Category: Africa

China’s growing presence in Africa

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By Jonathan Power
Writing from Dar es Salaam

Go Into the casino in Tanzania’s capital, Dar Es Salaam and what strikes you? The overwhelming number of players is Chinese. If the Chinese are not quite everywhere in Africa their numbers, their investments and their trade has mushroomed over the last ten years. If one compares Chinese and US investment in Tanzania there is no contest despite Tanzania being one of the US’s favourites.

Overlooked is that China has been in Africa twice before. Read More »

A stunning African success

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By Jonathan Power in Dar es Salaam

In an article last week, published in The Citizen of Tanzania, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, observed that “in the last decade after emerging Asia Africa recorded the world’s strongest growth rates. “In some cases”, she wrote, “the African lions outpaced the Asian tigers in their first two decades.”

The American and European economic crisis has had only a modest impact on those African economies doing well. “Resilience is home grown”, she says. African countries have been able to take advantage of the strong foundations they have built in the years leading up to the crisis. Since 2000 debt levels fell from over 100% to under 40% of GDP, foreign exchange reserves more than doubled and inflation was halved.

Two thirds of them, including Tanzania, have been able to pursue expansionary policies during the crisis – Keynesian policies of not slamming on the brakes as in Europe and the US – increasing spending on health and education and drawing a circle of protection around the most vulnerable people.

Judging from the substantial spending of the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation Tanzania is the most successful lion of them all. This aid program is contingent not just on economic and social policies but also on the degree of political freedom and the pursuit of justice.

The US ambassador heaps accolades on Tanzania. The World Bank says Tanzania is “a top performer” and in economic terms has been “a rock of stability”.Read More »

Is South Africa digging its own grave?

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By Jonathan Power

Is South Africa going to tumble from the sky like some out-of-control
aeroplane? It is beginning to look like it. Ex-president, Nelson
Mandela, who sacrificed a good part of his life in jail to liberate
it, must be wondering, and doubtless is full of grief. What is worse
for South Africa is that it happens concurrently with the rest of
black Africa’s economic take-off. Present forecasts suggest that
Nigeria in a few years’ time will overtake South Africa to be
sub-Sahara’s largest economy.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a great non-violent freedom fighter, summed
it up well: “The gravy train stopped at the station just long enough
for the whites to get off and the black elite to clamber on.”Read More »

Western Sahara – Divesting from all occupations

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By Stephen Zunes

In response to ongoing violations of international law and basic human rights by the rightist Israeli government of Benyamin Netanyahu in the occupied West Bank and elsewhere, there has been a growing call for divestment of stocks in corporations supporting the occupation.

Modeled after the largely successful divestment campaign in the 1980s against corporations doing business in apartheid South Africa, the movement targets companies that support the Israeli occupation by providing weapons or other instruments of repression to Israeli occupation forces, investing in or trading with enterprises in illegal Israeli settlements, and in other ways. Read More »

Opening the other eye: Charles Taylor and selective criminal accountability

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By Richard Falk

From all that we know Charles Taylor deserves to be held criminally accountable for his role in the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during the period 1998-2002. Taylor was then President of Liberia, and did his best to encourage violent uprisings against the governments in neighboring countries so as to finance his own bloody schemes and extend his regional influence.

It was in Sierra Leone that ‘blood diamonds,’ later more judiciously called ‘conflict diamonds’ were to be found in such abundance as to enter into the lucrative world trade, with many of these diamonds finding their way onto the shelves of such signature jewelry stores as Cartier, Bulgari, and Harry Winston, and thereby circumventing some rather weak international initiatives designed to prevent this outcome.Read More »

Africa’s lions are roaring

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By Jonathan Power
Abuja, Nigeria

Approximately half the people of Africa own a mobile phone. In many African countries phone technology is ahead of Europe and North America. Money can be transferred from the city to an upcountry village. Bills can be paid. In Ghana farmers can receive text messages reporting the price of yams and corn two towns away and thus find the best market without a middleman. In Kenya residents of small villages can receive texts to say when the perambulating doctor will next be coming. In parts of West Africa nurses are storing patients’ data on phones.

It may be more difficult to build up fast internet penetration on pcs but in some countries 40% of mobile owners are using phones for email and the internet. The IMF says that the telecommunication sector is adding 2% to Nigeria’s already handsome annual economic growth.

Black Africa has come late to the party but a majority of its 48 countries is leaping ahead. Read More »

Is Gambia a viable state?

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By Gunnar Westberg

Gambia, or properly The Gambia, is a curious remnant of the British Empire, a crooked British finger poking from the Atlantic coast into Francophone Senegal. It is the smallest state in Africa, with about 1.6 million inhabitants.

Gambia was a hot spot for tourism 20 or 30 years ago, but is now largely bypassed by many other attractive subtropical or tropical countries and Gambia never discussed in international media.Read More »

Democracy and economy buzzing in Nigeria

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By Jonathan Power

Lagos – March 6th 2012

Politically Nigeria has been extraordinarily lucky in its political leadership the last thirteen years. Under dictator Sani Abacha opposition was routed and its leaders imprisoned, tortured and murdered, the press was neutered and the treasury looted for personal gain. It only ended when Abacha suffered a heart attack in bed in the company of three prostitutes.

Then one of his most vociferous opponents, Olusegun Obasanjo, who had spent three years in a primitive prison, won the first post-Abacha election. Read More »

Nigeria – I have seen the future and know it works

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By Jonathan Power

Did you know that Nigeria, the most populated country in black Africa, is now one of the top five fastest growing big economies in the world? (The others are China, India, Turkey and Argentina.)

The image of Nigeria is of poverty, crime, corruption, election fiddling and maladministration. Africa, I find from my family and friends, is still a continent where death stalks – war, starving children and impoverished refugees.

But the tale of progress is unsung. This wretchedness is the only news that penetrates. Only one western newspaper, the Financial Times, has a full time correspondent in Nigeria where one third of all the black people in the world live. The rest get their news from the fickle eye of television and the rest of the newspaper pack.Read More »

The dangers of Nigeria’s extremist Islamic movement

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By Jonathan Power

The governor of the north-eastern Nigerian state of Yobe, Ibrahim Geidam, where the extremist and murderous Boko Haram movement had its origins, told me that the situation is now “under control”. He pointed to the recent arrest of its spokesman and the way he was cooperating with his interrogators.

He also told me of the splits that had developed in the movement. President Goodluck Jonathan in a rare one hour interview told me much the same. But he added a caveat. Boko Haram still has plenty of destructive power. “Who is to know if they have infiltrated major institutions, even here in the presidential compound. It might be a cook, a cleaner or a driver, waiting for their moment to explode a bomb.”Read More »