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Ingenious capital schemes were concocted to finance new projects. Socialized, centrally directed economies -- dressed up in ideological pretensions and encouraged by guilt-ridden sympathizers in the First World -- enabled Africa's traditional grafters to operate on an industrial scale.
The World Bank's Serageldin draws a fascinating graph. The vertical y line represents bonding -- quite literally the ties that bind a society together. The horizontal x axis represents options and opportunities -- freedom. Each society and each individual must make a trade-off, represented by an oblique line that angles up between the x and y coordinates. Someone who opts for traditional social bonds loses opportunities, but someone who chooses total freedom risks losing the social ties that give his life meaning. The U.S. and other developed countries rank high on options and opportunity, low on social bonds. Traditional societies like Africa's usually rated strong on bonding, are low on options and opportunities. "We have visions of reality that are different," says Serageldin. Therein lies the problem. "Bonding, imposed on a modern, institutional structure, becomes nepotism" -- a universal African practice. The worst outcome, he says, is to have neither one nor the other: "If we trade bonds for options but do not succeed economically, we risk catastrophe" -- precisely what has happened in the American big-city ghettos.
Despite 30 years of failure in Africa, many of the social ties still exist. How long they can endure is another question. "There is a mood of Afro- pessimism," says Serageldin. "It is sustained by press images of famine and slaughter that tend to swamp the positive achievements."
Much of the real energy of Africa, and its future, lies outside present government structures. Africans have been even quicker than Western donors to cut themselves off from corrupt government and nonfunctioning states. They simply ignore their governments because they have their own economy. Variously called the "informal sector" or the "parallel" economy, it is the real engine of life.
The U.N. International Labor Organization has estimated that the informal sector employs 59% of sub-Saharan Africa's urban labor force. If this sector is included, the size of Zaire's economy increases threefold. In many respects Africa is ahead of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe when it comes to free markets and regional economic ties.
Salaries in Africa become living wages only by unofficial dealing -- by baksheesh, bribing, finagling, operating off the books, bartering, finding a thousand intricate routes around the occlusions of law and bureaucracy. A telephone-company repairman in Lagos earns $60 a month. Therefore, the only way one can get a phone repaired is to "offer him a little something" on the side; in one day the repairman can pocket his official pay. No tip, no repairs -- which may be why most phones in Lagos do not work.