506 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSmarketing board, and the farmer bought off the swollen bureaucracy.
On the record, then, Benin is an empty husk with big negative trade
balance and negative growth; but it's really a smuggling machine.
The lesson one draws from these and similar instances is that Africa
is not so badly off as it appears, just worse. Look at a photo or TV
screen, at these prostrate fly-specked children, all bones, saggy skin,
bulging eyes and belly, and you are overwhelmed by the misery. You
know that the children you are looking at are dead by the time you see
them. Look at another scene, especially in the picturesque pages of the
National Geographic, and you marvel at the smiles and vigor of the
dancers or traders in an exotic landscape. The continent bears witness
to hope and hopelessness, courage and despair. Circumstances are ap
palling, but somehow people find ways to cope, survive, die, yet mul
tiply.
Meanwhile the international placemen and experts sing their litde
songs of innocence and inexperience. "Adjustment" is the current re
frain: a touch of freedom here, of market and exchange rate realism
there, and things will be better, may even get well. One of the games
economists play may be called "statistical misinference." Compare
more or less comparable numbers from different countries and draw
conclusions, past and future. So with Africa: as we saw earlier, com
paring Nigeria and Indonesia, Africa has done less well than East Asian
countries that started at a lower level. (One can make a similar invidi
ous comparison between Turkey and South Korea.) But why not turn
that around? If Indonesia could do so well, why not Nigeria? The same
World Bank report that deplores African performance in 1965-90 cites
Asian figures for 1965 ("conditions similar to those in Africa in 1990")
to envisage African growth over the next quarter century. Equal levels
at different times constitute for these experts similar conditions. Oh
yes, the proportion of children in school was higher in Asia, but that
is easily remedied. Otherwise, no problem. Of cultural and institu
tional differences, nothing.
News item: The United Nations, in collaboration with the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has announced a plan to
raise $25 billion over the next decade, over and beyond what these in
ternational agencies can find (much to come from private sources),
and invest it in African improvement.^28 At present twenty-two of the
twenty-five poorest countries in the world are in Africa, and 54 percent
of Africans five below the UN poverty line; what's more, Africa is the
only region where poverty is expected to increase over the next ten
years. How much can $25 billion do? Well, as of 1994, the debts of