Category Archives: Africa

Nigerian expat Abiola of Foreign Dispatches notes a report in the Telegraph of 25 June 2005 about the extent of corruption in Nigeria.

Here’s why scepticism over the world-changing impact of yet more aid and debt forgiveness is thoroughly justified.

The scale of the task facing Tony Blair in his drive to help Africa was laid bare yesterday when it emerged that Nigeria’s past rulers stole or misused £220 billion.

That is as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades. The looting of Africa’s most populous country amounted to a sum equivalent to 300 years of British aid for the continent….

The stolen fortune tallies almost exactly with the £220 billion of western aid given to Africa between 1960 and 1997. That amounted to six times the American help given to post-war Europe under the Marshall Plan.

I can’t close this post without including the following excerpt, which goes to show that lots of sensible Nigerians understand all too well something a lot of foreign know-it-alls seem incapable of grasping.

The G8 has refused to cancel Nigeria’s loans, despite writing off the debts of 14 other African countries this month.

Prof Pat Utomi, of Lagos Business School, said that was the right decision. “Who is to say you won’t see the same behaviour again if it is all written off?” he said.

A lively discussion ensues in the comments to Abiola’s blogpost.

Colby Cosh has a related post that quotes John Lennon at some length:

Lennon Where do people get off saying the Beatles should give $200,000,000 to South America? You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. After they’ve eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles. You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I’m not ready for it. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

And Black Star Journal links to a new BBC World Service documentary on The Aid Trap:

In the run-up to July’s G8 summit Britain is calling for the world’s richest nations to treble the amount of development aid. But is Aid really a solution to the causes of poverty?

Many economists challenge the idea that aid offers an escape to the poverty trap. Some say it may even create a trap of dependency and corruption all its own. We visit the two poorest countries in the World, according to the United Nations, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The coverage of Rhodesia [during its revolt against white minority rule] was deeply flawed from the beginning. The problem, stated briefly, was this: how could any war correspondent give a balanced account of a war where one side was Anglo-Saxon, entrenched in the cities, with access to the resources and the techniques of public relations, and where the other side consisted of people of a different race and culture, operating in the remote countryside, and who had neither the means nor–and this may be more important–the inclination to compete in terms of propaganda?

The answer is that no war correspondent could. The better ones soon became tired of regurgitating official hand-outs from the Smith regime in Salisbury and went home. But no newspaper wanted to admit that it had given up trying to present a balanced view of the war, so stories from Rhodesia continued to appear, particularly in British newspapers. Who was sending them? Few readers of the London Daily Telegraph realised that the paper’s correspondent in Salisbury, Brian Henry, was the same person as the Daily Mail’s Peter Norman, who was in turn the same person as the Guardian’s Henry Miller. And that in real life all these correspondents were a Rhodesian journalist called Ian Mills, who, as it happened, was also the BBC’s correspondent!

The dangers in this practice of the “multiple correspondent” immediately became apparent. One is that Mills, a competent journalist, could have become too busy to do much else than take whatever official information he could get and send it off to his many outlets together with what comment he could obtain on the telephone. He would hardly have had time to investigate the truth or otherwise of what he was being told, especially if such an investigation could involve long absence from his base. Next, with similar stories appearing in a variety of newspapers under a variety of names, the reader could feel that each confirmed the accuracy of the other. He would then tend to place more weight on the story’s facts than if he knew that all the stories were actually written by the one correspondent.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), p. 471

Too-oft-neglected Black Star Journal posts on a wise (and all-too-rare) move by Namibia’s President: Nujoma bows out.

I’ve often said that the greatest gift Nelson Mandela gave to South Africa was to serve only one term. In doing so, he sent the message that he was not indispensible, that he was not country. Too many African leaders peddle the propaganda that the state will collapse without their omniscient and omnipotent wisdom. In ceding power, Nujoma, like Mandela, sent his countrymen the message that they live in a mature country that is not solely dependent on a single man.

The charismatic Nujoma has often been compared to Robert Mugabe in neighboring Zimbabwe. They do share a few superficial traits. They both have publicly attacked gays, invoke anti-imperalist rhetoric whenever possible, have a great deal of charisma and are both former guerilla leaders. I believe they are friends.

But there are significant differences between the two. The main difference is that for his bellicose rhetoric, Sam Nujoma generally respected basic democratic norms and press freedom. There were no massacres in opposition heartlands, no mass arbitrary arrests, no use of food aid as a political weapon, no broad assault on the rule of law.

Another main difference is that SWAPO has evolved into an actual party that represents its membership and is not automatically beholden to its leader. In fact, there was a move by some to force through a constitutional amendment that would’ve allowed Nujoma to serve more terms as president. The party was independent minded enough to reject the effort. In Zimbabwe, ZANU-PF essentially remains an instrument of Mugabe.

By coincidence, Nick Kristof today paints an utterly discouraging picture of Zimbabwe in a NYT op-ed entitled A Morsel of Goat Meat.

Binga, Zimbabwe -­ The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970’s….

I well remember attending in Honolulu a pan-African celebration of Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980, with a Christian Sudanese grad school colleague (since immigrated to the U.S.) and a Muslim Sudanese housemate, and listening without sufficient skepticism to an earnest African student telling me how one-party rule was the only way to deal with tribalism in a country like Zimbabwe. Well, at least Zimbabwe now has two major parties, a brutally persecuted opposition party and a ruling party of thugs. Is that progress?