POVERTY: Africa's wealth not spread evenly

NICE , France— In years past, Africa was always the outsiders’ cornucopia, the font of gold and diamonds, slaves and minerals, cotton and rubber and, more latterly, oil.
These days, the continent’s riches draw a new cast of prospectors and predators, but the question is the same: who benefits — the people, or a coterie of political and military elites that has sunk deep roots in Africa’s postcolonial loam, fed and watered by foreign powers and investors?
Consider, for instance, Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe — two lands in the news where, by flukes of geology and geography, rulers have secured what seem to be charmed lives, tapping windfall seams of wealth to perpetuate their rule.
In Equatorial Guinea, oil was discovered in 1996, roughly halfway through President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo’s three decades in power. The country has since become the third largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola. Its annual wealth has increased 5,000 percent since 2002, but most of the population of around 650,000 lives on less than a dollar a day, according to Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group based in New York.
In Zimbabwe, the economy was in a tailspin when, in 2006, huge and potentially fabulous diamond deposits were discovered at Marange, in the east of the country. Yet, Human Rights Watch said, “the diamonds continue to benefit a few senior people in the government and their accomplices rather than the people of Zimbabwe as a whole.”
The people of those countries are not alone in suffering from what has been called the curse of riches.
In Angola, Nigeria, Sudan and Gabon, the powerful have thrived while the poor have gained little, if anything, from the ambiguous blessings of oil. In the postcolonial annals, near-exclusive dependence on a single commodity — copper in Cold War-era Zambia and Zaire, as Congo was then known, or uranium in Niger — entrenched one-party states even as African economies became hostage to the vagaries of remote, international markets.
In Uganda, now, there is talk of huge oil reserves in a land where the incumbent, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power since 1986.
Some people have called it the paradox of plenty: across the globe, around 3.5 billion people live in countries rich in oil, gas and minerals, according to an advocacy group called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, or E.I.T.I. Those people should all benefit, the group said, but “when governance is weak, it may result in poverty, corruption and conflict.”
And it usually does.
True, big companies, governments and advocacy groups have sought to shame or pressure or cajole errant regimes into compliance with higher standards.
“E.I.T.I. isn’t only about show,” said Jonas Moberg, director of the organization, which is based in Oslo and strives to build openness and accountability. “We believe that it can have an impact.”
But such mechanisms have been easy to ignore or circumvent, and both Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe have shown the limits of international efforts to set new standards of probity.
Equatorial Guinea applied to join E.I.T.I., grouping big oil and mining companies with governments and civic groups in the countries in which they operate.
Membership would have given Equatorial Guinea respectability, committing it to a new openness about its oil income. But in April, the country had not met a deadline to fulfill E.I.T.I.’s criteria, and, for the first time, the body turned down a request to extend it. Many other prospective members have also failed to meet those requirements, which include the inclusion of local advocacy groups and the adoption of new accounting methods to track the flow of oil money.
In another setback, Mr. Obiang sought recently to burnish his image by creating a well-endowed prize in his name at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — only to run into strong opposition from member states questioning his human rights record.
For its part, Zimbabwe is a signatory of the United Nations-backed Kimberley Process, also embracing companies, advocacy groups and governments whose role is to exclude so-called conflict diamonds from global trade.
In a critical test of the organization’s ability to police the diamond trade, Zimbabwe is seeking approval to export newly mined stones from the Marange fields in the east of the country, where the Zimbabwean military has been accused of abuses including murder, rape, torture and smuggling.
But, as in Equatorial Guinea, the question is simply this: what is more alluring to unscrupulous officials — an international imprimatur or instant access to clandestine riches?
(That is not the only bond: in 2004, a band of mercenaries planning to topple Mr. Obiang stopped off in Zimbabwe to pick up weapons. Instead of guns, they got arrested, and their leader was later extradited to Equatorial Guinea: call it professional courtesy.)
The Kimberley Process was established a decade ago to stem trade in stones fueling civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola, defining them as diamonds “used by rebel movements or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments.”
That rubric does not apply in Zimbabwe, where advocacy groups and others have expressed concern, not about civil war against a government, but about the authorities’ own behavior toward their people.
In July the Kimberley Process agreed to permit Zimbabwe to export some diamonds by early September in return for allowing the body to investigate the widely reported abuses in the Marange fields. But the organization is riven by divisions, its consensual deliberations can easily be stalled, and it is struggling to extend its success in stemming blood diamonds a decade ago to the newer and different realities of human rights abuse.
“The problem is that Kimberley has not evolved to deal with the problems of the 21st century,” said Arvind Ganesan, an expert with Human Rights Watch in Washington.
For both the E.I.T.I. and the Kimberley Process, he said, “it is the unwillingness or the inability of governments to comply with the rules they set for themselves that is at the heart of the problems today.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/world/africa/31iht-letter.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y