As we were celebrating Freedom Day over the long weekend in typically South African fashion, over a braai and some decent red wine, I had the opportunity to have a discussion with a gentleman who I had just met, on the crucial link between democracy and development which left me with much food for thought.

We, in the developing world have grown accustomed to the developed world preaching to us the virtues of democracy, political rights and a free market system as the best way to ensure economic growth and a better quality of life for citizens within a modern nation-state. To those in the West it appears that economic success and liberal democracy are seen as interlinked, with the former being seen as a direct result of the latter.

But how true is this? Does the Chinese economic miracle which is a direct result of a state-led economic development programme, led by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms not show us that a state need not necessarily be democratic in the liberal sense of the word nor does a society have to be open in order to produce the kind of economic growth that improves quality of life and standards of living within a nation?

What of the example of Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, a country that is highly celebrated even by the West when it comes to developmental matters, yet by all accounts it is an autocratic state where individual freedoms are subjected to the greater agenda of nation-building. These two examples seem to show that an autocratic state is capable of channelling and directing resources in a manner that produces the economic growth that is necessary to improve people’s lives.

All of these thoughts were inspired by this gentleman that I met at this braai over the long weekend, who was lamenting the fact that our democracy in South Africa makes it more difficult to take critical decisions that can help develop our country. His argument was that because our democracy requires consultation, consensus building and public participation, often public decision-making is a long, drawn out process that causes unnecessary delays which curtails our developmental agenda.

So, it would appear that democracy and development are not as interlinked and interdependent as the developed world would like to have us believe. Instead, what seems to matter more than the type of political system that a country embraces is: enhanced state capacity and efficiency in providing or delivering public goods, a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship being cultivated and inculcated within a society, improving the ease of doing business within a society and reducing the cost of doing business as they have managed to do so successfully in Rwanda, society being mobilised and galvanised under one developmental agenda, A concerted and targeted focus on human capital development. These are just some of the critical success factors that seem to be more important for development than what political system a country subscribes to.

The question that was asked is as follows: given a choice between political rights and better living conditions as well as a better quality of life, what would the people prefer? Amilcar Cabral seems to answer this question very well in his now clichéd quote, “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children.”

The people are not interested in political ideologies and systems per se, what they want more than anything is a better life, better lived and material conditions. For that, they are willing to make whatever sacrifices necessary, even if it means reduced individual freedoms.

So of course the issue is not about a choice between democracy and development, as if the two are mutually exclusive, but rather whether the one, democracy, is a necessary condition for the other, development as the developed world has led us to believe.

In fact, it may even be more accurate to state that democracy itself is not a pre-requisite for development, but rather a by-product of development as societies that are developing often experience the phenomenon of a growing middle class, and it is that middle class which as it becomes more affluent begins to push boundaries seeking for greater civil liberties instead of being focussed on trying to meet level one and two needs according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as most countries that fall under the developing world are currently experiencing.

Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government. He is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.