Think Africa Press

All African Issues

Search
Menu
Search

Latest stories

  • in Kenya

    Secrecy Savannah: Is Kenya being Shaped into Africa’s Flagship Tax Haven?

    102 Views

    $21-32 trillion has been siphoned off into tax havens, and now there is evidence to suggest the City of London is trying to make Kenya the world’s next tax avoidance hub.

    By Martin Kirk, Blessol Gathoni

    The skyline of Nairobi. Photograph by Dan Kori.

    If anyone doubted the sheer scale of corporate power and the importance of tax havens to it, they had the unedifying spectacle of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to enlighten them last month. In already infamous evidence to a US Senate Committee, Cook demonstrated that the international tax system is broken and big corporations are the last people to fix it. He said outright that he won’t consider repatriating the staggering $100 billion they have hoarded offshore if it means paying standard US corporation tax.

    This is just businesses doing what businesses do. Apple are not going to voluntarily take on extra costs, regardless of moral argument, when they do not have to and their competitors are not. The problem is structural, not individual. This is why, if the tax-avoiding instincts of companies like Apple – along with Glencore, Google, Starbucks, and in fact most large multinationals – are to be neutralised, the only thing to do is tackle the system of tax havens that makes every individual example of avoidance possible.

    The imperative is overwhelming. Tax havens exist for one purpose only: to provide a way for the rich to get around the taxes that pay for the infrastructure and services on which we – and they – rely. Tax havens have become, over the last 30 years, a key driver of vast inequalities around the world. The system has grown so big that it is now an arterial drain on public budgets everywhere. According to James Henry, ex-Chief Economist of McKinsey, somewhere between $21 and 32 trillion has been siphoned away from the mainstream economy through these means.

    Kenya: a future tax secrecy savannah?

    The global tax haven system is a network with many parts, and the more parts, the more extensive and powerful the network. 30 years ago, there were a handful of relatively small tax havens, serving a small elite. Today, there are more than 80, and they are a parasite on the mainstream, public economy.

    There is now mounting evidence that elite financial interests are planning to create a new tax haven – to add another node to the global spider web. This time it is on the African continent, which already gives far more to than it receives from the world economy. According to a recent report from the African Development Bank and Global Financial Integrity, Africa has already lost in the region of $1.4 trillion in illicit financial flows between 1980 and 2009. If successful, this hub will be a key mechanism to extract even more wealth from some of the world’s poorest countries.

    Until now, there hasn’t been a major tax haven in mainland Africa. Attempts have been made in the past to create one – always at the behest of huge, Western financial institutions, be that Barclays’ efforts in Ghana or the bungled attempts in Botswana – but we may now be looking at the most serious attempt to date. Kenya, it seems, may be in the sights of the tax haven capital of the world: The City of London.

    This time, the Corporation of the City of London is trying to expand its shadow economy into Kenya. The City of London and its ‘independent’ lobbying arm, CityUK, have been conducting high-level negotiations to help the country develop as an ‘International Financial Centre’.

    This may sound like a benign and even worthwhile activity. Kenya, after all, must develop, and being an International Financial Centre sounds like a good way of going about it. But what does being an “International Financial Centre” actually mean?

    When speaking to business insiders, the Kenyan authorities are clear. Alex Owino, a project manager at Kenya’s Finance Ministry, told a meeting in the City of London in 2011 that they plan for Nairobi to become a regional ‘offshore’ financial services hub, modelled on Ireland.

    Nick Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, has no doubts. “Make no mistake. This is a tax haven they want to set up. International Financial Centre is a euphemism”, he says. Commenting on their inspiration, he continues, “Ireland is a swamp of regulatory laxity, which is how they have attracted so much money. This is the business model of a tax haven: secrecy, financial regulatory laxity, tax loopholes. What is Kenya’s offering going to be?”

    The City of London’s long arms

    Being the midwife of new tax havens is increasingly a feature of the City of London’s offering to the world.

    For a start, there is the public record of what the City of London Corporation and CityUK do as a matter of course. They regularly lobby at high levels around the world for financial liberalisation, including promoting low tax zones. They do this as part of their objectives to promote UK financial services, presumably because UK financial services benefit from more low and no tax zones by virtue of their role as “the world’s biggest financial centre”. In other words, financial liberalisation and tax havens are good for the UK’s finance-driven businesses.

    Then there’s what insiders have said about the intent of the bankers in the City of London. In evidence to a British Parliamentary inquiry earlier this year, two very senior former bankers said this:

    Witness 2: The UK does not have [withholding tax]. Hence it is mainly arbitrage on other people’s tax systems. I am not saying that this is a good thing, I am just saying it is not in the UK. [emphasis added]

    Witness 1: That’s an important point. What you are seeing, and what is left is, exporting the avoidance. They may be sitting in London, but they are exploiting other countries’ tax regimes. From the UK’s point of view, you might see that things have gone fairly quiet. Whether or not that will be the case, the key is that while these people are very creative, and the good tax structures are still there, the business always has the capability to come back. [emphasis added]

    They gave their testimony anonymously, for reasons we can surely guess, but we do know that Witness 1 is a former employee in Structured Capital Markets at Barclays, and Witness 2 was Head of Debt Structuring Group at “Bank A”.

    And finally there’s the high level attention the City of London has been paying Kenya recently. Successive Lord Mayors of London – the Lobbyists in Chief of the City’s financial interests – have been in and out of the country rather a lot. Despite Kenya being just one of 43 countries in one of 50 Market Advisory Groups run by the City, it has received personal visits from Lord Mayors in 2011, 2012, and 2013.

    This should be a source of intense embarrassment to UK Prime Minister David Cameron as he uses his G8 pulpit this month to present the rich world’s prescription for tackling tax evasion. Can people in the developing world have much faith in the man who not only presides over the tax haven capital of the world, but who goes to fight for the City of London on matters of taxation far more than he has ever challenged it?

    Some people in Kenya are alert to the dangers. Activist groups including ours, /The Rules, are running a campaign right now to try to stop the imposition of a staggering 16% tax increase on staple foods such as milk, maize and other basic necessities. They rightly object to high tax increases on the poorest while corporate tax exemptions and theft are costing the country $1.1 billion a year. They see this as a portentous step along the path to reorienting Kenya’s tax regime – a path they have good reason to believe is leading inexorably to Kenya becoming Africa’s flagship tax haven.

    If they’re right, even more power, and Kenya’s future prosperity, will rest in the hands of the global financial elite – the very same elite who caused the global financial crisis and have proven at every turn that their interests are at odds with those of the majority.

    Martin Kirk was reporting from New York, Blessol Gathani from Nairobi.

  • in Ivory Coast

    Remembering Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Father of the Ivory Coast’s (In)dependence

    286 Views

    Unlike many African independence leaders, Houphouët-Boigny’s vision was of forging a common fate with ex-colonial masters.
    By Stephen Smith.
    From left to right: Marie-Thérèse Houphouët-Boigny, Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, Paula Ben-Gurion, Israeli minster Golda Meir. Photograph taken in 1962 by Israeli Press Office.

    That the child is father of the man may be particularly true for Africa and its ‘fathers of independence’. This is the case not only because half a century after the continent’s accession to sovereignty, Africa still bears scars of its childhood diseases – the lack of institutional capacity, to name but one – but also because the ‘fathers’ didn’t actually sire independence. Rather, they were themselves the progeny of overbearing historical circumstances, and fairly predictable ‘midnight’s children’ to boot.

    Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere was keenly aware of his dependency on the masses who were pushing for the end of colonial rule. “Unless I can meet at least some of these aspirations, my head will roll just as surely as the tickbird follows the rhino”, he explained. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah summarised no less crudely the pressure exerted on him by his followers, commenting: “Unless I lead them where they want to go, I shall be killed”.

    There is one notable exception: Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Ivory Coast’s first president. Arguably, he led his people where he wanted them to go and, to the extent possible, steered his own course through history. However, though he made history, he did not make it into history, at least not as gloriously as Nkrumah, Nyerere, Sékou Touré or Patrice Lumumba. Houphouët-Boigny is generally overlooked, or else dismissed as ‘a lackey of the French’. Yet, best comparable perhaps to Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Houphouët-Boigny wrote his own ticket and delivered a powerful message that, 50 years later, might still nurture African realpolitik.

    Puncturing the dream of a “political kingdom” as the safe haven of sovereignty, or of Pan-Africanism as a panacea for the woes of the continent, he contended that “the dignity of one’s economic condition” was the touchstone of genuine independence.

    From Dia to Felix

    The child that was to become Félix Houphouët-Boigny was born as Dia Houphouët – officially on 18 October 1905 but more likely five years earlier – in Yamoussoukro, then a small Baoulé village 250 km north of Abidjan. At the age of five, when his uncle died, human sacrifices were celebrated to instate him as the new chief of his ethnic group, which belongs to the larger Akan family of both Ivory Coast and neighbouring Ghana.

    Perhaps as a result of this traumatic childhood experience, Houphouët embraced Catholicism in 1915 under the influence of a missionary at the French primary school he attended. He also swapped his tribal first name for a Christian one. In 1945, after his first electoral landslide – in the Abidjan city council elections – he added to his surname ‘Boigny’, meaning the leading ram or bellwether.

    Later, colonial administrator Marc Simon would say of Houphouët-Boigny, “he dissembled a steely resolve behind mild manners, his seemingly dreamy mind never parting ways with extreme realism”. This is something the French learned to their cost. Having channelled the young Baoulé chief through their educational system, they had to reign in an aspiring youngster who was challenging the colonial hierarchy. Appointed as an auxiliary medical doctor – the highest level accessible to “natives” – at Abidjan’s main hospital, Houphouët-Boigny undertook to organise the entire African medical personnel as a ‘fraternity’, a trade union in all but name. The French responded by transferring him to Guiglo, an outpost near the Liberian border.

    Relocated, but ever resilient and resourceful, the young doctor took advantage of his banishment to set up the first coffee plantation in the far west of Ivory Coast. In 1929, he was brought back into the fold, to Abengourou, 70 km northeast of Abidjan and, then, the centre of the country’s cocoa production.

    In the Ivory Coast, natives grew three times more cocoa than their colonial competitors but were paid a significantly lower price for their produce. In addition, the colonialists benefited from forced labour while natives depended on their families or had to hire day labourers from the market.

    Economic iniquity became Houphouët-Boigny’s cause. In 1934, he signed with a pseudonym a diatribe in a small anti-colonial newspaper in Dakar, Le Progrès colonial, with the headline “We’ve been robbed overmuch!”. Summoned to the Governor’s office, he readily admitted to the authorship of the article and, to his surprise, was embraced by the head of the colonial administration, which was at loggerheads with abusive French farmers.

    Subsequent governors, however, reacted quite differently. In 1939, Houphouët-Boigny was ‘indefinitely suspended’ from civil service. Police reports and the colonial press labelled him an “Anti-French troublemaker” or, a dig at his already considerable personal wealth, “a capitalist-anarchist”. But as soon as freedom of association was conceded in the colonies towards the end of the Second World War, Houphouët-Boigny founded the Syndicat agricole africain, an African agricultural trade union. Within weeks, 12,000 of the roughly 20,000 native farmers in Ivory Coast joined his organisation.

    Houphouët-Boigny, the bellwether

    Forced labour was the next target. Under geopolitical pressure to loosen its colonial grip, France – liberated from German occupation with the help of 250,000 African soldiers – allowed for full representation of colonial natives in its own Constituent Assembly. Against the local colonial establishment, Houphouët-Boigny was elected. In the spring of 1946, he tabled a bill, which was adopted without debate, abolishing forced labour in the colonies.

    Overnight, he and his Senegalese colleague Lamine Guèye, who had put his name to the law bestowing citizenship upon former colonial “subjects”, became immensely popular across francophone Africa. But with the onset of the Cold War, the old order in the colonies returned with a vengeance. Under the guise of fighting communism, the colonial establishment repressed any expression of dissent. In the Ivory Coast, protesters were shot by police. The blame for the unrest was put on “Mao Tsé Houphouët”, also called “the Stalinist billionaire”. In January 1950, an arrest warrant was issued against him, though no action followed for fear of riots in the colony.

    Houphouët-Boigny paid the price for a political ruse. While most African members of parliament had wanted to join the French Socialist Party as a bulk to bring to bear their full weight, he had advocated in favour of them subdividing and affiliating all three of France’s major political groups so as to parlay their leverage. As a result, he was obliged to side with the Communist Party (PCF), a grouping none of his colleagues had been willing to choose. “You’re more of a tsar, you haven’t got much to do with Lenin”, Lamine Guèye put to him. “True”, Houphouët-Boigny replied, “but I need a lot of soldiers”.

    After the war, the PCF was France’s most important party. But by the early 1950s, shifting coalitions were built against the Communists leading typically to short-lived governments and institutional instability. Houphouët-Boigny ended up on the sidelines of French politics, and altogether off-side geopolitically; still worse, in his home country, he laid himself open to accusations of being a ‘subversive’.

    Only in 1951 did Houphouët-Boigny succeed in jumping the Communist ship. After protracted behind-the-scenes negotiations, he joined a small political party of former resistance fighters, the USDR, which had become the fulcrum of incessant alliance-building to form new governments. For the decisive meeting with the then head of the executive, René Pleven, the Ivorian MP arrived aboard an American limousine, driven by a white chauffeur in impeccable livery. “All is still possible”, Houphouët-Boigny declared. “Contesting colonialists is not contesting France. Under the right conditions, i.e. equality, we can live together in perfect harmony.”

    Houphouët-Boigny had staunchly opposed colonial inequality. Now that he was convinced that France and its sub-Saharan colonies were en route for a common future, he coined the neologism la Françafrique and vowed to serve the cause of a “Franco-African community” with unsparing loyalty. Neither the Franco-British attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, nor the colonial war in Algeria and hijacking of a plane to arrest the leadership of the Algerian liberation movement altered his public support of the French authorities. He was paid back in kind: in 1957, he became the first African ever to reach full ministerial rank. At one point, he was France’s Minister of Health, pushing through parliament a reform of the medical system.

    In 1957, Houphouët-Boigny headed the French delegation sent to New York to attend the General Assembly of the United Nations. Much criticism was levelled against him. He replied: “What lessons could be given to me by states that are legally and nominally independent but incapable of improving the standard of living of their populations? We’re perfectly legitimate in saying that, for us, there is no secure future without France…As for the United States, what can they tell me worth while listening to while I see in Harlem bevies of resigned Blacks who’re separated from the rest of the population and dealt with as outcasts?” Houphouët-Boigny felt vindicated when his French chief of staff, Jacques Kosciusko-Morizet, caused a scandal by taking to the dance floor at the Waldorf Astoria with his minister’s wife, Marie-Thérèse Houphouët-Boigny, a famous Ivorian beauty.

    The wager

    From an African point of view, what Houphouët-Boigny stood for came to a head in his famous “wager” with Kwame Nkrumah. In April, 1957, Nkrumah visited his Ivorian neighbour, who only a month previously had declined to attend the ceremony in which the Black Star had replaced the Union Jack and Nkrumah had proclaimed his country “forever free”. During three days in Abidjan, the Ghanaian hailed the “political kingdom” – i.e. independence – as the sine qua non of Africa’s emancipation, freedom and prosperity. Wherever he appeared, he was frantically acclaimed.

    Houphouët-Boigny waited until the last day of Nkrumah’s visit to respond in public. His falsetto jarred with Nkrumah’s sonorous voice as much as the message he carried. “Your experience is rather impressive”, he declared. “But on account of the human relationship between the French and the Africans, and because in the 20th century people have become interdependent, we consider that it would perhaps be more interesting to try a new and different experience than yours, and unique in itself – one of a Franco-African community based on equality and fraternity.”

    This was to be called “the wager”, as Houphouët-Boigny went on to conclude: “So let us meet up again in ten years to see who among us has chosen the best approach for his people.”

    Ten years later, toppled by a coup d’état, Nkrumah was living in exile in Guinea, the state run by his francophone alter ego, Ahmed Sékou Touré, who had said no to Charles de Gaulle’s proposal of a Franco-African community, preferring “freedom in poverty to riches in slavery”.

    For his part, Houphouët-Boigny had become, at Ivory Coast’s independence in 1960, the president of a country well on its way to superseding Ghana as the world’s most important cocoa producer – and overall to turning into an economic “miracle” – while Ghana sank amid instability and mismanagement. Houphouët-Boigny’s warning against merely “nominal independence” – that is, a political flag of convenience flying proudly above a poorer-than-ever land – had been vindicated.

    However, in the 1970s and 1980s, the 50,000 French expatriates running the Ivorian state and economy – five times more than under colonial rule – gave the “miracle” a hollow ring. The dependence on France, arguably a neo- rather than ex-colonial power, was there for all to see. In its own way, Ivory Coast’s independence was as nominal as the beggar’s choice next door.

    Who won the wager? Strictly speaking, within the bet’s ten-year limit, Houphouët-Boigny carried the day. Yet, inasmuch as the only way to learn how to play the harp is to play the harp, Ghana at least made its own mistakes and, since the 1990s, seems to have learned from them. This is small comfort for the generation of Ghanaians after independence which grew up in misery and chaos, without much schooling and healthcare or a functioning state.

    But it is also little comfort for the Ivorian youth of the past 20 years – years marred by a putsch, a civil war, and an outbreak of xenophobia in the name of ivoirité (“Ivorianness”) – to know that their parents had enjoyed a better life before. Houphouët-Boigny’s state was eviscerated by corruption abetted by the president himself (“when you’re roasting peanuts for others, no-one should look into your mouth”); land tenure was a mess he had created (“the land belongs to who is tilling it”); and his generous open-door immigration policy left almost a third of the population in doubt as to whether they were still immigrants or already Ivorian citizens.

    In fact, perhaps the sole and unexpected winner of the wager is the analyst, who keeps moving the time horizon and asking the same question. Not only will s/he understand historical truth as a dependent variable; s/he will also realise that the Franco-African relationship has never been, simplistically, the association of a French rider and his African horses. Though in varying and mostly unequal proportions, there has always been agency on either side. La Françafrique – since the late 1990s a polemical term to revile the French presence in Africa via a pun (la France à fric, ‘corruptible and corrupting France’) – was initially Houphouët-Boigny’s political project. During the three decades of his rule – from 1960 until his death in 1993 – the first Ivorian president co-managed with Jacques Foccart, the Gaullist “African hand” of similar longevity (1960-1996), what the French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon has more aptly called the postcolonial “Franco-African state”: an intricate web of institutionalised interdependence based on elite connivance between Paris and the capitals of francophone Africa.

    The “Franco-African state” is no more. Demography, democracy and globalisation have worn thin the ties between France and its former sub-Saharan colonies – thin, that is, by comparison to what it used to be.

    Broadly speaking, Houphouët-Boigny is remembered as a mildly authoritarian ‘father of independence’ who, in an onset of senility, erected a Pharaonic cathedral in his village, Yamoussoukro, which he also turned into the country’s capital under his reign. Yet, political projects need to be replaced, and judged, on a timeline. In 1959, on the eve of independence, Houphouët-Boigny told de Gaulle: “We have twenty lawyers, ten medical doctors and two engineers in Ivory Coast. Do you really believe we can fend for ourselves?” It was a legitimate question that, half a century later, resonates differently than in the heady days of imminent African sovereignty.

    In the end, was what followed a genuine partnership? Or was it, as Senegal’s poet-president Léopold Senghor once claimed in a spark of ire, “Kollaboration” (i.e. working with French neocolonialism the way the Vichy regime had worked with the Nazi occupiers)?

    There is room for debate. However, if the lot of ordinary Africans is accepted as a yardstick for competitive claims, it is not a foregone conclusion that Ghanaians under Kwame Nkrumah, or Guineans under Sékou Touré, were sold down the river less than Ivorians under Houphouët-Boigny.

  • in Mali

    Mali’s Premature Elections Threaten Stability and Future Legitimacy

    100 Views

    There are good reasons for holding elections in Mali as soon as possible. There are many better reasons for postponing them until the end of the year.

    By Jamie Bouverie

    A Malian refugee at Mentao camp in Burkina Faso. Photograph by Oxfam International.

    Mali’s upcoming presidential election, now due on 28 July, will be a watershed moment for the crisis-torn country. The goal of the election – to return the country to constitutional order and restore the political process – is something that Mali desperately needs. But the election holds no guarantee of attaining this goal. Indeed, there are compelling reasons to think that a July election will do more harm than good.

    Security concerns

    The first reason is that northern Mali remains insecure, vulnerable to attacks by armed groups, and partly outside of government control. The gains that the French made by retaking the north and putting the region’s militant Islamist groups on the back foot are neither absolute nor irreversible. President François Hollande may be announcing “mission accomplished” back at home, but Islamist fighters are far from being dislodged; suicide attacks and roadside bombs have plagued the northern regions since February, with Gao and Timbuktu seeing repeated clashes.

    Despite claims that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) leaders such as Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abou Zeid have been killed by the Chadian army, nothing suggests that AQIM’s base has been “dismantled”, as French Defence Minister Le Drian claimed on 7 March. Ansar Dine and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) also remain at large. Meanwhile, the Tuareg secessionist group the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) – which remains in control of Kidal – has denounced the election and refused to disarm.

    A worryingly large number of potential spoilers exist that threaten to undermine the election through intimidation and violence. If people are unable to vote, the election outcome would be less representative of the population and hence more easily framed as illegitimate. And worse, the election could reignite conflict in the north, where ethnic tensions have flared in recent months.

    French withdrawal

    France’s hasty withdrawal, which will see will some 2,000 troops leave before the election, only increases the risk of election-related violence. The UN’s Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission (MINUSMA) is set to be deployed on 1 July, but this leaves worryingly little time for the UN force to establish themselves. Furthermore, UN troops will not be nearly as well organised, trained or equipped as the French; and they are neither mandated nor prepared to deal with insurgents.

    A quick ‘in and out’ operation may have always been France’s hope in Mali, but it was never anyone else’s. Doubling down by cutting troop numbers in half before the election is like removing the safety net before the trapezist takes her jump. No conflict-prone country is more vulnerable or volatile than during elections – particularly one as unstable as Mali. France’s premature departure could easily hand an advantage to the Islamist groups and potentially lead back to the status quo ante. It could also backfire. As a retired French general said in February, “If France leaves too soon and the situation deteriorates, Paris will get the blame.”

    Logistical problems

    In terms of preparation, Mali is far from ready to hold an election in July. We should remain sceptical about any rhetoric from Malian officials about how preparations are on track. Moussa Sinko Coulibaly, Mali’s minister for Territorial Administration insisted on 6 April that they were on course to meet the July deadline. But at this stage the Malian government had not even awarded a contract to produce voter identity cards. More recently, on 10 May, Africa Confidential argued that Mali had scarcely begun to prepare for elections.

    The main logistical challenge is that hundreds of thousands of Malians are currently displaced, either intnernally in Mali or in neighbouring countries. This makes voter registration a formidable task, and there is little evidence to suggest that the government will be able to ensure that these communities are able to vote.

    Furthermore, Mali’s poor roads and low-quality infrastructure seriously hamper movement around the country. This is even worse during the rainy season which begins around June. In the wet months, flooding often makes roads impassable, communications break down, and much of the rural population is preoccupied with crop cultivation. In fact, July is probably the worst possible month for an election overall; not only is it a crucial month in Mali’s agricultural calendar, it also overlaps with Ramadan, which could further inhibit participation.

    A stubborn deadline

    If large swathes of the population are deprived of the chance to contribute to the writing of a new chapter in their country’s history, the project of rebuilding the country will rest on precarious foundations. After all, the previous regime’s inability to engage all Malians in the political process was one of the deep-rooted causes of Mali’s crisis. It is therefore essential that the election process does not ostracise certain groups. Unless all Malians are given the chance to shape their country’s future by casting a vote, it is unlikely that Mali’s next government will enjoy widespread legitimacy. In a country that has seen voter turnout figures of less than 40% in recent years, it is particularly important that voter turnout is not weak this time around. But this does not seem likely if the election is held in July.

    In spite of compelling arguments for postponing the election, Malian officials and Malian civil society seem committed to the date that has been set. The international community has also vigorously supported the July deadline.

    The reasons for this run deeper than simple concerns to re-establish political and constitutional order in Bamako. France is desperate to hand over responsibility to a new government so it can get out of Mali for good and as soon as possible. The US needs elections so that is can deliver aid to Mali since laws currently restrict Washington’s financial dealings with governments that result from military coups. And the UN, which is due to establish a 12,600-strong stabilisation mission before the election, wants a partner to work with in Bamako. This all makes the postponement of the election unlikely.

    Mali’s interim leader Dioncounda Traoré recently said that “if the elections fail, it will create even more problems than Mali has known during its crisis. We would be back to square one”. These words may well be prescient. The best chance of avoiding this outcome would be to postpone the elections until the end of the year. The sooner the Malian interim government and the international community realise this, the better.

  • in Ethiopia

    Ethiopia: DFID Fail to Act on Human Rights Violations

    120 Views

    The Ethiopian government may be guilty of atrocities against indigenous peoples as it completes construction of the Gibe III dam. UK aid-agency DFID has failed to exert its influence and protect the rights of these minorities.

    By Gordon Bennett

    How much longer will Mursi children survive in the Omo Valley? Photo by Survival International.

    Ethiopia may until recently have been a byword for famine, but in one part of the country at least, there are people who have lived largely without outside help for hundreds of years. With the connivance of the British government, this is about to change forever.

    The tribes of the Lower Omo Valley in south west Ethiopia – chief among them the Mursi, the Nyangatom, the Bodi and the Daasanach – depend on a combination of flood retreat cultivation on the banks of the Omo River, rain fed cultivation further back from the river, and cattle on the grass plains.

    They move between these resources seasonally so as to exploit them to their best advantage. A self-sufficient existence outside mainstream society has meant that few speak Amharic, and that fewer still can read or write. Like most of us they are strongly attached to their way of life and their traditions, and believe passionately in their right to decide for themselves whether and how to change them.

    But flood retreat cultivation will become impossible when the Ethiopian government completes the Gibe III dam on the upper Omo, as it is expected to do shortly. Large-scale irrigation will follow, allowing government sugar plantations to gobble up huge swathes of their ancestral land. At least ninety thousand people will be forced to relocate to permanent ‘villages’, compelled to give up their herds and become sedentary cultivators. If experience elsewhere in Ethiopia is anything to go by, many will end up dependent on government handouts or starvation wages on the plantations. A pastoralist way of life which has survived for centuries will disappear forever.

    An unwelcome jibe

    With no political clout, and no chance of redress through the courts, the Lower Omo tribes lack any means to protect themselves. But as the country’s second largest donor, the British Government is not without influence in Ethiopia and could, if it chose, do much to ensure respect for their basic rights. Unfortunately for the Mursi, the Daasanach and the other tribes of the Lower Omo, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has proved reluctant to act.

    The UK knows there is a problem. With masterly understatement, it has acknowledged that ‘past experience in other countries has shown that where people are resettled against their will this can impact negatively on their well-being and livelihoods’. ‘Impact negatively’ might well be interchanged with ‘utterly destroy’.

    In an attempt to avoid the worst excesses of forced resettlement, DFID and the other twenty-five aid agencies that make up the Development Assistance Group (DAG) have even produced a set of Guidelines for the Ethiopian government.

    These stipulate that resettlements should be ‘voluntary’; that they should take place only after a feasibility study has been discussed with the community; that the community itself should participate in the planning and implementation of the resettlement programme; that prompt and effective compensation should be paid for losses suffered; and that there should be an independent mechanism to resolve grievances and disputes.

    But in the Lower Omo Valley these safeguards have been totally ignored. The gulf between what is written and what happens in practice has never been wider. No feasibility studies were carried out before work started on the plantations. Thousands have already been removed from their land and herded into ‘villages’ against their will. More forced resettlements are on the way. No compensation has been paid, and no system has been put in place to handle complaints. When an American observer suggested to a DFID representative in Addis Ababa that few of the Guidelines had been followed, she replied that ‘none of them have been followed’.

    Atrocities provoke apathy

    The scale of oppression in the Lower Omo will probably never be known, but is at least partly described in a report published in January 2013 by International Rivers. The systematic violation of tribal rights in the Lower Omo is also charted in a petition that Survival International has now lodged with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

    But none of this is news to the British authorities. As long ago as July 2009, Survival International met with DFID to express its concerns about the threat that Gibe III poses for the Lower Omo tribes. In September 2011, Human Rights Watch told the Department that security forces relied on beatings, harassment and arbitrary arrests to crush tribal opposition to the plantations.

    DFID was sufficiently concerned by the allegations – or at least by the political fallout that it might suffer if they became more widely known – that in January 2012 it sent officials to the area to find out for themselves. At meetings with Mursi and Bodi they were told not only about the arrests and beatings but of the deliberate destruction of grain stores; of denied access to the Omo River; of threats to sell or kill the cattle of those refused to move; and of the widespread use of the military to intimidate people into giving up their land. There were numerous allegations of rape.

    For several months DFID said nothing about these complaints in public, and so far as is known did nothing about them in private. It appears to have been spurred into action (of a sort) only when its interpreter on the January trip warned, in September 2012, that in the continued absence of any progress, he would release his audio transcripts of the meetings. These give a graphic account of the suffering that the tribes have had to endure.

    Without Mursi

    One Mursi man, for example, had asked: ‘Now if you go to the Omo River … will you see any Mursi there? We have left it without any people there and we are staying here in the plains being hit by the sun. The people were beaten away by the Government that brought its force.’

    Another had complained that ‘the Government never came here, and we didn’t get to discuss with them about the sugar cane. They just went to the bush without talking to us, and looked at all the land, and then drove in their trucks and started clearing’.

    A third had told DFID that Government officials ‘come and take up all our land and give us violence, and they rape our wives. [They have done this to] the people of Bongo and also in the Bodi. If they give us violence and we are killed off then they can take over the land. It will be taken over by the people who can read and write. To me, this is my land, the Mursi land, our ancestor’s land.’

    In October 2012 – shortly after it had been shown the audio transcripts – DFID prepared a so-called ‘report’ of the January visit. The report was undated, did not name its authors and did not explain the ten-month delay in writing it. The report was released only after Parliamentary Questions about the trip had been put to the Secretary of State.

    Perhaps because DFID now knew of the transcripts, the report conceded that the allegations of human rights abuse were ‘extremely serious’. It concluded, however, that a more detailed investigation would be required to ‘substantiate’ them, and that this would have to be based on a ‘robust methodology’.

    An investigation was apparently regarded as the necessary corollary to the equally ‘robust’ stand that DFID has taken, so the report claimed, towards the violation of human rights anywhere in the Lower Omo. There was no mention of the fact that ten months down the line none of the allegations had yet been investigated, or were likely to be investigated any time soon.

    Perpetuating the abuses

    More than six months on, we are no further forward. DFID and other DAG officials returned to the Lower Omo last November, but only to monitor progress on the sugar plantations. More than a year and a half after they first learned of the allegations of rape, beatings and false arrests nothing has been done to ‘substantiate’ any of them.

    In the meantime twenty six agencies have continued to fund a government which, for all they know, has not only violated repeatedly the fundamental rights of its most vulnerable citizens but has continued to do so with impunity. A substantial chunk of these funds has gone to the Protection of Basic Services programme, without which the forced resettlement of thousands of tribal people probably could not have been contemplated.

    An ‘investigation’ of the horrific events in the Lower Omo would have faced huge obstacles even if it had been conducted when news of them first unfolded. The Ethiopian authorities would still have decided whom the DAG team would be allowed to visit and where it would be allowed to go. They would still have concealed any material likely to support the allegations, and allowed DAG access only to those officials thought to be sufficiently rehearsed in their protestations of innocence.

    But an investigation now of abuses perpetrated in 2010 or 2011 would be a cruel farce. The physical evidence will have gone. Some of the victims of the worst violence will have died, and others will have disappeared. Many more will fail to see the purpose of an ‘investigation’ that is too late to change anything: whatever evidence DAG might now unearth, it will do nothing for the thousands already expelled from their lands by intimidation, assault or worse.

    DFID and its colleagues on DAG must be aware of all this. They must realise that it is now well nigh impossible to ‘substantiate’ the original allegations of multiple rape, land theft and arbitrary arrest in the Lower Omo – and that if they want to take a stand on the violation of human rights at all, they must form the best view they can on what they already know.

    What they already know is that people from different tribes have given remarkably similar accounts, to different individuals at different times, of the methods used to evict them from their lands. The consistency of these accounts is a powerful testament to their truth, as is the absence of any obvious motive to lie. They also know, if they have any understanding at all of the Lower Omo Valley, that none of its tribes would willingly give up their ancestral land or the cattle on which they depend to make way for someone else’s sugar plantation. Why would they?

    DFID knows too that the Guidelines that it has so laboriously put in place might just as well not exist. It knows that the Ethiopian government has conspicuously failed to enact into law the land rights supposedly guaranteed to pastoralists by the Constitution; and it knows that this is because the authorities in Addis Ababa believe that pastoralists are hopelessly ‘backward’, that they must be sedentarised for their own good, and that it is irrelevant that this is the last thing they want.

    How politics trumps ethics

    Had DFID really taken a ‘robust stand’, it would have concluded more than 18 months ago that the allegations of human rights abuse and forced resettlement in the Lower Omo were overwhelmingly likely to be true. But this in turn would have required it to decide whether to suspend or reduce aid to Ethiopia until the government mends its ways. It has, or thinks it has, good political reasons not to do this.

    In 2011 – the same year in which state violence began to spread through the Lower Omo Valley – the UK pumped £344 million into Ethiopia. This was more than twice as much as it donated to any other African nation over the same period. Payments on a similar scale in 2012 and in each of the next three years will give the UK a significant stake in the country’s ‘success’. DFID has no wish to upset the Ethiopian apple cart, or to abandon the millions of people likely to benefit from British aid who are not to blame for what has happened in the Lower Omo.

    DFID may think that there will be no let up in the wholesale violation of tribal rights whether or not it pulls out. It may even have been persuaded by ministers in Addis Ababa that the days of the semi-nomad are over, and that they must not be allowed to stand in the way of ‘progress’. Above all, perhaps, the UK will worry that if it withdraws or restricts aid to Ethiopia as a mark of its disapproval, it will lose influence over one of the few stable regimes in a strategically important part of the world.

    But none of these considerations are compatible with DFID policy. It has solemnly announced, for example, that a core ‘vision’ of its aid programme for the country is ‘to protect the most vulnerable Ethiopians’. The most vulnerable, however they are defined, must surely include the tribes of the Lower Omo, and their ‘protection’ must at least include the protection of their right to exist.

    DFID is equally committed to the four ‘partnership principles’ that underpin all its development programmes, one of which is that countries which accept British aid must in return respect the human rights of their citizens. If the money continues to flow while this is persistently ignored, this principle is stripped of any meaning. What is more, as a signatory to the Vienna Declaration, the UK supports the rule that a desire to ‘develop’ tribal groups cannot justify the abridgement of their basic rights.

    The UK wants to avert, if it can, a collision between the principles that it has officially endorsed and what it sees as the realpolitik of Addis Ababa. The pretence that DFID or DAG will eventually conduct some sort of ‘investigation’ in the Lower Omo, and that in the meantime business must continue as usual, fits the bill admirably. By the time any report is produced one of the tasks in question – the annihilation of a pastoralist way of life and of the people who live it – will almost certainly have been accomplished. DFID will shrug its shoulders and move on. What else can it do?

    There is plenty of long grass in this part of Ethiopia – or at least there was, until the earth moving equipment appeared on the scene – but none as long as the grass into which DFID has firmly kicked the tribes of the Lower Omo.

    These victims are some of the many minorities that Survival International lobby on behalf of. For more information visit their website here.

  • in Development

    China-Africa: How Unreliable Data Skews the Debate

    113 Views

    Following the launch of a new China-Africa aid database, many different professions will draw on the findings. However, its unreliable sources may dangerously influence public opinion.

    By Adam Robert Green

    Monhla Hlahla, Chairperson, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa (IDC), South Africa, and Gao Xiqing, President of China Investment Corporation (CIC), China’s sovereign investment fund, talk at the World Economic Forum. Photo by WEF.

    ‘Publish or perish’ runs the mantra of the research industry, putting its harried worker bees under constant pressure to issue material. The development industry is similarly quick on the draw, with Morten Jerven recalling how World Bank staffers have published GDP figures on African economies despite having little or no source data, on the basis that it was better to have some data rather than none.

    But as any hypochondriac scanning the internet will tell you, a little information is a dangerous thing. And so it proves with the new China-Africa aid database, AidData. The resource, which took 18 months to compile, sought to find and classify all Chinese development finance to Africa from 2001 to 2011, using a media-based data collection methodology.

    But soon after it was published, the human encyclopaedia of all things Sino-African – Deborah Brautigam – slammed it, saying the numbers were ‘way off’ and riddled with ‘mega errors’. She warned of the dangers of rushing to publish China information gleaned from public sources, and without clear verification processes: “Data-driven researchers won’t wait around to have someone clean the data. They’ll start using it and publishing with it and setting these numbers into stone.”

    Fanning the flames

    Although the AidData researchers included notice of the limitations of the data set and its constantly-evolving nature, the media seized upon top-line figures like hungry jackals. Yahoo News announced that $75 billion of ‘previously secret’ Chinese aid had now been revealed (the ‘secrecy’ was played up in many other media headlines about the story). But that figure is dubious, since nearly half the cases in the dataset had only one source, with no ‘triangulation’ or verification of data against other sources. And obviously, none of this aid was ‘secret’ since it was all based on media reports.

    The debate over AidData is similar to that surrounding the Land Matrix database launched last year. Responding to fears of ‘land grabs’ – especially in Africa – the coalition of researchers aimed to document over a thousand land deals since 2000, spanning 58million hectares of land.

    While it was based on the output of dozens of research bodies and NGOs, it was littered with errors and flawed data – some of which was, again, based on single media reports – overstating the extent of Chinese land investment in Africa, which in turn fed the flames of the ‘China is colonising Africa’ narrative.

    Chinese ownership was ascribed simply because Chinese contractors were involved. Some deals were characterised as ‘Chinese’ in origin when they were coalitions of countries – for example, an Ethiopian biofuels project was described as a Sino investment was actually a collaboration between China, South Africa and Ethiopia, while a rice project in Mali was Libyan-owned with a Chinese contractor. An irrigated maize project in Zimbabwe was a construction contract granted to a Chinese company, rather than a Chinese investment, and the land did not even get developed.

    A dangerous method

    In reality, outside of Zambia, where Chinese companies have been investing since the 1990s, and a handful of former state-farm aid projects, now privatised with Chinese involvement, “there is very little Chinese farming investment in Africa” claims Brautigam.

    Those launching the Land Matrix acknowledged problems with the data but felt it was better to offer it to the global ‘hive-mind’ which would – Wikipedia-style – chisel it towards truth. Michael Taylor from the International Land Coalition, a participating institution, told This is Africa: “As most deals are characterised by a lack of transparency, it is notoriously difficult to get accurate information and to verify each deal beyond doubt. We therefore confirmed the source for each deal, but we cannot in most cases verify that the information is therefore correct.”

    Putting data into the public realm even though it likely contained errors “is a deliberate strategy,” he said. “We see the Land Matrix as a tool that enables wide public participation by researchers, affected community members, governments, companies and so on, in the continual improvement of the information in the database. It is therefore not a one-off publication of information that we believe to be correct, but a contribution to an open, ongoing and long-term discussion in which all with specialist knowledge in particular areas can be a part of the updating.”

    There is, of course, a romantic appeal to the idea of open, evolving public data venues and information crowdsourcing. But in the rush to share information, the slow, tedious process of verification, cross-checking and interpretation is often neglected.

    Those with agendas – be they activists looking to raise alarms, researchers scoping for a punchy idea or journalists on a copy deadline, could take a quick scan and publish. Like a virus, these bytes of information multiply online. Before you know it, they have become facts through use, rather than truth. Following the movements for ‘slow food’ and ‘slow science’, the time may be right for ‘slow data’. To this end, a facts collection website such as facts.net will be useful.

  • in DRC

    Taking the Fight to the DRC Rebels: The Potential Pitfalls of a UN Intervention Brigade

    179 Views

    The creation of a special UN unit in the DRC to conduct “targeted offensive operations” against rebel groups could prove helpful, but there are also dangers.

    By Christoph Vogel

    UN peacekeepers return from a helicopter patrol in the DRC. Photograph by Julien Harneis.

    Bukavu, DRC:

    At the end of March, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 2098. This not only extended the mandate of MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), until 2014, but also catered for the creation of an Intervention Brigade, a new special unit tasked with conducting “targeted offensive operations” against rebel groups.

    Led by a Tanzanian general, the Intervention Brigade will be composed of 3,069 troops, organised into three infantry battalions, one artillery, and one Special Force and reconnaissance company. Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa will all contribute troops, and the brigade will be mandated to “prevent the expansion of all armed groups, neutralize these groups, and to disarm them”.

    One of the incentives behind the creation of the brigade was impotence of MONUSCO last year in the face of the eastern Congolese rebels M23 as they seized towns and cities right under UN peacekeepers’ noses.

    The Intervention Brigade with its more explicitly combative mandate will no doubt provide new impetus in attempts to tackle the DRC’s numerous non-state armed groups. However, it is not clear that the underlying issues which hampered MONUSCO taking action in 2012 and which have long hindered UN forces in the region have really been addressed.

    Old problems die hard

    To begin with, MONUSCO is somewhat constrained by its mandate in a Catch-22-like situation: it must provide civilian protection but also restore the authority of the Congolese state, an actor which is all too often amongst the main perpetrators of violence itself.

    It should also be pointed out that MONUSCO (and its predecessor MONUC before it) did have a Chapter VII mandate, allowing it “to use all necessary means…[to] ensure the effective protection of civilians”. Rules of engagement and parallel chains of command from troop-contributing countries, however, have obstructed its ability to use force.

    Despite being a heavyweight amongst international peacekeeping missions, MONUSCO has also had serious constraints for many years in terms of transport speed, quality, and capacity. It is far from adequately equipped. For example, its maximum 17,000 soldiers (adding up to slightly over 20,000 with civilian and police staff) for an area the size of Western Europe – resulting in a ratio of one blue helmet per 10-15 square kilometres for the two Kivu provinces – is far too little. Troop-contributing countries also tend to be reluctant to provide their soldiers with expensive, high-quality equipment, resulting in operational delays.

    It is unclear to what extent these underlying and structural weaknesses of MONUSCO in the past will also affect the Intervention Brigade.

    One brigade, many rebels

    The new force will also face its own new problems. With just 3,000 soldiers, it’s unlikely it will be able to confront different armed groups at the same time. Different objectives will have to be ranked and prioritised, and this will inevitably have political consequences. There is the risk that political perceptions around the brigade’s decisions of who to tackle and in what order could be controversial and end up discrediting the force – and by extension MONUSCO and the UN – in some actors eyes. The regional make-up of the brigade could also raise suspicions of hidden political agendas.

    There are also simply a large number of armed groups in the region. Even after integration processes have started for a number of the Kivus’ larger militias – such as the Mayi-Mayi Yakutumba/Mayele in South Kivu, as well as the currently stalled process with Nyatura and APCLS in North Kivu – a potential pool of 20-30 armed groups will still remain active. Many of these are very small in numbers and arms and/or poorly organised, but they can still have a deadly impact on civilian populations in remote areas.

    One of the more major rebel groups is the FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu power outfit. The FDLR appears to have weakened in the past few years – partly due to joint Rwando-Congolese military operations but also due to the Raia Mutomboki’s presence in South Kivu – but remains a brutal and indeterminable threat. Having been dislodged from many former strongholds, the FDLR now operates in a scattered fashion and has retreated to difficult to access areas.

    The M23 meanwhile is believed to have close to 2,000 combatants and has already proven its fighting capacity and discipline. It could be weakened by the withdrawal of alleged external support from the likes of Rwanda and Uganda in late 2012, but remains a serious force.

    The M23 is also still engaged in talks with the Congolese government, further complicating the picture. Attacking M23 while talks are ongoing would seriously thwart diplomatic efforts. Indeed, while the military branch of M23 was measured in its reaction to news of the Intervention Brigade, its political counterparts were less restrained. M23’s president, Bertrand Bisimwa, for example, branded the plan “l’option de guerre”.

    An aggressive stance from the brigade could thus bring about an increase in violent reactionary skirmishes. And civilians could be put at risk if rebel groups resort to retaliatory attacks. Moreover, there is a danger that all UN actors (and maybe other humanitarians) will become associated with offensive action and come to be seen as legitimate targets.

    Tough choices

    For the Intervention Brigade to be successful, it is of utmost importance that, a) a flexible set of rules of engagement is established, b) material assets and equipment correspond to both the needs of the troops and the necessities of the intervention area, and c) political support is provided at various levels.

    Its choice of which groups to tackle will also have to be made carefully. Many are no doubt already on the brigade’s radar – such as the FDLR, M23, Sheka, the Masisi-based groups, Raia Mutomboki and others. A prudent choice in terms of feasibility and political impact, including at the local level, will be of paramount importance to the success of the brigade and therefore the UN’s operations in the DRC. Moreover, in terms of political balancing it will be dangerous to exclusively concentrate on M23 as indicated by several UN sources.

    The historical deployment of the intervention brigade bears a couple of historical pitfalls too. The currently multifaceted UN strategy involving the newly-appointed UN Special Envoy Mary Robinson, the Intervention Brigade, and a support role in both the 11+4 Addis Ababa framework and the Kampala talks appears more a cacophony than a coherent strategy. Beyond that, the urgent need to create a local counterpart to complement international (Addis Ababa) and national (Kampala) peace process elements has neither been addressed by the DRC government nor the UN.

  • in Culture

    Poverty Has a Creation Story: Let’s Tell It

    189 Views

    It is rarely explained how poverty is perpetuated, leading many to see it as natural and inevitable. If poverty is truly to be tackled, the logic of the debate must be changed.

    By Martin Kirk, Joe Brewer

    A Ugandan boy looks into the camera. Photograph by bel0ved.

    What would you say if we told you that the biggest obstacle to eradicating poverty is the way we think about it? That the human mind and our common sense logic about how the world works is where the battle to end poverty must first be waged? How might that alter how we approach concerns about economic development, healthcare, education, women’s rights, trade relations, and national debt?

    We all know what “common sense” is supposed to mean. And it’s a bit like ‘taste’, in that most of us think we have it. If there is anything that epitomises the concept of simple truth, common sense is it. In fact, Merriam-Webster describes it as “sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts”.

    It is such a feather-light, seemingly benign little phrase. And yet it is a driver of almost all human problems in the world. This is because what we call ‘common sense’ informs everything we do – it is the water our minds swim in. And, like fish in water, we barely recognise it’s there, let alone know how to account for it.

    But contemporary research in cognitive science tells us that, rather than being a reliable and simple thing, common sense is a highly complex and largely invisible collection of subconscious mechanisms, intertwined assumptions, persistent bodily experiences and habitual perceptions layered up over our lives. It is shaped and influenced by the cultures we live in, and it can be faulty and misleading in all sorts of ways.

    In fact, if there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that we can never assume clear or absolute – and certainly never ‘simple’ – common sense. Because we have human brains, we inevitably hold false information; are beholden to the perspective engendered by our own particular lives; and rely on stereotypes and archetypes to understand both ourselves and each other. This means, however well-educated or seemingly dispassionate we strive to be, we are always and forever prone to selective understanding and knee-jerk, irrational, and emotional judgments.

    Swimming in common sense soup

    So how does this apply to the practice of tackling inequality and poverty? Well, as with everything in life, there’s a lot of ‘common sense’ employed around ideas of inequality and poverty by NGOs, foundations, businesses, government agencies, and the broader public. It is the implied logic we subconsciously employ to filter and process information. For example, it informs whether we understand poor people more as victims or perpetrators of their situation.

    This ‘common sense’ is inevitably mixed with ideas of race, class, gender, nationality and any number of other variables, and inevitably affected by factors such as personal experience, age, educational background, social and cultural environment, and even mood. What we usually call fact, data, or empirical evidence therefore exists as one type of seasoning – albeit a very important one – in a highly personalised soup of thought. So understanding the ‘common sense’ logic that exists in our minds – individually and collectively – around inequality and poverty is essential if we are to engender action that might tackle it successfully, not to mention sustainably.

    Luckily for anti-poverty activists and groups, a lot is now known about the science of common sense. Linguists have studied it for decades, revealing the mental structures (called “frames”) that organise our social experiences into webs of inferential logic and associated knowledge. Psychologists have identified the emotional triggers that give rise to moral judgments, values and beliefs. Brain researchers have shown how perceptions arise as information processed in our heads. In other words, these frames – this ‘common sense’ – can be defined, studied, measured and affected in a rigorous and systematic manner to improve our effectiveness in real-world campaigns. What is needed now is for practitioners in the field to adopt this learning as a new standard, and put it into everyday practice.

    Poor, passive, undifferentiated

    To date, precious little work has been done to study common sense when it comes to inequality and poverty. We helped prepare the Finding Frames report (published in 2011) that looked at this question in the British context, and have commissioned some top-line research into global common sense for our global anti-poverty campaign /The Rules, but so much more needs to be done. Anti-poverty advocates need to understand how it varies across geographies and in different cultural contexts if we are to build a coordinated, planetary-scale response to the structural causes of inequality.

    What is clear from preliminary studies is that attitudes to poverty in the UK, and very possibly across the Global North, are not encouraging. When we looked at all the available data and did some linguistic analysis, we found a set of very troubling underlying assumptions. The soup, you might say, was off.

    The whole study can be seen here, but in summary most people conceive of global poverty as an issue synonymous with “aid”, which is seen as an act of charity. Charity, in turn, rests on the interaction between a powerful giver – be that an individual or a nation – and a grateful receiver. In this common sense, agency lies almost exclusively with the powerful givers; the grateful receivers are simply understood as poor, needy, and without control over their own destiny. Further, in global settings, “the poor” are understood as an undifferentiated group without intrinsic strength, often referred to through the shorthand of “Africa”, where nothing ever changes. It is in the photos of starving children in fund-raising advertisements; in pop concerts designed to raise a few million pounds or dollars; and in nonprofit charity shops where secondhand goods are bought and sold cheaply that this common sense of poverty is perpetuated.

    This won’t surprise most people who live in the Global South (another label that tends to cluster people into a category of anonymity). When you are on the receiving end of negative, judgemental or paternalistic frames, you can feel it. What might be more surprising is some of what we found when we looked more at the global picture.

    The need for a creation story

    One of the major discoveries from our research was that anti-poverty groups, both in North and South, rarely if ever explain where poverty comes from. This is a critical omission in the common sense of poverty. It means there is a gaping hole in the logic that stands in the way of commensurate action to tackle it. In other words, because there is no commonly understood creation story, there is no clear, logically robust understanding of (a) what causes poverty, (b) who the principal actors are, and therefore (c) a solution that can be readily and widely accepted.

    Every religion has a creation story. So does every tribe, nation and ideological camp. The creation story provides the original cause from which all else follows. For example, the Story of Original Sin from the Abrahamic religious tradition tells us where human fallibility came from – an apple plucked from the Tree of Knowledge by an unwitting woman in the Garden of Eden. It offers a historic context from which all evil sprang forth onto the world in a moment of human weakness. And it does so with such memorable visual concreteness that most of us can recite the entire tale thousands of years after it was first written down.

    Poverty, as we talk about it today, has no creation story. It lacks a commonly understood cause. And so there is no logical solution for how to end it. In other words, there is no mental architecture that helps us intuit and envision it ever being eradicated. To succeed at changing this common sense, anti-poverty groups will need to introduce a creation story

    Shifting the narrative of poverty

    So where does poverty come from? An in-depth answer to this question is not within the scope of this piece, but we published this article recently to bring attention to what we believe are structural and systemic causes of inequality – a set of financial rules introduced by an elite minority to game the global economy. We have recently launched a new organisation, /The Rules, to embody and promote this common sense in the operational setting of campaigns and collective actions.

    Empowered with this creation story, we can mobilise around concrete goals that readily make sense within the context of the economy as a cooperative game. Employing this commonplace frame to make sense of our collective experience, we are able to tell a story about the unfair policy structures that were set up intentionally by a recognisable cohort of people to extract wealth and pool it in their personal coffers. It was this common sense that fuelled the Occupy Movement in 2012, enabling it to spread from a tiny park in New York to the world stage in a few short weeks – the frame used was already widely shared in the minds of people everywhere. We are now deploying it as a narrative vehicle to deliver what we believe to be deep truths about the state of the world we are living in today.

    By framing mass poverty as something that is created by human beings, what we do is fill a crucial hole in the logic for the common sense of poverty. And once this hole is filled, all sorts of new options become more concrete and apparent. Immediately, logical targets arise; it becomes apparent where to invest resources to create meaningful change, and how others can get involved. In short, we gain an agenda for change that is bigger and more radical than small transfers of money from rich to poor and one that, crucially, works with the power of common sense.

    Deliberate and mindful framing is essential to effective communication. We are at base camp of a mountain of knowledge that should be considered critical to anyone interested in shifting narratives and common sense, including around poverty. At /The Rules we are working to put this knowledge to use in what will be a long uphill battle against entrenched powers that benefit from the status quo. But before we can succeed against them, we have to deeply and thoroughly understand ourselves.

    If we are to transform the political and economic systems that create and perpetuate poverty, we will have to change the logic of the debate. Doing this will require that we incorporate the best science of human understanding into our strategies for communication and engagement. The knowledge exists today for us to begin down this long road to cultural change that we believe to be a prerequisite for success.

  • in Lesotho

    Setting up Shop in Lesotho: How the Chinese Succeeded

    119 Views

    Chinese traders have become highly successful in Lesotho, a poor country with countless villages scattered across mountainous terrain. How did they manage it?

    By Mothusi Turner

    Exploring Lesotho’s mountains. Photograph by bittegitte.

    Of all the African destinations that Chinese migrants have travelled to since China’s economic and political reforms in the late-1970s, Lesotho is perhaps one of the least obvious.

    A tiny landlocked kingdom with a largely impoverished population scattered in often inaccessible villages dotted around a stark mountain landscape, Lesotho appears to have little to offer the prospective Chinese migrant. And yet, this country of just over two million inhabitants boasts a Chinese population of several thousands. This community is overwhelmingly made up of shopkeepers from China’s Fujian province who have established a trading network that extends deep into Lesotho’s mountainous hinterland, selling everything from basic groceries to clothing and manufactured goods.

    But as in many other countries across the continent, the presence and success of Chinese traders has been a double-edged sword. Some Basotho hail the availability of cheap goods while others decry the squeezing out of local businesses and accuse the Chinese of shoddy practices. And like many observers, most also wonder how they even managed to become so successful.

    Keeping themselves to themselves

    Despite the best efforts of the Lesotho government, no-one knows exactly how many Chinese currently live in the country. Official census takers in mountain villages often encounter bolted doors or truckloads of tipped-off Chinese residents speeding down the road in the opposite direction, suggesting many of Chinese who reside in Lesotho do so illegally. Most estimates, however, put the figure of the Chinese population in Lesotho somewhere between four and twenty thousand.

    Interestingly, Lesotho’s Chinese migrants also seem to be as wary of their own government as they are of national authorities. Despite their inescapable presence in the country’s retail sector, the Chinese tend to keep themselves to themselves and, despite rumours to the contrary, the Chinese embassy does not typically facilitate the entry of economic migrants to Lesotho.

    Instead, it prefers to distance itself from them. When discontent over the presence of foreigners in Lesotho’s retail sector boiled over into xenophobic violence in 1991, for example, the Chinese embassy in the capital Maseru shut its gates in the face of distressed shopkeepers who sought help.

    Setting up shop

    Rather than being in some way tied to Chinese state assistance to Lesotho then, migrants come to Lesotho under their own steam, lured by rumours of easy profits.

    But they do not arrive as hostages to fortune, without a plan and alone. Rather, given that kinship networks are the main pull factor behind Fujianese migration to Lesotho, new arrivals usually have links to one of the local Fujianese business associations before they even land. These commercial networks link Fujianese traders across Lesotho with wholesalers in neighbouring South Africa and suppliers in Mainland China, and help new arrivals in number of ways. The presence of Fujianese merchants in villages that, at first glance, seem too small or remote to support a retail business, is testament to the success these associations have had.

    To begin with, these networks direct new migrants towards niches in the market and away from areas already saturated by Fujianese businesses; in this way, they create a centrifugal force, pushing new arrivals into remote corners of the country.

    Fujianese commercial associations also give advice and provide start-up loans and insurance for new ventures. In fact, Fujianese traders typically spend their first couple of years in Lesotho paying off debts to these associations and to the migratory agents who facilitated their entry into the country. This is part of the reason Fujianese businesses have a reputation for being open 24 hours a day, seven days a week – their owners must work extremely hard and live very frugally simply in order to pay their initial debts.

    Start-up capital, hard work and frugality are central to Chinese traders’ success. Also crucial, however, is the ability of Chinese businesspeople to undercut their local competitors. This is made possible by using local Chinese business associations to buy and ship goods in bulk. This helps lower wholesale costs and, additionally, given that the many of the goods sold by Chinese businesses are non-perishable, they can also be stored on site for long periods of time to save on transport costs.

    Anti-Chinese sentiment

    All these factors help make the Chinese community in Lesotho commercially successful. However, all is not perfect. Despite – or perhaps because of – their success, strong anti-Chinese sentiment prevails in popular opinion in Lesotho.

    Rather than distinguishing between different East Asian groups, local Basotho often designate all Asians as “Chinese”, sometimes rudely calling them “the dog eaters”. Local frustration with the perceived Chinese takeover of the small-scale retail industry in Lesotho frequently manifests itself in stories of Chinese managers abusing local staff or of forbidding their Basotho employees from ever working at the till or handling cash.

    Furthermore, Fujianese shopkeepers have been accused of every imaginable malpractice, from removing pieces of chicken from barbecue packs and selling the underweight packs at full price, to vending poisonous baby formula and rotten vegetables, to relabeling and selling goods well beyond their sell-by date. Chinese businesses are accused of operating under fake licences and avoiding tax. Chinese migrants are also believed to eschew the national banking system, preferring instead to keep their earnings under their mattresses or on their person. A combination of xenophobia and opportunism has made East Asians the most frequent victims of violent crime in Lesotho – though since 1991 there has been no popular violence against the immigrant community as a whole.

    The prevalence of anti-Chinese rhetoric at all levels in Sesotho society, however, does not change the fact that the Basotho are increasingly reliant on the retail services provided by the immigrant Fujianese population. As one Mosotho told Think Africa Press, “if there was no Chinese in Teyateyaneng, where would I buy?”.

    As well as sometimes obscuring the benefits locals gain from cheap Chinese imports, anti-Chinese sentiments also sometimes obscure the realities of Fujianese immigration. While popular belief has it that Chinese immigration to Lesotho is increasing exponentially with the help of the Chinese government, for example, there is evidence to suggest that there are actually more Fujianese leaving the country today than entering.

    In fact, as economic prospects in Fujian continue to improve and China transforms itself into a country of net immigration, we can expect to see a shift in Fujianese migratory flows in Africa away from the poorest countries such as Lesotho, and towards wealthier African countries and China itself. Unless the Basotho take advantage of the Fujianese presence in the country and learn from their highly effective business model quickly then, it may be too late, as we can expect Fujianese traders to be replaced by another wave of foreign merchants – if not from China, then from West Africa or elsewhere in the global South.

  • in Economy

    How Canada Dominates African Mining

    173 Views

    Foreign companies from a range of countries compete in Africa’s mining sector. But according to a number of measures, those from one country dominate: Canada.

    By Travis Lupick

    Artisanal miners being chased away from a majority Canadian-owned gold mine in northern Tanzania. Photograph by Tamara Herman.

    When asked to think about foreign mining contracts in Africa, many people’s minds will jump to China, or perhaps one of the former colonial powers such as the UK or France. China’s construction and agricultural projects in particular are at the core of the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative, as are the Asian giant’s more than 1.3 billion consumers.

    Some readers might be surprised therefore to learn that Canada – with a population less than one-tenth that of China’s and geographically about as far from Africa as one can get – has quietly grown to become one of the largest stakeholders in Africa’s mining sector – possibly the largest, depending on how you quantify it.

    A grizzly competitor

    “We certainly are one of the biggest players [in Africa] in several respects”, Pierre Gratton, president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada, told Think Africa Press. “It’s a largely undeveloped, unexplored continent, which makes it interesting….A new frontier. Our industry is often one of the first to go where no-one has gone before.”

    Countries competing with Canada in African mining include the UK, France, Australia, China, and South Africa, but ranking their relative dominance is all but impossible; countries measure and declare assets and investments using different methodologies and with varying levels of transparency. However, documents provided by Natural Resources Canada seem to portray a relatively accurate picture of the country’s activities in Africa.

    According to these documents, in 2011 – the most recent year for which statistics are available – 155 Canadian companies were operating in 39 African countries. Their combined assets* totalled more than $30.8 billion, up from $26.5 billion in 2010.

    Canadian firms were most active in East Africa, with $12.7 billion on the ground in 2011. West Africa came next with $9.9 billion invested, followed by Southern Africa ($4.9 billion), Central Africa ($3.4 billion), and North Africa ($36.7 million).

    Ranked in descending order by value of assets, Canada’s most important mining partners in 2011 were: Zambia, Mauritania, South Africa, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Tanzania, Mali, Senegal, and Eritrea.

    While Canada is a major force in African mining, current projects on the continent actually only comprise a minority of Canadian companies’ operations overseas. According to Natural Resources Canada, assets in Africa accounted for just 21.5% of Canadian mining companies’ cumulative assets abroad. The majority are in Latin America.

    Taking stock

    However, those numbers describe just the interests of companies headquartered in Canada. Expand the picture to take into account other country’s projects financed on Canada’s Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and the TSX Venture, and Canada’s role in mining around the world grows even more substantial.

    According to a December 2012 report drafted by the TSX, during the first nine months of 2012, 89% of all global mining equity financings were done on the TSX and TSX Venture (up one point from 2011). The document states that only 7% of mining projects traded on the TSX are located in Africa, but that does not diminish the fact that a lot of money for mining sites in Africa is going through the exchange in Toronto.

    “There are approximately 315-20 listed [mining] companies that are not African but are doing business in Africa”, says Bruce Shapiro, president of Mine Africa, a Canada-based business and marketing company. “Of those, over 50% are Canadian. So in terms of the companies that we would normally look at, we certainly dominate that market.”

    Shapiro explains that what sets Canada apart is the level of access to finance available on the TSX, where there’s a tradition of an appetite for risk. “Capital, at the moment, is impossible to raise”, he remarks, in reference to struggling developed economies. “But if it wasn’t, it would be relatively easy in Canada, compared to some other markets.”

    Shapiro notes that Canada has vast deposits of mineral wealth within its own borders, a long history mining those deposits, and is now taking this expertise to Africa. Looking to the future, he continues, prospectors tend to be moving either into less-explored low-risk areas with stable governments or high-risk regions that tempt miners with the potential of very high rewards.

    Rocky relations?

    But in addition to a favourable private sector, mining companies are also attracted to Canada for a less-flattering reason, suggests Jamie Kneen, a coordinator for advocacy group MiningWatch Canada.

    “There are hardly any Canadian laws of international application”, he says. “If something goes wrong, people may be able to sue in Canada, but that’s not entirely clear – it hasn’t worked yet.”

    Kneen explains that while countries such as the US have passed domestic laws that govern corporations’ activities abroad, Canada has not done the same. The current Conservative government has actually voted down several attempts to increase accountability abroad.

    One of those attempts to regulate the mining sector overseas was initiated by Member of Parliament John McKay. In April 2009, he proposed a bill that aimed to increase corporate accountability in developing countries, but to no avail.

    “It died a glorious death”, McKay recalls on the phone from the Canadian capital of Ottawa. “They [mining lobbyists] don’t play to lose.”

    He notes that without such legislation, international corporations based in Canada are left to self-regulate their conduct and adhere to the domestic laws of the countries in which they operate as they see fit.

    “We have no ability to tell any mining company what to do, when to do, where to do, or how to do it”, McKay emphasises. In much of Africa, that creates potential for abuse. “Canadian companies are venturing into areas they’ve never ventured before”, he says. “There doesn’t seem to be any hesitation to go into conflict zones and areas where you know darn well you’re going to have some difficulties of some kind.”

    Indeed, as Pierre Gratton from The Mining Association of Canada notes, Africa’s mining sector is expected to continue to expand, and Canadian interests on the continent to grow with it.

    “There’s a recognition that this is something that we do well here, that we’re good at mining”, he says. “It’s one of the exceptions to the Canadian economy – we tend not to necessarily dominate sectors, but in mining, we do.”

    *Natural Resources Canada defines mining companies’ cumulative “assets” as “calculated at acquisition, construction or fabricating costs, and includes capitalized exploration and development costs, non-controlling interest, and excludes liquid assets, cumulative depreciation [sic], and write-off.”

  • in Nigeria

    Nigeria’s APC: A Progressive Change or A Powerless Coalition?

    109 Views

    Bola Tinubu, former governor of Lagos, leader of the ACN, and one of the main figures in the new APC. Photograph by Chatham House.

    With Nigeria’s ruling PDP facing serious internal and external problems, four opposition parties merged to become the All Progressive Congress.

    Since Nigeria’s transition from military rule to multi-party governance in 1999, the candidate representing the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has won every single presidential election. Although putting up a fight, opposition candidates have never really looked likely to end the PDP’s dominance.

    However, in the upcoming 2015 elections, Nigeria’s opposition could have its best chance yet. This February, four of Nigeria’s opposition parties banded together to form the All Progressive Congress (APC). Meanwhile, questions are increasingly being asked of the current government’s ability to tackle outstanding economic, social and security challenges, and the PDP is thought to be beset with internal disputes and personality battles.

    Could the APC signal a new era of Nigerian politics?

    A call for change

    Speaking at the inauguration of the new coalition, Tom Ikimi, chairman of the APC merger committee, proclaimed: “At no time in our national life has radical change become more urgent…We, the following political parties – namely ACN [Action Congress of Nigeria], ANPP [All Nigeria People’s Party], APGA [All Progressive Grand Alliance] and CPC [Congress for Progressive Change] – have resolved to merge forthwith and become All Progressive Congress and offer to our beleaguered people a recipe for peace and prosperity.”

    A merger of opposition parties has been proposed around every election since 1999, but until now conflicting political interests, ethnic chauvinism and even sabotage scuppered such efforts. The closest Nigeria came to such an alliance previously was in the lead-up to the 2011 presidential election when the CPC and ACN proposed a coalition – the two parties’ failure to resolve their difference and reach an agreement paved the way for a comfortable PDP victory.

    Prior to the APC merger, each opposition group was viewed more as a regional party, representing ethnic blocks – a contrast to the outwardly nationwide appeal of the PDP. The coalition has thus brought together several major ethnic groups and notably crosses the north-south divide by uniting together: the Hausa-Fulani-dominated CPC, which garnered 31.8% of votes in the 2011 presidential elections; the Yoruba-dominated ACN, which currently controls 6 out of the 36 states in the federation, including Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos; the Igbo-centred APGA, which holds one state; and the ANPP, which controls Borno and Yobe states.

    “The move towards a two-party system creates a potentially more credible, formidable and focused opposition”, explained Adigun Agbaje, Professor of Political Science at the University of Ibadan. Meanwhile, speaking to Think Africa Press, former PDP minister Femi Fani-Kayode went as far as to say, “If things don’t change and the present administration is not voted out, then Nigeria will eventually end up like the Republic of Zaire – a failed state with no hope of a decent future.”

    PDP difficulties

    In recent years, the total dominance of the PDP has waned somewhat. President Goodluck Jonathan received 57% of votes in the 2011 elections, down from the 70% garnered by his predecessor, the late Umaru Yar’Adua in 2007. The PDP controls 56% of the seats in the House of Representatives, compared to 73% in 2007. And its strength in the Senate over the same period has decreased from 81% to 65%.

    Furthermore, while the opposition is coming together, there are signs internal divisions in the PDP are deepening. There seem to be ongoing disagreements, for example, between governors and the National Working Committee led by Bamanga Tukur – these rifts were exemplified by the fact the majority of governors chose to boycott Tukur’s recent reconciliatory tour to various PDP-controlled states.

    A further contentious issue is the perceived decline of Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler who went on to win the 1999 and 2003 presidential elections and who continues to be an influential figure in the PDP and respected international figure. At local and international forums, Obasanjo has not shirked from speaking out against the government’s handling of the northern Islamist militant group Boko Haram and the high levels of unemployment. The removal of a known Obasanjo loyalist in the PDP’s national executive further points to a rift which, if not resolved, could play into the APC’s hands.

    APC’s upcoming challenges

    In response to the inauguration of the APC, the PDP released a strongly-worded statement signed by the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, asserting: “Nigerians are here confronted with an irony. It is an irony of a political party which without adequate planning, without a solid working rhythm, yet wishes to be entrusted to its effete, shaky shoulders, the fate of over 160 million Nigerians”. It continued, “the nation, her people and our democracy are all in jeopardy should they be entrusted with power.”

    Whilst clearly partisan, the statement points to the fact that the APC faces several tricky challenges itself.

    “Should the new party consolidate and begin to operate as a single entity, it is likely that the 2015 elections will be more competitive”, explained Samir Gadio, Emerging Markets Strategist for Standard Bank, “[but] the sustainability of the merger is not without risks”.

    “The presidential nomination ahead of the 2015 contest may still divide the new organisation. Besides, the PDP is still in control of most states and has access to administrative resources, which is a key comparative advantage”, he continued.

    Similarly, Ayo Dunmoye, professor of political science and dean of social sciences at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, insisted the APC ought to “debate on issues, not personalities”, embrace internal democracy, and allow candidates to emerge in free primary elections – “otherwise the merger will be stillborn,” he warned.

    Indeed, the two main players in the APC – Muhammadu Buhari, former military ruler and CPC’s head, and Bola Tinubu, former governor of Lagos and ACN’s leader – will likely have their own agendas in the run up to the 2015, and the choice of presidential candidate could prove a real test for the coalition. After all, a number of APC members look likely to be interested in that position, such as Buhari himself, former Minister of the Federal Capital Nasir El Rufai and governor of Lagos Babatunde Fashola.

    A new political terrain?

    A strong and viable opposition is an essential part of any electoral process and the merger should bring about increased competitiveness in Nigerian politics. But this in of itself does not guarantee ordinary Nigerians will benefit. Political wrangling in the past has done little to help ordinary Nigerians, and problems of unregulated money in politics, patrimonialism and corruption within parties are likely to confront the APC too.

    But amidst this, Agbaje of the University of Ibadan places his faith in the Nigerian people. “The resilience of the people, their vitality, broad disdain for authoritarianism and yearning for freedom, justice and equity promises to constantly work for a future secure in democracy, development and peace”, he says.

    Whether these ideals work in favour of the ruling PDP or the newly-formed APC remains to be seen, but if the new coalition manages to hold firm until 2015, the elections will be the closest of the Fourth Republic.

    By Lagun Akinloye

Load More
Congratulations. You've reached the end of the internet.

Back to Top
Close