenship community, those engaged in theorising or reflecting on practice, is to understand how this wave of globalisation has captured us all. All markets are connected, all telecommunications systems are connected, all weather systems are connected, our planet is home to us all. And now we can recognise that our largest economic institutions are companies, apart from nation-states. Our nation-states are not dead but they are in competition with supra-territorial corporations (STCs). The most urgent priority is to regain control of our STCs in order that we can direct their resources, financial and social, to helping solve, in partnership with government and civil society, the world’s most pressing social and ecological problems . In Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri said that: ‘Some claim that these have merely come to occupy the place that was held by the various national colonialist and imperialist systems . . . but the new reality of capitalism is that corporations are no longer defined by the imposition of abstract command and the organisation of simple theft and unequal exchange . . . but they directly structure and articulate territories and populations and make states merely instruments to record the flows of commodities, monies and populations that they set in motion.’

So, what does the future hold? While Africa is unique in having gone backwards in terms of economic growth in the last fifty years there are many signs of positive change in recent years which include significant moves towards to citizen participation through the development of democratic institutions, the slow post, but steady, development of post-apartheid South Africa. Countries such as the UK, despite Our Common Interest, need to stop selling arms into conflict areas even if its is a growth industry for the UK. AIDS, malaria, war and poverty means that life expectancy in Africa is expected to decline to 42 on average over the next ten years, the same as Europe one hundred years ago. Compare this to Japan where life expectancy is more than double this at 88, where population is one of the highest in the world and where there is a lack of natural resources – just ingenious, creative, cohesive, well educated people.
Finally, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report highlighted for the world the coming dangers associated with climate change, many of which will affect Africa more than other parts of the world because of poverty, geography, climate and poor infrastructure. One startling result of their work is that malaria accounts for 11% of disease in Africa, and this is likely to increase in the next few years. But, if this disease had been eradicated, as it has been in many other parts of the world, Africa would be have been $100bn better off over the last 35 years. This too is one of the five ‘easy’ to solve recommendations of the Copenhagen Consensus .
As the world rethinks its relationship to planet Earth the last word goes again to Wolfgang Sachs from the Wupperthal Institute: \"Eventually, the world will no longer be divided by the ideologies of \'left\' and \'right,\' but by those who accept ecological limits and those who don\'t.\" The same applies to Africa as everywhere else.

We are all Africans now

I am an African in that my wealthy lifestyle derives significantly, but not wholly, from my country’s exploitation of Africa and other parts of the planet. I am an African because my music gets its rhythms from Africa. I am an African because my pension fund and life insurance company has its shares in extractive industry companies that derive much of their profits from Africans mines and wells. I am an African because I know these things, and know that silence is complicity. I am an African because some of my heroes are Africans or people who learnt about oppression in Africa – Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi to name but two. I am an African because we will all be richer if Africa is richer, more stable, less corrupt, and more part of the global community, less a victim, more resilient, and perhaps one day wins the World Cup. I am an African because having once seen its landscapes, watched the big five and the little five hundred and lived amongst its people I can never escape its hold. We came from Africa; we took from Africa, and now its time to go back, to give back, and to celebrate; to understand ubuntu for the first time. African business has always been local and global. Now, its time to link ubuntu to kyosei to humanity to shalom.

Malcolm McIntosh
Bath, England
October 2005



Malcolm McIntosh