“The growth experience of Chad provides a lot of lessons for understanding the political economy of African development. It was based for most of its post-colonial history on a heavily controlled and taxed export crop sector, whose evolution was in fact driven by a parastatal company. This was only concerning a small part of the country, the “useful Chad” in the south, while the rest was left with minimal state presence,and no spillovers from the relative prosperity of the south. Independence gave the political power to the southerners, who had benefited from the French presence by giving rise to an educated elite that controlled the state apparatus. The southerners failed to understand the need to share a bit of their prosperity with the powerful northerners, made more efficient at fighting by their nomadic life and their involvement in livestock. It has been known since time immemorial that nomadic herders are better at fighting than sedentary farmers, and the great Arab social thinker of the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun, emphasized it in Al Muqqadima (1392).”
