UNCTAD opens in Accra

Africa climate projections from the Economist

Today the twelth annual United Nations Conference on Trade and Development convened in Accra. The theme is Addressing the opportunities and challenges of globalization for development.

At a press briefing on his arrival, the UN Secretary-General noted that the current food crisis that threatened the world, had dire consequences, especially for the developing world, adding that, the conference would take a serious look at the situation and how best to deal with it.

He said another issue that needed to be examined was the current trend of trade liberalisation and its impact on developing countries.


Speaker of Parliament, Mr Ebenezer Begyina Sekyi Hughes … said trade, democracy and development were linked in the modern era of globalisation, but noted that "for a number of years now, the inputs of the Legislature, which is the microcosm of the people, have been left out during global discussions on trade and development". Mr. Hughes said the trend was slowly, but hopefully changing, and representatives from the Legislature were now being involved in some of these discussions.

Unfortunately, leaving out legislatures and other organizations that gather and express the views of broad cross sections of people has been the practice in far too many countries.

I hope that the conferees at UNCTAD will pay attention to the conversations and conclusions of the IAASTD, International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. IAASTD concluded a three year study in South Africa last week.

"The question of how to feed the world could hardly be more urgent," said Robert Watson, director of the IAASTD and chief scientist at the British environment and agriculture department.

The findings of the three-year IAASTD indicate that modern agriculture will have to change radically from the dominant corporate model if the world is to avoid social breakdown and environmental collapse, he explained. "Agriculture has a footprint on all of the big environmental issues...climate change, biodiversity, land degradation, water quality, etc."

The IAASTD brought together more than 400 scientists who examined all current knowledge about agricultural practices and science to find ways to double food production in the next 25 to 50 years and do so sustainably, while helping to lift the poor out of poverty. They concluded that the way to meet these challenges is through combining local and traditional know-how with formal knowledge.

The effort produced five regional assessments and a synthesis report, as well as an executive summary for decision makers.

Representatives from 30 governments of developed and developing countries, the biotechnology and pesticide industry and a wide range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Greenpeace and Oxfam, were involved. Public sessions were also held to gather input from producer and consumer groups, as well as others within the private sector.

However, last year the two biggest biotech and pesticide companies, Syngenta and BASF, along with their industry association -- Crop Life International -- abandoned the assessment process. This was on the grounds that the final draft of the synthesis report was overly cautious about the potential risks of genetically modified crops, and sceptical of the benefits.

"It's unfortunate that they backed out ... I don't think they are used to working with a wide variety of participants as equals" …

AFRICOM & making US friends into enemies

Isadore Guvamombe writes regarding AFRICOM:

It is a fact that American foreign policy has attracted the retaliatory attacks the Americans love to call "terrorism". Having tried to effect illegal regime change in over 50 countries in addition to invading 35 others in 56 years, the U.S. made its bed and so must lie on it.
. . .
Most worrisome is the fact that the U.S. always tries to protect its interests by military means to the extent of pursuing illegal regime change on liberation movements, with the hope of replacing them with stooge regimes.

This is not something new. In the 20th century the people who were most willing to do the work to create more egalitarian and more democratic government in many developing countries called themselves Communists, especially during the independence movements and decolonization following World War II. The US worked to undermine and overthrow them around the globe.

Military "stooge regimes" have been the US government of choice for most of the world for some time. And in many of these cases, the reason was that the US perceived an economic threat to corporate interests from the communists. And in many cases there was a genuine threat. Liberation movements were working for the betterment of ALL the people, not just some, not just corporations and their shareholders. Liberation movements were looking for a just return for work, and fair distribution of resources.

Corporations harnessed US anti-communist sentiments for their legislative and economic agenda. The corporations, and the American people, would have been better served to work out fairer means of distributing wealth and resources. In the long run, the US achieved the opposite of what it claimed to want. The US accepted, and often facilitated the severe repression of the vast majority of their people under military governments throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, stopping political progress dead. The US only questioned those governments where it perceived some threat to US corporate interests.

In his book The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad writes about the US undermining and helping topple the Guatemala government in 1954:

Some US government officials in the field bemoaned their cozy relationship with oligarchies and militaries against the Communists. for example, the deputy chief of the U.S. embassy in Guatemala in the 1950s, Bill Krieg, noted that the reactionary forces were "bums of the first order" who "wanted money, were palace hangers-on," while the Communists "could work, had a sense of direction, ideas, knew where they wanted to go." They were "honest, very committed. This was the tragedy: the only people who were committed to hard work were those who were, by definition, our worst enemies." The CIA and the old social classes crushed the Left in many parts of the darker nations, enlivened the old social classes, and later - much later - found that they had created a monster they could not control.
(The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, ISBN 978-1-56584-785-9, p.164)

Most US military interventions have been to protect US corporate interests. And the long term effect of many of these interventions is to create enemies among people who might otherwise be natural allies, friends and supporters, the kinds of people who share the values the US professes to maintain. The US support for military regimes and oppression has earned much resentment throughout the world. Long term, this has severely harmed US interests and endangered US citizens. That upwelling of anger and resentment is what Prashad calls the monster the US cannot control.

No corporation left behind is not something new in US history, see these words:

"This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations."
1876—Rutherford B. Hayes, who became President of the US in 1877.

Or see the words of President Eisenhower, who famously warned his nation and the world about the military industrial complex in his farewell speech as president. This was after he spent his entire administration locking the military industrial iron triangle into power.

Unfortunately, there is another phenomenon Prashad describes in the Third World since World War II that has also happened in the US. Military expenditures went up as a portion of national budgets and as a proportion of GDP, domestic savings went down, along with drastic cuts in social spending. Eventually political perception shifted:

. . . security and defense had come to be reality, whereas social development became idealistic.
(The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, ISBN 978-1-56584-785-9, p.174)

Calling social development idealistic is to say it is a pleasant fantasy, not something we should hope to see in our lifetimes. Therefor, "security and defense" (ever increasing militarization) becomes the only "realistic" policy. But social development is the major value in the opening sentence of the United States Constitution, the Preamble. It is the reason for the Constitution, and the reason why the country and the Constitution must be defended. I hope the US can return to its founding principles, and return the blessings of liberty to posterity. I have emphasized those words that directly establish social development goals:

Preamble to the Constitution of the United States

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Africom and full spectrum dominance

Full Spectrum Dominance

Full spectrum dominance is not the method of a democracy. Full spectrum dominance IS imperialism. It is at direct odds with democratic principles. When a country espouses democracy, this should be the approach of last resort, if at all. It may be an appropriate approach for a military organization. The military has a more narrow and specific mission. However, the US has a civilian government. A democratic government should avoid wars when possible, and only engage as a last resort. Although it has migrated away from democratic institutions and principles, the US still preaches democracy. With luck it will alter its direction and return to democratic principles. It still has the tools. The military needs to support and uphold the principles of democratic government, at home and around the world.

"Full-spectrum dominance" is the key term in "Joint Vision 2020," the blueprint DoD, Department of Defense, will follow in the future.

Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.
. . .
Joint Vision 2020 addresses full-spectrum dominance across the range of conflicts from nuclear war to major theater wars to smaller-scale contingencies. It also addresses amorphous situations like peacekeeping and noncombat humanitarian relief. Key to U.S. dominance in any conflict will be what the chairman calls "decision superiority" -- translating information superiority into better decisions arrived at and implemented faster than an enemy can react.

The development of a global information grid will provide the environment for decision superiority.

In fact Joint Vision 2020 involves the dominance of space.

Control of Space (CoS) is the ability to ensure un-interrupted access to space for US forces and our allies, freedom of operations within the space medium and an ability to deny others the use of space, if required.
. . .
Global Engagement (GE) is the combination of global surveillance of the Earth (see anything, anytime), worldwide missile defense, and the potential ability to apply force from space.
. . .
Full Force Integration (FFI) seamlessly joins space-derived information and space forces with information and forces from the land, sea, and air.
. . .
Global Partnerships (GP) augment the military's space capabilities by leveraging civil, commercial, and international space systems. This operational concept results from the explosive growth of commercial and international space capabilities.

After reading this I thought that for the military, full spectrum dominance is the obvious goal in any military scenario. The problem is that the present US government, the Bush administration, sees every scenario as a military scenario. A military approach or "solution" should be the last resort. For Bush, it is the first choice. And full spectrum dominance is not just about scenarios, it is about controlling the whole globe, imperial control of the whole world, from and including space.

The Bush administration has been following an economic policy designed to make the US the economic equivalent of Argentina in the 50s and 60s, spending huge amounts of borrowed money that do not contribute to increases in productivity or infrastructure, a rich country making itself poor. The result has weakened the country and severely weakened the military. The Bush war on science has damaged the US scientific and technological edge. The stature of the US as a global leader has been severely damaged by the unprovoked occupation and destruction of Iraq. And because of all the money wasted in Iraq, the US is farther away from any positive accomplishment or constructive goal.

The US needs to find a political solution to its relationship with just about every country in the world. And it needs an internal political solution to its own dreadful behavior.

Because of oil, and a number of other extractive resources, but mostly the oil, the US has set its sights on full spectrum dominance in Africa. At the same time celebrity condescension and “humanitarian” ad campaigns portray Africans as afflicted and helpless. By painting Africans as people unable to help themselves, the celebrity humanitarian narrative, and the media attention it gets, make it much easier for nations, specifically the US, to engage in imperial acquisition in the name of humanitarian aid and development. And that is exactly the purpose of the Africa Command, and why it keeps describing itself in terms of diplomacy and humanitarian aid. (Pay no attention to the fact that by pouring arms into Africa throughout the cold war, and by backing terrorist organizations in Africa, the US contributed more than its share to the destabilization and suffering in many African countries. This continues through the present.

Those days are gone, as a friend says. Although the US can, and it looks like it plans to, make things very unpleasant in the short term. African countries now have people who can and will push back effectively.

To see a few of these people, and a more positive and productive vision, check out TED Global 2007 (TED = Technology, Entertainment Design) and listen to some of the speeches by Africans at TED Themes - Africa the next chapter. I'll probably write about these again.

ODF and OOXML in Ghana and the developing world

In Ramblings of an African Geek, Kwasi provides as neat and clear an explanation of the background and the issues of ODF and OOXML for Ghana and other developing countries as I have seen anywhere.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will be voting on this September 2, so it is currently a matter of interest and importance. I've included an excerpt, but it is worth reading the whole article, particularly if you may need to explain some of this at some point, or have the opportunity to ask questions.

Excerpt from:
Background information on ODF, OOXML and why It matters in the developing world

Developing countries are still building the vast majority of their IT infrastructure. This means that they do not have a massive base of old documents in a restricted format. Those documents are on paper. Their offices are still being computerized. Their people are still learning how to use those computers. If you are going to teach someone to use an office suite anyway, what difference does it make if that suite is MS Office, Openoffice.org or Google Writer? What difference does it make if those legacy paper documents go to ODF or OOXML? Either way the work has to be done and the money has to be spent.

The problem is, what happens when you lock yourself into a company’s proprietary format because they are giving you free stuff and claim the format is open, then they start charging you for it and you realize all those alternatives they assured you existed can’t fully open your documents and you are stuck with them and their licence fees?

In an earlier post he tells us more about why open source is important in Ghana as well as the developing world, particularly in Africa. As he says, money is the most often cited reason but it is not necessarily the most important. From a presentation he has posted:

Problem: At this point in time Africa is overwhelmingly a consumer of other people's ideas and technology.

Why is this a problem?

Well, it isn't if we have no issues with playing in second place for all time. Assuming we have a problem with that though, we will not achieve parity while we are dependent on outside brain power to solve all our problems while we sideline local talent and ability.

How does the Open Source movement help us to address this?

The free flow of information gives us a huge chance to level the playing field.
Lowers the barriers of information access.
Gives us a look at their tools and their processes.
This we can use to leverage those tools as we use them, and to create our own.

In other words, this is about more than just getting cheaper consumer goods.
Its about contributing back to the global share of information as equals.

India and Brazil have indicated they will vote in favor of ODF rather than OOXML. And Slashdot has a number of articles with good discussions in the comments. Two of them are here and here.

Investing in Africa - sunny optimism

The Economist has a rather nice article about investing in Africa this week, The sunny continent. It is mostly about two businessmen, Mo Ibrahim and Sam Jonah, and their thoughts and plans about the future.

Mr Ibrahim . . . is ebullient about the potential for mobile phones and mass entrepreneurship to deliver even more dramatic growth and poverty reduction in future, in Africa as well as elsewhere. He recently established a $150m fund to invest in African business.

Mr Jonah is a larger-than-life hail-fellow-well-met Ghanaian, who made his first fortune by selling Ashanti Goldfields, a Ghanaian mining company, to South Africa’s mighty AngloGold . . . He is now doing well in private equity. As evidence of his bullishness, Mr Jonah is trying to raise $250m to build long-distance roads across Africa—the lack which is one of the most obvious failures in the continent’s infrastructure. His goal is to find 50 successful African business people, each willing to invest $5m in the fund, and then to use multilateral funds to leverage the money into the billions.
. . .
There is increasingly a pro-African mood in the global business community nowadays, says Mr Jonah.
. . .
. . . much of the “help” Africa has had from outside has been of the wrong sort. By way of illustration, Mr Jonah points to three once impoverished European countries—Spain, Portugal and Greece—that might have stayed poor had they not been “rescued by their sugar daddy, the European Union.” The point, he says, is that richer European countries invested in these poor countries, “not as charity, but because they saw a win-win opportunity.” The same is now true of Africa, he argues. With a handful of headline-grabbing exceptions, “everyone in Africa is now getting their act together, with free markets and democracy.”

This is where Mr Jonah and Mr Ibrahim are somewhat at odds with each other. Last year Mr Ibrahim endowed an annual prize for leadership in Africa, which will recognise a retired African leader who did a good job in office. Mr Ibrahim, one of Africa’s first home-grown philanthropists, believes this prize will help raise the standard of leadership across the continent.

I have read elsewhere, I think it might have been in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago, that if Africa had received the same kind of investment eastern Europe did after the fall of the Berlin wall, there would have been even more to show for it. The United States has mostly engaged in military assistance, that has destabilized and impoverished its targets.

Many of the top U.S. arms clients --Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC) -- have turned out to be the top basket cases . . . in terms of violence, instability, and economic collapse.

The US is always claiming to be businesslike. It should act a bit more businesslike.

Business investment can have its downside, think Enron as just one example, and some of my friends think Jonah is a crook. I know very little about Ibrahim. But both men are on the right track in what they are saying. I hope the optimism and investment continue and pay off.
(If the Economist link does not let you in and you would like a copy of this article, or others I cite, email me at crossedcrocodiles, on gmail, I can email a copy.)

Ghana oil discovery - map, and more thoughts about the future

Ghana oil discovery, map of potential finds, from Vanco, 2002
Click on image above to enlarge, or click here for the original.

For a map of the Tullow find (to the left above) see the previous post.

As The Economist points out in Into Africa:

After lagging behind the rest of the globe in the 1990s, African output growth has averaged 5% a year since 2001, while the world has averaged just 4.2%. Strong commodity prices have, of course, played a vital part in this. The continent has 8% of the world’s oil reserves; more of America’s oil imports now come from Africa than from the Persian Gulf. . . . The continent has 23% of the world’s land, but only 12% of its farmland; there is scope to bring more territory under cultivation.

Many talk about the “resource curse” that has bedevilled Africa. If an economy has vast natural resources, a government can tax them easily; as a result, there is little incentive to produce the kind of regulatory environment that would encourage the development of a wider tax base. The availability of a “cash cow” such as an oil sector also encourages corruption.

. . . the volatility of African equity returns was no higher than that of Latin America over the period 1995-2006. There may yet come a time when African equities are hot stocks.

Ghana needs to protect her agriculture, and diversify. And when The Economist, or any western voice, talks about putting more land into cultivation, countries should be careful about what they plan to cultivate. Every country should plan to feed itself first, try to minimize environmental damage and create sustainable agriculture. The vision of the US right wing, of Africa as a continent sized sugar plantation growing bio-fuel for the US petrol appetite, would be comic, except that it is part of their reason for creating AFRICOM.

Ghana needs to beware. Oil, and other extractive resources can make a country much poorer, described succinctly in an article in Foreign Policy:

Collier’s model shows that producers of oil, timber, and minerals would on average see their gross domestic products rise by 10 percent in the first seven years, only to have them crash two decades later to only 75 percent of where they started. Sudden cash flows in unprepared countries, he says, lead to unsustainable public consumption, rising inflation, soaring inequality, trade protectionism, and a real danger of civil war.

Ghana oil discovery - thoughts about the future

Map of Tullow's recent oil discovery in Ghana
click on the map to see the larger view

The Guardian published an article this week about the oil discovery in Ghana, and potential effect on the Ghanaian economy. Ghana enters oil age with wary eye on neighbors.

.

. . as the euphoria dies down, people are debating whether oil is really the economic injection their country needs.
. . . "Nigeria has oil in abundance, yet the local people have nothing," said George Moore, a 29-year-old restaurant worker in Axim, a fishing village near Cape Three Point. "Is that what is going to happen here?"
. . .

"Our country works, but the idea of us producing oil still scares me," said Kofi Bentil, a business lecturer at Ashesi University in Accra. "It will totally change the structure of the economy. It could push us into overdrive, but it could also lead us to self-destruct."

One advantage that Ghana has over its oil-producing neighbours, said Mr Bentil, is experience and political stability. While countries such as Nigeria were already swimming in oil money at independence, Ghana has had 50 years to build up institutions to manage its finances.

It is also one of the few countries in the region to hold free and fair elections with peaceful transitions of power.

Although corruption at state level remains significant, accountability has improved greatly in recent years, donor officials say.

Mats Karlsson, the World Bank country director for Ghana, said that even without oil, Ghana was on track to become a middle-income country by 2015, when it would start to wean itself off aid. Oil revenues could accelerate that process.

Or, oil revenues could reverse the process.

The US Africa Command could be a destabilizing influence in Ghana as well as other countries. The focus of Africom is oil. Cooperation with African military organizations is an attempt to manage this resource. And the more the interests of the military in a country are supported above the interests of other citizens, the more chance there is of creating and extending coups and military governments. Currently Nigeria, Equitorial Guinea, and other places, are experiencing this kind of US military support. In the words of Vijay Prashad:

Resource wars in the Congo (over diamonds and coltran) and in West Africa (over oil) have set the continent on fire. The U.S. has thus far engaged with these conflicts through Africa's national armies, who have increasingly become the praetorian guards of large corporations. None of this can be justified directly as a protection of the extraction of resources, so it has increasingly been couched in the language of the war on terrorism. The Pan-Sahel Initiative (created in 2002) draws U.S. Special Operations Forces to Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. In 2004, the U.S. extended this to the major oil producing countries of Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia and renamed it the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative. After 9/11, the U.S. moved a Special Operations Force into a former French Foreign Legion base, Camp Le Monier, in Djibouti. In July 2003, the U.S. earned the right to deploy P-3 Orion aerial surveillance aircraft in Tamanrasset, Algeria. Under the guise of the War on Terrorism, the U.S. government has moved forces into various parts of Africa, where they were able to train African armies and to intervene in the increasingly dangerous resource wars.

Ghana needs to diversify her economy, and protect and develop her agricultural sector, if the oil is to help rather than hurt. And Ghana needs to provide health care, and free universal public education. This is a public good, even necessity, and should not be an individual privilege. Ghana needs all its brain power active and healthy, not just the brain power of the rich. Rich brains are not always the best brains. Every cedi invested in education will be paid back many times over in business development and revenues.

As b real points out in a comment, the US Senate has a hearing today on the Africa Command, Exploring The U.S. Africa Command And A New Strategic Relationship With Africa. In his opening remarks there were a few words Senator Feingold said that offer a glimmer of optimism even though the goal is still to acquire African oil and resources. I have emphasized them below.

I am prepared to fully support a unified, interagency U.S. approach that creates a military command with the primary mission of supporting our policies towards Africa and ensuring continued diplomatic, development, humanitarian assistance, and regional initiatives led by the Department of State, USAID, and other key stakeholders – including national and international NGOs, other bilateral and multilateral development bodies, and of course, African political and military leaders.

African leaders look a bit like an afterthought, but at least they are mentioned, unlike in the Bushco documents from the Heritage Foundation that lay out the Bush/Cheney vision of Africom.

Pan-African Infrastructure Dev't Fund launched at AU Summit in Accra

Click photo to enlarge.

The African Union Summit is meeting now in Accra, starting on July 1. There has been much talk in African media of Africans solving African problems, and the AU has just taken a giant step in that direction. I hope there is effective follow through, but just making the commitment is a significant stride in the right direction.

Historically Ghana has been a leader in Pan-Africanism, and many Ghanaians believe strongly in how important this is. E.K. Benasah II wrote a post about:

. . . a public Forum (in mid-June) to hear what Ghanaians have to say about the grand project of an African Union government. The forum was organised by a private newspaper, The Statesman; a private English-speaking radio station CITI 97.3FM; Metro TV; and a civil society organisation called the Centre for Democratic Development.

I wish I could have heard what people had to say. He touches on those discussions here. For protection of African peoples and protection of the environment, which comes to the same thing, and to apply some wisdom in the use of resources, African people must stand together. and the Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund is a strong way to begin.

It is just a beginning. With oil and other resources turning more Western and Eastern attention towards Africa, Africans must stand together to remain standing. As Adam Habib wrote in Business Day:

. . . there is an urgent need to try to develop a continental African response. The failure to develop one would have serious consequences for Africa and undermine all of the significant achievements of the past decade. Given this, should this not be the principal focus of SA in the AU summit starting later this month? Should we not use this opportunity to focus African minds in a realistic attempt to develop a collective African response to a developing continental threat?

The Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund, as reported in the Business News at GhanaWeb:

Accra, July 2, GNA - The Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund (PAIDF) was on Sunday launched at the ongoing 9th African Union Summit with an initial seed money of US$625 million raised from eight investors within the continent.
. . .
The fund, the first of its kind, was a public/private sector initiative, conceived, put together and completely managed by Africans. It sets out to raise at least US$1.2 billion to serve as a financing platform for infrastructure development on the continent, such as would accelerate economic development of Africa and thereby improve the living standards of the continent's 816 million peoples.

The creation of the fund was also a major step taken by Africans towards having African solutions to African problems, which was what the AU summit and the proposed union government was all about, thereby stopping Africa from continuing as a net exporter of capital through investments and debt repayment.

Mr Mahloepe noted that there were already 18 projects on the pipeline vying for funding from the PAIDF, saying that the strident investment procedures regarding the fund required that not more than 25 per cent would be invested in a particular region, not more than 20 per cent would be invested in a particular country and not more than 30 per cent in a particular sector.

"The 18 projects would require 4.2 billion dollars but by the close of this year we would have only 1.2 billion at our disposal so we intend to select the most viable projects and invest into those - already we are looking at two energy projects and one road project on the continent," he said.
. . .
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo, Ghana's Minister of Foreign Affair, Regional Cooperation and NEPAD described the fund as an historic initiative through which Africa was showing to the international community that "instead of the endless pleas for handouts and gifts we are now paving the way to help ourselves from our own resources."

"This meeting is different from those in the past where we negotiate for hand outs from the international community - this time we are building our own source of funding for our development," he said. He noted that poverty on the continent was largely defined by the lack of adequate infrastructure in the individual states and across the continent, saying that the responsibility lied with Africans and nobody else to set the tone for Africa's development.
. . .
Ms Nkosazana Zuma, South African Minister of Foreign Affairs said the setting up of the fund communicated a clear message to the world that Africa was ready to take up the responsibility of its development into its own hands.

As always, it doesn't cost much to talk. NEPAD was a source of criticism and controversy today for lack of accomplishments. We will have to watch and see if the actions of the Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund have any of the strength of the words at its creation. Will the money continue to come in? and will there be accomplishments to show for it? Many of us who remember the resource and ideological Scramble for Africa in the 1980s, dread the possibility of those civil wars, displacements, and refugee flows happening again. The lust for oil could make this time many times worse.

China in Africa

Visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufuor pose for photo with local children during a road completion ceremony near Accra, capital of Ghana, June 19, 2006. Wen and Kufuor co-inaugurated Monday the road between Ofankor and Nsawan, a portion of the trunk road linking Ghana's capital Accra and the west African country's second biggest city Kumasi.

Harold French has an article in the International Herald Tribune about the Chinese footprint growing across Africa. China's fundamental interest is oil, China really needs to expand supply to meet skyrocketing demand.

French compares an Ethiopian Airlines flight filled with Chinese, to those flights he has taken to Africa from the United States:

Yes, there is a smattering of business people and of tourists. But the Americans who travel to Africa tend to be aid workers of one kind or another: officials of the U.S. government and of the international financial institutions, like the World Bank, and the army of well-paid consultants and contractors that they deploy. They are also relief workers and missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, and academics doing research.

There is much to be gleaned from the contrast here. Chinese people today look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play. Too often, the West looks at Africa and sees a problematic pupil, a sickly patient, and a zone of pestilence, where failure looms in the air like a curse.

To be sure, China will not forever be the fresh-faced and idealized suitor that many in Africa take it to be today. This is clearly a special, honeymoon-like moment. But the very appeal of China owes a great deal to disillusionment in Africa with the West, whose preachiness and shifting prescriptions, whose unreliability and penchant in the face of frustration for damning cultural explanations for Africa's failures, free of critical self-examination, have left many Africans exasperated.

This exasperation has been the all but unacknowledged backdrop to a string of recent events, from the Wolfowitz scandal at the World Bank to the recent Group of 8 summit meeting, the common threads being Western posturing about helping Africa, a failure to deliver on promises and the dearth of African voices heard, or even admitted into the debate.

It is particularly this last that truly infuriates Africans: the dearth of African voices heard, or even admitted into the debate, as well as the West's unreliability and penchant in the face of frustration for damning cultural explanations for Africa's failures.

In a previous post I quoted Kenyan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo on the World Bank:

Not too long ago, in many African countries, the second most powerful person after the president was not the army commander or the vice president, but the World Bank country representative.

The policy prescriptions of the Bank . . . and loan conditions could neither be reviewed nor questioned by elected parliaments and cabinets.

And following World Bank and IMF prescriptions has left many African countries with these results:

So, at the end of the day, by following the advice of western experts you've destroyed your rural economy, gone from a country which could feed itself to a net importer of food, created huge slums around your cities, increased the instability of your country - and haven't modernized.

. . .

When citizens of third world countries talk about how the West in general, and America in specific, is keeping them down, this is much of what they're talking about.

French notes the same thing in his article, including the following statements:

Thérèse Mekombé, a member of a Chadian commission created to supervise the use of that country's oil revenues, was categorical in an interview, saying, "The World Bank is not a partner in development, and can never be a partner in our development."

Another recent exception was an op-ed column by the Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, which was published in this newspaper, urging G-8 nations to invest in Africa "like India and China."

And as French ads:

Compare this with China, whose diplomacy has been on a tear across the continent recently, writing off debt, exempting African exports from trade duties, lending increasingly huge amounts of money, and, generally speaking, making things happen quickly and in a big way.

Surely China is pursuing its own interests. Just as surely, much of what it is attempting will not pan out, or will have deleterious effects, particularly since no distinction is made between governments that are relatively clean and representative and those that are odious.

(Between the West and China) . . . it is not hard to see who is gaining ground.

Despite Bush, the United States still has a moderately good reputation in Africa, and still holds a position of some respect. Most African governments continue to deal with the US. This is primarily the result of work by Presidents Carter and Clinton. Carter's emphasis on human rights made a huge impact around the world. It is a great shame the US turned away from this immediately following Carter under Reagan. And Clinton has enjoyed a fabulous relationship with Africa where he is viewed as a brother.

Southern thinking and traditions are not often held in esteem by the US intelligentsia, aside from the GOP southern strategy to take advantage of white racism. But I often think that leaders with open minds, who come out of the south, have a greatly enhanced ability to achieve some success in resolving intransigent issues. Southerners know how to talk and keep talking. They have had to keep talking to work out the issues of civil rights. And when you have two sides that are completely opposed, the only possible peaceful solution lies in talking and talking and keeping talking, even when there looks like no possibility of compromise.

The present US approach to Africa, military assistance, the Africa Command, with diplomacy and aid subsumed under the Pentagon's aegis, is exactly the wrong way to go. It continues the western mistakes and arrogance that French describes. The Africom message is control and containment.

Those people who "look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play" are likely to do better both for African countries and for themselves. Although the same caveat applies here as everywhere in the world. It is critical for everyone to think long term about human rights and about the environment.

Aid has never, ever developed a nation

Kumasi Central Market, one of the largest open-air markets in Africa. 2005
For a link to the video montage, click here.

More and more voices are saying something I've been thinking about for some time. Africans need to solve African problems. This is the big drawback to the One Laptop Per Child program, selling cheap laptops for school children in developing countries, and to other technology development programs. No one in the target countries was involved in planning the development. It is a question raised about malaria research, and about a whole host of other issues.

In her film “Africa: Open for Business“ Carol Pineau asks:

Africa, Pineau tells us, has the best return on capital of any market in the world. Why isn’t there widespread investment on the continent. Risk? . . . The perception of risk far outpaces the real risk.

Pineau made her film about African entrepreneurship because she could not sell positive stories of African development to any news media. And it is certainly true that one sees almost nothing positive about Africa in the news media, although the Discovery travel channel has featured several different programs that were quite positive about Ghana. Still, that was travel entertainment, not news. I am constantly impressed by the entrepreneurship I see in Ghana. The usual coverage of Africa in the western news media: war and famine, is poisonous to those watching, as much as it is poisonous to the African people described.

Pineau is concerned about the long-term psychological damage of poor coverage of the continent. She reminds us that colonialism tried to ensure that colonies were never able to compete with their conquerors. She argues that the images of Africa are a form of this colonialism, and they perpetuate uncomfortable trends. “Aid has never, ever developed a nation,” she argues.

One of the problems is that we rarely take African voices seriously - she points to reports of snow on the peaks of Kilimanjaro. British geographic societies wouldn’t believe reports of snow on the mountain’s peak until a British explorer had been there. The same thing happens today, she tells us, in coverage of relief work. The people actually giving food and medical aid are Africans, but the people interviewed on camera are the “white saviors.”

The way development aid has worked so far has been a grave disadvantage to African countries. Kenyan economist James Shikwati says:

Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

In the interview with Spiegel he speaks about corn sent to Kenya as aid:

A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN's World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It's a simple but fatal cycle.

SPIEGEL: If the World Food Program didn't do anything, the people would starve.

Shikwati: I don't think so. In such a case, the Kenyans, for a change, would be forced to initiate trade relations with Uganda or Tanzania, and buy their food there. This type of trade is vital for Africa. It would force us to improve our own infrastructure, while making national borders -- drawn by the Europeans by the way -- more permeable. It would also force us to establish laws favoring market economy.
. . .

SPIEGEL: In the West, there are many compassionate citizens wanting to help Africa. Each year, they donate money and pack their old clothes into collection bags ...
. . .

Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livelihoods. They're in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria's textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

I don't know a great deal about Shikwati. From his words in the interview I have some reservations. He sounds a bit like the people in the US, mostly Republicans, who say you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it. So they cut social programs which actually do some good, and run the government into debt throwing money at themselves and their cronies. Or perhaps he sounds a bit like a libertarian, which I think was fairly accurately characterized as anarchy for rich people. And I'm not exactly sure I understand or trust his ideas on AIDs. But his overall theme, that Africans need to handle our own affairs is right on target. No one in business, and no entrepreneur, can compete with free goods.

Pineau asks two critical questions:

* What would we do if we really cared about development in Africa?

* What can we learn from Africa if we decided to listen and stop always trying to teach?

How to recoup without coups?

Marina Beach shanty town, Ajegunle, AJ City, Lagos (Courtesy of Femi Jarrett)
for a brief history of Ajegunle see Ghetto Radio

Ian Welsh over at Firedoglake wrote a recent column on a problem with western development "advice" and "assistance" that has been particularly damaging to African economies. The problem he points out is hardly the only problem, among others, corruption has had a devastating effect on the economies of many countries, and African countries have suffered more than their share of corruption. Those countries with oil have also suffered from the oil curse, with big incomes, but overall standards of living going down rather than up.

In order to generate cash needed or desired for a variety of reasons, developing countries were advised their greatest resource was land, on which they could grow cash crops. Unfortunately, the kind western high yield agricultural techniques necessary for most cash crops eliminate jobs and displace farmers, who then move to ever expanding slums in the cities. Meanwhile, during the last decades of the 20th century a number of developing countries were getting and following this same cash crop advice, glutting the commodities markets and driving down prices.

The ensuing lack of cash was treated as a failure on the part of the developing country, which was urged to work harder, borrow more, and spend less, in ways such as cutting food subsidies for the people whose livelihoods have been eliminated.

Welsh writes:

So you've gained hard currency, but you've lost jobs, most of which will never be recovered. The multiplier effect (the number of jobs created to serve primary jobs) is damn near zero, because the fancy new plantations and huge farms use machines built elsewhere, run on oil pumped elsewhere, need to be repaired by expats who were trained elsewhere, the fertilizer comes from oversees and even the seeds probably even come from overseas.

. . .

So, at the end of the day, by following the advice of western experts you've destroyed your rural economy, gone from a country which could feed itself to a net importer of food, created huge slums around your cities, increased the instability of your country - and haven't modernized.

. . .

When citizens of third world countries talk about how the West in general, and America in specific, is keeping them down, this is much of what they're talking about. It's an economic system, which while sold as a benefit to the third world countries following the prescriptions, coincidentally worked out to provide very cheap commodities to the first world for decades, allowed quite a number of loans to be made and didn't lift a single country I can think of out of poverty. (emphasis mine)

. . .

Those loans were made with the aid of experts who made pretty explicit claims about how things would work out for the better. The common excuse is that “corruption” is why they failed, but even in countries where there was little corruption, they failed. . . . Thirty years later the locals were worse off than they were before the loans were made and the advice was followed.

. . .

And meanwhile, in Asia, countries that didn't follow this path – countries that built up industry behind trade barriers, didn't try and convert their farmland into cash crops – countries that rejected the advice of the western experts, who didn't accept the loans – they're the ones who have lifted themselves out of poverty. The lesson, one might say, is clear. Beware Westerners giving advice. It's not that the advice doesn't work out to someone's benefit, it's just that that someone isn't you.

And why did African countries accept this bad advice so trustingly. I suspect part of the reason is that they had little to no experience as countries. Most of the Asian countries had a country identity long before the late 20th century, even those that may not have been independent or unified for a time. The borders in Africa were artificially drawn by Europeans, and African countries are still working out their identities and relationships within and between these borders. There has been a limited sense of a shared identity and history within many countries. Plus, there was very little local expertise of the sort needed to analyse Western advise, especially for the long term.

The dollar diplomacy, the low or no interest loans China is providing some countries, may offer a way to change course. Of course China is a huge marketer of cheap weapons as well, which are hugely destabilizing. And the US emphasis on military aid is also destabilizing. I'd like to be optimistic, but recent history does not offer much support.