Periscope AFRICA
REUNION Author Sam Hill feared his
friend’s daughter, Jeniba Sallu (below),
had died in the Sierra Leone civil war.
Luckily, she had not. Hill (center) pictured
with Jeniba’s husband, daughter and
grandsons at her home in Kailahun.are the ones least able (and predis-
posed) to do what it takes to help.i found jeniba in kailahun—
through Bockrie Sallu’s nephew (sadly,
Bockrie passed away about 10 years
ago). She and her husband Musa Kon-
neh live in a small house consisting
of a parlor with a bedroom on either
side. The parlor was tiny and crowded.
It held a single table with a solar-pow-
ered DVD player and two chairs facing
a small sofa. The walls were plastered
with pictures torn from magazines—
soccer players, travel ads and Beyoncé.
Wire mesh and shutters covered the
windows. The doors were made of ply-
wood as thin as cardboard. The Kon-
nehs have no electricity or running
water. The bathroom is an outhouse.
Most Sierra Leoneans scrape their
yards bare of grass as a precaution
against snakes. But the Konnehs had a
lawn in front with an orange tree and a
hedge of decorative plants, which gave
it a vaguely British feel, except for the
glint of razor wire woven through the
hedge to discourage thieves in the night.
After dinner, we discussed dif-
ferences between Sierra Leone and
America. I tried to avoid making com-
parisons that cast either in a bad light.
My interpreter interrupted me, “You
don’t understand, Sam, you don’t!
Sometimes I don’t get paid for months.
I live in a building where there are 50
of us and one toilet. If I want to use
the bathroom, I have to go at four in
the morning. I carry my bathwater
in a bucket up four flights and make
each bucket last two days. I cannot
afford a light at night. I have a written
agreement but that doesn’t matter. Ifmeasure of how easy it is to be a cap-
italist or entrepreneur in each coun-
try. At the top is Hong Kong, with a
rating of 90.2. The U.S. scores 76.
and Sierra Leone only 47.5, putting
it 167 out of 180 ranked countries. It
ranks 42 out of 47 in Africa.
According to the Foundation, “A
deficient legal framework leaves
property rights and contracts inse-
cure. There is no land titling system.”
There’s also no established and trans-
parent way to resolve commercial dis-
putes. And there’s still the elephant
in the room: Corruption. Sierra Leo-
nean leaders know this. They’re smart
and well-educated. However, things
like titling land are huge undertak-
ings. And, not everyone’s on board
with change. As Daron Acemoglu,
MIT professor and co-author with
James Robinson of the bestselling
Why Nations Fail and the forthcom-
ing Narrow Corridor: States, Society,
and the Fate of Liberty, says, “While
bad government may not work for
the majority, it always works for
someone, and those it works for are
usually those at the top.”
That’s the problem for most Afri-
can nations. The conditions for a
strong private sector don’t exist—legal
framework, infrastructure, know-
how. To address that, in their book,
The Aid Trap, Glenn Hubbard and
and co-author William Duggan sug-
gested a Marshall Plan for Africa. It’s a
top-down option that calls for devel-
oped nations to fund a large burst
of aid to build market economies
across the continent. It’s analogous to
what the U.S. did to support Western
Europe’s recovery from World War
II. That assistance took the form of
investments in infrastructure, loans
and technical exchanges. A watered-
down African version was embraced
by Angela Merkel in 2017 as a way to
slow the stream of economic refugees18 NEWSWEEK.COM OCTOBER 18, 2019
flooding into Germany. Her logic was
that if conditions were better back
home, fewer migrants would come to
Europe. Presidential candidate Julian
Castro has made a similar case for a
Marshall Plan for Central America.
Hubbard argues it would work
because it would be focused on the
private rather than the public sector.
Hubbard believes it could be tied to
changes like cutting red tape that
would create the environment for
economic growth.
Building a strong private sector is
the only answer that addresses the
developing world problem in a sub-
stantive and permanent way. It isn’t
an easy solution. Corruption is hard
to root out. And there will always be
the issue of scale. West Africa’s entire
economy is about the same size as Swit-
zerland’s. And there’s a bigger challenge.
For the most part, these efforts to build
the private sector are being led by peo-
ple who don’t know much about the
private sector—aid workers, World
Bankers, government bureaucrats.
They gravitate to politically-correct
solutions, like small-scale technology,
microfinance and cooperatives, rather
than economically-efficient ones, like
replacing subsistence agriculture with
industrialized farming. And they are
averse to the deregulation that enables
free markets. The people who are in
charge of helping developing nations“For someone
who’s lived in a
stinking tenement
with no plumbing,an ICE detention
camp is no big deal.”