WHERE FREE TRADE IS THE word, hypocrisy is never far behind. Rich countries preach the virtues of open markets, while enforcing tariffs to protect industries (agriculture usually) at home. And poor countries call on richer ones to change their protectionist ways while constructing their own, even more counterproductive, anti-import regulations. The main difference is that the people who live in poor countries, of course, suffer the most as a result of such regulations.
African leaders, in particular, are known to urge an end to protectionism abroad, while maintaining in their own countries tariffs four and a half times those imposed by richer countries. Such prohibitive trade barriers do help keep cheap goods out, though somehow a trickle of duty-free luxury items always finds their way to the lawmakers themselves, though not any of the countrymen they claim to be looking out for. Indeed, the people who claim that protection of domestic producers is necessary for the good of the country are usually the same people who find a way to still enjoy the benefits of free trade. This has always been the case, not just in Africa.
Take “Napoléon: An Intimate Portrait,” a recent exhibition at the National Geographic Museum in Washington. It featured some 250 objects belonging to the former French emperor and those who were close to him. In the collection was a document, signed by Napoleon himself, permitting a French merchant ship to sail for Great Britain. The ship was to pick up purchases made on behalf of Empress Josephine, who had a penchant for British goods. The permit was necessary because of Napoleon’s decree from 1806 prohibiting the European territories under his control from trading with Britain. Clearly, the imperial family was not expected to share the hardships that the trade embargo imposed on the rest of Napoleonic Europe.
One and a half centuries later, Joseph Stalin sought to purge the Soviet Union of foreign influences. All trade was controlled by the Soviet government. Importing Western literature and movies for mass consumption was strictly forbidden. But, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Stalin took in many a foreign film. He thought they were far superior to those made in the USSR. Stalin especially enjoyed watching westerns that featured Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. (He liked John Wayne, too, but ordered his assassination because of Wayne’s strident anti-communism. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, who met the American movie star in 1958, told Wayne that he had “rescinded the order.”)
As in Napoleonic France and Stalinist Russia, so in Africa today. Kenyan members of parliament, for example, earn salaries of about $130,000 a year. That is more than the salaries earned by members of parliament in Great Britain–a country with a gross national product that, in dollars, came to $33,940 per person in 2004. In the same year, Kenya’s GNP per person was $460. Kenyan MPs also receive many generous allowances, including $46,000 for the purchase of a tariff-free car.
Strikingly, in November 2005, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a taxpayer-funded offshoot of the U.S. government designed to aid “deserving” poor countries, has upgraded Kenya to “threshold” status. That means Kenya is well on the way to receiving more money in U.S. aid.
Even more outrageous is the example of Zimbabwe–a sorry country run as a personal fiefdom by Robert Mugabe. Mugabe, the man who gave Zimbabwe 500 percent inflation, 80 percent unemployment, and widespread famine, has taken a lesson in cronyism from Kenya. According to the Zimbabwe Independent, “lawmakers in the lower and upper chambers–who now number up to 216–will each get US $22,000 to import a vehicle under parliament’s car loan facility. This means US $4,752,000 will be spent on vehicle allowances.” All of those vehicles, the paper reported, will be imported duty-free.
Duty-free treatment by the Zimbabwean authorities, it should be mentioned, proved much harder to obtain for a group of South African churches and nongovernmental organizations that raised money to purchase emergency aid for the people of Zimbabwe in the winter months of 2005. While the South African food and blankets languished at the Johannesburg airport, the Zimbabwean government demanded that an import tariff be paid.
Many African leaders have called for further trade liberalization. Referring to the September 2005 summit of leaders at the United Nations, South African president Thabo Mbeki complained that the meeting had not achieved the necessary breakthrough on trade. “How serious is the developed world about this partnership to address this matter of poverty?” he asked. The real question that ought to be on the lips of all those concerned with poverty in Africa is, “How serious are the African governments in addressing the problem of poverty in their own countries?” Not very serious, is the answer, for as long as African governments persist in maintaining import tariffs on foreign goods, the vast majority of Africans will only be able to dream about cheap imports from overseas.
Marian L. Tupy is assistant director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty at Cato.
