Opinion
Analyzing the co-relation of the rise of Africa and the continents’ increasing embrace of democracy
Africa is rising not only on the growth charts of economists.
The continent that was a byword for poverty, chaos and bloodshed only a few decades ago, providing a media feast of famines and wars, is slowly but steadily notching up gains on the democracy scorecard too.
Last month’s peaceful Kenyan presidential election – and the Supreme Court process that confirmed Uhuru Kenyatta’s narrow win – confounded pundits’ predictions that East Africa’s biggest economy would tumble back into “inter-tribal violence”.
The Kenyan election, following a line of hotly-contested but broadly smooth elections last year in Senegal, Sierra Leone and Ghana, has bolstered what many see as a spreading embrace of multi-party democracy in Africa.
Combined with better economic management by many governments and a fast-growing population of young workers and consumers, this improving political maturity will underpin expected gross domestic product (GDP) growth for Sub-Saharan Africa of 5 percent or more this year.
“If you peel back ‘Africa Rising’, it is not just growth rates,” said John Stremlau, Vice President for Peace Programs at the Atlanta-based Carter Center and a veteran observer of African elections, including the most recent Kenyan one.
In a December outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa, Fitch Ratings called the vote in Kenya, seen as a political and economic anchor in East Africa, an “important inflection point”.
