During a long career as a foreign correspondent, when human disasters, violence, and turmoil were common, I experienced two long-running stories that were positive in nature and left me feeling blessed to have been in the right job, in the right place, at the right time.
One was covering China during the first decade of this century, a time of mind-blowing growth and transformation. The other was reporting in West Africa during the mid-1990s, when a quiet revolution that swept the political landscape seemed just as dramatic.
The continent’s first big wave of hopeful political change had come in 1960, widely called the “Year of Africa,” because 17 countries attained independence in rapid succession. The mid-1990s saw that era’s echo. In 1996 alone, when 18 African countries held competitive elections, democracy seemed to be on the march after decades in which authoritarians and the one-party systems they built were the rule across most of the continent.
Back then, I spent a lot of time going from country to country covering suspenseful campaigns and meaningful, civil, and often surprisingly detailed debates about possible paths forward for nations that faced some of the world’s most daunting development challenges. But one region drew me back time and again: the semi-arid belt to the south of the Sahara known as the Sahel.
One country in particular stood out for me as a kind of sentinel for much of Africa. In 1992, Mali had pulled off a stunning transition to democratic rule that seemed to catalyze political change in countries near and far. At the time of Mali’s breakthrough, it was a country of about 9 million people, with an annual per capita income of $280 and a literacy rate of a mere 40 percent. Seeing that democracy could sprout in such unpromising soil lit a path for other African nations, many of them much better endowed. Elections soon followed in Benin, Zambia, Ghana, and nearby Niger. Even authoritarian countries—such as Ivory Coast, where I was based—felt pressure to loosen controls on political speech and inject more life into their elections, if not free them up entirely.
Mali has been on my mind a great deal recently for far less encouraging news. In late April, its junta-led government was routed by the forces of a northern, ethnic insurgency that mounted a coordinated attack with an al Qaeda-affiliated radical religious group. In a broad-based attack that bore resemblance to the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, albeit on a smaller scale, fighters from these two groups struck several cities in the country simultaneously with deadly force and killed Mali’s No. 2 figure, Defense Minister Sadio Camara, and injured its intelligence chief. In a sign of how badly the government was rocked, Mali’s president, Assimi Goïta, disappeared from view for several days.
Today, once again, Mali seems to stand out as a sentinel for an enormous swath of the continent, only this time as an ominous one. Like Mali, two of its Sahelian neighbors—Burkina Faso and Niger—have recently traversed several years of shifting, but finally ineffectual, approaches to combating the spread of radical Islamism. They have all experienced military takeovers of national politics; rejected their former colonizer, France, as a security partner; and hired Russian mercenary forces to augment their armies. Meanwhile, they have each resorted to populist nationalism, forging an alliance among themselves and distancing their countries from many of their other neighbors, including by leaving the Economic Community of West African States.
As in Mali, the results for Burkina Faso and Niger have been slim to negative. Worse still, signs of insecurity and religious and other radicalism are spreading on the fringes of these three states. The north of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, has long been beset with violence from both the Islamist movement Boko Haram and other organized banditry. But in recent months, there has been increasing evidence that these kinds of destabilizing forces are penetrating stable West African democracies, such as Ghana and Benin, and a neighboring bastion of prosperity, Ivory Coast.
This is still a shifting situation, but we can at least attempt to draw lessons from history that can help avert deepening disaster. Looking back, I am struck by how clear it was already in the time of the African Spring in the ’90s that Mali was a bulwark against radical Islam, spreading insurgencies, and state disintegration in West Africa. It seemed evident to me that the future of democracy, at least in West Africa, reposed disproportionately on the success against long odds of the Malian experiment.
Although I felt real optimism in the moment, rereading my coverage, the signs were already surprisingly bad. International support for a democratic transition in Africa was scant, and officials in Mali and elsewhere spoke to me starkly about the future implications of this.
The headline on an article I wrote in the New York Times in February 1995 could well stand today: “In Africa, West Can Pay Now, Or Later,” it read in stark, telegraphic style. What this meant is that without both more substantial and much more effective help for Africa’s newborn democracies—and Mali, in particular—the consequences of deepening poverty and eventual state failure would be felt far and wide.
A month later, I wrote a piece on fears about Western aid cuts, which quoted Mali’s then-president, Alpha Oumar Konaré. “We are confronted with a series of grave inherited problems today, and if we do not receive the kind of help that we need, we will not make it,” Konaré told me. The irony is that senior Western officials acknowledged this at the time as well. In the same article, I quoted Anthony Lake, U.S. President Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, as saying, “Those of us who recognize the importance of continued active engagement and support for Africa are confronting the reality of shrinking resources and an honest skepticism about the return on our investments in peacekeeping and development.”
One can debate the generosity of Western development assistance to Africa in the Clinton era, but a few hard truths seem beyond dispute. The first is that after centuries of rank exploitation, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonial era that stretched from the 1890s into the 1960s, the West took severe advantage of Africa with scant regard for its economic or human development.
The second is that few African countries have had the economic means, whether in terms of export income or domestic savings, to lift themselves to even modest prosperity. In 1996, a Western aid official I spoke to for another article told me:
You look at Mali, with an annual economic growth rate of about 5 percent and a population growth rate of about 3 percent, and if you project that into the future, it will take this country about 50 years to attain the standard of living that the Ivory Coast enjoys today, and 100 years to reach the level of present-day Thailand. … But if a country like Mali can raise its growth rate to seven percent and get its population growth down to 2.7 percent a year, in only 35 years they can reach the level of prosperity of a Thailand.
The problem, as Joe Studwell argues in his recent book How Africa Works, is that sustained growth at this level is vanishingly rare on the continent, and the few countries that have achieved it did so under conditions that most African nations cannot hope to replicate.
The third stark truth is that Western economic assistance to Africa, already under pressure in the Clinton era, has declined further since. The United States, in particular, has grown stingier and steadily less engaged with the continent. U.S. President Donald Trump famously disparaged Africa as a land of “shithole” countries and, in his second term, quickly moved to kill off Washington’s principal economic assistance body, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
It is clearer now than ever that African state failure will inflict huge costs for the outside world. The least subtle way is through migration—chaotic, large-scale movements of people toward Europe and other parts of the world. This specter alone captures the imaginations of the West for reasons of xenophobia, racism, and selfishness. For the time being, though, African out-migration is still relatively modest, and African countries bear the overwhelming share of the burden in hosting one another’s economic and political refugees.
The deeper cost, though less viscerally felt in Western capitals so far, is potentially far greater. By century’s end, Africa will be home to more than a third of humanity. By then, African brains, African labor, and African consumption will be central, not peripheral, to global prosperity. A world in which that population is trapped in failing or stagnant states is not a world that prospers. The West can choose to engage seriously with Africa’s development now, or it can pay a far higher price later. That was true in 1995. It remains true today.
None of this is to say that the responsibility falls on the outside world alone. What is wrong with the African side in this equation is painfully obvious in Mali. It is no accident that the country cannot field an effective army. Since the collapse of Mali’s democracy in 2021, a phenomenon common to many postcolonial African states has deepened in the country, whereby those who govern have ceased their primary role of delivering vital goods to their citizens, meaning education, health care, agricultural extension services, and infrastructure improvements.
What replaces these is what economists call rent seeking, in which the principal business of government is to deliver benefits to those who govern, along with their families and patronage networks. Countries that are ruled this way slowly rot. A failure to develop and invest in a professionalized army is but one of the symptoms, and as leadership cliques become ever more preoccupied with their own privileges and survival, the military forces that remain see little reason to die protecting them.
Governments that become alienated from their people then resort to cheap tricks in order to stay in power. To a nation under siege from insurgents, this usually means mercenaries, as with the Russian forces in Mali. They exact high costs but almost never get the job done, fleeing battle, as I witnessed Ukrainian mercenaries do in Kisangani during the collapsing rule of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1990s. Mali’s Russians-for-hire did the same in April.
Another cheap trick is facile nationalism. Mali and its Sahel allies, Burkina Faso and Niger, have fetishized France’s past misdeeds of exploitation and intervention. But as much as their citizens have a right to be unhappy about erstwhile French domination, this is no policy menu.
Things seem bound to get much worse in the Sahel before they get any better. The road ahead, if there is one, will require institution-building national leaders who are obsessively driven to meet the real needs of their people and international partners who understand it is in their own deep interest to help them do so. Mali’s president warned in 1995 that without serious help, his country would not make it. The West was already running short of will then. It has even less now.
