Coastal - Interior development issues

From The Enduring Malformation of West Africa by Abel Gaiya.  The subheading is Why Economics Alone Cannot Explain West Africa’s Slow Development.  

Many West African countries have disparities between their northern and southern regions that conventional economic literature can neither explain nor solve. Across West Africa, there is a growing case for thinking about these shared disparities from a regional lens. 

West African scholars and politicians had high hopes for their region at independence. Even before this, in 1927 Ladipo Solanke had published United West Africa or Africa at the Bar of the Family of Nations, in which he argued that:

It took the white race a thousand years to arrive at their present level of advance: it took the Japanese, a Mongol race, 50 years to catch up with the white race, there is no reason why we West Africans, a Negro race, should not catch up with the Aryans and the Mongols in one quarter of a century.

Sadly, this prediction woefully failed. Instead, West Africa has gone over 60 years without the development Solanke envisioned, and Nigeria, the ‘giant of Africa’, ranks high on state fragility and features one of the highest poverty rates in the world.

We should not be too critical of the lofty dreams optimistic Africanist nationalists, economic liberals, dependency theorists and socialists had decades ago. It is only from the 1990s that the broader implications of West African (and African) development challenges have manifested empirically, in persistent poverty, greater difficulty in fostering growth-enhancing national political systems, the persistence of low intra-regional official trade and weak economic integration, high levels of parallel trade and violent extremism and droughts across the Sahel and Sahara.

[snip]

Malformation is not inconsequential. That the Liptako-Gourma area (at the intersection of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso) and the Lake Chad Basin (at the intersection of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon) form ‘the two main epicentres of transnational violence’ in West Africa is not a coincidence. The epicentres of West Africa’s malformation are Nigeria and Mali because they are the West African countries where the reversal between northern and southern regions have been most salient.

Analysts are realizing that relatively successful counter-insurgency efforts in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger risk pushing terrorists’ ‘territorial expansion towards the Gulf of Guinea countries and their desire to extend their influence beyond Sahelian countries’, especially northern Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, and also Ghana.

Unfortunately, coastal-hinterland disparities are often persistent. It might not be that much of a problem for regions with strong state capacity, undergoing widespread development and characterized by sufficient inland navigable waterways which connect coastal spaces with distant interiors. This applies, for instance, to China which has experimented with taking inland the urbanization strategy successful in the leading coastal areas in the 1980s and 1990s, in order to enhance interregional equality.

This is not the case for Africa, however, since Africa is the continent with the lowest number of inland navigable rivers relative to continental size and holds the highest number of people living in landlocked countries. Solving West Africa’s crisis and addressing its spatial inequalities requires much more than conventional economic analysis, deployment of the ‘good governance’ literature and simple arguments to turn towards a population-centric and development-oriented counter-insurgency approach. ‘Good governance’ analysis must be replaced by that of ‘developmental governance’ and West Africans must analyse their countries’ problems from a more regional lens.

Jered Diamond discussed much of this in Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he lays out the significant impact of geography on patterns of development.  That Africa has few significant coastal ports and major rivers which are not navigable far from the coast, obviously raises transportation costs with all sorts of knock-on effects.  

I don't buy Gaiya's overall argument primarily because it is unclear to me what exactly is the alternative to present circumstances.  I don't know what 'developmental governance' means.  

I accept that he might be, indeed probably is correct, that there is a real issue between concentrated coastal development divorced from interior development.  A national transportation infrastructure plan covering rail, highways and airports might help but would be substantially dependent on the contextual economic opportunities.  And if those opportunities don't exist?  Well, whats the alternative?

But it is worth keeping in mind.  And my impression is that while China has been very mindful of spreading growth across the whole nation, it still has been most concentrated at the most accessible locations, primarily coastal.