Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
from Global Investing:
Africa-doing well, risks remain
Africa is doing well but there are a few worries around the corner. These include the impact of the euro zone debt crisis, the need for an orderly exit from domestic easing policies and overdependence on commodities, says Henri-Bernard Solignac-Lecomte, head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's operations effectiveness unit.
The OECD, together with the African Development Bank, published an upbeat report on Africa this week, saying the continent will grow 4.5 percent this year and 5.2 percent next.
Solignac-Lecomte told an audience including financiers, journalists and environmentalists at a Royal African Society breakfast meeting in London this morning:
"We are not sure what is going to happen to the recovery in OECD countries and that has an impact on Africa which remains extremely exposed to demand in those economies. A key challenge is how these (African) countries can smoothly exit from counter-cyclical policies...having greater diversification of trading partners, Asia in particular, has worsened sectoral diversification."
Copper producer Zambia has increased its dependency on unprocessed commodity exports due to Asian demand, Solignac-Lecomte said.
And perhaps reflecting some of the difficulties Africans face in the developed world, Solignac-Lecomte replaced AfDB economist Alex Mubiru as speaker, after Mubiru failed to get a UK visa in time.
Critics pan Africa’s new patron of the sciences
Think scientific excellence and Equatorial Guinea may not immediately spring to mind.
Still less might you think of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, whose 30-year rule over the tiny central African oil producer country has left him with an international reputation for corruption and civil rights abuses.
Yet that did not stop the United Nations’ cultural arm UNESCO from naming an award for life sciences achievement after Obiang, who is funding the prize to the tune of $3 million. The lucky winner will be known next month.
Rights groups are incensed.
“The grim irony of awarding a prize recognizing ‘scientific achievements that improve the quality of human life’, while naming it for a president whose 30-year rule has been marked by the brutal poverty and fear of his people and a global reputation for governmental corruption, would bring shame on UNESCO,” 30 groups said in a May 10 letter to UNESCO.
“We repeat our call for the $3 million that UNESCO has accepted from President Obiang to be applied to the education and welfare of Equatoguineans, rather than the glorification of their president,” they urged.
Obiang is no stranger to controversy.
I commend you on supporting your people. I am living in America and because I asked my Mother to report a White Pastor for stealing my vote during a National Baptist Convention, we were both mis-used for a city’s drug program and neither of us are drug addicts. Detroit’s former Mayor Kwamee Kilpatrick told a union that I was gay and drug dealer when I returned to Michigan from Oklahoma. A man from Michigan had bombed the Federal Building there but this was not considered. Michigan allowed a Mayor in question to come up over both Church and State and make a judgement that ruined my reputation and work. This program is how politicians in America come back after their own sin by using anyone in public as a replacement or sacrafice.
One step forward, a few steps back
One of the few positives of Sudan’s elections, dubbed to be the first open vote in 24 years but marred by opposition boycotts and accusations of fraud, was a tiny opening of democratic freedom in Africa’s largest country.
Direct press censorship was lifted from Sudan’s papers and opposition politicians were given an albeit limited platform to address the population through state media.
Still, it seemed for the biggest international observer missions, such as the Carter Center and the European Union, the best they could say about the elections was 1): That they happened and 2): That people were not killing each other for once in this nation devastated by decades of multiple civil wars. (At least not because of the vote anyway).
They all agreed that the crack of democracy opened during the polls must be allowed to continue. And more progressive members of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s ruling party agreed. Presidential Adviser Ghazi Salaheddin told me he did not think they could go back on the democratic gains.
But it seems just one month after the vote, Sudan is sliding back to its old ways.
In Darfur, where Bashir is accused by the International Criminal Court of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Sudanese army took control of West Darfur’s Jabel Moun – which has been a key rebel stronghold pretty much since the conflict began in 2003.
It’s an impressive range of hills making it an ideal base to defend against attack. It’s also an area where the U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission (UNAMID) has enjoyed little access because of almost constant military clashes and bombing.
The African electorate is in an unfortunate state and it almost seems like any attempt to restore African suffrage it either met with total opposition or required corrupt practices. Nigeria is gearing up for what will most certainly be a very exciting round of elections in the coming year and Africans at home and in diaspora are looking on nervously at how that process will go. The legal environment for the 2011 elections is framed by the 2010 Electoral Act, harmonized (similar to a U.S. conference report) several weeks ago by the National Assembly. The new Act introduces many very significant amendments not least among which is the requirement that electoral results to be declared at the polling unit and at the ward level; this makes good on President Jonathan’s promise to audiences in Washington, D.C. and in Nigeria when he said this reform is necessary to improve the integrity of the elections by making it much more difficult for elections to be stolen through the tabulation process. For a more complete analysis of the coming Nigerian elections as well as a side-by-side comparison of the 2006 and 2010 electoral laws, please see article: http://carllevan.com/2010/09/nigerias-20 11-elections-obstacles-and-opportunities /comment-page-1/#comment-178 on scholarly blog by Dr. Carl LeVan; a professor of African politics and comparative political theory at American University, where he serves as Africa Coordinator for the Comparative and Regional Studies Program in the School of International Service.
Is Angolan media becoming less biased?
It was surprising to see Angola’s media regulator on Thursday accusing the nation’s only state-run newspaper of running a story that distorted a speech by the leader of the main opposition party to make him look favourable towards the government. The National Media Council, a government run body comprised of journalists, seems determined to help Angola’s media sector become less biased towards the government . It urged Jornal de Angola to be more rigorous in its coverage. The newspaper ran a story on March 14 based on a speech by UNITA leader Isaias Samakuva with the title: “Samakuva sees growth in several sectors of the economy,” when his words had instead been highly critical of the government, the regulator said. Jornal de Angola “should avoid arriving at conclusions that may change the meaning of the facts reported even though the story may reflect the opinion of the newspaper or of the journalist who wrote it,” the regulator said in a statement published in Jornal de Angola. UNITA spokesman Alcides Sakala, whose party had lodged the complaint with the regulator about the story, said the regulator’s move was a step in the right direction for a country that is opening up after a three-decade long rule that ended in 2002. But Angola still ranks 119 out of 175 countries in Reporters Without Borders media freedom index. The state owns two national broadcasters, the only radio station with nationwide coverage, and Jornal de Angola, the country’s most influential daily newspaper which often runs headlines praising the ruling MPLA party. This has helped the MPLA secure almost 82 percent of the votes in Angola’s 2008 parliamentary elections – the first to take place after a civil war that ended in 2002. The question now is whether Angola’s ruling MPLA party, which has ruled the oil producing nation for over three decades, is finally ready to loosen its grip on the media before the country holds parliamantary and presidential elections in 2012?
Thiong’o's memories of a time of war
Ngugi wa Thiong’o had been hesitant to write his memoirs, but wanted to give his children a wake up call about what life was like when you had to walk miles to school - not to mention being a political prisoner.
A giant of African literature, he has never been afraid to challenge the establishment. Yet while he recounts his time in prison with humour today, he has never moved back to Kenya full time since going into exile nearly 30 years ago despite being one of the country’s best-known writers.
Thiong’o was imprisoned without charge in December 1977 after peasants and workers performed his play “Ngaahika Ndeenda”, which criticised inequalities in Kenyan society.
Thiong’o went into exile in 1982 and only returned in 2004, when he and his wife were assaulted in what he maintains was a politically motivated attack.
“If I had returned to Kenya during the Moi dictatorship, I probably wouldn’t be breathing today. But after the defeat of the Moi dictatorship … my exile was over, because I know I can return to Kenya, I can visit Kenya, although I have to say that when my wife and I returned to Kenya for the first time we were brutally attacked by armed gunmen so I realised that the forces that had always been against what I stand for in terms of creating a more humane society, that those forces are still very much alive,” he told Reuters Africa Journal in Los Angeles.
“I was arrested in 1977 … when I was then professor and chairperson of the department of literature at Nairobi university. So, from being a professor and author of three novels, and so on, I found myself in a maximum security prison. On my left, were sections for the mentally deranged, and then the other side was for those who were condemned to die. So writers were somewhere between those two categories,” the 72-year-old told fans at Los Angeles public library, where he was promoting the first volume, “Dreams in a Time of War”.
Under Daniel arap Moi’s rule, dissent was crushed and those who opposed him were harassed and suppressed, many of them killed or subjected to Nairobi’s torture chambers.
As a 14 year-old High School student in Nigeria, my understanding of true struggle for independence was through the prism of “Weep not Child” Almost 40 years later, the memory of the images i captured on the pages of the book shines clearly and without any distortion. Thanks for the memory, and God bless you in your new endeavor
Time for an Afribond?
“Europe possibly needs an Afribond,” commented one contributor this week on the Thomson Reuters chatroom for fixed income markets in Kenya.
A nice quip from Henry Kirimania of The Cooperative Bank of Kenya and a reminder of just how much better placed Africa is now in terms of its debt burden than it once was and particularly in relation to what might now be regarded as the world’s Heavily Indebted Formerly Rich Countries.
“It used to be that when you thought about highly indebted countries, you thought about those in our part of the world,” Maria Ramos, head of South Africa’s Absa Bank told the recent World Economic Forum on Africa. “You can’t any longer.”
By global standards, African debt has also performed fairly well during the crisis over Greece. Although the yield on Ghana’s Eurobond spiked when concerns over Greece reached fever pitch before the EU and IMF safety net announced at the weekend, it has been on a steady downtrend and has fallen back somewhat this week.
Ghana, set to be the world’s fastest growing economy next year after it starts pumping oil later in 2010, is especially well placed, but debt yields have been falling elsewhere in Africa too.
Rising commodity exports, helping to feed Asian demand, generally better economic management, increased political stability and technological change such as the explosion of mobile phone networks have all helped to put Africa on a sounder footing than it was before.
Ill health hung over Yar’Adua presidency from start
By Estelle Shirbon
No sooner was Umaru Yar’Adua named in late 2006 as the Nigerian ruling party’s presidential candidate than people started asking whether he would survive four years at the helm of Africa’s most populous nation.
The answer to that question came on Wednesday night, when Yar’Adua died a year before the end of his term — a sad end for a quiet man who had been in poor health since well before he was catapulted into one of the world’s toughest jobs.
I was a Reuters correspondent in Nigeria at the time and I remember the bewilderment when rumours surfaced that outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo had selected the frail governor of Katsina, a backwater northern state, as his successor.
To find out more about this little-known figure, I travelled to Katsina in January 2007 to examine his record.
It is an arid state where most people live in shocking poverty and mortality rates for infants and mothers are among the worst in the world. I headed to the general hospital in the state capital to see what was being done to tackle these issues.
The hospital was no better or worse than many others in Ngeria. It was crowded and disorganised, with power cuts, little medical equipment available, too few beds, a dearth of medication, and wards that looked in need of a good clean.
Your write ups was trying to pass some vital information but you failed to bring it out properly.
Why.
Yar’Adua death leaves succession wide open
The death of Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua is unlikely to plunge Africa’s most populous state into crisis, but it intensifies what was already shaping up to be the fiercest succession race since the end of military rule.
Yar’Adua has been absent from the political scene since last November, when he left for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, and his deputy Goodluck Jonathan has been running the country since February and has since consolidated his position.
Yar’Adua’s death now piles pressure on the powerbrokers in the ruling People’s Democratic Party to resolve the impasse over who should succeed him.
According to the party’s constitution, power should rotate between Nigeria’s geographical zones, and there is an unwritten agreement that the presidency should alternate between the Muslim north and Christian south every two terms.
The conventional thinking was that should Yar’Adua — a northerner — die during his first term, as has happened, Jonathan — a southerner — would pick a new northern vice president and the pair would finish the unexpired term.
That northern vice president would then stand as the ruling party’s presidential nominee in the next election.
A string of northern names has been bandied around in the media and by political analysts as possible candidates to serve with Jonathan and then run at the next election.
We thanks for all success for all leaders,and we wish for best times in features.
World Cup Bonus for Workers
Soccer City in Johannesburg will be home to the opening and the final of the FIFA World Cup this year. On Monday, the men and women who helped build the stadium were given letters that assured them of two free tickets to the opening match.
120 000 tickets will be distributed to construction, community workers and children as part of a FIFA initiative to make sure that regular South Africans, who would normally not have the opportunity to go watch a World Cup match, can see their soccer heroes in the flesh.
Father of three, Zola Mdinmgi, said he will be taking his wife to the opening game on the 11th of June. “She knows too much about soccer. I’m too excited. It will be a big event for South Africa. It will also be nice to be here with my partner,” he said.
Thoziswa Maliwa shared the same sentiment and said she will be taking her boyfriend to the opening.” I’m so happy. Welcome to Soccer City.”
Organising Committee CEO Dr Danny Jordaan described the structure as, “not just a stadium, but a monument of this country.”
What do you think of the new upgraded Soccer City? Is it a monument to the country? Will South Africa turn heads come June 11th?
Just about the only thing FIFA has got right of late.
Hope and fear in African business
It might surprise some that African business leaders are much more optimistic than the global average, which is what a new survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers shows.
The study, for which hundreds of executives were surveyed, suggested optimism had held up in Africa despite the global downturn.
“Africa’s immense growth potential could help explain high levels of confidence compared to that of business leaders elsewhere, many of whom work in mature markets that were heavily impacted by the crisis,” the study said.
The report, released ahead of the World Economic Forum for Africa, also indicated African executives were more confident that their firms would be providing more jobs than were those elsewhere.
Not everywhere in Africa fared equally well, however. South Africa was no more optimistic than the global average.
And while African executives might be more optimistic, they are also more worried about potential risks. While the global average on the ‘Anxiety Index’ was around 39, African CEOs came in at more than 52.
