Tuesday, December 22, 2009

ARE REPORTS OF THE DECLINE OF U.S. GLOBAL POWER EXAGGARATED?

‘More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades-a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, markets open, billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress, and advancing frontiers of human liberty’ President Obama, in a recent speech ,reflected on the US’s role in the world in the past half century.
But is the United States’ global power, influence and leadership on the decline? Persistent voices from strategic think tanks around the world and from within the United States it self suggest that there is an emerging consensus that US global leadership and its global hegemony in general is severely under threat and slipping steadily.
British academic, Martin Jacques has authored a new book with a telling title When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order he estimates that over the next half-century, China will emerge as the world’s leading power and that there is a shift of power from the west to the East. Analysts project that by 2025, Asia will be home to three of the five largest economies in the world.
In another thoughtful piece, Japanese analyst Hitoshi Tanaka, author of The Crisis of Global Governance and the Rise of East Asia argues that US leadership of the world has slipped for reasons that include the disastrous foreign policy of former US president George W. Bush, including the costly invasion of Iraq, the continuing costly war in Afghanistan in military and economic terms which Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria estimates will cost $ 2 Trillion by the end 2011, have taken their toll. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the cost of the US debacle in Iraq at $ 3 trillion.
One would add that the current global financial crisis and the declining US economy have not helped matters either and exposed the vulnerability of the US economy which has reportedly shrank – the engine of US geopolitical capability and prestige.
‘The US’s net external debt climbed by more than $1.3 trillion in 2008 alone and is expected to reach almost $ 3.5 trillion by the end of this year. ..Unless the U.S. quickly achieves and maintains a sustainable economic position, its ability to pursue autonomous economic and foreign policies will become increasingly compromised’ notes Fred Bergsten in Foreign Policy.
The US has borrowed excessively from China to finance President Obama’s stimulus measures to shore up the US economy which is showing faint signs of revival.
TIME magazine reports that the US owes China $ 763.5 billion in US Treasury department debt.
Signaling an emerging new world order, China has publicly called for the replacement of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency owing to perceptions of a long-term weakening US economy. China has threatened to introduce a new global reserve currency called’ the renminbi’ to replace the US dollar. China’s increasing importance is exemplified in its influence in the current global financial crisis. it is viewed as the ’primary driver of global economic growth’. Indeed recently reported economic growth in China was interpreted as a more optimistic outlook for the rest of the world economy.
According to Newsweek China is slated to surpass Japan this year as the second largest economy in the world.
The rise of China, analysts suggest, has altered the world order and will see the declining influence of the Group of 8 countries (G8) of US, UK, Canada, France Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia and in their place the G2, China and US. President Obama has said that Washington and Beijing will shape the 21st Century.

In regard to the U.S. and China, Daniel Drezner talks of the former and later respectively as ‘a declining hegemony with the willingness but not the capability to act as the global leader, combined with a rising power with the capability but not the willingness to act as a global leader’.
I would add that the rise of Arab states such as United Arab Emirates and Qatar with their burgeoning financial muscle from oil wealth and astute economic policy have added another dimension to the global balance of power scene. Arab financiers have bought a handful of English Premiership football clubs such as Manchester City and Portsmouth. It was reported that an Arab consortium bought a 25% stake in Germany’s Mercedes Benz group. In Uganda, telecom giants Zain and Warid are testimony to the growing financial influence of the orient in world business.
So, is US power really on the decline? Mark Twain, a writer, was prematurely announced dead and on reading his obituary remarked thus ’The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated’.

Monday, November 30, 2009

The Dream of One East Africa is a Distant one

The East African common market was signed in Arusha,Tanzania a few days ago but as I noted during my travels through East Africa recently the road to one East Africa is still a long one.
The East African community doesn’t apply here, the immigration official at this Northern Tanzanian airport barked out at my attempt to seek a more East African reception with my Ugandan passport as I processed my entry into Tanzania recently. My illusion of a concretising vision of one East Africa was swiftly and rudely dashed. I decided to take a road trip back from Arusha to Kampala on return to see for myself how the dream of one East Africa is shaping up and was instead greeted with four immigration desks within Kenya and Tanzania. Waiting at any of these desks doesn’t make you feel any less foreign than say, the Australian standing next in line. The sense you get travelling in East Africa particularly in Kenya and Tanzania is that ordinary citizens in these countries don’t share the passion of their national leaders or at least their rhetoric when it comes to integrating into one East Africa.Even the strategic importance of one East Africa and that this drive for one East Africa is largely a top down vision which hasn’t yet found popular acceptance among your regular East African. Mobilising popular support among the citizenry of the member countries will be critical to any integration efforts. It should not be taken for granted that East Africans are for one East Africa. The current leaders are transitory and for this vision to be sustainable it has to take root within the populations of the member countries. The East African, in its latest issue, reports that Uganda manufacturers are making efforts to stall the East African common market for as long as they can because they loath the ‘blue band’ effect or the avalanche of Kenyan products in their domestic markets once the East African common market comes into effect. Tanzania has already put road blocks on the proposal for an East African common market. The future is in integration because small states are not viable and can no longer compete in an integrating world with countries the size of India and China which is why the Europeans are pushing for the highest possible union among themselves amidst these global blocks. I often find it ridiculous that a country the size of Uganda will compete on the same terms with countries such as the United States or China at the Olympics, the World Cup and yes, at the World Trade Organisation or at the United Nations given their clearly superior resource pool, economic, human and otherwise. That a country with the clout of Germany or France will seek strength in the wider European Union only tells you that countries like Uganda or Kenya need the East African community because on their own they can’t compete favourably. The current African political boundaries were established as a colonial convenience during the scramble and partition of Africa and countries such as Rwanda and Burundi were carved out as tokens to Belgium and in the case of DR Congo, as personal property of Belgian King Leopold. Most current African states have small markets that can’t support their home industries.Travelling in East Africa also illuminates the infrastructural impediments that stand in the way of the realisation of the full potential of integration. Only a leadership failure to grasp the strategic questions confronting their countries would explain why the road from the border town of Namanga in northern Tanzania to the now regional town of Arusha is not tarmacked. This road is clearly a lifeline for north-eastern Tanzania. For starters, Nairobi, in geographic proximity terms, is nearer Arusha than Dar-es-Salaam. On the way to Arusha, you meet several petroleum and other goods' trailers from Nairobi pointing to the economic importance of this route but you will be surprised that this route is not tarmacked. Paradoxically, it is easier to call Britain from our countries than say Burundi. In the words of Martin Luther King, ‘I have a dream’ that one day East Africans will walk the same road as fellow countrymen and realise that their destiny is one and the same.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Michael Jackson's 'This is it'-A Review

Even the high end on-line movie reviewer Rottentomoes.com didn’t have an advance review. I had heard that the movie was coming out and that AEG the guys who had hired Michael Jackson for the mind-boggling 50 shows in London had sold their rights to SONY pictures. My first instinct was that Sony wanted to make a buck on the back of the global outpouring of emotion that followed Michael Jackson’s untimely death.
I always trust Rottentomatoes whenever I need a quick opinion on a new movie. They even award percentage scores and declare a movie fresh or otherwise depending on the verdict of their several seasoned reviewers.
But not even Rottentomatoes had prior knowledge of ‘This Is It’.
I then decided I had to check it out –this ’musidocumentary’.
Even in Kampala where you hardly find a full capacity movie theater on a day like monday it was full house.’This Is It’ has been declared a two-week release since 27th October and there will not be the traditional prolonged play at theatres.
And there he was, doing his thing like only he could. Vintage Michael Jackson in a series of rehearsals at the Staples centre in Los Angeles under the master direction of Kenny Ortega with whom they worked back in the day.
‘This is It’ is no movie or even autobiography. It is simply a testament of Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for the sold-out scheduled July 2009 London shows just a few days before his tragic death. It offers a uniquely intimate portrait of Michael Jackson. A portrait we have not seen anywhere before. Besides being an exceptionally gifted performer- the ‘king of pop’, a perfectionist who is never satistified with a perfomance he turns in,we see that Michael was also a creative genius and he is very much part of the creative drive behind the shows.
We see Michael Jackson keep up with dancers half his age with incredible physical stamina for a 50 year old man. His vocal ability is clearly not what it used to be at his peak but he still recalls all the lines to his greatest hits.
This is supposed to be a rehearsal but he gets carried away on a couple of occasions when he gets lost into the music and he is in his element.
‘This is It’ is clearly a film made for the true Michael Jackson fan. Its a parting gift from a master showman. There will never be another Michael Jackson.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Have NGOs replaced the State in African Health Care Provisioning?

At the time of independence, many African countries aspired to provide western-style welfare state social provisions by providing free medical care and free university education and other social services to their citizens.
The prevailing political currents of socialist ideology around the globe in the 1960s occasioned by the cold war brought to birth the idea of ‘African socialism’ which in its crudest forms emphasized the sense of ‘African community’ and therefore the concept that ‘everybody’s welfare was everybody’s business’. In East Africa, Ugandan Prime Minister Milton Obote unveiled the ‘common man’s charter’ a socialist manifesto for newly independent Uganda. In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere gave credence to ‘ujaama’ villages or communal villages that provided an all embracing community.
Social services were freely provided and medical services at government hospitals were free as were other social provisions.
However in the early 1980s the idea of an ‘African’ welfare state came under serious threat as being unsustainable owing to failing economies under hardship due to falling international prices of the cash crops on which many African countries depended coupled with chronic political turmoil and ethnic tensions ubiquitous in post independence Africa.
African countries, and Uganda in particular, sought budget deficit financing from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Breton Woods institutions prescribed the hugely unpopular Structural Adjustment programmes (SAPs) that called for radically reduced social spending in the social sectors of health and education by the introduction of ‘user fees’ and ‘cost sharing’ in social service provision as well as the full-scale marketization of social provisioning.
The introduction of market liberalization reforms, including privatization of the social sector, has turned citizens into client-consumers rather than social provision beneficiaries with millions falling through the cracks.
The prolonged diminished fiscal ability of the Ugandan state to provide social welfare has seen an increasing importance of non -governmental agency providers of health care. In sectors such as HIV/AIDS health care and treatment in Uganda, non governmental and civil societal organizations dominate. Hence the failure of the state and the market in Uganda has seen the emergence of new service providers and the expansion of space for alternate players. The central question would therefore be that has the ‘pluralism’ of social welfare providers in Uganda called into question the need for a paradigm shift to a tri-model of state, market and civil society?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Deng Xiaoping And The Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls The Critical Years: A Book Review.




Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution is an autobiographical book about the trials and tribulations of Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping during the ten-year disastrously tragic ‘cultural revolution’ in Mao Tse Tung’s 1970’s China. Deng Rong, Deng’s daughter, provides an exceptionally intimate first-hand account of China’s ‘reign of terror’ under Chairman Mao Tse Tung. In many ways it comes off as a therapeutic book Deng Xiaoping himself would have ordered to recount his pain and humiliation but also to defend and protect his place in the communist party and China’s history as a whole.
On a human interest level, it is simply the story of an extra ordinary man who weathered political storm after storm. He was twice ‘over thrown’ and stripped of all his elite positions and status in the Chinese government under Mao’s orders and evicted out of his official residences. After being ‘overthrown’ he worked for many years as an ordinary fitter in a tractor factory hundreds of miles away from the capital Beijing and the second time he lived under virtual house arrest after his second ‘overthrow’. Each time he fell, he got back on his feet much like the proverbial cat with ‘nine lives’. Deng Xiaoping had an incredibly indomitable spirit and even in his darkest day waited patiently for the tide to turn.
Reading this book reminded me of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom another tale of an extraordinary life and a man who defied adversity and rose to the highest office of his land, just like Deng Xiaoping in China.
Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader of China after Mao Tse Tung’s death in 1976 , having previously served as Vice Premier of China. With his experience in China’s war of liberation and steady rise in the China’s communist party, he was widely viewed as the successor to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who died of cancer in 1976, leaving a gaping leadership gap at the highest level. Some even viewed him as a possible successor to Mao Tse Tung himself who in his 80’s was ailing and nearing his end as China’s paramount leader.
But there was one problem. Deng Xiaoping, who for a time lived in France in a ‘work-study’ arrangement, was not ideologically aligned to Mao’s extreme Marxist line of ‘class struggle’ and ‘dialectic materialism’. Although a member of China’s communist party of long standing, a hero of the China’s war of independence and an experienced administrator, many of the extremists in his party viewed him as a closet capitalist or to use their own term ‘a capitalist in-roader’.
In all fairness, Deng Xiaoping‘s ideological leanings were not strictly Marxist and asking what he was doing in a communist party is a decent question. He seemed more concerned with the pragmatic questions of state such as reviving the Chinese economy after the dysfunction occasioned by the cultural revolution, alleviating poverty in the country side, revitalizing industrial production, modernizing China etc. He once said he didn’t care whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice.Mao in fact had anointed the younger Lin Biao as his successor who in his estimation was closest to him in ideology and would preserve his beloved cultural revolution.
Mao installed Hua Guafeng as his successor whom Deng out manouvered after Mao's death and started China on its socialist market economy. In many respects, Deng Xiaopeng is the father of modern China. The China that is set to overtake Japan this year as the world's second largest economy.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

The New Global World Order: The Emergence of China and the Decline of U.S.Power

Is United States’ global power, influence and leadership on the decline? Voices from Strategic think tanks around the world and from within the United States itself suggest that there is an emerging consensus that US leadership of the west and its global hegemony in general is severely under threat and slipping steadily.
British academic, Martin Jacques has authored a new book with a telling title 'When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order' he estimates that over the next half-century, China will emerge as the world’s leading s power and that there is a shift of power from the west to the East.
In another thoughtful piece, Japanese analyst Hitoshi Tanaka, author of The Crisis of Global Governance and the Rise of East Asia argues that US leadership of the world has slipped for two reasons. The disastrous foreign policy of former US president George W Bush ,including the costly invasion of Iraq, without United Nations Security Council approval and a continuing costly war in Afghanistan in military and economic terms. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the cost of the US debacle in Iraq at $ 3 trillion.
The failure by the US to exercise global environmental leadership on the Kyoto protocol has irked many of the US’s own allies including Japan and the United Kingdom.
One would add that the current global financial crisis and the declining US economy have not helped matters either and exposed the vulnerability of US economy which has reportedly shrank - a major cornerstone of US geopolitical capability and prestige. The US has borrowed excessively from China to finance President Obama’s stimulus measures to shore up the US economy.
TIME magazine reports that the US owes China $ 763.5 billion in US Treasury department debt.
Signaling an emerging new world order, China has publicly called for a replacement of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency owing to perceptions of a long-term weakening US economy. China has threatened to introduce a new global reserve currency called’ the renminbi’ to replace the US dollar. China’s increasing importance is exemplified in its influence in the current global financial crisis., it is viewed as the ’primary driver of global economic growth’. Indeed recently reported economic growth in China was interpreted as a more optimistic outlook for the rest of the world economy.
According to Newsweek China is slated to surpass Japan this year as the second largest economy in the world with India not far behind.
The rise of China, analysts suggest, has altered the world order and will see the declining influence of the Group of 8 countries (G8) of US, UK, Canada, France Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia and in their place the G2, China and US. President Obama has said that Washington and Beijing will shape the 21st Century.
‘At the time of its formation in 1976,the G7 members accounted for 64% of global GDP, that number has now fallen to 56%. Meanwhile the economies of the so called G5 nations-Brazil, China ,India Mexico and South Africa have expanded and now account for approximately 12.7 % of global GDP. A figure that will continue to rise in the coming years’ writes Hitoshi Tanaka.

In regard to US and China, Daniel Drezner talks of the former and later respectively as ‘a declining hegemon with the willingness but not the capability to act as the global leader, combined with a rising power with the capability but not the willingness to act as a global leader’.
I would add that the rise of Arab states such as United Arab Emirates and Qatar with their burgeoning financial muscle from oil wealth have added another dimension to the global balance of power scene. Arab financiers have bought a handful of English Premiership football clubs such as Manchester City and Portsmouth. It was reported that an Arab consortium bought a stake in Germany’s Mercedes Benz group. In Uganda, telecom giants Zain and Warid are testimony to the growing financial influence of the orient in world business.

So, is US power really on the decline? The death of giants is often prematurely called.
Mark Twain was prematurely announced dead and remarked thus 'The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated’.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Why Capitalism Truimphs in Asia and Fails in Africa

President Obama speaking in Ghana on his recently concluded Africa trip re -echoed a question that has puzzled economists and other social scientists. Why has South Korea which had about the same Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as Uganda at independence in 1962 gone on to become a global industrial power house while Uganda wallows at the bottom list of the league of nations ?
In fact Kenya’s GDP was even higher than that of South Korea at independence in 1963 but South Korea’s GDP today stands at--- compared to Kenya’s,,,,
In 1959 Singapore ‘s per capita income was $ 400 compared to today’s $ 22,000.
At the time of African independence many of the countries in Anglophone Africa were regarded as better prospects than the South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore of the 1960s.
Sixty years on, the African countries have not only become poorer than they were in the 1960s’ but trail their East Asian counter parts on just about any major development indicator ever formulated.
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime minister, writing in his memoirs From Third World to First recounts how, over three decades, Singapore was built virtually from scratch in the 1960s, with no army, parliament and other basics of a state to speak of.
In contrast, at the time, Uganda was a functional state with most of the apparatus of statecraft.
Lee Kuan Yew through astute leadership and indomitable will went on to build a state that today boasts a per capital income that rivals several members of the current European Union. This he did through encouraging entrepreneurship and economic freedom
In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad between 1988 and 1997 transformed Malaysia into a manufacturing, financial and telecommunications hub. Malaysia started producing cheap appliances for western markets and providing home to the plants of major Japanese giants such as Sony and Panasonic owing to relatively cheap Malaysian labour.
China as recently as 1972 was a struggling state reeling from the disastrous ‘cultural revolution’ of Chairman Mao Tse Tung who pursued a radically communist agenda imprisoning and purging his party of any real or imagined ‘capitalists’ that bred untold poverty and dysfunction in a sleeping giant. Subsequent Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, strategically realizing that communism would not transform China made a u- turn and started China on the road to export-led industrialization dubbing it’ capitalism with communist characteristics’.
China, among other strategies, adopted a policy of population control and invested heavily in education especially in maths and science. It’s no wonder that Chinese and Indian students dominate natural science doctoral programmes in the United States.
Crucially, Asia ‘s example suggests that the state can be a major player and driver of growth and in Singapore, Taiwan and China, the state took the centre stage in driving national growth. It may not be widely known that the Chinese firms constructing stadiums and high rises from Luanda to Kinshasa are actually Chinese state-owned companies.
Tragically, in the place of the transformative leaders Asia has had, in Africa we have had ‘big men’. Although Asia’s success stories also suggest that a ‘benevolent’ dictatorship especially geared towards economic transformation is not entirely unwelcome considering that Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Deng Xiaoping of China, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia ,Suharto of Indonesia were not the most illustrious students of democracy but provided the leadership that turned the tide in their respective countries. Apologists for President Paul Kagame of Rwanda tend to take this posture.
It has also been suggested that Asian cultural values such as Confucianism, honour and a hard work ethic are conducive for productivity and spur economic growth. David Landes’ in his insightful ’The Wealth and Poverty of Nations’ Underscores the relationship between culture and economic advancement
While Europeans love their holidays and shut down on Sundays, Asians have no such proclivities.
The Chinese have won many civil works contracts in Uganda and the rest of Africa partly because of cost economics. Chinese engineers are said to be cheaper than their Ugandan counterparts, for instance, and they deliver that building when they say they will.
Next time we shall see how Africa took a wrong turn and why Asia continued on the path to the Promised Land.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

The King of Pop is Gone too Soon.

I first learnt about Michael Jackson when I was about ten. It was the Uganda of the early 1980’s and it was Obote II’s Uganda. Michael Jackson was my first major interaction with American pop culture. As I recall, it was the Thriller album days. The VCR was making an entrance in some select Ugandan living rooms. Those were the days of break dance and it was cool to do some break dance with the kids back at school.
I remember watching the full-length ‘Thriller’ music video and Rambo’s ‘First Blood’ at Namilyango Junior School when I was in form four of boarding school. . I recall the Ethiopian famine of 1985 and the anthem that ‘We are the world’ became at the time.
Michael Jackson was a very fascinating and unique act, even more so for a young Ugandan boy who didn’t have much alternative pop acts to compare him with. Of course I now know that MJ was ‘it’ and there will never be another MJ. In the words of the Motown founder who first signed the Jackson 5 ‘Michael Jackson was the greatest entertainer that ever lived’.
I had a soft spot for MJ and he didn’t lose me as a fan even when it become clear that his private life was a totally different script from the Michael Jackson we saw on the screen belting out, Thriller, Bad, Earth song, Heal the world, you name it.
He was very much a part of my childhood and initiated me into American pop and that fascination with everything American. As I child, I longed to visit the land of MJ and that dream came to pass in 2001 at Dallas, Fort Worth.
When he was announced dead, I couldn’t help but feel that a part of my childhood had gone with him. As children we sang his hits, imitated his signature dance strokes. Wore his trademark white socks, hat and fantasized about his red jacket.
His Thriller, Off the Wall and Bad albums stand out for me and when I think of MJ, I remember his ground-breaking music videos especially the ‘BAD’ video which is forever burned in my brain. Who's bad?!
As a school kid I remember using oil paint to label my cap with the letters ‘BAD’.
Yes, there will never be another Michael Jackson. Even Usher and Justin Timberlake would agree.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Dambisa Moyo's 'Dead Aid': A Book Review

Dambisa Moyo’s new book Dead Aid has sent ripples across the globe, particularly for those in the billion- dollar aid industry for whom this provocative book ought to make required reading. Dambisa argues that development aid to Africa ‘is no longer part of the potential solution but, its part of the problem-in fact aid is the problem’.
Dambisa Moyo is a London-based Zambian economist with degrees from Harvard and Oxford Universities with stints at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs.
Dambisa shows that over a 60 year period , US$ 1 trillion in development aid has been sunk into African countries with nothing to show for it in the recipient countries. Dead Aid maintains that aid money goes down the drain of corruption and props up despotic African regimes which are more concerned about appeasing paying donors rather than the disenfranchised populations they lead. Dambisa argues that development aid leads to market distortions, perpetuates an aid dependency syndrome in Africa and that enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurship suffer as a result when all African leaders have to do is’ wait to bank cheques’. Dambisa’s argument that aid is counter- productive is hardly original and William Easterly in earlier, more illustrious endeavors, White Man’s Burden and The Elusive Quest for Growth and Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion make even more compelling cases.
Even World Bank staffers have penned books around the subject such as Phyllis Pomerantz’s Aid Effectiveness in Africa but Dambisa takes it a notch higher
’ The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster’
Even African heads of states such as Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Paul Kagame of Rwanda are publicly making the case that trade not aid is a better hope for lifting millions out of poverty and deprivation in Africa and the rest of developing world. Although trade is the new buzz word among African leaders clearly foreign aid is still needed and its critics will be the first to acknowledge this much. The point being made is that aid should be more effectively targeted and it should not be seen as the panacea for bringing countries out of chronic poverty.
Dambisa’s call for the end of foreign aid altogether, which she calls for in the next five years, sounds at best hugely radical. In the place of western aid, she calls for African countries to cultivate fiscal discipline by raising finance through international bonds or international commercial lenders which in the current climate of the global credit crunch is an proposal dead- on-arrival .
Foreign aid may not have worked in Africa but to dismiss it outright would be to belittle the value of the Marshall Plan or US aid to Europe after the Second World War which transformed Europe or the case of American support to South Korea which is an emerging global economic power house. Clearly the debate ought not to be whether aid can be helpful but rather how it can be made much more effective and much more smartly targeted than it has in the past.
Indeed more innovative approaches to giving aid are gaining currency at a micro level and western entrepreneurs interested in improving Africa’s lot are thinking up some creative approaches. Aid is no longer purely humanitarian but has a tinge of business interest. For example computer companies which want to make contributions to development causes increase sales through declaring that US$ 5 will go to African charity from every lap top sale rather than make outright donations.
A Uganda entrepreneur in Denmark through his initiative byc4.com creates a forum for European humanitarian capitalists to lend money to deserving Ugandan businesses with friendly interest loans.
The days of conditions-free money seem to be in the fog of the season’s end.In summing, Dead Aid ‘s diagnosis on aid merits attention, the prescriptions offered, less so. African poverty is a multi-faceted animal with structural, cultural, institutional, attitudinal and even historical

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Wangari Mathaai's Unbowed:A Pedestrian Book Review

I am reading a May 2009 copy of TIME magazine and Liberian President,Sirleaf Johnson, in her 'Ten Questions' TIME interview mentions Kenyan activist,Wangari Maathai as one of her role models. And she is in good company.The first elected female president in Africa also mentions Julius Nyerere(former Tanzanian president)and Nelson Mandela among her other role models.
When Wangari Maathai was awared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, many were taken by suprise. Many know Wangari as an environmental activist, the founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya which as has chapter around the globe.
Reading a copy of Unbowed, Wangari Maathai 's memoir convinces any doubter that she deserved the Nobel prize.
Wangari Mathaai was one of former Kenyan president- Arap Moi's solitary opponents. And this is a shocker given that we know Wangari mostly as a green- crusader.
In a country where there was only one official political party-KANU, Wangari and colleagues provided the only opposition that Kenya knew. Its a miracle that she survived death which many of her peers were not so lucky to survive. Her methods like those of Martin Luther King and Mahtama Gandhi were decidely non-violent.
The book though is a remarkable testimony to the birth of an environmental advocacy group operating in a tyranical state in Africa. It took enormous personal sacrifice and sheer guts to beat the odds in keeping the green belt movement's candle burning in Moi's Kenya. The police, the judiciary and even the academia in Kenya all at different times proved to be road blocks in the way of Wangari Mathaai. In fear of the Moi government, they frustrated the efforts of Wangari and her environmental cause as appeasement to the Moi regime which understood Wangari as a threat to the regime in Kenya even when all she did was just to get women to plant trees! Of course it was alot more complicated than that. Wangari was treated as an opponent for many reasons, including, her external support from the west and her clout among women in Kenya and also because of partriachial perceptions that as an 'african woman' she had claimed more than her fair share of public affairs and belonged to the domestic realm.
The books begins off beautifully with a nostalgic tale of life in rural kenya during British colonial rule through Wangari's teenage eyes and takes us on a journey to colonial Nakuru,Nairobi and then the United States back to Nairobi and then to Germany and then back to Nairobi again-the story of her incredibly remarkable life. Wangari' s tale is seemingly larger-than-life. Her stuborn, fearless and selfless will amidst trials and tribulations seems beyond mere mortals.
Unbowed is also a story of one woman's effort to save the environment in Kenya and an african woman's treatise on the perils of environmental mismanagement and in the words of Mahtama Gandhi, being the change that she wanted in her world.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Adieu Tajudeen Abdul Raheem

From Facebook, the news began trickling in. Tajudeen , that behomoth of Pan Africanism and African thought was no more. Tragic road accident in Nairobi,Kenya is all the news we could get.
I knew about Tajudeen in 1994 as a secondary school student. He was the Secretary General of the Global Pan African Movement secretariat, then with offices in Muyenga,Kampala suburb.
At the time,current Trade Minister Kahinda Otafiire was the Chair. Tajudeen served for many years at the secretariat.
He has been a regular columnist in 'The Monitor' and a weekly column at Pambazuka an on-line Pan African content provider. He was also Deputy Director of the UN ,Milenium Development goals-Africa chapter. The news of his passing was utterly devastating and completely shocking - yet another case of an illustrious life cut hot in its prime. Tajudeen was indeed one of Africa's premier public intellectuals. He commented with distinction on African politics and on local Ugandan politics.
The world, especially Africa, is a poorer place because of his passing. We have lost a powerful voice that feared not to say and see it the African way with inspiring optimism of the promise that is Africa despite the tragedy that falsely seems insurmountable. Adieu Tajudeen. You live on in your works and in the movement you have spawned.

Monday, May 4, 2009

THE AK-47 IS STILL KING IN AFRICA

Want to become president in Africa? Well, how about starting out as a guerilla leader first? A recent survey by The Economist magazine of 5,000 politicians in the International Who’s Who to determine why some professions are so well represented in politics and why different countries favour different professions for choice of their political leaders turns out some interesting findings. In Africa, the findings are perhaps not that surprising considering that several presidents in Africa started out as guerilla leaders. Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda , Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Blaise Campaore of Burkina Faso are all sitting heads of state who started out as guerilla chiefs. Jacob Zuma of South Africa is a fresh entrant to the club. Two decades ago, the rule rather than the exception in Africa was that you started out in the military or as a guerilla chief before becoming president. Think here of Samora Machel,Sam Nojuma ,Robert Mugabe,Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela, Muamar Gaddaffi etc.
In the west, the picture is starkly different. An amazing a third of all members of the German parliament are lawyers. We all know that a certain Barrack Obama, Clinton (Bill and Hillary) are all lawyers and so is current Vice President, Joe Biden. Obama’s inner circle is said to be filled with old boys from Harvard Law. And if that wont do it for you consider that over a half of the entire United States Senate is made up of lawyers.
In China, the current and previous presidents are engineers. Chinese President Hu Jintao is a hydraulic engineer. The immediate past president Jiang Zemin was a soviet-trained electrical engineer. The current Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao is a geological engineer and eight out of the nine-member elite Chinese politburo is made up of engineers.
In Britain, the selection bias is said to be more dynastic than professional and the political class network there is formed at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
The United States too is no stranger to political dynasties if you think of the Kennedy Clan or more recently, the Bush Clan. In France, the elite Ecole Nationale Administration or ENA has trained most of the ‘super-civil servants’ who run the French civil service- a favoured route to politics. Seven out of the last 11 prime ministers of France have been alumni of the ENA. Lawyers still dominate in France as well and nine out of the Nicholas Sarkozy’ s first cabinet of 16 was made up of lawyers who included the President, Finance Minister and Prime Minister. Businessmen are said to be the second most important players in politics in Europe represented by two-time Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi ,the proprietor of AC Milan foot ball club. Business men’s foray into politics is clearly out of self-interest.
The Economist ‘s survey further shows that certain professions dominate politics in some countries. It’s shown for example that in Egypt academics are favoured, in South Korea, civil servants and in Brazil its doctors.
Politics itself has emerged as a profession on its own with many of the politicians in Britain and the United States jumping straight from university to party politics without getting a ‘real job’ first. Here we can cite the examples of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron and to a certain extent, Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton.
Going back to a country’s preferences for political office based on profession, interesting explanations which range from history, culture and stage of development are offered. For instance it is suggested that that lawyers are favored for political office in western democracies because they are given to ‘marshaling evidence, appealing to juries, command of procedure’ and that engineers are favoured in China because they know ‘how to build physical structures and keep them intact’ a preoccupation of communist regimes. Former Russian President, Boris Yelstin was an engineer-turned politician.
In Africa, the guerilla leader has been the most favoured occupational pathway to the presidency owing to the historic struggles for independence but also because of the political economy of armed violence in Africa.
So, next time that little kid asks you what it takes to become president of a country in Africa you know what to say.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

THE G 20 ECONOMIC SUMMIT: THE UK AND US NEED TO TAKE THE BULL BY THE HORN

Press reports indicate that French President Nicholas Sarkozy has publicly expressed his displeasure at his British and American counterparts for stalling on a G20 joint accord to respond to the global recession. Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel are pressing for more stringent measures to clean up the financial and banking worlds in advanced economies particularly the push for regulation of the industry and a rethink to the financial stimulus measures that have gained currency especially under the Obama administration.
In one sense the rift is ideological. The US and Britain want to bail out the financial and Banking worlds without requiring a radical surgery or a more stringent approach such as statutory regulation and other checks and balances in the industry, what in the US would be the republican standpoint.
France and Germany prefer a more regulated industry, that is cautious and see the US and UK as preserving a system that smacks of reckless capitalism that has brought the world to the brink of financial catastrophe. Clearly the execesses in the US and British markets impact the rest of the world which is why Europe see these reforms in the financial and banking industry as critical to the health of the rest of the world economy. Thomas Friedman was more right that he imagined. The world truly is flat.
The US and British governments need to step up to the plate and make bold decisions( inspite of the political costs that come with it) if another financial down turn is to be avoided and industry regulation is clearly at the heart of any such measures.
The era of banking and financial industry execesses such as off- shore banking,tax havens, cooking books of account, lending carte-blanches is over.
The evidence suggests that more prudent banking and regulation of the financial services industry is the way foward and indeed the Franco-German approach saved the duo from more severe effects of thedownturn as compared to the US and the UK.
The UK and US owe to the rest of the world to 'get it right' this time and save the world from another recession years from now.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

The Global Financial Crisis: Is this the end of the Asian Tigers’ Model?

It was supposed to be a straight forward model. To get out of the poverty trap all countries needed to do was to set up industries and factories for producing cheaply priced goods for the American and European markets. That setting up industries would create jobs and jobs would come with high incomes and millions would be lifted out of poverty and deprivation.
On the basis of this export-led growth model, Japan’s Toyota and Nissan produced reliable but competitively priced vehicles, South Korea’s Hyundai and LG produced electronics and China ,’ the factory to the world’ produced all these goods and almost everything else . Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore and others soon joined to complete the ‘Asian Tigers’ club.
For decades the Asian Tigers recorded unprecedented economic growth rates and established themselves as world- class industrial production power houses and not even the 1997 Asian financial crisis could stop them. Many western companies couldn’t compete with Asia’s low production costs, especially low-wage labour and soon moved many of their production houses to Asia. Have you noticed that it seems all computers are now manufactured in China?
Then came the global financial crisis or the credit crunch which unraveled in 2008.Suddenly
consumer spending in America and Europe drastically reduced, heralding the ’ end of free-wheeling consumption fueled by easy credit and the wealth effect of ever rising asset values’. As the economic slump deepens, export demand from the west can no longer sustain Asian industry. Tens of thousands of thousands of factories are closing down and millions have become newly unemployed.
According to a recent issue of TIME magazine, it is estimated that last year, 60,000 enterprises were shut down in China’s Guandong province alone, as export orders and credit dried up. In India, the organization for Indian Exporters warned that 10 million Indian workers were set to lose their jobs as a result of the slump in export demand.

Ajay Chhibber, the director of the Asia bureau at the United Nations Development programme says’ in a medium and long term sense the export-led growth model is coming under stress’.
The export-led growth model adopted by Asian leaders, including China ‘s Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and India’s Manmohan Singh in 1991 was responsible for lifting millions in Asia out of poverty as farmer workers become factory workers and their incomes skyrocketed overnight.
According to the World Bank, In 1981, nearly 80% of East Asians lived on less than$1.25 a day and by 2005 only 18% did In a comparable period, Sub Saharan Africa’s poverty levels have remained at 50% between 1981 and 2005 owing to our inability to hop on the globalization train by producing cheap toys, textiles, TVs that the west demands.
Critics of the export-led growth model point out the exclusion of the rural population who are left out in the mainly urban-based industrial jobs. For example despite India being touted as an emerging economy still has 70% of its population as being regarded as rural and poor. The number of poor Indians increased from 436 million in 1990 to 456 million in 2005. The majority have been largely left behind by the production-for-export sector that is majorly based in urban centres such as Mumbai. It is therefore clear that the export-led growth model on its own is not sufficient to lift entire populations out of poverty if it’s not accompanied by other initiatives such as land reform and investments education, roads and other infrastructure.
Dependence on western export markets and the global financial crisis has brought into focus the need to nurture domestic markets. The Chinese premier speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this year has conceded this much and clearly China’s huge domestic market should be tapped as an alternative market.

In the words of Charles Dickens, these are ’ hard times’ for the export-led growth model but clearly there don’t seem to be many tested models for lifting millions out of poverty.

Monday, February 9, 2009

CAN UGANDA ESCAPE THE 'CURSE OF OIL'?

‘A growing body of evidence suggests that oil, far from being a blessing to African countries is a curse. Without exception, every developing country where oil has been discovered has seen its standard of living decline and its people suffer, while its less endowed neighbors have gone on to relative prosperity’ writes John Ghazvinian author of Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil. The example of Nigeria is instructive on its own here. Nigeria, the world’s seventh largest oil producer is ranked among the twenty poorest countries of the world, with 57 percent of the population living on less than a dollar a day according to the World Bank .
Many African countries have recently discovered oil among them, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Sudan and until recently, Ghana and our very own Uganda.
The American charity, Catholic Relief Services projects that$ 200 billion in oil revenue will flow into the coffers of African governments over the next decade. This can only be good news, right?
Paul Collier in the 2007 bestseller, The Bottom Billion: Why the World’s Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About it goes one better and provides economic evidence that shows that oil or broadly natural resources discoveries in poor countries actually retard economic growth or create distortions in fragile economies. And this is no arm-chair treatise. He illustrates with hard-nosed evidence how natural resources are a ‘trap’ for developing countries citing examples such as Nigeria, Gabon and Angola. Economists refer to this sudden inflow of petroleum dollars in economies as the ‘Dutch disease’ or ‘ the paradox of plenty’.
According to John Ghazvinian , only about 5 percent of the billions of dollars invested in African petroleum projects every year are actually spent in Africa.
Because most oil production is capital intensive and relies heavily on ultra modern extraction technology, only limited highly skilled openings are available and these often go to foreign nationals The paradox is that oil exploration in Africa creates far more jobs for western nationals who have the requisite skills than it does for locals.

In Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil it is shown that the oil boom in Nigeria had a negative effect on agricultural production.’ From 1970 to 1982, production of cocoa fell 43 percent, that of rubber 29 percent and ground nuts 64 percent. The percentage of Nigerians living in poverty went from 28 percent in 1980 to 66 percent in 1996.Average annual income, which in 1980 was$ 800 per person, today stands at a mere $300’.
Several studies suggest that oil booms in developing economies result in a decline in national tax revenues. That because of the sudden inflow of foreign exchange accruing from oil revenues, the incentive to generate national tax revenue diminishes. ’Between 1970 and 1993, countries without oil saw their economies grow four times faster than those of countries with oil’.
Let us lose the economic theory and bring this a little closer to home. Picture this. Uganda has started exporting oil to the international market. The proceeds from the oil will not come in Ugandan shillings but in US dollars or euros. Suddenly, the country is awash with foreign exchange. The result is that the value of the Uganda shilling artificially inflates. The effect is that imported products become cheaper and consequently, a huge national appetite for imported goods like Hummers and Plasma screens grows. Meanwhile Ugandan coffee or iron sheets from Roofings become expensive for Rwanda and Congo because of the appreciating Ugandan shilling. The local agricultural and manufacturing sectors take a hit. But the government is not too bothered about the decline in tax revenue after all there are petrodollars It doesn’t stop there. Local food production is no longer commercially viable due to reduced export demand. Agricultural farm lands are abandoned as everyone rushes to the cities to get a piece of the oil boom. As a result there is less domestic food production and urban dwellers such as those in Kampala take to imported food stuffs. This is not an imaginary story. This is the story of Gabon, a veteran oil exporter in Africa which now imports 80 percent of its food from Cameroon.
Celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs’ Oil Revenue Management Plan’ for the management of Sao Tome’s future oil wealth that includes the establishment of a permanent fund dedicated to development projects and poverty reduction and a Norwegian-style fund for future generations should be endearing.
So, next time you hear that Uganda’s discovery of oil in Hoima and Amuru districts can only be a good thing. Think again.

Friday, January 9, 2009

THE BOTTOM BILLION: A Pedestrian Book Review

A few days before christmas a friend from Boston,MA brought a book along which he thought I would like.And Like it I did. In fact very much. Paul Collier's 'The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Falling and What Can be Done About it' turned out to be an immensly cheerful and worthy companion during the holidays and it was for good reason.
Collier's 'Bottom Billion' has been described by 'The Economist' as 'set to become a classic' and its no idle praise. It's praise that is well earned. Reading Collier's book reminded me of Jeff Sachs''The End of Poverty' and William Easterly's 'The Elusive Quest for Growth' and'The White Man's Burden' it fits in well with them-dutiful efforts by eminent economists to diagonise the causes of African's economic malaise and the road map out of it.
Paul Collier should know. He was head of development research at the World Bank.He has worked ex-chief economist at the World Bank,Joseph Stiglizt-a Nobel Prize economist.
Collier is economics professor at Oxford university and head of their centre of the study on African economies.
'Bottom-Billion' breaks new ground in understanding African economies by introducing a new paradigm with in which to understand the roots of Africa's worsening poverty. Collier talks about 'traps' which bind Africa to the ground. The traps include the usual suspects, conflict,natural rseources(especially oil), being land locked and 'bad' governance. The 'traps' are not especially new in development economics but Collier has moved scholarship further by adducing enormous quantitative evidence to show their influence on African economies.
Collier's book is backed up by years of development research in Africa which he has done with coloborations with several other researchers and clearly his book is no arm-chair treatise but a work generated out of over twenty years of economic research on African economies. Some of the work is plain fresh, never having been presented before in the way he does in the book.His work on the economic significance of coups,military and civil conflicts is especially endearing coming as it is from an economist. He also lends to his work some political science methods and research in a way that is unprecedented marrying ecomomics and political science in the quest
for answers to African economic dysfunction.
The book is full of invaluable findings that are instructive. For example his research shows that countries that have been in the pits(economically speaking) take 59 years to turn the corner!
Collier brings to the fore, the dimension of international trade and its relation to African poverty suggesting that opening western markets to African goods and services can be a life line for the 'bottom billion'.
'Bottom Billion' pushes the frontiers of mainstream development economics and goes beyond the body of knowledge we have become accustomed to explain what afflicts Africa beyond the tools of traditional economics.
His book is really one on Africa and it is clear he has been to many African capitals and is aware of the inner workings in contemporary African state craft as well as having a slew of contacts from Nairobi to Abuja.
The title is a little misleading because his attention is especially focussed on Africa and not the wider developing world as the title may suggest. His last chapter' The struggle for the bottom billion' which is a call to arms to rescue African economies doesnt keep up with the high tempo that starts of with the earlier chapter and seems some what of an anti climax.
The prose has a poppy feel.Its very accessible to the lay reader and it is easy to follow without the arrogant diction of scholarship or the' linguistic sophistication' you will find in many other works of development economics. The book doesnt take itself too seriously and there are many light hearted moments and occassionally his diction induces hearty laughter(uncommon for an economists) although in this he reminds me of Robert Guest's'The Shackled Continent' or even William Easterly's 'The Elusive Quest for Growth'. Yes, even with all the tragic and desparate poverty in Africa it is possible to squeeze out a laugh.And they come plenty in 'Bottom Billion'.