The Chinese market in fake European classical art is growing. Steadily. Something they bring to it? Industrial efficiency.
The village of Dafen in southern China has become the centre of a big industry, with about 8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 per cent of the world’s oil paintings.
August 30th, 2010
A well-researched piece in Intelligent Life Magazine. Concludes with:
Sport has infected other fields with its values. Everything from hairdressing to accountancy now has its own awards ceremony, making mere workers into winners and losers. The recent British election was dominated by televised debates between the main party leaders, which turned a four-week campaign into a three-set match. Heavily previewed and then exhaustively dissected, the debates were sport without the drama, the athleticism, the crowd reaction or even the scoreboard. In the messy aftermath, the place to find out what was happening was not the lead stories, which were often bland and clueless, but the minute-by-minute updates, supplied by deskbound reporters—a trick imported from sport.
A winner-takes-all culture, which would have been abhorrent a generation ago, has spread outwards from banking, with its eight-figure bonuses. It is harder to protest against that when we swallow the extreme economics of sport. Cristiano Ronaldo is paid an estimated £11.3m a year by Real Madrid, or £217,000 a week. And that’s before he slips on his Y-fronts. Tiger Woods was still valued at $82m as a brand byForbes in February, even after 14 mistresses’ worth of dirty laundry.
As a whodunnit, this is “Murder on the Orient Express”. Every suspect had a motive: they all dunnit. And we have let them. Sport, more than most things, is what we make of it. It plays on a screen not just in the corner of the room but in our heads. Its significance largely consists of what we project on to it. We may be watching in much the same numbers, but we are doing so with greater intensity, and inside a wider penumbra of collective consciousness. We all dunnit.
The government will sell 11 distribution companies created out of Power Holding Co. of Nigeria, the state-owned utility, and allow private companies to set up power plants using natural gas, hydro-electric dams and coal-powered stations, Jonathan said in a speech in Lagos, the commercial capital, broadcast on state television today [yesterday].
August 25th, 2010
Apparently, the fairly fragmented but resilient world of money transfer is getting consolidated:
Sigue, a US money-transfer company strong in Latin America, is buying the money-transfer business of Coinstar for $41.5m. Coinstar’s network allows users to transfer cash to 23,000 points worldwide – and Sigue’s CEO, Guillermo de la Viña, says the acquisition will make his company “one of the largest global money transfer companies with pay out locations in over 130 countries.”
More deals may follow this year. Unistream, a Russian money transfer company with 30 per cent market share in former Soviet countries, is looking towards the Gulf, the second-largest source of private financial transfers after the US. Reuters recently reported that Western Union and MoneyGram were looking at ways to expand into Asia.
The moves testify to remittances’ resilience. Flows to developing countries shrunk in 2009, down 6 per cent to $307bn, as immigrants in the US and elsewhere lost jobs (particularly in construction) and, in many cases, returned home. However, a new World Bank report forecasts that remittances will rise by over 6 per cent in 2010 and over 7 per cent in 2011.
All that is well and good, but how long is it going to take for someone to figure out how to include everyday Africans in the global, ‘borderless’ world of finance? I am thinking of payment services, not remittances services. In the past one month, three friends who are based in Nigeria have asked me whether I can help them open a Paypal account. Some people they are doing some work for agree to pay only through Paypal. They refuse to use Western Union because, well, they don’t trust the Nigerian end of the service.
Don’t tell me that nobody thinks that there might be some money to be made in Africa from that. Or that they are too scared of bad, fraudulent Nigerians to try and introduce such services there. We all know that no matter how sophisticated and bad you think Nigerian fraudsters are, the ones in developed countries are much worse. If those services can be made to work securedly in developed countries, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to get them to work in African countries.
Like all corruption, there is an element of victimization on both sides of the equation, unfortunately. The people who are extorted from are, obviously, suffering. But so too are the low level policemen in many cases. How can I best illustrate this? Perhaps the fact that the officers were forced to buy their own bullets, uniforms, and pay for their own transportation because the upper ranks had taken the bulk of the funding for themselves or other pet projects. The majority of the officers also likely believed in being policemen, and wanted to be a positive force for their countries. They were proud of their roles and sought to do the best job they could. But they were also pretty hungry sometimes. And as I was once wisely told, a hungry man will do anything you ask.
Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk of not finding a job.
One of my colleagues, Anja Peleikis, found out the same thing about Lebanese migrants in West Africa. See this article [pdf]. It is also somewhat similar to the case of the Igbo traders that I work with. One finds that the trade in a particular product is dominated by people from the same village, either within or outside the country.
Considering that Rwanda witnessed one of the most appalling waves of barbarity in history just 16 years ago, when around 800,000 people were hacked to death in three months, the efficiency is extraordinary. So much has gone admirably right in terms of development. But a lot is going depressingly wrong in politics. Mr Kagame has become more ruthless and authoritarian. In the run-up to the election on August 9th the opposition has suffered grievously. So where should the balance between development and freedom lie? Can democracy be shoved aside in the battle against poverty? And what should outsiders do to tilt the balance back?
In full from The Economisthere. Also check out the newspaper’s article on the presidential elections of tomorrow.
Helon Habila is a Nigerian novelist and poet. His first novel Waiting for an Angel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best First Book, Africa Region) in 2003.
From the BBC Worldservice (with audio). Why can’t one embed BBC media anymore?
I can’t quarell with the list and his reasons for choosing them. I remember the pleasures of reading the first two on the list, and the struggles of reading the third.
Habila himself is one of the better contemporary Nigerian writers. See this review of his new book, Oil on Water.
Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data.
It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like. Anybody who loses sight of this is a public nuisance, starting with Dr Athreya.
Not new (about a month old), but I just read it today. It was in response to the suggestion by Dr Kartik Athreya, a Federal Reserve Economist, that only economics PhDs dare write on economic policies. Effectively slamming most of the bloggers who comment on said policies. Mainly because economics is hard… really hard.
August 1st, 2010
OK, we knew that already. But the point was brought home particularly well with regards to the education sector in developing countries by Professor Emeritus Pai Obanya of Ibadan University in a podcast interview with the London International Development Centre (LDIC). Professor Emeritus Lalage Brown of Glasgow University was also on the podcast.
On the MDG goals, Professor Obanya says that the problem is that they are not owned by developing countries. People simply sign up to programmes that they don’t fully understand because someone promises to fund the programmes if they sign up to them.
He made a distinction between Education and schooling. They also discuss ICT in education.
Towards the end of the podcast, Professor Brown says there is a lot for Nigeria to celebrate during the 50th independence anniversary this year. I think so too; I will do a post on that sometime soon.
July 29th, 2010
I first read of land acquisition deals in Africa about two years ago. It was between South Korea’s Daewoo and the Madagascar government, and the details included leasing the land for 99 years, mainly for farming. The produce was to be exported, but Daewoo promised to invest 6 billion dollars over a period of twenty years in port facilities etc etc. The deal eventually fell through, primarily because of a change in government in Madagascar. Other deals in other parts of Africa were subsequently finalised.
A report prepared by IFAD in 2009 says that there have been ‘significant levels of activities’. In the five study countries on which the report is based, the available data showed that ‘an overall total of 2,492,684 ha of approved land’ had been allocated between 2004 and 2009. For perspective, ‘that is almost half the arable land of the United Kingdom and three times the arable land of Norway.’ In Sudan and Ethiopia alone, over the same period, the figures are 3.9m and 1.2m ha respectively.
The main reasons given for land acquisition include food security (remember the high prices of food in 2008), and biofuel production (EU has biofuel consumption targets; plus oil prices were also crazy high in 2008). Now, it has turned out that there probably are other issues underlying the acquisition drives.
From a new report prepared by the World Bank and leaked to FT, it seems that speculation might be a reason for what has now been described as ‘land grabs’. Speculators acquire land at extremely low rates, hold it for a while and then sell it off later at a higher rate.
The more troubling issue is that investors are crowding out poor, local farmers and producers. From Guardian:
They [the report] argue that investors crowd out the poorest local producers and at the same time invest little in improving the agricultural processes needed to meet the huge jump in world food production required to feed a burgeoning population.
There are also issues concerning the targetting of countries with weak land governance. Still from Guardian:
“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although investment deals promised jobs and infrastructure “investors failed to follow through on their investment plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.
I am actually not too surprised by this. Land issues are extremely difficult issues in much of Africa. I wrote a column for Business Day on this sometime last year.
My general reaction to this is that land deals do not necessarily have to be bad. If African governments could make deals that favour their countries there wouldn’t be much to worry about. Sadly, however, we know that it is often not the case. As a kind of solution, the World Bank report recommends a Land Transparency Initiative
modelled on the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, which commits governments, mainly in developing countries, to disclose revenues from oil and mining groups to improve transparency on the deals. Critics noted that eight years after its launch, only Liberia, Timor-Leste and Azerbaijan, were full members of the EITI. But the draft said: “By establishing a consistent format for reporting on land acquisition and monitoring [the] process over time, it could provide access to information sorely missing.
Although it is doubtful whether this will work, it seems to be the only suggestion on the table at the moment.
Nigeria’s consumer inflation eased to 10.3 percent year-on-year in June from 11.0 percent the previous month, its lowest level for more than two years, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday.
Growth in food prices, which form the bulk of the inflation index basket in Africa’s most populous country, also eased, to 12.0 percent year-on-year from 12.3 percent in May.
The growth in consumer prices, is the lowest monthly year-on-year increase since May 2008, when it rose to 9.7 percent, according to figures from the statistics office.
This is with the benchmark interest rate at 6%. Which is really low by Nigerian standards. In any case, I wonder how reliable the data is.
July 18th, 2010
… called Baobab. The description in the current edition of the newspaper:
…it will delve into politics, econoics and culture, and comment on the successes of Africa’s peaceful elections and foreign investment as well as on Africa’s troubles.
This is hoping that the language in which the discussions and analyses are framed will not be one of despair (remember The Economist’s own ‘The Hopeless Continent’ headline?), and of disaster, war and warlordism (see this Guardian op-ed). Anthropologists know quite well that the language in which a discussion is framed influences the content of the discussion, and even frames the understanding of the content.
the Minister of Information and Communications, Dora Akunyili, who read out the stand of the FEC at the presidential villa, said though NNPC is a growing concern, it is not broke.
“NNPC, from the auditor’s account, is a going concern, and does not have solvency issue as a corporation. Therefore, categorically, NNPC is not insolvent,” she said.
She added that there is always an outstanding balance between the federal government and the oil giant because of the regular transactions between them.
The billion-naira question now is this: who is to be believed? Mr. Babalola, who, six months after saying he had no doubts about the precarious financial position of the NNPC, is insisting that nothing has changed (that in fact, things have grown worse), or Mrs. Akunyili (on behalf of the Federal Government) and the NNPC, who are telling us that Mr. Babalola has no idea what he is saying.
In case you are unduly puzzled, remember, this is a country that does not know the amount of oil it produces
is the title of a paper by LSE‘s Development Studies Institute’s Kate Meagher. The abstract:
Analyses of the rise of violent vigilantism in Africa have focused increasingly on the ‘uncivil ’ character of African society. This article challenges the recourse to cultural or instrumentalist explanations, in which vigilantism is portrayed as a reversion to violent indigenous institutions of law and order based on secret societies and occultist practices, or is viewed as a product of the contemporary institutional environment of clientelism and corruption in which youth struggle for their share of patronage resources. The social and political complexities of contemporary African vigilantism are revealed through an account of the rise and derailment of the infamous Bakassi Boys vigilante group of south-eastern Nigeria. Based on extensive fieldwork among the shoe producers of Aba who originally formed the Bakassi Boys in 1998, this article traces the process through which popular security arrangements were developed and subsequently hijacked by opportunistic political officials engaged in power struggles between the state and federal governments. Detailing the strategies and struggles involved in the process of political hijack, this inside account of the Bakassi Boys reveals the underlying resilience of civil notions of justice and public accountability in contemporary Africa.
If you can get the article [gated] do. It provides some context for this BusinessDay piece on the current state of Aba, a hub of Igbo trade and manufacturing that is currently facing high crime rates.
Once upon a time, anti-neoliberal theory posited an opposition between state and the free market, arguing that the antidote to the latter lay in the active intervention of the former. But the opposition is false, just another piece of the detritus of the modern history of capital. As states become mega-corporations (Kremlin, Inc.; Britain, PLC; South Africa, Pty Ltd.; Dubai, Inc.) all of them, incidentally, branded and legally incorporated – they become inextricably part of the workings of the market and, hence, no longer an “outside”, an antidote or an antithesis, from which to rethink or reconstruct “the neoliberal paradigm”. Which, in part, is why government is increasingly reduced to an exercise in the technical management of capital, why ideologically-founded politics appear dead, replaced by the politics of interest and entitlement and identity, three counterpoints of a single triangle. And why the capillaries of neoliberal governance seem so firmly entrenched in the cartography of our everyday lives, there to remain for the foreseeable future. To the degree that any future is foreseeable.
Ever heard of the D8? They are Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey. Their central bank governors and foreign ministers met in Abuja on Tuesday.
The aim?
to seek closer economic cooperation that would help protect the group from another global financial crisis.
The decision?
Under a draft Abuja declaration, the group proposed to combat corruption, ease visa procedures, expedite multilateral trade agreements and review the creation of an investment fund for use by member countries.
Trade between the eight countries is estimated at around $68 billion, or about 3 percent of global trade.
“It has become necessary to review and adopt common regulatory regimes to safeguard financial systems’ stability and forestall a reoccurrence of the recent experience in our various countries,” said Nigerian Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi.
Of course, Iran is part of them, so:
The proposed declaration also backs “peaceful uses of nuclear energy,” but does not specifically mention Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities.
My name is Olumide Abimbola. I am currently finishing up just handed in 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
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