Misleading Africa
Professor George B.N. Ayittey
Professor George B N Ayittey - Economist in Residence (American University, College of Arts and Sciences) To Western development experts, Africa remains a puzzle-box of failed develop-ment policy. It is blessed with immense natural wealth yet it seems inexorably mired in squalor, misery, deprivation and chaos. When the World Bank in 2008 adjusted its yardstick for extreme poverty from $1.00 to $1.25 a day, it found, in the words of one New York Times report on the change, that
[w]hile most of the developing world has managed to reduce poverty, the rate in Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, has not changed in nearly 25 years. . . . Half of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa were living below the poverty line in 2005, the same as in 1981. That means about 389 million lived under the poverty line in 2005, compared with 200 million in 1981.1
This is typical of the kind of language used to speak about Africa, and there are plenty more examples of it: In 2003, the United Nations Development Program warned that at the prevailing rates it would take sub-Saharan Africa another 144 years to reach some of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan repeated the mantra at the African Union Summit in Abuja last January, and was echoed by Gilbert Houngbo, the UN African Development director: “The [African] continent will fail to reach the goal of slashing poverty in half by 2015.” One could probably wallpaper every house in Nairobi with such statements.
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