Business | Features
Welcoming modernity
The quality of life may have improved for a few but the problems of bulging younger populations, widespread poverty and unemployment in Africa remain unresolved
- By William Wallis, Financial Times
- Published: 22:59 October 4, 2009
As recently as 2001 - and for several years before - Abeokuta was the only destination listed on the international departures board at Murtala Mohammad Airport in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.
For those in the know, this added a certain frisson to time spent in the departures lounge. There is no landing strip in the town, so if you were to arrive by air, it would be because your plane had fallen from the sky shortly after take-off.
Today, the old panel has been replaced with one showing an expanding range of international destinations. In 10 years, there has been a sweeping makeover of what was one of the world's most intimidating and chaotic airports - travellers equipped to draw a comparison would have to agree that the experience is now far less fraught.
As globalisation has washed up on African shores, a veneer of welcoming modernity has been established at all but a handful of the continent's main airports. Beyond them, in many African capitals, enough urban undergrowth has been cleared to provide an environment both friendlier to business and more accommodating to visitors.
Yet a decade of accelerating economic growth - stalled at the beginning of this year by the global downturn - and the bubble in which expatriates and more affluent Africans live has expanded.
You can zip - or grind through traffic - from one side of Nairobi, Dakar or Accra to another with 21st century communications at hand: a Blackberry that keeps you in touch with headquarters; a mobile phone that cuts through dense thickets of bureaucracy to reach decision-makers direct and internet that connects, albeit with variable efficiency.
Thanks largely to South African and Asian businesses, you can also find shopping malls and supermarkets with abundant supplies of consumer goods. In some cities, you can even go to the cinema. You are less likely than before to re-emerge and find tanks in the streets and junior officers hijacking the levers of power. There have been about 90 successful coups in Africa in 50 years, only seven in the past decade.
Yet, political instability and conflict remain some of the principal impediments to the development of sub-Saharan Africa and to the allure of working in many of its individual states.
In the 1990s, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe were among the most attractive bases for businesses, their infrastructure and services, alongside Johannesburg's, the most efficient on the continent. Today, Abidjan is struggling to recover from civil war. Zimbabwe's economy has shrunk by two-thirds.
Outside disaster zones, you can also collide with darker realities of grinding poverty, urban desolation and rampant crime lurking behind new facades of efficiency.
Quality of life has improved in the upper echelons. But few African governments can claim yet to have answered the challenge of demographic change, bulging younger populations, widespread poverty and unemployment.
Reliable statistics that capture the resulting trends in migration and labour markets are hard to find. But the broad picture is fairly clear.
Each year, tens of thousands of poorer Africans risk precarious and illegal crossings to Europe in search of work. At the level of skilled workers and professionals, the brain drain continues apace. By some recent estimates, 20,000 skilled Africans leave annually, at huge cost to states that have invested in their future.
Conversely, as much as a third of development aid is spent on the salaries of expatriates filling the gaps. In recent years, there has also been a reverse trend. Economic liberalisation and increased investment have provided new opportunities for educated and experienced Africans.
Recruitment agencies are finding a steady flow of business from a diaspora that tapped into renewed optimism about Africa's future as economies boomed between 2000 and 2008. Rupert Adcock, managing director of the Global Career Company, says that over the past decade he has received a 56 per cent annual increase in the number of Africans seeking jobs back home, and 46 per cent yearly growth in the number of companies wanting to employ them.
Where 10 years ago, these were mostly multinationals, now a growing number of African companies are seeking to draw the skilled diaspora back.
So, while state sectors, where salaries are low, continue to haemorrhage doctors, nurses, technocrats and teachers, the private sector is drawing talent back. As barriers break down within regional economic blocs there is a steady growth in intra-regional job markets too.
It is impossible to generalise about the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. So an e-mail questionnaire sent to hundreds of contacts among African and expatriate professionals captured a predictably diverse range of opinion on whether the frustrations of working life in Africa outweigh recent gains.
The replies suggest that skilled Africans returning home often do so because they have reached a glass ceiling in the companies they worked for in the west, and can go further and contribute more in their countries of origin.
There was a consensus that technology, in particular the advent of the mobile phone, has been a significant driver of change in terms of quality of living, connecting Africa to the world and contribution to income growth. On the bleaker side, were complaints - many from Nigerians - about inadequate infrastructure, electricity cuts and corrupt, lethargic bureaucrats.
Most of all there was frustration at the venality of government and lack of leadership. Things may have improved on this front too, but relative to a less than perfect past.
The World Bank's annual rankings on the ease of doing business around the world gives an idea of how much more could be done. With a few exceptions - notably Rwanda this year which leapt 76 places after a big effort to spur investment - African countries still fill nearly all the bottom slots. The most exciting thing about working in Africa is the potential, says an investment banker who travels the continent. The most frustrating, are the obstacles to achieving it
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