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# Posted 9:03 PM by Patrick Belton

WHITHER AFRICA? The Economist sees good things in the continent's future:

Angola and Sierra Leone are at peace. The pointless border clash between Ethiopia and Eritrea has stopped. Congo's war, the worst anywhere since the second world war, is formally over. Liberia's warlord, Charles Taylor, has been driven into exile. Even in Sudan, which has known only 11 years of calm since 1962, government and rebels are on the verge of signing a power-sharing deal.

In the 1960s and 1970s, no African ruler was voted out of office. In the 1980s, one was. Since then, 18 have been, and counting.... Under most of the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, independent newspapers and radio stations were simply not allowed. Today, they are as numerous as they are irreverent.

The main reason the continent is so poor today is that Mugabe-style incompetent tyranny has been common since independence (see our survey). The most important question for Africans now is whether Mr Mugabe represents not only their past, but their future as well. There are encouraging signs that he does not.

The entire article is worth reading. A particularly sad blue note in this chord, however, is the heavy reliance of the continent's two natural leaders upon resource extraction - never a good role for a government seeking to shake off corruption and forge ties of accountability with its citizens (and taxpayers). Think the Gulf, and Mexico in the oil boom of the 70's. Nigeria's economy, like those, is based on the extraction of oil - and Nigerian political economy is in turn based on the distribution of oil rents. South Africa's is a more delicate situation, because the resource being extracted there is the tax dollars of the white population.

But, nonetheless, there are continent-wide trends of democratization and the spread of security and the free press, which are very much on the side of those who would wish its people well - this Economist piece does well to draw our attention to them. And our role in the spread of democracy and conditions of human dignity to Africa over our lifetimes, of course, must be much more than cheering from the sidelines.

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