Category: Africa Policy/Politics/Development

Concurrent with China’s rapid economic growth over the past two decades has been China’s increasingly deep interest, investment, and relationship with the African continent. China has engaged in considerable trade with African countries and heavily financed development projects. China’s expanding geopolitical influence through the media, military involvement, and diplomatic engagement has introduced ubiquitous new realities on the continent, which the United States should investigate and address more actively. As economic and political ties have deepened between China and Africa, some in the West have become skeptical of China’s intentions and whether negative impacts will arise from Chinese engagement with Africa. On the contrary, many African governments and citizens openly welcome China’s involvement, a major reason being China’s ability to address the infrastructure gap. However, this situation is not purely dichotomous and thus a more nuanced approach is required to assess the potential outcomes for African countries and the United States.

This paper argues that stateness, as defined by “the capacity of the state to exercise its fundamental functions” and maintaining a monopoly on the use of force, is a major determinant of FDI inflows in SSA countries. Through using the independent variable of stateness, which will be qualified and measured using various indicators, and the dependent variable of foreign direct investment, net inflows (BoP, current US$), this paper will use data from five SSA countries (South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, the Central African Republic, and Somalia) to demonstrate a correlation and causation from state capacity to FDI inflows. The years examined for data purposes are 2008 (sometimes earlier when necessary) until the most current year available in order to align with the 2008-2017 timeframe provided by the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance. This paper will investigate five causal mechanisms of stateness, explain how they are functions of stateness and affect FDI inflows, and then correlate the data and statistics of the mechanisms with the respective countries’ data and statistics regarding FDI inflows. These results show that states with stronger state capacity receive higher FDI inflows, ultimately confirming the hypothesis that high levels of stateness correlate with high levels of FDI inflows (and the converse of low to low).

While Ghana and South Africa have stronger democracies compared to many countries on the African continent, Ghana has proven to have a more legitimate and fair democracy. Compiling the various factors of democracy shows that Ghana’s prospects for democratic support from all citizens are stronger than South Africa’s democratic future. By examining the greater role… Continue reading Ghana and South Africa: A Tale of Different Democracies →

The upcoming elections scheduled for December 23, 2018 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo face various challenges of security, logistics, and equal freedoms if the elections are to truly be free, fair, and credible.

In “The Ceremony,” Emmanuel Dongala examines the progression of distorted perceptions of a proletariat worker in a post-colonial central African Marxist state. Through this viewpoint, Dongala narrates the day of the ceremony commemorating the new director of the manure factory, a position the worker at first claims to be his goal, after having worked tirelessly… Continue reading A Loss of Self-Identity: Blind Loyalty to Party Ideology and the Acceptance of Political Corruption →