Terror and Civil Conflict

Too many of Africa’s nation-states, both north and south of the Sahara, remain convulsed by combatants, infiltrated by insurgents, and damaged deeply either by the self-inflicted wounds of civil conflict or attacked from within by Islamists supported from without and loyal to externally propagated ideologies. In their founding years, independent northern and southern Africa harbored conflicts that tore new nations apart. In contemporary times some of those civil wars linger, joined as they have been since the dawning of the new century by newly spawned fundamentalist revolutionaries and by reactionaries who regard constituted authority and modern political instrumentalities as illegitimate, even haram—“forbidden.” Although there are fewer civil conflict deaths per year than there were in the 1980s and 1990s, there are many more episodes of terror, and fatalities, than there were in those times. And the seemingly intractable nature of some of the conflicts and many of the campaigns against terror give the impression that sections of Africa—Egypt and the Sinai; Algeria, Libya, and the Sahel; the Horn of Africa and Kenya; Nigeria and its northeastern neighbors; and the Democratic Republic of Congo—are today immured in warfare that will not easily end.

The China Factor

Solving Africa’s central concerns of the mid-twenty-first century—how to grow economically as its population surges and how to create more and more jobs for its burgeoning labor force—relies on China. Likewise, enabling Africa to improve its human security and human welfare in most of its component nations depends on China. Third, strengthening Africa’s infrastructural architecture depends mostly on China. Without steady domestic Chinese economic growth and the behemoth’s consequent continued need for primary resources derived from Africa, however, prospects for many of the latter continent’s nation-states are, at best, problematic. Chinese demand drives African prosperity, raises world prices for primary products, and has made it possible for a number of the polities of Africa to accumulate wealth, to uplift their peoples, and to begin to play larger roles on the world’s stage. In this decade, and later, Africa and China are bound together synergistically in ways that cannot readily be replaced by trade, aid, or attention from the United States, India, Russia, Brazil, or Europe.

Things Come Together

Africans are achieving greatness, or are at least poised to do so in this century. But to ensure such a positive outcome, Africans will have to tame the demographic tidal wave that threatens to bring vast numbers of young people into nearly all of their countries. In order to meet this challenge, schooling opportunities will have to expand and strengthen at the secondary and tertiary levels; technically skilled persons will need to become more numerous; and much more emphasis than now will have to be placed on capacity building for rapid economic growth. As people numbers surge, so crises will occur if employment possibilities expand too slowly, and without overcoming today’s sclerotic production of jobs. With intensifying urbanization, rural upheavals and massive in-migration, and crushing pressures within the planet’s largest cities, Africa’s coming together will depend on successfully meeting these and many other tough, but surmountable, challenges.

The Varieties of African Leadership

The political leaders of Africa come in all sizes, shapes, and persuasions. There are liberal democratic heads of state and heads of government, presidents and prime ministers; elected democratic leaders who become wily autocrats; strong authoritarians who brook no opposition and respect few freedoms; military men ruling because their followers are well-armed; kleptocrats who govern so that they can steal from the state and its citizens; a few who profess strong support for the public interest; and many who serve clan, family, and narrow conceptions of national “interest.” There are few women. Ideology plays little part in the very different styles and mechanisms of governance that these political leaders display. But nearly all of them are transactional; hardly anyone today is transformational in the manner of several of Africa’s founding fathers, such as Nelson Mandela.

Africa The Diverse

Africa is becoming the second most populous continent and several of Africa’s countries the most populous on the planet, after India and China. This surge of people will explode Africa’s cities, cause a massive youth bulge, and demand that African countries attract investors, create jobs, and cope with the social consequences of a median age under thirty. Meanwhile, Islam will spread and so will Pentecostal Christian sects. Inter-religious, inter-ethnic, and anomic conflicts will arise amid the spread of climate change effects such as drought, floods, and rising coastal waters. Africans will need to be resilient in the face of natural as well as demographic challenges.

Technology Advances Africa

Africa’s technological revolution is well underway, is transformative for human and economic development and greatly influences the conduct of politics. Where Africans were once relatively uninformed about the alternatives available to them in the spheres of political participation, economic path dependency, and social progress, now the glories of the World Wide Web, Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and straightforward SMS have brought the globe’s myriad opportunities and experiences to their urban and village dwellings. Amazon, Microsoft, and Huawei are all rolling out major data centers (cloud computing hubs) in South Africa and East Africa. The emergence of Africa’s middle class is facilitated by this new technologically enabled knowledge. Even remote villagers are able to feel a part of something all-encompassing. Technology has expanded horizons, enlarged existing vistas, and provided a solid foundation for further innovative embraces of the global village in the decades ahead—when there will be many more young Africans to build upon such existing edifices. Things no longer fall apart.

Corruption Retards Progress

Corruption is an insidious cancer of national bodies politic. Corrupt practices harshly cut across classes and castes, cripple institutions, disturb communities, and infect the very structure of people’s lives. Corruption destroys nations and saps their moral fiber. Moreover, corruption is invasive and unforgiving. It degrades governance, distorts and criminalizes national priorities, and privileges skimming natural resource wealth, patrimonial theft, and personal and family gains over concern for the commonweal. In Africa, corruption is rife, with half to two-thirds of all African countries deeply compromised in this manner. Only three or four countries are non-corrupt. Beating back corruption and thus delivering economic development, improved governance, and a sustainable belief in the overarching national enterprise are goals available to any of Africa’s ruling regimes when they renounce kleptocratic and rent-seeking ambitions

Africa’s Vanishing Animals

Africa is losing its animals. Many of the iconic fauna that are indelibly associated with Africa, and that attract so many local citizens and foreign tourists alike, no longer spread limitlessly across the vast savannahs of the mid-continent. Nor are many of the larger mammals of the unbroken forest often visible. Habitat loss, climate change, the pressure of humans searching for new pastures and agricultural fields, and this century’s massive escalation of illegal poaching have all decimated the herds of elephants, the pods of rhinoceros, the prides of lion, and even the towers of giraffe that once browsed and foraged without much human interference. Even the lowly and secretive pangolin is being hunted ceaselessly to satisfy Asian demand.

African Economies and Their Challenges

Population numbers throughout most of Africa will continue to increase severely in most parts of Africa for the next thirty years. Unless women in sub-Saharan Africa suddenly cease having more than two and sometimes as many as seven children, the gross labor force, unskilled and skilled, in almost every country will continue to grow despite existing, alarming, formal unemployment rates of 40% or more. To meet the minimum income needs of their citizens, to create a more robust consumer society, to grow the tax base on which governments fund their provisions of services and welfare, and to attract more and more external investment, sub-Saharan nation-states hence need to create jobs—the smarter, the more enduring, and the more capable of contributing a beneficial multiplying boost the better. New jobs are the key to sub-Saharan Africa’s future—to its increased prosperity, to its fuller integration into world trading systems, and to winning its several internal battles against fundamentalist insurgents and other supposed revolutionaries.

Health and Wealth

Africa’s current 1 billion or so residents are healthier than they have ever been thanks to medical science, special attention in several key countries to chronic disease remediation, and the efforts of several American philanthropic enterprises. Life expectancies are up and morbidity is mostly down, allowing Africans to work more productively, enjoy more leisure, and exert middle class pressures on their respective national governments. Daily life has become a little less brutish in a Hobbesian manner than it once was. There is more space and time now for the cultivation of progress socially, economically, and politically. But children still die in great number from pneumonia, tuberculosis is rife, HIV/AIDS persists, and malaria has not yet been eradicated. So Africans are still at risk.