Reading newspapers and magazines recently in Kenya it has not been hard to notice the hue and cry elicited by the survivors of torture, corruption, tribalism and other shortcomings of the former Kanu regime. Their call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission could not have come at a better time.
Ethnic and to a larger extent racial prejudice are very serious cross-cultural issues that the world of today has to contend with in spite of the Babel tower of globalization campaigns. Europe, one of the abodes of civilization and ‘enlightment,’ has suffered from the ethnic cleansing of the Serbians versus the Albanians, as Africa battles its own share of ethnic conflicts from time to time. Starting with the Kenyan scenario of the early and mid nineties to the Rwandan and Burundian cases of the Hutus and Tutsis puts Africa in a league of its own in fighting ethnic crises and prejudices.
According to some Members of Parliament from the Kenya’s Kalenjin community, the proposed commission will be used as a witch hunting machine targeting members of their community. This they say is more of a malicious vendetta than a transparent commission out to shed some light into the mistakes of the previous government. They further stress that the commission might be used as a conduit for propagating tribal agenda. How ironic! One glaring fact that the former Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa was called to assist Kenya establish this commission should be enough to give the government a benefit of doubt if Rev. Tutu’s experience with the same situation in post apartheid South Africa is anything to go by.
The truth is that these Kenyan politicians are in fact seeing the commission as a Kikuyu revenge tool for the tribal/ethnic crimes and other derogatory acts committed against the Gikuyu community during the dark days of Kanu’s rule. Let us be open-minded here by giving the Narc government a benefit of doubt in regard to such accusations. Let us remove pre-conceived ideologies from this one issue. As at now the best thing for the NARC corruption hawks and vultures to do is leave the old Mzee former President Daniel Arap Moi in peace for he deserves to exercise his rights as a citizen of this country and also an elder statesman and as such witness the much spoken about democracy at work in the new Kenyan political scenario. One may be tempted to ask whether the word “respect†will ever abound in the words and actions of some leaders who incessantly pour out unnecessary verbiage in attacking their elders.
The mass graft witnessed at the hands of crooked leaders was of earth-shaking proportions. Considering that massive cover-ups also furnished the looting, the kind of hard cash money that seemed to have changed hands at that time was unimaginable. The formation of the commission is thus of paramount importance if the Kenyan public conscience is to be relieved of clouding doubts, suspicions, mistrust and other emotional burden uploaded in that political era. What the Kenyan public ear is waiting for is when the perpetrators of the ethnic violence and other acts of social and bureaucratic irresponsibility are brought to book. They surely owe an apology to Kenyans.
In as much as there is a concentrated advocacy for the corrupt and prejudiced leaders to be held accountable, there should be an open prosecution. Let the innocent remain so the guilty can be taken to task. In that way, the NARC government will leave a satisfied common ‘mwananchi’. Only by doing this can they achieve their much belated vision cum mission of creating 500,000 jobs a year for Kenyans.
Back to the issue of tribalism and racism more wonders and sociopolitical phenomena still remain unexplained in the world; for example what was the driving force behind the Jewish annihilation by the German Fuehrer Adolph Hitler, one of the greatest perpetrators of crimes against humanity? Take a look at the recent German-Italian flurry of racial trajectories to an extent that their respective leaders failed to come to an agreement to the detriment of the emerging European Union behemoth!
One glaring truth is that there exists neo Nazi, Ku Klux Klan and other racially and ethnically segregative groupings in today’s world is yet another injection to the notion that history will repeat itself. As the Israelis battle for the control of their homeland, the rest of the ‘weak’ world watch afar not knowing what to do and not having the necessary resources to help quell the most critical conflict in the history of mankind.
The reality that leaders like of Benjamin Netanyahu are simply relieving their past and the accompanying nightmares should be considered when analyzing the Middle East conflict. Having seen his forefathers eliminated is bad enough to give him the vim as he fights for his fellow Israelis. With peace having become an elusive commodity in that part of the world, the only hope would be prayers for the hapless youth and children caught up in the melee since this conflict has always served to reveal more than meets the eye with revelations that the European Union is an ardent supporter of the Hamas movement leaving commentators and political analysts baffled.
My only call to the youth is to pray so that a permanent solution is found to the world problems such as these, considering that the psychological and emotional porters of such malignant garbage, luggage, and baggage of wars are usually us, the youth. Let us give good examples to the next generations such that the problems we are witnessing in the world today will not surface. Only then will our hope of making this world a better place than we found it become a reality.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
SIR – As the Director of Public Prosecutions joins the confessional queue, your leading article of July 27 (leader, Jul 27) rightly describes racism as “the new original sin, to which everyone has to confess”. It is high time that we left the race-relations bandwagon and got back to dealing with basic truths.
Mankind is a tribal species. We cluster by myriad classifications, be they geography, race, religion, skin colour, class or even football team. When we feel that our tribe is threatened, we react to defend it by attacking the threat. By current definition, we are all racist to some degree.
Legislation to combat this process, where it involves “positive discrimination”, reclassifying the seriousness of various criminal offences and forming overt minority interest groups and employment quotas, are all part of the problem, not of the solution.
While equality is the duty of the host country, respect for its customs and way of life are the duty of the immigrant. Making no effort to learn the host language, demanding representation by “community leaders” outside the democratic process, and seeking to change the host culture to that which they have chosen to leave are inevitably perceived as provocative by the native, majority tribe. We don’t have “Asian communities” or “Caribbean communities”; we have a British community of, over the centuries, countless origins.
No amount of legislation or trendy sociological theory will change the nature of our species. Until we recognise this, we will never achieve racial harmony.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
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Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Development aid does more harm than good in Africa, says Zambian economist and author Dambisa Moyo, so we should stop it. She has the ear of at least one African president, Paul Kagame of Rwanda. ‘Why should Bono be the one to determine economic policy in Africa?
It was during her studies at Harvard that she first started wondering why Africa is the only continent that is forever struggling. Later, as she was working on her thesis at Oxford, she tried to figure out why poor Asian countries like South Korea or Thailand managed to join the world of emerging nations when no African country did. For the next eight years, she worked for the US investment bank Goldman Sachs. Gradually her conviction grew stronger: Africa will never get on its feet unless it makes a clean break with the system of development aid.
It is aid itself that is keeping Africa poor. This in a nutshell, is the argument Moyo develops in the first half of her book, Dead Aid, which came out last month. She is referring only to government aid, not to emergency humanitarian aid or charity. “Development aid simply doesn’t work,” she says. “It was supposed to lead to sustainable economic growth and a reduction of poverty. Name one African country where this has happened.”
Dead Aid caused a sensation in Great Britain. Here was a young, successful, educated African woman trespassing in a world dominated by middle-aged white men. Economist like William Easterley and Jeffrey Sachs. Rock stars like Bono and Bob Geldof. What’s more: she was arguing for pulling the plug on development aid.
“The danger is that this book will get more attention than it deserves,” wrote The Guardian. “Her proposal to phase out aid in five years is disastrously irresponsible: it would lead to the closure of thousands of schools and clinics across Africa, and an end to the HIV antiretroviral, malaria and TB programmes, along with emergency food supplies, on which millions of lives depend.
In The Independent, Paul Collier, a renowned development expert and Moyo’s former mentor, wrote that “Moyo is to development aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam,” a reference to the Dutch-Somali politician whose critique of Islam has forced her into hiding. Like Hirsi Ali, she is criticizing the system from the inside.
Moyo is unfazed by the criticism. “I don’t see why Bono should be the one to determine Africa’s economic policy,” she says during a hurried fried squid lunch in Oxford. She is due at a reading shortly, and later tonight she is a guest on Newsnight, the popular BBC current affairs programme, together with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi who developed the concept of microcredit.
She speaks fast, without pausing for breath. “I am fairly aggressive,” she admits. Asked about her age, she offers instead that the average life expectancy in her country of birth is between 36 and 37. “I have passed that particular milestone.”
If most people have focused on the first half of her book, Moyo herself thinks the really explosive material is in the second half. There she offers African government a series of tools to balance their budgets without the need for development aid: issue government bonds; attract foreign investment; boost exports by concentrating on emerging markets like India or China; put remittance, the money sent home by Africans living abroad, to good use… “It’s not rocket science,” she says. “Other countries have done it with success.”
Your verdict about development aid is pretty harsh.
Moyo: “I’m really not saying anything new. In fact, I’m plagiarising. I quote other people’s research. As early as the sixties, Peter Bauer, the development economist, was describing development aid as ‘a tax on poor people in rich countries that benefits rich people in poor countries’. He was ignored. In the world of development aid it is not a secret that it just doesn’t work. But aid organisations and celebrities like Bob Geldof are keeping the myth alive. My own family suffers the consequences of development aid every day.”
What are those consequences then?
“First and foremost the widespread corruption. The people in power plunder the treasury and the treasury is filled with development aid money. The corruption has contaminated the whole of society. Aid leads to bureaucracy and inflation, to laziness and inertia. Aid hurts exports. Thanks to foreign aid the people in power can afford not to care about their people. But the worst part of it is: aid undermines growth. The economies of those countries that are the most dependent on foreign aid have shrunk by an average of 0.2 percent per year ever since the seventies.”
But surely donor countries have checks and balances. They demand good governance.
“But at the end of the day they let the African countries get away with it. World Bank research has shown that 85 percent of development aid was used for other than the intended purpose. Donor countries are propping up the most corrupt regimes. From 1980 until 1996, 72 percent of World Bank aid went to countries that did not abide by the rules. The need for donor countries to just keep on giving appears to be insatiable.”
So why do Western countries keep on giving if it doesn’t help?
“The cynical answer is: because it distracts attention from the trade barriers they have erected in order to protect employment in the West. These trade barriers cost Africa an estimated 500 billion dollars every year. That’s ten times the amount Africa is given in development aid. And because they secretly don’t believe that Africa is ever going to pull it together. They feel sorry for the Africans. So they buy themselves a conscience.
But hasn’t Africa progressed enormously at the social level? In 1960, fifty percent of children went to school. Now that’s 82 percent. Child mortality has dropped by more than half in the past thirty years. Don’t you care about this?
“You can pay school fees for a 12-year-old girl. You can makes sure she has an education. You can say: look what development aid can accomplish. But what good is that for the girl is she can’t find a job after she leaves school? Because they are no jobs to be had. Every time I go home to Zambia, there are more street children. They can read, they can write, they speak English. And the only thing they can do to make a living is to hustle. More and more parents in the countryside are keeping their children out of school. If there are no jobs in the cities anyway, they say, the children might as well start working on the land right away.”
But isn’t pulling the plug on development aid a recipe for mass mortality?
“Only the elite will feel the pain. The poor won’t even notice the difference. It’s not like they ever saw any of that money anyway.”
Development aid experts like to point out that for decades the rich nations have used development aid as a weapon in the cold war, as an instrument of foreign policy. Unlike you, They plead for more and better direct aid.
“So where are we going to direct the aid now? In the sixties aid was supposed to be used for big infrastructure projects. In the seventies it was poverty. In the eighties it was structural changes and financial stabilisation. In the nineties it was democratisation and good governance. In the past sixty years 1.000 billion dollars in development aid has gone to Africa with nothing to show for it. How many times do we have reincarnate development aid before we can admit that it’s just not working?
Rwandan president Paul Kagame has approached you because he too would like to get rid of development aid.
“The president has been critical of development aid repeatedly in the past. But he is still dependent on it for 70 percent of his budget. He read an article about me in the Financial Times during a flight. He saw a chance to rid Rwanda from development aid. He wanted me to come to Rwanda right away. I was to meet with his ministers, who would then spend the weekend debating development aid.
“We discussed how to get a credit rating report as a country, how to sell government bonds, how to attract foreign investors, how to find new trade partners… ‘Just imagine,’ I wrote in my book, ‘that one by one African governments would get a phone call from the donor countries: “We’re phasing out your development aid over the next five years.”‘ An adviser to president Kagame told me: ‘We want to be the ones to make that phone call.'”
Do you expect other African countries to follow Rwanda’s example?
“Most African leaders find it much more convenient to just cash the development cheque every year. This way they don’t have to take action. They can do whatever they want. There is no one to call them to account.”
Paul Collier, your old professor at Harvard and Oxford, thinks you are far too optimistic about African countries getting access to world financial markets.
“With all due respect but I have worked in the financial markets. I know what investors want. It is not an easy road to take. But it’s possible. The reward is sustainable growth.
“I grew up in a country where every kind of initiative was either dismissed or suppressed. They can’t. They won’t. I’m fed up. Let’s try something new. Because the old approach clearly doesn’t work.”
Isn’t this the worst possible time to try a new approach now that the credit crunch has paralysed the financial markets?
“These are challenging times. But it’s not because the American and European markets are out of reach that all markets are. There are gigantic financial reserves in China and the Middle East just screaming for investment opportunities. And even if the markets are closed, all the more reason for African countries to start preparing for when they open up again. This apocalyptic situation isn’t going to last forever. So go practise your roadshow for investors. Why should they invest in your country and not another? Your answer is going to have to be convincing.”
Paul Collier also feels that you underestimate the specific problems of Africa.
“The problems of Africa are gigantic: they are historical, geographic, tribal. But there is nothing we can do about that. Should we just resign ourselves to the fact that Africa will never develop? How much longer are we going to keep using colonialism as an excuse? Can we finally move on?”
Another one of your old professors, Jeffrey Sachs, is proposing to double development aid to Africa to 100 billion dollars per year.
“I don’t get that. I think it’s hypocritical. At Harvard he was always saying that Russia, Poland and Bolivia had to adapt to the free market even if it was going to hurt. But when it comes to Africa, he has a whole other recipe. Is he saying that Africa is fundamentally different from the rest of the world? Is he saying that Africa will never get it together? Is he saying there is something terribly wrong with this continent? I would love to debate him. His arguments are emotional. They have little to do with economics or logic.”
Dambisa Moyo: Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa, 208
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Although billions have been spent on foreign development and food aid to Africa in the decades since World War II, over half a billion people remain undernourished in Africa today according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture—a number that’s 53 percent higher than it was in 1992 when the government first began accumulating such figures.
While the reasons for continuing poverty are manifold, Western government programs such as food aid and agriculture and ethanol subsidies deserve their share of the blame. So argues the new book Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (PublicAffairs), written by Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, each of whom have years of experience writing page-one stories for the Journal on African matters, particularly African famine.
Unlike anti-aid analysts such as William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo, Thurow and Kilman see plenty of room for more (intelligent) action on the part of Western governments. In fact, Kilman argues that genuine agricultural development aid has yet to be sufficiently and intelligently attempted.
But their reporting in the Journal and in Enough provides vivid examples of the ways both aid policy and U.S. farm policy hurts, not helps, the long-term well-being of Africans as they struggle for self-sufficiency.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty spoke with Scott Kilman in July.
Reason: Why isn’t food aid an unalloyed good for an often-starving continent?
Scott Kilman: Western food aid to Africa started in the 1950s to serve two purposes, and only one was to fight hunger overseas. The second reason was that food aid had a lot of political support. The U.S. government was trying to get rid of excess crops. Politicians like Hubert Humphrey realized he could build a political coalition for fighting hunger overseas because there was something in it for us at home: to get rid of excess crops that were depressing prices.
The question wasn’t asked for decades: What’s the most effective way to help the hungry overseas? And our food aid program is not the best way to do it. It has unintended effects. Now, we spend roughly $1 to 2 billion a year on food aid—shipping actual food and grain across the ocean. And commodities sent over in these food ships has to be U.S.-grown. That in itself creates problems once you look at the logistics, taking wheat grown in Kansas under U.S. government specs, getting it shipped the way the U.S. government approves, on U.S.-owned ships which tend to charge the highest rates, put in big bags because that the only way that ports in poor countries can handle it, and by the time it gets unloaded there it’s half a year from when the government decided to send help. About 50 percent of the cost of food aid gets sucked up in the logistics.
We argue we should spend some of our food aid budget closer to the disaster. Africa might have famine in one country or two, but at the same time other parts of Africa have a glut. Part of the benefit [of using aid money to buy African food, not ship American surplus] is the food aid becomes economic stimulus and creates a market for poor farmers in Africa. But it flies in the face of political convention. You’ve had the Bush administration suggest trying this [buying some food for aid in Africa itself], and there will be some experimenting with it in the new farm bill.
Reason: Your book has an interesting set piece from Nazareth, Ethiopia, in 2003, in which U.S. food aid is driven by Ethiopian warehouses filled with the same food commodities, produced locally, rotting.
Kilman: By the time food aid arrives trundling down the road it’s usually after the worst of the calamity, and it often ends up disrupting food markets in Ethiopia. So in this case there was Ethiopian grain but farmers weren’t able to sell it because suddenly the U.S. government turns up as a competitor. Food aid swarmed in and depressed prices. It would have made more sense and been of more benefit if Western donors bought what was available in Ethiopia. African farmers describe it to us this way: it boils down to them scratching their heads and saying, it seems as if America needs hungry Africans to eat their surplus.
In the book we track down Sen. Dale Bumpers from Arkansas, he’s retired now, and ask him why [he insisted in 1986 that no U.S. aid could go toward studying, training, or helping other countries in any way to grow a crop that competes with any U.S. crop]. His first response was, he didn’t really remember it happened!
The way we award money to farmers for every bushel they produce of favored crops, like soybean and cotton, it spurs them to produce as much as they can to get more subsidies. This drives down prices in world markets, but the market signal to U.S. farmers to produce less doesn’t get through because of the subsidy. I don’t think until this decade that I as a reporter became aware of how subsidies have impact in the poorer parts of the world.
I was writing about spats between the U.S. and the European Union over their subsidies, and thought of it as just a trade war. I wasn’t thinking about, if our subsidy programs tend to depress prices, who else does that affect? Earlier this decade I woke up to the idea that it really affects farmers who don’t receive subsidies and only get what the market will bear. And oftentimes these farmers can grow crops cheaper than anyone else. The Doha round [of international trade talks] is comatose, and one of the big stumbling blocks is it could force the West to figure out how to change the way we run farm subsidy programs.
You have groups in the U.S. who have a very big interest in seeing the farm subsidy system continue the way it is, and it’s their first interest. You don’t have a political constituency organized around fighting hunger for hunger’s sake. It’s hard to find someone in the House or Senate who thinks of the hungry overseas as a constituency.
Reason: You also point the finger at an aspect of American energy policy in hurting the world’s hungry: our ethanol subsidies.
Kilman: The ethanol program creates a subsidy for demand on corn, which has a ripple effect on other crops. Farmers plant more corn, and plant less of something else. And what’s happened, I think unintentionally, is by creating a mandate for ethanol you tied the price of corn and indirectly the cost of a bunch of our food to the cost of oil.
Now one third of America’s biggest crop is used to make fuel, and that’s happened very rapidly. If you look at the price of corn today, it’s at a new plateau. Corn in the ‘90s and first half of this decade was usually $2 a bushel. Now a few weeks ago it was $4 a bushel, and now around $3.50, but it’s settling at a higher plateau. Soybeans have also settled at higher prices which means it’s more expensive to keep buying the same amount for food aid programs.
I was in Africa in 2007 when the price of corn first started going up. You are seeing food riots in the developing world, but I think it’s complicated. That run up in corn filters through other commodities, and what happens with the ethanol program and biofuel mandates is they have fed into a general environment where traders are willing to bid up prices. But in addition to ethanol, the developing middle class in emerging nations are eating better, want to eat more meat, and you need more grain to produce more meat.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
“The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world.†These were Tony Blair’s words not long after his 2001 election victory – a statement that echoes the American character in VS Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River who speaks of Africa “as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parentâ€. Continue reading →
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Steve Inskeep talks with Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo about her book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Moyo has been a consultant for the World Bank and an economic sub-Saharan Africa specialist for Goldman Sachs. She says American and European good intentions discourage innovation and breed corruption. Continue reading →
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
The French president has called for Africa to be given a bigger say in world affairs and better representation on the UN Security Council. President Nicolas Sarkozy, rounding off a two-day France-Africa summit in Nice, also said Africa would be a key source of global growth in the coming decades. He pledged to push for Security Council reform when France heads the G8 and G20 groups of leading economies next year. The summit was attended by 38 heads of state and some 200 business leaders. Mr Sarkozy told them: “How can we accept a world where 25% of the population lives in Africa and yet it does not have a permanent seat at the Security Council?
“This is an anomaly, an injustice and a source of imbalance.” At present, African countries hold three out of 10 non-permanent seats on the Security Council.
France doesn’t just want to be friends with Francophone countries. What we want is for France to talk to all of Africa
Nicolas Sarkozy French President
African states have lobbied since 2005 for two permanent seats with veto powers on an expanded Security Council, as well as rotating seats.
“None of the problems, absolutely none of the problems that the world faces today can be resolved without the active participation of the African continent,” Mr Sarkozy said.
“Africa’s formidable demographics and its considerable resources make it the main reservoir for world economic growth in the decades to come.”
Hosting his first France-Africa summit, Mr Sarkozy dispensed with the traditional “dinner among friends” – attended only by former colonies – in favour of inviting all attendees.
“France doesn’t just want to be friends with Francophone countries. What we want is for France to talk to all of Africa,” he said at the closing session.
France, which is vying with China and other emerging powers for markets in Africa, has used the summit as a platform to promote business ties with the continent.
It agreed to support the African Union in strengthening security on the continent, including training 12,000 African troops for African Union and United Nations peacekeeping duties.
Drug trafficking
Climate change was also high on the agenda and the leaders agreed to support creation of a renewable energy plan, including the use of solar power.
France announced the creation of the African Agriculture Fund, an investors’ fund, for food distribution and other projects, to initially raise $120 million (£82m) and potentially reach $300 million, according to a final statement.
It also pledged to help Africa combat piracy, terrorism and drug trafficking, with Mr Sarkozy stressing the continent “cannot cope on its own”. South African President Jacob Zuma described the summit as “very useful”.
He told AFP news agency that leaders had agreed to discuss at their next African Union summit a French proposal to seek two Security Council seats with 10-year mandates as an interim step to permanent membership.
“We cannot have institutions that were established in the 1940s, when there were fewer countries and colonialism,” he said.
Mr Zuma had earlier criticised the fact that military junta leaders of two former French colonies, Guinea and Niger, were among those in attendance and as such were being given “recognition”.
However, Madagascar – still embroiled in a political crisis – was not invited, and Zimbabwe refused to send a delegation after France objected to the attendance of President Robert Mugabe.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
The moment when Muammer Gaddafi, Libya’s leader, aspires for the creation of a single African nation has become a perennial irritant at African summits, eating into deliberations on more pressing crises of the day. Many of Colonel Gaddafi’s peers are still struggling to create viable nation states within territories carved out by Europeans in the 19th century. In that context, talk of a United States of Africa – a potentially unwieldy federation of 1bn plus people – seems distinctly premature.
In some ways, however, the Libyan leader is ahead of a game recognised since the onset of independence half a century ago as central to the continent’s development prospects, but on which little progress has yet been made. If African countries spoke with one voice, traded more among each other, and strengthened regional co-operation in keeping peace, they would go a long way towards overcoming the political frailties and economic fragmentation associated with their inherited borders.
To varying degrees over the past decade, regional economic trading blocs in south, west and east Africa have forged ahead with customs unions, eased working restrictions (in east Africa), and started planning common monetary policies and even single currencies.
Equally, in recent years the African Union has sought to enforce better governance, ostracising coup-makers, and this year ushering in new rules that allow unconstitutional behaviour by civilian rulers to be sanctioned too (although there has been only limited success in reining in the likes of Robert Mugabe).
Progress though is still hampered by lack of follow-through on the ground and fears among less developed countries, that they will be dominated by the big regional economic powers: Nigeria in the west, Kenya in the east and South Africa in the south. Moreover in a significant number of African countries the momentum towards further break-up is still greater than the other way round.
Idriss Deby, the President of Chad, warned recently that if South Sudan votes to secede at a referendum on independence due next January, it will be “catastrophicâ€. Transgressing the doctrine of the inviolability of borders would embolden separatist movements from Nigeria to the Democratic Republic of Congo and spark chaos, he warned.
Other Africans argue that until oppressed minorities first achieve a level of self-determination, free of oppression from centralised states, talk of greater regional integration will remain just that.
On average, only about 10 to 12 per cent of African trade takes place among other African nations according to a joint study published last month by the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank, and the African Union. “This is not an encouraging trend, especially when compared with other world regions,†the report says.
The continent’s infrastructure too is still geared towards exports. Railways and roads often lead to marine ports rather than linking countries over land. Even where there have been advances in harmonising tariffs and easing restrictions on the flow of people and goods, such as in the East African Community, reality on the ground often trails.
A recent study carried out by Rwanda’s private sector business association found the cost of trucking a container from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Kigali, the capital, 1,500kms and three border crossings away, can be three times the price of shipping the same container from the US. Bribery at weighbridges and roadblocks add more than $1,000 to costs. The same story is repeated across Africa.
The momentum though, is beginning to change. Institutions like the African Development Bank now prioritise infrastructure projects that foster regional integration.
The big African banks are spreading from state to state. Telecoms companies too, are harmonising their operations to gain economies of scale. And, when oil and gas investments are stripped out, South Africa is now the largest investor in the rest of the continent, not China, or the US.
Trade statistics do not capture a perhaps even bigger force, the informal sector. Until they were battered by competition from China, cobblers in the Nigerian town of Aba were exporting some 60m pairs of shoes around Africa. Their wares could be found everywhere from Kisangani in central Congo, to Dakar on the west coast.
For all Mr Deby’s fears, South Sudan is another place where regional imbalances are being addressed in spite of the status quo. It is not a member of the East African Community or even a country yet. But educated Kenyans and Ugandans, who lack jobs back home, have flocked there, making up for a desperate shortage of qualified local people.
The integration that is happening has been driven less by bureaucrats, and the likes of Col Gadaffi and more by business people – from suited-up executives to scrappy wheeler-dealers – who have spotted opportunities across borders and gone out to grab them.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
This paper on the future of Social Protection in sub-Saharan Africa, challenging current practices within the research and donor community, was jointly prepared by ODI Social Protection Programme, the Centre for Social Protection (CSP) at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA-DEV), and the Southern Africa Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP).
It notes that social protection is an extremely important policy agenda for Africa, and that remarkable progress has been made in a very short time. In recent years, donors and other external actors have invested heavily in financing social protection projects, strengthening capacity among implementing agencies, and building the evidence base to demonstrate the powerful positive impacts of social protection programmes. Nonetheless, many governments remain resistant to social protection, as advocated by donors and international NGOs.
A fundamental rethinking is required. All too often, social protection initiatives are imported from elsewhere and introduced with inadequate understanding of domestic political priorities and policy processes. As a result, pilot projects rarely scale up to national programmes, and ‘blueprint’ approaches rarely gain political traction. Where governments express a preference for different models, these are often neglected or dismissed, while ‘beneficiaries’ themselves are hardly ever consulted.
The paper concludes by proposing ten principles for future engagement by development partners with social protection policy processes in Africa. These include: support national policy priorities and minimise policy intrusion; limit pilot project ‘experiments’; and involve programme participants at all stages, starting with vulnerability assessments and project selection.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
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