So how to get good government? Restoring or securing it conjures up the dreaded specter of colonialism. After all, for all its other failings, colonialism provided the preconditions of economic development: peace and security. The development debate today is essentially about how such preconditions of poverty reduction and economic growth can be achieved without colonialism.
The most interesting contemporary contribution is by the Oxford economist Paul Collier. He argues that many African states have fallen into one or several development traps that are extremely difficult to escape. Moreover, once a country is mired in one of them, it is easy to fall into the next. Being poor makes you prone to conflict, and being in conflict makes you poor. So what hope is there for a poor country torn by civil war?
Citing the British mission to Sierra Leone, Collier argues for military intervention, when feasible, to secure peace. He supports international involvement to enforce post-conflict peace. But ongoing international assistance should be limited to providing voluntary good-governance templates.
Frameworks for how governments should make public spending transparent or how foreign resource-extracting companies should report their profits would make yardstick comparisons easier for local political activists, as well as providing a source of legitimacy for the government. The much-discussed Kimberly Process is a pilot project. Diamond companies volunteer not to buy from conflict areas in an attempt to prevent diamonds from funding warlords. This would be good for business, as affluent Western customers are now put off by the thought of buying blood-soaked jewelry.
Regional integration has featured prominently only in the last 50 years in Europe, but it has already resulted in a host of political and economic benefits to Europeans. Considerable evidence indicates that integration could be beneficial for Africa as well, given a framework suitable for African conditions.
This is a project worth supporting. Other efforts worthy of attention include formalizing the huge informal economy in states such as Ghana. Typically, these are projects that employ international expertise under domestically issued mandates.
It is a sign of the poverty of development economics that proposals such as these are regarded as cutting-edge. However, as long as there is a roadblock every 14km between Lagos and Abidjan — two of West Africa’s leading cities — progress on the ground will be slow.
With refugees spilling over borders, pirates hijacking ships and terrorists finding shelter, it is clear that although Africa’s solutions are its own, its problems are not. The rest of the world can no longer afford Africa’s poverty. But the evidence of 50 years of failed efforts is that it hasn’t a clue what to do about it.
Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University and a board member of the Moscow School of Political Studies.
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