The Nigerian Industrial Behemoth That Could Reshape the African Economy

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2:04Hello, OddLots listeners. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. We're the hosts of the OddLots podcast, and we've got something exciting for you. That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners, and we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles. That's right. So if you're in L.A., we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings, at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17th. We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned.

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3:05Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. I don't know what it is, Tracy. I kind of have this urge to do an Africa trip. Like, I sort of want to go to some of these capitals, Lagos, Accra, Kigali, and so forth. Like, I don't know. I'm like, I've never been there. And now I'm like, I'm kind of curious. Well, you know, the urge to explore Africa is well documented among the history of men, of white men in particular. So really, you're just following your instinct here.

3:38Yeah. I've been to Africa, various places. Morocco, Egypt, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, briefly. I have some insane stories I could tell you. But probably the one thing that stands out to me is the diversity of that particular continent, obviously. So Egypt is very, very different to a place like Mozambique. And I will say, you know, like, I saw some, some, a lot of development in places like South Africa, Egypt, to some extent. Mozambique was one of the poorest places I've ever seen in my life, to the point where a lot of people don't even want money.

4:16They would just barter for goods, like an extra T-shirt in your luggage or something like that. It is pretty extraordinary, just generally, you know. I think there was, if you had gone back 50 years ago or something like that, you would have had this view that, you know, countries around the world over time converge economically, particularly in a world of free trade. The factories chase the countries that have the cheapest labor, etc. And therefore, everyone in a world of free trade, you get this sort of, like, broad growth and wealth.

4:49But the extremes, you know, of outcomes over the last several decades has been truly extraordinary. Absolutely. So you have places like Nigeria, like Lagos, I think you mentioned, which seems to some extent be booming at the moment with higher oil prices. You have a very, very big IPO coming down the line. Yeah. So this is what I'm particularly interested in. We had a, I met a listener, a predisposive woman in a doxum when we were in London a couple of years ago.

5:19And he's like, oh, you guys really have to do an episode on this new oil refinery that's being, that's being built in Nigeria. We, and I said, anyway, this is for him. I hope he's listening at this point because. It took two years, but we're doing it. We're doing it because there's the news today that Dangote Refinery, or sorry, the news this week, we were recording this August 20th, came out earlier in the week that they had secured $400 million ahead of planned IPO, that there is $1 billion in backing from a few other firms.

5:51And also that the founder of this company, he's also, I believe, you know, he's one of the richest people in the world. And I don't think Dangote is anywhere close to being a household name. No. And it's going to be the biggest stock market listing in African history ever. So we should definitely talk about it. And I think it's good to talk about it in the context of why development in Africa has or hasn't happened in certain cases. Absolutely. Well, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest, someone we've never talked to on the podcast before. But it was probably an error because someone who's writing and thinking has been very influential to people of our cohort over the last several years who are interested in things like industrial policy and so forth.

6:32We are going to be speaking with Joe Studwell, Senior Fellow at the Africa Urban Lab, Senior Visiting Fellow at ODI Global, and the author of the recent book, How Africa Works. And of course, many readers may have read his previous book, How Asia Works, talking about how some of these East Asian economies got as wealthy as they did. So, Joe, thank you so much for coming on AdLots. Oh, well, thank you for having me. Let's start with the simple question. What is this company, Dangote, and who is the founder?

7:06So, Aliko Dangote is from Kano in the north of Nigeria. He's a Muslim trader, archetypal Muslim trader. He grew up trading soft commodities, got a substantial business doing that. And then he went under the presidency of Obasanjo to the government and negotiated a deal where he'd get four years of protection as a monopoly importer of cement, which was then made in Nigeria, in return for creating local cement production.

7:41And he did that. But not only did he do that, he went on to do it across Africa. He's in a dozen countries doing cement now. And he's beaten, in most places, the multinational cement producers like the Swiss Holcim and whatever, who previously dominated the business. So, that was the first thing that he did, that people really kind of sat up and said, wow, this guy has got something. And then he decided he'd do something much bigger.

8:13And he decided he would build an oil refinery in a country where a couple of times previously, government had tried to develop refining capacity. And it was just a disaster, an industrial policy disaster. Dangote did it. He spent $20 billion. It's east of Lagos, a huge, huge plant.

8:37And it worked. It is working. And not only that, he's expanding it now. So, in the course of doing that, he became the richest guy in Africa. But he doesn't stop because he's developed such capability in terms of project management and project delivery that he just goes on to other things. So, next to his oil refinery is a very large urea plant, fertilizer plant, which is now supplying the majority of fertilizer consumed in Nigeria.

9:08And he's recently signed up to do the same thing in Ethiopia, the second most populous African country after Nigeria. And, yeah, he just keeps rolling forward. And so, this listing, I think, will be pretty heavily oversubscribed because it's investor access to the first real quality listed industrial asset pack on the continent.

9:42I have a, this is just a sort of tangential question, but you mentioned that he was first in cement production. Why does cement production seem to be such a thing in developing nations in particular, such that if you go to a place like Nigeria or like Myanmar, you will see a lot of ads for different cement brands. And it feels like everyone is producing cement. Yeah, because it's so fundamental to development. I mean, development is about investment, construction, creation of physical assets.

10:16And so, cement is just absolutely fundamental. Okay, a serious question now then. So, what does the Dangote example actually say about, I guess, the diversification prospects for Africa? Because when I think, okay, it's a petroleum refinery that, you know, urea production, that's kind of industrialized, but it's also very connected to resources, right? And we've all heard about the resource curse. We know that various African nations have experienced it to some extent throughout time.

10:50So, how much of this is actually an industrial success story versus like kind of more of the same? I would say it's different to what we saw in the past in Africa. So, Africa has a reputation of having tons and tons of hydrocarbons and minerals resources. It's not really true, actually. We just perceive Africa that way because in the past there wasn't much other economic activity. So, it seemed like minerals and hydrocarbons were dominant.

11:21But if you compare it with somewhere like the United States and you look at what African countries have got, it's nothing like the mineral and hydrocarbon resources as a share of GDP. So, I would say that it's different to what we had in the past because you look at all of Dangote's businesses and it's really a demand-driven story. And what I mean there is that the growth of population and the growth of population density in Africa is now creating markets, particularly urban markets, of a type that we just didn't have before.

11:59And so, you build your cement plants and the demand for what you're producing is just massively greater than it was in the past. The same for refined oil products, the same for fertilizer. Africa as a continent now has 1.5 billion people. That's about the same population density as Asia in 1960. So, it's still not very densely populated, but it is when you compare it with immediately after the Second World War when Africa had 220 million people.

12:33So, it's gone from 220 million to 1.5 billion. And when after the Second World War, Africa had 220 million people, that was the same population density as Europe in 1500. And that, to me, is the fundamental reason why you didn't have a lot of economic growth. How does population density, per se, play an important role in a country's capacity to industrialize? Yeah, I mean, for all the reasons that you would expect, I already talked about markets. You've got to have markets for what you're going to produce, particularly urban markets are very important.

13:07Urban markets are also important because cities produce most of the tax that is paid in any country. Then you've got to think about infrastructure. Every society requires a lot of investment in infrastructure. The cost of infrastructure is determined fundamentally on a per capita basis, or its affordability is determined on a per capita basis. Until you've got the people, you're not going to be able to afford it. And then there are questions of division of labor. When you get concentrated populations in cities, you get much better division of labor, much greater specialization, and in turn, you get much greater creativity.

13:43So, you know, the famous statistic that's always rolled out is that 80% of GDP around the world is created in cities, even though they don't occupy that much physical space. In the Africa book, I use the example of the UK, where one city, London, generates 70% of the UK's fiscal surplus. You have London and the southeast region of the UK are the only two parts of the UK that produce a fiscal surplus.

14:18Seven other regions of the UK are all in fiscal deficit and essentially are subsidized by the most densely populated part of the country. Over 90% of publicly traded companies are listed outside the United States. So why limit your investing opportunities to one market?

14:50Interactive Brokers gives you access to stocks, options, crypto, prediction markets, futures, bonds, and more across over 170 markets in 29 currencies. The world is your market. Invest beyond borders. Join more than 5 million investors worldwide at ibkr.com slash invest. Restrictions apply. For more information and support, see ibkr.com slash why ibkr. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done.

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16:30Wise makes moving money simple, transparent, and straightforward. Wise offers 24-7 customer service and runs over 7 million daily checks to spot and stop fraud. And most transfers happen in under 20 seconds, which means your money arrives in less time than you've been listening to me. Join millions, saving billions. Be smart. Get Wise. Visit Wise.com or download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply. Are there limits to the population density thesis?

17:02Because I take the point, and again, if you think of Africa, like, it is absolutely huge, and we can get into some of the geographical limitations later on, and populations are, you know, relatively scattered. But thinking back to the Nigeria example, I mean, Nigeria population, like, has been one of the denser populated areas on the continent for a while, but it has actually, I think, underperformed relative to a lot of other countries. So what does that say about the importance of population density? So you're right. Nigeria is about 250 people per square kilometer, which is significantly higher than the African average today.

17:44I wouldn't say, though, that it has overall underperformed in the period since 2000, when the whole African economy has picked up. Nigerian agriculture, which is the thing I would expect to show growth first as population grows, because poor people will just eat more. I mean, that's the first thing they do. They consume more in the way of foodstuffs. Nigerian agriculture since 2000 has been growing close to 6% a year. That's faster than anywhere that I'm aware of in Asia, faster than someone like China.

18:17So things are moving. They're not moving crazy fast, because Nigeria is a pretty dysfunctional country at the level of its politics and organizationally. But within it, there are places that are moving fast already. And you already alluded to Lagos, which is the city of 14 million people, which already accounts for a fifth of the Nigerian economy, just this one city.

18:52And it's the most densely populated part of a densely populated country. And although when you go there, you think, oh, my God, this is just mayhem. But the fact is, an awful lot is getting done, you know, whether it is in terms of Ali Kodangoti's industrial development, whether it's in terms of infrastructure construction, whether it's in terms of the Nollywood film industry, or the Nigerian music industry that dominates the continent.

19:22It's chaos, but it's productive chaos. You know, I remember 25 years ago, you would read these things, and they would say, the importance, the key to economic development is microcredit and small businesses, and someone gets a loan on their phone, and then they buy a cow or a tractor, etc. Can you talk about the importance of big companies in economic development, the flip side of that? How rare is a company like Dangote compared to other potential industrial peers in Africa?

19:59And why is the size itself a sort of reason to think that this could have positive flywheel effects? Outside of South Africa, where obviously you have a much more mature economy and so higher revenues in big companies, Dangote is pretty unique. But Dangote doesn't stand alone in the sense that you see in different African countries the growth of significant numbers now of companies that turn over billions of dollars a year.

20:31So this is small change in terms of US multinationals, but it's previously unheard of in Africa. Quite a lot of these companies originate in agriculture in one way or another. They often are the manufacturing end of agriculture, so they process foodstuffs to produce processed foods, which is what Africans are now consuming instead of milling their own corn or whatever at home. And then they go on and they do other things.

21:01So there's a big firm, for instance, in Tanzania called Bakreza, comes out of milling, moved into milling in about seven or eight different African countries. But now it's doing everything from owning a football club to owning a TV station to real estate to running the boats out to Zanzibar, all of this stuff. So that part of the question, the answer is that we are seeing the growth of bigger companies in Africa. So then why do we need bigger companies?

21:33We need them for the same reason you need big companies in every economy, because only big companies have the cash flows to really be able to train people and move the needle on productivity. All right. So you're right. There's a huge amount of attention is paid to SMEs. It's not necessarily wrong. But when people talk about SMEs, it's an employment consideration. They employ people. They soak up a lot of unemployed people. But if you want to move the needle on productivity, you need big firms.

22:03So the animal economic paradigm that we're most used to discussing on Odd Lots is monkeys swinging from trees, per Ricardo Hausman's theory. But there's another one that you mention in your book, which is the flying geese paradigm. Would something like that apply to Africa in its current state? Do you see any evidence that industries are sort of trading up as countries actually advance and develop? Yeah, I think that the clearest evidence of the evolution of big firms is in the two most populous countries at the moment in Nigeria and in Ethiopia.

22:44And, you know, some countries are going to have to lead first in Africa, as they did in Asia. And the flying geese thing will ultimately prove to have some truth, as it did in Asia. It's just that the time frame tends to be rather longer than the people who come up with these theories imagine. You know, so, for instance, Cambodia now has a pretty large garmenting sector employing millions of people. But it did it did take about 60, 70 years for that to happen.

23:15What do we see in terms of what we would call like moving up the manufacturing ladder? Do we see things that we would call like, you know, the story was for years in China, it's like, OK, they make a million T-shirts and that gets them like one Boeing plane or something like that. And then eventually they make more advanced things and they can import more Boeing planes. Do we see that evidence currently of just the increased ability to do reasonably complex, reasonably complex assembly?

23:53Yeah, we do. We don't see it as across 55 countries. Sure. In Africa. But we do. I mean, I've, you know, I've talked about Dangote proving that he can do three. You know, cement's not uncomplex, fertilizer, quite complex. You've got to do, you've got to work with gas. It's not just a straightforward manufacturing process. And an oil refinery is unbelievably complex. So, and you do see, you see signs of similar things in other countries.

24:27Again, to go to Ethiopia, two, three weeks ago, I was standing in what will be the first float glass plant making, you know, regular modern glass used in windows and whatever. So, countries are moving forward in that respect. I mean, one observation I'd make in Africa is that governments tend to remain so weak that the private sector has to do more heavy lifting than it ever had to do in Asia, where you had developmental states with governments providing tremendous support to the private sector.

25:08You tend not to get that in Africa, often the private sector is the most competent, capable player in the game. But again, you know, it's demographics. We have to hope that the depth and quality of African governments will improve. And in theory, it should do so with thicker, denser populations, because that means that you've got bigger cities and you can raise more tax and more income is what a lot of African governments need to enable them to do more things.

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28:12So you mentioned being in Ethiopia a couple weeks ago, and I'm very curious how much time you're spending on the ground in the region now. And I feel like we should allow you to maybe provide a bit of context here, because a lot of people will know you from How Asia Works, which was this, you know, now it's a seminal book. But when it came out, it was kind of out of consensus. And then suddenly you're turning your attention to Africa. What's going on here? Why the transition?

28:39Well, it happened a while ago back in about 2018. So, I mean, the first thing that happened was that the Ethiopian and Rwandan governments invited me to go out and see what they were doing. And I said, it's very flattering that you're inviting me, but I don't know anything about Africa, so there's no point. And they said, no, no, no. We want to talk about Asian development policy. So I went, and I saw things that I thought were genuinely interesting and impressive. And then subsequent to that, I met with Bill Gates, who was a fan of How Asia Works.

29:13And at the end of that meeting, he said, oh, what I really want to know is what you think about Africa, because that's where I'm spending all my money. And I decided then that I would do the book that came out this year. So I haven't been everywhere in Africa. I've worked so far in about 15 countries. I don't go and spend my time in what you might call failed states, because it's not the nature of my work. My work's about economic development and progress. But I have thoroughly enjoyed what I've seen so far.

29:49And, yeah, and I'm reasonably positive. I mean, I'm not crazy positive, but I'm more positive than a lot of people are, I think. Well, can I just ask you a process question? Because if someone ever, they wouldn't, but if they ever came to me and said, like, I don't think so. We want you to write a book about Africa, which is a very big place that I admittedly know nothing about. I would be incredibly intimidated about starting that research process and just editing, you know, basically the history of economic development in all of Africa down to a consumable publication.

30:26How did you decide, like, what your research process would look like and how did you decide which things to tackle versus others? Because if, I mean, it's huge. It's a huge amount that you just took on. Yeah, so, I mean, the process in the beginning was to decide what to leave out. So, you've got 55 countries. And I whittled that down to 15 that I thought were important and would tell the reader enough about the continent as a whole. And, of course, that then makes the work a bit more manageable.

30:59But I knew that it was going to be a huge task and I did it, you know, as my main occupation over a period of five years. So, it took a long, a long time. One of the debates that's been going on that I see, I mean, part of, you know, like, obviously, like, the Asia stuff is just very hot right now. People, you see the booming, you know, the booming Chinese economy, the booming Korean economy, et cetera. Something that I'm curious to hear your take on is one of the things people are saying is that China's manufacturing dominance, its absolute efficiency gains, et cetera, are sort of depriving other parts of the world from having climbed the same ladder.

31:43That, for example, China, yes, it can make some of the most advanced chips in the world, but there might still be an entire city that's devoted to making Christmas tinsel or something like that. And this is the extremely low margin types of manufacturing that historically might have been the first seeds of a more complex ecosystem in another country. But on the other hand, and some of this comes through in your book, you could argue that some of the gains that we are seeing and some of the encouraging African success stories are in part thanks to cheap inputs from China.

32:19I'm thinking like fertilizer and probably cheap machinery, et cetera, that allows for improving agricultural productivity, which in your view is very key. Why don't you talk to us like your take on the relationship between the incredible gains we've seen in Asia and China specifically and the implications, therefore, for African prospects right now?

32:43Yeah, so first of all, I think that people tend to perceive China as continuing to export absolutely everything that it's ever made. But if you look at the trade data for China, what you see is that China's actually exporting less and less of the low value added stuff that it began with, and quite a lot of that is going to places like Cambodia, which I just mentioned. What China's really exporting at the moment is things like electric vehicles and other green energy products that are much more sort of cutting edge and capital intensive in terms of what it did in the past.

33:24So if Africa's competing against garmenting exports, for instance, it's much more competing against stuff coming out of Myanmar, out of Cambodia, out of Sri Lanka, out of India. So I think that Africa is capable of doing that. Its problem, its main problem is that it doesn't have much commitment from government to developing manufacturing sectors outside of, to an extent, Nigeria and Ethiopia, which has always had that commitment, Morocco to an extent as well, and then one or two other enclaves in places like Madagascar.

34:04And Africa needs to build that up. I think that telling Africans that they're not going to succeed in manufacturing is very dangerous and very bad advice. I absolutely think that they can succeed in manufacturing and the places that I've seen them manufacturing, they seem to be doing fine. I don't buy into the idea that there's been a change or there is an ongoing change now based around robotics and AI that means that there will be no manufacturing development in Africa.

34:36You're right that some cheap inputs from China have been helpful to development in Africa, but the thing I would emphasize much more than that that's come from China is large amounts of manufacturing investment. So if you look at the FT's micro database of FDI for last year, China put $12.5 billion into manufacturing investment in Africa. And if you then dig into like why are they doing that, the answer is usually because they can get better margins manufacturing in Africa, particularly for African consumption than they can in China.

35:17I mean, an awful lot of manufacturing in China today has very, very low margins. So Chinese money is looking, you know, steel is one example. Steel in China at the moment sells for about $500 to $600 a tonne. In Africa, it sells for about $1,000. So unsurprisingly, a number of Chinese firms have relocated steel mills to Africa. There's one in Zimbabwe, there's one in South Africa, there's one in Algeria, and there's one that's just been signed in Ethiopia.

35:50And it's all about margins in the end. And then, you know, Chinese firms also investing widely in all kinds of other businesses, ceramics, you know, to produce bathroom stuff that's consumed in vast quantities in developing countries, all sorts of things. So I don't buy the idea that there's this paradigm change in manufacturing. And I think the final point there I would make is that, you know, when you get conversations about robotics and AI and the effect on manufacturing, they tend to never introduce the question of cost.

36:34All right. So robots cost a lot of money and they are also a sunk cost that when you buy them for your factory, you pay for the whole thing up front. On the other hand, in Africa at the moment, somewhere like Madagascar, you can get labor for $60 a month, right? What it cost in China in the mid-90s, not adjusted for inflation. So my feeling is that any manufacturer who can make use of labor instead of paying up front for robots is likely to continue to do so.

37:07Not least, again, because people don't talk about the inflexibility of robots, okay? They can do a certain amount. When your demand goes up, you can't turn the speed up on most robots in factories, okay? They continue to do the same amount. You've got to get new robots, but that's not quick. Whereas when you need to hire and fire labor, that is very quick in developing countries. So I have a bunch of questions, specific questions on Africa's manufacturing potential, but just a step back question first.

37:40So you emphasize the development of manufacturing as like this important step in the growth of an economy, and you do this both in how Asia works and how Africa works. Explain what it is that seems to make manufacturing in some sense special when it comes to economic development. And could you ever have a situation in Africa where, I don't know, maybe a government is like, I don't want to mass produce a bunch of toilet ceramics. I want to leapfrog ahead to a service industry and just start there.

38:12Yeah, so what makes manufacturing special is that you can take people usually out of the rural economy, out of the farm economy, and bring them into the modern urban economy. And you can do that with relatively low levels of education. They just need to be numerate and literate, and they're in a factory. And then they largely learn on the job, and factories become the kind of vocational training schools for developing economies. So the whole process is affordable to the developing economy.

38:44The problem that you have when you want to jump into value-added services is that value-added services almost always require a higher level of education and training. So who's going to pay for that? The person who's coming out of agriculture hasn't got the money to pay for that. And, you know, is the employer, you know, so the government's going to come up with the money? You know, the government's not going to have the money because definitionally it's the government of a poor country. You know, and the best example really to look to is always India for where you go with like value-added services because of the Indian Institute of Technology,

39:23the history there, they've always had a supply of highly trained tech graduates who allowed entrepreneurs to build very successful IT businesses. But that IT sector in India still only employs about 6 million people. It's just nothing compared with the employment generated by manufacturing. You know, and then you look at the overall impact on growth. With India, which has never really had a serious manufacturing strategy, although Modi kind of talks it up at the moment, but he's never really had one.

39:57If you look back to the period since 1991 when India's reforms began, India's grown at 4.2% a year average. Okay. If you look at China, which really maxed out support for manufacturing, that's an economy that grew for 30 years at 10%. That, to me, is the difference. And so I often say to, you know, people in countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia, you know, what do you want to be?

40:31Do you want to be India or do you want to be something more like China? I'm curious, like you mentioned that one of the issues is that the sort of like the developmentalist mindset, as you understand it, or the optimal developmentalist mindset is unevenly distributed throughout Africa. So there are leaders who might want to talk to you about, like, well, what is a realistic way in which we can develop along the East Asian path and then others not? When you look at the uneven distribution of this, is this just about, like, some people have different opinions?

41:05Or is this about, like, there is something endemic to the politics in certain countries such that whoever is going to be the person that winds up in the seat, winds up as president and so forth, is maybe going to be more likely to fundamentally say, owe their political allegiance to, say, medium-sized farms or something like that, such that the developmentalist approach is going to be off the table because that is not the politics out from which they come?

41:38Well, I have never managed to get data to sort of nail this down very well. But my personal view is that endemic to the politics of Africa is that politics in Africa are particularly aristocratic. So you particularly have leaders and the people around them who are aristocrats with all the kind of prejudices that go with that. They don't like small farmers. They like big farms. They're not terribly interested in manufacturing.

42:08It's kind of, you know, sit in my office and wait for people to come to me. That has been, to me, the reality and the tradition. But I think that what is also very important is that demonstration, what economists call demonstration effects, count for a lot. And that as countries see places like Lagos or economies like Ethiopia moving fast, right? Ethiopia has not grown less than 5% for 25 years now.

42:42Wow. But it was the poorest country in the world. That's why it's taking a long time to get on the radar. You know, when you're 100 bucks GDP per capita to start, you know, the maths are pretty ugly for a long period. But now it's still growing 10% a year and it's at a couple of thousand dollars. So that makes some difference. But, you know, so the point is that when people see what's going on in these countries, as was the case in East Asia, when people first saw what was going on in Japan and subsequently saw what was going on in Korea and Taiwan, it makes a difference.

43:16You know, it becomes a self-reinforcing positive spiral. Wait, since you brought up Ethiopia, we know, well, your book came out earlier this year before, I think it was in 2020, Ethiopia, there was a civil war that broke out in Ethiopia. So I'm curious how you think of the relationship between economic development, the Ethiopian economic success story versus political stability.

43:46Because I imagine, you know, had you maybe written this book in 2019 or something like that, you already hold out Ethiopia as a success story in the current version. But maybe it would have been even more of a success story before the civil war.

44:03To be honest, I mean, the remarkable thing is that the policy tracks that were laid in Ethiopia prior to the civil war, combined with some adjustments and more opening to the private sector that's come under Arby, the current PM, have just meant that the economy kept growing 5-6% through the civil war. So, you know, that's what happens when you build institutional capability and you get the right policies in place. But it's a fact of life in Africa, and again, it goes back to demographics, that ethnic cleavage is present in pretty much every society on the continent, right?

44:43Because historically, population was so sparse in Africa, that different tribal, for want of a better term, groups didn't, it seems, from what historians can make out, come into conflict very much. Because whenever conflict was brewing, one group or the other would just take off, and there was always more land available. There was always massive amounts of land for people. And so all these thousands of different groups with 3,000 different languages continue to survive.

45:16But of course, today, with population up to 1.5 billion, going to 2.5 billion in 2050, these ethnic groups now are pushing up against each other in a manner that they never have before. And they have to find ways of getting past these kind of visceral, ethnic reactions that they sometimes have. You mentioned something there that reminded me of what I wanted to ask you about export manufacturing in particular, which is, again, you think of Africa.

45:48And as you said, it's just this huge amount of land, including some very, very remote tracts of land and nations, landlocked nations in the middle of the continent, where it takes days and days and days to actually travel anywhere else. How much of a limitation is that on manufacturing for export purposes in particular, especially since in a lot of these countries, we're talking about places that don't have a lot of infrastructure. And so I would imagine that some of your labor competitive edge starts to wear off once you start factoring in the need to, you know, put manufactured goods on a train for three weeks or something like that.

46:30Yeah. So just start by contextualizing the bigness of Africa. You can fit China, India, Europe, and the United States inside Africa. That's how big it is. It's crazy big. So, and then your question, I think, makes a lot of sense, so long as what we are thinking about is Africa exporting to other parts of the world. But my response to that would be that I think that a lot of export growth in Africa, most export growth in Africa, is going to come from exporting to other states within the African continent.

47:07And the data are beginning to show that the rate of exports within the continent is already growing faster than to other parts of the world. It doesn't mean that Africa won't export to other parts of the world. It just kind of depends where you are on this huge continent. If you're up in North Africa or if you're in Morocco and you're only 14 kilometers away from Europe, it makes sense to be exporting, you know, which is why two of the biggest French car companies are making their cars there now.

47:44And aerospace and other manufacturers that need to be close to Europe at what low costs have gone there. To Morocco? To Morocco, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Up in, there's a development called Tangier Med, Tangier up there, just basically near the closest bit to Europe. And they've opened industrial parks. Not huge, but there's, you know, 100,000 plus people working in the industrial parks there doing cars and aerospace stuff and other things.

48:16Can you talk a little bit more about, I think it was in your book that I saw, or maybe it was something, it was probably in your book, maybe it was something that I saw after reading it. But, like, this phenomenon that what makes Africa or what had made Africa unusual is that you didn't have this great landless peasant movement. That there wasn't, you know, because in part of the stories of Asia, it's like land reform, right? You have, like, some big transfer from wealthy landholders to the public.

48:47And that in Africa, that had never really been the issue. And that makes it a fundamentally different story. Can you talk a little bit more about just the sort of weird reverberations that come from an underlying condition where land is just not a particularly scarce resource? Yeah, it's very un-Asian. So, after the Second World War in East Asia, land was the most explosive issue because there just wasn't enough of it.

49:19And that's why the Chinese Communist Party won control of the country largely by redistributing land and giving land to people who agreed to fight for the People's Liberation Army. And then why the United States reacted by supporting land reform programs in Japan and in Korea and in Taiwan. And even in the 70s, when the U.S. was losing in Vietnam, sent people in to start doing land reform just before the fall of Saigon.

49:50But it was too late. So, that is demographics. And then the demographics of Africa, as we've been saying, is a very sparse population. So, everybody's got land. The only place that I'm aware of in Africa, in 55 countries that ever had any kind of land reform, was, oh, well, there was Kenya. I suppose there was in the highlands in Kenya, there was. But I was thinking of Zanzibar, which was a very particular case because you had these kind of this sort of feudal Armani elite who owned all the land when it became independent.

50:28But, no, that's been the case. And there are still large parts of countries that have super abundant land. I mean, somewhere like Tanzania, there's still loads of land left. But because of population growth, there are other parts of the African continent where there is now some rising land pressure. So, around the Great Lakes, in the Ethiopian highlands, and some bits of West Africa as well. But, yes, as you say, it's not been an issue, scarcity of land in Africa.

51:02The problem in Africa was scarcity of people. Well, but there is still scarcity of assets that make the land viable as well, right? And the only reason I know that is because I read the chapter on Botswana where you talk about how, you know, there's loads of land, there's loads of cattle. But all the elites own the boreholes that produce the water for the cattle. And so, you still end up with a very inequal economic society. Yes, exactly. You can still get that. And there's a tendency all over Africa today as demand for foodstuffs increases.

51:39As Africa has now had for 25 years, the fastest rate of the whole continent has had the fastest rate of agricultural growth in the world, just over 4%. There is the tendency for urban wealthy people, you know, what I refer to as African kulaks in the book, to buy up chunks of land or lease chunks of land and displace peasant farmers. So, for the first time now in Africa, you're beginning to see a kind of landless peasantry, something that has never existed before.

52:13Tracy, do you know what the etymological root of the word kulak is? No. Do you know, Joe? I don't know, no. It's good. No, you've stumped us. Go on. It means fist, as in they were perceived to be tight-fisted. Oh. And so that they were like, yeah, that's like where that word came from. That's like the one thing I know about them. All right, last question for me, you know, like I've never been, I do want to travel to Africa, but it's a whole continent. I've never been particularly interested in the past because I'm not interested, like, going on, you know, seeing wild animals or something like that.

52:50I want to visit a city. I like to see how people live and how urban economies are happening, et cetera. Where would you recommend I buy a ticket to? I think you've got to see Lagos. Okay. It's just insane. I mean, just the people, the chaos, you know, and yeah, you just. I got my son a jersey from, when we were in Madrid, I got my son a jersey from the team Atletico Madrid.

53:23And on the jersey, they're sponsored by the Rwanda Tourism Board. And so on his jersey that he wears, it says, visit Rwanda. So would you recommend also Kigali Chope? Yeah, I mean, that then will blow your mind because it's about the cleanest city in the world. You know, Kagame sends people out on Saturday morning picking up litter. There isn't much litter to pick up, but I mean, you know, polishing, polishing the city. We haven't really talked about Rwanda much, but as we famously know, its president has talked about this country could be the Singapore of Africa.

54:02And obviously, when you talk about. He himself is very Lee Kuan Yew Codin. Yeah, right. And so, right. So when you mentioned the cleanliness aspect, that's interesting. Where is Rwanda on that trajectory? And could you see a plausibility where it's a tiny landlocked country, unlike Singapore that has ports and stuff like that? But could it be the sort of like financial capital of Africa where that's the first stop for money, which then is invested elsewhere?

54:32I don't know that it will be. I mean, I don't think there'll be a single financial center for Africa. I think that's unlikely, but I think that Kigali can be one of them. You know, they've done a very good job bringing in tech people. They've done a very good job making it a conference center. They've done a very good job bringing in various multilateral organizations to be headquartered there.

55:02And of course, you know, what no one talks about is the fact that Kagame has expanded his country by essentially manipulating Eastern DRC, separating it from the rest of the DRC. And running it as a sort of Rwandan colony, which is handy because it's got, you know, some pretty decent mineral reserves, which all get run through Rwanda. I mean, the world has got a little bit more tough in diplomatic terms on Kagame in the last sort of two, three years, but not very tough.

55:41And yeah, he plays an extraordinary, but I think, you know, utterly ruthless.

55:52Well, actually, this just reminded me, there's a through line between how Asia works and how Africa works. There's a bunch of them, but the other one we haven't talked about yet is the importance of finance and I guess directed lending to developmental projects. And it seems like Rwanda in particular setting itself up as the sort of Singaporean model. I think they chose not to have capital controls at all, but talk to us a little bit about how finance plays out in all of this. And also, when you think about finance in developing economies, you might often think about corruption and the difference between a legitimate developmental loan

56:32to an up-and-coming company versus, you know, a crony of the president or something can sometimes be very narrow. But what's the importance of finance here and how are you thinking about it? Okay, well, I mean, first on Rwanda, you're right. So Rwanda wants to be Singapore. So they are looking to have no capital controls so that money can freely come in and out because they want to get all money related to Eastern DRC, money from other wealthy people who are going to feel secure about keeping it in Kigali.

57:04So they're not in a developmental game whereby they want to control their domestic finances for development. But that is what the tradition from East Asia is when you have a developmental state. One of the key things that you do is that you have capital control so that your domestic savings are locked down and your population can't decide to move its money to New York to get a better rate of return. The money stays at home. And then you have a banking system which – and there are a number of ways in which it's successfully been done.

57:37But essentially, you have a banking system which takes a lot of direction from government and also gets a bit of subsidy, fiscal subsidy as well, to support it for losses that may be incurred in supporting industrial policy. So, you know, inevitably, money is very important. And I wouldn't say that things have changed much in terms of what you want to do if you are more of a developmental state. So, I mean, I've been very intrigued by the reporting of Ethiopia over the last couple of years,

58:08which has been, I don't know, on Bloomberg, but widely reported to have got rid of capital controls, which is completely untrue. They've basically moved to where China is, right, which, as we all know, has capital controls. And so, you know, but they're open on the trade account so that investors in Ethiopia now know that the foreign exchange, they can get it in and they can remit it to their ultimate owners. However, across Africa, if we look across 55 countries, what we see is that most countries got rid of capital controls,

58:45and they did so on the advice of the IMF and the World Bank. That means that then you get private banks that are interested to come in and invest, and they go, oh, look, all these foreign banks have come and invested. Isn't that good? But what the private banks do that come and invest is basically just push out consumer credit, okay? And it's not conducive to development of domestic industrial capacity just to have your banks lending people money to buy imported motorcycles.

59:17Joe Studwell, this is fascinating. We could go on for a very long time. It's a shame that it took us so long for us to get you on the podcast, but very fascinating new book, very fascinating new work. And I think something that maybe, you know, I feel as though so many of the stories we hear these days are just over and over again. China does this. AI does this. China. Trump did this. I find it refreshing to hear this topic that kind of feels un-zeitgeisty, but also very interesting and important.

59:49So I really appreciate you taking your time. Thank you. See you guys. I thought that was super interesting. I thought it was like really, you know, look, you're talking about like, it's just such a cliche. Do you have to mention Africa as a place? It's just extraordinarily diverse and like there's no common geography or common anything. The point about like land abundance and labor sparsity as this sort of like defining aspect.

1:00:29And then the way I hadn't really like put it together, which is like if you can have the unfortunate, you know, tribes that are like totally separate and then suddenly you draw a big square around them or you draw a big shape around them and they have like no internal cohesiveness, you can understand how that creates this sort of like permanent political problem. Right. Well, the thing I find really interesting about Joe, the other Joe's argument is the population density aspect of it.

1:01:00Cause that, that feels to me like something which is changing. You can see it in the numbers that it's starting to change. And if you do get more dense cities, I guess just more customers for potential goods produced within Africa, then that takes care of a lot of the manufacturing challenges that you could foresee. When you think about manufacturing, you think normally like, okay, we're going to produce stuff cheaply and we're going to export it. And then we're going to do the flying geese thing. And then we're going to do the monkeys swinging from the trees thing.

1:01:33And that's how we become a developed economy. But then as you were pointing out, you know, development doesn't happen in a vacuum. You have huge competition from places like China. You also have a broad landscape globally of just people becoming more protective with their own trade. Right. So, so that would be a massive challenge for a place like Africa. Again, not a monolith, but we're talking about it as such. But if the population density means that the domestic market actually increases, then, then that's a huge market.

1:02:07It could be a huge market. Totally. By the way, did you see this story? It didn't come up that Morocco named a highway after President Trump. No, I didn't. Okay. So there's a story that, uh, it's like, it's funny and they, they, for whatever the reason, there's a Trump highway. And then I saw that several, I saw several weeks later after that news there, that there is an attempt to build a coastal East African natural gas pipeline.

1:02:37Yeah. That would go up through Morocco into Europe. And, and this is the key bit, that they're hoping to get financing from the American Export Import Bank to build that. And suddenly I was like, oh, maybe I do get why you would want to name your, uh, uh, your highway after President Trump. But like, anyway. Can I say one thing about Moroccan highways? Yeah. I know you're a fan of Buc-ee's. Oh, yeah. Moroccan gas stations are amazing. I gotta go. You would love them. And they actually have really, really good food and are extremely dependable and for the most part clean.

1:03:08But the food is the thing to go for. I really want to go. So, okay. We're going to do live Odd Lots in, uh, at the, uh, Dangote. Or, you know, we'll, we'll take a tour of the Dangote, uh, refinery. I'll go to Lagos with you. I haven't been. I'd love to go to Lagos. We should go. And, um, great. We'll make that happen. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Wiesenthal. You can follow me at The Stalward. Follow our guest, Joe Studwell. He's at Joe Studwell.

1:03:39Follow our producers, Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Armand. Dashiell Bennett at Dashpot. Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com forward slash Odd Lots. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots. And if you like this episode, if you want us to go on a trip to Lagos, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free.

1:04:12All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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