Lies we telll our children!

Lies we tell our children!

For years good parents have told their children a story that belongs to another century. ‘Study hard at school, we tell them, go to university, get a degree, get a good job and you will live happily ever after!’’ It is a story that was true in another time but less and less in the 21^st century and  certainly not now in Africa. The facts are well known to many graduates. Young people have believed the stories that their parents told them and done as they were told. But legions of them have come out of Africa’s universities and found nothing but unemployment facing  them in future.

The Supply Side- Blaming the Victim

The question is what is the cause of this situation and what should be done to give young Africans a brighter future than what currently awaits them?  There are two explanations that are offered. The first is supply driven and that is that we have simply created too many universities which have created an enormous supply of young graduates many of whom lack even the most basic of skills that are of use to either government or the private sector. Between 1990 and 2007 the number of universities in sub-Saharan Africa has grown from 24 to 460. Most of these universities are private and many are of the most questionable standard. At present the estimates are that there are over 680 universities in sub-Saharan Africa. All of sub-Saharan  African has a tertiary enrolment rate of only 8% of the relevant population which is much lower than the rest of the world. If Africa met the world average of around 30% we would have twice as many unemployed graduates.

It is easy enough to paint a picture of many African university graduates who have weak mathematical skills and who are incapable of writing a complete and coherent paper. While there can be no doubt that in some cases this is true in many cases this amounts to blaming the victim. It is precisely this problem that so many observers try to depict as the fundamental cause of unemployment throughout Africa. The argument goes that if we could just produce better graduates then all will be good and the good ones who will go to the ‘Centres of Excellence’ that the World Bank hopes to create in West Africa will all find jobs. In other words  the unemployment is a supply side problem. Just produce a better graduate and the demand will be there.

But will it? There is no doubt that the involuntary unemployment amongst graduates from the elite institutions in the developed and the developing world is almost zero. But what of the rest of the graduates? No-one has a comfortable answer to this question. The rest are just getting an education and only those who will come from elite institutions will find jobs.

Demand Side Problems -Its the Model!

 Why are there so few jobs created in Africa, whether they are for graduates or otherwise?  

The free market, liberal economic model we are in creates few private sector jobs in anything other than the world’s low cost centres, mostly in Asia. Manufacturing in Africa is virtually non-existent, extinguished in the 1980’s and 1990’s under World Bank policies and the effects of trade liberalization in the 1990s. We make nothing except holes in ground and a narrow but traditional  range of raw agricultural products. We export minerals using capital intensive techniques that create few jobs and import manufactured good from Asia. In mining technological change from underground to open pit mining has decreased employment levels enormously.  The globalized free market economic model emphasizes efficiency and Asia, in particular India and China, are simply more cost efficient than almost all Africa countries.

 Donald Trump is the American worker’s response to this economic model which has taken their highly paid jobs and moved them to lower cost China and Mexico where dynamic growing economies have emerged as a result. In return Americans, like Africans, get cheap consumer goods which they can afford to buy if they still have jobs. This model is efficient but hopelessly unsustainable and it is at the heart of why the world is becoming more politically unstable. No amount of blaming African graduates or building elite institutions will solve the demand side problem because it is a product of the global economic model we live in.

 There is an ’alternative Nkrumahist fact’ that is particularly relevant in explaining Africa’s predicament. Between the Congo River and the Cape are 250 million hard working, industrious and very entrepreneurial people who have good land, water and every conceivable minerals that should make them as rich as any developed country and yet, by and large, these African citizens of the SADC region live in poverty. It is only because Africans live in tiny countries, defined by white colonialists 150 years ago, and are ruled by what are too often malicious and corrupt elites that no  solution to Africa’s situation is found.

 Only a change of Africa’s economic model to one, paraphrasing  Donald Trump’s words, where ’Africans puts Africa first’ and seek to develop a large competitive African market, focus ruthlessly on  developing competitiveness and our manufacturing capacity will the myths of the last century have any meaning to our unemployed children. Until that time comes, the North and West African version of the 20^th century story  will remain the most relevant to our children  ‘’go to university, get a degree and then  when you find yourself unemployed, get on a boat to Europe  where, if you survive the crossing,  you can work illegally,  doing the same menial jobs for white people that the ancestors did when they were forcibly taken across the Atlantic 200 years ago”.  

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