Making Africa Work. Greg Mills

      Figure 4: East Asia and Africa compared: 50 years of per capita income (in 2005 $), 1960–2013

      Source: World Bank national accounts data and OECD national accounts data files, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicators&preview=on#

      Yet East Asia seemed to have few advantages over Africa at the point of decolonisation. Traditional East Asian societies were often characterised by ethnic disunity, frail institutions and limited governance outside of the capital, weak democracy, subsistence agriculture, fragmentary external trade linkages and acute social stratification. These conditions were prevalent, too, in many African states.47 Both continents shared a history of colonial (and commodity) exploitation, where the conquerors were sharply divided from the conquered by race, though there was a tendency on the part of the colonial rulers to favour some local groups over others. And in both continents settlers were imposed on the local groups, arousing intense hostility.48 This left them not only with unnatural borders and poor terms of trade, but their people were also left with a devalued sense of their own worth, angry with outsiders yet lacking confidence in their own abilities and suspicious of their fellow country people.

      Yet the East Asia region has prospered. As Barack Obama observed during his first visit to the African continent as American president in July 2009,49 colonialism alone does not explain the tribalism, patronage, nepotism, corruption and self-destructive policies that have caused the continent’s development to slip so far behind its people’s needs and its peers in other regions.

      While most East Asian countries had to accept a complex ethnic make-up as a result of colonial involvement, as with Africa, this has not in most cases resulted in endemic instability. East Asia, too, has had to cope with underdeveloped human capital, yet its states have, by and large, quickly turned their people into an asset through investment in education. While Africa’s institutional capacity is cited as a structural developmental impediment, some countries in South East Asia have grown economically with institutions at independence far worse resourced than those in African countries.

      In fact, in some respects, African countries were better off than their Asian counterparts at independence. Few African countries, after all, can claim the bitter cost and devastation wrought by the scale of conflict in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

      Despite the contemporary fad to bash aid as the explanation for all of Africa’s problems,50 Asian countries have also received comparatively large amounts of donor assistance. During the 1960s, aid per capita received by both regions was similar. Whereas some Asian countries enjoyed especially large aid flows (such as South Korea and Taiwan), and continue to do so (Vietnam), they did not allow themselves to become dependent on this single source of income. Asian countries have put aid to good use, because of improved governance, sound polices, effective planning and clearer, firmer local ownership of projects.51

      East Asian states that attempted top-down, centrally planned economic control and development were a disaster, just as the model has, too, proven a disaster in those African and other nations that have tried to take this path, no matter how intellectually coherent and tempting it might have been to the postcolonial leadership. Both regions suffered from characteristic problems of socialist gigantism and exploitation. However, those Asian countries – China, Cambodia and Vietnam, for example – that moved off this system immediately prospered.

      A better policy environment also helps to explain why some East Asian countries have used their significant natural-resource endowment to their advantage (Vietnam, again, or Malaysia, for example) without becoming overly locked into natural-resource production and hence vulnerable to price fluctuations.

      The difference in development results between East Asia and Africa does not originate either in political systems, even though, for some, East Asia’s development success has been used to justify authoritarianism, given that the region’s economies have managed high economic growth rates without conferring full political rights on its citizens.

      Democracy and development

      Given Africa’s historical, postcolonial experience, we suggest that democracy and development go hand in hand. It is not one or the other, democracy or growth, but these aspects are mutually reinforcing, however attractive African leaders (and some outsiders) might find authoritarianism as a system of government that ‘gets things done’.

      As described in Chapter 2, many African leaders have responded to the overwhelming wishes of their citizens by changing from autocratic regimes – the preferred system of government from the 1960s to the 1980s – to electoral democracies. There has been backsliding, inevitably, and many of the institutions and elections that have undergirded them have been imperfect. There are other very good reasons for maintaining these democracies over an anecdotal preference for a ‘benevolent dictator’. For one, as is examined later, such benign autocrats committed to popular welfare, as in the East Asian model, have been few and far between in Africa. Moreover, the empirical evidence is clear: Africa’s democracies develop faster, are safer for the incumbents and are richer than the alternatives.

      So far, it has proven difficult to duplicate East Asia’s model of soft authoritarianism in Africa. Because Singapore, for example, is a small and compact island, its leaders could argue that the population had to make sacrifices given the realistic challenges that Malaysia and Indonesia would pose if Singapore remained a poor country. Further, few African countries, given the challenges they face, have seen or can realistically expect the ‘legitimacy through performance’ that was central to gaining and maintaining the confidence that the island’s citizens had in its impressive leaders.

      There are many other aspects of East Asia’s relative economic success that have been similarly overlooked by advocates for autocracies. These include high spending on education, bureaucratic responsiveness, creating an attractive policy for business investment, low wages, high productivity, investment in infrastructure, raised agricultural outputs as an initial spur to growth and an overwhelming focus on competitiveness.

      Overall, the most notable differentiating factor between Africa and East Asia is, as highlighted in this volume, the relationship between government and the private sector. Private-sector growth in Africa has largely been an anathema, and not just in the period after independence. The colonialists – be they British, French, Portuguese or Belgian – whatever their ideologies in Europe, established highly interventionist states that actively prevented indigenous African economic enrichment, while protecting white settlers, colonial companies and monopoly capital.

      By and large, the African leaders that emerged after independence were comfortable with the economic systems they inherited (once stripped of racism), especially as state intervention offered many patronage opportunities. Expanding state control and intervention was one of the few levers open to them in the context of overall state weakness. This pattern was exaggerated by the failure of such liberators to have a plan beyond redistribution to their preferred constituents.52 Subsequently, African elites have remained largely uninterested