Business
Will North African revolution spread to rest of continent?
The world has seen a dramatic decline in global poverty over the past decade. The total number of poor people around the world fell to less than 900 million in 2010 from more than 1.3 billion in 2005; most of them in China. Although the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the nation’s economic progress, it also recognises that growth has been far from evenly distributed. The latest Chinese development plan specifically confronts inequality and attempts to mitigate it. African leaders have yet to catch on, and consequently inequality has been left to fester.
Across the world, as growth has spread and accelerated, so has inequality. It is clear that growth is often not enough to guarantee stable, cohesive societies. Rather than create a rising tide that lifts all boats, it can actually increase inequality in a society. And inequality, unlike poverty, is far more easily politicised, ethnicized and militarized, especially in African countries with heterogeneous populations and weak judicial and regulatory institutions.
A country can experience economic growth and get all the hardware of governance right (education, health, infrastructure, sanitation) while getting all the software wrong (basic freedoms, leadership, mitigating inequalities, addressing the youths’ demands). Eventually the system crashes. We’ve seen it in North Africa and the Middle East. Kenya’s post-election meltdown in 2007-2008 came on the heels of a five-year economic boom. It was also a period of particularly parochial and backward politics, which laid the groundwork for violent polarisation along ethnic lines.
Improved macroeconomic management, higher commodity prices and a generally positive economic trajectory since the late 1990s could spare sub-Saharan Africa the spasms erupting in the Arab world.
The supreme irony of the Arab Spring is that the leaders of Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and other countries have, in their alarmed reaction to events in North Africa, helped bring the revolution south, at least as an idea. In Kenya, youth groups agitating against soaring commodity prices include “revolution” in their names and slogans.
For now, their demonstrations have been easily dispersed. But if their complaints merge with long-festering ethnic and regional grievances, that could lead to a far more volatile uprising.
The idea of revolution has arrived on social media and the geriatric presidents and prime ministers are nervous.
By John Githongo
Githongo is chief executive of Inuka Kenya Trust and chairman of the Africa Institute for Governing With Integrity. He was Kenya’s permanent secretary for governance and ethics from 2003 to 2005.
