JOHANNESBURG: British writer Martin Meredith pulls no punches in his assessment of Africa: it is a bloody mess, its leaders are to blame, and no amount of aid from the West will solve that.

“Most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good,” he concludes in his recently published The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence.

“African governments and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival.”

Covering Africa’s past five decades, the book seeks to broadly answer one topical question: how has a continent with so much potential become the poorest in the world?

Africa’s plight was headline news with the July summit of the Group of Eight rich nations who pledged to double aid to the continent to $50 billion by 2010 and also agreed a package of debt relief for some of its poorest countries.

Meredith, who has written several books on African subjects, is sceptical.

“Debt relief and aid are not easy options but they are the easiest of those available,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“The G8 initiative is addressing the wrong end of the problem. It cannot be resolved without Western assistance but it leaves you with the problem of mismanagement of government. This cannot be resolved just through Western aid,” he said.

Many writers have shared his critique of the central role of state leaders in Africa’s demise, noting that political power is often seen as a path to self-enrichment.

But other analysts see more signs of hope.

“Africa is turning the corner under the imperative of greater accountability being driven from below,” said John Stremlau, head of the international relations department at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand.

“The abuse of power by the big man was also easier in the first 40 years of independence than it is today because the international accountability was lower ... In a post-9/11 world there is a greater concern about having politically capable states.”

Meredith, however, sees African leaders’ support for someone like Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe — whom Western leaders and African critics accuse of human rights abuses — as a hangover from past that does not augur well for the future.

Admiration for the continent’s people and places comes through in his latest book and he does not ignore other well-known factors stunting African development, though some analysts have given them more prominence.

The continent suffered debilitating foreign intervention, from a slave trade that uprooted millions to the cynical diplomacy of the Cold War, and faces environmental stress and a heavy reliance on commodities.

But he saves his wrath for Africa’s leaders and the world powers he says has propped them up.

The book portrays government incompetence, greed and cruelty on a staggering scale.

When the West African nation of Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957 — making it a beacon of hope as the first African country to shake off colonial rule — few could have foreseen what lay ahead for it and much of the continent.

“No other African state was launched with so much promise for the future,” Meredith writes.

“Ghana embarked on independence as one of the richest tropical countries in the world, with an efficient civil service, an impartial judiciary and a prosperous middle class.”

But its founding father Kwame Nkrumah pursued ruinous policies while maintaining an iron grip on media which ceaselessly praised him. He presided over soaring public debt and widescale graft.—Reuters