It takes 19 separate procedures to start a business in Chad, the world's ninth-poorest country, yet Australia and Canada get by with just two. Red tape is choking Africa, reports Michela Wrong

It was April 1992, and a young army captain called Valentine Strasser had just seized power in the West African state of Sierra Leone. The deposed president had fled in a helicopter and thousands of terrified Sierra Leoneans were heading for the border. As a reporter for Reuters, I was going in the opposite direction, the only white face on the first motor launch that steamed in to Freetown after the putsch.

I was met at the quayside by our veteran local correspondent, who gave me a run-down on the fast-evolving situation. But something else was preying on his mind: red tape. The following day, he insisted on taking me to a dark government office, where an immigration official subjected me to a slightly surreal interrogation.

That no one knew who was actually running the country was brushed to one side as the wheels of bureaucracy ground into relentless action. How, the imposing lady across the counter wanted to know, could her government be certain I wasn't intent on settling in Sierra Leone? Where was my return air ticket? Could I prove I had enough money on me to cover the cost of my stay? How could she be sure I wouldn't end up leeching off the state?

Any traveller who has wandered around Africa will have a collection of equally Kafkaesque anecdotes. I treasure the memory of a Zairois airport official in Lubumbashi, a city braced at the time for an imminent rebel attack, trotting alongside me on the tarmac to demand his statutory "tourism tax". Then there was the Angolan visa form that asked for the name, age, home address and district of every individual I hoped to interview in Luanda. And what of Sudan's torturous foreign currency regulations, which tinged every financial transaction with anxiety?

A desire to subject westerners to the same humiliations visited on Sierra Leoneans arriving in Europe certainly featured in my Freetown experience. But whether it is motivated by revenge or by a greedy appreciation of opportunities for graft, or simply represents the undigested residue of colonial administrative systems ill-suited to local conditions, red tape is choking Africa.

While African countries rightly complain about the extent to which trade restrictions and western subsidies constrain access to international markets, their own national legislation has played a heavy part in stifling enterprise, scaring off potential investors and stalling the long-awaited African take-off.

A World Bank study published this month highlights the extent of the problem. Doing Business in 2005, which covers 145 countries, focuses on five areas in which bureaucracy habitually looms large: starting a business, hiring and firing workers, enforcing contracts, getting credit and closing a business.

On average, the authors found, businesses operating in poor countries - the category into which most African economies fall - faced three times the administrative costs and nearly twice as many bureaucratic procedures and delays as in richer countries.

In the landlocked dust bowl that is Chad, the world's ninth-poorest country, it takes 19 separate procedures to start a business. Are they all necessary? Well, Australia, Canada and New Zealand manage to get by with just two. In Nigeria, a hopeful entrepreneur must go through 21 legislative hoops to register commercial property; in Helsinki, the same task involves three stages. Of all the regions, Africa had the most regulatory obstacles to doing business, the report found, while New Zealand, the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and China boasted the fewest.

African administrators might argue that all this paperwork is aimed at forcing employers to meet social obligations on a continent that has historically seen more than its fair share of asset-stripping and exploitative work practices. But ludicrous legislation simply pushes companies into the black market, where the law of the jungle is the only one that applies. Those who pay the price in terms of low wages, shaky job security and non-existent pension provision, the report states, are usually women, the young and the very poor.

Perhaps the report's most depressing finding is that since the first Doing Business study appeared last year, African countries have reformed the least, so the gap between the continent and the rest of the world grows ever wider.

None of this is an excuse for the west to sit on its hands, but it underlines the truth that, without dynamic and imaginative leadership in Africa, our own efforts will come to very little. Africa needs western aid. It deserves generous debt relief. The argument for fairer trade terms remains morally unanswerable. But a continent with a knack for shooting itself in the foot could be doing far, far more to assist in its own recovery.

Doing Business in 2005: removing obstacles to growth is available from rru.worldbank.org

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