Sep

14

Beautiful Africa Carnival 4th Edition

Filed Under News | 1 Comment

The Beautiful Africa Blog Carnival team brings to you the 4th edition of the Carnival tomorrow, 15 September. This edition is edited by Szavanna. We thank all contributors to this edition, and we solicit contributions for further editions. To submit contributions please visit the carnival home page. We are currently accepting contributions for the October edition, which is edited by Loomnie.

This picture was taken by Ishtar somewhere between Nigeria and Niger. For more from Ishtar, who is currently in Niger, you can visit Ishtar News

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Sep

13

Eldis Newsfeed

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Eldis is an arm of the Institute for Development Studies, Sussex. The managers of the website collect development related articles, publications and general information. According to the website, the managers of Eldis ‘focus on materials which are of strategic, policy or practical interest for development practitioners based in both the North and South.’

I have added an RSS feed of the Africa section of the site to my blog. Links to the latest Eldis entries on Africa appear at the upper right hand side of the blog. The links will take you to the articles as they appear on the Eldis website.

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Sep

8

Resources and Aid, any Similarities?

Filed Under Opinion, Reviews | 1 Comment

I downloaded Andrew Mwenda’s TEDTalks presentation and watched it last night. One of his main arguments was that aid makes the government fat, and that because of aid, governments are more attentive to the World Bank and the IMF than to their own citizens. Let’s elaborate on the argument a bit: governments know from whom they get money, and so strive more to satisfy their benefactors than their citizens. Mwenda makes the point that governments do not call the entrepreneurs among their citizens to discuss the development of the economies of the countries; instead, they listen to the people from whom a large chunk of the budget comes. I thought about this in relation to my country, Nigeria. I tried to imagine what percentage of the budget aid is. Just as I started thinking about this I remembered that Nigeria has oil, and that oil keeps the government rich.

Oil and Democracy
A political scientist, Michael Ross, wrote an article about resource curse. In the article, he builds a case for his argument that resources – chief of which, by the way, is oil – retard the development of democracy, partly because it frees the government of any dependence on the citizens. To bring this point home, let’s think about the percentage of Nigerians who are not employed in the organised private sector or in government, and then let’s think about how many of them pay any tax. Now, a government that does not have any resources has to depend on taxation from its citizens, and so has to look inwards. This is where aid comes in. If a country does not have resources but has a large chunk of its expenses taken care of by aid then that inward look does not seem to be needed

Another thing Mwenda pointed out was that government is the most attractive business in Africa. Again, let’s look at this in relation to Nigeria. There are people who get a job with a government ministry, go to work at about 11 in the morning and leave at about 1 in the afternoon. (I should throw in a quick word about many of the workers here. Most of the people who work in the ministries have to earn some money by the side to be able to take care of their families. Ingenious people that they are, while not working at the ministries most of them are busy at work on their own, most often trading.) The point is linked to a point made by Ross in his article: a government with resources is a rich government, something really attractive to a young person. The same point is also made by Mwenda in his presentation: since government makes money from aid, it is a rich and attractive option for young people who want to money. This point also ties in with the rent-seeking argument. With resource money, people in government can afford to keep a loyal team around themselves. If aid money provides more money for government it stands to reason to think that it might provide more money for politicians to attract more hangers-on.

Fears and Overreactions
If there are this many similarities between resources and aid, are there going to be more fatal similarities? Are we going to have people struggling to control government so that they can have access to aid (like in the case of civil wars that break out because of the desire of factions to control resources in a country)? Are we going to have governments buying arms and ammunitions with donor funding for the suppression of oppositions? Do we already have these situations? Am I simply overreacting. Actually, I hope I am overreacting.

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Sep

6

On Amy Winehouse and Self-Destructing

Filed Under Music | 2 Comments

I had seen Rehab a couple of times but I didn’t really know much about Amy Winehouse until I saw a news piece on her on CNN. I don’t think I ever really paid much attention to her until then. I liked the sound of her voice, and her style. It was the same thing I liked about Joss Stone, at least her first album. (I haven’t had time to really listen to the other albums so I can’t really say much about them.) I have visited Amy Winehouse’s website, and I have listened to snitches and snatches of her sound and what I heard sound like what I would really enjoy. But this post is not really about her music, it is about her self-destructing streak.

She is 23, and she is on heroin, cocain and a host of other drugs, and I find myself wondering why this is happening to her. Somehow, it just sounds really sad. She is so out of control that her family is begging her fans not to buy her album till she cleans herself up. Maybe if I didn’t find her music as nice as I did I would simply write her in the Britney Spears group and forget about her….

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