Link Banana

I recently heard — I wish I remembered where — Bill Clinton make the point that a moratorium on the use of the word “Africa” would likely make people see the continent as a little less bleak. While there are still big problems in places like Somolia, Chad, Sudan, and the DRC, there are a number of good and improving governments and economies.

The Ibrahim Index, a quantification of a sub-Saharan government’s quality, highlights the differences. While the aforementioned contries have the lowest scores, places you rarely hear about — Mauritius, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana, Namibia — are relatively well run. (South Africa’s pretty good too, but we constantly hear about it.)

(via Passport)

Though I think giving Nigeria’s active but low-budget film scene an “-ollywood” is tacky, these are some interesting (and graphic) photos of it.

(via Boing Boing)

Today’s good news: a new study found that there are many more western lowland gorillas in Congo than anyone expected. I found this line somewhat ironic:

“The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

I’ve documented before The Economist’s penchant for unusual economic indicators. The classic example, the Big Mac index — in which the price of the sandwich serves as a proxy for purchasing power parity (PPP), has been unveiled for 2008.

Perhaps more novelly, the magazine’s Africa correspondent, Jonathan Ledgard, offers the intriguing possibilty that sales of Coca-Cola are a signal of how peaceful and prosperous a given area of the continent is. (via Passport)

Peter Maas argues that Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang — nope, never heard of him either — is actually worse than the far-more-famous Robert Mugabe. Obiang’s qualifications:

Years of violent apprenticeship in a genocidal regime led by a crazy uncle? Check. Power grab in a coup against the murderous uncle? Check. Execution of now-deposed uncle by firing squad? Check. Proclamation of self as “the liberator” of the nation? Check. Govern for decades in a way that prompts human rights groups to accuse your regime of murder, torture, and corruption? Check, check, and check.

He goes on to speculate that no one criticizes the reign because, like the Saudis, they worry about access to the country’s (rather modest) oil reserves.

Sounding nearly as pessimistic as everyone else, The Economist assess which rivers around the world are most likely to lead to conflicts in the coming decades.

Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.

A fascinating idea is being implemented in Tanzania:

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.

The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

The programme, jointly funded by the World Bank, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Population Reference Bureau and the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund, marks an important step in the fight to tackle Aids, which claims 2m lives a year.

(via Passport)

Reuters conveys a story both troubling and — perhaps inappropriately — humorous:

Lychings in Congo as penis threat panic hits capital

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

(via Passport)

I’ve been completely remiss about sharing actual news this week, so to begin to pay back that debt, two slightly different views about the current — and thoroughly underreported — debacle in Somalia.

For Newsweek, Scott Johnson put together a piece that compares the situation to Iraq. How good or bad that comparison seems to you probably has a fair bit to do with how good or bad Iraq seems to you. A sample:

“Every year this fighting continues, the situation worsens,” says Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Abdul Salaam of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government. The Islamists’ eviction in 2006 left a power vacuum that the U.N.-backed government still hasn’t managed to fill. Ethiopian troops are loathed as occupiers and rarely leave their heavily fortified bases. And al-Shabaab has broken off from the Courts to wage a brutal and effective insurgency. The guerrillas have overrun at least eight Somali towns this year and control parts of the capital. Where once they brought order to Somalia, they now gleefully spread chaos.

Meanwhile, The Economist is more sanguine:

So Somalia is not yet a lost cause. After 17 years of anarchy and bloodshed, its GDP per person is still higher than Ethiopia’s or Eritrea’s. Somali traders still influence the price of commodities across the region. The country limps on, even without much aid; the trade in livestock to Saudi Arabia during the haj is worth a lot more than foreign assistance.

I’ll let Joshua Keating explain:

Uganda is being held in suspense right now as Lord’s Resistance Army commander Joseph Kony continues to delay signing a peace agreement that would bring an end to one of the world’s longest-running conflicts.

Current TV just put up an amazing short documentary on the conflict that includes an interview with a former top LRA commander who says he has no regrets about his actions

Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition and, depending on who you ask, it’s president elect penned a Op-Ed in The Guardian today. The most bruising line:

How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenged fail to open their mouths? Why is it that a supposed “war on terror” ignores the very real terror of broken minds and mangled bodies that lie along the trail left by Mugabe?

(via Passport)

I’ve of two minds on this story from today’s New York Times Magazine. On the one hand, Helene Cooper is a captivating writer who tell a compelling story of both Liberia and her family. On the other, the excerpt feels like an excerpt and left me mostly wishing that they’d published the book and not a part of it. If you can accept that the story ends too abruptly, and that the book won’t be out until September, I do recommend it.

I’ve been doing my best to avoid being “all Zimbabwe all the time,” but this required noting. The AFP’s reporting that a New York Times correspondent was among those arrested. This roughly my thinking on the matter:

“We are alarmed by reports that foreign journalists have been detained in Harare,” Joel Simon, the executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement.

“In light of the political situation, it is imperative that all journalists, foreign and domestic, be allowed to work freely. We call on authorities to immediately release all journalists currently being held,” he added.

For a more thorough summary of what’s happened there recently, try this Economist story.

One of my favorite things about The Economist is that it runs stories about places I almost never hear about. This week they have a story on the civil war in the tiny Comoro Islands, and one about Djibouti. About the tiny east African country:

After independence, Djibouti’s two ethnic groups, the Issas (who are ethnic Somalis) and the Afars drifted into Djibouti city. Most swapped a nomadic life of herding goats and cattle for long heat-haze afternoons chewing qat, a narcotic leaf flown in from Ethiopia. But things began to change when Eritrean independence cut Ethiopia off from the sea. Since then, almost all Ethiopia’s trade has been shipped through Djibouti, some of it on a rickety railway linking it to Addis Ababa. The bullish—some say bullying—thinking of Djibouti’s current president, Ismail Guelleh, a protégé and nephew of Mr Gouled first elected in 1999, has also helped pep things up. His slogan on billboards throughout the town is “Nous croyons” (We believe).

In what? Well, in Dubai. He wants Djibouti to follow the example of the booming gulf emirate or perhaps even of Malaysia, a Muslim model where many children of Djibouti’s elite head for university. Dubai Ports now runs Djibouti’s upgraded port. The economy may grow by nearly 6% this year, though unemployment is high and the IMF is unhappy with the government’s shoddy fiscal management. Businessmen say the port’s improvements make it hard to imagine that Eritrea’s Massawa, Somaliland’s Berbera or Somalia’s Bossaso will catch up soon. Some talk of turning the city’s scorching seafront into “St Tropez in the Horn”.

Among the false beliefs about the disease, this one seems the most unusual:

Among the most popular, and pernicious, conspiracy theories is that AIDS isn’t caused by a virus at all. Peter Duesberg, a biology professor at University of California-Berkeley, has argued that drugs and promiscuity are the principal causes of the disease in the United States. He attributes AIDS in Africa to malnutrition.

These are very cool. You should look at them. That is all.

(via BBGadgets)

Given the ongoing mess in Sudan, the recent chaos in Chad, the shambles of Zimbabwe, and the still-fragile situation in Kenya, it easy to see Africa as a hopeless case. In the Washington Post, Craig Timberg points to the great steps forward that have been made in western Africa in the last decade.

Reborn as well, over the past decade, has been democracy itself here in Ghana and among its neighbors along West Africa’s Atlantic coast. From Sierra Leone east to Nigeria, stability and at least a tentative version of multiparty politics have begun taking hold after many years of coups, military dictatorships and civil war.

(via UN Dispatch)

The Economist’s Special Report on China arrives with these contentions:

[C]oncerns about the dire consequences of China’s quest for natural resources are overblown. China does indeed treat some dictators with kid gloves, but it is hardly alone in that. Its companies do not always uphold the highest standards, but again, many Western firms are no angels either. Fifty years of European and American aid have not succeeded in bringing much prosperity to Africa and other poor but resource-rich places. A different approach from China might yield better results. At the very least it will spur other donors to seek more effective methods.

For all the hue and cry, China is still just one of many countries looking for raw materials around the world. It has won most influence in countries where Western governments were conspicuous by their absence, and where few important strategic interests are at stake. Moreover, as China is becoming more involved in places such as Congo, its policies are beginning to change. It has promised to co-operate with the World Bank in its development efforts in Africa. It no longer seems prepared to back its most objectionable allies in the face of international opprobrium. Its diplomats, for example, did eventually stop parroting their line about unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state and allow United Nations peacekeepers to be deployed in Sudan.

The Economist argues that trade bans may actually do more harm them good for the animals they seek to protect. They offer these solutions:

A better policy is to make wildlife more valuable to man, not less. One way that suits everybody is tourism. The gorillas in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda attract a lot of money from visitors. They are doing well, unlike their cousins over the border in Congo which do not earn their keep, and are prey to hunters who want to clear them out and take their land. Tourism is one way to help the Indian tiger, which is much rarer than people thought.

A second, less popular way to make money is to exploit animals sustainably. Killing individual creatures need not harm populations. Many animals may be farmed or ranched to create a valuable legal trade. That is what has happened with the vicuña, and with crocodiles and their kind. Rhino horns can be cut off without even killing rhinos.

The Christian Science Monitor tells of increasing vigilante violence in Mozambique. It all seems to share some similarities with the just-resolved conflict in Kenya.

Rising crime and vigilante justice are quickly becoming serious problems for this donor darling, long considered a stable, postconflict African success story.

The violence reflects growing inequality and increasing mistrust of authorities, observers say – sentiments often hidden beneath widely praised macroeconomic figures showing consistent growth.

“When people do not have trust in the system, when people do not feel that they are part and parcel of problem-solving, they organize themselves,” says Themba Masuku, a senior researcher at the Centre for Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, South Africa, who has studied vigilante justice. “And they take the law into their own hands.”