The recent recession has reinvigorated anti-capitalists everywhere, not least in Africa. In the continent’s economic powerhouse, South Africa, the rhetoric has, perhaps surprisingly, been most ardent. Blade Nzimande, the Minister of Higher Education and Training, said that there were no capitalist ideas that could address the problems that South Africa faces. Jeremy Cronin, the Minister of Transport said that “There is now a well-established scientific consensus that our present global economic trajectory is leading human civilization towards catastrophe.” Not to be outdone, the Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe warned that “Capitalist crisis threatens world peace because it may… result in fascism.” Other leaders on the African continent have expressed similar anti-capitalist sentiments.
Yet, the last decade was great for Africa. The real gross domestic product rose at an average annual rate of 4.9 percent between 2000 and 2008 — twice as fast as that in the 1990s. It is true that as a result of the financial crisis, African growth had slowed to 2 percent in 2009. But, it has since returned to an average annual rate of 5 percent. Developed economies, which contracted by 3.5 percent in 2009, have also returned to growth.
What was the impact of that growth on the lives of ordinary Africans? According to the most recent World Bank estimate, “For the first time since 1981, less than half of … [sub-Saharan Africa’s] population (47 percent) lived below $1.25 a day. The rate [of poverty] was 51 percent in 1981. The $1.25-a-day poverty rate in SSA has fallen 10 percentage points since 1999. Nine million fewer people [were] living below $1.25 a day in 2008 than 2005.” That reduction in poverty is especially encouraging considering that the population of SSA more than doubled between 1981 and 2008, rising from 398 million to 813 million.
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