Not a flash in the pan

: The plight of sub-Saharan Africa has been used sometimes correctly to underscore the need for global assistance, particularly in the struggle to contain pandemic diseases, but oftentimes less than correctly to pillory the ongoing integration of the economies of the world — a process better know as globalisation. Even today, it is not uncommon for opponents of modern-day capitalism, a.k.a. globalisation, to lament how maybe China has gained, maybe India too (or at least the few Indians who watch the TV programmes on which the anguished opponents of ‘heartless’ globalisation appear), but that has not been the case with Africa where dirt-poor cotton farmers are being crushed into the ground by farm subsidies in western economies. Many reformers have been put on the defensive on Africa, and have tried to trace reasons for why the benefits of trade and investment elude the continent’s countries to sub-Saharan Africa’s pandemic diseases, widespread civil and military conflicts, or this shadowy thing called ‘governance’.

The facts, however, are quite otherwise. The economic boom that lit up in the closing decades of the last century is truly worldwide in its reach. It is of course still possible to miss the opportunity, but you have to try very hard. All the countries of Africa showed the same rather depressing pattern till 2000. No growth, or inconsistent and weak growth. However, everything changed after the turn of the century.

For the continent, GDP is estimated to have grown by 5.2% in 2006, little below the 5.8% of 2005. In 2007, the forecast growth is higher still at 6.3%. In the two decades up to 2000, however, no matter how you sliced and diced the period, average economic growth for the continent as a whole ranged between 2.2 and 2.4%. Up to 2000, most African countries had experienced little of the economic resurgence that had swept through East, South East and South Asia over two decades.

The consequences of what was seen as an exclusion of the continent from the economic high table, compounded by an enormous burden of poverty and pandemic diseases, played a role in the theatres of politics, media and social activism. The few success stories of the 1980s, such as Cameroon, faced reversal in the next decade, and the only success seemed to be at the southern tip: South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland. There were some visible improvement in the 1990s in Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda,...