Empty Seas
Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Migrants Follow
By SHARON LAFRANIERE
KAYAR, Senegal — Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.
The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.
Nonetheless, Mr. Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.
“I could be a fisherman there,” he said. “Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore.”
Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.
That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.
Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations.
The region’s governments bear much of the blame for their fisheries’ decline. Many have allowed a desire for money from foreign fleets to override concern about the long-term health of their fisheries. Illegal fishermen are notoriously common; efforts to control fishing, rare.
But in the view of West African fishermen, Europe is having its fish and eating them, too. Their own waters largely fished out, European nations have steered their heavily subsidized fleets to Africa.
“As Europe has sought to manage its fisheries and to limit its fishing, what we’ve done is to export the overfishing problem elsewhere, particularly to Africa,” said Steve Trent, executive director of the European Justice Foundation, a research group.
European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fishing deals with Africa since 1979, is a scapegoat for Africa’s management failures and the misdeeds of other foreign fleets. They argue that African officials oversell fishing rights, inflate potential catches and allow pirate vessels and local boats free rein in breeding grounds.
Pierre Chavance, a scientist with the French Institute for Research and Development, said both foreign fleets and African governments allowed financial considerations to trump concerns for fish or local fishermen.
“One side has a big interest to sell, and the other side has a big interest to buy,” he said. “The negotiations are based upon what people want to hear, not the reality.”
Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.
Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources.
The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, studies show. Already, scientists say, the sea’s ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.
In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.
“The sea is being emptied,” said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa.
In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.
“Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue,” said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. “Now even five pirogues would not be enough.”
Fishermen like Mr. Diouf argue that Africans should have first priority in their own waters — an idea enshrined in a 1994 United Nations treaty on the seas that acknowledges the right of local governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to their surplus stocks.
But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa’s nearly 2,000-mile coast.
Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal’s fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should “cause significant alarm.”
But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.
Four years later, Mauritania followed suit. Despite reports that octopus were overfished by nearly a third, in 2006 Mauritania’s government sold six more years’ access to 43 European Union vessels for $146 million a year — the equivalent of nearly a fifth of Mauritania’s government budget.
“I don’t know a government in the region that can say no,” said Mr. Chavance, the French scientist. “This is good money, and they need it.”
Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who leads a Mauritanian association of small fishermen, said: “The E.U. has the money, so it has the power. It is easier to sacrifice the local fishermen.”
Those sacrifices are multiplying in Mauritania. One of the few countries with a private industrial fleet, most of it jointly owned with the Chinese, it has lost one-third of roughly 150 trawlers since 1996.
Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns P.C.A., a fish exporting firm in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running. Their two new orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou’s rough-hewn harbor.
“We can’t compete with the European Union,” Ahmed Cherif said as he strolled past row after row of idle pirogues. “The government should have kept this resource for Mauritanians. Let these people work.”
Europe is just one foreign contributor to fish declines. Countries from Asia and the former Soviet Union also dispatched ships to ply northwest Africa’s seas. But often those fleets stay for shorter durations and without the same promises of responsible fishing and local development.
In fact, little development has taken place since the European Union signed its first fish deal with a West African nation in 1979. The huge economic benefits that come from processing and exporting the catch remain firmly in European hands.
African governments either misspent or diverted the funds earmarked for development to more pressing needs, while the Europeans sometimes made only token efforts on promised projects. Nouadhibou harbor, for instance, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight years after the European Union promised to clear them to help develop the port.
In their defense, European officials say they moved to reform their fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that ship operators were overfishing and were undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio Donatella, who heads the European Union unit that negotiates fishing deals, says the new agreements are models of responsible fishing and transparency.
“One cannot say we are not fishing the surplus or that we have not respected scientific recommendations,” he said. Ultimately, African governments must protect and manage their own resources, he said.
Examples of mismanagement abound. The number of pirogues in six northwest African countries exploded from 3,000 to 19,000 in the last half-century, but Senegal and other nations have only recently begun to license them.
Guinea-Bissau, a nation of 1.4 million people, is a prime example of how not to run a fishery. According to Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.
For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau’s fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated 40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off.
Mr. Fati tightened enforcement, but said he still felt as if he was waging a one-man war. A few months ago, he left in frustration.
That bleak picture did not stop Guinea-Bissau and the European Union from agreeing last May to allow European boats to fish its waters for shrimp, fish, octopus and tuna. Over the next four years, the agreement will pump $42 million into a government that is months behind in paying salaries and still emerging from civil war.
Daniel Gomes, Guinea-Bissau’s 12th fishing minister in eight years, said he had tried to be conservative in how much access to grant foreigners, despite paltry scientific data and severe economic pressures.
Still, asked whether his nation would end up with empty waters, he replied: “This prospect is not out of the question. This could happen.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
[ add comment ] ( 2 views ) | permalink |
( 2.8 / 1438 )Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008
The Demons That Still Haunt Africa
By Alex Perry/Eldoret, Laura Blue/London
High up in the mountains of the northern Rift Valley is the village of Kiambaa, a place of maize farms and mud huts where the air is so light and pure, it is said to hold the secret of Kenya's world-beating distance runners, who train in the surrounding hills. On New Year's Day, a mob of several hundred people armed with machetes, clubs and bows and arrows surrounded Kiambaa's tiny tin-roofed church, where up to 200 men, women and children were huddled. The mob freed those who gave up mobile phones or money, raped the women, then closed the doors on the rest, heaped mattresses and dry maize leaves against the entrances and set them alight. The Kenyan Red Cross pulled 17 bodies from the ruins. Survivors put the death toll at 35.
At least one body, that of a young man called James, lay in a nearby field, where he collapsed after running out of the church with his hair and face on fire. Daniel Mwangi Nganga, 37, whose disabled brother was hacked to death in the family home as the crowd approached the church, recognized the killers as friends and neighbors. "We went to school together," he says. "They used to come to our homes. We prayed together." He searched for an explanation. "We just don't know what happened."
It wasn't supposed to happen in Kenya. Until a few weeks ago, this country of 37 million was a poster nation of the African renaissance, a term adopted by South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki to describe the continent's economic and political resurgence in recent years. After three decades beset by genocide, famine, AIDS and wars as obscure as they were endless, much of Africa is thriving. Soaring demand for resources like oil, timber and minerals--especially from China--has pushed annual economic growth for sub-Saharan Africa to more than 5% for four years running and is inching toward 7%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Conspicuous activism by Western politicians, philanthropists and rock stars has helped relieve the continent's debts and deliver billions in development aid. There is less war and more democracy. Peace reigns in the old battlegrounds of Angola, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Almost all African countries have held multiparty elections in the past 15 years.
Kenya is one of the stars of this revival: it has held elections regularly since independence in 1963, its economy grew 6.4% in 2007, and it has been a stable exception to turmoil in East Africa. But the outbreak of violence there following last month's presidential elections threatens that progress. A potential implosion in Kenya is especially worrying to the U.S. because the White House sees it as a frontline state in the war on terrorism, a bulwark against its volatile, jihadi-infested neighbor Somalia. Terrorists have occasionally slipped across Kenya's border, as in 1998, when al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, another neighbor. In 2007 the Bush Administration gave the government of President Mwai Kibaki about $1 billion in military and other aid. And there are special-operations soldiers based in Kenya at Manda Bay, on the coast just south of Somalia. The instability in Kenya has so alarmed the Administration that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reached out for help to an unlikely ally: Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, whose father was from western Kenya and who has relatives near the city of Kisumu, the scene of some of the worst violence. Obama recorded a message, aired on the Voice of America, calling for calm. On Jan. 3, the day of the Iowa caucuses, he spoke with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had flown to Nairobi, the capital, to see if he could negotiate a peace. In the days since his Iowa victory, Obama has had near daily conversations with the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, Michael Ranneberger, or with Kenya's opposition leader, Raila Odinga. Obama was trying to reach Kibaki as well.
Whether Kenya can be pulled back from the brink will reveal much about Africa's future. The nation embodies the best and worst of the continent--its vitality and economic potential but also its poverty, corruption and tribalism. So long as those conditions persist, crises like the one afflicting Kenya will continue to haunt Africa, stunting its growth and hurting its people. The outcome in Kenya may well determine whether Africa's renaissance sustains itself--or turns into another nightmare.
Roots of the Rage
The psychology of the bloodletting that has killed more than 500 Kenyans and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes may remain a mystery. Other questions are easier to answer. The immediate cause? A civilian coup by Kibaki, following a close race with challenger Odinga in the Dec. 27 general election. Three days after the vote, on live television, paramilitary police stormed the Kenyatta International Conference Center, where the vote was being counted and Odinga had a substantial lead. Minutes later, the head of the election commission declared Kibaki the winner. Kibaki was sworn in later the same day. That decision fanned simmering resentment against Kibaki's tribe, the Kikuyu, the largest of Kenya's 42 tribes. Though Kikuyus make up only 22% of the population, they dominate government and business. A 2005 report by the Society for International Development, a civil-society monitoring group, catalogued how Kibaki had packed his Cabinet, state corporations, the judiciary and provincial administrations with his tribesmen. The tribal animosities have been festering at least since 1963, when British colonial farmers sold their properties to wealthy Kikuyus, allowing them to encroach on the ancestral land of Luos, Kalenjins and others in the Rift Valley. Some blame also goes to the father of the nation, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who founded the ruling Kikuyu cabal.
In Nairobi the epicenter of the violence was Africa's largest slum, Kibera, where a million people live in tin shacks and clapboard huts--without sewerage, hospitals or jobs--a five-minute drive from some of the city's most luxurious homes. Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society in London, describes Kenya's poor as the "explosive dispossessed," ready to erupt into violence.
They did. Starting on New Year's Eve, tens of thousands of Kalenjin and Luo tribesmen tore through the Kikuyu sections of Kibera, mirroring violence across the country. Few seemed to care whether Kibaki and his tribe would fight back. "If there's civil war, it is the Kikuyus who will lose," says Titus Odiambo, a Luo fish trader. "It's their buildings that will burn. We don't have anything at stake." Some Kikuyu gangs struck back, but tens of thousands simply fled to the central highlands, where they are the majority tribe.
After a week of violence, Kibaki and Odinga came under heavy international pressure--and intensive lobbying by African leaders like Tutu and Ghanaian President John Kufuor and by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer--to reach some sort of compromise. But the question of who would rule was unresolved, leaving many Kenyans worried that the furies unleashed by the stolen election would lurk close to the surface, ready to break out at any time.
As Goes Kenya ...
What makes the unrest in Kenya most alarming is that its root causes are maladies that still plague other, less stable African states. The first is poverty. Despite Kenya's overall economic growth, 58% of its people are poor (defined as living on $2 or less a day). U.N. studies show that the gap between rich and poor is wider in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Despite the continent's recent economic growth, the number of its poor grew from 288 million in 1981 to 516 million in 2001.
The second malady is corruption. Kenya ranks eighth from the bottom on the list of the world's most corrupt countries, compiled by the watchdog group Transparency International. Kibaki's government and that of his predecessor Daniel arap Moi have been dogged by allegations of dirty deals running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Kibaki's former anti-corruption czar John Githongo went into self-imposed exile in Britain in 2005 after he became disillusioned by the President's lack of commitment to fighting graft and faced death threats. The government, he tells TIME, had "abandoned promises to equitably share power and economic opportunity, reform the constitution and fight corruption." Fixing the election result, he says, was "like throwing a match into a fuel drum."
As in Kenya, so in Africa's other powers. Africa is the also the world's most corrupt continent, with 36 out of 52 countries afflicted by rampant graft. In Nigeria the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission says the country's rulers stole $400 billion from 1960 to 1999. In South Africa barely a week goes by without a new corruption scandal among the business and political élite. A week after he was elected leader of the ruling African National Congress, Jacob Zuma was indicted on one charge of racketeering, one of money laundering, two of corruption and 12 of fraud in connection with bribes paid by a French arms company. (He denies all the charges.)
Finally, Africa's democratic institutions remain weak. Like Kibaki, many African leaders have a hard time accepting an unfavorable verdict from the electorate and walking away from office. "Democracy in Africa is not what is understood in the West," says Catholic bishop Cornelius Korir, whose cathedral in the town of Eldoret, north of Kiambaa, has become a refugee camp for 9,000 Kikuyus. "Since their wealth depends on power, our leaders are never ready to admit defeat." Incumbents like Kibaki, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni are among those who tried to alter their country's constitutions--some successfully--to cling to power. African voters are to some extent complicit in the undermining of democracy. When given an opportunity to vote out one corrupt leader, they often elect another, hoping he will be more generous with his ill-gotten gains.
Reason for Hope
So what can be done--for the people of Kenya and their 788 million fellow sub-Saharan Africans? For the West, part of the answer lies in holding African governments accountable for the graft and misrule that sow popular disgruntlement. The West largely contents itself with the appearance of democracy in Africa, not the reality, and gives billions of dollars in aid to corrupt governments. "The World Bank runs around establishing anti-corruption commissions," says Joel Barkan, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who was in Kenya for the vote. "They have been singularly ineffective." In Kenya the IMF and the World Bank suspended aid in 2006 but later resumed it. Threats to withdraw U.S. and other aid appear to have persuaded Kibaki to offer to share power with Odinga.
Ultimately, the emergence of a more peaceful, prosperous Africa depends on Africans themselves. That provides the strongest case for optimism. Some of Africa's most thriving states are places that recently seemed beyond hope. Rwanda, where tribal violence escalated into genocide in 1994, is reviving with relatively little corruption and subsiding tribalism. The IMF expects Liberia, shattered by civil war from 1989 to 1996 and again from 1999 to 2003, to post economic growth of 13.3% this year. There is hope for Kenya too. After all, the majority of Kenyans chose not to join in the tribal violence. Many civil-society institutions are strong and cut across tribal lines. Journalists, church leaders, women's groups, lawyers, tourist operators and even some politicians have united to condemn both the mobs and Kibaki, calling for an end to the killing and for the President to quit.
Still, memories of Kenya's unhappy New Year's Day won't fade easily. On Jan. 2 in Mathare, another Nairobi slum, a mob of people torched a gas station, burned three buses and two jeeps and slashed a Kikuyu man in the head with a machete. They chased another down a narrow mud alley and, when he slipped, beat him to death with rocks, then stole his wallet and shoes. There was nothing on the body to identify him, no one in the area knew him, and within hours he joined hundreds of corpses at mortuaries across Kenya, awaiting claim. Unknown. But not forgotten.
Mixed Picture
[This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy or pdf.]
With reporting by Joe Klein/New Hampshire
[ add comment ] ( 3 views ) | permalink |
( 2.9 / 1291 )http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/ ... 5220080103
Kenya's crisis spreads gloom over Africa
Thu Jan 3, 2008 7:48am EST
By Barry Moody - Analysis
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's sudden spiral into chaos after years as a regional anchor has badly set back Africa's democratic progress and will strike a heavy blow against the economies of a wide swathe of neighboring nations.
In a few turbulent days since a tarnished election on December 27, Kenya has gone from democratic hope to disaster, from a country seen as an island of stability in a dangerous region to a new trouble spot torn by ethnic bloodletting.
The election, which Kenya's opposition says was rigged to re-elect President Mwai Kibaki, ended a year in which democratic hopes in Africa had already been dented by a totally discredited poll in Nigeria and turmoil in the politics of South Africa, the continent's economic locomotive.
"This is the greatest setback to Africa's reputation since the 60s. Kenya has an iconic status, seen as synonymous with Africa," said Kenya expert Michael Holman.
But analysts do not believe Kenya's crisis will contaminate other nations politically.
"The politics of every country in Africa are very, very separate. African politics are all local and all personal ... I don't think it has any wider implications at all," said Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society.
Control Risks senior Africa analyst Chris Melville agreed: "While Kenya is at the heart of an unstable region, we do not consider that the current situation will significantly contribute to regional instability in the short-term."
Before President Mwai Kibaki's hurried swearing-in on Sunday, the conduct of the poll had been praised by monitors and there was optimism Kenya would make another major step with the first handover by a president defeated at the ballot box.
Kibaki's first victory in 2002 was a democratic watershed after 24 years of oppression under Daniel arap Moi.
But Kibaki's inauguration, after results had appeared to clearly show Odinga heading for victory, uncorked the most dangerous force in Kenya -- tribalism.
At least 300 people have died in clashes between Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe and an alliance of others led by Odinga's Luo.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
Kenya's economy, thriving before the election, is at a near standstill and this is where the greatest regional knock-on is expected.
"Kenya has the largest economy by far in the region. Nairobi has got the largest population of a city and most diversified industrial base between Cape Town and Cairo for that region," said Tom Cargill, Africa program manager at the Chatham House think-tank.
"So it is going to have a serious impact because other countries rely on Kenya for its economy."
Kenya's port of Mombasa and the single road snaking up to Uganda and beyond are vital for the economies of the whole region. The impact of the crisis is already being felt with petrol pumps running dry in Uganda and Burundi and rationing imposed in Rwanda.
"The Mombasa-Nairobi road is the only way into Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo, southern Sudan and most of northern Tanzania," Dowden said, adding that Kenya was also the base for aid operations into Somalia, Sudan and eastern Congo.
"The implications of Kenya going a bit wobbly are pretty serious for the whole region."
The road to Uganda, slow and badly maintained even in good times, runs close to some of the worst areas of ethnic tension and bloodshed over the last week.
"The longer this crisis goes on, the more that road is at risk not just from looters and so on but from those who want to hold either the country or the region to ransom by attempting to cut it," Cargill said.
And the shock setback in Kenya, one of the continent's strongest economies, could undermine general sentiment about Africa, some analysts say.
"There is going to be a global impact on people's appetite for taking on risks in a region that appears from the outside to be incredibly fragile and able to turn one election into chaos," said Columbia University Professor Josh Ruxin, who runs development projects in Rwanda.
Many analysts say Kenya's reputation for democracy and stability was exaggerated even before the vote.
They suggest Western powers had turned a blind eye to blatant rigging in previous elections, as well as deep problems of wealth disparity and tribalism, because of Kenya's value as a strategic ally and base for the United Nations and NGOs.
Whatever the outcome of Kenya's crisis, perhaps its greatest impact will be deep pessimism about democratic change in Africa.
"What is happening is a big setback for democracy ... Once the people who were in opposition get into power, they no longer wish to respect democracy. You ask yourself what purpose these elections serve," said Penda Mbow, Professor of History at Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop university.
(Additional reporting by James Macharia in Johannesburg, Diadie Ba and Alistair Thomson in Dakar; Editing by Giles Elgood)
[ 1 comment ] ( 2 views ) | permalink |
( 3 / 808 )Ghana reflects progress in Africa
By CHRIS TOMLINSON, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 12 minutes ago
Coby Asmah is a success in a part of the world that is hardly ever equated with success.
The design and printing business he launched from his dining room table 14 years ago now employs 54 people. He drives a new gold SUV, dresses as sharply as any Madison Avenue executive and vacations in the United States. And despite winning U.S. citizenship, he has chosen to stay in Ghana.
Asmah belongs to an Africa all but unknown outside the continent — one of growth and business opportunity, with a tiny but rapidly spreading middle class.
Fifty years after Ghana became the first African country to gain independence, Africa's economies are expanding by 5.4 percent a year — compared to a world average of 4.2 percent — and are projected to hit almost 7 percent next year. Investments are up. Banking firm Merrill Lynch & Co. concluded that Africa now offers investors as much potential as Russia.
These signs of economic hope come as the world is increasingly aware of its broader stake in Africa. Rich countries fear any disruption in the flow of resources out of Africa, which now rivals the Middle East in the quantity of oil it sends to the United States. Terrorism has revealed the danger of failed states, and hundreds of thousands of African immigrants flee to America, Europe and the Middle East every year.
The picture across the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa is still very much a patchwork. But a yearlong exploration by The Associated Press shows that progress — while fragile — is finding a foothold, in spheres ranging from democracy to education. Perhaps most strikingly, after few results from five decades of advice and $568 billion in aid, today's developments in business, education, government and other areas are being led by Africans themselves.
There is a new sense among many Africans that it is up to them to rethink their continent and challenge the West to do the same. The change shows up all over — in newspaper editorials, in a regional partnership for African leadership, in the revamping of the African Union, in a newly aggressive stance for fairer terms in agricultural trade, and in the confidence of entrepreneurs like Asmah.
"The change of thinking has been coming from Africa," says economist George Ayittey, a Ghanaian teaching at American University in Washington, D.C. "Civil society in Africa is becoming more and more empowered and emboldened, and they are driving the agenda."
___
Signs of prosperity are everywhere in this country of about 23 million people on the west coast of Africa. New roads are choked with cars, construction cranes dominate the skyline and shops brim with televisions, air conditioners and luxury goods. Real estate prices in the capital, Accra, rival those of an average American city, with a four-bedroom home in a nice area selling for over $500,000.
Asmah's office and printing press are located in a middle-class neighborhood of older homes converted for business.
Asmah, 42, was an artist in the Ministry of Education in 1993 when he first started selling graphic designs to friends. Soon he was ready to give up the secure government job, which for most of Africa's history was the hallmark of success.
He launched Type Company with money borrowed from family and friends. Business grew rapidly — almost too rapidly. Type Company had to outsource printing to others in Ghana, and the quality fell.
So Asmah bought a state-of-the-art, custom-made printing press and other equipment from Germany for more than $1 million. He diversified into security printing for banks, colorful packaging for local products and annual reports for dozens of businesses, which, like his, are homegrown and growing.
"Once you have a solution to someone else's problem, you have a business," says Asmah, whose polished appearance and calm demeanor project the image he wants for his high-end designs, despite a cluttered office full of computers and printers. "There is a lot of opportunity, because here, there is not a lot that is done right." Things not done right trip up businesses like his. It took five years to persuade a bank to help him lease $10,000 worth of equipment. Financing in Africa is hard to get, with high interest rates and stringent requirements. Government tariffs on paper and ink also drive up his costs, and he can't compete with preprinted imports because they are not taxed.
But Asmah says the odds of success in Africa are greater than anywhere else, including America.
Asmah is part of what economist Ayittey calls Africa's "cheetah generation" — young entrepreneurs who are fast, smart, adaptable and ready to tackle Africa's problems. Eventually — and it will take time — he predicts the cheetahs could overtake the bureaucrats and dictators who blame Africa's problems on colonialism and don't address them.
It is already happening in Ghana. Democracy is strong, and the economy is growing by 6 percent a year. The World Bank recently praised Ghana as one of the leading business reformers in the world. Ghana's debt is down by more than two-thirds, and inflation is under control.
Economic stability in turn draws investment. Foreign investment in Africa rose to a record $39 billion in 2006 from $31 billion just a year earlier, only partly because of oil revenues.
"It's a young economy and anyone who looks into that will see that Ghana is a safe terrain to be in," notes Asmah, who says his business exceeds $1 million a year in revenue and brings profits of 30 percent. "Returns on investment here are 20 percent higher than anywhere else."
___
Accra's first suburbs sprawl northward from the Atlantic Ocean, low-slung bungalows that stretch out on generous plots surrounded by high brick walls. Wide roads are laid out in a perfect grid. The neighborhood is in various stages of construction, but the shade trees around the more established homes hint at its future charm.
Mavis Boakye, 30, shares one of the new four-bedroom, cream-colored bungalows with her banker husband, her four-month-old son and her mother. Every workday morning, she climbs into a taxi for the 45-minute drive into her office in town.
Boakye is a department head at Type Company who supervises the digital graphic design team. The daughter of a poor civil servant laborer, she spent two years of mandatory government service producing drawings for Ministry of Health brochures. Afterward, she went straight to work because she could not afford university.
Now Type Company is paying $800 a month for her to go to university part-time, and she lives a solidly middle-class life. She and her husband watch Christian satellite television on a Sony Corp. home theater system. They shop at a new mall. They eat pizza at a South African fast food chain, and belong to a middle class sometimes nicknamed "black diamonds."
"I am making three times or four times what my father was making, and sometimes he looks at me and marvels and says, `I am happy you are doing well in life,'" Boayke says.
Boayke is an example of how wealth from companies is slowly trickling down through communities, in a part of the world where each worker supports six people on average.
In 2000, Africa's middle class of 12.7 million people made up just 2 percent of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2030, it is expected to more than triple to 43 million, or 4 percent of the population.
However, Africa remains overwhelmingly poor. Ten percent of the world's poor people now live in Africa, and that is expected to rise to 13 percent in the next 25 years.
The best hope for the poor could be private enterprise, which creates 90 percent of the jobs in developing countries. But business is dragged down by a lack of education, unreliable power, bad roads, disease and a long list of other problems.
Choking bureaucracy means that it takes 95 days to start a business in Tanzania, 138 days in Ghana and 177 days in Chad. In Australia, it takes one day.
Recently, African countries have begun to cut business costs and red tape, according to the World Bank. Ghana lowered corporate taxes and slashed paperwork at customs. Tanzania has reduced the cost of starting a business by 40 percent. Kenya is simplifying its business licenses.
Boayke has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug herself.
"The plan is that in three years, I will start something on my own," she says. "My husband wants me to start now because he thinks I will make more money, but I think I need to make more contacts before I start."
___
Near the port in Accra, the Ghanaian government has set up duty-free industrial zones to spur international trade. Hand-painted logos adorn the walls of the warehouse-style buildings, and their large wooden doors open off the loading docks. At lunchtime, women sell hot meals of beans and rice to workers in the shade of the eaves.
This is where Nora Bannerman's factory makes dresses and clothes sold in American department stores and lab coats worn by pharmacists at Walgreens and CVS in the United States.
Bannerman, who has made clothes since she was nine years old, is an icon in Ghana. She wears designer sunglasses as she drives through town in her cobalt-blue Mercedes Benz. She will not reveal her age except to say she was born in the Gold Coast, Ghana's name before independence. Her fashion design school has trained more than 100 students, and many have since set up their own businesses.
Bannerman's story shows how globalization both helps and hurts Africans in their desire to move ahead.
Easier trade gives Africans access to millions of people with money to spend, and Bannerman's designs sell in the United States, France, Germany and Switzerland. But it also brings competition, especially from China, which plays a growing role in Africa.
China imports raw materials from all over Africa, such as Ghana's timber and minerals. In 2005 Ghana's trade with China increased 35 percent to $816 million, making China its top trading partner. And China is investing — it loaned Ghana $30 million to build a national fiber optic network.
Yet China also floods the world with goods so cheap that Africans can't compete. Bannerman says Chinese companies mass-produce, without permission, her designs and traditional African fabrics at prices below her cost of production.
"China has been going all over Africa, picking out the good ideas," says Bannerman, sitting in her factory office. "While we were still doing high-value, hand-woven kente cloth, China came out with kente prints that are selling well to the United States."
Bannerman says her American buyers constantly pressure her to cut prices. But she won't and can't cut wages — the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act requires African exporters to meet human rights standards that do not apply to China, because of international trade rules.
Bannerman also has to pay high taxes on all imported cloth and thread that further raise her costs to export. And she competes within Africa against second-hand clothes from international donors that are not taxed.
She says all she and other African business people need to succeed is a fair playing field. "We don't want a situation where we are asking for aid all of the time," she says.
Africa has a long history of international trade. The 1st century gold coins of the royal families of Axum, in present-day Ethiopia, have been found as far away as India. Yet the continent today accounts for only 4 percent of global trade.
On the roads in almost every town, small-scale entrepreneurs balance on their heads everything from vegetables and ice cream to DVD players and television aerials as they sell to drivers stuck in traffic. But most of those goods come from overseas — $273 million left the continent in 2005.
Capital inflow to some African countries, including Ghana, is now rising. And so is hope.
This year's study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that despite crushing poverty, majorities in nine out of 10 African countries surveyed believe their lives will be better five years from now. Surveys in 12 African countries from 1999 to 2006 by the Afrobarometer Network, an independent research group, also found growing optimism.
Asmah says Africans can and will work hard to succeed, and he is trying to spread the wealth in his country.
He supports a business plan competition that gives advice to 60 promising entrepreneurs and helps them build contacts, in partnership with business promoter TechnoServe and Google.org, the Internet company's philanthropic arm. The top 20 winners get a jump start in their new enterprise.
The name of the competition: "Believe, Begin, Become."
[ add comment ] ( 7 views ) | permalink | related link |
( 2.8 / 254 )A Helping Hand
Contrary to how they're seen in the West, Chinese companies are a force for prosperity and peace in Africa, an expert says.
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 4:42 PM ET Nov 29, 2007
Yang Guang, director of the Institute of West Asian and African Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says that China and the United States "do not have strategic conflicts" in Africa. He notes that Chinese companies are attracted to the improved investment environment in Africa, but they make up only a fraction of total investment on the continent. Chinese companies are becoming more aware of principles of corporate social responsibility, Guang says. He states that China's investment in Sudan has helped the Sudanese people by allowing the country to develop economically.
The media likes to talk about China's thirst for African oil, but oil investments are just one part of China's investments on the continent. What other areas are Chinese firms involved in?
Chinese investment is involved in many sectors. At the beginning it was concentrated on a few sectors, such as resource development, including oil, agriculture, and fishing. But nowadays you can see Chinese investment in many manufacturing industries, such as textiles, consumer electronics, and China has also invested in tourism, telecommunication, and construction of roads. So it is much broader than it used to be.
China is a latecomer in the investment market in Africa. Chinese enterprises began investment in Africa in the late 1980s, but the value of investment has increased rapidly. So by the end of 2006, the accumulated amount of Chinese investment in Africa totaled 11.7 billion U.S. dollars. This is not a big number, if you compare it with the total direct investment or inflow into this continent. If you look at the 2005 figure, the total Chinese direct investment in Africa was 400 million U.S. dollars, but that made up only 1.3 percent of the total inflow of direct investment in Africa that year. The amount of Chinese investment in Africa should not be overestimated.
Of these investments, are the bulk of them from state-owned companies?
I don't have the exact figure about how much state enterprises invest in Africa and how much the private sector contributes to it, but if you look at the number of enterprises, that may tell you something. China has, in total, about eight hundred enterprises investing in Africa, but out of this total number, only a little bit more than one hundred enterprises are state owned. The rest of them all come from the private sector.
There's been a lot of criticism of China's policy of non interference in the countries it invests in, but what about the practices of these private enterprises? How can you characterize their investment philosophy and the way that they operate in Africa?
For the private enterprises, their behavior when investing in Africa is basically driven by some commercial motivations, like enterprises worldwide. First, this is partially because of the change of the domestic market in China. In recent years, we can see a kind of relative saturation of the domestic market with some labor-intensive products, such as textile and consumer goods. So it is harder for private businesses to sell their products in a domestic market at a satisfactory price.
On the other hand, they are also attracted by the improvement of the environment for investment in Africa, because in recent years the entrepreneurs in China have become aware that Africa has changed a lot. First, this is a continent with a great potential of resources. Secondly, this continent has been maintaining a moderate, fairly high, gross rate for about a decade. And thirdly, African countries are increasingly opening up to the outside world and welcoming foreign direct investment. So, in this case, Chinese enterprises are attracted.
There is a movement among Western companies toward better business practices and the practice of corporate social responsibility. Is that something these Chinese companies are adopting as well?
For the Chinese enterprises, there's also a growing awareness of this importance. This is not only for Africa, but they are also aware that without achieving a kind of win-win solution, without helping the local people to see the result of development, investing countries will not sustain their achievement in this continent. So we can see, especially the large-scale Chinese companies, they have already begun to pay attention to this, and are doing a lot of things in this regard. For instance, many of them are involved in building schools and hospitals for the local people where they have their investment, and they also pay attention to the localization of labor, to hire more local laborers.
According to Chinese statistics, last year the total number of Chinese in Africa, including those who do not do business, the total number was 80,000. But the same year, last year, the [number of] jobs created for local people was about 70,000. Seventy thousand jobs were created for African countries by investment in this continent by Chinese companies. What is new is that some Chinese big firms, such as CNPC, the leading oil company, have begun their first reports of corporate responsibility since last year. So things are coming and I think they will pay more attention in the future. If they want to be good competitors in the market, they will have to fulfill better their corporate responsibilities.
What are some of the challenges that China has encountered as a relatively young investment presence on the continent?
There are a lot of difficult things. First, a lot of enterprises in China are not familiar with this continent, and that is why they often come to us for advice and consultation about everything—from the law of investment, to the local customs—this is something they have to learn. Another problem is that they are not familiar with the kind of labor union system in Africa, the labor union system is quite developed in some African countries, but this system is a bit different from the Chinese labor union system.
Some of them also face the problem of the frequent changes of policies, and this is also something that they have to be prepared to face. Language is also an important issue, because a lot of Chinese companies don't have enough staff speaking good English or French or Portuguese to communicate with the local people. So this is also something they have to improve, and they have to be more familiar with the legal system of their recipient countries. So there are many, I won't say difficulties, but a lot of areas where they have to learn.
Many people are characterizing the United States and China as competitors in Africa. What is your perspective on that?
I don't think we can say that in an absolute way, because of course we cannot avoid business competition in several fields, but if you look at the issue as a whole—first, China and the United States do not have strategic conflicts in Africa. Secondly, if you look at business sectors where China and the United States invest, there is kind of a division of labor, because the United States is very good at investing in resources development and industries—oil, gas, minerals. Of course China also invests in these fields, but China also invests in a lot of labor-intensive industries—textiles, consumer electronics. And in those sectors the Chinese enterprises have a competitive advantage and the competition with the American business circle in those sectors is not that visible.
And even for resource development, we cannot consider it to be a kind of strategic competition, it is just competition at business level. China, the United States, and African countries have shared strategic interests, because China and the United States are both oil importing countries, so nowadays we face the same challenge in the international oil market, with a very high price and with the possibility of supply disruption.
Because both countries are major consumers and importers of oil, we have to contribute together to increase the producing capacity of oil. If the world has larger producing capacity, then both the United States and China will be much safer. And if you look at the interests of Africa, for many of them oil and gas represent the means for capital accumulation for their development. And they don't have the technology, they don't have the financial capacity, so they need foreign companies to transfer technology and to invest in their countries to develop this development potential.
But one might also argue that it places their strategic interests at odds. For instance, somewhere like Sudan—it's created somewhat of a foreign policy conflict there.
There are different understandings about the issue of Sudan, but the Chinese understanding is for a country as poor as Sudan, the first priority is the basic needs of the people, and to see their living standards increase. Economic development is the top priority for this country. Therefore, if we want to help these people to resolve their problems, then we have to start by resolving their development problems.
It has been true, in my view, that in practice the Chinese understanding is correct, because during the past few years this country went from a net oil importer to a net oil exporter. The fiscal budget has improved significantly, the economic growth rate is also rapid and, interestingly, the oil income has also contributed to the resolution of domestic conflicts. If you look at the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement], you may find that one of the components is the distribution of oil income. It is distributed on the basis of 50-50, so in other words the black people in the south can also benefit from this and poor people can also benefit from this result of oil development.
Chinese companies are very proud of this contribution to the Sudanese people. The United States argues that this is not a good regime, with a dictatorship and things like that, but Chinese foreign policy is non interference in domestic affairs and actually it is very hard to see whether a regime is a dictatorship or not. You have to find a commonly acceptable standard, so if this kind of standard does not exist, you cannot impose a one-sided view onto the others.
I believe that, due to the different cultural backgrounds, due to the different levels of economic development, it would be hard to find a uniform model of political development for the African countries. The best way is probably to observe and respect the efforts of the African countries in exploring their own way of political development. Otherwise, if you try to impose a model on them, there is little chance to succeed.
There have been quite a few reports saying that Chinese firms sell military equipment to the Sudanese government, and some people say that equipment is being used for violent purposes in Darfur.
China is an exporter of conventional arms, but this is done in the framework of international law.
I don't think China has provided conventional arms to the Sudanese government in order to fight against the tribes in Darfur. China has not done that. You can see weapons made in China in many places of the world, and it is very hard to say how they get these weapons. I don't know if the Sudanese government got the weapons directly from China, they may have gotten them from anywhere. So it is hard to say—if you find a weapon made in China, it doesn't mean that China supports this kind of war. This is not logical, because there are a lot of transfers of weapons worldwide.
Do you think China offers a viable model of economic development for Africa?
If you look at the Chinese policy toward Africa, now officially announced by the government, there is a new component, which is mutual learning at the cultural level. Experience of development is also part of the cultural things. I don't think China is a model of development for African countries, because African countries have their own national circumstances. They cannot copy the others, what they can do is just explore their own ways of development.
China's Helping Hand to Africa
[ add comment ] ( 1 view ) | permalink | related link |
( 2.9 / 700 )
Calendar
