Why is Africa the continent that keeps failing?

The unpaved roads were passable so long as they were dry, but we were in a rainforest, where, as the name suggests, it rains often and hard. We had to stop three times when the road turned to swamp, and once for a bridge that collapsed after too many floods and not enough repair work. But the worst delays were caused by 47 police roadblocks.

Cameroon is not at war, so there is no reason for these roadblocks, other than to give the police an opportunity to fleece motorists.

Every few miles, we would see a pile of tyres or a couple of oil drums in the middle of the road, and a plump gendarme relaxing in the shade of a palm tree. Some would make a show of checking to see if our tail-lights worked. Others would go through our papers looking for faults, so they could demand bribes not to arrest us.

This sort of thing is sadly quite common in Africa. The gendarme at the 31st roadblock shared with me a pithy explanation as to why Africans put up with it. He had invented a new law about not carrying passengers in beer trucks, and charged us with breaking it. When I suggested to him that the law he was citing did not, in fact, exist, he patted his holster and asked me if I had a gun. "I have a gun," he pointed out, "so I know the rules."

There is a theory, which is still popular, that most of Africa’s problems are the fault of western colonialism.

I would be the first to agree that the colonists did many bad things. But my impression, after six years of reporting from sub-Saharan Africa for the Economist, is that the theory is wildly out of date.

Africa is poor today mainly because it has been so badly governed for the last 30 or 40 years. Too few of Africa’s rulers are competent; many are predatory. Those Cameroonian roadblocks are a good illustration of how power is often wielded in Africa.

The police profit from hassling truckers; everyone else loses. Because it takes so long to move goods around, lots of things are much more expensive than they should be. A beer costs 50 per cent more in a small Cameroonian village than in the city where it was bottled. If a Cameroonian peasant wants to get his surplus crops to market, the transport costs gobble up a huge chunk of his profits.

Some African countries remain poor because of wars. Congo’s recent conflict, for example, not only claimed some three million lives, it also prompted millions of Congolese to stop tending their fields and flee into the bush to avoid being killed. This meant they grew less, and ate less.

More sophisticated industries were scuppered, too. For obvious reasons, no tourists come to see the gorillas in Congo’s stunning national parks. Last year, I found two functioning factories in eastern Congo’s main industrial town, (one making beer, the other quinine tablets), but doing business there was clearly tough. There is no banking system, and both factories had been smashed and looted by unruly soldiers in recent years.

Fortunately, most African countries are more peaceful than this. Unfortunately, most have still managed to grow poorer since independence, despite the explosion of new technology that has helped make life on every other continent across the globe longer and more prosperous.

You could argue that the collapse of, say, Zimbabwe’s economy has its roots in colonial injustice. British settlers took much of the good land in Zimbabwe, so the president, Robert Mugabe, was rectifying an old wrong when he took it back and gave it to black Zimbabweans. His land redistribution policy will be good for the country in the long run, say his apologists.

Practically no-one in Zimbabwe believes this. They know that much of the land confiscated from whites has been grabbed by colonels and cabinet ministers, not by the poor who were supposed to benefit.

On one farm I visited, the new owner, a friend of Mr Mugabe’s wife, had not only evicted hundreds of black farm workers, he had also ransacked their huts to steal the severance payments their white employer had been forced to give them before he was driven off.

When one looks at other aspects of Mr Mugabe’s record, his insistence that Zimbabwe’s troubles are all Britain’s fault seems even less plausible. It is hard to see, for example, how the wicked imperialists forced him to print money until hyperinflation made all his subjects’ savings worthless.

I once changed a couple of American hundred-dollar bills in Zimbabwe and was given a plastic sackful of currency in exchange. The Zimbabwean notes came in neat bundles of 100, with consecutive serial numbers. They were clearly fresh off the press.

Mugabe prints money because he has to keep paying the army to stay in power. He finds it hard to raise money in more conventional ways, because he has killed off so many of the industries that used to generate profits that could be taxed. No other African country (besides those at war) has collapsed as fast as Zimbabwe in recent years, but most share at least some of characteristics that brought Zimbabwe low.

In most African countries, the richest people are in government. Too many of the cleverest students aspire, not to create wealth, but to enter politics and grow wealthy on the fruits of other people’s labour.

Officials rarely see themselves as public servants; they see themselves as Big Men, whose extended families would be disappointed if they did not abuse their power to extort money from the weak. They create burdensome rules in the hope that businessmen will bribe them to be let off. Those Cameroonian gendarmes were only following their bosses’ example.

Since the end of the Cold War, several things have improved. Africa has grown more democratic: even the worst despots now at least go through the motions of holding elections, and voters have been able to throw out some 18 regimes since 1990 (compared with none in the 1960s and 1970s, and only one in the 1980s). The media are freer, except in Zimbabwe and Eritrea, so voters are slightly better informed, too.

In the last couple of years, the number of civil wars has fallen, though terrible carnage persists in western Sudan, northern Uganda and pockets of West Africa. South Africa, by far the continent’s most advanced economy, has been admirably stable since the end of apartheid, although it shows few signs of the kind of rapid economic growth that has transformed east Asia.

Many economists used to believe that the only thing holding Africa back was a lack of cash. Foreign aid was supposed to solve this by giving Africans the means to invest in their own industrial revolution. Development aid equivalent to six Marshall Plans has been poured into Africa in the last half-century, but it has not made Africans any less poor.

Unlike American aid to Europe after the Second World War, aid to Africa has largely been wasted. The difference was that the Americans were giving capital to people who already knew how to invest it.

The Europeans were rebuilding an industrial base that they had built once before, but had been bombed to pieces. The Africans were trying to construct something they had no experience of, which was much harder.

Some of the money was blown on overpriced dams or factories that never functioned. Much of the rest was squandered on pink champagne and limousines. There is evidence that aid to poor countries with sensible governments works well, but there are not nearly enough such governments in Africa.

In researching my book, I’ve found that talking to ordinary Africans is more illuminating than talking to their leaders. African presidents and finance ministers are intelligent men, who often understand exactly what the problems are, and say all the right things about how they plan to fix them, at least when being interviewed by Western journalists like me. But out in the forest, I hear a more honest refrain: the men with guns make the rules.

• Robert Guest is the Africa editor of the Economist. His new book, The Shackled Continent: Africa’s past, present and future, will be published by Macmillan on 16 April.