South Africa

Dwight Garner reports in his blog on books for The New York Times, “Paper Cuts,” that Chinua Achebe has been honored with the Man Booker Prize. The recognition is long overdue.

Could Zimbabwe be on the verge of collapse, possibly within the next six months? That is what a recent report indicates. With collapse or its threat might come a State of Emergency. Of courses states of emergency are as often politically derived as they are reflections of actual emergency. One envisions Robert Mugabe invoking emergency powers not to restore some semblence of normalcy — anarchy, after all, has served him well — but rather because it would provide him with another weapon in his arsenal.

A few headlines that have caught my attention as I enjoy the first days of my honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest:

Massive strikes, organized by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), continue in South Africa. They have been largely peaceful, but as the strikes enter their third week there have been some incidents of violence and threats, though the army has been called out to ensure public safety. The central issue is pay for public-sector employees, and as the sides grow entrenched the threat of a “total shutdown” become more real. The trade union movement was central to the anti-apartheid movement and COSATU sees itself as the vanguard of left politics in South Africa. Given that the strike effectively pits COSATU against its tripartite ally the ANC it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the alliance and on the future of South African politics.

The cost of living in Zimbabwe continues to skyrocket. This comes amidst concerns that the Democratic Republic of Congo had shut off power supplies to the beleaguered people of Robert Mugabe’s thugocracy.

At NPR Correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton discusses some of the latest issues facing Africans, including a bombing in Nairobi and the latest G8 summit. In a similarly Pan-African vein, the Mail & Guardian reports that African leaders hope to end the “theater of violence” that racks the continent. 

A United Nations Official has concluded that Africans will only pay attention to climate change when it can be couched in human consequences:

“Most people are unable to relate to the projections of increase in temperature or the impact of climate change on the economy, but if the climate change forecasts are linked to possible deaths, then countries will be forced to contemplate prevention plans,” said Yvette Stevens, the former UN Assistant Emergency Relief Coordinator.

“We need a ‘Stern review’ of the human costs; people are not motivated by the impact of climate change on a country’s gross domestic product (GDP),” added Stevens, who retired from the UN recently.

Actually, I cannot help but wonder if Africans are especially unique in this respect. For all of the attention this issue receives in the United States, for example, it seems pretty clear that huge numbers of Americans are pretty blithely untouched by climate change in terms of how they live their lives.

For the next few weeks I’ll be on the road celebrating my impending (Saturday . . . tick … tock … tick … tock) nuptials and so while I’ll be blogging as I can, it might be both light and a bit less analytical than usual. In other words, more links, less of my opinions. (I realize that for some of you this development represents nothing but improvement..)

Here are a couple of stories that caught my eye today: 

Nigeria has filed suit seeking nearly $7 billion in damages from Pfizer for the deaths of children who participated in an allegedly unauthorized and obviously risky test of meningitis drugs.  According to the story: “‘The plaintiff contends that the defendant never obtained approval of the relevant regulatory agencies …, nor did the defendant seek or receive approval to conduct any clinical trial at any time before their illegal conduct,’ Nigeria said in court papers obtained by Reuters.”

This case represents an example of there being no real good guys. Forgive me if I am sceptical of Pfizer’s virtue in this case. It would not surprise me in the least if a major pharmaceutical company used Africans as guinea pigs. Or at least if they used Africa as a testing ground precisely because Nigeria poses far fewer barriers in terms of regulation, standards and bureaucracy.  At the same time, I may be cynical, but I don’t really entirely trust that the Nigerian case, win or lose, is geared toward bringing justice or compensation for the victims. The Mail & Guardian shares some of my suspicions that the new dispensation in Nigeria may share more than a passing similarity with past regimes in which Big Man rule, kleptocracy, and a general lack of accountability and transparency have represented the rule and not the exception. This is the classic example of  a situation where Africa observers will hope for the best but prepare for the worst.  

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, it looks like the few foreign investors that remain in the country might see their assets seized by Mugabe’s government. we can probably file this under “Not At All Surprising.”

In South Africa recent studies have shown that many black business professionals are not especially happy in their jobs. The research also dispels a whole host of racially-predicated myths about the nature of “job hopping” in the country. 

Meanwhile, in rugby news, South Africa’s recent thrashings of England saw them break scads of Springbok Test Rugby records. More significantly, perhaps, the upcoming test match against global rugby minnows Samoa will see something unprecedented: when Jake White confirms his starting roster, only two of the seven backline players will be white. Observers are calling this lineup the “blackline.” This represents an enormous step forward in the transformation of the Springboks.

In yet another angle on the Zimbabwe crisis and the relationship between Zim and South Africa, The Mail & Guardian reports that skilled and semi-skilled construction workers are flooding from Zimbabwe to work on jobs building facilities for the 2010 World Cup. The deluge seems less problematic for South Africa, as despite its own unemployment problems skilled workers are always a rare commodity, than for Zimbabwe, which is hemmhoraging yet another segment of the economy that it can ill afford to lose but cannot afford to keep.

Madonna and Brangelina have been in the news for their adoptions of African babies. But ordinary folks (well, ordinary white folks with quite a bit of resources) are also adopting African children in increasing numbers. Ethiopia has become a popular source of these children, which is raising some concerns in that country. There is a fine line between altruism and exploitation. there is no doubt that across Africa there are children in desperate need of a new home. And yet at the same time, there is an element of this adoption trend that smacks of exploitation and opportunism.  The key is that there must be a legitimate and equal partnership with clearly established rules between the adopting couples and the legal systems of the countries in question. Hollywood should certainly not be the driving engine for the trendy accoutrement of an African adoption.  

It has been a good weekend for South African sport. The Springboks took on England and after a slow first half — they actually trailed 17-19 at the break — came on strong in the second and pounded England again, 55-22. Bryan Habana and Pierre Spies, both stars for the Northern Bulls, scored two tries on their home pitch at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria, and fullback Percy Montgomery finished with 18 points. New Zealand pummelled this year’s World Cup hosts, France, 42-11 yesterday, indicating that the Southern hemisphere’s rugby teams are set to assert their dominance in Europe later this year, although in 1999 New Zealand famously hammered Fance in a test match only to have France come back at that year’s World Cup and hand New Zealand a loss in one of world rugby’s epic games.

Pierre Spies:

Bryan Habana:

Meanwhile on the soccer pitch South Africa throttled Chad in an African Nations Cup qualifier in Durban.  Sibusiso Zuma scored twice for Bafana Bafana, which has fallen on hard times in recent years but is looking forward to returning to its mid-to-late 90s glory as South Africa prepares to host the World Cup in 2010.

Sibusiso Zuma:

I was, to be honest, prepared to be defensive about  a recent Mail & Guardian article titled “Can ‘Someone in a Hotel Room’ Report on All of Africa.” After all, I think it is perfectly possible for someone to engage in commentary if they have the background and intelligence and understanding even if they are not on the scene. “Reporting” per se may be difficult, but certainly writing ought to stand on its own merits. If I write something on this blog I’m not certain if it becomes more valid if written from Johannesburg rather than in Odessa, Texas, though obviously anyone committed to Africa wants to get there as often as possible.

The piece is instead about a rather disturbing phenomenon — the tendency of even the largest newspapers to have a single correspondent for the entire African continent. As the M&G article argues, “When one considers that Africa is the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent, taking up 20% of the Earth’s land area and accounting for 14% of the world’s population, the question of whether it can be covered by one person should be ludicrous.” Compounding the problem is the fact that many of those correespondents do not enter the job with any particular background on or experience in Africa. So not only do most newspapers, if they have anyone in Africa at all, only send one person, but that person may not even have any serious African bona fides. These tendencies once again reveal the ways in which “the West” marginalizes Africa.