Slow-motion horror stories ruining African nations

All the hullaballoo that one hears about the various development agenda in Africa ring an awfully familiar bell – that yet more leaders are betting their nations’ futures on the outcomes of their political and economic experiments.

The storyline goes like this: ‘All I – there is always that ‘I’ – want is development,’ some leader would declare, ‘so we will ignore all the best practices and follow this new path,’ And that would become the basis for some remarkably bizarre political and economic decisions. At the end, that becomes a slow-motion horror story that turns a promising nation into ruins.

One of the nations that fit that profile is Ivory Coast. While Tanzania achieved the low middle-income nation status in 2020, Ivory Coast attained that 40 years earlier. By 1980, the nation had sustained an average growth rate of above 7 percent for 20 years, something hitherto unseen neither in amplitude nor width in Africa. Back then, the Ivorians enjoyed better living standards that many Asians, including in China, could only dream of.

Blessed with neither mineral nor oil wealth, Ivory Coast relied heavily on coffee and cocoa production. Despite the tumultuous economic times of the 1970s, the Ivorians went through almost unscathed. Cocoa production soared, and Ivory Coast commanded over 25 percent of the global cocoa market.

Then Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the nation’s founding father, started to embark on his ‘development projects’. He chose to move the capital from Abidjan to his hometown, Yamoussoukro, where he also decided to build the then biggest church auditorium in the world, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace. An eerily familiar storyline, isn’t it?

When Houphouët-Boigny died in 1993, his successor, Konan Bédié, having rigged the election, started to marginalise his opponents, and followed an undemocratic path. The gains which the nation had made in its early years were undone, and the seeds of the 1999 coup d’etat that would end Bédié’s misrule, and of the civil war that would ruin that beautiful nation, were sown.

Again, a familiar and very predictable outcome.

Ultimately, the Ivorians, previously destined to be enjoying ‘un-African-like’ living standards, remained only marginally better than the rest of their African neighbours.

A decade or so later after Bédié was deposed, yet another African nation – Angola – was going through a similar path. Back then, Angola was the nation that was on every investor’s lips – oil prices per barrel had tripled and its economy was booming. Full of confidence, the powers-that-be decided to spend some of the dough on fancy projects. Very African, huh?

In Luanda, Angola’s capital, and home to 6.5 million Angolans, the government embarked on large-scale real estate development projects. Thousands were uprooted from their settlements to pave the way for new construction without any compensation. Who needs compensation if people are going to get new apartments instead?

For years that Black African city of Luanda – I mean a city in this god-forsaken part of the world – became the world’s most expensive city! Yawn. Nothing wrong, it was going to be turned into a Dubai after all, they said.

Then the bubble burst. In 10 years, GDP growth plummeted from above 10 percent to below zero in 2019. The government’s cash reserves dried up, construction projects were brought to a shuddering halt, and everybody was left wondering what had happened to the oil riches.

Once again, the poor remained poor, as yet another pointless African experiment came crashing down.

The lesson, then and now, has never changed – to lift people out of poverty, leaders have to do it the right way. Quick fixes never work.

While Ivory Coast could have transitioned its economy by choosing to add value to its exports, but, as it happened so often in Africa, it continued to rely on exports of raw materials to Europe and America. As a result, even though it has over 40 percent of the world’s cocoa market, it makes less than 5 percent of the $100 billion made from chocolates globally.

Similarly, while Angola could have chosen to learn from nations such as Norway by establishing a fund which would have insulated it from future economic shocks or could have chosen to learn from gulf nations such as United Arab Emirates, which have been investing in their people and alternative revenues sources, it chose the path of least resistance and paid the price.

A review of post-colonial African history usually leaves one with a very sombre feeling. Just when you think that Africa has turned the corner you get yet another leader who thinks he doesn’t have to follow the best practices. Starting with brushing off democratic processes, they usually embark on fanciful projects that don’t benefit the poor directly, ultimately it is the poor who end up paying for their leaders’ profligacy.

One is left wondering what Africans’ ancestors did to anger the gods so much.