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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.