Burundi

You are called, like your northern neighbor, a country of a thousand hills — though yours end at the shore of the second-deepest lake on Earth, water so old and so still that Bujumbura's fishermen have worked it by lantern-light for longer than either country has kept a written record of the year. Lake Tanganyika holds roughly one-sixth of the planet's unfrozen fresh surface water. Your capital moved off its shore to Gitega in 2019, but the lake never stopped being the fact your economy is built around.

I do not want to write to you only about October 1993 — the assassination of Melchior Ndadaye, four months into the presidency your people had just voted him into, and the twelve years of war that followed before the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Accords, mediated first by Julius Nyerere and finished by Nelson Mandela, gave you a power-sharing constitution built to survive the next provocation rather than merely end the last one. That history is real, and it is yours to hold, not mine to summarize past a paragraph. What I want to write about is what came after: a country that chose to keep counting its ethnic quotas in its own parliament and army by law, year after year, rather than pretend the counting was no longer necessary.

Here is what a standard country-risk model prices badly. Coffee and tea, grown on the same collines that were fought over, now supply roughly nine-tenths of your foreign exchange — a concentration risk every development economist flags, and none has found you an easy way to unwind, because the alternative to growing coffee on a steep hillside in Burundi has rarely been a factory job; it has been subsistence on a smaller plot of the same hill. More than half of your children are stunted by the time they start school — among the highest rates ever recorded anywhere — which is not a statistic about coffee, but about what happens when almost everyone farms and almost no one owns enough land to farm profitably.

So Merankabandi does not try to be a growth strategy. It tries to be plumbing: a cash-transfer and jobs system now reaching more than a million and a half people through a single Unified Social Registry the government can also point at floods and food-price shocks without building a new bureaucracy each time. And your newest bet is not aid at all — a $696 million African Development Bank-backed railway toward the port of Dar es Salaam, wagered on the theory that a country too small and too landlocked to extract its way to prosperity has exactly one underpriced asset left: the productivity of every hillside, and every hour, once it can finally reach a port.