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The second economy is endlessly inventive. It embraces everything from street vendors selling cigarettes and candy in a Dar es Salaam market to the intricate border smuggling of Zambian gemstones. At least 10 million of 26 million Kenyans make a living from small-scale cash-crop farming, carpentry, metalworking, tailoring, illicit brewing and running private transport. Secondhand clothes are imported from Europe and America and sold by the roadside. Packing cases are fashioned into furniture. Oil drums are made into roofing sheets, frying pans, barbecues, stoves, knives and lamps. Cars that cannot be repaired are salvaged piecemeal and turned into donkey carts. Much of this unofficial labor is carried out in the open air and is called jua kali -- "hot sun." As multinational companies are driven away by government policies and demands for kickbacks, as state enterprises fail and lay off workers, the jua kali economy is booming.
The official minimum monthly wage is 5,000 shillings ($17) in Tanzania, where a loaf of bread costs 190 shillings and a pair of trousers 4,000 shillings. "Nobody in Tanzania expects to survive on his salary," says Thomas Mrima, a truck driver who plies between Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. "Everybody makes money with everything he can lay his hands on. They steal government stores and sell them over the border. They use government machinery for private building contracts." Ripping off the government has become a popular sport: it is thought of as stealing from thieves.
So Africa improvises its own unofficial social contract, one deal at a time. People are brilliant at adapting to the impossible conditions created by their governments. That is the difficulty: such adaptation has allowed ramshackle government practices to continue too long, postponing the catharsis the continent needs to purge itself of corruption and incompetence.
Frustration over Africa has led some outsiders to the conclusion that Africans are hopeless at organizing anything. The reverse is true: they are ingenious organizers and able businessmen. The problem is bad government.
The trouble has arisen in part because of the gap between national aspirations and the practical problems of putting together a working government. Says Cyrus Reed, head of the African Studies Center at the American University in Cairo: "These countries were extremely fragile, yet they set goals that even the most organized governments would have had trouble fulfilling." Nearly all African leaders realized the first challenge of government is keeping the loyalty of the people; the solution was patronage. As that became more expensive and resources dwindled, the leaders turned toward the World Bank and the IMF to bail them out. So the countries went deeper into debt and dependence.
Now they are beginning to find ways out. If the '80s were the lost decade, the '90s show signs of hope. In 1990 more African nations introduced multiparty politics than in all the previous 25 years. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, 38 of Africa's 47 states were ruled by one party or by military juntas; today about half those countries have held free elections or adopted democratic reforms. Many Africans are talking about a second revolution.