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July 28, 2005
Ohmae on Africa
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m currently reading The Next Global Stage, a book I highly recommend.
One of author Kenichi Ohmae’s themes is how nation-states inhibit economic development. The most severe illustration, he notes, is in Africa:
. . . it is in Africa that the nation-state concept has had the most disastrous consequences for people and economics. In 1885, the European powers met in Berlin to carve up the continent among them. The entities they created are still with us. They were not making states at all in Berlin; they were establishing colonies or protectorates. When a growing tide of African resentment forced the rulers of Western Europe to concede independence and political self-government to their African holdings, it was agreed that the border demarcations drawn up in Berlin should serve as the borders of the new crop of nation-states. This was to avoid border conflicts and the incipient risk of conflicts. Nation-states were born that made no sense. They had territories comprising few natural resources, a food production sector dominated by subsistence cultivation and chronically vulnerable to natural calamities. Not surprisingly, many of these states have remained at the bottom of the world’s GDP league.
Apart from the economic myopia of these policies, ethnic and religious borders were ignored. Many of the new states contained festering internal conflicts. In the case of Nigeria and the Congo, these have spilled over into bloody civil wars with predictable impacts on resources. Other areas that had the potential for growth, such as the Niger Delta region, were divided between two separate nation-states (Nigeria and Cameroon), neither of which was interested in cooperation—both wanted only total control.
I had a conversation with economist Don Ratajczak last week in which he made the very same point.
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