More hereThe campaign for made-in-Nigeria products is gradually yielding good results as new information indicates that about 50 per cent of products consumed in West Africa as at today are made in Nigeria.Michael Awunor, president of (NAMACCIMAT), who disclosed this in Abuja, also said that Mali and Burkina Faso alone import, informally, over 300 tonnes of made-in-Nigeria products on a weekly basis, which amounts to 14,400 tonnes annually.
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In both cases, Ahmad(a suicide bomber) and Muhammad(imaginary forgiving character) did not derive their morality from the Quran.
Their ethical intuitions came from within themselves.
Their ethical institutions directed their attention to verses they chose to focus on and be inspired by, whether knowingly or uknowingly.
Their ethical intuitions influenced their choice of interpretation.
And hence, their morals did not come from the Quran itself.
Their morals ultimately came from within themselves thanks to their own ethical intuitions about what’s right and wrong, and were influenced by their near social context.
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First of all, get rid of any hang-ups you might have about Africa being a continent. It is a country, and so when people ask if you speak African, or eat African, do not get all worked up trying to explain how a homogenous Africa only exists in a lazy imagination. And certainly do not go the complicated route of explaining about how a country like Nigeria has over three hundred different languages. (Languages Not dialects Are you sure) Do everyone a favour and smile and say Yes or No as the spirit moves you. It will save you some frustration. Believe me, I know. It will also save your interrogator some bafflement. If you want to be humorous though, you can ask your interrogator if they speak European. Be prepared for some lessons on history though. Europe is a continent of history. Unlike that country, Africa, which is too dark for any sense of history to permeate...[continue reading]
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via Aid WatchersAidData 1.0, …assembles more aid projects from more donors totaling more dollars than have ever been available from a single source before. AidData catalogues nearly one million projects that were financed between 1945 and 2009, adding or augmenting data on $1.9 trillion of development finance records. We currently have data from 87 different donors, and data from even more donors will come online every few months.
Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. He argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues...
There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”
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In The Aid Trap,Hubbard and Duggan argue that the answer has been under our noses since the end of World War II. They propose that the U.S. government make direct loans to businesses and then direct the repayments of principal to host governments for use in building roads, electric grids, schools and the like. This was how the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after the war.
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The Wall Street Journal recently asked eight prominent philanthropists and NGO executives how they would spend $10 billion to achieve the biggest and longest-lasting impact on the world's problems.All eight came up with great ideas, but the clear winner in my opinion came from leading Swedish businessman and philanthropist Percy Barnevik, who said he would use the money to unleash the entrepreneurship of the world's poorest citizens.More here
My experience in Africa over the past 27 years has convinced me that this is the only way for people to break out of poverty. People are poor because they have no sustainable income. It's as simple as that. They must be given the tools, training and opportunities to earn an income that they can then put to work to improve the lives of themselves, their children and their communities. That is how the United States achieved prosperity and that is how Africa will do it as well.
Lagos Disco Inferno, 12 rare and wild examples of the sound of Lagos in the late 1970s. As Dean Disi (formerly director of Lagos label TYC Records) writes in the liner notes for the album:
Lagos by the 1970s was a huge metropolitan city. Due to the oil boom, there was money to be made with music and nightlife and big international record labels like EMI, Decca and Philips had set up their recording studios that for a big part got equipped with vintage hardware handed down from their European franchises...
...a uniquely vibrant, gritty, energetic and sometimes quite dangerous tropical metropolis has always been much more than just a city. A state of mind where third world poverty met the oil boom, where African traditions clashed with Western decadence. Make no mistake, this stuff will have you dance in a feverish rush in no time.More here
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While Achebe criticizes Western thinkers on Africa, he also sets himself apart from other African intellectuals by his complex stance toward the Christianization of his people. The Igbo are among the most fervent Catholics in Africa, and evangelical Christianity is also strong among them. Achebe’s own father was enlisted by Anglican missionaries to convert other “natives,” and Achebe himself benefited from the schools established by foreigners. Yet he remains alive to the damage done by Christianity and relishes how traditional spiritual beliefs persist among Igbo and other Africans.More here
The critiques of the colonial and the Christian legacies in Africa come together in Achebe’s powerful indictment against Western do-gooders who, he asserts, demean and diminish Africans in their pursuit of helping them. “Lurid and degrading stereotypes,” he writes, are invoked by aid workers, humanitarians and missionaries in order to drum sympathy for African causes. Yet by “dehumanizing the sufferer,” advocates of assistance for Africa, abetted by international media and Hollywood, promote corrosive stereotypes that drown out authentic African voices.
...the real challenge for many African cities may be less how to create a city of 'clean lines' with no poor people working in the streets, and more one of how to amplify existing ways of living and working in the city into an advanced regime of higher information density. The anti-hawker and anti-kiosk stance of the political elite and economically mobile hurts many people's livelihoods and lines many policemen and womens' pockets. Alternatively, this active edge of infrastructure and economies can be understood as a future-oriented system of organization for the city—one in which flexible urban ecologies absorb new human material through a network of small-scale and low-tech productive nodes
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More here...After years of neglect, agriculture must again be recognised as a fundamental driver of economic growth. Some 60% of Africans rely on agriculture for their livelihood, four-fifths of whom are women. And throughout sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture is a key source of foreign exchange (for example, about 80% of Malawi's foreign exchange comes from agricultural exports)...African farmers must be able to access the knowledge and tools they need to unleash agriculture's full potential for the continent. Existing knowledge must reach more farmers, new research must focus on Africa-specific solutions and progressive policies must support infrastructure and education programmes to build capacity.
The fiery Che Guevara once said that love is the basis of revolution. The clergy that stood against apartheid and dictatorships, or gave refuge to the hunted during the genocide in Rwanda, might not have agreed with Che's methods, but they were certainly being moved by a deep love for a collective humanity...today, without the evil incarnates of apartheid and the neocolonial dictatorships of the 1990's, oppression is no longer so easily definable. We are living in confusing times. Opposition parties have been bought off. Intellectuals are unable to help us digest what the betrayal of our second independence demands of us. Political activists engaged, sometimes by necessity, in bread and butter issues such as housing cannot attend to the national and international dimensions of our struggles.More here
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Why is it that Nigerian elected officials develop inertia when it’s needed most? This is a question that has become even more relevant given the Yar’Adua’s impasse...I doff my hat to the Nigerian information minister, Dora Akunyili, for her new-found courage and consciousness to the moral contract she has with the people. Her unilateral stance against the deceit and rascality of the Yar’Adua cabal is a refreshing breeze instead of the foul staleness of the Abuja obstructionists and status quo keepers.More here
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Kenya is not just disgusting roads, bad mobile service providers that won’t let us send texts for free, prosperity-gospel preachers, ‘internationally-certified’ pseudo-universities giving poor quality education, HATEFUL POLITICIANS WHO FIGHT FOR THE NEWS CAMERAS AND PLAY GOLF TOGETHER ON WEEKENDS, narrow-minded mothers-in-law who frown upon marrying someone from another tribe, hospitals where they steal government supplies and sell them back to patients, KPLC publishing a power-rationing schedule then not sticking to it and the epidemic of married men and women with ‘mpango wa kando’.More here
Kenya is people. Individuals with a voice that can become a collective cry for change. Kenya is you. Kenya is me. Kenya is hating it, but getting up and saying you’ll try, grabbing your shovel to start the clean-up of the Crap Mountain, like all the inspiring people above have done and continue to do.
The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala‐i‐Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970‐2006. We show that:
1. African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly.
2. If present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time.
3. The growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it.
4. African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.
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The lack of proper and affordable housing in Lagos has been a thorn in the flesh of Lagos residents for many years now. But the situation may soon change for the better.via Bombastic Elements
Lamenting the presence of Nigeria on the US government’s list of “countries of interest” (in the war on terror), Nigerian writer and first African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka told British journalist Tunku Varadarajan, at the Jaipur Literary Festival in January: “[Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab] did not get radicalized in Nigeria. It happened in England, where he went to university.”...[continue reading]
Image via WikipediaRwanda is one of the few nations in the developing world spending more on education than on the military. Kagame re-wrote the constitution such that his party cannot have more than 50 percent of the seats in parliament. Though Kagame is from one ethnic group, his Prime Minister and 70 percent of his cabinet are from the other. Thirty percent of elected officials at the level of municipality, parliament, and cabinet are required to be women; and a world-leading 56 percent of parliament is now women. The country is secure and the World Bank's Doing Business report recognized Rwanda as the greatest reforming nation in the world last year.More here
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I hate the idea that African life is simple bare life – the life of an empty stomach and a sick and naked body waiting to be fed, clothed, healed or housed. It is a conception that is structurally embedded in “development” ideology and practice. This kind of base materialism radically goes against people’s own daily experience with the immaterial world of the spirit, especially as this spirit manifests itself under conditions of extreme precariousness and radical uncertainty. This kind of metaphysical and ontological violence has long been a fundamental aspect of the fiction of development the West seeks to impose on those it has colonized. We must oppose it and resist such surreptitious forms of dehumanization.More here
More hereThis is an exceptional exhibition, even by the high standards the British Museum has established in recent years. It is extraordinary because it brings together such a large number of masterpieces that have rarely or never been exhibited outside Nigeria before – and when I say masterpieces, I mean artworks that rank with the Terracotta Army, the Parthenon or the mask of Tutankhamun as treasures of the human spirit.
For European artists a century ago, African sculpture was powerful precisely because it did not conform to the smooth idea of beauty that Picasso's generation had been brought up on – ideas that went back to classical Greece. But they had not seen the art of Ife, a medieval city state that flourished from the 12th to 15th centuries in West Africa, trading across the Sahara with the Islamic Mediterranean world.
More HereLet us we focus on advancing technology and knowledge capital in Africans to mitigate the impacts of trade shocks across the continent. This will help the continent better prepare for the cyclical ups and downs. Let Africa build technology clusters and advance knowledge. It is a better idea of having integration when regions join resources to create Knowledge Economic Communities (KEC). If African regions are connected through technology partnerships and networks, we will realize that currency integration will evolve naturally in this already interconnected world. Our monetary structures are weak and a single currency could hurt Africa deeply since our national budgets are still deficits-prone. Greece has offered a practical lesson for African scholars of current integration and we have to plan very well.
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For as long as the logic of extraction and predation that characterises the political economy of primary goods in Africa is not disrupted, and with it the existing modes of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources, the opportunities to create an alternative future will be reduced. The type of capitalism that favours this logic forges a strong link between mercantilism, political chaos and militarisation of society. This form of capitalism was already evident in the colonial era, with the regime of concessionary societies. All it needs to function are fortified enclaves, an often criminal complicity lodged at the core of the local society, the weakest possible state and international indifference.More here
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More hereKofi Sam is barking out variations on his evangelical theme: West Africa can provide the essentials for itself (food, clothing, shelter and healthcare) if only it first licks a second AIDS crisis—the Acquired Import Dependency Syndrome....The governmental system in Africa only caters to Western-educated people, even though they’re less than 15 percent of the population. From the president right down to the teacher, they get paid at the end of every month.No villager gets paid for anything. They get up in the morning, they go to their farms, they produce their cassava or yam or plaintain. Nobody guarantees them a market. Nobody gives them loans. All the taxes raised in the country are for Western-educated people, like Kofi Sam.
There is a very simple reason why some of Africa's bloodiest, most brutal wars never seem to end: They are not really wars. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The combatants don't have much of an ideology; they don't have clear goals. They couldn't care less about taking over capitals or major cities -- in fact, they prefer the deep bush, where it is far easier to commit crimes. Today's rebels seem especially uninterested in winning converts, content instead to steal other people's children, stick Kalashnikovs or axes in their hands, and make them do the killing.More here
More hereA couple of years ago one of the finest thinkers, Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, in the African blogosphere provided us with a detailed exposé on “Ghana Must Go”. Koranteng’s article was inspired by Marc Jacobs 2007 collection for Louise Vuitton. Louise Vuitton’s use of the ubiquitous “Ghana Must Go” material for his rather expensive designer bags triggered a few soul searching comments mostly revolving around the supposed “theft” of an African pattern design by others.
Many experts believe Africa, with its expansive base of newly minted consumers, may very well be on the verge of becoming the next India, thanks to frenetic urbanization and the sort of big push in services and infrastructure that transformed the Asian subcontinent 15 years ago. Just as India once harnessed its booming population of cheap labor, Africa stands to gain by the rapid growth of its big cities. Already the continent boasts the world's highest rate of urbanization, which jump-starts growth through industrialization and economies of scale. Today only a third of Africa's population lives in cities, but that segment accounts for 80 percent of total GDP, according to the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements. In the next 30 years, half the continent's population will be living in cities.More here
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