Africans living in the United States are twice as likely to graduate from college as the average American.

These African students often come from families who value education as a way to get on in life and place a high value on working and studying hard.

Sara Tsegaye, a straight-A student at UCLA, is one example of that success. Her parents fled Ethiopia in the late 1980s, first to Sudan and then, when Sara was one year old, they moved to San Jose, California.

Sara’s father works on a mobile ice cream truck in San Jose and her mother used to be a factory worker before she got laid off.

“We manage to pay for school because I’ve been working since I was 11,” Sara told Reuters Africa Journal. “I’ve been working with my dad on his ice cream truck, he’s been paying me and I’ve been saving the money. Also I had two jobs in high school and I saved up a lot of money. I understand the value of money.”

Sara wants to work with an NGO or a non-profit organisation after she graduates. She wants to travel and she wants to make a difference in the world. Other African students say they want to go home once they get a bit of experience in their careers.

But Africa is suffering from a massive brain drain just now and it’s questionable whether enough of those highly motivated students from America will return home in large enough numbers to really make a difference.

 
Activists often say that the world is not paying enough attention to Sudan’s Darfur crisis. But could the opposite be true — that Darfur is actually getting too much attention, from too many organisations, all at the same time?

A rough count shows at least 10 international and local initiatives searching for a solution to the region’s festering conflict. Many of them are at least nominally coordinated by the United Nation and the African Union. But with so many parallel programmes in play, the opportunities for duplication, competition and confusion are legion.

Top of the bill on the international stage is the double act between the United Nations and the African Union. Their joint Darfur mediator — Burkina Faso’s low-profile former security minister Djibril Bassole — spends much of his time shuttling between capitals, holding closed-session discussions with rebels, regional powers, Darfuri intellectuals and civilian groups.

The most high-profile initiative is a project launched at the Arab League for peace talks between Sudan’s government and rebels hosted in Qatar. Those talks, currently stalled, are hosted “in coordination” with Bassole but their have their own separate identity — Qatar has made its own statements and has held its own meetings with rebels.

During one crowded fortnight in August, both Libya and the United States held separate meetings with different sets of rebel splinter groups, urging them to reunite ahead of talks, with mixed results.

The Obama administration has since formalised its approach to Darfur with a new Sudan policy — although it did not go into details on which carrots and sticks its Sudan envoy Scott Gration would be able to offer Khartoum and Darfur’s rebels.

Egypt has held and hosted meetings with Darfur rebels and other major players. Russia, which says it wants to rebuild its influence in Africa, has appointed a Sudan envoy, and held a two-day symposium on Darfur earlier this month. China also has a Sudan envoy but has so far, mercifully, held back from organising its own conferences.

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki led a panel of African dignitaries around Darfur and produced a report packed with recommendations for the region. A group of veteran politicians formed by Nelson Mandela called The Elders have kept a watching brief in Darfur since their first visit there in 2007 and have continued to release statements and reports.

Inside Sudan, the Khartoum regime has trumpeted its Sudan People’s Initiative, a mass congress of political parties, civil society groups (but no rebels) that met in November 2008 to recommend a set of solutions to the crisis.

The south’s dominant Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) joined forces with opposition parties in September to release a Juba Declaration - a blueprint to solve Sudan’s ills including its own Darfur plan.

And that isn’t even counting the various Darfur peace plans and campaigns launched by mainly U.S.-based activists from Save Darfur and other coalitions - or the push for prosecutions by the International Criminal Court.

Cynics might say Khartoum and some of its key negotiating partners have an interest in encouraging the multiplication of Darfur’s peace efforts.

Each new initiative creates another set of meetings, another set of processes, another collection of excuses to delay making the hard decisions that will end the conflict.

Regional powers may also be competing for influence in Sudan, an oil producer and Africa’s largest country. “There has been a lack of a single clear strategy on Darfur so everyone is poking their nose in, trying to gain influence in Sudan,” said Al-Tahir al-Feki, a senior official with Darfur’s Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels.

Only one thing is clear. When the Darfur crisis is finally resolved and the Nobel Committee comes to hand out its peace prize to the organisations responsible for sealing the deal, there could be a crowded podium.

Ban Ki-moon isn't having a good year for public relations. Halfway through a five-year term as U.N. secretary-general, he's been hit with a wave of negative assessments by the Financial Times, The Economist, London Times, Foreign Policy and other media organizations. In a March 2009 editorial entitled "Whereabouts Unknown," the Times said Ban was "virtually inaudible" on pressing issues of international security and "ineffectual" on climate change, the one issue that Ban claims he has made the biggest difference on. The Economist gave him a mixed report card, assigning him two out of 10 points for his management skills while praising him on climate change (eight out of 10 points).
    
This week, Norway's Aftenposten newspaper made an unpleasant situation much worse. It published a confidential memo assessing Ban's 2-1/2 years in office from Oslo's deputy U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Juul's report is scathing -- and it comes from a representative of one of the world's body's top financial contributors. She says the former South Korean foreign minister suffers from a "lack of charisma" and has "constant temper tantrums" in his offices on the 38th floor of the United Nations building in midtown Manhattan.
    
She describes Ban as a "powerless observer" during the fighting in Sri Lanka earlier this year when thousands of civilians were killed as government forces ended a 25-year civil war against Tamil Tiger rebels, trapping them on a narrow strip of coast in the country's northeast. In Darfur, Somalia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Congo, she wrote, Ban's "passive and not very committed appeals seem to fall on deaf ears." She says that his recent trip to Myanmar was a failure and that some people in Washington refer to Ban as a "one-term" secretary-general.
    
Juul's letter could hardly have come at a more inopportune time. Ban is planning to visit Norway in the coming weeks, where he intends to meet with government officials and visit the Arctic circle to see for himself the effects of global warming and the melting polar ice. Now U.N. officials fear reporters will be more interested in what he says about Juul's memo than climate change.

So far Ban has not reacted to the letter. However, a Norwegian diplomat told Reuters that Ban's press office had been instructed to hold off on confirming his visit to Norway shortly after the news of Juul's memo began to spread.
    
Ban's PR difficulties didn't start this year. In March 2008, his chief of staff Vijay Nambiar sent a memo to U.N. employees explaining how to say his boss's name. "Many world leaders, some of whom are well acquainted with the Secretary-General, still use his first name mistakenly as his surname and address him wrongly as Mr. Ki-moon or Mr. Moon," Nambiar complained.
 
Then came Ban's own speech to senior U.N. officials in Turin, Italy last year, in which he described how difficult it was to improve the working culture inside the United Nations. The secretary-general seemed to acknowledge that his internal management style had failed. "I tried to lead by example," Ban said. "Nobody followed."
    
Ban's aides vehemently defend him, saying he's being treated unfairly by the press. One senior U.N. official suggested privately that Ban could very well turn out to be "the greatest secretary-general ever." They complain that people continue to compare him to his predecessor Kofi Annan, who was a very different U.N. chief and relied less on "quiet diplomacy" than Ban. Annan became a hero to many people around the world for standing up to the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Annan called the March 2003 invasion illegal. U.N. officials also complain bitterly about the indefatigable blogger Matthew Lee, whose website Inner City Press regularly accuses Ban and other U.N. officials of hypocrisy and failing to keep their promises to reform the United Nations and root out corruption. (Some U.N. officials accuse Lee of not always getting his facts right, but his blog has become unofficial required reading for U.N. staffers around the world.)
    
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, diplomats in New York say, is among those supporting a campaign against a second term for Ban. Juul's memo said Helen Clark, New Zealand's former prime minister and current head of the U.N. Development Program, "could quickly become a competitor for Ban's second term." But diplomats say they expect the United States, Britain and other major powers to reluctantly back a second term for Ban, if only because there appears to be no viable alternative whom Russia and China would support.
    
A recent article in the Times of London said the best U.N. chief in the organization's 64-year history was not Swedish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dag Hammarskjold but the Peruvian diplomat Javier Perez de Cuellar, who held the top U.N. post for 10 years until 1992. Nicknamed "mumbles" because he was so difficult to understand, Perez de Cuellar kept a low profile and, like Ban, preferred backroom diplomacy, not Annan's bully pulpit. Among the Peruvian diplomat's successes were managing the end of the Cold War, leading a long-delayed revival of U.N. peacekeeping and encouraging member states to back a U.S.-led military operation to drive Iraq's invading forces out of Kuwait in 1991.
    
Will Ban's preference for quiet diplomacy make him as good or better than Perez de Cuellar? That remains to be seen.

Sudath Perera has every reason to be content. He started up his textiles factory outside the Kenyan capital Nairobi nine years ago; today, he employs 1500 workers and turns over between 18 and 20 million U.S. dollars a year.

“We are contributing to the local economy by creating employment,” he says. “And indirectly there are a lot of local suppliers also relying on us.”

Perera’s factory is one of thousands of businesses on the continent that are taking advantage of a U.S. trade programme under which certain goods from around 40 sub-Saharan African countries can be imported to the States duty-free.

It’s known as AGOA – the African Growth and Opportunity Act – and was one of the main reasons for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to the continent.

“The ingredients are all here for an extraordinary explosion of growth, prosperity and progress,” said Clinton at the AGOA forum in Nairobi last week. “I know how important it is to translate legislation like AGOA into daily changes that people can look to.”

Many on the continent say they’re already feeling those changes. Textiles factory worker Christine Mwende didn’t have a job before Perera employed her; and though the 120 dollar-a-month salary she makes is low by Western standards, she says it’s made all the difference.

“This job has really helped me,” she told Reuters Africa Journal correspondent Vivianne Mukakizima. “When I started working here, my child had not started school – but he is now in class 4.”

(more…)

A presidential visit followed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s African tour cannot conceal a stark reality: China has overtaken the United States as Africa’s top trading partner.

That is one of the main problems facing Clinton on a seven-nation jaunt meant variously to spread Washington’s good governance message and shore up relationships with its key oil suppliers on the continent.         

U.S. officials are keen to trumpet a 28 percent jump in 2008 in trade with sub-Saharan Africa to $104 billion, even if the increase is attributable mainly to the high price of oil, which accounts for more than 80 percent of U.S. imports from Africa.

However, there is another statistic that says more about the direction of development on the poorest continent: this decade’s tenfold increase in trade with China to $107 billion last year, narrowly eclipsing the United States.

The financial and then economic crisis that has pushed U.S. and European economies into recession and forced their companies to crimp overseas expansion is only likely to accelerate the trend despite the regional goodwill towards U.S. President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan.

Nor is China the only emerging economy seeking a slice of a continent estimated to hold a third of the world’s mineral resources, and nearly a billion people slowly finding they want — and can afford — things like life insurance and iPhones.

The $23 billion bid by mobile phone firm Bharti Airtel to tie up with South Africa’s MTN Group, Africa’s biggest operator by subscribers, is the latest and biggest example of an Indian company on the prowl in the region.

Brazil is also making its presence felt, with offers of technology and know-how to boost food and biofuels production in Africa, where only a fraction of potential arable land is under cultivation.

In June, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew in to Egypt, Namibia, Angola and Nigeria — the last two being Africa’s biggest oil producers — to underscore Moscow’s intentions not to be left out in the cold.

For sure, the increased competition does not mean the world’s biggest economy is throwing in the African towel, especially given that Angola, for instance, accounts for 7 percent of its oil imports.

But maybe it might make visiting Washington bigwigs bite their tongues before embarking on yet another morality lecture the moment they set foot on African soil.

A new spate of attacks on shipping has made it quite clear that Somali pirates are not going to stop their activities just now, even though military operations by the United States and France have killed five of the buccaneers.

The international naval flotilla is stretched to protect the thousands of ships that use the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

Another reason for the pirates’ boldness is believed to have been the onset of good weather, which favours the small speed boats they use to stalk the lumbering merchantmen.

But if the navies’ capabilities are limited by the vast sea area they have to cover, the pirates may soon face a more compelling reason to rein in their activities, as my colleague Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu reports.

“The sea is calm now, but by May it will be terrible to sail on the Indian Ocean,” said Somali pirate Farah Hussein.

“Our attacks on ships will probably decrease in the coming month. But we might move to the Gulf of Aden to continue our mission,” he told Reuters by telephone.

If the pirates have to confine themselves to the Gulf of Aden, it should be easier for the naval flotilla to catch them, shouldn’t it?

It’s a cynical adage of British journalism that one dead Briton is, in headline terms at least, worth several dozen foreign fatalities.

A similar law seems to be in play with the latest hostage drama on the high seas off Somalia, where four pirates have been holding an American sea captain in a life boat under the watchful eye of the USS Bainbridge.

At the moment, other pirates back at their bases in Somalia are holding 18 vessels and 267 sailors, the fruits of several months of attacks on ships off the coast.

The media in the United States has focussed fully on this latest story - a drama with just one American at its centre - while showing rather less interest in the hundreds of other hostages, none of whom is thought to be American.

So is this just the cruel law in action? Or should we be grateful that piracy is now receiving the full attention of the White House and the State Department and hope that at last more decisive action will be taken to clear the shipping lanes of bandits?

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has orchestrated a defiant response to international efforts to arrest him for war crimes in Darfur but this is seen as hiding vulnerabilities that could signal trouble ahead.

Bashir has been travelling in the region in defiance of the arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. His travels demonstrate the court’s inability to arrest him and have won support from Arab countries and at home. He has also closed down aid groups accused of helping the court and addressed a string of nationalistic rallies.

But all this has done nothing to resolve major issues that could eventually loosen his hold on power.

(more…)

Far from being all bad news for Africa, the global financial crisis is a chance to break a dependence on development aid that has kept it in poverty, argues Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, who has just published a new book “Dead Aid”.

Moyo’s book, her first, comes out at a time when Western campaigners, financial institutions and some African governments have been warning of the danger posed to Africa by the crisis and calling for more money from developed countries as a result. The former World Bank and Goldman Sachs economist spoke to Reuters in London.

“I’m not saying its going to be easy, I’m just saying that there is a real opportunity for policymakers to focus on coming up with more innovative ways of financing economic development. In a way the crisis actually provides the African governments with the situation where they cannot rely on aid budgets coming through from the West.”

Moyo believes more than $1 trillion in development aid over the past 50 years has only entrenched Africa’s poverty, distorted economies and fuelled bureaucracy and corruption. She sees alternatives such as encouraging trade - particularly with emerging markets - encouraging foreign direct investment, microfinancing for enterprise and seeking funds from capital markets.

Moyo is not discouraged by the fact that all those options appear more difficult in the current environment.

“It just means the onus is on African governments to come up with a more compelling story as to why African governments are overseeing real asset investment not derivative products we don’t really understand.”

“If you focus on traditional markets like Europe and the United States, you come to the conclusion that markets are really damaged and it’s very hard to raise money in those markets, but if you start to look towards China for example which has $4 trillion of reserves, all of a sudden you could see there might be another opportunity to do a bond issue in the Chinese market for example.”

“The model that’s coming up, that I’m proposing, is essentially one where Africa and Africans become equal partners with the rest of the world, not one where there is kind of a donor and a recipient, where Africans are kind of viewed as secondary citizens,” she said.

“There is no other system, whether a political system or a business system, that has stayed as the status quo for 60 years when we all know it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, it’s not generating growth and it’s not alleviating poverty.”

Moyo is not worried about the impact of aid being taken away:

“It actually tends to pool at the top so it’s not like the average African is going to suffer. They don’t see the aid anyway. Essentially it‘s going to really affect the bureaucratic processes at the top and would really impact on corruption.”

“You could take me to country X in Africa and say ‘look at this girl here and she’s going to school because of aid’. Yes, that’s true but on a macro aggregate perspective these economies are not growing. They’re not growing fast enough to ensure that when that girl is done with her schooling she can find a job.”

Moyo is unimpressed by Western campaigners such as rock stars Bob Geldof and Bono calling for lots more aid for Africa.

“I fundamentally object to the notion that Africa needs more aid and I do think it’s time to have many more Africans speak out, especially the policymakers, because many of the policymakers actually don’t support aid  and yet they stay in the background and they allow this money to come into the economy.”

“You very rarely see Africans on the global stage saying ‘actually we would like to have much more aid please’.”

“I do think a gap has opened up to allow other people to formulate a view on coming to the global debate and offering opinions as to what they think Africans want. But maybe we should start a website called ‘Ask the African’ because I think you might be quite surprised to find that people say ‘we want jobs’, I wouldn’t mind a flat screen television, I wouldn’t mind having my kids go on holiday sometimes …’”

Picture: Helen Jones photography

How times change. Somalia’s new Islamist president has been feted in Ethiopia, whose army drove him from power two years ago - with Washington’s backing - when he headed a sharia courts movement.

Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was greeted with a standing ovation from African Union leaders at a summit in Ethiopia, which pulled the last of its troops out of Somalia last month, leaving the government in control of little beyond parts of Mogadishu. The hardline Islamist al Shabaab militia control much of the rest of southern Somalia.

Somalia was far from being a prominent front in former President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, but the reverse Washington suffered there appears to be among its most dramatic. Meanwhile, the past two years have brought at least another 17,400 civilian dead in Somalia and more anarchy that has fuelled a wave of piracy.

Ahmed’s former administration was marked out by both the United States and Ethiopia as being little different to Afghanistan’s Taliban. Hardline members of the group were accused of links to al Qaeda. Now he is widely described by the international community as a “moderate” and he himself has welcomed the new U.S. stance as positive.

“One can say that the U.S. position towards Somalia has become honest,” he told the Egyptian newspaper el-Shorouk. “In the framework of the Djibouti negotiations, America has become a force which supports peace.”

But Somalia’s new president, chosen by parliamentary vote at the weekend, must now face the al Shabaab militia who grew out of the armed wing of the sharia courts
movement but later split with him. Al Shabaab have vowed to fight and highlighted his support from “non-believers”.

To try to bolster Ahmed, Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, the African Union chairman, called for U.N. troops to join the 3,500-strong AU peacekeeping force in Somalia. Right now, they cannot do much more than to try to defend themselves.

But some analysts and Ahmed’s aides believe that creating a U.N. force would be counterproductive because it could be seen as Western interference and encourage those who fought the invading Ethiopian troops to pursue their struggle.

Getting Somalia’s clans behind the government will be another big task, a challenge previous leaders have failed to meet during 18 years of conflict.

What is the chance that Ahmed’s election as president will be able to bring peace to Somalia? What should Africa and the rest of the world do to try to make sure that happens? What do you think?