eBusiness Weekly
Chris Chenga
At present, Africa lacks competence and representation from its governments. Metrics to measure both competence and representation by the majority of our respective governments give a deplorable outlook.
Firstly, representation means that a citizen or a particular demographic in a country has a credible system of agency through their government.
That means the government functions in accordance to citizen or demographic will. This is not the case in many African states. Our governmental institutions do not represent citizen and demographic will.
Concededly, narrowly interpreted as poor democracy — perhaps through a lack of a more befitting phrase — African countries rank low on institutional democracy. One can make reference to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) democracy index where almost the entire continent scores below 4 out of 10 in terms of our institutions representing the will of people.
This is important because representation — institutional democracy — creates continuous moral, intellectual, and professional improvement in how a country functions. Because our countries lack representation or institutional democracy, the poor performance of many arms of governance is evident. Consider law enforcement in Zimbabwe. It suffered a gross decay in representation over time, leading to corrupt and inept institutions that deprived our legal system moral, intellectual, and professional improvement.
This is the same across many public institutions in Zimbabwe that are supposed to represent various groups of society, especially those that enable commerce. Consider the recent decision by Harare Town Council to force commuter transport to stop outside CBD limits, and have people move across the city without any transit system in place; that decision had no moral, intellectual, or professional sense.
However, as referenced by the above image though, poor representation is not a case in Zimbabwe alone. It is the story of the continent.
This past week there was supposedly a landmark agreement at the AU, branded the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA).
Contrary to a number of President’s convictions who signed various commitments at the occasion in Kigali, the ACFTA is far from one of the greatest moments of Pan-Africanism to date.
Instead, the signing of the ACFTA is a premature proposition to a continent with a criminal deficiency of representation, thus, making such a proposition almost offensive to the very populace assumed to benefit from ACFTA.
Fundamentally, many nation states on the continent lack any clarity and commitment from their governments to preserve or enhance quality of representation, hence, the inevitable decay of institutions across the continent.
The performance is there to see in Africa’s socio-economic metrics; by the end of 2018 it is projected that more than half the continent’s economies will see a drop in credit outlook, over 80 percent of citizens in sub-Sahara Africa will have a higher debt per capita, with job creation slowing down graduates will add to already high unemployment, and with respective governments unable to carry out sound fiscal management, social safety nets will be lower for each citizen on the continent.
Now, the proposition that a continent will benefit from commercially converging up to 50 nation states under these conditions is not too astute, especially when as stand-alone constituencies the systems of representation are clearly deficient with great pitfalls. Perhaps before pursuing such a venture, African leaders must look to develop functional systems of representation for their direct constituents first.
It was a telling moment that Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria, did not sign the ACFTA. President Buhari put off signing the framework agreement following protests by major Nigerian trade and labour unions, which warned that the deal would harm their economy.
This was ironically the most honest occurrence of the event, as it told the true story of most African presidents committal to the AU without due representation to their direct constituents.
In Zimbabwe’s case, there is the memory of the Zimbabwe signing what were sold as landmark free trade and integration agreements with SADC in 2014 at the Meikles hotel, only for a year later to revert to Statutory Instrument 64 as local industry was suffering.
Of course, certain impediments to the continent’s growth require the structural convergence that can be achieved by a coordinated block of nations, however, that can only work with a coordinated block of exceptional competence.
Currently Africa is a scattered block of institutional incompetence. This is what we often miss when trying to draw parity with relatively successful blocks such as the United State of America, China, and the European Union. When blocks work it is because there is a unity of exceptional diligence and astute socio-economic systems in individual constituencies.
The federal system in the USA enhances each state’s demand for competence. China became mighty due to the competitive improvement of economic zones and provinces.
The European Union only works as pressure is applied on laggards to improve on their competence for the entire union to prosper.
In fact, the ACFTA is a risk at this point for Africa. A set of commitments may seem to offer potential benefits as sold by the AU, but quite often it is the unpreparedness to offer remedies to when those commitments go wrong that are worrisome. Again we can learn from already existing blocks. The monetary imbalances in the EU have raised continental tensions as some countries have uneven trade balances.
The union has left industries in certain countries disenchanted and disenfranchised citizens feel that they have lost their constitutional representation as decisions on their livelihood are made in Brussels and not their direct municipalities.
Europe, a more mature continent has relatively handled these issues in a civic manner, but Africa is ill-prepared and far from such a level of dispute maturity if ever posed with such difficulties.
Conclusively, before African leaders try to sell the ACFTA as a breakthrough or landmark event, they must return to their direct constituents and start working on improving their own systems of representation.
Indeed if convergence is to ever to be pursed, the AU must be seen as an organization that carries out inclusion by qualification – that is to set credible benchmarks in metrics of constituent representation by respective governments.
The AU must be an organisation which works to converge continental excellence, not function as an excuse to the continents individual deplorables.
