Africa Emerges E-Book

Robert Rotberg

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 599

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer a troubled ‘dark continent.’ Most of its constituent countries are now enjoying significant economic growth and political progress. The new Africa has begun to banish the miseries of the past, and appears ready to play an important role in world affairs. Thanks to shifts in leadership and governance, an African renaissance could be at hand.

Yet the road ahead is not without obstacles. As world renowned expert on African affairs, Robert Rotberg, expertly shows, Africa today maybe poised to deliver real rewards to its long suffering citizens but it faces critical new crises as well as abundant new opportunities. Africa Emerges draws on a wealth of empirical data to explore the key challenges Africa must overcome in the coming decades. From peacekeeping to health and disease, from energy needs to education, this illuminating analysis diagnoses the remaining impediments Africa will need to surmount if it is to emerge in 2050 as a prosperous, peaceful, dynamic collection of robust large and small nations.

Africa Emerges offers an unparalleled guide for all those interested in the dynamics of modern Africa’s political, economic, and social development.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Continent on the Move

1 Myriad Challenges and Opportunities

Middle-class expectations

Africa’s renaissance

The power of numbers

Wealth, health, and schooling

The scourge of insecurity

Economic growth prospects

Exercising political voice

The road ahead

2 A Demographic Dividend or Just More People?

Population growth estimates

The cities

The youth bulge

The demographic dividend

Feeding the huddled masses

3 Tropical Dilemmas: Disease, Water, and More

Geographical realities

Climatic factors

Soils and forests

Water and not a drop to drink

Pests and animal ailments

The human disease burden

A plague of worms and flies

The other killers

Malnutrition and food security

A continuing struggle

4 Educating Future Generations

Barriers to opportunity

Universities and colleges

The brain drain

The task ahead: boosting the knowledge base

5 To War Rather than to Prosper

Conflict follows from state failure

Ethnicity as a cause

The civil wars of sub-Saharan Africa

The remedial role of African and UN organizations and institutions

Improved governance

6 Accountability and the Wages of Corrupt Behavior

Least and most corrupt

Venal corruption

Petty corruption

Rewards of limiting corruption

Battling corruption

Botswana and Rwanda: positive examples

Transparency and the media

The business atmosphere

The rule of law

7 The Infrastructural Imperative

Energy considerations

Hydroelectricity and new dam projects

Solar and wind alternatives

Arteries of commerce: roads and rails

8 Harnessing Mobile Telephone Capabilities

Not yet the Internet

Mobile phones everywhere

Mobile devices and social and economic remediation

SMS Texting for change

Hand-held devices and the greater good

9 China Drives Growth

Investment, trade, petroleum

Foreign assistance

Military aid

The labor question

The seamy underside of success

The Zambian case

Special Economic Zones

Human rights concerns

The balance sheet

10 Strengthening Governance

Measuring performance

Good governance

Bad governance

Middling governance

Ensuring better governance

11 Creating Responsible Leadership

Leaders matter

Critical competencies

The Mandelan model

Khama, nation-builder

The successor generations

Africa’s leadership crisis

Rising above the norm

Nurturing a new leadership ethos

Select Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Robert Rotberg 2013

The right of Robert Rotberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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In Memory of Great Leaders

Aleke K. Banda (1939–2010)

H. B. Masauko Chipembere (1930–1975)

Dunduzu K. Chisiza (1930–1962)

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane (1920–1969)

Eddison J. M. Zvobgo (1935–2004)

and for Joanna H. H. Rotberg (1935–2008)

Who lived and experienced it all, and greatly led and inspired all with whom she interacted.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Polity Press, especially Louise Knight and David Winters, for asking me to write this book, and encouraging me throughout the process of doing so. After many years devoted to Leadership, Governance, Failed States, Genocide, Corruption, and similar cross-cutting and more theoretical scholarly pursuits, it was a welcome challenge to return to compelling first concerns – Africa and its future.

Many Africans – friends and colleagues – have over many years and in myriad telling ways of friendship and collaboration contributed to this book and made it possible: the late and much missed David T. Hatendi, Selma and Jules Browde, Johnnie Carson, Caty Clement, Firle Davies, Sue Drummond Haley, Rachel M. Gisselquist, Allan Hill, Francie and Jeffrey Jowell, Calestous Juma, Raymond and Jean Louw, Frances Lovemore, Justin Malawezi, Moeletsi Mbeki, Greg Mills, Ben Rabinowitz, Christopher Saunders, and Thomas Tieku. During the course of intensive research for this book each added – as several have done for many years – important insights that have enriched the book. Several, too, were generously hospitable, providing important refuges amid the competing vortexes of Africa. I also appreciated and profited from the thoughtful suggestions of two anonymous readers for Polity Press. Leigh Mueller’s precision and exact wordsmithing greatly enhanced the final prose of this book; her efforts are celebrated by me as they will be by readers. I also thank Erin Hartshorn for producing such a full index.

Many of the strands in this book were brought together and woven more tightly at a remarkably evocative dinner in Lusaka, presided over graciously by Ambassador Mark Storella, in 2012. Elias Chipimo Jr., Mark Chona, Lishomwa Lishomwa, and Sikota Wina were among the friends and participants who spanned the succession of sub-Saharan Africa’s challenges and opportunities that all of us share. Their sometimes wry, sometimes trenchant, and always well-informed commentaries on past and present inform this book’s message. Cornelia C. Johnson helped to enliven that dinner, just as she has helped magnificently to make this book as relevant and game-changing as possible.

Ottawa, Madison, and Cambridge, October 15, 2012

Introduction: A Continent on the Move

Africa no longer is the fabled, deeply troubled, dark continent. Most of its constituent countries are growing economically, delivering significant social enhancements to their inhabitants, and progressing politically. A number of the region’s nation-states are increasing their per-capita Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) more rapidly than their Asian counterparts. Poverty is diminishing. Trade between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world has tripled since 2000 and attracted more private foreign investment than official aid handouts since 2005. Its share of global foreign direct investment has quadrupled since 2000. Almost everywhere in the sub-continent there is the exciting bustle of improvement and take-off. Its much-lamented infrastructural deficits are being erased, thanks to China. Furthermore, Africans are much healthier than they were, with startling improvements in child mortality being recorded across half of the sub-continent; dictators are fewer, democrats more common; the intrastate wars of the sub-continent are claiming fewer lives; and almost everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa there is hope for the future and an upwelling of pride. Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer the “basket-case” of yore, about whose future the rest of the world once despaired. Africa is ready at last to play an increasingly important role in the affairs of the world. Major positive changes, in sum, have already transformed what once was a chilling outlook for most of the sub-continent into a future potentially much more warm and uplifting.

Many, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), various consultancies, and experienced analysts, strongly believe that sub-Saharan Africa has turned the corner: “Something deep is at work. These countries are on a different path from the one they were on in the past. … ” This “turnaround is neither cyclical nor temporary. It is not just a blip on the screen. … ” Nor, Radelet assures us, is this resurgence of Africa a result merely of high commodity prices. It has been long in the making, at least in the 17 successful-country cases that he examined thoroughly, and results in part from fundamental shifts in governance and leadership.1

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia echoes this analytical optimism. What is going well in Liberia, she writes, is similar to a transformation occurring across a number of other sub-Saharan African countries: “Dictators are being replaced by democracy. Authoritarianism is giving way to accountability. Economic stagnation is turning to resurgence. And … despair is being replaced by hope – hope that people can live in peace … that parents can provide for their families, that children can go to school and receive decent health care, and that people can speak their minds without fear.”2

A rapidly swelling, ambitious, and globally conscious middle class is among the key drivers of this new momentum almost everywhere south of the Sahara, as it was a few decades ago in Asia. Twenty years ago, Africa’s middle class was much smaller, and powerless. Now there is a coterie of entrepreneurs and executives that is much less dependent than before on governments for favors, beneficial regulations and permits, and contracts. The rise of middle-class independence and an independent mind-set are signs of an Africa – as Radelet and Johnson Sirleaf proclaim – very much on the rise.

This is the new Africa that has begun to banish the miseries (and the miserable public relations) of the past. Whereas many observers in times past despaired of sub-Saharan Africa, and murmured that bad news seemed to overwhelm anything else coming out of Africa, now there are true success stories, demonstrable improvements in governance and democracy, and a brighter outlook all around. Twenty-five years ago, only Botswana and Mauritius were full democracies. Today there are elected democracies in a large proportion of the sub-continent’s states. Additionally, in many sub-Saharan African countries, formal rules are better respected and political institutions are taking hold.

Propelled to some important extent by significant drivers of economic uplift such as the dramatic spread of mobile telephone capabilities and China’s pulsating appetite for African resources, sub-Saharan Africa, almost for the first time in more than 60 years, has a golden interlude in which it and its peoples can take advantage of abundant new opportunities. The African renaissance could be at hand, propelled as it will be by a new generation of gifted leaders, by a new emphasis on strengthened governance, by a new willingness and desire to play a central role in the global commons, and by a determination to overcome the ethnic and acquisitive challenges that have for too long held back its states from becoming nations.

But, as we rightly emphasize the new positives, the road ahead for sub-Saharan Africa is not obstacle-free. The challenges are many, and serious. There are long-standing and several surprising, even alarming, new barriers that could derail this long-overdue great leap forward.

Sub-Saharan countries are about to expand their populations exponentially. Many small and weak states will double or triple their inhabitant numbers in the next 30 years. Several of the sub-continent’s now more populous nations will take their places among the largest countries on the planet. Cities will mushroom. Youth numbers will surge and dominate country after country.

As one sub-Saharan African state after another becomes much larger than could hitherto have been imagined or envisaged, so existing challenges will be neither erased nor avoided. Sub-Saharan Africans will still have to contend with the scourge of disease and reduced life expectancies and productivities, with massive educational deficits at secondary and tertiary levels, with an absence of potable water, with energy shortfalls, with being landlocked, and with weak road and rail infrastructures. Together with its burgeoning population, these are sub-Saharan Africa’s key natural, physical, and geographical challenges.

There are man-made challenges, too: the remaining civil conflicts and simmering wars in some parts of the sub-continent detract from development as well as creating worsening outcomes for the civilian populations directly affected. Everywhere, in nearly all countries, corruption prevails and hinders developmental progress. Weak rule of law regimes, internal insecurities, inhibited political participation, limited transparency and accountability, and a widespread disrespect for fundamental human rights all contribute to poor governance and its counterpart, slower economic growth. A legacy of irresponsible leadership (military coups and despotic adventurism) has brought about this lack of good governance and a deepening of the policy challenges that the sub-continent must now overcome if its future is going to remain strong.

This book is squarely about the onrush of positive change south of the Sahara amid consummate challenges and abundant opportunities for growth. It focuses on the heady, new emergence of the sub-continent and its countries, on the remaining obstacles and possible stumbling points of its coming decades.

This book sets out the chief challenges in some robust detail. After a pithy elaboration of these challenges in the first chapter, together with a discussion of economic prospects and the exercising of political voice, the second sets out the major, unanticipated, demographical hurdles over which much of the sub-continent must jump. The third chapter discusses the sub-continent’s tropical and geographical legacies, its health and disease challenges, and how those deficits are being overcome. The fourth chapter focuses on the region’s educational weaknesses, especially its paucity of university-trained personnel, its shortages of artisans, and the consequences for Africa of its “brain drain.” The fifth chapter sets out the sub-continent’s formidable need for peace, explaining the great extent to which war has mortgaged development and destroyed productive livelihoods. The sixth examines those factors of weak accountability and transparency which plague most of the countries of the region and hinder their progress. The seventh shows how sub-Saharan Africa is beginning to cope with its vast under-served need for electrical energy, and how it must start to build and maintain arteries of commerce – roads, rails, and harbors.

The concluding four chapters of the book are about the abundant opportunities which are available – if policy makers and their voters wish – to help to resolve challenges and enhance the progress of the countries of the sub-continent. Chapter 8 analyzes the communications revolution that promises, through the harnessing of mobile telephone capabilities, to vault sub-Saharan Africa over many of its developmental hurdles. Chapter 9 looks at the compelling Chinese contribution to the sub-Saharan African renaissance now and over the next decade. The tenth chapter sets out the benchmarks that will turn sub-Saharan Africa’s weak existing modes of governance into a strong, deeply rooted pattern of governance of the kind that the new middle classes desire and demand. The eleventh chapter is about leadership, and how the countries of the sub-continent can nurture the kinds of effective, modern leaders that they have largely long lacked.

Sub-Saharan Africa is emerging from its chrysalis of despondent, conflicted, corrupted, and ill-led decades. Tyranny and despotism are largely scourges of the past. This book celebrates the meeting of challenges and the triumph of human will and ingenuity over both natural and man-given adversity.

* * * * * *

This book is intended to be an intensely analytical, dispassionate, examination of the African condition. It is thoroughly grounded in empirical reality. Little is meant to depend upon conjecture or hope. At the same time, readers should understand that this book also represents an intensely personal attempt to come to terms with Africa’s future from the perspective of someone whose adult life has been involved intimately in the politics, the political and economic development, the governance, and the leadership of Africa and Africans.

In my public and private life I have attempted to support beneficial outcomes over the denigration of their peoples by African despots and dictators. I have tried to employ the power of the pen to right wrongs done to Africans by their own kind and by post-colonial outsiders. Having devoted an academic and public policy lifetime to Africa, having lived (and researched and taught) for long periods in Africa, having an abiding affection for all things African, and having a fervent desire to observe the uplifting of the peoples of Africa, in the writing of this book I have tried to employ the strongest possible scholarly skills of objectivity and data-mining. But the writing has also drawn on a deep well of compassion for the disparate peoples of the sub-continent.

The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have much about which to rejoice. But they also have much about which to worry. The future of their region and the respective countries in which they live is fraught with the innumerable challenges discussed in this book. Unless they and their leaders recognize their abundant opportunities, and seize them appropriately, they may prove unable to claim what is rightly theirs. This book, and my effort, is meant to set out the obstacles ahead clearly so that sub-Saharan Africans can overcome them, and so that they may emerge triumphant as modern Africa achieves goals that until now have proved mostly unattainable.

Notes

1 Steven Radelet, Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries are Leading the Way (Washington, DC, 2010), 11–15.

2 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, “Introduction,” in ibid., 3.

1

Myriad Challenges and Opportunities

Africa, especially the 49 countries south of the Sahara that belong to the African Union, is poised to grow and mature – to begin rapidly catching up with progress and modernity in the rest of the developing world and, soon, with advances everywhere. Its 900 million people, much more urbanized and urbane than before, and much more driven than in past decades by middle-class aspirations similar to those voiced everywhere around the globe, seek to transform the missed opportunities of the era from 1960 to 2000 into the sustainable successes of an Africa newly emergent and newly ready to triumph over the myriad geographical, material, and human vicissitudes that have for far too long prevented Africa from meeting the lofty expectations of its peoples and its more responsible rulers. Africans now seek to reclaim the promise of their independence years. They not only wish to assume their rightful place in the corridors of world diplomatic and political power but also want gradually to achieve parity of opportunity and prosperity with Asia and Latin America.

Africa has lagged the rest of the world for decades, failing overall to deliver to its numerous peoples the improved incomes and life chances to which they have long aspired. Compared to East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, Africans today remain under-educated; more afflicted with deadly tropical and other diseases; deficient in preventive and curative health care and facilities; particularly susceptible to the periodic stresses and strains of global warming and climate change; prone to low crop yields; desperately poor; malnourished; bereft of water; short of power; under-served by road and rail; and limited by flimsy Internet connections. Yet Africa is rich in potential, with vast supplies underground of critical industrial minerals, gems, and gold. Off or near its coasts there are substantial quantities of newly discovered deposits of oil and gas, many already productive and others awaiting exploitation. Only a few countries are now densely populated on the land, although those densities are about to increase exponentially. For the most part, Africa’s countries enjoy abundant sunshine to compensate for deficient soils and erratic rainfalls, and their indigenous farmers are endlessly inventive, conservative, and hard-working. Moreover, and significantly, in 2013, Africa is much better led and much better governed than it was during the first post-colonial period. Overcoming its deficits and bringing all of the positive attributes and possibilities together is the challenge of Africa’s next era of growth and development. Yet, policy makers must lead responsibly if Africa is to emerge healthy and strong in 30, and then 50, years’ time.

Middle-class expectations

Sub-Saharan Africa’s middle class has emerged as a critical driving force of positive change. Before this decade, Africa lacked a substantial middle class just as it had long lacked a meaningful hegemonic bourgeoisie. Now Africa’s middle class (defined by the World Bank and the Asian and African Development Banks as persons earning between $2 and $20 a day) has grown since 1990 from 117 million to over 200 million (in 2012). Thus, of Africa’s 900 million people, nearly a quarter are “middle-class” in wealth and, presumably, attitude and aspiration. About 60 million households now have yearly incomes equivalent to $3,000. (Nevertheless, this is a new middle class that has much less disposable income than comparable middle classes elsewhere. Most are still very poor by the standards of industrialized countries. Few are able to afford the “white goods” – appliances – on which middle-class households elsewhere dote. They do not routinely carry credit cards.) A Pew Foundation poll of 13 emerging markets confirms anecdotal evidence that the new middle classes in Africa and the rest of the developing world are more politically engaged than the poor for whom popular politicians in African states have long catered. Members of the middle class “consistently” care about such values as free speech and free elections; the poor seek primarily to improve their incomes. As it grows, the middle class acts on abstract ideas about governance and thus demands improved political leadership and service delivery. The middle class mobilizes via the new social media and the Internet, and uses mobile telephones more innovatively than do others. Sub-Saharan Africa has about 500 million mobile telephone users, and more everyday.