Saving Africa!

The Word, the one Word!

2010-12-16T09:46:00.000+02:00

And yet another thing…

The Word, the one Word!

The ideas that you, my three and a half regular readers, have been encountering here, present a major problem in communication. This business about Africa’s cultural heritage crippling the continent cannot be put into sound bites. The arguments are not readily accessible in the sense that people look at them and say ‘Of course’. If they had then I would not need to write whole books about the invisible cultural chasms that separate the developed peoples of this planet from those of Africa. The arguments would be as familiar as the two times table, inculcated from childhood, and Africa would be, well, more like South America.

So I have been hunting for years for the one word which could act as a launch pad into the whole complicated story, embracing all the aspects and consequences. And it has been there all the time. For it is this word -

URBANISATION

My slender existing readership may not need much education on just how tremendously important this phenomenon is. But for the benefit of those who stumble accidentally on the blog and are about to click away from it, just bear with me. I’ll keep the argument to bullet points

· The populations of cities in countries with poor soils and erratic rainfall – i.e. African countries - cannot be fed by the subsistence farmers around them

· So Africa needs either commercial agriculture or food aid

· But food aid (which is still growing - in the last two years South Africa has become a net food importer) cannot be a permanent solution

· Yet commercial agriculture needs serious capital, which will not be forthcoming without being backed by security of some sort

· The only sort of security that is practical is the title to the land (try and think of another)

· But Africa, with (again) its poor soils and erratic rainfall, has a culture of semi-nomadism arising from pastoralism and slash and burn agriculture, requiring movable assets - wives and children and livestock

· These cultural desirables are proliferating because modern medicine – mainly national immunisation aid schemes – is causing the population of humans and livestock to exceed the carrying capacity of its land, driving them from their rural areas

· And so urbanisation – and in Africa it is a catastrophe.

For this sort is not the pull-urbanisation arising from the creation of jobs in the cities. It is push-urbanisation, where pauperised people squat on land without title to it and without the incentive to improve their insecure hovels. No title deeds, no money.

And hence slums, the universal feature of African cities.

Ten years ago in the World Bank’s World Development Report for 1999/2000 there was a mystified comment on urbanisation in Africa. City growth in Africa is the fastest in the world, yet this is urbanisation without economic growth, something that has not happened anywhere else. The writers did not understand why this was so, but now perhaps you can.

Poverty…Nuts!

2010-09-23T16:25:00.000+02:00

23 September 2010

Remembering the sanitised reply to the German demand for surrender given by General McAuliffe at Bastogne in November 1944, perhaps the time has come to say quite explicitly, ‘balls to poverty’. For it is ridiculous that the simple, obvious and unfailing solution to poverty is continually disregarded. The only reason for Africa not moving into the type of universal middle-class is the lack of political will to give its citizens full ownership rights of the land that they are, more often than not, squatting upon.

My readers know how I bang on about this, but what they may not know is how became aware of this great void in the economies of Africa. It came about because I was fortunate enough to be in the mining industry of the one country on the continent that had simple, unequivocal rules for obtaining mining claims – negotiable property rights.

I had grown up in the then Rhodesia assuming – as most of us did – that the ‘find it and it’s yours’ and ‘use it or lose it’ rule for mineral deposits applied generally elsewhere. Wrong! The law in other countries in Africa generally divided miners into two types; local ones who were regarded as incapable of being able to do more than scrabble at surface resources, and foreign ones who would come in and do the real thing. So the mining law was split into two, with the discoveries of the first, local, prospectors liable to be taken from them if they found something that was of a size to be worthy of foreign interest. No mineral property rights for locals.

Yet the free trading of mineral rights is essential if a vigorous mining industry is to develop. The popular view is that geologists find a mine, the miners mine it until the ore is all gone and then it shuts down for good. In fact almost no mines follow this simple, plodding, pattern. Almost no mines are built by the finders and almost no mines have resources which are fully known or understood before they start up. There is an average of perhaps half a dozen transfers of ownership, from prospectors to developers to miners before the money can be raised to build a mine. Very frequently the scale of the resource turns out to be much bigger or, sometimes, much smaller than expected and so the mine is greatly enlarged or diminished. But then the vagaries of the market may lead it to close, and then reopen again, a process repeated perhaps several times until – usually much, much later than anybody imagined at the start – the ore is finally exhausted bar a very low grade remnant…and then the metal price moves up again to new heights and people start wondering if it will be worth going back down to see if anything more can be found, and then a geologist comes up with a new theory about how the ore got there in the first place which, if true, means there will be much more to be found after all…

From a government’s point of view this process, based on the cupidity of mankind and being messy, uncontrolled, unpredictable and above all risky is immensely distasteful, if only because there will be failures and the government might get blamed. “You let these ignoramuses attempt to mine a valuable resource belonging to the state, and now they have gone bust and their employees (who are, these days, voters!) have not been paid. It is all your fault. What are you going to do about it?”

So governments in countries without a mining culture – without an example of a vigorous industry with big and small, rich and poor mines and the villages, towns and cities that have arisen around them - tend to get involved in mining in all the wrong ways, deciding what is to be mined, by whom and where, needing evidence of the technical and financial capabilities of the investors, wanting the resources proven up before mining starts, demanding that environmental impact studies and environmental management plans and closure plans be submitted and discussed and approved and with a significant government representation on the board, if not a substantial ‘free ride’. From their point of view it is much better that only big, solid, mining companies who build big solid mines come to their country, preferably with government officials on their local boards, who can be trusted not to take risks that could embarrass everybody. But best of all the government, who knows best, should allow there to be only one mining company in the country, its own. Hence Gécamines and a host of lesser failures – Stamico in Tanzania, the State Gold Mines in Ghana, ZCCM in Zambia and so on.

The analogies with private land property rights are direct. Countries where these rights are either held by the government (Tanzania, Mozambique, Eritrea and so on) or where the equivalent of the land title registration office is a run-down and corrupt part of the government system (just about everywhere else) are awash with poverty. As I have noted elsewhere, you can always tell a poor country by looking down a street there – the absence of the ‘For Sale’ signs of estate agents (realtors). Indeed, the absence, anyway, of estate agents.

The poor may always be with us, but absolute, desperate, poverty is unnecessary. There is great wealth there, waiting to be unlocked. So shout it out loud – ‘Balls to Poverty!’

And yet another thing…

2010-06-27T10:42:00.002+02:00

The Word, the one Word!

The ideas that you, my three and a half regular readers, have been encountering here, present a major problem in communication. This business about Africa’s cultural heritage crippling the continent cannot be put into sound bites. The arguments are not readily accessible in the sense that people look at them and say ‘Of course’. If they had then I would not need to write whole books about the invisible cultural chasms that separate the developed peoples of this planet from those of Africa. The arguments would be as familiar as the two times table, inculcated from childhood, and Africa would be, well, more like South America.

So I have been hunting for years for the one word which could act as a launch pad into the whole complicated story, embracing all the aspects and consequences. And it has been there all the time. For it is this word -

URBANISATION

My slender existing readership may not need much education on just how tremendously important this phenomenon is. But for the benefit of those who stumble accidentally on the blog and are about to click away from it, just bear with me. I’ll keep the argument to bullet points

• The populations of cities in countries with poor soils and erratic rainfall – i.e. African countries - cannot be fed by the subsistence farmers around them

• So Africa needs either commercial agriculture or food aid

• But food aid (which is still growing - in the last two years South Africa has become a net food importer) cannot be a permanent solution

• Yet commercial agriculture needs serious capital, which will not be forthcoming without being backed by security of some sort

• The only sort of security that is practical is the title to the land (try and think of another)

• But Africa, with (again) its poor soils and erratic rainfall, has a culture of semi-nomadism arising from pastoralism and slash and burn agriculture, requiring movable assets - wives and children and livestock

• These cultural desirables are proliferating because modern medicine – mainly national immunisation aid schemes – is causing the population of humans and livestock to exceed the carrying capacity of its land, driving them from their rural areas

• And so urbanisation – and in Africa it is a catastrophe.

For this sort is not the pull-urbanisation arising from the creation of jobs in the cities. It is push-urbanisation, where pauperised people squat on land without title to it and without the incentive to improve their insecure hovels. No title deeds, no money.

And hence slums, the universal feature of African cities.

Ten years ago in the World Bank’s World Development Report for 1999/2000 there was a mystified comment on urbanisation in Africa. City growth in Africa is the fastest in the world, yet this is urbanisation without economic growth, something that has not happened anywhere else. The writers did not understand why this was so, but now perhaps you can.

THE LONG TRAGEDY

2010-03-20T10:26:00.001+02:00

Things in Africa are seldom what they seem. When the distinguished Afrikaans soldier, author and politician, Deneys Reitz wrote No Outspan in 1943, telling of his political career and adventures in South Africa between the wars, much of the book was about the ‘racial question’. Confusingly, this referred to the still-fraught interactions between the English- and Afrikaans-speakers in that country. If his book had mentioned the future of white-black relationships – and it is a measure of how remote the possibility of black rule seemed at the time that it did not – the issue would have been described as the ‘native question’.
In 1923 the then Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department began publishing an annual review. Its origins give it a convenient acronym, NADA, and right from the start it was something of a platform for frustrated philosophers on the ‘native question’. In that first issue, out of twenty-one articles no less than five argued for the introduction of private land tenure for Africans.

A particularly contentious matter was the Clause 43 problem. Rhodesia had been granted ‘Responsible Government’ in that first year of NADAs appearance, under a constitution that included the principle of equal rights in land purchase. That was all right when the country was run as a business. However, from now on the ‘native question’ would be under the responsibility of British politicians who had constituencies who were clearly ignorant of Africa and who might influence their representatives into adopting dangerously liberal views. Something had to be done about Clause 43.

What was done was the Land Apportionment Act. 83 ‘Native reserves’ had been created by the BSA Company in 1920, covering about 21.5 million acres, or about 22% of the country. At the time they were inhabited by (the precision is impressive) 675,499 people. However, while the reserves were under communal black occupation, clause 43 now allowed Africans as well as Europeans to own land anywhere outside these. So in 1930 the Land Apportionment Act was promulgated which split the country racially in land-holding terms. To the native reserves was added 8 million acres of what became known as ‘purchase lands’ where Africans could buy and sell land in relatively large areas. However, the door for widespread private property ownership throughout the country, with its immense wealth-generating potential, was shut.

Twenty five years later the rock was meeting the hard place. A combination of fifty years of peace and the limited spread of improved sanitation and medicine upon a culture organised for intensive procreation meant that the population in the middle of the century was roughly five times that at its beginning. In 1902 with a population of 500,000 it was estimated that the average carrying capacity of the country on a slash-and-burn basis was about 20 persons per square mile. Now, in the mid-fifties, with a population of 2.5 million, such subsistence activity would require 125,000 square miles of a country whose total surface area was only about 150,000 square miles. More, whereas the cattle count in 1902 was about 55,000, it reached 2 million in the 1940s. The hoe economy of the beginning of the century had been largely replaced by ploughs and draught power; fifty years later there were 150,000 ploughs in use, described by one crusty contributor to NADA as ‘the most devastating implement that could be put into the hands of a primitive people’.

Yet remarkably, again according to NADA, the damage to the environment that overpopulation was causing was accompanied by a massive increase in food output from what were to be known as the Tribal Trust Lands and the African Purchase Areas:
Product % of Country Output in 1951

Small grains (sorghum, rapoko, millet) 97

Gound nuts 95

Beef 58

Wheat 57

Maize 52

Ground peas and beans 80

Cotton 54
In 1957, when there were 193,000 Europeans and 2,350,000 Africans, the effect of the Land Apportionment Act was to give the following distribution of land availability:

:Square Miles % of Country

European Areas 81,230 53.5

African Reserves 52,966 34.9

African Purchase Areas 12,580 8.3

Forest Area 4,984 3.3

Totals 151,849 100.0

The last NADA was published in April 1979 when the Muzorewa government was imminent. The editorial suggested how unprepared it was for a world turned upside down:

By the time this edition is published the black majority rule Government will be in power. Hopefully the war will be diminishing… I am sure of two important factors which are firstly, that chieftainship is indestructible and is wholly necessary and secondly, that an administration which understands the Rhodesian black man is indispensable. …The mundane day to day recovery and maintenance of the wide range of minor infrastructure which is so essential to tribal life will once again, as it should, be left to the District Commissioner and his staff at ‘grass roots’ level.

Now we, all of us, black and white, are reaping the whirlwind of the long tragedy of the land.

SOME LIKED IT HOT….

2009-12-31T08:22:00.001+02:00

This is a very much updated article of mine from the Institute of Director’s magazine, Direct Report, in 2004. It in turn was drawn largely from a chapter in my book A Great Deal of Nonsense entitled Some Like It Hot. It seems that the chickens observed back then are coming home to roost in a big way.

Global warming = Big Money
Global warming is now one of the largest recipients of government research money in the world. It has gained an apparently unstoppable momentum, keeping an army of people in comfortable employment and financing research, journals, conferences and international travel. It also fills acres of newsprint and blog space, like this. So what is the truth?

The first thing to understand about global warming is that, all else being equal, increased carbon dioxide emissions from mankind’s activities will make the biosphere hotter. The carbon dioxide in the air has increased from 275 parts per million by volume at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century to 365 parts per million now, an increase of about one part in ten thousand. Carbon dioxide levels have never been as high as this in the 400,000 years of information now available (mainly from Arctic and Antarctic ice core samples). This is a ‘greenhouse gas’, that is it absorbs outgoing infrared radiation reflected back from the sun's heating of the earth's surface, and bounces it back again.

Yet it appears that only the surface temperature may have risen, and then only in certain areas. Stevenson Screens, those familiar white louvered boxes at meteorological stations, measure this temperature and these showed that a global warming of about 0.4°C occurred in the last twenty years of the 20th century. What was puzzling, however, was that neutral figures were obtained for North America, Western Europe and Australia. However, in tropical areas and Siberia the surface and satellite results diverged, with the surface records showing warming. Yet satellite and balloon checks did not bear out this warming. It is suspected that this phenomenon is because many Stevenson Screens in the third world have been surrounded by their rapidly growing cities, which give a known and marked heating phenomenon, the Urban Heat Island Effect. The conclusion is that the troposphere - the bottom layer of the atmosphere - does not seem to have warmed hardly at all.

Is the Planet Really Warming?
If you would like to get the basic data as derived from satellite observations go to -
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

The scientists responsible for collating this data (Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy of The University of Alabama) have this to say about the attempts to limit carbon dioxide emissions:

“While the approximately 0.14 C per decade of global warming seen in the satellite data is minor compared to the scale of some past climate shifts, it reminds us that the natural processes of climate change have not stopped….A fundamental point that needs to be understood is that if any of these proposals (including the Kyoto protocol) are implemented, they will have an effect on the climate so small that it cannot be detected. None of these proposals will change what the climate is doing enough to notice.”

Please Don’t Mention Water Vapour - Official
The tiny warming figure reinforces an enormous, glaring weakness in the whole argument for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Since water vapour has a greenhouse effect about double that of carbon dioxide and as air has an average moisture content of over ten times that of carbon dioxide, shouldn't we be doing something about that as well?

Evidently not. To quote 'A Beginners Guide to the UN Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol’: 'Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas, but human activities do not affect it directly'. No? Then how about this (bear with me; I have rounded off the figures to keep them simple) -

· The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the carbon burnt in fossil fuels amount to about 6 trillion tons a year
· This translates to about 20 trillion tons of carbon dioxide a year
· But this combustion also causes the production of over 5 trillion tons of water vapour (fossil fuels are all hydrocarbons; combustion of the hydrogen present in them produces water vapour)
· In addition, about 50% of this carbon is used for power generation, of which the majority of plants - say 80% - use evaporative cooling (that is cooling towers) to condense and recycle the steam generated.
· With this system something like 3.6 tons of water are evaporated per ton of fuel burnt
· This therefore generates another ten trillion tons a year of water vapour, which together with the 5 trillion from combustion totals 15 trillion tons of moisture into the atmosphere.

Now, remembering that this 15 trillion tons of water vapour we are producing has twice the greenhouse effect of the 20 trillion tons of carbon dioxide we also generate, why are we saying that water vapour does not affect global warming?

A standard answer is that water vapour does not stay in the atmosphere for more than a week. That may be true in temperate climates, but for much of the globe the winter is dry, and apart from dew (which evaporates off again once the sun comes up of course) that water in the air must stay there for months.

More, it turns out that if we don't take water vapour into account (both the very large natural amount and our own small contribution), our activities have generated about 5.5% of the present greenhouse gases. But if we do then they represent under 0.3%. Mankind's contribution is negligible. As nothing. Irrelevant. Unimportant. Not a factor.

Never Argue with an Institution
In the meantime the Kyoto Protocol had become institutionalised, with predictable results. The institution concerned with giving scientific advice is a United Nations body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It draws on a consensus of 2,000 scientists, and twenty years ago this army of boffins concluded:

'There is inadequate data to determine whether consistent global changes in climate variability or weather changes have occurred – to date it has not been possible to establish a clear connection between these regional changes and human activities.'

Not good enough; this was massaged by the IPCC into:

'The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.'

When the Secretary General of the IPCC was confronted with this deception, he said ‘it was the price the IPCC paid for having influence’. A very institutional response; its own survival comes first.

Global Warming = Global Scandal
It turns out that the original curve showing a link between carbon dioxide and temperature was wrong. And whereas before this discovery was exposed in dull academic journals dealing with metrological statistics, the e-mail hacking scandal known as ‘Climategate’ has revealed that the perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing. Expect much more scandal as tens of thousands of people whose jobs are now at stake attempt to explain it all away.

It’s the Sun, Stupid
There is, however, one very strong relationship between the earth’s temperature and an outside factor. A link between sunspots and the weather has long been noted - amazingly, in 1801, Sir William Herschel, the Astronomer Royal of the time, found a correlation suggesting that the price of wheat was directly controlled by the number of sunspots.

There is striking agreement between cold and warm periods and low and high solar activity over the last 10,000 years. Solar activity was very high during the medieval period, when the Vikings settled in Greenland, forming a colony that lasted until the Little Ice Age, when the sun quietened down and the consequent freeze drove them out. During the 20th century, sunspot activity increased again.

(To keep this simple I have removed the references from the quotations and sources here. If you want to see the sources take a look at the full text of A Great Deal of Nonsense which you can find elsewhere in this blog.)

So let me kick off with my views:*

2009-11-04T08:31:00.001+02:00

Development is a specific transformation, from a population composed largely of impoverished subsistence farmers to one composed largely of a relatively prosperous urban bourgeoisie. There is no other model; a development strategy that operates on the premise that there is some kind of a ‘third way’ that does not involve this transition is going to fail.* Subsistence, farming cannot feed such a large urban population; it has to be done by commercial farming or (as in Africa) by increased food imports* Neither the bourgeoisie nor the commercial farmers will materialise without property rights. As a result nor will development.For Africa specifically* Its peoples have survived where others perished by procreating faster than the ravages of disease, war, slavery and wild animals; with improved hygiene this survival mechanism led to a population explosion and run-away urbanisation* However, the generally poor soils of Africa, and the consequent semi-nomadism of most of its people, has resulted in land not being conceived of as a negotiable asset. Consequently the migrants to Africa's cities and towns have merely swapped rural poverty for urban povertyThese truths mean that the real job of the major players in development assistance - Government agencies, the World Bank, the UNDP - is to make the often-traumatic process of transforming subsistence farmers into bourgeois urbanites as quick and as painless as possible. They can do this both by providing technical support for mass titling of land and a registration system, but equally importantly by encouraging the appearance of the intermediaries that make up the property market - banks, building societies, estate agents and lawyers. In this transformation there will be losers and the aid NGOs will have a useful role to play in assisting them.So there is my credo, and the driving force behind my four books. Now pitch in. You can make your views known by posting a comment below. I will certainly read them and, I hope, so will a lot of other people who care for Africa and its peoples.

Africa’s problem is its population growth rate – there’s more

2009-05-28T16:40:00.001+02:00

Africa’s problem is its population growth rate – there’s more

Thank you to the correspondents who have seen that the population explosion is the fundamental problem in Africa. This phrase used to be used a lot, with accompanying fretting – here is David Lamb, the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Nairobi writing in 1980 – “in 1960 only one African city, Kinshasa, had more than 500,000 people. Now there are ten.” He was rightly alarmed at this, yet today, just thirty years later, Wikipedia, quoting the United nations, lists 52 African cities with more than a million inhabitants:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_populous_cities_in_Africa

Yet the words ‘population explosion’ are hardly ever heard nowadays, even though Africa’s population is still doubling every twenty-odd years. With over half the inhabitants under the age of 15, is it any wonder that the continent has not yet got to the starting bloc? The countries which have thrived have invariably brought their population growth under control – China and India are the pre-eminent examples.

The type of rigorous enforcement that was needed to achieve this – sterilisation in India, the one-child policy in China – will not work in Africa because of the intense cultural pressures on its inhabitants to have as many children as possible. The only thing that will work – and has worked everywhere it has occurred – is a combination of growing prosperity and urbanisation. And this will only happen when Africans become landlords, with freehold title deeds that enable them to compete for wealth in the sort of vigorous property market one sees in developed countries. Yes, there are slumps and booms in this market, but if small families cannot be enforced, then the availability of things rather than children at a time there is enough money in the pocket to allow a decision to be made between the two is the only lever that will do the trick.

Of course, this is not the sort of competitive environment that the aid agencies envisage for Africa. Their view was summed up by John Galsworthy by, as it happens, that arch man of property, Soames, in The Forsyte Saga - “If one had children and not much income, the standard of taste and comfort must of necessity go down…besides it was nice to be able to take holidays unhampered. Sooner in fact than own children, they preferred to concentrate on the ownership of themselves…In this way little risk was run, and one would be able to have a motor car.”

Soames was deeply disapproving. Yet, while it may seem an awful thing to say, the reality is that for Africans to prosper, they must enter the rat-race.

2008-12-31T07:51:00.000+02:00

Wishing everyone a more prosperous and successful New year

And Another Thing…

2008-12-02T11:23:00.003+02:00

The trouble with the discovery that a culture is that society’s survival mechanism is that it not only explains many events, it makes it embarrassingly simply to decide which are going to be the winners and which the losers. If much of sub-Saharan Africa does not change its culture, then it will continue to sink back until it is a morass of failed states. It can also, provocative though this may seem, be argued that Islam is likely to fade, perhaps becoming a religion as mild as the Church of England.

It is a religion that carries the ideas and prejudices of the nomadic societies amongst whom Muhammad lived and had to convert. His key message was monotheism (they were polytheists up to then) and even if he had given it the least consideration, it would have been fatal to his mission to argue that on top of this fundamental change in their beliefs, they would also have to alter their culture.

As a result, Islam incorporated the characteristics of nomads everywhere; the unequivocal loyalty to an extended family, male status evidenced by the number of movable assets - wives, children, livestock - and polygamy and the bride price. More to the point, it also built on the nomad's antagonism for the (relatively) wealthy townsmen - mainly Jewish at the time - who had fixed property and who controlled the money market. Muhammad wanted to build a financial system independent of them that did not have the time-linked uncertainties that so distressed his nomads in their dealings with the towns. This ideal has finally been achieved on the back of the oil wealth passing through the banks of Muslim countries, but it is manifestly not a natural arrangement. For example it sees interest as unearned income, making the rich get richer and the poor poorer, and elaborate arrangements have been created to permit Islamic banking to operate in an interest-free environment.

Nomadic societies are generally patriarchal, and new aspirants to senior positions in them are not welcomed by the establishment. In a capitalist community jealousy can be a useful emotion, driving those who perceive themselves to be under-rewarded to furious strivings upwards. However, in societies where tall poppies get cut down rather than encouraged, it can be deadly. Islam seems particularly vulnerable to this outlook. The distortions of Islamic finance depend upon the flow of oil, which will eventually cease. When that happens the godless modern environment of the capitalist states will become more attractive to the clever younger members of the religion, who will begin to see it as peripheral to their strivings. Perhaps, as with many of Europe’s churches, we shall then see mosques being turned into building sites.

And Another Thing…

2008-12-02T11:23:00.001+02:00

The understanding of the fundamental fact – that Africa’s present development failure is because its survival mechanism has not evolved to cope with the changed global environment – throws light on a number of mysteries about mankind’s behaviour in the continent.

One of the most important and contentious of these is the mysterious proliferation of HIV-AIDS there. Less remarked on is the correlation between development and HIV-AIDS; it thrives in those countries with better education and higher urbanisation. The reason becomes clear when we consider a key component of the survival mechanism of African societies – the bride price or lobola. Remember that this is returnable if the bride fails to produce children, a sine qua non in a society whose survival hinges on quickly replacing the enormous number of pre-puberty deaths amongst children before that society is wiped out.

This comes hard up against the principal fact of development – to quote from the first point in this blog - Development is a specific transformation, from a population composed largely of impoverished subsistence farmers to one composed largely of a relatively prosperous urban bourgeoisie. There is no other model; a development strategy that operates on the premise that there is some kind of a ‘third way’ that does not involve this transition is going to fail.

So, in Africa cities appear, and grow and grow. Young women go to the towns to work, and are no longer in an environment where a relationship is cemented by a transfer of livestock to the bride’s parents – and their return and the break-up of the marriage if she cannot conceive. (It may well be that the groom is the problem of course, but it seems that was, and is, a difficult concept for the culture). So these girls, away from their rural constraints, have to demonstrate their fecundity without the formality of lobola. Not promiscuity, procreation. Just check on the numbers of unmarried mums around you.

The solution is for Africa to become rich, and given the Western formula of honest government and inviolate private property rights, it can. With this will come the replacement of wives, children and livestock as the marks of prestige by the status symbols of societies who are no longer driven by the need to reproduce to the maximum. So expect serial monogamy – trophy wives – and the trashy, flashy assets of big houses and fancy motorcars. And small families with spoilt brats, every member of which is HIV negative. Check around you in Zimbabwe today; underneath the economic chaos this transformation is already happening in its cities. The government’s claim that HIV-AIDS is on the decrease in this country may even be true.

And Another Thing…

2008-12-02T11:18:00.000+02:00

Paul Johnson’s commentaries in The Spectator used this heading. I am borrowing it for occasional thoughts on the subject of this blog – getting Africa up to speed.

That marvelous BBC series, The Ascent of Man, was presented by Dr. Jacob Bronowski in the early 1970s. He, at the very beginning of this, had already seized upon what took me many years to understand – that nurture, not nature is what controls us now. He looked at the Lapps of northern Sweden - 30,000 people and 300,000 reindeer - and demonstrated how the Lapp society had adapted to survival in the frozen tundra by using the animal for their every need, following (not herding) them in their transhumance movements to keep this living, moving support system ready to hand. Similarly the Tibetans, in an even bleaker environment and with only the slow yak to support them, kept their population at a level where their society could survive on the sparse resources of their high rocky plateau by female infanticide.

So too in Africa, where the diseases so absent in the frozen lives of the Lapps and the Tibetans, proliferate, killing infants at a terrible rate. Here society’s survival mechanism required that every fertile woman produce children at a maximum rate, with early marriage, the bride price and polygamy being characteristics of the culture. As Bronowski pointed out, a quarter of a century before I did, culture is the survival mechanism of society.

If Africa’s present development failure could be summarised in one phrase it is that its survival mechanism has not evolved to cope with the changed global environment.

Talk about it here - leave your comments

2008-11-03T10:52:00.002+02:00

Leave your comments here....
Talk about it!!!!!!!

Writing what I should have written so many years ago

2008-10-30T14:59:00.000+02:00

By Kevin Myers
Tuesday July 22 2008
Last Thursday week, with famine approaching yet again, I wondered about the wisdom of forking out yet more aid to Ethiopia. Since the great famine of the mid-1980s, Ethiopia's population has soared from 33.5 million to 78 million. Now, I do not write civil service reports for the United Nations: I write a newspaper column, and I was deliberately strong in my use of language -- as indeed I had been when writing reports from Ethiopia at the height of that terrible Famine.
I was sure that my column would arouse some hostility: my concerns were intensified when I saw the headline: "Africa has given the world nothing but AIDS." Which was not quite what I said -- the missing "almost" goes a long way; and anyway, my article was about aid, not AIDS.
Since dear old Ireland can often enough resemble Lynch Mob Central on PC issues, I braced myself for the worst: and sure enough, in poured the emails. Three hundred on the first day, soon reaching over 800: but, amazingly, 90pc+ were in my support, and mostly from baffled, decent and worried people. The minority who attacked me were risibly predictable, expressing themselves with a vindictive and uninquiring moral superiority. (Why do so many of those who purport to love mankind actually hate people so?)
We did more in Ethiopia a quarter of a century ago than just rescue children from terrible death through starvation: we also saved an evil, misogynistic and dysfunctional social system. Presuming that half the existing population (say, 17 million) of the mid 1980s is now dead through non-famine causes, the total added population from that time is some 60 million, around half of them female.
That is, Ethiopia has effectively gained the entire population of the United Kingdom since the famine. But at least 80pc of Ethiopian girls are circumcised, meaning that no less than 24 million girls suffered this fate, usually without anaesthetics or antiseptic. The UN estimates that 12pc of girls die through septicaemia, spinal convulsions, trauma and blood-loss after circumcision which probably means that around three million little Ethiopian girls have been butchered since the famine -- roughly the same as the number of Jewish women who died in the Holocaust.
So what is the moral justification for saving a baby from death through hunger, in order to give her an even more agonising, almost sacrificial, death aged eight or 13? The practice could have been stamped out, with sufficient political will, as sutti in India once was. And the feminists of the west would never have allowed such unconditional aid to be given to such a wicked and brutal society if it had been run by white men.
But, instead, the state was run by black males, for whom a special race-and-gender dispensation apparently applies: thus the two most politically incorrect sins of our age -- sexism and racism -- by some mysterious moral process, akin to the mathematics of the double-negative, annul one another, and produce an unquestioned positive virtue, called Ethiopia.
I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.
Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O'Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children? No, of course I'm not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die.
Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.
Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.
But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.
kmyers@independent.ie
- Kevin Myers

The Burning Of The Bankers

2008-07-22T15:07:00.002+02:00

This is the satirical counterpart to All Poor Together, A Great Deal of Nonsense and Saving Africa!, filling a niche for those readers who want to enjoy the bizarre world of ‘development assistance’ without any earnest academic underpinnings. In the late 1980s, a Zambian with a Scots father and a foot in both societies became the unwitting courier for a consignment of high-grade marijuana seeds for delivery in New York. This was Dr. Forbes Phiri McGhie, an agronomist at the University. He was grateful for the opportunity to leave Zambia, as he had become a murder suspect with an embarrassing alibi – he had been seducing his professor’s wife when it happened.

At about the same time a major financial scandal threatened the Washington-based Program for Government Enterprises, an affiliate of the World Bank, when it was realised that Mozambique, torn by civil war, was going to default on its massive debt with them. What both the Program and Forbes had in common was the lively interest of a drug cartel, who saw in lawless Mozambique the production potential of another Colombia.

The Burning of the Bankers is the compulsively readable tale of Forbes’ desperate attempts to survive the machinations of both the Program and the drug barons. Anybody who has had anything to do with the development assistance industry will find caustic echoes of their own experiences, whether funny or tragic, in this remarkable book.

Author: John Hollaway
ISBN: 1-900922-00-2
Hardback
320 Pages
RRP £15.95

To order this book e-mail John Hollaway

All Poor Together

2008-07-22T15:05:00.003+02:00

“It should be required reading for every economist and every developed nation’s foreign aid specialist.” Direct Report.
In 1982 John Hollaway, a struggling Zimbabwean mining consultant, counted himself lucky to have secured a consulting job on a Swedish aid project in Tanzania. However, Buck Reef Gold Mine turned out to be a failure for reasons arising from the very fact that it was an aid project. The Tanzanian money that was supposed to support the project infrastructure never materialised and financial and technical decisions had to be made through a stifling bureaucracy. Worse, once made they could never be reversed.

As the years passed he realised that this was not an isolated case. In fact the Swedish aid official responsible for distributing millions of dollars of assistance to Tanzania at the time admitted that not a single project could be called sustainable. This revelation led John Hollaway to spend the next fifteen years gathering data on aid and trying to discover why it so often failed to improve the lot of the poverty-stricken. More importantly, when he did discover the causes of this failure, he was able to show how they could be overcome.

‘All Poor Together’ is a riveting personal account of this search. As the author has said

This book started as, and to an extent still is, a series of stories of my experiences in the gold mining business in Africa, principally about the crooks, scams and frauds that tend to gravitate to this part of the world. I have worked in the bush in over twenty countries of the continent, so there are some good stories to tell. But as I wrote, I realised that it was becoming a rant about the waste, the ineffectuality and the stupidity of the aid business on the continent. So I stopped, did a lot of research and restarted. The book really has become a catalogue of the frailty, the corruptibility if you like, of institutions, of big companies, stock exchanges, governments, and above all the aid organizations.

John Hollaway argues that the way forward is to start from below, to construct a new African society that has an interest in reforming its own political and social arrangements for the better. This society would have the courage to finally discard the clutches of the old family-based, polygamous cultural survival mechanism that was once so successful but now has become the instrument of its impoverishment.

Zimbabwe’s distinguished economist, John Robertson, said ‘this is the book I wish I had written.’

Title: All Poor Together: the African Tragedy and Beyond

Author: John Hollaway
ISBN: 0-7974-2749-1
Soft cover
364 Pages
RRP £9.95
To order this book e-mail John Hollaway

A Great Deal Of Nonsense

2008-07-22T14:58:00.004+02:00

“Hollaway has written a classic, the African version of Clausewitz’s Vom Krieg”
The Natal Witness
John Hollaway’s new book points out that for the first time in the history of life on earth a large section of human society has created an environment so secure that it is no longer necessary for its members to have numerous children for their culture to survive. Yet there is a feeling within this group that the economic system which produces such safe and comfortable lives draws too deeply on the earth’s resources for it to be allowed to spread to the rest of the globe. Development aid is not intended to create wealthier populations but is given out in the hope that the poor can live more happily in their time-honoured ways in harmony with the environment, as Rousseau envisaged with his ‘Noble Savage’. Poverty alleviation, not wealth creation, is the mantra.

Samuel Johnson called Rousseau’s ideas ‘A great deal of nonsense.’ With wit and pungent examples, John Hollaway demonstrates that they are indeed a fantasy. Sustainability? There is no evidence that there will not be sufficient resources as long as the market place dictates their price. Global warming? The evidence is confusing, inconclusive and being hyped by the proliferation of environmental lobbies who have jobs to protect. Biodiversity? We don’t even roughly know how many species there are to start with.

There is no evidence that mankind cannot reverse the negative trends that he may have caused in the environment. There is no evidence that the wealthy countries of the world are the biggest threat to it. There is no evidence at all that savagery is ennobling. The irrefutable evidence is that poverty is associated with wars, disease and pollution, and poverty is what must be defeated. This book sets out how it can be done

‘A Great Deal of Nonsense’ is an epochal follow-up to John Hollaway’s exposé of the aid industry in his book ‘All Poor Together’.

The eminent correspondent Michael Hartnack, who holds an honorary doctorate for his brave defence of the truth in Zimbabwe, wrote ” Read it or book your ticket out.”

Title: A Great Deal Of Nonsense: Poverty and the Noble Savage
Author: John Hollaway
ISBN: 0-7974-2734-1
Soft cover
326 Pages
RRP: £9.95

To order this book e-mail John Hollaway

Saving Africa

2008-07-22T13:31:00.004+02:00

The final work in the trilogy that began with All Poor Together and continued with A Great Deal of Nonsense. Saving Africa! Consider the challenges:

Africa’s population is the fastest growing in the world Its cities are growing even faster

With only 13% of the world’s population it has 69% of its HIV infections

It has received over 15 billion dollars in aid every year for forty years and this is set to double

But aid has not helped: overall, Africans are as poor as they were when it started

Why is this so? This book provides an intelligent and witty insight into the cultural underpinnings of Africa’s persistent poverty, as illustrated by Zimbabwe’s tragedy.
What can be done? Only Africans can save Africa, says John Hollaway, and this book sets out how they can do it.

“To save Africa it is necessary to understand Africa. Before modern medicine made a difference, Africa was the most dangerous place on the planet. To see how dangerous, consider the fate of Portugal. In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world between Spain and Portugal along a line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. Spain was free to colonise to the west of this line and the Spaniards went through South America like a knife through butter. It smashed the Aztec and Inca Empires within forty years of Columbus setting foot on the mainland, and over the next hundred years comprehensively looted the continent of its gold and silver. And Portugal? Portugal, exploring to the east of the line, encountered Africa and did not get beyond the beaches. The only exploitation they carried out was slaving, which could be undertaken at the coast without leaving their ships. On shore they would be lucky to live through the first rainy season.”

“…giving aid to Africa does not work because it is going into a continent where population growth, driven by the ancient need to stay ahead of disease deaths, prevents African economies even getting to the starting point, where fierce family loyalties – nepotism to outsiders – drains it away before it can do any good, and where the real engine of wealth – privately owned fixed property and the mechanisms that create a market in it – is almost entirely missing.”

“The answer? Only Africans can save Africa. But these Africans are those in its huge and growing diaspora whose determination to get to a better life means that they have the skills and energy needed to change the continent. They understand, and have adopted, the culture – the survival mechanism – of the developed countries. They are monogamous, they live in a meritocratic environment and they understand how private fixed property and a market place in it can make people wealthy. They have the ability to transform Africa. That is how it can be done.”

Title: Saving Africa

Author: John Hollaway
ISBN: 0-7974-3230-2
Soft cover
288 Pages
RRP £14.95
To order: mail John Hollaway