The African Time Bomb

Africa is on a knife edge of helplessness

Joe is having flashbacks of his time as a lifeguard.

President Biden was in Africa last week doing Biden things; falling asleep, apologizing for slavery, and promising billions of American tax dollars to the continent. Also dancing with the locals. The usual stuff. Count ourselves lucky that he didn’t wander off into the jungle this time.

There was an understandable uproar over the promised foreign humanitarian and economic aid, especially considering the multiple natural disasters that have affected millions in the US. Between the Maui fire last year and the catastrophic damage suffered from hurricanes on the east coast, the timing of these financial pledges appeared tone-deaf on the president’s part.

Maybe if they rename North Carolina as Nigeria, they’ll get more help.

Defenders of the financial aid support point out how foreign aid is another tool in the box of overseas soft diplomacy, and a way to counter the influence of China and Russia on the African continent. While these methods of statecraft are utilized quite often, it was not good PR to announce this when folks are still living out of tents and FEMA shelters in North Carolina.

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The Media weighs in

One article stood out for me in The Washington Post for inadvertently revealing an ominous truth about Africa’s future.

WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson’s latest article, “The truth about Biden’s aid to Africa is being lost on Republicans” doesn’t break new ground or contain unique insights on the Africa question. He covers familiar territory in highlighting the geopolitical concerns and tries to score partisan political points against the GOP.

Yet one section stood out in its implications for the 21^st century:

“This will be, increasingly, an African century. The continent’s population has grown from 283 million in 1960 to more than 1.5 billion this year, and by 2050 that number will soar to 2.5 billion, according to United Nations projections. At that point, one of every four human beings on the planet will be African. And the fact that populations in other regions are aging — and leveling off or even declining — means Africa will be home to an increasing share of the world’s working-age adults.

Quite simply, demography is destiny.” (bold emphasis added)

Where will all these people work? Oh wait, China has the solution. Put them all in the mines!

Though it does provide some direct humanitarian aid, China is hardly being altruistic. Much of the Chinese investment has been with the aim of extracting and ultimately obtaining resources — Nigerian and Angolan oil, for example, and Congolese minerals. Some of it has been simply to establish footholds in economies that will inevitably grow rapidly as populations increase.

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Stark Reality

2.5 billion Africans by 2050.

I do not share Mr. Robinson’s sunny disposition on the future of the continent. His talk of expanded economies and as yet realized levels of civilizational development seem more like wishful thinking than a clear-eyed analysis of the current state of affairs. Nowhere in his article does he address the biggest problem that faces this growing bubble of humanity.

Food.

The average African household devotes 42% of its budget to food, with some spending as much as 60% to procure foodstuffs. Compare this to 6% for US households. This doesn’t begin to account that a majority of the continent’s food supply has to be imported:

While Africa has over 65 per cent of the world’s uncultivated land, it is a net food importer, and as such, has been severely impacted by the rise of global food prices, resulting in increased food insecurity.

According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), African countries spend over $75 billion to import over 100 million metric tons of cereals annually. In 2020, 15 African countries imported over 50 per cent of their wheat products from the Russian Federation or Ukraine. Six of these countries (Eritrea, Egypt, Benin, Sudan, Djibouti, and Tanzania) imported over 70 per cent of their wheat from the region.

Below is another excerpt. This one from David Lamb’s book, “The Africans” ¹published in 1983. For almost five years, Lamb was a correspondent based in Kenya for the L.A. Times.

Prescient look at the future.

That the abundance of fertile land has been acknowledged for decades and not cultivated is an atrocity for the African continent and a bad omen for the world in the not too distant future. As we learned from the Ukraine-Russian conflict, any disruption of imported food supplies imperial millions across Africa. What stresses will be put on this rickety supply chain when another billion people are added?

Instead of a perpetual lifeline that cannot last forever, steps should be taken to make Africa self-sufficient and not rely on food imports to the degree it does now.²

You can now support my work by buying me a coffee/book.

1. If you are interested in an account of the African continent; its history, challenges, and faults, I highly recommend this book. Even published over four decades ago, the insights and analysis are still relevant today. The author is refreshingly unbiased (compared to most liberals today) in his concerns and reasoning why Africa has a long way to go.

2. What should be done and what will actually happen are two entirely different things. We can probably expect resource wars and mass migration of millions by mid-century.