Human Capital – Continent’s Development Albatross
27 November 2007
Posted to the web 27 November 2007
By Kunle Somorin
No nation becomes great when majority of her nationals are mainly idle, semi-skilled or outrightly unskilled.
Good health, natural resources and infrastructure serve to complement the human resources. Thriving in an information age depends largely on the development of this God-given endowments. That, in the main, is the bane of Africa’s development.
Sustained growth and elimination of poverty will for a long time remain elusive in sub-Saharan Africa until the region succeed in building, retaining and nurturing the required human and institutional capacity vital for grooming the successor generation and interfacing with other developmental partners and process. And to date, it remains the most constraining factor in Africa’s development.
A non governmental organisation, devoted to intervening in this onerous assignment, the African Capacity Building Foundation, ACBF, based in Harare, Zimbabwe, came into existence to address this deficit area. It reckons that although 35 percent of the official development assistance committed to this goal by developmental partners amounting to US$4 billion every year, go down the drain because it could not redress the imbalance between the sending countries and their receiving counterparts. The conundrum ends up being an annual pipedream. The requisite skills have not been delivered because the programmes financed are largely externalised. While externalising Africa’s human development crisis may be instructive, the plausible way seems to seek a genuinely African actualisation to the dream.
Improving Africa’s rating in the United Nations Human Development Index therefore is not only a challenge, but transforming the natural resources to refined products, the only way to prosperity and part to Africa’s renaissance. This nexus can only be achieved from a clearly African perspective to the issue, with focused leadership and an enlightened citizenry that could compete in a world that is divided, but still considered a global village.
By Human Development Index, attention is focused on the population vis-à-vis the living standard, the nature of growth and the quality of life and living. There is no gainsaying the fact that Africa’s population has been on the increase. By 1960, Africa was about 280million, which was 9 percent of the world’s population. By 1977, the population had shot up to 758million, approximately 13 percent of the world’s population. It is estimated that with its steady growth at 2.5percent annual rate, Africa will account for 20 percent of humanity by 2025. Its population has been estimated would, then, have risen to at least 1.5 billion.
Of its present population, five of its largest countries, accounts for one-thirds. These are Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Congo and South Africa. More than 30 of the 52 African countries have less than 20 million inhabitants, over 60 percent that are illiterate rural dwellers.
One important snag about the people of Africa is that largeness of arable land, preponderance of farming families, excessive deposit of mineral and natural resources, and being ancestral homes to pockets of distinguished scholars, scattered around the globe have not translated to development. Most of the people still live on less than one dollar per day. The few privileged ones that live in obscene opulence make their monies through dubious means, government patronage, contract scams, outright stealing from public treasuries, drug peddling and such prebendal acquisitiveness. The result is that corruption is at the base of every activity and there seems to be no end in sight for the monster to quit the landscape. An undisciplined population is a curse to human capital development.
It is only in Africa that population seems to outstrip economic growth four times and over. Africa’s contribution to world GDP was 7 percent in the 1960s, with agriculture accounting for most of its input, but by the close of the millennium it had stagnated at 2 percent. A continent that used to produce its own food and raw materials for its industries and still had enough to export before 1970s fell into miserable poverty and terrible dependency in the late 1970s, became a net importer of 30 percent of food items from other continents. More than half of the industries that came with self-government and the competition by early nationalists had either totally collapsed or were producing below installation capacity by the beginning of 1990s. While other continents continue to experience growth in socio-economic spheres, the dividends of decolonization and self-rule in Africa have been robbed by human capital depletion agents, like internecine wars, conflicts of attrition, intellectual atrophy, military despotism, hunger, diseases, debts, brain drain, civil, but undemocratic rule and backwardness.
The multilateral agencies have not helped much. By 1960, when sovereign nationhood became a fad in Africa, the new leaders met a cumulative debt profile of less than 100million dollars. Under two decades of self rule, the continent has amassed a crippling portfolio in excess of 100billion dollars. Africa through the treadmill of these institutions commit between 20 to 40 percent of her total earnings to debt payment, servicing or rescheduling. The import of this is that there is a correlation between Africa population growth rate and foreign debt. And it lacks the formidable team of economists to bail it out. It is therefore not surprising that when under two years as Nigeria’s Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, negotiated $18billion off her country’s debt, she was not only deified, her singular contribution was made a historical discourse as the country had to engage three firms of multinational consulting firms, less than two months after she left office to help negotiate with creditors on debt relief and forgiveness issues.
The human capital crises are further compounded by the absurd manner of leadership recruitment in the continent. From the respected club of intellectual leaders of the 1950s and 60s that produced the Kwame Nkrumahs, the Julius Nyereres, the Nnamdi Azikwes, the Haile Sailesses, the Obafemi Awolowos, the Sekou Toures, the Jomo Kenyattas and the Leopold Sedar Senghors, Africa descended to the valley of trench-combatants where the Mobutu Sese Sekos, Idi Amin Dadas, Charles Taylors, Samuel Does, and their civilian collaborators hold sway. Indeed, Africa has since independence not been lucky to be governed by ideas men. Most of the leaders are bare-faced thieves, who lack the conceptual understanding of the nuances and praxis of development and so they only leave the continent at the mercy of nature and other elements.
Africa’s Achilles heels are clearly, in her not being able to appreciate the most critical factor in development: human beings. Human beings are the major creator and sustainers of development and only through humans can the manipulations that put nature and material resources make meaning. Material resources are supporters and facilitators of development and that’s why abundance of these resources has not brought prosperity and higher living standards to Africa.
Prof. Dayton who teaches extra-European studies in Oxford has noted in how Africa developed Europe that ‘the most resourceless countries are the most developed in the world’. History of development in the last 500 years has shown that human development is more critical than material resources. Most of the countries in Western Europe and North America are resource poor, but have been able to develop because they have found solution to how to subjugate and dominate the environment, especially the resource rich countries through their human capital in manipulating knowledge. Colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism and globalisation are innocuously shaped and marketed to the resource rich countries, which lack the cohesive capacity to organise themselves and tap their God-given resources to their own advantages. There lies nexus between global politics and global economy.
Even in non-Western countries where development has taken place, South East Asia: Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, India and China, it would be misleading to attribute such to availability of better material resources than what obtains in the Dark Continent. The Asians understands the need for investment in human capital. Indeed lack of natural and material resources tend to stimulate and excite challenges to maximise energy in order to harness the gains from people’s limitation. A comparative analysis is here inevitable. Ethiopia which shares the same kind of population and natural resource with Korea as at 1960 was poles apart in outlook at the close of the last decade. By 1996, Ethiopia students in Medical, Engineering and Medical science numbered less than 2,000, whereas Koreans in similar fields had 454,000. A similar conclusion can be gleaned from the comparison between Nigeria and Indonesia. UNESCO reports that as at 1960, while Nigeria had 41, 504 in tertiary schools, Indonesia had 25,124; but by 1996, the table had turned with Nigeria having 22,080 in engineering faculties as against Indonesia’s 293,946. In Medicine, Nigeria had 22,121 students against Indonesia’s 44,678.
By the close of the 1980, the most highly skilled professionals had fled Africa due to different frustrating circumstances. The United Nations Development Programme at some point concluded that “the best African professionals prefer to work abroad”. For instance, the exodus of doctors has been most striking in the past two decades. More than 21,000 Nigerian doctors are said to be practising in the United States, 60 percent of Ghanaian doctors have left the country. The crisis prone Sudan had since 17% of her doctors’ leave in 1998, 20% of the university lecturers also left, 35% of the engineers joined the brain drain train as well as 45% of surveyors.
The league leader in arable land and energy reserves is Africa. It shares the same developmental pathology with Middle East, which with its energy reserves and agriculture potential is also the second poorest region on earth. The little development witnessed comes in from activities of transnational corporations prospecting for oil or involved in tapping resources from these resource-rich countries. What African leaders fail to appreciate is that material resources are exhaustible, while human resources are sustainable and infinite; and it takes much longer time to produce material resources than human capital.
Interestingly, the new arsenal for international development is anchored on a labour force that is healthy, skilful, knowledgeable and incorruptible. These are rare commodities in Africa. While it would be unfair to say nothing has been achieved in terms of manpower development, education and research, what is also not in doubt, is that the critical mass in terms of volume, quality and competence is grossly insufficient to power the challenges of economic transformation.
Earnest Harsch in his Can Africa Claim the 21st Century underscored Africa’s developmental dilemma in terms of the globalisation process when he called for the bridging of the information gap that keeps widening between North America and Europe on one side and African countries on the other side.
Record available at the beginning of the decade shows that “…whereas Africa has 739 million people, it has a mere 14 million phone line, fewer than in Manhattan or Tokyo…in 1999, only 1 million Africans have access to the internet, compared with 15 million in the United Kingdom; and Africa generate only 0.4 percent of internet content; excluding South Africa, a mere 0.02 percent.”
Much as the situation is improving with increased telephony through the Global System of Mobile Telecommunications, Africa is yet to understand the nexus between Information and Communications Technology, ICT, and economic development through cost saving for industry and increased transport efficiency.
For the poor, largely semi-literate, populace, ICT prospects are enormous. Although GSM provides jobs for the hitherto unemployed youths who sell recharge cards, handsets and accessories as well as operate business centres, ICT is still largely under-utilised. Conversely, unlike in Africa, Asians and Southern Americans use internet to facilitate firm, farm and other economic activities. In villages in Central Peru, people use internet to market organically grown oranges. Small manufacturers of traditional handicraft are already discovering how ICT can be a tool for marketing and distributing their wares across the world.
A recent survey on universities in the world ranked the best university in Nigeria, as the world’s 6001st. Africa’s best university in the ranking was university of Witwatersrand in South Africa and it ranks 2000th. Scientific research that generates knowledge has dwindled in the continent; this has exacerbated the asymmetry between Africa and the rest of the world. A report of Economic Commission for Africa said Africa’s expenditure on research, development, number of science and technology personnel, scientific publications and registered patent widen the hiatus between the ‘connected’ world and Africa. It reveals that the continent accounts for only 0.9percent of the world’s budget for such endeavour, with South Africa accounting for more than half of the continent’s profile.
Even at its highest in 2002, Africa’s share of world’s scientific publication was less than 1.5% and sub-Saharan Africa was 0.8%. For registered patents, sub-Saharan Africa share was a mere 0.2% in Europe and only 0.1% in the United States.
The crisis of human capital is aggravated by lack of access to tertiary education, the highest level where scientific and technical knowledge can be generated. Since that is also the sphere for expertise that can transform the continent’s potential in agriculture, mineral and natural resources, nothing gets done.
A UNESCO report notes that only 10 percent of school leavers are able to gain university admission. Only four countries in the continent achieved over 10 percent of higher institution transition among high school leavers. These are Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia and Algeria. Countries like Ethiopia and Burkina Faso could only achieved 0.06 and 0.08 percent respectively.
In terms of the relevance of even courses offered in these universities there still much to be desired. The major feature of courses reveals a preponderance of liberal arts and paucity of science and technical scholarship. Where they are found, laboratory facilities, qualified staff proved to be major challenges.
Poverty and disease, especially HIV-AIDS and the resurgence of tuberculosis and malaria also contribute to budgetary constraints. These, in part, made Stephen O’Connell and Charles Soludo in their Aid Intensity in Africa argue that since debt dominate Africa’s development, official development assistance must be based on economic criteria that will support human resources development.