Sub‐Saharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability?

Anheier, Helmut K.; Fröhlich, Christian; List, Regina A. Article — Published Version Sub‐Saharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability? Global Policy Provided in Cooperation with: John Wiley & Sons Suggested Citation: Anheier, Helmut K.; Fröhlich, Christian; List, Regina A. (2023) : Sub‐Saharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability?, Global Policy, ISSN 1758-5899, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 14, pp. 124-135, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13283 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/288192 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 124 | Global Policy. 2023;14(Suppl. 4):124–135.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gpol 1 | CONTRADICTORY PATTERNS The Fragile States Index ranks countries by their ability to defend national borders, police their territory and provide public services and economic stability, among other criteria. Of the 31 countries that are classified with a very high, high and alert status of fragility in 2019, 22 are in SubSaharan Africa (Fund for Peace,2019). Only three of the region's countries are ranked as stable (Mauritius) or more stable (Seychelles and Botswana). Africa appears to be illgoverned. Yet, in seeming contradiction, the Berggruen Governance Index (BGI)1 shows for the period 2000– 2019 that governance progress has been made in many African countries, a finding corroborated by the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (Mo Ibrahim Foundation,2020). What is more, a recent report by the International Monetary Fund (Newiak et al.,2022) found numerous instances of improved governance performance across the region. Africa is the world's poorest region, and home to some of the poorest countries worldwide. Yet for SubSaharan Africa as a whole, GDP per capita (constant 2015 US$)2 increased from US$1238 in the year 2000 to $1652 by 2019. Real GDP growth rates averaged 3.5% for that period, lower than Southeast Asia (4.6%) but higher than Latin America's (1%) or Europe's (0.6%) (IMF,2023). So, how do these seemingly contradictory patterns of governance fragility and poverty, on one hand, and improved governance and economic growth, on the other, fit together? The answer is that the countries making up SubSaharan Africa are not only highly diverse in cultural, political and economic terms but also at a level of development that makes them vulnerable and volatile as well as malleable for improvements and opportunities. In this context, it is important to consider that the majority (26) of the region's countries are classified by the World Bank as lowincome, based on an annual per capita income of less than US$1085, 17 are lower middleincome, six are upper middleincome and only one, Seychelles, is considered highincome. Low per capita income makes African populations vulnerable and less resilient to changing conditions, be they natural such as famines and pandemics or economic downturns and political instability. As Acemoglu and Robinson(2019) argue, it is not that less developed countries suffer from extended periods of low growth or even decline. On the contrary, they can grow, as we have seen above, sometimes at high levels and even quickly. However, what holds them back is their frequent inability to withstand economic downturns and crises of many kinds such as to maintain previous improvements. Gains in economic and SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE SubSaharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability? Helmut K.Anheier1,2 | ChristianFröhlich3 | Regina A.List4 Received: 18 August 2023 | Accepted: 22 August 2023 DOI: 10.1111/1758-5899.13283 1UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Los Angeles, California, USA 2Hertie School, Berlin, Germany 3Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany 4Independent Researcher, Hamburg, Germany Correspondence Regina A. List, Hamburg, Germany. Email: [email protected] Funding information Berggruen Institute Abstract The countries of the SubSaharan region have, on average, made significant progress in governance performance, especially in terms of democratic accountability and public goods provision— findings that seem to contradict patterns of state fragility and economic underdevelopment common in the region. This article explores this seeming contradiction and presents in more detail findings from the Berggruen Governance Index regarding the governance performance of five countries, namely Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Lagging state capacity and growing sovereign debt emerge as critical factors, and the article suggests that they may be responsible for the inability of many countries in the region to consolidate gains in governance as well as economic performance. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2023 UCLA Luskin School. Global Policy published by Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. | 125 SUBSAHARAN AFRICA GOVERNANCE governance performance as well as political and social stability are at a greater risk of being lost. Highincome countries especially, but already middleincome countries have more resilience, and, if suffering shocks or experiencing temporary decline, they are more likely to return to precrisis performance levels. What are the origins of this pattern where gains are made and lost? Of course, many analysts have commented on this, and here is not the place for a full presentation of the various explanations and theories (see Zartman's seminal assessment (2008); and more recently, Lancaster & van de Walle,2016; Olorungoba & Falola,2020). Instead, we focus on governance, the role of the state and public administration. Governance systems in Africa have specific characteristics that set them apart from other parts of the Global South (Hyden,2020; Tapscott,2021; VyasDoorgapersad et al.,2019). The first is that domestically, administrative systems were imposed by colonial powers that had little if any roots in the local population.3 They were systems of control and rent extraction first and foremost, and much less about building up state capacities to provide public goods. With independence (mostly in the 1960s), path dependencies set in, as the previous colonial administration system remained largely intact. In addition, a persistent reliance on financial and expert support from former colonial powers and later multilateral agencies like the World Bank meant that the African state— the locus of public administration— is a foreign creation imposed on society without roots in the economy or society. This tends to make its governance capricious and shaped foremost by political battles over how rents and privileges are shared among groups that come together for reasons of consumption rather than production. (Hyden,2020, p. 1) The second characteristic is that, since independence and throughout the Cold War, African governance and public administration systems have been influenced by international powers and pressured to adopt strikingly different ideologies and approaches to accelerate economic development. From the import substitution doctrine and African socialism to structural adjustment programmes and neoliberalism to social democracy and indigenous growth policies— all left their mark on Africa's political systems, and by implication, their public administrations that, typically underfunded yet often overstaffed and lacking both stability and competence, became vulnerable to corruption and predatory elite. As a result, African countries have lacked a wellcoordinated central policymaking and administrative machinery of government with the capacity to set objectives and ensure service delivery consistency (Nhema,2016). In some countries like Nigeria, with its exportoriented oil economy, the weakness of public administration systems is amplified by the resource curse of the Dutch disease, as Zartman(2008) argues.4 A third characteristic shared by most countries in the region is political instability, as demonstrated by the Fragile States Index discussed above. While there are a few exceptions (e.g., Botswana and Mauritius), countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and many others experienced frequent involuntary changes of government, particularly in the decades immediately following independence. Since 1950, there have been 210 coup attempts (Lawler, 2022). Even so, a third wave of democratisation seemed to take hold in the postCold War era, reducing instability into the 2000s, but the 2020s augur increasing volatility, as illustrated by a series of recent coups in the countries of the Sahel region. Given the challenges of relatively low levels of economic development and fragile governments and public administrations, what can we say about the governance performance of SubSaharan African countries for the first two decades of the twentyfirst century, when many countries in the region entered their sixth decade of independence? 2 | GOVERNANCE PERFORMANCE IN SUBSAHARAN AFRICA The BGI data, which covers 32 of the SubSaharan African countries, allows us to shed considerable light on general governance trends in the region, especially in comparison with other world regions.5 SubSaharan African countries as a whole have improved their performance measurably on all three highlevel indices— public goods provision, state capacity and democratic accountability— that make up the Governance Triangle, introduced in Anheier, Lang and Knudsen's article ‘Introducing the Berggruen Governance Index: I. Conceptual and Methodological Framework’ in this special issue. As shown in Figure1, SubSaharan Africa has made greater strides in improving the provision of public goods such as food security, healthcare and clean air than any other region, with its average score for public goods provision rising by 20 points from 24 in 2000 to 44 in 2019. Though some countries like Burkina Faso achieved larger gains (from 8 in 2000 to 35 in 2019) and some like Botswana more modest ones (47– 52), none of the region's countries included in the BGI lost ground over the period. As we will see later, all five of the countries highlighted in this article improved their public goods provision over the period by more than 10 points. Despite this promising news, Figure1 also shows that SubSaharan Africa continues to offer its 126 | ANHEIER et al. populace the lowest level of public goods, just reaching in 2019 the level South Asia had in 2000. Improvement in the region's state capacity since 2000 was noticeable (34 vs. 38 in 2019), but neither remarkable nor uniform across countries. Unlike public goods provision, state capacity did not increase significantly in any world region, as shown in Figure2. The SubSaharan African region's modest rise was led by countries such as Kenya (see below), Liberia and Gambia, which each made gains of at least 15 points over the 2 decades, but brought down by countries such as South Africa and Cameroon that lost 10 points or more. Many countries, including relatively highcapacity states such as Namibia and Senegal, began and ended the period at the same level. By 2019, the region's average for state capacity had just overtaken those of South Asia and Middle East/North Africa. Democratic accountability increased in the SubSaharan Africa region slightly more than state capacity did, with the average score rising from 53 in 2000 to 58 in 2019. This rather positive regional trend runs counter to that occurring in most other world regions, as seen in Figure3. Among the most improved countries are Gambia (from 36 in 2000 to 65 in 2019), Liberia (from 51 to 69) and Sierra Leone (50– 69). While these were improving, several countries tended in the opposite direction, including Botswana (from 78 to 68), Cameroon (45– 39) and Uganda (54– 46). Especially during the 1990s, the ‘third wave’ of democratisation surged in the region. In 1990, only 3 SubSaharan African states (Botswana, The Gambia and Mauritius) were ‘free’ and more than 30 ‘not free’, as measured by Freedom House. A mere decade later, in 2000, nine were categorised as ‘free’, two dozen were ‘partly free’ and only 15 were not (including The Gambia which had fallen back into the ‘not free’ category). At the end of our observation period, 2019, there were still 9 ‘free’, but fewer were ‘partly free’ (21) and more ‘not free’ (19). As we will see later, there are signs that this ‘third wave’ of democratisation is running out of steam. This generally positive pattern of improvement is consistent with the results of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), which also detected a steady rise in overall governance performance in the broader African continent from 2010 to 2018, with a small drop in 2019 (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2020). And like the BGI, the FIGURE 1 Public goods provision in SubSaharan Africa in international comparison. Source: Berggruen Governance Index 2022. | 127 SUBSAHARAN AFRICA GOVERNANCE IIAG found that improvements in public goodsrelated indicators increased more than those relating to state capacity or democratic accountability. Yet, a fundamental conundrum remains: irrespective of higher per capita GDP, what made improvements in public goods provision possible without comparable increases in state capacity? We will investigate this question in the context of the five countries presented below. While differences among the countries exist, the general pattern that prevails seems to indicate that increases in public goods provision as part of total government spending have been financed mostly by a combination of significantly higher government borrowing and somewhat higher tax revenues. Official development assistance played a role, though a minor one, only in Ghana, Kenya and Senegal. There are also indications that personal remittances from abroad, which have grown significantly in many SubSaharan countries since the beginning of the 2000s, may have led to a private substitution of public goods expenditure, thereby relieving fiscal pressures on governments to provide quality education or healthcare (see Desierto,2018). 3 | A CLOSER LOOK AT FIVE COUNTRIES Of course, behind the SubSaharan averages are significant variations in terms of country performance. Since we cannot do justice to the full variety in the space of this article, we offer here brief vignettes of a selection of countries— Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Senegal— highlighting the BGI findings and the opportunities and challenges presented for each. Table1 provides the 2000 and 2019 scores on the three highlevel indices for all five countries, and Figure4 shows trends over the two decades for each individual country. 3.1 | Nigeria Since independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria's administrative system has been plagued by organisational instability and corruption. While trending towards democracy, the country suffered from a brutal civil war (1967– 70), several military coups and periods of dictatorship until 1999. Nigeria is not only by far the most FIGURE 2 State capacity in SubSaharan Africa in international comparison. Source: Berggruen Governance Index 2022. 128 | ANHEIER et al. populous country in Africa6 and one of the most ethnically diverse (with more than 200 ethnic groups) on the African continent, but also the largest economy in SubSaharan Africa. Rich natural resource commodities, mostly crude oil, supported a considerable increase of GDP per capita from US$1462 in 2000 to US$2505 by 2019,7 although inflation has been higher than GDP growth for all but a few years over this 20year span.8 In essence, for the average Nigerian, this has meant economic stagnation at best. In addition, long periods of internal conflict, especially in the country's northern and eastern regions, rampant corruption and mismanagement of its vast oil revenues have undermined Nigeria's governance as well as economic performance. As Table1 shows, Nigeria's BGI public goods provision scores follow the SubSaharan average closely FIGURE 3 Democratic accountability in SubSaharan Africa in international comparison. Source: Berggruen Governance Index 2022. TABLE 1 Public goods provision, state capacity and democratic accountability in five African countries, 2000 and 2019. Country Public goods provision State capacity Democratic accountability 2000 2019 Change 2000 2019 Change 2000 2019 Change Ghana 35 57 +22 37 36 −1 81 77 −4 Kenya 25 53 +28 31 46 +15 56 64 +8 Nigeria 23 43 +20 20 27 +765 66 +1 Senegal 25 46 +21 51 53 +273 78 +5 South Africa 50 63 +13 53 43 −10 82 76 −6 Regional Average 24 44 +20 34 38 +453 58 +5 Source: Berggruen Governance Index 2022. | 129 SUBSAHARAN AFRICA GOVERNANCE and increase from 23 in 2000 to 43 in 2019. As seen in Figure4, this significant improvement from a rather low starting point fluctuates in particular in the first decade of the twentyfirst century, reflecting inconsistent policies resulting from contested government changes and profound ethnic and religious frictions. Though gains were made in life expectancy, which rose from 47 years in 2000 to a stilllow 53 in 2019, and income inequality, which declined over the period,9 both continue to be challenges. After the 2015 elections, public goods provision followed a more consistent positive development path, especially in terms of health and human development. Overall, Nigeria's BGI scores for state capacity remained quite low at around 20 from 2000 to 2010, FIGURE 4 Democratic accountability, state capacity and public goods provision in five African countries, 2000– 2019. Source: Berggruen Governance Index 2022. Democractic accountability Statecapacity Public goods provision Democractic accountability Statecapacity Public goods provision Democractic accountability Statecapacity Public goods provision Democractic accountability Statecapacity Public goods provision Democractic accountability Statecapacity Public goods provision SouthAfrica Nigeria Senegal Ghana Kenya 2000 2005201020152019 2000 2005201020152019 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 130 | ANHEIER et al. well below the SubSaharan average, but like public goods provision scores began to rise in the mid2010s, reaching 27 by 2019. However, the increase in public goods provision was unlikely financed by tax revenue, which actually decreased from 9.2% of GDP in 200010 to 6% in 201911 and remains at the lower end of the average African range (OECD/ATAF/ AUC, 2022). While government gross debt,12 which declined from 57.6% of GDP in 2000 to 7.3% in 2008 in the wake of debt relief programmes to return to 29.2% by 2019, might have contributed, oil revenues were an important, but weakening foundation of government spending until 2011 (15.5% to 22% of GDP), after which rents fell and have remained in the single digits.13 The Nigerian state also received strong backup in public goods provision from diaspora remittances, which increased from US$1.06 billion in 2003 to US$14.64 billion in 2005 and continued to grow to US$23.81 billion in 2019.14 This made Nigeria the sixthlargest remittancereceiving country among lowand middleincome countries (Ratha et al.,2020, p. 28). However, remittances fell sharply during the COVID19 pandemic. The weak state capacity scores reflect two major obstacles in the way of Nigeria's capacity to govern: the endemic corruption of a public administration system fueled by oil revenues, and internal security threats including kidnapping, terrorism and banditry, most notably the threats of Boko Haram and the socalled Fulani herdsmen in the northern parts of the country. Nigeria continues to suffer from two ills Hyden(2020) and Zartman(2008) identify: a fragile public administration easily captured by a predatory elite and a profound infection of Dutch disease. However, irrespective of high corruption and internal violence, Nigeria has somehow managed to remain a democracy for the last two decades, with four election cycles since 1999. Indeed, Nigeria began and ended the period at the same overall level of democratic accountability, 65 in 2000 and 66 in 2019, with scores fluctuating between 61 points in 2007 and 72 in 2015. Though this is higher than the average for the SubSaharan region, the lack of significant improvement confirms accounts that see the country's democracy only slowly consolidating and remaining fragile (Fasakin,2015). While recent elections were mostly peaceful, political participation is still strongly hindered. By the same token, a rather strong media and civil society activism bolster societal accountability. 3.2 | South Africa South Africa's economy is the most diverse and technologically advanced in SubSaharan Africa, its size second only to Nigeria's. At the beginning of the new millennium, economic growth, employment and capital formation increased until the global financial crisis hit in 2008, after which growth rates barely recovered. During the first presidency of Jacob Zuma (2009– 2014), the government turned increasingly to stateowned enterprises, which play a significant role in the economy. Even though it has the continent's largest industrial base and advanced infrastructure, state revenue still depends heavily on the extraction of natural resources, such as platinum, gold and chromium. Further economic diversification is held back by shortages of skilled labour in key sectors such as healthcare and technology. Per capita GDP remains among the highest on the whole continent and increased from US$4735 in 2000 to US$6189 in 2019. Despite somewhat slower economic growth, South Africa managed to improve public goods provision considerably, bringing its BGI score from 50 in 2000 to 63 in 2019 (see Table1). This trajectory is reflected in its Human Development Index (HDI) score which rose from 0.61 (2001) to 0.70 (2019), the highest in SubSaharan Africa.15 These changes are remarkable also in light of the manifold difficulties the country has been grappling with. HIV/AIDS, for example, was responsible for South Africa's average life expectancy plunging to less than 43 years by 2008. The first Zuma presidency was praised for its HIV/ AIDS policy, which has been credited with increasing life expectancy, which rebounded to 65 years as of 2022.16 Even with these efforts, in 2018 one in five South African adults (15– 49 years) was living with HIV/AIDS.17 South Africa is also challenged by persistent high youth unemployment of 47%18 by 2019, a poverty rate above 50% and income inequality at extreme heights, with a Gini coefficient of 63 in 2014, among the highest in the world.19 However, South Africa has implemented one of the most extensive social welfare systems among developing countries (e.g., for child support, oldage pension, school nutrition, unemployment insurance, etc.) (Goldblatt,2005; Oosthuizen,2021), putting pressure on public budgets. So does South Africa's higher education system, the continent's most developed and internationally recognised, which relies heavily on governmental support. While well above the SubSaharan average, South Africa's BGI score for state capacity decreased considerably from 53 in 2000 to 43 in 2019. At the same time, public debt increased from 37.9% of GDP in 2000 to 56.2% in 2019, with most of the rise happening after 2008. As seen in Figure4, the loss of state capacity coincides with the second Zuma presidency (2014– 2018), which was also marked by poor policy decisions, maladministration and corruption. Unsustainable government spending, collapsing stateowned enterprises and law enforcement unable to cope with a high crime rate are reasons why— in the eyes of some (e.g., Himbara, 2020)— South Africa | 131 SUBSAHARAN AFRICA GOVERNANCE has begun to deteriorate towards a ‘sophisticated failed state’. Having developed as a liberal democracy with a significant state presence in the economy since the end of Apartheid in the early 1990s, the country is one of the few in Africa never to have had a coup d'état, and regular elections are the rule (Lieberman,2022). The BGI score for democratic accountability remained at a high level of 82 points until 2012. The second Zuma presidency coincided with a decline towards 76 points in 2019. Still, a selfconfident civil society and vibrant media hold the government accountable and oppose attempts to weaken key institutions.20 3.3 | Kenya Only few countries in the SubSaharan African region have been able to maintain a stable growth pattern above the African average, among them Kenya. Defying generally downward economic trends during the second decade of the twentyfirst century, Kenya developed into one of the strongest economies in East Africa, as it established itself as a central logistics and transportation hub. With these developments, GDP per capita rose from US$1187 in 2000 to US$1653 in 2019, just above the SubSaharan African average. While Kenya shows strong improvement overall, it increased in public goods provision more than the other four SubSaharan African countries covered in this article. As Table1 shows, while it started out at a rather low level of 25 in 2000, similar to the regional average at that time, the provision of public goods more than doubled to 53 points by 2019, well above the average since 2010. Policies emphasising building infrastructure have underpinned this strong overall improvement (Wekesa et al.,2016), as have efforts to step up the provision of social and environmental public goods. Yet, as is the case in other countries, this expansion in public goods provision was to a considerable degree financed by growing public debt, which increased from 34.2% of GDP in 2007 to 59.1% in 2019. Personal remittances from abroad increased as well from US$685.76 million in 2010 to US$2.84 billion in 2019. However, Kenya's state capacity, too, shows a remarkable increase of roughly 50% from a score of 31 in 2000 to 46 in 2019, the strongest improvement in this BGI dimension in the SubSaharan region, starting out below the African average, but exceeding it today. Although corruption and mismanagement remain major issues, the positive trend indicates the effects of improvements in public administration, notably also in the management of infrastructure. The BGI score for democratic accountability in Kenya started slightly higher than the SubSaharan Africa average in 2000 and has increased in line with the rest of the region. The highly diverse country of over 70 distinct ethnic groups has kept pace with the trend towards somewhat greater democratic accountability in the region, but fluctuations reveal that Kenya is not yet a consolidated democracy (Hassan,2013) and instead retains a politicised public administration and justice system. Moreover, elections have become more polarised, more divisive and more violent (Bertelsmann Stiftung,2022). Nevertheless, BGI scores for democratic accountability improved considerably from 56 in 2000 to 68 in 2013 promoting Kenya along the way from a Freedom House designation of ‘not free’ to ‘partly free’. 3.4 | Ghana Hit hard by political instability in the 1970s and 1980s, and structural adjustment policies promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the midto late1980s, Ghana's economic performance gradually began to improve slowly in the 1990s and continued so after its first transition of power by democratic means in 2000 (KonaduAgyemang, 2000). The economy's growth rate has exceeded that of the SubSaharan Africa region for most of the first two decades of the twentyfirst century, reaching a peak of 14% in 2011 after commercial production of oil began. However, the country's dependency on only a few export commodities such as gold, crude oil and cocoa, and the absence of a larger domestic industrial base have meant that growth rates have been hard to maintain, and the gains have not necessarily been equally distributed. Meanwhile, GDP per capita increased considerably from US$1020 in 2000 to US$1981 in 2019. While Ghana's BGI scores for public goods provision stayed well above SubSaharan averages, they have varied over time— sometimes considerably— as governments changed. Though slight increases were seen between 2000 (35) and 2007 (38), public goods provision began to sustainably improve under the administrations of John Atta Mills (2008– 2012) and John Mahama (2012– 2017) from 44 in 2008 to 54 in 2017, and continued to rise to 57 in 2019. Though progress in addressing poverty, hunger and inequality reduction (economic public goods) has been modest and income inequalities between rural and urban areas remain high, health and human development measures (social public goods) improved considerably since 2008, with steps forward made particularly in gender equality and educational access and quality. Moreover, Ghana's delivery of environmental goods improved as well with a boost in the electricity access rate. While public goods provision improved, Ghana's state capacity did not, remaining on a consistently rather low level (37 in 2000 and 36 in 2019) around the