Africa’s Ugly Sisters

Lowest quality of life
The three ugly sisters are not the only countries in Africa with deep-seated problems, unresolved conflicts and the potential to export those problems beyond their borders.

South Sudan (a neighbour of the DRC and CAR) is one. Another is DRC’s neighbour, Burundi. But DRC, CAR and Chad have something striking in common in that they are all three still-functioning states that are consistently at the bottom of international rankings of the intangible aspects of quality of life.

For example, the Ibrahim Foundation’s Index of African Governance aims to provide the most complete collection of quantitative data on the essentially qualitative question of governance in Africa. With data on rule of law, human rights, opportunity and human development, it integrates these data streams into a single ranking of the quality of governance for 52 African countries.

With the exception of failed-state Somalia and the tiny police state of Eritrea, DRC, CAR and Chad are at the bottom of the table. Chad is rated 48th out of 52 countries, with CAR at 49 and DRC at 51. CAR has the worst education provision on the continent (not counting Somalia), and Chad has the worst human development and healthcare ranking (not counting Somalia). Another measure of the quality of life in Africa is the African Prosperity Report published by the Legatum Institute, a think-tank based in London and Washington. The Legatum report is a survey-based ranking that ranges across areas such as economy, opportunity, education, personal freedom, health and ‘social capital’.

Because it relies on surveys, it only covers countries where it is feasible to conduct such data gathering – there are only 38 countries in the Legatum rankings, but they do include our three ugly sisters. In the most recent 2013 report, the sisters are at the bottom: DRC is 36th, CAR 37th and Chad bottom at 38th. The previous year they were also at the bottom.

Africa is entering a period of increasing challenge. That means that stability is at a higher premium than before, as investors take a harder look at African businesses

One of the most revealing aspects of the Legatum results is that attitudes of citizens on many issues are not that much different from the African average – for example, for most citizens in the three countries, dissatisfaction with the quality of government is nothing like as high as might be expected.

Yet on more objective matters like economic growth rates, educational enrolment levels and availability of healthcare, the three sisters score far worse than the average. As elsewhere in Africa, the economic fundamentals are shaping the present and the future – and it doesn’t look promising.

For the rest of Africa, and especially for the neighbours of these three countries, the trouble in the heart of Africa is a shared problem.

What happens in DRC, CAR and Chad helps shape what happens nearby, and the instability that these three countries generate helps undermine prospects for all around.

Would there have been a Darfur crisis of such magnitude without the arms and lawless haven offered by Chad? Would the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda have continued so long and so violently without the proximity of a broken state in DRC? Would the Southern Sudanese civil war have been so long-running without neighbours like DRC, CAR and Chad? Would post-Gadaffi Libya have been more stable if it had not experienced infusions of arms from restive Chad?

What does all this instability and poor governance cost the economy of central Africa? The total cost is probably incalculable – but last year’s report from the Africa Progress Panel singled out just five murky deals involving the trading of mining assets in the DRC, and concluded that in the two years to 2012, these five transactions alone cost the country more than $1.4bn in foregone value – more than double the DRC’s entire education budget.

Africa is entering a period of increasing challenge. The headlong growth and keen investor interest of the last few years may start to slow, part of the larger cooling down of the emerging market growth story. That means that stability is at a higher premium than before, as investors take a harder look at African businesses compared to only a few months ago, when everything African seemed like an automatic good buy. In this harsher and more critical world, can Africa afford to have three ugly sisters generating uncertainty and conflict right in the middle of the continent?

The UN has already had success in bringing a measure of stability to DRC by creating an intervention force with unprecedented offensive as well as defensive powers. A new UN force is proposed for CAR too, although it will not deploy any earlier than late 2014.

In Chad, the prospect of former dictator Hissène Habré having to account for the brutality of his years in power as his war crimes trial gets under way in the Senegalese capital Dakar offers just a glimpse of a future when accountability may be part of government.

These are all straws of hope that even for the ugly sisters, there may be a better future. But if the past is any guide to the future, then that expectation is still a triumph of hope over experience.