Some years ago, the Uganda government rebuilt and widened the road from the western region city of Mbarara to Kabale onwards to the border with Rwanda.

It was a beautiful road, but Uganda President Yoweri Museveni was disgruntled that he wasn’t getting a good return on his investment. He scolded Ugandans, saying they weren’t exploiting the new infrastructure being built to create wealth, and in his trademark earthily scorn, grumbled that all the Mbarara-Kabale road was carrying were “rumours and idle gossip”, not commercial goods.

Not everyone laughed, but he had a point. Along with new roads upcountry, electricity has also been extended to many parts of Uganda. The spread of electricity has not led to the explosion of small industries that optimistic policy makers had touted. The two things roads and electricity have produced in plenty however are bars and churches – and mosques in some places.

It is a familiar story across Africa. In most of Sub-Saharan Africa, one drives long distances, and along villages squares and small and medium-sized towns there is the loud bang of music outside shops and bars, with many people, mostly young men, milling around. The roadsides are dotted with makeshift and permanent churches, the preaching of the men and women of the cloth blaring far and wide. From Fridays through the weekend, the ear-splitting music envelopes the air until dawn. The prayers too never end.

In Muslim North Africa, where alcohol is banned or restricted, it is much the same thing. Loud music, with men, young and old, sitting in roadside cafes, drinking chai, coffee, and smoking shisha is a prevalent sight.

The three-shift industries working 24 hours remain an elusive dream. The houses of worship and bars are what the new electricity lines power.

Not too long ago, in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, over a distance of about 2.5 kilometres along what then was a largely unused railway line, on Sunday there would be over 50 pop up churches set up about 10 metres apart from each other.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and, until recently, its largest economy, is reputed to have more churches than hospitals, schools, and factories combined. In despair, some Nigerians have suggested that the country’s fall from the top of Africa’s economic pecking order, might well have something to do with  its “over-religionisation” – of both the Christian and Islamic variety.

The scene couldn’t be more different than in China, that 21^st century industrial hotbed, and the source of most of the commercial goods sold in African shops and markets.  Most of the African traders who have travelled to China in the last 25 years to buy goods, head to Guangzhou, described as “store front for manufacturers in the Guangdong province, China’s biggest exporter, and is crammed full of wholesale malls offering everything imaginable in bulk: kitchen cabinets, furs, car parts”.

It is home to the biggest African community in the country, estimated at anything between 20,000 and 100,000 of them. But as these African traders tell it, they often travel to towns inside the Chinese heartland far from Guangzhou to get goods at prices that can be up to 50% cheaper (perhaps explains why the quality is often crappy). The sight on these long drives into Chinese country, they say, is one to behold. One drives for hundreds of kilometres past thousands of homes and micro factories where men and women are sewing clothes, making products from toothpicks, plastic combs, paper clips, everything, from the porches of their houses and backyards of their small business establishments. An atheist nation, there is no legion of churches in sight.

But religiosity only partly explains the difference. In the early years of industrialisation in Christian Europe, up to the close of the 1900s, the scenes in its rural areas were no different than China’s, with roads and highways strewn with hundreds of thousands of artisan producers of things; from glass decorations, music instruments, mittens, and decorated mugs. In countries like Italy, the 9^th-largest economy in the world by nominal gross domestic product (GDP), to this day these artisanal producers are still a critical part of the economy.

The breath-taking investment in infrastructure and energy generation in China, has visibly driven industrialisation and production at this level in ways Africa hasn’t seen.

The church, and God business in general, is the biggest competitor for Africa’s emotion, time, money, infrastructure, and energy with its economy. And it’s winning.

Keen to stress it was in no way a crackdown on freedom of worship, in early August Rwanda shut over 4,000 churches – and a handful of mosques – including 100 places of worship operating in caves on the banks of rivers – for failing to comply with health and safety regulations, including not being properly soundproofed. This brought the number of churches closed down in the country over the last six years to 5,600.

President Paul Kagame, came closest to signalling that this was an economic issue, criticising the extortion of the churches which, he said, were impoverishing Rwandans, and could be taxed like any other business in future, if they did not return to more godly and less exploitative ways.

Yet, it will be a tough fight to knock the churches and loud bars out of their place at the top of the African economic pedestal. For one, they understand the needs of a fast urbanising Africa with its exploding population better than most governments and agencies working on the economy.

With old family and social networks being fractured in rapidly growing towns and cities, and with many of them jobless, African citizens are craving community and support even more in the sprawling concrete coldness of cities.  The dreams of millions of young Africans born from the expansion of education, and spotty economic growth, have been shattered. Africa has the youngest population in the world, with over 60% of the people under 25, but unemployment for its youth is more than twice as high as for older adults. As at the end of 2023, youth accounted for 60% of all African unemployed. In the absence of jobs, the next best thing they can have is hope.

Churches don’t just do prayer. They offer these pressed and lonely Africans battered by the blows of capitalism community, in much the same way European premier league football does. And they offer hope in large doses. Then, they are very good at monetising it all, by pitching a transactional god who rewards those who give money and expensive gifts to his apostles on earth.

When it comes to offering new community, and selling hope, they play in the First Division, and governments in the Third. And, the governments have nothing on them when it comes to monetising blessings. Consider this; the majority of governments in this Africa, the most endowed continent with precious natural resources, have failed to make a fortune from these blessings, most of the value being captured by  Western and Asian companies. If they could be just half as good as the churches at monetisation, and wisely invest the riches in their flock, the extractive churches and loud roadside bars would barely exist. And maybe, those endless artisanal small industries in rural China, would sprout along African roads too.