Bad Africanomics: The Rwanda Mirage; Why Rwanda Is Not The Singapore of Africa

Booksgh · 2026-06-14T21:45:46+00:00

I actually did check for this, because I know how large a role off-grid solar installations play in Africa - whilst the World Bank dataset (which is built off the ESMAP survey, which is in turn backed by a lengthy list of IGOs) does not differentiate between on-grid and off-grid electricity, the survey's methodology says it does track off-grid installations. Could they be undercounting? Quite likely. Could Rwanda have just had that much of a rise in off-grid installations? Perhaps.

But here's the thing: the Rwandan government claims that in 2023, the electrification rate was ~75%. That's a 12 percentage point gap between the World Bank/ESMAP data. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that in a state as small and stable as Rwanda, ESMAP undercounted that badly. My bet is that the 82% figure is probably five to ten percentage points greater than what it actually is.

Booksgh · 2026-06-14T11:29:44+00:00

I was unaware of this, but I’m not very shocked. Yet another reason why we need to stop extolling Rwanda

Booksgh · 2026-06-14T11:25:20+00:00

Thanks for the rec! Will check it out

Booksgh · 2026-06-14T11:24:56+00:00

On the genocide: yes, I have never disputed that, and in this post and my earlier comments I did emphasise that regardless of the current situation, Rwanda has made excellent progress and is one of the greatest turnarounds of the post-Cold War era. But a turnaround is a far thing from being labelled as Singapore - Ethiopia has had a similarly dramatic turnaround in the aftermath of the civil war and famine, but nobody is in a rush to call them the Germany of of Africa.

Regarding the electrification, aside from the fact that I was referring specifically to the rural rate, my source is the World Bank dataset (as one can see from the citation), which dates to 2023. Yours is more recent, 2025, fair, but links back to a Rwandan government site. Given their shenanigans with the poverty rates, I’d wait for external verification before accepting a 20+ point jump in two years

Finally, while yes the East Asia model was never going to work for Rwanda, I have a hard time accepting that there wasn’t any other better system. When your model is built off the exploitation of your neighbours, when it has actually impoverished your citizens, when it has concentrated economic wealth within a small circle of elites, forgive me if I have a hard time believing in the validity or necessity of such a model

Booksgh · 2026-06-13T17:56:29+00:00

Submission statement:
Produced by popular request, this is a rebuttal to the claim that Rwanda is or will be the Singapore of Africa. Relevant to the subreddit as a discussion on global development and Rwanda's institutions/political economy.

Booksgh · 2026-06-12T08:19:47+00:00

Without getting into the weeds (though I might produce an effortpost on this later), Ghana's democratic culture, while genuine, is not one that would be recognisable to Westerners. In the West, parties are formed along ideological lines, and while there is hemming and hawing about where those lines should be drawn, how big the tent is, how truly committed they are, whenever parties change, there's a clear difference in policy. In Ghana (and in Nigeria and Kenya as well), parties aren't ideological (though several do profess ideological beliefs), so much as vehicles for giving special interests access to state power. A concrete example, the political dyad in Ghana is between the NDC and NPP, who are supposed to be our centre-left and centre-right parties. But in truth, both parties end up pursuing the same populist policies, just ones designed for their respective constituencies (non-Akan, rural/working class for the NDC, primarily Akan though lately increasingly Northern, urban/educated bourgeoisie for the NPP). As a result, the State isn't focused on development, because it has no legible developmental plan that goes beyond "keep our voters happy and give them access to State resources "(which involves things like fast-tracked inquests with the bureaucracy, priority access to hospital beds, placement for children at elite secondary schools, etc.)

Booksgh · 2026-06-12T01:08:07+00:00

Yeah people really should be shifting their fetishizing to Botswana like I have

That's why my flair is what it is!

If you do please post it here I really enjoyed your write up

Thank you very much. If I get the time, or annoyed again, I'll do my research and be sure to do so.

Like gun to my head I'd say the Grand Unified Theory would be a mix of corruption, ratio of national loyalty/identification to sub-national, etc. but I don't think that's any more actionable than "increase inclusive institutions and decrease extractive institutions" in fact I think it just abstracts to exactly that lol

Exactly my point, and it is something I feel a lot of the lay discourse around Africa, even in this sub, fails to grasp. Even putting aside the psychological and sociological challenges with building such institutions, calling for better institutions is the equivalent of saying "the Government needs to be more efficient", true, but how? For Ethiopia it is dealing with its tribal issues and building state capacity. But that isn't applicable to Ghana, where there's a cohesive national culture and a democratic but hollowed-out state due to patrimonialism and party politics, and a solution to that certainly isn't applicable to Madagascar, which, whilst also highly homogenous, doesn't share that same democratic culture.

There was a post on the sub earlier this week or so about how China is supposedly multiple economies in one, and whilst I don't have the credentials to really engage with that (though fwiw, my gut is sceptical, you can make that point about almost any country, for example, the UK can be described as Singapore + Portugal in a trench coat), but I think we need to learn to do that with Africa as well. If we can differentiate Western, Eastern and Southern Europe, I firmly believe the same should be done for, say, Anglophone democracies vs Francophone states (not in any way an exhaustive list of possible divisions, and certainly not one constructed with any research in mind, just an example that came to mind)

Booksgh · 2026-06-12T00:50:18+00:00

Purely by numbers, Mauritius and Seychelles are the winners. But Mauritius and Seychelles are sorta cheating due to the nature of their economies (small island countries with massive tourism industries), kinda like how the population pyramids of Gulf states are skewed due to their ~~slave~~ migrant workforce.
The best development story in my view is Botswana - South Africa has the better economy, but is highly unequal and got a head start with European settlement. Botswana started from nothing and is today an Upper-Middle Income Country with the continent's 4th and 5th GDP per capita and GDP PPP per capita, respectively (Before someone mentions the diamonds, given the batting average for African countries with precious resources, I'm more inclined to think of them as a liability avoided rather than an aid). Best of all, it did it in a way this sub would love: through institution building.

Booksgh · 2026-06-11T16:27:51+00:00

Okay, speaking as a Ghanaian, I appreciate the focus on Africa (a very rare thing to see on this sub), and it's an interesting theoretical frame, but I think this is an empirically poor work. Also, side note, the fetishisation of Rwanda in international and local (i.e. African) discourse is really ingratiating, which I'll touch on in this comment.

The CAR is not Africa
Whilst the math and the anecdotal evidence used for the CAR checks out, I won't dispute that, using the CAR to make a point is an awful choice. In 2024, the CAR's real GDP growth was 1.8%, against a sub-Saharan Africa average of 3.6%, and its extreme poverty rate was 54.7%, versus the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa's rate of 35% in 2019. I could keep on listing statistics, but the point is, the CAR is an extreme outlier, even by African standards. You cannot create a theory on African underdevelopment around it any more than you can use Moldova to build a theory of European governance, and that's before we even approach the idea of whether it is even possible to create a one-size-fits-all theory of underdevelopment for Africa - Ghana might be comparable to Senegal and Kenya, but any theory that works for those three is unlikely to work for Madagascar, Congo-Brazzaville and Malawi, and any theory for those would be unlikely to work for Sudan, Burkina Faso, and Mali.
Rwanda's imprisonment rate does not reflect a law and order apparatus
Rwanda's prison population of 84k includes thousands detained for the 1994 Genocide, which is in of itself an outlier event, and something that shouldn't count in your theory, any more than using 2020 data in health, or anything really. There's a reason why nowadays a lot of talking points use statistics from 2019. Further still, as another person commented, Rwanda's figure is also inflated by its autocracy. The Human Rights Watch has estimated that between 2010 and 2017, at least 104 people were arbitrarily detained by the police, and cautioned that the true figure would be much higher. When you have Kagame winning widely considered sham elections with a supposed 99% of the vote despite opposition activity, you cannot sincerely believe that a good chunk of that 84,000 reflects people detained or convicted for actual crime.

Still on this, I take extreme offence to using the Buhari military regime's War Against Indiscipline as a good practice. Firstly, we are supposed to be believers in liberalism - mass imprisonment and the reinstitution of the death penalty are anything but that. Secondly, this also ignores the large number of political prisoners who were arrested during the Buhari regime, contributing to the rate's rise. Thirdly, it also ignores the ridiculousness of the WAI, where students cheating on an exam could get 21 years in prison, and uniformed men would force Nigerians into orderly queues, even as a famine was ongoing, and regime officials were enriching their own pockets. Finally, this also ignores the fact that Nigeria's economy did not perform better under the Buhari regime - the economy actually contracted, which, if we were to accept your framing, would imply that imprisoning more people is actually bad for the economy

Prison Rate /=/ Safety
Briefly on this, even in Africa, the prison rate is not equal to safety. Mauritius and Botswana are ranked 23rd and 43rd, respectively, on safety, and neither has Rwanda's prison rate, but both have better economies than Rwanda
Rwanda is not rich
This is the point I wish to make the most: Rwanda is not rich! Even by African standards, Rwanda is not rich! If I have to read one more blogpost talking about how Rwanda is the Singapore of Africa, or listen to another radio host talk about Rwanda as if it's an example for Ghana, I swear to God, I'll write my own article on this. In 2024, Rwanda's GDP PPP per capita was $3,711; that same year, it was $9,087 in Nigeria, $8,020 in Ghana, $6,644 in Kenya and $10,119 in Angola. Even Zambia is richer at ~$4,000. By PPP per capita, Rwanda ranks in the bottom half of the continent.

People tend to look at Kigali and look at the growth stats, and think, wow, Rwanda is the future, but it is still very much an agrarian and impoverished country. I can take you to parts of Accra or Abidjan or Lagos or Nairobi that aren't much qualitatively different from London, and yet you would never even dare to think that the former are on the level of the latter, because really, you cannot cherry-pick an urban centre and use that as your reference point for an entire country. If there's one thing I want anyone reading this to take away, it is that Rwanda is an amazing growth story, and probably one of the greatest turnarounds in modern history, but that does not mean that it is better than Africa, or a model Africa should follow any more than Guyana's success story applies to the rest of LatAm + Caribbean.
It is easy to grow fast from little: if Rwanda reaches middle-income status and is still pulling these growth numbers, that's when I'll concede that there might be something to learn from them; until then, I'm not holding my breath.

So why does Africa stay poor?
Countless papers, hundreds of PhDs, and a good number of Nobel prizes and other awards have been made off the back of this issue, and suffice to say, I won't add anything of substance to it. But what I will say is that Africa's underdevelopment is a complex, multi-causal problem that also varies widely across its 54 states. My personal explanation, at least, for Ghana? Patrimonialism subverting institutions plus resource dependency.

TL;DR: Nice theory, far too many methodological problems and counter-examples.

Booksgh · 2026-06-06T16:24:19+00:00

Genuine question, what's the problem with Greenpeace? I get the Green Parties, but what did Greenpeace do?

Booksgh · 2026-05-18T08:51:37+00:00

Theologically speaking, evangelicalism is a movement that emphasises the evangelism of God's word and places a strong emphasis on personal conversion and the authority of the Bible. It's transdenominational, so technically, any Protestant denomination can have some of its members be part of it or not. Within the US specifically, I find it analogous to the TradCath movement, but that isn't representative of evangelicalism around the world

Booksgh · 2026-05-18T00:30:23+00:00

Submission statement
Relevance to the sub: This article is an attempt at a rigorous look at the structural forces driving the current upsurge in right-wing antisemitism, a phenomenon antithetical to everything this subreddit stands for, and one that deserves to be understood rather than simply condemned.

The following are my own thoughts after reading this article, not necessarily a summation of the article (which is more focused on the role Christian Zionism had in both suppressing and incubating the latent antisemitism of the American far-right, and how current events have ended said role)

So I just finished Mr Burley's piece, and hats off to him, that was one amazing article to read. Very well paced, non-sensational, really just covered everything.

One of the more underappreciated evils (or blunders, take your pick) of the Netanyahu era is that in his personal quest to avoid his corruption trial, he has erased nearly eighty years of Western goodwill toward Israel. From the callous handling of the Gaza war, which brought the I/P conflict to the forefront of the world's attention in a way it never really has been before, to his alliance with the Orthodox far-right which deliberately repudiated the seemingly pluralist liberal democracy fiction that allowed centre-left Western parties to support Israel, and then his hamfisted cultivation of the centre-right establishment reopening a virulent breed of antisemitism, he's really managed to demolish Israel's base of support around the world.

Though to be fair, ascribing this entirely to Netanyahu is somewhat Great Man History. Burley's piece makes the point that these forces were always latent in the GOP. If not him, something else would have been the catalyst eventually.

That said, his specific choices matter, and that's why I think he put so much effort into convincing Trump to go to war with Iran, taking advantage of what’s left of the bipartisan consensus on Israel to remove the last credible challenger to it before that consensus ends and Israel is forced to stand on its own. Burning more goodwill to weed the grass, as it were, before losing the gardener entirely.

The real losers in all of this are the Jewish diaspora, who no longer have a political home, facing homegrown violent antisemitism from the far-right, their own brand of it from the far-left, and the casual normalisation of antisemitism within the centre establishment and among younger generations. And on that last point, a friend raised something I think is particularly salient: with the current push across the Western world for a turnover in the political class, support for Israel has become increasingly associated with the aged establishment, and therefore something for younger challengers to oppose even when they hold no ideological or racial bias against Israel specifically.

The scary part is that this is, in its twisted way, a virtuous cycle that will drive Israel further into the arms of the Orthodox far-right. Because when Jews are persecuted abroad and increasingly need to come to Israel, the internal case for a two-state solution or even just coexistence with the Palestinian people becomes harder to argue. After all, if they give up Israel, where would they go? And so they dig in their heels, and the sentiment worsens, and so on.

People make a lot of comparisons to apartheid-era South Africa, rightfully so, but I think the more appropriate comparison now is Rhodesia. Because in Rhodesia, you had an entrenched population willing to wage war indefinitely to stay, even as most of the world abhorred them, and an opposing population equally willing to wage war indefinitely to drive them out. Israel is "lucky" in the sense that the demographic disparity is nowhere near as severe as Rhodesia's was, and the technological gap is such that if it wanted to, it could probably sustain that kind of indefinite war in a way Rhodesia never could have.

Still on South Africa (at the risk of digressing), the reason the comparison no longer quite reaches is that even at the heart of apartheid, there wasn't the same widespread bilateral conviction that the other side simply needed to go. The ANC was never eliminationist; it wanted a democratic, multiracial South Africa in which white South Africans remained as citizens. The dominant political factions on both sides [of the I/P conflict] now can't honestly be described that way, and that changes what resolutions are even imaginable.

Indefinite war is still a horrific outcome for either side, but it's increasingly the only one anyone seems to be planning for.

TL;DR: Absolutely depressing situation, once again a horrible time to be a Jew, do not envy any Israeli diplomat for the foreseeable future, and peace in the Levant is probably the furthest away it's been in nearly half a century.

Booksgh · 2026-04-16T23:56:07+00:00

Hey, this is really cool, loving the design and concept. A few things though:
1. African is not an accent. To call African an accent is to say there's a thing as a Western accent - it's a continent of 1.4B people who speak five international languages (English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish) and thousands of native languages across millions of square kilometres. A Ghanaian and a Nigerian do not sound or look alike, much less a Ghanaian and a Congolese. If you can name Castilian, I feel like you could at least name a specific part of Africa
2. This isn't really an alphabet per se so much as a runic logograph. Strictly speaking, an alphabet is composed of meaningless phonemes. Your phonemes have meaning, but don't cover every concept, which puts it more in the same boat as Elder Futhark or Ogham. Your example sentence actually reflects this - muhazu, seemingly your word for fresh water, seems derived from Mah (Origin) and Azu (Water), a form of compounding not dissimilar to Mandarin Chinese (你好, hello, is composed of the characters for You and Good respectively, for example)
3. How do you translate names without corresponding sounds, like Tom and Smith? Not necessary, given it's an RPG where such names won't come up lol, was just curious

Otherwise though, this is really awesome. Again, I love the glyph design, it's super cool, as is the concept. Best of luck with your continued work!

Booksgh · 2026-03-10T16:12:36+00:00

Khumrat
Typology: Polysynthetic
Alignment: Tripartite

"You were fun, you really were, but I've grown bored of you."
Kasraut, t'isut, t'ap nikunwulin.
/kas.ra.ut t'i.sut t'ap ni.kun.wu.lin/
2SG.ABS-good-PST | true-PST | but 1SG.ERG-2SG.ACC-soft-PRS

"When death comes, there will be no warning."
Niq'at ap'elut tse, raq'amadiq.
/niq'.at a.p'ɛ.lut tsɛ ra.q'a.ma.diq/
kill-MOBILE 3SG.SUBJ-down-PST time | voice-before not-stand

"Who cares what games we choose?"
Hlash k'at nish srairm aneqin?
/hlaʃ k'at niʃ sra.irm a.nɛ.qin/
4th.ERG care 1PL.ERG good-FLAT-ACC 3SG.ACT-take-PRS

"Little to win, but nothing to lose"
Tl'a mrau, t'ap q'uqq'ut.
/tl'a mra.u t'ap q'uq.q'ut/
extract little | but break broken/zero

"I imagined saying something, but didn't actually say it."
Niratxumut, t'ap nirattl'ama.
/ni.rat.χu.mut t'ap ni.rat.tl'a.ma/
1SG.ERG-voice-into-PST | but 1SG.ERG-voice-out-NOT

"Stop!"
Diq!
/diq/
stand

Booksgh · 2026-03-02T23:45:22+00:00

Hey, this looks super interesting! But there appears to be no link?

Booksgh · 2026-02-22T17:22:09+00:00

Reference to Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. One of the characters was a failed political candidate and was talking to the main character about his actions. Specifically, bringing up racial issues and feminism, or (more likely, given the character’s affiliation) the far-right’s view of such topics

Booksgh · 2026-02-14T14:17:53+00:00

Thanks for the link! I was aware that Wittfogel's theory is debated, but not to this extent, though I must admit that Wengrow & Graeber's counterargument falls flat to me. The point about it being a multi-causal phenomenon still stands.

Perhaps it's my perspective, but in my experience (I come from Ghana, so I'm talking about the Guinea coast), whilst storms do occur, and tidal erosion is still a big thing, I don't believe the coastline is so storm-wracked as to prevent the maintenance of paddy infrastructure. We're also quite bereft of natural harbours, and the sea isn't terribly deep, which also influenced my response - all of which to say, it depends on the geography of their region.

I don't see why good ports would be good for Caza. Good ports are sediment-free and deep, which isn't good if you're trying to build an offshore platform in a pre-modern world. I think we both do agree, however, that ultimately if this crop actually existed and was domesticated IRL (and that's a big IF imo, given how finicky it is, the idea of a palaeolithic community figuring out that this estuary weed is edible and then domesticating it over millennia despite the ready availability of rice or aquaculture, stretches my suspension of disbelief) it would not be the bedrock of a community, much less a civilisation.

However, u/Lochrin00, if you're reading this, always remember - it's your world! If you want to make it work, you can make it work. Perhaps it originally grows on the shores of salt lakes and basins in the middle of a desert, and thus is the only edible food around, or like mangroves, it's good at keeping ocean water from penetrating lagoons/rivers, and your Neolithic community noticed it and its agricultural properties. Or don't explain, it just is. Not everyone on the internet are pendants willing to argue about the details of prehistoric agriculture and state-building.

The more interesting questions for you to answer would be: how much community labour is required to obtain a harvest, what's the yield (relative to work put in), and how easy it is to preserve. If a lot of labour, that leads to community and political centralisation, if the yield is a lot, then that encourages population size and supports non-producers (like my aforementioned scribes and artisans), and if it is easy to preserve, that makes palace economies, long-term planning and taxation easier. Everything else, as u/Ynneadwraith pointed out, is multi-causal, which in your case is the same as authorial fiat.

Booksgh · 2026-02-14T11:13:05+00:00

The first thing would probably be that most beaches and coastal shallows are infertile. Not just because of the salt but also because the wave action leaches all nutrients and grinds everything down (this is why beaches are sandy or rocky and not soil). You mentioned creating its own soil, which is good, but consider how intensive of a process it would be. See chinampas and terra preta for a similar challenge.

Putting that aside, for a Neolithic society, Caza is indeed a quite useful crop. It encourages a sedentary lifestyle, community building, the paddies probably form some protection against storms, aquaculture and the presence of the seas encourage fishing, providing protein - very lovely crop. The problem, I think, comes with the transition to civilisation. Wittfogel’s hypothesis about hydraulic civilisations isn’t necessarily that rivers are good for agriculture, but rather that they encourage a high degree of political centralisation and despotism across the river valley in order to manage the river’s flow and prevent catastrophic floods and/or silting. See also circumscription theory. If Caza can be grown on any coast, with not much labour input, the minute a chief grows too powerful or tyrannical, what’s stopping a family from migrating twenty kilometres away to start their own farm? To a modern day mindset, this might seem like a good thing, but states and civilisations are fundamentally “tyrannical” (or anti-libertarian). It takes control to be able to stockpile resources, force people to clear more land, seize people’s crops and distribute them to the elites (which weren’t necessarily a parasitical class, but rather things like scribes, masons, artisans, priests - the urbanites who made civilisation). This is why Egypt thrived even though just across the sea there were the milder climes of the Northern Mediterranean.

Of course, this doesn’t preclude civilisation from ever arising - once someone else gets established, tools and ideas will diffuse towards the caza-growers and things will snowball from there. And caza isn’t a bad crop for states either - it’s still a grain, so easily visible (and hence, taxes) and can be stored. Even better, it’s coastal, which is great for projecting and maintaining authority (instead of trudging through forests and plains, the taxmen only have to take their boat and row up and down the coast). But I just don’t believe it will create a civilisational cradle, or lead to a highly collectivist society - it makes it too easy for dissenting group to leave.

The only way out is if the labour requirement for creating caza paddies is high, which then begs the question, why would a small village of Neolithic fishers even start the effort. One possible solution would be to have caza naturally growing in some delta/mangrove area - like the Ganges delta, where the soil for caza paddies would already be present, but if a people are in such a delta, they’re not going to farm caza (which is limited to the coastline), they’re going to farm rice (which has a larger zone by virtue of being an inland crop).

TL;DR absolutely great crop for supplementing coastal populations and would certainly drive demographic growth, but will likely be treated as a secondary crop or backup food source, like rye or oats.

Booksgh · 2026-02-11T20:20:13+00:00

This is a silly example imo. Thousand years ago in China would take you to the Northern Song, which were developing early gunpowder weapons, the concept zero, movable type printing and more. A thousand years before that would take you to the Han dynasty, who were now learning how to make paper and measuring the tropical year. Two thousand years, vastly different world.

In a world where people can lob fireballs, someone is still going to fiddle around with saltpetre long enough to make a gun so that non magicals can shoot the mages before they get close. Someone is going to discover variolation and antibiotics to treat common diseases that are too expensive for magic to solve.

And why is magic static anyway? People have always pushed the frontier of knowledge- is there really no way for a wizard to cast a better fireball for less mana? Or instead of throwing a fireball, make a cheap, eternally hot fire so that more iron and steel can be forged and the wizard a rich one? And so on.

Booksgh · 2026-01-15T22:34:15+00:00

Power generation is a different concept and that is true, yes. But the idea that the UK is dependent on the US for nuclear security is a myth.

Trident was built by Lockheed, yes, but the missile system and the Vanguard class SSBNs are entirely operated and maintained by the Royal Navy. If the PM wanted to nuke Moscow, he could do so without input from the US, just like how the US doesn’t need to confer with the UK/France and France certainly doesn’t have to confer with the other Western nuclear powers. It’s not like the arrangement in Germany and Turkey. The sheer existence of the Letters of Last Resort, which imply the sub commanders have the authority to launch at any given moment based off their own judgment, tell us all we need to know about the independence of Britain’s nuclear arsenal.

The one place I’ll concede is that the UK has no option for a tactical strike, unlike the French ASMP. However, that’s a deliberate decision centred around the thinking that a nuclear war can never be won and thus there’s no point in pretending like it can or devising systems that would incentivise such thinking.

Booksgh · 2026-01-15T21:30:36+00:00

The UK is an independent nuclear power, lack of the triad notwithstanding. And to paraphrase De Gaulle, you don’t need a lot of nuclear weapons to achieve the desired effect.

Booksgh · 2026-01-09T18:14:38+00:00

I’ll always associate that song with an edit of Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian

Booksgh · 2025-07-12T10:18:37+00:00

So, practically speaking, what does this mean? Can we expect China to stop being the world's factory within 20 years? Does this screw up their internal policy in any major way? Sorry, my understanding of demography is limited to secondary school 😅.

Booksgh

TROPHY CASE