Introduction
Sub-Saharan Africa has persistently occupied the lowest rungs of global development. On almost all socioeconomic indicators, the continent's development significantly lags behind the rest of the world. In recent years, however, there have been attempts to drum up Africa as an ‘emerging lion’. In both academic and popular debates, the general commentary has moved in the direction of positive assessment and optimistic projection – ‘Africa is rising’. In both academic works and non-academic literature, and especially in the general Western media reports about the continent, there has been a remarkable shift from projecting Africa as a hopeless place to projecting an economically roaring continent (Coulibaly 2017; Bright and Huby 2015; Taylor 2012; Mills and Herbst 2012; The Economist 2011).
From a capitalist standpoint, Africa is considered the main frontier of unexploited markets with a huge potential for experimenting with product innovations and digging up virgin investment opportunities. What is more, the continent holds an enduring place as home to enormous natural resources for which today's leading global manufacturing economies such as China and India are thirsting and scrambling to control (Carmody 2016). Indeed, as many analysts have pointed out, there is a new and no less aggressive scramble for the continent in the age of globalised capitalist production, this happening simultaneously with acceleration of Africa's economic marginalisation (Frynas and Paulo 2007; Carmody 2016; Moyo, Yeros, and Jha 2012; Ayers 2013; French 2014; Taylor 2014).
This turning to present a positive picture of Africa is understandable and commendable, for a continent that for centuries was the object of misleading and salacious portrayals, cynical caricatures and false constructions. In a widely cited cover page in 2000, the influential magazine The Economist painted a picture of a ‘hopeless continent’, but just over a decade later the same magazine had an ‘Africa rising’ cover (The Economist 2000, 2011). Imageries of a dark continent that had no history were the signature in profiling by Western scholars in the period before the continent was forcefully and brutally occupied by imperial powers in the second half of the 19th century. We should recall that it was the great F.W. Hegel who popularised the idea of Africa not being a historical part of the world and which had no history because it did not have states. The portrait of a dark continent gave way to representations of savagery and backward people in urgent need of civilisation, the leitmotif of European missionaries and ultimately the colonisation and plunder of the continent that continued from where mass enslavement had stopped.
Against the recent (and still ongoing) tide of Afro-optimism, but not quite the overly lurid and cynical characterisation of scholars like Chabal and Deloz (1999), stands a body of scholarship and commentary that takes a fairly measured scepticism (Miguel 2009; Khisa 2012; Mkandawire 2014; Beresford 2016; Carmody 2016; Akolgo 2018). This growing body of work by scholars of different disciplinary stripes seeks to provide a more plausible picture, recognising Africa’s marginal place in the global power structure but also the continent’s struggle to define its progress (Ferguson 2006; Young 2012; Taylor 2016). A range of scholars have contributed to a much needed attempt at a sceptical but illuminating assessment of Africa, providing scholarly interventions that steer clear of valorising Africa as much as avoiding big stroke brushes (see Mbembe 2001; Taylor 2012; French 2014).
The socioeconomic and political history of Africa has for long been written with sheer prejudice and utter distortion. Given the geopolitics of knowledge production and the Euro-American epistemological hegemony, researching and writing about Africa has largely proceeded through Eurocentric lenses and the recycling, nay reproductions, of stereotypical formulations that supposedly refer to the empirical realities of a continent so diverse and deeply complex (Ferguson 2006, 3). The colonial occupation of the continent was not just physical and institutional, it was also, perhaps more insidiously, mental and intellectual. The literary scholar Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1986), three decades ago, perceptively underscored the lasting and debilitating impact of the colonial project on African thought and knowledge production. Little has indeed changed, at least not in a decidedly radical manner, in the way that scholars (not just those in the West) write about Africa but also in the approaches and frameworks used to conceptualise and produce knowledge about the continent, its peoples, economies and politics.
The pushback against Eurocentric biases and distorted representations of Africa has in recent years yielded richly analytical and nuanced scholarly work. The point is not to embrace a pessimist view or paint a negative picture of the continent, much as it is not about bandwagoning to an uncritically positive portrayal and fleeting optimism.
This article contributes to the critical evaluation of the state of African economic and political conditions drawing on field interviews, insights and conversations with ordinary citizens, political and civic leaders, bureaucrats and policymakers, media analysts and academics in different countries. I make three interrelated arguments. First, the ‘Africa rising’ narrative at best sits on a shaky foundation. African economies may have registered modest growth in recent years but the growth is either superficial or not happening in the sectors that matter the most. The Africa that is rising is not seen and felt by the majority of African citizens. Second, the growing tendency to paint a rosy picture of the continent masks Africa's continued marginal position in the global capitalist structures of power, domination and exploitation. Lastly, the economic strains and stresses afflicting especially urban populations with rapid demographic shifts have generated a hungering for quick solutions. This has contributed to a new wave of populist politics across the continent. In making these arguments this article contributes to a growing body of critical political economy of Africa (e.g., Ferguson 2006; Taylor 2016; Bush 2018; Frankema and Waijenburg 2018). The rest of this article proceeds in three sections. The next section provides a snapshot of Africa's recent economic performance and shows why at a minimum there can only be cautious optimism, as against what is arguably a misleading rosy picture. I then present some snippets of reactions from interviews conducted in different African cities between June and August 2018. The penultimate section analyses some of the possible explanations why African economies are not delivering the much-needed transformation.
Rising from what and to where?
Africanist scholars have questioned the narrative of a ‘rising Africa’ not because Africa is not rising but to what end and with what benchmarks (Taylor 2014, 2016; Beresford 2016; Akolgo 2018; Bush 2018). As Beresford (2016, 2) rightly points out, images of shopping malls, coffee shops and skyscrapers are used to depict a continent ‘rising’, glossing over the fact that the majority of African peoples live in rural areas far away from the shopping malls and coffee shops in cities and other urban centres. It is hardly of much value to point to physical structures like skyscrapers as evidence of structural transformation when in fact Africa as a whole remains in a weak position within the structure of global capitalism (Taylor 2014, 32). And in this precisely lies the problem with standardised measures of growth, primarily GDP, which tell us nothing about the quality of life of citizens or their social harmony, the gulf between the majority poor and the minority rich and, most important, in the case of Africa, the positioning within the global economic structure.
Yet, even if we take GDP at face value as a measure of a ‘rising Africa’, the record is not as outstanding as it has been hyped. For example, between 2000 and 2010 sub-Saharan African growth averaged just over 5%, largely due to a commodity boom and oil revenues. This slowed down to under 4% in the years after (Leke and Barton 2016; Bush 2018, 28). The African Development Bank forecast of growth for 2018 was 4.1%, but as the year ended growth stood at just over 3% (AfDB 2018; IMF 2018). The slowdown was attributed in part to the slump in global crude oil practices that affected oil-dependent countries like Angola and Nigeria. For a continent that experienced negative growth for long spells in the 1970s and 80s, it is undoubtedly a big turnaround to have registered substantial growth rates starting in the late 1990s. But the growth has been only modest and far short of what, for example, the Asian late-industrialisers managed, as shown in Figure 1, and way below what had been projected by international financial institutions like the World Bank (Bush 2018, 28–29).
GDP Growth for East Asia and Africa. Source: Compiled from the World Bank's World Development Index indicators.
In recent years, the story of the ‘lions on the move’ has become a little more nuanced with deceleration in growth in last two to three years (UNECA 2017). A few years ago, the World Economic Forum noted that ‘most of Africa was booming – 25 of the top 30 economies had accelerated their growth from the previous decade’. But by 2016
the number of countries whose growth was similar or quickening has halved to 13 – Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania and Zimbabwe – and Africa's six largest economies have experienced slowing growth, partly reflecting lower resource prices and the Arab Spring. (Leke and Barton 2016)
Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP. Source: Compiled from the World Bank's World Development Index indicators.
At the macro-level of the global economy, Africa remains deeply marginalised and side-lined within the structures of global capitalism. Consider, for example, that Africa’s share of foreign direct investment is just over 3% and its share of global manufacturing a paltry 1%. The share of global trade remains a lowly 2% and its overall share of world GDP is a mere 2.5%. What is more, in 2017 Africa’s share of global trade in services was only 1.9% and extractives, primarily oil, accounted for close to 40% of the continent’s total exports (WTO 2018, 72–73). Global trade flows are heavily skewed to North America, Europe and increasingly Asia. Between 2015 and 2017 the value of trade declined more substantially for Africa than other regions of the world, with export earnings declining by about 20% (UNCTAD 2018, 8). Africa’s marginal position in the global marketplace is compounded by the internal structural imbalances of enclave colonial economies that are characterised more by extracting rent for consumption than value-added productivity (Bush 2018, 29), and restricted largely to extractive primary commodities since colonial times with little benefit to the African citizen (Carmody 2016, 229). Worse, much of the continent lacks basic infrastructure to spur productivity. It is estimated, for example, that the whole continent has an electricity generation equivalent to that of Spain (Mills and Herbst 2012, 5).
What do we read from the above figures and the trends thus far? The service sectors, which have been the largest source of growth – primarily telecommunications, banking, insurance, leisure and hospitality – are dominated by transnational (often speculative) hot capital that enjoys the freedom to repatriate profits without making long-term physical investments. The more risky ventures in manufacturing have attracted limited investment yet this is precisely where Africa's economies need a leap. A services-dominated economy is a feature of post-industrial societies whose skills concentration has shifted away from relatively low-paying blue-collar jobs to high-skills, high-paying professions in the services sector. It is a trifle misleading, therefore, to think that a continent that has remained the least industrialised can somehow parachute itself and compete in the post-industrial global marketplace. The services sector is largely consumptive and not productive. It has limited value addition and generates comparatively fewer jobs than manufacturing and value-added industrial production. Rather than export-processing zones and industrial parks, the ‘rising Africa’ has sprawling urban real-estate and hotel complexes in Accra and Kampala, arguably from illicit money, and coffee-shop chains in Kigali and Addis Ababa that have little capital investment. Foreign investors attracted to such countries for one reason or another, and who invest in real estate, coffee and fast-food chains, can easily disinvest.
Is Africa rising for Africans?
The average African citizens, or at least those I interviewed in Accra, Addis Ababa, Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Kampala and Kigali, face deep economic distress and do not relate to the rising Africa. Official and standardised measures of poverty aside (what is the difference between living on US$1.5 versus US$2 a day, for example?), the vast majority of African citizens remain trapped in the everyday struggle for basic livelihoods. The hustle to meet the most basic everyday needs and the overall rough economic environment characterise the lives of the average African in all the cities I have been to recently. The biggest cry is the runaway fuel prices that invariably drive up the cost of living, and compound the conditions of the urban poor. High fuel prices also dampen the profitability of small businesses. It is instructive that gasoline is cheaper in a rich economy like the US than in a poor African country like Uganda; worse, countries like Nigeria export crude oil yet face routine fuel shortages. For many Africans struggling to cover the basics, ‘It is a hopeless situation’, quipped a Ghanaian in Accra. The current president, Nana-Addo, ran on the promise of bringing down fuel prices, ‘but things have been worsening under his government’, he said (Interview 1). There is a widespread sentiment among many Ghanaians that politicians don't care about the suffering of the ordinary person, whether it is the NPP or NDC in power; they are the same’ (Interview 1).1 This sentiment of discontent with democracy in Ghana and the political class is prevalent, according to governance analysts in civil society, media and academia (Interview 2).
In Dar es Salaam, the populist postures of President John Magufuli have endeared him to the economically hard-pressed street people. They see him as the antidote to a system that has for a long time short-changed the majority poor and served the interests of the privileged, elite classes (Interview 3). Magufuli has rattled sections of the intelligentsia, government technocrats, politicians and the business classes, but he is hugely popular with the masses. The same feeling of economic alienation and social dislocation, partly a reason for the rise of populism in Europe and America, is driving the phenomenon of Magufuli in Tanzania and Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia. ‘Rais Magufuli ni mzuri sana’ (President Magufuli is very good) (Interview 4) is a sentiment I heard from almost everyone I spoke to among Tanzanians of lesser means and the downtrodden. It is the same view Ethiopians almost universally hold about their new and reformist prime minister, Abiy (Interview 5).
Unmistakably, in the ‘rising Africa’ there are winners and losers. The winners are arguably a tiny minority considering that the vast majority of African citizens remain trapped in poverty and deprivation. Wealth and income inequality has risen exponentially in countries that are flagged by the IMF and World Bank as high economic performers like Uganda, as shown by a recent study (Oxfam 2016). Growth in itself means little to the majority living on the fringes and barely getting along. The ‘Africa rising’ narrative is belied by the paradox of growth and unemployment (Ggobi 2017; AfDB 2018), underlining the superficiality of economic growth when it is concentrated in services sectors and not the critical sectors where majority of the population eke out a living, like agriculture, or where value-addition productivity generates job opportunities, like manufacturing. This is a widely accepted structural flaw acknowledged by the ostensible promoters of development, chiefly Bretton Woods institutions and UN agencies, but couched in euphemisms and embellished language like ‘a challenging outlook’ or ‘jobless growth’. But runaway youth unemployment is seen by Afro-optimists as a big blight on an otherwise promising performance (Mills and Herbst 2012, 17–18). Added to this is the fact that in countries like Ethiopia and Uganda where growth has been rather modest, those countries have at the same time had high population growth rates that easily wipe out the modest growth (Ggobi 2017).
An enduring feature of African economies is the deleterious role of financial malfeasance and official corruption that do not just undermine prudence in managing public resources but also affect business activities in the private sector. In fact, precisely because the private business sector remains very small while government is the dominant business actor even in highly privatised and liberalised economies, the imprudence in the public sector directly affects the functioning of the business sector. Part of the problem, as some scholars have noted, has to do with the management and distribution of economic rents (Kelsall 2013; Booth and Golooba-Mutebi 2012).
Countries where access to and use of economic rents is relatively centralised and heavily controlled either by the ruling party (institutionally) or by an informal but politically connected network (a form of crony capitalism) suffer less from pervasive rent-seeking, in which case there is a likelihood of rents being productively deployed. Rwanda under Paul Kagame has shown strong signs of a more disciplined political system where elite rent-seeking is highly controlled and constrained (Interview 6). This is reflected in the reported low levels of official corruption by Transparency International and in the country's high ranking on the Ease of Doing Business index by the World Bank, something that is credited to the commitment to transparency and accountability on the part of Kagame’s government (Interview 7). Ethiopia in the last years of Meles Zenawi emerged as a comparable case of this post-neopatrimonial model that is often referred to as developmental patrimonialism (see Crook 1989; Kelsall 2011, 2013; Vaughan and Mesfin 2011; Booth and Golooba-Mutebi 2012). However, under Meles's successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, matters seemed to get out of hand as rent-seeking and official corruption became more widespread (Interview 8). By the time the new prime minister Abiy Ahmed took office, Ethiopians had become increasingly agitated about growing government graft and the use of political connections for business profiteering. Although it is too early to know what structural changes might take place in Ethiopia, there is great optimism that Abiy will crack the whip on graft and malfeasance given the vast support he commands and the fact that, unlike his predecessor, he is in effective control of the levers of state power in Ethiopia (Interview 5).
Recurring political impediments to transformation
African economies have been growing (modestly) but not transforming. The basic structure of African economies has not changed (Carmody 2016, 3). Uganda is a very good example. Growth has happened in sectors that do not include economic activities on which the majority of citizens earn livelihoods. But this still begs the question as to why growth has not taken place in the right sectors and at such a substantial rate as to have a transformative effect. Neoclassical political economy explanations have centred on the failure to get the policy framework right, underscoring the vagaries of state intervention that supposedly distort the fundamentals of macroeconomic stability and price mechanisms (see, for example, Bates 1981; van de Walle 2001). But there is a sleight of hand here that ignores Africa’s strong economic performance in the 1960s and early 70s under the import substitution industrialisation (ISI) strategy, which was a statist development model. There is a concealing of how this statist model was forcefully and prematurely ended, to say nothing of the political processes leading to the imposition of a neoliberal regime in Africa but also in Latin America in the 1980s.
Africa’s industrialisation was torpedoed in part by externally sponsored military coups in late 1960s and 70s. By halting the immediate post-independence radical reforms that included Africanisation and the deliberate use of the levers of state power to propel industrialisation, African economies defaulted back to the old colonial enclave modal economies of commodity export and perpetual dependence on external paternalistic handouts. Today, it is the same old story: when global commodity prices plummet, Africa’s per capita growth slows or stalls.
If the stylised neoclassical proposition about state intervention is deleterious, we have to ask why governments pursue policies that distort market activities and hurt growth. There have been at least two dominant and standard explanations: social heterogeneity and political rationale. Easterly and Levine (1997) advanced the argument that high ethnic diversity in Africa negatively affects growth. Second, Bates (1981) suggested that the logics of bad economic policies can be located in their political functionality – that is, that African governments pursue growth-inhibiting policies especially against agricultural producers, because the urban constituents that pose a political threat benefit from policies that hurt farmers who are not sufficiently organised to be a political threat and thus be listened to. This orthodox explanation locates the problem in the neo-patrimonial nature of African political systems, characterised by deep-seated clientelism and patrimonial modes of rule that makes it difficult to undertake successful market and institutional reforms necessary for economic take-off (van de Walle 2001; Mills and Herbst 2012; Taylor 2012). However, there have been recent heterodox pushbacks against this standard argument (see Norman et al. 2012; Kelsall 2013; Mkandawire 2015). Relatedly, Alex de Waal (2015) has suggested that politics in the Horn of Africa (and, perhaps by extension, the rest of Africa) can be understood using the idiom of the ‘political marketplace’ of pervasive monetised patronage – the exchange of political loyalty for payment. The political marketplace, according to de Waal, has three key components: inter-personal political bargaining, pervasive rent-seeking and integration into the global patronage system. It is difficult to see how de Waal’s framework is fundamentally different from the old neopatrimonial model, but he underlines an important dynamic of elite bargains and monetary transactions which, he rightly points out, have contributed to undermining viable state-building.
The disastrous politics in South Sudan today, to say nothing of the enduring absence of a durable centralised authority in Somalia, speaks to the classic problem of state-building and political order that transcends defence and security to include the state's ability to enforce laws and to discipline all actors be they in politics or business. The problem of managing rents that Kelsall (2013) and other scholars believe to be at the heart of propelling growth is itself an issue of enforcing a certain political order that is attuned to productivity and not rentier proclivities. The capacity of African states to discipline elites and manage various societal interests has implications not just for political order but also for economic performance. South Sudan arguably best represents the dual problem of social disorder and economic turmoil wrought by a weak state system unable to rein in rentier actors and violent entrepreneurs.
In the immediate postcolonial era it was thought that big-man leadership was the antidote to social fragmentation and political factionalism. Several independence-time leaders presented themselves as statesmen around whom to rally masses in nation-building and the forging of development-oriented nation-states, from Kwame Nkrumah and Houphouet-Boigny to Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote. In due course, however, as Crawford Young (2012) has aptly argued, almost all became embodiments of autocratic rule that took their respective countries down the road of political instability and economic decay. Consequently, the 1980s was a ‘lost decade’ when much of the continent suffered negative economic growth and large-scale armed conflict which went on into the 1990s, with the 1994 Rwandan genocide being the most extreme instance of large-scale violence.
The return to modestly democratic forms of government and the realisation of relative peace and political stability at the turn of the century brought optimism and indeed visible signs of positive transformation. But the average African citizen is dissatisfied with the substantive value of democracy even in countries like Ghana and Senegal that have attained minimum democratic consolidation. ‘The system is rigged in favour of the powerful in politics and those connected to them’ (Interview 9), remarked a lower-level staff member of a prominent Ghanaian civil society organisation. The allusion to a ‘rigged system’ echoes a key component of the anti-establishment backlash that led to the election of Donald Trump in the USA and the general rise of populism in the West.
Africa is experiencing its own brand of populism, propelled by economic desperation and the clamour for meaningful socioeconomic transformation (Mills and Herbst 2012, 29). In Dar es Salaam, one sentiment arguably captures the feeling of many: that President Magufuli is the right man to push Tanzania in the right direction after decades of elite profiteering and abject poverty for the majority of Tanzanians (Interview 10). The allure of the ‘big man’ who can rein in official corruption and the excessive abuse of public office appears to be driving many African citizens into the corner of firebrand, quasi-authoritarian leaders. ‘It is not easy to govern a poor country like Tanzania’, one man who sees Magufuli as a saviour-leader told me, adding that with the many endemic problems of poverty and government inefficiency, African countries need tough and determined leaders like Magufuli (Interview 11). Since becoming the Tanzanian president in 2015 Magufuli has emerged as an enigmatic figure who is both praised (by the masses) and reviled (by the elite classes) not just in Tanzania but across the East African region. In the capital Dar es Salaam, he is seen by the more educated and privileged classes as a threat to freedom and democratic ethos, while the underprivileged, by contrast, see him as ‘their man’ (Interview 12).
In some of the recent debates about Africa's economic predicament there has been a focus on the role of ‘political settlements’ – the interplay between power and institutions or the way institutional configurations are understood as representing the underlying power distribution. There is a distinction between growth-enabling political settlements, the type where access to and use of economic rents is centralised and productively managed, and growing-impeding, the type where there is a flourishing of perverse incentives for rent-seeking and corruption (Kjær and Katusiimeh 2012; Booth and Golooba-Mutebi 2012; Kjær 2015). What is neglected in these debates is the extent to which political uncertainty looms large in especially those countries that face leadership succession crises. The continent-wide wave against presidential term limits starting in the mid 2005s has left many countries hostage to long-surviving rulers presiding over corruption-riddled regimes. For countries like DR Congo, Rwanda and Uganda that are yet to break the succession jinx, the longer rulers tenuously cling to power the more the future is uncertain. Rwanda's Paul Kagame still has a commanding hold in a tightly controlled country, but the feeling among many Rwandans that only he can instil the requisite discipline and stability is a cause for worry (Interview 13). Even the leader of the main opposition party, Vincent Biruta, who ordinarily should be vying to replace Kagame, instead sees him as the only unquestionably qualified person to manage the country (Interview 14). Given Africa’s global marginality, the abuse of state power and persistence of political uncertainty in many countries further undermines their prospects of extricating themselves from the straitjacket of marginality and economic underperformance.
Conclusion
In 15 years it is estimated that Africa will have more than a billion people in its workforce, the largest in the world. In many African countries today the youth constitute more than 70% of the population. By 2025 it is believed that a quarter of the world’s young people under the age of 25 will be from sub-Saharan Africa (Mills and Herbst 2012, 18). Advocates of globalisation argue that Africa needs more integration in the global economy (Wolf 2004; Mills and Herbst 2012). ‘Can Africa join in the world’s progress?’, ask Mills and Herbst. They conclude thus:
all signs indicate that it will be possible for at least some African countries to participate in an international economy that continues to be robust as long as they institutionalise and enhance their reforms. (Mills and Herbst 2012, 8)
African countries that have had impressive growth rates like Ethiopia are also facing increasing urban poverty – the streets of Addis Ababa appear to have more street beggars with each passing year. In Rwanda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front government has oversold impressive development indicators, but the country's average national income remains paltry. In some parts of the capital, Kigali, there is striking modernisation and the big presence of Western visitors has shored up the city's pedigree as a tourist destination. But the average Rwandan in Kigali faces as much difficulty getting along economically as the Congolese across the border in Goma. What I have tried to highlight in this article is the extent to which Africa’s economic situation remains dire even as the continent is touted as rising. There is mounting economic distress and political uncertainty across the continent both in democratic countries and in countries under authoritarian regimes.
Also worth highlighting is the persistence of pockets of low-intensity conflict and outright war, as in Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo, Somalia and South Sudan, that reminds us of the curse of war that has long wrecked the continent. Armed conflicts in these countries and the threat of outbreak in others will continue to cast a cloud on the continent's economic prospects. And the machinations and manipulations of rulers like Uganda's Yoweri Museveni to rule for life place the economic futures of their countries in peril and the fate of political stability in unimaginable jeopardy.