West Africa Rising: World Bank predicts more rapid growth
• West Africa Rising is a weekly look at business, investment, and development trends.
The world's poorest continent is getting richer, and you could almost smell it in the numbers read out by World Bank functionaries starring in a videoconference in Dakar, Senegal last week.
While the US limps back from its downturn at a economic growth rate of 3 percent, World Bank officials expect the 47 countries south of the Sahara to cruise at a respectable 5.3 percent growth a year – or 6.5, if you exclude South Africa and its sporadic strikes.
And even that appears as a pittance contrasted to an emerging celebrity-state like Ghana, whose economy – set to expand by 13.4 percent in 2011 – is now the fasting growing one on the continent.
Within West Africa, the land of Kente cloth and King's Bite cocoa is followed by Nigeria, where the World Bank predicts 7 percent growth over the next 12 months. And while the bank didn't put out numbers for Liberia, the International Monetary Fund projects that economy to grow by 9 percent between now and New Year's.
That's the kind of boom that "represents serious inroads against poverty," the IMF's deputy director for Africa, Mark Plant, told me over post-press conference pastries last year.
And it's happening – but not everywhere. And not for everyone.
Welcome to West Africa Rising, a weekly Africa Monitor column that looks every Tuesday at business, investment, and development trends in the region.
Sure, the 250 million denizens of Africa's western bulge live in the most heavily peace-kept region of the world. But the fast food chains of Lagos or the docks at Dakar Port tell a different story, one that goes beyond the typical world media's emphasis on African conflict.
Wal-Mart, KFC expand into Africa
Consider what the continent offers America: New markets, new allies, a new boom to be a part of.
Start with Wal-Mart, which, as of December, will be the biggest retailer on this continent of street vendors and fish stalls. Or watch KFC, which plans to sizzle its original recipe out of 1,200 Africa chains by 2014 – and double its Africa revenue in the process. Even American universities are boosting by 20 percent a year their own peculiar Africa-bound export: Study abroad students, 13,000 of whom backpacked through the continent last year.
Then there's the geopolitics: In an epoch when China has supplanted the Soviet Union as the compelling model of how to transmogrify a rural backwater into a new millennium hyper-power, World Bank attachés can point to Ghana as a flag-bearer for the Bretton Woods consensus.
So, in-between reports on how the UN negotiates a hopefully peaceful resolution to Ivory Coast's emergency, don't lose sight of the full picture: The next decade could be the one when West Africa rescues the West.
Check in each Tuesday as we take a look at the trends in one of the world's last investment frontiers.
Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo waits to meet Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga (not pictured) to discuss the post-electoral situation at the presidential palace in Abidjan, on Jan. 17. (Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters)
As Ivory Coast stalemate worsens, so do the chances of military intervention
At least 247 people have died since Ivory Coast's Nov. 28 election, which was supposed to end a 12 year conflict in the world's top cocoa producer. At least 49 people have disappeared, and those whisked away to secret prisons may number in the hundreds.
Those are the latest numbers from a United Nations mission that has been firebombed, shot at, and increasingly understood as an occupying army by defenders of Laurent Gbagbo, the renegade president who has escalated his refusal to concede electoral defeat into a once-in-a-generation-battle for the sovereignty of this former French colony.
And last week, the UN announced from Geneva that its agents have caught word of – but been blocked from visiting – a third mass grave, this one stuffed with 80 bodies buried less than 50 miles from the Liberian border; a line that 25,000 everyday Ivoirians have crossed since November, searching for a country where sporadically violent house searches, attacks on UN convoys, and tire-fire road blocks manned by gun-waving extortionists aren't the new norm.
"The question now being discussed within the UN is the urgency of military intervention, not only to protect UN peacekeepers," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who tried Rwandan war criminals in the 1990s.
Will foreign forces intervene?
Military intervention is the question now being discussed all over West Africa, actually.
In December, ECOWAS – the 15-country union of West African states – signed off on "the use of legitimate force" to remove Gbagbo if the former history professer can't pick a sunny spot in Nice or Nigeria to while away his retirement.
The bloc has 6,500 troops ready to snatch Gbagbo from his presidential bed, but you need not mingle in a pro-Gbagbo Abidjan rally or interview a pro-government militia leader in the country's west to imagine how even a well-executed kidnapping operation could ignite a second gruesome civil war in this, the region's third most populous country.
An ECOWAS attack would lead to a "Third World War," threatened Charles Blé Goudé, histrionic agitator-general of the government-backed Young Patriots militia, notorious for its Kristallnacht-esque attacks on foreigners and foreign-run institutions.
Which is perhaps why Ghanaian President John Atta Mills announced on Jan. 7 that his nation would not participate in any military invasion of its western neighbor. To his credit, he is probably securing the safety of more than one million Ghanaians who live and make their daily bread in neighborhoods like Abidjan's Ghana Town.
But such prudence pits Mr. Mills (whose party denies that he received campaign contributions from Gbagbo in 2008) against Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, the 84-year-old grandfather figure in the region lobbying hard to keep the military option open.
Mr. Wade is a close ally of Alassane Outtara, the former International Monetary Fund economist that nearly every world leader recognizes as the clear winner of the Nov. 28 election. The Senegalese president even financed and twice hosted Outtara during the candidate's run.
Now, his communications adviser says Wade "is looking for an ensemble of countries that can do something about this."
"This isn't Saddam Hussein we're talking about," Wade adviser Papa Dieng said. "Gbagbo is weak."
A crack in Outtara's strategy
Or at least Gbagbo is supposed to be weak: Outtara's masterplan was to fiscally starve Gbagbo out of power by blocking his access to the Dakar-based Central Bank where Ivory Coast's currency reserves are kept.
But that strategy seems to have sprung a leak.
"We have statistics showing daily withdrawals from Ivory Coast's account," Outtara's Development Minister Toikeusse Mabri told reporters in Dakar, Senegal on Friday.
Personal threats and attacks on Central Bank employees in Abidjan have led to unexplained activity on the country's account, Mr. Mabri said. His government – currently barricaded inside an Abidjan hotel that has to helicopter in everything from food to dry cleaning – is requesting a full bank statement, to be delivered today.
"What we have found is that not only has the account seen movement, but some commercial banks are implicated in measures that we could characterize as fraud," he added. "The system has been sidestepped. Checks from Ivoirian accounts have been deposited directly in a commercial bank. There's activity on a treasury bond that the system itself doesn't even recognize. There's been attempts to demand companies to pay their taxes in cash."
How long can it go on?
Under the circumstances, Gbagbo could last three months, Mabri said.
But beyond the ranks of Outtara's hotel government, observers are estimating that, between cocoa taxes, oil revenue, and plain-old extortion, Gbagbo's government might just be breaking even.
For 10 years, rebels and government soldiers alike profited from the cease-fire line, fringed with armed checkpoints that separated its Christian, wealthier south from the rural, poorer, Islamic north.
With ECOWAS's military option crumbling into non-committal statecraft – and Outtara's starve-'em-out strategy oozing money – it's plausible that Ivory Coast's cease-fire partition could continue to serve as another north-south groove in the geopolitical map; a limit, à la South Korea or South Sudan, where the international community's ability to impose democracy met its high watermark, and a stubborn, isolated autocracy found a way to hold on through the worst of times.
South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, center, hugs Catholic Archbishop Paulino Lukudu following a church service at Juba, Southern Sudan on Jan. 16, 2011. The Southern Sudan's president on Sunday offered a prayer of forgiveness for northern Sudan and the killings that occurred during a two-decade civil war, as the first results from a weeklong independence referendum showed an overwhelming vote for secession. (Jerome Delay/AP)
South Sudan's leader, channeling Mandela, calls for forgiveness for north
In a remarkable move at the close of a national referendum on seccession, Salva Kiir, the political leader of Southern Sudan, has called on his people – from inside a Catholic Church no less – to forgive the national government of Sudan for its decades of violence again Southerners. “May we, like Jesus Christ on the cross, forgive those who have forcefully caused their deaths,” Kiir reportedly said.
Southern Sudanese are believed to have vote overwhelmingly to form a new nation, though full election results are not expected until next month. In choosing the path of forgiveness, Kiir, while following his own conscience, is echoing an approach successfully followed by Nelson Mandela of South Africa.
The declaration by Kiir follows an equally remarkable statement by al Bashir, the head of Sudan’s Khartoum government, in which he signaled that he is prepared to let the South hive itself off peacefully. In a visit to Juba, the largest city in the city, al Bashir said he preferred a unified Sudan but would “respect” the South’s right to secede.
“Ties between the north and the south are very huge,” he said. “We spoke to our brothers on how to keep those ties, even if we have two states.”
A two-state solution to Sudan is no chimera. The national referendum, now completed, has been deemed credible by a delegation of foreign observers led by Jimmy Carter, and the Bashir government is on the verge of accepting what many foreign observers until recently considered the unthinkable: peaceful separation.
The logic for al Bashir’s position is clear. He is no democrat, and he appears to reserve the option to intervene in Southern Sudan if for some reason the Kiir government cannot gain control over its undisputed territory.
To be sure, disputed areas in the border between the two halves of Sudan could well experience violent conflict, but such conflict could co-exist with the emergence of the new nation of Southern Sudan.
Pessimists about the Sudan outcome should be chastened by the relatively peaceful round of voting. In the weeks prior to the vote, Beltway pundits rolled out their most energetic Afro-pessimism in order to create near-hysteria about the election. Their predictions could well demand humble apologies in the months ahead, since these predictions transparently tapped into routine fears and stereotypes of supposed African inclinations towards political violence.
Some gloomy critics still say any declaration of seccession by the South will lead to renewed civil war, but with each passing day without such a war, the chances appear to grow that the new nation of Southern Sudan will indeed be born. And the attempt at emulation of Mandela, by the likely new president of an independent Southern Sudan, augurs well for the birth of this new nation.
– G. Pascal Zachary blogs at Africa Works.
A man carries goods from the house of Belhassen Trabelsi, the brother of the former President's wife, Leila Ben Ali, in Sokra, 10 miles from Tunis on Saturday. The Tunisian capital's main train station has been burned to the ground, and many shops have been sacked and looted in violence that came after the North African nation's president fled the country on Friday. (Hassene Dridi/AP)
Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution, and how mobile phones helped it happen
I returned home to Africa five years ago because I had and still have a supreme conviction that Africa is rising, that Africa is actually the last great convergence trade of this world of ours. And that the real African story is not about what can be dug out of the ground but about the human capital, the 1 billion souls who walk upon it. And in many ways, the Wal-Mart acquisition of MassMart in the past few months confirms that.
The silver bullet, the entry ticket for Africa to the 21st century and this super-late cycle convergence has been the mobile phone. The mobile phone [internet-enabled and a mobile wallet] is the game-changer, at least here in Africa and perhaps throughout the world. It is the equivalent of the 21st-century fishing rod. Every development fellow worth their paycheck would say, "Give a man or woman a fish and you feed them for a day; give them a fishing rod and they can feed themselves for life."
Sitting in Nairobi and observing the tape at my investment firm, [It was Edwin Lefevre who said, 'The Tape is Your Telescope' in 1923 in his seminal book, Reminiscences of a Stock Market Operator], the Tunisian tape and the Tunis stock exchange had been flashing on my radar for quite some time. In fact, Tunis was the belle of the frontier-market ball.
From January 2006 through September 2010, it had rallied 243.781 percent. Until the Sri Lankans routed the Tamils and the Colombo Stock Exchange took off into orbit on a Tamil surrender peace dividend, Tunis was probably the best performing stock index in the world. This year it has slumped 10 percent through Friday, and the reasons are best seen in a potted transcript of the week's events.
Mr. Ben Ali in a speech on Monday called the riots “terrorist acts” that were the work of “masked gangs” operating for foreign parties.
"We are not afraid, we are not afraid, we are afraid only of God," the crowds chanted on Tuesday in Tunis.
On Thursday, the American secretary of State said the following in Qatar.
“In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand,” said Secretary Hillary Clinton. “Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever, If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum.”
[As an aside, I think Hillary has so much equity in the Islamic world. I think if she would tell her story, she would win the argument hands down with the womenfolk, who are clearly fed up and too scared to speak out.]
“No presidency for life,” Ben Ali, 74, said in Tunis, pledging not to run after 2014.
By Friday evening he was gone in a puff of smoke. French President Sarkozy would not allow him to land on French soil and it was the Saudi Arabians who accepted the Ben Ali entourage.
The day’s seismic events in Tunisia were described by the broadcaster Abeer Madi al-Halabi as serving “a lesson for countries where presidents and kings have rusted on their thrones.”
I have traded emerging and frontier markets all my life and I have noticed how often change tips not at the center but at the periphery, and then it travels to the center. This Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia was a 21st-century revolution. It was not televised but tweeted. I am certain its success is entirely correlated to the ubiquity of the mobile phone and the Internet. I recall a friend and an ambassador telling me, "Aly-Khan, the revolution is coming. The question is, can it be managed?"
And this Jasmine Revolution will amplify two ways: through the Maghreb and towards the holy cities of Saudi Arabia. The question remains the degree of the amplification. And it would be naive to expect that it might not cross the Sahara and head south.
Change is never incremental, it tips and surges. Looking at Tunisia and Africa, I see so many similarities. There is the widest spread between the average age of the rulers and the average age of the ruled. Tunisia is but the first example of the elastic band snapping. The demographic skew is such that an average of more than 60 percent Africans are under the age of 26. Massive urbanization pulls have concentrated these young people in cities. Through mobile phones, and the Internet, and social media, they are all connected.
And keep an eye on food prices. Those are sky high and not coming down and not unlike dry kindling, awaiting a spark.
The Jasmine Revolution feels like the story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Gulliver was the state. All powerful. You owned the levers to the state, you owned it all. L'état, c'est moi. Then the Lilliputians got connected and that connection was the net with which to catch their Gulliver.
John Donne wrote:
"...Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee..."
Aly-Khan Satchu is an investments broker in Nairobi who blogs at Satchu's Rich Wrapup here http://www.rich.co.ke/rctools/wrapup.php
A member of the voting staff takes fingerprint of a southern Sudanese woman voter at a polling station in Hajj Yousef Locality, Khartoum on Jan. 14. On Friday, southerners started their penultimate day of voting in the week-long referendum on whether to declare independence, a plebiscite that it widely expected to see the underdeveloped region emerge as a new nation. (Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)
As Sudan votes in referendum, US shows continued involvement
News broke today (Editor's note: This post was written on Jan. 12.) that the turnout of voters in the southern Sudan referendum has surpassed the 60 percent threshold required for the vote to be deemed credible. It is an important technical milestone, especially in conjunction with the uniformly positive readouts on the first four days of polling from observers. The US for one has a significant presence, between both the Carter Center mission and the deployment of US officials to observe the vote in five out of the 10 states in South Sudan.
The independence vote is “going extremely well” said US Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson in a joint press conference with lead US negotiator Princeton Lyman in Washington, D.C. Tuesday. “[W]e are pleased with the high level of turnout and the cooperation of officials in both north and south Sudan,” Carson said.
“There's been no problems at all throughout the area,” said Ambassador Lyman, who added that the voting environment in the North was well organized, with no overt security problems. (It’s worth pointing out, however, that an atmosphere of intimidation in the North surrounding the referendum led to low turnout during the voter registration process weeks ago.)
But US messaging during this critical phase has rightly not been limited to felicitations. It has also focused attention on the many political obstacles still to overcome – an encouraging sign that US diplomatic engagement will remain at a high level in the coming months.
“Now, a lot of technical work has been done,” said Lyman with regards to the many post-referendum issues northern and southern leaders have to work out. “But the tough political decisions on these issues remains to be done,” he said.
Aside from deciding how to split oil revenues after secession, the two Sudanese governments have yet to decide on what citizenship options will be given to southerners in the North, whether and how debt will be shared, and the status of Abyei (which in recent days saw an outbreak of violence that the UN Secretary General said was deeply concerning) among other technical economic and legal issues. Given these realities, US officials have emphasized that this week’s referendum vote is a beginning, not an end.
“[N]o matter what happens, it’s the beginning of a new chapter because issues are going to have to continue to be resolved,” said Senator John Kerry in a press conference in Juba. “We are prepared – in fact, anxious – to be part of helping to write that next chapter.”
And in a hopeful sign of continued US commitment from the very top, this message of “beginning” headlined President Barack Obama’s Sudan op-ed published in The New York Times on the first day of voting.
“[L]asting peace in Sudan will demand far more than a credible referendum,” said Obama, who emphasized the need for a political solution in Darfur in addition to those outstanding issues related to secession. The administration recently appointed former ambassador Dane Smith as the lead US negotiator for Darfur.
US incentives, including removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list, normalization of relations, and ending economic sanctions, remain on the table as a means of influencing the Sudanese government’s decision-making in the way forward. In Tuesday’s press conference, Lyman elaborated on the timing of these incentives, saying that completion of the referendum and acceptance of its results would prompt the US government to begin examining removal of Sudan from the sponsors of terrorism list. Consultations with Congress and other reviews would begin, Lyman said.
Actual removal of the state sponsor designation probably would not take place until July and would require resolution of post-referendum issues and Abyei, according to Lyman.
– Amanda Hsiao blogs for the Enough Project at Enough Said.
Local residents walk past the burnt shell of a car, in the Abobo neighborhood of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Thursday, Jan. 13. Daily life was resuming Thursday morning in the opposition stronghold neighborhood, which has seen deadly clashes between security forces and residents in the past two days. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo)
The financial war in Ivory Coast: Five key questions answered
Times are looking tough for Ivory Coast.
While Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade lobbies for a West African-led military invasion in Ivory Coast, the Ivorian military is threatening to mount a devastating defense on behalf of incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, who just about every major world leader considers the clear loser of the Nov. 28 election.
But the real battle for the world's No. 1 cocoa producer isn't happening on the streets of the commercial capital, Abidjan. It's unfolding in the bank corridors where cocoa revenues are wired, where tax reserves are cashed, where government debt is issued, and where government debtors come to collect their "coupon."
Understanding Ivory Coast's financial war is key to fathoming the calm exuded by supporters of President-elect Alassane Ouattara, who have been playing cards at the Golf Hotel where their candidate, an economist and former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been living off helicoptered-in food for weeks.
Some rosy day, Ivory Coast may have a president – or its version of a 38th parallel – but until that dawn, here are the five questions that should determine the outcome of what must be the most convoluted conflict of the year.
1.) Who controls the Central Bank?
Unlike Kenya or Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast's power struggle is taking place in an economy that was never set up for full-fledged independence from its colonial power, in this case, France. The country's currency – the West African CFA Franc, a banknote used in eight West African countries – serves as a nummary expression of how geopolitically pegged the country is to France and the other West African nations she colonized.
What that means for the two men who would be president is that the currency they use to pay their shadow governments isn't born in Ivory Coast. It's born in Dakar, Senegal, where, on Christmas Eve, the Central Bank told journalists that it will no longer recognize Mr. Gbagbo as president.
It could take an epoch before that principle becomes a bureaucratic reality. Last Friday, the Burkina Faso-based monetary union that sets policy for the bank brought bank officials to an orientation session in Mali with a "get a move on it" message.
But for Gbagbo, the bank's decision means he is essentially cut off from the financial apparatus of his own country. If he wants to take out a government bond – essentially a giant IOU to investors looking for a risky buy – he'd need the central bank to advertise, auction, manage, and sell it. If he wants to make a withdrawal from Ivory Coast's tax reserves, he'd have to practice forging Mr. Outtara's signature.
2.) Who's responsible for the government's debt?
But there's a catch: Ivory Coast doesn't just need money. It owes money.
In fact, the country owed a $29 million interest payment on a $2.3 billion bond that was due Dec. 31 – and it still hasn't paid.
"The bill should be paid only when the international community recognizes Laurent Gbagbo," the incumbent's spokesman Ahoua Don Mello told Bloomberg News last week. "I think it would be curious to ask our government to pay while the international community doesn’t recognize it."
On Tuesday, however, Gbagbo's Finance Ministry reversed that tone, and said they'd make the payment before a 30-day grace period triggered a default that would essentially excommunicate Ivory Coast from the global finance community.
But Gbagbo's government, as bond analyst Samir Gadio wrote in an e-mail, "would probably be unable to do so even if the political will existed and the treasury authorized the transaction. Indeed, the payment would have to be channeled via the Central Bank of West African States which now recognizes Outtarra as president."
3.) How long can Gbagbo pay his government?
"Although Gbagbo appears to be backed by the Army at this stage, this will be conditional on his ability to pay the security forces in the coming months," Mr. Gadio added.
He leaves out the part where soldiers pay themselves, or rather, coerce innocent people crossing borders and roadblocks to dash a little something from the bottom of their hearts/wallets. Among West African soldiers, Ivory Coast's fighting force has a reputation for masterful extortion, but it may not be enough to keep an entire government grinding on in the face of international isolation.
Salaries alone cost Gbagbo's administration $170 million a month, according to British newspaper The Guardian. Expect the military to enjoy first dibs on whatever wage money the government scrounges up. And since the election, it's been able to scrounge up enough to pay some of its servants some of their money, even if it's a few days late.
4.) How much control does Gbagbo have over cocoa and oil?
If Gbagbo has been able to keep his troops fed and his functionaries paid, it's in no small part because the lush, tropical stretch of Ivory Coast he controls happens to be the cocoa basket of the planet. The most fertile cocoa hills of Ivory Coast stretch right through sections controlled by Gbagbo's supporters.
But that industry has been nearly milked dry: Up to 40 percent of the export price of Ivorian cocoa consists of the government's take, both formally and informally. In coming chaotic months, as soldiers, ruffians, and bureaucrats skim more and more revenue off cocoa farmers, truckers, and traders, expect to see more cocoa smuggled across the Ghanaian border, where farmers earn nearly twice the $2 a kilogram they fetch in Ivory Coast.
But Gbagbo's government need not live on chocolate alone: The IMF suspects that state revenue from Ivory Coast's oil reserves may actually exceed the $1 billion a year it fetches from the cocoa harvest. How he'll manage, keep, invest, and pay out that revenue could help determine how long he can hold on to the Ivorian throne.
5.) Is the Idea of a new Ivorian currency for real?
In the last-minute drive to keep their government fed, Gbagbo's closest advisers are rushing to build the apparatus of a self-sufficient state – something intrinsically different from the Ivory Coast envisioned by Francophiles that founded it.
The notion of tossing up a strident, self-isolated Ivory Coast that more closely resembles Zimbabwe (where Gbagbo has sought advice) than, say, Senegal, may seem like a wide-eyed, midnight hour-idea meant to stave off an impending regime collapse. But it's closer to the entire raison d'être of Gbagbo's movement.
"They have an obsession with autarky," meaning economic self-dependence, International Crisis Group analyst Rinaldo Depagne told The New York Times. And it's an obsession that's had a long time coming.
Much is mind-boggling about the Ivorian conflict, but this much is clear: The country was founded with limited economic independence from France, from which it benefited from 40 years of stability, impressive growth, and French aid, while neighboring Ghana, now a rising world market, suffered the madness of military coups and banknotes that dove in value like pogs.
Today, not Ivory Coast, but rather Ghana leads West Africa, and the French ties seem more a disadvantage than a safety precaution. Growth in the eight countries that use the West African CFA franc, which is tied to the euro, has lagged behind the sub-Saharan African average.
The Gbagbo era has marked a perhaps inevitable backlash to Ivory Coast's French-friendly policy, and the latest expression of that resentment is the Gbagbo's Currency of the Ivoirian Resistance. It's the bills that Gbagbo's team has proposed printing as a way to pay civil servants and soldiers. As a currency, analysts say the MIR would almost surely be a disaster. But the irony is that, whenever the ruckus dies down, it might not be such a terrible idea.
"A large chunk of Africa is tied to the least adaptive zone in the world," African Development Bank Chief Economist Mthuli Ncube told Bloomberg News in June. "Surely, that's a disadvantage."
If there's hope for whatever comes out of this political crisis, it's that the conflict – messy and destructive as it has been – may offer this nation a fresh chance to reclaim its place as an economic leader in West Africa.
RELATED: Ivory Coast, Sudan referendum: Africa stories to look out for in 2011
Uganda's president and the leader of ruling National Resistance Movement party Yoweri Museveni attends a ceremony for his nomination as a presidential candidate at Mandela National Stadium in the capital Kampala on Oct. 25, 2010. Uganda cleared on Monday four candidates including long-serving leader Museveni for next February's presidential poll seen as a test of democracy in a country about to start producing oil. (James Akena/Reuters)
Is the opposition giving up in Uganda?
Next month, Uganda is having a presidential election – or, depending on your viewpoint, a mini-re-coronation.The Economist last fall called Museveni a "king by acclamation," and not just because he's been around forever, has a lot of houses, and puts his family in charge of most major posts. The magazine's Africa folks blogged, "Mr. Museveni has been careful to prevent any younger candidates building up a power base that could challenge him. He appears determined to stay until 2016, even if it means dividing his party, alienating military commanders, and arresting opposition leaders such as Olaru Otunnu, who used to work for the United Nations."
The word on the street is that most people think Museveni's around to stay. In fact, a new poll – billed by the government-friendly New Vision as an "opposition poll" – put Museveni's likely support at 66 percent (or 67, depending on where in the article you're reading). That's far above his closest competitor, Kizza Besigye (19 percent).
This, of course, doesn't inspire any politician much, except perhaps Museveni. Today, Besigye said that his party might pull out of the poll. The Southern African Press Association (SAPA) reports:
"If it is clear to us that this election is a completely hopeless process, we could still pull out at any time," presidential candidate Kizza Besigye said on Monday while recording a televised electoral debate.
Besigye, who is due to challenge President Yoweri Museveni on February 18 on behalf of the four-party Inter-party Co-operation (IPC), went on to clarify that by "hopeless" he meant "fraudulent".
Sound familiar? A coalition of opposition parties made the same threat in Burundi during the presidential campaigns in June. They followed through, leaving Burundians with only one name to vote – for or against, depending on which envelope you chose – on election day. That, in turn, solidified the ruling party's grip on political power, a hold that has many people worried about an increasing authoritarianism.
But Uganda has one thing Burundi didn't: An on-the-record worry by an EU official. According to SAPA, the departing EU ambassador told the independent Ugandan Daily Monitor that he worried about the free-and-fair-ness of the coming vote.
"I note particularly opposition parties still encounter difficulties in campaigning, in holding rallies, from time to time harassment, maybe intimidation, also access to the media," he said.
"I hope that in the coming weeks one can make an effort to ensure the playing field will improve."
There's still time – for Museveni to change his game, and for someone to remind Besigye that opposition pull-outs hurt one group above all others: the opposition.
– Jina Moore is a freelance reporter based in Kigali, Rwanda who blogs here.
South Sudanese children dressed in their Sunday best, who returned to the South by barges on the Nile river, sit amidst their belongings in Juba's port on Jan. 11. About four million Southern Sudanese voters began casting their ballots Sunday in a weeklong referendum on independence that is expected to split Africa's largest nation in two. (Jerome Delay/AP)
Will Sudan referendum inspire secessionists elsewhere in Africa?
Yesterday the BBC invited readers to a discussion on Facebook about the potential impact of South Sudanese secession on political configurations in Africa:
If South Sudan gets independence, will it encourage splits in other African countries? A number of voices are suggesting that could happen as the vote takes place in the South. Could Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Congo, Angola and others break up too? Colonel Gaddafi described a divided Sudan as “the beginning of the crack in Africa’s map” … Would that be a good or bad thing for the continent?
From what I know, border changes and the partition of nations occur relatively rarely. In Africa, you have Eritrean independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s, but beyond that I am struggling to find an example of a country on the continent seceding from or joining another since the independence era (see Wikipedia’s list of border changes in Africa since World War I). So I think that South Sudan’s secession may inspire hope among secessionists elsewhere, but I do not think it will touch off a domino effect of splits.
There is one other region in Africa that appears within reach of independent nationhood: Somaliland, which has claimed independence since 1991. Somaliland has its own government and enjoys a greater degree of stability than other regions of Somalia. Recently Somaliland successfully transferred power from one democratically elected leader to another, reinforcing democratic credentials that outshine those of many independent African nations. As crisis continues in southern and central Somalia, moreover, the US and other Western powers are showing greater willingness to consider recognizing Somaliland or at least treating it, de facto, as its own nation.
Interestingly, given this discussion about South Sudan and Somaliland, The Economist recently interviewed Somaliland’s new president, Ahmed Mohamed Silanyo, and Somaliland’s foreign minister, Mohamed Abdullahi Omar, on the subject. The interview is worth reading in full, but here is one key quote:
Baobab: What are the implications of the referendum in South Sudan for Somaliland’s quest for recognition?
AS: If the international community accepts South Sudan’s independence, that opens the door for us as well. It would mean that the principle that African borders should remain where they were at the time of independence would change. It means that If Southern Sudan can go their way, that should open the door for Somaliland’s independence as well and that the international position that Somaliland not be recognised separate from Somalia has changed.
What do you think? Is recognition for Somaliland in sight?
– Alex Thurston is a PhD student studying Islam in Africa at Northwestern University and blogs at Sahel Blog.
Singer Tuface Idibia (R) of Nigeria performs during the MTV Africa Music Awards in Lagos on Dec.11, 2010. (Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters)
Africa's countries are distinct entities, but their music is blending together
It simply doesn't do to feed the romantic, ubuntu-loving, sitting-under-a-baobab notions my continent fellows in the diaspora sometimes to have, but it's hard not to wax poetic about Africa's ever-evolving popular culture. I'm from an Anglophone country, so I'm cut off from a lot of the Zouk and Coupe Decale stuff in Cote D'Ivoire and Senegal; I'm circa early '90s on Congolese music; and Angolan hip-hop sometimes bypasses me. Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa are within my orbit, and it's just wonderful being able to see so much of what's cool outside my little cave. Everybody watches – sometimes with equal parts admiration and derision – Nigerian movies. Nigerian singers often go to South Africa to make music videos. Stars from across Africa make songs together.
Music has become the most meritocratic thing in modern Africa.
With all this cross-pollination necessary to make such a huge part of popular culture, it can be said that, in terms of popular culture, the continent is looking more and more like a country. What's cool easily becomes nationalized, then maybe regionalized, and, if the song is particularly cool, even loved across the continent, like Tu-Face's “African Queen” or Brenda Fassie's “Vulundlela” all those years ago. And there's the collaborations. Wyre (Kenya) and M.I. (Nigeria) did a song together. So did Dama Do Bling (Mozambique) and Sasha (Nigeria). And Fally Ipupa (Nigeria) and J. Martins (DRC). According to MTV Base, P-Square (Nigeria) and Tear Gas (South Africa) are planning a collaboration as well. Then Nigeria's superstar Tu-Face performs with a South African band during the 2010 MAMA awards (Yes, this list is heavy on Nigeria, but that's really is where some of the most popular artists continent-wide come from). Everyone cheers, and there really is no reason why we should not. If it's good music, you dance to it. If it's a good movie, you watch it. After all, Van Vicker is not less handsome because he's Ghanaian, nor are P-Square's abs any less defined for the fact of their Nigerianness. All are equal before the eyes of young, cable-having, cell-phone-using, internet-surfing Africans across the continent.
If preceeding times were marked with dogged territorialism, the drawing of cultural boundaries in bright-colored chalk that very often led to varying degrees of conflict, we could be so lucky as to see the signs of inching towards a new way of seeing Africa. It has been interesting to see identity with the continent become a changeable entity, a coat one can slip on when Ghana qualifies for the second round of the World Cup, or off, when one hears about something stupid someone's president did. The territorialism is still there, but more interesting is the willingness to erase the chalklines and adopt the larger, more inclusive identity of Africa. We could quibble with this and wonder if this necessarily a good thing, but I think the presence of this duality should be welcomed.
It is, of course, too early to say definitively what kind of change, if any, that the evolution of a larer African youth culture would bring, but the emergence of the culture itself speaks volumes. Even though the music is mostly derivative of hip-hop, it has ushered in one of the few things in which people look towards their own languages and environment for inspiration. The importance of this cannot be overstated in an Africa where, for the longest time, people have been looking abroad for inspiration, education, livelihood. As this popular culture evolves, it will worth noting the new ways in which the dynamic of this evolution changes, the role of major countries like Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa in this popular culture. If their pop culture influence increases, and thus the popularity and visibility of these countries, would it affect the countries at all politically? What would change? What would not? Why?
Having a window into what young people across the continent are into does a lot more good than simply exposing people to some singers or rappers they may not have heard of before. Even more than improving the quality of music produced on the continent, what has become obvious to me is that Western countries aren't the only ones that need a more complete image of Africa; Africans do as well. From my perch in Lagos, there is something about watching Channel O spotlight nightlife in Luanda, watching MTV to see a rap video from Gabon, or checking out the dresses at a red carpet event for an award show in Cape Town that normalizes people in a way that knowing about HIV rates, political upheavals or development indices cannot.
– Saratu Abiola is a Lagos-based blogger who blogs at Method is Madness.
Police on patrol in armoured vehicles pass people walking on a road in Abobo in Abidjan on Jan. 11. At least five people were killed in clashes between supporters of Ivory Coast's presidential claimant Alassane Ouattara and forces loyal to incumbent Laurent Gbagbo in Abidjan on Tuesday. (Luc Gnago/Reuters)
What would it take to remove Ivory Coast's Gbagbo?
After more than a month, the brinksmanship that has brought Ivory Coast back to civil war continues.
Two men, opposition leader Alassane Ouattara and incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, claim to be president. Most electoral observers, the country’s electoral commission, the United Nations, and most world leaders (aside from Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe) have proclaimed Mr. Ouattara the winner of the Nov. 28 runoff election. The vote count itself shows that Ouattara won with an 8 percent point margin.
Mr. Gbagbo clings to his office mainly through the loyalty of his powerful southern-based party, and through the country’s army. The radio and TV stations he controls have been accused of inciting hatred and violence against Ouattara’s party and ethnic group, and against the UN.
African Union mediators have come and gone, but the crisis continues.
West Africa’s strongest regional forum, the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) threatened to remove Gbagbo by force, but that threat has done little to convince Gbagbos. Of course, this might have been because Nigeria’s own military is involved in several peacekeeping operations already, notably in Sudan’s Darfur region, and that one of the other major ECOWAS members, Ghana, said that it would not send troops.
So small wonder that the news headlines about possible “solutions” in Ivory Coast have taken on a boy-cries-wolf quality. Mr. Ouattara’s envoy to the United Nations, Youssoufou Bamba, announced yesterday that there was hope for peace, after Ouattara opened the possibility of a coalition government with Gbagbo’s party, if Gbagbo himself steps aside.
Gbagbo "has followers, he has competent people in his party. Those people, we are prepared to work with them in the framework of a wide composite cabinet," Mr. Bamba told the BBC's HARDtalk television news program this week.
Efforts to whittle down Gbagbo’s hold on power – freezing his access to state bank accounts, for instance – have done little to encourage his cooperation in ending the crisis.
Fighting between soldiers loyal to Gbagbo and supporters of Ouattara broke out last week, with an estimated 33 deaths, according to hospital officials in Abidjan. Even the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, Netherlands, warned that his court might investigate the former president, if violence grew too severe.
So what does it take to get Gbagbo (or for that matter, any African leader) to step aside once they've lost a bid for reelection?
Author Paul Collier, in an opinion column in the Guardian newspaper, suggests the best and perhaps only tool strong enough to remove Gbagbo is his own army. Weaken loyalty between the army and the leader – perhaps by cutting off army salaries – and the leader might see it in his best interest to look for accommodations in the Cote D’Azur instead of Cote D’Ivoire.
Despite the happy rhetoric of African solutions for African problems, there is no solution in sight, unless it comes from within Ivory Coast itself.
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