My Beauty Best Teacher

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe writing in Africa Resource:

Africa has been the quintessential target of French military interventionism during this period because immanent in the worldview of the French political establishment, irrespective of ideological/political colouration, none of the former French-conquered and occupied African states is really independent or sovereign by any breadth or shade of either of these definitions. Instead, according to this conception, these are francophonie backwoods, which, at best, have some measure of local administrative autonomy (hence, “francophone Africa”!), with ultimate sovereign power lodged at the metropolitan centre in Paris

William Easterly writes in the Guardian:

Image via Wikipedia

A popular topic in the aid blogosphere this week was not about Haiti or Ivory Coast or south Sudan but about complex systems, ie systems that cannot be reduced to a simple mathematical or statistical model, where actions often have unintended effects. Yet this seemingly abstruse topic has surprising relevance to the Ivory Coast debate (and perhaps the others as well). One would want to be very careful making aggressive recommendations in a complex system whose principles are not very well understood.
Civil conflict is a great candidate for such an irreducibly unpredictable system. Civil conflict features political and military leaders on both sides, the general population is divided, and each side of the population contains an array of different interest groups. For every move by one player, there will be counter-moves by the other players, then counter-moves to the counter-moves, and so on...[continue reading]

Cameroon becomes a tourism destination-Global Voices
"Copycat Dictators and Cartoon Democracies..." Alemayehu G. Mariam in Ethiopian Review
"Formal education is not advancing Africa"-Nana Yaw Asiedu
Ivory Coast's descent into madness-Richard Dowden
Taking a look at Land 'Grabs' in Africa-African Arguments
African Export Successes by William Easterly & Ariell Reshef

Image via WikipediaChika Unigwe writing in the Guardian:

When, on 28 November – after Ivory Coast's elections had been postponed several times by the then president, Laurent Gbagbo – Ivorians took to the polls, there was a very real expectation that Gbagbo's government had come to an end. Unfortunately, they had miscalculated Gbagbo's determination to hang on to the post he had held since 2000 and which he – and his cohorts – see as his birthright...[continue reading]

Image via WikipediaIn Sahara Reporters Gary K. Busch provides a contrarien view about the crisis in Ivory Coast:

The civil war which broke out between the North and the South in the Ivory Coast was largely about the efforts of the Gbagbo government seeking to achieve real independence; a breakaway from the colonial dominance of the French which controlled almost every aspect of national life. He had the support of the Ivorian people. However now, after all the fighting and suffering by both sides, the current policy of Gbagbo seemed to veer away from confrontation to a policy of restoring the status quo ante; French neo-colonialism. This didn’t work. It fostered is a level of bitterness and rancour among a people who were watching the yoke placed on their necks again and, despite their current apathy and discouragement after years of fighting and sacrifice, they realised that, North and South, they had nothing to lose by sweeping the board clean of their black Frenchmen and installing genuine Ivorian patriots in their place...[continue reading]

In a country of long-term and soaring unemployment, these men found that their political activities gave them slight leverage in an atmosphere of otherwise dwindled opportunities. As one of my respondents astutely remarked, in a crisis-ridden Côte d’Ivoire, “the one business that works is politics.” Admittedly these men were far from gorging themselves off the fat of party politics. Instead, situated at the bottom of the hierarchy, they received little more than its crumbs. But crumbs – to appear as a guest speaker here, to get help to pay a medical bill or a child’s tuition there and to be relatively immune to the informalised state extraction in the form of the regular bribes – are all heavy incentives in the absence of gainful employment. Moreover, each speaker boasted of meeting warm congratulations after a speech, having his name called when walking down the street or being bought a beer from an admiring spectator he encountered when out on the town...[continue reading]

In the Globe and Mail Tristan Coloma reports on the African immigrant/trader community network in China:

This place is not really China, nor is it Africa; it lies in the midst of major highways in Guangzhou, southern China (formerly known as Canton). Officially, 20,000 Africans – probably more like 100,000 – live in or pass through the 10 square kilometres of “Africa Town,” where Igbo, Wolof and Lingala mingle with Mandarin and Cantonese. Some Chinese call it “Chocolate Town.”...In this roaring city of 18 million inhabitants and tens of thousands of micro-factories, the commercial activity is very different from the oil deals and huge public-works contracts the Chinese have secured in Africa.“We’re not here for fun,” said Ibrahim Kader Traore, an entrepreneur from Ivory Coast. “We work hard and do well. In Abidjan, people still swear by France, where you might be able to save $13,000 over 25 years; in China, you can have $130,000 in just five years.”...[continue reading]

A new transnational African business class may be emerging, which could flood sub-Saharan Africa with low-cost products from China. “China is trying to keep things at government level,” said Mr. Barry, “but the Chinese people will soon realize that it’s better for business to deal directly with ordinary Africans.” China would prefer Africans to do business with China without living here, yet 90 per cent of Guangzhou’s Africans act as intermediaries between the African continent and Chinese factories.

From Africa is a Country

The German shoe and sportswear company, Puma, sponsors at least 12 African national football teams–five of which qualified for the 2010 World Cup. To commemorate the World Cup year (and because it is good PR and to sell shirts), Puma commissioned artist Kehinde Wiley to create four new works of art inspired by the football stars Samuel Eto’o of Cameroon, John Mensah of Ghana and Emmanuel Eboué of Ivory Coast

In West Africa Always Wins:

...most of what Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote about the warlord phenomenon still applies to the handful of ex-students and poorly educated former army sergeants who have been plundering the northern half of Ivory Coast for the past seven years. "Warlords," he writes in The Shadow of the Sun, "are the sowers of tribal and racial hatred in Africa. They will never admit to this. They will always proclaim they are leading a national movement or party...What does a warlord do? Theoretically, he fights with other warlords. Most frequently, however, he is busy robbing his own country’s unarmed population. The warlord is the opposite of Robin Hood. He takes from the poor to enrich himself and feed his gangs. We are in a world in which misery condemns some to death and transforms others into monsters. The former are the victims, the latter are the executioners. There is no one else.”

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution discusses Paul Collier's book,Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places:

The key point of the book is how and why democracy doesn't work so well for the bottom billion. The early discussion of the incentives facing quasi-democratic governments is dysfunctional societies is brilliant. It's the best discussion I've seen of why "produce better government" is not the prevailing incentive in such societies. You can learn why ethnic diversity lowers the value of public sector activity but raises private sector productivity, why skills for construction are often a binding constraint in very poor societies, why the social returns to peacekeeping are so high, why Kalashnikovs are cheaper in Africa, why there are fewer civil wars in larger countries, and how the Ivory Coast went from development model to disaster...[continue reading]