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Africa 2013 Review: More Prosperity, Less Trickle-Down

Africa 2013 Review: More Prosperity, Less Trickle-Down

The shopping mall, symbol of Africa’s rise, was also the target of terrorists seeking made-for-TV mayhem and served as a reminder that conspicuous prosperity comes with its own perils, TheGuardian reports in its 2013 Africa review.

In September, Somalia-based Islamist militant group al-Shabaab attacked the upscale Westgate shopping center in Nairobi – described by The Guardian as one of the temples of Africa’s 21st-century consumer capitalism.

Despite this and other attacks by other groups, conflict was the exception rather than the rule in Africa in 2013, the report says.

Beneath seemingly random surface events, there were steadier currents, The Guardian reports. African Development Bank estimates the African economy grew by 4.8 percent in 2013, and it’s projected to accelerate to 5.3 percent in 2014.

Driving this growth are agricultural production and services, a rise in oil production and increased mining activity.

Inseparable from these are Chinese investment which correlates with Africa’s economic growth since 2000, the report said. In return for raw materials to feed its own economy, China’s companies – and laborers – are building hospitals and schools, roads and stadiums, the report said.

China says it is welcomed in Africa because it doesn’t interfere in domestic affairs, but its role in propping up dictators by default is being increasingly questioned. There is also increasing scrutiny over whether Beijing and its western competitors are paying fair prices for Africa’s abundant natural resources.

The continent loses twice as much in illicit financial outflows – through tax avoidance, transfer pricing and anonymous company ownership – as it receives in international aid, The Guardian reports.

This year’s Africa Progress Panel report analyzed five deals that cost Congo more than $1.3 billion in revenue through the undervaluation of assets and sale to foreign investors. This
sum, it noted, represents twice the annual health and education budgets of a country with one of the worst child mortality rates in the world and 7 million pupils not in school.

The panel highlighted the underbelly of the “Africa rising” story of the past decade: economic growth does not necessarily create jobs or trickle down to all. The boom may have created a plugged-in middle class addicted to mobile phones, but it’s also deepening the divide between rich and poor. And some of Africa’s most successful economies are also some of its least democratic,  TheGuardian reports.

Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, described how Ethiopia’s growth is literally plowing under communities in its path. “Addis Ababa is being transformed as if by monstrous engines boring through the heart of the city,” he said, according to The Guardian. “A new motorway flows into town sweeping aside
all before it… All along its path the traditional one-story homes of mud, wooden planks and
rusted corrugated iron roofs are bulldozed into heaps and replaced by six or more stories of concrete and brick. Hammering, grinding and showers of glittering acetylene sparks proclaim the arrival of armies of Chinese workers and the rise of mighty steel and glass constructions.”

But Dowden added: “Parliamentary democracy as we in the west understand it has no role in today’s Ethiopia. Out of the 547 elected members of the country’s lower chamber, only one is from an opposition party. I met him. Girma Seifu Maru is a nice man but a lonely one.”

As Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi said: “‘There is no connection between democracy and development,'” The Guardian reports.