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When Dr. Olayinka led Africa out of the conference hall in Washington he had already received imperious instructions from President Ayotunde to join him immediately in New York where the United Nations General Assembly was in the second week of its regular annual session. The Organization of African Unity (OAU), which had been having trouble finding an agreed meeting place on the home continent, had decided to take advantage of the gathering to hold a summit meeting in New York during the last days of September. It was for this that Ayotunde had come to New York and now found himself embroiled in UN politics, which he found even more byzantine than those of his homeland.
The income per head of the Group of 54 (G54) African countries was about 1/10 of that in the industrial economies, which had a total of 700 million inhabitants---and 20 votes in the UN. (NOTE: Voting in the UN was based on one nation, one vote). The Soviet Union and its satellites, described officially as non-marked industrial economies, had a total population of 370 million and 10 votes, of which three belonged to the Soviet Union. This leads us to goal #1 of the Africans: to take control of the true economic decisions inside the Bretton Woods institutions.
The World Bank and the IMF were affiliates of the UN, and the heads of these institutions attended the UN's top administrative council under the chairmanship of Javier Perez de Cuellar, the current Secretary General, yet they claimed complete independence from the UN General Assembly under their articles of agreement. Hence, goal #2 of the Africans: to break through this impenetrable barrier first, then settle their internal differences about what to do if they did gain even a measure of control over the rich world's institutions.
North Africa, which had borrowed extensively and traded in oil and other raw materials with the West, wished to deal with the Western nations as they always had, but on somewhat better terms and with a larger measure of participation in economic decision-making. Egypt was also associated with this bloc because it possessed a sizeable industrial base and derived considerable benefits from its association with the industrialized world.
The Sahel countries, however, could see no benefit in any links with the capitalist world. They were very poor and believed that they could not survive the competition of world markets. There was probably a slight majority of votes in the G54 for such a policy as de-linking but until now the influence of Nigeria and some of the richer francophone states had prevented the African radicals from taking the lead publicly.
They had not been idle, though. Led by Benjamin Mkapa when he was the Tanzanian representative at the UN, a small group of ambassadors in conjunction with some of the brightest of the secretariat in New York and Geneva had been drawing up plans against the day when they would be able to break away from the entanglements of the consumer societies. Working in the early 1980s in the aftermath of the Polish crisis they had chosen the name "Solidarity of Africa" (SoA) for their study group, which painstakingly recruited enthusiasts through the international secretariat to write and discuss working papers on such subjects as moving the UN to Africa, expelling the multi-nationals from that continent, building an African development bank and fund which would tax wealthy nation and redistribute the money to the continent's poor and starving.
It was this crucial issue of which the African state was to control the world economy for the continent's benefit that lay at the heart of the Africa-West dialogue and subsequently the Africa-West conflict. What Africa had to understand was this: In the first 25 years after World War II there had been an uneasy compromise. The former colonial powers, driven by the anti-colonial United States of Roosevelt and Truman, accepted a certain obligation to advance the economies of the ex-colonies that had been so recently dependent on them. This was more or less acceptable to the emerging 3rd World, which experienced historically unprecedented rates of growth. But in the 1970s a series of events upset the balance. The United States lost interest in 3rd World development due to its horrific defeat in Vietnam, and Congress began to refuse the funds that the World Bank and IMF needed to continue the whole development process, which began to appear to the 3rd World much less secure and much more dependent on the whims of US goodwill.
But at the end of the decade, first Britain, then the US, and then West Germany turned to the free market as the proper instrument for managing the world economy and cooled their support for international financial institutions, at least so far as they interfered with market pressures on Africa. The resistance by the Anglo-Saxons to any takeover of these institutions by Africa was of course redoubled, and the determination of the radicals in the UN to break this grip increased proportionately.
Kolingba was determined to make one final effort to hold the existing economic order together while giving it a decisive turn in favor of the middle-income countries.
He intended to do this in his long-planned speech to the United Nations General Assembly that Tuesday afternoon. His speech called for close collaboration between the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. Because he recognized that the IMF and more particularly the World Bank were not just providers of money but development strategists, this collaboration would extend beyond debt and lending into agriculture, health, population control, trade, and communication where the appropriate UN specialist agencies would work closely with the World Bank.
It was the most far-reaching and thoroughly worked out proposal for bridging the gap between industrialized Europe/America and developing Africa that had been put forward thus far, and while it made great demands on the World Bank and IMF it did leave them with a veto on investment strategy.
Kalingba never made his speech. Whether or not he would have managed to get the support he needed from the G57 to get his proposals through the General Assembly is perhaps doubtful, not least because President Ayotunde of Nigeria was now determined to break with the Bretton Woods institutions. But the question is academic. While Kalingba was discussing his proposals with African leaders he was interrupted by the Zairean finance minister who had just returned from Washington where he had an early appointment with the Managing Director of the Fund, Michel Camdessus.
He reported that he had been met at the great atrium of the Fund by an American secretary who took him straight to the office of the Fund Secretary, Jacques de Larosière, where he was kept waiting for 30 minutes before being curtly told that the Managing Director would not be able to see him because Mr. Regan, the US Secretary of the Treasury, had just received his resignation and his replacement, Marc Trebek, was busy. Dr. Larosiere then proceeded to lecture the Finance Minister on the folly of Zaire's support of Kolingba's resolution. Then, glancing at his watch, he said: "Now, I believe you wish to return to the United Nations. I have put my car at your service so that you can catch the shuttle to New York if you hurry."
"Thus was I hustled out of an international institution of which I am one of the Governors!" said the Zairean Finance Minister, Jules F. Sambwa, with all the bitterness of injured pride.
There was a moment of shocked silence, and then Kalingba said: "I will not speak at the General Assembly this afternoon. I cannot beg for reforms in an institution that is showing us the door. But I warn you all against the trap that the Anglo-Saxons are setting. They want to get us out of the Fund so that they can use it for their ends. We should not play into their hands by permitting ourselves to be excluded. We must exercise our right to elect our representatives at the elections to the Board of Executive Directors of the Fund and the Bank."
But tempers were running too high for the voice of reason to be heard. Kalingba's withdrawal gave the BOTS group their chance to take over the G57 and provide the intellectual basis for an African strategy.
Laraba Aliyu proposed that President Ayotunde should fill the "head of state" slot left vacant by Kalingba, and suggested that his speech should outline proposals for Africa to stand on its own two feet in a world economic order based on the United Nations. Ayotunde demurred, saying that he had neither the time nor the knowledge to write such a speech by 3:00 p.m. Aliyu promised that the BOTS secretariat would provide him with working notes. Reluctantly Ayotunde was flattered into agreeing, and messengers were sent to clear the change in speaker with the President of the General Assembly.
As the meeting adjourned Kalingba caught up with Jebat Gana and extracted a promise that he would make sure that their seats on the Bretton Woods boards would be filled. He also telephoned Miguel Boyer Salvador, the Spanish Minister of Finance, who was in Washington, and persuaded him to put up a candidate for the seat held by Equatorial Guinea, a tiny former colony of Spain that had attached itself to its former master some years earlier; Kalingba knew that in the present mood of hostility to all Washington-based institutions, the Guinean candidate would be withdrawn. "If they expel us we must retain our legal rights for the day we return," were his final words to Senor Salvador.
President Kalingba was thinking far ahead to the day when Africa would return to the World Bank and IMF as a full partner. In the meantime, he had done what he could to ensure that the Central African Republic and its neighbors retained a voice in the councils of those institutions. 479Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6UomOAd2Na
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The announcement that the Nigerian head of state was replacing the President of the Central African Republic as the main speaker on the new international economic order in the afternoon caused intense speculation within the UN, where Ayotunde was an unknown and, given recent events, puzzling character since he had first of all ordered Nigeria to abstain on Kalingba's resolution and then when it was defeated had reversed himself and instructed his delegation to lead Africa out of the Bank/Fund meeting. Even the jaded public showed some interest when SCAN announced that they would carry Ayotunde's speech live in the afternoon. The public galleries at the UN were usually only sparsely occupied by out-of-town bus tours, but this afternoon they were filled with a motley crowd of people who thought they should take a look at this ordinarily inoffensive and harmless body which appeared now to be having such a malign effect on Wall Street and the banks. They were joined in the galleries by a large group of American blacks who were in New York for the "Roots in Africa" rally which was to be addressed by some of the distinguished African visitors that very evening.
These blacks provided a ready-made and welcome claque for President Ayotunde, who had never spoken to the UN and was understandably a trifle nervous. But he was a natural politician, and he recognized at once that what he was addressing was not just a floor full of ambassadors and their attendant economic bureaucrats, but through television a mass audience in America and eventually the world.
He put on one side the detailed proposals given him by the BOTS secretariat and spoke without notes in words which appeared to the proletarian sense of oppression by powerful minorities, whether in Harlem or Lagos or the United Nations: "Yesterday I watched with disgust the so-called World Bank and Fund because the rich minority that controls it wished to re-impose colonial status on my people. So today I came right away to consult with the United Nations, the true parliament of man, which should control the finances of our global community in the interests of the majority of mankind.
"That is what I am not proposing in this august Assembly, which is the supreme authority of the United Nations. The World Bank and the Fund are affiliates of the UN and they must be taught to respect our lawful commands. We recognize that these international financial institutions have certain rules of prudence of their own, and we will respect them in detail so long as we obey the broad strategy that we deem to be necessary to save both Africa and the West from economic disaster.
"That strategy can be expressed very simply, though its implementation may be very complex: the growth rate in the productivity of the developing countries must be restored to a level that will enable us to abolish absolute and degrading poverty in our countries by the end of the century. This idea was first proclaimed in Africa by the then-president of the World Bank more than 1 decade ago, but nothing has been done about it. The end of the century is near."
There was some applause from the African delegations and the blacks in the galleries at this, and Ayotunde for the first time glanced at his detailed notes and then continued less rhetorically and less confidently.
"Progress to this end must not be hindered by lack of investment funds. The task facing the World Bank and the IMF is not only to deal realistically with the debt problem, which is creating a negative flow of resources from poor to rich, but allocate finance with less worry for quick profit and more for long-term development.
"They must form, essentially, an Africa Central Bank or Development Fund, whose priority is the eradication of degrading poverty.
"If the existing institutions refuse to accept these obligations then they will have lost their validity and their legitimacy. We Africans will not just resign from them, rather we will deprive them of their charter, cut them off from the United Nations body, and assign their functions to new agencies that can carry out the will of the world's majority."
The combination of BOTS's populism and Ayotunde's air of military command had shocked the assembly into respectful silence, but as he relied more on BOTS's notes and began to describe how the transition would be carried out if the international finance institutions refused to comply with these demands, there were murmurs of dissent. It was a tough policy involving the transfer of any repayments on "loans for development purposes" from the original lender to a "United Nations Development Fund." which, it was suggested, would be administered outside the United States. America was denounced as "the Robber of Africa" and an oppressor of its blacks at home in terms that derived from the radical secretariat rather than President Ayotunde.
This so irritated Ike Andrews, a Congressman from North Carolina who was part of the huge US delegation that he started shouting abusive questions at the speaker, which were quickly taken up in the public gallery by a group of Americans whose lapel buttons proclaimed that they were "golden oldies from Kansas"; their shouts of "you're trying to steal our money" were greeted by the black "Roots in Africa" group with mocking cries of "you can't take it with you when you go." In a few moments, there was a mini race riot in the galleries which the few security guards were quite incapable of controlling. The UN's TV cameras, under the control of a Ghanaian team, had perfect shots of lots of blacks being manhandled by whites, which were instantly fed into the local TV stations and so around the world.
The President of the Assembly adjourned the meeting and had the galleries cleared. The solid phalanx of nearly 300 blacks who felt they were the guests of the African VIPs refused to leave and soon the TV screens of New York were showing more pictures of blacks being forcibly evicted from the UN. In minutes, groups of young black activists were setting off from Harlem and the West Side for the United Nations Plaza.
Outside on the grounds of the UN fights broke out during which an African ambassador was knocked unconscious and President Kalingba's car overturned. The Security guards had almost succeeded in getting the "roots" group out to their waiting buses when an invasion of blacks from Harlem and the West Side swept down First Avenue. The riot lasted less than 1 hour, but it was fought out on television (courtesy of the UN film unit) in front of the UN building, and for the first time viewers saw that now famous acronym "Brothers of the Spear," on scores of posters which inexplicably appeared in the crowds.
When it was all over it became clear to the American authorities that this was not going to remain merely a local New York incident. Apart from the fact that an African ambassador to the UN had had his skull broken and was in the hospital on the critical list and that the limousine of a visiting head of state had been severely damaged by an American crowd the whole episode had been transmitted live in the most damaging way to a global audience by UNESCO's Africa-West News (AWN) satellite which floated somewhere above the Caribbean Sea, and was linked to other international satellites covering most of the globe.
US Secretary of State Shultz was quick to issue a generous statement of concern and apology, while his staff brought great pressure on New York City Mayor Ed Koch to apologize likewise. This proved to be a mistake, for Mayor Koch had little use for the UN with its frequent diplomatically immune violators of his "no parking" rules and its constant anti-American bias. However, he duly appeared on City News that evening and read out with obvious distaste a few sentences readied for him by the State Department. Then, as he was rising to leave the studio, he muttered: "Those grasping bastards sure had it coming to them." It was quite loud enough to be picked up by the presenter's microphone.
The audience in New York for the New York City News at 10:00 p.m. is comparatively small but it contains a high proportion of UN delegates who are busily engaged in diplomatic drinks parties at the time of the main network news. For them, this was the final straw, and the switchboard at the US Mission to the UN was swamped with protest calls, all duly recorded on their answering machines.
But by far the most significant response came from a small group watching the news on TV in a dingy office on 48th and 1st Avenue, which was the headquarters of the "Brothers of the Spear." Within minutes they had contacted the secretariat of the G57 and arranged an emergency meeting for the following morning. They spent the next twelve hours preparing a dossier of papers for each delegation. All the work of the last few years at last seemed to be bearing fruit, which might be harvested if only they could act before the diplomatic weather changed.
When the G57 met in the morning in the spacious Economic and Social Council chamber, each delegate---over 100 attended, including several of the heads of state and foreign ministers who were in New York for the General Assembly---found in his place a folder of papers under the imprint of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). They covered: the establishment of a UN bank and fund for African development under the control of the General Assembly; the delinking of agricultural and industrial economies; the promotion of Africa-Africa trade; plans for making economies in Africa complementary to each other; studies on labor-intensive industrialization, and so on. There was also a short typescript marked "draft", prepared by the African caucus, outlining proposals for removing the United Nations headquarters from New York to Geneva.
Some of these proposals had been going the rounds of UN meetings for years and were generally considered by the more experienced developing countries to be pipedreams. But the events of the past 48 hours had made new enemies for the West, and the ministers representing Zaire, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, for example, who had never given their support to such proposals before, looked at them now with an open mind and even some enthusiasm.
Just as the Ghanaian Chairman called the meeting to order, Miguel Boyer Salvador, the Spanish Finance Minister, who was not a member of the G57, came into the room and went up to President Kalingba. After a few moments of wild gesticulatory whispering Kalingba asked the Chairman if Senor Salvador could report on some developments in Washington. Without waiting for an answer or a microphone Sr. Salvador told the G57 that they would be expelled from the Bretton Woods institutions the following morning if the Anglo-Saxon resolutions were adopted, as they almost surely would be.
Laraba Aliyu immediately proposed that the G57 should use its voting power in the General Assembly to withdraw the UN from New York and relocate it to Geneva. At the same time, the General Assembly should direct that the functions previously delegated to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should be transferred to a new Africa Development Bank and Fund under the control of the General Assembly. He concluded with a tirade against the United States, denying that the move to Geneva would mean secession from the legitimate UN; it was rather a withdrawal from American attempts to pervert its purposes.
There was loud applause for this statement from the African continent, which had always been more at home in Europe than in the United States where they felt themselves identified with the national underclass. Before the G57 could approve this far-reaching proposal the Tunisian Finance Minister, Salah Ben M'barka, coolly asked how much of the New York United Nations establishment would move to Geneva and who would finance that move. The US, Britain, and West Germany were hardly likely to pay their share. Aliyu's evasive reply, which contained a thinly veiled suggestion that the richer North African countries might pay for the move, infuriated Ben M'barka. Before the meeting could deteriorate into a North African walkout the Chairman called for a half-hour recess to allow tempers to cool.
Jebat Gana took the arm of the furious Tunisian and piloted him to a corner in the African delegate's lounge for coffee and sympathy, where they were soon joined by the delegate of Libya. As his diary records, Gana did not find it too hard to persuade the North Africans that the G57 had not been captured by the radicals.
"Our difficulty," he told them, "is that the Anglo-Saxons have spoken so bluntly as to give moderation a bad name. But President Ayotunde is no radical, although he will now do anything to spite the Anglo-Saxons, however much it might hurt Nigeria. What is needed is action to keep the UN as an effective body with a bias in favor of Africa.
"But why," replied Ben M'barka, "should we Africans wish to take our repudiated debts to Switzerland, a country run by its bankers and dominated by the creditor ethic? Why should they pay good money, which they don't have, to transport the idle pensioners in these UN buildings across the ocean to be equally idle in Geneva, which is much pleasanter but even more expensive than New York? Why not leave the secretariat here, where it is primarily a burden on the Western world, and set up our small think-tank for development outside the United States? It could become the true United Nations representing the cradle of Mankind, and the developed nations would have to pay attention to it."
They discussed the question in detail and agreed that given the present American mood and an election year coming up at least this General Assembly could not continue in New York. It would be absurd to move it elsewhere in the West, and after reviewing the options they agreed that Kenya would be an ideal site. It was considered by many Africans to be a "model nation," yet it was itself too small to seek to dominate the Assembly. Jebat Gana, though himself an Asian, not an African, was delighted, and very efficiently set in motion arrangements for an emergency debate in the General Assembly the next day.
The rest of Wednesday was hectic even by Gana's standards, as the G57 hammered out a resolution that could carry as much of their voting strength as possible and maybe get the votes of some marginal countries in the industrialized world. The communist bloc, Japan, France, and Spain were singled out for special attention; on the other side, the African de-linkers were lobbied into accepting the move to distant and little-known Kenya, while the North Africans were persuaded that the G57 had not been lost to the radicals and that the General Assembly would be moving to a safe economic haven.
The true nature of what happened in the UN that week was not fully discerned by the media, which was distracted by the numerous flamboyant clashes of personality: the Africans filled with hurt pride and often playing to the gallery of resentful American blacks; US Secretary of State Shultz anxious to prove that he was not throwing Africa out of the UN, but very aware that many New Yorkers, probably including Mayor Koch, were demonstrating outside the building in favor of doing just that; the British impatient about being constantly begged from and bullied by their former African colonies and decided to stand firm once and for all without the customary protestation of goodwill.
But beneath the theatrics, there were powerful forces at work pulling the United Nations apart and setting Africa against the West in what was tantamount to a world war. This was only palely reflected in the resolution for Thursday's emergency debate, which was proposed by Tunisia and twenty other members of the G57 to give geographic balance. The resolution was based on Gana's draft, as negotiated with the North African states, amended to carry the various interest groups with it, and finally redrafted by Gana in a simplified form to give it sense and purpose.
It called for the adjournment of the current assembly sine die "owing to an environment that is not conducive to progress." A Special General Assembly for Restructuring and Development would open in Kenya at the beginning of November. This would be serviced by a small expert secretariat based in Kenya. The first item on the agenda would be the establishment of an Africa Development Bank and Fund to take over the responsibilities and functions that the Bretton Woods institutions had abandoned. There was a financial note appended which said that the costs should be defrayed by a special levy on the UN general budget. Only those who paid their allotted share of this levy would be eligible to attend the Special General Assembly.
The debate for so grand a theme was trivial, and the vote a foregone conclusion: 122 in favor, 25 against. It was interesting to note that the Soviet Union cast its three votes against but without any speech. Japan abstained and also abstained from speaking. Spain voted for the resolution, but no other member of the EEC did so, though France, with Gallic logic, voted against it saying that "if overruled by the majority we will pay our share of the levy." The Anglo-Saxon trio spoke strongly against it, and US Secretary Shultz, who was making one of his very rare appearances in the UN forum, warned that this might well prove to be "the end of the General Assembly and the economic activities of the United Nations as we know them."
This was to prove correct; but as the General Assembly wound up its affairs, including even the moribund Committee on Global Negotiations, there were no tears shed on either side. For Africa all attempts to gain control of its economic future through the United Nations seemed to have been rendered futile by the intransigence of the West; for the West, the idea of reorganizing the world's economy through a political assembly dominated by the votes of one continent seemed a mixture of lunacy and heresy. With varying degrees of ill will both sides determined to de-link and go their own way. The ideal of one world, which had inspired the victorious Allies at the end of World War II, was laid to rest, and the prospect of a struggle between one continent and the world became a reality. But this time the conflict was not, as in World War II, one of ideology backed by military might, but a division of class, between eating and starving. The cleavage between the affluent West and indigent Africa ran just below the income level of the European communist bloc which became a rather embarrassed camp follower of the billion eating, while Africa was the obvious home of three billion starving.
Japan, with its trading pattern normally centered around the Pacific basin, feared isolation from its traditional grouping, especially if China intervened on Africa's behalf. It was determined not to come into any kind of conflict with mainland China, and it made speedy overtures to the Africans, offering a special relationship that would begin to bridge the gap between rich Japan and poor Africa, without removing Japan from its secure position in the West as a leading industrial power.
Africa during these critical days was, as ever, mostly a victim of events it did not control. On its home turf at the UN in New York, it had responded to expulsion from the dominant economic system by storming out of it with the battle cry of delinking its economies.
Africa was moving its headquarters from the UN in the West to the UN Restructuring and Development Committee in Kenya without any properly prepared plan for their independence from the West. Throughout the 1980s their economies had been moving downwards and were on the verge of collapse. Facing them were the stagnant but strong economies of the West whose traditional dependence on Africa for raw materials was gradually being reduced through the new industrial revolution in man-made products.
For the industrialized world, the Washington debt settlement was like finding solid ground under its feet when the hangman sprung the trap door. The immediate sense of relief among the bankers was overwhelming, though they soon realized that immense problems and considerable losses lay ahead. But at least they had survived to bank another day.
Among politicians, the sense of relief predominated, but they recognized that a new set of dangers lay ahead. The post-colonial sense of obligation by the rich countries to Africa, and the more recent sense of interdependence, were shattered. Struggling to gain intellectual acceptance---as it was already being put into practice---was the new political theory that the function of the rich nations was to take over the management of the world in the name of efficient world productivity, from which the poorer nations (Africa in particular) would eventually benefit if they were ready to cooperate with the system and not seek to control it.
This shocked some finance ministers, who recognized the new managers as old imperialists writ large; it scared them all, for it was a very high-risk policy. Could the industries of the West survive without the raw materials Africa provided? Could the advanced economies of the West survive without the markets of Africa? Could the West live securely when it was, to some extent, infiltrated by a hostile Africa?
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