Why income and wealth inequality matter, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Whichever answer you prefer to the question with which this piece opens, one thread runs through these antipodean explanations. It is that before, and after independence, African societies were some of the most unequal anywhere in the world. The causes of this were numerous. Colonial rule was far from invested in questions of general economic efficiency. It not only created exclaves of the economy where participating natives were richer than excluded ones. It also created educational divides. The local elite bred from these processes inherited the new states. And from the collectivisation of rural agriculture, through the expropriation of smallholder farmers’ profits by state-controlled marketing boards, to the prioritisation of cash crops production over subsistence farms’ output, the policies of the newly independent states simply exacerbated their societies’ existing cleavages.