When I was a student of development constantly looking at very grim development statistics and relating them to what I saw around and heard on radio and television, the question “Why is poor Africa so poor?” perennially stayed with me.  Indeed I have seen the various efforts and plans to develop Africa, but sadly they have not helped much.  It is clear that the number of poor people in Africa has been on the increase and the gap between the poor and the rich has been widening.  The situation has now been exacerbated by the pandemic of HIV/AIDS.  Why is poor Africa so poor? 

STRIKING RURAL REALITY

          When I was out in the rural northern part of Zambia on my formation experience, when I saw the extreme underdevelopment there, the hard life that people live, the visible despondency and fatalism on their faces, this question came back with its depressing effects.  However, as I stayed there longer, slowly I began to see that there is so much that goes on in Africa that has been taken for granted.  I mean the things that are real and pertinent but are not paid attention to by governments, development experts, and development agencies and are therefore not factored into the various development strategies and schemes for Africa.

          Walking and travelling around I noticed villages right in the bush, met people looking resigned and despondent.  Let me briefly describe what I saw in some of these typical African villages.  There is a little garden of cassava at the back of mud huts, a little two square metre hedge of savannah grass standing in front as a toilet/bathroom.  In that poorly constructed hut lives an extended family of say ten to fifteen people.  The combined annual income for this household would roughly be $200 or even less.  Almost all the adults -- father, mother and uncle -- are illiterate and only one or two of the eight eligible children go to school.

          Two of the three teenage girls have a baby each and do not have any dreams for the future.  They would be waiting to be taken to marriage by some semi-illiterate young men of roughly eighteen to twenty one years in the neighbourhood who have built similar huts from the mud and poles around.  This is life and it has been like that for centuries and probably the community never asks why the situation is like that or is there a better life and is it possible?

          In the little rural town I worked, I sometimes visited the weather-beaten district council offices in the middle of tall grass.  I often found them locked and deserted.  Later, when I asked about the council operations I was told the council was almost defunct and was missing key personnel including the council secretary.  The council secretary who was there died some time back and other qualified men and women could not come forward to take up the appointment, as they were afraid of witchcraft.  At that moment a junior officer without the relevant qualifications had risen through the ranks and was supposed to be acting as council secretary.

          For the whole time I stayed there we had no Zambian television.  I was told they had not had it for over a year after the transmitter there was struck by lightning.  Was anybody interested in taking the Member of Parliament (MP) or the ward chairman to task so they could have television and know what is happening in Lusaka and around Zambia and the world?  I do not know! We were completely cut off and did not know what was happening in other parts of the country.  Tuning into Radio Two of Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) only available in the Short Wave was often difficult and one thing you hesitated to do especially if you wanted to have a good day.

          In that part of the country I saw vast tracts of unfarmed land.  Along the road that joined us to the provincial headquarters we went across  thirteen  rivers  and yet I saw no irrigation pipes and in our little town, water supply was erratic.  Trees were being cut down for charcoal and again forest rangers could not stop the practice for fear of witchcraft.

          When the council workers reported to a development meeting that they had problems in protecting water sources and in making use of the water sources like springs for safe drinking water, the local chief told the meeting that they needed to consult spirits through him if they were to succeed.

DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM

          Why do I mention all this? Whenever we read various analyses of development or of the poverty situation in Africa what comes out are  issues of financial inflows, infrastructure, expansion of exports, agricultural development, issues of employment, etc.  Undoubtedly these are key issues in the development process.  But what about the non-economic factors like belief systems, values, attitudes, institutions, social structures and systems, are they of less importance?

          In this article I want to point out that economics and economic systems in the third world need to be viewed from a wider perspective.  They need to be contextualised in the overall social system of a country.  This means any attempt at development must take into account the interplay between economic and non-economic factors in the development process.

          On top of the economic quantities we need to look at work culture, attitudes towards life and authority, bureaucratic and administrative structures, patterns of kinship and religion, cultural traditions and beliefs, land tenure systems, efficiency and integrity of government agencies, the flexibility and rigidity of economic and social classes and popular participation in political and economic governance.

          Are these issues adequately tackled in the development equation?  In my estimation the various plans and schemes mooted to help Africa overcome its perennial problems ignore these non-economic dynamics as non-quantifiable and therefore irrelevant.  Most programmes like SAP, ESAF, HIPC Initiative, PRSP, etc., are so focussed on national output (GDP), quantitative poverty reduction, macroeconomic balancing and targeting that they miss the whole picture.

          In 2000 poor countries acceded to the MDGs endorsed by the UN, World leaders, World Bank, IMF and the Regional Development Banks.  It is now (2005) five years down the line and it is becoming clear that many poor countries may not reach the MDGs by 2015.  Oxfam projects that by the year 2015, 247 million more people in sub-Saharan Africa will be  living on less  than a dollar a day, 97 million will have been deprived a place in school and 45 million more children will have died.

          As usual, many think the obvious solution is more aid for Africa and the developing world.  This is what Tony Blair wants to do taking advantage of his dual chairmanship of the G8 and the EU to engender more funding and debt cancellation for Africa.  Should this happen, it will undoubtedly give Africa a fresh start in meeting its development challenges.  But the central question of this article is: “is it just about money, what else?”

          Looking at the evidence available, it is likely that even with more dollars trickling in, many poor countries will not reach the MDGs.  Despite increased capital flows into Africa between 2001 and 2004, the World Bank 2004 report on economic prospects reveals that though the developing world in general registered an annual growth of 6.1%, Africa was well below this figure and is still lagging behind.  The report shows that the increases were wide spread around the developing world with the outstanding exception of Africa.  While the Asia Pacific regional grew the strongest at 7.8%, Africa was the lowest at less than the world average of 4%.

          In my view, it is clear that the issue is not just about money.  Obviously there are other major external factors like debt, international trade, etc., but in this article the focus is on the forgotten or swept aside internal factors.  Much time and effort has been spent on trying to mobilise resources and to lobby for debt cancellation and fairer trade just so that we may reach the 2015 UN targets of universal primary education, a two-thirds reduction in infant mortality, halving of extreme poverty, etc.  This is highly commendable but I contend that history must be able to tell us that we need to rethink the development strategy.

RESOURCE FLOWS TO AFRICA

         Aid agencies and rich countries have tried what America did in the Marshall Plan to help Europe recover from the after-effects of the World War in a few years.  This has not worked for Africa.  Traditional western economic theory approaches have justified the transfer of resources from the advanced to less developed countries on the premise that there are low levels of new capital formation in poor countries.  It is true that capital formation or savings are an important and necessary condition for growth and development but are not a sufficient condition.

          The Marshall plan worked for Europe because on top of the financial inflows, European countries possessed the necessary structural, institutional and attitudinal conditions.  They had first the right motivation and attitudes, reasonable popular participation in governance, effective land tenure systems and other social and institutional structures.  In addition they had strong and integrated money markets, developed transport systems, strong and diverse human resource base and efficient public bureaucracies to change inflowing capital into higher output. 

          Now look at our councils, our public bureaucratic structures, the work culture, endless strikes, attitude toward life, etc.  Since independence we had the first agricultural policy only last year.  Aid agencies and the rich nations assume the existence of the right attitudes, strong institutions plus other complementary factors such as managerial competence, skilled labour and the ability to plan and to implement those plans.

“INCULTURATING” DEVELOPMENT

          Having highlighted the deficiencies in Africa’s development process, I want to conclude on the need to tailor-make, to “inculturate” the African development process.  We have seen that transplanting western economic models on to Africa has not worked and will never work.  It is now clear to many development experts that what has come to be known as neo-classic, neo-Keynesian or neo-liberal economic theory is of limited relevance for understanding the characteristic features and the problems of African countries.  Stated bluntly neoclassical economics is irrelevant for newly emerging social and economic problems in Africa.

          The trouble is that even the economic or development theory taught in our African universities is imported straight into Africa through western textbooks, western influenced syllabi and western trained lecturers and professors.  The irrelevance of western economic thought for Africa should not surprise us as it emerged as a response to western economic problems faced after the Great Depression and after the World War.

          Africa must therefore not be forced to follow the development path of Europe or the Asian Tigers.  We reiterate that mobilisation of resources, debt cancellation, fairer trade are very necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustained and rapid development.  We will be missing the point if we think that Africa will be developed immediately we have our debts cancelled, huge inflows of dollars or when the west opens its markets to our products.

          For sure such conditions would facilitate development and growth; we will have more children in schools, we will have more money  going  to  the social sector or more medicines, we will have better roads and other economic infrastructure, etc.  But will we have good social, institutional and bureaucratic systems, the right attitudes towards work, motivation, the spirit of entrepreneurship, etc?

          We need to tackle in the PRSPs, HIPC Initiatives and in the local development plans the more profound issues of inequality, attitude, fatalism, and passivity.  There is also need for more effective and regular monitoring of the public institutions.  We need to ensure that it is not only Lusaka or other urban councils working.  But also the rural councils like Luwingu, Mporokoso, Lundazi, Lukulu, Chama, etc.

          We need to evaluate our educational system.  Is it relevant to our development needs, are we not merely educating “exports” to Europe and America?  If these and many other non-economic concerns are factored into the development function together with economic quantities then in my opinion we can hope for a truly developing and growing Africa.  But if we continue to sing the old tune of privatisation, free trade, liberalisation in exchange for more aid and capital inflows from Europe and America we will wake up to another rude shock!

Charles Chilufya, N.S.J
Jesuit Novitiate
Lusaka