Africa Continental Shift

The story going around Kinshasa is that one night late last December, Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko was entertaining a roomful of dinner guests when the television broadcast news of Nicolae Ceausescu's precipitate execution in Bucharest. Mobutu had long counted as a friend the Romanian autarch, who came to power in 1965, as he did. At the sight of that familiar face wreathed in blood, Mobutu abruptly left the room, abandoning his visitors without a word.

Finally, late last month, the authoritarian ruler of Zaire for all but five of its 30 years of independence was ready to speak. As his compatriots -- who had taken to calling their President "Mobutu Sese Sescu" -- crowded around radios and TVs set at full volume, Mobutu gave his answer to the stunning events in Eastern Europe. Reversing positions he had tenaciously reavowed only months before, Mobutu announced that he would allow two parties aside from his to compete for power and would turn the day-to-day running of the government over to a new Prime Minister. "Wisdom comes at 60," Mobutu told reporters, inflating his age by a year. "It is time to let go little by little."

In at least superficially mimicking the revolutions in Europe, Mobutu has lots of company in his own neighborhood. Since February three other one-party regimes in sub-Saharan Africa -- those of Benin, Gabon and the Ivory Coast -- have consented to pluralistic systems. These were radical moves, considering that the leaders of these lands, who with Mobutu have held power for a combined 96 years, had previously put up with virtually no dissent. Tanzania too has said yes in principle to pluralism, and Zambia has promised a referendum to decide the issue.

All these pledges of change, however, may prove more illusory than real. "Establishing a multiparty system is only a step on the way to democracy, not an end in itself," cautions Francis Wodie, leader of the opposition Ivorian Workers' Party.

If Eastern Europe's liberation inspired the shake-ups in Africa's mid-belt, the real detonating force was economics. Each of these African countries overspent badly in the 1970s, suffered plunging commodity prices in the 1980s, and today finds itself flat broke. Desperate for hard currency, each has been forced into structural-readjustment programs, which entail strict and painful austerity measures, in order to obtain loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Throughout the 1980s, political leaders told their constituents that times would be lean for a few years under the belt-tightening policies and would then turn rosy. But their deadlines are long past, and their promises are unfulfilled. According to a World Bank report last year, the gap in per capita income between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the Third World keeps widening. In 1988 the contrast was $330 vs. an average $750 for all developing countries. The nations of black Africa, home to 470 million people, together have the purchasing power of Belgium, a country of only 10 million.