Contemporary Africa

Challenges and Opportunities

T. Falola, E. Mbah, T. Falola, E. Mbah

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137444134
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

60 years after independence, African nations still find it difficult to face a number of challenges, from establishing meaningful democratic institutions to establish social structures centered on the advancement of gender equality. This volume approaches these contemporary African challenges while combating a reflexive and facile Afro-Pessimism.

C H A P T E R 1

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Introduction: Change and Continuity in Contemporary Africa

Toyin Falola and Emmanuel M. Mbah

Introduction

The optimism that characterized the African struggle for independence between 1945 and 1960 quickly dissipated once the statesmen of the continent’s respective nations realized how many unsettling issues and challenges created during the period of European colonial rule needed to be addressed. Fifty years after independence, African nations still find it difficult to establish meaningful, democratic governing institutions that could permanently eradicate graft, unwarranted patronage, and corruption; to configure self-reliant economies capable of redressing the poverty gap and cater to the developmental needs of the people of the continent; and to establish concrete social structures centered on the advancement of gender equality, protection of women’s rights, and promotion of education and health care. Because colonial authorities only paid lip service to these and other socioeconomic issues, African statesmen inherited a continent marred by a litany of almost unmanageable challenges. Their inability to deal with so many problems at once is symptomatic of the dysfunction that continues to afflict these new nations to this day. The challenges are even tougher because personal differences and ethnic cleavages created during colonial rule have produced many disputes and stifled inter- and intrastate dialogue. Thus, the numerous promises made during the struggle for independence—such as eradication of hunger and poverty; better health-care and educational facilities and services; modernization through expansions in infrastructure, job creation, and many others that were supposed to improve the standards of living on the continent—never materialized.

While scholars are not definitive about the extent to which the European intrusion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exacerbated Africa’s problems, it is an incontrovertible axiom that the colonial legacy remains one of the continent’s major obstacles. Of course, some improvements have taken place in industry, infrastructure, travel, education, and internally developed projects as well as in the expansion of democratic institutions, particularly the increasing role of civil society in social and economic development. But the colonial legacy remains a problem, especially because African economies are still dependent on the West and China, which too often dictate what to produce, production quotas, and prices. African economies are also overly dependent on the developed world for technology, skill, and expertise. As a result, the resources of the continent continue, as during the colonial days, to be “transferred abroad in various forms: sales of its raw materials; high prices for imports; and a never-ending servicing of loans.”¹

The Challenges

At the 2000 United Nations (UN) Millennium Summit, durable peace, security, protection of human rights, and sustainable development were recognized among a list of eight goals, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),² which are to be attained worldwide by 2015. MDGs are considered prescriptions for socioeconomic innovations, progress and growth, and advancements to make people’s lives better. However, thus far, the realization of these goals has been largely absent in contemporary Africa. For Africa, development involves harnessing state resources to sustain its citizens and to provide avenues for raising standards of living while reducing unemployment, poverty, and inequality. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the attainment of desirable levels of development has been a tall order; societies in this broad region have been influenced considerably by Western culture, mainly through global economic, political, and social networks that date back to the colonial period. Thus, Sub-Saharan African economies, from the late nineteenth century until today, continue to mirror economic patterns that have been progressively implanted by mostly Western nations and, more recently, China.

Mineral extraction and the agricultural sector comprise Africa’s primary commodities in Western and Chinese markets, for which it receives manufactured goods, near-obsolete technology, insufficient financial capital, and ill-adapted cultural practices in return. Over the years, low levels of manufacturing and industrial production have resulted in Africa’s dependence on overseas markets, the results of which have been aptly described by April and Donald Gordon:

So far, the “integration” of Africa into the global economy has largely gone badly for most countries on the continent as the cost of foreign imports compared to the prices of African exports has often been unfavorable to Africa, leaving almost all countries, most of their people in poverty, and living standards among the lowest in the world. Only a minority of African countries are prospering and relatively few Africans have been able to acquire more than a few tokens of the promised life the developed world symbolizes.³

The absence of development in Africa is characterized by the inability of many of its nations to address a multitude of socioeconomic challenges—many of which are reflected in the eight MDGs, such as too much debt, poverty, inequality, hunger, gender issues, lack of adequate health care, and environmental challenges. In this introductory chapter, we examine, albeit briefly, some of these challenges, beginning with Africa’s huge debt.

The Debt Problem

The debt problem is a major challenge and a principal inhibitor to development in contemporary Africa. Africa has the highest foreign debt “when measured in relation to economic output.”⁴ Repayment rates are very high such that many debtor nations have not been able to service their massive obligations. Economic policies designed to address the African debt problem and foster development, such as market capitalism, centralized social systems, and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have been attempted. Many such policies have, however, failed miserably because they have been designed from the outside by bureaucrats who are not in touch with the experiences of everyday Africans.⁵ SAPs, for example, did very little to reduce African debt; the program only further destroyed the African socioeconomic fabric. Too much debt with little development can only translate to economic standstill and/or regression, and that characterized African economies in the decades since the attainment of independence.

Unemployment, Poverty, and Hunger

The absence of development and long-term failure of economic policies, including those related to debt management, means that many more people are unemployed and go hungry on the continent today than before. Poverty is rampant. Limited access to food and its impact on African societies are major challenges that can, in part, be traced as a result of the introduction of the plantation economy for the production of cash crops such as cotton, coffee, cocoa, peanuts, and rubber. These export crops were designed to fulfill the needs of foreign markets during the period of colonial rule. Food production has also been affected by environmental issues and disasters, such as the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s that led to a famine affecting roughly 70 percent of Africa’s population. Population increases, rural-urban migrations, inadequate transportation, and storage systems, insecurity resulting from conflict, terrorism, and dictatorship, and unsound government policies represent other serious problems.⁶

Rapid population growth and urbanization in countries such as Nigeria often translated into fewer job opportunities and social services and hence slow rate of economic growth, especially when policies to enhance growth and create employment are bureaucratized or not taken seriously. Agriculture in rural communities has been neglected due to the absence of technology and financial capital. Lack of technology and resources means that people have to cultivate or graze cattle on deteriorating lands. The result is poor yields, more structural unemployment, rural-urban migration in search of jobs (complicating the socioeconomic and political problems of urban centers), and rural decay or the development of ghost villages in many areas. These problems crystallize into intolerance, conflict, and insecurity, as is happening in many Sub-Saharan African countries like Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Central African Republic, the Sudans, Somalia, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In the past, the large and extended African families and similar sociocultural institutions have served as safety nets for many Africans during hard times; however, the current trend is for well-to-do Africans to adopt the “Western nuclear-family model,” leaving millions of poor people to deal with their individual hardships.⁷ In a continent where the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing at an alarming rate and where there are fewer economic opportunities for the poor, elevating the living conditions for the poorest through job-creating investments will remain the soundest solution in the fight against hunger and poverty.

Women, Poverty, and Inequality

If there is one group that is afflicted inordinately by hunger and poverty in Africa, it is women. Their perceived unequal status in many areas only complicates the challenges they encounter on a daily basis. Raising the economic status of women and increasing their role in development in Africa is, therefore, an imperative challenge for a number of reasons. First, more African women than men live below the poverty line, usually on less than US $1.25 per day. Because more women on the continent are uneducated, their access to economic resources is minimal, and poverty runs amok among their ranks, especially those living in rural areas.⁸

Second, in many parts of the continent, traditional cultural practices, such as those regulating land tenure and ownership, do not favor women. These practices place a major constraint on the socioeconomic empowerment of women in Africa. Discriminatory land tenure arrangements have made it that close to 80 percent of rural women in Africa perform agricultural work that benefits men. It is true that legal reforms are being enacted and implemented in some countries to address issues of discrimination and marginalization of women, but in many rural agrarian localities women are yet to take advantage of these new policies because they lack education. Therefore, education is very important for the empowerment of rural African women; with education, they will be able to understand and mitigate legal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction: Change and Continuity in Contemporary Africa
• Part I: Colonial and Neocolonial Legacies
• Part II: Transformational Moments in Economies and Cultures
• Index