Quick Hits

Nigerians are a conquered people.-Sahara Reporters
'They Came in the Name of Helping'
A canny chameleon-Blaise Compaoré
The Longevity Project,Ghana.
Black Economic Empowerment failed-Moeletsi Mbeki
Carnegie's gospel of wealth

Not Caring about Our Women

Juliette Tuakli of Child and Associates in the Stimulist:

If we don’t start systemically supporting African mothers and re-conceiving the role and relevance of African women, we simply will not enjoy sustained economic development in Africa. Full stop. As things stand, the continent’s considerable “female resources” — agricultural skills, negotiation, commitment to infrastructure development and, last but not the least, child rearing — have been completely mortgaged to supporting an inequitable patriarchal system. Whether we like to admit it or not.

More here

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• Facets of Lagos (africaunchained.blogspot.com)

Democracy Attitudes

In a paper M. Bratton and R. Mattes report on attitudes to democracy building:

The good news is that democratic attitudes are generally on the rise among the African populations we have surveyed. If sustained, this up-tick– measured prior to the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008 – is a promising portent for
further democratization. But the bad news is that fewer than half of all Africans interviewed demand democracy and perceive its supply when these indicators are measured rigorously.As such, the project of democracy building still has a long way to go.

via Pambazuka

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Agahozo Shalom Youth Village

The Agahozo Shalom Youth Village (ASYV) aims to create a safe and structured residential community for orphaned children in Rwanda. The village will be a place of hope, where traumatized youth can "dry their tears" (Agahozo) and "live in peace" (Shalom).-website

A Literature Boom?

In Bookforum James Gibbons writes:

Are we in the midst of an “African literary renaissance,” as Rob Spillman (author of God and Soldiers) contends, an el boom from the other side of the Atlantic? Perhaps, but the surge of African writing is tellingly different from the Latin American explosion of the ’60s. Besides being identified with magic realism (though not all its writers practiced it), the literature of the Latin American boom was already formed within the region’s own institutions and coteries before being packaged in translation and exported. The new African writing is emphatically not homegrown. Forged in the crucible of globalization, it is a literature largely of displacement and exile.

More here
via 3quarksdaily

Makaechi “because of tomorrow”

Makaechi's

...mission is to offer solutions to the social and economic hardship that affect our global community. We pledge to introduce innovative platforms that will inspire a call to action for the greater good. We believe that we can improve the quality of countless lives through the implementation of simple technologies, self-help initiatives, and public awareness. Watch a video from their Patrick Okoroafor campaign

Quick Hits

An architect of Singapore's astounding economic growth-via Ethan Zuckerman
Investing and empowering farmers-Guardian
Nurturing an industrial renaissance in Ghana.
Africa,Business destination-TIME
Favoring poor governments over poor people-Aidwatch

Reducing Car accidents-Amend

From the Amend website:

Road traffic injuries are the number one cause of death and disability for children between the ages of 5 and 21 in the developing world — in areas where little, if any, emergency and pre-hospital medical care is available.
Remember the adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”? It’s true. The most effective way to improve this reality is to stop the incidents before they happen...[continue reading]

ewaBAMIJO

YK project's ewaBAMJO is:

...A bi-annual international festival for interdisciplinary arts, specially dedicated to throwing glamour on the city of Lagos and establishing relationship through DANCE, CIRCUS, COMEDY, MUSIC, DRAMA, SPOKEN WORD and other interdisciplinary art forms, under one dance umbrella, that brings about conferences, debates, film screening and shows around the theme: HOME AND ABROAD

'Democracy in Dakar'

Democracy in Dakar a film by Nomadic Wax bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film and explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process.

African Underground: Democracy in Dakar - Episode # 1 from Nomadic Wax on Vimeo.

via Society Hae

Assisting the Thieves-The Western Media

Aikins Adusei rails against the complicity and complacency of the Western Media when it comes to the acquired loot deposited in Western Institutions:

Corruption is rife in Africa because there are banking institutions in Europe especially Switzerland, France, Jersey Island, Britain, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Austria, US and many others who accept money from African leaders without questioning the source of the money. According to the UN around $148 billion are stolen from the continent by the political leaders, the business elite and civil servants every year with collusion and connivance of banking industries in Europe and North America.
Even though it is a common knowledge western banks are acting as safe havens for looted funds from Africa, very little attention is received from the western media to expose them. The media tend to focus their energies on the corrupt leaders with little or no mention at all as to where the monies they have stolen are being kept. There has not been any concrete effort to expose the banks that collude and connive with these corrupt leaders who are impoverishing the people. No effort has been made by the political elite in Europe and America to force the banks to return these stolen monies to the poorest of the poor because they are often the shareholders and beneficiaries of profits made by these banks.

More here

Madhvani Foundation

The Madhvani Foundation's underlying goal:

...is to maintain and promote scientific and technical education among the people of Uganda. The scholarship programme is aimed at benefiting Ugandans pursuing either undergraduate or graduate studies at University level in Uganda...they are looking for graduates with vision;individuals who are able to perceive the path to Uganda's future and who not only want to travel the road but also actively participate in its development.

Lets try and Sell to each Other!

Nicholas Norbrook reports in The Africa Report .

“Ghanaian farmers should be thinking about what they can sell into Niger, not what they can send to the UK,”-Tom Lines .Refocusing on local demand makes sense given the steady growth of African economies over the past decade. Galloping urbanisation and an emergent middle class has created the conditions for the emergence of supermarket chains in South Africa and later East Africa that have implanted themselves in over 20 countries across the continent.

via Trade Invest

Protecting innovative brains

Sherine Nasr in Al-Ahram:

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." No more accurate a formula exists to describe the divide between developed and developing countries than that once proposed by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs.Innovation has different implications to a scientist and an economist. "If the applied research doesn't have an impact on the economy, and will not generate money, it is not an innovation," -Hamid El-Zoheiri(RDI),
Thus it becomes clear that the commercialisation of innovation -- at least for the businessman -- is what really counts. This brings up the issue of intellectual property rights that should be maintained and protected."We used to value only physical assets, but intangible assets are becoming more valuable. The market value of companies are increasingly based on intangible versus tangible assets,"-Beat Mollet of Nestle

more here

A Parasitic Elite

Salisu Suleiman writes:

The elite in Northern Nigeria have created an artificial social circle made up of a narrow clique of extremely wealthy people. These people owe their wealth primarily to having held one public office or another. They own no factories, farms or any visible businesses. They contribute nothing to alleviate the abject poverty stifling the region's vast 'unwashed masses'.

The Creative Economy

Titus Kaloki writes about creativity echoing Richard Florida:

Tolerance for individuality and openness of minds are important for creative innovations and services to achieve economic gains. Without a receptive population selling creativity is difficult. This means education to involve creativity in content and evaluation.

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Green Lights For Plunder

Celia W. Dugger in the NYTimes:

The fight against corruption in Africa’s most pivotal nations is faltering as public agencies investigating wrongdoing by powerful politicians have been undermined or disbanded and officials leading the charge have been dismissed, subjected to death threats and driven into exile.
“We are witnessing an era of major backtracking on the anticorruption drive,” said Daniel Kaufmann, an authority on corruption who works at the Brookings Institution. “And one of the most poignant illustrations is the fate of the few anticorruption commissions that have had courageous leadership. They’re either embattled or dead.”

More Here

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Death of a Kleptocrat-Omar Bongo

Image by Rachel Smith via Flickr

Ethan Zuckerman writes about Omar Bongo's passing:

You’d think that the passing of a man who systematically looted his country for four decades would be the cause for celebration. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe it’s going to get better any time soon. Several African big men have passed on in the past decade, and the situation hasn’t improved much for their beleaguered subjects. When Togo’s Eyadema Gnassingbe died in 2005, the military installed his son, Faure… who was “elected” soon after. Lansana Conté died in December 2008, and within six hours of the announcement of his death, a military government voided the constitution and took over in a coup d’etat. No one’s predicting a coup in Gabon - the minister of Defense is Ali Ben Bongo, Bongo’s son and almost certain successor

More Here

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LagosSoundScape

From the Lagos SoundScape website:

For fifteen minutes I sit and I listen to the composed chaos, the Lagos Soundscape— ‘This is Lagos’. I have heard this familiar cacophony before; from my vantage view on the roof top of my family home in Lagos - on roof tops mainly-, at Kalakuta Republic, but also on the rare occasion when I am in no hurry to go anywhere and just drifting through this urban squalor...[continue reading]

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Beyond the Romance of Microfinance

In the Huffington Post TED Africa Fellow Magatte Wade co-founder of Adina and Michael Strong write:

In the course of starting a business based in Africa, I was referred to a former Silicon Valley CFO who had made enough money and now devoted his life to helping the world's poor. As I began to explain my project to him, which involved setting up manufacturing plants in Senegal, he kept encouraging me to buy crafts from local artisans rather than setting up manufacturing plants. Despite the fact that he had become wealthy through a capitalist world and lived a comfortable lifestyle that depended on tens of thousands of factories around the world, his vision of helping the poor was strictly limited to microfinance and local crafts. My vision of manufacturing in Africa was frankly repulsive to him.

more here

Bright Ugochukwu Eke

A profile of the artist in Res Artist:

...Eke focuses on the total disregard for the environment not only by the authorities but also by individuals who litter their communities indiscriminately. In the installation Acid Rain, he creates water (rain) droplets containing a blackish industrial chemical similar to acid rain. Shield consists of raincoats and umbrellas made of water sachets to protect from the toxic effects of acid rain...[continue reading]

Facets of Lagos

Image via Wikipedia

The attraction and intrigue about Africa's most vibrant but chaotic city continues to elicit interest. Two pieces unfold the varying layers of Lagos, firstly James Meek in the Guardian writes:

The rate at which Nigeria's population has increased, and continues to increase, is staggering. In 1950, 10 years before it gained independence from Britain, 34 million people lived here. The UN believes there are now almost 150 million Nigerians; it has become the world's eighth most populous country, bigger than Russia or Japan. Between now and the middle of the century, only India will add more people to the world's population. If you want to see what it means to live in the middle of a population explosion - the kind of generational leap in size that happened in London in the 19th century and New York in the 20th - Lagos is the ideal place. Where, I wondered, do all the extra people go?...[continue reading]

Meanwhile in the Economist's 'The City of More' travelogue piece, the writer states:

...my first impression of the verdant city was of explosive energy tempered by impressive urban development...The government fails to provide essential services, from infrastructure to education, so the market fills the gap. Lagos is a highly-functioning libertarian dystopia where you can get anything if you have the naira, and the tens of thousands streaming from the country can eke out a living alongside prospecting multinational yuppies. The Wild West model will never yield sustainable social or economic development, but in Lagos it’s the only game in town.

Creating wealth

In Business Daily Africa James Shikwati returns to the theme of wealth creation:

In a recent business breakfast forum, Michael Hastings,inquired from the audience whether one can give what they do not have.He pointed out that although Western capitalism model may have broken its back, the fundamentals of one must produce in order to give, still remains...It is clear that to give one must be a producer of what they give. In Kenya and Africa, we have “capitalists" who simply loot from what others produced.The great lesson that one gets from the “broken back of capitalism” is that if one fakes production and assumes to give what they never produced in the first place, the system will implode.

More Here

Quick Hits

The need for both Process and Content in education.
The Politics of Aid and Begging in Zimbabwe
The Senegal story begins to sour. The question is was it ever built on strong foundations?
Leo Igwe calls for a Renewal of the Thinking Culture and a conference is announced on the subject.
Untangling a complex-Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

Community Control & Conservation

Image via Wikipedia

In Tree Hugger:

The Rights and Resources Initiative says that while about one-third of forest in Latin America and Asia are under community control, in Africa that rate drops to just 2%. With such a low rate of land tenure, and the current slow rates of reform, the report says it would take the countries in the Congo Basin 260 years to reach the level of land ownership reform achieved in the Amazon.

Why is this important? A number of reports, this on included, point out that without effective community involvement, protection of indigenous people's rights, and those of women, programs to stop deforestation and decrease poverty are seriously compromised.

More Here

Beyond a Culture of Dependency

Wangari Maathai writes in Open Democracy:

Disempowerment - whether defined in terms of a lack of self-confidence, apathy, fear, or an inability to take charge of one's own life - is perhaps the most unrecognised problem in Africa today. To the disempowered, it seems much easier or even more acceptable to leave one's life in the hands of third parties (governments, aid agencies, and even God) than to try to alleviate one's circumstances through one's own effort...[continue reading]

Mousgoum Architecture

From a review of Cameroon to Paris Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa:

The kind of extraordinary domed house constructed by Chad and Cameroon’s Mousgoum peoples has long held sway over the Western imagination. In fact, as Steven Nelson shows here, this prototypical beehive-shaped structure known as the teleukhas been cast as everything from a sign of authenticity to a tourist destination to a perfect fusion of form and function in an unselfconscious culture.

More Here
via Toyin Adepoju

The Real Enterprising Economy-The Informal Sector

From late Tajudeen Abdul Raheem's last post:

The Majority of Africans continue to survive not because of government but in spite of governments. They eke out a living to keep body and soul together, provide for their families, doing all kinds of dirty work with little pay or selling anything that is buyable hawking all kinds of household wares, fruits, vegetables and myriad of consumer items.
The concept of informal settlements in Africa is not just about where people live but extends to informal markets in all kinds of goods and services: road side mechanics, vulcanisers, local industrialists who fabricate or copy anything from car parts to miniature planes! If the truth be told what is called informal sector is indeed the real enterprising economy of Africa delivering goods and services as and when needed

More Here

Sliding Liberia

A story of sport and renewal "...An unlikely discovery by Liberian Alfred Lomax opened the doorway to friendship and the joy of the ocean, buffering the ravages of the civil war he survived. An excerpt from the film "Sliding Liberia,
"..."
photo courtesy of the The Times Newsapaper UK

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