The World Has Changed...

In Africa we must adjust to the world as it is

“The world has changed.
I see it in the water.
I feel it in the Earth.
I smell it in the air.
Much that once was is lost,
For none now live who remember it.”

- Galadriel (Peter Jackson’s “Fellowship of the Ring)

I cannot speak for every government in Africa south of the Sahara, but my experience in government is one where putting out administrative fires is a daily time sink. Low capacity further down the hierarchy limits the extent of delegation. As head of agency, your day is inexorably cluttered with “the mundane”. You are so dependent on “donor partners” who pout if the minister himself doesn’t show up, another huge section of your time is in meetings and events to assuage the fragile egos of your partners. The smaller and poorer your country, the worse this is. The daily whack-a-mole, leaves very little time for strategic long-term thinking as local politics and external shocks conspire to suck the life out of well-intentioned plans.

Consequently, dependence on external assistance persists even when we clearly want independence in our policy making. But the world has changed – the path dependent dearth of strategic policymaking and implementation died a violent death with the Trump administrations disregard for any of the rules of international affairs. African countries will find out – the hard way – what it means when one can no longer depend on “partners.” The UK and the Netherlands will cut already declining contributions to international development to finance defense. It is reasonable to expect ALL of Europe to go down this path. There has been an erosion of public support in Japan for expanding official development assistance. The world has changed…

It could not have been lost on African leaders watching the complete lack of respect that the Trump administration has reserved for its European and Canadian allies and imagine that it would be different for them. The hard choices we have avoided making in Africa must now be made on terms we didn’t choose and at the most inconvenient of times. The consequence of dismantling USAID will be measured in thousands of lives lost in both the short and medium terms. It is hard to expect this administration to “care” about African lives when it has shown such disregard to American ones. The current budget plan seeks to cut $800 billion from Medicaid. Those cuts will also be measured in lost lives and aggressive declines in quality of life for the 41% of adults on disability, 39% of all children and the 80% of children in families with income below the federal poverty line. There is a perverse equity in the callousness.

The focus on poor governance in Africa has been disproportionately on the executive branch and understandably so. But this outlook underappreciates the extent to which parliament has been complicit in bad governance. The salaries of members of parliament across many governments significantly exceed those of their counterparts in more developed, wealthier countries. They have increased their salaries even as teachers and doctors have gone unpaid. They have expanded their perks as clinics ran out of medicines and students in rural areas or urban slums had to do without desks. They are consistently derelict in their oversight duties over the executive. The ultimate outcome for such poor behavior could be papered over as long as there were “development partners” willing to provide “assistance”. That world no longer exists.

But one would be remiss to leave out the behavior of African voting publics and their love affair with charlatans and incompetents. Only adults are allowed to vote, one must thus treat African voters as adults. They have consistently elected frauds, even when presented better alternatives. They have argued that seemingly better alternatives have “not paid their dues” or are “untested”, even as the “dues paying, tested” options deliver worse than nothing. Our voting publics have regularly rewarded ruling parties with extensions of mandates even as those parties have failed to deliver. African voters have tolerated behavior in political parties they would never accept from their children or families. Someone said it is almost impossible for non-crooks to win elections on the continent. It sounds hyperbolic, but it will resonate with many. The voting public has been complicit in their immiseration.

The world has changed. Nobody is coming to save us. It was always a mistake to surrender core policymaking to outsiders because they paid for our maize and medicines. But even that option is gone now. Here’s to hoping it’s a new day.