South Africa

There is a reason why economics is known as the “dismal science.” For all of the accoutrements of precision and exactitude, the reality is that much of economics is at least as much alchemy as science, and the supposed “laws” of economics are more like guidelines than immutable realities.

It is thus not surprising that Thabo Mbeki and some of his critics have such wildly varying views of his economic policies. Mbeki defends his record by pointing out the consistent, steady rates of growth of the South African economy under his watch and argues that his policies have prevented some of the econolic calamities experienced elsewhere. His critics, the SACP and COSATU chief among them, believe that he is not doing enough to address poverty and accuse him of being delusional about the direction of the economy.

Both arguments have merit, but when it comes to economic policies, I tend not to buy into what the SACP wants to sell. Mbeki has not done enough to embrace anti-poverty programs, and the gap  between the haves and have nots, which continues to grow, is appalling. Nonetheless, the anti-liberalism pablum that the leftists on the Tri-Partite Alliance want to spew also leaves me cold. In an ideal world the government would continue on its course while expanding enough to embrace more ardent programs to address inequality, poverty, unemployment and the like.

Charles R. Stith, a former US ambassador to Tanzania and director of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University, has an op-ed piece in today’s Boston Globe endorsing the Millennium Challenge Initiative as a way to help develop Africa. He argues that partisan squabbling over the amount of funding to provide the MCI is akin to an old proverb that asserts that when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. It seems to me that it would be worth providing the full funding that President Bush wants if only to see if the program is viable.

A number of stories caught my attention this weekend. Here are a few of them, with brief commentary as appropriate:

The Makana Football Association, which operated surreptitiously on Robben Island among the political prisoners has achieved recognition from FIFA, the sport’s governing body. A feature film, More Than Just a Game, starring Tsotsi’s Presley Chweneyagae, is to be released in South Africa in the next few weeks.

Thabo Mbeki recently has been stepping up his advocacy of a trilateral free trade area between South Africa, India, and Brazil. Mbeki believes that this trade bloc will give these leading nations in the developing world a stronger hand in trades with the World Trade Organization and will focus on addressing poverty and underdevelopment in the three countries and within the regional spheres that they dominate.

The Mail & Guardian’s “ZA @ Play” has an interview with Mark Gevisser, the respected observer of South African politics whose forthcoming book Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is highly anticipated. The interview is fairly anodyne, truth be told, but the book should stand as a definitive early treatment of Thabo Mbeki’s life if it can avoid the pitfalls of polemicism and advocacy to which virtually all of the books on Mbeki up to now have succumbed. 

Finally, a bit of a controversy has enveloped one of my old stomping grounds, Rhodes University. Last year Anne Warmenhoven submitted a doctoral thesis to Rhodes’ psychology department, which approved the dissertation and granted Warmenhoven the PhD. Her topic is the late disgraced former Proteas captain Hansie Cronje. But the dissertation apparently is nowhere to be found, apparently because members of Cronje’s family only agreed to speak with Warmwnhoven under conditions of secrecy. Obviously this goes against every principle of academic freedom and openness, not to mention ideals of transparency that are supposed to be a hallmark of the New South Africa.

If’s a busy news cycle right now in Southern Africa. here are a number of stories that caught my eye in today’s chock-full Mail & Guardian and elsewhere:

As the thirteith anniversary of the murder of Steven Bantu Biko at the hands of the security forces approaches different South Africans remember Biko’s life and death differently.

the Zimbabwe crisis continues unabated. The economic calamity has opened the door for corruption. Some maintain hopes  that South African-brokered talked will lead to a resolution of the political elements of the country’s conflicts, but it seems that  this may not be the time for whistling past the graveyard.

Meanwhile, transformation isn’t always easy. Members of the Democratic Alliance (DA) are up in arms over the Tshwane metropolitan council’s reported ban on white businesses. If the allegations are accurate, the DA would certainly seem to have a case that they will bring before the Constitutional Court. Meanwhile in a  pronouncement that is likely to be equally tendentious, the Black Management Forum  (BMF)  has argued that white women should be removed from the list of groups previously disadvantaged ”in terms of . . . employment equity legislation.” It is a bit hard for white women who benefitted in every imaginable way from apartheid suddenly stepping forward to claim their lots alongside the black South Africans on whose backs the Apartheid system built white privilege.

Finally, the M&G’s longtime rugby columnist Andrew Capostagno has a nifty piece on how this Rugby World Cup represents a “big chance” for the Springboks. He concludes his historically astute article by arguing that if the Boks achieve their considerable promise and “Win this one” South Africans “can forget, for a long, glorious moment, about politics.”

According to the Mail & Guardian, SADC’s plan for Zimbabwe’s economic recovery is a non-starter because, well, SADC and its member nations do not have the necessary funds and the prospect of such support coming from the west in sufficient qualities is highly improbable.:

The economic rescue package for Zimbabwe, touted at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Lusaka last week, is a non-starter, economists and political commentators argued this week.

They said that at least $15-billion would be needed to restore Zimbabwe’s collapsing infrastructure and revive commercial agriculture, the mainstay of the formal economy. The region could not foot this bill and Western “development partners” would not come to the party unless Zimbabwe democratised and introduced rational economic policies.

There are two (possibly three) questions that SADC ought to be asking: Were the funds available, would the economic recovery plan be either desirable or viable? This is a crucial question because any Zimbabwe economic recovery plan that does not incorporate regime change seems to be placing a misshapen stopper in a spilling bottle. Doing so will be, at best, a temporary solution. The second question then takes two paths: If such a plan is viable or desirable, is accessing the funding truly an impossible task? If not, then what plan must SADC develop in its place?

But of late it seems that SADC is uninterested in asking what ought to be baseline questions for fear of not finding their preferred answers. Until the member nations of SADC take the questions seriously, there is little reason why we should seriously consider their answers.

From a Medical Research Council report on children’s health issues in South Africa:

Every year almost 23,000 South African babies die in their first month of life, yet one in five of these deaths could be avoided with better education, and relatively inexpensive and easily implemented changes in healthcare, says a new study by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

“The bad news is that, according to the report, ‘one in five deaths could have been clearly avoided’, and inequalities are also highlighted, with avoidable deaths being twice as common in rural areas,” said Joy Lawn, Senior Policy and Research Advisor at Saving Newborn Lives, a programme run by Save the Children, an international non-governmental organisation for children’s rights, in the foreword to the report.

“The good news is that these deaths are not complex or expensive to prevent - improving the quality of care during childbirth is a top priority that would also save mothers’ lives and reduce long-term disabilities in children,” Lawn commented. 

This latter news, of course, is what South Africans must work to bring to fruition. These issues are tied in with questions of opportunity and access that South Africa also struggles to address.

Africans North-to-South, East-to-West are hyper-wary of foreign encroachments. This should come as no surprise after the dual destabilizing phenomena of western imperialism and the Cold War threw Africa into paroxysms of chaos from which it has not ever fully recovered. So despite (or perhaps because of) the myriad examples of China’s increased chumminess with Africa (which I have written about fairly extensively at this blog), including heightened interest from Chinese entrepeneurs, some Africans are increasingly concerned that this exploding Chinese interest just represents old wine in new skins, neo-colonialism from the east rather than the West.

Economic development in Africa can be a daunting concept. Countries with little infrastructural foundation are difficult to penetrate, and one of the key dilemmas comes with where to start. Food security, political instability, military conflict and crime, economic chaos — these problems can make building roads and bridges and phone networks nearly impossible to conceive, never mind to execute.

Perhaps the best way to develop larger infrastucture is to start small. At least this is the argument of Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School (and a former college classmate of your faithful scribe), in The Boston Globe. He discusses the case of Democratic Republic of the Congo entrepreneur Alieu Conteh, who founded the cellular telephone company that became Vodacom Congo:

His success is an example of a new strategy for building infrastructure in Africa that might revolutionize the continent. Called “incremental infrastructure,” the idea is to build essential facilities — telephone networks, power grids, roads — in small pieces using private investment, instead of relying on large, centrally planned, government-run projects. . . .

The infrastructure challenges most African nations face are enormous. Just to meet sub-Saharan Africa’s current power demands, for example, could cost $70 billion in new power plants — even more if African nations begin using power to process minerals locally instead of exporting them to China, North America, and Europe. But the success of entrepreneurs like Alieu Conteh suggests that African infrastructure is a big problem that demands a small solution.

We need to be wary of panaceas, of course. Big solutions and small solutions are necessary throughout Africa, but Zuckerman makes an important case inasmuch as executed properly, small solutions can become big ones, and by growing organically can help provide the development Africa most needs.

Uitenghage, and industrial city not far from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape is South Africa’s Detroit. It has long been the center of South Africa’s automobile production, with companies such as Volkswagen having a heavy presence. Recent reports indicate that VW is planning to shift production of right-side-drive VW Golf models for the Asia-Pacific region from Uitenhage back to Wolfsburg, not far from Frankfurt. 

 Naturally VW is selling the plan as an attempt to maximize efficiency and to allow the Uitenhage producers to do what they do best. But any time a major manufacturer, especially one as central as the automobile industry, decides to shift production away from South Africa, it is cause for some concern. South Africa on the whole has an impressive record of economic growth since 1994, but the economy assuredly is fragile enough that news such as this might have an unpleasant ripple effect.  

Privation connected to poverty and vulnerability to climate change is wreaking havoc throughout the continent. Lesotho continues to suffer from drought-fueled food shortages. The droughts have also affected Swaziland and South Africa. The economic crisis in Swaziland has led to increased sex trafficking among children as well as women. Informal settlements in Namibia are embody hell on earth. Climate change is leading to an increase in malaria cases in Kenya.

 The news of the increased UN-African Union peacekeeping presence has raised hopes of humanitarian relief for the people of Darfur. Sudan claims that it will support the troop presence. We;ll see how long Khartoum’s conciliatory attitude lasts. Some Sudanese, meanwhile, are looking to South Africa for a blueprint for peace.

At Foreign Policy Stephan Faris worries that the boomlet that parts of Africa appear to be enjoying might be chimerical, with oil fueling another manifestation of the resource curse. The Council for Foreign Relations explores the process of ”hunting for elusive peace.” Despite these real concerns, there also is real progress on parts of the continent, as Kofi Annan argues in the Mail & Guardian.

At The New Republic Eliza Griswold analyzes the Somalia crisis as “the other failed invasion,” which is problematic inasmuch as viewing Africa through the prism of Iraq manages to be both too Western-centric while at the same time allowing Iraq to disproportionately warp our views of other issues.

In order to address the mindboggling inflation rate in Zimbabwe (is it really possible that it could reach 100,000% by the end of the year?) the government has issued  a Z$200,000 note worth $1 US. Meanwhile, add water shortages to the daily sufferings of the people of Zim.