Baobab

THE IMF's most recent report on sub-Saharan Africa is cautiously optimistic. It predicts that the region's GDP will grow by 5% in 2011. Even better, a good part of this will be driven by medium-sized companies in non-petroleum economies. The IMF praises African governments for their "sound economic policy". African central banks, the Fund says, are handling currency fluctuations, budgeting and inflation better than ever. "The overall picture [for sub-Saharan Africa] is one of resilience in the face of one of the most wrenching periods for the global economy."

True, but the report underplays the extent to which Africa was protected from the global financial crisis simply by not being a part of it in the first place, a kind of security by redundancy. The region hardest hit by the downturn was southern Africa, which also happens to be the bit of the continent most integrated into the global economy.

Africa is entering into a treacherous period. The opportunities of increased trade are obvious, particularly when that trade is within Africa, but so are the political risks of failing to meet the Millennium Development Goals, ruining the land on which smallholders depend, and failing to employ more than a fraction of the young people flooding the job market. The IMF hints at what is already clear to many observers of a less diplomatic bent: sub-Saharan Africa will have to pass through a bottleneck around the year 2020, when the demographic, environmental and political pressures will be at their most crushing. If it can get through that, it should do fine. For now however, the IMF adds to the general bullish mood: there is money to be made in Africa, and more transparently than ever before.

MANY in Côte d’Ivoire had begun to doubt that another election would ever happen. But after half a dozen delays and more than five years of wrangling, the country held a presidential poll on October 31st. The peaceful vote and huge turnout, as high as 80% by some estimates, showed how keen Ivorians are to make up for a lost decade of political and military deadlock. But there is a long way to go before the country—divided between north and south since 2002 after a short, brutal civil war—can be fully reunited, let alone recover its lost reputation. Côte d’Ivoire was once West Africa’s jewel, with political stability and cocoa-fuelled growth that were the envy of the continent.

Neither the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, nor his chief challenger, Alassane Outtara, a former prime minister and IMF man, achieved an outright first-round win. A former president, Henri Konan Bedie, in third place, seems to have been knocked out of the running. The hope is that the country will stay calm for a run-off and thereafter. Mr Gbagbo’s cheerleaders, known as the Young Patriots, have a record of taking over the streets when thwarted. Thousands of French citizens fled when rioters targeted them after a disputed poll in 2004. The next few weeks will be tense.

The thorny question of nationality is still at the heart of the matter. In the boom years Ivorians welcomed peasants from neighbouring countries to work the land. But when jobs dried up, so did the hospitality. Mr Ouattara, a northerner, was ruled out of a previous poll on the ground that he was not Ivorian. The rebels who then seized the north said they did so because they were being made to feel second-class citizens.

This time round, all sides have so far played by the rules and resisted making the sort of ethnic diatribes that helped spark violence before. In a second round they may be less restrained. Just over 9,000 UN peacekeepers are keeping watch. But with so much at stake, will either side accept defeat?

Mr Ouattara will hope to count on the support of Mr Bedie in the run-off, as the pair are part of a coalition formed to stand up to Mr Gbagbo, who has run the country unelected for the past five years. If this coalition holds, Mr Gbagbo could be defeated. But the ageing Mr Bedie’s supporters cannot be guaranteed to switch their support to Mr Ouattara.

A peaceful election is vital if the Ivorian economy is to take off again—or if the country is to reunite. Though it is still the world’s biggest cocoa producer, the number of beans flowing out of its farms is dipping because of a lack of investment and reform. And the military roadblocks that keep the two parts of the country apart cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Whoever wins faces a daunting task, even if peace prevails.

ONSTAGE 68-year-old Mulatu Astatke is as subtle and understated as the Ethiopian jazz he created. The music, a hybrid of traditional Ethiopian music and jazz, is subdued, somewhat melancholy, and at times psychedelic. Mr Astatke, the originator and composer of songs in this canon, plays his principal instrument, the vibraphone, with a light touch. Between songs, there is no small talk. He thanks the crowd, and coolly introduces the next number.

Mr Astatke has completed a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard and been an artist-in-residence at MIT in recent years. But the seeds of his “Ethio-jazz” were planted in the 1950s and 1960s when he studied classical and jazz composition in Britain and America and honed his techniques while at Berklee College of Music, where he was the first African student. On visits to New York he hung out with jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and performed with the Duke Ellington orchestra in Ethiopia in the 1970s.

Mr Astatke’s name resurfaced in 2005, when his compositions appeared in the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers. A busy time of performing, recording, teaching, and composing has since followed. 

Mr Astatke is doing a world tour at the moment and Baobab spoke to him on his London stop when he performed at the Barbican Centre with the London-based group, The Heliocentrics.

Baobab: While at Berklee in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you started to combine what you were learning about jazz theory with the Ethiopian music you had grown up with. How did that happen?

Mulatu Astatke: My experiences in Boston and New York opened my eyes. I became a student of jazz composition and learnt how the music comes together. It helped me quite a lot, and helped me to find Ethio-jazz. There were so many great musicians at that time, and I lined up with everyone else to watch them. I met John Coltrane, I saw Bud Powell. Now I see people lining up to see me in Paris and Berlin. That's so beautiful to me. I’ve been very lucky.

Baobab: Since then you seem to have focused on fusing traditional Ethiopian music with jazz and worked hard to develop a distinct voice and style. Is that fair?

MA: Fusion and contribution, that’s my thing. There have been tribes in Ethiopia for centuries. Then we see Charlie Parker and the music he’s playing using diminished chords. I always say that Africa gave to jazz its whole feeling and conception. Not only the drums, but the science. Musicians are like scientists, just with different chemicals. There’s no difference between science and music, we just deal with sound. We are scientists of sound.

Baobab: Ethio-jazz has a melancholy sound to it. Why is that?

MA: We play five against twelve. This is a pentatonic scale that has been fused with a 12-tone progression. My thing was to combine these two without losing our character. The five is floating on top. You see this in Asia, in Japan, in Algeria. We have four different modes, and three modes for church music. It’s very beautiful. It’s all in how you approach the scales and the notes.

Baobab: You’ve opened a jazz village in Addis to train young Ethiopian musicians. What are your goals for the centre?

MA: It’s an information centre. We host jazz concerts and Ethiopian plays, and teach Ethio-jazz. We want to promote music to young pupils who have talent but who have never had a chance. We’re teaching the science of music—arranging, composing. I tell my students, learn the science of music first, don’t just jump in too quick. There is a line you have to follow. 

Baobab: What kind of music are your students interested in?

MA: Lots want to study Ethio-jazz, but many like dancehall, reggae and hip hop—music with more dancing and jumping. There are few outlets for classical and jazz. There are more and more guitar and bass players now because all they see on television is people with guitars jumping up and down.

Baobab: Your music was featured in the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. How did that collaboration come together?

MA: I was playing in New York and I was told he was coming to the show. I didn't know who he was but said to invite him anyway. He said he had been looking for the right music for his film for six years, and he thought my music was it. I said "no problem". Six months later he called, and that was it. And people have loved it.

Baobab: In what other ways has your music reached a wider audience?

MA: I’ve been sampled by hip-hop artists like Naz and now the Somali rapper K’Naan. Man, it’s exploding, I tell you.

Baobab: You recently composed a score for an Ethiopian film called “Lalumbe.” How did you approach the project?

MA: The film is a love story about people from the Hamer tribe in the south of Ethiopia. This was the first time I've worked with their tribal music and culture—hey hold drums on their back and jump and clap. I used different instruments and dancers to create beautiful fusion music for the film.

Baobab: You’re also working on an opera. How is it shaping up?

MA: I’m still working on it. The composition includes excerpts from Ethiopian hymns for Lent. The opera will include choirs, strings, trombones, and an ancient Ethiopian conducting stick. I hope to perform it in a church in Lalibela in North Ethiopia that is carved from a single stone and also in Europe. I decided to work on this project while I was at Harvard. It will be a big challenge for me but I want to see what people will say.

Baobab: Do you think that the music you’ve created over the years is revolutionary?

MA: It’s a cultural revolution. Why not give the world something different?. As long as you can play your own music and combine it with something else, you will have no problems. But it is a challenge, a beautiful and great challenge.

WHICHEVER bright public-relations firm advised the unappealing president of Equatorial Guinea that he could spruce up his international image by throwing $3m the way of a UN agency must now be licking his wounds. Obiang Nguema, the despotic president of the tiny (but oil rich) African nation since 1979, is best known for the nastiness of his rule (especially in his prisons), the clumsy way he rigs election results (typically claiming the support of nearly 99% of voters) and the breathtaking corruption which sees the ruling family syphoning off a large share of government cash for its own ends. After achieving some notoriety in 2004, when posh British mercenaries bungled a coup attempt against him (the Wonga coup), Mr Obiang set about trying to improve his image. The latest wheeze was to offer cash to UNESCO, the UN agency responsible for education, to set up and name a science prize after him. Instead of refusing point blank to help a dictator launder his dirty image, UNESCO's board and staff disgracefully considered accepting. Only after months of campaigning by activists, journalists and eminent Africans, such as Desmond Tutu, did the UN this week finally agree to drop its plans to collaborate with the despot.

The result of all this? UNESCO's not very high stock (based in Paris, it is widely seen as one of the least effective of all UN agencies, which is saying something) has fallen further—its director-general missed a chance to take a principled stand and to burnish her credentials as a fresh force at the institution. Months of negative press coverage of Mr Nguema have done him no favours either. Instead questions are asked about where the millions would come from: his own pockets (in which case, how did they come to be so stuffed?) or from state coffers. Either way looks bad. Not good PR for anyone.

Read our leader on the proposed prize.

JUST last month, a seemingly upbeat Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s prime minister, told a conference of potential investors in South Africa that his country was “no longer a basket case” and was at last “on the road to recovery”. The leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the former opposition party, conceded that not all was well in his 18-month-old power-sharing arrangement with Robert Mugabe, the president, and the ruling Zanu-PF party. But at least he and his erstwhile sworn enemy were now working together in a transitional government, which had allowed “normalcy” to return. “We are beginning to have hope,” Mr Tsvangirai declared. 
 
Barely three weeks later, that hope has been dashed. On October 4th the president and prime minister met to discuss the time-table established by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a 15-member regional club that acts as the guarantor of the power-sharing deal, to implement the pact. Most outstanding issues were due to be resolved by the beginning of September. But almost nothing has been done.

Moreover, to Mr Tsvangirai’s “utter surprise and disgust”, Mr Mugabe informed him at the meeting that one of the few steps he had taken was in direct violation of both the pact and the constitution: unilaterally naming ten new governors, all from Zanu-PF. Half of them were supposed to have come from the MDC. And the president is required to consult with the prime minister before making senior appointments.

Mr Tsvangirai said he had previously taken a “leap of faith” in agreeing to work with a man who had abused power for decades, in order to “allow Mugabe to address the mistakes of the past” and to “help him rebuild his legacy”. But he regarded this as one betrayal too many. He cited a litany of Mr Mugabe’s offences, including other “illegal” unilateral appointments for the governor of the central bank, the attorney-general, five senior judges and six ambassadors. The president and his party had been acting “as if they own this country”, he said, and had brought international sanctions on Zimbabwe “through the flagrant abuses of human rights and the economic disaster they inflicted.”

It is unclear where the disillusioned Mr Tsvangirai will go from here. He talks of a “war” between those who believe in freedom and democracy and those “who seek to maintain and abuse privilege”. He has called on citizens and foreign governments not to recognise the appointments, and asked SADC to intervene “urgently”. Yet he also says he plans to stay in the government and that he is committed to the power-sharing agreement, which is supposed to lead to new “free and fair” elections, possibly in the second half of next year.

So far, Mr Mugabe’s only response to his prime minister’s outburst has been to call for fresh elections once the power-sharing government’s two-year term comes to an end in February, regardless of whether a new constitution is ready by then. He has swatted away suggestions for continuing the government after further negotiations, arguing that “the things happening are absolutely foolish and absurd”. The 86-year-old president is unlikely to change his dictatorial ways, and SADC is unlikely to be able, or willing, to force him to do so. As Mr Tsvangirai has said, the road ahead will not be easy.

THIS is the week of Felabration, an annual music festival in honour of Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s most famous musician and a scourge of the establishment. Gigs and debates are taking place at the New Afrika Shrine, a huge and sweaty nightclub in Lagos, Nigeria’s mega-city of 15m.

Kuti was one of the founders in the late 1960s of afrobeat, a fusion of jazz, funk and traditional African rhythms. Over energetic percussion and horn riffs, Kuti railed against Nigeria’s elite, often seen as diverting the country’s vast oil revenues into their own pockets. “Instead of workers, we have officials. Instead of buses, them dey ride motor-car,” he sang in a track called “Authority Stealing”. He also criticised western companies’ roles in such corruption.

The line-up for today’s Felabration, 13 years after Kuti’s death, includes his sons Femi and Seun. Nneka, a female singer and winner of a Music of Black Origin award, is also taking part. In many ways, Felabration is an exuberant showcase of Nigerian talent. Africa’s most populous country is one of the continent’s leaders in the arts.

But the festival also shows that, in some ways, little has changed during the country’s 50 years of independence (which was also celebrated this month). The vast gap between rich and poor persists, fuelled by corruption. Much like his father, Seun thus sings in one of his tracks, “We get problems for house, we get problems for school...our leaders no care for us.” Nneka is similarly subversive.

While most Nigerians live without clean water and reliable electricity, wealthy politicians and businesspeople continue to be accused of foul play. Last week, Cecilia Ibru, the former head of Oceanic Bank, was sentenced to six months in prison for fraud. She has agreed to hand over 190 billion naira ($1.2 billion) worth of assets, including 94 properties around the world.

Perhaps Kuti still resonates with so many because so little has changed since his heyday—though he was also a fantastic musician. In reality, most Nigerians might say that they have little to f/celebrate.

IN THE print edition this week, we have a piece on the Global Fund, the main multilateral agency dealing with AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and the difficulties of extracting money from donors in these austere times. Here on Baobab, we have delved deeper into the issue.

Before the meeting the Global Fund distributed three hypothetical financing scenarios to show what was at stake. In the first scenario, the fund gets $13 billion, the minimum investment needed for the organisation to tread water. In practical terms, this would result in 4.4m people being on antiretroviral therapy, compared with 2.5m in 2009 (and compared with the current global need, estimated at 15m). The annual distribution of insecticidal nets would reach 110m, saving an estimated 16m life-years. The prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission would reach 610,000 mothers annually compared to 345,000 in 2009. In scenario number two, it gets $17 billion, the minimum to ensure that progress can be maintained. In the final option, it gets $20 billion which would allow faster progress towards achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

When the party was over the Global Fund was left with $11.7 billion in pledges, not even enough to keep treading water. In development, disappointment and cynicism are commonplace. But the fact that the Global Fund could be so under-funded just weeks after the world pledged anew its commitment to the MDGs still comes as a shock. 

The problem is not that the donors think that the Global Fund is an ineffective health financing mechanism. An independent report by the EU found that aid disbursed through the Global Fund had made a significant contribution to tackling HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, and malaria. Recent research from the Centre for Global Development paints a positive overall picture of the fund. 

According to a recent study on malaria financing by a research programme in Nairobi, global funding for malaria is already 60% short of the $4.9bn needed to properly control the disease in 2010. Precise funding allocations haven’t been announced but past trends give some clues. The Global Fund has historically allocated 29% of its budget to combat malaria and  so it probably spent about $795m on malaria in 2009—around 40% of global malaria spending. Financing for the Global Fund will be up by roughly 20% from 2008-2010, this will remain far below what it needed to guarantee coverage.

Multilateral aid makes it hard for individual countries to take credit because it obscures the ultimate source of funding. So some hope that governments may increase their giving rather than giving more to the Global Fund. This is unlikely though so the challenge will be to find more money. According to Professor Bob Snow, one of the authors of the study mentioned, this should include putting pressure on malaria-endemic countries with large domestic incomes—such as Gabon and Equatorial Guinea—to do more to help themselves. “A failure to maintain the momentum will mean money spent so far will have been for nothing” said Mr Snow. Existing treatment levels will be maintained under the minimal Global Fund replenishment but a smaller proportion of the infected will be treated as these diseases continue to spread. 

There is a sense in the aid community now that efficiency appears to strictly mean “more with less”. Not that aid commitments were on track before the recession. But global debt and widespread belt-tightening are likely to provide convenient excuses. The latest OECD estimates suggest that rich countries will fall short of their promises for 2010 by $20 billion and won't come close to their commitment to provide aid equivalent to 0.7% of GNP. Some countries, such as the Nordic ones and Britain, might but a lot of it could be through clever accounting.

One encouraging shift in the global development effort is that the donor roster is growing. If aid from the West suffers it will be partially offset by aid from non-traditional sources, such as Brazil, China and other emerging economies—what the development community refers to as “south-south co-operation”. It was estimated that these new donors contributed between 8%-10% of total aid in 2006. But the interventions of this new club of donors tend to focus on infrastructure, agriculture and opening up the extractive industries rather than health.

Ultimately, African governments will need to cover costs in the health sector. According to Paula Akugizibwe, Advocacy Coordinator for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa, “the colossal funding gap will test the strength of African governments’ rhetorical commitments to the fight against HIV”. Unfortunately, African governments don’t have a great track record with respect to fulfilling promises to their citizens either. Overall, the outlook appears bleak for the global fight against disease.

ON MONDAY night, Baobab enjoyed a glass of wine and a book presentation by Peter Cunliffe-Jones, the former West Africa bureau chief of AFP in Lagos. Mr Cunliffe-Jones has collected his impressions and analysis of Africa's most populous country in a volume entitled "My Nigeria". The same title might have been used by his grandfather who at one stage was the country's acting colonial governor. On the fiftieth anniversary of Nigeria's independence, Mr Cunliffe-Jones tackles questions both essential and obvious: how bad is corruption and what can be done about? Why is average life expectancy still so low (47 years at birth)? Can a state as diverse as Nigeria function well? Should it even exist?

Mr Cunliffe-Jones's heart is in the anecdotal material, the sideways glances and sly comparisons (he spent some time contemplating last night what Indonesia and Nigeria have in common and why their capital cities feel so much alike). He delights in sharing linguistic quirks. He also enjoyed musing that even in colonial times, what we now like to call civil society was necessary to curb "the natural rascality" of the political class, which he thought applied equally to Westminster MPs expensing their duck ponds and Nigerian party bosses on the take.

Baobab is off to Nigeria next week so will have good opportunity to see how accurate Mr Cunliffe-Jones's observations still are.

(The event was organised by the Royal African Society and hosted by the School of Oriental and African Studies)

IN THE print edition this week we look at morphine in Africa. Ninety percent of the world's morphine is distributed in rich countries but in poor countries it is hard to get hold of. This means that Africans with AIDS, cancer and other diseases get little pain relief. In the business section, we look at Wal-Mart's efforts to expand in Africa after the Arkansas-based "Beast of Bentonville" offered over $4 billion for Massmar, a retailer with 288 stores in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

AMONG the many development reports released last week, one of the more provoking was this one by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE). It details countries with the worst education systems. Topping the list is Somalia. Ethiopia and Eritrea are not far behind. But some of the findings look suspect. Are schools in Comoros really among the worst in the world? By what standard is Congo ranked far ahead of Uganda? It is unclear how much GCE researchers got out and about—and the ranking reflects this. Under its banner 1 Goal, GCE has relied on advocacy by footballers and other celebrities. It wants donors to increase education funding to poor countries from $4 billion to $16 billion by 2014.

Baobab agrees, but the failure of the report to take a clearer and colder look at the future is dispiriting. Education for African children is a right, yes, but it is also a strategic imperative: a crowded planet cannot afford an undereducated continent. The report notes that 48% of African children do not finish primary school. Yet it does not spell out what this means. For instance, what are the consequences in terms of lawlessness, terrorism, and regional stability of having 70% illiteracy in Somalia? Baobab is no scaremonger, but in this case the charities who backed GCE, including Oxfam and Save the Children, would have done better to have concentrated minds rather than hearts.

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma was said to be fighting for his political life. His once ardent supporters were supposed to be joining forces to oust him, perhaps even before the end of his first term in office. In sum, a party shindig in Durban this week was heralded as “make-or-break time” for him. What the ruling African National Congress (ANC) had done to Thabo Mbeki in 2008—by “recalling” him from the presidency—they could do again. But the plotters and whisperers have so far underestimated their man.

Amid increasing internecine back-stabbing in both the party and its wider alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the communists, and after weeks of strikes that brought the country to a virtual standstill, Mr Zuma has come back fighting. To resounding applause from 2,000 delegates at the party’s national general council, a five-yearly event, he hit out at those engaging in rumour-mongering, smear campaigns and even vote-buying in support of their preferred leadership candidates, despite the party’s ban on lobbying ahead of the ANC’s conference due in 2012, when the party’s leadership will be elected. 

At some point, all liberation movements have to deal with “all sorts of opportunistic tendencies”, he said. Organisations that fail to deal with such threats tend to vanish. The time had come for the ANC to act. “We have no choice but to reintroduce revolutionary discipline,” he said, without explaining what such a fearsome-sounding punishment might be. “If we fail to do so, we would be weakening the very fibre and existence of the ANC”. All must abide by the party’s principle of submission to the decisions of the leadership. 

This, coupled with an injunction that “juniors must respect their seniors” was a dig at Julius Malema, the incendiary head of the party’s Youth League. Reprimanded in May by the ANC’s disciplinary committee for sowing disunity, the irrepressible youth leader has continued to do just that, with the president increasingly as his target. According to reports from the conference, most of which took place behind closed doors, there has been no sign of his being in the slightest bit cowed by Mr Zuma’s latest threats. But he may push his luck too far. At least one youth leader has been expelled from the party before.

Cosatu, which has also accused Mr Zuma of weak leadership, seems more willing to kiss and make up after being thrown a few sops in the president’s speech. He reiterated his determination to crack down on corruption and nepotism, to speed up land reform, to pursue a “new growth path” with emphasis on job creation, and to set up a national health insurance scheme—all union demands. He also promised that the ANC would listen more to its alliance partners and consult them on senior appointments. 

So Mr Zuma is safe for now. The ANC has always been a broad church, ranging from dyed-in-the-wool Marxists to out-and-out free-marketeers. Mr Zuma was catapulted into power by a diverse group united in only one goal: to remove Mr Mbeki. That having been achieved, it is hardly surprising that the party has again split into warring factions. 

There is no obvious rival for the leadership, although Kgalema Motlanthe, Mr Zuma’s mild-mannered and apparently clean-handed deputy, has a growing band of fans in the party and in the country at large. There is no suggestion, however, that he is plotting against the president. With the critical backing of his fellow Zulus, Mr Zuma seems for the moment to be holding the ANC together. But this could change if he fails to follow his tough words up with action.

THIS week marks ten years up for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Within the next five years, the world's poorest countries are supposed to eradicate extreme hunger and halve the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty, provide universal primary education, empower women, eliminate child and maternal mortality, turn back the dark tide of AIDS and malaria and other diseases, and preserve biodiversity.

Africa has made a lot of progress on the goals since they were drawn up in 2000. But the ground is shifting under it: it is unclear if burgeoning consumer markets and more competitive economies will be able to outrun population and environmental pressures. Some of the criticism of Africa's performance this week will come from Western countries who have not delivered the aid to Africa they promised a decade ago. Judging from the overwrought press releases from various charities in my mailbox, the hand-wringing of the aid industry will be even more wearing. The best-case scenario of aid honchos this week is to win pennies and press conferences from world leaders. But the resulting platitudes hog space that should be occupied by radical ideas. So in my view (precisely because of the gravity of the issues), this is a week to tune out doctrinal discussions coming out of New York and instead to spend time thinking for ourselves, say, about African urbanism, or how Africa can reshape its villages with hi-tech and low-tech initiatives, while avoiding consumptive middle technologies.

What better way of tuning in than with African music? Here Baobab, in his blogging infancy, has to tip his kufi cap to Afropop Worldwide. The eponymous American radio show has superbly covered music from Africa since 1988. The country-by-country guide to African musical acts on its website is a better place to start the week than another MDG op-ed. For his part, Baobab will be turning up the volume on Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex—a masterful mix of Ethiopian jazz and Dutch punk. Other musical tips for stale debates would be gratefully received.