Regional Outlook : Africa’s Future Riding the Train to Nowhere : After a period of real optimism in the 1970s, the region has fallen further behind the rest of the developing world.

DAR-ES-SALAAM, Tanzania —  The Tanzania-Zambia Railway could well be a metaphor for Africa’s path in the 1980s.

Known as Tazara, the 1,100-mile, Chinese-built line linking the copper belt of Zambia to this Tanzanian port was turned over to the governments of the two abutting countries just before the decade began. Included were 128 new locomotives and hundreds of passenger and freight cars to run on the gleaming rails. Western countries contributed millions of dollars to maintain the right of way and to train railroad staff.

Today, little more than a decade after its opening, only 39 of the engines remain in working order. Another 39 are awaiting repair, and 50 have been destroyed by collisions and derailings on the deteriorating line.

Last year, a Swedish development agency donated 350 new cars to the railway--enough, it has been estimated, to last only seven years at the current rate of wreckage. Some of the cars derailed on their maiden journey, the Swedes recently complained in a blistering letter to the two governments.

Like Tazara, whose fate is the result of chronic African maladies of inattention, lack of maintenance, and penury, so went most of the continent in the 1980s. Development experts describe sub-Saharan Africa as a train running downhill to disaster.

After a period of genuine hope in the 1970s, these experts describe the 1980s as the region’s lost decade. By almost every measure of human welfare and economic health, the area retrogressed during that period, in some cases so sharply that Barber Conable, head of the World Bank, remarked recently that most Africans today are every bit as poor as they were 30 years ago, at the dawn of the continent’s era of independence.

“There was general deterioration in the main macroeconomic indicators, widespread disintegration of productive facilities, a rapid worsening in the social scene, repeated droughts and accelerating environmental degradation,” says a U.N. report. “The unending crisis did not affect only the current well-being of the average African; it threatened the long-term development prospects of the region as a whole.”

The 1980s saw many of Africa’s modest gains of the previous 10 or 15 years swept off in a windstorm of deteriorating roads, disappearing forest and cropland, collapsing schoolhouses, and mushrooming military budgets.

One can debate which African capital has the biggest potholes on its thoroughfares. Efforts to stem deforestation by planting fast-growing eucalyptus trees fail because Africans who need wood for fuel cut them down faster than they can grow. Ethiopia, which ranks close to rock-bottom in almost every measure of welfare and development known to humankind, spends more than 50% of its budget on weapons to fight a largely stalemated 30-year civil war with Eritrean rebels.

Many fear that the 1990s will be worse. For one thing, the rest of the world is losing interest in a place that never seems to get better.

“The broad international support for helping a continent in distress in the 1980s has been dissipated now by repeated calls for assistance,” says Salim Lone, a Kenyan who edits Africa Recovery, a U.N. journal of development news. “How long can people accept that Africa is a special place, when the economic and political returns from Eastern Europe are infinitely greater?”

Africa no longer has a geopolitical card to play. Gone are the days when Ethiopia and Somalia could play the East and West off against each other by switching allegiance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Zaire can no longer earn millions in U.S. aid as a staging base for anti-Marxist rebels in neighboring Angola, where Cuban troops have been on the other side.

“In the past, certain places in Africa could compete for attention by turning to the East or West,” Lone says. “But now East-West amity has stripped the continent of whatever strategic value it had before.”

The nearly 40 countries of black Africa south of the Sahara Desert are increasingly detached from the rest of the world in economic terms, too. Their export crops, such as coffee and tea, are not rare or highly valued. Their appetites for foreign industrial goods remain high, but the scarcity of foreign currency to buy them means that hospitals and shoe factories alike crumble for want of spare parts.

At the end of the 1970s, the continent had a healthy trade surplus of $29 billion with the rest of the world. Today, with reduced export income and higher import prices, it has a trade deficit of $7.7 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa’s share of world trade is 1.7%.

The gross domestic product of the entire region, which has twice the population of the United States, is roughly equivalent to that of Belgium.

There is no question as to who bears the burden of this economic estrangement: the poor. Africa has a near-monopoly on the bottom rankings of countries in terms of social welfare. Nine of the 10 countries with the lowest life expectancies in the world are African. Sierra Leone and Ethiopia have life expectancies of 42 years, tied for lowest with Afghanistan. The others are Guinea (43); Mali, Angola and Niger (45), and Somalia, Central African Republic and Chad (46).

Nine of the 10 countries with the highest infant mortality rates are also African: Mozambique and Angola, both the scenes of civil wars, are tied for the worst (172 per 1,000 live births), followed by Mali (168), Sierra Leone and Ethiopia (153), Malawi (149), Guinea (146), Burkina Faso (137) and Niger (134).

Six of the 10 countries with the lowest literacy rates and eight of the 10 countries with the lowest rate of access to safe water are also in sub-Saharan Africa.

There is little doubt that such unrelieved misery is straining the social fabric. The street protests and riots spreading across Africa this year in a demand for new political systems are rooted in the poverty afflicting every country.

More than 20 people were killed in five days of street clashes last week in Kenya, where the unrest, starting with an informal rally against the country’s one-party system, was fed by legions of the unemployed and underemployed who fill Nairobi and every other African metropolis.

The geographic characteristics of many of these nations mean they will never be rich, or perhaps even self-sufficient. In the roll of dishonor above, it should be noted that Mali, Niger, Chad and Somalia are desert countries with significant populations of nomadic herders. Burkina Faso, once known as Upper Volta, is on the edge of the encroaching desert. Central African Republic and Malawi are landlocked.

A great belt of the continent lies within the so-called intertropical zone, or ITZ, the swath of Earth between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn where weather patterns are the most unpredictable and crop failures frequent.

But the record is not much better in the comparatively richly endowed states of this region. Zambia, which has vast stretches of arable land, recently had to issue ration cards to its huge population of city dwellers because bread and wheat were in such short supply. When the government tried to raise prices of these staples last month, food riots erupted, taking 23 lives. In Kenya, perhaps the biggest success story among African economies, foreign aid amounts to 30% of the government budget, which obviously cannot be balanced without it.

When Ghana gained its independence in 1957 to usher in the continent’s post-colonial period, it was rich from an annual crop of the world’s highest-quality cocoa beans and from the gold mines that accounted for its colonial-era name of Gold Coast. Two coups and a series of inept economic policies followed. Today, foreign investors are trying to resurrect mines that have lain unused for 10 years, and the cocoa crop is insignificant.

Ghana boasts the lowest minimum wage in Africa, and even upper-level civil servants can feed their families only once a day. At one point in the 1980s, a two-income household in which both workers received minimum wage could afford less than 10% of the lowest-cost diet needed to meet minimum nutritional needs.

Africa’s lost decade could not have come at a worse time. The 1990s will see a surge in regional trade alliances like the European market, while sub-Saharan Africa’s 40 countries are still waging border skirmishes and erecting new customs barriers that inhibit competitiveness. Regional trade compacts such as the East African Community, involving Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, have either collapsed or, like the ambitious Economic Community of West African States, proven totally ineffective.

The world technological revolution will pick up its pace as computers and fax machines become increasingly indispensable tools of economic growth. These machines depend on adequate telephone service, but in Africa fewer than one person in 300 has access to a telephone--half the level of service as Asia’s and one-sixteenth that in Latin America.

“These factors can only lead to the further marginalization of Africa in the 1990s and beyond,” warns Adebayo Adedegi, head of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa.

Africa’s inability to emerge from its long decline has provoked a raging debate among development experts about the reasons--and particularly about the extent to which Western aid policies themselves should be blamed. Some argue that the nature of the aid bureaucracy--tens of thousands of technocrats and administrators paid at Western, not African, wage scales--overstates the amount of actual aid that has flowed into Africa.

“You talk about billions of dollars going to Africa--but how much of that actually benefits Africans?” remarks one U.N. Development Program official in West Africa. “Every European official here costs $100,000 to $150,000 a year to support, plus equipment, cars and so on. By the time you’re finished, half the money in any program is spent.”

Much of what is left has gone into project financing--the construction of demonstration farms, model factories and so on. Africa is littered with the rusted and gutted hulks of these well-intentioned but poorly planned edifices.

In Tanzania, for example, foreign donors in the early 1980s eagerly studied statistics on fish landings from rich Lake Victoria and paid for a multimillion-dollar fish processing plant on the lake shore in the district of Mwanza. The plant had an immense appetite for fish, and Mwanza’s fishermen obligingly supplied it--overfishing their portion of the vast lake so severely that it became a dead body of water. Today the plant is shuttered and crumbling, its lifeblood exploited into extinction.

African leaders themselves have done little to respond to external challenges, 30 years after independence and more than a decade after commodity prices collapsed. Instead of diversifying, the vast majority of these countries still depend on their top three commodity exports for 75% or more of their foreign earnings. Generally these are commodities, such as coffee and tea, in which the countries compete with each other in already glutted foreign markets.

The search for new markets is uneven, but often rewarding: Kenya responded to the collapse in the prices of coffee and tea by encouraging its small horticulture industry. Today the country is the world’s fourth-biggest exporter of cut flowers.

African leaders talk incessantly about how the national borders drawn up by the former colonial powers institutionalized political tensions by arbitrarily dividing some tribes and combining others.

Thirty years of economic history suggests the problem is not necessarily the wrong borders, but too many of them. Many sub-Saharan countries are simply too small or too deprived to be self-sufficient. Eleven are landlocked. Thirty-four have fewer than 10 million people. The distribution of natural resources is uneven: Zambia, with 7.5 million people, has copper and broad swaths of arable land--largely unused--while in neighboring Malawi, a similar population is crowded on one-seventh as much territory and with no mineral deposits at all.

African leaders complain, quite fairly, that in granting independence their European colonial masters left them with inadequate roads and railroads and a pitifully small cadre of university-educated leaders. But it is clear now that these leaders themselves must shoulder much of the blame for their countries’ problems.

One key is the persistence of failed policies. Many African statesmen formed their economic ideas in the crucible of anti-colonialism: They reacted against not only European politics, but also European free-market economics, which they saw as exploitative. Great leaders like Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania created something called “African socialism,” based on what they contended was Africans’ unique sense of community and self-help.

Today Zambia and Tanzania are among Africa’s most dismal failures. Nyerere’s catch-phrase, articulated in the “Arusha Declaration” of 1967, was “socialism and self-reliance.” But after decades of receiving the highest per-capita foreign aid in all sub-Saharan Africa, Tanzania is one of the world’s least self-reliant countries.

Kaunda, whose frequent emotional, even tearful, public speeches on the evils of nuclear proliferation and other scarcely relevant issues have made him a figure of worldwide respect, has presided over the collapse of one of Africa’s most promising lands. Zambia became independent blessed with the best industrial base in southern Africa; it has been left a rotting skeleton through the mismanagement of state-owned enterprises operating in an environment of unbridled corruption.

“Everyone knows that to run a socialist enterprise you need good management to make up for the lack of individual incentives like the profit motive,” one Scandinavian development official said in discussing the disastrous record of state-owned farms in nominally Marxist Ethiopia. “Of course, management skills are the one thing most lacking in Africa.”

Wherever the blame lies, the toll of Africa’s marginalization is enormous. The U.N. Development Program recently noted that “between 1979 and 1985 the number of African people below the poverty line increased by almost two-thirds, compared with an average increase of one-fifth in the entire developing world.”

The urgency embodied in this figure has, oddly enough, led development officials to contemplate how the “quick fixes” of the 1970s and 1980s went awry: The manipulations of currency rates and the rapid infusions of aid money and project ideas that frequently canceled each other out or duplicated effort--all without helping Africans build and sustain their own institutions.

Some development experts say what Africa needs may be something approaching benign neglect. If the developed world does begin to withdraw attention and resources from the embattled continent, one notes, it may finally wean itself from the diet of aid.

“There is a positive side,” he says. “It may actually encourage governments to adopt policies that will be much more self-reliant and not as dependent on outside resources.”

Africa and Third World: Region Falls Behind

Not only do the nearly 40 countries of black Afric live in a different economic world than the industrialized countries; they are slipping behind the rest of the THird World by many key measures of development. The burden of the region’s economic alienation is carried by the poor, such as the displaced villagers, below, gathered to collect food aid in Mozambique.

Access to Health Services

In percent of population

Sub-Saharan Arica: 45% Middle East/North Africa: 76% Asia, Oceania: 66% South Asia: 56% East, Southeast Asia: 75% Latin America, the Caribbean: 61%

Adult Literacy Rates In percent of population

Sub-Saharan Arica: 48% Middle East/North Africa: 54% Asia, Oceania: 59% South Asia: 41% East, Southeast Asia: 71% Latin America, the Caribbean: 83%

Gross National Product

In U.S. dollars, per capita Sub-Saharan Arica: $440 Middle East/North Africa: 1,780 Asia, Oceania: 390 South Asia: 290 East, Southeast Asia: 470 Latin America, the Caribbean: 1,790

Access to Safe Water In percent of population

Sub-Saharan Arica: 37% Middle East/North Africa: 69% Asia, Oceania: 52% South Asia: 54% East, Southeast Asia: 48% Latin America, the Caribbean: 73%

Life Expectancy at Birth

In years Sub-Saharan Arica: 51 Middle East/North Africa: 62 Asia, Oceania: 64 South Asia: 58 East, Southeast Asia: 68 Latin America, the Caribbean: 67