Africa: population growth, governance, democracy

Population Growth

The population of Africa grew from about 230 million in 1950 to 1.3 billion today, almost a five-fold increase, and Africa remains the fastest growing region globally, with the population increasing by around 2.55% annually. The UN has forecast that the population of Africa will almost double again by 2050 to 2.4 billion people – more than a ten-fold growth over the century since 1950.

Individual countries in Africa are growing at an even faster rate. Kenya, for example, had a population of six million in 1950. Today, it has 50 million people – an eight-fold increase – and this is projected to reach 96 million by 2050, a sixteen-fold increase since 1950.

In contrast, the population of Australia grew from 8.2 million in 1950 to 25 million today, a mere three-fold increase, and is forecast to reach 37 million by 2050, a four-and-a-half-fold growth since 1950.

There are a number of issues and consequences that follow from the above figures.

1. Even relatively wealthy Australia has experienced considerable difficulty in dealing with its comparably low population growth rate, in particular funding basic services to the community such as schools and hospitals. It also has a significant infrastructure deficit, with all levels of government struggling to fund and implement solutions that can keep pace with the demand of the growing population (the political goings-on relating to Sydney's WestConnex furnishing but one example). Inevitably, pressure on infrastructure and services (among other factors) has led to debate within the community over whether the rate of immigration is too high.
    
2. Bearing in mind the Australian experience, it is difficult to see how the faster growing and yet vastly more impoverished Africa – or, on a more local level, a country such as Kenya – will contain the impacts (poverty, health risks, social unrest, environmental degradation and more) of their explosive population increase. This is so even if one presupposes a moderately adequate level of governance across the region – yet competent governance in Africa is sadly hard to find (tiny Botswana, with a population of two million or so, is one notable exception). In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa has consistently been the lowest-ranked region in Transparency International's annual Perception of Corruption Index, and Africa more broadly performs similarly poorly in rankings of safety, security and conflict.

It seems clear that Africa, absent of a massive injection of international assistance, will be unable to deal in any meaningful way with the population growth that has already occurred, far less that which is coming its way.

Governance

As already mentioned, the majority of countries in Africa suffer poor governance, many being governed by what can best be described as one-party criminal gangs (see, for a discussion, Martin Meredith's The State of Africa) who, under informal patron-client economies, effectively service only a small elite (albeit an elite sufficiently large to sustain the existing government's hold on power). Zimbabwe is an example of one such system. The consequence is that an ever-increasing population at large attracts an ever-lower share of the funds that are available and so receives ever-poorer services. Compulsory education, for example, is rare in Africa; even in Kenya, one of the better-off African nations, primary education is compulsory and free, but secondary education is not. A visitor to the country will notice the huge number of private educational establishments, which indicates how much education is valued, but there is little or no control over the standards of such private establishments. Moreover, even at the 'compulsory' primary level participation in education is undermined by uneven regional access and gender bias. The situation in most of the rest of Africa is even worse.

Democracy

The developed world often naively assumes that, in the third world, an official commitment to 'one man one vote' provides sufficient guarantee that a democratic process is in place. Nothing could be further from the truth, with Africa as a region again performing poorly on international rankings of democracy regardless of democratic rhetoric.

In Western nations there is enormous institutional support for the democratic system: an independent judiciary, a free press, a military firmly under civilian control and numerous NGOs – often government-funded – addressing social issues such as inequality. Many countries have federal systems (the USA, Germany and Australia being examples) that impose additional constraints on the exercise of executive power. Even with the extensive checks and balances in our own democracies, however, the democratic process faces a growing threat from nationalism, populism and authoritarian leadership – in Europe, in the United States and in our own democracy in Australia.

Over most of Africa, in contrast, the judiciary is a tool of the executive controlled through partisan appointment; there is no free press (another area where Africa performs dismally in international rankings); and, in many countries, the military influences or actually forms the government, de facto if increasingly rarely de jure. The point is that there are few if any working democracies in Africa regardless of the presence of the paraphernalia of democracy; South Africa, for example, has a very good democratic constitution but that has not prevented the ruling ANC party from robbing the country over the past twenty years or so.

Botswana is one African country that is well governed: it has regular elections and not only is there a limit on how many terms one individual can serve as president (as there are in many African countries) but this limit has generally been observed (a departure from the all-too-common African experience). These measures notwithstanding, however, Botswana has been governed by the same party since independence in 1966, mainly because that party is controlled by the country's major tribe (Bamangwato). Is this true democracy? Maybe not. The keys to the county's success are the 'No Corruption' regime (established by the country's first president, Sir Seretse Khama) and its diamond wealth. Combined, these factors mean that the considerable mining revenue accruing to the government actually does end up in the government's coffers and not in individual's pockets, which seems to be the fate of revenue from mining and oil wealth in countries such as Nigeria, for example.

One question we should ask ourselves is whether Africa can in fact afford the checks and balances upon which our own democracy depends – bearing in mind that creating and enforcing these measures would reduce funding available for schools, hospitals, roads etc. (and, of course, the large sums of money diverted into the Swiss bank accounts of the elite). The answer is probably not.

Consequences of population growth in Africa and the third world generally

In view of the facts discussed above, there are really two consequences that should concern us (in that they impact on our own national security and social cohesion):

First, many people in the third world quite correctly see little hope for themselves and their families in their own countries and so will seek a billet somewhere in the first world, including Australia. There is, therefore, likely to be a massive, increasing and ongoing effort by migrants to cross the Mediterranean and also renewed efforts to find ways into Australia. Australia thinks it has solved the problem of unauthorised arrivals, but the facts and figures provided above strongly suggest that pressure will increase substantially over coming years.

Second, wages in the third world are far lower than in developed economies. We need to recognise that, as overall population in Africa grows, so does the educated cohort with professional and technical proficiencies that are in demand in Western countries (even if they represent a decreasing percentage of the African population as a whole). Some may leverage this demand and migrate to developed countries. Globalisation, however, means that more and more productive capacity will be transferred from the first to the third world, particularly in sectors where wages are a significant part of production cost. Thus, population growth in the developing world is likely to have a continuing negative effect on wages in the first world. Local discussions in Europe, America, Australia and Japan blaming their current governments for wage stagnation seem to me to be missing the point altogether.

Is there anything we should or can do about the tsunami that is going to overtake us.

Is there anything we should or can do to mitigate the impacts described above? Yes. China's one child policy – introduced as a temporary measure in 1978 and relaxed in 2016 – was a major factor (along with reform policies that loosened state control over the economy) in enabling that country to drag some 800 million people out of poverty over the past forty years or so while maintaining social cohesion. The rest of the world also benefitted hugely from this policy – a stable and growing China has driven down costs and the spectre of inflation and has helped drive economic growth in the rest of the world. Australia has been one of the prime beneficiaries.

The third world, and Africa in particular, needs to be persuaded that it is it in its absolute best interests to put in place measures that will help to reduce – or at least plan and control – population growth. The drastic policies that China introduced will not be possible anywhere else, but other measures – better education of women, greater access to family planning, and possibly financial incentives – will not only have a major effect on population growth and social cohesion but also further other important development goals such as women's reproductive rights, improved national health and direct investment in community capacity.

Are we focusing on the right issues?

One important issue not discussed above is the growing global threat from climate change. The factors driving Climate Change are greatly accentuated by population growth but, while there is endless discussion of global warming, little of that discussion seems to focus on the explosion in the worldwide population. This lack of attention notwithstanding, climate change is just as clearly a consequence of the massive increase in global population as the economic and social consequences outlined above.

The world population was 2.5 billion in 1950, with Africa accounting for just under nine per cent. A century later, in 2050, it is forecast that there will be 9.3 billion people on Earth, and that Africa's share will have risen to a quarter of the global population. Surely population growth is what we should be focusing on more than anything?