HIV self-testing showing promising results in Malawi.
Kenyan legislators, who make upwards of $175,000 a year, now have $3000 chairs to snooze on.
Jina Moore on the white correspondent’s burden in “Africa.”
This sad event in Zambia adds significance to my planned fieldwork there in the coming year on Chinese-African relations.
And lastly, celebrating the informal economy on the Continent:
[youtube.com/watch?v=Yi0fNa1G4-4&sns=fb]I admire Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society. That said, I disagree with the concluding paragraph in his latest post on the Rwandese military’s involvement in eastern Congo over at African Arguments:
“When a similar situation occurred in Sierra Leone, the Special Court for Sierra Leone went after the main supporters and funders of the rebel movement, in particular the President of Liberia, Charles Taylor. He was recently sentenced to 50 years in jail for his part in funding the murder and destruction of Sierra Leone. Yet the evidence of Rwanda’s support for warring groups in Congo is as strong – if not stronger – than the evidence that convicted Taylor. But because of the genocide in Rwanda and because both Uganda and Rwanda have good development programmes that western donors love to fund, they will not be criticised. Eastern Congo will continue to suffer.”
Following the damning UN report on Kigali’s adventures in the Congo and concerted campaigns by human rights activists, a number of donor countries, including the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands, have (unwisely) stopped sending aid money to Kigali.
I am inclined to believe that there is truth to the claim that Rwanda supports the M23. But that does not necessary lead me to conclude that Rwanda should therefore be ostracized by the international community, for the following reasons:
In a way the campaign to have Rwanda punished for its adventures in the DRC is emblematic of the problems associated with “mono issue activism” (Remember the danger of a single story?)
This is not a defense of Kagame’s human rights record. Everyone knows it is in the toilet. It is also not a blanket endorsement of foreign interventionism. What it is is an acknowledgement of the very complex context in which Kagame acted, and a consideration of the unintended consequences of cutting aid to Rwanda.
Rwanda’s involvement is a symptom of, and not the cause of the mess that is eastern DRC.
To those that want Kigali punished, I ask: What would it mean for Rwanda’s and the wider region’s security? What would it mean for economic growth and development for the 12 million Rwandese? What would it mean for infant and maternal mortality that have been on the decline (more rapidly than in most of the developing world) over the last decade?
Punishing Kagame (and the people of Rwanda) for Kinshasa’s ineptitude will not solve the problems in eastern Congo. That is just a fact.
UPDATE:
Please check out the comments section below for some insightful discussion on this subject. Despite the combativeness of some of the comments, they all raise some important points that I could not have incorporated in a short blog post.
Mars is about to get a special visitor…
[youtube.com/watch?v=h2I8AoB1xgU]The following campaign message by Martha Karua, a presidential candidate in Kenya’s election in March of 2013, highlights the material value of the Kenyan presidency.
“Tufanye hesabu tena…Let’s count the cost and keep all of us accountable. A recent research suggested that some presidential candidates will spend as much as Ksh. 11 billion shillings ($130 million) each to try and capture the presidency. Now, at around Ksh. 3.2 million a month including allowances, the President of Kenya earns Ksh 38.4 million ($452,000) a year, much more than what President Obama, the German Chancellor and the PM of England earn, and which translates to Ksh. 192 million in a five year term. So in one five year term, the most a president can hope to earn is around Ksh. 192 million, quite a substantial sum by world standards.
My question; why would anyone spend Ksh. 11 billion to only earn Ksh. 192 million? Does this math add up to you dear Kenyans? How would that individual be hoping to recover the remaining Ksh. 10.78 billion to cover their campaign expenses including buying of votes and bribery? The answer is simple! Corruption and impunity! Inflated government tenders to well connected family and friends. These inflated tenders drive the cost of living for all Kenyans sky high, the very reason ordinary Kenyans can barely make ends meet last 49 years!Do the Math!”
The skeptical African kid meme has been viral for a while. Just in case you have missed out on it.
The BBC reports:
Ghana’s President [John Atta Mills], who was suffering from throat cancer, has died in the capital, Accra.
A statement from his office said the 68-year-old died a few hours after being taken ill, but did not give details.
Vice President Dramani Mahama is due to be sworn in as the new president.
Ghana is scheduled to hold general elections later this year. With the passing of Mr. Mills it is unclear who will become the ruling party’s presidential candidate (more on this soon).
Dr. Leonard Wantchekon of Princeton has set the ball rolling on what is a promising project.
The [African School of Economics] ASE will meet the urgent need for an academic institution capable of generating the necessary human capital in Africa. Although the region has seen significant improvements in primary and secondary education in the past few decades there is still a pressing need for advanced education centers. Through our PhD programs, we hope to provide the missing African voice in many Africa-related academic debates. Furthermore, through our Master in Business Administration (MBA), Master in Public Administration (MPA), Executive MBA and MPA (EMBA and EMPA), Master in Mathematics, Economics and Statistics (MMES), and Master in Development Studies (MDS) programs, we will provide the technical capacity that will enable more Africans to be hired into top management positions in development agencies and multinational corporations operating on the continent. This will foster sustainable hiring practices that will retain talent and experience in Africa.
The school will open its doors in 2014.
Check out an introductory video by Dr. Wantchekon here.
I have a piece in the July issue of the Journal of Democracy emphasizing the need to focus on legislative elections just as much as presidential elections.
Reflecting the immense powers of the typical “big man” president on the Continent, many election watchers (academics, journalists and “democracy practitioners” alike) have tended to focus almost exclusively on the outcomes of presidential elections. I make the case that cleaning up the conduct of legislative elections is equally important in the quest for democratic consolidation in SSA.
“A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion (£13tn) hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study.
The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined.”
I am currently working on a project on commodities in SSA and have been amazed both by the region’s mineral wealth and how much of it gets stolen by local elites in cahoots with large MNCs. It is one thing to read about corruption from 30,000 feet. Getting an up-close view is another matter. The examples of the two Congos are instructive…
Congo-Brazzaville is one of the top oil producers in Africa. It is also a dirt poor country, with over 70% of its people living below the poverty line. Like in Equatorial Guinea (and other petro-states in the region), the ruling cabal in Brazzaville has turned the country’s oil wealth into private property – the symbol of which is the president’s son’s extravagant expenditures in European capitals (For more details see below).
[youtube.com/watch?v=VpGU1hsuSpU&feature=player_embedded]These details of the sleaze around oil revenues in Congo were unearthed, by among others, Elliot Associates, a “vulture fund.”
Across the river in the other Congo (Congo-Kinshasa aka DRC) another vulture fund is trying to get Kinshasa to pay up. The vulture fund, FG Hemisphere, paid $3.3m for the debt to a Bosnian state-owned company, and then went ahead and sued for $100m in the courts of Jersey to recover the debt. Recently the Privy Council in the UK, the final appeals court, ruled in favor of Kinshasa. For more on this see the Guardian (here, here and here), which has been following this particularly case closely.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has a mineral wealth estimated to be around $24 trillion. It is also one of the least and poorest governed places on the planet. A recent report indicated that as much as 5 billion dollars in revenue from minerals has disappeared from the state coffers in the recent past.
Should Brazzaville and Kinshasa be forced to pay up?
Opinion over the utility of venture funds is divided. There are those that blame them for going after the poorest countries, asking for taxpayers to pay for their rulers’ (sometimes dead and gone, like Mobutu) largesse. But there area also those who contend that the best way of making rulers less willing to steal is by forcing them to pay up their debts – especially considering that debt forgiveness alone cannot end corruption.
Eric Joyce, writing in the Guardian puts it thus:
Campaigners have always maintained that if FGH is unable to collect the debt then the money will go instead to public works in the DRC. This is simply not true. The doctrine of “sovereign immunity” applies across the world and it is therefore not possible for any creditor, “vulture” or otherwise, to access funds that have a sovereign purpose – that is, public expenditure. Creditors can only target cash being used to trade.
With this in mind, perhaps the do-gooders campaigning for debt cancellation and recovery of stolen monies could team up with vulture funds. The latter have both the expertise and financial incentive to go after monies hidden in foreign bank accounts and shell companies registered in tax havens. Just a thought.
UPDATE:
The Atlantic has a nice piece on the legacy of Meles Zenawi, the ailing Ethiopian Premier.
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The African Union elected South African Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to head its executive arm, the AU Commission. Ms Dlamini-Zuma is a former wife of the polygamist South African President Jacob Zuma. I hope that with Pretoria’s success in having her elected to head the AU South Africa will take a more proactive role in leading the regional organization. As I have stated before, I think the organization needs “owners” in the form of diplomatically powerful custodians. Being the region’s biggest economy, South Africa is well placed to provide strong leadership to the African Union, if it wanted to.
Still on the AU Summit, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has been conspicuously absent, fueling speculation that he is critically ill. Rumors abound that Mr. Zenawi has left the country for a Belgian hospital – the Saint-Luc University Hospital in Brussels (where he is believed to be receiving treatment for an acute case of hematologic cancer). Some opposition groups have suggested that Mr. Zenawi may have died in hospital. The last time he was seen in public was on the 19th of June. Mr. Zenawi has led Ethiopia since 1991. His record has been a mixed bag of aggressive and ambitious development projects (with results, growth has averaged over 8.4% over the last ten years) and militarism and authoritarian tendencies that have seen many opposition members detained, exiled or killed.
And in Somalia, BloombergBusinessweek reports on the massive corruption in the Transitional Federal Government.
The nearly 200-page report lists numerous examples of money intended for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) going missing, saying that for every $10 received, $7 never made it into state coffers.
The report, written by the U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea and obtained by The Associated Press Monday, says government revenues aren’t even clear: The Ministry of Finance reported revenues of $72 million in fiscal year 2011, while the accountant general reported revenues of $55 million.
The Somali Government remains an unrepresentative shell, propped up by African Union forces and barely in control anywhere outside of Mogadishu. No elections are in sight (and rightly so. I have never been a fan of rushed post-conflict elections. See Liberia circa 1997 for details), instead the UN and the AU are presiding over a process in which Somali power brokers will put together a list of electors to appoint the next parliament. The current government’s mandate expires the 20th of August (next month).
Macky Sall’s party, the Benno Bokk Yakaar (United in Hope) coalition won 119 of the 150 seats (79.3%) in the just-concluded legislative elections in Senegal. President Sall assumed office this year after defeating former President Abdoulaye Wade who had been in power for over 12 years. Mr. Wade’s party got a total of 12 seats (8%). In the last legislative elections (2007) Mr. Wade’s coalition won 87.3% of the seats. Turnout in Sunday’s poll was a paltry 37% – a 3 percentage point improvement from 2007 (According to the African Elections database).
President Sall’s big legislative win is a bad omen for democratic consolidation in Senegal – and a sign of a shaky party structure characterized by unstable cycling super-majorities (see here). One would have hoped for a more competitive showing by former President Wade’s PDS in order to provide a formidable check on the president. With these results Sall might also fall into the temptation of trying to legislate his opponents out of political contention just like Wade did, and succeeded for a while.
Following the success of Dead Aid (which I enjoyed very much), Dambisa Moyo tried a repeat with Winner Take All – a book on China’s rising dominance of global commodity markets – with very little success.
The first half of Winner Take All is mostly a recount of statistics (most of which are already in the public domain) and general information on the state of the global commodity markets. It is not until the second half of the book that Moyo delves into the real issues regarding her subject matter – global commodities and China’s insatiable appetite for the same. But even then, the chapters are rather short on actual information on China and are instead full of comparative statics with the rest of the world (or more accurately, mostly the United States of America).
Moyo is not a China expert, and it shows in Winner Take All.
If you are looking for an indepth take of Chinese firms involved in the global commodity markets, their specific investments, strategies and relationships with the Chinese authorities, you will be disappointed. Moyo simply treats all of China as a single actor. There is no domestic politics. There is no discussion of redistributive concerns within China and how they will impact China’s economic performance. There is no nuance on the potential impact of China’s impending demographic decline (except in the concluding chapter). In the end the whole thing reads like it should be a special in the Atlantic Monthly rather than a stand-alone book.
The book, mistakenly, falls into the trap of Western declinism, suggesting that China will undoubtedly emerge to be the ultimate monopsonist in the global commodity markets (almost unchallenged). There is also loose talk of potential for conflict over resources – something that is contradictory to discussions in other sections of the book that emphasize the symbiotic relationship between China and the rest of the world.
The greatest strength of the book is its balanced take on the economic, political and social effects of the rise of China – especially with regard to Chinese investments in the rest of the world. The “Angola Model” of infrastructure-for-resources, discussed in the book, is far superior to the Swiss-accounts-for-resources model that has been the preserve of the West in many resource-rich developing countries over the last half century.
Winner Take All is a far cry from the provocative Dead Aid. It lacks a substantive discussion on the political economy of China’s economic rise (whether domestically or globally). Instead, it gives perspective (for those not in the know) of the implications of China’s economic rise.
Most importantly, it is also a welcome addition to the works of scholars like Deborah Brautigam who continue to remind us – and rightly so – that China’s economic adventures in the developing world have net positive benefits, despite the overwhelmingly negative press. For this reason I would recommend the book.
Because it is Friday and I can’t seem to get anything done as I await the quarter final match between Germany and Greece (so called “bailout battle” at Euro Cup 2012). Btw, should Greece win the match they should get a blank cheque from Ms Merkel (It is also kind of neat that the two men leading the battle with the Germans both on and off the pitch are both named Samaras).
Anyway, back to Dusseldorf…. Being an absolute fan of air travel I found the mad skills of these pilots who land and take off under scary conditions to be pretty cool.
[youtube.com/watch?v=mMvLuUJFHYk&feature=player_embedded#!]
kenopalo.com 