"it doesn't matter how thin the cow gets if you are the only one on the...

[Kire]

teat."

The Captured State
Elites in the Asian tiger countries run the state in the public interest. In most of Africa, elites run the state in their own interests. Matthew Lockwood has written the best Africa book this year
Richard Dowden


The State They're In by Matthew Lockwood
(ITDG Publishing, £12.95)


Of the many books that have crossed my desk in this year of Africa—Geldof on Africa, Sachs on poverty, the Commission for Africa report—at last here is one that hits the bullseye.

Matthew Lockwood worked in the development aid business for 20 years and wants to know why it is not working in Africa. For decades, aid donors have tried carrots, sticks and a host of measures in between to try to get development moving in Africa. They failed. Have aid donors done something wrong? Is there something that works in every other developing country but not—apparently—in Africa?

Lockwood has come up with the missing piece of the jigsaw. It is African politics. The reason that—South Africa apart—sub-Saharan Africa has not developed is that it has not been in the interests of the controlling elites to develop it. In contrast to the "developmental states" of Asia—such as South Korea and Taiwan—which grew rich in the 1970s and 1980s by educating their populations and investing in export industries, Lockwood calls Africa's states anti-developmental, arguing that they actively discourage business, trade and innovation. In Asia, the rulers, often military men or one-party-state dictators just as in Africa, had a sense of national purpose, and the state broadly functioned for the public good. In Africa, the rulers captured the state, its institutions and sources of wealth, and kept it for themselves. They used it not to generate national wealth, but as sources of patronage to reward followers. Where reforms urged by western donors have threatened their interests, they "have resisted them until they have found ways to secure those interests in other ways," says Lockwood.

More: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6971&AuthKey=875ca4fec9c2b5177985a662ca7877e1&issue=508