I am just not sure that democracy is terribly relevant anymore. It feels like we might be trying to put in place an obsolete system, saddling emerging countries with a modernist fantasy.
Most 1st world nations have moved in directions that are decidedly undemocratic with relations to transnational organizations that have an impact upon our policy. In the United States for instance much of our actual policy is created by unelected regulatory bodies such as the FDA, DEA, FCC etc… Our democratically elected representatives act like an oversight body for these groups. Then you have international economic treaties that can override the legal decisions of democratically elected legislatures or else cause an international incident in regards to trade.
I’m just not sure that gunning for Democracy is really worth it at this juncture.
No African nation has anything near the Chinese population, and no African nation has anything near the Chinese government.
Chinese have a portion of their population being educated industrial elite. Africans usually don’t get even a basic education. China doesn’t have even a small fraction of the political civil strife that most African nations suffer, and there isn’t any indication that any kind of powerful stable government will emerge in central or east Africa in our lifetimes.
All of those things would have to change in order for Africa to become as economically powerful as China. Everyone with guns would have to just agree not to fight anymore, first. We won’t see that happen. Our children will not see that happen, and their children will not see it either.
Besides South Africa, I might offer Nigeria. They have a large population, with huge population centers desperate for work. Their industrial output is nothing to write home about, but they’re still exporters of certain industrial products – soap, cookware, textiles, canned goods – throughout West Africa. Obviously, they have a huge corruption problems, tribal tensions, income inequality, environmental degradation… But hey, that reminds me of a certain Asian country I’ve heard about.
They’re crippled by their banking system, though. Why, I heard most people can’t even get to their accounts without the help of a friendly intermediary from overseas…
When I started the thread, I was thinking about the problem from the perspective of an investor. While I agree that much of southern Africa is hopeless right now, some countries are not, e.g. S. Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, maybe even Angola. If you were looking for new, unexploited opportunities, what signs might you look for in Africa to let you know that it was time to move? I know that Africa doesn’t have China’s population or infrastructure, but does that mean it’s hopeless?
It’s a real problem for legitimate Nigerian companies. I’ve read that they have a lot of trouble getting paid through the ordinary channels that companies everywhere else use, just because banks are so immediately suspicious of everything Nigerian. Sort of an irony there – the 409 scammers have tried to do a number on the West, but they’ve hurt Nigeria much more substantially.
If I were an investor, I’d stay away from Kenya. The level of corruption and crime there is overwhelming. Tanzania has become much more welcoming of foreign investment. Mozambique, surprisingly, has seen a real resurgence, with solid economic growth, liberal economic policies, and a mostly democratic form of government. Too bad the place is covered in antipersonnel mines.
As to new opportunities, it depends, as always, what your interests are, and what your tolerance for risk is.
To hijack my own thread a little, do you feel that chaos, poor governance, etc. is caused simply by the spectre of colonialism? What impact do you think various nation’s foreign policies have on the emergence of Africa? I have read that years of foreign aid have created attitudes of gross dependency.
Short answer: I don’t think that failed-state characteristics are caused “simply” by any one factor. The aftermath of colonialism plays a significant role, sure, but the problems that much of Africa is having with developing prosperous stable modern states are influenced by pre-colonial issues too. These include lack of mercantilization/industrialization, traditions of tribal/ethnic separatism, and immense linguistic diversity almost entirely without literacy.
In a sense, of course, these factors don’t intrinsically mean that Africa was always doomed to be poor and/or chaotic, just that pre-colonial Africa was poised to develop in a different way from the modern western industrial model.
For better and for worse, though, that train has now left (IMHO). At this point, there seem to be only two choices for any people or geographical region of significant size: either develop a modern technologized nation-state involved in international commerce, or struggle with oppression, poverty and/or chaos.
SEJ, I’m not sure what you mean by the “spectre” of colonialism. The facts of colonialism fucked Africa up in a somewhat lasting fashion. When Europe cut most of these countries loose around 1960 or so, there was very little about their previous hundred (or 500) years’ experience under European dominance that prepared them to make a go of it at independence. Some countries got luckier with their leaders than others, but all of these countries found themselves, to one degree or another, without all of the interlocking parts that make up modern industrial societies. And in the absence of a single vital cog – e.g., a robust electrical grid, a uniform business code, a sense of national identity, a mechanism for the orderly transfer of power – the whole machine flew to pieces.
There’s another factor to be considered, which is that Africa is just not a very fertile place. Fully 70% of its surface is covered with soils that are poor or outright unsuitable for agriculture. And moreover, much of the best land is given over to export crops, commodities like coffee, tea, cotton and cacao, which means that African economies are unusually sensitive to fluctuations in commodity prices.
Africa has been dealt a bad hand – bad soils, a long history of slave raiding, colonialism, disease – and it’s small wonder that it hasn’t done particularly well. Progress is all about baby steps – working at democracy, making sure everyone gets enough iodine, distributing mosquito netting and condoms, encouraging reforestation – that kind of thing. It’s fair to say that in the past, aid donors have not spent their billions well, but they’ve at least learned from their mistakes a little. I certainly think they have a role to play, and shouldn’t worry so much about dependency per se.
I think this last point is overstated. There is a lot of linguistic diversity in Africa, but at the same time, there are a couple of trade languages that cover immense swaths of territory – Hausa in the west of Africa, and Swahili in Eastern and Southern Africa – and both have been written since medieval times. Moreover, Africans are a polyglot people. I don’t see language as being much of a barrier to trade, and in fact, African trading networks covered vast distances.
I don’t see much evidence that Africa was going nowhere before the Europeans came in. In fact, it seems like there was a certain amount of consolidation and empire-building going on. But the slave trade, and subsequent colonialism, had a devastating effect. As did the Cold War.
But that said, at this juncture in history, focusing on colonialism is interesting only as an academic exercise. Africa basically needs to get forward, playing with the hand it’s been dealt.
There is very little evidence that the world is flat for subsaharan African nations. No leaders and giants in science and engineering. No software development firms tapping cottage industry brains. No nucleus of independent manufacturers creating copied (or original) goods worth exporting. No history of getting enough wealth distributed from the foreign or domestic exploitation of natural resources. Precious few patentable original ideas. Few governments stable enough over time…and always the endless litany of excuses of why the rest of the world is responsible for Africa’s plight.
South Africa’s wealth and industrialization was created while it was under the control of European immigrants. It is unlikely that that model will be repeated elsewhere.
The debate will rage on forever about whether it is an external hand or simply lack of being able to produce enough people capable of creating and running factories and infrastructure without being utterly dependent on external help.
I see very little chance of subsaharan Africa being able to generate goods and services of interest to the rest of the world for the forseeable future.
Opportunities for investors are not completely absent. I have used a cell phone most of the way up Kilimanjaro, for instance, from Vodaphone, who saw opportunity for wireless money to be made even in Tanzania. But while it may not be hopeless, it sure seems to be whatever the next level up is.
It is kind of startling to see “subsaharan Africa” (even with South Africa excepted) described as essentially an undifferentiated mass of incapacity, as though there were no significant differences between, say, Botswana and Zambia or DR Congo.
They are all Western European besides Japan which is very mutable yet homogenous and capable of retooling its system in a short period of time when necessary. Also, they were established during the 20th century before the our present system of globalization which tends to hamstring emerging democracies with trade agreements that bind the hands of fledgling legislatures.
Nigeria also suffers from one of the most effective insurgencies relative to its infrastructure in the world. Its oil production can potentially be halted by insurgents because infrastructure is long and spindly. This would cause both a worldwide oil crisis and level the Nigerian economy.
As for colonialism. Colonialism is interesting. Now, I am talking kind of out of my depth referring to some things I’ve read recently, but one can look at South Africa where they worked with the white colonial infrastructure and Zimbabwe where they went the opposite route and see relative levels of success. Zimbabwe should be the most prosperous nation in Africa. Carter should have put a bullet in Mugabe rather than pandering to him.
I don’t think Kimstu was arguing that Africans were not developing on their own, but that they were developing systemically in a far different way than Western Europe when Western Europe came and imposed its bureaucratic infrastructure upon them. Its interesting to see the difference between Africa and the Middle-East versus India. A lot of the problem is the maps being drawn in ways that totally ignore ethnic divisions, and yet we still try to manage with these maps today. The maps were drawn based upon geographical landmarks like rivers or mountain ridges, but in many cases a tribe could be on both sides of the river or both sides of the mountain, so they cut tribes in half and enclosed two tribes in the same mass causing a lot of strife between tribes that were dominant and tribes that were not. This can be seen in Rwanda where the Tutsis were the dominant tribe under the Belgians and then overthrown and cleansed by the Hutus later.
Hong Kong is not a country, but if it were, it would be one of the world’s richest - with a GDP per capita of 38K. It was also one of the world’s last colonies - the Brits only left in 1997. (I don’t know what that says about the ‘colonialism makes you poor’ theory. Perhaps they’d have been even richer if the Brits had never been there?)
South Korea’s GDP per capita is $24,500 (34th).
Taiwan’s is over $30K (23rd).
Singapore - $33K (18th). Singapore also has a long experience with colonialism.
Egypt’s Nile Valley is supposedly one of the world’s richest (most fertile) agricultural regions, yet Egypt is poor. Say what you will about the Swiss and the Dutch - but it’s hard to accuse them of having an excess of good farmland. (In fact, there seems to be no correlation between wealth and arable land whatsoever. Consider Iceland, for example - #6.)
Even natural resources like oil have less impact than you might imagine. Nigeria’s oil wealth seems to have done little to help its people. Israel, on the other hand, has no oil whatsoever, and yet is still one of the richest countries in the region. (Israel is richer than Saudi Arabia, despite the later country’s enormous oil wealth.)
Europeans speak a multiplicity of languages, but are not poor. Israelis speak languages from all over the world, but are the 28th richest country. Indians are said to speak over a thousand different languages and dialects, and the Chinese speak several different languages as well.
Whatever the reasons for Africa’s poverty - language barriers, colonialism, barren soil - they don’t seem to hold up well when you consider how those same factors played out in other countries.
