Africa A Miner’s Canary Into the 21stCentury

(Essays on Economic Governance)

By Ivor Agyeman-Duah

CONTENTAcknowledgement

Introduction

Chapter One

Liberia: A Virginity that was De-flowered

Chapter Two

South Africa: Between Sainthood and Philosophy of Kinship

Chapter Three: Facing Mount Kenya

Chapter Four

Rwanda: The Beautiful Mountains of Kigali

Chapter Five

Ivory Coast and Ghana: A Re-visitation of the West African Wager

Chapter Six

Mauritius and Seychelles: Small is Beautiful

Epilogue

Introduction

By the first decade of the twenty-first century in January 2011, I had travelled extensively around the world. I had been to all continents, and in some I visited a number of countries. In Africa I had visited 20 countries of all geographic sizes--as big as Nigeria, as medium as Ivory Coast, and as small as the Seychelles Islands. If Africa was in a way going to claim part of the century as the so-called last frontier of development, the first decade was important then; important in the sense of seeing and feeling.

But it was also not an innocent decade—first there was the food crisis partly engineered by the rate of population growth in Asia; close to a decade drought in Australia, a world supplier of wheat, and the increasing price of oil and the production of bio-fuel using food crops. Since food is essential everywhere, shortage affected sectors of many economies.

Secondly, there was the financial crisis, its genesis being the inability of people to pay back loans contracted in the sub-prime mortgage sector (loans to even unemployed borrowers without any collateral or security) in the United States. Investment banks and mortgage brokers had devised complex and artificial mechanisms to keep the housing boom on course. Banks would fall,Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in the lead, between 2008 and 2009 and the shift to Europe starting with the Northern Rock (and the aftermath of almost weekly

demonstrations in Italy, Spain, Britain, Ireland and Greece against austerity measures in the last quarter of 2010) would not be long in coming as well as the consequences of Asian investment in especially London restaurants and other European capitals. These were economies that were integrated and the consequences changed the debate and policy implementation of the global financial architecture.

Of the many important books published within the period two were remarkable and reflective of the contentious debate of the moment, whether Africa was relevant or otherwise in the unfolding global events. The first, Fareed Zakari’s The Post American World (2008) had argued about the ‘empire-ness’ of American dominance in especially post-Cold War world. Though he does not subscribe to America’s economic, military and cultural decline as some critics make of the emergence of China, India and some of the G20 members, he explains that, it is other countries that are emerging in the light of global economic growth against the tight of technology and other processes. Africa and its role is a footnote in his analysis. The second and probably more favorable analysis, to at least African affairs constituents, is Gordon Brown’s financial history of the decade published in 2010 as Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization. He is the first leader or ex-leader of a major economy to have devoted a chapter in a memoir to Africa in recent times of what he had

done and what could still be done as the continent cannot be ignored for good or evil in the resolution of global crisis.

Africa, with limited integration in the global economy, could not escape the fall-out in terms of short-fall in billions of dollars of transnational remittance from nationals abroad, Aid, bilateral assistance as well as the multilaterals ( the World Bank and IMF) shifted attention to the European crisis. The continent still grew averagely between 4.5-5%. Some beyond this to 7 %. The figure was impressive and many pointed out quiet rightly that the growth was in specific sectors like the divestiture of dysfunctional state telecommunications, mining and increasing discoveries of hydro-carbons. These were and are still the sectors that connect to global interest because of their common economic integration value.

To someone travelling around that period, the consequences of the changing times again registered in the decline of the aviation industry through low traffic of flight reductions across Europe, Asia and Africa. Thus, there is no way Africa’s first decade of this century can stand in isolation of macro and micro analysis into the future because what affected it was not solely what was decided there or what happened there.

I had done these travels as a writer and later as a diplomat who served in his country’s two important missions- Washington, DC and London where many of the multilateral

policies that affected Africa in diverse ways were formulated. But I had also done work in international development and at least considered myself to have a fair idea of how societies and cultures move towards development of many types.

Before January 2011 I worked with former President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana during (?) his eight year presidency, serving as his special assistant on international development co-operation . His presidency was very eventful. Domestically, he had done some good things with the economy- interventions in social, health and education sectors which had changed for the good the indicators – (GDP per capita, growth rate which had temporarily hit 7.2 percent by 2008; lowered interest rates at the banks and because of reforms in the sector brought competition from re-located banks from Nigeria, South Africa, Libya and elsewhere with which a modern economy is measured with). In fact his government had been right that the size of the economy was bigger than had been estimated and that the GDP was at least three times more than the $15 billion estimate. A re-basing done by the Ghana Statistical Services and the multilateral institutions in 2010 would confirm this and put the economic size at 40 billion thus an attainment of a lower middle economy status. But many Ghanaians would still tell you that they see little or no change in their lives whatever the figures say.

But he had, like all leaders, his low moments in governance, driven by questionable policies which became fodder for sometimes petty opposition politics. If the balance sheet is drawn, adding aspects of his his international relations profile, he will be credited for maintaining - good neighborliness (Ghana is bordered by Burkina Faso to the north, Ivory Coast to the west, Togo and Benin to the east, and Nigeria further east. All but Nigeria were former French colonies. They had from the 1970s experienced leadership challenges which got worst with the civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast by the 2000s) and peace-building . Whilst president of Ghana, he co-currently became the chairman of the Economic Community of West African States, the chair of the African Union with the latter been particularly sensitive . His performance in these unions- mediation in the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia and his setting up of the Panel of Eminent African Personalities chaired by Kofi Annan that finally resolved the impasse in Kenya’s post election violence in 2007 had been appreciated. Not since the days of Nkrumah in the height of his Pan-Africanist stance had another Ghanaian leader had such accolades.

But the beauty of his exit from power as constitutionally mandated was to the international community less to do with his achievements since Ghana like many of the African countries that were doing well was still poor. It had everything

to do with not interfering with the final results of the 2008 elections in which his former foreign affairs minister, Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo Addo lost. Addo in the first round of balloting was leading with over 120,000 votes but that was not conclusive enough to give him victory. Surprisingly, when the next ballot occurred three weeks after, he was in vote deficit necessitating a third, a process unseen in the electoral politics of Africa before. The elections which could easily had led to another civil war in the eyes of the international community were also partly due to his tacit.

This recognition was reflected in his post-presidency international portfolios and engagements- from within Ghana and outside to assignments of the United Nations. Whilst he was president, I had been part of some of these travels. I had done a book of him, Between Faith and History: A Biography of J.A. Kufuor and had also been invited by The First Magazine ( to do a biographical essay on him) which with the Chatham House, published a commemorative edition to mark the award of Chatham Prize given to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007. He is someone I am therefore very familiar with- personally and in other capacities.

There was also the Interpeace- a peace-building organization based in Geneva which previously had strong attachment with the United Nations in fact, a baby of the UN operating in 17

countries around the world. For years, the former President of Finland and the 2007 Noble Prize laureate, Martti Ahtisaari was its governing chair. Scott Weber the Director-General of Interpeace persuade Kufuor to take over the chairmanship from Martti after he had done nine years. In between these major assignments was the one-off invitation from across the world- from inaugurating the annual lecture series at The Legatum Centre for Entrepreneurial and Development at MIT, Boston, to Ground Health Issues at Cornel University to Brazil .

As I travelled on many of these, I kept a diary to keep memoirs for a future historical construction. I decided that I will limit these to Africa. This book is therefore raw materials of personal encounters with players- African leaders, statesmen, politicians, economists and those who shape events and their implication on the people of Africa. It’s partly observation in meetings, contributor to policy discussion and as a reporter sometimes.

Six countries are covered - Liberia, South Africa, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mauritius, Seychelles and Kenya. These are different countries with different histories and cultures but reflecting the geographical map of the continent. Their economies are those of small islanders like Seychelles to those of medium size like Ivory Coast and of course the only emerging economy in Africa- South Africa.

Liberia in West Africa is a small English speaking country of 4million people. Though it was never colonized it has had a long association with the United States- slavery and return under US sponsorship of former slave descendants- Americo- Liberians to the motherland. The returnees, in one of the greatest ironies of political unfairness ‘colonized’ the natives and created a ruling class and division that would later bring about a prolonged civil war in Africa.

South Africa has a unique history of British and Dutch domination. Independent in 1910? it underwent apartheid or racial habitation until after liberation struggle by the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and to a lesser extent, the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko which helped to kill the system and the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.

In the Chapter, Facing Mount Kenya for instance, I discuss one country with two economies- the Nairobi economy- modern and one of the few to have capital markets in post-colonial Africa long before its plural emergence in parts of the continent. I examine whether this functionary economy gives the type of growth that is broad based and not class induced; the other –more deprived and rural is inhibited in its growth by cultural attitudes. This is partly so because of the type of public

policy encouraged by the country’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta.

Rwanda in Central Africa and the Great Lakes region was colonized by the French and the Belgians. It became independent in 1962 as an insignificant country in the affairs of the world but, a genocide in April 1994 against the small but the powerful Tutsi ethnic group which eliminated in months nearly 1million people brought it to world fame. It has since done interesting things for itself and gained the respect of the world. And then the Ivory Coast, the world cocoa producing ware-house and west Africa’s second strongest economy built by its France –loving, like all Francophone anti-colonial leaders of the 1960s, Felix Houphouet-Boigny who ruled for 32 years. The story of post-colonial state building in West Africa has always and fairly so, presented a scenario of Ivory Coast under Houphouet- Boigny and Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah- two countries with similar economic profiles- leading cocoa producers, coffee and other minerals and commodities as well as sharing historical and cultural practices. The artificial boarders divided its Nzeam ethnic group in two countries; the Asantes of interior modern Ghana whose ancestry go as far as Yamoussoukro, the home city of Houphouet-Boigny. I have compared the two countries which chose two post-independence development models and the consequences thereof.

In the last chapter, I looked at Mauritius and Seychelles, two small island countries which before the independence of Seychelles in 1976 was one country. With a population of 1.2 million (as at 2007) people as compared to the 90,000 of Seychelles, it is obviously the better of two economies in terms of global outlook. How it depended on nothing but services and its textiles industry is stimulating.

In the main I looked at contemporary leadership and how that kind of leadership has been or unable to create socio-economic development. Even that is broad for a work like this so it gets narrowed down to: growth in the dominant sectors of the individual economies and how they propel other drivers. There may be a bit of political economy here and there, revisionist history along the line, a portrait of a country and leader or other personalities to illustrate points and arguments or even to show off the human capacities of societies and people but the theme running through are: political leadership/ ruling class and socio-economic progress or otherwise.

A big emphasis however needs to be made. The comments and views expressed here, apart from direct quotations, are mine. They do not represent those of other people or travelling party.

Ivor Agyeman-Duah

Monrovia

January 9 2012.

Notes

1. Zakari, Fareed, The Post-American World ( London: Norton, 2008).2. Brown, Gordon, Beyond the Crash-Overcoming The First Crisis of

Globalization (London: Simon &Schuster, 2010). For his arguments on Africa see Chapter 10.

LIBERIA: A VIRGINITY THAT WAS DE-FLOWERED.The flight was going to be long but I had planned for it. It will take a total of 16 hours to get to London from Seoul via Dubai . Three days after, we make another 6 hour journey from London to Accra. In between I planned completing, This Child will be Great,1 the memoirs of Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, the first woman president of any African nation- Liberia. It was not the fact of it that attracted me to her and the book. That she is a tough politician and a freedom fighter registered on me in the late 1990s. She had granted an interview to a distinguished Ghanaian journalist, Cameroun Duodu who was Africa editor of London based South magazine.2 Duodu like Johnson was in self-imposed exile in London. She had also left Liberia and was the assistant administrator and director of the UNDP regional Bureau for Africa. She had refused to lobby African ambassadors in Washington, DC and New York to support her application for this position. At the end it was not the powers of the lobbyists, she had argued that would determine whether she would be able to perform well. She wanted the job on merit. She got it. But the South magazine had introduced her as a former finance minister of Liberia, the first woman again in Africa to hold such public office position, President of the Liberian Bank for Development and Investment, Vice President

of Citi Bank’s Africa regional office Bureau in Nairobi among other accomplishments rare, in the profile of successful women then and now.

But it was in reading this book on the long flight that the inner understanding of her dawned on me. If you marry at 17 against parental advice; had two baby boys within two years of marriage and before mid-twenties two more, it is likely that teen-age development- education, career prospects and dignity have passed you by. You think and behave in your teenage status like an adult because you have triple jumped the process. Worst if you are also the victim of husband severe abuse – verbally and physically such that you are forced to have another love relationship to draw back your sanity even as the abusive husband has not formalized the dissolution of marriage. But gloomy as these were, she still made it, passing through business school at the University of Wisconsin and studying public administration at Harvard University. She has argued in this book that such incidents, including been born into an upper class home and later slipping back to where the majority of Liberians belong, working class, because of the death of her prosperous father, the self-taught lawyer who had entertained the ambition of been the Speaker of the legislature, shape lives of people and indeed they do. The father, she tells us, led a fast life and loved women greatly contrasted with a prayerful mother, whose ancestry were

partly German and hence her own light complexion. But it was in defying the rebel leader and later illiterate military president, Samuel Doe whose government she had highly discredited internationally and worst of all meeting and having discussions in the bush in the company of highly drugged rebel soldiers, Doe’s challenger and currently International Criminal Court victim, Charles Taylor somewhere closer to the border between Ivory Coast and Liberia that spells her perhaps ordained audacity. She could have been killed.

I was happy going to Liberia to meet her. When we got to the Roberts International Airport (named for the first president of the country) on September 8 2010, it was my second time of visiting this west African country of 4 million people. The journey to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the Mamba Point Hotel, a decent three-star hotel for a post-war country was smooth; the motorcade ensured that we were there faster than usual- passing by the best areas within the city- law courts, the embassy buildings and in front of the famous Executive Mansion; a monstrous edifice with low architectural designs which made it name as the official government / president’s office. It was here the late first military leader of the country, Samuel Doe, was attacked and killed by the rebels of Johnson. The destructive effects of war registered on all these facilities, including roads though frequent visitors agree that much had been recovered in rehabilitation terms in the last five years.

Sirleaf had refused to use the Executive Mansion because it had been damaged during the war. When after some repairs she attempted to hold meetings with international guests and other African Union presidents, an electric trip almost burnt it . The international guests had to be taken away. She had since been using two floors of the Foreign Affairs building as offices till a better time when she would renovate the Mansion at close to 20 million dollars.

We were welcome to her floor by a lady secretary who ushered us into a waiting room as she took over the pleasantries from protocol/ security looking gentlemen. Kufuor of course is welcome prominently and told that, “the foreign minister will be with you shortly.” Two other nice looking women appeared beaming with smiles. I hear Kufuor murmured jokingly to one of our team members, Bernardo Arevalo de Leon, a Director at the Interpeace Office in Geneva and a former minister of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala , “All well for gender balance.” Soon the foreign minister, a middle aged beautiful lady with a low grey hair cut in a Senegalese looking long dress appears. In dignity she goes strong to Kufuor who had gotten up for her embrace with all of us standing. “ Welcome President Kufuor, good to see you again.” And then she turns to the rest of the team shaking hands. She excuses herself and within two minutes is back after a pep talk with Sirleaf whose office was just a door or two away as it normally is when you see ready

security detail. Olubanke King-Akerele, the foreign minister asked that the rest of the team be taken to the board room as she sat and had a word with Kufuor. We did – three of us- Bernardo, James S. Shilue, country manager of Interpeace in Liberia and me sitting at the right side of the board table . Few minutes later, we knew that Sirleaf had joined the two of them through laughter and greetings - with the security standing some five or so meters only out of eye shot. King-Akerele and three other senior public officers later joined us at the table sitting at the opposite side.

“ Good morning all of you” Sirleaf announced as she entered with Kufuor. Elegantly dressed, looking younger than the photos tells us of this 73 year old lady. Far shorter than I ever assumed she was; wearing a trade-mark African and specifically Liberian traditional head wrap matched with a broach in similar colors and well-tailored cloth. She sat, as did Kufuor with the rest following.

“ Well, good afternoon again, Madam President “ Kufuor began. He went on to explain how he got into the work of Interpeace and the fact that it operates in 17 countries around the world including Palestine, Guatemala, Somalia, Kenya and in Eastern Europe. It started with the name of War Worn Societies of the United Nations in 1994 for which Sirleaf

acknowledged in familiarity as she was in the system at the time.

The ceremony itself was meant to be simply, for Kufuor to formally present to her a year’s work of Interpeace in Liberia, Peace in Liberia- Challenges to Consolidation of peace in the Eyes of the Communities.3 It was studies which had been made possible with funds from the UN peace building and supported by the United Nation Project Offices.

Over 10,000 Liberians in the 15 counties have expressed their opinions on various national issues and this had been compiled to help the government’s policy formulation. Listening attentively, Sirleaf looked impressed. Shilue took over from Kufuor to explain the methodologies and other processes used to arrive at the consensus. He was happy they got a lot of support from her Ministry of Internal Affairs and other arms of government. And here Sirleaf face brighten, for she had not known much about the project but if sectors had collaborated efficiently, then she thought that was a good measure of decentralization.

The report was not something that should be new to government but it had professionally been packaged to make it a policy consideration. The key issues are: land and property disputes, local governance, rule of law and security, discrimination in citizenship/differences in identity, ethnicity

and religion/cultural practice and the last unemployment and access to resources.

Of the five the most troubling had been the issue of land. The exercise was extensive- covered the 15 counties and 59 districts. 273 urban and rural communities were visited. The sample view could be representative especially on the land issue. People run and leave their lands and other valuable property when there is war. Recovering or re-possessing them after could be a hell. And many of the cases reported in the report are about boundaries of agricultural land: boundaries between individual properties in a community; boundaries between communal lands; boundaries between private-statutory-and communal-traditional-titling; boundaries between communities and administrative districts and even between counties.

Sirleaf listened attentively to these as she had discussed some in Chapter 19 of her memoirs, Some Challenges Ahead. She has particularly discussed the issue of double sale of land and even set up a lands commission of a sort to resolve some cases.

Yet at the end of Shilue’s presentation, she remarked, “this is a very good summary of the report. It means I will not have to read all of it. I am happy that the government participated in this.” Then turning to Kufuor she said, “ Mr. President, I can

assure you that we will take this report to the Cabinet as a working document.”

That was refreshing for it is not at all times that reports get to the attention of governments let alone considered as a policy . The clout of a former African leader talking to a sitting one was instrumental. More so when like Kufuor the leader helped with electrification of the capital as part of re-construction efforts. But it will be a while to know whether some of the recommendations were followed through.

One thing I wanted to accomplish before we left. I presented her with a copy of Between Faith and History 4 which she was delighted to receive and gave to one of her assistants as a reading material on her September visit to the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. I also wanted her autograph a copy of her memoirs which I held in my hands and which might have surprised her. I bought it in South Africa. “ That is nice.” She said. But there was a dilemma here, Kufuor also wanted a copy of the book. One of her assistants dashed to her office but could not readily find one but Sirleaf signed my copy told me, “It is good you are working with my brother President Kufuor but I am signing this one for him even though you bought it. You have to find one for yourself.” I agreed. And she was complimentary, “ To President Kufuor for your contribution to the development of Ghana and Africa.”

As we left I fell into a short discussion with King-Akerele, who like the Minister of Commerce , Agriculture, Finance, Youth and Sports, Gender and Development and other high ranking women appointees had been plunked from the international multilateral system . She had been with the UNDP for 25 years working in parts of Africa including Zambia and the Seychelles.

But Liberia’s reconstruction has been the challenges of their lives. Unlike the systems they left behind they were to re-build the ones that confronted them. They travelled a lot. They depended on their international contacts a lot. Without that how do they re-solve the numerous deficits-half the population exist on less than 50 cents a day; over three-quarters lived on less than a dollar; an illiteracy rate of almost 70 percent and of unemployment, 80 percent in the formal sector. More seriously a larger percentage of those with jobs being young men whose only skills are as combatants. To complete the malaise, the debt portfolio was $4.7 billion to the World Bank, the IMF and other donors. They would later go Highly Indebted Poor Country Country (HIPC) to take advantage of non payments on interests on loans from the Bank.

Impressive as the credentials of the presidency is, a nation needs more than the best of its elite, the talented tenth, as W.E.B. Du Bois would describe them and demand of the African-American leadership in the civil rights era in the United

States of the 1960s. Sirleaf has determined that only the best human materials in Liberia would be used in the re-building process. She had deliberately enacted laws to this effect and to promote the growth of women professionals and protect the vulnerable against domestic abuse, rape, discrimination and lack of access to capital.

3

The journey to the country-side was what I looked forward to most this time. Abraham Odoom, my fellow traveler to Liberia had been District Chief Executive (DCE) of Twifo Herman-Lower Denkyira during part of the Kufuor administration. He was later promoted to be deputy minister of Local Government and then Health . He earned these promotions because as DCE he was able through the cocoa hi-tec- to increase production of cocoa through modernization- effective use of fertilizers and other agro-chemicals such that his district registered the highest production in Ghana. The cumulative effect of this had been that production levels in the country jumped from 350,000 to over 700,000 tones by 2008. The other traveler, Kwesi Poku was based in Monrovia as a consultant of the World Bank but as agro- industrial advisor to Florence A. Chenoweth, the Minister of Agriculture. He had in the 1970s and 80s worked in Liberia where he is associated with some of the agro-industrial developments. In his sixties, he knew more about the country-

its promise and its destruction through the war than many of the technocrats in charge now. Some of his consulting papers for instance, Agro-Industrial Value Chains- Development Strategy Frame-work for the multilateral institutions and government of Liberia 5 had been interesting. Like many others and a running theme of lamentation in This Child Will be Great, he questioned the basis of Liberia depending on a mono-crop-rubber plantation economy of Firestone whose presence in Liberia has dominated productivity out-look without any value chain addition to the lives of the peoples for decades. He asks pertinent questions and review strategic situations elsewhere- in Malaysia which like Liberia depended on rubber and tin as twin pillar of the colonial economy. “Initial primary commodity production continued to dominate the economy in the early years following independence however, in view of colonial Malaysia’s heavy dependence on rubber and tin export earnings, following sharp rubber price fluctuations during the 1950s and declining rubber prices in the 1960s, and in anticipation of the inevitable exhaustion of tin deposits, diversification of the economy after independence seemed imperative.”

He makes the same argument with oil palm whose potential in Liberia is perhaps higher than in Malaysia and again the comparison with Thailand is expressive. It rains more in Liberia than any other country in West Africa. But this rainfall pattern

is also tempered with a lot of sunshine making rice cultivation (the staple food) of the people the most ideal place to cultivate. Yet for years even before the war, that was not taken advantage of as Thailand did in south-east Asia markets.

Cocoa is another crop with great potential to succeed. The industry had however never been seen as a stimulus to growth, employment and poverty reduction. In a meeting and visitation to a demonstration farm in Grandbassa, about an hour and a half drive from Monrovia, it was clear compared with operations of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board that there had been little state investment in cocoa and its institutions. What is taken for granted elsewhere in the production process are major issues here .

The Liberian Produce Marketing Corporation (LPMC) has existed for decades. When I met with its Managing Director, Nyah Mantein he confessed that until Johnson Sirleaf suddenly focused on creating awareness of the crop, he had not seen its stimulus nature. The budget of the LPMC is low- $500, 000 per annum. It can only pay the salaries of between 50-60 workers within and outside of Monrovia, those of about 130 pensioners and recurrent expenditures. Because the industry was dead, there was no case made, over the decades for any strong budgetary support.

Here, like Ghana, there are no large cocoa plantations but small scale productions whose cumulative out-put in Ghana is very high- next to Ivory Coast. Over the years 30,000 acres of farms out of the potential 3-4 million hectares of cultivation and richer soil composition were abandoned. With a possibility to drift 200,000 people into employment (compared to Ghana’s estimated 600,000), the problem with Liberia lies in the fact that it takes between 5-6 years from planting to harvesting in the absence of requisite technology which in Ghana limits harvest to 3 years.

The Liberia situation is worst because apart from the problem of land tenure, cultivation techniques, harvest, fermentation, drying of beans are virtually unknown. Ernest Atta, an agronomist who had been part of our travelling team had noticed in this demonstration farm constraints like pruning, de-shading, and wrong chemicals for good soil fertility. He also observed that though labour and spraying-streams in and around the farm, as well as well built solar dryers were available, they were also underutilized.

That oil palm and cocoa production alone could generate revenue more than what rubber had done for this country over a century is not in doubt. A Ghanaian economist, Kwame Sarpong 6 ( had led in the transformation of the cocoa industry in the 2000s)who has done a detailed analysis of cocoa as a

transformative crop to the economy and poverty reduction in Liberia feels it could be more than black gold. For cocoa unlike oil, gold or other natural resources is a grassroots, peasant occupation with less sophisticated skills; its wealth is a bottom-up and not top-down distribution; its multiplier effects show first in the improved social and economic conditions of rural people and their investments in other businesses.

But why this diversification has not been able to take place is not a peculiar problem with Liberia but a development puzzle on a continent of multiple and abundant resources.

We spent some time in Monrovia but for close to ten days in the rural parts of the country- observing its agriculture potential and how if that is right, it could lead to rural poverty reduction . The role of aid agencies – their influence on policy even if sometimes unrealistic is most exemplified here. They have the money. And we also had meeting on policy with them including with the IITA on the Sustainable Tree Crop programmes of assisting farmers to expand farms through nurseries. The major challenges has been procuring seeds from Ghana and Cote d’ Voire to support the programmes. The expatriates at the office were so consumed with forestation and other preservation practices and prepared to spend money on these more than on other programmes of tangible positive growth outcomes.

The Liberia programme of Assistance in Priority Areas had however been in the following which is not different from many in sub-Saharan Africa though the intensity to address the Liberia case was obvious:

a) Peri-urban food production to feed 70 percent of the population as a result of post-war displacement .

b) High technology tree crops rehabilitation, consolidation and modernization with a view to expansion of current small-holding of one acre to economic size of 4 hectares per farmer.

c) Extension and training programme for public and private sector capacity building both in academic and on the job training.

The hinterland journey began in the Nimba County where we met with management boards , agricultural extension officers and members of cocoa cooperatives at Saelepea after 4 hours drive on bumpy rural roads. Though these cooperative members were cocoa farmers, they had almost abandoned them for domestic agriculture. It take years for cocoa to yield its fruits and with lack of support for the sector motivation was low; lack of proper grading and standardized mechanism, most farms were under heavy tree covers inhibiting increase in out-put; no pest control because of lack of input supply. Produce could be smuggled across the border to nearby Sierra Leone for

better markets but not much as we saw vast abandoned cocoa farms- before and after the war.

But the rural ecology is agro- friendly and the cooperatives were well-organized and the availability of the youth as a labour force available.In the Lofa County we visited some of the abandoned farms and at a small town – Kolahun met with cooperative farmer group.

In Foya District, we visited individual farmers and listened to their firsthand accounts of challenges and promise- a farmer with about 47 acres which was under rehabilitation and Fofana’s 80 acre cocoa farm which according to the owner had done 30 mt annually as against present lower output of 1 mt. We also drove all the way to Bong County in total over 10 hours of rural drive out of Monrovia.

As we drove back to Monrovia with sunset almost upon us, there was as much to talk about this country- potential for investors to help with its re-constructing as the government and leadership had much work to do in convincing the investor community of prospects. We have seen some Asians- from Malaysia dotted around the ……..hotel with lap-tops and animated conversations in Monrovia. One of them from Diaby Syme told me they were interested in the oil palm industry in the country. In fact since 2006 they had done feasibility studies into oil palm cultivation . By 2010 they had acquired 200,000

hectares of oil plantation the biggest ever in Africa and are investing billions of dollars.

But the largest concentration of expatriates and foreign business people seems to be Lebanese. With tens of thousands originally born here many have also migrated from Lebanon especially the South with Shiite Islamic mentality. As merchants, they dominate the main commercial streets of Monrovia- particularly the long stretch of Randall Street. They sell imported office furniture and accessories, electrical appliances and others. Their role in the war is sometimes overlooked but they allied themselves with some of the war lords to ensure that their investments and property were protected. Some of the Lebanese- Liberians and other immigrants with social and survival beliefs not quite different from the Hisbelloah in South Lebanon, played hard against their own. The rivalry among themselves and their businesses interest was such that some of them hired mercenaries to kill their business rivals in order to take over their business and property. By 2010, their population in the country was estimated to be 100,000-120,000. Like those of their kindred in many parts of West Africa in the 1960s, they had been in the timber, gold and diamond sectors exporting to Middle eastern countries as well as imports from there. Emmanuel Akeampong,7 a Ghanaian historian who had looked at Lebanese –Africans and the issue of national identity (from the time they

first migrated to Sierra Leone in the 1860s ; to Ivory Coast, Gold Coast/Ghana and Nigeria. Liberia was not initially a popular destination and if the numbers given are correct, it could be more of the opportunities of post-conflict societies for businesses) . There had been tension between some Africans and Lebanese-Africans as they question themselves- whether their (Lebanese) interest lies first in their profit margins for which reason they would abuse all ethical values to fulfill ( and often the victims of retribution or attacks-rape of their women, buggery) or whether Lebanese consider Africans after decades of shared identities as co-patriots. But the role of the Lebanese in the economies of Liberia as in other African countries cannot be underestimated.

But there have also been Ghanaian and other West African road contractors, educationists, engineers and other professionals in Monrovia. They may be working for multilateral institutions or their governments. Compared Liberia to their countries, they feel blessed. War itself is a destructive occurrence and for a country that has an unhappy history of elite rule for decades worst. It has been one of the ironies of human hypocrisy.

4

By September 2011, the challenge to Sirleaf’s leadership was imminent in the form of a general election. The country had 29 political parties. Though only 16 had been certified by the National Electroal Commission (NEC), three were considered major - the United Party led by Sirleaf, the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) led by Mr Winston Tubman and the Liberty Party by Brumskine. Tension breed out of mistrust was high. From the Electoral Commission, James Framayan been accused of politically been aligned to Sirleaf, the latter had also made unnecessary pronouncements. She had said on a political platform that she would use over 500 UN-Nigerian troops to teach her opponents a lesson when in fact they were part of the Nigerian Formed Police serving with UNMIL and was most unlikely this unethnical decision could be made by the UN. Such heated exchanges in intemperate language had been normal in politics of West Africa and not surprisingly in a post-conflict country. The earlier decision by Sirleaf that she would be a one term president during the elections in 2005 had endeared her to many Liberians. Some voted for her based on the understanding that it could partly lead to peace. But her later decision not to respect her own promise was considered deceitful. The opposition certainly and understandably played on this to explain that many of the things she had said including making the country better were done in such manners.

But other legal issues came up. The Constitution requires that candidates for presidential elections should have lived in the country for 10 years. This tactily meant Sirleaf was not qualify at all to stand elections but by the middle of September 2011, the NEC overruled this Constitutional provision which paved the way not only for Sirleaf but the others- Winston Tubman, Dew Tuan Wleh of the National Democratic Coalition and the former rebel leader Prince Johnson of the National Union for Democratic Progress. A Supreme Court interpretation came to nothing. To disqualify three of the leading candiadates with control of over 70 percent of votes was not realistic under the circumstance.

That the election outcome was not clear-cut with anticipation of a run-off showed the extent to which opposition to Sirleaf had solidified. It had been so partly because of these political issues; though some achievements in socio-economic terms had been made (attracting billions of dollars into especially the mining and rubber sectors and a GDP growth of from 5% to 9.5% over the years; the IMF had even cancelled over 4 billion of 4.7 billion she owes it), a lot of Liberians were still poor and disappointed in the level of progress. If Sirleaf was internationally respected and even adored for her professional attainments by governments and western institutions, not so with at least half the people in the country. She certainly panicked in the course of the campaign and it is likely

incumbency was over-exploited and bribery and corruption of opponents became some of the strategic instruments to prevent disgrace through loss. When it was announced only days before the October 11 elections that the Nobel Institute had deemed it proper to award her the 2011 Nobel Prize for Peace, it did not surprise friends and foes. Tubman, her closest opponent and like her, an alumus of the UN system and a Harvard graduate, was not either. He felt irritated and equated the announcement at that time to indirect interference in affairs of his country.It meant nothing to Liberians and he said it would not let Sirleaf win on the face of it. Even though the prize committee had awarded it to three women- another Liberian political and social activist, Leyman Gbowee and the Yemeni revolutionary and rights activist, Tawakkul Karman , they explained it had decided to award it to women for that year and that the three measured up to merit.

True to Tubman’s prediction Sirleaf did not win the October 11 outright ballot outright. The hundreds of observers from the ECOWAS, Africa Union, Carter Center, the EU and others all declared the conduct of the elections as free and fair with Sirleaf obtaining 44 percent of the 1.2 million votes compared to Tubman’s 33 percent votes. The surprising decision by Tubman’s CDC not to participate in the re-run for alleged fraud and vote buying, an accusation that not only Sirleaf party’s but CDC’s involvement was a blow to the country’s democratic

journey. The demonstration by the CDC against these allegations led to clashes with the Liberian police and UN forces. Deaths and injuries were recorded and the re-run affected through absention by opposition supporters; for afraid of the past ghost many stayed at home. But it was also clear that with Prince Johnson throwing his party’s support to Sirleaf, she would overcome the ballot and she did with a low turn out of ??? Though the credibility of the results and Sirleaf’s eventual swear-in was affected, the international observers backed her through and accused the Opposition of been bad losers.

Sirleaf ends This Child Will Be Great with : “ Nevertheless the challenges faced by Liberia and much of Africa are by no means in surmountable. But in confronting them we need to draw strength from ourselves and our rich past as a people, as well as from the time-honored successes and continued goodwill of our enduring partners. I am confident that Liberia can and will become a nation to be proud of once again. And Africa will rise.”

It might as well be that. Many may not see the silver lining yet and question the basis for any hope of seeing it yet but perhaps it would be long, very long to see the dreams of today come true easily and particularly with a high level of expectation.

-October 2010

Notes

1. Johnson, Sirleaf Ellen, This Child Will Be Great-Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President, (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).

2. Duodu, Cameron, “ ” in South Magazine 1989.3. Sanchez Enrique, Arevalo de Leon, Bernardo, Shinilue,

James, Apostolidis, Kallissa, Peace in Liberia- Challenges to Consolidation of Peace in the Eyes of the Communities (published by the UNOPS/Interpeace in September 2010). See particularly pp5-12.

4. Agyeman-Duah, Ivor, Between Faith and History- A Biography of J.A. Kufuor (Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishers, 2007).

5. Kwesi, Poku, Industrial Value Chains- Development Strategy Frame-Work for the Institutions and Government of Liberia. Written in 2010 and submitted to the World Bank and the Agricultural Ministry in Liberia, this is an unpublished document and working guide. See p18 especially.

6. Sarpong, Kwame, Liberia Cocoa Corporation. A report prepared by the Optimal Consultancy Services limited,

Accra in 2010 led by Kwame Sarpong, an economist who also first headed the Ghana Cocoa Board as CEO in the Kufuor administration . It was initially prepared for the development of a cocoa Nucleus Estate and a supplementary small-holder scheme. In three parts, the first- Background to Assignment gives details of the industry in Liberia.

7. Akeampong, Emmanuel, Race, Political Identity and Citizenship in Ghana-The Example of the Lebanese (Accra: Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006). This book came out of the inaugural lecture given by the author as a Fellow of the Academy. Its earlier draft was delivered in South Africa at the Race Relation conference in Durban in 2001 and later at the Centre for the Advanced Study of the African Society in Cape Town. For the general West Africa presence see in particular Chapter 2, “ Settling” Not “Sojourning”: The Lebanese Auxiliary Diaspora in Colonial West Africa”.

South Africa: Between Sainthood and the Philosophy of Kingship.Many people have their own impressions about South Africa. Its history of apartheid had been murky and made it for years a pariah state. But many also, especially, first time visitors experience deep cultural shock. In Africa but it is not of Africa. The beauty of Johannesburg with its modern architecture. The imperial presence of Cape Town. The calm and tranquility of Port Elizabeth and beyond it, the rural and rolling hills of Grahams town in the Eastern Cape. All mixed up – to make the rainbow nation as Archbishop Desmond Tutu first described it . These presences on the surface generate cynical mental discussion about the development benefits of apartheid if compared especially to Sub-Saharan Africa . But it is another story if this wealth is measured in the well-being of the 40 million inhabitants.

Soweto-(South western collections of townships) in its previous incarnation takes you back to urban congestion, dirt and dispossession. Now a sort of a tourist attraction and for years a pantheon of apartheid because of the Soweto uprising in 1976, it has been regenerated from 1994 and is now a spiraling estate. One of its attractions is 8115 Orlando West Soweto: the

Mandela House built in 1945, where he once lived with wife, Winnie. And not far off, where Desmond Tutu also lived and where Winnie to this day lives. That neighborhood sits at the feet of history. For just in front of Mandela House is an intersection-Vilkakazi and Ngakane streets - the famous streets where the Soweto Uprising started which among other things led to the partial destruction of Mandela’s house.

If you are like me who developed political consciousness in the 1980s and lived in Africa where anti-Apartheid songs like Fire in Soweto beamed the airwaves all the time and programmes were disproptionately devoted to apartheid, the images you developed of that society should be derelict. It could be Harlem in New York you bet, for the histories are similar. In the 1960s and 70s, Harlem and Soweto represented the poverty and oppression of blacks. The former in a free country and the latter in a ‘colonial’ setting. Notwithstanding the era of the Harlem renaissance-the out-pouring of great works of literature and arts by African American artists in the 1920s and ‘30s and in Soweto, the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko in the 1960s, today, there can’t be talk of a balance of progress. The transformation of Soweto at least in the congested semi-urban sense called Shanty towns under apartheid is a miracle. The state has regenerated housing for which the working class has a mortgage working payment plan. Housing is the first dignity that post-apartheid attempted to

give blacks. Mandela has said of his own -8115 Orlando West in his autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom that, “It was the opposite of grand, but it was my first true home of my own and I was mightily proud. A man is not a man until he has a house of his own.”1

Other social needs like schools, health-care, unemployment and even low wages could be burdens for political leadership. But I saw more hope here in people as we drove through the quiet streets on this early afternoon when many parents were at work in Johannesburg or Pretoria than in Harlem or the South-side of Chicago years before.

Political and social identities are of essence here. In such historic places of resistance, it is the heroes and heroines of liberation whose identification with the neighborhood soars its image and gives it a price. We saw this happened when in the 1990s Bill Clinton decided to set up his office in Harlem, when Maya Angelou bought a property there as well as Henry Louis Gates Jnr.

After Obama’s victory in the election and before his inauguration I walked for hours on the streets of Harlem sampling views on what that spectacular event meant to African- Americans among idle labour, petty traders, criminals and drug addicts . The addition as I walked around the exercise was the volume of Obama T-shirts, portraits and a new hope

among people which also dim the argument of lack of opportunities and possibilities if you work hard and are ambitious.

But all this is residing in the past. As the black middle class is growing and the troubled history of Soweto becomes distant affair in the minds of a new generation of blacks, people want to live in the best areas in town. It will be difficult to get CDs of the old anti- apartheid songs like Sonny Okosuns’s Fire in Soweto, those of Bellefonte and Miriam Makeba, nor do people commonly sing, Bring Me My Machine Gun or Kill the Boer. Music truly defines the issues and the times in which they were produced. Hip- Life music even a blending of lyrics of old with the current lives. Many in my generation get disappointed with the disappearing past. Societies move and people don’t remember the past everyday in their lives otherwise there will be no progress.

Over a decade after apartheid rule, many still resent the unclear polluted atmosphere- racial scars in schools, business and politics . The Xenophobia or re-emergency of what under apartheid was called black on black violence witnessed in the embarrassing attacks and deaths on African especially immigrants, illegal some of them were during the mid years of the Thabo Mbeki presidency registered on the mind of people.

The problems of underdevelopment in this 400 billion dollar economy is also a problem of human capacity development- a lack of an entrepreneurial class for years, skillful labour in the history of apartheid which was only partly addressed with the return of the ANC leadership from exile in 1990s. The return insignificant in terms of numbers to change the status quo rather rendered a rift between some of the alienated returnees and those who lived and confronted the system in their absence. That had its problem.

The issue of small scale businesses and entrepreneurial spirit which lacked in black ruled South Africa was that, at least in the reckoning of the novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2, what some African immigrants long liberated from colonial rule and acquainted with running businesses tried to do in South Africa. And that was what triggered in the long term the racial onslaught on them under the pretext of overtaking jobs that should go to South Africans.

As I say many –South Africans- blacks or whites, Africans and visitors from Europe have varying tales to narrate, tales as complex and surprising as the evolution of the country itself; about its emerging economy (now classified in the company of Brazil, Russia, India and China).

Their successful hosting of the world cup in July 2010, the capacity of displayed infrastructure, the performance of the

national team of Ghana which was the unofficial team of Africa- reaching the quarter final stage somehow reconciled South Africa with the rest of the continent. But it did not or does not end tales.

For many including accomplished Africans who thought the end of apartheid was as much their cake as South Africans, it was some shocking disappointment on issues of race, immigration and post-apartheid attitude. On a March 2007 evening, I sat at the VIP Lounge with the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka at the Kotoka International airport in Accra as he prepared to catch a flight to Lagos. I had invited him to do a book launch and also invited a South African journalist to cover the event. Soyinka was somehow reluctant to grant this journalist an interview after I had reminded him previously. He eventually did some ten minutes with him.

“ Do you know why I have decided never to go to South Africa on any invitation?” He asked me. “ No”, I responded. And then he explained in the presence of the reporter how he was detained at the Oliver Tambo International airport. Yes, he had entered South Africa soil without a visa but he had been assured he would be given on the spot visa. And not that it was an ordinary invitation. He had been invited by Nelson Mandela for his birthday celebration. Now, here was he who fought since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 and using

the weight of the prize, to internationally demonize apartheid but unable, once the system had been destroyed to enter it. It had nothing to do probably with race but everything to do with disrespectful attitude. Soyinka had met Mandela several times as a friend and was one of the first international figures to meet him after his return from Robben Island. He who Soyinka calls a “sage” and had dedicated and presented him with a copy of Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems.3 Soyinka has since, after major persuasion reclined his decision and visited Cape Town in August 2010 for the launch of his memoirs and to great welcome, You Must Set Forth at Dawn.4

**************

I have been to South Africa a couple of times. This visit was exceptional in the sense that it had to do with Thabo Mbeki who succeeded Mandela and recognized as an intellectual president or Africa ‘s twenty-first century philosopher king. After his presidency- or been botched out of office by Jacob Zuma, he decided on the Thabo Mbeki Foundation a think tank dedicated to Africa’s renaissance at the University of South Africa. It’s basically to help eradicate poverty and underdevelopment on the Continent; building friendship and peaceful cooperation among the peoples of Africa and other fall-out of Pan-Africanism. There is also the African Leadership Institute attached to it and devoted to investing in “ Thought Leaders for Africa’s Renewal.”

His presidency had partly been blissful and partly tragic. Blissful in the sense that, he steered the longest economic growth in the country since the Second World War. Internationally, as Garcia Macheal? who represented Nelson Mandela said at the evening of the launch: “You were there to re-shape African unite, its revival, and peace… channeled the resources of South Africa in these fulfillment; that for the first time, G8 leaders invited African leaders to their meetings.”

He had also epitomized the ironies of the game and that was the tragic part. Mandela according to Alec Russell, for years Johannesburg bureau chief of the Financial Times and author of, After Mandela-The Battle for the Soul of South Africa 5 had rather wanted Cyril Ramahaso to be his deputy and eventual successor but it had been Jacob Zuma the populist and darling boy of the ANC who had pushed for Mbeki. No wonder Zuma became Mbeki’s deputy later on. But to show that he had massive support within the ANC next only perhaps to Mandela, it was Zuma who after been sacked by Mbeki in controversial corruption charges had the last laugh of defeating Mbeki in election and taking over the ANC.

Adekeye Adebajo who writes on South Africa and based in Cape Town has compared the two friends to the characters in Soyinka’s 1963 play, The Lion and the Jewel , Lakunle and Baroka. The former, a westernized school teacher with

contempt for Nigeria and particularly the customs in its western part from which he came and Baroka, a traditional chief as they raced for the love of beautiful Sidi. As the end of the play the traditionalist won. In Adebajo’s appreciation, this classic play with meaning in post-apartheid South Africa as it was in pre-independent Nigeria is upon us again. Zuma who wears traditional Zulu dress and is polygamous is the Baroka and the westernized and sometimes arrogant teacher- Lakunle is Mbeki. The sought after love and Sidi represents the coveted ANC.

But Mbeki’s intellectualism in his early presidential years- arguments about the causes of HIV/AIDS as South Africans (with 5 million infected) died and rated one of the highest in the world and his reluctance for anti-HIV drugs usage; his much criticized diplomatic approach over Robert Mugabe and his ZANU PF in Zimbabwe and methods in settling peace process in some parts of Africa were not as abysmal as especially the western drug manufacturers of HIV vaccines and the media (some with clear vested interest) made it looked. By the time he became aware that too much intellectual policy and thinking could be victims of political exigencies and sometimes senseless, it was too late. Zuma’s populism would triumph at the end. The same media especially the British that were on his tail when Zuma took over with the many peccadilloes- revival of some vestiges of Zulu traditional characteristics, his personal

depiction as sex lover, contradicted urban South Africa ways and western notions of political modernity. “ What have we done?” some might have asked after the anger had gone. Mbeki, he who had been groomed by British educational institutions from sixth form to studying economics at masters level at the University of Sussex ; lover of Shakespeare, of the English romantic poets and in the process a poet himself on the traditions of the old English masters; working with another anti-apartheid icon Oliver Tambo in London and leading secret negotiations with the apartheid authorities in the 1980s. He suddenly started receiving more reflective coverage.

But perhaps and only so, it is this over 30 years of continuous absence from South Africa and the acquired educational background that has shaped his character. His biographer, Mark Gevisser with greater access to his subject tells us that the trouble lies partly in Mbeki’s role model of centuries gone by- the lead character and also title in Shakespare’s tragic play –Coriolanus. This heroic Roman soldier was eventually killed because of pride and obduracy. In fact Shakespare’s moral teaching about the play is political arrogance and the fall of man. Instead of seeing Coriolanus as Gevisser writes in his book, A Legacy of Liberation-Thambo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, as a “tyrant driven by hubris” Mbeki interprets Coriolanus in a twentieth-century honour role being “ full of truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice, absence of self-

seeking, brotherliness, heroism, optimism.” 6 Mbeki even describes his hero’s critics in ancient Rome as, “rabble and unthinking mob..”

After we had settled down at the Intercontinental Hotel in Sandston, Johannesburg, Mbeki’s former chief of staff Mojanku Gumbi,7 told us that, Mbeki would come over to welcome President Kufuor. He did. At 68, it was not just complimentary when Kufuor told him but for his grey hair, he might have been taken to be 40 years.

“ Ah, like this young man” pointing at me and collapsing into the elongated sofa with Kufuor.”

“Mr. President I am so glad that you honored my invitation to come. When I got the response from your office , I said, “Ah! This is great news. Welcome to South Africa, my brother.” Mbeki said .

“ What else could I do. If the invitation had even said, come and be a spectator, I will have done that because of all the things you did for Africa-” Kufuor responded.

But it is really interesting how people after leaving stressful jobs, seem to have some youth restored to their presence. Facial expression changed even as I am sure he liked the compliment.

“ I have a problem, Mr. President.”

“What is it about?” Kufuor asked.

Mbeki had invited 750 people for the dinner launch of the Foundation that Sunday evening but it had been oversubscribed from within the country and outside by 200. The best thing was to personally intervene and ensure that there would not be chaos. But for now, he had come to thank Kufuor for honoring his invitation. He had selectively invited him and former President Chissano of Mozambique as speakers and as they engaged in this humorous talk of their respective past, there was a mutual feeling that people have missed in a way some form of their governance. The sudden euphoria of renaissance in the first decade of 2000 was fast diminishing. It was not only Mbeki of their generation of leaders who was setting up this Foundation- indeed Chissano has a peace academy in Maputo and Obassanjo, a huge and certainly expensive presidential library in his home-town of Abeokuta in Nigeria.

“ There must be linkages of all these foundations and centres, Mr. President.” He said as he left Kufuor’s hotel suite.

Shorter, like Chissano and overshadowed by Kufuor in height, it is an interesting observation how some medium or short size personalities in history could defy the power and glory associated with huge frame leaders.

***********************

“ I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

“My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.”

This poetic rendition by Thabo Mbeki is part of his most famous speech, I am an African given on the occasion of the adoption by the Constitutional Assembly of The Republic of South African Constitution Bill of 1996. It is also the first chapter of his collection of essays titled, Reflections on African Challenges and Prospects. 8 It spells out his pan-African credentials and the history of the struggle for liberation to that point. Like the late President Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, also poet, cultural theorist and leader of the Negritude Movement in the 1960s, this speech, reflected in his 20 out of his 28 years living as exile in Zambia, Nigeria, Botswana, Swaziland and in between travelling extensively on the continent makes him really confident. His taking over the

renaissance leadership of Africa felt like an obligation. He had in earlier encounters with the late Julius Nyerere of Tanzania been convinced that South Africa’s role in Africa should be unquestionable in post-apartheid.

During his presidency and after, Mbeki engaged in negoliating complex conflicts in Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. He also chairs, since leaving office the Africa Union High Level Panel on Darfur (AUP) to investigate how to expedite peace and reconciliation in that region. The AUP was replaced by the Africa Union High Level Implementation for Sudan. He thus played an important role in the independence of South Sudan in 2011.

There has always been this group of political black elite who feel that because of Africa’s past solidarity to South Africa there is an obligation for it to do good in return in a post-Apartheid. In the mid 1980s, I had six ANC youth South African classmates in journalism school in Accra. There were a dozen or more in near-by National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI). They had studied in other African countries, Europe and continued elsewhere because they could not return home under apartheid. They were adoptive to cultures and societies and understood by knowledge and lived experiences the continent better than many of their generation. Some had Ghanaian girl-friends and eventually one of them married a Ghanaian. The

last time I heard they were living in South Africa with their two children. South Africans like these can easily share post-apartheid fruits with others. Like the Mbekis, they are the ones who talk about the renaissance of the continent. At school and especially on the day Mandela was released from Robben Island we all sang:

God bless Africa

Raise high its glory

Hear our prayers

God bless us, her children,

God, we ask you to protect our nation

Intervene and end all conflicts

Protect us, protect our nation, our nation

South Africa-South Africa

From the blue of our sky

From the depth of our seas,

Over our everlasting mountains,

Where the crags resound.9

It was really in growing up from there that I reflected the lyrics of this national anthem, perhaps the only one in Africa which

inspires continental nationalism instead of the ones with national and restricted historical aspirations. And the ANC the only party which in contemporary politics bears a continental name recognisation. Thus by its wealth, history and aspirations, South Africa could be leading Africa but it is also known that it is easier said than done.

Some cynics have questioned the basis of past leaders setting up foundations to pursue uncompleted issues and policies whilst in government. Is it a way of upstaging their successors especially if they have higher international profiles? Chissano as part of the launch of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation had disagreed in a South African Broadcasting Corporation TV interview and panel discussion and feels that if they have international profiles and are useful there should be a centre or foundation where this knowledge should be stored. As I sat through the discussions, I could not agree more with Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy, Mamphela Ramphele former Managing Director of the World Bank and Vice Chancellor emeritus of the University of Cape Town as well as Samuel Kobia, former Secretary-General of the World Council of Churches all co-panelists. If an African renaissance would take place and be useful it should be African centered in its thinking of issues.

The launch certainly had its atmosphere. Of the 300 people who attended, over 95 percent were black South African intellectuals. Not that one could expect peasant participation on such high policy thinking issues but the absence of mostly white intellectuals could be explained either in terms of the lingering of post-apartheid distrust of races or because it was of little concern to them.

But then , South Africa cannot have a mono-narrative for its past and the future ahead of it. Moeletsi Mbeki thinks that the first hurdle in South Africa post-apartheid attitude both to itself and its leadership of Africa should start with a self-retrospection. He feels the only real moment of Africa’s renaissance had fleetingly passed us by – the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) of Zimbabwe which challenged the entrenched political leadership in that country. The inability of the South African government especially the one led by Thabo Mebeki to sustain it, was the beginning and end of the renaissance; a wild assessment of a concept one may say.

In his book, Architects of Poverty-Why African Capitalism Needs Changing 10 published in 2009, he uses great scholarship and deep understanding of Africa but with Marxist analysis sympathetic to peasant deprivation, to explain why South Africa political elite will be wrong. He argues that the difference

between the South African economy and the rest of Africa notwithstanding the fact that with 5.5 percent of Africa’s population, South Africa accounted for 26.6 per cent of the continent’s GNI, are that:

a) an abundance of natural resources;b) the dispossession of the black and Afrikaner peasantries;c) the imposition of a freehold land tenure system;d) the transformation of the peasantry into wage labourers;e) the importation of foreign capital and skills;f) investment in the health, education and general welfare of

about 10 percent of the population;g) investment in a transportation and communications

infrastructure;h) investment in agriculture, manufacturing and financial

services;i) the establishment of rule-of-law institutions; andj) The establishment of an independent mass media.

Some of this could be contested especially the role of independent media. Nigeria’s in dictatorships as far back as the 1970s as well as Kenya and Ghana and their vibrant growth and relevance to democratic development by the time Moeletsi was even writing the book are clear examples. He goes further to question the methodology of the expansion of a black middle class. Under the Chapter, The De-Industrialization of

South Africa, he writes, “ Most people in South Africa, Africa, and the rest of the world naively believe that Black Economic Empowerment was an invention of South Africa black nationalists………The object of BEE was to co-opt leaders of the resistance movement[ by the white oligarchies] by literally buying them off with what looked like a transfer to them of massive assets at no cost.” To him it was in return for more favors and policy influence once Africans were in charge. Because of this, Moeletsi says that (p72) : “ Consequently, the life-style and standard of living of old white South Africa has become the goal to which the new black elite aspires. The reality, however, is that this standard of living can only lead the country to ruin.” 11

The certainty of doom and not even as invocation of an uprising for such fulfillment is clearer then the concluding remarks of Marx in The Communist Manifesto.12 Certainly, the behavior of post-colonial leadership in Africa has been a major problem. Some of the cases he builds against them are very true but to analysis the problems of a continent today using class analysis alone lacks some pragmatism- there are constructions and de-constructions of issues to do with ethnicity, deliberate deprivations of freedoms and types of social services in colonial past and even under apartheid which were not created by the new post-colonial African political elite. They had to still attempt to correct them because they

affect social progress. Are the peasants right in everything they do in Africa ?- the rate of procreation despite advisory services of birth controls ; what about the role of international trade and the multilateral systems, geo-politics and Africa’s integration in the global economy, trade agreements, and impact on Africa?

Overlooked in the case of South Africa is that a capitalist model had already been created and infrastructure laid out – the best in the continent for growth. This is notwithstanding the ANC’s no alternative but leftist posture with which it waged the liberation struggle. Some of these postures, it is clear will be incompatible with its economy of today.

If you walk the streets of South Africa, look at its growth rate figures (not forgetting that like all economies, there are rise and fall periods and even eras of temporary collapse and re-generation); its global emergence in the corridors of the UN, you begin to ask yourself when this will happen- a century from now as Marx had written of capitalism or this will fall before our very eyes like the sudden collapse of the Lehman Brothers. Some made the prediction as Mandela was been sworn into office- based on evidence from Africa that the black man would mismanage the country. It’s been close to two decades.

The very fact that Moeletsi could challenge this way and doubt South Africa’s role in any renaissance is also a virtue for it could

embolden its victims to live above expectation. It is an example of the complex narrative of South Africa exemplified in the deep thinking of twin-like looking brothers- the Afro-pessimist or a political Amos that Moeletsi could be and the retired Afro-optimist Thabo; the sons of Mandela’s contemporary and fellow of Robben Island, Giovan Mbeki.

The world is really what it is, difficult to predict its systems and twists of contour movements over the gone centuries and those to come. Hope is a pursuance but for it, aspirations die. What will be Africa’s role and what will the 21st century hold for it? Optimism is a preferred choice. Again the feeling of Thabo from, “I am an African”:

I am an African.

I am born of the people of the continent of Africa.

The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria are a pain I also bear.

The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share.

The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair

There is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned.

This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her false rise from the ashes.

Whatever the setback of the moment, nothing can stop us now!

Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace!

However improbable it may sound to the skeptics, Africa will prosper!

Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage

From our path, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say-nothing can stop us now. 1 3

October 2010

Notes

1. Nelson, Mandela, The Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela( London: Little and Brown, 1955). Also published sometimes as: Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, it has since 1956 been published in dozens of languages and under different titles.

2. Chimamanda Ngozi, Adichie, a Nigeria novelist of among others, Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus. Though a novelist, her themes are historical reflecting post- colonial Nigeria and Africa.

3. Soyinka, Wole, Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (London: Random House, ). Was one of the early collections published after the poet’s Nobel Prize award in 1986. A copy was presented to Mandela who was inspired whilst in prison by some of such writers.

4. Soyinka, Wole, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (London: Methuen, 2007).

5. Russell, Alec, After Mandela-The Battle for the Soul of South Africa (London: Windmill Books, 2009).

6. Gevisser, Mark, A Legacy of Liberation-Thambo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream (London:

Macmillan, 2009). This international edition of the book had extensive global review including Adekeye Adebajo’s in Transition 103 titled Prophet of Africa’s Renaissance. Even though character profiles like these are of interest to economists, financial analysts and brokers in the speculation money and commodity markets, the book has also been criticized for lack of adequate detour of Mbeki’s foreign policies.

7. Mojanku Gumbi for years, Mbeki’s Chief of Staff when President was also instrumental in the setting up of the Foundation. Conversations with author in 2010.

8. Mbeki, Thabo, Reflections on African Challenges and Prospects (Johannesburg: Kyosti, 2010). The essays in five sections covering South Africa, its relations with Africa, the multilateral trading system and others. Mostly written by Thabo himself.

9. God bless Africa, popularly known as…….south Africa’s national anthem was for years, especially during the anti-apartheid struggles the most popular protest sing in Africa.

10. Mbeki, Moeletsi, Architects of Poverty- Why African Capitalism Needs Changing (Johannesburg: Macmillan, 2009). See chapter 3 and 4, The De-Industrialization of South Africa and the Making of a Failed African States respectively.

11. Ibid., pp10 -12

12. Marx, Karl, Engels, Frederic, Communist Manifesto. Originally published in 1848 as Manifesto of the Communist Party.

13. See the essay, I am an African in Mbeki’s collection, “ Reflections on African Challenges and Prospects.” p13

Facing Mount KenyaKenya like any state has a past to reconcile with in its journey to nationhood. Political re-alignment (which has not seen much of the day since independence in 1963) and technology have shown how far this country has travelled. One of my visits coincided with what the media called the re-birth of the country in August 2010 - the adoption of a new constitution to usher in the country’s Second Republic. This was after the 2007 electoral disputes which almost degenerated into a civil war. A columnist of the Saturday Nation 1(in its August 28 edition) shared a nostalgia which more than anything affirmed how time has passed.

Sometime in the mid 1960s, Jane then a pupil at Kenya High School had a row with her father- Jomo Kenyatta then a few years into his presidency. Jane had invited friends for a birthday party but the father suddenly had to cancel it because the whole family would go to the port city of Mombasa for a vacation. The concern and noisy protestation of Jane, as she later told the columnist, Gakiha Weru in the article, End of all-Powerful President, “was not just about the party but the embarrassment she would go through because some of her friends were not on phone and there was no way of communicating to them that the party was off.”

But the father was of course Jomo Kenyatta, the most powerful man in Kenya . To solve the daughter’s problem, “he lifted the telephone handset and simply called the then Voice of Kenya (now Kenya Broadcasting Corporation), directing them to put out an announcement to the effect that, “Jane Kenyatta’s birthday party that was scheduled to be held on Saturday has been cancelled.” It was done and Jane I am sure was relieved.

In today’s terms, critics will accuse Kenyatta of abuse of office and waste of tax payer’s money. But it will also not have been an option. Kenya has the biggest mobile phone penetration of 49% in East Africa.

I have been fascinated with which of the two has influenced Kenya’s post-colonial evolution most- the inherited Constitution from British colonial rule of 1963 the so-called Lancaster Constitution or the colossal personality of Kenyatta as it strode on the political wave-length. Unlike Ghana or Nigeria where transitional constitutions to independence reflected on concerns of the protagonists of the times, it was not the case in Kenya. Ghana had its 1951 Constitution addressing the issues of the liberal opposition to Nkrumah-the Danquah-Busia tradition, the middle class, farmers and especially the cocoa merchants in the Ashanti , the Brong and Western regions(then largest cocoa producing areas and generating the bulk of revenue) and followed it up with elections and later more amendments to

the Constitution. Some scholars like Robert Bates 2 have added to this the maintenance of colonial institutions such as the Cocoa Marketing Boards (even the anti-colonialist Nkrumah Government did not abolish but benefitted)which held prices of the commodity to the detriment of the producers even when the world price had gone up. The agitations and resultant movement- National Liberation Movement (1954-1957) all helped to shape the nature of the new post-colonial constitution through a form of decentralized power at least legally before Ghana’s independence in March 1957.

In the case of Kenya, the Lancaster Constitution agreed to (by the inexperienced negotiators on the Kenyan side) had sought to protect the interest of its settler colonialists with powers vested in the Governor and then the in-coming prime minister and later president. Kenyatta and others criticized these provisions during the struggle for independence as it was on these that anti-colonial rebellions were quelled including through the activities of the Man Mau. The Kenyan historian William Ochieng writing on amendment to this Constitution in 1964 in De-colonization and Independence in Kenya says that, “The October 1964 Republican Amendment gave the President enormous executive power, which enabled him to provide the so-called strong and wise government that Kenya’s leaders believed to be essential at this stage of the country’s growth.”3 The amendments would grow to thirteen and more but not

much would happen because the new political class from Kenyatta’s time saw the status quo as useful instrument for their own political survival against opposition and to the nurturing of a democratic dictatorship in their favour.

The British did not want to leave Kenya only because of its wildlife environment and blessed timeless safari heaven (where in contemporary terms the British royalty could reveal themselves and where Prince William made his nuptial decision); the Britons who still lived there had their business interests to be catered for in the negotiations at Lancaster. For if there was also at the evening of these de-colonization processes any African country that knew which ideological path to follow, it was Kenya. It got independence more like a neo-colonial state with capitalist investments already high. Apart from Britain the United States had since the 1920s made major investments here. American transnational companies such as IBM, Firestone, General Motors and banks had established offices from the 1970s. The country had also signed military agreements with the US which in the 1970s allowed the former to have access to Kenya’s international airports in Nairobi and Mombasa for naval vassals. In his essay on US Foreign Policy toward Kenya, Mueni wa Muiu 4 explains why Kenya was getting 99% of its foreign Aid from capitalist countries.

The other factor of influence in Kenya’s immediate post-independent path was of course the emergence of Kenyatta. Born in 1894 in the British East Africa to working class traditional people, he gained political consciousness through his Kikuyu ethnic group. His formal entry into politics in the 1920s was through the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) which sought the unification of all Kikuyus, protection of their cultural heritage including lands and inherent resources; eventually becoming its general secretary and editor of their newspaper; championing where need be the ethnic superiority of his people including defence of female genital mutilation of girls. Even his first travel overseas was through the KCA to lobby for Britain to return Kikuyu tribal lands to them.

This background most likely influenced the political patronage that many Kikuyu enjoyed -choice land in the Rift Valley, access to capital for business and political office. To this day the other groups – Luo, Luhya, Kamba, Maasai, , Kalenjin, Kisii and the Somalis (like the Ewes spread across Ghana, Togo and Benin) complain of Kikuyu dominance. Sometimes, its not ethnicity but a trans-ethnic interest which convert to middle class creation among them, especially the political class.

The irony for me has been that Kenyatta was also a Pan Africanist who perhaps considered himself in the mould of Nkrumah. But whilst he was conscious of his Kikuyu ethnic

roots and sought sometimes to place them above others , Nkrumah from a minority group did the opposite- to the extent that he attempted the abolition of chieftaincy, a vehicle he thought promoted ethnicity. The real true unifier, the Pan Africanist who succeeded most in this enterprise was however Julius Nyerere of Tanzania who provided a clear cut formula of ethnic unification for a post-colonial state using the Ujamaa ideology- a form of African brewed socialism of collective villiagization even if the economic dimension of it flopped and chieftaincy- still a useful local government tool in parts of Africa largely got destroyed in the process.

Kenyatta’s reaction to ethnicity and national development might however have been given a modern outlook in Europe where he later in the 1930s studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) under the influential and world acclaimed master at the time- the Polish, Bronislaw Malinowski. Many of Malinowski’s theories later defined the field including his reasoning that, “when the needs of individuals, who comprise society, are met, then the needs of society are met.” How this can work in a multi-ethnic society is difficult to appreciate. Kenyatta would move on, under Malinowski’s guidance to work on his LSE thesis on Kikuyu ethnographic matters. With a Foreword by his master, this would later be published as Facing Mount Kenya.5

Notwithstanding flaws in his time which still vibrates in their movement forward, Kenyans still remember him ( in the many monuments in his name)and his generation of leaders – Oginga Odinga, Joseph Zuzarte and others for what good accomplishments they brought.It was from what Kenyatta set up as standard that would be followed by others after. It was the only precedent they knew. Unlike in Ghana or Nigeria where the military intervened to no avail, Kenyans stuck to the known precedent and managed to create an artificial stability supported by capitalist interests until the end of the Cold War.

His death in 1978 brought to the throne his Vice President, Daniel arap Moi. Despotic and an allay of capitalist interest from abroad until the end of the Cold War when he was betrayed and forced to accept multi-partism by the same interest group. He may not have consciously planned of an ethnic ideology in favor of his Kalenjin people for almost three decades that he was in power but he knew of their marginalization and not much that he did was able to tilt or balance regional, generational redistribution of wealth and resources. The stability of his time again clouded the misconception of a nation at peace with itself even after he had opened up and conducted elections from the late 1990s.

But then Kenya is also one African country where from the liberation leaders- including Jomo Kenyatta to current times,

turned political management and state craft into a serfdom. The problem this created was resistance to change, to other ways of doing things. One individual who symbolized this was the man who would replace Arap Moi in 2002 as President- Mwai Kibaki.

A Founding member of the Kenya African Democratic Union in 1960, he was secretary to the Minister of Finance from 1963-65; became Minister of Commerce and Industry till 1969; Minister of Finance and Economic Planning from 1970-78 (concurrently serving as MP); Vice President to Moi as well as Finance Minister till 1983. He had other portfolios till 1988 when the fall-out came and he became leader of the Opposition, Democratic Party against Moi.

One would expect that after half a century of public service to his country, he would give way to a younger generation for except been a lecturer in economics at the Makerere University in Uganda (where once an undergraduate in economics and graduate studies at the London School of Economics in Public Finance), all his life has been in public service of Kenya.

Kibaki’s disagreement with Moi had partly been because of the Moi’s appointed successor of his party, Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo Kenyatta. Kibaki finally became leader of Kenya in his 70s and the world saw a president in a wheel chair been sworn in as

he had slipped and broken legs and perhaps limps during the 2002 campaign. With a re-newed confidence perhaps not so much in his leadership but getting rid of Moi, Kibaki by 2007 had also become unpopular. His inability to reduce corruption, a flagship of his campaign and the growth of a middle class at the expense of the working and labour forces became unacceptable. His own appointed anti-corruption crusader- John Githongo who attempted to expose the rot in his government had to run to exile in Britain. The government was not only internationally ridiculed through Githongo’s many media exposes but a controversial biography on him, Its Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower by Michela Wrong did not do the government any good.6

It must be said however that the economy (of whose trajectory Kibaki knew more than many had done well- again how well depending on what kind of indicators and their interpretations) was in good health. Under Kibaki in 2002, the growth rate was 0.6%. By 2007 when the elections took place it had grown to 6.3%. Certain fiscal strategies might have been adopted as well as the rise in tea exports and tourism receipts. As is the case many new governments in Africa especially from the 1990s had registered impressive growth rates as they attempted to fulfill expectations of electorate only to re-lapse few years afterwards. In the case of Kenya however, growth rate and per capita income could also be deceptive. The biggest economy in

East Africa with the best infrastructural development, it is also the headquarters or bureau of many multilateral institutions especially the UN, development agencies and media organizations- from CNN to CCTV (which to increase Chinese role in the development of the region chose Nairobi for its headquarters). The population of this community runs into conservative estimate of 30,000. Hundreds of millions of dollars for personal ennolments and projects are poured into the economy annually. It is most likely that a large amount of the sum is also transferred to expatriates accounts . But it is likely that in the calculations of national revenues and per capita, all these are factored into the domestic calculations which could create their own distortions of growth; growth that may be rootless or specific in the sense of productivity of the middle class and unreflective of the larger segment of the people- a non human centered type.

In a sense it is better to talk of economic development in two sets. The Nairobi economy- modern and class based(with the oldest stock exchange in sub-saharan Africa established before its independence in1954) where all these donor expenditures and government’s own circulate with its big corruption schemes and the rest of the economy which would be discussed subsequently.

This among other factors (some of which have been explained above) probably explained why most believed Kibaki lost the 2007 elections this time to a man of a different political generation- Ralia Odinga.

Born in 1945 from the Luo ethnic region, a millionaire businessman, leader of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and whose late father, the popular Vice President to Jom Kenyatta- Oginga Odinga was Kibaki’s political contemporary.

It has been established that the post-conflict electoral crisis which claimed the lives of 1,500 Kenyans and displaced 600,000 was not a one-sided instigation and that both Kibaki’s PNU and the ODM were involved as the International Criminal Court confirmed in late 2010. But it still did not dispute the fact that Ralia Odinga won the votes and not Kibaki. The power sharing agreement as we know was as a result of a panel, Panel of Eminent African Personalities, set up by Kufuor in 2008 as African Union chair and made up of three – former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan who chaired, former President of Tanzania,Benjamin Mkapa and Mrs Graca Machel. It was to “ achieve sustainable peace, stability and justice in Kenya through the rule of law and respect for human rights” with the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation (KNDR) .The Panel of Eminent African Personalities of the African Union, as it came

to be known, agreed on the signing of the National Accord and Reconciliation Act 2008 which Act marked the end of violence.The PNU and the ODM agreed to do the following:

a) Immediate action to stop the violence and restore fundamental rights and liberties.

b) Immediate measures to address the humanitarian crisis, and promote healing and reconciliation.

c) How to overcome the political crisis.

d) Addressing long-term issues, including undertaking constitutional ,legal and institutional reforms; tackling poverty and inequality as well as combating regional development imbalance; tackling unemployment, particularly among the youth; consolidating national cohesion and unity; and addressing transparency, accountability and impunity.

Kibaki was made the President after and a compromise position of Prime Minister created for Ralia. In the interim they were to work together and ensure that these agreed to objectives worked.

2

As you meddle through Uhuru Park, where independence was proclaimed, one of the street takes you through down-town or

central Nairobi. Here you see nicely laid out government and ministries buildings. There are virtually no aggressive petty traders and hawkers. You also, not even miles away, see part of the glory of Nairobi economy-industrial and manufacturing sites for fruits and alcoholic beverages and building materials on both edges of the streets with their well manicured pavements and dotted lane gardens. But soon, its farewell to the city, a dual road the left lane which takes you to the airport and the right towards Mombasa and as far as the Tanzania boarder with Kenya. The tarred roads give way to untarred and pot-holed navigation of vehicular movements. And then you see also more bicycles riders, way-side food vendors avoiding the splashing of liquefied mud from speeding vehicles. Traffic wardens, some with faded uniforms bid your passage through.

We were travelling to Kajiado, a district about one and half hours from Nairobi. On this particular day, rains have come down and so the driver- a Kenyan lady was anticipating that it would take more hours. The stimulus to this economic infrastructure- between the city and rural Kenya is the construction of huge bridges, expansion of road-net by busy Chinese engineers and masons and their Kenyan counter-parts. These are common sites in Africa in the last ten years; the so-called Chinese presence which had changed the trade formula, aid architecture and economic governance between Africa and the rest of the world. This presence has been reinforced by the

China Africa Policy of 2006 7 with its great emphasis on financial cooperation, resource cooperation and infrastructure development. This was born also of the China-Africa Forum for Cooperation 7 which pitched the leadership of Africa against China in Beijing for mutual benefits.

Interestingly, no policy for Africa, whether of the decades old bilateral ones with colonial ‘masters’ EC-ACP agreement, US Africa Policy, France –Africa Cooperation or Japan’s TICAD have made much impression within a decade as China’s. They work according to country specification and needs avoiding issues of governance and human rights in despotic societies. Some western critics have characterize these as neo-colonial as China’s growth of 9% and more becomes a challenge to their monopoly of leadership. But perhaps if this is the fulfillment of Napoleon’s prophecy that China was a sleeping giant and that its awaken will tremble the earth , little did he know that Africa would serve as one of the engines of that awakening through the supply of its natural resources particularly energy.

The World Bank through a study it conducted into Sino-Africa relations and published in 2007 as, Africa’s Silk Road-China and India’s New Economic Frontier 8 did not support this neo-colonial characterization at the end of the first decade of this century. Africa has benefitted at least for the first decade. The problem has been that Africa has negotiated badly from the

1960s with its European partners on its concession agreements for natural resources. Even Nkrumah the apostle of anti-colonial and liberal models negotiated badly on the VALCO with Kaiser. If capacity for that was low at the time it has not improved drastically today as the global multilateral trading system has become more complicated because of the integration of economies- small and big and the many disadvantages of been outside of it.

Does the $40 billion investment in Africa by 2010 (from $400 million in the early 2000s) so far reflect growth into Africa’s future?

We-I and the two European World Food Programme officers in the car knew that some of these mega infrastructural projects we were seeing were critical to the urban-rural bridge that Africa needs for stimulation. The danger also lies in the Chinese penetration into the retail business restricted for locals . In Africa in their tens of thousands, it is one of the reasons for the frosty relations between some Zambian workers and Chinese expatriates. It also explains the arrest in December 2010 in Ghana of some Chinese mining workers without work permit and disrespectful towards local people and environmental preservation. Some of these thoughts and discussions served us well as we passed drought village by village, somersaulting roads into destination.

Kufuor the World Food programme Ambassador against Hunger was in another car behind us. The visit to Kenya and its rural parts were indeed to afford him an intimate field working relationship .

Kajiado’s uniqueness is in its level of poverty. With a population of [ ] they occupy north west of the country. Within it we drove to Mailua- home to the Maasi ethnic group famous for their cultural ways and by-ways as nomads who for centuries have straddled through rural Kenya and even Uganda. With their ethnic totems of bright colours and dresses, big ear holes and hanging rings, the origins in Europe today of pierce skins and tongues could have been copied from here. The economic assets of these ancient people are in the population of the cattle and other livestock. The vegetation for the stock is what adds value to their assets. But climate changes and the advent of drought which has killed thousands of those livestock as well as the vegetation and water sources should change their life styles. You feel the severe Harmatten and other forms of dry winds as trees have died, the soils are depleted partly due to grazing; the adults and infants who are malnourished, sickly, of course unskilled in many ways .

The problem has been how to persuade these pastoralists to diversify their thinking- to realize that they could go into crop farming with bigger dividends, ensure good health, better

drinking water, and security of their children. Kufuor spoke to hundreds of Maasei adults and children as they congregated at a small local church about these. They sang for him Maasei praise poems and presented him with a walking stick and hand beads in their colours- a vocation engaged in by women with some little revenue coming from the tourism market. The congregation apart from listening were also coming for their daily rations of rice, beans, and cooking oil . Kufuor gave each according to the family size. Happily they collected these and happily back to the hunts.

There are no way children here- with no idea of the world beyond them, lower life expectation ratio could be part of a future globalization of human capacity utilization.

But again it is interesting how cultural attitudes and practices can influence the potential for growth. The agricultural drought lands, with hilly contours in Kenya, that makes farming sometimes so difficulty, cuts across into Kamal Elhagfarah and Dabae (not far from the Ethiopia town of Nazareth). Standing here on a previous visit, the vistas, one official explained, extends as far as to Botswana, where again nomadic attitude prevails in a small part.

In these villages in Ethiopia contrast to Kajiado however, we met farmers with the right attitudes engaged in MERET- Managing Environmental Resources to Enable Transition to

More Sustainable Livelihoods, a programme the government had initiated with the WFP. It gets food insecure communities not only to rehabitate the unfriendly environmental conditions but in income generating activities to improve lives. This is augmented by experimenting with seedlings, and better crop yields; working with extension officers and WFP advisors from Nazareth.

The programme seeks to also build feeder roads which would make it easier to transport crops to the destined markets, reforest barren hillsides, restore springs and rainwater ponds as well as the reconstruction of agricultural terraces. Few years after over 400,000 people working in over 200 villages across the country have improved their farms and seen higher producer price for cash crops which are reflected in better homes- from small , thatched mud hut to new and better homes.

Here at least one of the farmers as usual poor in outlook explained the difficulties of production process to Kufuor. With a mobile phone in hand, he was leader of a small cooperative talking of what he does (the types of trees they have planted which bring nitrogen to the soil and help with water retention) when the phone rang. Curious enough there is no electricity in Dabe but this farmer told me he charges the phone every other day in Nazareth- over 30 miles away in anticipation of calls from

extension officers or traders. He also shares the phone with others.

Though Ethiopia also has a pastoral population whose infants like those of Mailua, school attendance is encouraging because of the School Feeding Programme of WFP. Prime Minister Zeles Menawi was particularly concerned about that as he told Kufuor during discussions with him in Addis Ababa- a model Aid dependency he wants to avoid though in principle he supports the programme. But definitely food or relief could be a first step or emergency option for arresting a bigger worrying problem of rural and pastoral poverty. That dependency is not reliable is inherent in the fact of laziness it creates in people not to cultivate the soil. But it could also become a political weapon when distribution excludes opposition to the politics of the distributors.

3

If you were in Kenya on the day of the promulgation of the new Constitution-August 27, two years into the Government of national unity , you could think wrongly that an antidote has been found for the country’s many ills. Devolution of power from Nairobi to the grassroots- so that communities could at least have input in fashioning their destines and addressing some of the challenges they had gone through were what the new Constitution seeks to fulfil. At least that is what part of it

says. The judiciary has been known to be corrupt and least a check on the executive; the police service was worst- recruitment had been based on ethnic basis sometimes as had promotion through the ranks. Senior officers ensure that lucrative or special departments are filled by relatives and those without ethnic or other contact hardly got promotion. These and other public institutions were not functioning effectively. A police officer told me the junior ranks as in other institutions were fully in support of the new Constitution after a referendum . Those against were members of the established order who for generations have ensured nepotism prevailed. Interesting aspects of the Constitution which takes full effect when a new Government emerges out of the Coalition include the clause that the position of the Inspectaor General of Police(IGP) be advertised and that an IGP need not be a police officer. An attempt by Kibaki to impose a chief Justice after the promulgation of the Constitution was resisted by the people and the court uncharacterically rejected that.

Infact on the day of promulgation, Uhuru Park which is perhaps bigger in land side then Freedom House in Pretoria had overreached itself with 150,000 people . At the stroke of the pen, a 21 –gun salute, “the nation shed off a set of laws inherited from the British and entered a new constitutional dispensation in which the powers of the Presidency will be reduced.”

The heads of state who had witnessed this had also included some of those who helped to save the country in the aftermath of the electoral disputes. As Kofi Annan entered the grounds cheers was infections; Kufuor who the Daily Nation 9 a day before had described as “The Man Who Saved Kenya” received an equally standing ovation as he walked through, others including Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni, Union of Comoros’ Ahmed Abdallah Sambi and controversial Sudan’s Omar-alBashir. But it was really the coming unto the stage of Ralia Odinga to speak that excited the Park; and he did so in the language of the masses, the antics he displayed, the parables he deployed and his power of oratory was such that even those on the VIP including Kofi Annan were turning their backs for translations with unimaginable joy and honorific adoration from the crowd. He mentioned, as a vintage politician would the revere names of liberation leaders- Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, his father and many others.

The crowd was really expectant- those who had engaged in violence and made others widows and those who had not were one as a nation . As the military assets passed by- the tankers, the elements of power and destruction, armored cars with soldiers armed and showing their readiness to defend the nation from external aggression, you could think of how the same weapons could be unleashed on the people not long ago.

Nana Effah-Apenteng retired from Ghana’s diplomatic service on good standing; his last posting was as Permanent Representative and Ambassador to the UN in New York. Kufuor had appointed him as special advisor on African Union affairs in 2007.He worked with the Panel of Eminent African Personalities and became Chief of Staff, Coordination and Liaison Office in Nairobi. Assuming initially that the assignment would run for some few weeks Kofi Annan anticipated a long drawn out one. In his third year by 2011, the office was responsible for ensuring the reform agenda through the KNDR were followed with monitoring and evaluation as objectives. So much institutional publications of the causes of the conflict and its effects on Kenya’s march for progressive nation building had been done. The Kofi Annan Foundation based in Geneva and African Union alone had complied and edited a 1000 page document, the Society for International Development started a series on the general theme of, Constitutional Working Papers; but there is nothing more interesting then getting Kenyans themselves to talk about these issues. The KNDR’s third annual conference, Building a Progressive Kenya from December 5-6 2011 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel was typical. 500 people attended .

Living by Our Constitution as a concern theme, frank exchanges especially from women activists were revealing in terms not only of scholarly and policy output but community and native

wisdom. Yash Pal Ghai, a Constitutional Scholar with association at Harvard and Oxford who was part of the making of the new Constitution had provocatively asked whether the Constitution notwithstanding its rich values of nation-building was really inspired by the people. I thought that question had been answered by the referendum and through the feeling I got talking to Kenyans. “In the case of Kenya, the people have imposed the Constitution on the elite/ruling class but it is a reluctant class that is supposed to implement it.” He wondered how, a corrupt political class that sometimes collaborated with drug dealers and jail or subject the poor to extra-judicial killings when they complain, make any good of a values inspired Constitution; the same politicians that engage in land grabbing to the detriment of the poor. The interesting thing about the new Constitution is before it is fully used, the political class were discussing amendments and subversion as briefly discussed above. Njeri Kabeberi, the vocieferous Executive Director of the Centre for Multi-Party Democracy felt that the problem was with the politicians. You listen through and you find how similar some of the challenging issues are common in Africa- principally one of leadership.

Yet these challenges were at the dawn of post-colonial Kenya issues to be overcome with patriotism. Kenya’s foremost novelist and playwright Ngugi Wa Thiong O at 26 was representative of the optimism of his generation after the

effects of the Mau Mau rebellion. In the new Kenya, both the intellectual and craftsman, the teacher, the nurse, the peasant would all help, as in Weep Not, Child, to serve the country. Forgotten was the type of leadership to drive this optimism. Thirteen years after in 1977, he had written the play, I Will Marry When I Want a controversial but critical one of injustices and inequalities affecting ordinary Kenyans; a play staged by peasant actors and actreeses in an open village theatre in Limuru. Playwright is imprisoned for incitement. He gets more frustrated and wrote, The Devil on the Cross three years after. Post-colonial optimism has become a pesstimistic enterprise.

Chinua Achebe had in a popular dirge to African leadership in 1983 written on Nigeria and really, Africa : “ The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

Kabeberi, speaking on top of her voice at this dialogue room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel looked very frustrated. Ngugi and Achebe live their frustrations in exile but not everybody can afford that; so you contest: “ Denmark has used its Constitution

for 125 years and amended it only twice- to allow women to vote and to have a double legislative chamber ……” It is a confused leadership that would want to change something it has not used or a confused individual who has bought a new cloth and without using it throws it away as an old item.

The testing and operation of the constitution would be hard because of the lack of precedent of practice. It would be many years before temptation not to tamper sinks in. Even the rejection of a ‘Chief Justice’ almost imposed on the nation which I thought was a victory for democracy was no victory in the argument of Kabeberi: “ We should not go to court to enjoy the rights provided for in our Constitution.”

When in the course of the dialogue, Graca Machel, Member of the African Union Panel of Eminent African Personalities, spoke as a respectable outside looking in, she pleaded with them to answer this important modern qualification in whatever they did: what is Kenya’s national identity or the soul or DNA ? In a society where even religious or faith based organizations gravitate toward ethnic sponsorship for political victory, that question under the lubric of a One Kenya, One People was in order. And this particular session was colorful enough to reflect Kenya’s diversity- a retired bishop of the Methodist Church of Kenya, Chairman of the Luo Council of Elders, Chairman of the Kalenjin Council of Elders, Chairperson of the League of Muslim

Women of Kenya, an executive Director of the Muslim for Human Rights, the National Coordinator of the Ukambani Progress Forum and many others constituting a panel and interacting with a multitude of local and international stalkholders. They all agreed on the challenges and on the solutions, yet it is some of the same leadership elements that fail to construct the Kenyan national identity by sticking to their individuals parts. But then, a national identity has its limited uses such that even if Kenyans find one, they will still have work to do in building a cohesive society. It was a search for national identity and the inevitable importance of oneness that brought England, Wales and Scotland together for a British identity in the late 1890s. Yet it did not completely obliterate what makes an English, a Welsh or Scottish as seen in the devolution of powers and strengthening of their respective selves before the end of the twenith century. The same could be said of the Blakans before it became Yugoslavia and then again the disintergration to its unit parts in the 1990s. But attainment is still a first step to look forward to.

A very beautiful country with a capital that is perfectly constructed with big parks and shady trees, Nairobi is perhaps the only capital in much of Sub-saharan that you drive through massive avenue trees and where it is an offence to cut trees. That this orderly environment produces a controversial ruling class that much of the citizenry blame for human development

is an irony of beauty without growth. They have nothing but their determination to change the unwanted status quo.

-December 2011

Notes

1. Weru, Gakiha, “ End of all-powerful President” in Saturday Nation, August 28 2010. p24. The Saturday Nation, published by the Nation Media Group (also publishers of Daily Nation) is one of the influential weeklies in Kenya.

2. Robert H. Bates, a scholar and professor of the science of government at Harvard has done cutting edge research on the economy of development in Africa. Among some of his influences had been the publication of, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

3. William Ochieng’s quotation from De-colonisation and Independence in Kenya is cited from the review essay, “Quest for True Change Started a Year After Independence Over Imperial Presidency”, by David Aduba, Daily Nation, August 27 2010, p9.

4. wa Muiu, Mueni, “United States Foreign Policy toward Kenya” in, Assessing George W. Bush’s Africa Policy and Suggestions for Barack Obama and African Leaders, published in New York: iUniverse, 2009. This is an anthology on foreign policy and development by mainly African academics meant to influence for good US policy on Africa .

5. Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta was first published in London by Secker and Warburg . It was also one of the early books to be published under the Heinemann African Writers Series .

6. Wrong, Michela, Its Our Time to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle- Blower (London: Harper, 2009).

7. The China-Africa Forum for Cooperation was established to help with Africa’s bilateral relation with China.

8. Broadman, Harry, Africa’s Silk Road- China and India’s New Economic Frontier (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007).

9. Daily Nation, August 27, 2010, p6.

Rwanda: The Beautiful Mountains of Kigali.Rwanda has a beautiful landscape. The curves leading to the green mountains if you drive around central Kigali makes it a ring city. But the beauty beholds you from the sky. If you are entering it from Nairobi and passing through Tanzania airspace, you see the western part of Lake Victoria. You also see as you descend gradually into Kigali, the many lakes and rivers surrounding this country of 26,338 km2. You are within, without been told the Great Lakes region though geographic location is central Africa. On its northern boarder is Uganda, its east, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo and to its south, Burundi. Between them they have enough lakes, minerals and others whose source for energy consumption and export volumes for the region, the rest of Africa, according to experts cannot be underestimated. Yet it is one of the most conflict prone -ethnic and religious corners of the world.

Sadly, Rwanda, roughly 11 million in population only came to global limelight through its 1994 genocide. How come one people- who speak the same language, share the same traditions and cultures and for centuries lived together could one day in April decide on an extermination spree in the context of eliminating the Tutsis- (the favored group of the Belgian colonialists) by their Hutu brothers and sisters, the majority? Where the now Kigali Memorial is in Gisozi was the

central gory point. Built with the assistance of the Kigali City Council, the government of Belgium, Sida, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation but working also with the Pears Foundation of Britain , here alone, over 250,000 people are buried, the climax of a long story from 1959.

Once- centuries ago, Hutus- the majority group with 75 per cent of the numbers, Tutsis 14 percent, and the Twa 1 percent lived in harmony. Whatever divisions existed was purely on social basis until European colonial rule by particularly Belgium in 1894 turned these normal divisions into ethnic cleavages. They favored the Tutsis because of multiple constructions they made of their beauty, intelligence and other sensibilities notwithstanding the fact that they were virtually nothing to distinguished a Hutu from a Tutsi. This categorization intensified as identification system- ID cards were issued and Tutsis were given more access to education, vocational skills and opportunities in social settings making them wealthier whether through further accumulation of economic assets- cows or other sources of wealth. This class division lowered the self-esteem of the Hutus to the extent that Tutsis who lost wealth, became lazy or unproductive were re-classified as Hutus. Like all colonial methodologies, traditional institutions, especially in Belgian rule as also witnessed in Burundi and the Congo were abolished or weaken using divide and rule tactics. Colonial rule might have brought some education, science and

technology to a “dark” corner of the world but as we continued our journey in the museum, the guide, a genocide survivor commented, “But when the Belgians left, there was a country that had its independence but not its identity.” They had abolished monarchial rule of the Hutus in 1959 against their resistance with some going into exile in neighboring countries such as Burundi. By 1961 self-imposed exile was still fashionable and Paul Kagame only 4 years was exiled (with parents unable to stand anti-Tutsi feelings) to Uganda. Later in 1979 he would join the National Resistance Army of Yoweri Museveni. The Belgians finally left in 1962 but historians of the region say that 1959 was the defining moment-the preparation for genocide against Tutsis as manifest hatred built up and got to a climax from 1990-1993. The early 1990s started with the training of youth militia by the Hutus with the assistance of French government as small scale persecution of Tutsis in business, politics, and agriculture began.

Negotiations for a cease-fire on the initial skirmishes between the two group was signed between Habyarimana and his Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) in July of 1992 and agreed to in 1993 at the Arusha Peace Accords 1 in Tanzania but it did not work. The hell of April 1994 was inevitable. When the plane flying the Hutu President of Rwanda- Habyarimana was shot air –borne on April 6 1994 by Hutu extremists (many say so though others think it was the opposite)but under the pretext

that the pulpits were Tutsi, it was the immediate cause of the war. It had been planned by inference that immediately after the clash on slaughter of Tutsi should began. Thus habyarimana was sacrificed by his own to make a case for the genocide.

Already the ideology of genocide- the intellectual work of justification had been done. Apart from the notorious trio- Jean-Paul Akayesu(a teacher), Clement Kayishema and George Rutaganda all Hutu community leaders of good standing who between them were accused by the international tribunal of killing or instigating tens of thousands, there were others. One Hutu journalist- Hassan Ngeze whose quotation decorates the museum wrote before April 1994 that: “We say to the Inyenzi( cockroaches -that is the Tutsis) that if they lift their heads again, it will no longer be necessary to go fight the enemy in the bush. We will start by eliminating the internal enemy….. They will disappear.” 2

Gorier was the composition of the Ten Commandments by Hutu extremists giving ten reasons why Tutsis should all die. The first one stated : “Hutus must know that the Tutsi wife, wherever she maybe is serving the Tutsi ethnic group. In consequence any Hutu who does the following is a traitor- acquires a Tutsi wife, acquires a Tutsi mistress, and acquires a Tutsi secretary or dependent.” The last commandant says that

“all Hutus should be taught at all levels the Hutu ideology- that is the 10 commandments.” 3

The Kigali Memorial is an emotional drench of sorrow. How could innocent children- from ages 5 months to 18 years, be killed alongside their mothers as they lie in pools of blood? Or how do you imagine asking your neighbor to kill your Tutsi wife of over 25 years of marriage whom you have 5 children with because you cannot do that yourself? How would the teenagers grow up- thousands and thousands of them who were sent to orphanages, to know the stories of how their parents died? What country are you in? The museum tour was in complete silence as we moved along to its end and as the women among us shed silent tears. What else? And do you ask for whom the bells toll? And when it was all over-an evil incarnate history of a 20th century world, and when the killing fields had been created, and over a million people gone, the apologies followed.

But then the last apartment of the museum is also the most sorrowful probably to get the maximum effect. It breaks the heart and even murderous angels could hestitate. It has among the posters of dead children with short biographical notes one of a handsome confident looking boy:

David Mugitraneza 4

Age: 10

Favourite sport: Football

Enjoyed: Making people laugh

Dream: To be a doctor

Cause of death: Tortured to death

Last words: The United Nations will come for us.

For days it is said that it was this boy’s confidence that gave hope to the adults around in the face of imminent death. The UN did not come and so he died with many others. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown who had also been a pilgrim to the Memorial told leaders (45 in all) of the G8/G20 this story in July 2009 in northern Italy where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was in the chair. The meeting he recalled fell silent. “ David was a boy who had believed the best of an international community which had failed him.” 5 Berlusconi had tears in his eyes and Obama had since then made several references to David’s death. If only David’s faith could be restored even in death.

The UN which had left Rwanda when it shouldn’t through its Secretary-General, Kofi Annan said on the 10th anniversary of the genocide: “I could and should have done more to stop the genocide in Rwanda 10 years ago….. The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret.” 6 The Belgians apologized so did the

French and it will be 16 years after that Rwanda would restore diplomatic relations with Sarkosy’s France.

Kufuor wrote in the visitor’s book as the journalists scrambled for space : “The World Must know of man’s capacity to do evil so as to be wiser and better. God have mercy on man.” But his voice was broken and it took him a while, an unusually long while to respond to questions from the journalists after the tour.

One will never understand until one experience it through a tour of this kind why Rwandese and Kagame in particular are very reluctant making references to Hutu and Tutsi particularities and peace-building alliances until this. One cannot also understand the anger that Rwanda generates against others and the UN until this. Though one cannot blame Kofi Annan personally for the UN failure, it’s still a stain. When in July 2010 I was paying for the purchase of Stanley Meister’s Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War 7 at a Waterstones bookshop in central London, someone in the queue looked at this particular title of those I was holding and said, “ah, the failure of Rwanda.” It had become Annan’s “annus horribilis.” The biographer admits it in the chapter, The Stain of Rwanda: “ There are naysers who have contempt for Kofi Annan because they believe he has the blood of Rwanda on his hands. Their disdain has not diminished over the years.

They opposed his election to a second term as Secretary-General and his award of a Nobel Peace Prize, and they continually demanded that he resigned.”

*****************

It was at the Des Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali where we lodged and sat over for an afternoon lunch that Gasamagera Wellars, a Member of Parliament told me that, Hotel Rwanda, the internationally acclaimed film of the genocide, was a metaphor of what happened at the Des Mille Collines. (Since then Rwanda had featured in more TV, radio, internet documentaries than any other Africa country in diasater including even the Congo crisis perhaps only equal to those on Apartheid South Africa and the trans-Atlantic slave trade). He had himself escaped to this hotel with his family though the father was butchered. They were among the 1,200 people that crowed for the three and half months turning corridors and every corner into a sleeping place. “ To this day, I feel safer in this hotel than walking across the streets of Kigali” he told me. They had escaped bomb attacks and seen from the hotel people been butchered and would forever be grateful to the Ghanaian contingent that protected many Rwandese slaughtered on the streets at cost to their own lives . The commander of the battalion, Henry Kwami Anyidoho’s account of the detailed

events are in his 1997 published memoirs , Guns Over Kigali 8 ; of course a best seller in Rwanda.

Rwanda is by the 2010s dealing with the trauma of the genocide. About 200,000 people were initially arrested for the crimes. Some were released. The International Court of Tribunal (in Arusha) set up by the UN had a four year mandate but it passed its time and set a record in its investigation.(Its precedent, the Nuremberg trials lasted within four years.) At the end of it, it had tried 45 individuals, 17 were sentenced to life in prison, 9 to 25 years, 11 between 6 and 20 years. In Rwanda itself between 50,000-60,000 were on trial from 1996 but the number increased in 2001 to over 250,000 with the establishment of the “ Gacaca courts” using traditional alternative source of dispute resolution . Before the Gacaca courts the regular courts had between 1997 and 2002, tried 9,000 of Rwandans with 9 % sentenced to death, 36% of this number to life imprison and 20% acquitted. 9

Interpeace’s presence here is very positive and as it is their strategy, they found in Kigali a local NGO and empowered it to solve local problems. The Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace (IRDP)over the last decade has engaged in the restoration of interpersonal relations which had created mistrust and suspicion among people. It has been able to create in its decade of existence, a space for reflection and exchange

by identifying possible obstacles to the delicate peace. “ It chose dialogue based on research involving Rwandans from all walks of life and drove a social transformative process in the search for consensual solutions aimed at preventing future conflicts.” 10

Headed by a professor of economics at the University of Rwanda, Rwanyindo and a team of well trained researchers using desk top, quantitative and focus group methodologies, it has through its annual National Group meeting brought peace builders- often 200 from all sections of Rwanda for discussions on issues to do with democracy and rule of law, local governance and citizen participation as well as ethnic identity in nation building.

Each year has had a theme reflecting on aspects of peace and development. Sometimes participants had joined from Somalia, Ethiopia and Burundi. The interesting and encouraging thing has to do with people whether at the meetings or those interviewed in the villages speaking freely on: procreation, ethnic relationship, agriculture and problems with extension officers. As many as 2,000 had been interviewed for 2010. These research works are then proceeded and has a way of influencing government policy since they work closely with the government.

The IRDP’s Peace Centre funded by the Japanese Embassy in Kenya and the Canadian International Development Agency has become a supplementary facility to help its work. Supported by the Interpeace, this huge building has space for real development, grass-roots debates, publications and filming of regular and annual proceedings as well as commissioned books, documentaries of the past and the way forward as you see children, students and adults- Hutus, Tutsis and Twa at the library . You will not make much of some of these peace analysis and issues until you have visited the memorial and known what the absence of these caused.

******************

Paul Kagame is an enigmatic figure in the politics and international relations of post-conflict nations. Very slim and tall he is a Tutsi. He is also laconic in conversations and philosophical. At 53, he has the confidence of his country and had just won over a 90 percent approval in general elections in October 2010 in a free and fair atmosphere. Opponents had criticized him for deliberately blocking the chances of major individuals and their parties on the pretext that they were engaged in ethnic politic . A close ally of Uganda’s Museveni (though they would later fall out on strategic and geo-political interest in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Kagame had stationed troops in eastern Congo-until 2002 against Rwandan dissidents suspected of participating in the genocide),

he had left Rwanda at the age of 4 a victim of Hutu “banishment” and fought as a guerilla with the National Resistance Army in the bush . At the appropriate time, he would with the great force of the Rwanda Patriotic Front backed by Uganda seized power in October 1994 to become Vice President and Minister of Defense. He would in 2000 replace Pasteur Bizimungu (the Hutu president he has entered into alliance with) on political differences after Bizimungu resigned. He could have plunged the country further into ethnic cleansing as a revenge for the death of tens of thousands of his group. Though they also killed to gain power and a BBC profile of Kagame, Rwanda’s Strongman accuses him (citing a French judge) , of ordering the assassination of Habyarima- an act which sparked the killings, that is normally against conventional history of the genocide as he is known to have no genocide ideology. In the second week of January 2012, a French court that had done intensive investigation confirmed Hutu extremists and not Kagame most likely shot down the plane.

I was going to meet this man for the first time and at very close quarters. I had met him twice- at a conference organized by then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London in 2008 and at the promulgation of the new constitution for Kenya in Nairobi . Francis Gatare, his private secretary came to the hotel to take me there whilst Kufuor came in another car. In any case, the State House where he lives is about 5 minutes drive to the

hotel. Like many Rwandese elite, Gatare had been trained at the Makerere University in Uganda, for many years, an Ivy university in east Africa which drew intellectuals from the surrounding countries and even other parts of the continent including Noble laureate Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, Ali Mazuri from Kenya , the late famous Tanzania Marxist and politician also of Birebeck College, London, A.M. Babu ; even V.S. Naipaul held a residence fellowship for writing ; besides some of the future leaders of East Africa including Kibaki of Kenya were educated there too. Gatare until he assumed his current position was an economic advisor to the UN in Kigali and also worked in the public service in other capacities.

Security to the State House is so thorough that Gatare had to undergone a car search first, get clearance from the inner security before we passed through a detector on this late Sunday afternoon. The president, a globe trotter for development had returned from Italy barely a day before.

We sat for some few minutes in an adjacent office space within an obviously beautiful presidential palace built on enormous acreage of land; in an enclave of colonial Belgian space.

Pleasantries over, the media excused, Kufuor congratulated him on his election victory and co-operation with the

Interpeace and the IRDP. With legs crossed, he nodded in appreciation as Kufuor told him, he “ sensed the government is a patron in a progressive movement of people and re-construction in Rwanda.”

“ Thank you Mr. President but it is in nobody’s interest if we don’t support. We supported it and will continue to do so. There are challenges and there will continue to be. There is no place without them but as long as there is good intentions, you can confront the challenges.”

Information Communication Technology is advanced in this country then other parts of Africa which has not experienced a history of trauma. In a large measure it is because, it has been a policy to use this era of technology for development. “ A Ghanaian professor, Mr. President, set up our IT policy and our relative success in this field had been his doing.” Kagame told us. And this interest and novelty is acknowledged world-wide through each child per lap-top policy which has been a template for other countries including Ghana-showing it is not just good policies but good-will at their implementation which makes a difference. With few embassies around the world, visas to the country are issued via the immigration department on the internet and fees paid through it or at the point of entry into the country.

We had driven extensively through the city and even though people told us that the provinces are more beautiful than what we saw especially if you are driving towards the Congolese boarder, we still saw beautiful sites and poverty and like many countries in Africa new construction . A UNICEF officer who had been in the country for nine years told us that most of what we saw within central Kigali had recently been built under Kagame and that when he came to the city around that period it was a shanty city . Six new areas were experiencing massive development as urbanization dawns on a people who had previously developed their provinces and villages instead of the capital. The foreign minister, Louis Mushikiwabo a lady in her 40s presumably, and who previously worked for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, told us of a spirit of development among the government and people which saw 30,000 classrooms built in 2009 alone. Still a poor country before the war, it made it no better.

On once been asked by a European journalist on what he thought about the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and how to solve it having done well with his own, Kagame said that that was not his specialty and that what he knew was, “If you have a problem owe it first before you find out the causes of it or blame other people for them.”

He also told us that, “politics can be irrational” which could be a truism but not many also reflect deeply on the other thing he said to us: “It’s the future we have to look at. I tell people it depends on what we want for the future. The genocide happened, there is nothing we can do about it but we can do something about the future.

“ The same human beings who could sit down to draw a master plan for the genocide, the same human it is who can do something for our recovery.”

After 40 minutes of livid conversation which also touched on Rwanda been the first country for the NEPAD’ Peer Review Mechanism 11, Kagame closed on a note of how Africa should know itself better. Perhaps, he said, if the airline service he envisages comes true it would help with aviation and communication needs of central Africa and there could be flights to Ghana and other West African countries. Already, the rail lines from Kigali to other central and east Africa countries had caught the attention of the East Africa Common Market.

There is no doubt the genocide contributed to the poverty of the country at many levels. Many Rwandese working at the Civil Service, banks where monies were also looted, the UN agencies which suffered destruction of personnel and infrastructure and the private sector where industries and manufacturing bases were destroyed. The UNDP office just

across the Des Mille Collines Hotel has a memorial for the staff that perished crossing over to the safety of the hotel .

Its explains in part why there is a good number of expatriates in central positions of the economic management of the country. Ghana alone has about 30 working as heads or senior managers with UNICEF, UNDP, MONUSCO, Ecobank, African Development Bank and, Rwanda’s Ministry of Infrastructure. The chief economic advisor to the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning , Fred Quarshie is a Ghanaian and head of this expatriate community . Maxwell Opoku-Afari who had worked in Accra as special assistant to the Governor of the Bank of Ghana in the 2000s and at the time of the visit a visiting senior economist of the African Department of the IMF was working on a three year policy support instrument for the country.

Kagame’s largely aid dependent economy is not so much Eurocentric as a pragmatic approach to where help will come from. Through bilateral relations there is an agreement with the Nigerian government for medical doctors to work in the country. A similar agreement with the Cuban government in Cuba where doctors are paid by the South Africa government. The ratio of doctors per patients had been deplorable and few years ago, there were only 20 dentists in the country.

But the economy of this post-genocide country should be respected more for the leadership that gave birth to it than the base on which it grew- Kagame’s personal style of leadership and sympathy from the world. All the indicators make it a poor country. For instance in an International Development Association (World Bank)and International Monetary Fund Joint Debt Sustainability Analysis approved in May 2010 it reported the following: “ Rwanda’s external debt of the central government (including guaranteed) at the end-2009 was US$ 749.1 million(14.4 percent of GDP). More than fourth-fifths of external central government debt is owed to multilateral creditors. External debt has declined from 85 percent of GDP in 2000-04 to about 15 percent of GDP since 2006, thanks to substantial debt relief. Rwanda reached the HIPC Completion Point in April 2005 and also benefitted from MDRI relief in January 2006. Domestic debt was RWf 228.3 billion (7.7 percent of GDP or about third of total public debt at end-2009, down from 13 percent of GDP in 2005-07. Within domestic debt, the end-2009 stock of short-term debt (Treasury bills and central bank monetary instruments) was equivalent to 3.1 percent of GDP.” 12

The government’s Vision 2020 11 seeks to ensure that the country attains a middle income economy- an annual per capita of $900 from an earlier $380 in 2000 ; reducing poverty to 30 percent from 60.4 percent and life expectancy to 55 from the

49 of 2000 figures. The vision will depend on six pillars for realization:

a) Good governance and a stable stateb) Human resource development and a knowledge based

economyc) A private sector economyd) Infrastructure developmente) Productive and Market Oriented Agriculturef) Regional and International Economic integration.

Like many sub-Saharan African countries that opted for HIPC, these agreed to programmes with the World Bank and the International Monetary depended so much on what were put into them.

The Government’s self-promotion literature, Rwanda- A Rising Star- 2003-2010, on critical examination paints a donor economy trying to be self-reliant: dependence had been 70 percent until 2009 when it came down to 52 but there had been agriculture growth. With 80 percent of the people involved in agriculture it generates over 40 percent of its Gross Domestic Product . And this has reflected in its growth of 10.4 % in 2009 increasing the export volume of its cash crops- tea exports from $22.6million to $48.7 million in 2009 with a target of reaching $90 million in 2012 as value addition take hold instead of just raw materials; coffee from nothing in 2000

to $37.29million in 2009.13 These are enlargement to the sector as facilities such as washing stations keep increasing by the day.

These infrastructures are just developing and there are no coffee or tea brokerages to gauge the international markets and its affiliation with the International Coffee Association and related bodies . In fact there are those who think the genesis of the genocide has been deprived of its political economy causes. In the essay, Coffee and Genocide- a Political Economy of Violence in Rwanda,14 Isaac A. Kamola, a political scientist argues that it was as the world price of coffee began to collapse that Rwanda’s political troubles intensified. In one year alone- 1986-87 the country’s revenue fell from 14 billion to 5 billion RwF. It got worst after they failed to re-negotiate the International Coffee Agreement. “By situating the Rwandan genocide within the broader context of the international coffee economy, it becomes evident that the violence was not merely a ‘local” conflict, nor was it strictly an ‘ethnic’ conflict. Instead, the conditions for genocide were actively produced by human activity taking place across the planet. The social relations produced by the coffee economy (and its eventual collapse) intersected, overlaid, recorded, and fragmented what were already historically and materially situated “ethnic”, religious, regional, political, institutional, personal, and market relationships.”15

The role of this commodity not necessarily in the Rwanda genocide but implicit in the case of Ethiopia is show-cased in the 2006 TV documentary, Black Gold directed by Marc Francis and Nick Francis.16

Still, huge attempts at infrastructure and institutional development finance are ongoing: There had been banking reforms-the Financial Sector Development in 2006; the Rwandan Stock Exchange was established in 2008 with seven brokerage houses ; the Rwandan Revenue Authority was established in 1997 as part of reforms designed to restore and strengthen the “ main economic institutions of the country”; the effectiveness of micro-credit to peasants and others. In fact reporting of Rwanda in this period- 2005-2007, and of its public financial management, the World Bank and the Organization for Economic and Development (OCED) said: “Rwanda recorded significant improvements in the quality of public financial management systems over the period 2005-2007 meeting an internationally agreed target well in advance of 2010 deadline.” 17

It could be argued in defense of HIPC that countries that take the programmes, enjoy debt forgiveness and have the vision to pursue the objectives of poverty reduction programmes benefit. The economy of Rwanda maybe aid dependent and so long as they make use of this and the leadership is focused, it

could graduate to another level as seen in economic history of Korea after its terrible three year war (1950-53), the first Cold War confrontation on Asian soil involving all the major protagonists as well as Japan in East Asia and even Britain( which saw a third of its economy destroyed ) , after the end of the second World War. They relied on the famous aid package of the Marshall Plan to re-build infrastructure and also loans for businesses and industries. If Japan could turn round to the United States after 1945 to re-align in geo-political strategies and benefit in economic and military terms Rwanda could. By joining the Commonwealth, the second non British colony after Mozambique for technical and multilateral assistance in 2009 and also re-establishing diplomatic ties with France, it is moving in the right direction. By this, it is following a foreign policy or economic diplomacy typical of much of the developing world without geo-political or security importance to those who call the shots.

Again by abolishing the death penalty, a policy that surprised many people because of its recent past, the country endeared itself to human right organisations around the world. It has its economic dividends since many of the anti-death penalty advocates are within the OECD.

The world could be what anybody makes of it.

The modern economic architect of Rwanda however is, the former finance minister, Donald Kaberuka who now presides over the African Development Bank in Tunisia. He became President in September 2005 after a fiercely contested election with giants that included K.Y. Amoako, former executive director of the UN Economic Commission of Africa. He had been recognized partly because he made something into the future of Rwanda and not turning back into the past. Kaberuka had said in 2005 and this is still a mantra at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning that:

“We will continue to maintain sound fiscal and monetary policies consistent with our growth objectives. We are fully conscious that macro-economic stability is a necessary but no sufficient condition for economic growth. We should also be aware that instability is a tax on the poor and a brake on private investment. We need to maintain sustainable fiscal stances, contain government expenditure and avoid lax monetary policies. We must always steer clear of what look like easy options but which are actually damaging in the long term.” 18

-November 2010

Notes

1. Arusha Peace Accords, 1993 is about power-sharing agreement reached between the Hutus and Tutsis in this northern Tanzania city . It was also an important melting point for the country’s first President, Julius Nyerere’s, socialism ideology.

2. Notes taken on museum tour in November 2010.3. Ibid. many of the minds that drafted these

“Commandments “ and later committed them into operation were leading Hutu intellectuals.

4. Notes taken on tour in Nov 2010 but also see chapter 10- Post Crisis Africa pp198-200 of Gordon Brown’s book, Beyond The Crash-Overcoming The First Crisis of Globalization, London, Simon and Schuster, 2010.

5. See page 198 of Gordon Brown’s Beyond The Crash.6. Press reports posted on Kigail Memorial after the

genocide. 7. Meisler, Stanley, Kofi Annan-A Man of Peace in a World of

War (New York: John Wiley &Sons, Inc, 2007).8. Anyidoho, Kwami, Guns Over Kigail ( , 2007).9. Cruvellier, Thierry, Court of Remorse- Inside the

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Madison: Wisconsin Press, 2006). The book was translated into English by Chari Voss and is under the Critical Human Rights title of the University of Wisconsin Press.

Crusvellier, a journalist like his translator, Voss covered the daily trials in Arusha from 1997 to 2002 and were inspired to do this book together.

10. The IRDP which is located in central Kigail has been supported in its activities by the Aid agencies and governments including: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and also the International Development and Research Centre (IDRC), UNDP etc. Among others, it has in its Dialogue and Consensus published (with the Interpeace): Democracy in Rwanda (2005); History and Conflicts in Rwanda (2006); Building Lasting Peace in Rwanda: Voices of the People(2003).

11. The International Development Association of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund report, Joint Debt Sustainability Analysis was issued in 2010. Thanks to Maxwell Afari formerly a special assistant at the Bank of Ghana and now senior economist with the IMF for sharing this document with me. See in particular the Introduction to the document.

12. Spens-Black, Hannah, Rwanda-The Rising Star (Kigail: Great Lakes Communication, 2010). This is a government sponsored publication looking at Rwanda from 2003-2010. It also spells out the vision of the government extending to 2020 popularly known as Vision 2020.

13. Ibid., see particularly the pp9-13 and pp24-30.

14. Kamola, Isaac, “ Coffee and Genocide- A Political Economy of Violence in Rwanda” in Transition 99. The magazine published by the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard is a quarterly publication from Indiana University Press.

15. Ibid., p69.16. Black Gold directed by Marc Francis and Nick Francis

is reviewed in Transition 99 magazine . It looks or follows the journey of Tadesse Meskela who manages the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union which was founded in 1999 and is today the biggest fair-trade coffee producer in Ethiopia.

17. See Rwanda-The Rising Star. pp28-3018. Donald Kaberuka’s quotation here is on page 24 of

Rwanda-The Rising Star.

Ivory Coast and Ghana: A Re-visitation of the West Africa Wager.Two books have influenced my view of the Ivory Coast (the Anglophone name for its French version of Cote d’Ivoire; ). The first is a comparative study of post-colonial state building, The West African Wager: Houphouet versus Nkrumah 1 written by the American journalist , Jon Woronoff ; the other, a travelogue and more famous, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro 2 by the master, V.S. Naipaul first published in The New Yorker in 1984 . It’s about the writer’s impressions of the former French colony and in particular about the breeding of crocodiles in an otherwise obscure palace ground - the birth place of Houphouet-Boigny later turned into the capital, Yamoussoukro about 240km from Abidjan. He wanted to make a fantasy land of his village, what a British journalist called, a “jungle capital”. This village of not more than 15,000 but currently in 2010, 200,000 people was to replace Abidjan as the capital.

First things first. 1957 was an important date in the history of de-colonization in Africa. Kwame Nkrumah at 48 years had led the Gold Coast to a new state of Ghana. He would become the toast of many of the liberation movements especially after his December 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference which brought many of them to Accra, the capital. He had through the parapets made many anti-colonial statements in many a

believer’s ear, “We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility.” Pilgrims would come to Accra famous among them Nelson Mandela and other ANC officials. They came to be inspired, to be trained in Marxist thinking and in guerilla warfare and also money for the struggle. Others, like W.E. B. Du Bois and George Padmore came to stay and to help the new nation. From afar it brought Martin Luther King Jnr. and other civil rights leaders in the 1960s when the Movement was driving to its final destination in the US.

As part of his independence speeches , Nkrumah had said:

“The success or failure of our efforts to make Ghana into a prosperous and happy State will extend far beyond the frontiers of Ghana itself. A failure on our part would have tragic consequences for other African terroritories strieving towards independence. We must not fail! We shall not fail!” 3

But not everybody was impressed. One of them, another elite African educated leader, Felix Houphouet-Boighy, later President of independent Ivory Coast from 1960. Like many of his kind in French colonial Africa, there was no hurry for independence as they, supposed to lead their people to independence were themselves part, because of the French policy of assimilation, of the legislative arm of the its government in Paris. Houphouet- Boighy at 52 was also leader of his country. He waited for Nkrumah to officially visit Abidjan

barely a month after Ghana’s independence in April 1957 to bet him on the routes to development:

“Your example has not ceased interesting us… your experiment is very tempting….But because of the human relations that exist between the French and Africans, and given the imperative of the century…..the interdependence of peoples…..we felt that it was perhaps of greater interest to attempt a different experiment from yours, the only one of its kind: a Franco-African Community based on equality and fraternity. France’s enlightened self-interest, but especially its keen sense of humanity, have led to it to seek with us, actively and sincerely, the achievement of a new community.” 4

These exchanges were not just bilateral in nature and venue. Houphouet-Boighy happened to be a member in 1957 of the French delegation to the UN General Assembly meeting in New York which Nkrumah would attend.

He took again the argument to him there. He wished in his speech that Nkrumah would have “prompt and complete success” for Ghana’s independence “but” he explained, “we wish, in a spirit of healthy emulation, to conduct our own experiment” 5- to go for French-African community, a modified form of colonialism some imputed, to political independence. His argument was that colonialism was so brutal in its wickedness of under-developing Africa that any post-colonial

state by 1957 (including of course Ghana) did not possess a viable economic gravitas to survive. He dismissed for good measure any such independence as “nominal”.

Thus, began the story of the famous West African wager. Two different routes to post-colonial development- Nkrumah’s seek ye first the political kingdom and everything else will be added to thy. It had been state industrialization- what became known in the 1960s as import substitution industrialization in Ghana. The reverse in the Ivory Coast was agricultural revolution- feed the people and be assured of food security even as you concentrate on cash crops both for export and for the industries that should emerge later. Here were two economies with similar cultural characteristics and different means to an end.

Culturally, certain ethnic groups in Ghana trace their ancestry to Ivory Coast; a journey of 5 hours by road from the western part of Ghana, 3 hours by a speed-boat from any of the river outlets from Cocody in Abidjan and 40 minutes by air travel. To this day, the Nzemas in western part of Ghana where the boarder divides the two countries share family heritage- speak the same language, inter-marriages, engage in cocoa farming; the Asantes of the ancient kingdom of Ghana and the Akans of southern Ivory Coast and Yamoussoukro centuries before the major migration took place, shared histories of ancestor

knowledge and trade in especially textiles. By the 2000s it was estimated that between 800,000-900,000 Ghanaians were residents- permanent and non permanent of the Ivory Coast. Many were small holder-cocoa farmers, peasant traders and operators of “chop bars” or traditional restaurants. But a good number of the women were also associated with prostitution at one time so rampant decent women traders were indiscriminatly associated with it.

The high point of this cultural solidarity and exchange in recent times was when Houphouet- Boigny sent a large retinue of senior chiefs and traditional leaders (in attire and customary attitude the same as many of the Akan stock in Ghana) to attend the funeral of the late king of Asante, Otumfuo, Opoku Ware II and to perform certain Akan rituals on behalf of the people of Ivory Coast in 1998.

Besides the cultural affinity, the underlining theory of the pact taken by Nkrumah was that in the early stages of development when there are low industries, finance for industrial expansion was critical and should come from the surpluses derived from agriculture. Nkrumah was also interested and in fact adopted the socialist model of development which had underneath it a robust ideological disposition of anti-imperialism- what he thought had been capitalist exploitation of not only labour but the natural resources of the Gold Coast and colonial societies.

This coincided with keenness in import substitution industrialization from the beginning. But some critics at the time, including his own advisor, the St. Lucian economist, W.A. Lewis (later winner of the Noble Prize in economics) thought was not the best approach. For with a population of about 5 million at independence, Lewis had written a report about industrialization in Ghana in 1953 saying that it was too early to adopt such a policy. Ghana’s labour was expensive because of its small population. Not that there was no counter argument to this but because the policy would later fail, this argument stands. Nkrumah’s position had led to a huge expansion of state enterprises such that by 1966, 53 of them were in existence with 12 boards. Public service had also populated from colonial era number of 98,000 to 250,000 over the same period. Infrastructural development were abundantly visible from primary and secondary schools to health –care centres and universities and the creation of the industrial city, Tema and the building of Akosombo Dam. Meanwhile the economy had expanded by about 19 percent due mainly to its exports of cocoa and gold (with high world market prices in the 1950s and ‘60s). Other minerals and commodities were not exploited as these. The economy was also never diversified. The reserves at the departure of the British were over 250 million pounds.5

Houphouet-Boigny on the other hand had little natural resources but tropical forests and fields by the 1960s.He

encouraged the importation of labour from the surrounding neighborhood- Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana and elsewhere to supplement its 1960s population of 3 million. The migrant labour would dominate the cocoa and coffee plantation fields and would soon make Ivory Coast the biggest producer of the commodity in the world. Other agricultural products would include pineapples and palm oil and cashew nuts. Its port would become the busiest and one of the biggest in West Africa. He Encouraged less formal education at this point an act that consciously or otherwise delayed any challenge to his authority contrary to the case in Ghana where Nkrumah encouraged free and compulsory education for all and was impatient to Africanize the civil service so that Ghanaians and Africans could be in charge. Good as the policy was it also made it difficult to create a subservient middle class in Ghana as the case was in the Ivory Coast. The University of Abidjan- federal in nature was established four years after independence in 1964. It would be 30 years before another at Bouake. Otherwise nationals had to go to Dakar or Paris for training and capacity acquisition. He used French technicians, advisors, administrators (thus still unbraiding of the colonial ties) in public administration in what critics may call the creation of a neo-colonial state. So long as people were well fed, got what they wanted in life, there was little complain about issues of

governance. The weaknesses of the inherent leadership traits were not noticed.

It was that which gave Houphouet-Boigny the room for fantasy projects. Paris, which mattered to many francophone leaders, was happy for him and that mattered so much for the man it refered to as “the sage of Africa”. Abidjan to this today is beautiful in many parts- the Cocody residential area and the Plateau Centre are encircled by lakes and rivers like central Geneva and the business district so well- manicured landscape. It attracted the share-holders of the African Development Bank to site its headquarters here even if in some pockets, they dwell alongside urban slums.

When V.S. Naipaul came here in 1984 he was obviously impressed with what he saw especially in the leader’s home village. The artificial lake in his elaborated palace with ponds of crocodiles, the five star hotel-Hotel President obviously named for himself; and to keep his hold on his people a mighty white mosque in rivalry to those in North Africa; the construction, (to world uproar in some quarters) of the largest Basilica, Our lady of Peace- bigger than St. Peter’s in Rome, seating 7,000 people and at the conservative estimate of 300 million dollars. It only affirmed that indeed governments and not individuals built national monuments. 6

Though these have been subjected to economic analysis somehow, it had in criticism been the same as ancient monuments. When the Great Wall of China was been built at such huge cost to the Song Empire rulers and in labour terms, millions of people were starving. The Tajal Mahal in Agra, western India took decades to be completed again the cost of cruelty to labour extremely high. Today, they are wonders of the world. Whole economies are built around them.

The trouble is if the vision dies young. Almost 27 years after his first visit, Naipaul went again (on a major visit to Africa for his 2010 book, The Masque of Africa- Glimpses of African Belief. 7 Interestingly Kwame Anthony Appiah had asked if I could be his guide in Ghana but missed it because Naipaul, who had won the Nobel in Literature in 2001 had postponed his travel and I was travelling elsewhere.

He had titled the chapter on Ivory Coast, The Forest King, after Houphouet-Boigny as indeed many things and issues about this country are equated to his name. He had noticed on a visit to the cathedral that, “Elsewhere, between one column of the porch and the outer skin of the dome a fair-sized piece of stucco had fallen off, revealing the metal armature. Much complicated scaffolding would be needed before that could be put right; perhaps it never would be. It was possible that this

was how it would be nibbled away, this piece of vainglory of the forest king.” 8

It could only become that if the possibility becomes a likelihood and the edifice fails to become a lasting monument. But it looks like failure is far away. Standing on the 11th floor of the Hotel President which overlooks the Bascilica in 2011 it was still a glorious edifice in my eyes.

But oil explorers who would come over in the 1970s to attempt diversification of the economy would leave right about the time the prices of cocoa and coffee would slide in the world market. This was also the period of consciousness and frustration as the economy experienced difficulties and the people knew that there could be post-boom –a burst of the cocoa economy which would affect their lives.

The first results of the Wager between the two countries would not however be long in coming- February 1966. Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a popular uprising even if on hindsight future generations would be divided on this and the reasons according to the military were basically political-economic ones (external interest and the role of the Americans discomfort with Nkrumah’s ideological disposition towards the East or Soviet bloc). The balance sheet according to Jon Woronoff was a victory for Houphouet-Boigny. Nkrumah could only be in real power for 9 years but his ideological competitor

would stay for 33 years only death ( by prostate cancer at 88) separating him from the love of his people who to this day sound his horrific and in even extreme cases shed tears at the mention of his name.

By 1966, the foreign policy and economic development direction of the two countries were pointers to something. According to the Economic Survey of Ghana (1967),9 Nkrumah’s development plan was never achieved and in 1959 Ghana had its last surplus. From 1959 onwards, the deficit according to the Government’s own publication, in the balance of trade grew apace, nearly doubling from 1963 to 1965 to reach a figure of over $100million. The country found it very difficult to pay for its imports and its debt rose swiftly. Its foreign liabilities catapulted from $16.3 million in 1961 to $395million in 1966 while foreign exchange assests with banking system dropped from $197 million in 1961 to zero in 1965 and worst to $-45million in February.

If these were bad news the Economic Survey of Ghana even at the time Nkrumah was still in power was bold enough to write: “ In 1965, the rate of growth of GNP was 0.2 %........was the poorest ever achievement of the economy since statistical data on the GNP was complied in 1950. It is doubted if this record has been broken by any peace-time year with the exception of the period of the Great Depression.” 10

The Ivory Coast on the other hand was financing its development plan, at that time ,development planning been the fashionable economic model in many economies. Investment rose rapidly from $81million in 1960 to $190million in 1965. There was no doubt that it was making great efforts and investment took more than 15% of total resources in 1960 and 18% in 1965. The economic growth rate was 12% compared to the negative indicators in other aspects of Ghana’s.

Almost 40 years after Woronoff’s publication, much has happened. The conclusion to his book has been partly prophetic: “In the end Houphouet-Boighy seem to have chosen the right goal and given the people what they wanted most….bread. Even those who grew nostalgic for Osageyefo in post-coup Ghana, who missed the warmth and excitement, had to admit that things would have been alright, “if only we didn’t have to eat every day.” Maybe nine times out of ten, this goal prevailed, the concrete and palpable was wanted. Nine years out of ten an Houphouet would win. In the tenth year, however, there might be an upheaval and with it a Nkrumah.”11

Of course, when Woronoff wrote, Nkrumah was out of power. Thus, his win in the literary sense here is about his economic ideology of state intervention, socialist model of development prevailing. State intervention and some form of socialist

thought did play a major role in the restoration of economies of Europe after the second World War in the mid 1940s. Since then it has been a catalyst in restoring economic balance more than of itself standing as a functionary agent for growth; it became atavistic in the 1980s to 2000 when liberal thinking, markets and monetary economices triumphed. It became relevant again as a restoring balance mechanism in the financial crisis, the first major one in globalization from 2007 starting with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US and other European banks that followed shortly; a situation which has restored Keynes creditability of the importance of state and the markets(in joint efforts) in our time.

As will partly be seen shortly and in other devoted (topics on Ghana) elsewhere, Nkrumah’s win over Houphouet was in a political sense (since variants of his economic ideology glared from Nkrumahism from 1979 has not been successful in Ghana). By allowing the development of political consciousness or been forced upon him by a vibrant opposition to his regime, political succession and alternatives to growth and development had always existed in Ghana. It never existed in the Ivory Coast under the over three decades of its founder.

2

If Houphouet-Boigny won the first wager, the second after his demise was one of danger, almost an obliteration of what makes the Ivory Coast and Abidjan a delight.The success of that victory was also the seeds for its later instability and leadership troubles. His politics was a carefully calibrated dictatorship even monarchial . It did not prepare in any serious way a succession plan. Henri Konan Bedie succeeded him and won election in 1995 against a weak opposition. Like Houphouet-Boigny, Bedie attempted to consolidate his power through brute force but it was also at a time that in much of West Africa, people and movements were challenging entrenched political leadership. While Houphouet-Boigny for over three decades concentrated efforts at unification of the country using immigrant skills and labour for productivity, Bedie attempted to undo this with ‘Ivorite”- a concept to de-citizenise immigrants’ dominance in all aspects of the economy and public service- especially in politics and the army. In the event it affected people of Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea origins. This touched on sensitive nerves including the northern Muslim, Alassane Quattara former Deputy Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the West African Central Bank who was suddenly declared a citizen of Burkina Faso his mother having come from that part they said. Interestingly, when Houphouet –Boigny died it was Quattara who had left the IMF and was serving as the country’s Prime Minister who made the

announcement of his death to the nation and famously declared that the Ivory Coast had been orphaned.

The Ivorite application was in the army-again a large number of them originally non- Ivorians. It led to the first coup in 1999 that brought Robert Guei to power and led Bedie into exile in France. Elections were later held and Laurent Gbagbo, a history professor who had started his opposition politics and led trade union protests before Houphouet –Boigny died was elected over Guei. Quattara, a Wharton School of Business trained economist was disqualified for not been an Ivorian and so could not contest for the office. This led to violence and eventually a civil war from September 2002 (having started when Gbabo was in Italy) and had to return home. But the Government had lost the northern part of the country to rebels especially the city of Bouake many of whom supported Quattara though the rebels were led by another norther, Guillaume Solo (later to be made a compromised Prime Minister). But Guei, depending on who you spoke to, had died along with others in this second coup attempt. A year after, Gbagbo and the rebels agreed to a series of national unity accords first the Linas-Marcoussis Agreement (in January 2003) the Accra III Agreements(July 2004), Pretoria(April 2005) and finally the Ouagadougou Political Agreement (March 2007) which re-affirmed the previous ones and also the resolutions of the UN Security Council.

Disagreements, killings, based on ethnic and political clashes and involving Ivoirians, immigrants and France would continue along these courses until October 2005 when Gbagbo’s mandate expired. Kufuor had been central in many of these, came to know the protagonists very well and earned their confidence in the negotiations. But it was impossible to hold another election to elect new leadership because there was no disarmament. And so Gbagbo through his own intrigues had to hang on till 2010 for the elections.

But much had happened in between. The Ivory Coast with a population of 21.1 million by 2010 had for a long while been West Africa’s richest country and was also a truly pan African spot for integration with a third of the population in the 1980s been foreigners in different professional and occupational pursuits. In the course of the crisis, the economy had shrunk by over 1.5 % within 2002-2003 and rate of growth until 2008 was 2.2% from over 8% that it was before the war. This was even far from the 1970s when the Gross Domestic Product peaked at 360 percent. The non governmental organization, Global Witness, estimates that more then $58 million of cocoa proceeds were diversified by the government, rebels and individuals to prosecute the war. Looking at the porous nature of the west African boarders and the non functional cocoa institutions during the war, it is possible the figure could be higher- through smuggling to the neighbours.

3

Many national airports around the world bear the name of political heroes; modern founders of nations and martyrs normally of liberation struggle. It would have been surprising if the Abidjan airport were to be indifferent to Felix Houphouet-Boigny. In his grave he may also be happy as some of his compatriots may feel saver for just behind the airport is the imperial presence of France- a military base by the re-assuring name: Armed Elements of the Impartial Forces.

This visit to the country in October 2010 was important. Former US President, Jimmy Carter had asked Kufuor to co-chair the impending elections with him and his Carter Centre. At 86, and since serving only a term as President, it has been amazing how he has been able to turn what looked a failure in the eyes of many ( the American hostages in Iran in particular )to global recognization at the frontiers of development. He had through the Carter Centre which he established with his wife Rosalynn in 1982 positively touched the lives of millions around 65 countries in the areas of peace-building and conflict resolution, health-care, democracy, human rights and economic opportunity. When he was awarded the Noble Prize for Peace it far transcended his efforts in the Middle East crisis (the Camp David accords) when in power and universally very acknowledging.

Just close to the time of elections, he suddenly took ill so Kufuor would do that with his Vice President for Peace Programmes, Dr. John Stremlau.

The Golf Hotel where we lodged was also where other international observers and journalists were. The extra security assurance was the presence of the UN peace- keepers who have for some years camped here. Kufuor and his Carter friends would have to meet separately the protagonists of this political drama. Prime Minister Soro had decided that he would come over instead of Kufuor doing so. He did with a small group of government officials and security. At 39, the aura of power had made him look larger than his age. He would not let Kufuor get up to greet or welcome him. He considers him like a father. In fact Kufuor had told him during the negotiations to end the civil war in Accra that at 29 he was still young and should bid his time since the future looked good for him. He should also be flexible and let loose the northern part of the country which was under his and the rebels control. He burst into laughter and in English diluted in the comfort of French began. “I remember and will never forget what you told me years ago in Accra. The elections tomorrow are the result of your previous work.” As Kufuor thanked him for his remarks, Soro recognized Kwaku Addo , Kufuor’s driver in Accra who was with him and again a huge laugh. Kwaku had been Soro’s guide in the many night outings in Accra during the peace talks. He might have

really liked him. When Kufuor said, “Now you are growing and in responsible leadership” the laughter was chorus as everybody guessed what it could mean.

If Soro had not been 39 at this time, he could probably be standing as a presidential candidate against his 65 year old former university professor, Gbagbo. He had initiated him into the ways and by-ways of socialist thoughts and thinking and some urging towards student agitation. Now teacher and student have the country upon their destiny.

I first met Alassane Quattara at his IMF office in 1997.We were a group of 12 international journalists touring the United States. Everyone of us remembered how in spite of his heavy schedule he has hosted us for lunch and took us through the workings of the Fund and his role as its deputy director. I have since wondered why he would leave that lucrative office for the uncertainties of politics. Public service should be the motive otherwise he should be rich or at least, his Jewish wife of grand standing and influence.

The uncertainties of politics led to his house been destroyed when the rebels got so close to his own destruction. He had to seek refuge at the French embassy here. It may explain why his current one is so fortified. That he is full of grace shows in the interior of this beautiful house. He welcomed Kufuor to the huge sitting room overlooking a swimming pool and garden. His

advisors and communication director for the campaign looked completely exhausted. But they were hopeful for the next day’s ballot.

“Campaign was peaceful in all 19 regions.” He said. The problem had been with the chair of the Independent Electoral Commission who had arbitrarily decided, without the knowledge of other commissioners, to award a contract of $10 million for electoral materials to people who worked for a government ministry and connected to government. But, I never had any serious obstacles in my campaign. I realized people want peace. We have gone over the initial doubt. I am confident the elections will be peaceful.” He said visibly calmed but with some confidence added, “Recognization of the results is the real text. We will accept if free of any manipulation.”

Credited by many independent observers as having the best organized structures for his Rally of the Republicans Party (not surprising of a technocrat of his standing), the militant elements within are also the worst and deadly if confronted.

The importance of this election was the fact that it would be the first truly competitive one in the 50 year history of the country and comes at the cost of $412million. A lot of this was coming from the donor European community.

Seeing Henri Konan Bedie, the controller of the Democratic Party of Cote d’ Ivoire, the oldest party founded by Houphouet-

Boigny come out of his living room to welcome Kufuor was a remembrance of the negotiation time of the past. He has dyed his hair- to perhaps look younger than his 76 years of age. But without even that he did not look his age compared to his competitors who have left theirs to grow grey. Smaller than his name projects, Houphouet –Boigny’s immediate successor told us, “my party is strong. We have had some reservations about the electoral process though. I also know that an election is never won in advance.”

We would not be able to see the incumbent, Gbagbo until we got confirmation he would be able to on October 31- election day. Obviously an odd time to see a sitting president hoping to extent his tenure beyond a ten year period. The surprise was when he agreed to do that. Kufuor has had countless meetings with him at this state house. The house was full of security people, his campaign team officials of the Ivorian Popular Front running around the background receiving calls from polling stations across the country. The polls had closed some two hours before. As we sat at the first living room where he would normally welcome his VIPs and then take them to a bigger one, we heard the shout of “Big John” . We all stood up for his presence. He shook hands with everybody but looked a bit agitated. Gbagbo’s joviality had not deserted him at this hour . Perhaps he had a feeling where the results were going. He was the front-runner and perhaps expected that the margin would

widen in his favor even at this early stage. When Kufuor introduced the Carter Centre group to him, he expressed appreciation but with a sense of humour told everybody, “You know, I have never visited Atlanta. My daughter studied there and now works at our embassy in Washington, DC but never been there.” When John Stremlau also a professor at Emory University extended an invitation for him to come over to give a public lecture some day he accepted. But when and as what?

We will have to leave shortly as a courtesy for his seeing us at a moment like that. But he had extended an invitation for dinner the day after quite oblivious of what the stakes in terms of election results could be.

But looking at their tiring bodies it was obvious that these three, Gbagbo, Quattara and Bedie were in the twilight of their dominance of the politics of the last 15 years. At 65, 68 and 76 respectively, they were not looking younger and whoever wins shuts the ambition of the others for the future.

Election day in Abidjan was extremely quiet. With virtually no vehicular movement, the boarders to the neighbouring countries had been closed and the airport security tightened. Quenes started forming by 5pm for 7pm voting. Normal with voting in many developing countries, there were late start in places by 2 to 4 hours because papers and electoral officers were late or had not been given the final go-ahead on time. The

government last minute decision not to block the use of SMS on the day under the pretext that it could be used to disseminate misinformation and violence was wise. This peace was however bore out of what the people had seen before- violence and death in civil war. It could be, as everybody also knew that, it was a calm larvae waiting for a peg powder to cause havoc.

We sat through to the counting of votes after the 5pm deadline. The party agents of especially the three leading contestants ( there were a total of 14 but the others were non-scorning getting zero results) were very vigilant ensuring their leaders marks were right. Quattara had trained 80,000 instead of 40,000 of these agents for the 20,000 polls nation-wide. The results from the polling stations were relayed into the constituency and then regions before final transmission to the Independent Electoral Commission. For months and years all these processes that on the day looked so simple and smooth had been carefully and aggressively been negotiated. Misunderstandings in the course of that had accounted for sporadic violence and postponement of the elections.

At the end of it all, it was generally agreed that Ivory Coast’s first competitive elections had been peaceful. With over 80 percent turn-out of the estimated 6 million people, it was also known as the results started coming in on the second day that,

it was not conclusive. Neither of the three leading candidates could get the 50 percent votes. When it was finally announced, the results were as predicted by polls . The first three came to expectation. Gbagbo made 38 percent followed by Quattara with 32 and Bedie with 25 .

By any failing to make the 50 percent mark, a run-off between Gbagbo and Quattara was fixed for November 28.

How the world can change!! In 2003 Ali A. Mazuri in a foreword to my book, Between Faith and History: A Biography of J.A. Kufuor wrote of fortunes of countries. “ More than thirty additional years have passed since then…..Ghana which has become a model of relative stability and which is emerging slowly as a beacon of prosperity.…. Cote d’Ivoire is struggling for a new equilibrium between domestic contending forces and a new balance between independent African assertiveness and a continuing special relationship with France. Perhaps the original wager of 1960 was too simplistic about the comparative causes of stability and prosperity in African countries. The heroic country of yesterday can become the pathetic country of today-and vice versa. The reasons are much more complex than such issues as which country is neo-colonialist and which one chooses a command economy.” 12

The reasons could really be complex. The stability in the Ivory Coast though an uncultivated one and rather subtly imposed,

Ghana was in turmoil during the Ivory Coast’s stability. From 1966, the country had experienced several coups the most dangerous in 1981 when Jerry John Rawlings launched his 31st December Revolution. In the course of that three former military leaders were killed at the stakes; three Supreme Court Judges and a retired army officer were murdered by elements within the Revolution; businesses relocated outside the country and a war against the already small middle class ensued with confiscation of property and assets mostly for no reason nor were people put on proper trial for alleged offences; there was virtual imposition of sanctions by donors not enthusiastic of this left-wing inspired revolution. It would be in 1992 when after economic decline and later major re-structuring of the economy that the country would have its first controversial elections with again Rawlings in control.

The stability from 1981 to 1991 had been brutally imposed amidst counter-coup attempts and imposition of curfews. From 1992 when it adopted the new Constitution the country has not looked back and changed governments successfully through the ballot box. It has given space for economic planning which by the mid 2000s could grow at 7.2 percent when Ivory Coast was doing under 4 percent. The heroic country of yesterday can truly become the pathetic country of today. The issues are indeed complex but leadership defines everything in a fast changing world.

4

Many people had predicted right- if Gbagbo or Quattara won there would be a stalemate. But I had wondered why that should be so if the re-run was decent. It could then be that the protagonist of the re-newed stalemate is a vallian of the democratic order. It became Gbagbo after December 2.

Expectations had been that by December 1 the Independent Electoral Commission would declare the winner. Kufuor could not make it to Abidjan . He was chairing the annual board meeting of Interpeace in Geneva. He had however issued a statement to the international media as co-chair of the Carter Centre entreating the contestants to a peaceful re-run and acceptance of the popular will. By late evening, that was not the case. Voting had again been smooth amidst high tensions with few isolated cases of disorders. There were media reports that Quattara was in the led. The Carter Centre’s own projections when we made contact from Geneva confirmed this. Around 8pm on the day, a frantic call from Abidjan originally to Kufuor in Accra got him in Geneva . When Kufuor confirmed his identity over the phone, he was asked to hold on and then came the voice of Quattara. He had according to their camp’s estimation won the elections by 54% of the votes slightly lower then the Commission’s verdict. He had been given the Commission’s results. Gbagbo’s party had also been given

as well as the UN. His concern however was that Gbagbo from their intelligence was reluctant to accept which was not surprising. His call was for Kufuor to assure Gbagbo on his behalf of a cordial political relationship and full protection as a former President. And on a lighter note to invite Kufuor to his inauguration as he had done so much for the unite of the country as reflected in the confidence that the contestants had had in him all along.

To do the right diplomatic thing, Kufuor called Gbagbo minutes afterwards to listen to what he had to say. Interestingly, the elections according to him was still inconclusive and that as he was talking to Kufuor he was having an emergency meeting with his party. Obviously they had issues, especially in northern Ivory Coast to review - an area that seems to have given Quattara the needed votes. Kufuor made another call to Soro, the Prime Minister who had days earlier resigned his post and confirmed that indeed there were indications that Quattara had won the elections. The international media hours after would announce that Quattara had won though there was yet to be formal declaration by the Independent Electoral Commission. The behavior of the international media seems to have annoyed Gbagbo but the boldness of the Commission to announce the results at The Golf Hotel instead of at its office confirmed fears for their safety. When it eventually, before the international media in a press conference, decided to do so,

there came the shock of one of its members, tearing the results paper before the world- its fraudulent, he asserted. The Commission would go ahead to declare and there the high drama started.

But the Commission’s formal declaration and the huge media reportage before and after placed Quattara in a favourable moral course. The same electoral agreement had also said the Constitutional Council must endorse the Commission’s result. When it did not and alleged that there were electoral frauds in many parts of the North and that it had annulled the results from those parts which meant that, Gbagbo then and not Quattara had won the elections, it came as a big shock to many people. Quattara had won with 400,000 votes but the Constitutional Council had cancelled results in many parts of the north to the tune of 600,000 votes.The UN which under the same electoral agreement was the final certifier of the results declared Quattara the winner. Like the Electoral Commission and the UN, many –and they run into thousands, of the observer teams around the world had declared that though there had been some malpractices in the North as well as in the South and especially Gbagbo home region, they were however, not substantial to nullify the results. Before people could overcome the shock, Gbagbo was sworn in as President. Hours after he announced a cabinet. Quattara, without access to state apparatus but confined to The Golf Hotel under 800 (of

the 10,000 UN troops) security protection was also sworn in as President with a cabinet list and with Soro as Prime Minister.

An election that was supposed to give the country a new leader had given more then it needed. Ivorians were tired of uncertainty but the 15 nation Economic Community of West Africa States of which Ivory Coast is a member was not only angry but brushed aside any negotiations let alone, indications from the Gbagbo side that it was prepared to share power with Quattara- a short fall of a moral rectitude which rather reinforced the resolution of ECOWAS leadership that met in Abuja , Nigeria under Goodluck Jonathan that Quattara and not Gbagbo was the declared winner of the election . Days after, the African Union would recognized Quattara as would France, the European Union and other multilateral institutions some of whom had already put sanctions in place. Gbagbo was been drawn by a sea of strong protest but still unmoved in the ancient faith of always surviving upsets to his authority and by this time perhaps, a divine right to continue his rule.

With this Quattara decided that his supporters march to take over the state owned TV station which was the propaganda arm of the Gbagbo government and which had blocked Ivorians views of the mounting international pressure against him. The violence that erupted from this attempt as his militia and the state army ensured that by the third week of

uncertainty, over 200 people had lost their lives through mostly extra-judicial killings . When Gbagbo issued a media warning that all foreign troops-including the UN and observers should leave the country, he was still unaware of the extent to which his powers and legitimacy had eroded. The Security Council instead extended the troops mandate to six more months and stengethened its strategic presence to not only ensure peace but to defend itself and others against possible attacks.

To weaken his power further the World Bank decided to suspend all loans to Ivory Coast. Quattara also appealed to the Central Bank of West African States, based in Dakar which also serves as the central bank of Ivory Coast not to deal with the government. This appeal was heeded to after the governor of the Bank initially reluctant to do that had to resign. On Christmas eve-December 24 2010 the leadership of ECOWAS met and authorized their ministers of defence to map up a strategy that would if need be, use force to get Gbagbo out of power as it has not dawned on him that he was riding a dying horse; a strategy that had earlier been advocated by the Prime Minister of Kenya Ralia Odinga, apparently the winner of the 2007 elections but forced to share power as a way of restoring peace.

Now with virtually no international support, Gbagbo had to employ the services of an American lobbyist, Lanny Davis

whose beat was to appear on the international media including the CNN defending his position. What annoyed people most was the fact that Davis who had previously advised President Clinton on crisis situations, was been paid $100,000 a month by a government whose legitimacy was under serious question.

The importance of Ivory Coast to the economies of some of the neigbours soon registered. The Ghana Cocoa Board which regulates the cocoa industry had in September 2010 said it would increase prices by 33% to $2,169 per ton compared to the $1,690 per ton paid by the Ivory Coast’s Cocoa and Coffee Exchange. 14 Farmers started smuggling cocoa to Ghana for better prices in the absence of checks at boarders an act which has always attracted sanction from the Ghana Cocoa Board as it prides itself as having the best premium with the beans from Ivory Coast only diluting its market value. About 75,000 to 100,000 tons of cocoa beans had been smuggled to Ghana since the 2010-2011 harvest season according to Bloombery relaying on the New York based Commodities Risk Analysis report by the third week of December 2010 13. But Ghana had also lost 100,000 tons of beans to smuggling to the Ivory Coast during the 2009-2010 season at the cost of $300million.

Over 3,000 Ghanaian food-stuff traders and importers of especially staple rice, cassava and plantain which the Ivory Coast produced in abundance also feared the crisis would make

trading and their livehood more difficult. Similar patterns were registered in Burkina Faso. About 20,000 of Ivorians had to fled to Liberia’s Nimba County by the third week to escape attacks from militia which according to the UN High Commission for Refugees had serious social and economic implication not only for the refugees but the slowly recovering economy of the country.

By the third week of January 2011 the world was still uncertain about the Ivory Coast. The EU had imposed forms of sanctions including travelling ban on Gbagbo, government officials with Switzerland confiscating assets of some of them . Some amount of diplomatic engagement including visits to the country by Mbeki, Obassanjo and the AU’s envoy- Prime Minister Ralia Odinga,were of little effect . Gbagbo’s wife Simone Hervet Gbagbo, a university professor had been the personal strategist of her husband. Inclined to the left, it had been she who all along had plotted this intransigent position some critics and insiders say. Author of a best-selling memoir, Parole D’Honneur, she looks ordinary and many including former Ghanaian Ambassador to the country, Kabral Blay Amihere, who is not too much fond of her as the husband, admits of her powers and influence in the politics of the country as a student agitator who had previously suffered political detention with the man she would later marry.14

The use of military force seems to be the option left. But the momentum for that was ruffled. As if to keep the wager aflame, the President of Ghana, Prof. Evans Atta Mills on the second week of January met Ghanaian and foreign journalists to review his Government’s performance in two years. Obviously, he expected a question on Ghana’s policy on the impasse in the Ivory Coast. Not that it was in dispute for Ghana been a member of ECOWAS was also the second largest troop contributor to its operations. Already 500 of them were in the Ivory Coast including some security guides to Quattara at The Golf Hotel. Mills had also signed into the heads of state communiqué in Nigeria to use force to remove Gbagbo from office if need be.

But his response to a question from a journalist in the media encounter was an unsettling one for many not least other leaders in the sub-region. He- as Commander in Chief of the Army and for that matter the country was against the use of force because that would not solve the problem in the country. Using force to counter a prevailing force had in history not always worked according to anticipation. The worry of Ghana was also understandable because it stood to suffer most (in trade , social crisis -refugees trek, destruction of facilities possibly its new oil installation in western Ghana) from repercussions of a failed external military intervention. The problem however seems to be breaking ranks with his

colleagues- not having any discussions with them but with the media. It was fodder for the world broadcasting net-works which since the elections had focused daily on events in the Ivory Coast. The BBC World Service, VOA and others relayed this piece of news minutes after from Accra. The words from Mills were plain- in native Fante proverb, “Di Wo Fie Asem” which means, “Mind Your own Business.” It was not the responsibility of Ghana to decide who became the President of the Ivory Coast or mingled in the internal affairs of the country. This obviously became difficult to appreciate- for what then was the essence of joining multilateral organizations and signing on to military pacts? The Government’s spin doctors- of journalists on local FM stations and a few who travelled to Ivory Coast (in what some said was government sponsored trip)and had Gbagbo heaped praises on Prof. Mills did not help . The BBC Network Africa sarcastically used Mill’s words as “a wise saying for the day” and subjected him to criticisms through calls from its listeners; so was its, Africa Have Your Say.

As some international actors portrayed Ghana’s new policy as betrayal, Ralia Odinga came to Ghana and had audience with Prof. Mills to clarify Ghana’s policy on the situation. Ralia in a press conference told the local media that Ghana according to the government had not broken ranks and that she was still with ECOWAS and in agreement with all its decisions including the use of force. This left some spin doctors and Ghana’s own

foreign Minister, Mohammed Mumuni (who had accused the BBC of unfairly representing Mills as “self-centered and inward looking”) in the cold. For they had defended why Ghana would not sanction the use of force. They even went to the extent of releasing minutes of a meeting of African Ambassadors accredited to the UN in New York questioning the effectiveness of a possible use of force, as basis of support for Mills’s position. Interestingly, these ambassadors did not intend this leakage since they represented not their own interests but those of their governments and that they were only supposed to defend the domestic policies of their governments which translated into foreign policy. How they could constitute themselves into an opposition to their governments is the story of lack of understanding of diplomatic practice by the Director of Mills Communication , Kwaku Anyidoho who boasted that it was not a leakage but a news release he circulated to the media.

To revert to a consensus position again, Mills on January 21 2011 told the diplomatic community in a new year reception that, “ Ghana is in full support of the declaration that Alassane Quattara is the elected President of Cote’d’Ivoire… additionally, the country is in agreement with all the sanctions imposed on Cote d’Ivoire in the aftermath of the disputed elections.”

That restored some sanity in foreign policy but it had dented the image of the Government as the head of ECOWAS, Ghebo (a strong defender of the use of force) until his taking up the position was the chief foreign affairs advisor to Mills and the more respected head before him- Mohammed Ibn Chambas had been vitriolic on Gbagbo’s refusal to leave office. Gbagbo (Chambas knew him well as he was very pivotal in the negotiations after the civil war) he said, was a disgrace to Africa.

But it was becoming clearer by January ending of 2011 when the African leaders met in Addis Ababa for the annual AU meeting that support for and against the protagonists was becoming ideological pushing the immediate cause of the stalemate to the background. It also showed that the AU secretariat through its Commissioner, Jeng Ping, was sometimes very fickle in appreciation of continental issues.

A leftist intellectual and Pan-African ideologue, Gbagbo had managed to equate the situation to French intervention in another’s internal affairs; that France still had colonial desires which was resisted by him as against the puppetry countenance of Quattara. This argument was sweet in the ears of some Pan Africanists. It had been pushed at the UN frontiers by the country’s ambassador there Koffi Charles (who was refused accreditation by the UN as Quattara’s

representative was recognized ). The argument was even taken to higher power levels and appealed to France’s opponents sometimes. Thus, Russia was reluctant initially to endorse the Security Council’s extension of its troop stay in the country.

When at the end of their meeting, the AU set up a presidential commission to re-evaluate the impasse; it was a far cry from the ultimatum given Gbagbo that force was imminent. The Organization of African Unity would always be the African Union.

The composition of the Commission was worrying enough for many: Goodluck Jonathan, Ralia Odinga, Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe.

Goodluck was President of Nigeria and chairman of ECOWAS and had expressed Nigeria’s preparedness to lead force in the Ivory Coast and possibly contribute the biggest troops. Nigeria’s foreign policy was clear on the Ivory Coast even if as a regional force it had not set a moral example of how to conduct credible elections in the past. At least it was covered in this by the collective expression of the regional body.

Ralia Odinga, a victim of robbed elections in Kenya had to compromise on a position of Prime Minister in an election in 2007 in which he was internationally recognized to have won. From the start against Gbagbo’s claims, he has internationally supported his removal by force. Infact when the AU appointed

him initially as its envoy to hold talk with the protagonists, the assumption was that his views were those of the AU. But again the AU had displayed some ineptitude by failing to negotiate properly with the Kenyan government for which Ralia was only a part. Some Kenyans saw this as more of a recognisation of a Prime Minister with limited powers (constitutionally) but been elevated in a global charged media interest in West Africa; a sort of an unconscious moral up-liftment.

Jacob Zuma’s militant, ideological and populist decorations in both domestic and foreign policies were all over him. Without the intellectual aroma to push these forward sometimes (having been watered down because of South Africa’s strong capitalist infrastructure which can easily overwhelm his capacity for untoward actions) many knew his heart was with Gbagbo. And not because of his acquired ideological position only but anyone who has read Jeremy Gordin’s 2011 edition of Zuma: A Biography finds unfortunately why Zuma, very viciously maligned (sometimes against his ethnic background which he was forced to publicly protest during his state visit to the Buckingham Palace) would entrench to anti- western positions. But he even had to by March 2010, change South Africa’s position to support Quattara and in conformity with the peace and Security Council Commission of AU.

Of course Robert Mugabe, passed 87, was the godfather of so-called anti-imperialism resurrection who uses hate speech, racial abuse, re-distribution of land against the English and the West to resuscitate the decline in his own once well – groomed economy; popularity and respect as a freedom fighter. Like Gbagbo of later times, he would accuse his Opposition figure Morgan Tsvangirai of been an imperialist stooge on the pay roll of British multi-national companies and governments.

But then the editorials of many of these western media could be reflective of what many of their colleagues in Africa thought as any sampling of these would show on the Ivory Coast. Gbagbo himself had flirted with the same French established order of doing things in Africa .

The New African magazine founded in London in 1966 struggled hard to no avail to prove that the election fiasco had much more to do with French imperial interest as in its 17 African former colonies and that this time it had met resistance by Gbagbo . In its February issue of 2011, it could only support Gbagbo’s position by using other comments by follow leftists-former and current African leaders like Angolan Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, Jerry John Rawlings of Ghana, and Museveni not to mention others.

Yet Rawlings had insisted from his revolutionary days in 1982 to his retirement in 2000 that he does not believe (like

Museveni ) in multi-party democracy; he still preaches against the West. Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings is a strong woman like Mrs Gbagbo. They and their husbands share the same attitude to power. But they are not alone of their kind in Africa and the larger world. They more often substitute universal values of choice for leadership and other fundamental values as western and as imperial attempts to dictatorship among free people. Historical injustice of the past colonial and imperial ethos should guide Africa against repetition of exploitation of man against his fellow be it of parallel ethnic or racial notation for unjustifiable ends. But should it be used to subvert popular will of people?

The WEST, itself a construction undergoing cultural meaning and revision, may not be innocent. Africans, Caribbean, Middle Eastern societies and Asians have problems with them. Kishore Mahbubani, Dean and professor of Public Policy of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy has argued quiet admirably in his influential book, The New Asian Hemisphere- The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, 15 that like western leaders, he is equally concerned that the world is becoming a more dangerous place. But he adds: “In trying to understand the sources of this danger, they (western leaders) assume that the problems are over there, not over here. Western editorials and commentaries seem to have an almost automatic assumption

that the rest of the world is responsible for generating the problems, while the West is struggling to deliver the solutions.”

This certainly is also true and the best example comes again from their attitude in Africa and the Middle East through the speeches they gave from mid January to February 2011 (Arab Spring) when the uprisings started first in Tunisia, then Egypt, Skirmishes in Jordan and Yemen against decades old dictatorships . Not to talk of the genocide in Libya which led to the demise of Gaddafi and the eventual disintergration of the Syrian government as well.

No matter how irritable this maybe and sometimes they are very irritable, it does not mean that there should be an ideological FIXATION as counter-point by some with the Ivory Coast.

The end did come. High drama. Huge uncertainly even in the end and a lot of blood shed. By the first week of April 2011, the rebels had taken over 80% of the country with the regular army offering no resistence. The only protection for Gbagbo who had disappeared from public eyes was provided by the well-paid members of the elite presidential guard.When Quattara announced that the country’s land, sea and air boarders were closed, he was only exercising the powers of a commander in chief and the first major indication that he was in charge. Negotiations with the French embassy by Gbagbo’s camp were

said to be through and that arrangements for exile were in place. This was later rejected by his camp osentibly on the insistence of Mrs Gbagbo wrongly this time believing in the magic of her strategies. Finally when massive bombardment by the UN , French and the rebels had done their worst in the presidential villa where they were, the president and wife like Saddam Hussein were found in a bunker at the presidential palace . The world witnessed the end of needless intransigence, the humiliation that befall such dramatis personae. Whether it was the professional French soldiers that found them and handed them over to the Ivorians to avoid accusation of neo-colonial intervention was irrelevant to many. But the images of a sovereign symbol arrested with only a singlet was enough embarrassment. They were apparently beaten and the wife, according to a Ghanaian Archbishop, Duncan Williams, very close to them, raped. Quattara would be swore in properly as President and Ghabgo put under house arrest for six months. The setting up of the Truth, Recociliation and Dialogue Commission thereafter was in keeping with Quattara’s earlier promise. But the surprising event of it all was the almost secret fly-over of Ghabgo to the International Criminal Court in Hague in December 2011. That obviously endangers the work of the Commission headed by a former Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny knowing that there were people on Quattara’s side who had also committed atrocities against innocent people. As to

whether that was the right thing to do or not, and whether it would bring peace to the Ivory Coast or not, time would tell.

Many but a dictatorial leader who engineered precipitous landmark events have failed to be witnesses of the end times. Not long and far away, we had seen the intransigence of Sergeant Samuel Doe in Liberia which led to his death and of Charles Taylor whose nemesis is upon him in the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Foday Sankoh of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone who died like a chicken whilst been tried and in Ivory Coast itself, the follies of the late Robert Guei. They played against time and peoples popular desire but at the end only matching to a waterloo.

5

But then the country would never be the same. Civil wars are love lost; ethnicity is deepened not only among their lords but the intelligentsia who sometimes propound theories for action. Chinua Achebe has written about this in his poetry (among them the collection, Beware Soul Brother) of his experiences of the Biafra War in Nigeria. Wole Soyinka in his, The Man Died- Prison Notes recalls the role of the military in the escalation of war even if the intention of sovereign integrity is the goal; the ultimate price for the ticket was paid by the Ibo poet and giver of the anthology Heavens gate, Christopher Okigbo, who was

killed in combat in Nsukka. All in their youthful glory and exuberant for actions and inactions of the motherland. If Civil wars were such fleeting events they would be out of mind. But the memories live . They affect their (nation) cultural attitudes, political thinking and leadership selection (explaining in part why some Nigerian political parties have decided that it would rotate the presidency primaries between the North and the South and within the South among the Yorubas’, Ibos’ and the others instead of looking for good qualities of leadership which geographic fixation alone cannot guarantee) as well as formula for resource allocation . Most important of all, their memories are transmission wires for generations that came after them- whether as writers or readers and policy makers.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born 7 years after the Biafra civil war. She did not physically see combat and the tens of thousands that perished. It makes her cry whenever brutalities of the war were told her as a child and even in adulthood. Her bestselling novel about the war, Half of a Yellow Sun which transformed her literary career to global fame is still about living the past in the present- how Biafra lasts in the psychology of man. In a different essay on the book in Transition , African “Authenticity” and the Biafran Experience, she writes:

“….War is not mere history for me; it is also memory, for I grew up in the shadow of Biafra. I knew vaguely about the war as a child- that my grandfathers had died, that my parents had lost everything they owned. Long before my parents began to talk, under my keen questioning, about their specific experiences, I was aware of how this war hunted my family, how it colored the path our lives had taken….” 16

Memories are running through the third generation by this time. Property or material wealth were destroyed or lost. Her immediate relatives, distant ones, thousands of Nigerians close to home call, and who underwent similar experiences cannot forget. A desire for ethnic revenge may be passed time but the memories of the past live on.

Biafra gives us an aftermath, a post-script of the dramas of war and the consequences to economic growth and the hard recovery thereafter. In a sequel to his best-selling book, The Bottom Billion-Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (2008), the Oxford researcher economist, Paul Collier argues in Wars, Guns and Votes-Democracy in Dangerous Places (2010),17 that the mantle of Francophone Africa’s flagship has passed, largely by default, to Senegal. “Could anything have been done to avert the catastrophe?” he asks. This was at a time the Ivory Coast looked peaceful and

when the December 2010 elections had not been conducted with the looming uncertainty that followed it to the re-run.

This is a dual statement of truth and ambiguity. First, Senegal has been at the cultural frontier of development in Africa and particularly in West Africa for decades. Its leadership of cultural renaissance has been state driven and historically laddened. The leader of the post-colonial state as well as its cultural movement –Negritude (that spread across West Africa) was the poet laureate and cultural theorist- Sengor. Its other well known intellectual, anthropologist and physicist, Cheikh Anta Diop developed Afrocentric consciousness in much of Africa from the 1960s. Its been (still in 2010) the venue of major arts and cultural festivals reflecting (including the hugely attended 3rd World Festival of black Arts and cultures in Dakar) on the shared history of the continent from the Goree island of slavery to assertiveness of state-building, literature, music and dance and the builder of Pan African monuments the most famous and controversial been The African Renaissance Monument- the tallest bronze statue in Africa overlooking the Atlantic and constructed at the cost of $26m. Wade had argued, against the concerns of critics of poverty that, “ It brings to life our common destiny. Africa has arrived in the 21st century tall and more ready than ever to take its destiny into its hands.” This was in addition to the country’s keenness in the promotion of the New Partnership to Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

In terms of been an economic frontier force however, it is ambiguious if with half the population of Ivory Coast(12.5 million), comparatively lower export volumes and undeveloped agricultural base it could carry the burden and serve as a food-stuff trading hub in West Africa as the Ivory Coast became and still is. And with its own political uncertainties- with Wade attempting by 2010 to run election again for the third time- seeking a total of 15 years rule or the strong indications of encouraging his son to run after him ; serious complains of electoral dominance whether it could itself stay peaceful enough.

Notes

1. Woronoff, Jon, The West Africa Wager: Houphouet versus Nkrumah (New Jersey, Metuchen , 1972). This book is one of several that were published around the period. Ghana and The Ivory Coast (1971) was another which was edited by Philip Foster and Aristide R. Zolberg. The latter with contributions by some of the best economic historians of the time looked into such issues as : Political and Administration Linkage; The Modernisation of Marriage Laws in Africa with particular reference to Family Law etc. The promise of these two countries was so high among scholars and writers that so much was written of their different post-colonial strategies more than others in the region.

2. Naipaul, V.S., The Crocodiles of Yamoussuokro ( 1984). Initially published as a single article in The New Yorker in 1984 it later became part of his collection of books of essays.

3. Nkrumah’s independence speech on March 6, 1957 was published in the Daily Graphic of March 6, 1957, p9 see also p10 of Woronff’s book, The West Africa Wager.

4. Houphouet-Boigny’s response to Nkrumah was reported in Marchess Tropicaux du Monde, on April 13 1957, p943.

5. Agyeman-Duah, Ivor, An Economic History of Ghana: Reflections on a Half a Century of Challenges and Progress

(Oxfordshire, Ayebia Clarke Publishers, 2008).This is an anthology on economic issues. See particularly the arguments of Dirk-Jan Omtzigt from pp43-52 and Nii Moi Thompson pp53-72.

6. Naipaul, V.S., describes in details, a revisionist account of his visit again to the country in his book, The Masque of Africa-Glimpses of African Belief, London, Picador, 2010. See chapter four, The Forest King.

7. Ibid.8. Ibid., p206.9. The Economic Survey of Ghana, was a series that reflected

at particular times, the economic well-being or otherwise of governments.

10. See The Economic Survey of Ghana 1963.11. See concluding chapter of Woronoff’s 1972

publication, The West Africa Wager.12. Agyeman-Duah, Ivor, Between Faith and History: A

Biography of J.A. Kufuor (Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishers, 2007).

13. Bloombery, a commodities analysis channel.14. Blay Amihere, Kabral, Between The Lion and the

Elephant- Memoirs of An African Diplomat ( Accra: Digibooks Limited). Kabral a journalist and former President of the Ghana Journalists Association served as ambassador to the Ivory Coast from 2006-2009 and

witnessed many of the events prior to the election of 2010. Part two of this memoirs deals with his time in the country. An Nzema himself from the western part of Ghana, he brings a cultural and intimate analysis to his assessment. Though he seems to like Ghagbo he still writes that he is a very complex political personality to understand in terms of what power means to him and what he can do with it.

15. Muhbubani, Kishore, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Perseus Book Group). Kishore is also dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. See in particular chapter 5. He had a distinguished diplomatic career and is also author of Can Asians Think?

16. Ngozi, Adichie, Chimamanda, “ African “Authenticity” and the Biafran Experience” in Transition 99 edition p49-50.

17. Collier, Paul, Wars, Guns and Votes- Democracy in Dangerous Places (London: Vintage Books, 2010). A well researched and written book, it discusses in part the post civil war situation in the Ivory Coast (chapter Seven, Meltdown in Cote D’Ivoire) before the election fiasco months after publication. But it is on the whole a

comparative analysis not only of Africa but parts of Asia and Latin America.

Mauritius and Seychelles: Small is Beautiful.The optimism of an economy and a country’s growth could sometimes be found in the pleasant and confident expression of its people. If it is one coming from a diplomat, its deeper since they are normally mandated to be optimists under even confusing situations. In London, Daly, a friend who works with the elite foreign affairs First magazine as its Chief Operating Officer, had arranged for us to meet with the Mauritius High Commissioner, Abhimanu Kundasamy for a lunch discussion on his country. Being a member of the iconic RAC Club Mall near the Piccadily Circus in Central London, Daly ensured we indulged in as good a lunch as a useful conversation.

High Commissioner Kundasamy like most Mauritians ( estimated 70%) are of Indian descent and their physical characteristics show without any formal introduction. “We are confident of our future” he told me after we had deposisted our winter coats at the restaurant reception and settled down for lunch. “ We know what we want. The world is our ostrich.” I did not need to ask many questions to keep him talking. He was excited I could see. The middle age diplomat is convinced that Mauritius, a small Southwest Indian Ocean country that centuries ago was a ‘fuel’ station for European navigators and

traders on mission to Asia, is even bound by history and circumstance to play a bigger role in global affairs with its population of 1.2 million people according to estimates in 2007. When it gained its independence in 1968 from the British (after over centuries of Dutch and French colonial rule), it, like Singapore had no natural resources or needed global commodities with which to grow but its people.The economist and a protégé of John Maynard Keynes, James Meade like many people at the time was pessimistc of the island’s future: “ It is going to be a great achievement if the country can find productive employment for its population without a serious reduction in the existing standard of living… The outlook for peaceful development is weak….”

What happened in between Meade’s ( who became a Nobel laureate in economics and by the time of his observation a senior research fellow at Christ College, Cambridge University) pessimism and the overcome in High Commissioner Kundasamy’s posture 42 years on?

Of course, economists are not prophets. And nobody knows what tomorrom brings. Idle, intangible and non valued natural elements of yesterday could easily become economic assets for today’s global economy.

Kundasamy’s point only underlines the fact that influence in the globalization process in the twenty-first century has more

to do with non traditional European nations and attitudes as with new actors and emerging powers ; and that size does not matter. “ Negative signal of China’s involvement in Africa is interesting but it has to do with colonial interpretation of issues by some Europeans who think, this is our turf. But the Chinese when we sit down treat us as equal. In 10 years, China will provide more Aid to Africa than the G8….” He smiles as he picks the last morsel of roasted beef from his plate.

He can afford to be confident for much has changed in the country since the early 1990s. Of its population about 9% is in the agriculture and fisheries contrary to the development paradigm of higher population ration in much of the developing world; 30% is in the construction and industry ( and here we are talking of a stimulus of luxury buildings and apartments as holiday homes for the country’s growing middle class and foreigners in Europe and elsewhere); transportation and communication constitute 7% with trade, restaurants and hotels 22% of output; other services make 25% and finance 6%. The services sectors by 2007 was contributing over 70% of its GDP compared to most of Sub- Saharan Africa where it was 56%. Again in 2007, the Human Development Report of the UNDP ranked Mauritius as the best among sub-Saharan African countries with a GDP per capita of $5,807. In terms of governance and economic performance, it had receive similar accolades from the Moi Ibrahim Foundation.These

achievements have however not been through sole efforts or on the basis of earlier forms of imperial advantage as in Europe of old or through control of trade negotiations. Its been part and parcel of the influx of global re-alignments in trade such as applying the WTO Customs Valuation Agreement or the trade and Investment Agreement between it and the United States in 2006 . It gave it exclusivity and allowed Mauritius to do better in areas they have comparative advantage. This is in addition to its eligibility through the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act which since its establishment in 2000 by the Clinton Administration has allowed some African countries preferential access for imports . Though Mauritius is middle income and thus not poor enough as a beneficiary of AGOA, it has had 40% of textiles and apparel exported to the United States. These are measures that however have greater domestic growth influence underpinned by a high level of literacy and skillful labour, where over 80 % of the people own their homes as well as a health insurance system where life expectancy is over 80 years and is able where the facilities are not available to send patients abroad for treatment. In addition to this, it is becoming one of the best places in the world for medical tourism.

But these do not necessarily make it a paradise- at least not in the economic sense . Another Nobel laureate in economics who recently developed interest in the progress of this country, Joseph Stiglitz see behind this “miracle of social welfare” some

difficulties: “ The Mauritius Miracle dates to independence. But the country still struggles with some of its colonial legacies: inequality in land and wealth; as well as vulnerability to high-stakes global politics….” Thus on hindsight and with the advantage of time, what Meade saw as most unlikely in the mid 1960s could be classified as a miracle by Stiglitz.

When the High Commissioner said that , “ the world is our ostrich” it meant for me however, the pivotal role that this island nation whether by design, ambition or history wants to plays as a bridge between itself and Africa, Asia and the rest of the world. In Africa it belongs to COMESA, SADC AU, the Indian Ocean Rim-Assocation for Regional Cooperation, the Indian Ocean Commission and others. It has also signed since 2002 the Cotonou Agreement between the European Union and 78 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) States and in 2008 signed the Economic Partnership Agreements.

In June 2011, Mauritius strategy of making itself relevant as a gateway to Africa from Asia particularly India was clear and beyond forging bilateral links listed above. Finance Minister Pravind Jugnauth told Asian investors: “ …… You can use Mauritius to provide financial and legal services and structure your international investments, particularly into Africa…. Africa offers huge investment opportunities. This continent is set to become the next pioneer market. In this regard, Mauritius has

taken a number of measures to position itself as a good investment platform between Asia and Africa by signing several bilateral agreements with the main African countries…..”

Before this would even sink into the thinking of investors, the country had set up the Global Board of Trade (GBOT) in 2010, a multi-asset exchange that offers future trading in commodities and currency derivatives. It connects African bankers, brokers, traders and companies to a variety of global products. The GBOT is in effect to add value to products from Africa which as often are exported in their raw state and thus attracting less foreign exchange. It also embarks on massive education through capital market research by bringing in Africa’s intellectual capital market from abroad.(What African intellectual market can do is certainly not in doubt as has been witnessed in the setting up for example of Databank Financial Services in Ghana over two decades ago and the clean up of the financial sector in Nigeria in the last decade.)

The GBOT however takes inspiration from India- again Mauritius using both its cultural and ancestry connection for growth. “The income of farmers and various producers and exporters in India increased substantially after the establishment of the Multi-Commodity Exchange (MCX) of India, the world’s sixth largest commodity of futures exchange in terms of trading volumes, prompted by the Financial

Technologies (FT) Group. GBOT and its product offering, if understood well can bring similar advantages…..”

The interesting thing about Mauritius is, they do not talk about intentions and make promises to do good as many African governments do. They wait, set these intentions in motion and talk about them when there are tangible evidence to show for. When GBOT was launched in October 2010 a total of 418 contracts were traded for $10.72m on the first trading day by members in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. By July 2011 trading had reached a peak $65.24m

Mauritius’s intended leadership of the financial and business sectors in Africa is devoid of the vague rhetorics of continental union and Pan Africanist flourishes but delighted by more of what is likely to be achieved and help growth. It maybe hampered by among others its size and small economy but it is one small Africa country on rapid move.

High Commissioner in the course of the lunch tried me on a quizz: What country was Indonesia’s biggest foreign investor in 2008? As I was thinking of the Dutch because of colonial ties, Japan because of proximity or the US as the world biggest economy, he jumped in to say, it was Mauritius. I later found out that it invested $6.47 billion in Indonesia through its International Financial Centre operations.

2

The Bank of Ghana was established in 1957 as one of the sovereign institutions that came with been independent of British colonial administration. Before then Ghana was part of the colonial currency system, the West African Currency Board. It made things especially trading with Europe easier because we used the pound sterling and other convertibles. One of my disaapointments with the Nkrumah regime was the dissociation from the system as a new sovereighty( its likely that symbolism was a great delight to the newly independent) and later on when his Pan Africanism was at its preaching apex, the call for a common African market and currency, transport-through shipping and airlines, trade and military high command among others. What prevented him from consolidating and reforming some of these to match post-colonial rule? I understand though that to others that may smack interestingly of neo-colonial endorsements.

Mauritus like Ghana also had its central bank after independence in 1968 but as economic histories of countries have shown, troupes maybe tokenism sometimes and so Ghana’s first became irrelevant in this development sector. The financial sector in Mauritius’s economy is in a better shape even as the central banks of these countries, like many others elsewhere play a basic role: creating macroeconomic stability

and fashioning monetary policy to suit taste and circumstance- these days inflation targeting been a core pursuit.

I met withMahamudu Bawumia, a Ghanaian economist at the Movenpick- Ambassador Hotel in Accra in September 2011 for an afternoon tea and discussion. He had returned, like others of his generation from abroad and joined the Bank of Ghana rising in a short period- by 2000 to become its Deputy Governor in his late 40s. He is partly credited with reforms at the Central Bank having worked under Paul Acquah the governor who for decades was a respected economist at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC and had upon the request of then former President, Kufuor, come down to assume this position. Bawumia had also earlier in the late 1990s worked under then governor Kwabena Duffuor. Apart from this important public policy position he is also an academic whose research interest in monetary, financial sector development and development finance had allowed him to spend time, after he was forced to resign in 2009 from the Bank, as a Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of African Economics at Oxford. He had in earlier years studied at the University and obtained a PhD in economics from the Simon Fraser University in Canda. A brilliant economist ( not known as a politican) as his peers are quick to acknowledge, he suddenly became famous in Ghana not in a technocratic sense but as a vice presidential candidate of Nana Akufo Addo in Ghana’s

general election of 2008. Surprise by this choice from within his own NPP he lost his position as Deputy Governor of the Bank when the New Patriotic Party lost and the Opposition, NDC came to government in 2009. His going to Oxford as a researcher was primarily to write a book on Monetary Policy and Financial Sector Reform in Africa – Ghana’s Experience. Strangely l like his naivety in politics. Like me he is also interested in Mauritius and told me that the financial sector reforms in Ghana was “to get closer to where Mauritius is today.” They had even received technical assistance from the Mauritius Central Bank. Like it, Ghana did an amendment of its Banking Act again( originally there was the colonial Bank of Ghana Ordinance 1957, No.34 which established the independence of the Bank. Nkrumah however thought that the Central Bank was to help with development finance instead of being independent. In 1963 when Ghana’s economy was under severe pressure and less and less foreign reserves, he enacted the Bank of Ghana Act, 1963 (Act 182) which meant that the Bank had to operate by consulting the Government).There had since been other amendments and reforms.

The ones Bawumia was part had to do with these among others: generate competition which saw the setting up of Nigerian, Libyan, South African and Indian banks operating in Ghana. Interest rates came down, access to credit for small and medium sectors as well as big businesses were on the rise;

moderation of the pay system such that a cheque could clear in a day so people in Europe, Asia and elsewhere once in Ghana for business ; there was for instance the introduction of the e-zwich system and the redonominatin of the currency; reliable internet service .

“One of the reasons we for instance allowed in the foreign banks was we wanted to think globally; it was to ensure that traders going to South Africa, India …. will find it easy working with these banks because they have branches here.”

The area where Mauritius’s example was of great appeal to Ghana was however in financial center operations. Off-shore banking had attracted some negative connotation( tax evasion, money laundering and terrorist activities though Ghana had passed an anti-money laundering Act) but it was interested and got Barclays Bank to initiate one in Accra. The country felt, like Mauritius that it was in a position- geographically, legal system, time-zone, political stability, human skills to do this. When the new government got in in 2009, the project was abandoned.

“ I am sure they did not understand it.” Bawumia explained to me. But he admitted that Off-shore as a word had lost attraction and that International Financial Service or an International Financial Centre as in Mauritius, Singapore or London was more respectable. And the new government also had to fulfil a campaign promise of abolishing it because it was

suspecting it could be an avenue for campaign financing and political corruption by their opponents. “ We thought in terms of financial government it was good, it is internationally a good thing-licensed banks that had- that is why we were talking to big banks. We thought we had an advantage here- people financing activities within the sub-region could do so from here- that was why the change or preference to International Financial Centre………we thought we needed to put things in place- market was good in Singapore, London and Mauritius so we had to revamp the whole financial sector.”

3

Seychelles Islands is an Indian Ocean archipelago. The collection of 86 symbolized the era of Anglo-Saxon dominance in global affairs in the early twentieth century; a reminder also of the extent of empire and British imperial identity as far as across the Indian Ocean. If it was the imperial post of the British it was also a bitter memorial of the dispossession of cultures and peoples, especially anti-colonial leaders from their peripheries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. With a population of less than 100,000 and reflective of its history-once colonised by France in 1768, it was seized by the British in 1794 when it was part of Mauritius until 1903. Seychelles

became independent in June 1976. 90 percent Catholics and 8 percent Anglicans they speak French, English and Creole.

Referred to by a political scientist, Salabert in 1994 as “a prison without bars”, it received anti colonial leaders from the empire who had either engaged the British in war or given them troubles in the colonies .They included, the Sultan of Perak, Malaysia, Abdullah Jaafar Morathan in 1877 for precipitating war with the British and killing an officer, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus exiled in 1956 on charges of encouraging terrorism as leader of Greek Cypriots when he pressed for independence from Britain, Afif Didi of the Maldives, kings from Uganda, Mwanga and Kabarega, leaders from Palestine, Malawi, Somalia, Zanzibar, Egypt and the longest exile of all, Nana Agyeman Prempeh I, king of Asante, part of modern day Ghana who was exiled for 27 years from 1896.

In 2000 I travelled to the Seychelles. Two things had taken me there. The first, to use the more cultural term, searching for roots- the origins of my extended family’s perceived aristocracy in the 1950s.My maternal great grandfather- Kwame Boatin became a sub- chief to the king of Asante or Asantehene, Kwaku Dua Panin (1834-1867) and Asantehene, Kofi Karkari (1867-1874); he also became a diplomat travelling to the future capital Accra, and the coast, Cape Coast and eventually London to negotiate or prevent confrontation with the British who

intended invading Asante and thus making it part of its colonial enclave. Asante became a British protectorate under Nana Prempeh I. The British even after this agreement invaded and had war in 1896. They decided to exile King Prempeh, his mother, wives and some of his chiefs to the Seychelles island.

Kwame Boatin was one of the chiefs. On the exile journey abroad the SS Darkwa in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Paul Boatin my grandfather was born in 1900. His other brothers and a sister –George, Henry, Harold, William, Thomas and Regina were born in the Seychelles subsequently . Kwame Boatin himself died in the Seychelles in 1918 and as it was the case his children under British government arrangement were brought to Ghana.

Delighted to be on the islands, I walked through Mahe, the biggest of them and could see the changed architectural designs that were homes to the Sultan of Perak, Kings Mwanga and Kabarega from Uganda.

Interest in my visit to the islands was shown by the current king of Asante, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II when I first discussed it with him in late 1999. (My late father, Joseph Agyeman-Duah for over 40 years resident historian at the palace and formerly of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana was seen as an authority on Asante history. He had exchanged in the 1970s, his right of succession to the silver stool of Mampong, the

second most powerful king of Asante, to become an Anglican priest having also studied theology up to a doctorate level. That gave me some added contact and connection to contemporary Asante authority and affairs).

The king felt my visit would re-establish contact with the descendants there and also with the government. He personally supported the visit and gave me a gift (the Denkkyem Kye, the emblem of the Royal House of Asante and a photo of his recent coronation as the 16th king or occupant of the Golden Stool, the symbol of his office) and a hand-written letter for President France- Albert Rene. In the absence of the President who had, someone told me gone to the Middle East for weeks to see to his personnel businesses, I met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeremie Bonnelame for the presentation . Interestingly, the country was preparing for the centenary of the exile of King Prempeh and the Yaa Asantewaa War of 1900, the last Anglo-Asante war led on the Asante side by a queen of Ejisu (a small town in Asante) who was also sent to the islands after Asante’s defeat. She died 21 years later.

“If the king of Asante can join us in this celebration, it will be fantastic.” The foreign minister said.

“I will convey this to him. Since he is eager to re-establish ties, I am sure he will take this official request seriously.” I responded.

The seriousness of the request was reflected in the following day’s newspapers which had photographs of the minister and I and what I was in the Seychelles to do.

I also met with the Archbishop of the St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Mahe where King Prempeh and other exiles were converted and baptized from the early 1900s. The church authorities had been generous and waited for me for weeks to film the building and its interior before expansion work could start. I had also visited the archives to do photo-copies of birth certificates of my grandfathers and other notable exiles as well as met and had conversations with a very eccentric Indian, Kantilal Jivan Shah, a friend of the late Mother Teresa who still has as part of his art collection, a Kuduo (an ancient vessel belonging to King Prempeh) and a wooden stool.

I had earlier filmed the house that King Prempeh lived in in southern Victoria (the capital). In Mahe, I could not tell the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation crew I was working with, what to film and what not to film; in a country whose natural topography, surrounding sea and mighty rocks, the vistas of whose blue-sky-line only disappears for rocky caves to emerge.

Like blacks in the United States, some people here like hyphenated identification ; Afro-Seychellois to play on their Africa origins least they be taken for people with Indian, Caribbean or one of the other multi-ethnic groups here. The

reason race matters here, J.C. Mahoune, an anthropologist explained had to do with the fact that, it is typical to have a mother with four children but different racial fathers- a black, a Chinese, a French and Indian.

And yet the people see themselves as a family. The middle class is structured more on the basis of hard work, good education and excellence –an opened opportunity course but whites are wealthier than blacks or people of mixed races. My kind hosts, Mary Prempeh Mamba, her husband and four children (descendants of King Prempeh still living on the island) who will not let me stay in a hotel are part of this middle class. It would be they who would take me to where their auntie, Huguette Prempeh lived in Rochon in Mahe. Huguette in her 80s was a direct grandchild of King Prempeh and was surprise to find her dressed in a typical Asante old age dress of ‘Kaba’ which I am told was more of her dress mark. Though repatriated to Ghana with her children (of a Seychellois father), she left them in Kumasi in the care of other family members she was introduced to. She has since lived here. I remembered her because she used to come and see my grandfather Paul when I was very young. We also attend the same St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Kumasi with her half-cast children and grand-children. She could still speak the Asante Twi. She was however not of good health and lived in isolation. Though Mary had requested several times she should join them in their beautiful house, she

had refused. Delighted to see someone from Kumasi, she relapsed into a melancholic mood after we have had a long conversation. I gave her a small present and as I was leaving her eyes were wet.

The poet and the hymnist, Isaac Watts indeed song for all ages past and the hope for the future :

“Time, like an ever rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.”

An Asante proverb of nostalgia also reflect her countenance at this point: we remember the departed at the spot or place we all use to concregate.

Four years after my visit, though I had been in contact with Mary, I phoned this time from Washington, DC to find out how Hugetee was doing and was told she passed away three days earlier at 87. When I called her children in Kumasi, they were preparing for the one week funeral rites. It had been decided that she be buried in the Seychelles.

3

As an island it is expensive to live here. Everything is virtually imported. The first few days before my host took me home, I

was paying 65 dollars a day for a hotel room without a TV and phone. I was shown a plot of land that was 120x20 for $20,000 dollars and it would cost over $50,000 to complete a modest house of three small bedrooms. For everything apart from sand, would have an import label. Without any natural resources and even today with an economy built on tourism, food processing and fisheries, it could only be used by the British for punishment of those who had and would resist their exploitation.

But like Botswana and Mauritius, small economies and less populated, it is governed well. The GDP per capital is $11,117. It ranks well in the accounting of the UNDP Human Development report and the Moi Ibrahim Index for good governance since it was instituted some few years ago as well as doing well on the Transparency International ranking on corruption.

In a book that is partly revisionist oriented, a justification of colonial rule in some respect (not solely with grabbing of natural resources and political control), Niall Ferguson’s controversial but well written book, Empire -How Britain Made The Modern World, he writes :

“Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different

economies around the world. Those empires that adopted alternative models-the Russian and the Chinese- imposed incalculable misery on their subject people. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of the states in the world…”

Ferguson who at the time of the publication in 2004 was professor of International History at Harvard University and a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford further writes:

“Consider too the role of the British Empire in facilitating capital export to the less developed world. Although some measures of international integration seem to suggest that the 1990s saw greater cross-border capital flows than the 1890s, in reality much of today’s overseas investment goes on within the developed world. In 1996 only 28 percent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1913 the proportion was 63 percent.”

In other words, British colonial rule was not all about benefits to Empire but how a country like Seychelles owns its modernity to that encounter.

4

I always wondered what my grandfathers brought up in mixed influences of French, English and Indian cultures in Mahe,

thought about such arguments- empire, identity and colonial societies. They who had been given such English names at their baptism. Paul Boatin died when I was too young to consciously ask such intriguing questions. The last of them, Thomas died in 2008 at 96 years. But they were (like the few dozen others repatriated from the 1920s to Asante) never seen as well integrated. And they themselves perhaps also felt isolated with their love for plants, garden, tea-parties, cricket, the BBC World Service and their evening walks to the palace of the king of Asante. When King Prempeh himself returned in 1924, he was already an Anglican convert with the baptismal name of Edward and hence the Asante royalty would be Anglican. His children like the Boatins who also settled at Ashanti New Town close to each other’s house also bore the same biblical/ English names- Henry, William, Joseph, Grace and the like. They would become leading lawyers in Kumasi and the eldest Henry an Appeal Court Judge, first Chancellor of the St. Cyprian Anglican Cathedral with his brother William as Registrar at one time . They carried themselves in high esteem and respected their countenance . Henry’s dead wish had been like a notable Englishman of good accomplishment be interred at the Cathederal of his co-founding St. Cyprian the Martyr in Kumasi.

The Boatin brothers never forgot lessons of modernity they brought along. After their education in Kumasi and at the

Achimota School in Accra, they became educationists and public administrators in the newly independent Ghana.

Paul Boatin was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth for his services to the king of Asante and public service to Ghana. When he died he was succeeded in these services by his brother, Henry Boatin. William who was once the resident director of the Institute of Adult Education and what was also called the Institute of Extra Mural Studies in Kumasi (a branch of the University of Ghana) also gave cricket commentaries; his best day in life could probably be when he was the designated protocol guide and Master of Ceremony by the King of Asante in 1977 at the visit to Kumasi of the Prince of Wales, Charles ; Harold Boatin an educationist was also very fluent in French and its civilization ( Kwame Nkrumah’s classmate at Achimota) he was made Ghana’s Ambassador to Guinea in 1957. Thomas went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to study and to teach and to the University of Durham in the mid 1940s; by the 1960s he had joined the West Africa Examination Council in Freetown and became the first Ghanaian head of its office in Accra. Their only sister Regina, died young. They introduced many Anglican practices including Paul’s formation of St. Mary’s Guide in Kumasi and later Thomas (on retirement), the co-founder of St. Anthony Anglican Church in Accra. In 1981 the French government awarded Thomas the CHEVALIER DE L’ORDRE DE

PALMES ACADEMIQUES for his contribution to French culture and civilization in Africa including the setting up of the Alliance Françoise d’ Accra. Thomas also co-founded the freemasonry, Asanteman Lodge with Paul. They spoke Asante Twi with ascent but a lot of English and I guess when they wanted to gossip about others the Creole or French. They were more comfortable in suite than traditional wear-‘ntama’.

Other historians and writers have followed and assessed the impact that these British exiles had on their return to the colonies. Archbishop Makarios would become the first President of Cyprus after his exile years; Mwanga II who was also exiled with the King of Bunyoro Kitata Kingdom (in today’s modern Uganda) in 1899 died there in 1903 and the remains returned to his people in 1910; Abdullah Jaafar Moratham, the Sultan of Perak finally returned after 18 years as did the others.

When I think of Ferguson’s first quoted argument and the values of my grandfathers and their contribution to Asante and Ghana, I feel there is a sense in which some indirect impact of colonial rule was of essence for a future globalization of thoughts and liberal institutions: western education which for over centuries have dominated global scholarship, democracy and its affiliate institutions which are part and parcel of global governance arrangement, belief in Jesus and Christianity which

straddle the globe, the BBC still the world’s most reliable radio broadcaster.

In the case of Abdullah Jaafar Moratham, he fell in love with Seychelles classical music and especially “Ma Rosalie”one of the songs he endlessly enjoyed listening to and which would define the identity of Perak on his return. The borrowed tune became the national anthem of Perak. It eventually became the national anthem of independent Malaysia in 1957.

King Prempeh when he returned and restored as king against the agreement with the British (a condition for reparation in 1924 been that he would not be king), indirectly abolished ‘human sacrifice’ for occasional rituals in Asante and instead live stock for the same rituals. This had been influenced by his Anglican faith as were other rituals which he thought had outlived their usefulness.

But these were more of by-products of colonial objective then its meaning. These exiled years no matter the longetivity of absence did not diminish the faith of the subjects. All of them came back though with some level of liberal dispositions which mingled well with their old traditions as shown above. The destruction of traditional systems which the British had anticipated in their absence survived them but the secondary anticipation of “western modernity” was successful to a degree.

The meaning of empire had been as it was- voyages to find sea routes to Asia and Africa and the Americas; to promote private British enterprises be it through the East Indian Company with authorization from Queen Victoria or not; to force if need be trade relations and to determine the terms; crash any resistance to it and possibly kill to the glory of rule Britannia!!

Epilogue

These essays have been written with an optimism about Africa’s progress as we get into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The major drafts were written within a four month period from October 2010 to February 2011. I do not know if the historical confrontations dealt with here and the contemporary interpretation given, as well as the sketches and the witness I bear is indeed deserving of this optimism. For often the emerging good in the narrations seem to lie side by side with the discomfort of high political theatrics: a fictional truth in Ivory Coast, the failure of Somalia and emergence of the al-shabab an Ismamic sect which threatens the country’s already failed stature; the case of Boko Haram in Nigeria which by 2012 was advocating for Sahria Law and making martyrs out of Christians in especially northern Nigeria; the still abyss situation in the Congo which surprisingly has not overcome the ancient observation of Joseph Conrad’s A Heart of Darkness (still in the volatility in the Great Lake Region) or what another travel writer of my generation, Tim Butcher correspondent for the Daily Telegraph described in his 2007 book, Blood River as the “broken heart of Africa”; the intransigence in Zimbabwe and the somehow inability of regional bodies like ECOWAS, SADC and the AU itself to deal decisively with these.

Within this incongruity it is still a transition of a sort- the soldiers or military dictatorships and mafias are giving way since the 1990s. They may change clothes or in other designs (including supervising elections in which they are contestants) to a sometimes semblance of democracy ; one of interpretation of constitutions, bad electoral laws, in other words, rigging of elections.

But the seeming bad cases are like rose flowers and their thorns. The Ivory Coast- the world’s leading producer of cocoa, the Congo- the richest natural resource constituency in Africa and even Somalia (in its three halves) was once the most literate state in Africa under Siad Barre; Eritrea, the Comoros. If it is not visible challenges of governance in civil wars, post-conflict situations in others, it is combinations of these, scarcity of food in environmentally depressed places like Ethiopia or rural parts of northern Ghana or Kenya. These are only examples of multitude of governance issues in the 53 nation continent .

If we however look at the bottlenecks that these present us, we lose what Africa is or capable of as it becomes increasingly part and parcel of the global processes in the century.

In June 2010, The McKinsey Global Institute published its Africa research report, Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential

of African Economies. The continent in the first decade of the century fared this way:

a) $1.6 trillion- Africa’s collective GDP in 2008, roughly equal to Brazil or Russia’s.

b) $860 billion- Africa’s combined consumer spending in 2008.

c) $316 million- the number of new phone subscribers signed up in Africa since 2000.

d) 60% is Africa’s share of the world’s total amount of uncultivated, arable land.

e) 52% is the number of African cities with more than 1 million people each.

f) 20 % is the number of African companies with revenues of at least $3 billion.

In the report’s projection of Africa’s tomorrow-the future, these were it:

a) $2.6 trillion will be Africa collective GDP in 2020.b) $1.4trillion will be Africa’s consumer spending in 2020.c) 1.1billion the number of Africans of working age in 2040.d) 128 million the number of African households with

discretionary income in 2020e) 50% will be the portion of Africans living in cities by 2030.

The report had grouped a good number of countries including those in this book into Transition Economies- having lower GDP

per capita but growing rapidly. They are different from Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia that are Diversified Economies and again from Pre-Transition Economies that are very poor with GDP of just $350 but also growing rapidly. These include Mali, the Congo and Ethiopia.

The report says, “Africa long-term growth also will increasingly reflect international social and demographic trends that are creating new engines of domestic growth. Chief among these are urbanization and the rise of the middle-class African consumers. In 1980, just 28 percent of Africans lived in cities. Today, 40 percent do-a portion close to China’s and larger than India’s- and this share is projected to increase.”

Whilst these projections and statistics are reliable, they do not of themselves speak to a glorious future of happiness. Growth of middle class and consumer spending could be ambiguous. Are the consumption patterns going to be goods and services produced largely in Africa? If not and the incomes are rather spent on imported goods from outside- canned food, vegetables, rice, fisheries, poultry in the numerous foreign owned malls springing up all over the cities in Africa then what type of growth does Africa get? The truth is that some of these acquired cosmopolitan tastes and fashion will see Africa adding more to global growth (through international trade in commodities) then their domestic ones and only increasing

urban- rural poverty if policies are not in place to steer it in certain directions . If its farm produces are not in these malls but rot on the streets and farm houses, because the growth is not one that affect its industrial and agricultural sector, again Africa loses.

Whilst it is good that Africa now gets the attention and is the subject of economic research by such global institutions, it is within Africa’s court to direct how these opportunities; inevitable integration of the world benefits it.

Within the same period that the MGI report came out in 2010, The Chatham House (probably Europe’s most influential think thank) in June, published its own, Our Common Strategic Interests- Africa’s Role in the Post-G8 World. Established as The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, it created its Africa Programme only in 2003 and since then has made it relevant to the discussions of global affairs. The report is also true when it says, “Africa has never been in such a strong bargaining position in international affairs, with increasing numbers of suitors.”

On the continent itself, civil society awareness with a large range of media-orthodox- newspapers and magazines, FM stations, independent television, social (internet, twitter, face book) and mobile phones are registering their own phenomenal growth. For of the 6,480 think tanks spread around the globe in

2010 according to Think Tanks and Civil Societies Programme of the University of Pennsylvania and published in 2011, Africa’s share is a progressive 548 - 8% over-runing North Africa and Middle East as well as Oceania.

The western media may have their powers of influence and hundreds of millions of audiences globally but there is space in much of Africa now for their independent media to help debate and act on the doings of recalcitrant leaders and in some cases help with successful elections as has been the case in Ghana since 1992. In Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya especially but in many other places also, dozens of public policy institutions are looking at economic development, security, local government, banking and non banking financial institutions(capital markets and local investment more then at any time since independence) .

When Ghana needed about 750 million dollars in 2007 it went(not to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund where there would have been issues of justification of what it wanted to do with it and some conditions to fulfil) but to the capital markets. With its B plus rating by Standards and Poors’ and Fitch, it got oversubscribed three times for what it needed to finance infrastructure development. When Nigeria at the beginning of 2011 needed billions of dollars for similar exercise, there were hue and cry in the international media about its bad

address and how over 14 billions dollars had been stolen from its treasury by osentibly the same politicians who wanted credit from the markets. The bad publicity notwithstanding, Nigeria got more then it needed. The time has even come when bad news is analysised more for its economic possibilities then the value of its journalism internationally.

It is the effect of this side of Africa that gives optimism; a side largely in the hands and influence of the private sector. High political drama may survive this decade but slowly it’s time to die will come as everything else does. But at the end it is dignity that counts. And it is that which should be Africa’s biggest indulgence. Naipaul maybe controversial in many ways but not all even in the fictious sense of his character as in, A Bend in the River. For whether as individuals or collective ideal called state or nation, he was right: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

About the Book

Africa- A Miners’ Canary Into the Twenty-first Century (Essays on Economic Governance) is a collection looking at Africa from the perspective of one who has travelled the Continent. It looks mainly at the first decade of the twenty-first century and deals with issues of economic governance. From the regional points of the continent, this travelogue looks at the political class and economic development from as small an island country like the Seychelles to medium one like the Ivory Coast and an emerging economy such as South Africa’s. Presidents and Prime Ministers as well as opposition leaders, working class champions and peasants are encountered and their varying views of lives reflected. It is at once a complete departure of travelogues of natural histories and nature.

The writer, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, travelling in the company of a former African leader- John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana and sometimes alone, discusses and profiles such issues as : what a first woman president in Africa could do and not do in Liberia; the sainthood of Mandela’s post-apartheid rule and the philosophy of kingship witnessed in the succession of Thabo Mbeki and the effects of such transition on South Africans; in Facing Mount Kenya for instance, he discusses one country two

economies - the Nairobi economy and the non- modern one of nomads and the Maasei and looks at public policy as a craft in the hands of its first President Jomo Kenyatta and how it contributed to its current state; he also looks at how to re-build a beautiful country like Rwanda from a post-genocide ideology as well as a re-visitation of the famous West –Africa wager- the different but interesting paths to development undertaken by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast and the results five decades after; Mauritius and Seychelles are subjected to the relative comfort of managing small economies as well as the role of romance to growth. And above all, how the British empire in particular, and other European colonizing forces in the 19th century helped shape the identities of these peoples and countries.

About the Author

Ivor Agyeman-Duah, founder of the Centre for Intellectual Renewal, a cultural economy and development think-tank in Ghana has been a writer since his 20s initially for Panos Institute and West Africa magazine in London. As documentary film maker, he was part of the production team for the BBC and PBS documentaries, Into Africa and Wonders of the African World presented by the Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; served as a production advisor on Ampitheatre of Death, an Africa and Arabian slave trade documentary presented by the Nigerian Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka; as well as the producer of the acclaimed, Yaa Asantewaa: Heroism of an African Queen.

He has written extensively on economic histories and development in Africa and East Asia and is author of nine books among them two edited anthologies, An Economic History of Ghana (2008); Pilgrims of the Night- Development Challenges and Opportunities in Africa(2010).

He has held fellowships at the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for Africa and African American research at Harvard University and

a Hilary and Trinity resident scholar at Exeter College, Oxford. Agyeman-Duah was also the second African to be awarded a Centre for Regional Economic Studies Fellowship by the Korean Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul. He holds an Msc in International Relations and Economic Development from the London School of Economics and an Msc in Economic Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.