Why African dictators and democrats failed where Asian dictators and democrats succeeded

The world has gone through colossal economic revolutions in the past 70 years. Asian Tigers such as South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore etc have recovered from the dreadful experience of Japanese and British colonialism to become significant actors in the world economy. 

More recently, the People’s Republic of China has risen from the Rape of Nanking and the convulsions of the Communist revolution in the 1950s and the 1960s, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, to become the second largest economy in the world.

These phenomenal transformations have lifted hundreds of millions of Asian citizens from poverty and have elevated their countries to positions of economic and political prominence in world affairs. Even Latin America has made significant strides, but Africa’s inertia appears incurable, despite the horrors of colonialism and apartheid.

Single-party states or determined dictators have guided the Asian Tigers out of the doldrums of poverty and underdevelopment. In contrast, post-colonial African states continue to stumble under dictatorial regimes or democratic governments.

With very few exceptions, such as Botswana, Mauritius, and Rwanda, neither dictatorial or democratic regimes have advanced the economy to lift Africans out of misery in any significant numbers, or earn the respect rather than the pity of others. 

Among the most humiliating symptoms of the African condition are the regular China-Africa, France-Africa, Russia-Africa, US-Africa, and most recently Turkey-Africa meetings where African heads of states flock to the capitals of the aforementioned states. The aim of these gatherings has been to line up African leaders behind the particularistic political and economic agendas of the hosts, but rarely has there been a unified African agenda in such assemblies. 

The puzzle

The critical question is why Asian authoritarian and more recent democratic rulers have championed economic advances in their societies while our dictators or democrats have failed to reverse African underdevelopment?  

There is not a single thesis that can explain our leaders’ propensity to reach dead ends, but two scenarios are suggestive: political leadership that does not understand the vital role of the state in the reinvention of the national enterprise, and the preponderance of self-indulgent elites who have failed to understand their national mission.   

First, most African leaders had no idea about the nature and structure of the colonial capitalist economy they inherited and why such a system was incapable of dynamic and expansive growth. The excitement of freedom was mesmerising to Africans; however, the leaders did not appreciate the need for qualitative restructuring of the inherited economy in order to open greater opportunities for the people to eradicate poverty and advance accumulation.

As a result, African leaders mechanically expanded the inherited system where possible, such as in education or the production of raw materials for exports, but little else.

Some liberation leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, had progressive alternative ideas. Nkrumah’s presidency was cut short, while Nyerere dominated Tanzania for two-and-a-half decades. The latter’s attempt to establish African socialism failed in the economic sphere.

In contrast, others reified a neocolonial order while tinkering on the margins. Kenya’s founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, and those around him became the political and economic kingpins in the country and created a society where inequality and political tribalism became endemic. Whatever might have been the failure of Milton Obote in Uganda after independence, Idi Amin turned this ecological paradise into a horrid purgatory.

Elsewhere in southern, central, west and north Africa, little economic transformation transpired. Even countries with substantial natural resource endowment, such as Nigeria, DRC, Sudan and Algeria, did not advance as their regimes failed to use these advantages to transition from raw-material based economies to industrialising countries.

Second, the greatest debilitating mindset was the desire of many political leaders to act and live as Big Men without the rule of law. Many of the early post-independence leaders drifted from being liberators to dictators and election riggers.

Such a political order opened the floodgates for military coups. Outside powers engineered some of these coups in order to maintain old colonial relations with Africa, as was the case in former Zaire, Ghana, CAR, etc.

The combination of old colonial powers’ desire to maintain their hold on African resources and the first African authoritarian wave deepened sectarian political wedges between communities. In many instances, the authoritarian wave reinvented tyranny and political tribalism as a strategy to hold on to power and preempt the consolidation of the civic nationalist agenda of the liberation days.

Authoritarian rule, political tribalism, lack of economic transformation, and feeble growth compelled most African leaders in the late 1980s to seek relief from international financial organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These organisations imposed a neoliberal economic strategy on African states.

But neoliberal strategies in the form of structural adjustment programmes failed to change Africa’s fortunes. Inequality and economic injustices worsened.

Consequently, the combination of mass civil discontent and pressure from Western donors compelled African dictators to accept electoral politics in the 1990s. However, those elections, even in places where there was a change of government, have yet to lead to a transformative economic outcome.

Examples of these include Ivory Coast, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, Nigeria, Ghana, DRC, Tunisia, Senegal, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Nearly two-and-a-half decades after the shift to electoral politics, the democratic and the remaining authoritarian regimes have yet to make a dent in Africa’s impoverishment.

Why is African leadership lacking?

The great American sociologist, Barrington Moore Jnr, noted in the preface of his magisterial book, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship, that a bourgeois impulse transformed Britain from feudalism to democratic capitalism.

More recently, Australian political scientist Elizabeth Thurbon pointed out in her recent book, Developmental Mindset, the clear and deep commitment of the South Korean leadership to the strategic role of the state in the economy. Such devotion enabled the country to safely navigate the threat of neoliberalism during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.

What appears to be lacking among postcolonial African democratic and authoritarian leaders are the “impulse” and the “developmental mindset” that drove earlier and recent transformations in other parts of the world.

In our continent, many of those who came to power immediately after liberation had little understanding of the historical role of the state in economic transformation.

The second generation of leaders, mostly military dictators, were even less informed about the dynamics of development, while the third generation of African leaders have been schooled in neoliberalism and think of the state as a mere custodian (night watchman or rent haven for a parasitic elite), rather than the strategic guide of economic transformation.

Africa’s future demands a new class of leaders in the public and private sectors with the impulse and developmental mindset before our continent is permanently encased in the cul-de-sac of human history.

• ⁠This article was republished from the Daily Maverick website with the author’s permission. The original can the found here.