Guest post: Africa – stop catching up!
Mar 14, 2013 4:12pm by beyondbrics
There are two prevailing and conflicting views of progress in Africa: the ‘incrementalists’ and the ‘cyclicalists’. The incrementalists say Africa is ‘catching up’; the cyclicalists say it is ‘not catching up fast enough’ because it is locked in a ‘two steps forward one step backward’ rhythm.
My opinion is that both views are muddled.
The incrementalists attribute technical backwardness to ‘problems of poverty’. They insist that because development is a long, drawn-out process, Africa’s current, much talked about, growth should be seen as a ‘wave’, the effects of an ‘accumulation’ of small successes.
The cyclicalists would point to the recent polls in Kenya and Ghana to show that elections in Afrcia are not getting better. More experience and more money do not seem to be improving their quality. Kenya appeared to have spent about four times what the UK, with more eligible voters, typically spends on elections. There are some in Ghana who insist that its 1979 election was superior in accuracy to the 2012 one.
The cyclicalists thumb their noses at the recent commodities boom, reminding all who care to listen that in the early 1970s a very similar boom paved the way for a debt crisis a decade later.
However, for clarity in this debate we need to hone in on a more concise phenomenon like ‘economic transformation’, and leave the over-philosophical theories of ‘development’ aside for a while.
One can quibble over exotica such as the ‘meaningfulness’ or ‘inherent goodness’ of such social change, but at least the measurement can be objective. It is hard to quarrel over the fact that Japan and Singapore today have achieved a phase-shift unattained by Myanmar and Pakistan. Whether or not Pakistan is a better place today than 40 years ago is harder to pin down unless one descends to the philosophical. By ‘economic transformation’, I take inspiration from Lee Kuan Yew’s thesis of ‘third world to first world’ transition. This is a model that I argue hinges on technical progress, of a sort that shifts the phase of productivity in a national or regional economy from one level to another completely discontinuous level.
I urge the same degree of focus when evaluating the post-colonial African transformation project and how it has fared so far.
The incremental-change argument flies in the face of the evidence. Economic transformation is, on the contrary, abrupt, disruptive and traumatic.
The idea of accumulated institutional reforms leading eventually to a snap is similarly unsupported in history. Countries that have achieved the phase-shift have diverse institutional characters, with highly differing levels of unfinished business where institutional reform is concerned, but they all share high levels of tolerance for fast-paced technical change, technology adoption and, above all, a strong culture of punishing technical failure. The meritocracy of these nations hinges on one’s conformity to new technical values.
Rather than accumulative processes, countries are launched into a phase-shift by movements led by technical mavericks. The industrialists who created the wave of FDI into Deng Xiaoping’s China and built the outsourcing model; the lean-way industrialists of Japan; the scientific vanguard that turned church-ruled Europe on its head; and the infrastructure monopolists of America, all had one thing in common: a sudden break with tradition and a complete shift of productive technique.
Technical Maverick Movements (TMMs) when they become part of the establishment are adept at harnessing power. The US defence-industrial complex and Japan’s MITI-keiretsu complex, until they ceased to be disruptive, are good examples of how new technical values can become the driving force of a society, and how mavericks, like the wartime code-breakers of Great Britain, can become mandarins.
Africa’s enduring elite has refused to cede any space to new technical values and the TMMs that generate them. Like all value systems, new technical values are binary in nature: they are either in place or they are not.
The TMMs that are forming in Africa, whether in Kenya’s Silicon Savannah, at the head of the factory revival in Nigeria (the Dangotean era, if you wish) or in the transcontinental ‘mass banking’ movement, pockets of excellence though they are, are sadly fringe shows. They are in no position yet to dominate for the time-span of one generation needed to incubate the right technical values across society.
The cyclicalists are also wrong because like the incrementalists they see a steady-state growth process. But it is the same Africans who when in America are seen as highly productive workers that at home run heavily resourced airlines that never depart on time or ever respond to customer complaints (Nigeria’s Arik, for example).
The so-called ‘pockets of excellence’ in Africa are actually the key to the puzzle.
In Africa’s mass banking TMM, you have UT Bank in Ghana which disrupted the financial industry by promising to process all loans within 48 hours, when all around bureaucratic and corrupt practice was the expectation; and Equity Bank, which showed that you can make profits without concentrating solely on the tiny upper class. Both clearly demonstrate that technical values are either/or. You either shift or you don’t. There isn’t a series of endless intermediates.
Nor is there any inevitability about technical relapse as the cyclicalists like to portray. Example: quality standards in Ghana’s cocoa industry have survived several turns and tides, as have standards in tea cultivation in Kenya. In fact, TMMs thrive in spite of the odds!
The point however is that TMMs need power, and at scale. Otherwise you get fragmentary results, such as mobile banking in Kenya, aviation and logistics in Ethiopia, or large scale factory production in Nigeria. And here too, you either have the power or you don’t.
It is a myth that all Africa has to do is ‘quicken its pace’ in ‘catching up’ with the economically transformed world.
African countries will either experience sudden change or they will continue the current strategy of adapting better to their situation, as pockets of excellence remain dots on a mediocre landscape. There is no middle way.
Bright B Simons is the inventor of the world’s most widely-adopted mobile anti-counterfeiting technology ( www.mpedigree.net) and a researcher at IMANI Ghana.
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