By Robert Guest Africa editor of The Economist and the author of “The Shackled Continent: Africa’s past, present and future”.

He told me his main problem was avoiding officials from the city council, who constantly tried to extort bribes from him or confiscated his stock on the pretext that he had broken some obscure or perhaps imaginary rule.

He said that when visiting his wholesaler, he took a long detour to avoid the centre of town, where the officials usually lurked. His story speaks for many.

Sub-Saharan Africa lags far behind other parts of the world in trying to reach its Millennium Development Goals. By the UNDP’s estimate, on current trends, it will not halve extreme poverty until 2147.

Bad government

The main reason, in my view, is bad government. Rich countries can and should help Africa by abolishing farm subsidies, lowering trade barriers and targeting aid more wisely, but in the end it is only Africans who can make Africa prosperous.

What Africa needs is leaders who try to get the basics right first. The state should provide peace, secure property rights, an even-handed legal system, education, health care and roads. It should not seek to micro-manage private business.

Africa has far too much red tape, much of it so onerous that its sole purpose seems to be to provide bureaucrats with an extra income, by demanding bribes not to enforce the rules. With better governance, Africa can grow richer, as Botswana’s admirable example shows, marred though it is by a horrific AIDS epidemic.

The role of journalists

Journalists can help a little, by reporting things as they are, and by mercilessly hounding crooked governments.

This is not always easy in Africa. Because events there make no material difference to newspaper readers elsewhere - a Zambian stock market crash is hardly going to affect house prices in London - most media organisations have no more than one or two correspondents in Africa.

Since there are 48 countries south of the Sahara, those correspondents are thinly spread, and often miss events of great human, if not economic, significance.

One of the reasons it took so long for news of the Rwandan genocide to leak out, for example, was that most of the journalists who should have been covering it were in South Africa, covering the that country’s first democratic election.

Internet cafes and satellite phone

Communications are not as bad as they were in the days when the way to get your story out was to find the only telex machine in town and bribe the operator to let you use it. Today, even tiny African towns have internet cafes, and satellite phones work almost anywhere. But there are plenty of other headaches.

It is hard to write with confidence about economic issues when the raw data are so unreliable. Besides South Africa, few African countries compile more than the patchiest of statistics.

In the most chaotic places, such as Somalia, there are practically no numbers at all. In other places, such as Angola, the government keeps records but refuses to publish information that would make it look bad, such as the details of what exactly happens to the oil revenues.

Security for the media

Journalists can operate much more freely today than they could during the Cold War, but they are still subject to official harassment in several countries.

In the last two years, The Economist has lost four freelance correspondents in Africa: two were deported on trumped-up charges, one left after receiving death threats, and one left after a friend, a fellow journalist, was murdered by a policeman.

Life is much harder for local journalists, however, so perhaps we shouldn’t complain.