Since the early 1990s, incomes in Rwanda have increased more than three fold
rightly complain that outsiders carelessly lump together its 54 different countries and talk of it as a place that rises or falls as one. Such generalisations are not just lazy but also obscure more than they clarify. The most likely trend over coming decades in Africa will be a clear divergence between how various countries are doing, argues Nic Cheeseman, an expert in African democracies. Some are becoming richer and more democratic even as others stay poor and undemocratic.
The first lesson, about the importance of simply having a state that works, comes from Rwanda and Burundi. Both are small, landlocked and densely populated. Since independence both saw genocides against their Tutsi minorities by their Hutu majorities. In the early 1990s Burundi was almost twice as rich as Rwanda. Yet since then incomes in Rwanda have increased more than three times . Those in Burundi have fallen. One big difference between the two is governance.
Zimbabwe and Botswana further reinforce this. In the early 1980s Zimbabwe was richer than Botswana before Robert Mugabe destroyed its economy by wantonly printing banknotes and stealing farms for his cronies. Now Botswana is seven times richer. Having sensible economic policies is not enough, though. Several other African countries also tried to boost manufacturing by attracting foreign investors to export-processing zones. Only a few, including Ethiopia, Lesotho and South Africa, succeeded. Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Roy, two economists who also looked at Mauritius, concluded that its trade and investment policies accounted for only part of its success. Another important ingredient was the strength of its institutions.
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