A good capitalist in Africa

from The Independent On Line

Robert Calderisi, the Canadian-born economist and former World Bank spokesman for Africa, says he is not an Afro-pessimist and he is not lumping all of Africa into one basket.

But judging from his book, The Trouble With Africa, the continent - give or take five countries that take poverty reduction seriously - is a basket case. The five countries he cites are Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and "perhaps Mali".

Calderisi is basking in the heat in a garden at a Johannesburg hotel. It is welcome after the cold of Montreal where he has retired after 30 years at the World Bank.

He is a taut, lean, well-preserved man with steel-grey hair. Initially his presence is a little too intense for comfort. He is far more sensitive than I expected, having submerged myself in his litany of the continent's woes and his often-hectoring tone.

But he loves Africa and has its interests at heart, he says.

A devout Roman Catholic, he is committed to bettering the lot of the less fortunate and he wants to see foreign aid working to reduce poverty - and kept out of the coffers of the powerful. After all, aid is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, he says, and he tries to set out the reasons why aid has gone for a ball of chalk.

He has aimed the book at those who want to see the continent winched out of its victimhood, and its oppression by thuggish dictators. Initially he hoped that his readers would be teachers, scholars and churchgoers, those most likely to raise their voices in protest. But when The Trouble with Africa was first published in 2006, it garnered a slew of rave reviews and was named as one of The Economist's books of the year. It was hailed as "a stimulating contrarian essay" in Publisher's Weekly, and was reviewed with Jeffrey D Sachs's The End of Poverty; Economic Possibilities for our Time in the New York Times Book Review.

Sachs, Bono and Bob Geldof, who advocated the doubling of aid to Africa, are not praised by Calderisi. He says he would like to see aid to individual countries slashed by half, because he believes leaner budgets can be managed better. He is also after some good, old-fashioned agricultural productivity.

He stands up for the World Bank, which he says - and not everyone might know - is not a bank in the conventional sense but a financial co-operative owned by virtually all the world's governments. It is a specialised agency of the United Nations and is the most important foreign aid body - forget the labels dished up by the banks' critics and other Flat Earthers.

He says that you will probably not find democracy in the bank, but certainly there are no new maharajahs, no lords of poverty, no masters of disaster - and the bank is not biased against Africa. It has been following a policy of affirmative action.

He disagrees that the bank's unsuccessful structural adjustment policies, designed to lift countries out of debt and desperation, were responsible for the collapsing economies of the '80s and '90s.

Millions would disagree and, over the decades, have stormed through the streets protesting about the mess that they believe the World Bank and its sister organisation, the International Monetary Fund, have wrought. The anti-globalisation movements claim that these bodies, by demanding that countries restructure their economies to gain access to loans, have brought them to their knees.

But Calderisi defends these conditions, which focus on economic growth, but are often at the expense of what the people on the ground believe are the essentials. The policies that the World Bank advocates are no different from the macroeconomic policies that have left the poor behind in South Africa.

The Trouble with Africa is stacked with the kind of polemic of the 19th-century pamphleteers such as David Ricardo and John Cobden who, Calderisi says, were his inspiration and embellished their aims with fine descriptive writing. He has offered up a memoir, as he once offered up himself to the continent.

As the Canadian high commission's first secretary (development), he was posted to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1976 to 1978. He was the bank's international spokesman on Africa (1997 to 2000) and country director for Central Africa (2000 to 2002). But it seems the deepest connection he made with the continent was when he headed the bank's regional mission in Ivory Coast from 1991 to 1994.

When Calderisi went to Ivory Coast, he was living with a man - his partner of 30 years and now his husband Jean Daniel, a former French monk. They were married under Canadian civil law. Thanks to Daniel, he came out to officials at the bank, who balked at the news because they were afraid of offending the Ivorians.

But the bank put its misgivings aside, for Calderisi was, after all, the man for the job: a Rhodes scholar, who held degrees from Montreal University, Oxford and Sussex Universities, the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School.

As it turned out, the officials Calderisi and his partner met were living double lives, with their "second offices", a metaphor for adulterous affairs.

Such personal details add a touch of simpatico to what looked as if it would be an abrasive anthology of the continent's failure to come to grips with its shadow and to put to good use the aid that was being sloshed out by the West by the bucketful.

Here is the softer side of Calderisi, the man who finally resigned from the bank at the peak of his career in 2002 - to nurse his ailing parents in Montreal. They died within a year of his resignation and his twin brother Ronald died unexpectedly in 2005. He has no regrets that he left the bank.

He spends his days at a keyboard. In a 73-page essay, an "open letter to Pope Benedict XVI from a gay Catholic", he described himself as "little more than an overgrown altar boy, torn between a deep attachment to the traditions and values of the Roman Catholic Church and the dream that one day it can become truly universal".

He told the pope in the letter that he did not regard homosexuality as an appropriate subject for church teaching, let alone for its approval or disapproval. His sexuality was less important to him than his Christianity or Catholicism. "I am not going to plead for greater openness towards gay and lesbian Catholics, although obviously I believe in that."

He told the pope that he had no intention of arguing that homosexual Christians should be more tolerant of the church because of its current limitations, although there too, he said, his sympathies would be clear.

Instead he focused on promoting Christian unity - admitting married men to the priesthood, removing discrimination against women and abolishing the stigma that currently hangs over divorced men and women.

This essay, with which he enters the raging, underground battle in the church, does not engage in ridicule, he says. It is written from a particular point of view, but also with deep sense of loyalty and love.

This is his standpoint then, and with the same apparent openness in our interview, he makes his "impatient" case for Africa. He stresses that aid is not working because of wrong-headed policies and over-taxation. Yes, small agricultural producers such as cotton growers get a raw deal because they cannot compete in the international market. Yes, farmers in western countries are protected by huge subsidies, but that's not the crippling factor. In his view the stumbling block is inefficiency; it is a lack of capacity and skills - swearwords all.

He says in this book that he was not aiming at conservatives but, with the bank linking privatisation and poverty reduction, he is certainly heading in that direction. He is against all that is "politically correct", against the standard excuses of colonialism and slavery for shoddiness and lack of efficiency.

Of course, he is not denying the wretched histories of so many African countries, but he wants to see the continent pick itself up by its bootstraps and get down to some serious agricultural activity.

But before he prescribes remedial action, and there is plenty on offer, he takes us on his magical mystery tour of the continent that began three decades ago.

Calderisi agrees that his criticism is strident, but it is hard to argue against his suggestion for mechanisms to trace and recover public funds, or to disagree with his call for a free press and an independent judiciary.

Calderisi looks post-colonial history straight in the eye and acknowledges that it has been riddled with wrong policies, corruption and greedy dictators.

In an essay in The New Statesman in June 2006, he wrote that oil has filled the coffers of unsavoury regimes that have been in office for more than two decades, in places such as Angola, Gabon, Cameroon, the Congo (Brazzaville) and Equatorial Guinea. The "dean" of the group, Omar Bongo of Gabon, came to power in 1967.

In The Trouble with Africa, he names a few dictators and illustrates their grotesqueries. In the same New Statesman essay, he quotes Chinua Achebe's 1983 essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, his obvious source of inspiration.

Achebe wrote: "There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of true leadership."

Calderisi excels in his chapter on the Ivory Coast. A model country, the showcase of capitalism under the leadership of its first president Felix Houphouet-Boigny, it was an exception on the continent.

Houphouet-Boigny used force to repress secessionist movements - he sent his army to massacre 6 000 villagers. But by the end of his life in 1993, his ruthlessness had been almost erased from history books. He had bought a mansion in Paris and was rich enough to fund from his own pocket a $400 million replica of St Peter's Basilica in Rome in his home village.

But, as he probably discovered before his aides pulled the plug on his life support system, you can't take it with you and the country cannot live on the memory of even a benevolent dictator.

Then came a coup in December 1999 when the army overthrew the government. By 2002, in the wake of a series of poor leaders, Abidjan was burning and Ivorians were fleeing to Liberia.

This is one of many expertly narrated stories in a book about Africa's troubles, which is itself not without trouble in its focus on the ills of the continent rather than on the errors of the World Bank.

South Africa is an exception in the sea of woes, but he is aware of the continuing corruption. So far, we have not needed aid, he says. May it remain that way.