Op-eds

Why Africa’s violence levels up in 2024 — the lingering effects of Covid-19

9 Jan 2025

Increasing levels of extreme poverty in Africa were turbocharged by Covid-19, fuelling the fire of relative deprivation.

The year 2024 was bleak for Africa. Libya and Sudan were partitioned. Ethiopia struggled to contain insurgencies in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia, and conflict continued in South Sudan and Somalia.

Coups placed four countries in the Sahel under military regimes and violent extremism spread terror in northern Mozambique, Mali, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Niger and elsewhere.

In Kenya, a punitive new tax regime resulted in riots, leading President William Ruto to sack his entire cabinet. In Nigeria, President Bola Tinubu similarly struggled to effect painful economic reforms after inheriting an unsustainable fiscal situation.

Expectations that regular elections would deliver improvements in living standards, health and wellbeing weren’t met. Desperate and angry, people increasingly resorted to violence. Elections offer the promise of progress, but generally, democracy has not delivered economic growth in Africa. Nor has it improved security.

In some regions, especially the Sahel, instability and poor development that followed polls led to a resurgence of the military in politics. Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Gabon have, of course, never really had democracy. Still, they have gone through some of the motions, such as regular elections, with the repeated promise of positive change.

But the sham that has passed for democracy in these coup-afflicted countries damages the brand, firing a yearning for stability, without which development (and democracy) is not possible.

On average, Africans will only recover to their 2019 pre-pandemic income levels in 2027. The rest of the world did so in 2022.

In addition to poor leadership, deep or structural drivers constrain Africa’s growth and feed into a cycle of dissatisfaction, resentment and violence.

Relative deprivation is the tension between your actual state and what you feel you should be able to achieve. Ted Robert Gurr, the father of the theory, described it as the “perceived discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities”. It is what people think they should have relative to what others have, or even compared with their own past or perceived future.

The reality for many Africans is often extreme deprivation. Better education, urbanisation, the internet and social media have created expectations that these conditions can and should improve – and that ruling elites are the problem.

Perhaps the most impactful structural driver of relative deprivation in Africa is the lingering effects of Covid-19. On average, Africans will only recover to their 2019 pre-pandemic income levels in 2027. The rest of the world did so in 2022. Covid-19 cost the continent eight years of income growth, with many people still scrambling to make ends meet.

The graph below presents the percent change in GDP per capita comparing the 2024 situation with a no-Covid-19 scenario. For example, the graph shows that Mozambique’s GDP per capita in 2024 was 1.72% lower than it could have been had Covid-19 not happened.

A recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund suggests that periods of stagnation lasting four years or more tend to increase income inequality by almost 20%. With its growing population, Africa is recovering more slowly from the impact of Covid-19 than other regions – a trend that is fuelling instability.

Covid-19 effects have been exacerbated by the global shocks of slower-than-expected economic growth (so-called slowbalisation) that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rising tensions between the US and China and cyclical trends. Africa is again a proxy battlefield as Russia pursues its war on Ukraine against the West in the Sahel.

By 2030, at which time the international community has vowed to eliminate extreme poverty globally, about 26% of Africa’s population will still live below $2.15 per day.

Covid-19 has also significantly affected extreme poverty. After slow but steady poverty reductions from 2003 to 2014, extreme poverty in Africa increased annually, and Covid-19 turbocharged the trend. The chart below presents extreme poverty in 2024 in Africa, Asia and the rest of the world. In 2024, about 18 million more Africans were living below $2.15 compared with a no-Covid-19 forecast.

Partly as a result, Africa will overtake Asia as the continent with the most hungry people by 2030. Africa already has the largest proportion of people without enough nutritious food (20.4%), but Asia is home to more than half the world’s hungry people. Prospects for Asia are more positive since it has a bigger focus on local production, crop diversification, fertiliser use and more public investment in agriculture than in Africa.

Covid-19 hit Africa at a time when its youth bulge – although declining – was about 17 percentage points higher than the average for the rest of the world. Sub-Saharan Africa has a huge youth bulge. In Kenya, almost half its adult population is aged 15 to 29, slightly below Nigeria. In the UK, from which Kenya and Nigeria obtained their independence several decades ago, it is less than half that portion.

Young, increasingly better-educated, urbanising Africans want jobs, a better future and the potential to escape from the informal economy that sees many live in urban slums such as Kibera in Nairobi or Makoko in Lagos.

More than 60% of Africa’s GDP is spent on debt servicing, which significantly reduces resources available to spend on development and real economic growth.

Given its young population, the average African economy will grow more rapidly than other regions, perhaps about 1.5 percentage points faster, but not rapidly enough. The number of extremely poor Africans will stabilise at about 457 million in 2026/7.

By 2030, at which time the international community has vowed to eliminate extreme poverty globally, about 26% of Africa’s population will still live below $2.15 per day.

The critical variable here is rapid population growth at 2.6% per annum. Although it provides a more significant labour force, this growth rate requires economic expansion of more than 10% per year for several decades to absorb that cohort. Instead, average economic growth rates will probably be just above 4%.

Meanwhile, more than 60% of Africa’s GDP is spent on debt servicing, which significantly reduces resources available to spend on development and real economic growth. Afreximbank reports that Africa’s debt burden has grown substantially in the past 15 years, surging by 39 percentage points between 2008 and 2023 to 69% of GDP in 2023.

At current interest rates, African countries cannot wean themselves off external debt, and many risk defaulting. Repayment levels constrain economic performance, and governments simply don’t have the revenues to provide more security.

Meanwhile, geopolitical rivalry again fuels instability. Previously, arms flows to unstable parts of Africa were partly inhibited by restraints generally imposed by the United Nations Security Council. With a permanent council member (Russia) invading another country (Ukraine) and showing no restraint in the pursuit of its security interests, no one takes the Security Council seriously.

Recently, Amnesty International pointed to the flow of weapons into Sudan from the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Turkey, Serbia, Yemen and China. Media reports of Russian and Ukrainian engagement in Mali create the impression of a proxy war.

The international community is faced with strategic choices regarding Africa’s development prospects. Although many avert their gaze from the continent’s slow progress and eulogise the purported transformative effect of artificial intelligence, the sheer number of Africans and the pressure they will exert globally, particularly on neighbouring Europe, will eventually demand serious attention.

That is the challenge the African Futures and Innovation team at the Institute for Security Studies intends to examine. Watch this space. DM

Jakkie Cilliers, head, African Futures and Innovation, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Pretoria.

First published by ISS Today.

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