Since the fight for flag independence in the early 1960s, the African continent has struggled with "development" -- both as a reality and in the many ways in which it has tried to make sense of the idea. Because of this, so many years later, we have not managed the transition from our economies' dependence on primary and extractive industries to economies driven by manufacturing and the ability to add value to our exports. Part of the development dialogue tried to find positives in this: by leapfrogging the manufacturing stage of development, it was argued, economies on the continent simply proved the wisdom of not reinventing the wheel. But our rapid embrace of the service economy still has not entrenched economic growth, nor does it promise to make growth sustainable. Indeed, we continue to face difficulties in sending our children to and keeping them in school or training them in ways that make them both employable and productive. We can barely keep them or our larger societies in good health. The dilapidated state of most of the continent's healthcare facilities has long been a metaphor for the health of the continent's economies. Nor have we been able to successfully run the businesses without which our economies are mere parodies.
Why is this so? The deprivations of slavery and the several dislocations associated with the colonial experience both left Africans with societies organised to serve external interests. Predictably, the reorientation of these economies that was required to get them to serve local interests, after both these experiences, was always going to be pricey, disruptive of established practices, and protracted. No one thought the continent's post-colonial transition was going to be easy. Yet, examples abound across the continent of economies that earned windfall revenues (on the back of produce exports) whose outcomes did not differ from economies that did not. And elsewhere, the world has a surplus of economies similarly afflicted by both slavery and colonialism that still found enough strength to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
If the pre-colonial experience is not a sufficient reason for the continent's underdevelopment, what about neo-colonialism? This is a much woollier word that looks to describe how former slavers, and colonial overlords continue to act in their own interests, but not how the now free ex-colonies still cannot find the nous, or the muscle to act in theirs. There is a persuasive case to be made for the way the distortions from both slavery and colonialism may have limited the options available to succeeding economies. But how much of history is destiny? Not much, if Franz Fanon is to be believed. Exhausted by their pre-colonial past, successive generations of Africans have chosen to revel in relative obscurity. This way, they have spectacularly failed to discover their mission, and thus have never stood a chance to fulfill this mission or betray it.
How much of the causes of this lack of agency is local? All of it, apparently. Nonetheless, two other aspects of the African's lived experience might matter even more than the African's apparent lack of agency. Or, put differently, our lack of agency presents itself through two ominous symptoms. Much has been made of how corruption and incompetence have affected the continent's outcomes. But in a lot of the local conversations about how economies on the continent may fix their development challenges, it does not feature prominently enough.
What happens to a university faculty, for instance, which ends up with a third-rate intellectual at its helm -- because it seeks to comply with Nigeria's "federal character" requirement, perhaps? Almost without fail, subsequent recruitments into the faculty will be of even lesser competence. This would not be the case were institutional arrangements in an economy and the cultural integuments that lend them long-term expression supportive of putting the best minds in all key positions. Usually, the only way through which an incompetent person gets to high office is via the corrupt route. Conversely, few persons, events or processes lend themselves to corrupt practices than the incompetent. If incompetence and corrupt practices are handmaidens to each other, do we not do the continent's chances of stronger growth and development a huge disservice when we downplay the cost to our respective countries of corrupt tendencies and sheer incompetence?
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The cost of both traits is exceedingly high. And both are self-fulfilling practices, in the sense that they create a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. To drive the continent's economies forward, to improve the outcomes for its increasingly immiserated people, and to strengthen its voice at the global marketplace -- all pressing tasks from where we now stand -- we are invited to break this cycle as soon as we can.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
