Jean Claude Abeck, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Africa Center for Strategic Progress
jcabeck@africacfsp.org

Why have many Africans remained the poorest in the world despite their continent’s development potential and the plethora of untapped mineral wealth? Among Africanists, no pastime is more common than the debate over Africa’s impoverishment. “Africa is the poorest part of the planet.” This quotation from Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson is an appropriate epigraph to George Ayittey’s book, ‘Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa’s Future.‘ In about 400 pages of thought-provoking arguments, Ayittey—Africa’s distinguished Economist—persuades his factious readers that Africa is impoverished because it is unfree. He submits that Africans unjustly lost their freedoms to repressive colonialists and painfully now to modern African leaders who perpetuate similar colonial-style oppressive practices. I find Ayittey’s claims convincingly profound, far-reaching, and understandably stringent, but I wonder if many of his readers would assent.

It is now fifteen years since Ayittey provided his controversial blueprint for Africa’s future. It is not the latest to do so, but its policy prescriptions echo louder now than they did then. Today, waves of democratic reversals and stagnations, deteriorating press freedoms, and rising autocratic and strongman leadership are ubiquitous in Africa. Undoubtedly, Ayittey’s book is a stark reminder that the fate of a prosperous Africa depends on freer and more open political and economic systems in times like these. In a world of increasing global competition, ordinary Africans, or the “Atinga,” as Ayittey puts it, struggle to fit in more than ever before. The race to the top has become more challenging, the climb ostensibly steeper, and the odds stacked against many across the continent. Consider a digitally divided world where Africa’s poorest find themselves at the very bottom, yet they must compete in a global but unequal capitalist system. Ayittey reminds us that there is a problem, one deeply and painfully rooted in failed leadership. He further asserts that contrary to African liberation and nationalist leaders’ promises, independence did not usher in prosperity and that Africa’s post-colonial economic performance has remained gloomy ever since. Why? Ayittey’s voice may be loud and bold, but many others share similar or opposing views.

Recurring Questions

Ayittey’s book is not the most recent to debate poverty, development, and prosperity in Africa. Dambisa Moyo, who once was a student of Ayittey, addresses Africa’s development quagmire vis-à-vis foreign aid in her book, “Dead Aid.” Both Ayittey and Moyo agree that the “Africa rising” narrative is unrealized. They both attribute Africa’s despair and economic retrogression to false starts, corruption, and flawed policies. They seem to argue that foreign aid is a curse rather than a blessing. However, Ayittey and Moyo offer different pathways to the future. While Moyo argues that Africa should look to the East for development support, Ayittey disagrees and contends that Africa should look to itself—go back to its roots and build upon its indigenous institutions.

Whereas adherents to aid’s ineffectiveness have grown in recent times, they are not without opposition. Jeffery Sachs, an American economist, academic, and public policy analyst, thinks that Africa needs more foreign aid to improve its economic outlook. William Easterly adopts a more constructive position. Easterly cautions that “the appropriate goal of foreign aid is neither to move as much money as politically possible nor to foster a society-wide transformation from poverty to wealth: the goal is simply to benefit some poor people some of the time.” Like Ayittey, Easterly posits that the lack of freedom (including experts’ tyranny) significantly correlates with poverty for the world’s poor. Ayittey, therefore, stands out in a crowded field.

The book explains why Africa failed to develop. It divides an African economy into three sectors: the modern/formal, informal, and traditional/rural sectors. The informal and traditional sectors host the vast majority of the poor, while the modern sector is the elites’ abode, who channeled much of the development resources into the urban areas where they lived and neglected the informal and traditional sectors. The modern sector is where all the chaos, struggles for political power originate, characterized by dictatorship, absence of accountability, etc.

Roadblocks to Freedom and Prosperity

Despite the long list of ideas, Ayittey’s book is exceptional. He maintains that Africa is still in bondage. Most of its people continue to live in fear and insecurity, where they suffer from repression and bear the brunt of chronic corruption. These groups of people are angry, and rightfully so. Ayittey may be daring, but he is right. A closer look at recent conflict and protest trends in Africa suggests that young people are increasingly expressing their desire for more freedoms and openness. Nigeria’s #endsars protest, Cameroon’s Anglophone uprising, and Uganda’s political unrest exemplify the Atinga’s anxiety and anger. To survey these barriers to freedom and prosperity, Ayittey analyses Africa’s most impoverished people’s neglect and betrayal, their challenges, bleak prospects, and the dearth of economic successes in chapters one through eight. He then commits the rest of the book to propose pathbreaking recommendations for moving Africa forward, chapters nine through eleven.

Contrary to popular belief among many Africans, Ayittey asserts that poverty in Africa has little to do with colonialism, racism, American imperialism, and artificial borders. Instead, it is significantly the result of bad leadership that propagates Africa’s resource exploitation by Western nations. He adds that political power is used for crushing rivals in Africa, amass personal fortunes, and enrich cronies. For instance, oil revenues in Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, and many others primarily benefits the ruling class members. Consequently, the Atingas, who make up most of Africa, are angry and fed up with the lies and deceit from the African elites. These angry peasants have taken their vengeance to the streets, resulting in relentless chaos and instability across the continent. According to Ayittey, Africans never gained true freedom from decolonization. Instead, leadership changed from one oppressor to another, from the European settlers to the black neo-colonialist. Hence, exploitation and oppression have continued uninterrupted.

Are Western institutions absolved of any wrongdoing? Ayittey disagrees. He holds that they are accomplices. Western donors have failed to reverse economic decline primarily due to systemic and programmatic design flaws, bureaucratic red tape, and policies structured on false premises. For example, the inability to distinguish between African people and the African leaders, in which case the leaders have been the problem, not the people. A case in point is President Clinton’s appeasement of African tyrants in hopes of nurturing a “new African renaissance.”

Ayittey emphasizes cultural betrayal as a significant challenge to prosperity. The African post-colonial elites were preoccupied with ending colonial rule and ‘catching up’ with Western economic progress, understandably so much that they adopted foreign values and blatantly disregarded indigenous African heritage in the process. Ayittey examines Africa’s post-colonial development model and concludes that post-colonial leaders introduced alien structures, systems, and models such as socialism, political pragmatism, military nationalism, and Afro-Marxism. Such was a “cultural betrayal” because, in Ayittey’s words, these systems “can never be justified upon the basis of African tradition.” He rebukes the hypocrisy of post-colonial elites. Africa’s nationalist and liberation leaders have long grieved that no development took root in Africa during colonialism. The argument goes that indigenous exploitation was the principal driving force behind colonialism, not social development. Ayittey highlights Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Julius Nyerere (Tanzania) as prime examples of leaders who “vowed to demolish that miserable distorted colonial economic structure Africa had inherited and erected in its place alternatives that would serve the needs and interests of Africa, not those of Europe.”

Looking back, Ayittey holds that though these elites erected alternative development structures, they failed miserably to serve Africa’s interests. For example, the one-party systems adopted by African leaders ignored the traditional (village) assembly system. In a village structure, decision-making is inclusive and representative of the community, including the elders and young adults. Similarly, the Europeans and Arab conquerors introduced and forced Christianity and Islam on Africans. African leaders disregarded their indigenous African heritage to the disadvantage of its development and dismantled rather than rebuilt (and strengthened) existing local institutions. He describes the post-colonial development efforts as a big false start and accuses African leaders of blindly imitating Western attributes and symbols, mistaking them for modernity.

Furthermore, Ayittey dismisses the logic of foreign aid. Ironically, aid has become a bondage to the African people, although initially intended to provide relief. For all the talk, aid was designed to bridge the resource gap and spearhead development. Contrarily, it has led to the overdependence and reliance on external resources for development. Ayittey reinforces his claim with Peter Boone’s 1995 study on Politics and the effectiveness of foreign aid. The research shows no significant correlation between aid and growth. The reasons foreign assistance has been ineffective in development are obvious. From the donor’s side, aid allocations soak in bureaucratic red tape and non-development driven conditionalities. From the recipient’s side, most donations came from poorly structured and mismanaged consumer loans and loans towards grandiose projects run by state enterprises geared towards prestige than efficiency. These financial aid crises resulted in what Ayittey terms first and second-generation problems.

Moreover, the failure to usher meaningful development despite foreign aid revealed the following issues about African leadership: inhumane and gross incompetence, mismanagement of public resources, and state control and direction of economic activities, resulting in food scarcity problems. These are what Ayittey labels “first generation” and “second generation” The first-generation problems mostly characterize a predatory state, state overreach, and a governing patronage system in which the head of state usually amasses enormous socio-economic and political power. With state ownership of production, industrialization efforts failed miserably in countries like Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Zimbabwe, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire). As a direct consequence, Africans suffered an agricultural crisis. The second-generation problems of famine, commodity shortages, and inflation emerged across the continent. A people that once fed themselves now turned towards food importation for survival.

Consequently, two major trends emerged: a debt crisis and a drift towards autocracy. The public grew impatient with the failing promises of the elites. For example, in Tanzania, Nyerere received about $10 billion over 20 years from Western aid donors backing his Ujaama socialist experiment. These state-controlled programs began fomenting instability and pushing governments towards dictatorial models due to stiff criticism and dissent from the population.

Ayittey predicates his assessment of Africa’s developmental failures on the assertion that the imposition of a strong state control (statism) system and a socialist model robbed ordinary Africans of the liberty to determine their own destinies. The colonial settlers snatched the freedoms Atingas once enjoyed in traditional pre-colonial Africa and now under siege by African elites. These policies failed to develop Africa for several reasons: poorly planned and executed economic projects, administrative ineptitude, corruption, and graft. Also, these failures hindered development due to a lack of policy implementation. He argues that even the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), adopted in 2001 as a mechanism to eradicate poverty, was founded on a false premise—the proposition that colonialism, the Cold War, and an unjust international economic system heightened Africa’s impoverishment. He believes that NEPAD’s structure is inherently poised to extract more foreign aid, and ironically a Western idea, modeled after the U.S Marshall Aid Plan. Ayittey concludes that NEPAD failed to include Africa’s civil society’s voices during its formulation.

Belated Policy Blueprints

Undeterred by critics, Ayittey unapologetically dismisses political correctness and upholds that Africa’s leadership is a monumental failure. He admits that African prosperity is long overdue. Getting it on track demands bold and revolutionary thinking. He persuades his readers that it depends on Africans’ will to take their destinies into their hands, steer their destinies, solve their own problems and lead in Africa’s development. Africa needs investment in agriculture, manufacturing, education, health care, telecommunications, and infrastructure. But can Africa do it alone? While Ayittey may be right to focus on Africa’s commoners—the Atinga—he seems to underestimate the international community’s role. Dambisa Moyo writes that Africa is a source of global threat. It is only appropriate that the international community help solve Africa’s problems before they become global concerns. However, Ayittey provides two significant directions for innovative policy thinking and strategic shift.

First, he proposes that Africa’s indigenous economic institutions must set the blueprint for development. Antithetical to post-independent elite thinking, free “markets were not invented by Europeans and transplanted into Africa.” Ayittey provides numerous examples of free markets that existed in Africa, predating European invasion on the continent. Timbuktu, Salaga, Kano, and Mombasa are all examples of great African market towns. He rejects African elites’ strident anti-market policies after independence as an “act of unpardonable cultural sabotage.” Ayittey believes that Botswana is the single African country that exemplifies indigenous oriented market systems. He advocates for free village markets, free enterprise, free trade, and trading routes like those that crisscrossed indigenous Africa, especially those dominated by women enterpreneurs. Ayittey contends that women’s role in free trade is critical in today’s economy, as was in traditional African society. It would be interesting to learn what Ayittey would make of the recently adopted Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and whether it represents a fundamental step towards African economic growth.

Secondly, Ayittey proposes that Africa can achieve development by focusing on the “economic lot” of the people—the “real peasant majority” or “average African.” In his ‘Atinga model,’ development must begin at the grassroots level, with a bottom-up approach that places the average African at the center of growth. The objective is to liberate the peasant class from tyranny and exploitation. To do so, Ayittey says we must carefully observe and study the Atingas, their ways of life, economic activities, and institutions with a single imperative—to improve them. For example, improving upon the dugout canoes still used by native African fishermen is one way out.

Nevertheless, Ayittey fails to identify the mechanisms needed to establish a sustainable bottom-up structure. He assumes that developing a bottom-up institutional model will be easy. At least William Easterly thinks it is naively optimistic about implying that institutions can rapidly change from the top to reflect a bottom-up approach. Still, Ayittey succeeds in convincing his readers while offering sufficient pessimism.

Ayittey’s answer to Africa’s poverty is to adopt a development strategy that is agricultural and rural-based. But first, ordinary Africans must be free to do so. He recommends that Africans reevaluate the state’s role in establishing a grassroots model (his village development model). This model must be driven and run at the local levels with limited state oversight. Ayittey proposes that locally-led structures can attain peace through conflict resolution mechanisms embedded in indigenous practices in which the rule of traditional chiefs is paramount. He cautions that Africa needs proactive states that recognize their inherent limitations and believe in the ingenuity of the Atingas.

For Ayittey, the only way to save many African countries is to reform the modern sector, but the ruling elites, he adds, are not interested. So implosion is inevitable in such countries as Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, etc. Therefore, if development must occur, Ayittey says we must “unshackle or unchain” Africa’s majority from the modern sector and concentrate on the informal and traditional sectors. Africa must situate itself within the global community, and its elites must play a positive role far beyond corruption, mismanagement, and the iron fist.