The usual way to refer to the performance of African countries over the forty or so years since independence is as a ‘crisis,’ or even a ‘rot.’ Robert Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth argues that Africa suffers from ‘new age primitivism,’ Keith Richburg (Out of Africa), Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz) and Bill Berkeley (The Graves are Not Yet Full) all echo this sentiment. And the image is not one limited to just part of the political spectrum, or only popular accounts. Samir Amin, Director of the Left-leaning Third World Forum, describes the continent’s experience as ‘maldevelopment.’ In the middle, Bill Easterly and Ross Levine of the World Bank used multiple regressions to attempt to understand the causes of ‘Africa’s Growth Tragedy.’ On the right, Norman Stone (a former history professor at Oxford University) has gone as far as to propose a program of ‘enlightened re-imperialism' to sort Africa out. Conditions in Africa today, he argues, are similar to the bloody mess that prevailed before European colonization in the nineteenth century, and so "there is a strong case for another version of the nineteenth-century liberal international order to be re-imposed....”
In these versions of Africa’s recent history, there is but one thing to argue over –who is to blame. Norman Stone sees the problem as one of African leadership and wants control passed over to the West. The left look at the same failure and blame what they see as already excessive Western control --colonialism still rampant, but continued under a different form as the neo imperialism of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Those closer to the center see the issue as some mis-combination of the roles of state versus private versus civil society. But in all interpretations, these ‘causes’ are the root of the same blight –Africa’s abject failure.
This does, however, raise the question, ‘at what has Africa failed?’
The answer for parts of the continent is clear –Rwanda failed to prevent genocide, Sudan is heading the same way. Congo-Zaire, Sierra Leone and Somalia have failed to create the conditions for normal life to continue. At times Ethiopia has failed to adequately feed large parts of its population. It is these countries that have been the focus of writers who know that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sell print. But these countries do not make up the majority (or even a sizeable minority) of the continent. And we do not say all of Europe has ‘failed’ because of living conditions in Albania or Chechnya.
The usual, and broader, ‘failure’ mentioned has been in terms of economic growth rates. While Africa’s GDP growth actually outstripped Western Europe’s over the last half century, population growth was so much faster in Africa that per capita income growth has been sluggish indeed. The exceptions are small –Botswana and Mauritius have both posted East-Asian like growth rates for extended periods, but have a combined population of about two and a half million people. According to the World Bank, GDP per capita in Sub Saharan Africa rose from $477 to $561 in the 1960-99 period. In the same period, high-income countries increased their incomes from an average of $13,000 to an average of $31,000. Africa’s income as a percentage of the wealthy world fell from 4.8 percent to 1.9 percent over that period, then –a dramatic divergence.
But perhaps this is an unfair comparison. As suggested by Africa’s per capita income in 1960 --$477—growth rates have always been very low in Africa, and the post-colonial period is by no means exceptional. In this way the continent is different from the rest of the world –including East Asia or Latin America—which have all seen past periods of rapid growth.
Why might this be? Positions differ, but Jeffrey Sachs is an indicator of where the development economics mainstream appears to be moving. Sachs is a widely respected Economist and Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who used to believe that governments played the overarching role in determining the rate of economic growth. He has recently changed his mind, and sees factors such as distance from major markets and sea transport, low population density, tropical climates and high rates of infectious disease as having a larger role to play in slowing Africa’s economic development.
Supporting an explanation that downplays the positive (or negative) effects of government policies on long term growth as compared to longer-term problems is the weak reaction of African countries to a range of different policy environments –from state-led dirigisme in the 1960s to structural adjustment programs in the 1990s. If the right kind of government was really the key to fast growth in Africa, one would expect that Ghana –interventionist in the 1960s and 1970s, liberal-reform oriented in the 1980s and 1990s—would have seen significant growth in at least one of the two periods. In fact, GNP per capita growth averaged –0.4 percent per annum in the first two decades and 0.1 percent in the last two. Economic polices continued a colonial pattern of swinging from ‘interventionist development’ to ‘liberal economy’ and none of it appeared to make much difference to long-term economic performance.
Comparing African growth rates to those achieved in other regions which are not hampered by a range of natural and structural barriers might give a misleading indication of success or failure, then. The worst we can say in fairness is that Africa has lived up to its (low) historical record. This is a post-war performance about the same as that of the US and Europe (where growth rates have been fairly stable over the long term since 1870), worse than East Asia (where growth rates dramatically improved from the pre-war period), but ahead of Latin America (where growth rates fell).
More importantly, comparative performance in economic growth is a very narrow indicator of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ for a state. After all, it is usually assumed that economic growth is a means to the end of a better quality of life for a country’s citizens. And independence leader Kwame Nkrumah’s boast that Ghana’s streets would soon be paved with gold notwithstanding, the generation of Africans that emerged from colonialism in the 1960s certainly had broader concerns than economic growth alone. They were concerned with celebrating the glories of pre-colonial African achievement, legitimacy and nation building and expanding access to health and education, for example. Former President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere sums up his country’s successes in elements of this broader agenda: “The British Empire left us a country with 85 percent illiterates, two engineers and twelve doctors. When I left office, we had nine per cent illiterates and thousands of engineers and doctors.” And this broader success has been repeated across the continent.
