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Sub-Saharan Africa is burdened with half the world's 10 million refugees, partly as a result of the drought that has held the Sahel region in its arid grip for more than a decade. As nomadic herdsmen wander thousands of miles in search of food and water, some 14 million acres of potentially productive grasslands are destroyed each year by their livestock. At least 20% of the continent is desert; experts believe that the process of "desertification" could encompass 45% of Africa in 50 years if current patterns of land use are allowed to continue. Famine and pestilence plague hundreds of thousands of Africans. Livestock diseases like rinderpest, a fatal viral infection known as "the cattle plague," and human maladies like malaria, cholera and bilharziasis, a water-borne urinary-tract disease, are on the rise.
Political oppression has taken its own savage toll. Early last year Nigeria expelled 2 million Ghanaian workers to ease the mounting problems it faced trying to provide work for its own population. Some 700,000 ethnic Somalis, victims of a protracted war with Ethiopia, live in refugee camps within Somalia. The Sudan shelters another 637,000 refugees, including secessionist Eritreans who have been forced to flee Marxist-oriented Ethiopia, as well as 200,000 Ugandans. The Ugandan refugees have fled in two waves: those escaping the brutal policies of former Dictator Idi Amin in the '70s and those who have recently left Uganda to avoid President Milton Obote's military "cleanup" operations. Zaïre supports another 335,000 refugees from upheavals in Angola, Rwanda and Burundi.
Africa's blight and decay also extend to projects and equipment built or financed by well-meaning foreign countries. In rural Senegal, a $250,000 U.S.-made solar-powered irrigation system lies idle, mainly because of maintenance problems. Just outside Lusaka, in Zambia, hundreds of government vehicles sit abandoned in a parking lot. Some are wrecks, but many others are almost new, missing only a clutch plate or a windshield. Desperately short of foreign exchange, the government of President Kaunda prefers to import new vehicles through aid programs rather than buy the spare parts necessary to repair the old ones. In Zambia and Tanzania, locomotives badly needed to haul copper and agricultural produce sit on railroad sidings because no one can fix their hydraulic-brake systems.
In scores of countries where small, labor-intensive projects are needed, technological white elephants have proliferated. In Tanzania, Zaïre and Somalia, glass-and-steel airport facilities, built in anticipation of air traffic that has not materialized, have been allowed to fall apart. Escalators do not work; electronic flight-schedule boards have been replaced by blackboards; automatic sliding glass doors have to be operated manually. In Uganda and Angola, some high-rises lack glass panes and running water. In 1975 Canada built a $2.5 million semi-automated bakery in Dar es Salaam, but often there is no flour to make bread. Moscow's aid efforts have fared no better. A Soviet-built cement factory at Diamou, Mali, was designed for a capacity of 50,000 tons a year.