How we got to Eatingdom, world of the corrupt

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From Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Ghana, to Nigeria, corruption is becoming a more vexed and contentious issue. In Kenya, the Gen Z Revolution has pinned it up as one of the key problems that must be solved yesterday.

In dictatorships, half-dictatorships, quarter-democracies, half-democracies, and liberal democracies in Africa, graft is rampant in all but a handful of countries.

How does one explain this, without naming thieves individually, or mentioning the word “greed”? As the clever folks might ask, what are the structural reasons?

There are many reasons, but we will focus on three; first failure, second democratic success; third social sophistication. Failure because since the late 1980s, following the failure of socialist experiments, and government-controlled economies, Africa has been doing liberalisation, tinkering with free market forces, and socialism lite in the form of “state capitalism” (in Ethiopia for example) but, after a decade or so or boom, it has all stalled.

In parts of Africa not too long ago, you needed to get a letter from a Permanent Secretary, minister, or President to buy foreign exchange (at a price fixed by the Minister of Finance), to buy a car from a dealer, or to buy a crate of beer

The government set the price of cotton, coffee, tea, rice, sugar, even potatoes. Only a state monopoly could buy your grain, coffee or tea – and pay you three years later if you were lucky. The African soil has been well fertilised by those who died of heartbreak waiting for a state monopoly to pay them for their produce. Apart from mboga, roast maize, and peanuts on the roadside, there were few things whose price was determined by the producer. Even school uniform prices were controlled by state bureaucrats. In a Central African country, the president designed the school uniforms.

Through this monopoly and price setting, the state stole from honest workers and distributed this surplus among its officials and politicians. However, the coffee marketing board, grain authority, or cotton buying agency, weren’t considered stealing from the people.

From the end of the 1980s, many of these state monopolies ended in the wave of economic liberalisation, and private businesspeople and organisations were now the ones buying the coffee, cotton, maize, wheat, beans, and potatoes at market prices.

The producers were paid slightly better, and more promptly. If, say $1.5 billion was going into the pockets of the state bureaucrats in state-controlled economies, that money moved to the private sector, but the demand for it in the state remained. Therefore, they clawed it back by taking it corruptly from the taxes, which had grown in size from economies that had expanded from reform and liberalisation.

However, this economic expansion wasn’t enough to create all-round wealth and riches, otherwise, we would have afforded to pay a junior civil servant $5,000 a month, give her a car loan, and an affordable mortgage so that they wouldn’t have to steal from the taxpayers. The post-Cold War economic project had failed.

Secondly, a good thing happened. One-party rule ended in nearly all of Africa. Until the recent spate of coups in West Africa and the Sahel, except for Eritrea, all countries had independent parties, even where an autocrat was in State House and routinely stole elections when he organised them. This was still a success, even if qualified.

Political competition raised the cost of obtaining voter support, winning political office, keeping parliamentarians on the president’s side, and watering the ruling party machine. To fund it, the politicians raided the Treasury.

Now one-party and military dictatorships were very corrupt too (as Kanu rule in Kenya and Mobutu Sese Seko in DR Congo proved). However, what has happened in the more democratic era is that demand for patronage has grown exponentially. Corruption has been democratised.

Democracy also grew the ranks of the elite and intellectuals who supported various political parties. When they came to power, they had many highly educated and articulate ranks who spouted PhD-level defences of corruption. This is one of the biggest differences between old and new corruption.

Thirdly, as a result of unequal economic growth, and the accompanying decline of the public systems, there was a sufficient middle and upper-working class to pay for their children to go to better private schools. This is one element of the social sophistication we spoke of. The others are private hospitals, fenced-off estates, expensive private gymnasiums, and so forth.

This “private solution to public problems”, as some have described it, took away not just talent that would have created better-run public sectors, but it meant that some of the best and brightest of a country no longer felt the pain of state failure, bad service delivery, and corruption.

Therefore they didn’t invest effort in fighting corruption, allowing it to feed and grow fat. The Kenya Gen Z uprising is unusual in that it broke the wall between those who went to schools which have fences and football pitches with manicured grass, and those who went to schools without a fence, and whose football grounds are red Earth dirt.

The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. Twitter@cobbo3Continue Reading

Vision 2050: How Tanzania’s youth can drive .5 trillion future

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In our high-gear development strategy for Tanzania last week, we projected Tanzania’s GDP to soar to an astounding $2.5 trillion by 2050, with GDP per capita reaching $18,000.

This vision starkly contrasts with conventional – read World Bank’s – estimate of less than $3,500 per capita GDP by 2050. We have a choice: we can accept the limitations of conventional forecasts, or we can choose to ignite a future of exceptional growth. Planning is about making choices, and my vision for 2050 is that of a nation on a trajectory to power not otherwise.

That said, no sustainable growth strategy, high-gear or otherwise, can succeed in Tanzania without addressing a crucial piece of the puzzle: the Youth Challenge. By 2050, Tanzania will have about 130 million whereby, using current ratios, more than 70 million will be below 25 years.

That implies a staggering four million or more youth entering the job market every single year, aggravating the situation caused by the existing youth unemployment time bomb that currently stands at around 70 percent. But where others see only doom, we see opportunities of Brobdingnagian scale.

I wrote my first article about the youth challenge in 2020 where I argued that Africa, with an average age of 19 compared to 29 and 37 for India and China respectively, is letting its youth down by pursuing many fanciful narratives such as youth entrepreneurship. Since then, I have written at least half a dozen other articles related to the same subject, in the process developing ideas for absorbing millions of youth into formal employment.

Out of everything I have ever written on the subject, I think the idea of using the military, specifically the national service (JKT) in a reformed sense, was the most potent and is worth revisiting, especially with Vision 2050 in mind.

JKT was once envisioned as a beacon of youth development, a place to forge discipline, ignite patriotism and empower young minds. But it hasn’t lived up to its promise since its original purpose became clouded in military talk in the 1970s.

Today, opacity shrouds its operations, achievements are unclear, and even supplying necessities for the TPDF is beyond its grasp. All this while, JKT has relied heavily on government subsidies, the very opposite of what its mission ought to be.

However, JKT’s potential to make Tanzanian youth a driving force for building the nation remains immense. It has vast landholdings, a readily available, large workforce through conscription, and a strong emphasis on discipline. These are all key ingredients for economic transformation.

Of all the Tanzanian presidents after Nyerere, I think only Magufuli was close to comprehending what JKT could do – consider his use of JKT conscripts to build government structures, school desks, and even a wall around the Mererani mines.

The man practically solved a decades-old school desk shortage in just one year! I’m not exactly a Magufuli fan, but that’s what transformative leadership looks like.

That said, even Magufuli didn’t grasp fully what JKT can do, or he would have done it. Let me try to paint a picture of that vision for Tanzania here by borrowing details from a proposed project developed by a friend – a former government strategist – who reached out to me after reading some of my articles.

In this vision, Tanzania proposes a synergistic large-scale youth development project through JKT which incorporates 3.5 million youth initially. Villages will contribute 500 youth each to a six-year military programme focused on discipline, construction skills, specialised farming, and digital technology. Youth will receive land, build their own homes, and gain valuable agricultural training.

Their farms, houses, and factories will be equipped with state-of-the-art digital facilities for them to enjoy modern amenities right where they are. Processing factories built by JKT will ensure value-added production, with joint ventures selling finished products domestically and internationally.

The project offers a unique incentive: after 6 years, the house and land become the youth’s property. This ownership, combined with agricultural and technology training and market access, empowers young people to build a secure and prosperous future.

Extended military training and discipline will address the wishy-washy everything-goes bodaboda cultural syndrome that characterises our nation now. Elite civilian strategists and experts will lead the project being supported by men in uniforms.

Production will soar: the numbers are mind-boggling. We will end poverty and youth unemployment permanently. And the government will collect tens of billions of dollars annually just in taxes alone.

I wish I could say that this idea is novel, but many nations have used the military for dramatic economic transformation before. I have written about South Korea and Israel in previous articles, but we can add Russia, China, and even the US to that list. This isn’t novel – when transformative leaders really want something special to happen, they turn to their men in uniforms to make sure that it does. Reforming JKT and taking it back to its original vision of kujenga taifa is crucial for achieving our kind of 2050 vision.

May God make that happen.

Charles Makakala is a Technology and Management Consultant based in Dar es SalaamContinue Reading