The Cost of Distraction — Why Africa struggles to stay the course

The eagle came out of a cloudless blue sky. One moment I was a boy in the garden, a sack of mielie cobs at my feet and my face turned to the sun. The next – a piercing screech split the afternoon. Before I could react, a young African hawk-eagle was already in its dive. Wings tucked. Talons spread. It struck with terrifying precision, snatching one of my grandmother’s chicks and lifting off in the same motion. Our dog exploded into pursuit but never stood a chance. Higher and higher the eagle climbed, the chick hanging motionless in its grip, until it was no more than a speck against the sky.

And I just stood there. Frozen. Staring. Awestruck by how magnificent it was.

Then Gogo came out of the hut, red doek on her head, hands on her hips, her eyes flashing. “Uhleli wenzani ubuka nje uheshe lutshontsha inkukhu zami?” – Why are you sitting there, doing nothing, staring, while the eagle eats my chicks?

“Nxese, Gogo.” – Sorry, Gogo.

Decades later, I watch South Africa debate its economy and I recognise that boy. Recently the South African Communist Party gathered some 300 delegates in Boksburg for a Conference of the Left, convened to rebuild a socialist agenda before the municipal elections; the governing coalition, meanwhile, remains split over how far to open the economy to the market.

The left argues for a stronger state; others argue for freer markets; some blame capitalism, others socialism. We are mesmerised by the magnificence of the argument – the plumage of left and right – while the thing that feeds us is carried off into the sky. And a grandmother is asking the only practical question there is: never mind how splendid the bird is – is it taking the chicks?

China vs sub-Saharan Africa

Few contrasts answer that question more starkly than China and much of sub-Saharan Africa over the past 40 years. In 1980, China was poorer than much of sub-Saharan Africa. Within a generation it became the world’s manufacturing powerhouse; today the average Chinese produces about $13,000 a year, against less than $2,000 across sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. The map has flipped.

Why? Many point to communism, others to capitalism. Both miss it, because ideology alone predicts almost nothing. The Soviet Union was communist and collapsed; North Korea remains communist and poor. Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are capitalist and prosperous; Botswana and Mauritius are democratic and prosperous. China’s own reformer had the phrase for it: Deng Xiaoping liked to say it does not matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice – not an endorsement of any ideology, but a challenge to all of them. Nations prosper not by winning arguments but by catching the mouse, and keeping the chicks.

The real lesson is coherence. Economists call the countries that pulled off rapid catch-up growth “developmental states” – Japan, then South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China. What they shared was not an ideology but a way of governing: an insulated, capable bureaucracy that could hold to a 30-year plan without an election resetting it every few years. Roads connected to ports, ports to factories, factories to skills, skills to industrial policy. The pieces reinforced one another, and the result was not merely growth but momentum.

The authoritarian fly in the ointment

Here the argument gets uncomfortable. Most of those states built their coherence under authoritarian or one-party rule – which tempts a blunt conclusion: that prosperity needs a strong hand, that multiparty democracy is hopeless at coordination, that Africa needs tougher government. That conclusion is half right and dangerously half wrong.

Concentrated power has the highest variance of any way of governing: it produces both the miracles and the catastrophes. For every Lee Kuan Yew there is a Mobutu; for every Park Chung-hee, a Mugabe, who inherited a breadbasket and engineered a famine. Strongman systems spread from Singapore to South Sudan. Democracies cluster around “mediocre but functional”. To bet on a strong hand is to bet you will draw the rare good autocrat – and no one has found a way to guarantee the draw.

There is a deeper problem. As Amartya Sen observed, no functioning democracy with a free press has ever suffered a major famine – not because democracies decide better, but because they can correct their mistakes. A society that can remove a catastrophic leader without a coup has an off-ramp. Authoritarian coherence has none; the machinery that let China commit for 30 years is the machinery that left it no way to halt the Great Leap Forward while tens of millions starved.

So here is the distinction the whole argument turns on. Coherence and toughness are not the same thing. Coherence is sustained alignment and disciplined execution over time; toughness is the concentration of power.

The developmental states did not succeed because power was concentrated – plenty of concentrated regimes simply looted their people. They succeeded because they paired that insulation with competence and a credible long-term commitment. Power concentration was a delivery mechanism, never the active ingredient. Argue for the mechanism and you inherit the variance and the missing off-ramp. Argue for the ingredient and you do not.

Is Rwanda Africa’s answer?

No example shows this better than Rwanda. After the 1994 genocide left it shattered, Rwanda under Paul Kagame became the closest thing Africa has produced to an East Asian developmental state: two decades of strong growth, sharp gains in health and schooling, an efficient and relatively clean bureaucracy and a capital other African cities are measured against.

Vision 2020, now Vision 2050, are exactly the kind of multi-decade, election-proof commitments fragmented democracies struggle to make. If you want evidence that coherent government can deliver real development in Africa, and not only in Asia, this is it.

But Rwanda also carries the bill. Kagame won the 2024 election with about 99% of the vote, and the government has been repeatedly criticised for suppressing dissent, jailing opponents and silencing journalists. And as of early 2026 the downside is no longer theoretical.

The M23 militia – which the US, United Nations investigators and others say is backed by Rwandan troops – has seized Goma and Bukavu, the two largest cities in eastern DRC, in an offensive that has killed thousands and drawn sanctions and aid cuts from Washington, the European Union and others, driven in part by control of the region’s mineral wealth.

If those accusations hold, and the US Treasury and UN experts say they do, the most coherent state on the continent is using its capacity to seize its neighbour’s wealth by force. Coherence pointed inwards builds railways. Coherence pointed outwards, with no one able to say no, becomes conquest. It is the African hawk-eagle again – magnificent, sovereign of its sky – and the chicks it carries off belong to the grandmother next door.

Ones to watch: Botswana and Mauritius

Which is why the countries Africa should study most closely are not China or Rwanda, but Botswana and Mauritius. Botswana, one of the poorest places on Earth at independence, became a functioning democracy that turned its diamond wealth into schools and reserves rather than a presidential fortune: for three decades it was among the fastest-growing economies on earth, banking mineral revenue in a sovereign fund and holding an unbroken line of multiparty elections.

A diamond slump is straining its finances now, but decades of accountable, coherent government remain the achievement worth studying.

Mauritius is the sharper case still. In the 1960s the Nobel economist James Meade gave the overcrowded sugar island little chance; instead it held to its democracy, diversified from sugar into textiles, tourism and finance, climbed to one of the highest incomes in Africa, and now tops the continent’s governance rankings. Both did the thing that is supposed to be impossible: they sustained coherence inside an accountable democracy, with the off-ramp intact – the ingredient without the bill.

This reframes our own debate. South Africa’s difficulty has never been a shortage of freedom, and the answer is not to surrender any.

We have world-class universities, sophisticated finance, deep entrepreneurial talent and a respected constitution.

One administration launches a programme; the next abandons it. A city adopts a master plan; the funding evaporates. Too often an election resets the priorities; coalitions manufacture uncertainty; and we mistake all that motion for progress. It is movement without momentum.

Our problem is not ideas. It is fragmentation. We struggle to keep freight rail running, to maintain municipal infrastructure, to keep the lights on. Freight rail that moved 226 million tonnes at its 2017/18 peak had collapsed to about 150 million by 2024, and is only now clawing its way back.

I have spent much of my career on both sides of that gap. At the Electoral Commission I helped train thousands of the officials who make an election run – millions of ballots from thousands of stations counted in a single day. It is among the most coherent feats this state performs, and it happens inside a multiparty democracy.

Later, as a chartered accountant at the Auditor-General, I read the other ledger: the master plan that becomes an unspent allocation; the target that never reaches a line of expenditure. The question that has followed me between those two desks is why the discipline that reaches the ballot box so rarely reaches the railway.

Manufacturing coherence

The repair is not less democracy and not a strong hand. It is the unglamorous work of manufacturing coherence inside a democracy – the work Botswana and Mauritius actually did.

Insulate the core economic functions, the things that must run for 30 years, from the five-year cycle – not from accountability, but from constant political disruption. Bind successors to long-term budget commitments so a change of administration cannot simply delete the plan.

Depoliticise the bureaucracy and protect appointment on merit, so competence outlasts whoever holds office. None of this asks anyone to surrender a vote. All of it asks us to stop confusing the freedom to choose a direction with the discipline to hold one.

This may be the defining challenge of Africa’s next 40 years. The continent has the youngest population on earth and the minerals the world now needs – but potential is not destiny. The future belongs to countries that can align government, business, labour and civil society behind a handful of long-term priorities and pursue them relentlessly, without dismantling the freedom that lets a people change course when they are wrong.

The question was never socialism or capitalism, a stronger state or a freer market. It is whether we can stay committed to anything long enough to build it.

Gogo never asked which kind of eagle had taken the chick – dark-winged or pale, hawk or kite. She asked why I was standing there, watching, while it did. Decades on, with the eagles only grown larger and the chicks they carry off no longer always our own, it is still the only question worth answering. DM