Africa Works

Alexis Sinduhije, one of Africa’s great journalists, is somewhere in Europe, waiting out the tense aftermath of the failed election this summer in Burundi. Sinduhije withdrew as a candidate for president some weeks prior to Burundi’s national election June 28. From an undisclosed location this week, Sinduhije gave me a glimpse of his anger at Burundi’s elite — and his criticism of Western donors for permitting his country’s dysfunctional leadership to delay the inevitable turn to social and political reform. Writes Sinduhije: “I am surviving trying to re-collect my movement as the ruling party and the government are busy to destroy it. Trying to get sponsorship to fund the work of organizing the party again. As you know election was rigged and the entire West let it go and remains silent on harrass, torture, killing and jailing of the opposition members. It is a shame.”

For more from Sinduhije, see his recent essay in The East African.

OK, Nigeria isn’t for sale, not all of it at least, only the national electric power company.

In a country most people lack reliable electricity to their homes and workplaces, the government’s declaration of an intention to sell of its pathetic state-owned electricity company is cause for celebration — and also reflection on how what private-ownership will bring, should the government manage to sell even a controlling stake to outsiders.

The government this week said it wants foreign investors to put $10 billion into its ailing electricity company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria. The long list of potential investors includes Canada, Turkey, Saudia Arabia, China and India, but not the U.S.

Surely Nigeria offers profit-opportunities for foreign investors — and the promise of improved living standards for all but the top ten percent of Nigeria’s population who already live in relative opulence. Electricity is the critical technology for African countries to master. The difficulty is more political=economic than technological. State-ownership, while sometimes warranted, has been an utter failure in the electricity sector in Nigeria and in many other African countries.

Privatization isn’t easy, however. Nigerians need look no further than neighboring Cameroon, where ten years ago an American electricity supplier, AES, purchased a controlling stake in Cameroon’s entire electricity system, dominated then as now by hydro-power sources. To date, the purchase by AES is the only case of a single company taking over responsibility to supply electricity to the residents of an entire African country.

While the Americans brought cash and expertise, they were initially stymied by the endemic corruption in the electricity network. Not only were customers routinely looting the company, by stealing electricity or hijacking equipment, employees were conniving with the crooks. When I visited Cameroon in 2005 expressly to study the privitization, AES had installed a new local management that ultimately got its arms around the worst abuses of the old regime. Service vastly improved. Yet at a price: tariffs rose also. AES then faced a new problem: resentment at rising rates, without gratitude for the improvements brought by foreign investment expertise.

Nigeria likely will follow a similar path, if indeed the privitization occurs at all or even if Nigeria sells off different pieces of its electrcity network to different investors. After all, the electricity supplier touches the lives of everyone. Power outages in Nigeria are of course a symbol of the impotence of a government that controls mammoth oil reserves and permits vast gas flaring that might even be used to generate electricity for beleagured locals. Even hardened socialists and their statist cousins must by now despair that the government can ever reform on its own the Nigerian electric power company. But private investment is no panacea. While it ultimately may provide relief for those who live too much of their lives in darkness or by the dim light of a kerosene lamp, privitzation may ignite new types of frustrations that neither the state nor private investors will be prepared to manage.

Hints of the possible mayhem were quick to emerge. Following the privatization announcement, workers at the state-owned electricity went on strike, reinforcing their image as greedy incompetents yet at the same time causing more severe blackouts than what passes for normal.

The turmoil over who supplies electricity and how is worth the struggle. Nigerians can talk about shooting satellites into space, or the massive expansion in mobile phone use or the creative explosion of the footprint of Nigerians on the Internet . These are impressive achievements of course. But until Africa’s most populous country masters the most important technology of the 20th century, neither Nigeria nor Africa can enter the technological world of the 21st century. Electricity is a foundational technology on which so much else depends. No other technocratic project in Nigeria could be more important than renovating, improving and indeed democratizing electricity delivery for all.

The singer Angelique Kidjo presents a rather pedestrian portrait of her life growing up in Benin, and then — as she insists — her life in “exile” as a performer in Europe and the U.S. The whole notion of Kidjo as an exile is worth examining. Her native Benin never posed an explicit political threat to her, but rather economic and artistic limits. The Marxists who took power in Benin thought the extreme Westernization of the countries Paris-centric elite deserved condemnation. Kidjo’s life outside of Benin suggested that the Marxists were not wrong about everything. Her hybridized and highly Americanized form of pop music retains her African roots, but mainly in the manner of her attire, hair-style and stage presence. Musically, she is product as well as a victim of the “world music” market. Drained of her specific West African background, Kidjo’s “sound” is as generic as her political comprehension. Writing as both she and her independent Benin reach 50 years old, Kidjo rather casually sums up the entire sub-Saharan with a sweeping (contestable) generalization: “After 50 years of independence,” she writes in The New York Times, “my country is stuck in what the Nigerian writer Chimamande Adichie calls the “single story” of the continent: poverty.”

The equation of African-ness with impoverishment offends me, morally, empirically and aesthetically. The canard that “all Africans are poor” is designed chiefly to appeal to white Europeans and Americans who are most comfortable comprehending the African experience as a variant of impoverishment. But as I have written often on this site and, most recently, in The Christian Science Monitor and the Milken Review, the real story of Africa today is the coevolution of wealth and poverty. That some Africans are poor is without dispute. That a surprising number of Africans are well-off is often ignored. That wealthy Africans, at home and abroad, have an obligation to assist poor Africans is the one thing that virtually remains unspoken about the African condition, and the attitude of non-Africans to this crucial region. That elites arose in Africa, despite wide gaps between rich and poor, is widely accepted by scholars, and well-known by elite families themselves, of which Kidjo most certainly hails. Her relative enriched and enriching experience as a youth in Benin she proudly displays: “Although I was already making a living as a teenager with my singing career, my parents insisted that I dedicate myself to school because we lived in such a great educational and cultural environment. By the 10th grade, I was already studying philosophy, and debating the merits of Rousseau and Camus with my friends.” And yet her exit from Benin and her current relationship with her nurturing maternal society draws a blank. Writes Kidjo: “As a singer, the only thing I could do was to praise the revolution and sing at political gatherings. I felt I could no longer express myself and one day in 1983, without telling anyone, I escaped the country. I realized on that day that the dream of a proud independent Africa had been broken. Since that day, even though I’ve lived and worked in exile, I’ve drawn almost all of my inspiration from the incredible richness of my culture.” Her gratitude prompts her to ask readers to donate to charities working to assist the worthy cause of girl education in Benin and Africa generally. “Invest in girls education,” Kidjo says, is the most important single step that Africans can take to assist Africa. Investing in girls is terrific, but should not be done without an awareness that there are two classes of girls in Africa: rich ones and poor ones. These two types of girls begin with different advantages — and require different types of assistance. Ignoring wealth in Africa, and making a cult of impoverishment, helps neither of these very important girls.

Based on her reticent posture in Holland today, Naomi Campbell may be hoping to receive more unsavory gifts from some present or future African dictator in the years ahead. The super-model, cross-examined as a “hostile” witness in the criminal case against deposed Liberian dictator Charles Tayler, pointedly denied that she knew that the bag of diamonds she received in 1997 while on a visit to South Africa came from Taylor. Disputing testimony from her agent at the time that indeed Taylor tried to ignite an affair with her, Campbell — a legendary beauty afflicted with an infantile mind — seemed intent on signaling to other African dictators that she is not the kind of women who gets an illicit gift and then gabs. She even went so far as to dis the rough diamonds she received, calling them “pebbles.”

The prosecutors with a United Nations war-crimes tribunal want to show that Taylor directly dealt in illicit diamonds, using them to lubricate his dictatorship and float his lifestyle. That the court must rely on such flimsy evidence as the Campbell affair suggests that Taylor’s trial is verging on the trivial. The major questions about his role ought to include an examination of the U.S. government’s role of installing him in power and, perhaps, helping him remain in power long after he vacated the peculiar “reservation” that his C.I.A. liasons envisioned for him. That a UN war-crimes tribunal persists in conceiving of Taylor’s crimes in the most narrowest of fashions — as if he was a shoplifter caught on a clumsy encounter with Harrod’s — highlights the limitations of human-rights law. The big crimes committed by Taylor go well beyond the scope of any war-crimes mandate and hark back to an era when really “big men” in Moscow, Washington and Havana called the shots in many African countries. What’s needed much more than criminal trials of deposed African dictators is a kind of truth-and-reconciliation commission on how the Cold War contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union distorted African societies from top to bottom and consumed some of the continent’s best and brightest.

Cocoa farmers in West Africa – growers of the main portion of world cocoa supply – are distant actors in a weird rumble over prices, which recently hit a 33-year peak, achieving the highest prices on record since 1977. The proximate cause of the record price is speculative activity by commodities traders, especially a particular hedge fund, Armajaro of London, which recently shocked financiers by actually taking deliver of physical cocoa.

The financial drama has masked a fundamental shift in the pricing of one of Africa’s most prized outputs. Cocoa is essential in the manufacturer of chocolate and producers, who are largely clustered in the neighboring countries of Ghana and Ivory Coast, have long failed to form a cartel to drive up prices, much in the same oil producers (OPEC) do. In economic terms, cartels can make sense, rewarding owners of a relatively scarce commodity.

Common and concerted action is often required for a cartel to take hold. When governments try to form cartels – say, to fight back against traders in the world’s big cities – they must hew to the same script. In the case of Ghana and Ivory, such common action has never been possible. Since independence in 1957, Ghana’s government has closely controlled the sale of cocoa, essentially nationalizing the crop through a cocoa board that acts as a single selling agent on the international market and prices on farmers who by law must sell their crop to the government. Ivory Coast, by sharp contrast, has long permitted farmers to sell to anyone, on the open market, at any price they can fetch. The result is that farmers in Ivory Coast gain more money from their cocoa than farmers in Ghana; it also means that official production in Ivory Coast is boosted by smuggled cocoa from Ghana.

The cartel of international cocoa buyers – chiefly America’s ADM and Cargill and Zurich-based Barry Callebaut – all of three of whom exist in close cooperation with a small group of global end users, concentrated in Europe and the U.S. – benefited greatly from the schism between Ghana and Ivory Coast on cocoa policy. Lower prices were the result. For decades even, Western companies, and consumers, benefited from ultra-low prices of raw cocoa, which fueled the expansion of cheap chocolates in groceries and sweet shops.

The days of inexpensive cocoa are unlikely to return. One expert told the Financial Times on July 30 “If you consider the fundamentals, I’d tend to say prices won’t fall. There’s no fundamental reason why cocoa should become cheaper.” And that’s not because of the changing practices of commodity traders. Demand for cocoa is already high, China (largely chocolate-free today) represents a new frontier and cocoa supply is stagnant, so a re-evaluation upward of cocoa has occurred.

The benefits to African farmers should be significant over time. Unlike some other crops, new gardens can require years of planning and labor. Existing trees are subject to blight and aging and must be worked intensively to maintain yields. When I visited Ghana’s cocoa-growing region a year ago, I was struck by the prosperity of farmers I met but also the relative inflexibility of growing cocoa. Expansion of output is hard to achieve. Inputs, such as fertilizers, are expensive and are used less than they should be by non-organic growers. New trees take years to reap fruit. Field labor is surprisingly costly. Producers also fear a glut; they can benefit from stagnant production too.

Ghana’s independence leader, Nkrumah, once dreamed of setting cocoa prices in Accra and Abijan, not in London or Chicago. A producer cartel proved impossible, and cocoa farmers in West Africa suffered. Now a “market cartel” has emerged. West African cocoa farmers, and their families, should be cheering. Capitalism, so often the instrument of their oppression, is now working dramatically in their favor.

Russell Southwood edits an incomparable, and influential, newsletter on information-technology in Africa. He chiefly rides the wave of business in mobil telephony — and the intense competition among global hardware suppliers to sell their wares to African telcos. In a revealing new article, he examines the potential for a similar boom in Internet services. The African web remains underdeveloped and yet Southwood sees expansion around the corner, both from the bottoms-up and the top-down. Unsurprisingly, the biggest barrier to a web explosion in Africa is the very ubiquity of mobile telephony in the region. Who needs their own computer-to-Web connection when the mobile-phone networks with the Web also. Writes perspicacious Southwood:

“The Internet is the basis of Africa’s second wave of investment after mobile. It’s much smaller but the potential is considerable. Almost everyone wants to see the Internet grow but there are significantly different strategies when it comes to making it happen. The private sector is seeking to find the magic services and applications that will generate both users and money. Governments and their donor supporters look to provide improved services and efficiencies in their processes. Russell Southwood looks at the contrasts between top down vs bottom up strategies for the African Internet.”

In the end, urban Africa may become a test-bed for the merger of the computer and the phone, prefiguring the collapse of the distinction between information devices of various sorts. Thus, the tantalizing prospect exits in that in Africa technological conditions exist to spawn real breakthroughs that come first to the world’s poorest region and only later to the rest.

See Safaricom’s M-pesa money transfer service for proof that in information technology Africa can be on the cutting edge.

Business in Africa is dynamic, growing, socially relevant and historically peaking. Never in history has the sub-Saharan been home to so many diverse enterprises.

The great African independence era came during the high-water mark, globally, of state-controlled economies. In recent decades, market-oriented approaches took longer to take root in Africa than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Now that Europe and the U.S. are rediscovering the role of the state in the economy — and because of the financial crisis and over indebtedness — the reputation of the private-sector is declining and fewer people today view business as a solution to urgent problems than they once did. In Africa, the state remains a central economic actor, but the global crisis hasn’t slowed the expanding role of business and the newfound passion for business profit and market expansion among Africans and foreign investors in the region.

The media, the international foreign-assistance community and the official diplomatic community remain largely blind to the exciting business developments in Africa. That blindness is only partly accidental; the official “aid” community, including the media that often acts on its behalf by providing gloomy articles about Africa’s prospects, often appears to emphasize the bad over the good in the region, which means ignoring or undercutting reports of business prospects. And so, for me, I’m not surprised at the scant international attention being given a meeting of Africa’s private=sector elite in Kampala that’s devoted to convincing governments to reduce barriers to trade within the sub-Saharan. Incredibly, the barriers to trade between neighboring African countries are startingly high; in addition to various duties on goods, trucks themselves — the chief transporters of goods — are often subject to high (and random) fees and taxes. Remarkable a trader in say Kampala can be more cheaply and effeciently ship a load of stuff to Shanghai than to Lusaka.

The evidence is overwhelming that the biggest upside for Africa lies in trade by, for and with other Africans. Such trade, which remains at shocking low levels wcompared to trade within the world’s other major regions,  will do more for poverty-reduction and peace-promotion than anything else. That neither the diplomatic nor the humanitarian communities understand the significance of trade within Africa, between Africans, speaks volumes about the dysfunctionality of the role given the sub-Saharan in the world community. If the world must experience an “enough moment” about political violence and human-rights violations in Africa, perhaps we can also say enough to the neglect of across national borders within the sub-Saharan.

To be sure, the business boom in Africa demands close monitoring. Business takes short-cuts, and also spawns inequalities. Partly that’s because some business lavish attention on the rising upper-classes in Africa: monied elites who can afford Western-style products and services. Even as business booms in Africa, inequality is also rising rapidly, as I document in a new essay of mine, “Haves and Have-nots (Africa Style),” in the fall issue of Milken Institute Review.

Hats off to the Financial Times for its superb coverage of Ghana’s handling of its off-shore oil resources, and the growing concern that neither the development of this oil, nor the profits produced by it will be well managed and well used.

These are early days for Ghana and its off-shore oil, but this week’s news about wrangling over the ownership of exploitation rights raises fresh worries that Ghana, held up by the Obama administration as a model for good governance in Africa, is actually not.

Last fall I visited Takoradi, the nearest major city to Ghana’s offshore oil, and I was impressed by the cadres of African oil engineers — notably a group of Nigerians employed by Schlumberger — descending on the city as part of the advance efforts to ready the reserves for retrieval. Takoradi is a gorgeous coastal town, a model for what’s going right in Africa’s medium-size cities. But even last year prices for basic goods and services were rising in Takoradi in anticipation of the oil flowing. The creation of a super-rich oil “enclave” in Ghana, while perhaps inevitable, raises questions about whether the government really understands that managing its new oil wealth is not simply about spending the revenues wisely (as opposed to simply permitting government officials and their cronies to steal the cash) but there’s also the serious issue of preventing “Dutch disease,” whereby rising oil revenues leads to a weakening of Ghana’s service economy and rising prices generally.

Because of strong revenues from the export of cocoa and gold, Ghana stands a better than good chance of avoiding Dutch disease — since, admittedly, the country already suffers from it to an extent because of these older lucrative commodities. But as the FT highlights, the cruder problem — theft of oil revenues — remains a threat. Much of the present sense of urgency surrounding how to exploit Ghana’s now-proven oil reserves turns on whether the former government of John Kufuour engineered a sweetheart deal that gave political insiders a stake — perhaps worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or even more than a billion — in the foreign production company that will harvest the oil in Ghana’s waters.

Nigeria, the nation, is not usually held out as a model of anything, no less of a Valhalla for builders of effective just nation-states. Not so for three authors of an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, “Defining Success in Afghanistan.” For Stephen Biddle, Fotini Christia and Alexander Their, the U.S. can’t reaslistically build a “strong, centralized Western-style government in Kabil.” But these political analysts insist that “Afghanistan is not ungovernable.” There is a “feasible” option that can serve as a lodestar for American success in the Afghan war, and justify the loss of lives and the costs being incurred by the American public. And that’s for Afghanistan to achieve the level of political maturity presently possessed by Nigeria.

Yes, that Nigeria. The country in West Africa. The big one with all those people.

Biddle, Christia and Thier, as is probably obvious, are not Nigeria experts, nor even Africa experts. They probably haven’t visited Nigeria or even maintained any Nigerian acquaintances. Because this is their picture of the Nigeria they’d love Afghanistan to become:

“After the end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1970, Nigeria had a weak federal government and a strong regional system, in which individual governors were free to organize local administration as they wished. Even today, the country retains some traits of internal mixed sovereignty. States in the Muslim north have sharia law, whereas others secular judicial systems. The central government intervenes selectively to suppress unrest, such as in the Delta region. Although there are signs that Nigeria may now be deteriorating, for most of the last 40 years it has functioned tolerably.”

Signs of deterioration indeed. Who knew that for scholars of international security and relations, African affairs remains a sphinx? Perhaps what the authors call “internal mixed sovereignty,” which political philosopher Will Kymlicka and others term “asymmetric federalism,” does do some good in Nigeria. And for brief references to Nigeria, the one by Biddle et al at least has the advantage of presenting the country as a role model notwithstanding the failure to mention periods of dictatorship and martial law as well as the widespread looting of public oil monies by federal and state governors alike. But enough. This case rather seems like another example of the penchant for highly educated non-Africans to say anything about Africa, or anything that appears to support their own political views. Debunking the dumb things said about Africa and its people by Americans could be a fulltime job but it isn’t because such debunking doesn’t help enough Americans score their own debating points. In the end, the question being answered is “What has Africa done for us lately?”

The general problem in African politics is the weak capacity of citizens to realize citizenship rights within their own country. While it is bad, for instance, that immigrant Nubians must pay bribes to obtain birth certificates and passports in Kenya, some native-born Kenyans must pay these same bribes to achieve these same ends. The denial of citizenship – to immigrants, or dissidents — is a much smaller problem, though denial is often a tool to silence politic dissenters or the economically marginal (and sometimes the advantaged “foreigner” as in the case of the Lebanese of West Africa or the South Asians of Uganda). Remedies for Africa’s citizenship “deficits” suffer from a lack of global context; for instance, much of what African nations “need” to do regarding naturalization and harmonization of citizenship rules and practices are not yet done in such developed countries as Japan, Germany or Poland. What is gained by imposing on African societies a much higher standard for the politics of immigration than, say, Ireland.

Much of the formal problems with obtaining citizenship in specific African countries also occur in Latin America. As I’ve described in my 2003 book, “The Diversity Advantage,” on diversity, migration and nation-states, Germany and Japan lack clear rules on naturalization and tie citizenship closely (if not wholly) to ancestral ties to land. So why can’t African nations do the same?

I believe African nations should not base citizenship on “blood ties,” because whatever benefits of citizenship can be earned. The flip side of “earned” citizenship, or post-racial models of citizenship, can be seen through forms of institutionalized discrimination, either of affirmative action for some or “affirmative limits” on others. An interesting comparison also could be drawn between the status of Lebanese and South Indians in certain West African countries and the status of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia; for instance, ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, while afforded citizenship, must comply with regime that makes it harder for them to access certain public services (such as university education) and gives “native” Malays more opportunities in employment. Might not a similar approach to citizenship be tried in say Zambia, where many white Zimbabwean farmers have moved in the past ten years and where Chinese migrants have also settled in recent years. Why should these advantaged immigrants be given equal rights to those ordinary Zambians born and raised in the country? On the flip side, why should nonwhite Zimbabwean farmers, who bring knowledge and wealth and enterprise to another African country receive a pathway to citizenship benefits that are afforded the very people born in Zambia.

My main point is there is not only one legitimate political response to migration when there are actually many.

The two most interesting problems in African citizenship:

(a) the most need to recognize sub-national affiliations (either ethnic or territorial) as part of formal, legal citizenship and to accept (in the manner of Will Kymlicka, the distinguished Canadian political philosopher) the inevitability of “asymmetric” forms of citizenship whereby one set of citizens may possess different rights (notably language rights) than others. Avant-garde citizenship structures might enliven discussions about the achieving working political arrangements in such critical multi-ethnic nations as Nigeria, Congo or Sudan. Asymmetric forms of citizenship could promote national unity while at the same time enhance regional autonomy and local power.

Many African countries could take specific small steps, such as permitting dual citizenship and making naturalization of spouses automatic, that would at least put them on par with European countries, most of whom do not permit anything like the wider entitlements that the author presumes (but doesn’t document) would benefit African societies. Asymmetric forms of citizenship, which some also call “multicultural citizenship,” are an increasingly important tool for accommodating diversity among citizens, whether “natives” or “settlers.”

(b) the need for members of the Diaspora to achieve dual citizenship in order to facilitate their expanded involvement in their countries of origins (alas many African countries wish to strip their own citizens of their passports after they naturalize in the US or Europe).

None of what I say above precludes the creation of a “common African citizenship.” One passport for every African is an appealing idea. But there is no need for one-size-fits-all  approaches in a world where multiple identities coexist. That there can be multiple types of belonging – to ethnic group, nation, continent, race, gender and adopted places – is a sociological fact and increasingly a political given.