“Intra-African trade is 4-5 percent of our international trade. Why? This is unacceptable, unviable, and people need to stand up and say this… Who are we to think that we can have 53 tiny little countries and be ready to compete with China, India, Europe, the Americans? It is a fallacy.”

“Some of our countries, and I’m really sorry to say this, are just not viable…We need scale and we need that now — not tomorrow, the next year or the year after.”

Rather than making headlines with those words, Ibrahim had originally intended at the conference in Tanzania to award this year’s winner of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Prize – an annual award that is given to African heads of state who rule wisely and hand over power to elected successors.  The Foundation though could not agree on a worthy recipient of the prize.

So instead of highlighting a success story, he chastised the leadership in Africa: ”We are poor, we are hungry, we are going without…Something is drastically wrong. I think we have the right to ask our leaders: are they really serious?”  This gripping analysis does not need much further commentary.  The daily exploits of leaders like Omar al-Bashir in Sudan and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe against their people are well known.  Likewise, the daily hardships imposed on people throughout the continent by more subtle forms of political repression, corruption, and state decay are also well documented.  But what of the issue of state size and Ibrahim’s call for greater political and economic integration?

Mwangi Kimenyi at Brookings recently wrote an interesting post about “Africa’s (Large)⁴ Problem.” On the issue of state size, he states that small states are generally performing remarkably better than large states that are generally associated with weak governance.  Specifically, he finds that many “African countries are characterized by the quadruple problem of ‘largeness’ that seems to affect governance.”  The four problems that lead to a “fairly messy situation” are large geographical size, population, population diversity and the abundance of natural resources.  To make his case he uses Sudan and Nigeria as examples:

Consider some of the poor performers in terms of governance: Sudan has a land mass of 2.5 million square kilometers—over 25 percent of the area of United States. The country shares borders eight countries. Although not that large in terms of population (about 40 million), the country is richly endowed with natural resources, primarily oil, and has over 100 ethnic groups and a complex North-South-Muslim-Christian divide. Nigeria is smaller in geographical size than the very large Sudan, but still equal in land mass to the combined size of California, Nevada and Oregon. And Nigeria has a population of about 150 million and is home to over 250 ethnic groups and large oil reserves. The DRC is the third largest country in Africa, shares borders with nine countries, has a very diverse population of close to 60 million, and is well endowed with many natural resources.

And then concludes:

If I am correct that size does matter, and given that all the dimensions of size discussed are not subject to policy manipulation, then it seems rather futile to talk about improving governance in many of the African states without significant restructuring of the state. True, establishment of anticorruption agencies, reforming judiciary and other such reforms might help deal with the problem of governance to some degree, but it seems that such reforms are unlikely to deal with core sources of state weaknesses.

At first glance, Kimenyi’s bleak reading of the problem of governance seems to undercut Ibrahim’s prescription of a solution.  States cannot begin to discuss political and economic integration across the continent until the large states address the plethora of interlocking problems within their countries. Pointing to solutions, Kimenyi suggests a highly decentralized federal system for many countries and points to Ethiopia’s federal system and the autonomy granted to South Sudan as examples.

Given that Ibrahim began his foundation to evaluate countries’ progress in dealing with domestic governance, he would certainly not disagree that reform must begin at home.  Perhaps he then should have stated – and maybe he did but the media only picked up on these new comments – that, despite their recent successes, smaller African states will be stifled in their development until their larger and more complex neighbors take comprehensive steps toward political and economic reform.  Think of the possibilities if Sudan, for example, were an engine of growth for its nine neighbors and not a state on the verge of collapse and failure?

The three other panelists and I had a really interesting conversation on the issue for about an hour.   We discussed the various ways that the G-2o countries can collectively support peace and political reform in Sudan.  I specifically drew attention to the possible use by the United States and other partners of an internationally-brokered  debt relief package for Sudan as innovative new leverage point with the regime in Khartoum.  If President Bashir and the National Congress Party truly commit to peace, then debt relief should be on the table.  But if they continue to obstruct peace and commit grave human rights abuses, their recent appeals to the international community for relief from their burdensome $34 billion in debt should be roundly ignored.  I will be blogging more on this topic tomorrow.

Until then, you can watch a webcasting of the discussion here.