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Kalingba's speech caused panic on all stock exchanges, with the Dow-Jones index dropping a record 50 points, though there were noticeable rallies after Lawson's robust statement to journalists just before noon, and again during Lawson's speech to the annual meeting in the afternoon. But when Africa walked out of the Bank/Fund meeting near the close of business, prices again went into a "free fall." Bank shares fell steadily during the day, as did World Bank bonds, but there was no domestic run on the banks in the West, and the closing of the US and European foreign exchange markets at noon, New York time, stopped the panic selling of major international currencies. The contrast between Atlantic and Pacific reactions was very marked. When the Far Eastern markets opened in the morning the yen stood firm and the stock exchanges in Tokyo and Hong Kong were rock steady.
The catastrophe that the Western financiers dreaded but had long foreseen was that if a major sovereign borrower like Nigeria defaulted, banks in the West would "call" loans made to other possible defaulters, in the hope of getting in their claims first. This would lead to a general default by several African countries since most of them had borrowed far more than they could pay back, and simultaneously to the collapse of almost all the major banks since they had lent far more money than the total of their equity capital and reserves: they were lending borrowed money to Africa.
With the world's credit system thus truly busted, world trade and investment would be disrupted and brought to a virtual standstill. Already that day temperate zone products such as wheat and beef, which were normally exported to Africa, dropped sharply in price on the commodity exchanges, while African foodstuffs like tea, bananas, palm oil and other goods expected to be cut off by Africa soared on the futures market.
Late on Monday Kalingba was still asserting fervently and sincerely that he had no intention of subverting the existing economic order, only of making it work. He was interviewed that evening on World Roundup, the prestigious international news program of Satellite and Cable Associated News (SCAN). It was typical of SCAN to have found Kalingba, which every other journalist was trying to do in vain, and to persuade him to agree to be interviewed, fulfilling yet again its boast that it "makes today intelligible and makes tomorrow's news."
Even those who had watched most of the Bank/Fund sessions as they began to appear on local and then national television were puzzled by the events and unclear as to their implications. Millions of people in North America and many more millions around the world looked to SCAN to make sense of what had happened. World Roundup was televised throughout the US and the satellite to more than twenty associated countries in the industrialized world, which used it as the basis of their national programs.
Kalingba was equal to the tough questioning put by the interviewer, a carefully briefed expert whose face never appeared on the screen. When asked by whose authority he had precipitated the present crisis, a charge Kalingba dismissed, saying that he had been attempting to deal with a crisis that already existed, he revealed that in the week before the annual meeting he had been given a free hand to negotiate by the leaders of the most influential African countries.
Jebat Gana, Singapore's Permanent Representative at the UN, was present at the private meeting in Bangui of African leaders called by the Central African Republic's President, and his diary gives a full account of it. Though not an African himself, Gana was invited to the meeting because of his mastery of the bizarre machinery of the United Nations.
Kalingba had chosen leaders whom he believed could carry not only their own country but a wider region or group of countries as well. The Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, Zambian strongman Kenneth Kaunda, and Tanzania's foreign minister, Benjamin Mkapa (who seemed to be the heir of Julius Nyerere's pragmatic radicalism). Also present, were Abdou Diouf of Senegambia (who was currently presiding over the Organization of African Unity) and Major Samuel Ayotunde, President of Nigeria. With an eye to Arab money, which was so crucial to Africa, Kalingba had also invited Colonel Gadhafi of oil-rich Libya.
There was general agreement that the rich countries of the West, including the Soviet Union, must be made to pay more attention to Africa's needs. There was even agreement in the privacy of this meeting that any bargain must carry some benefits for the West. But the cracks in African unity were nonetheless all to evident. The Arabs and blacks of Sudan, for very different reasons, said they would pay their small debts to the West without question. Mauritania advised caution in taking any action that might break the credit system on which world economic progress had depended for the last century. President Ayotunde questioned whether Africa could survive being cut off from the West. Mr. Mkapa wondered whether Africa could survive being linked with the West, and made an impassioned plea to break the global economic system and de-link the peasant economies from the industrial dreadnoughts which dominated world trade.
It was a measure of Kalingba's stature and the trust that he had inspired in this increasingly desperate group of national leaders faced with economic collapse and political ruin that he was given a free hand to negotiate without any clear explanation of the tactics he would employ.
Kalingba's questioner on World Roundup pressed his point further when he asked him by what right he. as president of a landlocked, unstable country in the heart of Central Africa which was woefully unable to assert its power beyond its immediate environs, had to challenge the economically strong, even if in the name of the entire continent. Kalingba refused to be drawn, and calmly reiterated that he had not sought confrontation; it had been brought about by the American and British refusal to seek an accommodation through international negotiation. By dismissing Africa from the World Bank and the IMF they were simply confirming those institutions in their role as a "rich man's club."
"But President Kalingba," insisted his questioner, "if you want access to the rich man's club you'll have to abide by their rules and pay your bills. Or you'll have to get out."
It was this shift that finally strung Kalingba into showing something of the strength of feeling that underlay his reasoned arguments on behalf of Africa.
"By what right," he said angrily, "does the rich man's club have sole use of my people's riches? By what right does 1/4 live in affluence and 3/4 in penury? By what right is your club landlord of the globe with the power to evict a continent from its shacks and hovels for not paying the rent?
"You may well force us to leave the international financial institutions---your club---but we shall not leave the Earth---the world cannot live without Africa! Not forever will the many accept the dominance of the few."
The populists in Africa would have applauded Kalingba's closing words. On a national level, the means of putting them into effect were even then underway. Implicit in the agreement of the very poor African states to support Kalingba's resolution at the Bank/Fund meeting was the condition that if Africa were defeated, the struggle for a new economic order would be transferred to the United Nations in New York. This condition was now being fulfilled and control of African strategy was passing out of the hands of a few newly-industrializing countries into the hands of the many very poor countries in Africa proper.
Paul Volker, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, was next to appear on World News Round-up. He confidently explained how and why the banking system would survive the day's events. All the major bankers of the West had agreed on a collaborative plan whereby each would support the other if there were any massive withdrawals of funds, and none of them would themselves engage in sudden or massive movement of capital which could upset the system. But the real assets behind the Western banking system were, he said, not documents about loans to Mauritania or arrangements with Egypt, but the immense productivity of industry and farms in America and Europe. The loss of billions of dollars to Africa was no small matter, he agreed, but it should not cripple the nations of the North Atlantic region if they cooperated and refrained from trying to claw back from their Western partners what they had lost in Africa.
The statement from Japan's PM Nakasone, however, indicated a breach of the West's uncompromising stand against Kolingba's resolution. He announced that he had asked members of the Asian Development Bank to send back their finance ministers from Washington via Tokyo for a high-level meeting at the weekend, to which Australia had been invited, and also, for the first time, Kenya, which would attend as an observer. He firmly stated that Japan would not be divided from Africa, which had the poorest and most populous developing economies. "On the Dark Continent," he said, "we have historic obligations and interests from which we shall not be deflected."
From South Africa, the editor of the Rand Daily Mail reported that the confrontation between the West and Africa was regarded in government circles as clear evidence of the conflict between black and white, which had always preoccupied that country. The general belief was that the great powers would, as a result, be more openly sympathetic to South Africa.
Or would they?
In Moscow, the response suggested that the new and much younger leadership that had recently come to power found itself in a bind. The correspondence of Sweden's Dagens Nyheter reported that the news of Kolingba's resolution had been covered briefly on television early in the evening, with sympathetic comments about the final convulsion of capitalism and the end of neo-colonialism. But then the item had been abruptly dropped. Now the reporter had just learned that the following morning Pravda would contain an article signed Observer, which usually meant the highest authorities in the land, denouncing Africa's moves as a threat to world stability at a very dangerous time and blaming deviant "imperialists" in China as the instigators of the threat.
The dilemma facing the Soviet Union was not unfamiliar. While traditionally it supported the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements in Africa, for several reasons its interests were bound up more with a prosperous industrial West than with a post-colonial and impoverished Africa. At recent UN trade conferences, the Soviet Union had voted consistently with the Western bloc. A disastrous harvest had left the country with no choice but to negotiate with the US for grain and to an increasing extent Western Europe. To make matters worse, China seemed to be moving much closer to Africa in its struggle against the industrialized powers than the USSR, itself an industrial power, could ever do. This in itself made the Kremlin suspicious of any concerted action by Africa. Finally, the subversive movements supported by Moscow in the Sahel region were beginning to influence the predominantly Muslim Soviet republics of Central Asia, whose rapidly growing population was threatening ethnic Russian dominance. All in all, the Soviet Union seemed poised to back the West and abandon its proteges in Africa.
In the Sheraton Washington Hotel that same Monday evening there was a final attempt by the center group of the West to regain control of the policy that Nigel Lawson had run away with so effectively in the afternoon. It started at the meeting of the G5 in Regan's office where Lawson was taken to task by the Japanese and French Finance Ministers for having gone much further in his speech than anything which had been agreed among them. Even Mr. Schauble, after some pious platitudes about the rich countries' obligations to impoverished Africa, complained that the British had alienated several countries that might have remained in the Western camp; he meant the East Europeans, but the Japanese and French nodded in agreement, both thinking of their special relationships with African countries.
Lawson was far too shrewd a politician not to see the elements of a bargain: everyone agreed on the need to discipline defaulters and of protecting the banking system from the consequences of default, but each country wanted to save some special associate in Africa from expulsion. He therefore proposed that in these cases, rather than pour money into bankrupt economies simply to avoid default, guarantees should be given, or if necessary, payment should be made directly to the relevant bank rather than passing it through the leaky hose of an African kleptocracy.
Secretary Regan was quite well aware that Lawson had gone much further in his speech than had been agreed between them, but after his experience with the Senators that afternoon he was convinced there was no way in which Congress would bail out any debtors who threatened to default. He therefore saw no alternative to Lawson's strategy and was indeed anxious to reassert his leadership within this group by representing it as a joint Anglo-American plan. After telling the G5 of his visit to the Hill that afternoon and of the Senate Committee's point-blank refusal to bolster any government that had borrowed more than it could replay, he made a strong plea for a united front when they met their colleagues. He was successful, and in the subsequent meeting, there were no signs of the rifts that divided the five ministers.
The big committee room where the other finance ministers of the industrialized world who were not big enough or rich enough to belong to the G5 had been waiting was buzzing like a disturbed beehive. Without any formalities, the Spanish Finance Minister attacked Donald Regan for his treatment of President Kalingba that morning and warned that the Anglo-Saxons were splitting the world most dangerously and had already united Guinea and Spain against them. The Italian Finance Minister, Bruno Visentini, supported this and asked how international organizations such as the Fund could be effective in such an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion.
Regan responded calmly and reasonably, explaining why his government could not accept what amounted to a unilateral repudiation of loan agreements, and mentioning the deep concern felt by both bankers and Congress at Kalingba's resolution. But Mr. Rubio was in no mood for reason and turned to Lawson to ask him by what authority he had threatened that there would be no loans to any who had voted for Kalingba's resolution.
Lawson replied that he had been careful to speak only for his government, but he believed that others might agree with him. Regan nodded vigorously and the three other G5 ministers at least inclined their heads. At this point, Michel Camdessus, the Managing Director of the Fund, asked whether increased funds could be put at the disposal of the IMF to assist in the rescheduling of African debts. Regan replied that was a matter for the board of the IMF to discuss but he doubted if his government could support it.
"I am sure Her Majesty's Government would never support it," said Lawson.
"Are you trying to bring the whole of Africa to its knees?" asked Camdessus.
"No," replied Lawson, "to its senses."
That retort seemed to bring the meeting itself to its senses. There was still a lot of ill will at how the Anglo-Saxons had taken a policy line without consultation, but, as the peacemaking Canadian minister pointed out, President Kalingba had not given them much time for consultation. At least this meeting, the Canadian continued, had made it crystal clear that none of the richest democracies were prepared to bail out the debtors once again and this should be made clear to the Africans. But finally, he warned that refusing debt relief or punishing the big debtors, was not an adequate policy. "What is our positive policy?" he asked.
Regan rather uneasily replied that he hoped to discuss this with them all the following day. Lawson went upstairs to work till the small hours on his plan of action, to ensure that it was the first in the field.
On Tuesday morning Lawson had breakfast with Regan in his office at the US Treasury, and they agreed on a modus operandi for the next 3 days, which both ministers felt was as long as the freeze on financial transactions could hold. The G5 ministerial group would act as general staff, the secretariat would be provided by the two English-speaking members, for the sake of efficiency and speed, since English was the official language of the Bank and Fund. They were to use a suite of offices hitherto occupied by the African caucus, which had moved overnight to New York, and the first ministerial meeting was to be at noon that day.
Lawson handed Regan a copy of the papers he'd prepared overnight, saying that he would like the Secretary to look them over and, if he agreed with the gist, to introduce them to the group. Regan glanced at them and said enigmatically that they would be very useful for his next meeting. As Lawson left he saw the pale, disheveled figure of Michel Camdessus, the Fund's managing Director, arriving.
Regan was very firm with Camdessus: he read them the outline of Lawson's plan for using the IMF as a safety net for the big international banks and told him that the G5 had the votes to put it through the board. If the Managing Director would cooperate it would be excellent; if not he should consider very carefully what his options were. Camdessus muttered something inaudible and left. Two hours later Camdessus's aide (a bright young man from the Bank of England) rang Lawson to say that the Managing Director had resigned. Godfrey Ji, the Deputy MD, will be taking over at once. Lawson did not need reminding that Ji had been the American candidate for Managing Director when Camdessus had been elected by the anti-American votes for continental Europe and the developing world. The way was now open to transform the IMF into an instrument of the emerging Anglo-Saxon policy.
Nigel Lawson's plan for action called for the expulsion from the Bank and Fund of any African country that defaulted or threatened to default on its debt. They would be denied all credit in Western markets, and if they wished to buy anything (including food) from there they would have to pay for it with money earned since the default by the sale of goods to the West. Thus pressure on Africa would be maximized, and the dangers of embargo on raw materials needed by the West would be minimized. It was expected that the whole of Africa would default, owing several hundred billion dollars to its creditors. Such a massive default would lead to the fall of the Western banking system, but the key feature of Lawson's plan was to prevent this.
If necessary, the IMF could create a sufficiency of special drawing rights to fulfill the guarantees, which would be allocated only to those central banks that had remained firmly within the system. This would achieve a closed circle of responsible banks, with the defaulters and probably all the weak economies of Africa on the outside where they could be assisted but where they could not hinder the organization of an orderly world market economy
Gross overlending to Africa, especially by the United States and German commercial banks, would not make this easy, while syndication of loans involved numerous smaller banks. But Schauble's plan removed the element of a sudden catastrophe which could cause panic and the collapse of the banking system.
The bureaucratic files of these days demonstrate that it was the treasury officials of each government who were the hardest to persuade of the merits of the Anglo-Saxon plan. They talked to each other and estimated the risks: they saw the short-term gains and the long-term disasters; they knew the dangers of an Africa-v-the World scenario, and the losses without any countervailing gains of a trade war; they saw the ultimate impracticality of many of the divisive proposals made in the plan. They therefore respectfully made their case to their political masters. The ministers listened sympathetically and then made their decisions, which the officials dutifully accepted and loyally defended against outside critics. When the disasters occurred, far worse even than the officials had expected, they could say "I told you so" ---but by then only to their wives and diaries.
With difficulty, the central bankers managed to persuade the big commercial bankers to stay in Washington and not to break ranks. In general, the big lenders and especially the West German bankers were very skeptical of the tough policies being discussed by the G5 ministers. They considered them hasty, unnecessary, and unwise---the kind of thing that politicians always do because they do not understand money, thinking it is produced by taxes rather than by industrial effort. The big four of the West German banks called on Karl Otto Pöhl, (then) President of the Bundesbank, and conveyed their fears in the strongest terms. The central banker shared some of their fears but said that the minister, a former head of the Dresdener Bank, had argued that things had gone too far, and with the Americans backing the proposals it was safe, and his duty, to support them.
It was a tribute to the power of the central banks that not one major commercial bank succeeded in breaking ranks and starting a stampede which could have brought down the whole system. It was also a tribute to the herd and survival instincts of the big bankers. It is worth noting, however, that some small banks involved in widely syndicated loans did try to call these loans, which under complicated cross-default clauses in the loan contracts could have resulted in a default being declared. But under cover of the freeze and strong political pressure, the small banks' actions were simply ignored and bankers of the African country concerned---also marooned in Washington---were quietly reassured.
It was thus under the relentless pressure of political will that the operating room was set up for the amputation of Africa from the global body economy, with that most modern form of anesthesia, the freeze.464Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡft4lx57ODo
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It had been agreed at the very start of the G5's deliberations that if any one of the 5 sought to save Africa from this amputation it should do so and keep the rest of the group informed. The only one to carry out this agreement to inform fully was the German Finance Minister Dr. Schauble, who had spent Tuesday evening talking to the East Europeans, and on Wednesday morning gave a copy of his memorandum on these conversations to each of his colleagues.
Most of the memorandum simply recounted how the East Europeans had told him how they expected to get much more assistance from the Bank now that the kleptocracies of Africa were being rightly expelled. This was not unexpected news.
But there was one section at the end of a much greater interest:
"I had one more visitor this night---Mr. R. Olegovich, the Economic Minister at the Soviet Embassy. He had asked very pressingly to see me about the Siberian pipeline which is now finally completed. He talked about it with obvious great technical knowledge, but quickly turned the conversation towards the vexed question of the Payments Agreement for this project, which I had not heard was in any trouble. He asked if the Soviet Union ought not to belong to some broader clearing system than the one set up for this particular project. What about the International Monetary Fund in this connection? Should it not serve the whole Western industrial complex, whatever the economic system of individual states? Was this the logical outcome to the breakaway of non-industrial Africa?
"Mr. Olegovich, who spoke fluent German, was very talkative. He told me that he was speaking quite informally and unofficially "as befitted neighbors." But he was quite clearly trying to get a message across to the leaders of the industrialized world. He spoke very freely about the errors made in Soviet agriculture and wondered aloud whether the World Bank's expertise in agriculture might not be put to better use in Ukraine rather than Uganda. And what about a crash development of the untold resources of Siberia; "that is the new heartland of the Northern hemisphere; it is there that we can make ourselves strong enough to meet the real threat that faces us all ---Muslim menace, as I call it, spreading up from the Sahara into our Central Asian Republics.
This was diplomatic nitroglycerin!
What Regan and his colleagues realized was that if this demarche meant anything it meant that one of the potentially richest storehouses in the world was open for exploitation and that one competitor had a half day's lead in staking a claim. Within 24 hours the United States, Japanese, French, and British embassies in Moscow were seeking interviews with Nikolai Shchelokov, the new Minister for Siberian Affairs.
The unsmiling Japanese PM Nakasone spoke next and told the group that all the Asian ministers invited to the weekend conference in Tokyo had accepted and he would take the chance to urge them on that they should remain members in good standing of the Bretton Woods institutions.
No other ministers had anything to add to the discussion.
Neither M. Beregovoy nor Secretary Regan had been idle in trying to keep old friends inside the system, but they had failed. Beregovoy and his colleague in New York at the UN had seen every member of the French Community and its African associates and had tried to persuade them to stay within the Bretton Woods system. But almost without except they had been met by a stony refusal. M. Beregovoy had explained why France herself could not afford to break with the system and had discussed how the French could help her former African colonies economically, outside the Anglo-Saxon system and inside the Franc Zone, even during the tough days of embargo, expulsion, and expropriation that lay ahead. But a last attempt to get the francophone African countries to participate in the Bank/Fund board elections and vote for an executive director to continue to fill their traditional seat was rejected.
Regan had been under great pressure from the State Department, and the Department of Defense, to find a formula that would give the United States some allies at least in the Horn of Africa around the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. In a bad-tempered and explosive meeting with several Cabinet colleagues Secretary Regan had replied that he would surely be as accommodating as possible, but it was up to the State Department and Department of Commerce to persuade such countries as Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia to avoid a costly confrontation with the whole industrialized world over the principle of honoring debts.
Eventually, it was decided to concentrate the US effort on reaching an agreement, within the next 24 hours with Egypt (for North Africa) and Zimbabwe (for the southern cone). In the event, both countries were reluctant to cooperate and made demands which the US could not publicly accept. So the US found itself in the unusual and unwelcome situation of being without an avoid friend and ally among the strategically vital countries south of the Nile River.
This was the position when the G5 met on Wednesday night to approve the last draft of the resolutions which would pass through all their complicated stages next day. All the ministers were exhausted, but at least Regan and Lawson felt that they had got roughly what they wanted, despite the objections of the faint of heart.
The IMF had been transformed (per Lawson's plan) into a safety net for Western banks encumbered with big loans to Africa. The Fund would guarantee these loans. At the same time, it was to be converted into a debt collecting agency with powers to compensate itself as best it could for any default in payments to the West, but impounding African assets outside its territory. But to restore credit to the threatened banking system of Europe and North America it was made clear that the IMF support for these banks in their debt default crises was backed by full faith and credit of the whole industrialized world, and not just by its earnings as a debt collector. Should the need arise the Governors of the IMF were specifically authorized to create credit in the form of special drawing rights which would be backed by the productivity of the industrialized world.
The World Bank's role had been bitterly disputed in the G5, strictly along lines of national interest. Regan had made it quite clear that the US did not expect the Bank to have any major funds for development if the expected defaults took place, but Nakasone argued that if he succeeded in keeping Japan in Africa, China, and India, for instance, must expect to benefit from their involvement in the Dark Continent. The US Secretary, foreseeing major Congressional problems about competition with India for Africa, argued that this would be impossible at first until those who'd voted for Kolingba's resolution had proved themselves creditworthy. Schauble argued that priorities should be given to any available development funds and expertise to be channeled from Africa to Eastern Europe, where there had been no threat of default or political instability. It was eventually agreed that the future role of the bank would be decided by the Bank's governing body when the international credit situation was clearer. Meanwhile, nothing should be said in the resolution or by members of the G5 in public.
As the defensive isolationist aspects of the proposals became more and more apparent, the spirits of the financial community became increasingly gloomy. By Thursday, however, the news of the Soviet Union's overtures to Dr. Schauble, and the "secret decision" of the G5 to give Eastern Europe priority over Africa for development, had become the main focus. It was built up (primarily by the West Germans) as the hope for a future that otherwise seemed bleak, and Siberia appeared as a brave new developing world called in to redress the balance of the old.
In particular, the prospects of East/West trade and a proper outlet in the communist bloc for agricultural surpluses lifted the spirits of those Europeans and Americans who saw that the new economic order that was emerging would reduce Africa/West trade to a trickle of barter. There was only the flimsiest of evidence that there had been any real change of heart in the Kremlin, but in this dark hour of Africa/West economic relations, any slight chink of light in the East seemed to herald the dawn, and every banker was determined to be the first to salute it.464Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOG21vsCtwT
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On 11:00 A.M. Thursday, the conference hall of the Sheraton Washington Hotel was only 1/4 full as Regan rose to move the adoption of the resolutions which had been formally approved earlier that morning by the Joint Procedures Committee. There was a certain sense of charade about the occasion: the Liberian Chairman, like all the Africans, was absent, and his place taken by M. Camdessus, the French acting Managing Director of the Fund. In contrast, the industrialized countries fielded full delegations and tried to ignore the empty spaces. The Special Guests ---the bankers---were all there, for they wanted to hear firsthand the official verdict on which their future depended. It was to this wedge of bankers that Regan mainly addressed himself.
It had been agreed amongst the G5 that none of them would speak after Lawson had presented the resolutions, and few of the smaller industrialized countries wanted to speak. They mostly intended to vote for the Anglo-Saxon formula, without enthusiasm but were swept along by the apparent need to save their banking system from destruction by adopting the only plan of salvation in sight. Jean Godeaux, Governor of the Central Bank of Belgium made a brief technical speech in support, and then after a long silence, T.E. Desta came to the lectern and made one final plea for moderation in the shortest speech on record at an annual meeting. Mariano Rubio, Governor of the Central Bank of Spain (who represented his country while his Finance Minister was meeting with his colleague from Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, at the UN in New York) was the last speaker. He uttered a few words of warning and after the applause for his speech had died down the resolutions he had spoken against, but voted for, were duly adopted by an overwhelming majority.
The Bretton Woods institutions had been given over to the sole control of the industrialized world to manage a global economy on behalf of 1/5 of the globe's population.
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