Africa News blog

Was South Africa right to deny Dalai Lama a visa?

By Isaac Esipisu

Given that China is South Africa’s biggest trading partner and given the close relationship between Beijing and the ruling African National Congress, it didn’t come as a huge surprise that South Africa was in no hurry to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama.

Tibet’s spiritual leader will end up missing the 80th birthday party of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a fellow Nobel peace prize winner. He said his application for a visa had not come through on time despite having been made to Pretoria several weeks earlier. (Although South Africa’s government said a visa hadn’t actually been denied, the Dalai Lama’s office said it appeared to find the prospect inconvenient). Desmond Tutu said the government’s action was a national disgrace and warned the President and ruling party that one day he will start praying for the defeat of the ANC government.

It’s the second time the Dalai Lama has been unable to honour an invitation to South Africa by Tutu after failing to make it to a meeting in 2010.

South Africa will certainly win more plaudits in Beijing, which last week agreed to $2.5 billion in investment projects with during a visit by South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe.

But pro-Tibet activists say South Africa is undermining its credentials as a country of freedom and democracy, established after the end of white minority rule a generation ago.

from MacroScope:

Building BRICs in Africa

Some eye-catching numbers from Standard Bank out today on the influence of BRICs countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- on Africa.

First off, the bank says the global recession and its recovery have been nourishing these so-called South-South ties. But it is all now ready to take off. The bank estimates:

-- By 2015, BRIC-Africa trade will have incresed threefold, to $530 billion from $150 billion this year.

-- BRICs share of Africa's total trade will increase from one-fifth today to one-third in the next five years.

-- BRICS foreign direct investment stock in Africa will swell to more than $150 billion from around $60 billion today.

Standard Bank bases these assertions partly on estimates for BRICs growth over the next five years -- eg, domestic output, global output and a doubling of BRICs trade with the world in general. But it also sees Africa growing rapidly -- for example, a per capita real annual growth rate of 5.7 percent between now and 2015, and a doubling of private consumption in Africa's 10 largest economies. And it adds:

Crucially, a host of global-minded corporates is emerging from the BRICs. In 2010 231 (11.5 percent of the total) companies listed in the Forbes Global 2000 originated in the BRICs, up from only 83 companies (4 percent) in 2005. Recent trends are a harbinger of deeper potential.

Breaking down the walls – Sudan’s oil transparency push

It was a just another seminar on transparency in the oil sector. Seemingly banal.

But this was being held in Khartoum, involving live debates between northern and southern Sudanese officials, a minerals watchdog and the international media, who were allowed free access to publicly grill those who administer what has for years been an incredibly opaque oil industry.

What emerged was surprisingly positive and all walked away feeling that — at least until the Jan. 9, 2011 referendum on southern independence — this was the first step towards finally unpicking all the stitches that have sewn the sector tightly shut to outsiders.

We are “PR stupid” said the newly appointed Minister for Energy from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, Lual Deng, who instigated the forum.

He said this to explain the discrepancies in oil production and oil prices uncovered by Global Witness, a non-governmental organisation, whose report “Fuelling Mistrust — the need for transparency in Sudan’s oil sector” provoked the discussion.

These discrepancies include oil prices published by the ministry of finance web site with little clarification of how they had been calculated, even citing barrels of Sudanese oil selling for as little as 15 cents a barrel.

Global Witness also found discrepancies between China’s CNPC, which dominates a Sudanese oil sector dogged by U.S. sanctions, and Sudan’s energy ministry output figures. Those figures were easily explained as the difference between gross production and net of water, gas and solids on Wednesday.

Africa optimism rising

When some of the most influential figures in emerging markets finance spoke to a group of Reuters editors, they were asked about top picks for growth beyond the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

One continent came up again and again – Africa – and one country in particular – Nigeria. Goldman Sachs global head of economic research, Jim O’Neill, highlighted the improvement in the growth-environment index of Africa’s giant over the past decade.

“If it were to show the same increase in its growth-environment score over the next decade, many investors will look back and say why the hell didn’t I invest in Nigeria,” said O’Neill, who coined the term BRICs.

You can read the full story here.

Recent interest in Africa has been buoyed by the World Cup while a series of reports have highlighted its prospects beyond the global crisis. There was a recent McKinsey study and Fitch has come out with an improved outlook for sub-Saharan Africa.

There is certainly plenty of optimism outside the continent. Will it be fully realised this time around?

West must change approach to Africa

Tom Cargill, Assistant Head of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, writes on the West’s relationship with Africa:

French President Nicholas Sarkozy put it best this week, when he spoke of the increasing important of Africa in Global Affairs: “Africa’s formidable demographics and its considerable resources make it the main reservoir for world economic growth in the decades to come.”

This is indeed the principal finding of our new Chatham House Report ‘Our Common Strategic Interests: Africa’s role in the post G8 World’. Yet so far there is very little evidence that Western policy makers, publics, or most importantly, businesses, are waking up to the opportunities that are slowly draining away from them with each passing day.

For the past ten years, fundamental change has been taking place across large parts of Africa. Growth rates and stability have increased. Political, regulatory and security reform have deepened. Increasing investment from China, but also Brazil, India, Turkey, South Korea, Argentina and other ambitious emerging powers has acted for the most part as an accelerant.

Even the global financial crisis has in some ways hastened this process, for while in the short and medium term it had a devastating impact on millions across Africa, it has also revealed the true ebb of power from East to West, and encouraged the new economic actors of the G20 to chase access to the 40 percent of the world’s mineral resources, and 1 billion consumers gathered in Africa. Almost as important is the 25 percent of UN General Assembly votes that are represented by the continent’s 53 countries.

Meanwhile, many Western countries seem trapped in a humanitarian conception of Africa.

Popular media coverage and policy judgement is overwhelmed with a perception that Africa is simply a problem continent with little strategic value, except as a space where largess is shown and good things done to make up in some small way for the messy reality of international diplomacy.

Motor-rickshaws changing face of transport in Mali

Mali introduced Chinese-made motor rickshaws in 2006. They’ve been such a hit that most of Mali’s bigger cities are overrun with them and competition between drivers is pushing down prices. They’ve now been barred from the centre of the capital, Bamako, but in Mali’s third-largest city, Segou, the rickshaw-taxi is the main means of public transport.

“I have a wife and seven children,” rickshaw driver Bassidi Baba Djefaga told Reuters Africa Journal. “This rickshaw is what enables me to feed my family. Before I had the rickshaw, I was a taxi driver and had two taxis. But when the new rickshaws arrived, I saw that taxi cars weren’t going to be good business any longer. So, I sold my two taxis and bought a rickshaw.”

Bassidi was one of the first drivers in Segou to buy a motor rickshaw, and it paid off. He can now make around $300 a month — a lot more than the average income in Mali, which is around $130.

The rickshaws are a government initiative to create employment and improve transport. Mali’s minister for transport introduced them in 2006 after a visit to China, where motor rickshaws are widely used.

In Mali, drivers buy them from the government for about $2000 and pay for them in instalments over 20 months.

For the people of Segou, the motor rickshaws have revolutionised transport. Before, the only options were taking a donkey cart or an ordinary taxi, which can cost up to 50 cents per trip within Segou. In a motor-rickshaw the same journey costs 10 cents.

How will Chinese culture influence Africa?

So far, media coverage of China’s involvement in Africa has mostly been about investment. Stories of Chinese engineers in hard hats standing by roads up mountains in Ethiopia. Stories of Chinese farmers moving to Zambia. 

But, in a push to extent its economic reach, China is now making a very real effort to export its culture to the world’s poorest continent. Last year the Asian giant overtook the U.S. as Africa’s top trading partner, confirming to the West that it has a real battle on its hands to maintain its influence over African nations.

But, while China’s economic influence is now mighty and its cheap goods can be bought everywhere from Lagos to tiny tribal villages in remotest Ethiopia, Africans, especially young ones, still admire and try to copy U.S. culture.

Middle class teenagers in Nairobi dress like suburban kids from Atlanta, posters of Obama adorn minibus windows in Kinshasa, American hip-hop is everywhere.

China now seems to have realised this.

Here in Addis Ababa this week China and Ethiopia signed an agreement to work on a “cultural exchange program” from 2010 to 2013. Ethiopia’s state news agency said the countries will dispatch “art troupes, artists, writers and art exhibitions” to each other. It will be interesting to see how mutual the traffic is.

And it’s not just China trying to use culture to secure access to a continent overflowing with mineral resources and a largely untapped consumer market of nearly 1 billion people with more money in their pockets each year.

Africa-Asia ties flying high

Investment from China and other Asian countries was an important factor in several years of unprecedented growth in Africa before the global downturn hit.

It is very much seen as a critical driver for Africa’s future growth prospects as well.

China has repeatedly emphasised its commitment to Africa through the global troubles and is emerging even more solidly implanted on the continent now. Other Asian countries are also pushing hard, as a recent high-level Indian visit showed.

As one of the main links between Africa and Asia, Ethiopian Airlines offers an interesting indicator as to how the ties have held up and are expected to grow.

Early last year it was talking of cuts, but it is now at 14 flights a week to China and 12 to India. It is planning flights to more destinations in both countries.

Unlike many airlines elsewhere, it also managed to double its profits in its last business year.

Searching for reasons to be cheerful in Sudan

Only the most foolhardy commentator would dare to say anything optimistic about the coming year in Sudan, four months away from highly charged elections and 12 months from an explosive referendum on southern independence.

So here goes — five reasons why Africa’s largest country might just manage to reach January 2011 without a return to catastrophe and bloody civil war, despite the worst predictions of most pundits.

Oil Often the cause of conflict, oil could end up helping to prevent it in Sudan. The country’s oil industry, as it currently stands, only works when north and south Sudan work together. The south has most of the known oil reserves while the north has all of the infrastructure — from pipelines to refineries to a sea port. Talk of a southern refinery and an alternative pipeline route to the sea via Kenya are currently “pie in the sky”, one diplomat told me.Both sides may choose to fight it out over contested border oilfields after the widely expected “yes” vote for southern independence, thereby disrupting oil flows and scaring off investors. But it would be much more profitable for all concerned to work out a revenue sharing scheme and live side by side as business partners. The south’s government gets up to 98 percent of its revenues from oil sales so would struggle to survive without some kind of deal. 

Talks and process The scariest times since north and south Sudan ended their last civil war with a 2005 peace deal have come when northern and southern leaders stopped talking to each other.Since a breakthrough in negotiations over key legislation late last year, officials from both sides are currently holding almost daily face-to-face meetings. Many of those meetings are focusing on preparing for the elections and referendum.

Low expectations The International Crisis Group issued a downbeat report saying both the north’s dominant National Congress Party (NCP) and the south’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) were interested in the elections “for the wrong reasons”.The NCP wanted to establish its political legitimacy, to counter the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against its leader President Omar Hassan al-Bashir over war crimes in Darfur, it said. And the SPLM wanted to tick off the election to get through to the next stage in the peace process, the prized referendum.But those limited aspirations might not be such a bad thing, if you are more interested in Sudan getting through its elections peacefully then having a technically perfect poll. If the NCP and the SPLM get what they want, they might have the clout to push Sudan through its tricky election period, steamrollering over already-mounting opposition complaints of vote fraud.

External pressure External players in Sudan — among them China, Middle Eastern investors, and the United States — will use what influence they have to press for stability, for a mixture of humanitarian and commercial reasons.The 1983-2005 north-south civil war festered for so long partly because the rest of the world ignored it for so long. This time, thanks to other factors like the separate Darfur conflict, the world is watching Sudan closely.

War fatigue The biggest hope for peace is that both sides will remember the cost of the last civil war — an estimated 2 million killed, 4 million forced to flee — and decide that nothing is worth a return to that level of bloodshed.

Out of Africa — and into China

At a meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh this month, China promised to double the aid it gives to Africa and even forgive the debt of some of the continent’s poorest countries.

We’ve known for some time that Chinese are migrating to Africa to exploit business opportunities. But it’s perhaps less known that growing numbers of Africans are also moving to China to live and work.

One of the most visible is Vimbayi Kajese, a 28-year-old Zimbabwean who reads the news on China Central Television – or CCTV – and is the country’s first African news presenter. 

CCTV 9, also known as CCTV International, is China’s state-run English language channel. As well as China, it’s available in more than 80 countries, of which six are in Africa — an increasingly important audience.

“I’ve been in China for over 3 years now,” Kajese told Reuters Africa Journal. “I came after I graduated from the U.S., and the reason why I came to China was because China is the next upcoming emerging market and definitely is the place to be.”

Kajese is one of an increasing number of young Africans heading to China, where a booming economy and ever-closer ties with Africa are creating opportunities as tempting as any in the West.

Tebogo Lefifi left her job as the CEO of a South African mining and property development firm and came to China. Now on a Chinese-funded scholarship to study Chinese economics, the 34-year-old wants to make sure Africans make the most of China’s growth. But some of that may have to wait until she’s mastered the language.     Lefifi is setting up an organisation for China-Africa discussion and networking in Beijing. Young African Professionals and Students, or YAPS, will eventually help African professionals and companies trying to get ahead in China.