The Economist, 15 janvier, article payant
Closing arguments : To catch up economically, Africa must think big
But it would require a new surge of ambition
Extraits :
(…) The demographic divergence could be a boon. African emigrants will be needed to do jobs in the rest of the world. They will send home remittances, which are already worth almost double the continent’s total fdi. African economies will inevitably grow as their populations swell, adding to global demand. If sub-Saharan Africa can repeat Asia’s transformation, it “will become the next major engine of global growth”, argues a research note by Bridgewater. Today, it says, the region is home to 15% of global population, accounts for just 3% of global output and provides 5% of growth. If sub-Saharan Africa were to raise its productivity growth from around 1% per year to 4% (close to India’s recent rate), by 2050 its share of world output would be 10%—and it would account for a fifth of global growth.
The risk, however, is that Africa combines high population growth with low or stagnant productivity growth—and that the Africa gap only widens. If current trends continue unchecked, this is what will happen. The Institute for Security Studies (iss), a South African think-tank, has published scenarios for the future of the continent. These “African Futures” incorporate data on a variety of factors including demography, productivity, financial flows, infrastructure and measures of human capital. Its “current path” makes for sober reading. By 2043, the year its forecasts end, median African gdp per person, adjusted for purchasing-power parity (ppp), will be about a quarter of the rest of the world’s, essentially what it is today. And Africa will still have 400m people in extreme poverty, the vast majority of the world’s destitute.
This special report has tried to explain the reasons for this disappointing path. These include the scarce use of technology in agriculture, the rise of unproductive, low-end services and the absence of a manufacturing revolution. Productivity is further hampered by small firms and small markets. Africa has perhaps just half of the investment it needs to close the gap. “Something drastic is needed to change this rather dismal forecast,” write the authors from the iss.
Yet there is a better way forward. The iss also forecasts a “combined scenario”, where it projects what would happen if African countries did most things right. These include making a quicker demographic transition, expanding education, increasing investment in infrastructure, boosting agricultural productivity and manufacturing, encouraging greater financial flows and implementing the African Continental Free Trade Area (afcfta). Under its most optimistic scenario the iss reckons the Africa gap would begin to close over the next 20 years. By 2043, gdp per person in ppp terms would be about a third of that in the rest of the world. Just 8% of Africans would live in poverty, rather than the 17% projected on the current path.
Viewed from 2025 that continent-wide tide seems unlikely to rise. More probably the gaps already visible between African countries will widen. Last year it had nine of the 20 fastest growing economies in the world, including Ethiopia, Rwanda and Ivory Coast. “Africa is becoming a split story,” argues Charlie Robertson, author of “The Time-Travelling Economist”. The countries that have seen fertility rates fall below three, as happened in Mauritius in 1979 and Morocco in 1999, have enjoyed demographic tailwinds, he argues, as families have been able to save more money, increasing the overall pool of investment and lowering interest rates. Kenya should pass this threshold in 2029, Mr Robertson points out.
“You need to discriminate between the different countries on the continent,” cautions Amit Jain, who spent many years in Africa and is now at the Centre for African Studies at ntu Singapore. He points to how Morocco is developing a commercial-agriculture sector and suggests that east African countries are doing better than their peers in west Africa in educating their children and expanding access to electricity. The likes of Kenya are well located to integrate into Asian firms’ supply chains, he adds. “Countries in the region might not hit $60,000 per capita but $15,000 is possible and would be a heck of an achievement.” (…)
Everyone with a stake in Africa must think big. Countries need development bargains that allow for the emergence of large firms and productive industries. Africa as a whole must make the afcfta a reality, giving it more bargaining power at international forums. Foreign countries need to face up to the reality that their current approach to development financing is nowhere near sufficient for Africa to transform its economies and respond to climate change.
Perhaps most important, Africa needs to recover a sense of ambition. In too many African countries the default approach is what Ken Opalo of Georgetown University calls “low-ambition/muddling-through developmentalism”, a “destination anywhere” approach which follows paths defined from outside without a clear sense of the paramount goal. There is an urgent need for African policymakers and business leaders to set their own far-reaching goals for economic transformation and rally their people behind them.
The stakes are high. Africa’s demographic boom has led to the idea that the 21st is the African century. It could yet be. But a quarter of the way into it, Africa had better hurry up. ■
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/to-catch-up-economically-africa-must-think-big
The Jerusalem Post, 14 janvier, article payant
Sudan: The real genocide
Whether you call it an obsession or antisemitism, social convenience or just ignorance, the international silence on the Arab genocide in Sudan adds up to the same thing: an egregious moral outrage.
The writer is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Full article here: https://kinzler.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/14-anvier.pdf
Link: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-837219
The Wall Street Journal, 12 janvier, article payant
Africa Has Entered a New Era of War
A surge in conflicts has gone largely unnoticed amid higher-profile wars in Ukraine and the Middle East
Extraits :
An unprecedented explosion of conflicts has carved a trail of death and destruction across the breadth of Africa—from Mali near the continent’s western edge all the way to Somalia on its eastern Horn.
Older wars, such as the Islamist uprisings in northern Nigeria and Somalia and the militia warfare in eastern Congo, have intensified dramatically. New power contests between militarized elites in Ethiopia and Sudan are convulsing two of Africa’s largest and most populous nations. The countries of the western Sahel are now the heart of global jihadism, where regional offshoots of al Qaeda and Islamic State are battling both each other and a group of wobbly military governments.
This corridor of conflict stretches across approximately 4,000 miles and encompasses about 10% of the total land mass of sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has doubled in just three years and today is about 10 times the size of the U.K., according to an analysis by political risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft. In its wake lies incalculable human suffering—mass displacement, atrocities against civilians and extreme hunger—on a continent that is already by far the poorest on the planet.
Yet, these extraordinary geopolitical shifts in sub-Saharan Africa have been overshadowed by higher-profile conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. That has led to less attention from global policymakers—especially in the West—grossly underfunded humanitarian-aid programs and fundamental questions over the futures of hundreds of millions of people.
Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946, according to data collected by Uppsala University in Sweden and analyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. (…)
There is no single driver for the emergence and escalation of so many different conflicts across a huge and diverse geography. But, experts say, many of the most-affected states were left vulnerable after failing to settle on a strong mode of governance after independence—whether as functioning democracies or established authoritarian systems—or were destabilized during moments of once-in-a-generation political transitions. (…)
One inflection point was the year 2011, when, amid the pro-democracy uprisings of the Arab Spring, militaries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervened in Libya to support rebel forces fighting the country’s dictator Moammar Gadhafi. With Gadhafi’s death and Libya’s descent into chaos, thousands of armed men moved south into Mali, reigniting a Tuareg rebellion against the government in Bamako that coincided with the global expansion of extremist ideologies promoted by al Qaeda and Islamic State.
“With the Sahel, it’s clearly a problem of Libya’s collapse and the highway of arms and ideology that that creates,” says Ken Opalo, a Kenyan academic and associate professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “So you get weak states, lots of guns and young men leaving Libya and ideologies coming all the way from Pakistan. Then everything is on fire.” (…)
From Mali, the jihadist insurgency spread across porous borders into Burkina Faso and Niger, where new military juntas frustrated with the failure to defeat the militants have kicked out French and other Western troops. It now threatens coastal West African states such as Benin and Ghana. (…)
Counting the dead in African conflicts is notoriously difficult. (…)
For Ethiopia, for instance, experts at the University of Ghent in Belgium have estimated that the two-year war between the government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front caused the deaths of between 162,000 and 378,000 civilians. Acled, whose analysts scour local news sources and contacts for real-time conflict data, counted fewer than 20,000 war fatalities from the fighting itself.
What is clear from the data is that civilians are much more likely to be deliberately targeted in conflicts in Africa than in many wars elsewhere. (…)
The intensifying conflicts have displaced a record number of Africans—most of them inside their own countries. The continent is now home to nearly half of the world’s internally displaced people, some 32.5 million at the end of 2023. That figure has tripled in just 15 years. (…)
Africa’s current conflicts haven’t prompted the outpouring of sympathy in the West that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the outrage ignited by Israel’s war in Gaza. There has been no equivalent to the Live Aid concerts motivated by the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, the protest marches over the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s or even the #BringBackOurGirls campaign linked to the abduction of 276 schoolgirls from the Nigerian town of Chibok 10 years ago.
That lack of popular attention has translated into a dearth of political action to resolve wars in Africa or alleviate the suffering. (…)
The U.S. remains the leading funder of humanitarian aid in Africa despite the distractions in Europe and the Middle East. Washington contributed 47% to the U.N.’s Sudan emergency response plan in 2024 and nearly 70% of that for Congo.
Other traditionally large donors, including Germany and the U.K., have already cut their aid budgets amid the crisis in Ukraine and economic problems at home. And many experts expect substantial changes to U.S. foreign and aid policy under the incoming Trump administration, especially toward U.N. agencies—and a further waning of American influence.
The U.S. and the U.N. “were able to hold a line about what would be considered beyond acceptable for some cases,” says Acled’s Raleigh. “With the Trump administration coming in, that line will disappear. And so the self-interested conflicts that we’re seeing and the people creating violence across the continent will not be checked.”
The Economist, 12 janvier, article payant
Free markets : The capitalist revolution Africa needs
The world’s poorest continent should embrace its least fashionable idea
Extraits :
In the coming years Africa will become more important than at any time in the modern era. Over the next decade its share of the world’s population is expected to reach 21%, up from 13% in 2000, 9% in 1950 and 11% in 1800. As the rest of the world ages, Africa will become a crucial source of labour: more than half the young people entering the global workforce in 2030 will be African.
This is a great opportunity for the poorest continent. But if its 54 countries are to seize it, they will have to do something exceptional: break with their own past and with the dismal statist orthodoxy that now grips much of the world. Africa’s leaders will have to embrace business, growth and free markets. They will need to unleash a capitalist revolution.
If you follow Africa from afar you will be aware of some of its troubles, such as the devastating civil war in Sudan; and some of its bright spots, such as the global hunger for Afrobeats—streams on Spotify rose by 34% in 2024. Less easy to make out is the shocking economic reality documented in our special report this week and which we call the “Africa gap”.
In the past decade, as America, Europe and Asia have been transformed by technology and politics, Africa has, largely unnoticed, slipped further behind. Income per person has fallen from a third of that in the rest of the world in 2000 to a quarter. Output per head may be no higher in 2026 than it was in 2015. Two giants, Nigeria and South Africa, have done atrociously. Only a few countries, such as Ivory Coast and Rwanda, have bucked the trend. (…)
What should Africa’s leaders do? A starting-point is to ditch decades of bad ideas. These range from mimicking the worst of Chinese state capitalism, whose shortcomings are on full display, to defeatism over the future of manufacturing in the age of automation, to copying and pasting proposals by World Bank technocrats. The earnest advice of American billionaires on micro-policies, from deploying mosquito nets to designing solar panels, is welcome but no substitute for creating the conditions that would allow African businesses to thrive and expand. There is a dangerous strand of development thinking that suggests growth cannot alleviate poverty or does not matter at all, so long as there are efforts to curb disease, feed children and mitigate extreme weather. In fact in almost all circumstances faster growth is the best way to cut poverty and ensure that countries have the resources to deal with climate change.
So African leaders should get serious about growth. They should embrace the self-confident spirit of modernisation seen in East Asia in the 20th century, and today in India and elsewhere. A few African countries such as Botswana, Ethiopia and Mauritius have at different times struck what Stefan Dercon, a scholar, calls “development bargains”: a tacit pact among the elite that politics is about increasing the size of the economy, not just a fight to divvy up who gets what. More of those elite deals are needed.
At the same time governments should build a political consensus in favour of growth. The good news is that powerful constituencies are keen on economic dynamism. A new generation of Africans, born several decades after independence, care a lot more about their careers than they do about colonialism.
Narrowing the Africa gap calls for new social attitudes towards business, similar to those that unleashed growth in China and India. Instead of fetishising government jobs or small enterprises, Africans could do with more risk-taking tycoons. Individual countries need much more infrastructure, from ports to power, more free-wheeling competition and vastly better schools.
Another essential task is to integrate African markets so that firms can achieve greater economies of scale and attain an absolute size big enough to attract global investors. That means advancing plans for visa-free travel areas, integrating capital markets, plugging together data networks and finally realising the dream of a pan-African free-trade area.
The consequences for Africa of simply carrying on as usual would be dire. If the Africa gap gets bigger, Africans will make up nearly all of the world’s very poor, including the most vulnerable to climate change. That would be a moral disaster. It would also, through migration flows and political volatility, threaten the stability of the rest of the world.
But there is no reason to catastrophise or give up hope. If other continents can prosper, so can Africa. It is time its leaders discovered a sense of ambition and optimism. Africa does not require saving. It needs less paternalism, complacency and corruption—and more capitalism. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/01/09/the-capitalist-revolution-africa-needs
L’Express, 29 novembre, libre accès
Sahel : au Tchad comme au Sénégal, l’armée française n’est plus la bienvenue
Afrique. Le Tchad a annoncé jeudi soir rompre ses accords de défense avec Paris. Même décision au Sénégal, où le président a informé de la fermeture à venir des bases françaises.
The Guardian, 29 novembre, libre accès
Swedish PM says Baltic sea now ‘high risk’ after suspected cable sabotage
Regional leaders meet after undersea telecoms cables severed, while Chinese ship remains at anchor nearby
The Guardian, 24 décembre, libre accès
UAE becomes Africa’s biggest investor amid rights concerns
Activists alarmed at emirati companies’ poor record on labour rights and fear projects may fail to address environmental concerns
Extraits:
The United Arab Emirates has become the largest backer of new business projects in Africa, raising hopes of a rush of much-needed money for green energy, but also concerns that the investments could compromise the rights of workers and environmental protections.
Between 2019 and 2023, Emirati companies announced $110bn (£88bn) of projects, $72bn of them in renewable energy, according to FT Locations, a data company owned by the Financial Times.
The pledges were more than double the value of those made by companies from the UK, France or China, which pulled back from big-ticket infrastructure investment projects in Africa after many failed to deliver expected returns. African leaders were also disappointed with climate finance pledges by western governments. At the Cop29 climate conference, for example, wealthy countries promised $300bn annually, whereas developing countries had demanded $1.3 tn.
Although African leaders have welcomed the increased interest from the Emiratis, some activists and analysts have expressed fears that the UAE’s poor record on labour rights for migrant workers, continued support for hydrocarbons and failure to address environmental issues will characterise its investments in Africa.
“African countries are in dire need of this money [for] their own energy transitions. And they plug huge holes, the Emirati investors, that the west failed to,” said Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank. “But at the same time they come in with less attention to labour rights, to environmental standards.” (…)
“African countries need all the financing and trade they can get,” said Ken Opalo, an associate professor at Georgetown University. “However, there is also the opportunity for the attention to breed criminality – like we are seeing in the gold sector.”