By 2030, Africa will be home to 80 per cent of the world’s poorest people. In many ways, the continent will be the last major region to remain underdeveloped and scarcely governed.
There is little indication that the many conflicts in the Horn, Sahel, Great Lakes, or even places like Mozambique will have been resolved. Investments in education, health, infrastructure, and other public goods and services will remain depressed due to low national output.
Decades of underinvestment in human capital will mean that workers’ productivity in both agriculture and non-agricultural sectors will remain flat or decline.
I cite these facts not be alarmist, but to remind us of the urgency with which we should be approaching public policy making.
The situation is really bad and getting worse in most parts of the continent. Meanwhile, we have some of the most complacent elites in the world who do not seem to have the first idea about how to fix the region’s problems.
It should bother all thinking people that after 60 years of independence, only a handful of African countries – all of them small in size – can credibly claim to be on the path towards becoming high-income countries.
The rest are either stagnant and lower-middle income, or remain desperately poor and getting even poorer.
Leadership is the single most important explanatory factor behind these outcomes. To paraphrase African author Chinua Achebe, there is nothing unique about Africans as a people or the region to explain these outcomes.
They are simply the result of having elites who are not bothered to do the bare minimum.
Ominously, the same elites do precious little for themselves. Despite the region’s natural resources, there are precious few legitimate African resource billionaires. There are almost no African global companies of repute. There is very little innovation that comes from the region.
Despite presiding over countries with little institutional constraints to personal wealth accumulation while in public service, African elites are the very bottom of the global totem pole when it comes to the business of legitimate wealth accumulation.
It shows in their perennial failure to accumulate wealth that lasts for more than one generation – in no small part because they seldom invest in the education and formation of their offspring.
The 21st century will be one of rapid global change. Unfortunately, so far it appears that Africa will be a peripheral player in global affairs. Just like it has for over 500 years.
- The writer is a professor at Georgetown University
