Africa remains the least-industrialised continent, so the idea that it can somehow parachute itself and compete in the post-industrial global marketplace of services is bewildering.
For long, arguably the most widely debated subjects concerning the African continent is the continent’s socioeconomic status. What reform measures can pull Africa from the pit of underdevelopment and the nature of foreign aid interventions to “save” a sorry continent have dominated a lot of policy and scholarly analyses for decades.
Africa occupies the lowest rungs of global development. On almost all socioeconomic indicators, the continent significantly lags behind the rest of the world. Much of the academic and popular debates and discussions in past painted a big brush picture of poverty, hopelessness, and desperation. In 2000, The Economist captured the pervasive cynicism of the time with a cover-title screamer of ‘The Hopeless Continent’ while in 1984, Time magazine summarised Africa as ‘Coups, Conflict, and Corruption.’
However, in the recent decade, there has been a dramatic turnaround in the narrative of projecting and presenting Africa, from a cynical and pessimist painting to a positive assessment and optimistic portrayal ― that Africa is on the rise. Not surprising, in December 2011, just about a decade after casting Africa as a hopeless continent, The Economist’s Africa cover story titled was ‘Africa rising.’
Presenting a positive image of Africa is most welcome for a continent that was for long the object of misleading and salacious stories and tales, cynical caricatures, and false constructions. Imageries of a dark continent without a history were the signature profiling by western scholars in the precolonial period. The portrait of a dark continent gave way to representations of savagery and backward people in urgent need of civilisation, the leitmotif of European missionaries and ultimately the colonisation of the continent.
Africa is the remaining main frontier of underexploited markets with a huge potential for experimenting with product innovations and virgin investment opportunities. The continent’s predominantly young population is estimated to reach a billion workforce in the coming years.
What is more, the enormous natural resource endowments that are perpetually inexhaustible despite centuries of despoliation by external actors working with local agents, intermediaries, and beneficiaries, set Africa apart as a continent of tremendous potential. In all, Africa’s fecundity is an attraction for capitalist exploitation by both the traditional Western powers and the emerging markets of the East ― China, and India.
All that being said though, the ‘Africa is rising’ narrative sits on a shaky foundation. First, African economies have registered modest growth in recent years and the record is not as outstanding as it has been hyped. The growth is either superficial or not happening in the sectors that matter the most and GDP growth figures on their own tell us nothing about the quality of life of citizens or societal harmony and Africa’s position in the structure of the global economy.
Between 2000 and 2010, growth averaged just over 5%, largely due to a commodity boom and oil revenues. Growth slowed down to between three and 4% during the 2010s, attributed in part to the slump in global crude oil practices that affected oil-dependent countries like Angola and Nigeria. With the current COVID pandemic, the International Monetary Fund now forecasts -1.7% growth for Africa for 2020.
For a continent that experienced negative growth for long spells in the 1970s and 80s, it was undoubtedly a big turnaround for the 2000s and 2010 with growth above four percent overall. Yet Africa’s real GDP growth for the last two decades has been mostly modest and not anywhere the rates of Asian late-industrialisers in the 1970s and 1980s or India’s and China’s impressive growth during the last two decades.
Second, Africa remains marginalised in the global capitalist structures of power and domination. For example, in past years Africa’s share of foreign direct investment was just over 3%, and the share of global manufacturing a paltry 1%. The share of global trade was a paltry 2% and the overall share of world GDP is a mere 2.5%, the share of global trade in services was only 1.9% and extractives, primarily oil, accounted for close to 40% of the continent’s total exports. The internal structural imbalances of enclave colonial economies characterised more by extracting rent for consumption than value-added productivity, and poor physical infrastructure compound Africa’s marginal position in the global markets.
The services sectors, which have been the largest source of growth ― primarily telecommunications, banking, insurance, leisure and hospitality ― are dominated by transnational (often speculative) hot capital that enjoys the freedom to repatriate profits without making long-term physical investment commitments.
Countries like Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, Sierra Leon, Tanzania and Uganda, among others, have mostly attracted investments in real estate, leisure and hospitality, coffee and fast-food chains, where they can easily disinvest because the costs of doing so are minimal, much less so in manufacturing and value addition. Rather than export processing zones and industrial parks, the Africa that is rising has sprawling urban real estate and hotel complexes in Kampala and Luanda, arguably from illicit money, and coffee-shop chains in Kigali and Addis Ababa that have little capital investment.
The more risky ventures in manufacturing have attracted limited investment, yet this is precisely where Africa’s economies need a leap. A services-dominated economy is a feature of post-industrial societies whose skills concentration has shifted away from relatively low-paying blue-collar jobs to high-skills, high-paying professions in the services sector.
The services sectors are largely consumptive and not productive; they have limited value addition and comparatively generate fewer jobs than manufacturing and value-added industrial production. Africa remains the least-industrialised continent, so the idea that it can somehow parachute itself and compete in the post-industrial global marketplace of services is bewildering.
Questioning the narrative of a ‘rising Africa’ is of course not because Africa is not rising ― but to what end, and with what benchmarks. Images of shopping malls, coffee shops, and skyscrapers are used to depict a continent ‘rising,’ while glossing over the fact that the majority of African peoples live in rural areas far away from the shopping malls and coffee shops in cities and towns. Until African economies marshal the infrastructure to power manufacturing and propel real productive sectors, growth will remain ephemeral and superficial.
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