• ALBERTO ROJAS

    @ rojas1977

    Madrid

Updated on Sunday, 22august2021-02: 35

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  • The recovery race VII From Mexico to Argentina: the region hardest hit by Covid is struggling to get back on its feet

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To answer the question of what the economic recovery of Africa will be like after Covid-19, it may be worth first reviewing the few certainties, and the enormous doubts that the passage of the pandemic has left and does leave on the continent.

While the coronavirus collapsed the hospitals of the first world, the fragile health systems of the poorest countries did not suffer its blow in the same way, nor did all the millions of people die as the experts predicted.

Africa is the continent with the fewest air connections in the world. That explains the delay in the expansion of the coronavirus since February 14, 2020, the date on which the first positive of the virus was found in

Egypt

. Movement between countries is less than in Europe or Asia and this is influenced, for example, by the absence of highways and the small number of airlines that cover, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa. That is why cases rose (and still are) more slowly. In addition, most countries have a much younger population than Europe, with

60% of the total population under 18 years of age

, that is, the age group that usually passes the virus asymptomatically and less contagious. .

Nor do we know the real impact due to the lack of tests and laboratories. With a minimal capacity to test, it is curious that the countries that have reported the most cases of Covid are the wealthiest on the continent:

South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco or Ethiopia

. Does that mean they have more real cases than Cameroon, Somalia or Mauritania? No, but they do have more resources. For many health ministers on the African continent, the coronavirus is the last of their concerns. With meager budgets and health structures often inherited from colonization, Covid is less of a problem than malaria, cholera or measles.

Having clarified this point, and knowing that the data are fragmentary and incomplete, we can intuit that the coronavirus has not impacted as a disease in Africa as much as in Western countries, neither in infections nor in mortality. Does that mean that the economic blow has also been less? Let's see it.

Economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to

have contracted 2.0%

in dire 2020, closer to the lower bound of the forecast in April 2020. According to the World Bank, prospects for recovery are strengthening amid efforts of the countries of the continent to contain new waves of the pandemic and accelerate the arrival of vaccines. -2% does not seem like much given the circumstances, but we will see how that data does not say too much in a continent economic differences not only between countries (many more than Europe, for example), but within the country itself.

The best example is

Nigeria

. In an oil state where Ferraris driven by millionaires coexist with the poorest citizens on earth, the country faces the enormous challenge of managing its current demographic bomb: 220 million people and growing amid enormous political and religious tensions. At the other end of the oil-exporting countries,

South Sudan

, for example, with a similar extension, it has 12 million more inhabitants, at least three who have fled due to the civil war, that is, a huge extension of rural and underdeveloped land with unsolvable problems of ethnic violence. The way of dealing with the post-pandemic recovery will be totally different in both cases. South Sudan is likely to act as if the virus, a lesser evil among all those that affect it, never happened. For many African countries, especially the poorest, it is not about recovering their economic development, because they never had something like it, but rather promoting it for the first time.

Analysts

Steven Forsythe and Suneeta Sharma

write

a long essay on

Medium

about the different impact of the pandemic in Africa and the way out of the crisis. “It is essential to understand how differences in economic structures can affect the impact of Covid. For example,

Cape Verde,

the most infected country in Africa per capita, gets 18% of its gross domestic product from tourism, a sector that has been devastated by the pandemic.

Seychelles

tourism

, which originally had a growth projection for 2020 of 3.3%, ended up falling by 14.4%.

"However, the African countries that are large producers of minerals such as gold have suffered much smaller impacts, due in part to the increase in the price of the raw material," say Forsythe and Sharma.

For the United Nations, "the coronavirus will drag the main African economies to a drop of around 1.4% in GDP, while the smallest economies face a contraction of up to 7.8%."

The slowdown is mainly due "to the adjustments in exports that affect the producers and sellers of primary products and the consequent losses in fiscal revenues, which reduce the government's ability to expand the public services necessary to respond to the crisis."

In other words, if the poorest governments in the region also earn less, they will respond worse to the recovery.

This same summer the French Council of Investors in Africa or CIAN, for its acronym in English, was held in Paris. The conclusion of

Akinwumi Adesina

, president of the African Development Bank, was as follows: “Before the start of the pandemic, the six most dynamic economies in the world were African. But after more than a year of sanitary restrictions, countries that depend mainly on oil and tourism have paid a heavy price. To create wealth, these nations will need to diversify. There is also the Continental Free Trade Zone. To be profitable, it must have a real industrialization of the entire region, so that it is not only a zone of exchange but rather a crossroads where there are companies and industries.

For the United Nations Development Program, “the economic recession of the pandemic will persist in all countries, with reductions in GDP in some areas, as the coronavirus will continue to be present in the 2030s and, possibly, in the of in 2050 ». On the uneven impact on African countries, UNDP reports state that, “although some countries show a sustained recovery, others will slide into increasing economic recessions. For example,

Mauritius's

GDP is projected to

decline by -10.2% this decade, and that drop will be sustained to 6.9% in 2050, while Mali, a country impoverished by war, will fall by -3 , 3% in this decade and -9.2% in that of 2050 ».

What solutions can be applied to get Africa's vulnerable economies back on the growth path? One of them may be to

renegotiate the debt.

The moratoriums were designed to free up resources for health services. However, these attempts have generally been unsuccessful. The International Monetary Fund, for its part, will inject $ 16 billion into Sub-Saharan Africa, although specialists estimate the recovery needs at $ 42 billion, much more than double.

Africa will have to catch up in a context of localized but important problems, perhaps more damaging than the pandemic itself, such as corruption, climate change, the spread of jihadism throughout the Sahel, Chinese neo-colonialism, the exodus to the big cities, overcrowding ...

The character: Cyril Ramaphosa, a leader against the crisis and the pandemic

Perhaps the country that best exemplifies the fight against Covid and its consequences is South Africa.

It was one of the African states most affected by the pandemic (with

a fall of 6.1%

of GDP in 2020 and 78,694 deaths from the disease), it has even suffered its own strain (beta variant) and its expansion condemned millions of people not being able to leave their

townships

despite relying on a subsistence economy.

The country's finances have long been frozen, even before the coronavirus. The gold industry and mining stopped making a profit and tourism has stopped coming. For all these reasons, the president of South Africa,

Cyril Ramaphosa

, announced before the summer his plan to get out of the crisis: his government is going to allocate 500,000 million rand - about 24,500 million euros - to a new package of measures to prop up the economy and face the serious social consequences that the coronavirus crisis is producing in the country.

According to

Business Times Africa

, the program will be financed by prioritizing about R130 billion from existing budgets and loans, while another R200 billion will be collateral for banks to lend.

Another R100 billion will go to job protection and about R50 billion will go to social assistance.

All this money represents around 10% of the national GDP and will be obtained from a new budget, the Unemployment Insurance Fund and multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank.

The South African president, a member of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, will have to attend to the health and economic emergency if he does not want his streets to burn again.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Coronavirus

  • Africa

  • GDP

  • Egypt

  • Europe

  • Nigeria

  • Paris

  • Mali

  • IMF

  • Ferrari

  • Morocco

  • Asia

  • Covid 19

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