The Enduring Malformation of West Africa

Many West African countries have disparities between their northern and southern regions that conventional economic literature can neither explain nor solve. Across West Africa, there is a growing case for thinking about these shared disparities from a regional lens.

Written by Abel B. S. Gaiya

Feb 9, 2023

Illustration by Onyinye Dike / THE REPUBLIC.

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Godfathers: An Introduction. Buy the issue here.

West African scholars and politicians had high hopes for their region at independence. Even before this, in 1927 Ladipo Solanke had published United West Africa or Africa at the Bar of the Family of Nations, in which he argued that:

It took the white race a thousand years to arrive at their present level of advance: it took the Japanese, a Mongol race, 50 years to catch up with the white race, there is no reason why we West Africans, a Negro race, should not catch up with the Aryans and the Mongols in one quarter of a century.

Sadly, this prediction woefully failed. Instead, West Africa has gone over 60 years without the development Solanke envisioned, and Nigeria, the ‘giant of Africa’, ranks high on state fragility and features one of the highest poverty rates in the world.

We should not be too critical of the lofty dreams optimistic Africanist nationalists, economic liberals, dependency theorists and socialists had decades ago. It is only from the 1990s that the broader implications of West African (and African) development challenges have manifested empirically, in persistent poverty, greater difficulty in fostering growth-enhancing national political systems, the persistence of low intra-regional official trade and weak economic integration, high levels of parallel trade and violent extremism and droughts across the Sahel and Sahara.

It was only in 2000 that Frances Stewart, director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the University of Oxford, convinced scholars to go beyond simple terms like ‘tribalism’, ‘prebendalism’, ethnic diversity and class struggles to emphasize horizontal inequalities as key for studying the roots of many conflicts in Africa.

Building on these developments, one could argue that West Africa is ‘malformed’—an idea based on three major arguments—spatial inequalities between coastal and hinterland spaces, the decline in functional interdependency between the desert-edge and the savannah, and the fall of trans-Saharan trade as a revenue source and environmental risk mitigation for its populations. Political scientists and development scholars have begun to give greater attention to the role of spatial inequalities in African politics. Development scholars have also come a long way from perceiving economic development as simply requiring political will to a better and more complex understanding of political economy constraints.

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About the Author

Abel B. S. Gaiya

is the chief research officer at Clean Technology Hub and holds an MSc in Development Economics.

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The Enduring Malformation of West Africa