My Beauty Best Teacher

The cautionary tales of commodity dependence continue.In Pambazuka Khadija Sharife writes about Zambia's copper straitjacket:

Once perceived as an icon of progress in Africa thanks to wealth from its copper mines, today over 75 per cent of Zambia's population lives below the poverty line...Khadija Sharife recounts the country’s ‘riches to rags’ story – a story that is being repeated in former resource colonies across the continent, which although ‘politically liberated’ have ‘remained economically chained’.

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Even Russia's Medvedev rails against commodity dependence.

Khadija Sharife writes in FPIF:

In Africa, political power is often used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card, immunising the venal political elite through various mechanisms. Transparency International, the global corruption watchdog renowned for its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), argues that corruption is especially rampant in Africa. TI defines corruption as the ‘abuse of entrusted power for private gain’, a notion limited to the governing bodies in developing countries.
But this is only half the story. A respectable financial army plays an invaluable role in a global shadow economy. A coterie of bankers, accountants, and lawyers – based in ‘transparent’ London, New York, and Singapore – serve as the ‘postcard-island’ tax havens, and they're backed by multilateral financial institutions. Corrupt government leaders get away with graft much more easily and more frequently because of these international financial enablers

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Via Pambazuka

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• Zambian expresident Frederick Chiluba cleared of corruption (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Enrichment of Africa's French Allies (time.com)

Khadija Sharife writes in FPIF:

In Africa, political power is often used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card, immunising the venal political elite through various mechanisms. Transparency International, the global corruption watchdog renowned for its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), argues that corruption is especially rampant in Africa. TI defines corruption as the ‘abuse of entrusted power for private gain’, a notion limited to the governing bodies in developing countries.
But this is only half the story. A respectable financial army plays an invaluable role in a global shadow economy. A coterie of bankers, accountants, and lawyers – based in ‘transparent’ London, New York, and Singapore – serve as the ‘postcard-island’ tax havens, and they're backed by multilateral financial institutions. Corrupt government leaders get away with graft much more easily and more frequently because of these international financial enablers

More here
Via Pambazuka

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zambian expresident Frederick Chiluba cleared of corruption (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Enrichment of Africa's French Allies (time.com)

Khadija Sharife in FPIF writes:

The portrayal of Africa's strong-arm leaders as lone rangers obscures the system underpinning the dictatorships and delinks dictators from their primary source of sustenance. The rhetoric of French-controlled development endorsed by Bongo is a subset of France's postcolonial Africa policy — Françafrique — designed to create structural dependence and domination by reasserting geostrategic control over natural resources through the use of black "governors." The pulse of the Françafrique ideology — fric is slang for cash — is rooted in shadow economies sustaining respectable corporations, various intersecting shadow networks, secret services, private lobbies, and political and diplomatic relationships between the official and unofficial political elite. These forces are individually and collectively able to mobilize substantial economic, political, and military support.

More here
via Pambazuka

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Enrichment of Africa's French Allies (time.com)
• The Resource Curse and Democracy (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)