How reflexive catastrophizing inhibits policy imagination in African states

On the need for a grounded understanding of contemporary challenges and progress in African states

This is the fourth post on the impacts of aid cuts on African states; and the urgent need to grow out of aid dependency in the region. The first three posts are available here, here, and here. See also the excellent posts from Gyude Moore and Grieve Chelwa on the same topic.

This post should be read as a pep talk for these difficult times.

I: On the coming anarchy in West Africa that wasn’t

Whenever I want to gain some perspective on African states’ contemporary challenges and prospects, I read Robert Kaplan’s wildly alarmist doomsday piece about West Africa published in February, 1994:

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real “strategic” danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism.

West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization.

The region was supposedly doomed to a catastrophic Malthusian future:

West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal trading post, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility and disease, is again becoming as Graham Greene once observed, “blank” and “unexplored.” However, whereas Greene’s vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freedown of his celebrated novel, The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa’s future.

No reasonable person can deny that there’s a kernel of truth to Kaplan’s doomsday predictions. However, no one can honestly look at West Africa today (or back then) and argue that Kaplan’s predictions had merit.

Our advantage, of course, is that we have the benefit of hindsight. Kaplan simply had no idea that he was writing in the nadir of (West) Africa’s decline during the disastrous long decade that begun in the early 1980s and lasted through the mid 1990s.

That said, it is hard to justify the levels of catastrophizing on display above. This was basically if How to Write About Africa was a real essay. Even back then a facts-based analysis of the region would’ve quickly revealed the historical and therefore cyclical dimension of the core drivers of state fragility (and some collapse) and economic and political crises throughout the Continent in the 1980s through the early 1990s. A global negative commodity shock, debt distress, major policy failures, and the ensuing state retrenchment processes (including structural adjustment) in the 1980s couldn’t have come at a worse time. Most African countries were barely 20 years old. Many had a tough go. About a third of countries eventually saw conflict due to dwindling state capacity and inability to deter or defeat armed rebellions. A number of states simply collapsed. It’s hard to understand the onset and execution of the conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone — which shaped Kaplan’s doomsday analysis — without placing them in this context.

By the early 1990s scholars like Thandika Mkandawire had already been writing a lot on this subject. Furthermore, one would need to be intentionally obtuse or worse to even consider that bizarre phenomena like “General Butt Naked” would ever become the norm of any society, regardless of prevailing poverty levels. Especially not in Africa.

Likely influenced by what Ian Solomon once described as “the fraying [but obviously sticky] narrative of [African] failure”, Kaplan had no idea that some semblance of order would eventually return to West Africa; or that reasonably credible elections and presidential turnovers (including under losing incumbents) would visit the region. On the economic front, he had no way of seeing that beginning in the mid 1990s African economies would rebound and collectively avoid recession for 25 years straight (until the COVID pandemic).

Claims about Africa and Africans. Source: The Economist

It worth reiterating that Kaplan wasn’t alone in confusing the ill-timed cyclical crises of the 1980s-mid 1990s for the “natural” state of African states. The wider self-referential closed loop of mostly foreign “Africa Hands” in diplomacy, journalism, and academia also missed the mark. Recall that The Economist’s infamous cover came about five years after the inflection point. In typical fashion, the article behind the cover was anchored not on actual Continental trends but on the conflict in Sierra Leone (0.6% of Africa’s population), with passing mentions of Rwanda, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe. In other words, it was hardly a continental survey. Few people remember that the second lead article in the same May 11, 2000 issue of The Economist had the following paragraph documenting the beginning of the following two decades of Continental growth (not mentioned is that average growth in Africa in 1999 was about 4%):

Can Africa change? Yes, it can. There are instances from all over the continent that, in the right circumstances, Africans can greatly improve their lives. Until the floods in March, Mozambique had been growing at 5% a year since its civil war ended, culminating in nearly 12% growth in 1997-98. Uganda too had growth rates of 7% in the 1990s. But real change needs something deeper than quick spurts of growth.

I bring up Kaplan and The Economist because the current moment presents some echoes of the 1990s. Protracted conflicts in central Africa, the wider Sahel, and the Horn at times give the impression that the centre can no longer hold and that things are falling apart again.

Meanwhile, the fabric of Pan-Africanism seems to be fraying with every emerging rift within the region’s economic communities (RECs) and other inter-governmental organizations. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger just left the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The tiff between Rwanda and the DRC over the former’s support for rebels in the latter is undermining comity within the East African Community (EAC). Conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia as well as Ethiopia’s slow-burning domestic conflicts threaten to scramble geopolitical stability in the wider Eastern Africa region. To make matters worse, the current multipolar moment fuels the centrifugal tendencies at national, REC, and continental levels as individual political/military formations and countries get pulled in different directions by major and middling global powers.

Then there are the ongoing aid cuts, which promise a painful adjustment period in the short to medium term. Decades of aid dependency across the Continent exposed critical sectors such as health, education, and water access to sudden shifts in aid allocations. For the most part, bureaucratic-administrative systems in many African states simply forgot how to deliver services in these sectors. The dwindling of donor funds will undoubtedly erode development gains achieved through aid. Improvements in maternal and infant mortality figures will stall or begin trending in the wrong direction. Kids will go unvaccinated and experience malnutrition (and stunting). Refugees, those facing drought/famine, and others in need of humanitarian assistance will sometimes not get the help they need. There is no way to sugarcoat any of this. People will die.

A superficial glance at the headlines would lead one to conclude that, as a region, Africa is simply Not Gonna Make It (NGMI). However, that would be a mistake. The NGMI attitude and narratives of catastrophe like the one above aren’t real talk — in fact, they often don’t match the facts on the ground. Therefore, we should view them for what they are: discourse styles that breed cynicism and limit policy imagination.

We should also be aware of their impacts on policy. Their dominance in people’s mental models of how Africa works means that instead of shooting for the stars, policymaking on the Continent almost exclusively focuses on limiting the downside. Notice that the ensuing irrational risk aversion feeds off and reinforces narratives of catastrophe. For example, you can’t modernize agriculture because what if people lose their “traditional” sources of resilience and end up exposed to a famine? What if governments take over management of critical health systems and let millions of people die due to corruption and negligence? What if curriculum reforms aren’t pushed on governments and public education collapses? Why build robust national grids that can support industries and other major firms when you can build “resilient” distributed micro grids in rural areas that do little beyond lighting? What if finance ministries and central banks are freed from undue influence from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and they end up destroying their countries’ macro stability? What if you strengthen the state (like in most other well-run places!) and its used not to provide essential public goods and services but to oppress citizens? What if?

When it comes to the Continent, one feels like there is always an excuse to preserve a patently intolerable status quo or concoct an intellectual justification for chasing random red herrings — both by domestic and foreign actors. If you strip away all the ideological and intellectual cladding, deep down this pro status quo bias combines cynical NGMI attitudes with internalized narratives of catastrophe to construct a facade that hides and therefore limits the Continent’s developmental potential. Since very few people in decision making roles believe that actual success is possible, the intellectually lazy habit of muddling through policy challenges without a clear vision or direction is the norm.

Even Kaplan would agree that two things can be true at once. While West African governments are not paragons of effective administration and service delivery, it is also true that the coming anarchy never materialized. To the contrary, the trends clearly point in the direction of punctuated progress. The Continent’s mortality transition is nearly complete, and fertility transition is finally picking up steam. Life expectancy is up. More kids attend school. State collapse is rare despite a number of insurgencies in the wider Sahel. Overall, states are better able to weather crises than they did in the dreadful long decade that begun in 1980. I will be the first to argue that we need to be a lot more ambitious and do a lot more yesterday. But it would be inaccurate to characterize the last 30 years as nothing but anarchy.

Trends in the leading cause of mortality across Africa between 2000-2019. Source: WHO.

I cannot emphasize this enough. We should care about narratives of catastrophe as applied to the Continent for the simple reason that the narratives we tell ourselves shape our perceptions of how the world works and therefore the feasible set of policy alternatives. Narratives beget stylized facts.

To illustrate this point, let’s consider the emerging narratives about how the global development community should respond to official aid cuts.

II: Who’s scared of ending aid dependency?

Do Africa’s ruling elites care enough to reallocate budgets towards life-saving interventions if all aid disappeared? Over the last fortnight I have received variations of this question as everyone scrambles to make sense of what’s going to happen in the wake of ongoing aid cuts by donors (U.S. being the biggest and most erratic of them all). And the more I have thought about it, the more it’s become clear that discourses around this question reinforce narratives of catastrophe and NGMI attitudes. It’s basically The Coming Anarchy lite. Instead of the current crisis forcing everyone to confront the real risks of aid dependency and therefore consider a future with diminished aid dependency, the general tendency has been to huddle around proverbial camp fires and share narratives of catastrophe in efforts to justify maintaining the status quo.

This is not to say that we should be blind to the facts about the coming impacts of aid cuts. The projections are truly horrifying. Rather, the point is that the correct response to the current crisis must involve serious efforts towards a substantial reduction in aid dependency. We must try to actualize the idea that the best form of aid-giving is one designed to succeed by eventually becoming unnecessary. Of course the rates of decrease in aid dependency will vary by country and sector, conditional on prevailing levels of state fiscal and bureaucratic-administrative capacities. However, the test for all aid-giving moving forward will be in the direction of movement. Efforts to restore the status quo ante must be rejected at all costs. It’s as simple as that.

I do not claim to have all the answers on how to end aid dependency or how to structure ongoing aid in order to avoid reinforcing dependency. What I can promise is an open-minded willingness to learn and try to move the needle with those interested. I also do not claim that the process of adjustment will be easy. There are no magic bullets waiting to be discovered.

That said, I reject the very common and intellectually bankrupt default to NGMI attitudes and narratives of catastrophe to justify inaction. The serious problems facing aid-dependent low-income counties during these uncertain times require sober consideration of the facts and a whole load of ambition. This will include studies to ascertain actual budget allocations that will be needed (the headline figures in the news don’t fully capture the problem in either direction); political economy analyses to help in structuring the onboarding of critical sectors into line ministries; careful attention to minimize the negative impacts of aid cuts; robust discussion of the misuses of foreign aid as a policy tool and to limit low-income countries’ policy autonomy; and data collection and analyses to keep track of how ending aid dependency is impacting outcomes. Again, doing all these things and more will be hard. In many cases success will be far from guaranteed.

However, those of us interested in a different and better future must not allow NGMI attitudes and narratives of catastrophe to be instrumentalized in silencing open debate about potential paths forward.

Returning to the question above, I don’t subscribe to the narrative that Africa’s elites are uniquely venal or that the region can’t produce leaders that care enough to do good by their people. All else equal, there are no good leaders, just properly incentivized individuals. African leaders are just as cross-pressured as their counterparts elsewhere — they care about popular support and want to win elections; they have good and bad policy preferences; they want to enrich themselves and their elite backers; and they are motivated by specific ideologies/beliefs about how the world works. With this perspective, it is easy to see that that type of African leaders that predominate today are products of history. For every Tsishekedi there was a Lumumba. For every Hichilema there was a Kaunda. Indeed, there’s even evidence of intra-personal temporal variation with the likes of Buhari and Museveni. While external factors are certainly not the only drivers of leadership quality in the region, it’s fair to say that for decades the international aid regime and other structures governing global economics and politics have partially contributed to the emergence of a very specific type of African leader that prioritizes personal enrichment and the outsourcing of ideology/beliefs and policy preferences to foreigners.

It follows that changes in the aid regime and global institutions will shift the set of incentives elites face across the Continent. One problem for those who subscribe to NGMI attitudes and narratives of catastrophe is that they reinforce the idea of permanent failure. Yet the only constant in — including in Africa — history is change.

Which is why we must not waste the current aid crisis. Africa’s ruling elites must be made to understand that modernizing developmentalism and structural economic change are in their interest. They also need intellectual and ideological support to unapologetically pursue these objectives. Gratuitous oppisitionism must be put to rest. This will require a healthy appreciation of the real constraints faced by Africa’s ruling elites; as well as an understanding that much-needed state-building and political development (including institutionalized electoralism) aren’t the same thing. There will be no leapfrogging of strong African states as the foundation for stable politics, economics, and regional cooperation.

III: Conclusion

In the coming weeks and months there will be countless conferences and roundtables on the future of international development after aid cuts. To be blunt, many will be dominated by NGMI attitudes and narratives of catastrophe. Few will try to incorporate the views, interests, and policy preferences of aid recipients. There will be a lot of performative posturing for attention (and funding) without any concrete actionable agendas. New experts on “transitioning out of aid” will be minted.

Yet going by the discourse on aid cuts so far, chances are very slim that the aid establishment is ready to take an informed gamble on a different path. Mental models are stuck in catastrophe-avoidance mode — it’s like listening to Toto’s “Africa” on loop while stuck in a winding supermarket line. There is very little room for actionable new ideas. Plus most people’s career incentives are off. Few people want to confront the reality that neither their good intentions nor their real career achievements (especially in health) are good enough. It’s as much a personal struggle as it is a structural problem.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We should exploit the current crisis and geopolitical moment to focus minds on the urgent need to end aid dependency. This means deliberately designing aid programs to strengthen local self-sufficiency (instead of setting laughably low localization targets). It means supporting broad-based growth and national development (especially in agriculture and value addition before export), instead of championing nanodevelopment approaches and flirting with anti-growth policies in agriculture and energy sectors. It means investing in intra-Africa trade and the development of continental supply chains. It means increasing governments’ fiscal capacities by abolishing unfair tax practices and trade mispricing by firms domiciled in donor countries and seriously tackling illicit financial flows — which at $88.6b are far in excess of total aid received — that rob aid recipients of much-needed capital. And, yes, it means respecting low-income countries’ policy autonomy.

If somehow we did all that, it would still just be the beginning. In the long run, the onus is on low-income countries’ politicians and policymakers to ensure that they fully own their policies and overall developmental goals. As Gyude Moore argues, no society has ever developed by outsourcing its developmental ambition to foreigners — especially foreigners, however generous, who are wedded to NGMI attitudes and narratives of catastrophe; and who cannot imagine a world with substantially reduced aid dependency.