Therefore, investment growth that diversifies the economies and creates jobs in Africa, notably in industry, has remained very low.
Instilling a sense of urgency and ownership
Beggars work the traffic lights in the city of Fes. They are sub-Saharans, our Moroccan colleague tells us. ‘They are working their way through the country to get to Europe.’ There were, in 2016, an estimated 1 million sub-Saharan African migrants waiting along the North African coast – mostly in Morocco, Algeria and Libya – intent on making their way to mainland Europe. In the Sahel, the city of Agadez in Niger (since the 15th century a gateway between West and North Africa) had become an epicentre in migrant smuggling, with more than 20 000 passing through monthly in 2016, most from West Africa, and Nigeria in particular.53
Given the continent’s projected population increase, without economic growth Africa’s poverty threatens to overwhelm Europe. While Europe will work to secure its borders, and to find and fund the means to keep Africans in Africa, Europeans cannot be expected to be more successful at encouraging and improving African economic growth than Africans themselves, or more committed to this task.
Yet, compared to East Asia, in Africa there has not been the same sense of urgency or the need to introduce reforms in response to this looming crisis, particularly those reforms aimed at radically increasing economic growth and numbers of jobs. In part, this reflects hostility to foreign capital. It also relates to lack of capacity and poor leadership. And it reflects a failure to learn from the experience of others.
The continent’s ambitions should not be to duplicate the Asian path, but to learn from Asia and other fast-growing regions to create a vision to ensure that leaders and citizens can flourish together. Having a ‘good’ crisis – that is, using the opportunity crisis brings to usher in difficult and heretofore politically unpalatable changes – has been a key element in catalysing reform in Asia and Latin America, including, among others Colombia, Chile, El Salvador and Costa Rica.
While identifying and using a sense of crisis, African leaders will have to strive to escape the ‘tyranny of the emergency’ and instead create a common vision of how their countries will progress. We were reminded by one colleague that ‘a disciplined nationalism is the secret sauce of development’. This can be interpreted as the deep commitment to popular welfare exhibited by East Asian leaders, whatever the system of formal government. Failure to develop a common vision by which societies as a whole can advance will mean that leaders will not be able to explain the actions in a wider context, critical constituencies will not understand why they are being asked to make sacrifices, and political stability will inevitably be endangered.
Just as the arguments for addressing this crisis go beyond statistics to a human story of hope and fear, so do the methods. Colonialism and racial exclusion left a deep scar of injustice and rivalry. This has left a legacy of suspicion towards business, and, in particular, foreign enterprises. In this environment, emotion is as important in appreciating the policy options as empiricism.
Leaders will need therefore, at the outset, to develop a ‘growth ideology’ beyond the vacuous vision documents that litter the policy landscape. Rather than employing more consultants, governments and ruling parties will need to drop their animosity towards business. Such an approach calls for government to come to an understanding with business, and to remedy stultifying attitudes that vary from benign neglect to ostentatious antagonism. Business, for its part, needs to clearly understand and deliver on its wider social responsibilities in an open and transparent fashion, designed to build and maintain trust. A failure to achieve this amid a rapid population increase brings the risk of accelerating a social and political crisis, and, ultimately, state failure and, thereby, widespread human tragedy.
The chapters that follow address the critical sectors that make up the economies of Africa’s countries, and illustrate modes of reform and best practice.
Part 1
The state of Africa’s people, institutions and structures
Chapter 1
People and cities
Five steps for success:
•Cities must be seen as drivers of Africa’s diversified growth and jobs. Urban-centred growth represents a dramatic change from the export of natural resources, which has been central to most African economies.
•Urgent action is the only way to address the pending urban-population explosion.
•Focus on city-level funding and authority as a means to redefine the resources to enable local governments to meet the challenge of quickly expanding populations.
•Promote density of housing and cost-efficient transport solutions to realise the urban dividend.
•Focus on the provision of local security as the door through which much else follows.
Challenges and opportunities: So far, the rapid increase in Africa’s population has not been matched with a growth in jobs. Urbanisation in Africa does not yet appear to be delivering the improvements in economic growth and quality of life achieved elsewhere, notably in Asia. Instead, African cities are growing in a largely unplanned manner, stretching existing infrastructure and services to beyond breaking point and failing to improve productivity and create jobs. Whether a population surge turns out to be a good or a bad thing depends, largely, on how government responds, enables job creation and improves the absorption of people into the private sector.
Key statistics: According to the 2016 Ibrahim Index of African Governance, 33 African countries have experienced a decline in safety and rule of law since 2006, nearly half of them quite substantially. Almost half of the countries on the continent recorded their worst ever score in this category in the period 2013 to 2015. The index has ‘demonstrated a strong link between Safety & Rule of Law and governance performance’.1
Hillbrow is the most densely populated part of the City of Johannesburg. It’s a potpourri of nationalities, customs, cuisine and language, a blur between informal and formal, legal and illegal. A dip into its labyrinth reveals a fable of the modern African city.
Our guide is Brighton.2 He left the army in Zimbabwe in 2005 ‘for greener pastures,’ he says, and has been working as a security guard at a school since 2009. ‘No single group dominates the suburbs,’ he says as we drive east, although, of course, there are pockets of ethnic flavours. ‘More Somalis and Bangladeshis live in Mayfair,’ he notes, as we drive down the high street. ‘There are more students here,’ he says, pointing at a young couple lounging on a balcony in Berea. ‘But everyone is mixed up – Nigerians, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans. We all become South Africans to survive.’
The suburb of Hillbrow is a rectangular shape running north–south, covering a little over a square kilometre and officially housing 100 000 people, perhaps twice that number, compared to Johannesburg’s average of just under 2 500 per square kilometre.
One of the 50 largest cities worldwide, and the wealthiest in South Africa, Johannesburg was founded on the riches beneath its soil. It is home to 7 million people, the bulk of the population of the province of Gauteng, the heartland of South Africa’s economy.
Today, Hillbrow is synonymous with a collapse in governance in the 1990s and the flight of wealthy white South Africans to the north of Johannesburg or farther afield. There is in-your-face evidence of illegality – Brighton eagerly points out a queue of men waiting to buy drugs from a plain-clothes policeman who has hopped out of the back of a passing van in O’Reilly Road. When asked what sort of drugs, ‘Marijuana, crack, [the heroin-based] unga … whatever you want’ comes the reply. It seems drink is the greater devil, however, with constant ‘watch out for him’ references to the stone-faced drunk standing dead centre in the road or tottering off the pavement.
But it’s not so much the illegality