A report on armed conflict in Africa has shown that the cost to the continent's development over a 15-year period was nearly $300bn (£146bn).
The research was undertaken by a number of non-governmental organisations, including Oxfam.
It says the cost of conflict was equal to the amount of money received in aid during the same period.
This is the first time analysts have calculated the overall effects of armed violence on development.
The report says that between 1990 and 2005, 23 African nations were involved in conflict, and on average this cost African economies $18bn a year.
It concludes that African governments have taken encouraging steps at a regional level to control arms transfers, but that what is needed is a global, legally-binding arms trade treaty.
The president of Liberia, which is just starting to recover from a long civil war, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, also wrote the preface to the report.
She told the BBC "the proliferation of weapons is a key driver in armed conflicts".
"We need to restrict the supply of guns to African conflict zones - and an arms trade treaty is a vital way to do this", she said.
Ongoing burden
The BBC's Johannesburg correspondent Peter Biles says that some costs of war, such as increased military spending and a struggling economy continue long after the fighting has stopped.
READ THE FINDINGS
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Liberia's Defence Minister, Brownie Samukai told the BBC's Network Africa programme that to his knowledge expenditure this year alone included sums of $11m and $35m "for training, equipment, facilities, buildings and construction - a combination of these types of expenditure."
The researchers say that although the number of armed conflicts is falling in Africa there is no room for complacency, with little hope of a swift settlement in either Sudan or Somalia.
And some experts argue that Africa actually needs to increase its arms spending.
Haneelmoed Heitman - the Africa correspondent for Jane's Defence - told the BBC "in a lot of countries the primary problem is that the national security forces are too small, too ill-equipped and too ill-trained to actually provide any sort of security".
He cites the example of Cameroon which has some 12,500 troops to cover around 400,000 sq kms with no transport or reconaissance aircraft.
"Without helicopters for tactical movement", says Mr Heitman, "it's physically impossible for them to deploy to counter banditry or insurgency".
He concludes that most African countries need to spend more on military equipment - but primarily on transport such as helicopters to allow them to mobilise to deploy against the "bad guys".
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( 2.9 / 451 )Russia Enters the Race for Africa's Riches
Russians take their place alongside the Chinese in a battle for resources to fuel their growing empires.
By Owen Matthews
Newsweek International
Oct. 15, 2007 issue - Late on a Friday night at the Simba Saloon in downtown Nairobi, music by the Kenyan pop sensation the Boomba Clan is playing, and the ties are coming off. At the bar, banker types in expensive suits swap news of the latest bank IPOs and mineral concessions, the must-have gossip in Africa's biggest boomtown. Some of the conversations are in English. Some are in Chinese. And increasingly, many of them are in Russian, as Moscow begins to give both the West and Beijing a run for their money in the race for Africa's riches.
Today, emerging-market giants are fighting for oil, gas and metal ore in Africa as energetically as 19th-century European colonialists grabbed land on the continent. Recently, the Chinese have been the most aggressive, with more than 700 companies active in 50 countries, according to Standard Bank of South Africa. China is now Africa's second largest aid donor and trading partner, behind the United States, with trade up fourfold to $40 billion since 2000. But Russia, the second most active emerging-market power in the area, is gaining. While trade with Africa is only $3 billion a year (up threefold since 2000), Russian companies flush with cash have sunk over $5 billion into buying up African assets since 2000— and that's not counting $3.5 billion of oil exploration deals that will come online before the end of the decade. China, meanwhile, has put $6.64 billion into Africa over the same period, a large part of it through the China Development Bank—but much of that money has been sunk into infrastructure projects like telecommunications, electric power, water conservancy, transportation, agriculture more properly described as development aid. Pushed by the profit motive, and by a Kremlin eager to build economic empires, Russian businessmen are heading south. Africa, like Russia in the early 1990s, is full of basket-case economies with great mineral wealth—and the Russians reckon they know how to deal with those conditions.
Russia has strongly encouraged its companies to buy assets around the world because it suits President Vladimir Putin's philosophy of restoring his country's international position. Recent energy deals in Algeria have gone hand in hand with $4 billion in arms sales from Moscow. Russian businesses interested in South Africa have gotten a boost from a deal Putin made with President Thabo Mbeki to expand nuclear cooperation. Last September Putin made a whistle-stop tour of Africa, with several top Russian oligarchs in tow—including Viktor Vekselberg, who pledged to invest $2 billion in metal and mining projects in Africa, adding to holdings that include vast Kalahari manganese reserves he has owned since 2004. "I want to see Russia regaining its close partnership with Africa," Putin said, waxing lyrical about Soviet influence on the continent.
While the Chinese are staking ground in Africa mainly to power their burgeoning cities and manufacturing sector, Russians see the deals differently. Russia is the world's largest energy exporter, and has plenty of its own metals and minerals. But rich Russian companies want to extend their global reach while they have the money, and with oil topping $80 a barrel in recent weeks, the time is now. There's another motive too, analysts say: moving empires beyond the reach of the Kremlin serves as insurance against future political changes in Russia.
Over the last three years, four top Russian metal companies—Norilsk Nickel, Rusal, Renova and Alrosa—have invested more than $5 billion in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Russian oil giants Lukoil, Rosneft and Stroytransgaz have signed major exploration deals in Algeria, Nigeria, Angola and Egypt worth more than $3 billion. Earlier this year, Lukoil snapped up 63 percent of a field off the Ivory Coast in a production-sharing agreement with the Nigerian owners. That came shortly after a $2.2 billion Chinese deal in the same area.
While the Chinese are focused almost solely on buying commodities, the Russians have that in mind and more. Economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to hit 6.7 percent this year, and the region's debt burden has fallen from 80 percent of GDP a decade ago to about 30 percent. Economic reform is gaining momentum in places like Zambia and Kenya, and countries like South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria now boast a growing consumer class. The Russians see that, and are fast expanding from oil into financial services, telecommunications and retail. "Africa is ready for the kind of huge growth we saw in the former Soviet Union—from retail to telecoms to manufacturing," says Roland Nash, a strategist at the Moscow-based investment firm Renaissance Capital. "It just needs an injection of capital and expertise."
Russian banks, which have learned at home how to navigate a treacherous market, are fast outpacing Western private equity investors such as the Washington-based Emerging Capital Partners and even South African hedge funds. It's a Russian investment house, Renaissance Capital, that is pioneering services that will soon allow billions of dollars in outside money to be channeled into sub-Saharan African businesses (ex-South Africa). Last year Renaissance organized the biggest IPO in African history—a $350 million sale of stock in Access Bank of Nigeria, which pushed the bank's value to $2 billion. And a new Africa Fund launched by Renaissance this month is expected to reach its $1 billion cap by spring—making it as large as the total of five funds put together since 2000 by Emerging Capital Partners, previously the largest private equity investors. "We're at the beginning of a major transition," says Steven Jennings, CEO of Renaissance. "We've been in Russia and the CIS since 1992—we know about early-stage capital markets. There is a different culture in Africa, of course—but the challenges of imperfect legal systems and so on are the same."
It's not clear that Russia and China will be better or worse for Africa than the earlier Western arrivals turned out to be. South Africa has been a model for sustainable growth in the region, but South African corporations eager to expand throughout the continent may be winnowed out by Chinese or Russians who can pay cash for practically any asset they fancy. China in particular is building railways and roads, which conveniently run mainly to mining areas. What's more, critics say soft loans could lead to a new cycle of dependency—this time tying African nations to the purse strings of emerging-market powers. "Even interest-free loans need to be repaid," says Sanusha Naidu of the Centre for Chinese Studies at South Africa's Stellenbosch University. "And African governments, which finally have money to use following the writing off of their debt by Western donors, might find themselves reburdened."
Local leaders reply that they've been receiving Western aid and following Western business and development models for decades without seeing returns. "They feel that countries such as Russia, China, India and Brazil can bring something new to the table," says Naidu. Certainly they can bring plenty of cash. As the ties come off on the dance floor, and cocktails worth two weeks' wages of a Kenyan laborer are split, it's unclear what else the new conquerors will make of Africa's future.
With Karen Macgregor in Durban
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21162105/si ... ek/page/0/
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( 3 / 289 )Is Western aid making a difference in Africa?
By Danna HarmanThu Aug 23, 4:00 AM ET
"Is this really how to save Africa?" asks Tanzanian columnist Ayub Rioba, a day after Bill Clinton has left Africa. "We appreciate generous and humane contributions from people like Bill Clinton," he writes in The Citizen, a respected Tanzanian national daily paper. "But we [Africans] must also show that we are doing something. We cannot sit just like couch potatoes waiting for others to come and give us medicine."
"We have been made permanent recipients of aid, funds, scholarships, food, medicine, from developed countries.... And what exactly do we do with all that aid and assistance and help? Almost nothing. Since we gained independence, almost 50 years ago, we have been receiving aid permanently, and statistics today indicate that we are becoming poorer!" adds the columnist.
Outside attention to the continent has fueled thousands of successful programs ranging from eradicating smallpox and reducing infant mortality rates to helping more children go to school and more farmers get microloans. But, despite the aid, the number of poor people in Africa has almost doubled in the past decade.
Burdened as Africa is with government debt, trade barriers, droughts, and sickness, some 46 percent of Africans survive on less than a dollar a day. Nearly half of those make do with less than 50 cents a day, according to the development policy research unit the University of Cape Town in South Africa. According to the United Nations, life expectancy on the continent is falling, averaging just 46 years, in large part because of AIDS.
There are different schools of thought when it comes to explaining Africa's decline – and how to stop it.
Mr. Rioba fits squarely in the "governance first" camp, which argues that the onus is on Africans to better their own governments and behavior – not on outsiders.
For decades, countries such as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) under Mobutu Sese Seko received billions of dollars in aid and loans – much of which was squandered by corrupt and incompetent officials.
Against this first camp sits the so-called "poverty first" camp, often represented by Columbia University economist and UN Millennium Project director Jeffrey Sachs, who says the solution to Africa's problems lies in tackling poverty, and that this can definitely be achieved with sufficient aid.
A third group believes in aid, but argues it's not the quantity that is problematic, it's the way it has been administered.
If ending poverty were so simple, argues William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University, why has the $2.3 trillion spent over the last five decades not done more? "The biggest difference between Sachs and me is that he thinks aid can end poverty and I think it cannot," he says. "The end of poverty comes about for home-grown reasons, as domestic reformers grope their way towards more democracy, cleaner and more accountable government, and free markets," he says. Mr. Easterly says aid can certainly help alleviate the suffering of the poor, but that "the problem with aid is the people implementing the aid projects have weak incentives because they are never held accountable for results."
Mr. Sachs, in turn, poses: Is $2.3 trillion really so much? That sum, he says, is "from all donor countries in the world to all developing countries for all purposes," which means, if you work it out, around $16 per person per year in the developing world.
"To say that aid was gargantuan and that it failed is a cruel joke. It was neither gargantuan, nor did it fail when it was applied in good faith for developmental purposes (rather than for the cold war, or to ship US grains or to pay high-priced consultants)," he argues.
Sachs points out that the US spends more than $600 billion per year on the Pentagon, and less than one-hundredth of that in help for all of Africa. "One day's Pentagon spending would pay for all the bed nets [to stop malaria] for every sleeping site in Africa for five years," he charges. "People are hungry. People are dying. There are countless proven and effective ways to help, and which can extricate people from poverty in the long run. The drama is whether American politics can rouse itself to take note," he says.
In his quest for spreading this message and increasing aid, Sachs often turns to superstars, and many have embraced his ideas and his can-do attitude. Bono calls him "my professor." Actor Brad Pitt sings his praises. Madonna is a big supporter, and Angelina Jolie filmed a 2005 MTV special, "The Diary of Angelina Jolie & Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa" that promotes his work. Vanity Fair, in its recent Africa issue billed him an "adviser to the UN and movie stars" and a "savior" of developing nations.
"Sachs offers very simple, concrete, and measurable solutions to specific developmental problems," says John Prendergast of ENOUGH, a group with a mission to "prevent genocide and mass atrocities" in Africa. "He doesn't necessarily have answers to major crises like Darfur and eastern Congo, but he does have important responses to malaria, dirty water, and bad sanitation. That is an important baseline for further socioeconomic development in the long run."
But Easterly is not impressed, calling Sachs a "messianic crusader who ... skillfully uses celebrity and media for the cause." Celebrities "love" Sachs, explains Easterly, "because he promises a huge payoff to Western aid efforts and describes the problem as easy to solve, if you just have a few celebrity videos and concerts." Easterly suggests aid dividends will almost always be modest. The solution requires donors to help continuously and be accountable for results. But he says, that is just "not as ... appealing to the People magazine crowd."
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( 3 / 283 )August 18, 2007
New Power in Africa
Chinese Entrepreneurs Flourish in Africa
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.
What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.
“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.
Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.
Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.
During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.
Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.
At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.
Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.
Chinese Expansion
You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”
Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.
His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.
Mr. You’s partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era now. There’s a flight to China every day.”
The pickup in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.
Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.
One of the largest road builders, China Road and Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.
On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.
Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.
“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”
In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.
“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”
Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.
Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”
Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.
In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.
“After a day off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,” said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here.
African Ambivalence
Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.
“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are unbelievable.”
When the salesman finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us again,” one said.
After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did you sleep last night?”
One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.
“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”
Howard W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.
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