J. Peter Pham’s lecture at Christianity & National Security 2023.

J. Peter Pham discusses the demographic, economic, and spiritual growth of African countries. The following is a transcript of the lecture.

Mark Tooley: Well, I hope you had a good evening, and we have a full day ahead that you’re going to enjoy a great deal. Our first speaker is Ambassador Peter Pham, who has had a distinguished diplomatic career and lives here in Washington, D.C. He’s an active Episcopalian, and we were very grateful that he spoke at a conference on Anglican political theology that we hosted here in Washington last year, providing profound insights on what the Anglican tradition brings to public policy and statecraft. I believe he may touch on some of those themes in his talk this morning, but we’ll find out. So, Ambassador Pham, thanks for joining us.

J. Peter Pham: Thank you, Mark, and thanks for the invitation and opportunity to be here this morning. I was just about to quip that this is looking like church, but then they filled it up. In my church, the front rows are usually empty, and people start sitting from the back, with the most contested seats farthest from the front.

My time is brief, but I thought it would be useful to give a slightly different approach, which I told Mark I entitled my remarks “Mission Africa: The Stakes in the 21st Century’s Continent of Hope.” I’ve had the blessing in my life to work on an area I’ve been passionate about since before I knew enough to realize what I was passionate about, and that’s the continent of Africa. I’ve been very blessed to spend my career working on that as a political scientist, diplomat, and increasingly on the corporate side.

That may seem like an odd fascination, and my parents certainly wondered about me in my career choices. In fact, I think for a long time they worried whether I was going to be able to support myself being passionate about what seemed to them to be a hopeless continent, as one famous cover of The Economist had about a quarter of a century ago. But I think increasingly it is the continent of hope for the 21st century. Why is it strategic? Why am I talking about it at a conference focusing on realism, Christian realism, and national security? I’d like to make five points about why this is an important topic and why perhaps we should focus more on it at a strategic level, and then delve a little into why, as believers, as followers of Jesus, as Christians, we ought to be interested.

First, on a strategic level, if we think strategically, and I know my good friend Elbridge Colby was here yesterday, the focus on priorities… First, the sheer diplomatic weight of Africa. It’s the largest block in any international organization, 54 votes, and they often vote as a block. There are various assumptions for that, and we can get into that if you want, but that’s a solid block representing almost 30% of the votes in most international organizations, including the United Nations’ General Assembly.

Second, there’s a demographic shift going on. By 2050, which isn’t far away now, hopefully, I will be retired, but especially the young people in the room, I address myself to you. You’ll be well into your careers, perhaps at the apex of your careers by 2050. One in four working-age persons on this planet is going to be an African. One in four. It’s the youngest continent on the planet. The median age currently is about 19. Median, not average. So it’s going to be the youngest, a motor for economic growth, or a potential security challenge.

Those numbers… if you think of Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, currently the population is about 200 million. By the latter part of the century, by which time I will either be retired or hopefully, by God’s grace, off to a better place, there will be 400 million Nigerians. By the end of this century, Nigeria will be the third most populous country on the planet. But it’s not just sheer numbers. It’s not just the youth, but where they’re located. Africa is also the fastest urbanizing region in the world, and with that comes people living together. Infrastructure and other costs go down. Economists call it agglomeration effects, but it also means that there are security challenges of people living together. Famine can happen, and it’s tragic in rural areas but generally stays there. Hunger in cities leads to instability, riots, and all sorts of other effects.

An example… The city of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country I did a lot of work on in the last administration, currently has in an area the size of a typical American sprawl midsize city – I was just in Omaha, and it was perfect because the municipal boundaries are virtually the same area. Omaha has 487,000 people in 156 square miles. Kinshasa has 16.5 million.

Third thing: economic significance. We usually don’t think of Africa as economically significant, but in the decade leading up to the pandemic, seven of the twenty fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic, five of the top ten fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa. And it’s not just commodities. It’s all sorts of things, and this is a market opportunity for our business, American business.

And with that economy comes the adoption of technology. Again, something counterintuitive, we usually don’t think of Africa as a technological innovator, but in certain financial settings, it is. For example, more of Africa’s economies move by mobile money than any other place in the world. I laugh every time my bank sends me a thing to have me sign up for mobile payments directly without using cards and all those other things, much less cash. I laugh because to them it’s the latest and greatest thing. For Africans, it’s something that’s more than a decade old. In Kenya, a quarter of the economy moves by M-Pesa payment system, developed and used by Safaricom, the leading mobile phone provider in that country.

Fourth, critical materials and resources. Just a few data points, and one can throw lots out there, but I just want to throw a few to tease it out. Cobalt is absolutely necessary for all sorts of high-tech functions, specifically with electric vehicles. Now, whatever one thinks of Mr. Musk and Tesla, whatever one thinks of environmental issues, whatever one thinks of the practicality of it, the fact is, electric vehicles and all sorts of renewable energy works are there. Can’t ignore them, and whatever technologies have yet to be discovered. Cobalt… 70% of the world’s cobalt is produced in one country: The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Another data point: Copper. Without copper, we don’t have electric wiring. Without electric wiring, this green revolution isn’t going anywhere. The International Energy Agency, which is an umbrella group that was established after the Arab Oil Embargo of the early 1970s to monitor energy and energy usage and try to coordinate in some fashion, issued a report a week ago estimating that, to achieve the energy goals that the United States, the European Union, and other countries have pledged to achieve by 2050, whatever one thinks of them, to achieve those somewhat minimalistic energy goals, one has to add 50 million miles of electric cabling on the planet between now and 2040.

Which of you, wondering what 50 million miles of cabling… That’s equal to all the electric wiring and cabling that exists currently on the planet. We have to double that, and that can’t be done without copper. And how are we without sufficient copper? Since, especially in our country, we don’t care. We’ve made the political choice, or at least, certain people have made the political choice that we’re not going to mine it here.

In fact, last year, Congo shot up to be the world’s second-largest producer of copper, and then there are all sorts of other esoteric minerals. Unfortunately for us, and this is a challenge, and I tie this back to my friend Elbridge Colby’s talk yesterday, most of the processing and mining is currently done by China. Seventeen of the eighteen cobalt mines in the DRC are operated by China. And if you’ll forgive me a little bit of political commentary on the side, including the biggest one, the Metalkol mine, which was a title passed to a Chinese-state-owned company through the good services of a certain Mr. Hunter Biden, and that’s in the New York Times.

Finally, security concerns. Not just jihadism and the crisis of state legitimacy and the coups you’ve heard about, but geopolitical competition. Our geopolitical competitors, China, Russia, have upped their game in Africa. Regional competitors or powers, however, you want to look at Turkey, the Gulf Arab states have likewise upped their game, and the former colonial powers – the UK, France – have increasingly, our allies there have increasingly, been pushed off the continent, especially the French who, this week, are being kicked out of Niger. Now, all those reasons for why this topic, I think, is important and deserves more on a strategic level, more consideration.

But beyond that, and I think this is where I can address at this conference, Africa is also a land of opportunity. Not just on the geopolitical, geoeconomic level, but also on the level of believers. Although Christianity has a very old history on the African continent, dating back to the earliest days in the book of Acts, Philip and the conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch and his conversation, back to New Testament times, of course, Alexandria and Egypt was a center of Christianity in the early days from St. Mark’s arrival there all the way through to the theological, Christological controversies of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries.

And of course, Ethiopia, one of the oldest Christian countries in the world. But yet, in 1900, there were 7 million Christians on the African continent, 7 million. Roughly 9% of the population. The last year for which we have relatively accurate data – there are some estimates, but really accurate counting – 2020, there were 470 million Christians on the continent. Roughly 57% of the population. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Christians in Africa represent roughly a quarter of all Christians on our planet. And while religiosity is often treated as a static character on the African continent, what’s been very interesting to monitor as a phenomenon and that’s largely underreported, is the number of Muslims on the African continent who convert to Christianity… Just to cite one example: Uganda. The best sociological, anthropological data says, then Ugandan long-term data, roughly one-third of those born and raised Muslim at some point in their life, midlife, later in life, become Christian. And that’s an overlooked factor when we talk about religious dynamics.

Some of you, although I look around the faces, some may be a little young for this… But some of us will remember 2014, and the schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok in Northeastern Nigeria. And one largely overlooked fact, and I berate the media for failing to point this out with the exception, by the way, of Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw of the Wall Street Journal, who wrote an excellent book on the subject… most of the media didn’t bat an eye and kept repeating the same nostrums that Northern Nigeria is Muslim, Southern Nigeria is Christian, and the country is evenly divided. Drew and Joe pointed out that if that was true, then a couple of days after the kidnapping, the jihadists wouldn’t have needed to have converted those girls to Islam. Forced conversion. If they were already Muslim, and the fact is, as Drew and Joe point out in their excellent book, most of them were actually, although they were in the North, Christian, and it was a Christian village that they were kidnapped from.

The growth of Christianity in Nigeria, by the way, spiritually in Africa… This is why I say it’s a land of mission. It’s a much more intense sociological experience than other places. One-third of Africans polled, irrespective of where, have witnessed a healing or an exorcism. Sixty-one percent of Christians in Africa expect Jesus to return in their lifetimes. On the other side of the ledger, 52% of Muslims on the continent expect the Khalifa to be restored in their lifetimes.

Nigeria, I said I’d return to that, some interesting statistics to throw out there about why this is strategic, why it ought to be of concern to us… Last year, Open Door’s World Watch, which is an excellent survey for those who don’t know it on Christian persecution around the globe… 90% of the Christians murdered for their faith in the world last year were in one country: Nigeria. 5,621 Christians were killed for their faith between October 1, 2021, and September 30, 2022. In a few months, we’ll have the figures for last year. Of those 5,621 fellow believers, 5,400 were in Nigeria, making Nigeria arguably the most dangerous place on the planet to follow Jesus.

Nigeria also ranked number one in homes and businesses attacked for faith-based reasons, and where it came in second is hardly comforting. Number two in attacks on houses of worship, number one being China, of course. So some sobering statistics. On one hand, we have Africa as a strategic stake, but above and beyond the purely worldly stakes, those of us who profess belief in Jesus and the faith also have the consideration of the religiosity and persecution of fellow believers.

So there’s a lot at stake. And I’ll close with one final comment, and that is in the foreign policy of the current U.S. administration, there has been an increasing attack, I would argue, on the religious faith and sensibilities of our African friends. Just this week, the U.S. State Department issued a business advisory against doing business in Uganda, telling American businesses and investors that they risk reputational harm by doing business in a country that, according to the U.S. State Department, oppresses LGBTQ+ individuals.

Now, whether the legislation recently signed into law in Uganda is prudent, the virtue of prudence, that I think people can debate… But to single out Uganda as a place where warnings should be done in business when no such warnings have been issued in other places, and I would note places like Iran where I don’t think the diversity agenda fares much better, is somewhat hypocritical. But I think it does signal something. So with that, let me just stop with one last word for you, which is the importance of this continent. It’s a passion of mine, I know, and maybe eccentric, but I would argue, especially for the young people in the room, full of challenge and arguably, the most strategic competition is being engaged. Our foes on every side have already figured this out, and it’s time for us to wake up.

Thank you very much. Okay. First hand up…

Q&A:

Question: Thank you very much. My name is Elizabeth Nala; I’m from Taylor University. You mentioned at the beginning of your talk, these pre-pandemic numbers having to do specifically with the economy. How did the COVID pandemic impact Africa?

Answer: It certainly stopped a lot of the economic growth. The number of fatalities, and this is an interesting one, and I’m not a scientist, a biological scientist, so I’m not going to speak to why the numbers were certainly nowhere near what those who were panicking thought they would be. Now whether that is because of inborn immunity, that needs to be studied, but certainly, the death tolls are nowhere near the numbers that one would have anticipated for an area that doesn’t have the health infrastructure or the ability to enforce the type of draconian measures that we did in our own country. And I think that’s something people are going to have to figure out why. And I’m not an epidemiologist, so I’ll wait for the numbers to be crunched and the data to be collected. It remains to be seen why that was.

So it didn’t suffer the consequence, but the overall decline in trade, the overall decline in demand for resources certainly negatively affected the economies. But many of them have also bounced back relatively rapidly. So we’ll see. I don’t like statistics in one year. That’s why I use the statistics of over a decade. Any one year you can have a blip. You know, a place like South Sudan can have the fastest growth in the world because the year before they were in the middle of a civil war. Their economy plummeted down to next to nothing, so you’re going to have huge growth if you stop fighting for a bit. But that’s not… you have to look over a certain period of time.

Okay. So first the gentleman in the far back, yeah, the far back, in the back row. Oh.

Question: Thank you very much. Tobias with Brownstein. Professor Pham, say that I do agree with you that Africa is important and it is probably most important since it has been since the 1960s. But what exactly should we do? Should we charter private companies to buy land and mine in Congo? Should we do it in Nigeria? What exactly should our proper response be to maintain our interests in the Sub-Saharan Africa region?

Answer: One, we need a strategy. And I would argue that… We had one not without its flaws, but we had one in the last administration. And I don’t say that because I wrote most of it, but a strategy has to have a couple of things. One, a proper strategy, and I’m sure some of the speakers yesterday spoke about this… You have to identify your objectives, what it is you’re trying to achieve. You have to identify what means you have, what resources you have to achieve those objectives. And then you’ve got to connect those with a plan of how to go about it. One to the other, and that’s a proper strategy. Sounds very elementary.

The other thing about it is you often can’t put it out there, because obviously, certain things can’t be said for either security reasons or simply diplomatic reasons. The last administration’s strategy was, and remains, by the way, classified. And the reason it was classified was specifically… you can’t signal everything in public. You have certain broad outlines, but you can’t say “these are our priorities one, two, three, four, five,” because that gives it all away. And not to mention, if you list “these are our priority countries,” if you list five priorities, there are going to be 49 very angry people at the very least. So it had to be classified. The current administration’s so-called strategy document on Africa is entirely open. They published it, so you can get it on the White House website. Well, you can’t list priorities because someone’s going to be offended. So you list all sorts of things. It’s a list of things that, many of which are unobjectionable, but you can’t do everything. The good Lord can, but we creatures have limited means.

And so you have to make those decisions. A proper strategy, one to recognize the importance of the private sector. Through administrations, Democrat and Republican, foreign assistance to Africa, what do you think of foreign assistance has been relatively constant fluctuating, given our economic cycle, budget cycles… But over the last 15 years, roughly between 6.5 billion and 7.5 billion a year in government foreign assistance to Africa. Seventy-five percent of which, by the way, is eaten up by health-related expenses. The President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and other programs, with 25% left for everything else: democracy promotion, governance issues, everything else.

Last year, the private sector, the American private sector alone, invested in Africa about 46.2 billion. So it’s clearly the private sector that’s going to drive this, not government money. Government money can, in some circumstances, be leveraged, but certainly has its limits. And then we have to be thinking about it strategically. We’re in an era where I think the lack of attention to Africa is almost as criminally negligent on the part of our political leaders as it would have been if in the 1970s, and we did have a little episode of this, we decided to turn our back and not pay any attention to the Middle East.

And of course, we had that little adventure through history during the, except for the Israel-Egypt peace, during the Carter administration and the Iran hostage crisis and everything else. We’re at the same type of inflection point with regard to the African continent, and we need to pay attention. But thank you for your question.

Question: Thank you, Dr. Pham. So I’ve kind of got a three-part question, but it all goes together. So you talked a lot about economic development in Africa, but I was wondering if there was a certain country that you saw as a democratic leader, and also, I was wondering what evidence you would use to justify because there have been a lot of coups, and you know, there are a lot of different experiences in Africa. So I don’t want to oversimplify, but I was just wondering what you thought would be a model of democracy in Africa. And also, the other part of the question, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism came to mind during your talk because I was wondering if, like, one of the things Weber suggests is that Christian ethics aligns with a lot of other ethical ideas that align with capitalism, and whether you consider democracy to be an ethic as well? So I was wondering if you can see Christianity playing a role in a cultural shift that would move a certain country toward democracy, if Christianity has a role in promoting democracy in Africa?

Answer: Thanks for your question. First, let me start with your question on… We’re very quick to condemn coups, and I certainly am not an advocate for coups, but that being said, the presupposition is that what came before the coups was democratic or legitimate, and that’s often either superficial reporting or simply not true. A good example is a country I know very well. I, in fact, lived in my youth, Guinea, the Republic of Guinea. Guinea had a very tragic history. It was the first country to break free of France, but it followed a Marxist ideologue who never failed to make the wrong choice when he had an opportunity. After they got independence from France, Eisenhower reached out, and he rebuffed Eisenhower and went with the Soviet Union. Then, when the Soviet Union had its schism with Communist China, he followed Communist China. Long story short, that first Sekou Toure, the inventive leader, finally when he died, he died at the Cleveland Clinic because the medical facilities in his country that he ran weren’t sufficient, so he had the luxury of going to the Cleveland Clinic. He was followed by Louis Lansana who was his hangman, literally hangman.

Lansana was an interesting character. Every day he went to Sekou Toure’s house. Sekou Toure had a calendar on his wall, and it was like one of those one-sheet-a-day calendars. At the end of the day, he would tear off the page and on the back in pencil would write down the names of the people to be taken into custody and executed that night for whatever alleged reasons in his mind, and they would be hung from the Castro Bridge. The name of the bridge itself says something about Sekou. Toward the end of Sekou Toure’s life, Lansana, his hangman, decided that, figured out that no one was actually checking if he added a few names to the list every night. And so, he systematically eliminated anyone who might be a rival. So when Sekou Toure went off to eternal judgment, all of Lansana’s rivals had been strung up at one point or another in the preceding several years, so he got the presidency and kept it until his death in 2008. Finally, there were elections in 2010, and the reason I’m going into details is to illustrate this point. The elections in 2010 for me… the results were fixed, and fixed by the former colonial power in an attempt to get back in. In the first round, the leading candidate was a former prime minister, Cellou Diallo, who got 42% of the vote. Second place was a left-wing oppositionist who’d been in exile and spent most of his time in cafes on the left bank in Paris, Alpha Conde, who got 17%, so it had to go to a runoff. In the runoff, candidates three and four, who between the two of them had 20% of the vote, endorsed the first… they thought they knew which way the thing was going so they endorsed the first-place finisher.

So even presuming for the sake of argument that they could… those two characters, Cidya Toure, and… I forget the name of the fourth guy, could only get half their followers to vote the way they wanted, that alone would have put Ceillu Diallo over the finish line. And yet, in a strange turn of events, somehow the first-place finisher lost votes despite the endorsements in the second round, and Alpha Conde was declared the winner in 2010 and invited to the White House under President Obama as an example of the new democratic Africa. In 2015, he runs for reelection, a fiasco of all sorts of problems with it… and wins, in quotation marks, re-election. In 2020, he changes the Constitution to get rid of the term limits and wins a landslide. So fast forward to September 5th, 2021, a military group overthrew him. My point being, yes, that was a military coup, but was what came before a democratic regime? I would argue that no, it was actually an illegitimate government. That was never a democracy. It held elections with pre-cooked results, and so when you give people no chance to vote out or vote you in, for that matter, and someone throws you out, is that necessarily the same thing as the overthrow of a democratically, a truly democratically elected government?

And I think these are some of the questions that one needs to ask. I’m not justifying coups, but I do think we need to look at what comes before that. I think much more important is your other question, which is: Is there something… and I would agree with you and Weber to a certain extent, in the fact that I think there is something in Christianity: the respect for the individual, the idea of grace, and a whole bunch of other things that predispose a country to both a democratic transition and to sustaining that afterward. And in fact, if we look at the countries around Africa that have, without… with whatever flaws they have, been able to more or less avoid military coups, many of them have a strong, if not a Christian majority, a strong Christian presence, or in some cases even where it’s overwhelmingly Muslim, Senegal being a good example, where a strong ethos… Despite the numbers in Senegal, the Christian population is possibly 10%, but the first president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, who governed the country and was the first African leader to step down and retire peacefully when he stepped out in 1980, was himself a Christian in a Muslim country and established a pattern that to now has prevailed. The country’s never had a military coup, so I think there is something there. You can look at other places where the economy’s more… in Kenya, again, a very strong Christian… there’s a very strong Muslim community, but also imprinted certainly with Christianity and even places that are far from perfect… good example being South Africa, the long-standing Christian ethos that enabled certain things… the… the… Whatever one thinks of the current government, I don’t think very much of it, but the fact that they were able to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after years of apartheid was based upon a Christian understanding of confession, forgiveness, and redemption… That doesn’t make sense without that matrix, I think.

Question: Good morning. My name is Kendrick, from Canyon University. You talked a lot about the future and prosperity of African countries, Nigeria specifically. I wanted to talk about the confidence of their government. They are ranked very low in confidence and high in corruption, and I wanted to hear your thoughts on how we combat that and how we can see that country moving forward.

Answer: Well, if you’d asked me that question three and a half months ago, I would have said the new government was off to a good start, and this is the glass half empty or glass half full. On one hand, President Bola Tinubu, who took over, has achieved in his first 100 days a whole bunch of changes that had eluded his predecessors. One, he’s allowed the Naira to float, the currency to float, instead of having fixed exchange rates, which were artificially set and provided all sorts of arbitrage opportunities for the politically connected but didn’t serve the country’s economy. Great. He also got rid of the fuel subsidy, which was a vast suck-hole for government expenditures and again didn’t really benefit people. So two major achievements that eluded his predecessors, and he did that in the first 100 days. Unfortunately, more recently, in diplomacy you learn very quickly if you’re going to be successful, never make a promise or threat that you aren’t able and willing to carry out. And they made all sorts of threats about intervening in Niger after the coup that frankly, if he’d consulted a minimally competent military planner, they would have told him this is impossible. Instead, he kind of charged ahead and now they’ve painted themselves into a corner and don’t know how to climb down. However, he did achieve, by threatening that military intervention, uniting everyone, so I guess he achieved national unity except it was against him. The leading Muslim organization in the country, the NSCIA, spoke out against it. The Roman Catholic Bishops had a very strong statement against it. And most recently, the Anglican Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Nigeria came out against it. So he’s now managed to unite the three largest religious groups in the country against him. So in that sense, he’s achieved national unity. I don’t think in the way he intended. He also is going to be a one… and I’ll make a prediction… one-term president. The man is not his claimed age. He claims to be 70, which is rather miraculous and precocious of him, considering several years ago, it’s all over social media, his daughter had her 60th birthday. Some precocious young man, quite clearly, but clearly he’s… you know, one can do the math as to what a more likely… is now, of course, we Americans should be a little more humble and not think too much about age as presidents since people can point out some embarrassing things to us.

So, we have time for one more. One more, okay. The young lady midway through the room.

Question: Hi. My name is Lindsay Heiser, I’m from Messiah University. My question is just, what do you think is going to happen moving forward for the Christians in Africa? Do you think the numbers are going to increase with the death rates decrease? And how would America be able to step in and help moving forward?

Answer: I think the Church is on a trajectory of growth. This is… it’s the same pattern in the Church throughout the ages. Tertullian wrote about this in the third century. The blood of Christians is the seed of the Church. Where there’s a powerful witness, there’s growth. How Americans react… one is by calling spades spades. In the last administration, we had a Secretary of State who took these issues very seriously and designated countries, including where Christians were, like Nigeria, where 90% of the world’s martyrs are being produced, and labeled that a country of concern. The current administration delisted Nigeria from that concern. The listing was so irregular that even its appointees to the International Religious Freedom Commission – a body established by its own appointees – questioned in their annual report last year how they came about that decision because no one could point to any data of significant improvement. So I think we have to be candid about that. For all the reasons we should pay attention to the minerals, the economics, the demographics, and all that… as believers, it’s incumbent upon us to have a little bit of solidarity with our brothers and sisters.

So, thank you.