Economic growth in Africa, as in the rest

of the world, depends on a vibrant private

sector. Entrepreneurs in Africa, however, face

daunting constraints. They are prevented

from creating wealth by predatory political

elites that control the state. African political

elites use marketing boards and taxation to

divert agricultural savings to finance their

own consumption and to strengthen the

repressive apparatus of the state. Peasants,

who constitute the core of the private sector

in sub-Saharan Africa, are the biggest losers.

In order for Africa to prosper, peasants need

to become the real owners of their primary

asset—land—over which they currently have

no property rights.

Peasants must also be given direct access

to world markets. They must be able to auction

their cash crops, including coffee, tea,

cotton, sugar, cocoa, and rubber, freely

rather than being forced to sell them to

state-controlled marketing boards at discounted

prices. In that respect, South Africa

is unique in the region. The country does

not have a large disenfranchised peasantry.

Most of South Africa’s private sector

belongs to South Africans, who also have a

say in the political process. The future will

show whether those factors will constrain

the power of the South African political elite

in a manner that is sufficient to safeguard

South Africa’s growth potential.

When the colonies in Africa and Asia became

independent, their political leaders were faced

with two main challenges: achieving domestic

political stability and transforming their

economies from the production of raw materials

to industrial production. The outcome of

that project is today a matter of general knowledge.

Although Asian countries went through

many conflicts in the early years, by 1965 most

of those conflicts had been resolved. Asian leaders

turned to the second challenge of developing

and diversifying their countries’ economies.

Africa’s story is far more mixed. Many old conflicts,

including wars in Sudan, Ethiopia, and

Eritrea, continue. More recent conflicts, such as

the genocide in Rwanda, continue to erupt on a

scale and ferocity that is difficult to fathom.

Internal conflict has split Côte d’Ivoire—once

the crown jewel of West Africa—in two. With few

exceptions, Africa’s political elites have driven

their countries’ economies backwards.

that many observers, the 1974 winner of the

Nobel prize for economics Gunnar Myrdal

among them, expected Asia to remain mired in

poverty while Africa steamed ahead. A comparison

between Ghana and South Korea, two countries

that were at a similar level of development in

the 1960s, shows that the opposite happened.

The World Bank found that “In 1965 . . . incomes

and exports per capita were higher in Ghana

than in Korea . . . Korea’s exports per capita overtook

Ghana’s in 1972, and its income level surpassed

Ghana’s four years later. Between 1965

and 1995 Korea’s exports increased by 400 times

in current dollars. Meanwhile, Ghana’s increased

only four times, and real earnings per capita fell

At the root of Africa’s problems are ruling

political elites that have misused the economic

surplus generated by the African continent

over the last 40 years. African political

elites have exploited their position in order to

Western levels,

projects that were not supported by

the necessary technical, managerial, and

educational development, and

agriculture and mineral extraction to

overseas private bank accounts, while

borrowing vast amounts from developed

countries.

What were the results of those predatory

policies? According to the World Bank and

the International Monetary Fund, which

have become Africa’s fairy godparents,

Africans are poor and getting poorer. The

World Bank noted, “Despite gains in the second

half of the 1990s, Sub-Saharan Africa . . .

enters the 21st century with many of the

world’s poorest countries. Average per capita

income is lower than at the end of the 1960s.

Incomes, assets, and access to essential services

are unequally distributed. And the

region contains a growing share of the

world’s absolute poor, who have little power

Other researchers have corroborated the

World Bank’s observations. According to the

National Bureau of Economic Research,

Thirty-six percent of the region’s population

lives in economies that in 1995

had not regained the per capita income

levels first achieved before 1960.

Another six percent are below levels

first achieved by 1970, 41 percent

below 1980 levels and 11 percent below

1990 levels. Only 35 million people

reside in nations that had higher

incomes in 1995 than they had ever

In fact, many people in sub-Saharan

Africa have fallen so far down the economic

2

scale that it is hard to imagine them getting

poorer.

African states as we know them today

were not created by Africans. With a few

exceptions, such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia,

and Sierra Leone, they were created by

European imperial powers that had little

regard for ethnic and religious differences

among Africans. The arbitrary nature of

African boundaries explains in part why over

the past 30 years Africa has experienced civil

wars, intertribal wars, violent communal

conflicts and pogroms, wars of secession,

and more recently, in the Great Lakes region

of Central Africa and in parts of the Sudan,

genocide and ethnic cleansing. Those conflicts

have been accompanied by vast population

movements in and out of several national

boundaries. As a result, Africa is host to the

largest number of refugees and internally displaced

persons in the world.

The states that the African political elites

inherited from the colonial powers often

served as tools of political oppression but

also of economic exploitation through such

instruments as poll taxes and forced labor on

plantations, mines, and infrastructure projects.

The introduction of cash crops provided

the state with revenue that the colonialists

used to consolidate their power over the local

populations. State corporations or favored

private monopolies from the colonial

power’s home country bought cash crops

from the peasants. Either way, the farmers

got the worse end of the bargain, as they were

paid at far below world market prices.

The political elites that took over African

countries in the 1960s saw government as a

source of personal enrichment. One of the

great pioneers of this scramble for power on

the eve of Africa’s independence, Ghana’s

Kwame Nkrumah, urged the emerging political

elites: “Seek ye first the political kingdom

Africa since the 1960s is thus the history of

groups of elites seeking the “political kingdom,”

with the primary purpose of enriching

themselves. Built into that quest for wealth

was the exclusion of outsiders, including

both the masses and the weaker parts of the

political elite. Competition for economic

resources exacerbated the ethnic and religious

tensions that were already present.

That explains in part why there have been so

many intrastate conflicts in Africa.

During the past 50 years there have been

only two interstate wars among African

countries—the war between Tanzania and

Uganda in the 1970s and the war between

Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1990s (and the

latter war could be considered a continuation

of the secessionist conflict between

Eritreans and Ethiopians). But intrastate

conflicts have been legion, fragmenting

African states into warring factions and parties.

In many countries, internal conflicts

have weakened the state to the point where

African governments can no longer perform

essential services, including enforcement of

the rule of law.

All modern schools of political thought,

from Marx and Lenin to Hayek and

Friedman, agree on at least one thing: the private

sector is the driver of modern economic

development.

In their quest for greater security and comfort,

private individuals seek ever more material

wealth. That process compels them to produce

more and exchange what they produce

with other individuals who also seek greater

security and comfort. Put together, those acts

of production, exchange, and consumption

constitute the modern capitalist economy.

In order to produce more, private individuals

must generate savings and plow those

savings back into the production process in

the form of new and improved techniques,

processes, and products.

3

That is the logic of capital accumulation.

If you wish to accumulate more value, you

have to produce more value. To be able to

consume more, you must be able to do the

following:

more capital. That, in turn, requires you

to accumulate more capital or save.

That may come from technological

improvements or entrepreneurial alertness

to opportunities to reduce waste.

Those who cannot use their capital most

efficiently tend to have less of it than others.

Alternatively, less efficient producers are

“bought out” by more efficient producers.

Like people everywhere, Africans want

security and comfort. Unfortunately, the

great majority of Africans are today experiencing

the opposite. In many instances,

Africans face daily hunger, homelessness,

threats of violence, actual violence, and starvation.

If we consider the peasant household as a

firm, Africa may have one of the largest private

sectors in the world. Most Africans live and

work on small farms that populate the African

countryside (see Table 1 for examples of selected

African countries). Theoretically, therefore,

Africa should be a hive of economic activity.

What has gone wrong?

Africa’s private sector is predominantly

made up of peasants and, to a lesser extent,

subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational

corporations. But those groups are dominated

by the unproductive political elites who

control the state. Africa’s private sector is

powerless. It does not have the freedom to

maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not

free to decide what happens to its savings.

It has long been recognized that peasants

tend not to join forces to further their political

interests. They are, therefore, open to exploitation

by other social groups that dominate

them politically. In his classic analysis of

French society in the 19th century, Karl Marx

noted the powerlessness and, therefore, the

vulnerability of peasants.

The smallholding peasants form a vast

mass, the members of which live in

similar conditions but without entering

into manifold relations with one

another. Their mode of production

4

Agriculture Industry Services

1970 1980 1990 1970 1980 1990 1970 1980 1990

Agricultural countries

Ethiopia 91 89 86 2 2 2 7 9 12

Kenya 84 82 80 5 6 7 9 11 13

Oil producing countries

Nigeria 71 54 43 11 8 7 19 38 50

Gabon 79 65 52 9 12 16 12 22 33

Newly industrializing countries

Mauritius 34 27 17 25 28 43 41 45 40

South Africa 31 17 14 30 35 32 39 48 54

isolates them from one another

instead of bringing them into a mutual

intercourse. . . . Each family is almost

self-sufficient; it itself directly produces

the major part of its consumption

and thus acquires its means of life

more through exchange with nature

than in intercourse with society. . . . In

so far as there is merely a local interconnection

among these smallholding

peasants, and the identity of their

interests begets no community, no

national bond and no political organization

among them, they do not form

a class. They are consequently incapable

of enforcing their class interests

in their own name, whether through a

More recently, Milton Friedman observed

that the reduction of the size of the agricultural

sector relative to the rest of the economy

tends to be accompanied by increased political

clout of agricultural producers. When farmers

form a majority of the population, they tend

to subsidize the urban minority. When farmers

form a minority, the urban majority subsidizes

them. The reason, Friedman wrote, rests

in higher transaction costs that large groups

have to face in comparison to smaller groups.

A group that seeks benefits through

political pressure is handicapped by

being too numerous and, at least up to

a point, benefited by being few. Government

can spend a dollar per member

of a majority only by collecting more

than a dollar from each member of the

minority, each of whom will therefore

squeal louder than each of the majority

will applaud. On the other hand, government

can spend a dollar per member

of a small minority by collecting only a

few cents from each member of a large

majority—the applause is then far louder

In most of Africa, the urban population is

much smaller and more concentrated than

the rural population. As such, the urban population

finds it easier to organize and to

achieve its ends. The peasants, however, are

more numerous and more disorganized. As a

result, the interests of African peasants are

not well represented, even in countries where

the political elites claim to act in the interests

of peasants. Robert Mugabe, for example, has

reduced the Zimbabwean peasants to paupers

who now have to be fed by the United

Nations’ World Food Program.

African political elites use their control of

the state to extract the agricultural surplus or

savings. Were the peasants free to retain that

surplus capital, they could invest it in improving

their production techniques or diversifying

their economic activities. Instead, the

political elite uses marketing boards and taxation

to divert those savings to finance its own

consumption and strengthen the repressive

made the following observation about

Ethiopia’s dependence on foreign food donations:

“By law, all Ethiopian land is owned by

the state. Farmers are loath to invest in

improving productivity when they have no

title to the land they till. Nor can they use land

as collateral to raise credit. And they are taxed

so heavily that they rarely have any surplus

A great deal of what is consumed by

Africa’s political elites and the states they

control is imported. Such elite consumption

of imports acts as a major drain of national

savings that would otherwise have gone into

productive investment in Africa. That is the

secret to Africa’s growing impoverishment

despite its large private sector. The more the

African political elites consolidate their

power, and the more they strengthen their

hold over the state, the more the peasants are

likely to become poorer, and the more the

African economies are likely to regress or, at

best, stagnate.

One of the most striking cases of that phenomenon

is Nigeria. According to a study of

Nigeria prepared by the Centre for the Study

of African Economies at Oxford University,

between 1980 and 2000 per capita gross

5

domestic product (GDP) in 1996 dollars

adjusted for purchasing power parity fell

from US $1,215 to US $706. The authors

pointed out that the 40 percent drop in

income understated the size of Nigeria’s

problem. “First the fall in real per capita consumption

was very much greater [than the

fall in per capita income] while the available

evidence suggests that inequality rose. This

combination of a very large fall in per capita

consumption combined with increasing

According to another source, the number of

Nigerians living below the poverty line

increased from 19 million in 1970 to 90 million

in 2000. That was accompanied by a

massive rise in inequality. In 1970 the top 2

percent of the population earned the same

income as the bottom 17 percent. By 2000,

the income of the top 2 percent was equal to

To understand the potential of what

could be achieved in Africa with correct policies,

let us compare what is happening in

Nigeria to what is happening in China. While

per capita GDP nearly halved in Nigeria and

the number of people living below the poverty

line skyrocketed between 1970 and 2000,

per capita income in China increased sevenfold

during the same period, lifting more

The African oil industry provides the

most graphic illustration of the role played

by predatory political elites in African underdevelopment.

Oil revenues make it possible

for the political elite to become detached

from the local population and economy.

When that happens, there is no need for the

political elite and the state it controls to

invest in public goods enjoyed by the population

at large. Worse, oil revenue provides the

political elite with the funds to repress the

described the impact of oil production on

Equatorial Guinea and Gabon:

Equatorial Guinea now pumps more oil

per person than Saudi Arabia. Its economy,

once negligible, has grown at an

incredible 40 percent annually since

1996, when the oil boom began. . . .

Equatorial Guinea was never well governed:

Obiang Nguema, the president,

seized power by executing his uncle in

1979. But oil has made his regime

increasingly paranoid. Several members

of the ruling family are thought to want

a bigger slurp at the oil barrel. Mr.

Obiang sees plots everywhere, and

arranged periodic crackdowns. Several

opposition leaders were jailed last year

after a mass trial, to which many defendants

turned up with broken arms and

legs. Mr. Obiang scoffs at western

notions of transparency, insisting that

how much money his government earns

from oil is nobody’s business. “Oil has

turned him crazy,” says Celestino Bacale,

In the years after independence, when the

political elite was relatively small and closer

to the masses that had supported it in its

struggles against colonialism, the elite invested

in education, healthcare, and transportation.

Thandika Mkandawire, director of the

United Nations Research Institute for Social

Development, has noted:

If one takes a growth rate of 6 percent

over more than a decade as a measure of

successful development performance,

in the 1967–1980 period, ten countries

enjoying such growth were African.

These not only included mineral-rich

countries such as Gabon, Botswana,

Congo and Nigeria but also such countries

as Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, who

slightly outperformed both Indonesia

and Malaysia during the period. One

interesting feature is that much of this

growth was sustained largely by domestic

savings, which increased significantly

after independence, reaching, on the

Zimbabwe provides a textbook example of

the correlation between falling standards of

6

living of the population at large and the growing

power of the political elite. In their struggle

against the white minority regime,

Zimbabwe’s nationalists enlisted the support

of the peasants and agricultural workers that

made up the majority of Zimbabwe’s population.

During the 1980s, the first decade of

Zimbabwe’s independence, the ZANU government

made strenuous efforts to uplift those

agricultural constituencies. In the meantime,

however, ZANU set out to crush ZAPU—its

former ally. ZANU succeeded only after a great

deal of bloodletting. What remained of ZAPU

was absorbed into ZANU-PF (ZANU’s new

name) in 1988. Once it consolidated its hold

on power, the ZANU-PF political elite quickly

forgot about its wartime constituency and

proceeded to enrich itself to the great detriment

of the national economy and the population

at large. The University of Zimbabwe’s

Tony Hawkins notes that Zimbabwe’s per

capita GDP in 1990 Zimbabwean dollars fell

from Z$2185 in 1999 to Z$1355 in 2003.

Zimbabwean per capita GDP was lower in

2003 than at the time of Zimbabwe’s independence

European joint stock companies have

operated in Africa since the dawn of the capitalist

era. One of the most famous among

them, the Dutch East India Company, started

the colonization of South Africa in the

mid-17th century. During the “Scramble for

Africa,” those companies followed close on

the heels of the conquering armies of the

colonial powers and established agricultural

plantations, mines, railways, harbors, and

new cities. Later they diversified into making

consumer goods for the burgeoning African

market, from soap and beer to blankets, fishing

nets, and processing raw materials.

When African states became independent,

foreign corporations lost their colonial protectors.

Before long they, like the peasants,

fell prey to the appetites and whims of the

new African political elite that controlled the

newly independent African states. The lucky

corporations were nationalized and their

owners compensated. The unlucky ones were

confiscated by individual politicians without

compensation. Many corporations survived

as best they could. They bribed the new elite

or found ways of ingratiating themselves

with their new masters. Even the mighty

Western oil companies have not escaped the

destructive power of Africa’s political elites.

They are periodically compelled to make

huge payments to foreign private bank

accounts of the local heads of state and their

friends and families. For example, the U.S.

Senate has uncovered vast sums paid by oil

companies to the private American bank

accounts of Equatorial Guinea’s head of

The political elites in sub-Saharan Africa

largely refrained from seizing the heavy manufacturing

and mining companies. Foreignowned

companies therefore still dominate

those sectors, with state-owned enterprises or

parastatals increasingly playing a minor role. A

recent study by the World Bank showed that

the most productive companies in, for example,

Nigeria, are those owned by multinational

corporations or by non-African industrialists,

of those owners are easy targets, however, as

they are not represented within the political

elites. Like the peasants, they are subjected to

all sorts of official and unofficial taxes, ranging

from bribes for factory inspectors and customs

officials to artificially high electricity tariffs,

arbitrary municipal rates, and so on. That is

another way that the African political elite contributes

to fostering Africa’s underdevelopment.

Because political elites obstruct the operations

of industry and divert profits to elite

consumption and capital flight, Africa’s manufacturing

industries are unable to grow and,

therefore, create employment for all types of

workers.

According to one study, for example,

Between 1970 and 1980 [Ghana’s] per

capita GDP declined by a total of 19.7

7

percent; from 1980 to 1983 it dropped

by a further 21.3 percent. There was

sharp decline in both domestic and

export production. The manufacturing

index plunged from 100 in 1977 to

69 in 1980 and 63.3 in 1981, with average

capacity utilization in that year

estimated at only 24 percent.” Even

after 1983, when the World Bank and

other donors tried to breathe life into

Ghana’s industry, “Overall capacity

utilization improved from 30 percent

in 1983 to 40 percent in 1989 and

appears to have stagnated at around

this level for much of industry in the

The result of that massive onslaught against

Africa’s manufacturing and mining sectors was

all too predictable. In a recent report, the UN

Industrial Development Organization painted a

grim picture:

since 1970, though there are

a number of exceptions to this trend.

Moreover, average manufacturing labor

productivity relative to aggregate labor

productivity is lower now than it was in

1970. There is, therefore, both a widening

productivity gap between agriculture

and manufacturing and between

manufacturing and economy-wide productivity,

meaning that Sub-Saharan

Africa has moved backwards in the past

Not surprisingly, the UN International Organization

for Migration estimates that each year

20,000 African professionals emigrate out of the

The issues discussed here do not mean

there is no new investment in sub-Saharan

Africa. Investment in petroleum and other

extractive industries proceeds apace. More

recently there has been a spate of investment

in mobile telephony and in some tourism

and retail infrastructure. There are also a few

new investors in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular

South African and Mauritian corporations

and companies from Asia and Latin

America. Most of those investors, however,

shy away from long-term investment in manufacturing.

Though part of sub-Saharan Africa geographically,

South Africa has two features

that distinguish it from the rest of the region.

First, South Africa does not have a large peasantry.

Second, its private sector is owned

mainly by South African citizens, one of the

unintended consequences of sanctions and

disinvestment in the 1970s and 1980s. Those

two features have enormous implications for

governance in South Africa.

Although South Africa is ruled by a political

elite that has much the same roots and

characteristics as most of the political elites

in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the South

African elite is enormously constrained by

the fact that it does not have a passive peasantry

to exploit. Instead it is surrounded by a

dynamic private sector that is owned by

South African citizens whose rights are constitutionally

guaranteed and are enforced

through the electoral process, the judiciary,

and an independent mass media that sees

itself as the watchdog over citizens’ rights.

In addition, during the struggle against

apartheid, the current South African political

elite was compelled to enter into an alliance

with the black urban workers. South Africa’s

urban workers are well organized into independent

labor movements, especially trade

unions, which articulate and represent their

interests. Central to the interests of the black

workers and private-sector owners is job creation

for the former and profit maximization

for the latter. Those two forces, therefore, have

a common interest in promoting economic

growth and minimizing the private enrichment

of the political elite. That is what makes

South Africa different from the rest of the

region and what accounts for its ability to

8

grow its economy while the economies of the

rest of sub-Saharan Africa are stymied by the

dead weight of consumption by political elites.

That argument does not, however, mean

that the political elite in South Africa will not

try to enrich itself at the expense of private-sector

producers. Black Economic Empowerment,

a government policy that aims to

increase black participation in the South

African economy through a system of racial

quotas, is in reality an attempt to siphon savings

from private-sector operators. The fact

that BEE has proved to be more of an uphill

battle than the political elite in South Africa

expected is due to the ability of the private sector

to resist dispossession. Time will tell who

will come out ahead in what could be a titanic

struggle by the political elite to “privatize” the

wealth of South Africa’s current private-sector

owners. An even bigger question is what

impact such struggles will have on the future

growth of the South African economy.

The South African political elite is being

encouraged to pursue BEE by elements of the

super rich who seek political favors from the

state in order to

listing of their corporations from

the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to the

London Stock Exchange,

and

policy decisionmaking.

Foreign multinational corporations continue

to play an important role in the South

African economy. The property rights protection

enforced by the South African Constitution

protects foreign investors. The sophistication

of the South African economy and its

extensive integration in the global economy

via a plethora of international licenses,

patents, and copyrights means that foreign

corporations have independent clout in South

Africa. That point was brought home in the

negotiations between South Africa and the

American Chamber of Commerce over BEE in

American information technology companies

operating in South Africa. Not surprisingly,

the giants of U.S. information and communication

technology will not have to comply

with BEE if they do not wish to.

In 2001 most African governments adopted

the New Partnership for Africa’s Development,

or NEPAD. NEPAD, which provides a

framework for Africa’s development, emphasizes

the role of good governance in stimulating

economic growth. While NEPAD may

address some of the worst excesses of the

political elites, it does not address the fundamental

problem: the enormous power imbalance

between the political elite and key private-

sector producers. If the driving force

behind sub-Saharan Africa’s underdevelopment

is the structural powerlessness of producers

and therefore their inability to retain

and control their savings, there will be no

development in sub-Saharan Africa. So how

is that to be reversed, and by whom?

Development in sub-Saharan Africa

requires a new type of democracy—one that

empowers not just the political elite but sub-

Saharan Africa’s private-sector producers as

well. It is therefore necessary that peasants,

who constitute the core of the private sector in

sub-Saharan Africa, become the real owners of

their primary asset: land. In addition to generating

wealth, private ownership of land is the

only way in which rampant deforestation and

accelerating desertification can be addressed.

That means that freehold must be introduced

and the so-called communal land tenure system,

which is really state ownership of land,

ought to be abolished. Moreover, peasants

must gain direct access to world markets. The

producers must be able to auction their own

cash crops, including coffee, tea, cotton, sugar,

cocoa, and rubber, rather than be forced to sell

them to state-controlled marketing boards.

9

Sub-Saharan Africa needs new financial

institutions that are independent of the

political elite and can address the financial

needs not only of peasants, but of other

small- to medium-scale producers as well.

Those could be cooperatives, credit unions,

savings banks, and so on. In addition to providing

financial services, those institutions

could undertake all the other technical services

that are not being provided at present

by African governments, such as crop research,

extension services, livestock improvement,

storage, transportation, distribution,

and many other services that would make

agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa more productive.

Foreign donors could play a constructive

role by helping such institutions

with expertise and management and shielding

them from predation by Africa’s political

elite. The above changes could for the first

time bring into being a capitalist market

economy that answers to the needs of African

producers and consumers.

If NEPAD is to contribute to Africa’s economic

development, it must help redesign

Africa’s political economy so that it protects

the rights of private-sector actors instead of

rent-seeking political elites. NEPAD must

devote more of its time to addressing fundamental

issues related to African political economy

rather than impressing foreign governments,

such as those in the G8, with inflated

accounts of democratization on the African

continent.

(Washington: World Bank, 2000), p. 19.

2. Ibid.

3. Richard B. Freeman and David L. Lindauer,

“Why Not Africa?” National Bureau of Economic

Research Working Paper no. 6942 (1999). In 2003,

sub-Saharan Africa had 688 million inhabitants.

p. 84.

5. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,

and Wishart, 1968), pp. 170–71.

6. Milton Friedman, “The Advantage of Being

Few: How Farmers and Other Vocal Minorities

2004.

8. Centre for the Study of African Economies,

“Sources of Growth in Nigeria: An Initial

Analysis,” unpublished.

9. Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian,

August 2004, pp. 77–89.

August 21, 2004.

States,” January 25, 2003.

12. Thandika Mkandawire, “Thinking about

13. Tony Hawkins, “The Zimbabwean Economy

2003. Also see http://m1.mny.co.za/mnsbx.nsf/0/

C2256B190030A01742256CCA00450883?Open

Document.

14. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian

Affairs, “Equatorial Guinea: US Senate Probe

Reveals Massive Theft of Oil Revenue,” July 16,

2004, http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?Report

ID=42237&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCou

ntry=EQUATORIAL_GUINEA.

2002).

University Press, 2002), pp. 6, 81–82.

17. United Nations Industrial Development

Organization, “Industrialization, Environment

and the Millennium Development Goals in Sub-

Saharan Africa: The New Frontier in the Fight

2004, pp. 39–40; emphasis in original.

18. Emily Wax, “Driven Away by Upheaval, Drawn

10

by Ted Galen Carpenter (November 10, 2004)

(March 15, 2004)

(September 22, 2003)

Vásquez (September 17, 2003)

Ian Vásquez and John Welborn (September 15, 2003)

Peña (May 28, 2003)

12, 2003)

Ivan Eland (February 5, 2003)

Peña (December 11, 2001)

Hanke (December 4, 2001)

(May 30, 2001)

Daniel Lee (March 29, 2001)

Doug Bandow (March 21, 2001)

Charles V. Peña (September 6, 2000)

2000)

James M. Sheehan (April 12, 2000)

(December 20, 1999)

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