Title: Emerging Africa. How 17 Countries are Leading the Way
Author: Steven Radelet
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, 2011, Pp 169
The thesis of this short book by Radelet rejects the conventional wisdom that treats the entire African continent as a basket case characterised by AIDS, corruption, social and economic disintegration. The author concedes that this picture has been true for most of the continent since decolonisation but insists that some African nations have always been or have recently become different: “There’s good news out of Africa. Not all of Africa. But from a large part of Africa that quietly, with little fanfare, is on the move.”
To prove his point, he divides the continent into three groups: first, the poor, stagnant, often conflict-ridden economies that define the popular image of the continent, such as the DRC, Somalia, or Cote d’Ivoire; second, the oil exporters characterised by often irresponsible handling of their rent-like revenues, such as Nigeria, Angola, or Sudan; and, finally, the seventeen so-called ‘emerging countries,’ including Ghana, Botswana, or Ethiopia. He defines this group as comprising those nations that since the mid 1990s have consistently achieved at least 2% growth per annum, a measure that is a useful indicator of change despite its limitations: “The turnaround in these countries is more than just growth: trade, investment, and private business activity have expanded rapidly; poverty rates have fallen; education and health indicators have improved; and there has been a clear shift toward democracy and stronger governance. But growth provides an informative starting point”.
Radelet identifies two discrete misperceptions about African economic growth: first, the perception of stagnation from 1960 till today ignores “three very distinct phases, each with significant change,” modest growth running roughly from 1960-1977, followed by a devastating decline from the mid 1970s until the mid 1990s that still defines the popular image and “encapsulates the continent’s well-documented 20-year economic, social, and political collapse”. But what most commentators seem to ignore is that this period ended fifteen years ago, followed by a third period of steady growth ever since.
Secondly and most importantly for the thesis of his book, Radelet points out that “the popular story [is] misleading because the aggregate trend does not capture the variation within the continent, especially during the third phase.”
It is this variation in socio-economic performance that makes the book interesting for lawyers interested in international, constitutional and administrative law. Radelet suggests five key factors that account for the turnaround and set the group of ‘emerging countries’ apart from their peers.
He gives pride of place to the rise of democratic and accountable government, stressing the importance of the rule of law and sound administrative practices. The other factors are more sensible economic policies; the end of the debt crisis and attendant major changes in the relationship with the international community; the spread of new technologies offering new opportunities for economic and political empowerment; and, finally, the emergence of a new generation of political, legal, and business leaders more attuned to global standards of efficiency and accountability.
One of the strongest aspects of the book is its skilful and approachable use of complex statistical data to prove its hypotheses. The charts are solidly referenced, graphically pleasing and well integrated into the main body of text whose argument they directly support. Much can be learned, both in terms of substance and style, from the book’s clarity of purpose, data-driven, jargon-free, and impactful exposition of its central thesis –the need to differentiate between African nations and study why some have done much better than others.
But while this reviewer lauds the author for his explicit aim of being ‘relevant’ in the sense of affecting the policy discourse surrounding African aid and development, there remain a number of (avoidable) shortfalls often encountered in this kind of overly ‘popular’ scholarship. There is an inordinate degree of name-dropping (Bono likes the book); lavish praise for collaborators (Jeff Sachs, Paul Collier, Liberian president Ellen Sirleaf) and, perhaps more troubling, for the organisations that have funded Radelet’s work (the Gates Foundation, among others). To be sure, these things are conceivably excusable given the scope and readership of this book. Still, Radelet’s lack of interest in alternative positions and his contentment with shallow explanations for complex institutional dynamics, especially legal matters, leaves the reader frustrated.
Throughout the book, the reader is presented with the issue of financial and technical development aid as if there is global consensus about its moral, political, and economic inevitability.
Likewise, to this reviewer the essential connection between a government’s ability to collect revenue and its attendant administrative sophistication would have merited greater attention in the author’s explanation of the differential developmental paths taken by African nations.
A stylistic irritant is the author’s peculiarly American journalistic fixation with the ‘voice of the common man’ to illustrate complex political, constitutional, or economic phenomena. To this reviewer it is not always apparent why an individual farmer or taxi driver’s opinion of a complex legal or social phenomenon would be relevant to an abstract discourse. Arguably, such sentiments become effective only in the aggregate, the collation of which is the intellectual labour one expects from good scholarship.
Most irksome, however, is the failure to carry many of the arguments to their logical conclusion. Radelet, for instance, correctly identifies the disappearance of Cold War aid rents as a major driver of political and economic change. Because authoritarian governments in Africa no longer had large amounts of externally provided disposable income, the traditional pattern of buying off internal opposition gave way to more constructive conflict-resolution through reform while “in the past, they had always been able to respond to the [protests] by raising civil service wages, cutting university tuition, or increasing subsidies for food or electricity.”
True indeed. Yet, Radelet refuses to entertain the argument that ongoing and seemingly permanent aid transfers continue to enable precisely this pattern of irresponsible governance, arguing instead for still greater foreign alimentation.
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