{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Bad news: Our leaders have escaped the idiocy of rural life - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/African-leaders-have-escaped-the-idiocy-of-rural-life-/-/434750/2616566/-/154yfgn/-/index.html

Bad news: Our leaders have escaped the idiocy of rural life - Comment

Analysts cite many reasons why most Africans continue to live in poverty, some in extreme poverty, more than 50 years after their countries became independent and fellow Africans took the reins of political power.

A great deal has been written about the euphoria with which Africans embraced self-rule and how, despite early spurts of economic growth, some spanning well over a decade, soon enough despair and disillusionment set in as their new governments, which they believed they could count on to deliver the good life, fell short of expectations.

Meanwhile in regions such as Southeast Asia where self-rule arrived amid deeper levels of mass poverty than in Africa, governments were quick to get their act together and deliver mounting levels of prosperity, building what came to be known as "tiger economies."

Interestingly, the past two decades have seen Africa do pretty well in terms of economic growth, leading to much talk about Africa Rising, as some of the fastest growing economies, touted as "lion economies" by some, are now on the continent. The impact on poverty in real terms, however, remains generally limited.

So why on earth do Africans continue to wallow in poverty despite economic growth on the continent having picked up, with some countries posting some of the highest growth rates in the world?

The key reason, according to an expert whose views are hardly isolated, is that "growth is occurring within an untransformed economic structure." This explanation is likely to fly over the heads of those of us who grasp little expert jargon of this sort. There are, however, simpler explanations where this one came from.

Again, it is the blokes at the Developmental Regimes in Africa project at the UK's Overseas Development Institute and the Tracking Development project at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands who have put forward ideas that are likely to disrupt the cosy consensus that has hitherto guided policy making and thinking.

They suggest that, among other things, the reasons are not merely technical; they are also political and personal.

The technical reasons, including sound macroeconomic management, account also for Africa's much-celebrated economic performance in recent years. The political and personal reasons merit detailed exploration given Africa's association with the long-running debate about the type of leadership, politics, or governance arrangements that are necessary to achieve inclusive development and other such good things.

What is it about politics that has kept poverty so high? Some analysts will quickly seize on the usual explanations: Dictatorship and corruption. Well, not quite.

The key explanation, it seems, is that the ruling elite in Africa have had no compelling reason to invest resources in agriculture, the main source of livelihood for up to 80 per cent of the people they lead, and in rural development generally.

In Africa, rural people and the poor generally pose no political threat to the ruling elite. On their own, they are unable to mobilise themselves into coherent groups to make demands with consistency and take organised action against sitting governments should the demands not be met. Elites opposing governments in power, themselves town-based and not embedded in rural society, are hardly able to fill the gap.

And so sitting governments continue championing policies focusing on technology and industrialisation while deliberately neglecting smallholder agriculture, the very foundation on which prosperity has been built in regions such as Southeast Asia, and targeting it for elimination in pursuit of "modernity" that neither feeds nor puts money into the pockets of the poor.

In countries touted as democratic, where regular changes in leadership are the norm, exchanging one set of suit-wearing political elites for another every 5 or 10 years does little if anything to change the way things work; politicians focus on short-term goals: Winning the next electoral contests, not delivering the good life.

The poor continue being poor, voting for loud and manipulative elites that do little, if anything for them. Meanwhile foreign good Samaritans come in with strategies that, in the absence of the right political context, can only be temporary palliatives.

‎And where do personal factors come in? Well, you know that most of Africa's first generation of political leaders were sons of chiefs, right? That may suggest they were well schooled in the art of leadership. It is possible they were.

Many, though, were also raised not to fraternise with the peasantry and get to know intimately what their lives were like. Rather, they were sent to school, in many cases in large towns, and encouraged to stay there and partake of the modernity that rural life couldn't possibly offer.

To put this into perspective, consider one Southeast Asian leader, identified as "the driving force" behind rural development efforts in his country in the 1960s and 70s.

Influencing his outlook were "happy memories of village life" and a childhood spent "working with ordinary village people in the rice fields."

As for two of his African contemporaries, one left his village "to escape the drudgery that was peasant farming." The other also "left home to escape all that". The experts have spoken. Well worth a good debate in Africa.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.comBad news: Our leaders have escaped the idiocy of rural life - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/African-leaders-have-escaped-the-idiocy-of-rural-life-/-/434750/2616566/-/154yfgn/-/index.html

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.