President Paul Kagame recently asked a question; one that’s as old as the years African states have been independent. Why is it that certain other countries, which were at the same level of Africa 50 years ago have now left us behind (in terms of development)? This is a problem that has exercised the brains of countless thinkers, political scientists, writers, and other intelligentsia.
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Why did a country like South Korea for instance, which several African countries were better off than by GDP measure, per capita income, and other indicators of human well-being, go on to develop into an industrialized nation but not one African country did? Why has Vietnam done it, even after it suffered one of the twentieth century’s worst conflicts; one that left generational trauma?
Besides these two examples there are several other cases of Asian and South American countries that not long ago were derided (together with Africa) as “Third World” backwaters, which have emerged as industrialized giants. China. Korea. Vietnam. Mexico. Chile. And others.
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Their industry is at the forefront in electric vehicles, renewable energy technology, chip technology, name it.
But almost all of Africa has been left behind. There isn’t a field in which sub-Saharan Africa is even remotely competitive.
Why indeed?
I won’t try to pretend I know all the answers. This is a complex question; one with lots of historical context (which of course the leaders well know), affecting countries that at independence were hamstrung by every conceivable disadvantage.
Everyone knew what these disadvantages were, but the biggest, most urgent one at the time of independence in the early 1960s was lack of national cohesion, in so many of these new republics. The typical African country was an artificial creation, defined by boundaries that typically encompass hundreds of different ethnicities, languages, and cultures.
In human history no country, empire, city state, whatever, has pulled its people out of poverty, ignorance, superstition and the like, and built a technological base, then proceeded to become an advanced state without national cohesion. Those that succeeded did after they first developed into polities where the citizenry had a shared language, shared culture and values, and a shared understanding of where they wanted to go.
Without these things, the fundamentals of a successful society one can call them, societies or whole countries will remain stuck in backwardness. On the other hand, with these fundamentals in place, no challenge is too big to overcome.
Cohesive societies can overcome bad rule (a lot of governments in Asia or South America were bad indeed), overcome hunger, overcome high levels of illiteracy and more, to emerge as technological, financial, and industrial powers.
The “Asian Tigers” had these things in place, as did several countries of Latin America that were in the same basket as Africa in the sixties and seventies.
One can be sure a lot of African leaders understood these things. But did they understand the task at hand? It was a herculean task: one that required the leaderships to draw up national strategies with the goal first and foremost of creating a sense of national unity in each of their populations.
The leaderships needed to selflessly work, around the clock in fact, to build the educational infrastructure (not necessarily classrooms alone, but mass media like radio and tv would come in handy, not mentioning consistent newspaper and magazine campaigns), and to invest in the personnel, materiel and the like.
All to shape the mindsets of their peoples; to orient them away from thinking of themselves in terms of tribe, to seeing themselves as nations. (In fact, a certain leader, statesman of this region attempted it, creating a sense of national unity that’s probably unrivalled in sub-Sahara, though unfortunately there was little continuity of his work after he left. This great man’s legacy was to show it’s possible to build a sense of national cohesion in African states).
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You can’t have a field of good crops if you don’t do the hard work of tilling the soil first, said Nigerian writer Elechi Amadi. An observation of the very obvious, that continent’s post-independence leaders would have done well to heed, and embarked on tilling the soil first; building the required national mindsets, compromising on which national languages to unite the people, sorting similar unifying aspects.
Only after this kind of preparatory work were done would the continent’s leaderships then have followed up with the equally arduous, patient, painstaking, long-term tasks of training the multitudes of civil servants, engineers, scientists, tradesmen and women, and more. Also known as the human resource base required, to build social infrastructure. To build industry. To build a technological base.
But to Africa’s great misfortune, too many of its leaders focused on completely different things.
One important thing to note about President Kagame’s question however: even as he asked it, he’s been busy providing answers, here in Rwanda.