Despite routine attempts to pump up Africa’s promise, with slogans such as “Africa Rising” and the “African Renaissance,” the continent is falling behind the rest of the world.
This long slide is proof that the West’s old formula of engaging Africa has failed dismally.
Close to five trillion dollars (in real terms) has been disbursed in aid to Africa in the last 60 years. Yet much has been wasted—and not only because the governance conditions of the primary recipients meant that it could not be properly spent, Much of it was given for strategic purposes during the Cold War, and a lot of it was spent on the givers themselves to manage noisy constituencies and influential providers—not least in the NGO sector, the 21st-century imperial service.
Yet Africa remains the poorest continent. The per capita income of Africans is (in real terms) just $1,589, compared to the global average of $11,852. Revealingly, the share of sub-Saharan Africans of this average has decreased from 41.4 percent in 1960 to 13.4 percent. The continent is now the largest repository of the world’s poor, some 460 million, or 30 percent of Africans living in poverty, compared to the global average of 8.5 percent.
The reasons for Africa’s relative failure centers on the choices made by its leadership, who prefer to stay in power by cosseting elites rather than delivering prosperity. But it also goes to the manner of its integration with the global economy. For all of Beijing’s propaganda about the “win-win” benefits of China’s relationship with Africa, it’s mostly one-way traffic in China’s favor, which does everything on commercial terms that favor Beijing over any African partner.
But this long drift into developmental obscurity does not have to be so.
There are two great potentially positive changes afoot in Africa: people and minerals.
The first relates to demographics. Africa’s population doubled between 1950 and 1980 to 500 million, when less than 30 percent lived in urban areas. It is now touching 1.6 billion and is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, when over 60 percent will live in the continent’s towns and cities.
This rapid growth rate will make Africa, along with Asia, the driver of global urbanization, its economies driven by a youthful energy and aspirations. Africa already enjoys the world’s youngest population. In 1950, just 10 percent of the world’s youth lived in Africa; today, it’s 28 percent. Some 60 percent of Africans are under 25. The median age is just 19; with Niger, the youngest, at just 15.
By the turn of this century, Africa is expected to contain 12 of the 25 most populous countries.
This scenario offers a terrifying prospect of hundreds of millions of young, angry and hungry people on the move as calcifying elites continue to ignore their prospects. But there is another version, where Africa grows into a vibrant market through accessing the technology and riches of those bigger economies interested in a deal founded on sustainable interest, not simple extraction.
The second big change is in critical minerals and what lies beneath the African soil.
Africa is blessed with a wide variety of the critical minerals essential to the digital revolution, particularly cobalt (over 70 percent of production), manganese (62 percent), platinum group metals (80-90 percent of global resources), along with significant deposits of graphite, lithium, and copper. This offers the promise to insert Africa into global supply and value chains in ways that go beyond the usual Chinese model of buying raw material and exporting them back as finished products. Africa runs a widening trade deficit with China of $62 billion in a total of $296 billion in two-way trade, around 22 percent of Africa’s total trade and some 73 percent of the continent’s overall trade deficit.
These figures are skewed further by Chinese control over these exports which thus scoop the majority of earnings, leaving behind only resource rents. In this way, China’s recent offer of duty-free access to imports from 53 African countries (excluding Eswatini given its relations with Taiwan), is hollow since it is “primarily aimed at securing advantages for Chinese investors to import raw materials from Africa, rather than genuinely opening its domestic markets to African producers.” African producers moreover face a range of non-tariff and other barriers to entry into the China market.
It’s “win-win” alright, but twice over for China.
Still, there is an upside to Africa’s relative poverty. Getting just a few things right can make a big difference, especially basic infrastructure. Just 60 percent of Africa’s population has access to electricity, leaving roughly 600 million people without power. Sub-Saharan Africa houses over 80 percent of the world’s unelectrified population. Power transforms healthcare, education conditions and opportunities, safety and security with lit streets, and productivity.
While the world is hung up on green energy, the greatest polluter of all in Africa is the absence of electricity. Without electricity, the continent faces desertification in parts as burgeoning numbers of people search for fuel.
Simple improvements in transport logistics (in using digitization for trade, removing the scope for malfeasance) and skills can also make a tremendous difference given the scale of the catch-up growth and the low cost of African wages.
What is required to turn Africa, the continent of tomorrow, into the continent of today?
A new deal will depend on a leadership that puts people first, of a sort that recognizes that the old ways have largely failed their people.
It will have to put job creation and growth at the top of its agenda. This translates into working with the world’s largest economy and its allies, rather than scoring cheap political points against it while failing to offer practical solutions to some of the world’s most intractable issues, including the security dilemmas of the Middle East. Partnerships involve more than trade to encompass politics.
It could include investment in critical minerals production, through investment in logistics, derisking, and direct off-take and other investment regimes. Recent history reminds that entry into African markets investments requires support for democratic governance, since that not only creates transparent conditions but secures them from predatory competition through the rule of law.
And a fresh outlook will have to recognize that trade is the engine of growth. For Africa, the problem is not globalization per se, but the difficulty, expense, and often financial penalty of accessing markets.
Closer relations with the United States offer the tantalizing prospect of a direct route into global supply chains, the promise of a positive hand-up rather than continuing the futile game of development through hand-outs.
Greg Mills and Ray Hartley are with the Platform for African Democrats.
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