AFRICAN QUEEN
ON 11 January, the
Economist
published a hefty special report entitled “The Africa Gap”, which identified a number of ways in which “the economic gap between Africa and the rest of the world is getting wider”.
The magazine’s leader column informed the continent that it was jolly well time to buck up: “If its 54 countries are to seize the opportunity, they will have to do something exceptional: break with their own past and with the dismal statist orthodoxy that now grips much of the world. Africa’s leaders will have to embrace business, growth and free markets.”