we suggest that democracy and development go hand in hand. It is not one or the other, democracy or growth, but these aspects are mutually reinforcing, however attractive African leaders (and some outsiders) might find authoritarianism as a system of government that ‘gets things done’.
As described in Chapter 2, many African leaders have responded to the overwhelming wishes of their citizens by changing from autocratic regimes – the preferred system of government from the 1960s to the 1980s – to electoral democracies. There has been backsliding, inevitably, and many of the institutions and elections that have undergirded them have been imperfect. There are other very good reasons for maintaining these democracies over an anecdotal preference for a ‘benevolent dictator’. For one, as is examined later, such benign autocrats committed to popular welfare, as in the East Asian model, have been few and far between in Africa. Moreover, the empirical evidence is clear: Africa’s democracies develop faster, are safer for the incumbents and are richer than the alternatives.
So far, it has proven difficult to duplicate East Asia’s model of soft authoritarianism in Africa. Because Singapore, for example, is a small and compact island, its leaders could argue that the population had to make sacrifices given the realistic challenges that Malaysia and Indonesia would pose if Singapore remained a poor country. Further, few African countries, given the challenges they face, have seen or can realistically expect the ‘legitimacy through performance’ that was central to gaining and maintaining the confidence that the island’s citizens had in its impressive leaders.
There are many other aspects of East Asia’s relative economic success that have been similarly overlooked by advocates for autocracies. These include high spending on education, bureaucratic responsiveness, creating an attractive policy for business investment, low wages, high productivity, investment in infrastructure, raised agricultural outputs as an initial spur to growth and an overwhelming focus on competitiveness.
Overall, the most notable differentiating factor between Africa and East Asia is, as highlighted in this volume, the relationship between government and the private sector. Private-sector growth in Africa has largely been an anathema, and not just in the period after independence. The colonialists – be they British, French, Portuguese or Belgian – whatever their ideologies in Europe, established highly interventionist states that actively prevented indigenous African economic enrichment, while protecting white settlers, colonial companies and monopoly capital.
By and large, the African leaders that emerged after independence were comfortable with the economic systems they inherited (once stripped of racism), especially as state intervention offered many patronage opportunities. Expanding state control and intervention was one of the few levers open to them in the context of overall state weakness. This pattern was exaggerated by the failure of such liberators to have a plan beyond redistribution to their preferred constituents.52 Subsequently, African elites have remained largely uninterested in major reform and liberalisation, apart from ‘opening up’ the system in piecemeal fashion (from cellphone companies to infrastructure investments), and in a way that has reduced any threat to the status quo.
Therefore, investment growth that diversifies the economies and creates jobs in Africa, notably in industry, has remained very low.
Instilling a sense of urgency and ownership
Beggars work the traffic lights in the city of Fes. They are sub-Saharans, our Moroccan colleague tells us. ‘They are working their way through the country to get to Europe.’ There were, in 2016, an estimated 1 million sub-Saharan African migrants waiting along the North African coast – mostly in Morocco, Algeria and Libya – intent on making their way to mainland Europe. In the Sahel, the city of Agadez in Niger (since the 15th century a gateway between West and North Africa) had become an epicentre in migrant smuggling, with more than 20 000 passing through monthly in 2016, most from West Africa, and Nigeria in particular.53
Given the continent’s projected population increase, without economic growth Africa’s poverty threatens to overwhelm Europe. While Europe will work to secure its borders, and to find and fund the means to keep Africans in Africa, Europeans cannot be expected to be more successful at encouraging and improving African economic growth than Africans themselves, or more committed to this task.
Yet, compared to East Asia, in Africa there has not been the same sense of urgency or the need to introduce reforms in response to this looming crisis, particularly those reforms aimed at radically increasing economic growth and numbers of jobs. In part, this reflects hostility to foreign capital. It also relates to lack of capacity and poor leadership. And it reflects a failure to learn from the experience of others.
The continent’s ambitions should not be to duplicate the Asian path, but to learn from Asia and other fast-growing regions to create a vision to ensure that leaders and citizens can flourish together. Having a ‘good’ crisis – that is, using the opportunity crisis brings to usher in difficult and heretofore politically unpalatable changes – has been a key element in catalysing reform in Asia and Latin America, including, among others Colombia, Chile, El Salvador and Costa Rica.
While identifying and using a sense of crisis, African leaders will have to strive to escape the ‘tyranny of the emergency’ and instead create a common vision of how their countries will progress. We were reminded by one colleague that ‘a disciplined nationalism is the secret sauce of development’. This can be interpreted as the deep commitment to popular welfare exhibited by East Asian leaders, whatever the system of formal government. Failure to develop a common vision by which societies as a whole can advance will mean that leaders will not be able to explain the actions in a wider context, critical constituencies will not understand why they are being asked to make sacrifices, and political stability will inevitably be endangered.
Just as the arguments for addressing this crisis go beyond statistics to a human story of hope and fear, so do the methods. Colonialism and racial exclusion left a deep scar of injustice and rivalry. This has left a legacy of suspicion towards business, and, in particular, foreign enterprises. In this environment, emotion is as important in appreciating the policy options as empiricism.
Leaders will need therefore, at the outset, to develop a ‘growth ideology’ beyond the vacuous vision documents that litter the policy landscape. Rather than employing more consultants, governments and ruling parties will need to drop their animosity towards business. Such an approach calls for government to come to an understanding with business, and to remedy stultifying attitudes that vary from benign neglect to ostentatious antagonism. Business, for its part, needs to clearly understand and deliver on its wider social responsibilities in an open and transparent fashion, designed to build and maintain trust. A failure to achieve this amid a rapid population increase brings the risk of accelerating a social and political crisis, and, ultimately, state failure and, thereby, widespread human tragedy.
The chapters that follow address the critical sectors that make up the economies of Africa’s countries, and illustrate modes of reform and best practice.
Part 1
The state of Africa’s people, institutions and structures
Chapter 1
People and cities
Five steps for success:
•Cities must be seen as drivers of Africa’s diversified growth and jobs. Urban-centred growth represents a dramatic change from the export of natural resources, which has been central to most African economies.
•Urgent action is the only way to address the pending urban-population explosion.
•Focus
