Cover Story Africa


Cracking the code Unlocking Africa’s secret to wealth


History shows that no country has ever become rich by exporting foodstuffs and raw materials without also having an industrial sector and in modern terms, an advanced service sector. The more a country specialises in the production of raw materials, the poorer it becomes. But this is a lesson Africa has still not learned. In the 19th century, the saying in the USA was: “Don’t do as the English tell you to do, do as the English did.” Our advice to Africa and other developing countries is: “Don’t do as the Americans and the British tell you to do, do as the Americans and the British did.” For Africa, this is the only way out of poverty and into prosperity. And the time to take that route is now! Osei Boateng reports.


T


here are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engines, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate col- lection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies, or how to make a living for its


people when its former economic role as the entrepôt of the region is becoming defunct. This is how Singapore’s founding prime minister and economic miracle worker, Lee Kuan Yew, starts his 729-page tome, From Third World to First – The Singapore


8 | April 2011 New African


Story: 1965-2000, published by HarperCollins 11 years ago. Lee Kuan Yew, a third-generation descendant of immigrants


from China’s Guangdong Province, was half-right. Tere is no such book specifically on how to build a nation out of immigrants from China, British India, the Dutch East Indies, but there are numerous books going back to antiquity showing how nations were built, and how they progressed from poverty to wealth. Love him or hate him, Henry Kissinger, America’s foreign


secretary and national security adviser of yore, can put his fingers on the right pulse – sometimes. He wrote the “Foreword” to Lee Kuan Yew’s book, and in a roundabout sort of way chided “the father of Singapore’s emergence as a national state” (Kissinger’s words) for his implied lack of proper attention to historical detail. “…Te long established nations of the West,” Kissinger wrote


in the Foreword, “have fallen prey to the temptation of ignoring history and judging new states by the criteria of their own civi- lisations. It is often overlooked that the institutions of the West did not spring full-blown from the brow of contemporaries but evolved over centuries which shaped frontiers and defined legiti- macy, constitutional provisions, and basic values. “But history is important,” Kissinger thundered. “Te institu-


tions of the West developed gradually … [but] many postcolonial states have no comparable history. Tasks which, in the West, were accomplished over centuries, must be completed in a decade or two [by developing countries] and under much [more] complex circumstances.” Te critical line in Kissinger’s argument is: “History is im-


portant.” He was in fact echoing what the Roman politician and philosopher, Cicero, had said centuries before: “Not to know what has been transacted in former times,” Cicero said, “is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world


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