Democracy has made progress in sub-Saharan Africa, but the fight against poverty has not. We trail East Asia and the Pacific in reducing poverty because we lag far behind in economic growth.

In May 2000, The Economist outraged many people when it described Africa as ‘The Hopeless Continent’. ‘Who would want to live in Europe anyway?’ demanded our own Financial Mail. ‘Ignore this racist diatribe,’ commanded Jovial Rantao in the Saturday Star.

In the good old tradition of ignoring good news, little attention has greeted the London magazine’s latest survey of sub-Saharan Africa, entitled ‘How to  make Africa smile’. Among other things, the paper said there were encouraging signs that President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe represented Africa’s past, not its future.

The most telling example of the advance of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa since the end of the cold war, The Economist said, was this: in the 1960s  and 1970s, no African ruler was voted out of office, while in the 1980s, only one was. ‘Since then, 18 have been and counting...a sign that some African governments are becoming more accountable to their people.’

So much for the view that robust oppositions able to oust governments at the polls are bad for African democracy. They are indeed the surest sign that democracy is alive and well.

Africa nevertheless faces an enormous challenge to reverse its relative and absolute economic decline. Latest World Bank data show that in 1990, 19% of the poorest people on earth lived in sub-Saharan Africa. The proportion rose to 27% in 1999 and will rise even further — to 50% — by 2015. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than a dollar a day.

Translating these percentages into people means that the number of the extremely poor in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 241m in 1990 to 315m in 1999 and will increase further to 404m by 2015. Whereas the proportion of people in all low and middle-income countries who are poor will drop from 30% in 1990 to 13% in 2015, the proportion of sub-Saharan Africans who are poor will drop from 47% to 46%— barely at all.

Why is this region doing so badly against poverty? No growth — in fact, negative growth, better described as shrinkage, in gross domestic product (GDP) per head. Between 1990 and 1999, GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa shrank by 5%. In striking contrast, it rose in East Asia and the Pacific by 75%.

Poverty, in other words, is declining as a global problem. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it is looming larger as a sub-Saharan African problem. The question for South Africa is for how much longer we can keep on subordinating growth to redistribution.

—John Kane-Berman