Filed under: africa | Tags: africa, Gaddafi, Liberia, Mobutu, Moi, Mugabe, neocolonialism, Nimeiry, Smauel Doe, sudan, Zimbabwe
I am no apologist for colonialism. I am also not a fan of blaming everything on colonialism. Arbitrary borders, neocolonialism, assassination of presidents, unfair farm subsidies etc etc are the usual things we hear as explanations to why most of Africa remains economically backward. I say it has been more than 50 years and its about time we moved on. Colonialism had its evils, no doubt about that. However, it’s enduring legacy on the Continent has been the fault of Africans and their leaders. There are numerous other countries that have managed to take off even though they were also colonized and for some time were heavily dependent on the industrialised West.
Mobutu, Amin, Bokassa, Moi, Mugabe, Nimeiry, Gaddafi, Doe etc etc were all Africans who deliberately chose to mess up their countries. Nobody held guns to their heads to force them to do what they did. Guinea – at independence – is a clear case that it was quite possible to break free from the former colonizers. All the above mentioned men presided over wasted dictatorships. They killed and maimed and jailed thousands of their citizens but never attempted to do what Pinochet did for Chile or the dictators of the Asian tigers did for their countries. Instead they stole everything they could from their treasuries.
The reason I bring this up is because I just attended a talk on the legacy of colonialism in Africa where the general consensus seems to have been that European colonizers were to blame for most ills on the continent. I find this track of thought wanting. African failure should squarely be blamed on inept African leadership.
Researchers have discovered a trend in the habits of mosquitoes. The little insects are feeding on human blood earlier than they used to. This means that more and more people get bitten earlier in the evening before they get to sleep under bed nets – which in turn translates into higher malaria infection rates. Bed nets lower infection rates by a whole 40%. Now researchers are urging people to use mosquito repellents. Personally, I don’t think this will fly. I for one do not like the “tourist smell” of repellents (I still don’t get how tourists stand themselves smelling like that!). I would advocate for a more aggressive approach to eliminating mosquitoes. DDT is bad, I know. But can’t we find other means of doing this? Plus malaria deaths, lost man hours because of disease burden and expenditures on anti-malaria medication may outweigh the cost of eliminating mosquitoes – thereby making the latter the more rational option.
Meanwhile, the WHO in a 2003 report says that malaria is still alive and well and continues to kill 2000 African children every day. That translates to 0.73 million children every year. I need not even add the figures for people over the age of 5.
Filed under: africa | Tags: africa, Genocide, Internally Displaced People, IRIN News, Kampala, refugees, Uganda
I could not miss the irony. African leaders will be gathered in Kampala, Uganda (19th – 23rd Oct.) to come up with a mechanism to protect the more than 11 million internally displaced people (IDPs) on the Continent. IRIN touts this as a landmark move. But I beg to ask the question: Is anyone asking these leaders what is causing this internal displacement in the first place? Couldn’t we all be better off if the kleptocrats who run the Continent were not into stealing elections, emptying their national treasuries, marginalizing segments of their populations and in extreme cases committing acts of genocide? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to not have IDPs in the first place?
Filed under: African Economies, africa | Tags: africa, aid watch, Al-Shabab, Bread, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mogadishu, New York Times Review of Books, Puntland, Somalia, somalia pirates, Somaliland, Texas in Africa, William Easterly
Taking a break from Collier and Hoeffler and Crawford Young (and into my third cup of tea for the night) I came across the following links…
William Easterly has his usual skepticism when it comes to practitioner-certainty in the field of Economics. How I wish I had time to read the two books he is banging on about in the New York Review of Books.
This result of a World Bank funded project is sort of long-ish, but I liked because one of the authors is a fellow student at the department – and because it touches on something that I care about. I can’t wait for the time I shall be doing similar fieldwork…
And Texas in Africa has a piece on Somalia that is asking the right questions. Is it time for the US and the rest of the world to call Al Shabab to the negotiating table? May be not.
Filed under: africa | Tags: africa, ECOWAS, William Easterly, COMESA, SADC, EAC, trade and development, african trade, development in africa
William Easterly has this neat collection of pics to show just how badly Africa is doing in many sectors compared to the rest of the world. The Continent’s share of global trade is a paltry 2%. In the 1960’s Africa’s share of world exports was 3%. By the 1990s the same had declined to 1%. The decline in exports did not translate into more intra-continental trade – which still stands at a dismal 10%. This despite the proliferation of regional trade agreements on the Continent (ECOWAS, SADC, EAC, COMESA, ECCAS, SACU…..). It would be interesting to analyse just how effective these regional trade pacts have been over the decades. Me thinks that like the OAU and latterly the AU they have merely been big men’s clubs with no real impact on trade and development. But I could be wrong.
An illustration of Africa’s ever shrinking share of world trade since the 1950s can be found here.
Filed under: africa | Tags: africa, agriculture, climate change, Congo, demographic dividend, Drought, Economist, Famine, farming, green revolution, Kenya
The Economist has two interesting pieces on the demographic trends in Africa. The first article notes that the fertility rates on the continent are finally beginning to come down. The second one discusses the chances that Africa will take advantage of the democratic dividend and execute its own green revolution.
As I have argued before, there is a great deal of economic sense in bringing population growth on the Continent under control – at least until people’s life options have been increased enough so that they can make well informed choices on the number of offspring to have. The usual critics of family planning measures – the Church and conspiracy theorists – should take some time to visit slums or rural homes in which overburdened, dis-empowered daughters of the Continent with little or no economic wherewithal run
Filed under: africa | Tags: africa, China, Chris Blattman, darfur, development economics, Economic Development, india, Khartoum, Scott Gration, TN Srinivasan, William Easterly
My promise to write a post on African development is almost becoming like Dr. Dre’s promise to release the Detox album. I promise it will come soon, after I settle on an opinion that is robust enough to withstand more than a few critiques.
For now we should be content listening to much wiser development experts – like Blattman, TN Srinivasan (the man who taught me intermediate microeconomics) and cynic in chief Bill Easterly.
A few years ago I used to conflate economic development with modernization. I thought that all it took to make vibrant economies in the global south was the importation of technology, material goods and ideas of governance from the more developed parts of the globe. But time has taught me that historical lock-in effects matter. The global south’s geography, historical poverty and social structures have created path dependencies that will take a lot of time to undo. This is not to say that we should give up on the idea of accelerated development. What I am suggesting is that as we do this we should have it in mind that certain things take time to change and that short-term failures disappear when you look at the long-term picture.
In other news, the conflict in Darfur has become less sexy and so it is no longer all over the news. But Darfurians are still suffering. The same applies to the Congo. Here is yet another reminder that the madness in the land of Mobutu continues unabated.
Filed under: africa | Tags: africa, trade, Kenya, Raila Odinga, Nairobi, Mwai Kibaki, Hillary Clinton, AGOA, UPS, development
Nairobi is currently playing host to delegates from all over the Continent and the US attending the 8th AGOA conference. I had time yesterday to listen to Sec. Clinton’s and President Kibaki’s speeches (President Kibaki, please fire your speech writers and hire a speech therapist). Despite the embarrassing delivery, President Kibaki’s speech struck the right tone. The US should open up more to African business and Kenyans (and Africans in general) should be quick to take advantage of the existing trade opportunities – even as they continue to tackle governance problems (which, contrary to Premier Odinga’s comments, is a major road block to African development).
I felt like Clinton’s comments were a bit too vague. It is high time the US stopped treating trade with Africa as something that only happens at the pleasure of Washington (for more on this see Aid Watch). The one thing that hit home in the speech was the call for an increase in intra-continental trade. The last time I checked this accounted for a paltry 10% of all trade on the Continent. Poor transcom infrastructure is to blame. But political risk (read deplorable governance) is also to blame. I hope the many African delegates present took this point seriously.
I don’t know what deliverables come out of such AGOA gatherings so I will wait till the end of the conference to comment on its relevance. For now I am happy that United Parcel Services (UPS) has pledged to buy staff uniforms from the Kenyan market.
Filed under: africa | Tags: africa, Charles Taylor, Civil War, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Foday Sankoh, General Butt Naked, Liberia, Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Trial
News that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female president, had funded at least two rebel groups – including Charles Taylor – left me surprised and less optimist about the Continent. It was a stark reminder that politics is a dirty game, especially in the context of a civil war as crazy as Liberia’s (which had among its cast the self-styled General Butt Naked). It is hard to imagine how any prominent Liberian politician from the 80s and 90s could have avoided siding with any of the many warring factions.
Perhaps this comment from the FP website sums it best:
“Of course, it’s not clear that there is a Liberian over the age of six who hasn’t supported one rebel group or another the past twenty years. If they were all banned from politics, there wouldn’t be a local left to run the place.”
It is hard to sympathize with Ms Sirleaf without appearing to be applying double standards given Taylor’s treatment by the wider international community. That said, one thing is clear: Ms Sirleaf is no Foday Sankoh or Charles Taylor.
And speaking of Liberia, Charles Taylor’s defense at his trial in the Hague is turning out to be a major hilarity. And of course nobody does better reporting on these issues than Wronging Rights.
A reader gave this link to a certain critique of Moyo’s “Dead Aid.” The criticism offered by this gentleman, although weighty in its own right, has not changed my admiration of Moyo’s work. The fact of the matter is that Africa needs to rid itself of dependency on well wishers from wherever on the globe.
Moyo’s book, because it is intended for general consumption, lacks the regressions and seminar-like proof that some of her critics are asking for. It does not take a statistical genius to realize that it was Western aid that propped the corrupt (and most probably mentally challenged) Bokassa.
And the simple argument that correlation does not imply causation does not fly either. It has been more than forty years of western aid to Africa without any meaningful development. Within the four decades, if there was something else other than aid that was retarding African development we should have discovered it. The fact that we have not means that aid might be the problem. And what Moyo proposes is a viable alternative.
And to be honest, the main reason why I am in full support of the Moyo way is not because I am sure that it would succeed. It is for the simple reason that it would give Africans agency in their lives. It would force African governments to govern their people humanely. And it would reduce African dependency on the rest of the world. Anyone who has taken time to observe Africans’ interaction with the rest of the world knows the enormous degree of self-doubt that Africans have. Grown men take off their hats to kids the ages of their grandchildren simply because they are not from the Continent. This much needed self-confidence will only be achieved when Africans truly take charge of their destiny. Moyo offers an option that might lead to this.
