Southern Africa had a memorable Valentine’s Day. In Johannesburg, the business heart of South Africa, Morgan Tsvangirai, the former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, lay dying of cancer. Eighty kilometers away, in Pretoria, the country’s capital, Jacob Zuma was resigning as President. Tsvangirai stood for freedom, accountability and racial harmony. Zuma stood for the exact opposite. […]
The Department for International Development (DfID) of the UK government wants to increase direct cash transfers to up to six million people. In the light of the truly shocking Oxfam scandal last week, bypassing charities altogether may prove appetising. Especially when DfID struggles to meet the 0.7 per cent of GDP target. But experience in […]
Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa – forgive me, President Ramaphosa – is self-evidently a private and reserved human being. Since his decision to contest the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), he has been the subject of an endless series of “think-pieces”, more or less informed including by this author, as well as a year or more […]
Human progress, as I have pointed out before for CapX, is neither linear nor guaranteed. And while the world is getting better across a multitude of indicators of human well-being, individual countries can and do regress – sometimes dramatically. Perhaps no two countries exemplify that fact as well as Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Both nations took […]
In every single African country, young people make up the majority of the population – and they are generally very ill-served by their ageing governments. Young leaders, where they can be found, don’t just come with energy; the right ones can bring new ideas, technocratic competence, and a new idealism. Instead, some of the continent’s […]
An incredible 155m children around the world are chronically undernourished, despite dramatic improvements in recent decades. In view of this, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals include Zero Hunger. But what do we understand by the word hunger? It may refer to lack of food or widespread food shortages caused by war, drought, crop failure or […]
Why do people refuse to learn from other people’s mistakes? That is a surprisingly perplexing question, for no commonly advanced explanation provides a full answer. Venezuela, for example, is separated from Cuba by the Caribbean Sea and from Chile by the Andean Mountains. Maybe it is that geographical distance that explains why the Venezuelan people […]
In the last few months Zambia has experienced one of the worst cholera outbreaks in years. Governmental corruption and mismanagement of resources have largely been blamed for the lack of infrastructure that would have prevented such an outbreak. In response to the crisis, the government introduced heavy-handed measures that resulted in mass rioting. Despite government incompetence, […]
The global economy enters 2018 with good momentum. Expectations for growth this year are rising in many countries, equities are hitting new highs and business confidence is buoyant. The worries around Brexit, the US elections, risks in the Chinese economy and populism in Europe that loomed large 12-18 months ago have eased. Our “worry index”, […]
During the Cold War, a new profession emerged – “Kremlinologists”, a hodge-podge of academics, journalists, other scoundrels, and commentators, who would study every minute detail of the behaviour of Soviet Union leaders when they were in public. They examined who stood next to whom, whose chair was closer or further away from the leader, who […]
No discussion about the history of science, technology and innovation policy in Africa is complete without mentioning Calestous Juma. Juma, Professor of International Development at Harvard University, passed away late last year after a long battle with cancer. Juma championed the use of technological innovation to tackle sustainable development challenges like food insecurity, climate change, […]
Levels of armed conflict flux and wane in Africa. In 2017, levels of high fatality violence were significantly lower than during the immediate post-Cold War period. This trend has occurred in spite of the recent increases in terrorist-associated fatalities in key countries such as Nigeria and Somalia. Even terrorist fatalities have declined since 2015. But the […]
South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), has a new president – Cyril Ramaphosa. But who is he? Ramaphosa cuts a fitting figure to take over government, stabilise the economy, and secure the constitutional architecture that he helped create at the end of apartheid. But to expect more would be expecting too much. […]
The death of Calestous Juma last week is miserable news. A Harvard professor who rose from poverty in western Kenya, son of a carpenter father and a farming mother, Calestous was a truly original scholar, writer and thinker on the topic of innovation. He was also enormous fun, always wreathed in smiles and heaving with […]
The last twelve months have been a confusing time for African democracy. We have seen coups that didn’t look like coups and elections that didn’t look like elections. In this sense, it was a year of illusions. As in 2016, the broad trend is clear: with a number of notable exceptions, the gains made in […]
As nations come to terms with fragile growth in the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, the importance of productivity has been brought sharply into focus. The OBR’s gloomy forecast illustrated the extent of the UK’s problems, but we are by no means alone. To varying degrees, nations all over the world – rich and poor – are […]
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