Baobab

SITUATED barely 100 miles (160km) south of the Tropic of Capricorn, you might expect Johannesburg, South Africa's commercial capital, to be bathed in tropical heat all the year round. But this city of 4m inhabitants lies 5,500 feet (1,700 metres) above sea level and it is now mid-winter. So although the middle of the day is generally warm, with clear blue skies and a sun too hot to sit out in comfortably, the nights can be bitterly cold, with temperatures dropping below freezing. But apart from the fancier hotels and some upmarket office blocks, almost no one has central heating—or adequate heating of any form for that matter.

Everyone complains about the cold. During the winter months from May to September, it forms the main topic of Johannesburgers' conversation. Yet no one does anything about it. At night, families, swaddled in overcoats and wrapped in blankets, huddle around what is often the only fire (gas, wood or electric) in their uninsulated drafty homes, where the wafer-thin windows radiate back the outside cold, and the shaded verandas or stoeps (so pleasant in the summer heat) prevent the sun's warming rays from penetrating. The schools are not heated, nor are most restaurants or shops. Offices barely are. 

Bed, preferably with an electric blanket and piled high with thick duvets, is really the only comfortable place. Getting dressed in the morning is agony. Taking a shower even worse. The uncarpeted wooden or tiled floors (excellent, again, in summer) are freezing under foot. Icy tap water sends darts of pain through newly brushed teeth. Skin dries and cracks painfully in the moistureless air. Coffee gets cold before it can be drunk. Olive oil turns solid in the bottle. Red wine has to be put in the microwave to be palatable. And if that's what it's like for rich folk, imagine how poor black people cope in the townships and shanty-towns.

Earlier this week, in the sprawling black township of Soweto outside Johannesburg, an angry mob, unable to bear the cold any longer, went on the rampage, burning down the homes of two African National Congress councillors and torching their cars in protest over the soaring cost of electricity. They were used to getting their electricity for free, through illegal (and often dangerous) connections to the grid. But then the heavily indebted state-owned power company, Eskom, decided to put an end to this drain on its resources by installing money-gobbling pre-paid meters in houses. No longer able to heat their homes, the impoverished residents turned their wrath on their local councillors who, they said, should have never agreed to the installation of Eskom's little "green boxes".

One might have thought this would serve as a lesson to other public officials dealing with the poor in the misery of Johannesburg's winter. But it seems not. Two days later, as temperatures dropped to –2°C, around 2,000 residents in a decrepit city-centre tenement block were thrown out onto the street, with what meagre belongings they could salvage, after the Johannesburg council deemed their building to be a fire risk. It was up to the landlord, they were told as they stood helplessly in the freezing night air, to find them alternative accommodation. Fat chance. It took an emergency High Court order to get the tenants, who included women and children as well as about 50 blind people, back inside before they all froze to death.

But, hey, at least winters in South Africa are short, Johannesburgers ruefully remind themselves and others.

RULING parties in Africa often have to answer as much to their donors as their citizens. A recent paper suggests that the government in Somaliland has become more accountable to its citizens because of the lack of aid.

Somaliland announced its secession from Somalia in 1991 and has operated as a more or less independent country ever since. It has its own president, parliament and constitution. It even boasts a central bank that prints its own currency, the Somaliland shilling. The peaceful existence of its three million mostly Muslim, but secular, residents contrasts sharply with the disorder and instability of Somalia. The world, however, has refused to recognise Somaliland. Reluctant to encourage other separatist movements, the West remains committed to supporting the embattled Transitional Federal Government in Somalia which opposes its separation.

In his paper, Nicholas Eubank, a researcher at Stanford University, claims that some of Somaliland's success is down to a dearth of aid. Donors cannot give aid directly to the government since it is not recognised as such. It has been dependant on raising local tax revenue, which the paper says citizens have used as leverage to make the government more inclusive, representative and accountable. For those looking to bash the multi-billion dollar aid industry, it is an appealing thesis. But is it true?

The port of Berbera, a trade hub for landlocked Ethiopia's 80m consumers, is one of the government's main revenue streams. In 1992 the government tried to take the port by force form the Isle Muse, a small clan. Having failed, it entered into negotiations which led to the inclusion of other clans into a more representative government that won the backing of the country's richest businessmen. Mr Eubank argues that the government was forced to negotiate with the owners of the port because it was short of money. This would not have happened if it had access to aid money; the port brought in 80% of the government’s $51m budget in 2008, a measly sum compared to how much Somaliland could get in aid were it to be recognised.

Others say that the "benign neglect" of British colonial rule allowed stronger political institutions to develop which made negotiations about the port more productive. Even so, the government's dependency on taxation certainly gave local business people greater leverage.

Somaliland's experiences cannot be applied directly elsewhere. But it offers some lessons. The resource constraints which led to a more inclusive government gave each clan a stake in maintaining stability. It is impossible to judge whether this outweighs the benefits that aid might have brought, but it should give donors pause for thought when they start splashing cash around. Somaliland's chances of becoming a fully-fledged country have risen with the precedent of South Sudan's independence. But the Somaliland government should consider its options before accepting the aid that would pour in if and when it is recognised. Its stability has in part been a result of a weak central government that does not threaten traditional regional leaders. An influx of money could upset this delicate balance.

THE careers of foreign correspondents are defined by certain epochs: the second world war, the cold war, post-colonialism and the Vietnam war, for example. My first stories told of the end of the Salvadorian civil war and the Romanian revolution. But then came the new world order whose defining story was that there was no defining story. Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? The Rwandan genocide? The opening of Eastern Europe? China? The internet? None quite fit the bill.

That changed on 9/11. Since then foreign correspondents have been working in the epoch of "the war on terror". Stories have swirled around Islam, often in strange ways. My undergraduate studies were in Islamic history. It was heady stuff, Averroës writing in the margins of Aristotle, co-mingling his observations in such a way that scholars still argue which nuance belonged to the Greek and which to the Moor. For all their luminosity, Granada, Cordoba, Damascus and the ecumenical court of Palermo were never an obvious fit for a foreign correspondent. Then I started racking up Muslim conflicts. Bosnia, Kosovo, Russia and Uzbekistan added to the tally. After 2001, I moved to Afghanistan to write about al-Qaeda. Like many other Westerners there, I longed to glimpse Osama bin Laden loping out of a cedar forest, into the sunlight.

For the last few years I have travelled among Muslim communities in Africa. In particular, I have been tracking the jihadist fighters in Somalia. There is something particularly wicked about the ideology of the global jihad there. Like a parasite, it feeds on the absence of order and Somalia is too weak to shake it off. It imposes its own certainties and brutality. It is resilient. The jihadists have lost several military campaigns. At one point its fighters were shredded from the air by Ethiopian and American planes. Yet they managed to take control of south Somalia and large parts of the capital, Mogadishu. In those areas music and dancing have been banned, women marginalised, and brave Somalis butchered for standing up for freedom and human rights.

Lurking among the jihadists was a group of al-Qaeda operatives responsible for blowing up the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Those attacks, which killed 224 and wounded 5,000, were the curtain-raiser for the war on terror. In 2007 Abu Taha al-Sudani, an explosives expert, was killed by the Americans. In 2009 Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan was accused of carrying out a terrorist attack in Mombasa in 2002, was killed by an American helicopter strike. Nabhan's death left a Comorian, Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, as the head of al-Qaeda in the region.

I had long been fascinated by Fazul. I tracked down his mother and sister in the Comoro Islands and interviewed them about Fazul. What was he like as boy? Why had he turned to terrorism? His mother was angry, angry at the intrusion, and angry at her son; not for killing innocents, but for failing to come home for his father's funeral. Fazul's sister was more open. Fazul had been a good student. His teachers said he was close to winning a scholarship to a French university to study mathematics, but France had cut its budget for African students so Fazul—from a poor family—went to study in Pakistan instead. From there, tempted by the promise of a monthly salary, he was recruited into al-Qaeda. After 1998, he was listed on the FBI's most wanted list, a $5m bounty on his head. Kenyan police almost caught him several times, but he always managed to escape. George W. Bush claimed credit for his death in a missile strike. The missile missed.

I am dubious that Fazul was as brilliant as the FBI made him out to be: multi-lingual, a master of disguise, a computer expert, the operational brain of al-Qaeda in Somalia. Some sources suggest he was often depressed and spent his days in a room watching television. But Fazul was canny. His Comorian features—a descendant of runaway slaves and pirates—allowed him to hide himself among the Bajuni people of south Somalia. With the right beard and clothes he could pass as an Arab; jeans and a t-shirt made him look more Western. He sailed in and out of Somalia on shark-fishing dhows. He often ventured into the Somali desert, moving along the dried up river beds at night with groups of young fighters. He hid himself among the mangrove swamps close to the Kenyan border, assisting in the training of new recruits. The stories that he was involved in the blood-diamond trade seem unlikely. But he did handle wads of cash. He had a stack of passports and identities. He built up ties with the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda. He may have co-ordinated the suicide bombings in Uganda last year that killed crowds gathered at a restaurant and a nightclub in Kampala to watch the World Cup final.

Fazul was shot dead in Mogadishu on June 8th. He had travelled from Tanzania in March on a South African passport in the name of Daniel Robinson. It was midnight in Mogadishu. He found himself not at a Shabab checkpoint but a government one. He fired his pistol first but was then shot in the chest. He and a Kenyan accomplice who was killed along with him were wrapped in a sheet and buried. It was only after his belongings were sorted out and a laptop found, along with $40,000 and a modified Kalashnikov, that anyone suspected he might be anything other than a foot soldier. His body was exhumed and his DNA sent to Nairobi to be checked against samples the FBI had taken in 2007 from his children.

To me, Fazul's death, together with the sinking of Osama bin Laden to watery depths, signals the beginning of the end of the epoch of the war on terror. The end will not be tidy. Iraq has not recovered; the Taliban and the drug runners of Afghanistan will outlast foreign intervention. In their weakness the jihadists in Somalia are even more likely to strike Kenya, Ethiopia or perhaps South Africa and Europe. Since Fazul's death suicide bombers have already blown up the interior minister of Somalia. It is more a matter of drift: the narrative of jihad will no longer command the attention of foreign editors. It is spent. Other stories are taking over—China versus the rest, the anthropocene and climate change; a new epoch for today's foreign correspondents.

BEING famous is not the same as being influential. Neither means that you are worthy. Having set itself the task of finding the 100 most influential Africans, the magazine New African struggles with these distinctions. The list (which is apparently the first of its kind, despite this) is in the June issue. It includes many obvious choices—Goodluck Jonathan, president to some 150m Nigerians—as well as some deserving non-politicians, such as Akon, the Senegalese-born American musician.

Nigerians are noteworthy in their dominance of the list. Much of the continent may view them with suspicion but they still rule the roost. Three of the five poets and authors are Nigerian and they dominate the business elite. Given its wealth, South Africa's limited presence is perhaps disappointing by comparison, though the most famous African is one of theirs. But is Nelson Mandela, plagued by ill-health and generally absent from the public stage, really still one of the 100 most influential people in Africa?

Then there is Robert Mugabe. He is a popular man in parts of Africa. Other think of him as a tinpot dictator who plunged his country into misery and clings to power at the behest of his henchmen so that they can continue to plunder. The editors of New African explain his inclusion in their list thus: Mr Mugabe continues "to mesmerise the world as well as vex his opponents with his ability to hold on to power". Baffour Ankomah, the magazine's editor, adds carefully, "The list in itself is not necessarily an endorsement as such but what it does show is the diversity of skills, talents and personalities".

In looking at such lists the most fun is to be had spotting who is missing. On the whole, New African highlights the well-known over the influential backroom players. It names Genevieve Nnaji, the Nollywood actress, but none of the money-men and producers who make the decisions in the Nigerian film industry. Also missing is Manuel Vicente, the head of the Angolan oil giant, Sonangal. He is little noticed but one of the most influential men in Africa. Perhaps he will make the cut next year.

LEBANESE businessmen in west Africa like to tell how in the 19th century their forefathers arrived by accident, disembarking from ships en route to South America. Making money there is no easy feat and few would come by choice, they say. The sweltering corner of the continent is marked by instability—most recently in Côte d’Ivoire—feeble infrastructure and rampant corruption.

But 250,000-odd Lebanese who live there—the largest non-African group in the region—are faring well. Since a second influx during the Lebanese civil war, their interests have expanded beyond small trading outlets. Today many oversee vast business empires involved in construction, telecommunications and industry which dominate import-export. Some have sidelines in diamond smuggling too.

Ezzad Eid, a businessman and community leader in Liberia, home to around 4,000 Lebanese, sits in his glassy office in Monrovia sipping Rim water, one of many imports from his home country. His businesses—which include a chain of hardware stores, an aluminium factory and a plush hotel—turn over millions of dollars a year in a country where the government's annual budget is just $369m. Mr Ezzad claims that 60% of Liberia's economy is in Lebanese hands. His boast is probably too high—no accurate figures are available—but it certainly a sizeable chunk.

Those in business say several factors have helped them to succeed. Most crucial are trade networks among the Lebanese diaspora and beyond, says Abdallah Shehny whose office-equipment business spans Sierra Leone, Liberia and Dubai. Contacts in countries Brazil to China—little trade is done with other African countries due to costs of overcoming poor infrastructure—are important for trade. But they also act as substitutes for the lack of local services such as access to finance. Family workers bring down costs.

Thousands Lebanese fled Liberia's long civil war; those who stayed found plenty of opportunities for reconstruction. Many educated and well-off Liberians also left. But competition from businessmen from India and China is now growing.

Flexible responses to the changing political and economical situation has been key to the diaspora's success, according to Mara Leichtman, an American academic who studies the Lebanese in Senegal.

Easy relations with the political elites and the money to pay bribes also help. Liberia's Lebanese are unable to buy property and are banned from 26 industries, but simultaneous patronage by officials is common. "I budget for bribes," admits a Lebanese restaurateur. "Anyone wanting to do business here does."

Widely visible success has fuelled local resentment. Protests over pay and job conditions in Lebanese-run companies occur. "The Lebanese mainly trade, sending money out of the country rather than investing," grumbles Sam Mitchell, the head of the Liberian Business Association. Others accuse the community of leaving little room for local businesses and collaborating to drive them out of the market.

New Lebanese immigrants are unlikely to be deterred. Business is booming. As one businessman puts it: "Anywhere is easier to make money than Lebanon."

BAOBAB recently attended the Africa leg of the World Economic Forum's global tour in Cape Town. The main meetings were best suited to ballooning enthusiastics, such was the hot air expelled from the stage. The president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, for instance, was applauded for pointing out that "there should be more economic opportunity in Africa than there has been."

But it was not the toadying or the solemnity with which African grandees issued their progress reports that made WEF so depressing. It was the inchoate feeling that the chief executive officers and others who sit on the WEF's various committees were two or three years behind in their thinking. The call was for radical solutions: if only there had been some radicalism on offer.

ANYONE who knows anything about Nigerian politics is aware of the split between north and south. The mainly Christian south has long been at odds with the predominantly Muslim north. Hoping to maintain peace in what can often be a violent country, elites from the two halves have shared power for the last 12 years by working out deals among themselves. The presidency and other posts are meant to rotate. But the successful out-of-turn candidacy of Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, in elections on April 16th has exposed how glaring the rift is. Results show that he won near unanimous support in the south and failed to win a single state in the north. The unanimity within each of the two regions is stronger than had been apparent during the campaign. This is worrying. Mr Jonathan will have to try hard to convince northerners that they have at least some say in government. Otherwise a large (and disproportionately poor) part of the country could drift towards political extremism. The new president would do well to pin this map above his desk. If it hasn't changed by the time of the next election, he will have failed.

ON SATURDAY April 16th Nigerians went on to the polls to elect a president. The first results from the 120,000 polling stations across the country suggest that Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent, will be re-elected. He appears to have taken about twice as many votes as his nearest competitor. At least 30 out of 36 states have recorded results so far and Mr Jonathan reportedly won 20 of them. Nine went to Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler who has been his main challenger. The advantages of incumbency in the Nigerian political system are immense and observers were not surprised to see Mr Jonathan ahead. In recent months he has doles out vast amounts of public money to supporters. They now hope he will follow through on his campaign promises, including the reform of the power sector. Support for Mr Jonathan was strongest in the south of the country, from which he hails. Mr Buhari fared strongest in his home region in northern Nigeria.

More important to watch than the results themselves will be the reports from independent election observers on whether the poll was credible. Nigeria has a history of fraudulent elections, mostly due to the machinations of Mr Jonathan's party. But the president made a concerted effort last year to make elections fairer, hoping to win a genuine mandate from the electorate to help him push through difficult reforms in the next four years. Before that, however, he may be forced into a run-off against Mr Buhari. He has to win a national majority of the vote plus a quarter of votes in two-thirds of Nigeria's states. He may well manage that. Full results are expected to trickle out in the next few days.

AT FIRST, they looked like piles of burnt rubbish by the roadside outside Laurent Gbagbo's bombed and now-deserted presidential palace in Abidjan—nothing unusual in this once-prosperous city which, after nearly two weeks of fierce fighting, looks even more like a giant rubbish dump than before. But then, among the cinders, we suddenly noticed the charred flesh still clinging to the straddled legs, the leering grin of the skull and the intolerable stench. There must have been half a dozen of them, all with bands of rusted wire around their necks, the remains of the tyres used to "necklace" them. All had been burnt alive. Who had done this to their own people? Did it matter any more when both sides had been guilty of similar atrocities?

Inside the palace, perched on a hill overlooking the palm-fringed lagoon, soldiers of the rag-tag former rebel army of Alassane Ouattara, the new president, lounged around in the shade, their AK-47s lying idle at their sides, as curious passers-by (mostly journalists) sneaked in to examine the marbled splendour of what until recently had been one of Mr Ggagbo's two remaining strongholds. Apart from some damaged ceilings and a few broken windows, the whole place looked surprisingly intact. The occupants nevertheless looked as if they had left in a hurry. In the presidential guest-house, furnished with fake Louis XV furniture, many of the lights were on, the air-conditioning and telephones still working, and the crumpled beds with their duvets hastily thrown back only recently abandoned. Mr Ouattara says he plans to move in as soon as possible, perhaps before the end of the week.

Although he sometimes spent the night here, this was never Mr Gbagbo's real home. The presidential residence was on the other side of town. It was there that he spent his last days of relative freedom, holed up in the cellar with his wife, children, grandchildren and mother, praying and singing and surprisingly calm, according to one fellow occupant, as the final battle raged around him. The half-empty bottle of 1945 French brandy, reportedly found in the bunker after he had left, may have helped too. It was after a second night of aerial bombardment by French and UN helicopter gunships, which partially destroyed the residence, that on Monday he finally decided to call it a day, sending his chief of staff out ahead of him, waving a white handkerchief. Perhaps this symbol of surrender wasn't noticed or perhaps it was ignored, but somehow the widely detested Gbagbo hardliner, Desiré Tangro was hit by a bullet, as Mr Ouattara's troops moved in to arrest the former president. He died in hospital the next day.

Within spitting distance of the presidential residence is the run-down Hotel du Golf, where Mr Ouattara took refuge with his entourage after defeating Mr Gbagbo in the presidential elections last November. The main road linking the hotel to the city centre has been cleared of the last roadblocks, manned by Gbagbo youth militias, that kept the new president a virtual prisoner for over four months. But everywhere there are the signs of recent fighting: twisted carcasses of burnt-out cars, many riddled with bullets; abandoned piles of tyres, rubble and wood used to create barricades; remnants of clothing; a bloated fully-clothed corpse in the middle of the road, which no one has even bothered to pull to one side.

The hotel itself is in a state of chaos, crammed with cars, soldiers in red berets, blue-helmeted peacekeepers (who have been protecting the hotel) and a variety of Ouattara hangers-on. Despite Mr Ouattara's presence, security seems lax. A sign points visitors to "Parking, Tennis, Plage (beach)", but the lagoon is too polluted for swimming and the tennis courts have been turned into temporary prisons. A couple of dozen youths, stripped to their ragged underwear, wander around disconsolately, complaining that they have been held there under the blazing sun, without any kind of bedding or sanitary facilities, for the past nine days after being arrested for breaking the curfew. Their guard says they were picked up as suspected Gbagbo militia members in the midst of the conflict.

We have been touring the city in a UN bus, part of 53-vehicle UN "peace convoy" aimed at reassuring the residents that the fighting is over, that they can now come out of their houses and begin to resume their normal lives. Although there are signs of looting everywhere, almost none of the buildings has been touched. Most of the shops, cafes, banks and petrol stations remain shuttered, and there are still almost no private cars about, partly because of the shortage of petrol.

But lots of pedestrians are now in the streets, selling French baguettes and fresh mangos from the metal basins balanced on their heads, heaving along great plastic containers of much-needed fresh water, or just chatting quietly in the shade. For many, it is the first time since the "battle for Abidjan" began a fortnight ago that they have ventured out. All cheer and wave delightedly as the convoy, looking more and more like a victory parade, sweeps by. The ever-cynical hacks assume we must have stuck to the pro-Ouattara areas, but it is good to see all the same. For the first time in months, not a single shot has been heard in the last 24 hours. The city is starting to breathe again.

ALASSANE OUATTARA, the internationally recognised president of Côte d'Ivoire, heralded a "new era of hope" for his fractured country after his rival, Laurent Gbagbo, was seized yesterday after an assault on his compound. The capture of Mr Gbagbo marks the end of a four-month standoff after last November's presidential election that descended into fierce fighting. But rebuilding the cocoa-rich country that was once a banking hub for west Africa will not be easy.

Mr Gbagbo, who came to power in 2000 and clung on throughout a civil war that split north and south, has refused to step down as president since losing the presidential election. The Ivorian electoral commission and the UN have backed Mr Ouattara, a former deputy director of the IMF.  Mr Gbagbo has been holed up in the presidential palace during the conflict while Mr Ouattara has taken refuge at the Golf Hotel, both in the commercial capital Abidjan. Their supporters have fought across the country. Up to 1m Ivorians have fled the fighting.

Mr Gbagbo's position has looked increasingly precarious since late March, when Mr Ouattara's supporters launched an offensive that swept towards Abidjan. France, the former colonial power, and the UN added their firepower to the battle for the coastal city. Some say these foreign forces overstepped the mark; others say the intervention was in keeping with a UN mandate to protect civilians.

Mr Ouattara's first big task will be to rein in the security forces that were until yesterday under the command of his rival. "Gbagbo was not alone—he was backed by thousands in the security forces and very undisciplined militia men. These men are still armed and present throughout the city," cautions Corinne Dufka, a west Africa expert at Human Rights Watch, a lobby group. She fears an ongoing cycle of attacks unless disarmament takes place on both sides.

The new president has vowed to set up a truth and reconciliation commission, of the sort used after other African conflicts, to investigate those involved in crimes and human-rights abuses during the recent fighting. But questions have already been raised over whether a commission would be impartial. Mr Ouattara's troops may have behaved as badly as their opponents; there are reports that they burned villages and raped and killed civilians as they swept towards Abidjan.

In its heyday, Abidjan was hailed as the Paris of Africa. In recent weeks, aid groups have struggled to reach casualties or transport drugs due to fighting in the streets. Residents have been trapped in their homes, unable to buy food or drinking water. Mr Ouattara will have to work hard to return to those glory days.