Fragment Africa for growth

Is Africa poised for steady, rapid growth? asks The Economist. Only if we partition states, according to Gilles Saint-Paul, who after who reminding us of the ethnic, corruption, war, and trust problems in Africa, explains:

I am skeptical about indiscriminate foreign aid packages. Some researchers (for example Jean-Paul Azam of the University of Toulouse) actually claim that the overall impact of foreign aid is negative and that it increases civil wars and homicides: the foreign aid can be used to buy weapons, or catastrophes can be deliberately provoked by warlords in order to attract foreign aid and then take over the resources. I am also skeptical about the Paul Romer project of creating a Norwegian colony that would act as an African Hong-Kong whose development would actually spread to the rest of Africa by some unclear epidemic mechanism. None of those schemes addresses the above problems; and the Iraq experience is a cautionary tale against neo-con inspired political engineering. On the other hand, it would be extremely valuable to be able to partition countries such as Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Ivory Coast or Burkina Faso into smaller and more ethnically homogeneous ones. In addition to being good for the economy it would above all save millions of lives.

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