That's a meaningful answer; but it's all too easy to exaggerate the democratic advantage. The figures which Halperin et al. cite show that from 1960 to 2001, growth rates were about the same in low-income democracies and low-income autocracies, though the democracies do better on "social indicators" such as health and well-being. So that's one cheer for democracy. The high-growth states in Africa tend to have oil, like Nigeria and Angola; governance is beside the point. The few high-growth, low-resource countries include non-democracies like Ethiopia and Rwanda as well as democracies like Ghana. Mali is in the middle of the pack, at about 4.5 percent growth per year, though its population growth rate of around 3 percent has wiped out much of the effect. And now former President Touré -- or ATT, as he is known -- proved a less determined reformer than was Konaré.
Mali is a desperately poor country. The IMF ranks it 156 in the world in GDP per capita, two notches above Haiti. Social indicators, which democratic governments are supposed to boost, are much worse. Most Malians live in small villages without electricity or fresh drinking water or health clinics or schools. As Robert Kaplan recently pointed out, channeling Samuel Huntington, what Africa's weak states lack is not democracy but governance -- a functional state presence extending even into the hinterlands. The modern Malian state, whether elected or not, has never exercised authority in the vast wastelands of the Sahel in which the rebels have proclaimed their new state, any more than, say, the government of Sierra Leone has in the jungle interior. The feebleness of the West African state apparatus creates vacuums which are filled by smugglers, drug lords, or jihadists with global ambitions.
If the regional problem is not so much despotism as frailty, the solution is not so much democracy as capacity. Many Malians might be willing to swap their feckless democracy for, say, Rwanda's version of Prussian bureaucracy. Of course they can't, any more than the Rwandans could trade their murderous ethnic politics for Mali's cousinage. States are shaped by history, geography, and ethnic identity. In West Africa, authoritarianism has typically worn the garb not of the benevolent dictator but of the mutinous officer or the mumbling gerontocrat. Modernization theory, which once purported to explain how democracies develop, posited a phase of authoritarian state-building before nations were "ready" for democracy. There have been very few such cases in Africa. If Mali is ultimately going to build a real state which can provide at least minimal education, health care, and electric power, it will be because democratic leaders succeed in the slow work of forging economic growth and mobilizing citizens around public goals. So really, it's two cheers for democracy.
It is, of course, profoundly in the interest of the West to enhance the capacity of weak states, lest international criminal gangs and terrorists turn their hinterlands into a playground. That's why, for example, the United States agreed in 2006 to spend more than $400 million through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to help build up Bamako's international airport, and to increase land under irrigation. The MCC is an excellent program -- devised, let us not forget, by the George W. Bush administration -- which requires the recipient to draw up and carry out the development program while the United States retains oversight capacity. But after five years, progress in Mali looks pretty modest: The MCC lists many of the targets as being zero percent fulfilled. "Improving state capacity" is harder than it sounds -- by several orders of magnitude.
Still, it's good news that the people of Mali are still attached to their rickety democracy after 20 years. And it's good news that Ecowas was able to restore that democracy without firing a shot (though re-taking Azawad will prove a much harder job). Mali will probably have an election some time next month. Another free-and-almost-fair one will be nice -- but it won't be enough.
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