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A year ago, Good Governance Africa (GGA) released a press statement that Vladimir Putin was ‘fast escalating the kind of brinkmanship which history teaches us will lead to another world war if it is not skilfully contained. The repercussions of this behaviour are truly global, and the negative impact on African countries cannot be overstated’.
A year later, we do not (yet) have a world war, but African countries have been impacted severely by Russia’s unwarranted invasion of Ukraine. Many pre-COVID-19 gains against poverty have been decimated, food security concerns have ramped up and inflation eats at any real wage gains made prior to 2020. It would have been a challenge to recover from the pandemic without further supply chain and global energy disruptions wrought by the war.
Globally, gross domestic product (GDP) growth is expected to slow significantly in 2023. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) forecasts ‘full-year recessions in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as in the UK’. Monetary tightening in the US will probably lead to economic stagnation there.
While this is relatively good news for keeping global interest rates stable, it does mean less demand for African products in key European and US markets. The protracted war and China’s reversal of its disastrous zero-COVID-19 policy will keep oil prices at upwards of US$80/ barrel until the end of 2024. This is temporarily good for the revenue basket of African oil-exporting countries, but oil wealth continues to show up in econometric regressions as strongly associated with underdevelopment. In other words, it is always a question of where the oil money lands up and what is done with it.
Invariably, in the absence of good governance, oil rents accrue to ruling elites whose incentive to build a broad tax base is essentially absent. Repression of citizens and co-optation of formidable opponents become easy options. Moreover, high oil prices ironically fund unsustainable fuel subsidies for imported fuel made from the very crude oil African countries such as Nigeria and Angola possess.
Difficult
Not only will oil prices remain high, but grains and fertilisers will be difficult to access. These are key inputs for domestic food security and African countries continue to suffer the double burden of these high input costs and climate change impacts reducing food production.
It is not clear that Russia will continue implementing the grains deal that allows for the safe passage of food supplies out of Ukraine to global markets, especially as it comes under increasing sanctions pressure. Aside from the economics, the other major implication Good Governance Africa (GGA) warned against was the geopolitical impact of Russia’s aggression: “Putin’s aggression has undermined the very fabric of a post-Cold War order that Russia has been integral to maintaining. Its actions make a mockery of the UN Security Council of which it is a permanent member. The fact that Putin has openly threatened the nuclear option is brinkmanship on a new level.” African countries have become ripe for old Cold War rivalries to again manifest.
Most African countries who abstained (26 of the 54 nations) from the UN motions to condemn Russian aggression have argued that it is ‘simplistic and infantile’to think that international condemnation or calls for Russian withdrawal will change Putin’s mind. That seems to be missing the point. The Russian leader has hardly shown himself amenable to negotiation.
It remains the case that the African countries most likely to abstain from condemning Russia are those which import the highest volumes of arms from Russia as a proportion of total military equipment imports. This is the ‘realpolitik’ of the situation and it seems to render leaders incapable of discerning strategic foreign policy errors.
A year on from Putin’s wrong-headed invasion of Ukraine, the world is in turmoil, the poor suffer the most, and African leaders seem unable to find a backbone to condemn Russia. As the global geopolitical fault lines deepen, African countries seem to increasingly be at sea.
Ross Harvey