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[christianul]

At the dawn of decolonization throughout the African continent, in the 1960s, many scholars and observers were optimists about the continent’s wealth and its possibilities for rapid development. Nearly five decades later some of them still hold this view. Most of them do not. The reason is apparently clear: debilitating wars brought misery and poverty. Alongside it, continuous corruption of the Africa’s governments and leaders led to think that the problems are mostly political and African elites are mainly out to help themselves and keep their grip on power (in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone…). By this view, the state is little more than a tool for theft while the development agenda is mostly a façade masking a series of rackets being perpetrated upon the donors and the African people. Thus the enormous financial aid that it receives from international organizations or states is unconsciously lost. While there is still much uncertainty and debate about development ideas, there is perhaps just as much misinformation about what international agencies actually do in the development arena. African people often have found the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization easy targets, painting them as puppets of a global conspiracy to keep developing the continent. According to James Wolfensohn, a former World Bank director “while Africa is one-fifth of the world its GDP is between 2% and 2.5% of that of the world.”An analysis seems indispensable to see why the richest continent (in terms of raw products) has been economically kept back. Hence, considering this mosaic of factors, we should try, objectively, to understand the reason for the status quo of African development. Before studying the geographical framework of the continent and its impact, we will analyze the socio-economic environment in which it lies. Then we shall elucidate historical factors that have been constraining Africa from development. Subsequently we will pay particular attention to recent reforms and the plausible solutions they might bring.




Economic structuralists argue that how the world economy is structured determines the conduct of world politics. From this viewpoint, one can see that unless political-economic structures of the world’s patterns of production and trade are radically altered, Africa would not find a way out of poverty and under-development. From this perspective, it appears important to note that the static economies of most African countries, especially Sub-Saharan ones, have been maintained because they did not receive important substantial economic assistance and concessions. Also they lack of politically empowerment and a greater say over the operation of IGOs such as the IMF and World Bank. In fact according to the notions of economics structuralism, the state of current economic relations between the West and Africa is based on dependency and neocolonialism. As David Lamb states in his book The Africans, “there is not another continent blessed with such abundance and diversity.” Still it is the poorest of all. Moreover, another socio-economic factor for the under-development in Africa lies in the wrong policies and imported ideologies, good intentions notwithstanding, African countries pursued since independence during the sixties. Unlike most Southeast Asian countries which accomplished the East Asian Miracle (The East Asian Miracle; Economic growth and
public policy), the African continent current situation is due in part to political instability, ethnic competition, corrupt regimes. In addition to these issues, there has always been a debate over two main notions of development to adopt for developing Africa. They are digging holes vs. capital flows. Todd J. Moss, a Deputy assistant at the Secretary of State, in African Development explains that “for a hole digger, development is about delivering more services, executing projects, managing logistics, and imparting knowledge” whereas the capital flows viewpoint is that promoting development is about getting the environment right so that people do such things naturally. Since most African countries still did not adopt any of these concepts, it remains unclear whether or not they may efficiently help them. Meanwhile their socio-economic development remains in a status quo. However, with the second proliferation of states (after the World War 2) which led to most of the current African nations today, we should take a look at how Africa is geopolitical divided and its repercussions.

With fifty three countries sharing 30,221,532 km² and 922,011,000 people ("World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision" United Nations), the Africa continent is the second most populated region after Asia and has more countries than any other continent. This situation can sometimes explain the different conflicts and wars. Like Ethiopia and Eritrea, or Sudan and Chad or even Nigeria and Cameroun, many other African nations pursue wars for dominance over a specific lands and territories to control resources. At the end of colonization, when the European powers left, they cut the continent systematically and irrationally for their own profit. Not those of the local populations. Thus, today in Africa, it is not rare to find a same ethnic group living in different countries or one country having numerous tribes. Then, these countries are more just state instead of nation-state, since most of them really do not correspond to the notion of nations. For instance in Cote d’Ivoire, a former French colony located in West Africa, there are sixty six ethnic groups. The vast majority of these groups have parental links with surrounding countries: Mandingos living also in Mali, Dioulas in Burkina-Faso, Guéré in Liberia or the group of Akan in Ghana. Oftentimes, illiterate people living in these villages can transgress a given country’ rule and obey another’s for the simple reason that historically, they are not linked to this particular country. Here, we should mention that African countries are relatively young when compared to the ethnic groups. Hence this fact has been an instrumental tool for wars and instability throughout the continent and largely contributed to mass murder. As examples, there are the cases of the civil war in Sierra Leone in which Charles Taylor sent his troops to fight against the governmental regime on an ethnic basis as the rebels were from his region. Alongside it, there is the case of the Tootsie and the Hutu. The massacre in the 1990’s perpetrated against the Tutsi population was pushed on by Hutu from Burundi and vice versa. Although these are just brief examples of how dire geopolitical borders contributed to wars and therefore blocked development, there are several other examples. Recently, African leaders, like the Libyan leader Muhammad Khadafy have been arguing for a need of uniting African nations into a single one. Still, for other chiefs of states, like the South African Thabo Mbeki, the causes for the stagnant environment of African development lies in history.

For many observers and analysts of the African continent, history can bring explanations of the current state of Africa. In the Clash of Civilization, Samuel Huntington says “the Fall of African kingdoms more than five centuries ago, marked the beginning of a dark period for its people.” This view can be justified by the slavery around in the 17th and 18th centuries and the colonization which was not always “peaceful”. Hence, these sufferings endured by the African people let sequels and mentally changed the intellects of African elites. That’s why it is not atypical to see many of them incredibly pessimistic to the development of their continent. Furthermore, most of these elites do not want/cannot see by themselves an opening to the solving of the African development. They are reluctant to start actions that may change the status quo. Nonetheless, with its fabulous history, the African continent has not always been in this situation. According to the professor Cheikh Anta Diop in his book The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, “the history of Africa will remain suspended in the air and cannot be written correctly until African historians connect it with the history of Egypt.” As if he believed that an economic development is inseparable from a mental and historical development, Diop thought it’s the recent (colonization, slavery…) and negative history of Africa that prevent its leaders and government from taking genuine reforms to move on. Sub-Saharan Africa has undoubtedly had an unlucky history that severely affects its development progress today. Colonialism and the arrival of European ideas, technology, and systems had colossal effects on Africa-the influences of which are still deeply felt today. As real and in many ways catastrophic as this was, there are also many reasons for people today to either exaggerate the legacy or use it as a convenient scapegoat for other mistakes. However, one of the remarkable features of contemporary Africa is the enduring connection to European powers. French-speaking Africa is perhaps the starkest example of this, where links between France and its formers colonies are strongest. In most of francophone Africa, French is still the official language and France maintains security through active troop presence. Economically, trade and business is dominated by French firms, the West and Central African currencies are tied to the French franc (technically to the euro since 1999, but the relationship remains controlled by Paris), and even the budgets of many countries are drawn up by French bureaucrats. Recent critics of these facts led to better understanding of Africa problems and opened a debate over plausible solutions for African development.

Lately, case studies (from the IMF, African Development Bank and other regional banks) for African Development compared Capitalism vs. Socialism in Africa. Benefits and disadvantages of both were analyzed. The result was comprehensive: all African countries are trying to achieve economic development through what most of them once considered to be their nemesis: capitalism In his book Economic Development in Africa, Godfrey Mwakikagile, a Tanzanian scholar, declares “capitalism is heartless by nature. But it can be tamed and used for the benefit of society because of its dynamism and incentives to production.” Nowadays, it is clear that despite dire predictions by some pundits, Africa’s economies have, on average, performed well considering the odds against them. According to a report by the International Monetary Fund in 2007 (Africa: Recent Economic Developments and IMF Activities) “growth was more resilient than in most other regions during the recent global economic downturn, with real GDP increasing by more than 3 percent per annum in Sub-Saharan Africa […] compared with about 1.5 percent in the advanced economies. Thus, during the 1990s, most African states went from state-controlled economies to privatization and a general reorientation of economic policy from one based on government and internal markets to one based on the private sector and export growth. Here we must cite the example of “Zambia, which privatized 140 of its 202 state-owned companies in 18 months” according to Godfrey Mwakikagile. Similarly, there have been even more stunning performances. According to the World Bank, Uganda’s economy grew by 9.4 percent in 2003, a brilliant achievement by a country which only a decade before was devastated by war. Lynne Duke, in Africa: a Sign of Hope amid the Turbulence, is persuaded that this trend is going to move up because while “Malawi reached a 16.1 percent GDP growth, Ethiopia’s economy grew by 11.9 percent in 1996. Africa’s spectacular economic performance can also be looked at from another perspective. In West Africa, the tiny republic of Equatorial Guinea broke the record on the entire continent. The World Bank estimated its economy growth rate in 2004 by an astonishing 37.3 percent. That is more than three times the growth rate of China’s economy, the fastest growing in the world. According to Flemings Research, an arm of Fleming’s international bank, Africa is now the second-fastest-growing region in the developing world, thus, surpassing Latin America. Africa is now waking up, as we have learned from the stunning economic growth rates of several countries across the continent. It seems that now Africa’s main task is to sustain growth over the next several decades, not just for a year or two. Evidently, this requires political stability.


So, now, we must ask ourselves why has Africa has lagged so far behind other continents? It has nothing to do with genetic differences among races, contrary to what Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein state in their best-selling book “The Bell Curve“published in 1994 in which they contend that black people are less intelligent than whites and Asians because of genetic differences; and that blacks in Africa have, on average, the lowest IQ in the world: an IQ of 65-70, which is considered retarded. That’s just an incendiary thesis. Since they are unable to explain why there are blacks –in fact millions of them by the authors’ won admission – who have higher IQs than millions of whites and Asians, this thesis does not stand. Others have come up with historical, geographical (colonial boundaries) or climatic and cultural reasons. In spite of some African success stories, it still remains an indisputable fact that collectively sub-Saharan Africa has, in fact, performed very poorly, compared to other developing region, like Southeast Asia. That’s why Africa has a long way to go to be out of this status quo to truly develop. Long-term development is possible only if the money needed to sustain such growth comes from locally generated wealth accumulated from national savings and domestic investments, not from foreign investments. Foreign investments are needed to fuel initial growth due to lack of capital in the poverty-stricken nations of Africa. But the ultimate responsibility for Africa’s redemption from the vicious cycle of poverty is Africa’s. And the amount of foreign investments going to Africa will largely depend on what Africans themselves do to develop their economies. Nevertheless, some African thinkers, like a Congolese mayor try to make sense of the current state of Africa by saying “In Africa the climate is such that there’s always fruit around, in the back of the house, and you just reach up and pick it when you’re hungry. But in Europe and Asia, the climate forced people to get food, to protect themselves from the cold winter, to develop a spirit of battle…”

By Christian Seya
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"La force du baobab est dans ses racines "