My Beauty Best Teacher

Toilet capitalism in Zimbabwe

Jeremy Weate writing in African Arguments:

...the underlying cause of corruption is the structure of Nigeria’s quintessential “petro” state. There are a number of characteristics of the petro-state we can point to. Firstly, it features a broken social contract in the form of a rupture in the relationship between taxation and accountability. Royalties and taxes paid by international oil companies are direct contributions to the federal coffers, by-passing the citizenry. As the government has no need to rely on internally generated revenue, it has no incentive to engage with accountability actors such as civil society organisations. It is therefore close to impossible to apply accountability pressure into the system of governance. In Nigeria ministers never resign.

The obvious developmental solution to the stultifying fiction of the petro state is a systematic decentralisation of fiscal arrangements, supported by constitutional devolution. This would be the Nigerian ‘third way’ between an enforced unitary status quo and an unrealistic appeal for a once-and-for-all break up. This would include rigorous checks and balances placed against presidential and state governor discretion; it would also ensure that local governments are funded independently of state governors. Finally, it would include the mandate that oil windfalls over the benchmark price are saved rather than squandered (replacing the Excess Crude Account).

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via Feint and Margin:

In Africa, non-tariff trade barriers raise transaction costs and limit the movement of goods, services, people and capital across borders. To further development, African governments must embrace regional integration, break down these barriers and help Africans trade with each other.

Nicolas Van De Walle reviews Peter Eichstaedt & Theodore Trefon's 'Congo Masquerade':

Trefon takes a broader view of the DRC, examining the country’s sociopolitical dynamics and its failing institutions. His book has no heroes. It is sharply critical of the DRC’s rapacious political class. But Trefon is perhaps even more critical of the aid efforts of the United Nations, various bilateral and multilateral donors, and international nongovernmental organizations, all of whom he suggests might actually be making things worse, by perverting institutional incentives for reform. The Congolese state, meanwhile, remains essentially collapsed, unable to provide social services or ensure law and order. The uncoordinated proliferation of donor projects weakens the state apparatus by hiring away the few available competent Congolese administrators and by providing various perks and resources to a class of local middlemen who now live off foreign aid.

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A Mind of Malaka rejoinder to You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum!:

When Wangari Maathai began her campaign to reforest Kenyan’s landscape, her success was not with the members of her government. It was with her people; local people without much education, but who had a vision bigger than any government official had the mind to conceive. Trickle down policies do not work in Africa, because there is rot at the head. Africa’s only way forward is a grassroots/wildfire movement. With one spark, you can ignite an entire continent. It’s not going to be easy, and change never easy. Sometimes you will have to take a beating – figuratively and literally – to get the change you want to see. Ask any person who has been successful if that success did not come with some measure of pain.

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In Stealth of Nations:

Kate Meagher, in her 2010 book Identity Economics chronicles the recent history of the informal garment and shoe manufacturing clusters in Nigeria's Igboland. It's a fairly pessimistic look at the possibilities for these merchants.

She writes, "If the travails of Igbo informal producers have revealed anything, it is that even the most dynamic and well established informal enterprise networks lack the ability to assert their productive interests against the distruptive agendas of local officials, let alone to defy national or global economic and political interests." Meagher calls for strengthening the capacity of informal operators while leaning on the government to find ways to work with informal merchants -- thus allowing them an opening to turn the identity economics of tribal social networks into something that can develop across regions and transcend traditional divisions...[continue reading]

Reuben Abraham writing in CNN:

image courtesy of Business Edge

Entrepreneurship and business are rarely accorded a serious place in discussions around drivers of economic development. A cursory look at the numbers makes this seem very surprising. China has pulled approximately 600 million people out of absolute poverty since Deng Xiaoping unleashed market reforms in the late 1970s. Never in human history have so many people been pulled out of grinding poverty is such a short span of time.

Similarly, South Korea has gone from a per-capita income of $291 in 1970 to $20,000 today. Even reform laggards like India have managed to pull a couple of hundred million people out of grinding poverty since economic reforms were initiated. Across the world, we find countries that created an entrepreneurship and business friendly environment were successful in reducing poverty drastically.

Despite the evidence, there are strong lobbies in emerging markets that make the claim that business friendly policies are anti-poor. Personally, I am in favor of redistribution, like these lobbies claim to be. However, what do you redistribute? One cannot, after all, redistribute poverty. One can only redistribute wealth, and to redistribute it, you have to create the wealth first...[continue reading]

A Design Indaba preview of the recently concluded South African Informal City exhibition:

Informal city. Photo: Tanya Zack.

The South African Informal City is an initiative of the Architects’ Collective and forms parts of the technical site visits offered by the Local Government Programme for COP17...Looking at South Africa’s most relevant and innovative design and research projects in terms of urban migration issues, the 20 works featured in the exhibition aim to promote dialogue around informality and urban development.
Inner city informality, in-situ upgrading, catalytic projects, un-built projects and backyard interventions are the five categories in which the projects are presented.

Cooperation, information sharing and positive action between policy makers, practitioners, academics and civil society is what the exhibition aims to promotion, together with taking a critical look at informality and urban development. “The exhibition will provide opportunities for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and for existing research and realised projects to become part of a greater public debate,” says Karen Eicker, Architects’ Collective director.

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We have highlighted the commodity resource characteristics of football players within the continent.I would like to ask, why cant we build up an African football space comparable to South America's professional leagues with all its consequent non-material and financial benefits? John Wilson expands on the African state of affairs in the Guardian:

Image courtesy of orble

...there's something distasteful about an economic system that means the best players from Africa, if they're to be properly remunerated, have to move to a different part of the world to perform for western Europe's benefit. That's true of other parts of the globe, of course, but the economic imbalance isn't as stark and, elsewhere, doesn't have the same awkward echoes of colonial exploitation.

Talk of a new slave trade is unhelpfully emotive, but there is an unpleasant traffic in vulnerable and often naive young players, and it seems hard to deny that the demands of the European market have shaped the tactical development of African football. Tom Vernon, who runs an academy near Accra in Ghana and scouts for Manchester United, speaks of the "Pape Bouba Diop" template: having seen the success of big, muscular west African players, clubs go to west Africa looking for more big, muscular players and so that sort of player is prioritised, something that in part explains the dearth of west African creative players in the decade between Abedi Pelé, Jay-Jay Okocha and Kanu and the emerging generation of Kwadwo Asamoah, Dede Ayew and Gervinho.

It even suits the football administrations of individual countries within Africa to pretend that all is well, that things are developing. Not to do so, after all, would be to admit failure, and to do that would be to risk the sinecures that bring wealth, prestige and influence. The myth of Progress is sustained by a conspiracy of the complacent and the self-interested.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writing in the NYTimes:

Economic arguments are useful, but so are human arguments, which seem alarmingly lost on the Nigerian government. Prices have gone up but salaries remain the same. A driver in Lagos who earns 25,000 naira, about $152 a month, would have had to spend almost three-quarters of his salary on transportation to and from work, and this is before he would have to pay for food and, if he has children, for school fees. In Nigeria we like to say that we can “manage,” but it is almost impossible to see how many people could manage that.

We are an oil-producing nation and it is not unreasonable for Nigerians to expect affordable petrol, nor is it unreasonable for Nigerians to expect more from a democratic government. A friend of mine, after calculating how much she would now spend getting to work in Lagos, said, with her eyes alive with rage, “Our senators make $100,000 a month if you count their salaries and allowances. A month! In dollars! They live in government houses and have government cars. And none of them pay for their own petrol.”

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Specialized corridors and other innovations for improving Agricultural productivity
Boughezoul: A Flawed "New Model of Urbanism" in Algeria?
Arabs and the long revolution, by Brian Whitaker
Intra-regional trade booming
Can Technology End Poverty?
A Book: The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working

The FT reports:

By gambling that public anger would dissipate after a few days, Mr Jonathan placed and lost the biggest bet of his presidency. He has now opened talks with labour leaders that will resume on Saturday. If no solution is found, the main oil union says that, from Sunday, it will start shutting down crude production, which provides four-fifths or more of government revenues.

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Jeremy Clift writes:

Amid the drab suits of international finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s colorful and vibrant traditional African attire always guarantees she will stand out in a crowd. Often wearing a coordinated head wrap, Okonjo-Iweala is a big personality with matching opinions. “I feel very Nigerian, very African, and I love it,” she says.

On where her grit comes from

Okonjo-Iweala tells how during the civil war, while her mother was ill and her father away in the army, she rescued her three-year-old sister who was sick with malaria and at death’s door. She put her sister on her back and walked 10 kilometers to a clinic in a church, where she’d heard there was a good doctor. When she arrived, there were a thousand people outside, trying to break down the door. Undeterred, she crawled through their legs with her sister on her back and climbed through the window to see the doctor. “I knew if she didn’t get help she’d die,” says Okonjo-Iweala.The doctor gave the girl a shot of chloroquine and put her on rehydration therapy, and within hours she was back to health. The injection saved her sister’s life. “The 10 kilometers home with her on my back, that was the shortest walk of my life. I was so happy,” she said.She has shown the same pluck and determination ever since.

...and manner

Affable, approachable, and hardworking, she was known for her rigor and strong technical knowledge. “I would say she is an eternal optimist and a straight shooter,” says Tijan M. Sallah, who currently heads the Capacity Development and Partnerships Unit for Africa in the World Bank and who wrote a book with Okonjo-Iweala (see Box 2). “She is also a strong advocate for women,” he adds, pointing to her efforts to help promote promising young women into managerial positions in the World Bank. She also helped set up a private equity fund to invest in African women–owned businesses.

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Anene Ejikeme writing in the NYTImes:

Image by Raquel Marín

On Jan. 1 Nigerians awoke to find that the price of gasoline had gone from just under $2 a gallon to almost $4 a gallon. Since the beginning of this week, tens of thousands of angry protesters have taken to the streets all over the country; several are dead. Apart from nationwide protests, the country faces continuing sectarian violence. Many fear Nigeria is on the precipice of total collapse...[continue reading]

The Economist on the current protests in Nigeria:

Image courtesy of 360Nobs

A strike over fuel prices and government corruption has brought Nigeria to a standstill. Tens of thousands of workers in Africa’s second-biggest economy have vowed to continue their protests until a popular fuel subsidy is restored.Shops, markets, banks and public offices have been closed for three days. Some international flights have been cancelled. Roads have been empty of cars and buses. Instead, the streets of cities across the country have been filled with thousands of protesters. The demonstrations have mostly been peaceful but at least three people were killed and dozens more injured when police fired on protesters accused of rioting in Lagos and Kano.

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A 3rd part in our series on 'Energy Black Swans', Watch this presentation from Dr. Joseph Zawodny of Nasa:

Rodney Brooks founder of iRobot writing in Tech Review:

“Making more competitive products relies on a tight intertwining of design and manufacturing. And making it domestically keeps transportation costs low and creates short supply chains that respond quickly to customers.

“More significant, it offers the chance to empower factory workers with information technology, just as the personal IT revolution has empowered office workers. We can create tools for ordinary workers, with intuitive interfaces, extensive use of vision and other sensors, and even the Web-based distribution mechanisms of the IT industry.”

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Moeletsi Mbeki on the ANC's policies:

We are paying the price for half measures and a victim ­ideology that drives consumption instead of production...A black upper class is now in place which, despite its size, is significant and established, he says. There has been a badly needed – though at best partial – redistribution of wealth in favour of blacks, not least through the tax system and government expenditure, but also through initiatives such as Black Economic Empowerment, a want-to-be equitable wealth plan closely associated with his older brother Thabo Mbeki, who led the country from 1999 until he was abruptly ousted from office by his own party, the ANC, in 2008.

Continuing...

Such piecemeal efforts do not amount to transformative justice, however, "which in South Africa should be about raising the earning power of the worker. We have a capitalist system and therefore by definition, the productive assets are owned by small groups, for whom large groups work. If their earning power was enhanced, it would have a knock-on effect on so much else, not least our education and health systems. That would have been real transformative justice."

But it didn't happen that way. Instead, the wrong measures were put in place, in his view. "The ANC adopted the Washington Consensus and other policies that began to shrink rather than grow the economy. Today it's stagnated, if not regressing. Look at the manufacturing system, once the main employer. Now it's shrinking and that's critical because it employs the semi-skilled and unskilled who are the bulk of the South African labour force.

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Lagun Akinloye writing in Think Africa:

The removal of Nigeria's fuel subsidy has met much resistance but there could be considerable long-term benefits.

The much touted removal of Nigeria’s fuel subsidy came into force over the New Year’s weekend. Annual spending on the subsidy surpassed the $8bn mark by the end of 2011 and its removal forms a central part of the government’s new economic direction to instil fiscal discipline in the country and invest the money saved from the subsidy into infrastructural projects. However, the battle is far from over, with civil society groups and labour unions sounding the drums of war and ordering their members onto the streets in protest as fuel prices more than double across the country...[continue reading]

A note of caution for those championing western views of intellectual property in Africa. Noam Chomsky states:

The World Trade Organization proposed new, enhanced intellectual property rights, patent rights, which means monopoly pricing rights, far beyond anything that existed in the past. In fact they are not only designed tomaximize monopoly pricing, and profit, but also to prevent development.That’s rather crucial. WTO rules introduced product patents. Used to be you could patent a process, but not the product. Which means if some smart guy could figure out a better way of doing it, he could do it. They want to block that. It’s important to block development and progress, in order to ensure monopoly rights. So they now have product patents.

Well if you take a look at, say, US history. Suppose the colonies after independence had been forced to accept that regime. Do you know what we’d be doing now? Well first of all there’d be very few of us here. But those of us who would be here would be pursuing our comparative advantage and exporting fish and fur. That’s what economists tell you is right.Pursue your comparative advantage. That was our comparative advantage. Wecertainly wouldn’t have had a textile industry. British textiles were way cheaper and better. Actually British textiles were cheaper and better because Britain had crushed Irish and Indian superior textile manufacturers and stolen their techniques. So they were now the preeminent textile manufacturer, by force of course.

The US would never have had a textile industry. It grew up around Massachusetts, but the only way it could develop was extremely high tariffs which protected unviable US industries. So the textile industry developed,and that has a spin off into other industries. And so it continues.

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