Loomnie

Gideon Rachman of FT writes:

It is ironic that the democratic movements in the Arab world broke out just as autocracy seemed to be coming back into fashion. Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” thesis epitomised the democratic triumphalism of 1989, recently wrote an article for this newspaper that lauded China’s ability to “make large complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well”, while lamenting that American democracy “will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern”. This month has also seen the publication of Dambisa Moyo’s much-discussed How The West Was Lost, which laments the “economic folly” of western democracies and lauds the dynamism of China.

Placed in the context of the wider debate between democracy and authoritarianism, the sight of demonstrators on the streets of Cairo demanding freedom should be immensely cheering to the west. The neoconservatives who always argued that the Arab world could not forever be an exception to the global spread of democracy may be tempted to claim vindication.

A guest post from Benson Eluma, a NigeriansTalk contributor.

WHAT ARE THE differences between Achebe and Hart? Achebe says we have to go back 500 years to understand the problem of Africa; Hart says no, the required span is ‘the last century’. I feel that by the time we get to the start of Hart’s last century, we might begin to sense that we need to go back another fifty or hundred years in order to understand the processes that led to the most recent hundred, and so on and so forth backwards.

But isn’t it interesting that Hart ignores the fact that, as regards the specific trouble with Nigeria, Acbebe’s triumvirate of ‘slavery, colonialism and the Nigerian civil war’ has two members whose historical relevance fall squarely within the ‘courte durée’ of the last century? And then who says that those two, or even the entire troika, are not part of the story of Nigerian peoples today? The civil war is part of daily discourse in Nigeria. People, many of them not even born at the time, invoke it and keep it fresh in living memory, e.g. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. Many people still refer to the civil war as part of the backdrop to the situation in the southeast today where kidnapping is the reigning topic of trouble in daily conversation. Nigerians invoke the civil war in their stories of ongoing ethno-religious violence in the north. And there is the belief that the insurgency in the Niger Delta has failed to spark a fire across the rest of the country because of the lessons of the civil war. Nobody wants to be told ‘no victor, no vanquished’ again. These are part of the stories of Nigerian peoples today. And colonialism, too, features in many of these stories; ditto slavery. Sometimes the pessimism and despair become too much that some people, not knowing what else to say, declare that they would like to have the British back.

I am alarmed by the impression which Hart gives that we don’t need to have good politics and good laws to make Nigeria better. I would love to be chided that I have somehow misread him on this score. And really, I don’t get what he means by the ‘economic conditions of democracy’ which he says, Achebe only ‘deals with… through their negation as excessive ill-begotten wealth’. Recently, there has been a lot of excitement in Nigeria over allegations by the CBN Governor that one-quarter of government’s annual expenditure is spent on paying the salaries and bonuses of members of the National Assembly, a group made up of about one thousand people. Excessive ill-begotten wealth is a burning issue in the story of Nigeria.

But there are areas of agreement between Achebe and Hart. The one tells us:

During the colonial period, struggles were fought, exhaustingly, on so many fronts — for equality, for justice, for freedom — by politicians, intellectuals and common folk alike. At the end of the day, when the liberty was won, we found that we had not sufficiently reckoned with one incredibly important fact: If you take someone who has not really been in charge of himself for 300 years and tell him, “O.K., you are now free,” he will not know where to begin.

The other concurs:

‘The desire for freedom was the fuel of the anti-colonial revolution; but any conception of the new society was vitiated by a complete failure to take into account the contours of the world that it was being born into.’

Where Achebe speaks with passion, Hart aims for a certain dispassion but, rhetorical strategy apart, they are talking of the same thing. Both of them share a romantic vision of a Nigeria that has the manifest destiny of a big role to play on the African continent. Of that Nigeria, Hart prophesies thus: ‘It will only begin to realise its promise when domestic political projects coalesce into appropriate forms of political and economic leadership at the continental level.’ Political and economic leadership at continental level is as romantic an aspiration as Achebe’s ‘new patriotic consciousness’. In point of fact, Achebe paradoxically diminishes the playing field of this patriotism, making it a burden of accountability to the people on the part of leaders (thus reducing it effectively to a domestic affair). But it used to be that every patriot was accountable to the will of the state as determined by the leaders. Hart, for his own part, doesn’t place any such limitations on the powerful. He is speaking of old-style domination in international affairs, otherwise why would he have no qualms prophesying a ‘sub-imperial role in Africa’ for South Africa ‘under black majority rule’? Imperialism, sub or super, means that some countries exist for the glory and advantage of the imperial power. This is the kind of system Hart coolly envisages for the continent? I would love it to be shown that I have placed a tendentious construction on his words here.

Achebe seems the worse romantic of the two—for instance, when he begins to make it appear as if everything in the precolonial past is what is good for Africa today, especially drawing from the lore of the Igbo to make this point. Yet his actual concerns and suggestions still manage to relate to the present, at least as regards Nigeria, in its own context and conditions. The world may have changed from what it used to be in the 1960s, but Achebe doesn’t sound like a broken record to me. Corruption in politics and in the running of the economy is a perennial problem in Nigeria. It is a question that we must address, whether or not Nollywood takes over from Hollywood next week; whether or not every Nigerian gets connected to the world via Blackberry; whether or not Asa and Naija hip-hop and Rita Dominic are making waves on the continent and beyond; whether or not Shell has replaced the state in the Niger Delta.

Maybe, Achebe doesn’t give us much to hang our hopes on—I even doubt that giving hope is his main objective in his op-ed. Hart’s main objective seems to be to give hope. But hope in what really? If China, Brazil, India are emerging as economic powers, does that mean that Nigeria is emerging into similar prominence too? Are we following any of these countries in its footsteps to economic stardom?  And as for the ‘second diaspora’ referred to by Hart, I can’t say that it is entirely the outcome of ‘voluntary migration’, at least in the case of many Nigerians. People from all walks of life, from professors to prostitutes, are fleeing Nigeria, or being captured from it. It is not just a rate of emigration; it is more of a spate of escape and capture. And many of those who go out are reluctant to return because the conditions—political, social, economic, legal—are not right yet. Some who return from the diaspora do so only to contribute to the mess, e.g. to ‘chop’ much more money in the Nigerian National Assembly than they would earn as public servants or private sector workers in the West. Some are like Emeagwali—expatriates who make a hit by selling false images to those back home. And because we are so enamoured of ‘Tokunbo’ regardless of the quality of the person or product in question, given the decay of most home-based and home-grown things here, we always fall prey to the cunning of the Emeagwali-type of expatriate.

Yet, I want to agree with Hart that there has to be hope somewhere; for as Achebe says, ‘Nigeria’s story has not been, entirely, one long, unrelieved history of despair’. I see hope in what people are trying to do by themselves and for themselves; but I don’t see much hope because our insupportable system vitiates every genuine effort. Indians are returning in droves; it is the other way round in Nigeria.

I think that Achebe has already started to do what Hart says is needed ‘above all’: ‘ask how multiple forms of political association at more or less inclusive levels might help address the development question’. That takes us back to storming the gates of the political kingdom. If, as Hart says, we must ‘take into account the world we are being born into’, then this world would have to be a place in which we can grow, a place in which we can look forward to some measure of, yes, benevolence. Otherwise we are faced with a future of conflicts and clashes in which things might get much worse for us. Local and foreign malevolence brought us here in the first place. And then, too, the notion of capitalist development simmering within Hart’s commentary requires regulation. Where the authorities that are supposed to provide this regulation and control, i.e. to stand apart from but oversee the running of competition, fail to perform their duties with competence and transparency, but rather become completely embroiled in the dog-eat-dog struggle of private profit-seeking and graft, the capitalist economy Hart has in mind will not take full flight.

We may be getting tired of being told the same thing over and over again by these social critics who do not see that the world is changing. But frankly, the Nigerian system is the broken record, not Achebe. Recently, Wole Soyinka announced that he was going to stop talking about these things, but surely not because they have evaporated in the changed world system. In 2011, yes there is Nollywood, yes there is GSM, yes there is Internet banking, yes there is a growing population—but Nigeria is still a ‘cesspool of corruption and misrule’ with its education, healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing, mining, banking, security, sports and a caravan of other sectors, amounting to a gross shambles. Is this assessment correct or not?

The Economist has a nice article on immigration in Germany. If you can recall, Angela Merkel recently said that multiculturalism has utterly failed in Germany. This was following the furore that was raised by the publication of a book that claimed that immigrants and muslims were causing the downfall of Germany. The book was written by Thilo Sarazzin, a member of the board of the German Bundesbank. He was subsequently forced off the board of the Bundesbank. (See the Economist article for a recap of the main issues.)

What some of the people I have spoken with are scared of is that this might yet become a major political issue, leading, for instance to the creation of an acceptable right wing party. (There are the crazies, like NPD, the neo-Nazi party, but nobody really takes them seriously.) The fear is that if Ms Merkel is unable to contain the discussions surrounding immigration within her party, it is possible that some members might decide to go with the general sentiment of anti-immigration and form a political party that retains the basic economic policies of the right of centre CDU, but adds to it anti-immigration rhetorics and policies. A party like that, I am afraid, will be appealing to certain segments of the German middle-class.

Remember the Google and China issue? I recently came across part of the text of a keynote address delivered by Tricia Wang, ethnographer and PhD candidate in sociology at UC San Diego, at the New Direction in the Humanities Conference, UCLA. Her take on the China and Google saga is encapsulated in this excerpt:

And here’s the kicker – in leaving China because the Chinese government wouldn’t conform to their rules, Google reproduced the very imperialistic behavior that have characterized the greatest imperial powers: leaving a country or region when they couldn’t get the natives to abandon their own way of thinking or adopt a new way of behaving

What’s emerging is a new rhetoric of development and globalization in what I am calling neo-informationalism: the belief that information should function like currency in free-market capitalism – border-less, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of neo-informationalism rests on an moral framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that free and open access to information can create social change. This moral framework of neo-informationalism is so naturalized that Google and like-minded companies work their way around the world unquestioned for their position on open information. Phrases such as “information wants to be free” reflect the techno-anthropomorphizing of information, a necessary step in naturalizing any neo-informationalist agenda.

Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through free-market conditions.

This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. While Wendy wasn’t speaking of technological objects per se, I make the case that this is indeed a variant of the hacker ethic; social change is made through direct programming of software code and interaction with technological devices while maintaining distance from the state.

What I want to point out is that while this is a very reasonable process being accomplished by very reasonable people — Westerners creating products and policies for Westerners – I am not comfortable with pushing this belief on others in the name of a “higher calling.” This is a simply a redux of cultural imperialism that says “we know better than you, and if you don’t believe us, too bad you have no choice, because we’re offering you emancipation by giving you access to our Internets.”

We should question any ethical system that reproduces a familiar trope of colonialism. Whereas past waves of imperialism used Religion, Science, or Globalization as a rhetoric of development, the new rhetoric of neo-informationalism is used as a guiding principle for entering new regions—ethical principles that can be used as proxies for pushing our belief system onto other people. As a result, the work can be less about free information and unlimited compassion and more about desires for free-access to new markets and new commodities.

The whole article is here.

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.

Check it out here.

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 Economist here. Also check out the newspaper’s article on the presidential elections of tomorrow.

A reader writes:

Without undermining the intellectual capabilities and the personal achievements of Ms Hirsi Ali, she often comes accross as self-overestimating and excessively self-benefitting. Since she stepped out of the islamic faith, she seems extremely obsessed with projecting islam in a negative light. For a self-proclaimed islam expert, I would appreciate a discuss that projects a more rational, objective and more balanced projection. She is celebrated in the West because of her anti-islam crusade. I reside in the Netherlands and I know that she avoids public debates and discussions with people of authority and experts on Islam who do not share her views of islam. My attention was drawn to Ms Hirshi Ali in the early nineties when she was a young member of the PVDA (The Workers Party in the Netherlands). As a young politician, she was out-spoken, well articulated and determined. She later cross-carpet to the VVD (Liberal party). Following political scandals surrounding her acquisition of the Dutch citizenship, she had to quit her seat in the parliament. Since a few years she has been working for the extremely consevative American institution: The American Enterprise Institute. For a self-proclaimed liberal individual, her taking up a job position with this institution, suggests a great degree of contradiction to me, knowing the goals and objectives of this institute.

For the good order, I am not religious and could care less on religious issues, it’s just that I sort of had higher expectations of Ms Hirshi Ali towards the minority communities in the Netherlands. With her intelligence, personality and achievements, she could go a long way as a role model to young immigrants who are not interested in religon. This I miss in her list of achievements, hence the term: “excessively self-benefitting”

I think that basic economics, the way it is taught today, tends to give people reflexive pro-free market, anti-government positions — positions that arenot held by people with a deeper exposure to economic thinking. When your understanding of government finances is based on reading the newspaper, it’s somewhat eye-opening to come to college and learn that free markets lead to maximum societal welfare and taxes impose a deadweight loss on society — the pictures are so simple and compelling. That’s why a little bit of economics makes you more likely to be a Republican.

But when you learn more about principal-agent problems, information asymmetries, and so on, you learn that those simple pictures are simplistic to the point of being misleading. That’s why Joseph Stiglitz argues in Freefall that understanding economics is crucial to understanding why free markets often lead to suboptimal outcomes. The problem isn’t knowledge per se; it’s a little bit of knowledge.

The morals of this? If you want to be an economist make sure you stay and get a PhD in it.

From The Baseline Scenario.

BusinessDay:

There is going to be lots of jobs and racketeering during the period. Artisans would make more money and thugs will have more jobs to do for their principals which would mean more money for them. The list of those that will benefit is endless.

Election campaign involves a lot of activities which include party meetings, road show/ awareness, lobbying among others. In each of the activities, money is spent in printing T-shirts, fez caps, handkerchiefs, wrappers, and even in food and drinks, among others.

And from an analyst:

The artisans that have developed muscles to function as party tugs will be gainfully employed and rewarded accordingly. This will motivate them to be willing to die for their political masters.

About politicians and courage:

Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened dictatorship than it is in a democracy. However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.

On Europe and the EU:

… Europe is a cultural space, which does not necessarily overlap with the EU as a physical space; otherwise there would be endless Israeli-style debates about where the frontiers should be. The EU is different, as it started its life as the European Economic Community with the idea that it was an open entity. Anyone could join if they conformed to the rules, the norms and the regulations. This was very easy to say in 1958 because most of Europe was in prison. You didn’t have to worry about whether you would have to take in Slovakia, because there was no risk, no prospect of that, thanks to the Russians. All you had to worry about were the wealthy countries of the West: either small, wealthy countries like Austria or big ones like Italy or Spain. After 1989 all this fell apart. The EU became legally, culturally and institutionally committed to expanding and accepting anyone who wanted to join from a space that could be recognised as Europe. Since no one defined that space, there was no limit. Turkey at the time was not a problem: first because in those years it was mostly a military dictatorship; and second, because it was on the other side of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and those two were not about to come into the EU.

Today we live in a very different situation. Europe is defined by the rules of the EU and its willingness to take in new countries. But already in the mid-1990s it was clear that no matter what anyone said in public, in private Brussels wanted to slow this process down, and if possible bring it to a stop. The reasons were very good, because the EU succeeded on the basis of genuine interstate co-operation, in which wealthy states or regions helped poor ones, and small new members could be forced to behave well. This was fine as long as the overwhelming majority of members were big and wealthy and the only likely new members were small, and either wealthy, or if poor, very small. When this changed in the 1990s, you started to hear people saying: ‘Wait a minute, Europe must be defined culturally, it must consider heritage: spiritual, architectural and linguistic heritage.’ This was simply a way of saying: ‘We can’t take in Muslims.’ Now, I did hear the Catholics say that Orthodox Christians can’t be accepted either. People would say this in Poland, in Croatia, to some extent in Hungary, but what they were really talking about were the Russians, the Serbs and the Romanians, not the Orthodox Christians in general. However, this could not be said openly, so once again the language was misused.

The concluding paragraph:

I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent. It can’t be an economic language since part of the problem is that we have for too long spoken about politics in an economic language where everything has been about growth, efficiency, productivity and wealth, and not enough has been about collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour. We have thrown away the language with which to do that. And until we rediscover that language how could we possibly bind ourselves together? We can’t come together on the basis of 19th or 20th-century ideas of inevitable progress or the natural historical progression from capitalism to socialism or whatever. We can’t believe in that anymore. And anyway, it can’t do the work for us. We need to rediscover our own language of politics.

The full article, in the London Review of Books, is here.