Friday, 09.05.08

Africa: From Anarchy to Normalcy

KAMBOU SIA/AFP/Getty Images

Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was heckled and jeered by a feisty opposition as he opened parliament recently.

The decline of Mugabe, an odious dictator in a class with Kim Jong Il and the Burmese generals, will give a seal of good-product approval to a continent that, despite persistent catastrophes, finally looks to be the beneficiary of a series of positive global trends.

Even without Mugabe, governance will be dicey throughout Africa. Just a few weeks ago, a military junta overthrew Mauritania's first democratically elected president. Off the coast of Somalia, piracy -- the maritime extension of anarchy on land -- is worse than anywhere in the world, including Nigeria. The governments of Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Chad still need United Nations peacekeeping missions to monopolize the use of force. Kenya and Sierra Leone, the victims of ethnic and tribal-based rebellions, are healing but remain fragile. At the root of many of these problems are a youth bulge and high rate of young male joblessness: over 40 percent of the population in most sub-Saharan African countries is younger than 15. African countries still dominate the bottom ranks in all human-development indices. On no other continent are institutions so weak or nonexistent.

Operating against these bleak realities are equally powerful -- and hopeful -- positive forces. Freedom House reports that the number of robust democracies among the 48 countries south of the Sahara has risen from three to 11 since 1977. Grassroots democratic movements are spreading, and are contributing to Mugabe's ongoing demise. Economically, real GDP in sub-Saharan Africa expanded by 6.5 percent in 2007, the highest growth rate in decades. If trends hold, poverty in Africa should be halved by 2015.

Oil production is already booming, and food production may follow suit. Africa is the only part of the world without a green revolution. Scientific breakthroughs that tripled crop yields in Eurasia and Latin America have bypassed Africa's, mainly because no single solution fits the continent's diverse farming systems and varied agro-ecological zones. But high-yield varieties of major African crops like sorghum, millet, maize, and cassava may soon be custom-fitted to Africa's micro-terrains and climates.

Moreover, as Martin Walker, senior director of A. T. Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, writes, the booming economies of China and India now have a fierce interest in developing Africa's food potential for their own needs. China has supplied African countries with technical assistance in tea planting, soil analysis, and irrigation. China is leading the Asian dash into Africa, with investments as diverse as in chocolate in Ivory Coast and in copper in Zambia, and plans to build or modernize railroads, highways, and dams across the continent. America, which will in the next decade be getting a quarter of its oil from West Africa, will compete with China on development projects, to Africa's benefit.

Beyond China and India, sovereign wealth funds in the Persian Gulf could be the next big investors in Africa's raw-material base. Of course, there are problems: sovereign wealth funds are not charities. Billions of dollars dumped on Africa could erode, rather than promote, efforts at good governance. Still, a slow-moving megatrend is beginning to take shape. The economic rise of the former Third World is leading to money flows into Africa. In this way, the Third World, rather than the West, will end up rehabilitating its own ground. And that will be one of the great ironies of the 21st century.

And there is something even larger going on: the end of Africa's millennia-old, geographically imposed isolation. In addition to suffering from disease and poverty attributable to the world's hottest climate, Africans since antiquity have been physically cut off from the great cultural traffic of human affairs. Though five times larger than Europe, Africa's coastline, in relative terms, is not nearly as long. And with some exceptions in East Africa, the continent has few good natural harbors. Few rivers are navigable from the sea, and the Sahara Desert has for centuries hindered human contact from the north.

But geography may no longer be destiny. Globalization has finally reached critical mass in Africa. The mobile-phone industry is now worth $10 billion across the continent, with subscriber growth running at 40 percent annually. New air routes are opening up with the Middle East and Asia. Africa will be influenced by the rest of the world to the same degree that countries in Eurasia along the historic path of migrations always have been. Africa will lose some of its distinctiveness, even as it closes the gap with the rest of humankind.

But one big thing could impede progress, and it has to do with geography: climate change, to which Africa's primitive, rain-fed agriculture is particularly susceptible. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Africa is "very likely" to warm faster than the mean global rate, with decreased rainfall in southern Africa causing droughts, and increased rainfall in East Africa causing flooding and soil erosion. These are only two examples of pan-African climatic upheaval that could interact adversely with politics, ethnic relations, and local economies.

The outlook for Africa is mixed. But that is an improvement over the 1990s, which saw several state collapses and the persistence of dictatorships. When the curtain finally does come down on the decades of Mugabe's misrule in Zimbabwe, it will have more than symbolic value. Africa is about to begin a new cycle of history.

— Robert D. Kaplan

Filed Under: Africa, development

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