The ongoing violence in the Central African Republic has taken a devastating toll on its economy. While that may not come as a surprise, its GDP has been hit harder than all but the most protracted civil conflicts in post-independence, sub-Saharan Africa.
Using World Bank data, GDP growth, current and projected, during the civil wars in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola, each with significant drops during each conflict’s infancy or crescendo, has been analyzed.
Prior to the Seleka-led uprising and coup, the Central African economy was actually growing, incrementally. By 2009, growth was at about 9%, plateauing close to 7% just before the outbreak of hostilities. Foreign direct investment had dropped after a surge under Bozize, but remained strong until 2012.
But the unraveling of the state has caused an economic collapse. By 2013, GDP dropped to -18%, one of the largest free falls in the history of African conflict, where data is readily available. The World Bank, for example, has absolutely no data on Somalia. Forecasts show an almost instant, steep recovery, but as the Central African Republic descends further into anarchy, the predictive economic prospect models can’t hold sway.
To put the C.A.R.’s economic floundering into perspective, the Ivorian civil war between 2002 and 2007, which divided the country in half between the rebel-held north and the government-controlled south, caused the economy to falter only slightly. At its worst, the Ivorian GDP dropped to roughly -2% during the entirety of the conflict. It only fell to -4.5% when Laurent Gbagbo refused to give up power, bringing the country to the brink of another civil war in 2011.
Likewise in Mali, where battle-hardened Tuaregs, some who had served as mercenaries for Gaddafi, pursued their perennial separatist claim to the northern Malian stretch of the Sahel, known as Azawad, with an urgent aggression. Mali’s economic output decreased 7% to -1.2%.
The only conflicts that compare are the horrific and protracted civil wars of Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The Biafran War, Nigeria’s devastating civil war of the late 1960’s, caused the GDP to drop to -16%.
During the beginning of the brutality in Sierra Leone, GDP plummeted to almost -19%, and waxed and waned until the end of hostilities in 2002, when economic growth immediately shot up to almost %27.
The consecutive Liberian civil wars between 1989 – 2003, notorious for its ineffable atrocity, saw a -50% drop — a total economic collapse.
For the conflict dubbed “Africa’s World War,” where over two million lives have been lost, the D.R.C.’s economic misfortunes have still never reached its neighbor’s levels.
And, lastly, Angola, which fought a war of independence and a consequent brutal civil war between 1961 and 2002, did indeed experience a -25% drop in GDP in 1993, the result of United Nations-imposed sanctions on the ruling faction, UNITA. Indeed, no data exists prior to the mid-1980’s.
It’s also worth noting that during all the conflicts analyzed here, foreign direct investment inflows almost never severely deviate from set patterns. In Liberia’s case, FDI was essentially non-existent in the country during a latter stage of the civil war, but at its onset, investment spiked just as the economy nosedived.
There is still, without doubt, money to be made during the course of conflict, especially those in mineral-rich countries.
The severity of civil conflict should, firstly, always, be assessed by the loss of life. But assessment through an economic prism shows, tragically, that the Central African Republic has matched some of the most brutal periods of violence in Africa’s post-colonial history.