Nigeria: Africa's Largest Economy?

From the Africa Report:

Even without much-needed infrastructure developments, Nigeria is on course to become Africa’s largest economy. However, much remains to be done for the country to reach its full potential.  

The road suddenly peters out. The few bin bags littering the end of the worksite suggest that the funds have run out, too. On either side of the road, however, new farms and buildings have sprung up, growing thicker as you cross the new Makarfi bridge into Kaduna. They will, ultimately, make up Millennium City, a decongestion suburb for Kaduna, with planned lots linked to the national grid and water mains. Had former Governor Ahmed Makarfi managed to connect the road to the Abuja road, who knows what other entrepreneurial forces would have been unleashed.
..[continue reading]

Let Ethiopians debate Ethiopia!

In Aid Watch:

It’s sure was nice to see mainly Ethiopians vigorously participating in a debate about Ethiopia, in contrast to the usual Old White Men debating Africa. The Meles visit to Columbia had the unintentional effect of promoting this debate...[continue reading]

Watch related videos:

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Productive Agricultural Linkages and Marketing Systems

Lauren Streib in the Daily Beast reports on the work of Productive Agricultural Linkages and Marketing Systems (PALMS), they:

Teach women farmers to use basic machinery, like tractors, and crop production will increase. But the effects of the implementation of such technology are revolutionary. The women helped through PALMS have access to knowledge, capital, and technology that allows them to assert power within their families, their communities, and improve the economy of the entire country...[continue reading]

Watch Letticia Brenyah of PALMS describe their work and its impact:

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How Indonesia overtook Nigeria

Peter Cunliffe-Jones writing in the BBC:

...Both Indonesia and Nigeria, my guidebook told me, are the giants of their region, home to tens of millions of people. Both were formed as one nation by Europeans around 1900. Both were governed by the colonial system of "indirect rule". Both once made money from palm oil, and later discovered oil and gas.At independence, the standards of living in the two countries were comparable on most measures. And since independence, both have suffered three decades of military misrule and corruption.Their first coups were launched within months of each other - in September 1965 in Indonesia and in January 1966 in Nigeria - and their military regimes died within 12 months, in May 1998 and 1999.
It was not only my friend who made the comparisons. But, talking to the editor of an Indonesian magazine the day after I arrived, I was struck by a statistic he mentioned in passing. In Indonesia, he said, the life expectancy of a child at birth had risen from 45 to 70 years since independence.In 1960, Nigeria produced almost half the world's palm oil, now it covers just 7%In Nigeria, life expectancy remains stuck just above 45; today it is around 47.

More here
Jeremy Weate providing further context states:

...in the final analysis, the difference in models of corruption and commercial contracts boils down to a stronger civil society in the archipelago state. In which case, the lesson Nigeria can learn from Indonesia is the importance of building up a healthy civil society, which includes non-governmental organisations, the media and religious organisations. The work is still all ahead..

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Overcoming the Burden of Resource Wealth

Suman Bery writing in the Economist:

With the two exceptions of Malaysia and Indonesia these countries did not enjoy rents from significant mineral resources. As such they were not subjected to the so-called “resource curse” of a struggle for control of these rents, the problems of an appreciated real exchange rate, and lack of competitiveness of the tradables sector. Also, at the time of their fast growth episodes, most of the Asian countries were well into their demographic transition, with the dependency ratio declining as the labour force expanded. This led to a rise in their saving rates, complemented in many cases by significant foreign aid.
As Angus Maddison pointed out a decade ago (in his "The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective") Africa’s underlying circumstances are much less favourable. (His discussion includes Mediterranean Africa, while I will restrict myself to sub-Saharan Africa.) Several of its major economies enjoy enormous mineral riches, which the world over pose tremendous problems for economic management. The prices for these minerals fluctuate violently in global markets causing volatility in revenues; the easy availability of mineral revenues inhibits the growth of a domestic taxation culture essential for the development of accountability to the citizenry; the struggle for illegal control of the mineral resources has been a source of fierce conflict and corruption; while the easy foreign exchange revenues the mineral exports make available boost the real exchange rate. This inhibits the growth of labour-intensive manufacture, which was the source of Asia’s growth.

More here

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Child-Driven Education

Sugata Mitra at TED:
.

..I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. Self-organzing systems also always show emergence,which is that the system starts to do things,which it was never designed for...Education is a self-organizing system,where learning is an emergent phenomenon.Itll take a few years to prove it,experimentally,but I'm going to try..

Nigeria's Presidential Race-It’s Neither Ribadu nor Utomi

In Grandiose Parlor:

I would love to see either Ribadu or Utomi become president one day, but what they are doing is trying to score a knock-out victory without throwing a punch! They must earn their slots, politically. They need to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty by learning to operate from within the political system, even if they so much hate it. This is the only way they would understand and appreciate the magnitude of the problem of governance—or lack thereof.
Ribadu and Utomi can showcase their brilliance and impeccable qualities to other politicians and the electorate at the grassroots, if they would operate in a capacity less glamorous as the presidency. This would offer them the opportunity of political baptism and credibility, which they lack but need to win elections.

More here

Naija Lingo

"...Naija Lingo is an online Dictionary for all your Nigerian pidgin/broken English needs. It is a dictionary for people who want definitions to Nigerian words or slang, names and phrases and created by the people (you) who know them. Naija Lingo is an open dictionary where you the user are free to add and edit words as time changes, and as the meaning of words evolve and new words are formed..."-website

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African Center for Economic Transformation

Founded by K. Y Amoako "...The African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) was established in 2007 to promote high-quality policy analysis and advisory services, assisting African governments in achieving long-term growth and transformation of African economies..."-website

Nuhu Ribadu the 'Eliot Ness' of Africa to run for Presidency

ABC reports on the presidential candidacy announcement of Nuhu Ribadu:
"There is a need for a party that is national," Ribadu said. "There is a need for a party that will give Nigerians a chance for democracy to work, an alternative to what we have today."...[continue reading]

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Area Girls

The TVE Channel profiles the "Area Girls" of Lagos:

MDG's contd.

Surprised about MDG's and the lack of progress. Start here:

via Aidwatch

Whats Wrong With the MDG's?

From a recent Lancet–LIDC Commission report on the MDGs:

The MDGs are fragmented not only in their implementation but also in their underlying conceptualisations of development and overlapping of means and ends...While this approach captures a range of development perspectives, it generates a poorly aligned mixture of means, ends, and sometimes competing ideas about normative aspiration (eg, economic growth vs sustainability), which has made the MDG project less useful than it could have been, since opportunities to link the goals together coherently have been missed and a rigorous approach to assessment has been overlooked.
The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting after 2015

via Bombastic Element

Bizspring

A Project Diaspora initiative,Bizspring's:

...aim is to act as a linkage between Africa’s entrepreneurs and innovators with resources to grow small to medium sized entities. PD aims to provide a platform for these programs and is looking for collaborative partners to support the initiative.
PD teams are launching on-line networking, entrepreneurship conferences, and resource databases that tap global skills and motivation to empower Africa’s small to medium sized businesses...[continue reading]

NGO's "They don’t give a dam about development

Nathalie Rothschild writes in Spiked:

...why are NGOs like Survival International and International Rivers, which are spearheading the protest against Gibe III, not focusing their efforts on lobbying for investment in smart, ambitious and truly sustainable solutions to prevent the disastrous, and avoidable, effects of floods which every year displace, kill and plunge thousands into poverty? Why are they opposing large-scale development projects – like dams – that could contain the impact of both droughts and torrential downpours?
The answer is because their interest in preserving the lifestyles of ‘indigenous peoples’ really means that they do not want Ethiopia and other poor nations to modernise and have what we in the West have: industrialisation.

More here
via Friends of Ethiopia

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Charitable ignorance: The reality of aid

Samantha Spooner writes in the Daily Nation:

The critics of the aid industry have focused heavily on aid accountability on both the part of the donors and the beneficiaries, and on concerns over whether aid breeds poverty and is therefore not conducive to long-term sustainable growth.
While these analyses are both valid and widely recognised there is another insight into the potential inefficiency of the aid business which sheds light on an anthropological, more localised critique: Sometimes aid attempts to solve problems which are either created or misunderstood...[continue reading]

Living from a tray-Living as a Hawker

The unsung unseen salt of the earth, the invisible hawkers we pass by every day.The inimitable Salisu Suleiman writes:

courtesy of NationMedia

Auwal is 27, and sells kola nuts. His heels have worn through his flip-flops. There is no accurate way of measuring the distances he walks everyday peddling kola nuts, but 10 kilometres is not a bad guess. He has a wife and children back home, as well as aged parents he has to assist from time to time. The combined value of his tray and the kola nuts he sells is about N2, 000. He lives from his tray...[continue reading]

Kenya's Eclectic Cuisine

Shane Mitchell writing in Saveur:

Photo: James Fisher

I find shelter behind twin blue doors in an alleyway, at the home of Lela Abdulaziz, whose family owns several fruit and vegetable stalls in the city's main market. I struck up a conversation with her earlier this morning, while buying black Zanzibar peppercorns from her father. On hearing that I'd come to Mombasa to learn about the foods eaten here, she invited me for lunch—my first taste of home cooking in this part of East Africa, a region knit together by a complex skein of linguistic and religious kinship that constitutes Swahili culture. In her foyer, Lela sheds her bui-bui, the black robe and head covering worn by many Swahili women, and begins preparing the meal. First, she unfolds a low wooden stool that has a serrated blade affixed to one end. She sits, a half coconut gripped in her hennaed hands, and grates the white meat against the blade into a fired-clay bowl. Then she stuffs handful after handful of shredded coconut into a woven-palm-frond strainer called a kifumbu. I watch as she pours in a cup of water and squeezes the kifumbu to extract the coconut's rich, thick milk, which she stirs into a chicken stew, called kuku wa nazi, that has been simmering in a pot on a charcoal brazier.

More here

Developing Art Ecosystems in China & Africa

Bombastic Element on art ecosystems and markets in China and South Africa:

It is apparent South Africa, in terms of the push-pull tensions of its post-Apartheid society and emerging middle class, occupies a unique nexus of culture and politics that's boon for artists and art consumption...while in China It is very simple. You have a society [exemplified by] rapid consumerism and a system that's authoritarian. The 2 co-habit, mingle, co-exist in each other...

More here

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Esther Mahlangu's Artwork

Pattern by Texture reports on the work of Esther Mahlangu:

Esther Mahlangu is an important proponent of this tradition. She draws freehand, without first measuring or sketching, using luminous and high-contrast vinyl paints that lend extraordinary vigor to her murals. While at a glance purely abstract, her compositions are built upon a highly inventive system of signs and symbols. Mahlangu is the first Ndebele artist to transpose wall paintings onto canvases and to take the conventions of her artwork into the larger arena. In 1989 she came to Paris to create murals Magiciens de la Terre exhibition

More here

African Federation for Emergency Medicine

"...African Federation for Emergency Medicine talks about every citizen’s right to receive emergency care by trained emergency care health professionals, one of the most important functions of the organization is to help countries in Africa develop emergency medical care, systems, and training programmes...The mission of the AFEM is to “promote at an African and international level interchange, understanding and cooperation among health care workers providing emergency care”..."-website

Getting Resource Extraction Right

Paul Collier writes in ANSA:

...as the radically different trajectories of Botswana and Sierra Leone illustrate, growth based on resource exports is critically dependent upon the quality of public choices. A long chain of decisions has to be got right, not just once but repeatedly for a generation. The upstream part of the decision chain involves reconciling strong incentives for prospecting with capturing as much as possible of the resource rents for society. This requires overcoming acute problems of agency, of time-inconsistency, and of asymmetric information. As the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico demonstrate, it also requires the effective restraint of environmental damage.
The downstream part of the decision chain is about harnessing revenues for sustainable growth. Resource revenues need to be treated distinctively: they come from the depletion of a natural asset and should be substantially offset by the accumulation of other assets. The only European model of prudent use of resource revenues is Norway, but the Norwegian model is inapplicable for Africa. Norway has more invested capital per member of the labour force than anywhere else on earth, whereas Africa has less. Hence, whereas it is appropriate for Norway to accumulate foreign financial assets, Africa needs to invest domestically

More here

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We need an African Common Agricultural Policy

Aboyeji E Iyinoluwa writes in Project Diaspora:

...when one looks closely at the CAP, the objectives are very Euro-centric - and rightly so. The entire point of the subsidies are to enable Europe be self sufficient in the production of its food. For food import loving Africans, this might seem like a strange idea, but in a world of genetic modification, bio terrorism and Monsanto, food is becoming a national security issue and there are several good reason for keeping its production domestic. In fact, a lot of the developed countries we aspire to (including the United States) have subsidies in the spirit and style of the CAP. In a perfect world, much of Africa’s chronic food shortage problems could be solved by adopting a CAP style arrangement for Agricultural production. There is no sense is trying to open a European market for African agricultural products when even with huge volumes of food imports, we can barely satiate the starving people on our own continent.

More here

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“Either you make films or make excuses”-Nollywood

Ethan Zuckerman reporting on Nollywood:

Nigeria’s film industry is the third largest in the world in financial terms, with revenues in the neighborhood of $200-300m a year, and it’s likely that Nigeria produces as many films per year as Bollywood. Films are made quickly and inexpensively – the budget is usually under $100,000, sometimes under $10,000 and filming rarely takes more than a month. The vast majority of these films go straight to video. Indeed, there’s almost no other market for Nigerian films – cinema operators tell us that the production quality of films isn’t high enough to allow them to be shown in theatres. As much as 70% of Indian film revenue comes from screenings, as does a substantial, though much smaller portion for Hollywood. (This whole paragraph is cribbed entirely from Dayo Ogunyemi’s excellent slide deck on Nigerian Film Financing, prepared for a 2009 WIPO meeting.)
Given that over 90% of revenue comes from home video sales, piracy is a problem in the Nigerian space. The politics of this are complicated – some producers told us off the record that the same distributors they rely on to market and sell their licensed wares are involved with pirating other producer’s movies.

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"These Aren't Carvings..."

From the BBC:

When magnificent 16th-century bronze casts were discovered in the kingdom of Benin in 1897, many could not believe they had been made by Africans. It was thought West Africa lacked the technical development required to make them. Dr Casely-Hayford travels to present-day Nigeria and Mali in search of the truth, exploring what the bronzes mean, how the technology to make them developed, and what it reveals about the lost kingdoms of West Africa.

Watch the video:

via Bombastic Elements

Trees, Deforestation and lost Knowledge

Sylvester Ogbechie writes in H-AfrArts:

Balanzan tree, Mali courtesy of Christiane Lauschitzky

Since tree rings are evidence of significant life of these trees, the deforestation and very young age of the remaining trees will soon probably render the question moot. As for asking the local people for their oral histories of these trees, don’t bother. Those who know this history, i.e. those who actually lived in an era when these histories was required learning, hence people like my kinsmen who saluted the great trees and saw them as custodians of knowledge, most of them are dead and long forgotten.

More here in Sociolingo

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"Failed States" and an African Solution

George Ayittey writes in Harvard International Review:

In crisis-resolution, the African tradition entails consultation and decision-making by consensus. When a crisis erupted in a typical African village, the chief and the elders would summon a village meeting and put the issue to the people. There it was debated by the people until a consensus was reached. During the debate, the chief usually made no effort to manipulate the outcome or sway public opinion. Nor were there bazooka-wielding rogues, intimidating or instructing people on what they should say. People expressed their ideas openly and freely without fear of arrest. Those who cared participated in the decision-making process. No one was locked out. Once a decision had been reached by consensus, it was binding on all, including the chief.
These village meetings are indigenous African political institutions and commonplace across the continent. Despite their distinct names in various parts of the continent, the basic principles and methods employed are the same. In recent years, this indigenous African tradition was been revived by pro-democracy forces in the form of national conferences to chart a new political future in Benin, Cape Verde Islands, Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger, South Africa, and Zambia.

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Arabs and their Racism towards Africans

In Afrik News:

Arab racism towards Africans has for long been a taboo subject, considering that it is politically incorrect to voice out the obvious: That Arabs, who are mostly Muslims, are racists to boot and consider Africans, Muslim or Christian, as inferior...Arabs think they are superior and exhibit racism towards Africans. This is the undeniable truth. White skinned Arabs, including the black skinned ones (Sudan for example), consider themselves superior by virtue of their self declared Arab identity.

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Lessons from Asian capitalism

Thoughts to ponder for those in Africa who believe in mimicry rather than adaptation and self-generation, Kishore Mahbubani wrote in the FT:

...the strengths of Asian capitalism are greater than the weaknesses. Within a decade Asians will have some of the largest free trade areas, including those between China and the Association of South East Asian Nations, the Japan-Asean FTA, and the Indian-Asean FTA that is likely to be set up. Recent history has taught Asians a valuable lesson: more trade leads to greater prosperity. In the Asian way – two steps forward, one step back – trade barriers will gradually come down. By the middle of the 21st century, intra-Asian trade will far surpass that of any other region.
Despite this, there will be no ideological trumpeting of the virtues of Asian capitalism. After their experiences of the past 100 years, Asians are wary of ideology. They prefer the simple, commonsense approach of learning from experience and they will heed the advice of Adam Smith, who said that prudence is “of all virtues that which is most useful to the individual”. It may also be helpful to nations.

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Expanding on the "Internalist School"

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong discusses the Internalist way of thinking with George Ayittey:

Q. How did the “Internalist School” came about?
Ayittey: It evolved rather slowly in the 1970s. When Africa gained its independence in the 1960s, the euphoria that gripped the continent was infectious. “Free at last!” was the chant that resonated across Africa. African nationalist leaders who won independence for their respective countries were hailed as heroes and deified. Currencies bore their portraits. Statues and monuments were built and named after them. It was sacrilegious to criticize them. They outlawed opposition parties, declared their countries to be one-party states and themselves “presidents for life.” Their intolerance of dissent, lack of democratic freedom and creeping despotism sowed the seeds of internalist revolt.
Very soon in the late 1960s, the euphoria over independence and the honeymoon wore off. It became increasingly clear that Africa had traded one set of masters (white colonialists) for another (black neo-colonialists.) The oppression and exploitation of the African continued unabated. Soldiers stepped in a spate of coups in the 1970s but the soldiers were themselves another batch of “crocodile liberators,” far worse than the despots they replaced. Africa’s post colonial story is one truculent tale of one betrayal after another. This has little to do with colonialism but leadership failure.

Continue reading here and here

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Reconciliation after Genocide is just another form of torture.

Susie Linfield writing in Guernica:

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light. Even worse, the phenomenological realities—the human truths—of the victims’ experiences are often ignored or, at best, treated as pathologies that should be “worked through” until the promised land of forgiveness is reached.

via
3QuarksDaily

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