The African continent needs to become self-reliant

COMMENT

African governments’ response to the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic has been largely impressive, entailing differing degrees of lockdowns. The nature and quality of enforcement has varied from country to country and will determine how each country’s governance and economy evolve after the pandemic ends. 

Balancing the effectiveness of the lockdowns, protecting rights and sustaining livelihoods, always a delicate undertaking for African governments, will be a challenge they must successfully address, while simultaneously reimagining a post virus socioeconomic and political dispensation for their countries. 

Can this crisis be turned into an opportunity? That depends. Covid-19 has exposed the fragility of African governance systems vis-à-vis protecting citizens. Understanding and strategising with this reality will help turn this crisis into an opportunity to achieve genuinely sustainable African development.

Virtually all countries have total or partial lockdown orders, which are being very strictly enforced, as they should. These lockdowns necessarily affect rights and livelihoods everywhere, but worse so in least developed countries, of which Africa has the largest number. Indeed, the whole point of having constitutional provisions for invoking emergency powers is to allow governments the extraordinary right to suspend rights as needed.

Abuses

Anyone would have expected that most countries would have interfered with rights reluctantly, sparingly and minimally. Unfortunately, it would appear that what has been done reluctantly, is the acceptance of constitutionalism, human rights and rule of law, going by the speedy resurgence of abusive tendencies, the welcome exhortations that lockdowns were not meant to punish but to protect people, notwithstanding. 

Many security forces appear to have missed that message, going by the widespread, though largely unauthenticated, reports of overzealous enforcement by the police and soldiers in many countries. Some governments have been taken to court by rights groups and courts have upheld the people’s rights. In some countries people have been killed in spite of the promise that the security forces would be enforcing the lockdown with a listening ear, to help, to protect and to keep us all safe.   

Livelihoods

With up to 80% of the economy being in the informal sector, where families live hand-to-mouth — what they make each day goes directly into the food for that day — it is a big challenge to support the livelihoods of the majority of the population. And because business in the sector is highly dependent on high human traffic and mobility, even those who venture to go out do not make much because their customers may not be as daring. 

An income maintenance support programme from the state would be needed to sustain the livelihoods of these individuals and families, but few exist in the region. As many people said on the streets, either they die of hunger by complying with the lockdown or they die of Covid-19.  Mitigating measures are clearly needed.

In the United States, because of the lack of a comprehensive social security system, the federal government had to create systems to support both business and individuals. Yet in most of Europe, all governments had to do was augment the resources in the system that already existed with more resources. Some African countries, among them South Africa and Zimbabwe, announced cash payments to vulnerable people, although these are at vastly different levels both substantively and operationally, depending on the prior robustness of the social security system in the country.

The challenges notwithstanding, the measures appear to be working. South African reports suggest that the curve is flattening, before the pandemic has overwhelmed the healthcare system, which was the main objective. While there is a difference between levels of lockdown and strictness of implementation as well as pre-existing country conditions, there is no reason to not assume that comparatively similar trends are obtaining in the other countries. 

The real question is what lessons would have been learnt from the pandemic and after the lockdowns. Let us assume for the moment that governments are fully conversant with the debate and the science around when to open up society and economies, in terms of testing, tracing, isolation and treatment imperatives to defeat the virus and to minimise the casualty numbers, leading to a responsible, fact-based, science-driven opening up.

After the lockdown and the pandemic

Much of the focus of governments now is on when and how to restore the normal functionality of society after lockdown. Several think-tanks are modelling different pathways to economic recovery, based on the assumption that the recovery goal is for Africa to go back to the status quo ante. We will not interrogate the models, because the assumption is fundamentally flawed. To operate on that assumption is to ignore or negate all that the pandemic has revealed about the fragility embedded in that status quo ante. The response beyond current containment and mitigation measures must be strategic and far-sighted, designed to sow the seeds of new development strategies consistent with long-desired but relegated African aspirations.

Whatever economic models end up being adopted must be chosen and assessed on their ability to enhance the achievement of three fundamental development goals in Africa — a comprehensive social safety net, access to an advanced health system for all and progressive self-reliance in African development.

Social safety nets

The Covid-19 threat has exposed the vulnerability of African citizens like nothing else could have.  While emphasis has been inordinately placed on economic participation as the guarantee of sustainable livelihoods, the need for real social safety nets has only been paid lip service to. Where they exist, they are based on donor programmes and usually focus on specific benefits in a time-bound, sometimes project-linked mitigation. In any case they cover about 10% of the population. 

What Covid 19 has revealed is the extreme inadequacy of these social safety nets. While workers in the US and most of the developing countries have been fretting about total job and income losses caused by the lockdowns, in much of Europe the issue has been more about the adequacy of the state-supported income-maintenance programmes than of fretting about falling below the safety net.

Debates about social security in Africa is decades old, to no avail. The primary reason for this, more than availability of resources, has been the ambivalence of key development partners on the correct model, leading to indecision on the part of their client governments. Indeed, the term social safety nets itself was introduced to discourage talk of social security, given its connotation of welfare statism, which sailed against prevailing ideology. And yet the Covid-19 pandemic has brought the need into sharp relief.

Health policy and investment

We now know that if countries had the capacity to quickly develop tests, trace and contain, and had sufficient hospital capacity to safely treat those sickened by the virus, economies would not have needed to be closed and the now certain recession would have been avoided. The cost of a robust health care system would now have to be assessed from that perspective. Africans will have to build healthcare sectors that are self-sufficient from comprehensive care capacity to manufacturing of needed equipment to testing and management of pandemics. Even the elite have now realised the folly of depending on their reliance on receiving their medical care abroad, when this deadly pandemic cut off their access.

Self-reliance

The degree to which countries turned inwards to take care of themselves should be a wake-up call to developing countries — global solidarity goes only so far. The ferocious grab for products needed for the fight against Covid-19, were eye-opening, with wealthy countries outbidding the poor countries. In the US, not only did states compete with each other on the global market, but the federal government outbid their own states and other rich countries, leaving very little likelihood that even better off African countries such as South Africa and Nigeria, let alone the least developed countries, could compete.  The need for progressive self-reliance has never been more sharply highlighted.

Africa’s recovery from the pandemic is a rare opportunity to refocus on human development as the ultimate goals for all development, not its by-product. Development agencies and governments have been saying this for a long time, it is now past time to do it.

Joseph LM Mugore is an international development consultant who advises governments and their development partners. He writes in his personal capacity