The list of supposed ‘structural’ handicaps that are holding Africa back is impressive.
First, there are all those conditions defined by nature – climate, geography and natural resources. Being too close to the equator, it has rampant tropical diseases, such as malaria, which reduce worker productivity and raise healthcare costs. Being landlocked, many African countries find it difficult to integrate into the global economy. They are in ‘bad neighbourhoods’ in the sense that they are surrounded by other poor countries that have small markets (which restrict their trading opportunities) and, frequently, violent conflicts (which often spill over into neighbouring countries). African countries are also supposed to be ‘cursed’ by their abundant natural resources. It is said that resource abundance makes Africans lazy – because they ‘can lie beneath a coconut tree and wait for the coconut to fall’, as a popular expression of this idea goes (although those who say that obviously have not tried it; you risk having your head smashed). ‘Unearned’ resource wealth is also supposed to encourage corruption and violent conflicts over the spoils. The economic successes of resource-poor East Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea, are often cited as cases of ‘reverse resource curse’.
Not just nature but Africa’s history is also supposed to be holding it back. African nations are ethnically too diverse, which causes people to be distrustful of each other and thus makes market transactions costly. It is argued that ethnic diversity may encourage violent conflicts, especially if there are a few equally strong groups (rather than many small groups, which are more difficult to organize). The history of colonialism is thought to have produced low-quality institutions in most African countries, as the colonizers did not want to settle in countries with too many tropical diseases (so there is an interaction between climate and institutions) and thus installed only the minimal institutions needed for resource extraction, rather than for the development of the local economy. Some even venture that African culture is bad for economic development – Africans do not work hard, do not plan for the future and cannot cooperate with each other.[2]
Given all this, Africa’s future prospects seem bleak. For some of these structural handicaps, any solution seems unachievable or unacceptable. If being landlocked, being too close to the equator and sitting in a bad neighbourhood are holding Uganda back, what should it do? Physically moving a country is not an option, so the only feasible answer is colonialism – that is, Uganda should invade, say, Norway, and move all the Norwegians to Uganda. If having too many ethnic groups is bad for development, should Tanzania, which has one of the greatest ethnic diversities in the world, indulge in a spot of ethnic cleansing? If having too many natural resources hampers growth, should the Democratic Republic of Congo try to sell the portions of its land with mineral deposits to, say, Taiwan so that it can pass on the natural resource curse to someone else? What should Mozambique do if its colonial history has left it with bad institutions? Should it invent a time machine and fix that history? If Cameroon has a culture that is bad for economic development, should it start some mass brain-washing programme or put people in some re-education camp, as the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia?
All of these policy conclusions are either physically impossible (moving a country, inventing a time machine) or politically and morally unacceptable (invasion of another country, ethnic cleansing, re-education camps). Therefore, those who believe in the power of these structural handicaps but find these extreme solutions unacceptable argue that African countries should be put on some kind of permanent ‘disability benefit’ through foreign aid and extra help with international trade (e.g., rich countries lowering their agricultural protection only for African – and other similarly poor and structurally disadvantaged – countries).
But is there any other way for Africa’s future development beyond accepting its fate or relying on outside help? Do African countries have no hope of standing on their own feet?
One question that we need to ask before we try to explain Africa’s growth tragedy and explore possible ways to overcome it is whether there is indeed such a tragedy. And the answer is ‘no’. The lack of growth in the region has notbeen chronic.
During the 1960s and 70s, per capita income in Sub-Saharan Africa grew at a respectable rate. At around 1.6 per cent, it was nowhere near the ‘miracle’ growth rate of East Asia (5–6 per cent) or even that of Latin America (around 3 per cent) during the period. However, this is not a growth rate to be sniffed at. It compares favourably with the rates of 1–1.5 per cent achieved by today’s rich countries during their Industrial ‘Revolution’ (roughly 1820–1913).
The fact that Africa grew at a respectable rate before the 1980s suggests that the ‘structural’ factors cannot be the main explanation of the region’s (what in fact is recent) growth failure. If they were, African growth should always have been non-existent. It is not as if the African countries suddenly moved to the tropics or some seismic activity suddenly made some of them landlocked. If the structural factors were so crucial, African economic growth should have accelerated over time, as at least some of those factors would have been weakened or eliminated. For example, poor-quality institutions left behind by the colonists could have been abandoned or improved. Even ethnic diversity could have been reduced through compulsory education, military service and mass media, in the same way in which France managed to turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, as the title of a classic 1976 book by the American historian Eugen Weber goes.[3] However, this is not what has happened – African growth suddenly collapsed since the 1980s.
So, if the structural factors have always been there and if their influences would have, if anything, diminished over time, those factors cannot explain why Africa used to grow at a decent rate in the 1960s and 70s and then suddenly failed to grow. The sudden collapse in growth must be explained by something that happened around 1980. The prime suspect is the dramatic change in policy direction around the time.
Since the late 1970s (starting with Senegal in 1979), Sub-Saharan African countries were forced to adopt free-market, free-trade policies through the conditions imposed by the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF (and the rich countries that ultimately control them). Contrary to conventional wisdom, these policies are notgood for economic development (see Thing 7). By suddenly exposing immature producers to international competition, these policies led to the collapse of what little industrial sectors these countries had managed to build up during the 1960s and 70s. Thus, having been forced back into relying on exports of primary commodities, such as cocoa, coffee and copper, African countries have continued to suffer from the wild price fluctuations and stagnant production technologies that characterize most such commodities. Furthermore, when the SAPs demanded a rapid increase in exports, African countries, with technological capabilities only in a limited range of activities, ended up trying to export similar things – be they traditional products such as coffee and cocoa or new products such as cut flowers. The result was often a collapse of prices in those commodities due to a large increase in their supplies, which sometimes meant that these countries were exporting more in quantity but earning less in revenue. The pressure on governments to balance their budgets led to cuts in expenditures whose impacts are slow to show, such as infrastructure. Over time, however, the deteriorating quality of infrastructure disadvantaged African producers even more, making their ‘geographical disadvantages’ loom even larger.
2
Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian engineer and writer, notes: ‘The African, anchored in his ancestral culture, is so convinced that the past can only repeat itself that he worries only superficially about the future. However, without a dynamic perception of the future, there is no planning, no foresight, no scenario building; in other words, no policy to affect the course of events’ (p. 69). And then he goes on to say that ‘African societies are like a football team in which, as a result of personal rivalries and a lack of team spirit, one player will not pass the ball to another out of fear that the latter might score a goal’ (p. 75). D. Etounga-Manguelle, ‘Does Africa need a cultural adjustment program?’ in L. Harrison and S. Huntington (eds.),
3
According to Weber, in 1863, around a quarter of France’s population did not speak French. In the same year, 11 per cent of schoolchildren aged seven to thirteen spoke no French at all, while another 37 per cent spoke or understood it but could not write it. E. Weber,