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NY Times, Oct. 18 2016
‘Africa Rising’? ‘Africa Reeling’ May Be More Fitting Now
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — For decades Africa was eager for a new narrative, and
in recent years it got a snappy one.
The Economist published a cover story titled “Africa Rising.” A Texas
business school professor published a book called “Africa Rising.” And
in 2011, The Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles about economic
growth on the continent, and guess what that series was called?
“Africa Rising.”
The rise seemed obvious: You could simply stroll around Nairobi, Kenya’s
capital, or many other African capitals, and behold new shopping malls,
new hotels, new solar-powered streetlights, sometimes even new Domino’s
pizzerias, all buoyed by what appeared to be high economic growth rates
sweeping the continent.
For so long Africa had been associated with despair and doom, and now
the quality of life for many Africans was improving. Hundreds of
thousands of Rwandans were getting clean water for the first time. In
Kenya, enrollment in public universities more than doubled from 2007 to
2012. In many countries, life expectancy was increasing, infant
mortality decreasing.
But in recent months, as turmoil has spread across the continent, and
the red-hot economic growth has cooled, this optimistic narrative has
taken a hit. Some analysts are now questioning how profound the growth
actually was.
“Nothing has changed on the governance front, nothing has changed
structurally,” said Grieve Chelwa, a Zambian economist who is a
postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
“Africa rising was really good for some crackpot dictators,” he added.
“But in some ways, it was a myth.”
No place exposes the cracks in the “Africa rising” narrative better than
Ethiopia, which had been one of the fastest risers.
Ethiopia is now in flames. Hundreds have been killed during protests
that have convulsed the country.
The government, whose stranglehold on the country is so complete that
not a single opposition politician sits in the 547-seat Parliament,
recently took the drastic step of imposing a state of emergency.
Many of the Ethiopia’s new engines of growth — sugar factories, textile
mills, foreign-owned flower farms — now lie in ashes, burned down in an
antigovernment rage.
At the same time, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, an arm of
the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, just listed Ethiopia as the
fastest growing economy on the continent from 2010 to 2015. The
Democratic Republic of Congo, which is also rapidly sliding toward chaos
— again, was second.
Political turmoil on the one hand, rosy economic prospects on the other.
Can both be true?
“It comes down to how sustained the turmoil is,” said Acha Leke, a
senior partner at McKinsey.
In Ethiopia’s case, the unrest appears to be just beginning. Videos show
demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians chanting
antigovernment slogans, giving a sense of the depth of discontent. The
protesters hail from Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, a population
of more than 60 million, leading many analysts to predict that this is
no passing fad.
The inauguration this month of a cross-border rail line from Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, to the nation of Djibouti. Credit Tiksa Negeri/Reuters
South Africa, the continent’s most developed nation, has been racked by
waves of unrest. Troops with assault rifles stomp around college
campuses, trying to quell student protests. The country’s currency, the
rand, hovers near a record low.
South Sudan, which topped The Economist’s list in 2013 of the world’s
fastest-growing economies, is now a killing field, the site of one of
Africa’s worst civil wars.
Mr. Leke, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, says that political
turbulence can drag down any economy, and that the growth of recent
years has not been shared among the people nearly as widely as it could
have been. According to a recent report by the African Development Bank,
unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa remains close to 50 percent and is a
“threat to social cohesion.”
As Mr. Leke said, “You can’t eat growth.”
Still, he says, there have been fundamental — and positive — changes on
the continent, like increases in disposable income for many African
consumers.
Mr. Chelwa, the Zambian economist, has a different view. The
fundamentals of African economies have not changed nearly as much as the
“Africa rising” narrative implied, he said, with Africa still relying
too heavily on the export of raw materials and not enough on industry.
“In Zambia, we import pencils,” he said.
He also points out t
