Tag Archives: paris

A most unlikely critique of françafrique

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This is from the BBC:

On Sunday, Luigi di Maio [Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister] called on the European Union to impose sanctions on France for its policies in Africa.

He said France had “never stopped colonising tens of African states”.

He accused France of manipulating the economies of African countries that use the CFA franc, a colonial-era currency backed by the French treasury.

“France is one of those countries that by printing money for 14 African states prevents their economic development and contributes to the fact that the refugees leave and then die in the sea or arrive on our coasts,” he said.

“If Europe wants to be brave, it must have the courage to confront the issue of decolonisation in Africa.”

Read the whole thing here.

di Maio is a member of the Five Star Movement, whose popular support in Italy appears to be trending in the wrong direction (which might explain the decision to poke France in the eye in this manner).

Here’s a description of Macron’s françafrique. 

And here’s how violent extremism in the Sahel might be reinforcing françafrique.

screen shot 2019-01-22 at 11.47.02 amIt is worth noting that, from the French perspective, the economic case for françafrique is not as strong as it used to be (see image). Trade with the CFA zone as a share of total French trade volume has been on a steady decline since the 1960s. However, the corrupt symbiotic relationship between African and French economic and political elites is still strong. Plus France still needs francophone Africa for geopolitical reasons. By 2050 about 80% of the world’s French speakers will live in Africa.

Demography and the African future of the French language

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This is from the Economist:

Today more people speak French in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, than in Paris. By 2050, thanks to population growth in Africa, some 85% of the world’s French-speakers will live on the continent. Mr Macron has been promoting French on his recent travels to the Gulf, China and, pointedly, Ghana, an English-speaking west African country surrounded by French-speaking ones. Visiting Tunisia, he said he wanted to double the number learning French there by 2020.

I wonder what Ngugi wa Thiong’o makes of these developments.

Here is a possible answer:

La Francophonie “cannot just be an institution for saving the French language; that is not what Francophone countries are worried about,” explains Mr Mabanckou. “Africans don’t need the French language to exist.” He asks how many universities in France teach Francophone African literature, and complains that American students are more likely to study such writers than are French ones. The French literary world clings to a Paris-centric vision, Mr Mabanckou says, too often failing to consider writers from former colonies as part of mainstream literature, as British publishers and universities now do.

Mozambique: Is there such a thing as predatory sovereign lending?

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The Wall Street Journal has a great story on Mozambique’s hidden debt scandal:

Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 8.03.37 PM.pngThe government picked Mr. Safa’s company, Privinvest, to supply ships, including patrol and surveillance vessels, and asked its help getting financing. The company disputes the characterization of the ships as military, saying they weren’t outfitted with weapons. Privinvest approached Credit Suisse about a loan for Mozambique, and a committee of senior executives, including then-CEO Gaël de Boissard, approved the deal.

Credit Suisse’s top brass signed off in part because the bank had pioneered a way to lend in developing countries without taking on much risk.

The bank found it could purchase sovereign-debt insurance through the Lloyd’s of London insurance market to hedge as much as 90% of the loans against default. Credit Suisse charged higher interest rates on the debt than its insurance premiums, pocketing the difference mostly risk free.

The insurance policies Credit Suisse used only covered governments. So when Mozambique wanted to borrow the money through state-owned companies instead, the bank came up with a twist: Mozambique would cosign.

FT notes that:

The debt was originally borrowed via a special purpose vehicle for Ematum [tuna fishing company], an arrangement that does not require the same level of disclosure as a sovereign bond issue.

Basically Credit Suisse, the Russian VTB Capital, and their Mozambican accomplices knew exactly what they were doing.

When the money got to Mozambique it mostly went into private pockets. The proposed tuna business the loans were intended to finance went bust (realizing a paltry 2.5% of projected sales). And the security purchases (ostensibly to secure Mozambique’s vast yet-to-be-developed gas fields) proved useless.

Meanwhile…

…….conditions in Mozambique are worsening. Its foreign-currency reserves fell to $1.8 billion in May from $2 billion in January, and it is seeking $180 million in food aid. Intensified fighting has sent more than 10,000 refugees to neighboring Malawi, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

Credit Suisse is a Swiss financial services company. According to the WSJ Privinvest’s struggling subsidiary Constructions Mécaniques de Normandie built the ships sold to Mozambique. The latter is, of course, based in France. Corruption knows no borders.

The illusion of modern-day meritocracy

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That is, most observers—novelists, economists, and laypersons alike—tend to assume that labor income now plays a much bigger role than inherited wealth in shaping people’s lives, and that human capital and hard work have become the key to personal material well-being. Although this is rarely formulated explicitly, the implicit assumption seems to be that the structure of modern economic growth has led to the rise of human capital, the decline of inheritance, and the triumph of meritocracy.

This article asks a simple question: is this optimistic view of economic development justified empirically and well grounded theoretically? The simple answer is “no.” Our empirical and the- oretical findings suggest that inherited wealth will most likely play as big a role in twenty-first-century capitalism as it did in nineteenth-century capitalism—at least from an aggregate view- point.

That is Piketty in an interesting paper on the long-run evolution of inheritance in France – in the current issue of the QJE (this is gated but ungated versions are available online ).