I: When you don’t know where you are going, anywhere along whatever path will do
This post is more of a pamphlet than my normal commentary here, and was triggered by a number of conversations I had following this year’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in Beijing.
The summit’s theme was “Joining Hands to Advance Modernization and Build a High-Level China-Africa Community with a Shared Future.” According to the English translation of his speech, President Xi Jinping mentioned the word “modernization” more than 30 times. The description of the theme and Xi’s speech at the summit were both very official Chinese. And as I argue below, they also reflected China’s important role as a model development partner for African states. China, in many ways, exemplifies what it takes to achieve structural change towards national development.
Yet while most African leaders (and the general public) like to talk about emulating China’s economic rise (along with those of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea), there’s still widespread misconception about how China and other East Asian countries did it (most people like to credit autocracy). In this post I’ll focus on one important (and terribly underrated) feature of Chinese economic success that remains absent in most African countries: the deliberate quest for modernizing structural change with clear policy goals in mind.
Before proceeding further it’s worth clarifying the intention of this post. I am not interested in praising China’s autocratic regime or its foreign policy. My aim is to evaluate China’s approach to development partnership, especially its emphasis on modernization, and contrast it against the “mainstream” development thinking in African countries. Which is to say that this post’s bigger goal is to challenge African thinkers/policymakers to embrace and invest more in the idea of African Modernity as a core driver of efforts to improve human welfare in the region. Despite my use of China as a model (which tends to trigger all sorts of histrionics in certain people), a useful way of reading this post is through the lens of how ideas shape development policymaking and the lessons African countries ought to learn from China’s rise.
The thesis of this post is simple and straightforward: Chinese development cooperation would be a lot more impactful if it were met by African elites committed to modernizing structural change and a willingness to learn the right lessons from China’s economic rise. This is because, as a general matter, Chinese policymakers get what it takes to achieve national development and have shown a willingness to partner with African states towards the same end. Consequently, Chinese development cooperation — in both rhetoric and practice — is amenable to an African formulation of what ought to be the end state of development policymaking: well-ordered modern African economies and societies. Unfortunately, Africa’s ruling elites, most intellectuals, and their traditional development partners remain interested not in structural change but in what I can only call “low-ambition/muddling-through developmentalism.”
I’ll be the first to point out that this bold vision of development isn’t always pursued by Beijing in its dealings with African governments. Like all foreign actors on the Continent China only cares about its interests. However, the important thing is that development cooperation with China puts the option of transformational change on the table in much more concrete ways than all other development partners out there. The problem, as I see it, is that the majority of African leaders and policymakers have mental blocks against the explicit pursuit of modernizing structural change.
Why does it matter that leaders and policymakers have an ambitious end state to guide their development agendas?
For the simple reason that the ends we seek often shape our choices of means. Which is to say that if you don’t know where you are going anywhere will do and you won’t be particularly be picky about what vehicle you use to get there. Unfortunately, in too many African countries destination anywhere is the predominant mode of statecraft. The approach invariably features low-ambition common denominator goals set and haphazardly implemented without a clear vision of an (aspirational) end state — think the MDGs and SDGs. Yes, as I have argued before, few things signal policymakers’ lack of seriousness (and perverse policy extraversion) like the use of MDGs/SDGs as national development targets:
While there are exceptions to the rule, a good heuristic for knowing whether policymakers in low-income countries lack ambition is the frequency with which they mention the MDGs/SDGs. I choose this example advisedly. On the one hand, compacts like MDGs/SDGs outline easily verifiable policy goals that focus minds and, in some cases, have produced real improvements in human welfare — especially in sectors like health, education, and water access. On the other hand, the goals are an example of the lowest common denominator approach to global policy entrepreneurship that is at once overly ambitious but also lacking in specificity; and which can easily fool unimaginative bean counters into missing the forest for the trees.
Unencumbered by facts about how the world actually works or the rights and ambitions of their citizens, the entire cast of characters on the caravan to anywhere keeps going through the motions of “doing development” — by mostly mitigating the negative consequences of underdevelopment — while remaining cynically resigned to the fact that little will actually change.
Perhaps a mud-walled concrete example might help drive home my point. It’s admittedly an extreme example (most schools in Kenya don’t look like the one below), but which I hope adds value to this discussion.
I am currently writing a book on the political economy of education policy in Tanzania since independence. This means that I spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest (policy) research on education in African countries and elsewhere.
One thing that’s hard to miss in these works is the dearth of strategic system-level thinking among the Continent’s policymakers in the education sector. The way one signals smarts in the field is by excessively worrying about narrowly-defined learning outcomes (for good reason), while pretending to be ignorant about system-level facts. It’s also the surest way to attract money for projects and improve one’s status in the field. This partially explains why African governments recently embarked on curriculum reforms that are mostly doing more harm than good. Importantly, governments perceive these poorly-designed reforms as ends in themselves, and not as means towards the modernization of education sectors or structural change in their overall quality of human capital.
Doing reforms without seriously thinking about system-level drivers of poor performance or reforms’ actual impacts is the de facto end state of policymaking in the sector. The ends (meandering around) have come to define the the means (haphazard policymaking).
The ensuing absurdities are legion. The same governments that let students study in structures like the one above (with all that it implies about policy seriousness) — and especially when they can afford better infrastructure in schools — also wax lyrical about their commitment to improving learning outcomes and meeting SDG targets. Forget that they are the ones that destroyed public education systems by exploding class sizes and pupil/teacher ratios in the early 2000s; remain indifferent to the decades-long (and still ongoing) destruction of higher education; have no interest in improving labor markets to increase the returns to education; and are willing to adopt all manner of dubious reforms merely to attract cash that can be pilfered by cronies.
The underlying incentive structure has created a bizarre world where otherwise smart people pretend not to know/understand the major system-level problems that make schools like Maramar not conducive for learning. Instead, lots of resources get thrown at interventions designed to marginally move the needle. In other words, doing reforms is the end state. Meanwhile, the minority of researchers and policymakers who focus on system-level factors and are motivated to modernize their education sectors are viewed as heretics who have strayed from the one approved path to anywhere.
How we got here and what can potentially be done to remedy the situation is the subject of the next section.
II: Exorcising the ghosts of past policy failures
Let’s be blunt. There’s a huge deficit of reality-based ideas for policymaking in most African states. This, I contend, is due to both massive under-investments in policy-relevant knowledge production and learned intellectual solipsism by the African Left (who are, in my view, the most promising force for positive change in the region). Consequently, the discourse on policy tends to oscillate between mindless economic orthodoxy (which dominates but is no match for the region’s economic problems) and gratuitously rejectionist ideological/moralizing critiques aimed at delegitimizing serious modern economic management and the very idea of development. We shouldn’t be surprised that few good ideas have emerged from this battle of ideas.
To compound matters, Africa’s reactionary governing elites almost uniformly harbor vulgar conceptions of development that are nothing but the simple mimicry of others (let’s call them “cargo cults”); and therefore fundamentally anti-development.
The resulting ideational fracture has prevented the region from arriving at a broad-based consensus over what ought to be the end state of development policy; as well as the ability to sustain internally-coherent pro-development coalitions. Of course reasonable people can debate about specific means, but it helps to have a general agreement over common aspirational ends. Consequently, in most cases policymaking takes the form of meandering towards destination anywhere. And since the crass cargo cultists are in charge, it usually doesn’t take much for anyone promising silver bullets to get a hearing and shape policy touching tens of millions across the region.
How did we get here? As I see it, two factors explain the lack of a robust shared commitment to developmentalist structural change (or dare I say an unapologetic pursuit of African modernity).
First, too many people learned the wrong lessons from the policy failures of the early postcolonial period. The two important lessons from the first three decades of independence (1960-1990) ought to have been: 1) ideological straightjackets are a waste of everyone’s time, the color of the cat does not matter as long it catches mice; and 2) it’s really hard to execute structural socio-economic change when you are a brand new state with weak administrative-bureaucratic structures (therefore, good faith mistakes were bound to happen, and the important thing was to learn from them — most importantly the need to build strong states!)
Second, modernization theory and related ideas that motivated the thinking around “big push” development flopped. The idea that you could magically transform low-income countries into industrialized democracies simply by mimicking features of high-income countries made no sense either in theory or practice. Here, too, the wrong lessons were learned. Instead of putting the postcolonial failures in context (see above), African policymakers allowed themselves to be convinced that they simply couldn’t hack it and therefore needed to dutifully sit back as they got taken on faddist rides to anywhere by global development institutions and their supporting epistemic communities. Bizarrely, the explicit quest for structural change — which necessarily implies a self-aware pursuit of socio-economic and political modernity — came to be viewed as misguided and essentially anti-modern (i.e., unscientific). Instead, a variant of high scientism founded on feigned ignorance of what needs to be done to achieve structural change took pride of place. Again, bizarre stuff.
Coincidentally, the institutional turn in development (from around the early 1990s) provided a convenient cover for ignoring the fundamental problem of wandering to anywhere. The problem of under-development — as cartoonishly rendered by the region’s most influential public intellectuals and policymakers — came to be viewed as the result poor governance (basically, corruption and autocracy). Thus a plague of reformitis spread throughout the region. All African countries had to do was to become perfectly governed and corruption free before they could start growing and converting growth into development. Such a belief makes very little sense, of course. Good governance is great. But 1) good governance is best viewed as an outcome of political/economic development and 2) good governance is utterly useless when not deployed towards useful societal ends.
How can we get out of this trap? I don’t claim to know the full answer to this question. However, I think that it is imperative to generate broad-based consensus on the normatively preferred end state of development policymaking. Such a concensus should unapologetically embrace the idea of African Modernity characterized by deliberate investments in the capacity for socio-economic and political transformation (note that to become modern isn’t synonymous with Sinicization, Westernization, etc). Self-aware pursuit of African Modernity would then be the basis of cultivating a regional movement for modernizing structural change (and making informed big bets) in different sectors — from agriculture to manufacturing, health to engineering, the arts to architecture, etc. This is the only way of ensuring that the perennially desiccated skeletons of African aspirations take on flesh in the near future.
Of course reasonable people should be able to debate specifics, especially on how to get to the desired end state (albeit without unreasonable imposition of ideological straitjackets). But it serves no one to keep filibustering the important work of improving human welfare throughout the Continent by engaging in intellectual navel-gazing and/or promoting the low-ambition developmentalism of the cargo cultists. Thandika Mkandawire’s words remain as important as ever: Africans have always wanted and deserve structural economic change.
It may […] be true that internal development and external impositions may have led to undesirable ‘development models’. In this case, one can talk of ‘imposed’ or ‘failed’ models, but the objective of development in the broad sense of structural change, equity and growth [is] popular and internally anchored.
III: Learning the right lessons from China’s economic rise
Which brings us back to China. It would be ideal if African leaders and thinkers took Xi’s modernization narrative seriously. China is a relatively harmless “teaching case” for both leading sides of policy debates in the region. The reactionary incumbents should find its “it doesn’t matter where you start” and “state capacity over regime type” lessons comforting. For both ideological and historical reasons, China shouldn’t be as toxic for the African Left as other development partners. This isn’t to say that the region should take instructions from Beijing. Rather, it’s a call to center a reality-based pursuit of structural change as the core goal of economic policymaking — while being open to learning from and seriously cooperating with China.
To this end, China offers important lessons on what it actually takes to achieve socio-economic modernization and structural change. There are no short cuts or magical off-the-shelf solutions. It matters to have elites who understand their unique roles on the grand stage of history. You don’t have to be perfect to get on the ladder of sustained rapid economic growth and development. All you need is stability and a good enough system of government. Learning by doing is the best way to go about doing new things; and it is always a good idea to change in your own pace and on your own terms. Outsiders (donors, IFIs, multinationals, policy experts, etc), can help, but they can never be the main drivers of your national development. You can borrow liberally from others, but success crucially depends on the capacity to adapt ideas to your own context. Don’t let foreigners’ ignorance, biases, and deliberate sabotage limit your ambitions. Avoid fads.
Furthermore, it’s silly to remain trapped in ideological straitjackets — the optimal balance of states and markets is highly (spatially by and temporarily) contextual. Strong states and predictable modern policymaking, as opposed to erratic autocracy, are the core ingredients of successful developmentalism. The achievement of both growth and development requires the entrenchment of basic freedoms and local responsive government (even under national autocracy) as well as popular mobilization for development — some may call this the creation of a project-state. Ultimately, you can only develop by investing in people.
The combination of its ideational orientation, recent rise from under-development, a willingness to finance investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges, railways, ports, airports, power plants and grids, etc), as well opportunities for trade and finance puts China well above African states’ other development partners. This is why despite recent declines in credit flows (see below), China is still the region’s most important economic partner.
With that in mind, African countries should assiduously pursue modernizing structural change as a core pillar of their relationships with Beijing. Rather than remain the cheap geopolitical dates that they are, they should take President Xi to task regarding his promise of partnerships structured around modernization of their economies. Four particular areas immediately come to mind:
[1] Deeper ideational exchanges among policymakers, think tanks, research institutes, and high-level officials: As I keep arguing, ideas matter. Unfortunately, a lot of ignorance still defines the contours of Africa-China relations. For example, too many African elites attribute China’s success to autocracy; while too many Chinese elites maintain an extractive mindset when it comes to the region. This can be changed through deeper people-to-people and institutional interactions, as well as deliberate investments in knowledge accumulation (especially on the African side) — especially with regard to modernization of government and policymaking. Again, learning the right lessons about China’s rise is an imperative. Here, Beijing’s seriousness about high-level diplomatic engagements (see below) can help. But cooperation must extend beyond just Confucian Institutes and ad hoc trainings. If there’s one thing that African states ought to learn from China, it’s the importance of building a capable bureaucratic-administrative state.
[2] Investments in agricultural production and exports: The FOCAC commitment to modernize African agriculture remains terribly under-utilized by both sides. Towards this goal, China committed to $20b worth of total agricultural trade by 2030. However, there hasn’t been a commitment to an actual import figure from Beijing. While the trends are in the right direction (see below), current volumes are still far from the target — this year the total agricultural exports to China will be well over $3b. The encouraging fact is that this is one one of the fastest-growing export sectors in the relationship (projected to be over 7% in 2024).
Here, African states must be hard-nosed in their negotiations with Beijing. Bargaining collectively, they must not allow China’s stalling tactics (such as vague phytosanitary standards) to get in the way of agricultural exports. They should also make good use of the “green lanes” to simplify and expedite agricultural exports, tariff reductions, as well as opportunities to link African agricultural SMEs to Chinese markets. By now it should be obvious to all that modernizing the agricultural sector and getting productivity off the floor will have massive developmental impacts. Which is to say that they should lean on Beijing for concessional finance for agricultural infrastructure, market access, as well as research and extension services.
[3] Industrial cooperation and trade: Trade between Africa and China is set to hit $300b next year. However, since about 2012 African countries have faced a worsening trade deficit vis-a-vis China (see below). In my view, these trends reflect both China’s export capacity and African states’ failure to negotiate more favorable trade deals.
The obvious way to go about addressing this challenge would be to modernize and integrate African manufacturing into Chinese supply chains. This should start with, but certainly not be limited to, value addition in the mining and agricultural sectors. African governments should also insist on local content/value addition for ever more of their manufacturing imports from China. The other low-hanging fruit would be services (especially tourism). More than 130m Chinese tourists will travel the world each year. There is no reason why African markets shouldn’t aggressively fight for and capture a sizable share of this figure.
[4] Investment and financing: Finally, despite the declines in financial flows in recent years, China can still play a critical role in financing large projects across Africa. The $30b in financing commitments isn’t something to sneer at. Here, too, it would be ideal to see African governments think critically about how to use Chinese financing guarantees to de-risk large projects and crowd in private sector investments.
IV: Conclusion
Ideas and the narratives that we tell ourselves about the ultimate goals of policymaking matter. Which is why in this post I have argued for African states to openly and unapologetically embrace the pursuit of African Modernity (and implied structural change) as the core motivation for their development policymaking. I further argued that, to that end, the region would be best served to learn the right lessons from China’s economic rise, as well as leverage Chinese economic cooperation to pursue modernizing national development.
In order to be able to achieve all that, there is an urgent need to elevate the quality of policy discourse throughout the region. The current situation of mostly rejectionist critiques facing off against feckless mimicry/orthodoxy is not productive. It is time to adopt a reality-based understanding of the region’s economic, political, and social challenges and accept that the pursuit of modernizing structural change in different sectors is a noble of endeavor.
To reiterate, the ends we week will always define the means we choose. And right now the lack of consensus on the ends means that there is very little serious thought throughout the region on investing in the means needed to achieve them. For example, there are still fundamental intellectual disagreements in the region about basic things like whether African states should be strengthened! My point here is that such disagreements are not merely academic, but actually impact what people view as legitimate objectives of policymaking. I contend that agreeing on ends (modernizing structural change) would alleviate a non-trivial amount of the crisis of confidence and legitimacy gaps that are common among African policymakers.
