Howard W. French
The topic of my column last week, the first in an occasional series of a Q&As with interesting thinkers, was ostensibly the rapidly changing nature of cities in Africa. But an important subtext of the piece, present throughout the conversation, was African performance or, perhaps better stated, underperformance on a range of issues.
My interlocutor last week, George Kankou Denkey, noted, for example, that Africa, a continent that is presently urbanizing on a scale never experienced anywhere before, generally lacks urban planners; even its universities seem unengaged with the topic. Elsewhere, he pointed out that although one of the largest megalopolises in the world is fast taking shape in the densely populated coastal region of West Africa from Lagos to Abidjan, there are almost no true highways covering the 500-mile distance between them, and no rail of any kind to facilitate east-west travel and commerce across borders.
As a former longtime resident of this region, what I remember even more about my time there was a seemingly far humbler detail, but nonetheless one that is lacking in so many cities on the African continent: the old-fashioned sidewalk. Almost everywhere one looks in Africa, cities are sprawling, but the pedestrian—never mind the cyclist, the current obsession of city planners elsewhere in the world—is a rank afterthought.
There are many other ways to take the measure of African underperformance, but for me, one that speaks to human development, as opposed to physical infrastructure, stands out: literacy rates. Sixty-five percent of adults on the continent were able to read and write in 2019, according to data from the World Bank. It must be said, parenthetically, that without exception, African states inherited from their European colonial rulers extremely low literacy rates when they gained independence, beginning in the late 1950s. The French left Chad, to take one example, with three high schools for a population of 3.5 million in 1960.
Progress on literacy has been steady, especially since the late 1980s, but it is still largely inadequate on the continent, to say nothing of progress on eliminating gender disparities in reading ability. The same is true of other measures of educational attainment, from completing primary schooling—only 56 percent in 2018—to university enrollment, which according to one study stands slightly above 10 percent for Africa overall.
To be sure, thinking about Africa in the aggregate has sharp limitations in terms of usefulness. I don’t think it amounts to too much of a speculative leap, however, to conclude that much of the continent is underinvested in education. Africa will require much more rapid progress on measures of educational attainment than has been the case even in the recent past in order to take advantage of the continent’s so-called demographic dividend. Africa’s population is by far the youngest, on average, of any continent in the world, meaning that 60 percent of the world’s population of people under 30—those of prime working age—will consist of Africans by 2040. Without access to education, though, they will struggle to make this demographic dividend pay off. Much the same is true, by the way, about the need for significantly more investment in things like public health, housing and access to electricity and clean drinking water, to take four areas of great and rapidly growing need. How Africa will address these gaps looms as one of the great questions facing humanity in this century.
African underperformance looks much less like an outlier when one widens the lens to reconsider how well other, supposedly more successful parts of the world are performing.
As daunting as Africa’s challenges may seem, this is not, however, a column solely concerned with the continent’s infirmities. It is, instead, an appeal for much greater humility and an urgent sense of context for inhabitants of other parts of the world, especially citizens in rich countries, who may feel the reflex to condescend when it comes to Africa.
African underperformance, if we can agree to call it that, looks much less like an outlier when one widens the lens, as so seldom happens, to reconsider how well other, supposedly more successful parts of the world are performing. Rarely has there been a better time to do this. What follows in no way relieves Africa’s problems and is not meant to explain them away. It may, however, help us better understand how we, as a species, are doing, and perhaps also help people think about the utility of aligning positive goals for the entire planet.
To begin with, we have the United States, which as everyone knows, has just completed its chaotic exit from a long war in Afghanistan, the latest of many dubious, post-World War II armed conflicts the U.S. has engaged in. To take Afghanistan alone, this has meant the squandering of all or much of $2 trillion, depending on whether any of the gains associated with the American-led “intervention”—such as educational participation and attainment, particularly for girls—survive government by the Taliban.
There is no space here to put the extent of the American failure in Afghanistan under a microscope, but $2 trillion is a lot of money by any standard, and represents resources that could have been spent in the furtherance of any number of important human needs. Throughout the Cold War, American and Soviet military spending—and spending on weapons of mass destruction, in particular—constituted a significant portion of global economic output. We are all too accustomed to associating technology with progress and success, but this grotesque squandering of human talent and resources in the pursuit of military superiority must also be seen as a particularly grave type of underperformance, or worse, human failing.
Combatting climate change is one of many obvious endeavors on which some of these squandered resources could have been better spent, but there are others, including partnering with Africa to place the continent on a more promising growth footing and fighting diseases that adversely affect large numbers of people.
In this light, it does not seem like a stretch at all to say that the U.S., therefore, has been underperforming—indeed badly underperforming, when judged by the bang for the buck of its military-led approach to engaging with the rest of the world. This becomes even clearer when one considers America’s many, serious domestic problems, from gaping inequality, persistent poverty and widespread homelessness, to failing infrastructure.
How well do others measure up? Europe, like the United States, has been a woeful laggard in helping marshal a much faster and more equitable global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, some might cavil that looking after less fortunate others is not the default responsibility of people in the rich world. The ultimate lesson of this pandemic, as with climate change, however, may turn out to be that there are no true havens, or at least not for very long. Mutating viruses, like rising seas and calamitous new patterns of rainfall and storm fronts, will eventually come for all of us. So, here again is a grave instance of underperformance. Related to it is the persistent European illusion that Africa and Europe have separate fates, which they do not. If life becomes unviable or insufficiently rewarding across enough of Africa, the people of the affected regions will inevitably make their way to Europe, like it or not. In this sense, once again, Europe is badly underperforming.
What of other parts of the world? It would be easy to expound on Russian underperformance, given that the country that boasts the largest territory in the world has a modest-sized and stagnating population and yet is relatively closed to outsiders. Despite relatively high education levels, Russia has only three global industries: hydrocarbons, nuclear energy and weapons. Japan and South Korea are rich by most any standard and yet in many ways sit remote and aloof from the rest of the world, especially when it comes to immigration.
India, meanwhile, has long been touted as the world’s largest democracy and long dreamed of by Western diplomats and strategists as a quasi-ally in their steadily intensifying competition with China. But 22 percent of India’s people live in poverty, according to World Bank data, and the Indian middle class has shrunk substantially during the ongoing pandemic.
Finally, we come to China. Its growth can seem nearly miraculous, but it has come at high cost to the environment and human rights. And as much as Beijing would like to insist that no country has the right to weigh in on another’s internal affairs, neither of these are merely domestic considerations.
Even as China works hard to rein in its carbon emissions and lower domestic pollution, for example, Chinese companies continue to market coal-fired power plants to much of the world with government approval. Other Chinese companies, meanwhile, market internet technology “solutions” that enable governments to strictly police their citizens and limit speech, although Western companies are no strangers to this trade. China’s biggest underperformance, though, has nothing to do with business. Rather, it involves the failure of the government of the world’s largest country, and perhaps soon its largest economy, to articulate anything like a universal vision of human, or citizen’s rights.
This is a topic ceded almost entirely to the West, whose record is both deeply flawed and inconsistent. Human rights are too important to the future of the globe to be essentially left to the whims of Americans and Europeans. In other words, as long as China maintains its present vision, which systematically privileges the rights of states over the rights of their citizens, people everywhere will suffer from the lack of real competition on this front.
Africa’s underperformance invites easy judgment because many of the problems that the continent struggles with have already been overcome by other parts of the world. This not only feeds a false sense of superiority, but also serves to obscure the many ways that the ostensibly more successful countries and regions are also failing. The reality is that underperformance is our common lot, and in a world where widely shared problems are expanding, we would all do well to think more clearly and with greater urgency about the interlocking ways that we are failing each other.
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