Life Expectancy in Africa: Improving Public Health Policy, Augustine Adu Frimpong

Abstract

Reviewed by: Life Expectancy in Africa: Improving Public Health Policy by Augustine Adu Frimpong Patrick Chukwudike Okpalaeke BOOK REVIEW of Frimpong, Augustine Adu. 2020. Life Expectancy in Africa: Improving Public Health Policy. With a foreword by Onyumbe B. Lukongo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 260 pp. $105 (hardback), $99.50 (ebook). In a critical survey of most countries in the Global South, less developed or developing economies tend to share certain similar features—poor health systems, poverty, insecurity, and more—and this has perpetually frustrated developmental struggles within these countries, even as little effort is made to address the issues at hand. This is unsurprising, as most African leaders would rather spend state resources on regime securitization (Appiagyei-Atua et al. 2017; Mulbah 2018, chap. 4; Van Wyk 2007) instead of human security where matters of health improvement and standardization should have been key concerns, especially in countries aspiring to level up with the developed economies of the world. The slowness of Africa's developmental strides has received a large dose of academic investigation from political, economic, and cultural perspectives, but Augustine Adu Frimpong's Life Expectancy in Africa: Improving Public Health Policy engages the discourse on Africa's quest for development through a dual perspective—health and economic growth. Frimpong's analyses open up a new vista on some of the reasons Africa is still trapped in a quagmire and how the continent could be liberated through a concerted effort devoid of external blueprints that would ensure sufficient and healthy human-capital resources. Life Expectancy in Africa has five chapters, a preface, foreword, and appendices. In chapter 1, Frimpong situates his work within existing literature that explores the links among life expectancy, health, development, and underdevelopment. He traces how life-expectancy levels in most African countries have been inconsistent, as well as how, based on Western models, they have continued to struggle not to fall. Besides civil wars, strife, and conflicts that have negatively affected African countries, corruption, the so-called sit-tight syndrome, and bad leadership have frustrated attempts at improving life expectancy in Africa. Frimpong reinforces the idea that health is wealth, since "the wealth of every nation can be measured by the health status of its citizens" (3). To buttress the argument embedded in Life Expectancy, he explores his ideas through theories (system theory, spatial theory, conflict theory, and economicgrowth theory) and models (health model, slow-growth model) as a [End Page 139] practical way of showing how increased life expectancy based on quality and improved health care can stimulate and sustain not just economic, but national development. Frimpong's methodology, based on the specifications of spatiotemporal and spatial analyses in certain models, helps strengthen analyses of the nature of health policies. It furnishes population samples, specifies the nature of data used in the research, and invokes hypotheses and questions that serve as guides, telling how each of these layout indices helped the research arrive at the targeted results. Generally, it reveals that conflict—both internal and external—has affected Africa's life expectancy more than other factors, especially since the fifteenth century, when foreigners began to invade the African continent. Worse still, postcolonial Africa has been submerged in a series of armed conflicts, many of which have seen countries spending their resources on the acquisition of arms and ammunition, rather than on items that could help improve citizens' health. Over more than five decades (1960–2015), Frimpong's research reveals the staggering figures associated with life expectancy in Africa: "In relation to the data analysis, the majority of the African countries were not doing well in terms of the numbers of years[;] an average African is likely to live between 56 years (minimum) and 75 years (maximum)" (53). In both the northern and southern regions of Africa, general life expectancy ranges between forty-nine and fifty-two years. Nothing accounts for these figures more than armed conflicts, which have ravaged the continent. Frimpong concludes that life expectancy in Africa could be improved through sustainable high-quality health policies. This assertion has been tested in most developed economies, where policymakers (and the government) prioritize citizens' health care and make approaches to attaining longevity affordable, as that is...