MAINTENANCE. "Let's change the growth model", such is the leitmotif of the Togolese economist, who
advances, in his new book, ways to turn the continent's demographic growth into an asset.
The tone is set from the first chapter entitled “ Africa , laboratory of neoliberalism”. Kako Nubukpo,
economist and former Togolese minister, maintains that "the Greek tragedy was first African". " Basically,
it is as if we had understood nothing of the lessons of the structural adjustment imposed for more than thirty years
in Africa ," he said to himself when he witnessed, bewildered, the measures put in place by the Troika (Commission
European Union, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund ) in the context of the crisis
Greek financial statement of 2008.
Structural adjustment, which refers to these neoliberal-inspired policies imposed on Africa from
1980s, also marked him personally. "I belong to a generation born at the end of the
1960, and my adolescence is structural adjustment. And when we say that the African elites do not return
not in Africa , we sometimes forget that it was also a trauma for the African urban middle class
who no longer had a future at home. Among the people of my generation who had the chance to leave, very few
returned to the country. Very little,” he tells us.
The African emergency, let's change the growth model, published by Odile Jacob, however, is far
to be limited to this single analysis of the paradoxes of the measures developed by the financial institutions
international organizations during these "all-market" decades. The one who recently became dean of the
Faculty of Economics and Management of the University of Lomé - he is also a researcher at the Center for
international cooperation in agricultural research for development (CIRAD) - reviews
many challenges facing the continent. Demography, migrations, the CFA franc - one of
his favorite subjects - the common market, or "the shams of emergence". He also pleads
for a return of the “political”, through heterogeneous forms, and of sovereignty. And give some
reasons to hope. “We have everything in Africa : the land, the workers, and even the funds when you see
illicit capital flows out of the continent. According to the United Nations Economic Commission
for Africa , this represents almost 80 billion dollars a year. It's more than aid flows
development and foreign direct investment,” he confided to Point Afrique . Illuminating.
Le Point Afrique : Why speak of an “urgency” to change the growth model?
Kako Nubukpo: The idea of "emergency" contained in the title of the book refers to the African youth who are arriving
each year in the labor market. According to figures from Cnuced ( United Nations Conference on
trade and development ), they will be 600 million over the next forty years, which
represents 15 million young people a year. I who have been denouncing for fifteen years the character
ultra-restrictive public policies, I can only be challenged by the inevitable hiatus between the strong
future job demand and gaps in proactive public policies. Starting from
finding that could be described as prospective, so I tried to see how we got there by
going back over the last 30-40 years.
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Throughout this journey, you use a recurring notion to characterize the relationship to the world of
African continent, which is that of extroversion. What is it about ? Extraversion is characterized by a situation where the productive forces, the social relations of production,
intellectual forces are shaped more from outside than from local realities. In Africa ,
and in particular in French-speaking Africa , we have three illustrations of this extraversion. First,
in the real sector of the economy, with, for example, the fact of exporting raw materials without
transform on the spot. Second, in the monetary and financial sector; it is in particular the idea of having
a vehicle for accumulating wealth outside the continent, symbolized by the CFA franc. Third, in
the intellectual sector, where we observe an importation of ideologies in vogue in the West. However, it seems that
these three modalities of extraversion reinforce each other, to finally create a dual system,
in which the elites, on the one hand, and the population, on the other, each live their own history, but this
is not the same story. I also mention from the introduction of the book the fact that Africa does not produce
its own leaders.
You are indeed talking about “offshore managers”…
Yes. And this refers to two components. First, to the desire to retain power on the part of
often illegitimate leaders - in the sense of badly elected or not elected at all - and who have no social base
popular in their country. They are therefore taken hostage by the rest of the world, in particular by the West, which
imposes a vision of the world on them. And if they adhere to it, it is also because their only chance of maintaining
in power is to be good students of the international doxa, starting with the IMF and the Bank
world. Look at Alassane Dramane Ouattara in Ivory Coast , André Milongo in Congo, or Nicephore
Soglo in Benin, these are people from international financial institutions, and who, once in
power in Africa , have never ceased to replicate what is called the Washington consensus, in
environments that were not appropriate for these policies. The second factor is historical. Our
Most African intellectuals have been trained abroad, particularly in the West.
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You are also part of it, you who studied in France?
Yes, and I have always said that I had been Minister of Prospective in Togo, but that I had no legitimacy
endogenous, that I did not represent the populations. Even if this experience also allowed me to better
understand the daily challenges for populations. But to return to the training of our elites
postcolonial times, there is a time when, unless you are extremely brave, you simply take the place of the
colonizer. I recall, and I also refer you to the work Les Hussards noirs de lacolonie de Céline
Labrune-Badiane, that the first school created in Senegal by Faidherbe in 1905 was called the school of
Hostages. When I worked at the Central Bank of West African States ( BCEAO), the Governor and
his deputies had privileges inherited from those granted to the French stationed in Africa , in particular
premiums (distance, risk, etc.). This leads to a situation where the governor of the BCEAO
earns 30,000 euros per month over 14 months to carry out a public service mission, when the wife of
Togolese household earns 30 euros per month. It is therefore also through this historical construction that the elite
goes offshore, and that explains many mistakes in governance. In this regard, it should be noted that we
speaks of "governance", and in particular of "good governance", but we forget to talk about vision,
whose governance is only one form of management. Structural adjustment, for 35 years, by exporting
in particular the concept of "good governance", has eluded the search for a social project. For all
these reasons, intellectual extraversion is therefore very profound.
How do you shape this vision which you believe is lacking in many African states?
When I piloted the Togo 2030 vision, I realized that everyone had their own vision of
the future. But who takes the trouble to collect the aspirations of people across the country to develop a
collective story? Democracy is not just about tamper-proof ballots. The procedures of
collective deliberation are also the basis of this model, as are programmatic debates - at
the opposite of the debates of people that we see too often. However, our Heads of State have more appetite for
summits or international conferences only for the expectations of their citizens, that we could do
go up by giving greater recognition to local authorities, local governance and modes
of collective action. How often do they go to the provinces of our states?
It is a fundamental error to say to oneself that, because one has completed higher education abroad or because
that we work for major international consulting firms, we are competent to decide on the
destiny of a nation. That's also why I'm skeptical of all these plans
of emergence concocted by consulting firms on the lookout for contracts. These Experts Do Exactly What
that the IMF and the World Bank have been blamed for. They do not know the local realities and
do not endogenize the methods of financing development. In the end, our development plans
rarely come from the desires of the people in Africa .
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You criticize the development plans drawn up abroad for not being sufficiently in line with the
long term. Is this a recurring feature?
It started with structural adjustment, which destroyed the Ministry of Planning and weakened the ministries
sectors. This, moreover, is what fundamentally characterizes the Washington consensus: it is a
short-term macroeconomics, we must not forget that. More than thirty years later, we have seen the emergence of
poverty reduction strategy papers, which had a three-year horizon. And today,
we move on to national development plans that have a five-year horizon! So there is a kind of
return to the planning as it had been put in place in the early 1960s. Except that there was
lots of breakage in the meantime.
You plead to give more space to politics. But for that, we also need fair taxation and a
redistributive state. However, in many countries, we observe a mistrust of citizens vis-à-vis their
rulers and their management methods?
From the moment the populations are convinced that they have at their head what is called in
microeconomics of governments with a private agenda, they have no incentive to pay taxes, because
that they have no public services before their eyes to which they could legitimately claim. Of
moreover, you also have the question of the informal sector, which represents 80% of the economy of our countries,
sometimes even more. Here again, we qualify as informal a traditional mode of functioning of the populations
and we take up the semantic register of the colonizer. In fact, we are desperately trying to bring in
in formal frameworks modes of thought, ways of being, which have their own history and rationality.
The fact is that the formal economy includes very few people in Africa .
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Moreover, many African states rely on the export of raw resources to fulfill their
crates... Do they really have other choices?
I see that we are signing more and more free trade agreements with the rest of the world, and that the
trend, driven by the World Trade Organization, tends towards tariff disarmament. So,
we are going to collect less and less customs duties. This is the very principle of tax transition.
You mean it's a way to generate revenue that's not sustainable?
Exactly. And if we plan to compensate for this shortfall through direct taxation, we would need a base
productive less narrow. Otherwise, it amounts to bludgeoning, as most states currently do, the
urban middle class . However, it is a narrow base and the tax rates are very high. This verse
what should be sought, in principle, is a broad base and low rates. But here again, we come up against the absence
coherence of public policies. We cannot accept dismantling tariffs and therefore
reduce door taxation, without first having worked out possible substitutes. We risk to
end up with states that will have even less tax revenue than today, but as many
social demands to be satisfied.
The problem therefore lies in the production and transformation of wealth. But what surprises me,
today, in the orientations of the IMF, it is that it ignores the heavy tendencies. This institution is based on
the weakness of the African productive supply to impose a reduction in demand. That's what we call
uptake. The IMF seems not to understand that the locomotive of African growth in the long term
will be the request. Policies should therefore rather act on the means of increasing the productive supply.
But we remain riveted to this idea of a balance between public spending and public revenue. It has no
senses. The development process in the world has always hinged on credit, which has fueled the
production, with reimbursements at the end of the cycle.
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Among these avenues of production and processing is the agricultural sector, which has been completely
neglected by successive World Bank development reports... How to boost
this sector today and also make young people want to invest in it?
The World Bank's 1981 'Berg' report says there's no point in aiming for self-sufficiency
food, that it is preferable to specialize in sectors generating foreign exchange and to import
food. It is important to remember this. To encourage young people to turn to agriculture, we must
develop public services, get out of the phenomena of macrocephaly that characterize countries
comprising a single large city. We must create medium-sized towns, close to rural centres, so as to
avoid migration. Then there are three points that seem essential to me. First, increase the
productivity, which presupposes water control, varietal research and the ability to support farmers - missions that are the responsibility of the agricultural offices. Then, we must work on strengthening
institutional (producer organizations, agricultural services, such as insurance, credit, etc.) In
the cotton sector, you have access to credit, inputs, you can bet on the entire purchase of
your harvest, plus a guaranteed price. But in the grain chains, you don't have any of these
services. Which brings me back to the third challenge of agricultural policies, and to the state's vision in
matter. If producers have a haphazard perception of what the state does in terms of agricultural policy,
they cannot invest. And finally, we have a totally extroverted banking system, which does not lend
to farmers. Let us remember that the common agricultural policy in the European Union represents half
of the European budget, or that the American producer has support that is 720 times greater than the support
enjoyed by the Tanzanian producer. And we would like to put them on the same market... It's a game of
fooled. And with what is announced on the demographic plan in Africa , it is not playable any more, because we
let's talk about the stability of the whole planet. This is why I speak of the African emergency.
At the end of June, the Heads of State and Government of the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS) spoke out on the creation of the eco, a currency that they could share. What about
do you think, you who have been pleading for several years for an alternative to the CFA franc?
First, the fact that nations come together to have a common monetary destiny seems to me to be
a good thing. But we must not forget that the same causes produce the same effects. So if
the eco becomes a CFA bis, it cannot work. In relation to the CFA, I have always supported several
requirements . First, a name change, because the name refers to the identity. Second, the
movement of foreign exchange reserves from the French Treasury to other institutions, for example, to the Bank
international settlements in Basel. Third thing, the exchange rate regime: I believe that we have
need for a flexible regime with peg to a basket of foreign currencies, rather than staying
pegged to the euro. This has repercussions on the financing of our economies since we are confronted in the
franc zone at double-digit interest rates. However, with the imperative for our youth to have access to
income-generating activities and also that of being competitive in exports, we cannot contract
borrowings with interest rates at 15%. Consequently, if the eco is part of this agenda, we can
to support. What is likely to be thorny, finally, is what will be played out on the political level, with a
travel from Paris to Abuja, the federal capital of Nigeria, which is the leading economic power in the
ECOWAS. Because, beyond the currency, the monetary union is also crossed by questions
policies, which underlie, for example, questions of budgetary solidarity, process
harmonization, banking system, financial market...etc. French-speaking heads of state in West Africa
the West ready for this transfer to Abuja? There is still all this transition to build.
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You say that an industrialized Africa by 2050 is entirely possible. Under what conditions?
Over the past 20 years, Africa has recorded the second highest growth rate among
five continents. But once reduced to the number of inhabitants, this growth is three times lower
than in emerging countries. And if you look at the demographic numbers, you see that
over the past fifty years, all continents except Africa have at least halved
their demographics. Emergence is correlated with mastery of demography. If Africa therefore wants to bet
on its demographic dynamism and turn it into an asset, it is necessary to strengthen public policies in terms of
education - with particular emphasis on matching training and employment - and family planning -
as we knew it in the 1960s. It is therefore a question of passing from a demography suffered to a
chosen demographics, so that productivity gains can drive structural transformation.
Then, it is necessary to identify the colors of the economy, whether it is a low-carbon green economy
where Africa has a strong potential, blue economy (maritime), purple economy (culture) or economy
transparent with this strong appetite of African youth for digital technology. Besides building
of transport, energy and telecommunications infrastructures, this means identifying niches
carriers for each of these sectors according to the different contexts. For example, with regard to
digital innovation, you have to scale up what I call national systems
of innovation and research, so that we are not confined to anecdotal and interesting stories to
tell when our young people create new things, and that these innovations can fit into a
structural transformation process.
For the time being, what we are seeing in Africa is what economist Dani Rodrik calls transformation
structural upside down. The process of early deindustrialization due to structural adjustment broke everything
which was voluntary. And today, jobs are migrating from the primary sector directly to the tertiary sector, skipping the secondary sector - industry. Now, that's where you have the added value and the jobs. And it's
This is also why there is an urgent need to find coherence between the three sectors.
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