Successive failed rain seasons in Kenya have led to a drought that experts say is the worst in the country since 1996.

And it is not just a problem for Kenya. Aid agencies estimate more than 23 million people will need food aid in the Horn of Africa region.

Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai says it shows how ill-prepared much of Africa is to deal with the effects of climate change.

Herders who depend on cattle for their food and income are having to drive their livestock hundreds of kilometres to seek pasture and water - but find little relief.

“The grass was green when I got here, but it is finished now and a lot of our animals are dying,” Grewan Lesakut, from the pastoralist Samburu community in the Rift Valley, told Reuters Africa Journal.

“The way I see it, all our cows are going to die,” fellow herder John Lenyarui said. “I know some people who had 50 cows but have nothing now, some with 200 and now have only 40 and myself I had 500 and now I have 100.”

Kenya’s Meat Commission is doing what it can. It has offered to buy thousands of cattle from their owners to be slaughtered for meat. But the government facility has been stretched to the limit and thousands of have died outside the slaughterhouse.

“This is a very ugly scene, a very disturbing scene that the country is facing,” Livestock Minister Mohamed Kuti said.

Most nomadic groups hold on to their animals even in times of severe drought, seeing them as their most valuable investment.  In desperation, Turkana villagers, from northwest Kenya, are selling their goats well below market prices to the European Union’s humanitarian wing which then distributes the meat to the hungry.

Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, says the drought is evidence of the long term effect of climate change.

“This is an excellent time for Kenya maybe to realise, and for the rest of Africa to learn, what we are talking about when we say that climate change is going to hit Africa very seriously, and it’s partly because Africa is completely unprepared for what is coming with climate change,” she told Africa Journal.

“For more than three decades we have been saying it is important to protect our forests, to protect our rivers, to protect our lands so that we stop soil erosion and to protect our wetlands.

“Somehow, all of them have come and have converged during this last two, now going to three, years and everybody and everything that is living in this country is feeling it.”

(Pictures: Turkana men slaughter goats at a livestock de-stocking centre in the Loyoro village of Turkana district in northwestern Kenya. Reuters/Thomas Mukoya. Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maathai delivers a speech in Japan. Reuters/Kim Kyung Hoon.)

Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa grower, kicked off the 2009/10 season on bleak note on Thursday, with the head of the body overseeing the industry warning that even the most optimistic forecasts predicted a fall in production.

“Our plantations have suffered from the crisis,” said Gilbert Ano, echoing concerns about the West African country’s cocoa trees becoming too old, not being looked after properly by under-supported farmers and producing less cocoa as a result.

In talking about the “crisis”, Ano used the increasingly prevalent explanation for why things in Ivory Coast — once the region’s most stable, with an economy that boomed while neighbours stagnated or went to war — are not going very well.

He is referring to the political and military quagmire his country has been stuck in since a brief 2002-2003 war, during which rebels captured the north of the country. United Nations and French peacekeepers have since overseen a fragile peace, during which a return to war has been averted but elections have failed to take place.

For a long time, this “crisis”, didn’t appear to have much of an impact on cocoa. Exports, in fact, hit record levels in 2007/08. Roadblocks and a handful of flare-ups over the years meant transporting the beans, which are used to make chocolate, became more difficult and expensive. Nonetheless, solutions, which sometimes involved transiting through neighbouring countries, were always found.

But the real impact of the “crisis” is now being felt. As politicians rowed over election dates, voter lists or rebel disarmament, the lack of investment in the trees or small-scale farmers and alleged corruption amongst administrators has done its damage and output is falling. Some say it might fall by half over the next few years.

The reforms needed to reverse this have been talked about for years but cannot take place until the “crisis” is over, cocoa experts say.

So indeed the cocoa sector can quite justifiably talk about being in crisis. But in Ivory Coast, the “crisis” is now being used to explain just about anything. A once-vibrant business environment and professional class has been caught up in the “crisis”. Though some investors have remained, many others say they are waiting for the “crisis” to end before pumping in more money. Whether to explain increased corruption or poverty rates or even justify soldiers harassing drivers on the roads at night, the answer often comes back - “It’s because of the crisis”.

Once I was told that the crisis meant I shouldn’t worry about work and, instead, go and have a beer.

Has all this talk of a “crisis” adopted its own momentum? Ivorians are weary of the “crisis” but many say a small minority are doing what they can to extend it as they have worked out how to tap the “crisis economy”, which makes it more difficult to hold people accountable. Is this true?

The only way out of the “crisis” appears to be elections but they are constantly being
delayed. First due in 2005, they are now meant to take place in Nov. 29 but that date now looks in doubt.  Will elections really bring an end to the “crisis” or will they lead to another one?

Is the soaring gold price a ticket to a better life for struggling freelance miners in Burkina Faso?

The impoverished West African country is trying to revive its gold mining industry, spurred by the global financial crisis and the need to reduce the economy’s dependence on cotton.

Near the village of Mogen in northeastern Burkina Faso, artisanal miners are engaged in a dangerous hunt for gold in hand-dug pits.

Landslips kill miners almost every year, although mostly during the rainy season. When it’s dry, children help sift the soil in search of the nuggets that pay for food and school fees.

On a good day, a miner will unearth around five milligrams of gold, which earns about $10. But often they come up empty.

Jeremi Nacanabo, who helps run an association of informal gold miners, told Reuters Africa Journal: “We don’t have the technology to take out the gold. Right now we’re working in a traditional way, which creates enormous problems and causes many accidents.”

But gold mining in Burkina Faso is experiencing a revival after a halt in the late 1990s caused by poor management and inadequate capital.

Analysts say poor prices for cotton, the country’s main export, have rekindled interest in mining. The financial crisis is tempting investors to buy low-risk assets such as gold, which is now selling for about $1,000 per ounce.

Burkina Faso revised its mining codes in 2003 to attract foreign investors with tax breaks.

The goal is to join the ranks of Africa’s top producers — South Africa, Ghana and Mali — within the next three years.

In the dusty northeast of the country, the Taparko-Somita mine, which is run by the
Canadian-listed, Russian-controlled company High River Gold, is the first of four gold mines that have begun operating in the past two years.

Together they produced 5.5 tonnes in 2008 and they are heading for more than that this year. The government takes a 10 percent free stake in each mine.

Local miners, who once worked for themselves, are finding jobs with the mining companies. They earn a salary, work in safer conditions and are given training.

But even with the recent gold rush, Burkina Faso is still struggling to revive its economy and provide basic services for its 13 million people.

Of course everyone can’t be part of the gold mining revival, but global demand for Burkina Faso’s natural resources could at least provide some trickle-down benefit for the economy.

Millions of years ago, Madagascar separated from the other continents and evolved separately. Today it has about 12,000 plants most of which can be found nowhere else in the world. Many of these plants have medicinal properties, but their habitat is under threat.

In the town of Tolear, people rely on herbs as the nearest hospital is far away. Traditional healers combine plants and a little bit of magic to cure patients.

“The forest helps us to cure all illnesses,” Dimbiraza, a traditional healer, told Reuters Africa Journal. “So we need to preserve the forest everywhere in the world, not just in Madagascar, in the world because the forest is nature. It’s our second God. There’s God up there and the forest is our second God.”

The forest around Tolear is like a huge natural pharmacy.

Malagasy companies such as Homeopharma manufacture plant products for sale at home and for export to Europe and the United States.

Claude Ratsimivony, the company’s chairman, says the market is seeing growth rates of 30 to 40 percent and there are still medicinal plants to be discovered.

“We still have not discovered everything. We know that there are about 12,000 species, but Madagascar is a country that is mysterious in the respect that it still guards the secrets of its traditional healers.”

But some of Madagascar’s plant secrets may be lost before they can even be found as forests are being cut down for charcoal and farming.

The government has initiated several conservation projects and wants to do more to preserve the plants that contribute to both modern and traditional medicine. It will be interesting to see if they can keep ahead of the slashers and burners.

Since the end of international sanctions against Libya, leader Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam has symbolized hope in the West that a secretive, authoritarian oil and gas exporter can reform itself from within.

The sharp-suited, western-educated Islam has called for a new constitution, a freer press and an independent judiciary, music to the ears of the U.S. and of European governments all desperate to give a moral basis to their re-engagement with the oil-rich north African state.

Islam took the end of diplomatic isolation as the cue to press for a cautious public debate among ordinary Libyans about their future.

Two newspapers and a TV station linked to Islam have been holding government officials to account for their failings.

A new constitution that would bolster press freedom and an independent judiciary is ready for approval by Libya’s General People’s Congress, a newspaper editor and close ally of Islam told Reuters this month.

Optimism among advocates of liberal reform has turned to disquiet however, as attention shifts to Islam’s brother Mutassim, Libya’s head of national security who is viewed by some observers as a rival for power.

Mutassim is reported to have built a strong support base in Libya’s conservative
Revolutionary Committees and he held talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington in April.

Analysts are divided over whether the showdown between the Gaddafi scions is genuine or merely window dressing to keep Western governments believing in the chances of peaceful reform.

Islam’s globe trotting helped secure the end of sanctions and Libya’s return from
diplomatic isolation, but his liberal message has also grabbed the spotlight from exiled Libyan dissidents, whose voice is now seldom heard in the debate about Libya’s future.

“A scene has been set that portrays Saif al-Islam as the rebel successor to his father. But this scene is of course managed and controlled by the regime itself,” said Amel Boubekeur of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Macroscope has discussed the growth of sovereign wealth funds many times (see here or here). Just to recap, the global state-owned SWF industry is set to more than double in the next 10 years from the current $3 trillion, according to estimates from Deutsche Bank.

John Green, global head of business development at Anglo-African bank Investec, argues that Africa will play a key role in the expansion of SWFs in years to come.

"Africa is very rich in commodities. Africa in aggregate has gone from a significant fiscal deficit, largely funded by aid, to a continent that has a fiscal surplus. That's what has precipitated a lot of thinking around this issue," he says.

Green says he agrees with the view that in the next 5 years there will be enough surplus around in many African countries to begin to build future generation funds properly.

Libya is a leader here with the continent's biggest sovereign wealth fund, which manages $65 billion in assets. Nigeria is working on legislation to create a SWF aimed at softening any impact from falling oil prices.

Read the full Reuters interview here.

There has been some excellent writing and drama from South Africa over the years, and much of it is serious stuff.

One thinks perhaps of Athol Fugard and J.M. Coetzee. Even the titles — Sizwe Bansi is Dead and Disgrace — convey a certain gravitas, at the very least.

So, a science fiction movie set in Johannesburg comes, to many outside South Africa at least, as something of a surprise.

For those who haven’t seen it, South African-born director Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is the story of how a mysterious space craft appears over Johannesburg.

It turns out to contain starving aliens, referred to scathingly as “prawns”, who are brought down to the city and housed in an enormous and chaotic shanty ghetto.

The film is done in the form of a documentary — although it can’t resist some good
old-fashioned shoot-outs involving the aliens’ space weapons.

It’s also pretty funny as it satirises just about everybody — the bureaucrats given the task of evicting the prawns from District 9, the soldiers who have to be restrained from shooting them, the Nigerian bandits who exploit them ruthlessly and the unfortunate prawns themselves, who are addicted to cat food.

But of course it’s not all sci-fi fun. This being South Africa, audiences are also asked to consider more ponderous questions that relate to the country’s racial history and also how to deal with “aliens” who suddenly appear on the doorstep after being afflicted by some crisis at home — something the South African government has had to contend with in recent years as Zimbabwe has imploded, forcing millions across the border.

A project in Ethiopia that helps destitute women become self-reliant by providing them with paid employment has attracted a lot of attention from politicians visiting Addis Ababa for an international get-together.

Alem Abebe is a 14-year-old girl who left home three years ago and made her way to the capital. She now earns 50 US cents a day working at the Abebech Gobena project in one of the city’s slums. It’s not enough to send money home, but enough to survive — and to pay for night school.

But by the World Bank definition, Abebe and other women working at the project are still extremely poor: they earn much less than the daily income of $1.25 or roughly one euro that’s now used to measure poverty.

But the whole point isn’t to hand out money for free: but to help women who would be on the street get a job, an education - and a future.

It’s a departure from previous aid models, which saw large sums handed over by the West to African countries, a system that some say hasn’t really helped the world’s poorest continent.

“The model that’s coming up or that I’m proposing is essentially a model where Africa and Africans become equal partners with the rest of the world, not one where there’s a donor and a recipient where Africans are viewed as secondary citizens,” Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian author, told Reuters Africa Journal.

“This is really an environment where Africans are getting something, they’re getting paid for doing something, for being entrepreneurs, for generating something, for building products, for establishing infrastructure. It’s not the aid model where you get money for nothing,” said Moyo, whose book Dead Aid argues that Western generosity often doesn’t actually help in the long run.

Today the global financial crisis means that Western countries are trying to save their own economies and are no longer prepared to spend so much on aid. So is direct aid still a solution. Or are small projects that generate employment better at fighting poverty?

French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet is floating the idea of an on-line lottery to raise aid for Africa.
 
The plan is pretty modest - the aim is to raise around 10 million euros a year for projects such as boosting school access to girls in Africa.

Critics are already writing it off as an empty gesture, particularly as Africa is suffering from billion-dollar aid shortfalls as recession hits rich donor countries.

To put it in perspective, the World Food Programme said last month it had received just $3.7 billion of the $6.7 billion it needs this year — a shortfall that would take 300 years of such lottery takings to plug.

Some dismiss the plan as yet another PR gimmick intended to gloss over years of exploitation of the continent by rich world.

Others wonder whether it is really in the best of taste to link aid to the world’s poor with a game of chance.

“Yet again, it is really shows a lack of respect for Africa,” a contributor by the name of Aboubacar wrote on Joyandet’s blog.

Joyandet counters that this is an example of the “innovative funding” needed to raise awareness off Africa’s plight among a media-overloaded public.

The idea in itself is not new — the United Nations and others have toyed with the idea in the past.

There have even been suggestions that you could “piggy-back” well-established national lottery systems with games whose revenues would then target specific issues — a scratch card lottery for AIDS orphans, for example.

It is sensitive ground. But could they ultimately capture the public imagination in the same way that the Live Aid concerts launched in 1985 did?

Nigeria’s central bank sliced through the hubris of the business elite with its $2.6 billion bailout out of five banks and the sacking of their heads in what looks as though it could be a new era for corporate governance in Africa’s most populous country.

Recently appointed Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi said lax governance had allowed the banks to become so weakly capitalised that they posed a threat to the entire system, and described the move as the beginning of a “restoration of confidence” in sub-Saharan Africa’s second biggest economy.

The 1.14 trillion naira ($7.6 billion) in bad loans run up by the banks is roughly equivalent to the combined annual income of the poorest 20 million people in Africa’s most populous nation, each of whom live on around $1 a day.

Yet the “Friday massacre”, as one newspaper dubbed it, set Blackberries buzzing in Lagos champagne bars not because of the breathtaking scale of the money involved, but because of the might of the corporate aristocrats felled by Sanusi’s axe.

“Ordinarily in Nigeria there is a sacred cow culture,” said Reuben Abati, a respected leader writer and chairman of the editorial board of Nigeria’s Guardian newspapers.

“Once someone is prominent in a particular industry you assume those persons are untouchable. What Sanusi has done now is to say nobody is too big to be held accountable, whether they are an Ibru or an Akingbola.”

Cecilia Ibru and Erastus Akingbola — the former chief executives of Oceanic Bank and Intercontinental Bank — were arguably the highest-profile casualties of the cull, titans in a corporate elite dominated by egos and empire builders.

Ibru is from one of Nigeria’s most powerful business families, whose interests range from shipping and hotels to oil and media. Akingbola is president of Nigeria’s Chartered Institute of Bankers and brimming with honorary doctorates.

“Some are born great, others achieve greatness, while others still have greatness thrust upon them. But rarely do we have these three attributes combined so well in an individual as is the case in our Dr. Erastus Bankole Oladipo Akingbola,” blasts the biography on his website.

In his trademark bow-tie and frameless spectacles, Sanusi’s slight physique and measured rhetoric mark him out from some of the more flamboyant personalities it is his job to regulate.

Some Nigerian commentators have argued that the cull by Sanusi, a northerner, targeted southern bank executives and that it was a retaliation for consolidation four years ago which saw some northern banks absorbed by their southern peers.

But the forensic precision of Sanusi’s public statements left the numbers to speak for themselves.

The loans they racked up — including credit to speculators on a stock market which fell 60 percent over the past year and unsecured financing to fuel importers who have seen oil prices halve — meant the five were constant borrowers of public money.

They accounted for almost 90 percent of exposure to the central bank’s discount window, a facility which allows banks to meet short-term obligations by borrowing central bank funds.

The results of Sanusi’s audit have left many wondering how the five banks managed to survive for so long.

Intercontinental and Oceanic had both won national and international banking awards. Analysts from brokerage Renaissance Capital were shown Intercontinental Bank’s balance sheet in April and published a report saying it had enough capital to absorb its asset risks and there was no threat to its solvency.

Ibru was quoted in this month’s edition of McKinsey & Company’s business journal McKinsey Quarterly as saying: “In five to 10 years, we expect to be a well-known, established bank beyond this sub-region of Africa.”

One Nigerian analyst commented “When the dust settles, one of the most shocking aspects of this crisis is going to be the magnitude of the gap between the rot in the system and what its leaders wanted us to believe.”

Will this be a new era for Nigeria’s companies? For Nigeria itself?