What Advice Would Work in the Quest for Africa’s Development?

The following story (abit extended and exaggerated by me though) is quite interesting, later on I would like to link it to my argument in this blog. The rats were experiencing a great problem. There was a cat that was eating them, and they had lost many of their dear ones. Their greatest fear was that within no time, this cat would wipe out all the rats from the face of the earth. The rats then convened a great meeting known as the “Council of Rats of the World to Put an End to a Threat on Rats’ Lives Caused by a Greedy Cat.” In the council they invited world renowned consultants who discussed their problem at length. Some of the consultants were very ignorant with their situation, while others felt that they understood their problem. At the end of the great council several suggestions were arrived at as follow:

1. A meeting was to be convened between the rats and the cat so that they could help the cat to explore other types of food and leave the rats alone.
2. The rats were to develop a cage to put in the cat.
3. A loud bell was to be tied on the neck of the cat so that whenever he was around the rats would hear and run away.

All these suggestions were applauded for their novelty and the ability to save the lives of the rats. The problem with all these suggestion was the fact that they could not be accomplished because there was no volunteer among the rats to carry out any of the specific recommendations. So until today the rats are looking for volunteers among themselves for a reconciliatory meeting with the cat, the rats who would cage the cat and the ones to mount the bell on the neck of the cat. The cat on the other hand continues eating the rats.

The above situation is what the Sub Saharan Africa faces. William Easterly one of the development critics for Africa advocates for a search model. According to him Africa will only develop if it solves one problem at a time. Some of the books he writes such as the White Man’s Burden and the Elusive Quest for growth and many of his articles give Africa in a very bad and misserable picture. The search model is one of Easterly’s major contributions to the wider development economics, however it might not benefit the people to whom it is addressed to when he seems to have little or no respect for them. The other growth model which Easterly has developed is the “total factor productivity” as a great driver to economic development. Easterly is a brilliant non conventional scholar, but his great contributions could be overlooked because of the way they are presented. Jeffrey Sachs of the other hand looks at Africa’s development from a much more holistic view point. The paths he suggests have been dubbed as “big plans.” He suggests that the west should write of debts for Africa and dedicate part of their national incomes to help Africa come up. The same path seems to have been taken by Paul Coullier in his Bottom Billion (2007) where he suggests that Africa needs a mixture of interventions (sort of a Marshal Plan) such as trade, aid and military support.

The global economic development statistics paint a really gloomy picture for the Sub Saharan Africa region and the entire African Continent as a whole. The African continent’s total GDP contribution to the whole world is 6.8%. That of Sub Saharan Africa is 5.3%. When Nigeria and South Africa are removed from this group the total GDP of the remaining 42 countries add up to 2.8% of the global GDP. These statistics of course look miserable and scary. Other statistics show that the total cost Africa has incurred as a result of armed conflict since 1990 is USD 300 billion at 1990 ppp. The highest cost was incurred in Burundi from 1993 to 2005, followed by Rwanda in 1990 to 2001. Child mortality is about 180 children per 1000 live births. The proportion of the population living on less than USD 1 by 2004 was 40%. When it comes to deaths as a result of malaria, HIV/AIDS and many other diseases (many are imaginable) the picture is more scary. What the statistics would like to show is that “All Africans” will die soon because they all might be sick. Sometimes I wonder who is more sick is it the statisticians and their work or the Africans (just a loud thought). Pictures taken of Africa by development workers have one thing in common and that is to depict Africa as a land of idiots, foolish and primitive people. The “global development fashion” at the moment is to depict Africa as a continent with no hope and full of misery.

As an upcoming African development economist, I know that the contributions of other economists in this field matter a lot. However, the fact that many development economists have no respect but contempt, ridicule and pity for Africa contributes a lot in killing the esteem Africa has. Once the African listens to the jeers of at times very ignorant professors whose opinions are shaped by the literature available and hence draw all their conclusions from it, it makes it hard for the student to share his or her own perspectives to what is happening in the development debate. In any case the voices of many brilliant African economists have been quashed because they feel psychologically subdued by a world that would not listen to them but quashes and tramples upon them. At the same level even the African professionals are not taken at par with their global colleagues as they are considered to be inferior. Students too in diaspora can attest to the fact that the efforts to integrate in the host communities and be accepted as a merit student takes much effort.

My conclusion is that time for African intellectual to express what they believe to be the African Solution is now. There is so much richness to read and evaluate the suggestions from all other people of the world despite their attitude towards Africa. However let the Africans see the feasibility of the solutions provided from practical perspective. We should not care about the bad labels given to Africa (the people giving these labels are ignorant) but let us care about what can possibly contribute to the African solution. One of the great Kenyan spirits is “harambee” i.e. pooling together and this had done much to the development of Kenya. I really think, it has reached a time to meet global intellectual fire with soul force. Africa will one time develop and the economic prophets of doom will be shamed!