In Africa, one doesn’t need to look hard these days to spot crises.
Case in point: the broad swath of the continent known as the Sahel. There, in recent years, one country after another—Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Guinea—has seen ineffectual elected governments fall to military juntas.
In Africa, one doesn’t need to look hard these days to spot crises.
Case in point: the broad swath of the continent known as the Sahel. There, in recent years, one country after another—Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Guinea—has seen ineffectual elected governments fall to military juntas.
In Africa, soldiers face constant and seemingly irresistible temptation to step into political power vacuums. But since the 1960s, military regimes have been unable to offer cures for the problems of the continent’s struggling nations. Their record of instilling stability and economic health has been remarkably dismal.
Crises have arisen in many directions, from the deadly civil war in Sudan, to the spread of Islamic insurgencies in Nigeria and other coastal nations, to the seemingly endless fiddling with constitutions in countries such as Ivory Coast. Although less brutish than classic coup d’états, “constitutional coups” are closely related and allow leaders to perpetuate their rule, often for life.
In recent days, Cameroon has offered the sad spectacle of a country whose leader has so completely dropped out of public view during an extended stay in Europe that rumors of his death spread widely. That 91-year-old president, Paul Biya, has been in power since 1982. In an absurdist bid to quell speculation about Biya’s condition, his government forbade media discussion about his health or whereabouts on “national security” grounds.
As different as each of these countries’ circumstances might seem, there is a common underlying denominator: a state’s inability to assure even the basic well-being of its citizens. This includes services almost taken for granted on other continents, from universal access to electricity and clean water to decent and affordable schools.
The causes of Africa’s economic woes are, of course, complicated. South of the Sahara, nearly all African countries have gained their independence, beginning with Ghana in 1957, as heirs of the abject exploitation and neglect of their colonial rulers. Despite the West’s self-ennobling rhetoric of the white man’s burden, imperial powers did little to spread literacy on the continent, and even less to train people at a university level. The physical infrastructure that colonialism left behind was similarly scant, and in most instances, had been built to simply move raw products to ports, where they could be shipped to Europe.
In the decades since independence, Africa has also been hobbled by its Balkanization, including an imperial legacy of 16 landlocked countries, almost all of which are poor and unstable today. Less obvious, but just as insidious, is the structure of the global economy. For all the reasons just cited, Africa was spectacularly ill-prepared to profit from the globalization that swept the world beginning in the 1980s.
That era’s biggest winner by far was China, which by virtue of its large market, literate and experienced workforce, and low wages, captured a huge portion of the international investment in cheap offshore manufacturing. China’s prodigious successes in building industries, such as plastics, textiles, and basic assembly, left little room for poorer, smaller countries hoping to industrialize in its wake.
Meanwhile, over the decades, Western-led international financial institutions—especially the World Bank—have frequently shifted directions in their lending and economic strategies toward the African continent, often with little regard for Africans’ own priorities and economic needs.
By now, to state that Africa has often been ill-served by its foreign partners should not be controversial. Beyond the realm of economics and development, the West—especially the United States—has long talked up the virtues of democracy while sustaining some of its deepest partnerships in Africa with starkly undemocratic countries, from Ethiopia and Rwanda to Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Even China’s emergence as a powerful economic player on the continent has begun to look like something of a false dawn. Enthusiasm ran sky-high in Africa after China went on a construction spree in the early 2000s, building modern railways, ports, highways, and airports across the continent. There was never any deliberate debt trap involved, as many critics have alleged, but hopes of a Chinese-fueled African takeoff have since dimmed, as Beijing has cut back on its lending to the continent and African countries have faced difficulties in servicing their debts with China and other creditors.
What this all means to me is that Africa must look inward, to its own resources—intellectual, social, cultural, and even economic—to fulfill its people’s desires for healthy development. The good news is that there are signs this is beginning to happen. Above all, I see these in the civil society groups that are fighting against official corruption and the capture of African states by political elites, against electoral and constitutional chicanery and wanton human rights violations.
There is evidence of rapidly growing civil pushback in countries as far-flung as Ghana and Nigeria in West Africa and Kenya on the opposite coast. Since June, Kenyans have braved police bullets to resist their government’s efforts to raise taxes, which are used in opaque—and, many people believe, corrupt—ways. In Nigeria, people have also taken to the streets in large numbers to fight government policies that are driving falling living standards; these include the end of long-standing state subsidies for gasoline prices and a stark decline in the value of the national currency, the naira. And in Ghana, thousands have protested the widespread devastation of the country’s land and waters by illegal gold mining, which they consider closely linked to official corruption.
In and of themselves, these are not revolutions. Far from it. But the goal that underpins them is revolutionary: the normalization of citizens holding their governments accountable. This is something that the nominal democratization of many African countries through the regular holding of elections has clearly failed to achieve.
Africa’s newly invigorated civil societies have many heroes, even if they still labor in relative obscurity or isolation, often at considerable risk to themselves. One of the most interesting figures in recent months has been Bright Simons, a Ghanaian gadfly whose social media presence on X and other platforms is something like a running public-policy seminar on transparency and corruption. From one day to the next, his investigations and disquisitions can cover everything from real-estate speculation in shopping malls, to routine corruption in government procurement and contracting, to the murky ins and outs of oil leases signed with foreign exploration companies.
Simons is under no illusion about how much more needs to be done to ensure that the Ghanaian state delivers better results for its people. He would also be the first to say that this cannot be the task of a few intellectuals such as himself, however well-intended. Instead, to be successful, these movements must include much of the middle class and broader citizenry.
Still, Simons sees hope in the spread of transparency and anti-corruption efforts around the continent, and he believes that Africa’s fragile civil societies can advance faster toward these goals by building much stronger bridges between disparate citizens’ movements.
“Individual [African] countries are very weak, and finding critical mass for anything in them is difficult. So how do you acquire critical mass in such a context? You unite civil society efforts across the continent,” Simons said. “If there was, you know, 20 people [on transparency and corruption] in Ghana, 20 people in each of the other countries, you’d have a thousand people all of a sudden, which is more like a critical mass, and that’s what we need for quality governance and accountability to become culture … If we can’t find it in individual countries, we need to build it in a pan-African way.”
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