(^432) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
So, although the colonialists often left behind an infrastructure of
roads, ports, railroads, and buildings, maintenance was another matter.
The ability of the ex-colonies to neglect and run down their material
legacy was stunning, as visitors could attest. (The same thing happened
in central and East European countries drawn into the inept bureau
cratic world of socialism.)^12 Much of what these subject populations
learned in the schools and universities of the colonial master was po
litical and social discourse rather than applied science and technical
know-how—the makings of revolution rather than production. And
maybe that was the first priority: freedom first, economy later; because
freedom is a necessary if not sufficient condition of development.
The first post-freedom numbers for product and income per head
were encouraging, but probably misleading. They reflected more ap
pearance than reality. As more transactions became commercialized, for
example, as more product went to market rather than to home con
sumption, the results showed up in the data where they had not before.
Economic pundits predicted bright futures for such ex-colonies as
Nigeria (oil), Ivory Coast/Côte d'Ivoire (cocoa), Algeria (oil and gas).
Then disappointment. Few of these ex-colonies maintained consis
tent growth per head,* and their dependence on highly variable terms
of trade (agricultural commodities vs. manufactures) inflicted painful
swings in income. As President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania complained
in 1976, why should his country have to give twice as many bales of
sisal this year as last to buy the same farm tractor? Of course, he had not
complained earlier (1970-74), when the price of sisal rose more than
four times in four years.^13 (Mercurial commodity prices were an old
story. Between 1925 and 1928, the world price of rubber fell from 73
cents to 22 cents a pound, and then with the Great Depression, to less
than 3 cents a pound in 1932.^14 The plantations of Southeast Asia
[Malaya, East Indies, Indochina] took a beating. But from there the
price could only go up, as it did up to and into the war. War is hell on
tires and great for the rubber business.)
In the face of freedom's disappointments, the law of undiminishing
conviction took over. Those accustomed to blame material failure on
foreign wrongs now decided that exploitation had merely assumed
- Thus, after good years in the 1960s and 1970s, the Côte d'Ivoire showed negative
growth over the next decade, -4.7 percent per year per head from 1980 to 1992—
World Bank, World Development Report 1994, Table 1. Algeria and Nigeria show a sim
ilar pattern, although their rates of decline are lower, -0.5 and -0.4 percent from
1980 to 1992. In the latter two, civil war has had a disastrous effect on the economy,
in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970, in Algeria today.