Learning from China: Adapting development strategies for African contexts

_______________

OPINION

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

Although it may not be possible to have a comprehensive cookbook of China’s rapid development recipes, a few policy frameworks implemented in the country can provide guidance.

The Chinese development model has not been uniform. It has been at every stage punctuated by state-led industrialisation alongside export-oriented growth, and strategic global engagement, among other factors/ policies.

Africa sets its sights on China for direction, as a late developer, because China has mastered the art of leapfrogging growth or catching up.

However, given the disparate and diverse political and economic characteristics between the two entities, we need to carefully tailor and adapt what works and leave what doesn’t, from the Chinese blueprint of late and rapid development.

There is a unique political economy framework that made China’s development success possible.

Whereas Deng Xiaoping is highly credited for instituting transformative reforms, there was a strong, centralised state which he leveraged to implement pragmatic policies, i.e., special economic zones (SEZs), massive infrastructure investment, and education and technical training to spur human capital development.

Deng was also granted a monopoly of power rendered by the Communist Party, which allowed him to have continuity of his policies under the stability of a cohesive political structure. It was also workable to implement policies on a largely ethnically homogenous population, with a social history of collective discipline embedded in Confucian cultural ideas.

Such moral compulsion from social norms and habits can hardly be transplanted, but it facilitated the rapid policy implementation we see in China.

Additionally, industrial transformation was timely in a nation which was poised to reform its large agrarian economy.

African nations emerged out of colonialism with significant infrastructure gaps.

The post-colonial contexts they find themselves in require that they assert economic sovereignty and push for state-led development, which fits well with the Chinese model.

It has, indeed, been China at the frontline of supporting Africa’s move to bridge infrastructure gaps, supporting such projects as Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway and Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, under the BRI, among countless other projects in several African countries.

Moreover, China never lends itself to political interference in Africa as a precondition for its investments, as is common with Western aid and development finance, which comes pegged with prescriptions and conditionalities of all manner, eroding away the autonomy and agency of African states.

The diversity among and within the 54 African nations, however, implies that the continent’s political economy is widely different from China’s. We have so many ethnicities, are corrupted by colonial legacies, plagued by electoral volatility undermining policy continuity, fragmented by opposing governance structures, which ultimately complicates state-led development initiatives.

Weak institutionality and corruption are a serious hindrance to Africa’s development efforts.

Weak institutions make China’s state-led, long-term development strategies hard to replicate, because governments face significant opposition and illegitimacy, making the long-term stability that shelters growth absent. Corruption disorients public-spiritedness, turning ruling regimes into cash-and-carry kleptocracies.

This is the challenge for countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, making the implementation of large-scale projects unsuccessful.

There is a need to earn legitimacy for African governments by ensuring merit-based and accountable governance that serves all citizens without accentuating ethnic differences.

Traditional leaders should also not be merely co-opted but fundamentally involved in local and national development programmes, so that they view state development policies as an inter-collective program in which they and their co-ethnics have a stake, and must therefore take responsibility and involvement.

While China’s development leveraged export-led growth to satisfy the global demand for manufactured goods, Africa finds itself in a different context. It is a resource-dependent continent; its economies survive on the extraction and sale of primary commodities like minerals, oil, or agricultural products. The key to transforming this status quo to increase returns rests in domesticating ownership and ensuring the locals have a higher stake in the businesses and industries.

This will nip profit repatriation and rent-seeking in the bud. Local ownership here does not mean that indigenous people must be the only ones with economic rights, but rather that even companies owned by foreigners must register locally and transfer the most profitable work of their business to Africa.

Whereas China’s development was easy to mobilise in a socially cohesive population, Africa’s ethnic diversity should not be mourned as a challenge; rather, African governments should embrace traditional and communal participatory approaches to social mobilisation towards development goals.

Africa’s ethnic groups were historically assimilationist, and this cultural heritage must be encouraged as opposed to perpetuating colonial divisions that politicised divisive ethnicity.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Development Watch Centre