These are good days to be involved in the business of war in Africa. As we approach the end of a wretched millennium for the world's poorest continent, the flames of conflict are burning brightly throughout the region, and the warlords and arms dealers are happy.
The escalating war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has sucked in the armies of eight neighbouring countries. Mindless, meaningless conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia have reached new levels of depravity in recent years.
Fighting in the continuing civil war in Angola - so old it was name-checked in the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK in the 1970s - is fiercer than ever, even after one million deaths. Africa is a continent of perpetual false dawns. Who remembers now the hopes of the 1960s, when a slew of eloquent, charismatic leaders led their people to freedom from the colonial yoke? Kenyatta's nationalism? Nyerere's state socialism? Nkrumah's Pan-Africanism?
All so much hype and failed dogma. The good have been slain, the mediocre have prospered and the simply bad have made their Swiss bankers very happy.
Today, many African countries are mired in corruption. They are the laggards of international development, languishing at the bottom of just about every measure of social progress and civilised standards. Their health and education systems have gone into reverse and the fragile African environment is threatened with collapse.
Over 200 million people in SubSaharan Africa were starving in 1990, more than double the number 20 years before. Nine out of the 10 countries with the lowest life expectancy in the world are African. Nine of the 10 countries with the highest under-five mortality, and eight of the 10 countries with the lowest levels of adult literacy are in Africa.
Now the brightest stars of the post-independence generation are starting to lose their way also. Two years ago, in an optimistic article on the continent's prospects, I singled out Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea as standardbearers for a new Africa. Today, the latter two countries are at war with each other, and Uganda is squandering its newly-created wealth on army movements in Congo.
All the old excuses, rooted in the trauma of post-colonialism, are trotted out with less frequency these days. Africa's European masters created tribal politics, favoured elites, artificial borders and a massive and enduring inferiority complex. The Belgians raped the Congo for 80 years, and then pulled out in a matter of months. In Rwanda, they elevated the Tutsis to the status of local overlords and kept the Hutu majority in ignorance and poverty, again pulling out just months before the inevitable blood-letting.
TANZANIA'S former leader, Julius Nyerere, went to the World Bank last year and was asked why his country was such a failure. "I responded that we took over a country with 85 per cent of its population illiterate. The British ruled us for 43 years. When they left, there were two trained engineers and 12 doctors. This is the country we inherited."
As the historian, Eric Hobs bawn, has noted, a few hundred armed men, reinforced by foreigners, could take control in a newly independent but enfeebled state, particularly when the alternative was inexperienced or incompetent governments producing recurrent states of chaos, corruption and confusion. "The typical military ruler in most African countries was not an aspirant dictator, but someone genuinely trying to clear up such messes, hoping - too often in vain - that civilian government would take over again. Generally he failed in both endeavours."
DURING the Cold War, the continent was the arena for wars between the superpowers. Guns and military aid flowed into Africa in huge amounts. When the Cold War ended, the military apparatus was withdrawn, but the guns remained.
Likewise, the colonial masters might have pulled out, but their capitalist economy remained in place. For Africans, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are the new targets in the universe of blame.
In 1988, Tanzania's per-capita income was $280 a year; a decade later, it was $140.
"So I asked the World Bank people what went wrong," says Mr Nyerere. "Because for the last 10 years Tanzania has been signing on the dotted line and doing everything the IMF and the World Bank wanted. Enrolment in school has plummeted to 63 per cent and conditions in health and other social services have deteriorated. These people just sat looking at me. Then they asked what could they do? I told them have some humility. Humility - they are so arrogant!"
At least Tanzania has been relatively peaceful for the past 40 years. Other countries which resisted implosion only did so through the rise of the "big man", such as Mobutu in Zaire or Moi in Kenya. The "big man" ruled with an iron fist, bringing stability backed by US dollars at the price of massive corruption.
Big men preside over vast disparities of wealth; the top 20 per cent in Africa consume 60 per cent of national income. In the mid-1980s, sub-Saharan Africa, with half the population of China, was importing six times as many cars and 390 times as much wine.
Most of all, Africa suffers from the lack of a substantial middle-class, an educated, enterprising group with a vested interest in societal stability, justice and democracy. Instead, the oligarchies rip the states off for everything they can get, the military takes its cut and the vast majority who are poor merely subsist. The elites care little for the cannon fodder who serve in the army and, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has argued provocatively, they don't care about the AIDS crisis either, as the disease is putting a halt to rampant population growth among the poor.
Meanwhile, bright Africans flee as asylum-seekers or to study in western universities, creating a new "brain drain"; 30,000 Africans with PhDs are working in the developed world, when their skills are desperately needed at home. Sometimes, the elites fall out with each other, and fresh wars break out. The rulers of Eritrea and Ethiopia are former allies, and even members of the same family, but that hasn't stopped them fighting. Uganda and Rwanda are also former bed-fellows who have started squabbling in recent months. This dispute, like the civil war in Angola, is essentially over control of resources, the vast mineral wealth that lies beneath the ground in the Congo and in Angola.
The army - or whatever maverick militia happens to hold sway in a particular region - offers many young African men the best hope of advancing out of poverty. At best, it offers hope of education, travel and excitement; at worst, the chance to extort, pillage, rape and kill. There is endless cannon fodder in countries where up to 60 per cent of the population is under 15 years of age.
State socialism failed in Africa as elsewhere, and the results of 40 years of aid have been profoundly disappointing. In the 1990s, free enterprise was tried, with mixed results. The economies of countries like Uganda and Ethiopia grew rapidly, but poverty also increased.
Today, the world simply doesn't care. Private investors have shunned the continent as too risky. Aid budgets are plummeting. There is little prospect of the international community intervening in the Congo, for instance, in the way it has in Kosovo or East Timor. Africa is a continent fast running out of excuses. The rest of the world has stopped listening and while that might not seem very fair, it might not be a bad thing. Only Africans can sort out the mess they have got themselves into.