Guardian Weekly year in review 2013: Africa’s growing prosperity brings its own perils

The shopping mall is the glass and steel symbol of Africa’s rise. More Africans were seduced by them in 2013 than ever before. But the mall was also then the logical target for terrorists seeking maximum impact on their perceived enemies and the world beyond.

In September al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group from Somalia, brought mayhem to the upmarket Westgate shopping centre – one of the temples of Africa’s 21st-century consumer capitalism – in neighbouring Kenya. At least 67 people were killed in a made-for-television siege in Nairobi that lasted four days and served as a reminder that conspicuous prosperity comes with its own perils.

Kenya’s moment of truth had been expected earlier, in March, when the country went to the polls, still haunted by its previous election in which more than 1,100 people were killed. Instead the vote passed relatively peacefully. For, as 2013 showed, this is the least predictable of continents that makes fools of both the prophets of doom and the Pollyannas of growth. Al-Shabaab, for example, had been written off by some after losing its strongholds in the Somali cities of Mogadishu and Kismayo. The Westgate mall attack announced that it was still in business and there were signs within Somalia that the military campaign against it had stalled. Officials there admitted they could not kill their way to victory; they are also fighting an idea.

There were intimations of al-Qaida wrapping its tentacles around Africa. Somalia’s president described al-Shabaab as indistinguishable from the late Osama bin Laden’s network. Islamist militancy was also flourishing in the west. In January jihadists planned to march on the capital of post-coup Mali, only to be thwarted by a rapid intervention from French troops. Nigeria, perhaps, summed up the contrasting narratives of the day better than anywhere. One of the fastest-growing economies in the world – 6.81% in the third quarter of 2013 – it is now predicted to usurp South Africa as the biggest in Africa by the end of next year. Yet the insurgency by Boko Haram (translation “western education is sinful”) continued to kill, rape and conscript child soldiers. In a single attack in September it took at least 142 lives in the town of Benisheikh.

Despite this, conflict was increasingly the exception rather than the rule. Along with Kenya, Zimbabwe held an election that had many running for cover because of precedents. Yet not a single person was reported dead as a result of politically motivated violence. President Robert Mugabe’s victory was questioned by many, however, amid claims of vote rigging. “From the margin of terror to the margin of error,” one opponent alleged.

Even one of the great insolubles, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, finally took a turn for the better when the rebel militia known as the M23 was swiftly defeated by a UN intervention brigade and the Congolese national army. This was hardly the end of what has been described as “Africa’s first world war”, as numerous armed groups persist, but it was a rare sign of what co-ordinated international intervention might be capable of.

Yet just as global attention seemed to take the sting out of volatile elections, so fresh weeds grew in the shade. A surge of elephant and rhino poaching helped feed transnational crime syndicates and networks such as al-Shabaab. A March coup unhinged the Central African Republic, and by November the international community was using such words as “pre-genocidal” to draw attention to the chaos that saw rebels perpetrating gruesome killings.

Beneath seemingly random surface events, however, there were steadier currents. The continent’s economy is estimated by the African Development Bank to have grown by 4.8% in 2013, and projected to accelerate to 5.3% in 2014. The main engines are agricultural production and the services sector, a rise in oil production and increased mining activity. Inseparable from this is the juggernaut of Chinese investment. Chart it on a line graph since 2000, and compare it with a line graph showing Africa’s economic growth over the same period, and the correlation is striking. In return for raw materials that feed its own economy, Chinese companies – and labourers – are building hospitals and schools, roads and stadiums.

China says it is welcomed because of its non-interference in domestic affairs, but increasingly questions are being asked about its role in propping up dictators by default. There is also ever greater scrutiny of whether Beijing and its western competitors are paying a fair price for Africa’s abundant natural resources. The continent still loses twice as much in illicit financial outflows – through tax avoidance, transfer pricing and anonymous company ownership – as it receives in international aid. This year’s Africa Progress Panel report detailed five deals that cost Congo more than $1.3bn in revenues through the undervaluation of assets and sale to foreign investors. This sum, it noted, represents twice the annual health and education budgets of a country with one of the worst child mortality rates in the world and 7 million pupils out of school.

The panel highlighted the achilles heel of the “Africa rising” success story of the past decade. Economic growth has become a mantra that does not necessarily create jobs or trickle down to all. While the boom is nurturing a tweeting, mobile phone-addicted middle class, in many states it is also entrenching or even deepening inequality between rich and poor. And some of Africa’s most successful economies are also some of its least democratic.

“Addis Ababa is being transformed as if by monstrous engines boring through the heart of the city,” Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, writes of Ethiopia’s capital. “A new motorway flows into town sweeping aside all before it and an urban rail system is smashing through buildings, roads, gardens– everything accompanied by cranes and trucks, noise and dust. … All along its path the traditional one-storey homes of mud, wooden planks and rusted corrugated iron roofs are bulldozed into heaps and replaced by six or more stories of concrete and brick. Hammering, grinding and showers of glittering acetylene sparks proclaim the arrival of armies of Chinese workers and the rise of mighty steel and glass constructions.”

But Dowden adds: “Parliamentary democracy as we in the west understand it has no role in today’s Ethiopia. Out of the 547 elected members of the country’s lower chamber, only one is from an opposition party. I met him. Girma Seifu Maru is a nice man but a lonely one.” As Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi said: ‘There is no connection between democracy and development.’ ”

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This article titled “Guardian Weekly year in review 2013: Africa’s growing prosperity brings its own perils” was written by David Smith, for Guardian Weekly on Thursday 19th December 2013 00.01 UTC