Introduction
This edited book is concerned with the nexus between governance, security and development in Africa. Specifically, it is conceived to interrogate the debate and politics of âAfrica rising,â a contemporary catchphrase for what many proponents perceive as the fast-moving economic, development and governance transformations of the continent. From all intents and purposes, the discourses on âAfrica risingâ presuppose the occurrence of a planned, sustained and systematic change in the governance, security and development landscape of the continent capable of empirically redefining and repositioning Africa away from its vulnerable subaltern status in the global political economy. This book offers a searching critique and assessment of the Africa rising discourses. Has Africa been rising as many proponents of the euphoric discourses have claimed? If indeed Africa is rising, how much of the impact is reflected in the living conditions and well-being of the citizens? Is Africa uniformly rising or are there just a few countries on the rise while the rest stagnate or even probably regress? Is there any osmotic resonance between the rising African states and their ânon-performingâ counterparts? Using a nexus of context-specific, regional and international data, the various chapters of this book have been structured to shed light on these intellectual puzzles with a view to enunciating policy-relevant visions, interventions and strategies on how Africa can arise or rise sustainably.
Africa entered the 2000 millennium as a heavily beleaguered continent marked by a post-colonial history of massive governance, security and development deficits. Decades of statesâ policy failures and neopatrimonial plunder in a bunch of dysfunctional neo-colonial economies that are overly dependent on production and export of primary commodities have exposed many countries on the continent to an erratic balance of payment deficits, rising external borrowing and debt crisis, skewed and unsustainable development, massive youth unemployment, high poverty levels and ultimately armed rebellion and civil wars. In its worst post-independence economic crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the situation was evidently exacerbated by the inappropriate therapy of Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) foisted on most countries of Sub-Saharan Africa by the World Bank, IMF and the US Treasury Department, three powerful global financial institutions based in Washington and altogether known as the Washington Consensus. SAP placed emphasis on stringent credit financing that attracted conditionalities, such as huge debt service obligations, currency devaluation, dismantling of stateâs social development obligations, privatization of public enterprises and massive deregulation of the economy (Dibua 2006; Moghalu 2014). The unbearable external debt overhang and debt service obligations associated with the SAP regime bankrupted African economies and ruptured their political systems. At the turn of the last century, Sub-Saharan Africaâs twenty years economic and political crisis had generated about two dozen armed conflicts of varied intensities which prompted the London-based magazine The Economist to portray Africa in its May 2000 edition as âThe Hopeless Continent.â The latter was the controversial title of the magazineâs cover story. Despite the apparent hopelessness of the African long-drawn-out crisis, many African intellectuals, policy practitioners and statesmen were visibly offended by this pessimistic castigation of the continent as âthe hopeless continent.â
Fast-forward to 2005, the security and economic development conditions and prospects of many hitherto marooned African countries were looking a lot more optimistic. Many warring parties of the 1980s and 1990s in countries devastated by armed conflicts had laid down their arms or been defeated in the battlefield to make way for a return to peace. The civil wars and armed conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote dâIvoire, Angola, Mozambique, Uganda, Southern Senegal and Rwanda were all brought to an end. Africa emerged from two decades of war and political turbulence and profited massively from a long boom in commodity prices as well as peace, improved governance and a better investment climate (Grynberg 2016). In recent years, significant de-escalation of hostilities relative to the peak years of war has occurred in some of the tinderbox areas marked by persistent armed violence, notably Northern Mali, South Sudan, Libya, Darfur-Sudan, Eastern Congo, Central African Republic, Somalia and North-East Nigeria.
Since the 2000s, liberal democracy has spread on the continent like wildfire, bringing an end to diverse shades of civilian and military dictatorships. Through the political conditionalities of SAP, a strong impression was created in the late-1980s by the leading international financial institutions (World Bank and IMF) bankrolling economic recovery on the continent that dismantling authoritarian governance structures and replacing them with liberal democratic institutions (notably multi-party electoral system, parliamentary structures and debate, independent judiciary, free press and respect for human rights and civil societies) would facilitate economic transformation, growth and development. Instead of the Bretton Woods institutions accepting responsibility for drawing Africa into deeper crises through the introduction of SAP, the World Bank produced a document entitled From Crisis to Sustainable Growth in 1989, in which they blamed lack of good governance and policy reform as the cause of economic crisis and lack of development in Africa in the 1980s (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018: 29). By the 1990s, the ideological prescription of political reform as a prerequisite for economic development canvassed by the Bretton Woods institutions had gained strong currency in international development quarters and among African civil society organisations leading to a united pressure on African governments to embrace liberal democratic institutions and practices. By courtesy of this induced pressure to democratize the political space as necessary precondition for economic growth, Africa witnessed a rapid resurgence, spread and consolidation of the Western neo-liberal model of development throughout the continent. It is this neo-liberal model of development, which is essentially rooted in post-Keynesian economic theories of the relationships between monetary policies, growth, trade and development, that takes the credit for what has been popularised as âAfrica rising.â To put it more bluntly, Africa is ultimately rising due to the final conquest and consolidation of the Western neo-liberal model of development throughout the continent. This is the disguised ideological underpinning of the Africa rising narrative.
According to IMF data, between 2008 and 2017, a number of African countries such as Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Zambia, Uganda, Niger and Burkina Faso recorded an average annual GDP growth rate of between 5.6 and 10%, with Ethiopia recording an impressive growth rate of roughly 10%, making it the worldâs second fastest growing economy over the 10 year period (Global Finance 2018). With this fantastic economic growth performance, it seemed that Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was finally witnessing what in mainstream modernisation paradigm could be termed âthe preconditions for take-offâ if not the actual âtake off of self-sustaining economic growth.â According to the chief proponent of this economic growth theory, Walt Whitman Rostow, âtake-off is an industrial revolution, tied directly to radical changes in methods of production, having their decisive consequences over a relatively short period of timeâ (cited in Goalstone 2007: 216). The term âtake offâ implies three things in Rostowâs conceptions of five stages of modernization-oriented growth: âfirst, the proportion of investment to national income must rise from 5% to 10% and more so as to outstrip the likely population growth; secondly, the period must be relatively short so that it should show the characteristics of an economic revolution; and thirdly, it must culminate in self-sustaining and self-generating economic growthâ (Guru, n.d.).
Compared to Sub-Saharan Africa, the seemingly more insulated Arab Maghreb Union countries of North Africa had for decades enjoyed better economic performances and political stability in spite of their repressive autocratic regimes, leading many analysts to postulate that the Arabs had a pathological antipathy to democracy, and at any rate, had no need for democratic reforms to achieve far-reaching and sustainable economic and political development (cf. The Economist 2014, 5 July; Monshipouri 2014). In the aftermath of the 9/11 2001 terrorist attacks in America, the US government nonetheless significantly increased its international development assistance to North African and Middle Eastern NGOs working for de-radicalisation of Islam, women empowerment and sundry political reforms short of regime change (Hamid 2011).
When the Arab Spring broke out in December 2010, overthrowing three longstanding dictatorships in the North African Maghreb region (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya) and unravelling the dominant discourses of governance and stability in the Arab world, the immediate reaction to the ârevolutionâ was a mix of cautious euphoria and hope that the youth-led clamour for change would almost certainly break the limits to political and economic development in the Arab world.
It was little wonder that while the Arab Spring still unfolded in North Africa and the Middle East, The Economist magazine took a courageous step to atone for its sin of over ten years by publishing an optimistic narrative of Africa in December 2011 with a cover page story titled âThe Hopeful Continent: Africa Rising.â This rather bullish narrative which was welcomed by many African policy experts and sympathisers around the world chronicled the fast-moving positive changes of the preceding decade on the continent, remarking that:
After decades of slow growth, Africa has a real chance to follow in the footsteps of Asia. ⊠Over the past decade six of the worldâs ten fastest growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. ⊠The commodities boom is partly responsible. In 2000â08 around a quarter of Africaâs growth came from higher revenues from natural resources. ⊠But the growth also has a lot to do with the manufacturing and service economies that African countries are beginnin...