What Is Going On With Africa.
A New Segment of The Intellectual Sunglasses Newsletter.
Hi, there. Welcome to the new Wednesday Edition of the Intellectual Sunglasses Newsletter. Every Wednesday and Friday, I will be profiling, analysing, and commenting on the African economy and the African continent at large and providing a badly needed counterpoint to a largely over-optimistic or more commonly over-pessimistic perception of Africa. I will still be doing the global stuff on Monday and the literary stuff on Sunday. Thank you so much for reading, sharing, subscribing,… if you like the newsletter, please share, comment, and subscribe. Anyway, welcome, sit back, relax, and read.
Africa: A person who has been robbed of all his clothes but should rejoice when he is handed back a necktie.
Everyone has clear opinions about what Africa's problems truly are:
To the IMF, it is the absence of free trade, neoliberalism, and democracy.
To Walter Rodney, it's colonialism and the slave trade.
To Ha-Joon Chang, it is the International Monetary Fund, structural adjustment programmes, and the deleterious recommendations of the Western World.
To Jeffrey Sachs, it's unacceptable levels of foreign aid.
To Thomas Sowell and a host of others, it's the same set of intractable problems: culture, weather, geography, and history.
To Chinua Achebe, it was squarely a problem of leadership.
Some other "experts" on the African dilemma opt for more comprehensive diagnoses. I read the Bottom Billion by Paul Collier several years ago, and recall being impressed at the surefooted certainty of it all.
Paul Collier, the distinguished British economist and author of the book, was quite convinced of what the roots of African problems were:
Wars.
Natural Resources
Bad Governance.
Bad Neighbours.
Fix those, Collier promised, and Africa would no longer have to endure being the subject of books like The Bottom Billion.
The arguments found a receptive audience. Collier's work was hailed as an important contribution to the Africa debate. The Economist, in its regular habit of prophesying, wrote that it was ‘set to become a classic’. Martin Wolf, an influential writer at the Financial Times, showered even more lavish praise, calling it:
A splendid book … which shed much light on how the world should tackle its biggest moral challenge.
Some of this praise was well deserved. Even today, it is difficult not to admire the diligence of Collier's pessimism. And the book made some valuable points: natural resources do erode the relationship between the government and the governed; if governments do not need the taxes of their citizens to finance projects and their salaries, they do not have and will certainly not obey obligations towards those citizens.
Wars also have a way of spilling over into adjacent territories. It is not by accident that nearly every neighbour of the Democratic Republic of Congo is running a competition with the country for the worst place to be a human being on Earth.
I was hooked. This was what I had been waiting for: a proper explanation of why Africa kept lagging behind on every metric that mattered.
But there are things that only time, and not intelligence, can reveal. Some years on, the cracks in Collier's edifice are far easier to spot. For instance, although almost every African society has had a civil war in its recent history, wars and poverty are not necessarily bedfellows.
The most dangerous wars in human history, World Wars I and II, were started and largely fought by the most powerful and industrialized nations in the world.
Moreover, there is work by the renowned economist, Tyler Cowen, that wars stimulate technological advancement. There couldn't have been nuclear energy or computers without world war 2, industrial chemistry without world war 1, and the space industry owes its entire existence to the not always cold war.
There's more of a point to natural resources. But having natural resources is one thing, using them poorly is another thing entirely. Scandinavia and to a lesser extent, the Middle East, have done quite well with their massive oil reserves. Canada is one of the most resource-rich and yet one of the most developed nations in the world.
Resources, it seems like everything else, are neither a blessing or a curse. If a person gets stabbed, it's not the fault of the knife.
Perhaps, it is bad neighbours that really do the trick. And yes, neighbours are important. But they aren't everything. Just ask Mexico how well it's been doing while sharing borders with the richest country of all time. The answer: not well enough. The Global Peace Index still ranks Mexico as the least peaceful country in Latin America.
North Korea is the most messed up place on planet earth. It has not stopped South Korea, its closest neighbour, from becoming one of the richest, most successful, and most admirable countries in the world.
Indeed, only nine countries have a larger Gross Domestic Product than the small Asian nation. It seems then that bad neighbours can only cause significant problems when the country itself already has significant problems.
It's a bit like a virus. You would prefer to be with healthy rather than infected people. However, once you are surrounded by infected people, whether you get those infections yourself almost completely depend on your own defences: vaccination, distancing, a strong immune system, and access to great healthcare
Lastly, while bad governance is definitely a massive hindrance to economic development, it's a symptom of larger problems, the most direct of which is the political process or lack of it that allowed these people gain access to power.
This is not to say that these aren't contributors to Africa's current state of affairs. It's simply that these views do not add up to a consistent, accurate analysis of what exactly Africa needs and what exactly it must do to keep moving forward.
Everyone is feeling some part of the elephant and declaring his or her part to be the fundamental problem at play. Some analysts are inventing their own elephants altogether.
What Is Certainly Not The Answer
In the 1930s, a group of embittered African intellectuals began a new movement. In a complete giveaway of zero marketing skills, they called it negritude. If you’ve ever had to memorize David Diop's sentimental Africa poem, you can extend your gratitude to negritude. Negritude was an affirmation of Africa's own uniqueness, of its own primacy.
There was only one problem with negritude: it didn't work. Negritude was backwards-looking. It wanted to praise Africa's past rather than concern itself with the continent's future. It was misplaced nostalgia dressed up in a ballgown of victimization.
You can't invent greatness out of thin air. You can try very hard but eventually one of two things will happen: either the illusion collapses or it is kept in place by force and complicity.
The Soviet Union fell not just because it had since been outmatched technologically and economically by Western Europe and America, but also because people's beliefs in the Soviet Union's ability to remain a valid counterpoint to capitalism collapsed.
Beliefs matter. The stories we tell about Africa matter. And not just for the reasons you think.
Globalization is a story. If you believe it is inevitable, you are likely to support handout schemes like universal basic income rather than ask more pressing questions about the structure of economic and political power.
If you believe that countries cannot succeed without the apparatus of a free market, you are more likely to support exploitative commercial activity in the guise of efficiency.
If you believe Africa is the way it is because of its past(history), its people(culture), and its place(geography), then you are much more likely to believe the continent will always remain this way. You see, Africans cannot rewrite the past or export their continent or create a new set of Africans.
After all, you cannot have both progress and a permanent problem. They are mutually incompatible.
The African Story is Adding a New Chapter
Here's the open secret of the twenty-first century: Africa is steadily changing. According to a recent report by the IMF World Economic Outlook Database, three of the six fastest growing economies on earth are in Africa.
The number of African women in the workplace, in the schools, and in the office, probably the most reliable metric of economic growth, is consistently growing.
New disruptive technology like cryptocurrency, robotics, and decentralized finance, promise a new wave of entrepreneurship and growth.
Africa is still burdened by a plethora of issues, but it is increasingly becoming the most important playing ground for capital and entrepreneurship in the world we live in today.
The new segment of this newsletter is all about measuring, predicting, analysing, and contributing to this new wave.
It is not about telling optimistic stories or about releasing forecasts of doom and gloom. It is about telling things differently. It is about telling them better.
We will be looking at:
China and Africa.
Is China an Ally or an Enemy? What do the Chinese really want? And why is Africa the most integral part of China's ambitions.
Politics
We've always had dictators throughout human history but Africa has not moved on.
Why hasn't democracy worked in Africa?
Is it even the answer?
Do we need new political systems?
Culture
Is there really a problem with African culture or is it just the imposition of ancient prejudices?
Finance.
What's behind the profusion of payments companies?
Is the space bloated?
And is something more hidden at play?
Scams.
Why have Africans fallen for such a variety of scams and schemes? Who are the new con artists of our age?
And what are they selling?
History
Africa still staggers under a past chequered with the slave trade and colonialism.
But why did all of that happen in the first place?
Why was it Africa rather than anywhere else that was so extensively looted for land, resources, and labour?
Natural Resources
Are they part of the problem?
Part of the solution?
Or neither?
Monetary Policy.
Why are African currencies such weak assets?
What explains their constant slide downwards?
And is some of this damage self-inflicted?
Foreign Aid and The IMF.
The IMF gets such a bad reputation these days. Is that well deserved?
And has all of that foreign aid done Africa more harm than good?
Traffic and Infrastructure
Emerging Opportunities.
And much, much more.
In a nutshell, this is about the African economy: where it is, where it can be, and where it is going. Sometimes, I will be agreeing with the farrago of criticisms and analyses that litter the intellectual space about the African continent. Other times, I will be in legitimate and strong disagreement.
We can't understand and profit from the emerging African economy without understanding its politics, its perception, its stories, its past, and most important, its future.
In the immortal words of Daernys Targaryen, "Shall We Begin?"
TILL NEXT TIME, STAY COOL.
Don't overlook the value of a transparent and adequate legal system (laws, courts, and expertise). It's a boring topic to many, but it's a necessary (if not sufficient) condition of development. It may need to precede markets.
England did a lot of godawful stuff, but it did its colonies a great service with its court system. Conversely, places trying to develop without it more quickly turn into violent oligarchies.