Joe Studwell: recommendation

Transcript context

…Well, possibly we’re going backwards [laughs], but Tanzania worries me also. Three years ago, I had many friends and acquaintances telling me the reforms were going wonderfully. This is the next market-oriented miracle, bet on Tanzania. I’ve only been there once. I guess I was a little skeptical. And now, in the last year and a half, Tanzanian politics seems quite volatile. It’s not stable anymore. It’s of course not a petro state. There’s not an issue comparable to diamonds. Doesn’t this problem just crop up again and again and again, that there’s not a stable place where you would really want to put much of your money? There certainly continue to be a lot of problems with politics, but you don’t see the levels of civil strife in Africa that we saw in the 1990s. You don’t see the number of coups in Africa that we saw in the 1990s. What we have at the moment, if you think of violence, is mainly violence that is focused on the Sahel and all really relates to a very particular problem that’s partly climatological, partly demographic, and it’s just very difficult to manage. So, I don’t think that the political story is great, but the data tell us that there is considerably more democracy in Africa than there was in the ’80s and ’90s, and that states are more stable. But is there still a lot of bad governance? I think that there is, but that is why my book concentrates — when it’s presenting optimism — on what is going on in the private sector, and particularly what’s going on in agriculture, which doesn’t require a lot of state input and state activity. And the numbers there are really pretty good. We’ve had the fastest average rate of agricultural GDP growth since 2000, about 4.5 percent in Africa, compared with anywhere else in the world. It’s been faster than anywhere else in the world. And that’s really a kind of night-and-day change to where Africa was at in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. Those sorts of things are very important. The growth of the agricultural sector is also creating the first large private-sector firms in Africa because, of course, agriculture has a manufacturing component as well when we process all the stuff that is grown. And we’re getting large firms operating across borders in Africa now, in the agribusiness sector. We’re talking about the politics of Tanzania as a cause for concern, but equally, you could look at Bakhresa, the biggest Tanzanian agribusiness firm. It now operates in eight, nine, or ten different countries in East and Southern Africa. It’s moved into all sorts of other businesses. They own a football club, they own a TV station, they’re in petroleum products, they’re in all sorts of stuff. They’re a proper diversified conglomerate of the kind that I would associate with Southeast Asia. All that’s going on in the private sector, despite the still concerning politics that you rightly refer to. Does Africa have a manufacturing future? Is robotics coming, AI, possibly some reshoring?…

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