From Ken Opalo:
A common misperception economic policies in African states tend to be statist, far-Left, or anti-market. This is not supported by the data (see examples of Kenya, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and South Africa below). In actual fact, most governments in the region tend to be eager adopters of allegedly apolitical “best practices” that are essentially center-right economic orthodoxy. If you add to this their social policies, the modal African government is essentially Center-right. What these countries often fail on is implementation (partially because said policies are seldom useful in context and/or due to weak state capacity).
And this:
Third, the lack of governing experience and decades of state repression have led to a perversive anti-statist discourse and politics on the African Left. Among Leftist intellectuals, the colonial origins of the African state has been used as a reason to perpetually delegitimize state-building (many of the same intellectuals suffered state repression). In this rendering, the African state can never overcome the original sin of colonial origin; and should be abolished and replaced with a Pan-African state (which presumably would be better at deploying coercion and providing public goods and services). At the same time, many economically-ascendant Africans who are broadly sympathetic to Leftist politics harbor anti-statist sentiments when it comes to the economy and tend to overstate the statist origins of African economic underdevelopment — this partially reflects the ideological hold of economic orthodoxy in the region. The reality, of course, is that African countries are terribly under-governed. Data on security and law enforcement, registration of births and deaths, education attainment, taxation, expenditure absorption, economic regulation, etc. all point to the fact that the contemporary African state is too small and too weak to meet the challenges of modern economics and politics.
Here is much more. I am not sure how much the left- vs. right-wing framing applies to Africa at all — sometimes I think the better category is “prioritizes things going well, or not,” as part of the author’s remarks would seem to indicate.
