China and the Politics of Development on the African Continent

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Damian

(This article is reproduced courtesy of Global Politics magazine).

The rising influence of China on the international stage has raised a lot of questions from policy analysts and the media in relation to its role in challenging the dominance of the traditional Western powers and in particular the United States. This is most pronounced in relation to China’s involvement on the African continent. China’s development aims have meant that they have become heavily involved in resource rich areas with huge investments across the continent and in particular the Southern African region. With China’s economic involvement in the continent has come a significant degree of political influence; the African Unions (AU) new headquarters in Addis Ababa is a gift from the Chinese and a symbol of the growing political and economic cooperation between China and Africa.

China and the Politics of Development on the African Continent

The rise of China’s influence led US Secretary State Hillary Clinton to state: “we don’t want to see a new colonialism in Africa,” as a warning to African countries in her official five day tour of the continent last year. The majority of commentary on China has focused on the changing geo-politics and security of the African continent but China is also changing the politics of development on the African continent. A quasi-cold war is taking place on the continent in which the Western neo-liberal development agenda is running counter to China’s state led capitalism, a situation which has intensified with the crisis in the American and European financial systems.

The South African government is leading the charge in relation to implementing a development agenda based on the Chinese development model. The South African Minister of Public Enterprises Malusi Gigaba in a piece he wrote for the South African newspaper Business Day states:

The global financial crisis has legitimised state involvement in the economy and has shifted the focus to how this should happen. Part of this debate is how the state should leverage enterprise ownership in the developmental process. SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) have played a critical role in developing an industrial base in highly developed and emerging economies. Experience suggests that private and public companies have performed both well and badly in achieving key national developmental goals. There have been patriotic, efficient private companies that have made long-term investments to achieve national objectives. There have also been corrupt, inefficient and rent-seeking SOEs that have been captured to serve narrow interests and have undermined economic development. (07/02/2012)

The global financial crisis and the emergence of China and Brazil as major economic players in the international system have challenged what was once a political red herring: the role of the state in the economy. The accepted political paradigm since the Washington Consensus in the 1980s was that the state should play no role in a market economy and has dictated the policies and politics of development and aid on the African continent. African states placed primary emphasis on selling state owned enterprises to the private sector and sought to attract international financial capital in response to the policy power of the IMF and the World Bank. The subprime mortgage crisis and the consistent economic growth of China and Brazil have created the political space for politicians on the continent to begin reasserting the role of the state in the development of the economy.

There is an emerging intellectual consensus among the policy elite on the African continent that is actively challenging the economic and political foundations of Western influence on the continent. Dambisa Moyo has been the most celebrated of the emerging thinking taking place on the continent. In her book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa, she argues that what the continent needs is a reliable trading partner and that China can be both a commercial partner and serve as an example of a country that has pulled itself out of poverty. Singapore used to be the poster child of the Washington consensus and a means for the Western donor nations to scold African governments for their lack of economic growth and development. The resulting rise of China on the continent is leading to a weakening of the kinds of soft power often utilised by the US and other Western donor nations to gain international solidarity and influence domestic policy.

China is actively involved as a commercial partner and investor in Zambia, Sudan, South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Congo, Guinea and Algeria. In addition the China Development Bank estimates that it has lent $7 billion to over 30 African countries since the development of the China-Africa Development Fund. The presence of the fund as an active investor on the continent in bilateral state-led infrastructure projects is leading to the re-emergence of the state as a key driver of economic development in African nation states.

The inability of Western donor nations to match the investment and funding drive of the Chinese will see a long term decline in the ability of the West to act as the sole policeman on the African continent. The waning of Western influence in the long term will open up the opportunities for the rise and development of the African Union (AU) to act as a stabilising force on the continent. The rise of China will provide the political space for African countries to determine their economic and social policy mixes, long held back by seeking to follow the strict orthodoxy of neo-liberal economic policies. It is a phenomenon that policy makers will have to analyse more closely in the coming years.

Posted in Africa, Aid, China, Corruption, Democracy, Economy, Geopolitics, Human Rights, Land Grab, Natural Resources, Protest | Leave a comment

A World Adrift

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Damian

An interesting opinion piece by Jeffrey D. Sachs.

The annual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have provided a window onto two fundamental trends driving global politics and the world economy. Geopolitics is moving decisively away from a world dominated by Europe and the United States to one with many regional powers but no global leader. And a new era of economic instability is at hand, owing as much to physical limits to growth as to financial turmoil.

The shift to such a multipolar world has the advantage that no single country or small bloc can dominate the others. Each region can end up with room for maneuver and some space to find its own path. Yet a multipolar world also carries great risks, notably that major global challenges will go unmet, because no single country or region is able or willing to coordinate a global response, or even to participate in one.

In short, the global economy is experiencing a sustainability crisis, in which resource constraints and environmental pressures are causing large price shocks and ecological instability. Economic development rapidly needs to become sustainable development, by adopting technologies and lifestyles that reduce the dangerous pressures on the Earth’s ecosystems. This, too, will require a level of global cooperation that remains nowhere to be seen.

The IMF/World Bank meetings remind us of an overarching truth: our highly interconnected and crowded world has become a highly complicated vessel. If we are to move forward, we must start pulling in the same direction, even without a single captain at the helm.

Read the full article at Project Syndicate.

Posted in Earth, Economy, Environment, Geopolitics, Natural Resources, Sustainability | Leave a comment

Syrian Christians worry about life after Assad

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Damian

Assad has portrayed himself as the defender of the nation’s religious minorities, including Christians and his Alawite Muslim sect, against foreign-backed Islamic extremists. Opposition activists scoff at that notion, saying he has deliberately exploited sectarian fear to stay in power.

Syrian Christians sit in a park in Bab Touma, a Christian quarter of the Old City in Damascus June 9, 2010.

But warnings of a bloodbath if Assad leaves office resonate with Christians, who have seen their brethren driven away by sectarian violence since the overthrow of longtime strongmen in Iraq and in Egypt, and before that by a 15-year civil war in neighboring Lebanon.

Many here fear revenge attacks against minorities, who helped buttress four decades of repressive rule by the Assad family, and the emergence of what they describe as a new dictatorship by the Sunni Muslim majority.

“If the regime goes, you can forget about Christians in Syria,” said George, a 37-year-old dentist who, like others interviewed, asked to be identified by either a first name or nickname. “Look what happened to the Christians of Iraq. They had to flee everywhere, while most of the churches were attacked and bombed.”

Although not all of Syria’s Christians back Assad, their fear helps explain the significant support he still draws despite his ferocious crackdown on what began as mostly peaceful protests and his government’s increasing international isolation.

Worried Christians have only to look to the strife-torn city of Homs to see what a civil war might look like. There, residents say, Sunnis, Christians and the Alawite community, a small offshoot of Shiite Islam, have fallen victim to gruesome kidnappings and killings.

The rise of Islamist parties in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia has added to the feeling among Syria’s Christians that they are under siege. Some find affirmation of their fear in the demonstrations that take place every week after Muslims’ Friday payers, when antigovernment protesters spill out of mosques nationwide, chanting religious and political slogans.

Read the whole article here.

Posted in Human Rights, Islam, Middle East, Protest | Leave a comment

The Island President

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Damian

A Leader’s Struggle to Save his People from Turning Into Climate Refugees

Courtesy of Earth Island Journal.

Watching a film about a leader’s efforts to save his country less than a month after he’s been deposed from power a can be a little depressing. But even without that specific context, there’s much that’s both compelling and poignant about The Island President, a feature-length portrait of Modhamed Nasheed, former president of Maldives and inadvertent environmental activist, who was forced to give up office after three years in a February 7 coup d’etat.

An archipelago of 1,200 tiny, breathtakingly beautiful islands in the middle of the azure Indian Ocean, the Maldives is one of the nations most vulnerable to climate change. Most of the nation’s islands are just about 1.5 meters above sea level. None of them have hills. The highest point in the nation stands at 2.4 meters. Climate scientists predict that if nothing is done to mitigate climate change the islands will eventually sink under rising waters.

Back in 2009, filmmaker Jon Shenk, whose past works include Smile Pinki and Lost Boys of Sudan, followed Nasheed through his first year in office as the then new president learned to deal with the combined challenges of establishing democracy in the island state that had lived through three decades of dictatorship and saving it from the peril of rising sea waters.

Shenk and his crew were given unprecedented access to Nasheed. They got to film everything from family dinners to the president’s strategy meetings with his top aides and ministers to his conversations with other world leaders. The result is a beautifully shot and edited film that presents a candid and rather gallant portrait of the so-called “underdog” leader.

Using a mix of original and archival footage the documentary traces the trajectory of Nasheed’s career — starting with his 20-year pro-democracy movement against the brutal regime of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, during which he endured multiple arrests, torture and 18 months in solitary confinement, and culminating with him more or less of saving the day at the 2009 United Nations climate change negotiations in Copenhagen (COP15).

The film’s montage of Nasheed’s seemingly endless rounds of meetings with world leaders and his passionate speeches at global summits, press meets and interviews not only offer a rare insider’s look at the political deal-making that goes on in the global arena, it also does a great job of underscoring just how frustrating international climate negotiations have been so far. Especially for, as Nasheed describes, “a bunch of small islands with no clout or anything.”

One can’t help but be charmed by this charismatic and media savvy leader who’s willing to go any length to bring attention to his country’s plight, including holding the now-famous underwater cabinet meeting, and offering sound bites that lead to headlines like “Global Warming is Like Nazi Invasion, Says Island Leader.” Or telling it as it is at an United Nations summit attended by Obama: “We continue to shout … even though we know deep down that you aren’t really listening.” Or when totally exasperated at the deadlocked talks at COP15 he tells his entourage in a mix of his native Dhivehi and English: “I’m really going to loose it if these bureaucrats keep bickering endlessly about the text… What the hell… the whole world is being destroyed and we keep going on about this conference of the conference of, you know?”

Nasheed’s primary goal through all this is to get world leaders agree to cap global emissions at 350 parts per million — a figure that many scientists and climate experts say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. He believes reduced emissions combined with well-thought adaptation strategies can save his low-lying nation. And for that he needs to get big emitters like India, China, Brazil and the US to agree to bigger emissions cuts.

Sadly for Nasheed — and indeed the world — charm, media savvy, and good intentions can only move things so far in the world of politics. Though he does manage to help broker some kind an international agreement at Copenhagen in the eleventh hour — which the film notes is “the first time in history that China, India, and the United States agreed to reduce carbon emissions” — it was nowhere close to the commitment we require to save Maldives or life on Earth as we know it. Nor have we managed to reach anything close to a reasonable global emissions reduction commitment in the years that have followed.

“It is tiring. It is exhausting. But you go on and on,” Nasheed says about his efforts to bring about an emissions deal at one point in the film. And that, I think, is the core message of The Island President .

Posted in Climate, Environment, Oceans, Sea Levels | 2 Comments

Indian Inequities

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Damian

Despite two decades of rapid economic growth, India’s wealth gap is worsening.

In many ways India is an economic success story, showing record growth over the past two decades. But in that same period of time, income inequality in the nation has doubled, ranking India last among emerging economies. So why is the gap between the haves and have-nots widening? And how does this effect India’s aims at becoming a global superpower?

See more links, images, graphics and videos here.

Posted in India, Poverty | 1 Comment

Africa’s amazing rise and what it can teach the world

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Damian

Ten years into the continent’s quiet revolution, lessons for the developing world.

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-7880p1.html?cr=00&pl=edit-00">jbor</a> / <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/?cr=00&pl=edit-00">Shutterstock.com</a>

Great article from The Atlantic.

The poverty mafia once controlled the development debate in Africa. No longer. The old approach was about how to prevent Africa from getting poorer. All development goals were essentially negative, as experts wallowed in risk-aversion and promoted various doomsday scenarios of an Africa with a rapidly growing population.

The new thinking on development is to share Africa’s wealth more equitably. That’s right: Africa’s wealth.

In 2000, when I first visited Sub-Saharan Africa, to report on the civil war in Burundi, the international community was preparing itself for a new round of development failures. Wealth was a dirty word. The influential economist Paul Collier even suggested that African countries were better off poor because wealth — especially resources that could be sold on international markets — inevitably fueled civil wars.

Yet at that same moment when leading development thinkers saw the most modest of futures for the sub-Saharan as a region, a diverse group of determined African technocrats — from Ghana to Uganda, Zambia to Kenya, South Africa to Rwanda — joined forces with technologically savvy, globally oriented capitalists to launch a quiet revolution in development thinking. In time, their changes helped lead to Africa’s dramatically improved economic performance, and greater confidence in their ideas.

The economic evidence that they were right, building since the start of the new century, now seems incontrovertible. In the ten years from 2000 to 2010, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were in sub-Saharan Africa: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique, and Rwanda. In eight of the past ten years, sub-Saharan Africa has grown faster than Asia, according to The Economist. In 2012, the International Monetary Fund expects Africa to grow at a rate of 6%, about the same as Asia.

Ten years ago, development was synonymous with disappointment for Africa watchers, to paraphrase the chapter in Frederick Cooper’s classic survey, “Africa Since 1940.” The decades following de-colonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s saw metrics in economics, health, and well-being decline almost across the board. Writing in 2002, Cooper observed, “No word captures the hopes and ambitions of African leaders, its educated populations and many of its farmers and workers … better than development.” Yet “development and disappointment,” Cooper concluded, went hand in hand as the development strategies of African governments, and the foreign-assistance strategies of the international community, proved ineffective and, to some critics, even retarded African development.

What changed? Partly, the boom in commodities. Sky-high copper prices have lifted copper-rich Zambia. Record cocoa prices are bringing $2 billion annually into Ghana. Kenyan farmers, mostly small, are responsible for $1 billion in annual exports of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, a figure that dwarfs the country’s traditional coffee and tea exports. And, of course, high demand for oil and gas has helped a number of countries enormously. But even countries without such natural resources, such as Rwanda, have seen significant gains, mostly because of improved economic governance and the return of money and skills from Africans who left their countries during the dog days. Rwanda, for instance, long an importer of food, now grows enough to satisfying the needs of its people, and even exports cash crops such as coffee for the first time.

Technology also plays an important part in the new African boom. Probably the most astonishing development success since 2000 in Africa has been the communications revolution. A dozen years ago, merely making a phone call (or receiving one) was virtually impossible even in Africa’s most important commercial centers. An elite business person might hire two or three people fulltime simply to repeatedly dial phone numbers over the crumbling, puny, and perversely sub-optimal government-owned telephone systems. Nigeria, at the time a country of 100 million people, had at most 100,000 working dial tones. It was not remarkable for one call out of every 50 made to be completed. Naturally, the effect on productivity was devastating, but equally as bad was the sense of isolation. Everything had to be done face to face, consigning people to long trips for even trivial maneuvers. Waiting became a way of life.

No longer. The advent of mobile telephones has brought instant communications to hundreds of millions of Africans, rich and poor, urban and rural. Africans are now on the move. Text messaging and digital money-transfer services, such as Safaricom’s M-pesa in Kenya, have transformed ordinary life. Yet this most visible of all African advances, this gigantic step forward in linking Africans to each other and to people around the world, occurred with virtually zero assistance from the professional development community of donors and economists, aid workers and development agencies. Uniformly, these “experts” said Africans were simply too poor to benefit from mobile telecommunications, so they provided scant assistance in the 1990s and early 2000s when African governments, in the main, relaxed their long hegemony over telecommunications and permitted private companies to lead the push into mobile phones. Read the whole article here.

Posted in Africa, Economy, Natural Resources | Leave a comment

The Fight of the Century

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Damian

As economies contract, a global popular uprising confronts power elites over access to the essentials of human existence. What are the underlying dynamics of the conflict, and how is it likely to play out? Fascinating article by Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute.

As the world economy crashes against debt and resource limits, more and more countries are responding by attempting to salvage what are actually their most expendable features—corrupt, insolvent banks and bloated militaries—while leaving the majority of their people to languish in “austerity.” The result, predictably, is a global uprising. This current set of conditions and responses will lead, sooner or later, to social as well as economic upheaval—and a collapse of the support infrastructure on which billions depend for their very survival.
<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-67992p1.html?cr=00&pl=edit-00">michael rubin</a> / <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/?cr=00&pl=edit-00">Shutterstock.com</a>

Anti-capitalist demonstration.

Nations could, in principle, forestall social collapse by providing the basics of existence (food, water, housing, medical care, family planning, education, employment for those able to work, and public safety) universally and in a way that could be sustained for some time, while paying for this by deliberately shrinking other features of society—starting with military and financial sectors—and by taxing the wealthy. The cost of covering the basics for everyone is within the means of most nations. Providing human necessities would not remove all fundamental problems now converging (climate change, resource depletion, and the need for fundamental economic reforms), but it would provide a platform of social stability and equity to give the world time to grapple with deeper, existential challenges.
Unfortunately, many governments are averse to this course of action. In fact, they will most likely continue to do what they are doing now—cannibalizing the resources of society at large in order to prop up megabanks and military establishments.
Even if they do provide universal safety nets, ongoing economic contraction may still likely result in conflict, though in this instance it would arise from groups opposed to the perceived failures of “big government.”
In either instance, it will increasingly be up to households and communities to provide the basics for themselves while reducing their dependence upon, and vulnerability to, centralized systems of financial and governmental power. This is a strategy that will require sustained effort and one that will in many cases be discouraged and even criminalized by national authorities.
The decentralization of food, finance, education, and other basic societal support systems has been advocated for decades by theorists on the far left and far right of the political spectrum. Some efforts toward decentralization (such as the local food movement) have resulted in the development of niche markets. However, here we are describing not just the incremental growth of social movements or marginal industries, but what may become the signal economic and social trend for the remainder of the 21st century—a trend that is currently ignored and resisted by governmental, economic, and media elites who can’t imagine an alternative beyond the dichotomies of free enterprise versus planned economy, or Keynesian stimulus versus austerity.
The decentralized provision of basic necessities is not likely to flow from a utopian vision of a perfect or even improved society (as have some social movements of the past). It will emerge instead from iterative human responses to a daunting and worsening set of environmental and economic problems, and it will in many instances be impeded and opposed by politicians, bankers, and industrialists. It is this contest between traditional power elites on one hand, and growing masses of disenfranchised poor and formerly middle-class people attempting to provide the necessities of life for themselves in the context of a shrinking economy, that is shaping up to be the fight of the century. Read the whole article here. Read the whole article here.

Posted in Corporations, Democracy, Economy, Environment, Food, Natural Resources | Leave a comment

Civilisation faces ‘perfect storm of ecological and social problems’

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Damian

Scientists and development thinkers today warn that civilisation is faced with a perfect storm of ecological and social problems driven by overpopulation, overconsumption and environmentally malign technologies, says an artciel in The Guardian newspaper.

Ecological destruction

In the face of an “absolutely unprecedented emergency”, say the 18 past winners of the Blue Planet prize – the unofficial Nobel for the environment – society has “no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilisation. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us”.

The stark assessment of the current global outlook by the group, who include Sir Bob Watson, the government’s chief scientific adviser on environmental issues, US climate scientist James Hansen, Prof José Goldemberg, Brazil’s secretary of environment during the Rio Earth summit in 1992, and Stanford University Prof Paul Ehrlich, is published today on the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the UN environment programme (Unep). The paper, which was commissioned by Unep, will feed into the Rio +20 earth summit conference in June.

Apart from dire warnings about biodiversity loss and climate change, the group challenges governments to think differently about economic “progress”.

“The rapidly deteriorating biophysical situation is more than bad enough, but it is barely recognised by a global society infected by the irrational belief that physical economies can grow forever and disregarding the facts that the rich in developed and developing countries get richer and the poor are left behind.

“The perpetual growth myth … promotes the impossible idea that indiscriminate economic growth is the cure for all the world’s problems, while it is actually the disease that is at the root cause of our unsustainable global practices”, they say.

The group warns against over-reliance on markets but instead urges politicians to listen and learn from how poor communities all over the world see the problems of energy, water, food and livelihoods as interdependent and integrated as part of a living ecosystem.

“The long-term answer is not a centralised system but a demystified and decentralised system where the management, control and ownership of the technology lie in the hands of the communities themselves and not dependent on paper-qualified professionals from outside the villages,” they say.

“Community-based groups in the poorer most inaccessible rural areas around the world have demonstrated the power of grassroot action to change policy at regional and national levels… There is an urgency now to bring them into mainstream thinking, convey the belief all is not lost, and the planet can still be saved.”

The answer to addressing the critical issues of poverty and climate change is not primarily technical but social, say the group. “The problems of corruption, wastage of funds, poor technology choices and absent transparency or accountability are social problems for which they are innovative solutions are emerging from the grassroots.”

To transition to a more sustainable future will require simultaneously redesigning the economic system, a technological revolution, and, above all, behavioural change.

“Delay is dangerous and would be a profound mistake. The ratchet effect and technological lock-in increase the risks of dangerous climate change: delay could make stabilisation of concentrations at acceptable levels very difficult. If we act strongly and science is wrong, then we will still have new technologies, greater efficiency and more forests. If fail to act and the science is right, then humanity is in deep trouble and it will be very difficult to extricate ourselves.

Read the full article here.

Posted in Climate, Earth, Environment, Natural Resources, Rainforests, Sustainability | Leave a comment

Africa safeguarding its mineral wealth

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Damian

Interesting article from The Economist.

African governments are seeking higher rents and bigger ownership stakes from foreign miners. Not before time.

THE true extent of Africa’s vast wealth of resources is hard to guess. Geologists have picked over most of the rest of the globe in search of minerals, yet huge swathes of Africa remain largely unprobed. But the immense ore deposits so far discovered and soaring commodity prices on the back of rip-roaring Chinese demand have convinced the world’s miners that the continent is the next big frontier. Bumper profits have also spurred mineral-rich countries to seek a bigger share of the spoils.

African governments are seeking higher rents and bigger ownership stakes from foreign miners

The list of African governments that have miners in their sights is a long one. South Africa, home to the greatest mineral wealth in the world, estimated to be worth $2.5 trillion, is considering imposing a swingeing 50% windfall tax on mining “super profits” and a 50% capital-gains tax on the sale of prospecting rights. Those are among the proposals put forward by an independent panel of experts, set up by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to study the possibility of greater state intervention in the mining sector.

Resource nationalism is nothing new. Big Oil has suffered periodic bouts of nationalisation and sometimes seen contracts torn up in the Middle East and beyond that had run for more than 50 years. Nor is the practice confined to developing countries that feel they came off second-best when negotiating resource deals in years gone by. Australia is set to raise some $8 billion a year through a controversial new tax on miners; Britain has previously dipped into the profits of oil companies in the North Sea.

Major resources mined in Africa

However, in the past year resource nationalism has jumped to the top of the list of things that worry the 30 biggest global miners. This was prompted by 25 countries worldwide announcing plans to boost their take of profits, according to a survey by Ernst & Young, a consultancy. A rapid rebound after commodity prices collapsed in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2009 convinced cash-strapped governments that large multinationals were easy targets. In Africa mining companies are often especially vulnerable—they are usually the biggest corporate beasts around. Widespread poverty has provided a ready excuse for governments dependent on income from resources.

Read the full article here.

Posted in Africa, Corporations, Natural Resources | Leave a comment

The Injustice that is West Papua

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Damian

This film highlights the brutal history the native population of West Papua have endured for many decades under the oppressive Indonesian military.

Posted in Democracy, Human Rights, Land Grab, Natural Resources, Protest, Uncategorized | Leave a comment