 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 of 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 a hopeless continent. And not too 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 is 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 the 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 under the fourth Republican constitution, government 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 bank vice president at the time, responded. And we didn't ask you to win the elections. We only said have it like 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 the 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've watched Ghana do that almost every four years. So it happened in 1996, it happened in 2000 and so on. And the same thing happens. So it actually happened only in Ghana. It happens in almost every African country where there are elections. So you spend a lot of time fixed and 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 ever to Ethiopia. I was invited in 1994 by the Ethiopian Economic Association to share with them my experience as a Ghanian 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. And it emphasized Lantania 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 Lantania 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've 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 tall buildings and I saw a discipline people behaving like in Helsinki that would cross the road. So I said, what's going on here? I looked at the economic performance data and they 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 to an African. This kind of change is what we need. But then someone also said well they may be doing this but they are not democratic. But they've had elections. They had elections not too long ago. But you have to change the constitution for the president to run again for the third time for another 7-year term. So clearly there's something good happening in Rwanda but it's not democratic. What does it mean for understanding of democracy and how democracy influences the way economies are supposed to perform? So these three things encouraged me to think that democracy is not something that you treat lightly. There are aspects of it that may be exciting and there will be other aspects that may be not so exciting. So as an economist let me see how to prove it to that. So that's how if you don't understand anything at all from this lecture you remember my three experiences and I think it will be fine. So basically as we typically would do I will talk about the unchanging structure of Africa's economies and explain 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 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 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 we are looking for immediate outputs. Elections will be coming in another four years so they've got the 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 and 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 percent per capita growth that's not bad for many economies and 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 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 community 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 2030, not 2013. 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 poor people is also a place of a lot of dysfunction. That's also part of the challenges that the African needs to be confronted with. Poverty apart from increase in inequalities is also going to increase. These are the kind of challenges that Africa is talking about. Of course, I introduce in interaction some of the structure debates. Can Africa survive without structure transformation? What are the arguments like the rhetoric type of position and 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 discuss structural 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 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 the time the ARC was being created, every central bank in the region, almost every central bank in the region knows how to stabilize after the elections. So you know that it will take you four years to repair things. It will take you one year to spoil it. So the central bankers have conditioned themselves for it. We 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 how can strong institutions function without strongmen? How do we define who a strongman is? Is Fokagami a strong man? Probably. There are many other strongmen in the region who may not have achieved the kind of results that Fokagami has achieved. So I spent quite a bit of time on the changing structure of the economy. Here the discussion is about the contribution to GDP growth from agriculture, how this is changing or not changing. We talk about agriculture and employment. We discussed 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 discussed that and we talk about the new interest in structure transformation. You will see that I will mention quite extensively the work that Justin Lin has done. This chart is basically to show that unlike the past when Africa's performance was always 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 migraine worse than the rest of the world. Clearly Africa has learned something about 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 migraine decline happen. What's interesting about 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 you would discuss is they move from agriculture into informal activities like in the service sector. That's something that we talk about. This chart here basically shows how important agriculture is to the African economy compared to other regions. That's a point that we make quite a bit of in the presentation. 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 remains very high. The rate of decline is not nearly as high as in other parts of the world. We make that point in our paper quite strongly. Again we look at the composition of the contribution of agriculture to industry to total employment. We do make that comparison. 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. We have seen a shift in total employment from agriculture not as fast as is required but that shift is not benefiting industry. We look into the informal sector. It leads Roderick to talk about the reversals in the transformational growth. It's something that we need to pay attention to. Of course we are talking about how to do that. How do we explain the absence of stronger transformation? It's important largely because many African governments are quite keen to change the narrative. They are 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 as-properies zones and provide various incentives for companies to bring in some FDI and so on. Given 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 wiki 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 the enormity of the problem with respect to electricity access. Clearly Africa is well behind all the other places with an estimate of 40% of the population but only have access. So rural areas are west of trying to locate industry anywhere in rural Africa becomes a huge problem largely in view of the situation there. Alangel, 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 the 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 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. It was likely for Justin Lane's benefit. I don't know if he's in the room today. Justin here. Okay. I'll show him that I think he writes about 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 rigidity that make it difficult for people 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 not to 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 structure 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 the public financial management system in most countries receives 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 improve 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 is 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 have improved they have improved considerably in the last two decades. There is very little evidence that they do influence the kinds of decisions that need to be made on when it comes to straka transformation. There is very little link between the baguette 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 baguetry and 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 the baguette. But what is interesting is that it's still worse than in the other places at the point that we make with this chart here. This chart shows how things like transparency and others have improved in Africa the accountability and dealing with corruption and the states being able to talk freely about corruption as a problem. The clear indications that there's more transparency. We talk about the fact 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. Uganda seems to be doing very well. I don't know whether Louise has anything to do with that. You never know. Having good central bank and deputy governments is always very important for these kinds of things. They are influenced by the finance ministry maybe showing the Botswana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique and Tanzania are publishing quite a few. 6 or 7 out of the 8 that are suspected. Of course they are kind of like Equatorial Guinea that do publish nothing at all. So the important thing is that in many countries the process of doing the baguette have become a lot more transparent. I do receive invitations every time again from the finance ministry in Ghana to sit in meetings to discuss, workshops to discuss the baguette. What is she going and what is she not going? Clearly a lot more transparent. In almost every African country today, you will find radio stations that devote time to discussing the baguette. What goes into the baguette and the query why particular roads are going to be paid for for the baguette and not others. So the issue of transparency and how it is fostered accountability is very important. The extent to which it leads to reduction in corruption is yet to be tested. But clearly if people know more about what is in the baguette, the likelihood of it having an effect. So you are not going to be financing projects that do not exist in the past. There were projects that were always found in the baguette but they never got anywhere. So there is a lot of transparency taking place. So that I moved to having learned from how to do baguettes how is this affecting the way we pursue our term change. That's where I go to the last section of 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 IMF to do, beyond what we agreed with DFID and YIDZ and all those other agencies to do what 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 does have a program a medium term program and in that program whether it's the a poverty reduction strategy or something similar whether they are serious about them or not but they always talk about modernizing agriculture. Every African country talks about modernizing agriculture and they also talk about industrialization. They talk about these two things clearly these are long term things that you want to pursue and I've made the 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 is 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 terms 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 again for agriculture most developed blueprints in Africa have an extra interest in 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 wants to intervene in markets to allow provide incentive for the functioning of the industrial sector you don't find it anywhere the number of countries that have talked about industrial policy and do have a document that define industrial policy but very seldom do you find the kinds of arguments for particular investments to be made the way that what would anticipate Yesterday I was very privileged to listen to John Pey and his team present the paper on industrialization without smokestacks That's what John and his team were pursuing I agreed with most of the orientation of that paper in terms of looking at other sectors within the economy alongside manufacturing Of course John was that the story about manufacturing got lost It sounded almost like Africa can industrialize with that manufacturing I was surprised that Justin Lin was up in arms The important thing that we want to pursue here is that Africa needs to have clearly stated industrial policy What goes into that industrial policy should be informed country by the states of things in that country the human capital available the challenges that are provided by nature and so on These are 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 was emphasized is knowing how to pick the winners knowing how to pick the right winners and I know that as a result of the our fingers burned in the 1960s and 1970s when we were doing the imports of sushi 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 Now discussions that we will have and economic decision making African countries saw considerable instability, political instability in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s We talk about the number of kudita that took place in the region and after they went through shakal adjustment the number of kudita 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 largely only in name were largely only in name we've seen countries like Angola, Cameroon, Ekuchiragini the DRC and Congo all produce elections and election results and 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 Democrat democracies that we have in Africa increased considerably after 1989 so that by 2000 a good number of African can 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 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 about 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 do talk about countries that could easily qualify for this indeed ok 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 of 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 the one who have done studies in these Samogulu 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 we talk about the fact that per capita GDP is about 20% over the past 30 years this translates to zero points increase 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 force tests 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 agriculture productivity and growth of course that's the skeptical view and there are a number of studies that have gone in Africa one of the best known is the way by Kisangani 2006 published in Canada which basically looks at 37 countries and then concludes support the skeptical view there are a number of these what is important in this discussion is the fact that next there are those who see a positive relationship and those who do not I have looking at the performance of very countries come to the position 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 most of Africa you will find evidence of all of these sometimes in the same country you will find the authorities playing out let's take a country like Nigeria Nigeria is Nigeria claims to be the largest democracy in Africa the largest democracy has the largest population so the largest democracy in Nigeria does have regular elections every four years do have elections and 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 Char Saludo decided to consolidate the banking system in Nigeria a very tough decision one that most governments would have run away from effectively reducing the number of banks significantly in a very short period the Nigerian government was able to do it and yet the Nigerian government was able to do much about the oil industry was able to control corruption so corruption gets worse and worse and worse so do you blame corruption in Nigeria on democracy 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 my own country so let me talk about Ghana even though it's a risky thing to do you know one of the things I like about Ghana is all I need to do is listen to you for five minutes and I know which party you belong to so I'm quite sure that the Kenyans here after five minutes we know which party I belong to but after the risk I'm sure they will be wrong anyway so Ghana has changed so we enter this phase of election governments every four years that's in 1992 what we call the fourth republic so we changed from Rollins to Kufuwa another party and then from Kufuwa we went to it was Atamels we went to John Muhammad and now with President Kufuwa so we know how to change governments 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 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 very well that supply of power gets very erratic if 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 will find a solution to the problem so we know that and because we know that and the governments also know that we sort of come into 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 when I talk about this in Ghana it's not look that but there's no they feel connected 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 but the idea behind 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 haven't solved the problem so it's not simply an issue of a factory it's 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 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 how to do social protection the same Ghana knows how to enhance the functioning of the public services today in Ghana what are the most interesting and I think Maxwell is here so he can confirm we do a lot of re-adjustment 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 4 years I struggle with that we talk about things like modernization of agriculture 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 and we change that we are 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 a very it's not a nice thing 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 under 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 wouldn't even discuss what should be in the curriculum it is these things that for me reflect the strong the use of inappropriate tools for the long term problems of course whenever I've spoken about the kinds of things that we want to want to provide free senior high schools we want to finance it with the oil rents 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 the 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 that will provide them with the experience they need to be ready for the job market I wouldn't 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 that 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 will be made sometimes for the population and other times for the government I conclude by simply saying that it's important that we think about these kinds of discussions that in our own countries whether we are 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 future we will be thinking more and more about the long term we will be thinking about the gains for the entire nation 10 years from now 20 years from now as opposed to what will happen 4 years from now thank you very much