http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/world/africa/africa-rising-africa-reeling-may-be-more-fitting-now.html?_r=0
Africa | Memo From Nairobi
‘Africa Rising’? ‘Africa Reeling’ May Be More Fitting Now
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
OCT. 17, 2016
NAIROBI, Kenya — For decades Africa was eager for a new narrative, and
in recent years it got a snappy one.
The Economist published a cover story titled “Africa Rising.” A Texas
business school professor published a book called “Africa Rising.” And
in 2011, The Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles about
economic growth on the continent, and guess what that series was
called?
“Africa Rising.”
The rise seemed obvious: You could simply stroll around Nairobi,
Kenya’s capital, or many other African capitals, and behold new
shopping malls, new hotels, new solar-powered streetlights, sometimes
even new Domino’s pizzerias, all buoyed by what appeared to be high
economic growth rates sweeping the continent.
For so long Africa had been associated with despair and doom, and now
the quality of life for many Africans was improving. Hundreds of
thousands of Rwandans were getting clean water for the first time. In
Kenya, enrollment in public universities more than doubled from 2007
to 2012. In many countries, life expectancy was increasing, infant
mortality decreasing.
But in recent months, as turmoil has spread across the continent, and
the red-hot economic growth has cooled, this optimistic narrative has
taken a hit. Some analysts are now questioning how profound the growth
actually was.
“Nothing has changed on the governance front, nothing has changed
structurally,” said Grieve Chelwa, a Zambian economist who is a
postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
“Africa rising was really good for some crackpot dictators,” he added.
“But in some ways, it was a myth.”
Photo
A cafe in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, in October. Credit Mulugeta
Ayene/Associated Press
No place exposes the cracks in the “Africa rising” narrative better
than Ethiopia, which had been one of the fastest risers.
Ethiopia is now in flames. Hundreds have been killed during protests
that have convulsed the country.
The government, whose stranglehold on the country is so complete that
not a single opposition politician sits in the 547-seat Parliament,
recently took the drastic step of imposing a state of emergency.
Many of the Ethiopia’s new engines of growth — sugar factories,
textile mills, foreign-owned flower farms — now lie in ashes, burned
down in a fury of anti-government rage.
At the same time, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, an arm of
the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, just listed Ethiopia as the
fastest growing economy on the continent from 2010 to 2015. The
Democratic Republic of Congo, which is also rapidly sliding toward
chaos — again, was second.
Political turmoil on the one hand, rosy economic prospects on the
other. Can both be true?
“It comes down to how sustained the turmoil is,” said Acha Leke, a
senior partner at McKinsey.
In Ethiopia’s case, the unrest appears to be just beginning. Videos
show demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians chanting
antigovernment slogans, giving a sense of the depth of discontent. The
protesters hail from Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, a
population of more than 60 million, leading many analysts to predict
that this is no passing fad.
It seems the continent as a whole is heading into a tough period.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, faces its gravest economic
crisis in years because of low oil prices. At the same time, it is
trying to fight off Boko Haram, one of the most bloodthirsty insurgent
groups on the planet.
Photo
The inauguration this month of a cross-border rail line from Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, to the nation of Djibouti. Credit Tiksa
Negeri/Reuters
South Africa, the continent’s most developed nation, has been wracked
by waves of unrest. Troops with assault rifles stomp around college
campuses, trying to quell student protests. The country’s currency,
the rand, hovers near a record low.
South Sudan, which topped The Economist’s list in 2013 of the world’s
fastest-growing economies, is now a killing field, the site of one of
Africa’s worst civil wars.
Mr. Leke, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, says that
political turbulence can drag down any economy, and that the growth of
recent years has not been shared among the people nearly as widely as
it could have been. According to a recent report by the African
Development Bank, unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa remains close to
50 percent and is a “threat to social cohesion.”
As Mr. Leke said, “You can’t eat growth.”
Still, he says, there have been fundamental — and positive — changes
on the continent, like increases in disposable income for many African
consumers.
Mr. Chelwa, the Zambian economist, has a different view. The
fundamentals of African economies have not changed nearly as much as
the “Africa rising” narrative implied, he said, with Africa still
relying too heavily on the export of raw materials and not enough on
industry.
“In Zambia, we import pencils,” he said.
He also points out that some of the fastest-growing economies, like
Ethiopia, Angola and Rwanda, are among the most repressive. These
governments can move ahead with big infrastructure projects that help
drive growth, but at the same time, they leave out many people,
creating dangerous resentments.
In Ethiopia, that resentment seems to be growing by the day.
The trouble started last year when members of Ethiopia’s largest
ethnic group, the Oromo, began protesting government land policies.
Soon Ethiopia’s second largest ethnic group, the Amhara, joined in,
and the protests have now hardened into calls to overthrow the
government, which is led by a small ethnic minority.
If you track the news coming out of Ethiopia, you would not be a fool
to think it is two totally different countries. One day, there is a
triumphant picture of a new electric train, with Chinese conductors
standing next to shiny carriages (China remains a huge investor in
Ethiopia.) The next, there are grisly images of dead bodies that
witnesses said were people gunned down by police.
Photo
A light-rail station in Addis Ababa this month. A report by the
McKinsey Global Institute, an arm of the consulting firm McKinsey &
Company, recently listed Ethiopia as the fastest-growing economy in
Africa from 2010 to 2015. Credit Mulugeta Ayene/Associated Press
Several witnesses said the security forces might be beginning to
split, with some officers taking off their uniforms and joining the
protests.
The most recent economic data shows Africa’s growth slowing because of
political instability and a global slump in commodity prices. Morten
Jerven, a Norwegian economic historian who has studied statistics from
across Africa, argues that the growth was never as robust as had been
believed.
He said that the economic indicators for many African economies in the
1990s and early 2000s were inaccurate, and that the economic progress
in the last five to 10 years that appeared to have been sudden was, in
fact, gradual.
In other cases, Mr. Jerven said, African governments made bold
economic assumptions or simply used fake numbers to make themselves
look good. “The narrative had been too rosy,” he said.
Africa Yearning or Africa Struggling might be a more apt
characterization, but neither of these is especially new. Whatever
narrative emerges should include what Mr. Chelwa calls the continent’s
“ghastly inequality,” and the sharp increase in the number of people
who are now better equipped with technology and information and are
demanding more from their governments.
Of course, it is difficult to apply a sweeping narrative to all 54
countries in Africa, where analysts agree that the picture is mixed.
For instance, Rwanda remains stable with new businesses and floods of
tourists while its neighbor, Burundi, teeters on the edge of chaos.
Some of the same economic factors that investors cite as grounds for
optimism, like Africa’s growing cities, cut both ways. According to
Mr. Jerven, rapid urbanization in Africa often leads to sprawling
slums, low wages and legions of disenfranchised youth.
“All the economic variables for turmoil are there,” he said.
Received on Mon Oct 17 2016 - 12:41:42 EDT