 Gates Mukesius, thank you very much. Economist work, often with what we call interaction effects. Finland and music, that's a fantastic interaction. Dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Each year, UNU-wide invites a prominent international scholar or policymaker to give the wider annual lecture. And I'm extremely pleased that Professor Ernest Arijiti will give today the 2018 annual lecture entitled, The Political Economy of Structural Transformation, Has Democracy Failed African Economists? Ernest, the Secretary General of the African Research University's Alliance, Arua. And previously, he served as the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana and Director and Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the African Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution. He also served two terms as Chair of the UNU-wide Board and he's currently a member of the UNU Council. Ernest's research focuses on the economics and development and the role of institutions in development, regional integration, economic reform, financial systems in support of development, and small price enterprise development. And he is indeed very well known for his path-breaking work on informal finance and microfinance in Africa. He served on a long list of advisory and international commissions and he is very much the right person to speak on the topic of today. Ernest, we have looked forward to your lecture and we will be all ears when we listen to your wise words. The floor is yours for the 2018 lecture. Thank you very much, Fin. First, for inviting me to deliver the 2018 wide annual lecture and also for the introduction. I'm very pleased that for the first time ever, I was going to do a lecture heralded onto the podium by a choir. So it's the first time for me and it suddenly put me in the right mood for delivering the lecture this year. I was quite thrilled to hear them sing and finish in English and in Kiswahili. So thank you very much for making that possible. Today, I've opted to speak on the topic, the political economy of structural transformation has democratically failed African economies. I'm quite sure that not many people are used to hearing me talk about politics but I think we've gotten to a point in our lives as Africans where we cannot escape the need to talk about the politics of our region and how that affects the development or the fortunes of the region. It's important that we put Africa into the right perspective. It's a region that today is seen by many as having made some very decent progress in the last decade. But not too long ago, 2009, the economists were describing it as the hopeless continent and not long after that, in 2011, when some optimism came into the scene, we saw Africa rising and another two years later, the aspiring Africa. So clearly, the way in which the world sees Africa has changed or is changing. One thing remains however, even though the narrative may be changing in terms of how African governments are seen by the world, there is also the other side that with every marginal change that you see, there's something else that may be less understood and less positive for the people that live in the region. I've chosen to talk about this and my talk is motivated by three experiences that I've had in the last two decades. The first is my experience with economic reforms in Ghana, which began in 1983. So after doing it for about nine years, we then opted to replace the military regime that brought in the reforms with an electric government in 1992. So many of us were quite worried about how the transition was going to be made. We watched how in preparation for the first elections and at the fourth, the public health constitution, governments began to spend and spend and spend like there was no tomorrow. And of course, that meant that soon after the elections in 1993, the economy was in complete mess and the economy that had taken almost a decade to stabilize was in a complete mess. So in 1993, the government organized a meeting with all the donors to see how best we could change the situation. I was lucky to be invited to the meeting and I listened to the minister of finance, explained how donors had forced the government to have elections as a result of the way they had to have elections to legitimize policies and so on, had no choice. And then they were a bank vice president at the time, responded, we didn't ask you to win the elections. When you said, have a look, we didn't ask you to win. So it was the process of trying to win the election that created a huge deficit that took almost four years to fix. So that was my first experience. African governments having elections and a strong desire to win the elections and as a result of that, more or less destroying so many gains from almost a decade. But I watched Ghana do that almost every four years. So it happened in 1996, it happened in 2000 and so on. And then the same thing happens. So and that's what happened only in Ghana. It happens in almost every African country where they had elections. So you spend a lot of time fixing, stabilizing the economy and you use a year to destroy it. So that's my first experience. The second one that also motivates this talk came from my first visit over to Ethiopia. I was invited in 1994 by the Ethiopian Economic Association to share with them my experience as a Ghanaian living through the reforms in Ghana. So I gave what I thought was a very nice talk and in my talk, I spoke about the need for reforms. I did emphasize Lanternia reforms. Of course, as I spoke, the Prime Minister was there so I thought he was enjoying himself. So later on when he got up to speak, he said to my hearing, there will never be a change in a Lanternia system so long as I remain Prime Minister. I mean, of course, coming from a democratic Ghana, I was wondering what's going on here? How can a Prime Minister say that so long as I remain Prime Minister, there's going to be no change? So it gave me an insight into how strong leaders in Africa ruled. It gave me an understanding that there will be no change so long as I, the strong man, remain in power. My third experience, which also influences what I'm going to say today. Earlier this year, I was in Kigali for the next Einstein Forum and I'd been to Kigali 10 years earlier and I saw the huge contrast. Kigali has changed so much. It was more beautiful, neat. I saw many more taller buildings and I saw a discipline of people behaving like in Helsinki, they would even cross their road. So I said, what's going on here? I looked at the economic performance data and it showed a lot of promise. This year, they expected 6.8% growth, 6.1% last year and before 8.6%. So clearly, something was going right in Kigali. Clearly, something good was happening there. And of course, I had many of the Africans there saying, this is what every African leader must do. This is what must happen through an African. This kind of change is what we need. But then someone also said, well, they may be doing this, but they're not democratic. They're not right, but they've had elections. They had elections not too long ago. Yeah, but you have to change the constitution for the president to run again for the third time for another seven year term. So clearly, there's something good happening in Rwanda but it's not democratic. What does it mean for an understanding of democracy and how democracy influences the way economies are supposed to perform? So these three things have encouraged me to think that democracy is not something that you treat lightly. There are aspects of it that may be exciting and there are other aspects that may be not so exciting. So as an economist, let me see how to probe into that. So that's how, if you don't understand anything at all from this lecture, you remember my three experiences and I think we'll be fine. So basically, as we typically would do, I will talk about the unchanging structure of Africa's economies and explain why, why the absence of structural transformation. Then I will talk a little bit about how policies are made in the region and how basically those changes in terms of the way policies made could possibly influence our interest in long-term outcomes. Then I will talk about the new political environment, the environment in which African governments experience pluralism, an experience in which many Africans have a voice in who rules their country or does not rule their country. And what it means for structural transformation and then I will conclude after that. So the main argument that I will make today is that if economic management efforts of the last several decades have not led to transformation, it's not simply a question of what democracy and associated practices are good for Africa. It goes beyond that question, that's basically my point. The main argument is African governments have not adapted democracy appropriately for the purpose of building institutions that generate the reforms to support structural transformation. So you can be a democracy, but if you don't have democratic institutions, if you do only hold elections, but you don't have the right institutions, the likelihood that you reap the benefits or the dividends from democracy becomes very low. So that's the point. That's if you when governments express interest in long-term development, they manage this interest with a short-term framework, if you need a budget. So they are looking for immediate outputs. Elections will be coming in another four years. So they've got a short results. Are we making the point that in many countries, that's the main thing that drives decision making. I will argue that appropriate policy and institutional force for structural transformation must be anchored in long-term development frameworks and institutional structures. You can't pursue long-term goals with short-term strategies or short-term frameworks. Or you can't use institutions that are designed for a short-term purpose to achieve a long-term aspiration. These are the main points I want to make in them. So in my introduction, and I do have a very long paper that I wrote for this, I talk about the positive stories. I share the recent growth in Africa that has been good. Africa's performance in the last decade has been very, very good and that's compared to other developing regions around. We're talking about 3.1% per capita growth. That's not bad for many economies. That's the kind of thing that we talk about. So we talk about the fact that Africa has been seen as an area of promise. We talk about the fact that Africa is generally seen positively a lot more so today than it was 20 years ago. And it's not simply growth figures showing gains, but a greater respect for African institutions. There were many people who have said 20 years ago that every good gain that is reflected in the growth numbers probably is a result of a commodity price change. Today we know that Africa does have some very good policies that have delivered good results. Of course, I also talk about the not so positive stories. The World Bank has estimated that Africa will be the home to the largest number of extremely poor people by 2030. Sorry, it's with 2030, not 2013, it's 2030. Africa will be the home to the largest number of extremely poor people by 2030. That's clearly a big problem. Apart from being the home of four people, it's also a place of a lot of dysfunction. That's also part of the challenges that Africa needs to be confronted with. Poverty, apart from increasing inequality, so they're going to increase. These are the kind of challenges that Africa is talking about. Of course, I introduce in interaction some of the stricter debates. Can Africa survive with a stricter transformation? What are the arguments, like the rhetoric type of position, others? Can Africa really move on, continue achieving decent growth rates without changing the structure of its economies? We'll be taking a position that no. And then I discuss stricter adjustment and after. Did we simply learn to survive? There are a number of many African finance ministers who would argue that they've learned to fight fires. A lot of what we do in terms of managing the economy is fighting fires. And we're fighting fires since 1983. Are we still going to continue fighting fires? Did we learn something? Yes, we did learn something. We learned how to stabilize our economies. Today, if you look at every typical African economy, compared to, let's say, at a time the AERC was being created, every central bank in the region, or almost every central bank in the region, knows how to stabilize after the elections. So you know that it would take you four years to repair things, it would take you one year to spoil it. So the central bankers have conditioned themselves for it. They know how to deal with it. Similarly, finance ministry officials know how to do good budgets. So what have we learned from that process? We talk about it. And then I talk about leadership and institutions. When Barack Obama came to Ghana, his first trip to Africa, he made mention of the fact that what Africa needs, good institutions, strong institutions, not strongmen. It's one that we test in this case that Africa needs strong institutions and not strongmen. How do strongmen function without strong institutions? And can strong institutions function without strongmen? How do we define who a strongman is? Is Pocogami a strong man? Probably. There are many other strongmen in the region who may not have achieved the kind of results that Pocogami has achieved. So I spent quite a bit of time on the unchanging structure of the economy. Here, that's what a discussion is about the contribution to GDP growth from agriculture, how this is changing or not changing. We talk about agriculture and employment. We discuss the issue of migration and the pain by rural urban development. We also look at things like the changes in the strength of the industrial and the service sectors in relation to agriculture. And of course, there's a bit of discussion about the demographics that you find over there. The important thing is the call for more inclusive growth and how to make this sustainable. We discuss that, and we talk about the new interest in stricter transformation. You will see that I'll do our mention quite extensively the work that Justin Lin has done. So this chart is basically to show that unlike in the past when Africa's performance was always well beyond, below what the other regions of the world were doing, today, Africa basically sometimes does better than the rest of the world. That's only my guy worse than the rest of the world. So clearly, Africa has learned something of how to manage its growth performance. The bit about this contribution to GDP shows where in other parts of the world, the contribution of agriculture is declining over time. In Africa, we've seen a marginal decline happen. What's interesting in our Africa's case is the fact that when that decline took place or is taking place, it's not going to the places where you expect that to go. You don't find people moving from agriculture into industry as manufacturing. What we're discussing is they move from agriculture into informal activities, like in the service sector. That's something that we talk about. So this chart here basically shows how important agriculture is to the African economy compared to other regions. So that's the point that we make quite a bit of in the presentation. So here you see the contribution of agriculture, forestry efficient across the different regions. For Africa, it's much more important than it is to other parts of the world. Then we look at the contribution of agriculture to employment, total employment. You see how for all of the world, agriculture is declining. For Africa, it's also declining, but it remains very, very high. The rate of decline is not nearly as high as in other parts of the world. So we make that point in our paper quite strongly. Again, we look at the composition of the contribution of agriculture to industry, of industry to total employment. We do make that comparison, and then we discuss the contribution of services to total employment in Africa. What is important is the fact that Africa clearly is missing that middle section, the industrial sector. So we have seen a shift in total employment from agriculture, not as fast as it's required, but that shift is not benefiting industry. It's going into the informal sector. It kind of leads, Roderick, to talk about the reversals in the transformational growth. It's something that we need to pay attention to. I believe we should. And of course, we're talking about how to do that. How do we explain the absence of stricter transformation? It is important, largely because many African governments are quite keen to change the narrative. They're quite keen to change the story about what is happening to different sectors. So they are doing their best to promote industry. Of course, they do this through various schemes. They do this through the creation of expropriation zones and providing various incentives for companies to bring in some FDI and so on. But it's not giving the kind of results that governments are looking for. What have we made to explain this? Is it the lack of infrastructure? Especially electricity? Is that a matter of weak institutions? Is it the business environment? So many things have been written about why Africa does not excite industrialists, whether from within or from outside. What this chart does is show us the enormity of the problem with respect to electricity access. Clearly, Africa is well behind all the other places. There's an estimate of 40% of the population that only have taxes. So rural areas are worse off. Trying to locate the industry anywhere in rural Africa becomes a huge problem largely in view of the situation there. And I guess when these people have done some studies into why it's difficult to do business in Africa, they talk about corruption, they talk about high cost of power, they talk about non-enforcement of contracts, they talk about poor security and transport infrastructure as well as policy uncertainty. But policy uncertainty probably used to be a more important problem in the 80s than it is today. That's the position that I would take on that. So, of course, it's a whole theory that expects a lot of convergence following the work of people like Saul and others. We discuss quite extensively in the paper the absence of convergence. We talk about how divergence has become the issue and why today we see a growing gap between the developed world and the less developed world. How do we explain that? In those discussions, things like the role of the state become important. Should the African state play a more direct role, the kind of role that Justin Lane talks about, or should it be a lot more controlled what it does? What kind of institutions do you need to foster convergence? What kind of institutions do you need to strengthen the capacity of African industry to produce a bit more productive? That's the kind of discussion that we see more and more in the literature. Of course, here, I'm not going to go through the whole of this slide. I mean, it was likely for Justin Lane's benefit. I don't know if he's in the room today. Justin here, no, okay. So, basically, he has to assure him that the things he writes about are read and we read them and we critique them also. So, this is largely focused on things like what the state should be doing in the area of trying to remove the rigidities that make it difficult for people to industry to locate in Africa. Quite extensive, we talk about basically the role that the state should be playing. How far should the state go? How far should the state not go? All of that is discussed in these two slides. One of the points that I try to make in trying to explain the absence of Storker transformation is the fact that today, there are many things that African governments can do as a result of the reforms that they pursued in the 80s and in the 90s. One important one that I talk about is the fact that the public financial management system in most countries received considerable attention. So, the way in which the baguette is prepared, the link between the baguette and various other things that the government wants to pursue, specifically in the short term, improved considerably. So, we felt a bit of time in the paper about how the baguette processes improved in most African countries to the extent that today there's enough evidence about the quality of the baguette improving as a result of these changes that have taken place. One point that I make in the discussion of the baguette processes is the fact that even though they've improved, they've improved considerably in the last two decades. There's very little evidence that they do influence the kinds of decisions that need to be made on when it comes to Storker transformation. There's very little link between the baguettes and the longer term frameworks that are required for making the changes that we do talk about. So, that's a point that we make here. This chart showing the index of quality of baguette tree and the financial management. Basically, the point here is that for Africa, which is the lower one, we've seen some improvement at the same time that for other developing countries, we see a worsening of the quality of their baguette. But what is interesting is that it's still worse than in the other places. That's the point that we make with this chart here. The chart shows how things like transparency and others have improved in Africa. The accountability and dealing with corruption, the state being able to talk freely about corruption as a problem. The clear indications that there's more transparency. We talk about that in Uganda, in South Africa, there's probably a full set of aid baguette documents. There are no baguette documents that are obliged to publish. And Uganda seems to be doing very well. I don't know whether Louise has anything to do with that. You never know. I mean, having good central bank governments and deputy governments is always very important for these kinds of things. Their influence on the finance ministry may be showing the Botswana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, and Tanzania are publishing quite a few, six or seven out of the eight that I suspected. Of course, they're kind of like Equatorial Guinea that do publish nothing at all, so on. So the important thing is that in many countries, the process of doing their baguette has become a little more transparent. I do receive invitations every now and again from the finance ministry in Ghana to sit in meetings, to discuss workshops, to discuss the budget. What should go in and what should not go in? Clearly, a lot more transparent. In almost every African country today, you find radio stations that devote time to discussing the budget, what goes into the budget, and the query why particular roads are going to be paid for for the budget and not others. So the issue of transparency and how it is fostered accountability is very important. The extent to which it leads to a reduction in corruption is yet to be tested, but clearly, if people know more about what's in the budget, the likelihood of it having an effect. So you're not going to be financing projects that do not exist in the past. They were projects that are always found in the budget, but they never got anywhere. So there's a lot of transparency taking place. So that I move to having learned from how to do budgets, how is this affecting the way we pursue long-term change? That's where I go to this last section of five, the new political environment planning for structure transformation. Beyond the Washington consensus, so beyond what we agreed with the World Bank to do, beyond what we agreed with the IMF to do, beyond what we agreed with DFID and GDZ and all those other agencies to do, what do African countries want? The African Union has set forth the agenda 2063 with the aspiration towards a prosperous Africa based on inclusive growth and sustainable development. Almost every African country that have paid attention to let's have a program, a medium-term program, and in that program, whether it's the a perverted direction strategy or something similar, that program talks about two things, whether they are serious about them or not that other matter. But they always talk about modernizing agriculture. Every African country talks about modernizing agriculture and then they also talk about industrialization, they talk about these two things or clearly these are long-term things that you want to pursue. And I've made a point that talking about modernizing agriculture without investing in agriculture is not going to really yield the kind of outcomes that you are looking for. The chart on the right clearly shows you the agriculture share of government expenditure by region. So we compare Africa to other places. What you see here, in the fact that agriculture gets from the state is much, much less than in other parts of the world. Interestingly, we have the comprehensive African Agriculture Development Program which commits all African governments to devote at least 10% of their annual national budget to agriculture in pursuit of the MDEs at the time. What is interesting is the fact that only Malawi was able to achieve that target. When it comes to industrialization, as it's given for agriculture, most developed blueprints in Africa have an extra-interesting manufacturing and value-added production. The main thing that they do in this regard is to provide some tax incentives and they provide infrastructure for these EPZs that you find in many different places. I do mention the fact in the paper that industrial policy which basically reflects the way the state was to intervene in markets to allow or provide incentive for the functioning of the industrial sector. You don't find it anywhere. There are a number of countries that have talked about industrial policy and do have a document that requires industrial policy, but very seldom do you find the kinds of arguments for particular investments to be made the way that one would anticipate. Yesterday I was very privileged to listen to John Pey and his team present the paper on industrialization, what do you call it? Without smokestacks, right? That's what John and his team were pursuing. And I agreed with most of the orientation of that paper in terms of looking at other sectors within the economy alongside manufacturing. My only concern, of course, John, was that the story about manufacturing got lost. So it sounded almost like Africa can industrialize without manufacturing. And I wasn't surprised that Justin Lin was up in arms. The important thing that we want to pursue here is that Africa needs to have a clearly stated industrial policy. What goes into that industrial policy should be informed country by the states of a sense of that country. It has to be the state that you have, the human capital available, the challenges that are provided by nature and so on. These are the things that should be going into industrial policy. And I have no difficulty at all supporting things like subsidies. I have no difficulty with picking winners. The most important thing I would emphasize is knowing how to pick the winners, knowing how to pick the right winners. And I know that as a result of the getting our fingers burned in the 1960s and 1970s, when we're doing the enforce of social industrialization, everybody has run away from picking winners instead of learning how to pick winners. And that's a point that I do make quite a bit of in the paper. So I have no difficulty with picking winners so long as we do that properly. In the last discussion that we will have, we'll talk about democracy and economic decision making. African countries saw considerable instability, political instability in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. We talk about a number of coup d'etats that took place in the region. And after they went through struggle adjustment, the number of coup d'etats that occurred went down considerably. So when you talk about that, what did they learn from it? They learned from that, the need for good governance. And that's the kind of thing that the World Bank preached quite extensively in the 90s, good governance. The pursuit of good governance led to the elections. But today we've seen that many of the elections that were organized were likely only in name. Were likely only in name. We've seen countries like Angola, Cameroon, and Kuchiragini, the DRC, and Congo all produce election results. And then nobody really believes them. But we do accept them because we have to be nice. So we accept these results and we pretend that democracy is taking place. And when things go wrong in those countries, we blame it on the new democracy. That's one of the issues that I talk about. My colleague Joab Wadi has written about the number of electoral democracies that we have in Africa, which increased considerably after 1989, so that by 2000, that was quite a good number of African-Canada could be described as democracies. So is there a link between Africa becoming more and more democratic, more and more having more and more elections, and then the way the economies perform? There are a number of people that have written quite extensively about these experiences. Many of them can be put on three different scenarios, what they call the conflict scenario, and then the compatibility scenario, and then the skeptical scenario. In the conflict scenario, elected officials take a short-term view of our policy-making. They are always thinking about the next election, as I've described to you earlier, and so most decisions that are taken will have this in mind. I don't talk about countries that could easily qualify for this. Indeed, okay, let me go to the next topic, the compatibility scenario. Here, this is more of the positive relationship between elections and democracy and current performance. Here, the emphasis on pluralism is to have checks and balances and the freedom of press providing safeguards against the system abuse or predatory behavior. So what people are looking for is evidence of a positive relationship between the elections or the democratic processes and the economic performance. And of course, in the last scenario, there's no relationship that can be found between democracy and development. And then what we have done studies into these. Simoglu is one of such, and then his work clearly, followed by many others, shows that there's some positive relationship between having a democracy and current performance. He talked about the fact that per capita GDP increased about 20% over the past 30 years. This translates to zero points, it's increased in annual growth. The idea here that democracy is more likely to lead to the protection of the rights of individuals, including property rights and so on. So the argument about a positive relationship between democracy and the performance is linked to how the rights of individuals are protected and the way that incentive forces they are making the right economic decisions which will lead to growth. My colleague Fosu also has studied this and concluded that countries that have democratic regimes enjoy agricultural productivity and overall growth. Of course, that's the skeptical view and a number of studies that have gone in Africa or for Africa, one of the best known is the way by Kisan Ghani, 2006 published in Canada, which basically looks at 37 countries and then concludes support the skeptical view. The number of these is what is important in this discussion is the fact that it's mixed. There are those who see a positive relationship and those who do not. I have looked at the performance of various countries, come to the position, but it doesn't really matter whether it's a matter of democracy, fostering development or there being no strong relationship between them. This is because in most of Africa, you will find evidence of all of these. And sometimes in the same country, you will find the authorist that is playing out and how does it work? Let's take a country like Nigeria. Nigeria claims to be the largest democracy in Africa, the largest democracy. Had the largest population, so the largest democracy. And Nigeria does have regular elections every four years. Do you have elections? And now we've seen elections lead to a change in government. So clearly, there's something credible about the way they run elections in Nigeria. Is the way decisions get made linked to the elections? Sometimes yes, other times no. I've seen Nigerian governments take very radical decisions. A good example would be when Charles Soludo decided to consolidate the banking system in Nigeria. A very, very tough decision, one that most governments would have run away from, effectively reducing the number of banks, very significantly, in a very short period, the Nigerian government was able to do it. And yet the Nigerian government was not able to do much about the oil industry. They were able to control corruption. So corruption gets worse and worse and worse. So do you blame corruption in Nigeria on democracies or not? It's a very difficult one. We saw corruption in Nigeria under the military regime and we've seen corruption in Nigeria under the civilian regime, under the elected regime. Does corruption play any significant role during elections? Probably not. If all the parties are engaged in it. So it's very difficult to see the link between democracy and outcomes in Nigeria. I take Ghana, my own country. There's no point talking about, that country doesn't talk about my own country. So let me talk about Ghana. Even though it's a very risky thing to do. One of the things I like about Ghana is all I need to do is listen to it for five minutes and I know which party you belong to. I'm quite sure that the Ghanians here, after five minutes, we know which party I belong to. But I'll take the risk. I'm sure they'll be wrong anyway. So Ghana has changed. So we enter this phase of electing governments every four years. That's in 1992, what we call the Fourth Republic. So we change from Rollins to Kufo, another party. And then from Kufo, we went to John, it was Atamels, then from Atamels, went to John Muhammad, and now with President Kufo. So we know how to change governments. We know how to, so the presidents know that we know how to change them. We know how to sell our votes. We know how to draw out of a candidate something. So if I'm a Ghanian and I see elections coming, I know there's a high likelihood that the road in front of my house will be fixed. I know that if I need water, I don't need to make too much noise. I have to simply wait for the next elections and there's a high likelihood that it will be fixed. If there's power, and indeed everybody who knows Ghana knows very well that a supply of power gets very, very erratic as a result of the tariff arrangement that we have there because we can't pay for the production. And you know that no matter how many power cuts or load sharing takes place, as elections approach, they'll find a solution to their problem. So we know that and because we know that and the governments also know that, we're sort of coming to an arrangement or an understanding that help me and I also help you. Help me with the infrastructure and help me. So when you do that, I'll help you to gain power. What it means is that come elections, promises are made and the current government made quite a number of promises. I promised free senior high education. I promised every district with a new factory. I promised every village with a dam. So the people understood that and they liked the idea. So they voted for the government. What it means that today, the government of Ghana has to produce over 200 factories before the next elections. I mean, how is that going to work? And how do you produce these factories without an industrial policy? How do you produce, you know, when I talk about this in Ghana, it's not, look that, but there's no, there's few connects here, but I know them so I'm not worried. So the government of Ghana seriously believes that it can produce more than 200 factories. Of course, I've heard people debate about what type of factory and the people say, a factory is a factory. Yeah, but the idea behind producing, promising 200 factories or more is that you won't deal with the unemployment problem. That's the whole idea. So if you're going to have 200 factories that don't employ anybody, they have to solve the problem. So it's not simply an issue of a factory is a factory. You need to have the factories that can produce jobs. That's the kind of dilemma. So Ghana has learned, or politicians in Ghana have learned in my view, to make commitments of a long-term nature, like producing factories or producing dams, using short-term instruments, shooting using short-term frameworks. That's why we want to build 200 factories, but we don't have a policy on industrialization. That for me is a good example of the conflict scenario. But the same Ghana also knows how to deal with poverty. The same Ghana knows what to do in terms of social protection. The same Ghana knows how to enhance the functioning of their public services. Today in Ghana, one of the most interesting things, I think Maxwell is here so he can confirm, we do a lot of readjustment of the banking system, allowing banks to shut down if they are not performing, and the likelihood of a run on them is very high, allowing. So that's commitment. That's clear indication that the government knows what to do at the right time. But the same government promises 200 factories within four years. I struggle with that. We talk about things like modernization of agriculture. I haven't, apart from South Africa, that is trying to do land tenure reform. I haven't seen any single African government try in a very serious way to do reform of the land tenure system. And yet we know that to modernize agriculture requires considerable infusion of capital. Today, less than 4% of all investment in Africa, it goes into agriculture. Less than 4%, how do you change that? You're not going to change that by leaving the land tenure system intact. Something has to be given. You've got to make it worth anybody's while to want to invest in agriculture through things like land consolidation. How do you do land consolidation if you don't intend to do land tenure? In Ghana, nobody talks about land tenure reforms because it's not nice to talk about why, because no interest group was to be a loser in that kind of discussion. Parliament is not going to be the forum for negotiating the interests of groups in land tenure reforms. And so, we talk about modernization, but no land tenure. We talk about giving every village a dam and yet we have no policy on irrigation. We talk about providing free senior high schools I would even discuss what should be in the curriculum. It is these things that for me reflect the strong use of inappropriate tools for the long-term problems. Of course, whenever I've spoken about the kinds of things that we want to work to provide free senior high school, I want to finance it with the oil rents and so on. That's nice. It's nice to be able to give everybody free senior high school education using oil rents. But we also know that 10 years after these kids leave their schools, they'll be unemployed. They'll be unemployed. 10 years after they've left those schools, they'll still be unemployed. And so, we have a choice. We have a choice between giving them the rice skills that they can find jobs with and those rice skills may come from functioning industry. I will provide them with the experience they need to be ready for the job market. I would have to do anything about industry. So, we are willing to use the oil rents to finance free senior high school education. But more ambivalent when it comes to using oil rents to support modernizing agriculture or an industrial development program. That's where I have my difficulty. How do governments make those choices? How do they decide? That's the political economy side. How do they decide that financing free senior high school is more important? Of course, they know that free senior high school is more popular. More families are likely to be interested in the free senior high school than in supporting agriculture or than in supporting the construction of factories. So, governments have found a way of making these choices. And that's the point that I make. So, that's my story. African governments do make choices, but the choices that they make don't reflect our long-term interests. The choices that they make reflect only the short-term gains that we've made, sometimes for the population and other times for the government. So, I conclude by simply saying that it's important that we think about these kinds of discussions that in our own countries, whether we're from Malawi, from Zambia, from Tanzania, Uganda, we think about it. When we make those choices, choices about what needs to be done now and what needs to be done in the future, we'll be thinking more and more about the long-term. We'll be thinking about the gains for the entire nation, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, as opposed to what will happen four years from now. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ernest, for not shying away from difficult questions. We thought this year it would be appropriate to have a commentator. And I'm pleased and grateful that Dr. Rachel Gisenquist, who is a political scientist and a research fellow with UnionWide accepted my invitation to serve in this capacity. Rachel works on the politics of the developing world with particular attention to ethnic politics and group-based inequality, state fragility, governance and democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa. She has extensive field experience from no less than 24 African countries and elsewhere. And before she joined us here at Wider and Helsinki, she spent three years at the Harvard University as research director for the index of African governance. And she's also spent time at the London School of Economics and with the World Bank. Rachel, we look forward to your comments. Good afternoon. So it's a real privilege to offer some comments and reflections on this annual lecture as a way to kick off our collective discussions. Not only, of course, does the lecture advance a thought-provoking and sometimes challenging argument, but it also brings together a number of diverse strands from our work at UNU Wider over the last decade. And this makes it, I think, a very appropriate annual lecture at this conference as we take stock of what we've learned and think about what comes next. So Ernest's lecture begins with the question, has democracy failed African economies? Does democracy lead to the right economic choices for Africa? Can democracy lead to policies that support structural transformation? And I think that these questions, like many of the most pressing questions in development today, are at the intersection of economics and political science. And so I am very pleased as a political scientist to offer some comments. And I'll focus on these questions in particular. So I have four brief points, which draw both on the presentation this afternoon and also on the longer underlying working paper. I think as you'll see in some sense, some of these points are sort of a reinterpretation of Ernest's arguments, but from a political science perspective. And I hope that I can in this way stir some discussion a bit. The first point is to underscore that the question of whether democracy leads to the right economic choices or to socially optimal policy choices more broadly is certainly not one specific to Africa. So indeed Ernest recognizes this in considering related literatures in his working paper. I think for instance of Samuel Huntington's 1968 book Political Order and Changing Societies as one example. Still I think it's worth underscoring this point and the broader relevance of the central questions posed in the lecture. Policy time to electoral cycles is a challenge around the world. And there's evidence that voters across a wide variety of contexts don't necessarily vote in their own economic interests, short-term or long-term. There's been a big discussion of the latter point in US politics in recent years. So think for instance, maybe some of you have read Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? So it was published in 2004. It was a New York Times bestseller. And his starting point is that conservatives in the United States support economic policies that don't benefit the majority of the people in the state of Kansas. And yet the state is one of the most conservative in the union. The book of course then presents an argument for why this is so. That said, my second point is that it may very well be that the question of whether democracy leads to the right economic choices is more pronounced or more problematic for Africa than for some other parts of the world. There are a number of possible reasons why this might be. So Ernest's lecture has I think largely highlighted what we might call the formal functioning of democratic institutions in economic policymaking. For instance, the fact that elected officials governed by electoral cycles adopt short-term approaches. That structural reforms which require a long-term perspective are difficult to sell to impatient electorates. And that there are weaknesses in the legislative oversight of budgets in many countries. I think we might also consider here other aspects of formal electoral and policymaking processes in democracies and why Africa's experience on average may differ from that of some other regions. For instance, we expect political parties to play a role in aggregating, influencing and representing the interests of ordinary voters. Thus, they could play a role in supporting and selling long-term structural reform. However, more personalistic parties with weak programmatic platforms would be less likely to play this role. And we see parties like this in many countries and certainly in a number of African countries. We might also think for instance about citizen engagement and the challenges posed by poverty in many African countries. Poverty and the factors that go along with low levels of economic development, so high rates of illiteracy, lower levels of education and the challenges in access to information affect citizens' means and ability to monitor and evaluate the performance of their elected representatives and to hold their elected leaders to account. In other words, poverty affects the full or the ideal practice of democratic citizenship which has implications for the quality of economic policymaking. Well, we can expect such challenges to be persistent for African democracies. We do have some means to begin to address them. I'm thinking for instance of capacity building efforts for political parties and civil society groups, parliamentary strengthening programs, media training, public information campaigns and generally devoting resources to improving education for all. My third point however concerns some additional reasons why countries that are formerly democracies might not be making the right economic choices in African countries. So Ernest is very careful, especially in the paper, about and talking about democracy. But I think it's important to remember that we should be really careful in talking about democracy. All countries in which political leaders are selected through nominally free and fair elections are commonly labeled democracies by many and certainly by many academics. But we can also distinguish among democracies. So electoral democracies only meet minimal electoral criteria. Electoral democracies are not liberal democracies where citizens also enjoy deeper safeguards of civil rights and political liberties, the rule of law, separation of powers and so on. The concept of electoral or competitive authoritarianism is also worthy of note here. So it describes political regimes where the formal institutions of democracy, in other words regular multi-party elections, go along with authoritarian governance. And recent literature suggests that electoral authoritarianism is a useful way to think about political regimes in a number of African countries. This suggests that it may not be the formal institutions of democracy, of voting, electoral cycles and so forth that are most important in understanding economic policymaking in many African countries, but rather the role of authoritarian political elites. Authoritarian political elites are winners under current systems. And so they have little real interest, little interest in real structural transformation, much less in policies that support more inclusive economic growth. And how to transform such systems is a really big challenge. My fourth and final point relates to the underlying expectations often held about democracy, the expectations that Ernest is challenging in the lecture. Well, liberal democratic governance is a worthwhile goal in itself. Should we really expect it to be a means to development? Should we advocate for it as a means to development? A large body of classic research, as the paper points out, suggests that in fact the relationship works the other way that development supports democracy. Thinking about some of these sort of good governance agenda expectations for democracy, what precisely are the mechanisms through which we expect democracy to work to support development and better economic policymaking? When we think about such precise mechanisms, is it really electoral democracy that plays a driving role, or is it rather more efficient and effective government institutions or more capable states? Is it necessarily accountability through the ballot box that makes all the difference, or is it more social accountability, which might be supported by non-electrical institutions and practices, like town hall meetings or community scorecards? In conclusion, I think some might argue based on the points raised in this lecture that the lofty goals of democracy should be sacrificed for development, which is best pursued, they might argue, by strong developmental states. But Ernest doesn't make this argument, and neither would I. He concludes, rather, that the problem isn't necessarily democracy, it's what he calls in the paper the new politics. And I think a good place then to end my comments is the famous quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill. Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rachel. That was part on. Ernest, you want to react to Rachel? Okay. Okay, we will now open up for questions and answers. I will sort of start this side and then move to this side. The room is so big that I simply cannot see all of you at the same time. So I'll sort of go from here to here. Who would like to be first? Don't be shy. I do know that we aren't Finland, but... And I mean, there is a joke about somebody who speaks a variety of languages, who is a Finn, and he was in a meeting, and the meeting sort of went quite sort of around. And it was not obvious what one would comment. And then somebody walked up to this person afterwards and said, I noticed that you were very quiet. Is it because you're not comfortable with the English? And then the answer was, no, no, no, no, I can be quiet in many languages. Okay, yeah, here. Oliver? Okay, Oliver Morris, the University of Nottingham. A good friend of mine, political economy, always described the paradox in the economics literature that we were brilliant at finding reasons and models to explain why politics failed, but we were terrible at finding explanations for why politics might work. And if you think of it, all of our political economy models explain why it doesn't work. But we don't have good models that explains how might it work. So from your discussions, would you have any suggestions for how can anybody contributing to creating the incentives for politicians to do the right thing? Okay, yes, here in the front. Thank you very much. Peter Cuote from University of Ghana. Prof Saity, thank you very much for the thought-provoking presentation. You spoke about the political business cycle and I want to talk back to you. What do you think African governments should do to reverse this political business cycle where we spend three years to mess up and then spend a year to, sorry, a year to mess up and then spend three years to clean up? Thank you. Okay, everyone's here in the middle. Mark, close to your hands. Hi, I'm Mark Dre from TIFID. I have a question relating to what challenges increasing complexity poses to democracy and the role of the individual in democracy. And part of Rachel's comments there were that voters don't support the things that are in their best interest. But in order for them to do so, they need to understand what's in their best interest. And earlier, we were at a session about the international financial system and there was this idea that after the financial crisis, we didn't get further with reforms. And I thought partly that's because to push our governments to get further with reforms means the average person on the street understands enough about the international financial system to know what's wrong with it, to push for those reforms to fix it. I'm not sure they understand. They don't seem to understand that vaccinations are a good thing. So, and I'm just curious to know, how do we square that circle? Okay, next question. Over here, Francis. Thank you for a very interesting and stimulating lecture. A strong theme going through the lecture, aside from what you said about democracy, was about the need for industrial policy. And I felt that it was not the Democrats' fault that people don't have an industrial policy. Countries have been told for decade after decade that it's wrong to have an industrial policy. And maybe if now the conversation changed in a very powerful way and everyone would agree that they should have an industrial policy, this could be superimposed upon democracy in such a way that, all right, you have your problems that you've mentioned, but at least you also have a structure of planning, which would enable you to go through them with hiccups, but at least to go in the right direction. Thanks. Okay, yeah, Deepak. Thank you for a very interesting lecture on this. Two questions. First, if we consider the experience of Asia, political democracy has been neither necessary nor sufficient to create a developmental role for states. Now, I think of democracy as a prior, but we need to recognize that political democracies are about institutionalized checks and balances, but they evolve slowly. They create self-correcting mechanisms. Are you perhaps coming to a conclusion too soon that democracy is not conducive to development in Africa? Or could it be that democracy is in its very early stages, it's at best electoral democracy without rights for citizens, civil, political, social, so the two questions in a sense are independent. It is possible to get industrial policies and governments that are developmental in their roles without democracy. We've seen that happen in Asia, but it is also possible to think of democracies being the only institution that might serve longer-term objectives despite short-termism in political cycles. Okay, thanks. I'll take one more question up here in the front and then allow Ernest to comment, reply. Thank you very much, Prof. When I saw the topic, I thought that we were driving into a cul-de-sac because politics and economics have never been good-bed fellows, so I knew that the results was going to be what it was. However, there is, I mean, despite political economy anyway, but I think I've never been able to resolve this issue of chicken and egg which comes first. Is it a democracy that engenders development or it is a development that rather engenders democracy, proper democracy, so to speak? So I don't know what your thoughts are. Some people think that you need to develop first and democracy will come along. Others think just go and have democracy, whatever it is, and then development will follow you. That's my conundrum. Thank you very much, Ernest. That was quite a rich list of questions. Yeah, thank you very much. I think we do have a very rich set of questions and comments. Oliver is asking about how we create the right incentive for politicians to do the right thing. That's the main reason why we should, as a people, always have in mind having the right institutions. The right institutions provide the checks and balances that Deepak was talking about, those right institutions. So if you have a parliament, for example, as a result of the new democratic dispensation, there are things that we should require the parliament to do, which will be of a developmental nature. And as a result of the space that we create for the parliament to perform that, other politicians will be forced or obliged to fall in line. So long as we leave everything to the discretion of politicians, I'm not sure that's going to happen. So we've got to write out more formally the kinds of things that we expect in the long term. We've tried in Ghana to consider at various meetings the efforts to legislate what government can spend or cannot spend, providing limits to how far the budget can go. Is that the kind of thing that we want? We don't need to go that far. We don't need to legislate everything, but it's important to set the right tone, having institutions that are, we do have a planning commission in Ghana. Everybody knows in Ghana that the only reason why you get sent to the planning commission is to get you out of the way. So how do you strengthen the planning commission? These are, if you have a strong planning commission, like what they have in India, it can influence the way the politics is done. Peter says, how do we deal with the political business cycle? It's basically the kind of things, but I think people have become more and more discerning in many countries. They're able to see through what politicians have to. And the fact that from time to time we see changes in government as a result of the elections suggests it makes me a lot more hopeful. A lot more hopeful that in the not too distant future, politicians, and this is a bit of what Rachel said. The kind of Pogbara politics that we see in Africa, you find everywhere in the world, except that in Africa, it does cause more trouble for us than it does elsewhere. That's the basic difference. Francis wanted to know whether the absence of an industrial policy was the fault of, absence of democracy. No, that's not the point that I make at all. I do suggest that because we are not using the democratic institutions to push for longer-term development, which in a way is the same to what I said to Oliver. I'm not doing that. It becomes possible then for political agents to only then pursue the short-term interests. The absence of an industrial policy can happen also under a democratic system. But how do we use a democracy to do that? How do we bring up? So what a democracy should be doing is fostering more debates, more discussion of what should go into the industrial policy. What kind of sectors are you going to support? What kind of winners are we willing to... So a democracy makes more discussion possible than will have been the case in an autocracy. Deepak, I agree with you that democracy is a prior. I agree with your position that in Asia, we've seen more of an evolution of this democratic system that have fostered the developmental state. And your own country, India, is a very good example of that. I'm not at all suggesting that we should forget about the democratic state in Africa. No, that's not the point. My point is that the democratic states in Africa are still maturing. And in that process of maturing, many of them are ignoring things that are in the longer term interest of their people. So we've got to fix the way the democracies work. I will be the last person to shun democracy. I believe in it. I believe strongly that democracy can work, but it will do so only under certain conditions. And those conditions include having the right institutions in place. For me, a major right institution is a properly functioning parliament, a properly functioning judiciary, and properly functioning civil society. So these are elements of what I consider a good democracy. Tony, your question is, which comes first? This is not, there's enough evidence that democracies can support the developmental state. And there's also enough evidence that in countries where the economy is performing well, it becomes easier for democracies to function. The leaders that are in states where the economy is doing well have little to fear. So they allow freedom of speech, usually. They allow people to compete for the right to own things. They allow more freedoms for expression and so on. So that's enough. It's not a matter of which one comes first. If you look at the literature, there's a whole tone of studies of this nature. It's not the most important thing. For me, how do you use democracy in Africa? That's what I'm looking at. How do you use the institutions that come with democracy? Okay, thanks. Other questions? Yes, in the very back? Thank you very much. My name is Wisdom Aqbalu, and I'm with UNU Wyther. Professor Ayete, thank you very much for such an interesting presentation. Unfortunately, I'm not very optimistic, like you. And this is why. The process that deliver political leadership in most of these African countries are inherently corrupt. How do people become politicians or win political power? They do so by investing. They have to campaign. And where do they get the money? Most of the time, they get the money from individuals or businesses that have interest. And they sign contracts that become effective as soon as they step into office. How will someone who benefit from weak institutions be ready to clean up these institutions when they get to office? That is the reason why most politicians will never improve their institutions when they are in office. They will not let the laws work so that people can take them to court for contracts that they signed before even coming to office. And it becomes even more serious when you have collusion between political parties. You have two dominant political parties in a country like Ghana, and they look out for each other. So how do we get from this state to building a cleaning institution? Unfortunately, I don't have the answers, and I'm not that optimistic. There was a hand in the very back, in the very back, the lady in the very back, Jerusalem. I'm not a political scientist, but I have a burning question on this one. Can you comment on two countries, Ethiopia and Rwanda, who became more industrialist before they became more democratic, linked that to the risk of leadership, especially when it comes to choosing the right set of policies, long-term policies, and the risk of being the right type of leader, and how can we support risk-taking in this environment? Thank you. We will then, okay, in Ghana. Thank you very much, Ernest, and my name is Jogunadung from the African Economic Research Consortium. I was listening to Ernest, and I was asking myself, do we actually know the objective function of our politicians, especially when they go to office? In fact, when I was listening to you, I realized that since 2002, for example, if I take Kenya's example, we have had several coerctions. Every new erection, there are different coerctions. No coerction has taken the government for two times. It's only one time, and then there's a new coerction. So it's quite interesting whether we know the objective function of the politicians. And for this, let me perhaps start the story from a little bit farther. I remember in 2001, Paul Corrier started this project of trying to explain civil, sorry, should I say, civil wars in Africa. And one of the dominant explanation about civil wars was that presence of rootable resources, that is, you can root resources and coordinate a rebellion against the government. That's what was sustaining civil wars. But as we developed this project, towards 2002, 2003, I think Kenya was included in that sample. And my question was, but we haven't had civil war in Kenya. Now I said, no. I think if you look at the ethnic violence around erection time in 1992, 97, and a bit of that, then there is, this is a dog that didn't bark. So it was included as a case study. But it was now me and Professor Mungi Kemenez to explain what was really happening. But our strong conclusion, just to tie up with what I was asking before, is that actually being in government was like a rootable resource. You could use the rules or the laws that exist or even enact new ones to affect resources to yourself. This is consistent with what he was really saying. You can affect resources to yourself, either using the existing laws or even enacting new ones. And maybe that is where we are. That is why then if you are now asking why we don't have economic transformation even after repeated erections and all that, maybe it is because the objective function actually is totally different. Maybe, I don't know whether you relate that. The Kenyan case showed very well in terms of that and the book is published in 2005. And I think the political violence in 2007, somebody called me and asked me, do you change your conclusions with given the political violence that took place in 2007, 2008? And I actually argued that it enhances the conclusions. Maybe that could be something that we can, you can perhaps push some light on. Okay, time is running. I'll take one more question. Okay, up in the very back up there. It was actually Paul. Thank you very much. My name is Biomimawa Gwella from the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development in Nigeria. Yes, there has been, we know predominantly that the population of Africa is young and there's been a huge focus on Africa's youth as a future, an engine for change. What would you think their role will be in the whole process of transformation? Knowing fully well that a lot of them may not have grown to know democracy or democratic tenants. Also, I would like to get your perspective on the African Continental Free Trade Agreement that has been purported now to be a model that would change economies. And for a country or my government who's refused in a way to sign it, what would you think, what would be your perspective on that? Thanks. Okay, the very last question, Paul, you'll get that one. Yeah, sorry. I'm being signaled to by my colleagues up there that this will be the last question and then Ernest will, of course, be given the chance to respond. Before you do run out, there will be another couple of songs, so you might wanna be staying on just a little bit longer. Paul. Paul, mostly University of Sheffield. You mentioned a number of governments, including your own, which have been very good at democracy but not good at transformation. But no one has mentioned the one, certainly one African government, which has been very good at democracy over a long period and over that same period, very good at transformation, which is Mauritius. What do you think we can learn from them? Okay, thanks very much Ernest. So another set of rich questions. Yeah, thank you very much. My first came from wisdom, who was not so optimistic. He didn't see how the politicians could clean up the act. I understand wisdom perfectly. I don't expect politicians to do it. I expect the society to lead the charge. I expect, so why do I give such a talk? I give this kind of talk in the hope that it will resonate with the other Africans and they will understand the need for us to have a discussion back home. So I expect civil society, I expect universities, I expect NGOs, I expect everybody to be discussing this. Unemployment is a big challenge anywhere in Africa, whether it's Ethiopia or every unemployment is a big challenge. And yet, very, very few African governments discuss how to tackle it. What is going to happen, they'll set up a committee that should think about some program that provides jobs for a select group of people. Everybody knows it's a structural issue. How do you engage with it? So we need to be a lot more confrontational. We need to force governments to have a change of mind about this, that long-term development cannot be pushed aside. That's basically the message. Jerusalem was interested in the Rwandan and the Ethiopian examples, wanting to know which one began. I'm not sure that either Ethiopia or Rwanda can be described as industrialized. Certainly they've seen improvements in the performance of the economies. And we saw that in Ethiopia first and then we saw the Rwandan act. For me, the most important question is how these positive gains or these gains that have been made can be turned into long-term development. Based on a new transformation. That's what I haven't seen. So I've seen good performance in Rwanda. I've seen good performance in Ethiopia. They are not industrialized yet. The question in Uganda's question was, would you know the objective function of politicians? No, we don't, but for me it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we should build the institutions that will force them to conform. We should build the institutions so if we have a strong civil society, it pushes, it makes negligible what the objective function of the politician is because in the new rule of law, there's a way of dealing with that. There should be a way of dealing with corrupt politicians. That's the argument that I make over here. The free trade area, how likely is it to... I think it's a good initiative so long as the African Union is willing to make the kind of commitment to make it work. I've seen many initiatives, not nearly so much, but also coming from the African Union that have not really functioned properly because governments have not made the commitments and followed through with the commitment that they have made. So it all depends on how individual countries... So it depends on South Africa, it depends on Nigeria. So I do hope that Nigeria will soon make up its mind on the free trade area. Paul's question was about Mauritius. Why nobody's talking about Mauritius? I don't even know why. I don't know why we're talking about Mauritius, but clearly Mauritius is an outlier in the examples that we've given here. I haven't paid much attention to the politics of Mauritius. I know more about the economy than I do about the politics, but there are a few outliers in Africa. I mean, I talked about Rwanda being an outlier, Botswana, another outlier. So there are quite a few outliers in Africa, but my area of focus is in the countries like Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Ghana. These are the countries that I'm looking at. So I will look at Mauritius as an outlier. Thank you, Ernest. We've almost come to the end of this annual lecture. I mean, I guess I'm sitting here and thinking that maybe it's not democracy per se, which is, how can I say, at fault, but maybe the way in which the transition to democracy has been handled in a number of cases, and maybe it is about how do we bring strong African leaders to be accountable? Maybe that's sort of the thing that's sitting at the core of the messages that we have been discussing, at least that's sort of how I understand some of the messages. I would like to very much express my sincere thanks to Ernest for being willing to put difficult questions on the table, questions that should be addressed, questions that should be discussed, both here in Helsinki, but also across Africa and across the development community. Thanks a lot to Rachel for providing a very valuable perspective on what we have been discussing. I'd like you to join me in an applause for Ernest, and before you do join us in the reception outside, we will have another two songs. Greg Muskes, please take the scene. Thank you, thank you very much, regardless.