by Robert Guest
Most African cellphone firms are privately owned, and many operate in competitive markets. It shows. Walk into a mobile phone shop in Lagos or Nairobi, and your handset will be up and ringing in five minutes. The old state-owned fixed-line monopolies used to take several years to connect your house to the network and then charged exorbitant rates for woeful service. A friend of mine in Nairobi whose telephone regularly broke down paid several bribes to engineers from the state phone company to fix it until he discovered that the engineers were deliberately cutting him off again after they fixed it to earn more bribes. Another friend, who lived in Nigeria, received a colossal bill one month because someone at the state phone company had hired his office line out at night to people who wanted to call relatives in Europe.
Most Africans cannot open accounts with traditional telephone firms because they have no credit history. Private mobile firms, however, sell them pre-paid cards. When they use up all their minutes, they buy another. There is no chance – and this is tremendously important for poor people – that they will receive an unpayable bill at the end of the month.
The mobile phone companies, because they receive payment in advance, waste none of the time and money that fixed-line firms do chasing bad debtors. So their cash flow is better, and they are able to expand their networks faster. In several African countries, the number of mobile users has overtaken the number of landline users in less time than it can take to get a landline installed.
How countries go high-tech
Visitors to the Ajaokuta steel plant in Nigeria are surprised to see goats grazing among the gantries and children playing by the silent rolling mills. The Nigerian government flushed away $8 billion trying to build a steel industry at Ajaokuta and elsewhere. The idea was first proposed in the 1970s, after the oil boom began. Nigeria’s military rulers saw steel as the first goose-step down a forced march to industrialization. Steel mills would turn local coke and iron ore into shiny metal, which would then be used to build railways.
Contractors from the Soviet Union, bidding to build Ajaokuta, produced a twenty-one-volume feasibility study, but it was never translated from Russian and probably never read by any Nigerian decision-makers. They wanted a steel industry whatever the cost, partly as a matter of national pride and partly because big projects brought big kickbacks. Ajaokuta has yet to produce a single bar of steel and will probably never be able to do so at a profit. Other steel mills in Nigeria operate fitfully, at a loss, and usually at a small fraction of capacity.8
As this story illustrates, it is hard for governments to micromanage technological change. Most African politicians want their countries to become more technologically competent. But it is not easy. To make the best use of foreign technology you need some locals who understand it. Airplanes and telephone networks need to be maintained. Foreign products sometimes need to be adapted to local conditions. And if a country is to start coming up with inventions of its own, it needs the kind of political, social, and economic arrangements that foster innovation.
The example that everyone looks to is, unsurprisingly, America. How, ask politicians from Abuja to Cape Town, can we build a Silicon Valley in our own country? The short answer is, they can’t. America’s thriving high-tech industries were not planned. Silicon Valley is what happens when thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs migrate to a sunny rich state with tough patent laws, a sophisticated financial system, and a culture of inventing things and then making money out of them.
All these things take time to evolve. Governments can remove obstacles and prod things in the right direction. But when they start making detailed plans they tend to come unstuck. Public investment in basic science is useful, for those who can afford it. But public investment in developing high-tech products is usually wasteful. Politicians are slow to admit mistakes; hence Nigeria’s steel folly.
The head of South Africa’s Medical Research Council, Malegapuru Makgoba, argues that politicians find it hard to understand scientific method because it is more or less the opposite of politics. “Politicians are trained for loyalty, whilst scientists are trained for independence. Politicians get promoted for being economical with the truth, whilst scientists get fired for bending the truth.”9
After making these observations, Dr. Makgoba and his colleagues produced a report, based on five years of research (it was leaked in 2001), concluding that AIDS was the leading cause of death in South Africa. This contradicted President Thabo Mbeki’s odd beliefs, so the government was furious. Dr. Makgoba says that the minister in the presidency, Essop Pahad, Mbeki’s hatchet man, called him and threatened that he would be fired and “forgotten by history.” “Part of his portfolio is to phone and threaten scientists,” said Dr. Makgoba. “He is trying to overrule science with politics. It is very frightening.” Pahad denies it all.10
But Dr. Makgoba is not the only South African scientist to complain about the president’s alleged meddling. Sipho Seepe, a physicist and newspaper columnist, argues that “Mbeki conflates and confuses his political authority with intellectual authority.” Hence the difficulty of persuading the president that the global medical establishment knows more than he does about AIDS. “Of course scientists can be wrong,” says Dr. Seepe, “but they are usually corrected by other scientists, not by a politician with no training in science.”11
Many of the things that governments can do to promote technology are worth doing anyway. Establishing peace and stability, for example. Clever people are mobile and prefer not to live in war zones. Another crucial factor is openness to trade and investment. Isolating yourself from the rest of the world is a good way to stay technologically backward.
I once sneaked into North Korea, pretending to be a tourist, to take a look at the world’s last totalitarian state. It was a useful reminder of how fortunate we all are that the Cold War didn’t go the other way. I was followed everywhere by two official guides who, if I commented on how nice a building was, would reply: “Yes, thanks to the benevolent leadership of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, there are many great buildings in Pyongyang.”
Everywhere I looked I saw the stultifying effect of the government’s policy of “self-sufficiency.” Nothing invented since the 1950s appeared to have entered the country. The government tried to hide this, naturally. At an exhibition I was shown a computer with a “North Korean” operating system. It didn’t do much. I asked the party functionary in charge why, and he said it was “in display mode.” I re-booted it and saw the logo “Texas Instruments” flash up on the screen. The functionary was so embarrassed I felt sorry for him.
“Self-reliance” used to be a popular mantra among poor countries. In Africa, as well as Latin America and India, many governments made a virtue of shutting out foreign goods and investment. Inevitably, they shut out ideas, too. With no foreign competition, local firms had no one to learn from and little incentive to make their own products better. In Tanzania, a ban on importing computers was not wholly lifted until 1994.12
In the last decade or two, most developing countries have opened up a bit. Freer trade has brought new products, which can be taken apart and copied. Foreign direct investment has spread skills and technology. When BMW and Daimler Chrysler build cars in South Africa, they train African engineers and transfer know-how to their local suppliers.
High-tech trade has made a big chunk of the developing world much richer. Between 1985 and 1998, developing countries’ exports of high-tech products grew twelvefold. Exports of things dug out of the ground or grown in it rose by a paltry 14 percent over the same period. By 1999, high-tech goods were actually a larger slice of developing-country exports than they were of the exports of advanced industrialized nations.
Africa, sadly, missed out. Between 1970 and 1997 African exports per head fell, from $175 to $163 (in constant 1987 dollars). If we leave out South Africa and oil-producers, Africa’s cumulative terms of trade losses between 1970 and 1997 were equivalent to 120 percent of GDP.13 That is, the prices of the sorts of things t
hat Africa traditionally produces have fallen. Most of Africa’s exports are of primary products, that is, unprocessed raw materials: copper, cocoa, and all sorts of other crops and minerals. Apart from oil, the prices of such commodities have been sliding in real terms ever since the industrial revolution. As the world grows ever more technologically advanced, the proportion of its wealth that it needs to spend on raw materials falls.
Think of a computer. The cost of the metal and plastic that go into its wiring and casing is a minute fraction of the final price tag. The expensive parts are the skills that went into making it, the software that runs it, the promise of technical support that comes with it, and the advertising and marketing that persuades customers that the whole package is worth buying. Africa produces the copper from which some of its wires are made.
But the continent is not doomed to do so for ever. Countries that start at the bottom of the technology ladder can leapfrog. In building a railway network, they don’t have to bother with the steam age. When setting up a telephone system, they can skip copper wiring and go straight to fiber optics and mobile telephones. And they don’t necessarily have to pay for these things themselves.
The firms that know how to wire countries are usually willing to do so at no cost to the public purse so long as they are then allowed to charge people to make calls. In fact, they will pay good money for the privilege. In 2001 Nigeria raised $570 million auctioning licenses to set up mobile networks.
Intellectual property rights, and wrongs
I was once standing in a Zambian market, browsing through a fine selection of tapes. There was a lot of Congolese dance music and a good sprinkling of Western pop: Madonna, Kenny G, Dr. Dre, and so on. Both types of music are popular in Zambia, and both types of tape had fairly obviously been pirated. (The misspellings on the packaging were a bit of a giveaway.)
Suddenly, a furious crowd surged around the corner, pursuing a man I guessed was suspected of stealing something, because he was covered in blood. They caught him and started kicking and punching him. A man on the mob’s periphery, noticing the shocked look on my face, shouted at me: “This is what we do with thieves!” The robber was dragged to the police station on the other side of the marketplace. I think he survived, but I am not sure. I put down the bootleg Papa Wemba tape I was holding and bought nothing.
In Africa, few people think that piracy is immoral. Unlike those who steal sheep or loaves of bread, thieves of intellectual property are never lynched. One can understand the Africans’ point of view: most patents and copyrights are held by rich Westerners who will not go hungry if a few enterprising Zambians filch their ideas. Poor countries, runs the argument, need to steal ideas, for they will never scale the technology ladder if Merck and Microsoft extract royalties at every rung.
This is a reasonable argument but only in the short term. Piracy is a cheap way to climb the lower rungs, but failure to respect intellectual property rights deters high-tech investment. Firms will not bring new technology to countries where it can be stolen with impunity. Furthermore, if poor countries do not reward innovation, their people will have no incentive to innovate. The most inventive African country by far is the one that takes intellectual property rights most seriously: South Africa. Scientists in South Africa are actually rewarded for their efforts. So are South African musicians, up to a point. Half a dozen bootleg CDs are sold in South Africa for every genuine one, but that still leaves kwaito stars from Soweto much better off than Congolese rumba bands, who sell almost no records at home (which is a pity; the Congolese musicians sound much better).
The one area where Africa can free-ride with impunity is in regulation. It takes time, money, and expertise to determine whether a drug or foodstuff is safe. Agencies such as America’s Food and Drug Administration have huge budgets and make few mistakes. Poor countries could save millions, and get valuable medicines on the shelves more quickly, if they simply decided that a product safe enough for Americans is safe enough for them, unless there is good reason to assume that, for example, it might work differently in a tropical climate.
Getting the basics right first
Most important, to take advantage of technology, Africa needs better scientific and mathematical skills. The good news is that education is improving in Africa. A hundred years ago, almost no Africans could read. Now, 60 percent of adults can. Since 1985, literacy has improved or stayed the same in every African country for which the UN Development Programme could find data. The bad news is that the data are incomplete, and the data-less countries tend to be battlefields such as Angola and Sierra Leone, so the true picture is less rosy.
One problem is that many African countries’ education budgets have been captured by the elite, who want free university education for their children but are less worried about the masses who cannot even attend primary school. Zambia, for example, spends 135 times more public money on each university student than on each primary school pupil despite the fact that university students typically come from affluent families. Each year in Niger, 4,700 students receive university scholarships worth ten times the national average income while 900,000 rural children receive no education at all.14
This makes no sense. You cannot build an education system from the top down. There is no point having lots of universities before there are enough adequately prepared children to fill them. Besides, the benefits of primary education accrue to society at large, whereas those of higher education are more concentrated on the individual who receives it. So primary schools should have first claim on scarce public funds.
East Asian countries have tended to put first things first. Japan introduced universal and compulsory primary education in 1872, when its citizens were on average no richer than the people of Djibouti are today. Other East Asian countries achieved universal primary enrollment in the 1970s. Secondary enrollments initially lagged but surged ahead in the 1980s as the “tiger” economies boomed and demand for skilled workers soared. Tertiary enrollments rose last: in South Korea from 16 percent in 1980 to 68 percent in 1996.
The tigers have also, with the notable exception of Singapore, tended to make advanced students pay for their own tuition. In South Korea in 1993, 61 percent of upper secondary students attended private institutions, and 81 percent of university students. Poor but bright students can win scholarships. But for most university is a costly venture, which perhaps helps explain why so many Koreans opt for the kind of technical subjects that lead to well-paid careers. Koreans are 116 times more likely to study science at the tertiary level than youngsters from Burkina Faso.
Another lesson from East Asia is that how much you spend on education is less important than how you spend it. Public education spending in East Asia was only about 2.5 percent of GNP in 1960, inching up to 2.9 percent by 1997. Other developing countries spent far more – 3.9 percent on average – while African governments spent a whopping 5.1 percent. As East Asia grew richer, the absolute level of spending rose, but not nearly to the levels common in Western Europe or North America. And yet East Asian students consistently thrashed everyone else in internationally comparable tests. How did they do it?
What went on outside the school walls was crucial: mothers nagged children to do their homework; the job market rewarded educational attainment. But what went on in the classroom was important, too. The state saw its role as making sure that every child learned to read, write, and manipulate numbers. Calculators were forbidden until students could do sums in their heads. Laggards were coached until they reached the required standard.
Teachers addressed the whole class at once, quizzing individual students from time to time to make sure everyone was following. Classes were large. In Korean primary schools in 1975 the pupil–teacher ratio was more than fifty-five to one; in secondary schools it was thirty-five to one. Big classes are thought to deprive students of individual attention. In other developing countries ratios were kept down to an average of thirty-six in primary schools and twenty-two in secondary schools,
for this reason. But, given a limited budget, there is a trade-off between class size and teachers’ pay. With fewer teachers, Korea was able to pay them more, relative to average income, than any other comparable country. This made it easier to recruit good teachers.
Recently, some African countries have begun to charge college students so that primary school can be free. During the 1990s both Uganda and Malawi went from spending less than half of their education budgets on primary schools to two thirds. The results have been excellent, especially in Uganda, despite protests from the elite.
Unfortunately, even in countries where primary schools are supposed to be free, parents are often hit with extra charges for books and uniforms or to supplement the teachers’ salaries. Some of these charges are illegal: teachers are not supposed to demand bribes to do their jobs, and schools often keep no records of what happens to the extra cash they squeeze out of parents. Some charges are pointless: Uganda greatly increased enrollments by scrapping uniforms, which many poor families cannot afford.
There are many other things that African governments can do to foster a more educated population. Since money is always a problem, they could spend less on defense, which absorbs on average half as much as health and education combined (and four times as much in Sudan). They could stop expelling girls who become pregnant, a common practice. And they could copy South Africa’s program of handing out free peanut-butter sandwiches to primary school pupils. Malnutrition stunts a child’s ability to learn.
Once people have valuable expertise, however, keeping them is a problem. Africa loses 23,000 professionals each year,15 which helps explain why Chad has only one doctor for every 30,000 people.16 It is the brightest and best-educated who leave: émigré Africans in America are among the most highly educated of all ethnic groups in that country. The more demand there is for a particular skill, the easier it is for those who have it to find work in a rich country, so software specialists are especially flighty.