Colombian city, from textile manufacturers to services. They are supplemented by mining, electricity generation, construction and, increasingly, tourism. Medellín’s success is connected to openness, both between its own communities and to international markets.
These developments have helped change local attitudes and integrate communities into city life, merging the formal with the informal. Medellín gained the Urban Land Institute’s Innovative City of the Year award in 2013, beating New York and Tel Aviv in the process.
Moving up and with the times is not something most African cities have yet managed, at least not in quite the same positive way.
Conclusion: A new urban agenda
Medellín was, not that long ago, synonymous with a level of anarchy that even the most challenged African cities have yet to achieve. However, a dedicated government with a comprehensive security, economic and infrastructure plan was able to turnaround a situation that many had deemed hopeless. The critical ingredients were the recognition the severity of the situation and the leadership taking responsibility for both the problems and the solutions.
The positive lesson for African leaders from Medellín is that change can happen and even extraordinary difficult situations can be addressed in a relatively short period of time. There is another dimension too. Positive change in an urban environment affects proportionately greater numbers of people than in the rural areas, and in so doing releases considerable entrepreneurial dynamism and economic growth.
Achieving this demands a concerted effort by the state and its leaders. Sometimes, as in the case of Father Engel, there are heroic individuals who try their utmost to improve their neighbourhoods. However, they cannot ensure the security of even small areas, let alone highly complex and combustible African cities, and it is difficult for them to sustain their programmes. The dynamics of high population growth, lack of employment and rapid urbanisation can create large areas where government rule is not apparent, and criminals and others can move freely. As a result, the future, as long as ‘business as usual’ continues, is of increasingly anarchic urban areas where people attempt to pursue lives under great stress and insecurity. Given current policies, governments in Africa will not be able provide either the conditions or resources needed for cities to make best use of their inherent advantages of density and scale.
The solutions have to be vested in the overall political economy if urban environments are to provide an answer to Africa’s extreme challenges of social and economic exclusion. Within this framework, can a solution be found that links housing, financing, security, internet connectivity, transport and governance to education, economic growth, healthcare and job creation? Key in this is certainty in the rule of law and avoidance of corruption.
There is little gainsaying the extent of the African challenge. Africa’s current urban frameworks, as will be seen in Chapter 6, are less a product of positive push and pull factors than of desperation. Using this opportunity to deliver a different future involves an acceptance of, on the one hand, the need for density in housing and, on the other, the role that informal communities and business can positively play. Planning, governance and architecture, in this way, become less about building afresh and more about inserting structures into the informal sector and building on the resources and resourcefulness already present.36
Whatever the scale of these challenges, and the constraints of time and resources, Medellín illustrates that 20 years is long enough to fundamentally break the negative patterns of the past if good leadership and the right sets of incentives are in place. The challenge to African leaders is that such dramatic results require a sharp deviation from the status quo that gave birth to these conditions.
The security aspect cannot of course succeed alone. Committing substantial military and financial resources to contexts as diverse as Iraq and the DRC illustrates that there is no such thing as a security solution to a country’s problems. Security crackdowns might provide space, but a political and economic solution is required for longer-term stability.
Chapter 2
Democracy and development
Five steps for success:
•Democracy and development are indivisible. Democratic government represents the interests of the general population, and not just an elite.
•The bouts of stability that authoritarians can bring must be viewed sceptically, given the superior global economic performance and stability of democratic governments over the long term.
•Democracies must be crafted to address the particular political, economic and demographic challenges that countries face.
•Democracy is vital to the empowerment of cities because only democratic leaders are able to devolve power.
•A ‘democracy playbook’ is necessary to meet the threats to democratic elections and institutions.
Challenges and opportunities: The fundamental challenge to improving African economies is to develop structures and incentives that promote private-sector growth and the enrichment of the population. Correspondingly, the interests and considerations of elites across the continent must be devalued. Democratic systems, broadly defined, are best able to enrich whole societies because they are driven by the voters and their interests. Empirical evidence shows that democracies tend to govern better. It is the accountability of institutions – the hallmark of democracy – that promotes both political participation and good economic governance. Yet democratic progress, and even consolidation, appears to have stalled or even gone backwards in parts of the continent.
Key statistics: Despite the challenge of building institutional democracies, and the uneven progress in this domain across the continent, 70 per cent of Africans in 34 countries surveyed preferred democracy to ‘other kinds of government’ by 2013. The number of African electoral democracies increased from just two in 1980 to more than 40 a quarter of a century later. But the number of countries that are considered ‘not free’ outnumbers those considered ‘partly free’. Although the continent has the youngest population in the world, with a median age of 19.5 years,1 the average age of the 10 oldest African leaders is 78.5, compared to 52 for leaders of the world’s 10 most developed economies. By 2016, Africa’s five longest-serving presidents had been in power for between 29 and 36 years.
‘One of the asymmetries of history,’ wrote Henry Kissinger of Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, ‘is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries.’ Kissinger’s one-time boss, Richard Nixon, was even more flattering. He speculated that, had Lee lived in another time and another place, he might have ‘attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone’.2
Singapore has been used an excuse not to fully democratise by Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, among others. It is the case that the island nation’s economic success is inextricably tied to Lee’s style of rule. However, superficial references to Singapore as an alternative to democracy miss some important truths.
Like other nations in East Asia – including South Korea, China, Indonesia and Taiwan – Singapore modernised under a system of rigid political control. Nevertheless, the island state has enjoyed extraordinary freedom of individual choice and economic openness, a gentle autocracy quite distinct from sometimes violent and corrupt African eras of authoritarian rule, of which Lee himself was critical. Moreover, while some dictators might like Lee’s ‘big man’ image, the reality of Singapore was far more than reliance on one person; it was fundamentally about reliance on institutions, and improvements in policy and governance in the pursuit of development.
Although Lee presented the articulate public face and adroitly
