Archive for category: Africa

Why we have no idea whether Africa is rising or not

Finally, something that I can agree with. If we want to fetishise numbers we should at least try to get them right. Morten Jerven at FP:

Today, due to the uneven application of methods and poor availability of data, any ranking of countries by GDP is misleading. The basic problem is that many countries have been using outmoded data and methods. Nigeria’s astonishing upward revision is due to the fact that, until quite recently, the authorities there were still using data and methods from 1990, and have only recently decided to update them. The new methods are capturing a whole range of fresh numbers, such as data from telecommunications (mobile phones) and the service sector. Needless to say, while we wait for the new figures, any comparison between Nigeria’s GDP and another country’s are meaningless.

In research conducted for Poor Numbers I surveyed methods and data in use in national statistical offices in Sub-Saharan Africa. For many countries no official information was obtainable. The IMF Statistics Department periodically reminds authorities to update their baseline statistics every five years (in accordance with international best practice). But within the past seven years, limited resources and data availability have meant that only seven countries (Burundi, Ghana, Malawi, Mauritius, Niger, Rwanda, and Seychelles) were able to follow suit. Of the 34 countries for which information was available, 21 reported having a base year that is within the last decade, while 13 countries have base years from the 1980s and 1990s. This means that our last reasonably accurate picture of these economies is more than a decade old. By comparison, most Western economies update their base years on an annual basis.

Yet the available figures do suggest one likely finding: Many economies in Africa today may be richer than we think. Some of them, like Nigeria, probably are. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we don’t really know for sure. The African growth and income evidence does not tell us as much as we would like to think — and for some countries it’s seriously misleading. It’s disturbing to think that, as recently as last year, we were still working under the assumption that Ghana was a poor country. Now we’ve discovered that we have to re-examine all our ideas.

For both Nigeria and Ghana, the implications are that a large amount of economic activity has gone missing since the 1990s, making it impossible to write the history of those countries based on the official statistics. Were the estimates made in the 1990s exhaustive? When did the economy grow and at what rate? What policies caused the growth?

And we have not even added the informal economic activities within and across countries. And by the way, if you see any figures for those, for obvious reasons, doubt them.

Update

Lee Crawfurd just told me on Twitter that informal activities are captured in household consumption data. That is an excellent point, although the collection of household data – income and consumption – are problematic for different reasons. See section 29 of this UN Economic and Social Council doc on poverty and the informal sector [pdf].

January 30, 2013 Read More

So the Chinese are benefiting from AGOA

Of course they are:

A paper from the Centre for the Study of African Economies suggests that savvy Chinese companies have set up shop in Africa as a route to get their products into the US, with the added incentive of all those juicy AGOA benefits.

The logic is impeccable. Not only does an Africa platform get them duty-free access to US markets; they can also avoid punitive quotas on China’s exports, imposed under previous protectionist measures enacted by the rich world such as the Multifibre Arrangement.

And even during that whole MFA thing, Chinese companies were producing in Africa so they could export as products from African countries. Which was one of the reasons that it looked like textile industries in some African countries were doing OK. Once the MFA expired, after a few years of which China joined the WTO, there was no longer any need for them to export from Africa. I wrote about all that a couple of years ago here, touching on the AGOA bit, especially as it affected (or not) textile. An excerpt:

Before the MFA expired, the United States introduced the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), an initiative that opened up the American market to African countries. Before the expiration of the MFA, textile products were one of the fastest growing exports to the US under AGOA. However, by the time the quotas were lifted, Chinese exports [exported from China] increased rapidly and proved to be stronger competition than African companies could handle. According to a 2005 presentation made to the US-China Commission by Princeton Lyman, a former United States ambassador to Nigeria, African countries suffered from the increase in exports from the Chinese textile industry on two fronts. Cheap exports from China were undermining local textile industries. At the same time, the growth of Chinese exports to the United States was making it almost impossible for African countries to compete with China for the US market.

December 19, 2012 Read More

Who is funding infrastructure projects in Africa?

From a new report by the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa on external funding of infrastructure projects in Africa:

In 2011 total external financial commitments/investments in African Infrastructure declined to 2009 levels. Overall commitments totalled US$41.5billion – a decline of 26% compared with 2010 figures. Commitments from ICA Members declined by 56% to US$11.9billion as compared to 2010 figures.

Financial commitments by ‘other’ financiers such as Arab Funds and particularly China has witnessed a continuous increasing trend. In 2011 such ‘other’ commitments grew by 39% to US$18.1billion. and the Arab Funds have doubled their contributions, and private sector commitments have nearly recovered to pre-crisis levels.

Private finance to African infrastructure although experienced a decline as compared to 2010 figures, has remained relatively stable in porportion terms accounting for approximately 27% (US$11 billion) of total external financial commitment/investments.

The full report.

December 18, 2012 Read More

A fascinating research I look forward to reading

LSE PhD student Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed researches domestic workers, a.k.a. househelp/housemaid/houseboy, in Lagos:

My research is an account of the lives of male and female domestic workers in Lagos, Nigeria. It looks at the forms of control they experience in their daily interactions with their employers, as well as the multiple ways they respond to such control. This qualitative study involved eight months of fieldwork from November 2011 to July 2012 in Lagos, during which a total of 79 interviews were conducted.

In this research I used a snowball-sampling technique to access domestic workers.

I identified several different “snowballs” (relatives, friends, domestic workers) who were then asked to name an acquaintance who might be interested in participating in my study. Each new participant was then asked to recommend someone they knew.

Here.

December 12, 2012 Read More

A Framework For Discussing ‘Africa Rising’

Jolyon Ford

Jolyon Ford of Oxford Analytica:

I wonder if we should perhaps think of sub-Saharan Africa as a collection not so much of jointly emerging markets, but of diverging ones.

Last week I was privileged, under the umbrella of the commendable ‘Invest in Africa’ initiative, to join experienced businesspeople in London discussing endemic inaccurate negative perceptions by outsiders of the relative risk of doing business in African countries.

The curiosity is that longstanding, ingrained negative perceptions persist now alongside a more recent, contrary trend – the more hyperbolic proponents of which claim that anyone not rushing to invest in Africa must need their head examined.

There is perhaps no better theme for a contemporary African Argument – for those following business issues as well as (often related) developmental or political ones – than efforts to unpack and understand this ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. Simon Freemantle’s recent post here is an excellent addition. It develops an argument he delivered with typical cool conviction at a recent Joburg event where we reflected on the proposition ‘Africa: New Hope or New Hype?’ hosted by Ernst & Young’s Michael Lalor.

There are many dimensions to getting behind simple binary characterisations of either ‘Africa rising: all is great’ or ‘Nothing new here: it’s a false dawn’. Each time one goes (as we constantly must) behind the headline rates of growth, one sees the complexity – both the exaggeration about transformative progress, and the under-reporting (or misreporting) of the many positive achievements and trends.

Here.

November 29, 2012 Read More

Oil Contracts: How to Read and Understand them

Oil Contracts Cover

A couple of weeks ago I attended the launch of Oil Contracts: How to Read and Understand them, a BookSprints book by OpenOil, a Berlin-based energy consultancy and publishing house. They basically got ten people with different expertise on the oil sector – corporate lawyers, energy activists, government negotiators – together in a house for one week and out came the book. If you want to learn more about the process, see this post by Zara Rahman of OpenOil. (Here is the BookSprints post on the process)

The book is written for the everyday person who is interested in having an idea of what goes into an oil contract, so the language is very accessible. We can all agree that this is an essential document for those trying to understand the dark world of the global extractive industry. Hey, in Nigeria, we don’t even know how much oil we export.

You can download a pdf version of the book here. E-book versions are also available.

November 15, 2012 Read More

Biafra and humanitarian imperialism*

As we are reminded by Chinua Achebe of the atrocities that led to the Biafra War, and the horror that the war was, we should also not forget the era that it heralded – that of humanitarianism. From a 2010 article New Yorker article by Philip Gourevitch:

Since Biafra, humanitarianism has become the idea, and the practice, that dominates Western response to other people’s wars and natural disasters; of late, it has even become a dominant justification for Western war-making. Biafra was where many of the leaders of what de Waal calls the “humanitarian international” got their start, and the Biafra airlift provided the industry with its founding legend, “an unsurpassed effort in terms of logistical achievement and sheer physical courage,” de Waal writes. It is remembered as it was lived, as a cause célèbre—John Lennon and Jean-Paul Sartre both raised their fists for the Biafrans—and the food the West sent certainly did save lives. Yet a moral assessment of the Biafra operation is far from clear-cut.

After the secessionist government was finally forced to surrender and rejoin Nigeria, in 1970, the predicted genocidal massacres never materialized. Had it not been for the West’s charity, the Nigerian civil war surely would have ended much sooner. Against the lives that the airlifted aid saved must be weighed all those lives—tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands—that were lost to the extra year and a half of destruction. But the newborn humanitarian international hardly stopped to reflect on this fact. New crises beckoned—most immediately, in Bangladesh—and who can know in advance whether saving lives will cost even more lives? The crisis caravan rolled on. Its mood was triumphalist, and to a large degree it remains so.

Michael Maren stumbled into the aid industry in the nineteen-seventies by way of the Peace Corps. “In the post-Vietnam world, the Peace Corps offered us an opportunity to forge a different kind of relationship with the Third World, one based on respect,” he writes. But he soon began to wonder how respectful it is to send Western kids to tell the elders of ancient agrarian cultures how to feed themselves better. As he watched professional humanitarians chasing contracts to implement policies whose harm they plainly saw, he came to regard his colleagues as a new breed of mercenaries: soldiers of misfortune. Yet, David Rieff notes, “for better or worse, by the late 1980s humanitarianism had become the last coherent saving ideal.”

How is it that humanitarians so readily deflect accountability for the negative consequences of their actions? “Humanitarianism flourishes as an ethical response to emergencies not just because bad things happen in the world, but also because many people have lost faith in both economic development and political struggle as ways of trying to improve the human lot,” the social scientist Craig Calhoun observes in his contribution to a new volume of essays, “Contemporary States of Emergency,” edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (Zone; $36.95). “Humanitarianism appeals to many who seek morally pure and immediately good ways of responding to suffering in the world.” Or, as the Harvard law professor David Kennedy writes in “The Dark Sides of Virtue” (2004), “Humanitarianism tempts us to hubris, to an idolatry about our intentions and routines, to the conviction that we know more than we do about what justice can be.”

Maren, who came to regard humanitarianism as every bit as damaging to its subjects as colonialism, and vastly more dishonest, takes a dimmer view: that we do not really care about those to whom we send aid, that our focus is our own virtue. He quotes these lines of the Somali poet Ali Dhux:

“A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.”

Read in full.

*I stole the phrase “humanitarian imperialism” from this Noam Chomsky article, which is also worth your time.

October 17, 2012 Read More

The Economist interview on Boko Haram

The Africa editor of The Economist talks to Lizzy Donnelly of Chatham House on Boko Haram. I mostly agree with her, mainly because she made sure to express the uncertainties about Boko Haram, the disagreement among ‘Nigeria watchers’ and ‘analysts’ on the group, and the fact that there is so much that is not known about them. But she hit the sweet spot when she pointed out that oil wealth likely led to the current state of Northern Nigeria – high unemployment etc. etc. – and that the north used to be a strong centre of commerce in West Africa. She didn’t elaborate on this in the interview so I’m going to do it in one sentence:

Part of the north was on the famous trans-sahara trade route; up until the 1970s there was a strong textile industry (there was a minor surge sometime later, but that is mostly gone now); and in the 80s when I was in primary school, the pyramids of groundnut from the north were highly visible parts of our Social Studies textbooks (pyramids of groundnut in the north, oil palm in the south-east and cacao in the south-west).

Just so one is not misunderstood, it should be added that oil wealth led to the current state of the economy of the whole of the country, not just the north.

Give it a listen, especially if you need a brief introduction to Boko Haram.

October 11, 2012 Read More

Reviews of Achebe’s There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

First the conclusion of this ‘review’ (really, it is a summary of what the ‘reviewer’ likes in the book; and such a word as review should ideally not be used for it. If, however, we choose to call it a review, we should add that it is at best anodyne) by Noo Saro-Wiwa:

The final chapter is an exhortation to better governance, in which he examines corruption, ethnic bigotry, state failure and the steps Nigeria must take to rehabilitate itself. This prescriptive wish list reminds us of the gap between theory and practice in Nigerian politics; it makes you pine for the likes of Achebe to govern. But sadly, he’s not writing a manifesto; instead, we have in There Was A Country an elegy from a master storyteller who has witnessed the undulating fortunes of a nation, which – unlike young “Dictionary” – has yet to fulfil its potential.

The real review, by Chimamanda Adichie, a self-confessed admirer of Chinua Achebe (read the review to see the different reasons she admires him) and the writer of an award winning novel with the Biafran War as its central theme:

This is a book for Achebe’s admirers, or for those not unfamiliar with his work. Parts are similar to passages from previous essays, and interspersed in the narrative are poems which, even if tweaked here, have been published before. Keen followers of Achebe will be interested in some of the new material about his life in the first section of the book. But the second section, about the war itself, mostly forgoes personal memory. In writing about the major events, Achebe often recounts what he was told rather than what he felt and the reader is left with a nagging dissatisfaction, as though things are being left unsaid. There are a few glimpses. On a visit to Canada as a Biafran ambassador, one of his hosts at the Canadian Council of Churches made a joke, and in the middle of the loud laughter that followed, it occurred to Achebe that Biafra had become different from other places, where laughter was still available. And, later, hearing a plane take off from Heathrow, he instinctively wanted to dive for cover. There are other small details, but all tantalisingly brief, sometimes oblique. I longed to hear more of what he had felt during those months of war – in other words, I longed for a more novelistic approach.

Don’t stop with that as it is one of the more critical paragraphs in the review.

Although these reviews don’t really make me feel that I will learn anything new from the book, and even though I will find this disappointing because the Writer ‘was there’ and so could write more about Nigeria at inception – being part of the early elite and all that – and his experience of the Biafran War, I will buy and read the book anyway.

October 6, 2012 Read More

Drug trafficking and usage in Africa

Ken Opalo has an excellent article on drug trafficking in Africa:

The problem of drug trafficking in Africa is not merely a law enforcement concern. Firstly, it is a threat to the development and consolidation of important state institutions, especially the region’s judiciaries and security agencies. In many of the African states that have been cited as important transit destinations for drugs from Latin America and Asia, drug traffickers have managed to infiltrate vital state institutions. Important politicians, members of the judiciary, and key members of the security apparatus – both police and the military – have been their primary targets. As a result, the very institutions that have been charged with policing such illicit activities have been the ones that actively promoted and/or provided protection for drug traffickers. Ineluctably, the large amounts of drug money up for grabs have caused splits among ruling elites, sometimes resulting in bloody conflict, as has been the case in Guinea-Bissau since early 2009.

Apart from the political and security problems that come with drugs trafficking, another particularly worrying trend is the adoption and usage of cocaine and heroine by people in communities along the trafficking routes. From a UN report:

Drug use appears to be spilling over into countries lying on trafficking routes, such as in West and Central Africa, which is witnessing increasing numbers of cocaine users. The increasing use of heroin and drug injecting is also emerging as an alarming trend, particularly in Eastern Africa.

September 8, 2012 Read More

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Archive for category: Africa