Africa Analysis
October 26, 2009
Poor leadership sows the seeds of African agricultural failure
Dianna Games for Business Day
A GREEN revolution, like any other revolution, takes real leadership; it requires an acknowledgement that food production is a life-and-death matter, a Vietnamese academic told an agricultural conference I attended in Hanoi last week. Feeding a nation was not possible without a clear and decisive strategy, he said. Vietnam has proved that it knows a thing or two about producing food, for not only its people but a good chunk of the globe. Its own green revolution allowed it to move from being a net food importer to one of the world’s biggest exporters in certain crops. Good leadership, high…
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October 12, 2009
Guinea’s army-backed regimes show folly of turning a blind eye
Dianna Games for Business Day
Most people would not be able to find Guinea on a map – until the recent slaughter and rape of dozens of people in the streets of the capital, that is. As the horror was splashed across the world’s media, the rulers of this West African nation tried to distance themselves, and the army they command, from the massacre. The regime, which seized power in a coup d’etat last year after the death of dictator Lansana Conte,, is trying to sell the army as the saviour of this blighted nation. The African Union, confronted by these unfortunate events, has been…
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RETURNING to his country after an absence of more than a decade, a Nigerian friend said what had caught his eye first was the fact that Lagos had streetlights — and they worked. The streetlight project, which brings some light to a city of 15-million people, is one of the Lagos State governor’s early initiatives to start rolling back the decay of Nigeria’s commercial capital . Street signs have been installed across Lagos, giving some self-respect to even the deepest slums, new public transport systems are running, litter is being removed for the first time in decades, and parts of…
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MEDIA reform has been slow in coming to the “new” Zimbabwe. Daily newspaper The Herald, which has acted as President Robert Mugabe’s propaganda mouthpiece over the years, has shown scant sign of support for the unity government and it is sowing the seeds of dissent. Articles in the past fortnight have lambasted the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) for trying to get Zimbabwe onto the agenda of last week’s Southern African Development Community (Sadc) summit in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It then praised Mugabe’s “diplomatic victory” in keeping the issue off the agenda. It also thanked SADC leaders for…
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September 7, 2009
Leader’s mission to change the course of Rivers State
Dianna Games for Business Day
CHIBUIKE Rotimi Amaechi is a man in a hurry. The governor of one of Africa’s richest natural resource areas, Rivers State in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta, Amaechi aims to make his four years in power count. “We have a lot to do in Rivers State. Our leaders have abandoned the area for a very long time,” says the outspoken leader, whose bold statements and fearless approach to change have occupied many column inches in Nigeria’s media. Governors in Nigeria are extremely powerful politicians and Amaechi’s importance to the polity is further highlighted by the fact that Rivers State is the…
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NIGERIAN society is reeling from the unprecedented corporate drama playing out before it, watching as the country’s blue-chip business elite is hauled before anticorruption officials in the media spotlight. The banking crisis, which has seen the Central Bank of Nigeria firing the CEOs of five banks — Oceanic, Union Bank, Intercontinental, Afribank and Finbank — has rocked the business world. Central bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, in office for just two months, acted on the basis that large loan portfolios and poor governance had left the banks so poorly capitalised they posed a systemic risk. By Friday, 16 bank executives…
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When President Mwai Kibaki first came to power in Kenya in 2003 he put out an arrest warrant for the chief justice, among many other public officials, in a bid to stamp out a cancer that had taken hold of the country. One of his first legislative acts was to publish three anti-corruption bills. Just two years later, the media reported that corruption under Kibaki’s rule had cost the country about $1bn, nearly a fifth of the state budget. His anti corruption chief John Githonga left Kenya after receiving death threats. In Nigeria, the fight against corruption has been patchy…
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The close relationship between South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma, and the country’s powerful trade unions had the private sector and investors worried. Would the payback for union support of his campaign, which helped sweep him to victory in April, be a leap to the left for a carefully charted, investor-friendly economic policy? Would there be rampant state spending to appease poorer sections of the population, for which Zuma’s promise of poverty alleviation was the answer to their prayers? Certainly Zuma has appointed leading members of the trade union federation Cosatu and the South African Communist Party to critical roles…
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ZIMBABWE is currently swamped by investor conferences. The perception of rich pickings at rock-bottom prices and the search for new capital by the public and private sectors have raised the business profile of a country no one wanted to visit a year ago. And despite the flaws of the unity government, the economy is starting to turn around. The introduction of hard currency has been the biggest factor in restoring a sense of normality and is allowing companies to gear up for a new era. International companies that were forced to ring- fence their Zimbabwe operations as a result of…
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WHY is it so often those with the biggest cars and smartest houses who complain about how iniquitous capitalism is? Smug claims about the death of capitalism in the wake of the global financial crisis have become commonplace in Africa, as elsewhere, and there seems to be real hope that a new world order will emerge that allows the continent half a chance of competing in it. Unfortunately for the Mercedes-Benz socialists among us, any new order is likely to be more about shifting the emphasis of global trade and investment flows, rather than any radical change in economic model.…
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THERE was some angry talk last weekend in the Wellington Hotel in Warri, the commercial capital of Delta State in Nigeria. To pass the time while waiting for a meeting with the state governor, who presides over the largest chunk of Nigeria’s oil economy, I wandered into a public meeting of Niger Deltans in the hotel’s convention centre, where a heated discussion was taking place. As the entire gathering turned to look at me in surprise, I decided not to linger — my decision informed by the alarming headlines on the newspapers being sold on the hotel steps: “Army pounds…
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