Bars of soap, lipstick and pitta bread are out; hair straighteners, garlic bread and Blu-ray disc players are in. The latest shake-up of the shopping “basket” used to measure UK inflation shines a light on Britain’s changing spending habits.
Part of the anxiety over China’s presence in Africa comes from the challenge they pose to traditional ideas about aid. The Chinese operate with low costs compared to Western aid projects that pay high salaries to foreign experts and put them up in fancy hotels. A 2008 Oxfam study, for example, estimated that donors to Mozambique hire 3,500 “technical experts” at a cost of $350 million per year, an amount that could provide 400,000 local salaries. While Chinese projects do import labor and management, workers live in simple housing and are paid modest salaries, minimizing overhead and allowing the Chinese to greatly underbid Western donors. The Chinese also avoid imposing restrictions on their zero-interest loans for infrastructure, preferring to give African governments agency and complete buy-in. They do not demand economic or democratic reform, and they invest and emphasize profitability in sectors that have been all but abandoned by traditional donors — the messy business of industrialization is not on the agenda of the Millennium Development Goals.
Africa is a different place from how it is often portrayed in the popular media. Thanks to sound economic policies in many countries over the past decade or so, Africa has been able to withstand this crisis much better than has been the case in the past. The fact that the crisis hit Africa anyway does not mean that the policies were wrong. On the contrary, those policies helped to buffer Africa from the worst of the crisis, and they should now be strengthened. All three national leaders with whom I met—President Kibaki of Kenya, President Zuma of South Africa, and President Banda of Zambia—conveyed to me their strong sense of the policy agenda ahead.
March 12th, 2010
Sunday 21st March, Sidney Street LGBT Centre, off Oxford Rd
David Kato, LGBTI activist from Uganda and member of SMUG
http://www.sexualminoritiesuganda.org will talk about his experiences as an
activist in the context of recent legislation threatening the death penalty for
“aggravated homosexuality”, the campaign in Uganda to stop the new law as
well as international efforts for decriminalisation. To be followed by
questions/discussion. David is on a short tour of the UK and this is his only
Manchester date.
David will be joined by Sokari Ekine, activist, writer and founder of http://www.blacklooks.org/ a site documenting social justice issues in Africa
and the diaspora with a focus on LGBTI rights, gender-based violence,
militarism as well as literature and popular culture.
Delicious cheap food and cafe available from 12.30pm. Talk/discussion 2-4pm
Sunday 21st March, LGBT Centre, 49-51 Sidney Street, Manchester (Behind
8th Day Co-op off Oxford Rd)
The event is free but voluntary contributions towards travel expenses of
participants gratefully received. The venue is wheelchair accessible and all on
the ground floor. If you have any queries please contact mikewupton@hotmail.com
Would ordinary Nigerians have felt Yar’Adua’s absence? Since the experience of the Nigerian state for most Nigerians is limited to demands for bribes by officials and policemen, the government and who is running it is of little consequence to them. Everything positive in their lives is achieved by themselves in spite of the ruling elite and their officials, not because of it. Many might say that Nigeria would be better off without a government at all.
I wrote something along those lines sometime ago. Read the whole post here.
March 10th, 2010
Farafina Trust will be holding a creative writing workshop in Lagos, organized by award-winning writer and creative director of Farafina Trust, Chimamanda Adichie, from May 20 to May 29 2010. The workshop is sponsored by Nigerian Breweries Plc. Guest writers who will co-teach the workshop alongside Adichie are the Caine Prize Winning Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, Chika Unigwe winner of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for creative writing, South African writer Niq Mhlongo and celebrated Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo.
The workshop will take the form of a class. Participants will be assigned a wide range of reading exercises, as well as daily writing exercises. The aim of the workshop is to improve the craft of Nigerian writers and to encourage published and unpublished writers by bringing different perspectives to the art of storytelling. Participation is limited only to those who apply and are accepted.
Your e-mail subject should read ‘Workshop Application.’
The body of the e-mail should contain the following:
1. Your Name
2. Your address
3. A few sentences about yourself
4. A writing sample of between 200 and 800 words. The sample must be either fiction or non-fiction.
All material must be pasted or written in the body of the e-mail. Please Do NOT include any attachments in your e-mail. Applications with attachments will be automatically disqualified. Deadline for submissions is April 22 2010. Only those accepted to the workshop will be notified by May 6 2010. Accommodation in Lagos will be provided for all accepted applicants who are able to attend for the ten-day duration of the workshop. A literary evening of readings, open to the public, will be held at the end of the workshop.
Ms Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s former minister for finance, and currently a managing director of the World Bank:
intra regional trade in Africa remains low and accounts for less than 10% of total trade . Between 1999 and 2006, for example, intra-African trade increased by an average of just 14 per cent per year, while trade with the United States and China expanded by 26 per cent and 61 per cent respectively. Despite the low level of intra-African trade at the regional level, in some African countries intraregional trade is significant. Five countries export more than half of their goods within Africa, while another 14 export more than a quarter.
She goes on to write about how it works in East Asia.
Intra-regional trade in East Asia has increased rapidly and now represents most of the region’s total trade. The most prominent manifestation of the intensification of Asian intra-regional trade is “production fragmentation” enabling producers and countries to specialize in particular products along an integrated supply chain. As a result, products and components travel repeatedly across borders before becoming final goods. In East Asia, Japan made a conscious decision to outsource production of component electronic parts to Thailand and Malaysia as part of its overall industrial strategy.
Her recommendations include political commitment to regional trade in particular and regional integration in general. And:
A policy framework for intra-regional coordination must be developed and countries must be willing to commit to this framework. This means the leader must handle issues of multiplicity of membership for example which weakens member-state’s commitment to coordinate policies to promote intra-regional trade.
For the first time in five years, no big US investment bank appears among the top nine sovereign bond bookrunners in Europe, according to Dealogic data compiled for the Guardian. Only Morgan Stanley ranks at number 10.
Goldman Sachs doesn’t make the table. Goldman made it to number five last year and in 2006, and number eight in 2007, the data shows. JP Morgan was in the top ten last year and in 2007 and 2006 but doesn’t appear this year.
“Governments do not have the confidence that the excessive risk-taking culture of the big Wall Street banks has changed and they still cannot be trusted to put the stability of the financial system before profit,” said Arlene McCarthy, vice chair of the European parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee. “It is no surprise therefore that governments are reluctant to do business with banks that have failed to learn the lesson of the crisis. The banks need to acknowledge the mistakes that were made and behave in an ethical way to regain the trust and confidence of governments.”
Is it not possible that in a heated polity Mrs. Yar’Adua sees herself as isolated and her husband as threatened; viewing each delegation that approached Saudi Arabia with the same cynicism that is abroad across the land and drinking from the same sectional cesspool from which the national psyche is daily watered; she would watch life ebb out of her man, her insecurity and loyalty driving choices that are now the source of criticism? Is it possible that this is a wife fighting for her husband the best way she knows how?
In this aspect the restraint of the Acting President, which is seen in some quarters as slowness and even cowardice, takes the shape of wisdom and humanity, standards that are rarely ever prominent in our win-lose public life. It is possible to see the fingerprint of misogyny all over the glee of the attacks on Mrs. Yar’Adua.
I feel that this is a possible understanding of the situation Mrs Yar’Adua is in, and I said as much in a somewhat rambling post (forgive me, a combination of lack of sleep and too much coffee sometimes takes its toll).
And in relation to the constitionality of how the Acting President was appointed:
As things stand it will be difficult under the provisions of the current Constitution to justify the creative process with which the Senate fashioned an acting president, an action, which was not only laudable and in fact heroic in the context, but also not necessarily constitutional. It is a mark of the institutional progress that even though a president had been missing for three months, there was a process that kept the affairs of state grinding even if slowly. It stands to reason that what we need is a far less ambitious document.
That is also my stance. Indeed, it is a sign of institutional progress that the country has been able to muddle through a very difficult situation and come out of it with something that we all might not agree with, but that somehow works. It is also impressive that the country was run quite well all through the time that there was no president, something that made me write, cynically, that we probably do not need a president.
These are really impressive things that should be highlighted. Agreed, we need to have discussions on recent and ongoing happenings, but reducing things to sensationalism only distracts from the issues that really need focus. Sensationalism sells paper, but does it really serve the public?
Swiss voters will go to the polls on Sunday to decide on a proposal to appoint state-funded lawyers across the country to represent animals in court.
Supporters of the initiative say such lawyers would help deter cases of animal cruelty and neglect, by making sure that those who did abuse or neglect animals would be properly punished.
The clothes are being produced in a “green” factory in Sri Lanka – the first in the world to be awarded a gold rating for environmental responsiblity by LEED, the international green building certification system.
And they are:
made from end of line Tesco stock which would otherwise end up in landfill….
For a further discussion/problematisation of the concept see ‘Beyond “Identity”‘, by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper. Ungated pdf version available here.
February 28th, 2010
The president of Rice Importers and Distributors Association of Nigeria (RIDAN), Gbadamosi Mufutau,
urged the federal government to harmonize the duty on rice with the neighbouring countries to discourage smuggling. “You observed that any increase in duty, tariff, levies and benchmark always cause increase of importation of such products to Republic Benin and Togo ports with the intention of smuggling such products into Nigeria markets,” he said.
The main reason for his policy advice? He said:
Smugglers have almost driven the importers into extinction because they evade duty and taxes and sell at cheaper prices. You know that the margin on a bag of rice is quite small, a maximum of N150 per bag. For those of us that import into the country through sea ports pay duties, levies and pay wages, one would see that the smugglers are sabotaging the economy.
The crash of 2008 revealed the flaw in the euro’s construction, as each member country had to rescue its own banking system instead of doing it jointly. The Greek debt crisis brought matters to a climax. If member countries cannot take the next steps forward, the euro may fall apart, with adverse consequences for the EU.
The usual images of Africa are of a continent mired in conflict and squalor. But this picture, based on Africa’s most corrupt regimes, is unfair and misleading – like claiming that all Europeans are guilty of “ethnic cleansing” because of what happened in the former Yugoslavia. Yes, African has some failed states, but most of its 53 countries are mostly peaceful, agreeable places.
Last year, the annual Ibrahim Index of African governance, produced by my foundation, showed that governance had improved in two-thirds of African countries. And if we look at politicians such as Joaquim Chissano, the former president of Mozambique, or Festus Mogae, the former president of Botswana, as well as men like Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela, the high caliber of African leadership is obvious.
February 25th, 2010
The Nigerian president got back to the country in the early hours of Wednesday. It is reported that his flight landed in a well-guarded presidential wing of the international airport in Abuja. From an investigative report by NEXT, we learn that the acting president, Goodluck Jonathan, as the acting Commander-in-Chief, did not release the troops that went to secure the airport, and that he did not approve the guards that are currently guarding him.
Mr Goodluck Jonathan apparently called off the Wednesday meeting of the Federal Executive Council because of the uncertainties surrounding the return of the very sick president.
On the same day, the spokesperson of the president, Mr Segun Adeniyi, issued a press release that says that the vice president is still the acting president, until the president is fit to return to work:
After being discharged by the team of medical experts overseeing his treatment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua returned to the Presidential Villa, Abuja early this morning.
President Yar’Adua wishes to express his profound gratitude to all Nigerians for their prayers for his recovery, their exceptional generosity of spirit and their appreciation of the fact that all mortals are subject to the vagaries of ill-health.
President Yar’Adua is grateful to the Vice-President, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, for competently overseeing the affairs of state in his absence.
The President also wishes to thank the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the entire membership of the National Assembly, the Governors’ Forum, the Judiciary, the Armed Forces and other security agencies, former heads of state and other eminent Nigerians for their roles in maintaining order and stability during his absence.
President Yar’Adua wishes to re-assure all Nigerians that on account of their unceasing prayers and by the special grace of God, his health has greatly improved.
However, while the President completes his recuperation, Vice President Jonathan will continue to oversee the affairs of state.
Everything reads pretty normal up to this point, right? Well, it turns out that the spokesperson who issued the press release had not even seen the president up till then. And when you read a headline like Turai Takes Over you start wondering what is really happening in the country.
Obvious questions: Is the president as fit and in the state of mind that the press release says? Who authorised the press release?
And, is Mrs Turai Yar’Adua, the wife of the president, really the one running the country? Did she make them release that press release in order to cover up the fact that her husband is very sick?
Let me try to answer those questions.
According to reports of the return of the president, the man is in a really critical situation. NEXT:
his critical condition has necessitated his continued stay in the Ford E-250 intensive care ambulance that picked him at the Abuja airport. He is expected to be in the ambulance until the intensive care unit that will receive him is retrieved by Julius Berger from Katsina and re-installed in House 7 within the grounds of the Presidential Villa.
If he is in that state then one would not be surprised that nobody is allowed to see him except his wife and his security guards. I don’t think that visitors are allowed in ICUs. This might answer the question as regards why nobody is allowed to see him. The fact that the acting president has not seen him might also be due to that. Remember, the Mrs Yar’Adua has not issued any public statement about the state of her husband’s health.
If nobody has seen him then the press release was probably written by the press office. The main information in the release, besides the part that tries to claim that the president said that he was recovering, is that the vice will continue acting as the president. The part where the report claims that the president asks Nigerian citizens to pray for him might be the work of a press office that is used to writing press releases on behalf of a president who has been in poor health for a long while. They are probably simply used to writing these sorts of things on his behalf.
Now to the issue of his wife taking over.
First, let us assume that she is just a very distraught wife who is able to call on friends of her husband to help secure the airport while her husband – not the president – returned. She obviously would not allow people to see her husband since he is in a critical condition. In any case, the country has an acting president so there is not much to worry over in that.
The second scenario is one in which she is the one calling the shots, taking charge of government, dictating to the Chief of Army staff about how many troops to release in order to secure the airport, and trying to stop Mr Jonathan from performing his duties as the acting president. If this is the case then it is absolutely the fault of those she lords it over that way. She is really nobody, just the wife of a very sick man who is unable to act in the capacity of a president. If she can command the power she is claimed to be commanding then the so-called ruling elite are to blame for rolling over and letting her take control.
And that might well be the case. In many situations in Nigeria, if you want to curry favour with the boss you do not go to the vice, you go to the wife. Power is often seen as being embodied in the person who holds it. In order to have access to that power one needs someone who has unrestricted access to the Power. That is the wife. Which is why, in order to get the head of, say, a university department to do something one would be advised to talk to his wife.
So, maybe the wife is running the show in that way. Maybe people run to her for favour and she makes them do her wishes because she is the only one who has access to Power.
Whatever the case is, things are going to have to become clearer in the next few days.
And, oh, you are surprised that there has not been any outcry among the populace? Well, it is because nothing has changed in the country. Salary workers still get paid and things appear to be normal. It seems that the machine of government is better oiled than I ever thought.
February 24th, 2010
So, apparently, the Nigerian president has decided to return home, only a few days after the vice president was named acting president. Interesting.
NEXT reports that the president’s ambulance arrived in Aso Rock, Abuja, the presidential ‘grounds’ about 4 hours ago.
See this Aljazeera report for some background to the story.
So, what happens to the acting president? Who will be ruling the country?
There seems to be no end to drama in Nigeria. It is amazing – and this has to be said over and over again – how much Nigerian leaders, in their confusion, have managed to sort of keep it together and get the state going. Somehow. The book on this period in Nigeria has to be written.
My name is Olumide Abimbola. I am currently finishing up a PhD dissertation in Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. The dissertation is an ethnographic study of the international trade in second-hand clothing. I follow the trade from the United Kingdom, a source country of choice, to West Africa, finding out the relations that enable and sustain the trade. More
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ae743281-9522-449b-b4d5-ae18e51e0618)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=99dfc09c-a286-4e15-afec-f66a4e7c1e49)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=884b83b0-1710-4dfe-8700-330c33a20513)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4d59fbb4-23b0-4c80-b619-1574ed331cbc)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8a4b1a2b-da93-492d-99af-959c1120fbf6)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=2d82fc94-8936-4af6-95fc-f237cc513b16)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8e5a3296-d87d-4f61-818d-5415e2454430)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=81ae4fd6-5118-405c-89a7-5a42c415a48c)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f4499863-8706-467b-bb95-41d984993da7)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d1835645-0525-496b-b60b-df4f6a2910ce)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=891079b2-b24d-49d5-9b2e-2b43f2c1338f)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=bbbfd6c1-acf9-4235-85f5-446377f5cae3)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f30fe6c9-3dc3-453f-8cb8-569c4a694a07)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f1906613-7843-4077-ad53-a109bf9256c0)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=fa68f421-a4c6-43e3-af06-3812570aebb1)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=53c85f1d-7885-4b5a-b23c-782fe482a3da)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=21dd475d-e83c-44b6-8bca-c4d7ed23a685)
Recent Comments