Archives for July 2010

What's your favourite hotel in Africa? Mine has always been the rambling, eccentric, idyllic Orchid, on the edge of Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although La Maison in Timbuktu offers equal views and superior bragging-rights.

The line-up for least favourite changes a little more regularly, but there's a particularly venomous hotel/brothel in Lira, northern Uganda, that sticks in my mind.

As for the oddest, well, I've just spent a couple of unplanned days in Dakar, Senegal, failing to catch a connecting flight due to heavy seasonal rains further down the coast, and the airline decided to put us up in the Ngor Diarama.

From its shabbily austere façade, I guessed that it was a cheap Chinese knock-off, built as part of some obscure new trade deal. But then I noticed its location - on a graceful, expensive promontory edging out into the Atlantic. The lady behind the desk in the dark, empty, echoing reception hall put me straight. The hotel wasn't a new eyesore but an ageing icon.

"It was built," she said proudly, "in 1953, by Le Corbusier."

Whether it was really designed, or simply inspired by the pioneering Swiss-French architect, I have not yet managed to pin down. But it clearly was the five-star jewel in France's West African colonial crown.

These days and many owners later, "maybe we have three stars," said the receptionist with a hopeful grin.

That might be stretching it. Upstairs, long corridors meander off into endless tiny stairways - a dizzying mezzanine effect that is repeated inside the dusty, soulless, split-level rooms. If you want to wash your hands after going to the toilet, you'll need to open three doors and climb down a flight of stairs, swatting away clouds of mosquitoes en route.

I would say that the Ngor is thoroughly out of keeping with what I saw of the rest of Dakar - a relaxed, sophisticated blend of old and modern - but that would be to overlook the city's most famous new construction.

I saw it from the plane as we landed. From a distance it looked like Mother Russia had brought her family from Volgograd for a scantily-clad beach holiday. But it gets worse up close.

What was clearly meant as a rousing symbol of Africa's bright future seemed to me to be a gaudy, faux-Soviet monument
to personal hubris, built by North Koreans and either hated or merely ridiculed by every local person I met.

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We've just stopped to get a tyre fixed at a ramshackle garage in the town of Bo in southern Sierra Leone. It's about a three-hour drive from Freetown along an immaculate new road, paid for by the European Union.

We're here to look at the diamond industry - free now of the "blood" diamond tag, but still involving plenty of sweat and toil - and to examine attitudes towards the current trial of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who is accused of being the "blood diamond" kingpin behind Sierra Leone's civil war.

I'll be writing more about that soon, but while we were waiting at the garage we met a man from Shepherd's Bush in London.

Here's what he had to say:

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I'm writing this on a hotel balcony in Freetown, with a steep green hillside at my back, the Atlantic Ocean breaking on the rocks below and Chinese CCTV news blaring from the restaurant television.

It's a decade since I was last here, and Sierra Leone strikes me as an unusually vivid example of the changes that are now shaping so much of Africa.

On my last visit, in the immediate aftermath of a particularly vicious war, the headlines were all about disarmament, peacekeepers, and NGOs. The streets were clogged with white United Nations vehicles and a traumatised population was still wondering if they could ever put things back together again.

Today, Sierra Leone is still bogged down in the familiar developing country issues of poor governance, corruption, high infant mortality, and entrenched poverty.

But the unmistakeable scent of progress is in the air and business has taken centre stage. Mining in particular. And business with China above all.

I had dinner last night with some local journalists. Once we'd finished discussing the scandal of the moment - a 15-minute sex video featuring a local celebrity - Austin Thomas began explaining to me why he'd just spent the last two years in the chilly, north-eastern Chinese city of Harbin, studying journalism.

"I want to master the language," he said. "It is very important and can be an advantage in this world." When he first arrived in Harbin, the university told him he was "a guinea pig. "They were not sure we Africans could cope with the cold. It was minus 40 degrees. But now there are thousands of us there."

Austin, and the others at the table, had no illusions about China, or its role in Africa. "It's good, and it's bad," said Austin. There were angry complaints around the table about how Beijing was "buying up" Sierra Leone's government, flooding the country with inferior products, and building a new foreign ministry in Freetown just to curry favour with those in power.

"China's agenda in Africa is not just economic. It's looking to be a superpower and the more countries it controls, the more it can achieve that," said Austin. He wasn't too impressed with China's journalism either - "too many barriers, too many conditions, the opposite of western journalism," he concluded. But he and his colleagues reserved most of their scorn for attitudes in their own country. "We are failing - we want everything to be put on a plate," said Austin. "Politicians here are driving us crazy. They're self-centred. They only want to enrich themselves, not develop the country. Africa can learn so much from China's determination to succeed."

It's still far too early to judge China's impact in Africa - whether it is simply bleeding a supine continent dry, shoring up authoritarian regimes, providing essential infrastructure, injecting cash, fostering crony capitalism, offering a welcome alternative to failed western development models, giving countries a little economic breathing space, or simply inspiring people to work and study harder. My sense, right now, is that it's doing all of the above.

But Austin put his finger on something fundamental - education. "Right now we can't emulate China, or South Korea, or Singapore," he said. "They have education. We do not. That's what's killing Africa."

And that's why, in two months' time, he will say goodbye again to his wife and two children, and fly back to Harbin for three more years of study, and with luck, a PhD in international relations.

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A dose of post-World Cup reality for South Africa from the OECD this week.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - a club of the world's richest countries - has just released its first economic survey of the country.

"You're steering the ship well enough, but watch out for those gaping holes beneath the waterline," is my sense of what the report is trying to say in its 128 pages of detailed analysis.

The OECD's fairly orthodox assessment zooms in on the biggest structural challenges facing South Africa - its failing schools, its over-regulated economy, its highly unionised labour market, and the "overriding policy challenge" of "extreme" and sustained unemployment, which now exceeds 50% among black youths. The report contrasts South Africa's high unemployment with the BRIIC countries of Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, India and China.

Let's leave aside, if we may, the legitimate question of whether South Africa should be taking economic advice from the likes of the US and UK right now rather than, say, China and Brazil, and instead focus on the choice that the OECD seems to be setting out for the country's leaders.

Although the report acknowledges the complexities of South Africa's situation and history, and the lack of a single silver bullet to address unemployment, it highlights the issue of an increasingly under-skilled workforce searching for jobs in an economy that is moving in a different direction.

The choice - although the OECD doesn't put it quite so crudely - seems to be between the protection of "decent jobs" and lowering unemployment.

"Decent jobs" is a worthy, and familiar, slogan and ambition of the ruling ANC.

But in an unusually trenchant paragraph, the OECD criticises "government rhetoric" and warns of "the current pattern of a core of well-paid labour market insiders existing alongside a similar number of excluded and impoverished outsiders." In blunter words, the unions are protecting their jobs and benefits at the expence of the unemployed.

Is this a fair choice? Is President Zuma the man to break the deadlock? Or does South Africa need a Thatcher, a Lula, a Lee Kuan Yew, or a Deng Xiaoping to tackle the demon of joblessness?

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It's 10 years since I covered my first Somali peace deal story. It was on a scorching hilltop in Djibouti and everyone was talking hopefully about how this, the 13th peace process I think, would finally end the anarchy and violence. It didn't and nor did the many deals that followed.

Somalia breeds pessimism more assiduously than any other country I've covered as a journalist. It is very tempting to conclude that this week's bombings in Uganda mark the beginning of a new, regionalised and increasingly dangerous stage in the conflict.

"The kaleidoscope has been shaken," was how one Western diplomatic source put it to me.

A bomb attack somewhere beyond Somalia's borders was almost inevitable. If an international naval taskforce patrolling the coast could not stop Somalia's pirates, then a dangerously under-resourced peacekeeping force in Mogadishu protecting an embattled and feuding transitional government was hardly going to contain al-Shabab. The organisation had made its intentions clear beforehand.

So what happens next? How should Somalia's neighbours and the wider international community respond?

The same, but better, seems the most likely answer, at least in the short term. As Ethiopia and the US have learned to their cost, heavy-handed foreign intervention in Somalia is unlikely to advance the cause of peace.

The trouble with the current carrot-and-stick approach has been that the stick is too short and weak, and the carrot too often ends up in someone's back pocket in Mogadishu.

Donors, regional and international, need to help beef up the African Union force in Mogadishu to its intended strength or beyond, and to accelerate the training of Somali troops in Uganda. "More needs to be done, and quickly," said the diplomatic source.

There has been talk for months of a big offensive against al-Shabab in Mogadishu. The Ugandan peacekeepers, sinews stiffened, may well feel more inclined to take robust action. But this is where the carrot starts to come into play.

There is no point in seizing territory if you can't keep it. Somalia's transitional government is hopelessly factionalised and weak, but it is the only show in town and it has had some success in forging alliances with other groups in Somalia. Somehow this needs to be encouraged and supported.

As this recent report spelled out, al-Shabab itself is not a united front. The Ugandan bombs are likely to encourage divisions in a group that seems increasingly torn between its original and purely Somali agenda, and the cause of global jihad.

Last year I made a couple of short trips to south and central Somalia, and met members of al-Shabab. It was clear then that the flood of foreign jihadists joining the group was a source of potential tension, which might now be exploited. Attacking Ugandan peacekeepers in Mogadishu can be squared with al-Shabab's nationalist agenda, but killing foreign civilians in Kampala reveals an entirely different, imported and alien ideology.

"If we're learning anything from other conflicts it is that you need to hold your nose and talk to the bad guys," said the Western diplomatic source. "This may be an opportunity to split off some of the more moderate elements."

An opportunity? Don't hold your breath, but Somalia needs to grab at every straw.

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Much discussion here in South Africa right now about how the local media should handle the issue of xenophobia.

For many months now, rumours and threats have been circulating about a possible outbreak of violence against immigrant workers in South Africa immediately after the World Cup.

Given the horrific clashes in 2008, it's no surprise that a lot of Zimbabweans, Malawians and others here are extremely worried at the moment. Idle threats? Perhaps, but there have been some incidents already
and there's no mistaking the fear in the voices of several people I've spoken to in the last couple of days.

The authorities initially seemed keen to deny there was even an issue to discuss - and that all those suddenly leaving the country were simply migrant workers. But now they are becoming a lot more proactive.

It's a sensitive subject for journalists to cover.

There's a danger that we become part of the problem - whipping up hysteria, spreading rumours, and either fuelling violence or doing the work of those who simply want foreigners out of their communities. You'd be surprised how quickly a camera crew can become a magnet, or catalyst, for trouble - I've seen it several times myself.

But there's also as this commentator argues a danger in staying silent.

Personally I think the media here have got it just about right - raising questions, nudging the authorities to take preventative measures, and hopefully helping to make sure that South Africa's well-earned World Cup honeymoon does not end too abruptly.

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The vuvuzelas have stopped punctuating every moment. Most cars have shed their flags. And the newspapers are slowly returning to their more regular diet of introspection and gloom.

Yes, the World Cup is nearly over here, and South Africa is wondering what it all meant, and what comes next.

A couple of days ago I spent the afternoon in Sweetwaters - a bleak township south west of Johannesburg - surrounded by tin shacks, shoeless children playing in the dirt, and a dozen teenaged boys furiously kicking at an old football.

The tallest boy, Lindo Sithebe, 18, folded his arms solemnly. "The World Cup is not for people like us," he said without expression. "The World Cup is not for places like this."

After weeks of euphoria, confidence, and vuvuzelas, it was a sobering moment, a reminder that a month of football is not necessarily going to transform South Africa.

But a few yards away, I ran into a group of middle-aged women who begged to differ.

There were five of them, sitting on upturned plastic tubs behind Esther's vegetable stall, catching the fading warmth of the afternoon sun.

Sharon, tall and argumentative, was drinking beer and complaining that she didn't have enough blankets at home.

But all five women were in agreement about the World Cup. Samantha Mphahleni put it best.

"It's much easier to say I'm a South African now. It makes you feel proud. It makes you feel more alive."

Pride and confidence are hard things to measure. But in recent years, South Africa seems to have been running low on both. The magic of the Mandela era has been wearing off.

But over the past month, the change I've seen has been remarkable.

White families - faces painted with the national flag - have ventured onto buses and into black townships for the very first time - giddy with the sense of discovering their own country.

Immigrants from around the continent have rubbed shoulders in crowded bars. Sharp-dressed Congolese, laid-back Zimbabweans, rowdy Ghanaians with their drums and body paint. All united by a rare, but tangible sense of pan-African unity.

Then there are the fans from further afield - shocked to find, as one columnist put it here, that they're more likely to be killed by kindness than by criminals in South Africa.

I was in Bloemfontein for England's final performance against Germany. After the match, the fans poured out into a nearby shopping centre, to drink, mingle, and sing.

I stood watching one group with two black South African office workers. "Your fans are amazing," said one of the women. "We were all scared they would be hooligans. What is that wonderful song they're singing?" It was actually something about German bombers and the RAF. But I didn't spoil the moment for her.

Now, of course, the holiday is nearly over, and a "back to school" feeling is starting to grow here.

A few days ago I managed to grab a moment with President Jacob Zuma. He was at yet another tightly choreographed Fifa event, looking less exhausted that I expected.

Mr Zuma is a bit like his country - his background is turbulent, heroic, and in recent years buffeted by scandal. He's a man of big appetites, and flaws, and enormous personal charm.

After the tournament South Africa, he assured me, would never be the same again. He spoke of the upgraded infrastructure, of the social cohesion, of the invaluable experience gained by police, government and so many other groups.

But now comes the hard part. The authorities here have finally shown how competent they can be, given a real deadline and enough commitment. But that is, frankly, something of an exception.

South Africa may be a stable, stunning, sophisticated democracy. But it is faced with high unemployment, a crippling housing shortage, a school system in crisis, and one of the world's biggest wealth gaps. The government's record in tackling these problems is nothing to boast of.

"We cannot go back," said Mr Zuma. "We must maintain this momentum, and build on our successes."

Let's hope he can because expectations here have just risen sharply.

Back in Sweetwaters, Samantha and her friends said goodbye and walked back to their tin homes before the sun dipped below the hillside.

The day before, President Zuma had paid an unexpected visit to the township. He'd handed over the keys to three smart new houses built by a charity for some of the poorest residents.

"I saw him," said Samantha, "in the flesh". She's lived for the past 17 years, in a shack the size of a garden shed. She shares it with five others.

"I believe the World Cup will change my life," she said. "I hope it will. Zuma came here and gave us answers. Now I have faith in him. Anything is possible."

A version of this report appeared on From Our Own Correspondent.

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The newspapers here are full of good-riddance obituaries today - for the country's long, unpopular experiment with something called Outcomes Based Education, or OBE - the cornerstone of primary and secondary teaching across South Africa.

When it was launched, 12 years ago, OBE was seen as a bold, ambitious riposte to the old apartheid system of Bantu education, which condemned black students to inferior schooling. But OBE itself proved to be politicised and unrealistic. It failed to take proper account of the realities of the new South Africa and assumed, for instance, that pupils would have access to telephones, the internet, libraries and so on.

As this article reveals, under the OBE system, every year a million children have dropped out of school and more than five million have finished their education unable to read or write adequately. South Africa may have just pulled off a triumphant World Cup, but those statistics are cause for real alarm. It's good the government has finally recognized that.

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Some encouraging headlines plucked from a mixed bag of projections from the African Development Bank's annual review of the continent.

- Overall, Africa's economies are projected to grow (unevenly) by 5.2% next year, making this the strongest region in the world in terms of climbing out of the global recession. East Africa is leading the pack.

- China will double its investment in Africa in the next few years, with the establishment of manufacturing parks seen as the next big development. The Brazilians and Indians are also moving in fast.

- The global economic crisis has nudged African countries towards more concrete reform of their tax systems. This is nowhere near as dull as it sounds. A key way for African governments to shake off their distorting dependence on foreign aid is to learn how to tap more effectively into local sources of wealth. The money is there, but the political will and administrative capacity are not. I'm sure the South African Revenue Service could provide some tips...

And now for a quick statistics quiz... Which African state's GDP grew by a whopping 20.5% a year over the past decade? And who came second with 11.6%? Which government spent the most on public education? And if the Comoros is the most unequal country on the continent (according to the Gini coefficient), which is the most equal?

Thanks for your replies. The answers, in order, are: Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Lesotho and Ethiopia. Congratulations to Longoae and Ethiopiawi. I wish I could tell you that your prizes are in the post.

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Lots of Ghana puns in the papers here today - as Africa waits breathlessly to see if Ghana is gonna garner enough goals to go through to the football World Cup semi-finals.

The whole continent seems to be rooting for the Blacks Stars. Even South Africa's former President Nelson Mandela has issued a statement of support.

As the football teams start to thin out, perhaps it's time South Africans voted for their favourite fans. My money was on the broad-brimmed Mexicans for the first week or so, but after spending yesterday with about 50 singing, pot-bearing, jubilant Ghana supporters, I think I've found my winners. They even composed a special song for our cameraman, Chris Parkinson, who is marrying a South African woman later this year.

And in case you haven't been swept away by the excitement, optimism and general sense of continental unity, here's something to chew on.

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