African leaders (presidents, heads of government, etc.) gathered in
Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, this past summer to celebrate 50
years of the successes and challenges of the Organization of African
Unity, OAU, now known as the African Union, AU.
In less than four decades, the organization was able to support and
sustain various struggles for political independence on the African
continent. These struggles were often violent like the national
liberation movements in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Angola,
Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, among others.
The leaders of the OAU, despite their serious ideological differences
on account of the cold war, closed ranks and negotiated the political
independence of countries in the continent. In fact, the two existing
world powers ( the U.S. and Soviet Union) often supported different
liberation movements within a country during the fight for independence.
It is important to give credit to the earlier leaders of the organization such
as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamel Nasser of Egypt, Ben Bella of Algeria,
Modibo Keita of Mali, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Sekou Toure of
Guinea, Haile Salassie of Ethiopia, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and
others who sacrificed their personal comfort, territorial space, and
resources to ensure political independence for countries in the African
continent.
During the independence celebration of Ghana, President Nkrumah
asserted that the independence of Ghana was incomplete except it was
linked to the total liberation of Africa. What the African Union is
trying to pursue, like the African Economic Union, owes its root to the
analysis of Nkrumah who, indeed, was far ahead of his time. The African
Liberation Committee of the then-OAU located in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania,
was very active. Tanzania gave a large area of its country to the
African National Congress– the movement that fought for the liberation
of South Africa. During the struggle for the emancipation of that
country, Nigeria was the only frontline state outside the frontline
countries and it committed much of its resources to the political
independence of not just South Africa but to all the other countries
struggling for independence.
After countries in Africa gained political independence, economic
freedom became a serious challenge. African countries were unable to
break away from the economic aprons of their former colonial masters.
These imperial powers, like Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, had
integrated their colonies into the world capitalist system. Therefore,
in essence, though the African countries were politically independent,
their economies remained neo-colonial.
African countries exported raw materials, natural resources and
unskilled labor to the economies of their former oppressors. Within the
African countries, the new leadership and elite class became more
interested in primitive capitalist accumulation than in addressing the
fundamental problems of underdevelopment, hopelessness and poverty. This
is not to suggest that there were no marginal successes such as the
emergence of an educated class of Africans, relative infrastructural
development, etc.
For the most part, the economies of Africa, particularly sub-Sahara
Africa, SSA, were driven by the ups and downs of prices of commodity
exports. No economy in SSA is industrialized, thus most of the existing
companies were either assembly plants, packaging or bottling. In
addition, they were branches of transnational companies and so the
situation remains the same today.
Apart from bad economic and political governance, the austerity
measures and later the structural adjustment programs in most African
countries in the late 1970s and 1980s could be traced to sharp drops in
the prices of commodity exports.
When variables like primitive accumulations, corruption and looting
of the treasuries are added to the equation of Africa’s development, it
is not surprising that poverty has increased, inequality has widened and
most, if not all of the countries, thus remain underdeveloped. In
Botswana and Ghana, two countries seen as success stories by the Breton
Woods Institutions, poverty and widened income inequality still persist.
Freeing the economies of Africa from dependence on commodity exports
remains a serious challenge. This present crop of African leaders
emerging from democratic struggles have attempted to better manage their
economies in a macroeconomic sense. For example, in the recent global
economic crisis, African economies grew positively and were less hit by
the global financial crisis. During the crisis, the performance of
macroeconomic fundamentals such as growth, inflation and unemployment
were relatively satisfactory. Of course, most of the African economies
do not have sophisticated financial systems, hence their partial
insulation from the global crisis.
All recent forecasts show that economies of Africa are experiencing
macroeconomic stability, reflecting moderate inflation and robust
growth. Ethiopia has a growth rate of 7.2 per cent, Nigeria 6.5 per cent
with single digit inflation, and South Africa about 5 per cent.
Sub-Sahara Africa was projected to grow by about 5.2 per cent in 2013
and 5.8 per cent in 2014. SSA economies are now the destination for new
investors, especially in infrastructure. A few years ago, the World
Bank published: Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? Several scholars and
those interested in Africa’s development have argued that Africa would
be the next continent to leapfrog into sustained development.
The austerity in the economies of Europe has resulted in the search
for new markets and Africa is the continent to explore and exploit. Even
the Portuguese who destroyed the economies of their former colonies,
have returned to Angola, Mozambique and others to invest and search for
employment. The new entrants from Asia, particularly China, have massive
investments in Africa. Are they properly engaged by our leaders and
policymakers? African leaders, policy-makers and technocrats must
negotiate with these new investors bearing in mind that despite the
macroeconomic stability and satisfactory growth, the African economy is
suffering from very high rate of unemployment (25 percent),especially
among the youths, extreme poverty and widening inequality –
unprecedented in the last 20 years.
These ”new” investors are not charity organizations, but are
interested in not just earning high returns for their investments but
also in growing their austerity-stricken economies in Europe. Today’s
African leaders must work aggressively towards economic emancipation so
that 25 years from today, Africa would be a developed, modern and
knowledge-based continent with poverty at its barest minimum.
By Akpan- H. Ekpo a Professor of Economics, is Director-General, West African Institute for Financial and Economic Management
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