africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
that countries such as France, Spain, and the Netherlands, which have a substantial
amount of anti-corruption legislation on the books, engage in desultory
enforcement. 9 This is to say nothing of China. Enforcement is one area in which
the U.S. actually has a fairly strong record. 10 But even there, the threat of a race
to the bottom remains a real obstacle to the enforcement of anti-bribery laws (Adeyeye,
2012: 141).
Avoiding a race to the bottom is a huge challenge, but not a futile one. Had there
been neoclassical economists around in the late 18 th century, they would have insisted
that the British attempt to stamp out the slave trade would be bound to fail.
Well, it didn’t fail. Abolition took 60 years of real effort and investment, and was exceedingly
costly, but it succeeded. Britain and the U.S. outlawed the Atlantic slave
trade by 1808 (the latter acting from the less-than-pure motive to limit the growth
of America’s black population and to protect the—by then lucrative—American domestic
slave trade (Deyle, 2005: 14-39). This was followed by a series of bilateral
treaties banning the slave trade. Slavery was outlawed in most of the British Empire
in 1833 11 , helped along by £20 million in reparations paid out to slave owners.
Much of this was achieved by a small group of dissenting members of parliament
who held the balance of power at Westminster and auctioned their support to governments
that could not survive without them.
Enforcement was ramped up outside the Empire by aggressive diplomacy and
British military action, which escalated to an undeclared war against Brazil in 1850
to end the slave trade there. The United States finally agreed to searches of its
ships in 1862 and Cuba was pressured into ending slave imports five years later
(Kaufman and Pape, 1999: 631-668). The example reminds us that we should not
make the race to the bottom a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Any discussion of African development would be incomplete without attention to
corruption as one piece of a larger and more complex puzzle. Corruption continues
to impede the rule of law, good governance, and stability that facilitate state building.
Undoubtedly, every African state is different and faces distinctive challenges.
But corruption is important enough in enough countries that it cannot be ignored.
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