Africa

Tired of rising electricity and food prices, 25,000 members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) marched on Eskom’s Johannesburg offices today. The march sounds as if it was almost festive, with a holiday mood prevailing among the marchers. But beneath the surface there is real anger. I heard it when I spoke with South Africans over the last month, and the anger manifests itself all over the pages of the country’s newspapers, the pictures on its television screens, and in the words and actions of its people.

As usual, the political ramifications linger just beneath the surface. protests these days are all aimed directly or indirectly at a government that appears not only not to be able to provide basic services and to fill basic needs, but that, worse, appears not to care. This seeming lack of apathy largely explains much of the mobilization behind Jacob Zuma, who has yet to reveal how his government would differ from Thabo Mbeki’s on issues of delivery and poverty alleviation. One of the benefits of opposition to an unpopular leader is that one can be vague about solutions. In this sense, Jacob Zuma is a cipher capitalizing on the country’s discontented mood, meaning all things to all people.

Nigeria’s Niger Delta is an inflamed troublespot that does not look to have any easy solutions. Rebel groups continually sabotage the oil industry there, sometimes attacking, kidnapping, and even killing people associated with the oil industry, locals and foreigners alike. Whatever their methods, the rebels’ grievances are real. Between corruption, inefficiency, misallocation of resources, and simple differences in priorities, the oil curse is alive and well in Nigeria where very little benefit has trickled down to the country’s masses.

Nigerian President Yar-Adua has categorically rejected rumors that his government is going to look to the British military to intervene and crush rebellion in the Delta. Even granted that the West has always been a lot more willing to act to protect access to African resources than to protect African lives, the speculation about British intervention does not make a lot of sense logistically or politically. Nonetheless, the very existence of the rumors tells a great deal about the chaos that has enveloped the oil-rich yet otherwise impoverished Delta and the lengths to which some think the government will need to go to regain control.

Anyone who has spent any substantial time in Africa is familiar with the importance of the informal economy. In South Africa, for example, there are the parking guards and gardeners and maids and cooks and people willing to wash your car or clean your windows. And then there are the street peddlars, especially in towns and cities. They get up early and set up shop on sidewalks. They sometimes sit docilely waiting to make a sale, they sometimes engage in the hard sale, cajoling, pleading, begging, interoposing themselves physically in your path in ways that can for some be physically menacing, or at least that make traversing your chosen course a bit more difficult.

IRIN reports on one segment of the informal economy in Ghana, where there is a flourishing market in used electronic devides and appliances, most imported in bulk from the United States. The demand for these objects is great. But while this demand reveals an ingenious attempt to fill a niche in the marketplace, it also carries with it some problems. Because of a lack of regulation, many of the items are shoddy, and many more are not energy efficient, which can burden the countries energy resources. Furthermore, Ghanaians have been discarding these appliances in an area called “Abgogbloshie,” one of the most toxic and polluted sites in Ghanaonce they no longer function. This has created a significant health hazard.

The country is beginning to deal with regulating these imports, particularly to deal with the environmental impact that the flourishing used appliance trade brings. But the process will almost assuredly be spotty, as the demand is great and the domestic market simply cannot fill the people’s needs. This is just one example of how the informal economy profoundly shapes culture, society, and the economy in Ghana, and I would argue throughout Africa. And it represents both a problem, but also an opportunity for African leaders and entrepeneurs.  

I should be back to regular posting soon. My travels did not end with the return to the US, but I plan to be back at full posting volume in the next day or so. In the meantime, over at the FPA Africa Blog I have a long piece on the Zimbabwe crisis, the talks about talks, and the apparent progress that has been made over the past few days. Suffice it to say that I continue to be skeptical, but hopeful.

Ok, I’m back in the US, settled in, and ready for regular posting again.

When I was in South Africa I was able to see two very good friends who are Zimbabwean expats. One works in the business end of biotech and we were both graduate students together at Rhodes University back in 1997 (Oakdene House represent!) albeit in very different disciplines. The other is a historian whom i met at a conference in Pretoria a couple of years back. He’s hit hard times after funding disappeared for his position at an important online history site and he is holding on to hope that something will come through soon, before he has to go back into the maw of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Neither of my friends is optimistic about Zimbabwe, and, after all, why would they be? Even forgetting the rapaciousness of Robert Mugabe’s regime and the politics he has created, the immediate concerns that my friends have for their families and friends do not involve roaming bands of ZANU-PF thugs, but rather fears of famine, the mind-boggling inflation that continues to skyrocket — it is at an incomprehensible 2.2% with no signs of abating — despite (because of?) the introduction of laughable bank notes, such as the new Z$100 billion bill that is worth about $1 US and can buy approximately four oranges, or could as of yesterday, if one could find oranges to buy, and the fact that a loaf of bread now costs approximately a third of a teacher’s monthly salary. These economic conditions are all the direct result of Mugabe’s politics and failed policies, of course, but for the average Zimbabwean these are not matters of politics qua politics.

[Arthur Mutambara, leader of a breakaway MDC faction, Robert Mugabe, and Morgan Tsvangirai celebrate the success of the talks about talks. AP Picture via Financial Times]

So what to make of the apparent success of the “talks about talks” that have led to the signing of a memorandum of understanding about future meetings between Robert Mugabe and his beleaguered challenger (and presumptive true choice of the voters) Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change? Certainly Mugabe’s willingness to sit down with his rival, the handshakes and photo-ops, the signs of movement after so much stasis, and an interregnum in the bloodshed are all worth something. But what? After all, “talks about talks” has a rather Orwellian ring to it, even if the idea of “talks about talks” was a vital moment in leading to the CODESA negotiations that led to the end of Apartheid in South Africa.

One cannot really blame observers in southern Africa or elsewhere for holding on to hope. As I’ve written here before, the tendency is to hold on to hope when hope is all one has on which to hold. And perhaps the new agreement finally to meet, to hash out these difficulties, really does represent a breakthrough, a new dawn, however tentative. But I cannot shake the images of the last few months (indeed the last few years) and the lengths to which Robert Mugabe has gone to hold on to power. And I cannot shake the thousands and thousands of words I read about the Zimbabwe crisis while I was in South Africa, more even than I read on a daily basis here in the US, from sources even more wary than I, such as The Zimbabwean, which has chronicles in grim and unremitting detail the situation in that country. And I think of the day-to-day fears of my friends for their families. And I think again of what I think the odds are that after all that has transpired Mugabe will suddenly yield even a modicum of control to a man and a party he has terrorized and abused and harassed.

By all means, then, let us believe that the process, however slow and tortured, has worked. Let us believe that after all of the silent diplomacy and seeming aloofness Thabo Mbeki’s gambit has worked, however belatedly. Let us imagine that a new day is dawning and that the talks about talks have yielded talks that will lead to concrete change. By all means hope that finally we have more than hope before us. But forgive me if I am skeptical.

Today marks Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s 90th birthday. The great man is slowed but still robust, with his characteristic grace and wit still intact. As South Africa muddles through, the country’s leaders would do well to dwell on Mandela and his meaning, not merely his undeniable symbolic power, and not even the mythology that surrounds him — in some cases rightfully — but rather on his approach to leadership and governing.

Mandela’s greatness stems not from his perfection – he was not perfect and would be the first to recognize as much — but rather from the humility of his approach, on his willingness to compromise, on his loyalty, and on his unparallelled integrity. As just one example of a shortcoming leading to positive action, Mandela recognized even before he had left office that he had fallen short on what would prove to be one of the country’s, the region’s, biggest challenges, the threat of HIV-AIDS. And so his foundation has tackled that issue head-on and in so doing has done much good on that scourge that so haunts the country.

Mandela emerged from 27 years on imprisonment by a regime that deserved no quarter. But Mandela knew that in order to accomplish his goals of a non-racial, or multi-racial South Africa with one-person, one-vote democracy, he would have to negotiate with his enemies. And so he went about establishing the conditions for negotiation, cajoling some of his more skeptical comrades while at the same time making clear to the National Party the parameters within which negotiations would happen. Mandela was not the sole, perhaps was not even the most important, negotiator for the African National Congress, but he was the most important figure in the negotiation process, and knowing this, Mandela leveraged his identity and his leadership to bring about the end result that he desired.

Nelson Mandela will not live forever, yet he will live on. the question is how he will live on: As the father of a new South Africa forged in the consensus of the Freedom Charter or as the lamented apogee of an ANC gone awry. It is too facile to speak of historical crossroads, and yet South Africa certainly seems to be dealing roughly with the post-Mandela era. Thabo Mbeki will likely leave office scorned, his absence not long lamented despite his own well-earned status as an ANC exile leader. Jacob Zuma is hardly off to a promising start as the president of the ANC, and though it appears that he and his supporters may well find a way to cause the corruption charges against him to evaporate, as the country’s president Zuma seems detined to be a divider rather than a uniter. South Africa does not need another Mandela — there can be no such thing and we’ve been lucky to have the one — but what it needs is leaders who look beyond Mandela’s symbolism, beyond the birthday praise, however insufficient in relation to what the man accomplished and has meant to so many, and who can capture the essence of what Mandela wanted for his country and his world.

Grown men are not supposed to have heroes, or in any case are not supposed to worship them publicly. But Mandela is my hero. And he is the hero of millions. Long may he live in the minds and hearts and actions of South Africans and people the world over. More important, long may he live.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and at dcat.] 

Today marks Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s 90th birthday. The great man is slowed but still robust, with his characteristic grace and wit still intact. As South Africa muddles through, the country’s leaders would do well to dwell on Mandela and his meaning, not merely his undeniable symbolic power, and not even the mythology that surrounds him — in some cases rightfully — but rather on his approach to leadership and governing.

Mandela’s greatness stems not from his perfection – he was not perfect and would be the first to recognize as much — but rather from the humility of his approach, on his willingness to compromise, on his loyalty, and on his unparallelled integrity. As just one example of a shortcoming leading to positive action, Mandela recognized even before he had left office that he had fallen short on what would prove to be one of the country’s, the region’s, biggest challenges, the threat of HIV-AIDS. And so his foundation has tackled that issue head-on and in so doing has done much good on that scourge that so haunts the country.

Mandela emerged from 27 years on imprisonment by a regime that deserved no quarter. But Mandela knew that in order to accomplish his goals of a non-racial, or multi-racial South Africa with one-person, one-vote democracy, he would have to negotiate with his enemies. And so he went about establishing the conditions for negotiation, cajoling some of his more skeptical comrades while at the same time making clear to the National Party the parameters within which negotiations would happen. Mandela was not the sole, perhaps was not even the most important, negotiator for the African National Congress, but he was the most important figure in the negotiation process, and knowing this, Mandela leveraged his identity and his leadership to bring about the end result that he desired.

Nelson Mandela will not live forever, yet he will live on. the question is how he will live on: As the father of a new South Africa forged in the consensus of the Freedom Charter or as the lamented apogee of an ANC gone awry. It is too facile to speak of historical crossroads, and yet South Africa certainly seems to be dealing roughly with the post-Mandela era. Thabo Mbeki will likely leave office scorned, his absence not long lamented despite his own well-earned status as an ANC exile leader. Jacob Zuma is hardly off to a promising start as the president of the ANC, and though it appears that he and his supporters may well find a way to cause the corruption charges against him to evaporate, as the country’s president Zuma seems detined to be a divider rather than a uniter. South Africa does not need another Mandela — there can be no such thing and we’ve been lucky to have the one — but what it needs is leaders who look beyond Mandela’s symbolism, beyond the birthday praise, however insufficient in relation to what the man accomplished and has meant to so many, and who can capture the essence of what Mandela wanted for his country and his world.

Grown men are not supposed to have heroes, or in any case are not supposed to worship them publicly. But Mandela is my hero. And he is the hero of millions. Long may he live in the minds and hearts and actions of South Africans and people the world over. More important, long may he live.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog and at dcat.] 

40+ hours, one lost piece of luggage, three movies, several television shows, two read books, several newspapers, and virtually no sleep later, I arrived back home last night. I am catching up on life and will resume posting soon.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and at dcat.]

40+ hours, one lost piece of luggage, three movies, several television shows, two read books, several newspapers, and virtually no sleep later, I arrived back home last night. I am catching up on life and will resume posting soon.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog and at dcat.]

After three weeks here in South Africa, this evening I will board a South African Airways plane bound for Washington, DC’s Dulles International Airport via Dakar, Senegal. If all goes well I will land at 6:00 am eastern time tomorrow, Tuesday, at which point I’ll hope that I can get to BWI in time to catch my onward flight that will eventually take me back to Texas.

Leaving South Africa is always bittersweet for me. I love this country, its people, its culture and politics and sport and even, in odd ways, its history. And every time I leave I have no real idea when I will next be back. Next year? 2010? As of right now, I am simply not sure. South Africa is a part of my life, a vital part, and when I leave I will miss it even as I am excited to be home again, to see my wife and friends, to sleep in my own bed, and not to live out of a bag.

Over the course of the next few days I will continue my assessments about what i have seen and done in the hopes that it will continue to shed light on how I see South Africa right now, in the middle of 2008. Between now and then I have much traveling to do with a very cranky back. in the airport I am set to see a Zimbabwean friend who has fallen on difficult times here in South Africa. And then I’ll leave South Africa again, knowing full well that I will return, soon if not soon enough, to this place I have so come to love over the last decade-plus.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and at dcat.]