:Title: George Ayittey : TED Talk: Cheetahs vs Hippos :Author: Jim Carroll :Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:32:32 PDT :Modified: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:39:09 PDT :URL: http://www.ned.com/group/econo-politics/news/0/ The inspiration for this group is a talk that I saw at TED recently where George Ayittey talks about the economic realities of Africa, and how the local governments are not set up to foster economic growth. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/151 .. raw:: html I'd like to dissect the talk, and connect the parts to other sources in an effort to increase my understanding that I'm sure others already have. ---- **Comments** :Author: Jim Carroll :Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 18:55:24 PDT So he talks about the informal economy, and the different traditional economy. Did anyone catch the difference between these two? They both seem to be under-the-table. ---- :Author: David Frayne :Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 21:26:40 PDT I'm guessing the difference is that the informal economy deals with modern goods and services traded under the table, whereas the traditional economy deals with ancient technology (such as herbal remedies) that hasn't ever been recognised by the modern economy. ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:15:32 PDT This is precisely, exactly what I see happening in Opok Farm Village. The need is to build the extended family from a group of child-headed households. I need to watch that a couple of more times. Thanks, Jim. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:57:30 PDT I may be quite wrong, but I don't think that Ayittey is talking about about a traditional economy and an informal economy. I think he's talking about a traditional sector and an informal economy. That's plain as mud, I know, but Ayittey's critique is African governance. Part of his solution is to build upon traditional institutions, among them the marketplace. But as Ayittey, points out, traditional African notions of markets are not premised on property as an individual, but as a clan. So in most African countries there are laws more or less built upon Western ideas of individual liberty and property, but the traditional systems also must be accommodated. There are various ways of doing this across African countries, and even within countries. Another part of his solution is to encourage investment in the informal economy. Now what the informal sectors are, I think are as fuzzy as Ayittey's short hand of the traditional sector. One of the conversations I want to put out relevant to this discussion is from `Benin Mwangi`_ Africa in Business. I definitely recommend the blog, but I'm a bit miffed that my comment wasn't posted to the discussion, I'm linking to. Mwangi is an American, in banking. LOL I'm a blogger in my basement. But I think there's some ideological blind spots that happen around the provocative discussions prompted by Ayittey. It's one thing to buy into his construction that African problems are for Africans to solve, and another to try to bend everything to fall into Ayittey's world view. He is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, but the distinction Ayittey makes about traditional sector ideas of ownership get glossed over, and probably doesn't fit as neatly with AEI's agenda as neatly as people think. Anyway, my unpublished post to the thread at Benin Mwangi's site was prompted by a post about Chinese Entrepreneurs in Africa at `Dani Rodrik's blog`_. I found the comments to the post there, and actually the post itself smelling of a privileged perspective and carelessness. It's very hard to talk about "Africa" really because of so many ingrained stereotypes. My basic point of the comment was that the Chinese entrepreneurs gathered capital within the informal economy of China and invested in informal sectors in African countries--the example was Malawi. As the business grow they have to interact with the modern economy in any case. Once they're big enough they really are part of the modern economy. One of Ayittey's big fans is Emeka Okafur and at his blog `Timbuktu Chronicles`_ many businesses along this continuum are highlighted. Ayittey's talk prompted a bunch of discussion. Here are some blog posts that give a flavor of some of the discussions in blogs. `Ethan Zuckerman`_ is one of the essential ones. Ethan I think mentions Eric Hersman, aka `Hash`_. Hersman blogs as White African. His parents were Bible translators so he grew up in Sudan and Kenya. Something I love about Hash is he is able to argue in the African way--not sure how to describe what I mean. Hash is always nice, but give as well as he takes. Something else about Hash is he's a Geek and is able to translate Geek to Cheetah.`Grandiose Parlor`_ makes the argument that Africa can't discount the Hippos, something that other bloggers in Africa did as well. People are inspired by Ayittey, but "God is in the details" as they say. I've read "Africa in Chaos" and would recommend it. I ought to read "Africa Unchained." While I think his ideas are important, if for now other reason than they spark so much productive discussion, It's very hard to make sense of "Africa" instead of the diverse situations of particular places in Africa. There's a good interview with Ayittey by Bill `Moyers`_ online. .. _`Benin Mwangi`: http://beninmwangi.com/2007/08/12/whythawk-meme-on-informal-market-economies-in-africa/ .. _`Dani Rodrik's blog`: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/08/chinese-entrepr.html .. _`Timbuktu Chronicles`: http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com/ .. _`Ethan Zuckerman`: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2007/06/27/pushing-the-hippo-out-of-the-frame/ .. _`Hash`: http://whiteafrican.com/?p=666 .. _`Grandiose Parlor`: http://grandioseparlor.com/2007/06/is-the-hippo-generation-becoming-irrelevant/ .. _`Moyers`: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/botswana/index.html ---- :Author: Mark Grimes :Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:27:32 PDT *some info pulled from the video* NPO/NGO's and "aid" helping the African governments..."It's like the blind leading the clueless." Fundamental question, who do we want to help in Africa? The people, or the governments? Wealth creation versus wealth redistribution three main sectors: **Modern** (where most of the corruption is, and most of the aid goes) Most of the people exist in the next two sectors...(and they sectors are governed by two tribe types, those that have no chief/leader and despise tyranny of leadership, and the sector that has a chief, but he/she is surrounded by council upon council upon council of advisors to make sure the chief if acting on behalf of the people. Decentralization of power. **Informal** (trade, black market) **Traditional** (agriculture, crafts) Western POV: I am because I am African POV: I am because WE are And African markets were dominated by women. Institute change from within and take Africa back one village at a time. Great video Jim, glad you shared it and started the group. ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:06:12 PDT A quick initial point but I think it's wrong to characterise *informal markets* as being either 'under the counter' or 'black markets'.... (with apologies for dubious use of the term in this context) An informal market can simply be bartering or exchange i.e. a 'market of exchange' based upon a mutual recognition of the others worth (what they bring to the table) that is not reliant upon the sale of goods or current market money values. After all, George Ayittey's tone when he refers to informal markets is positive and there *are* more 'markets' than the 'free marketeers' would have us believe. ;) ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:15:40 PDT The way I see it is when Ayietty is talking about the traditional sector he's not talking about agriculture and crafts per se. Ayietty talks about the traditional sector more as a paradigm, rather patterns in Africa's story, that need to be remembered and applied to the new African context. He make the point that markets are an ancient part of the African story, as well as the notion of limited government being a part of the African story--the idea of de-stooling the king. Also in the context of limited government the role that women play in markets and limiting the power of kings. I think these patterns that Ayittey references when he talks about "traditional sectors" are meaningful. But the problem is that the traditional sectors exist in real contexts and within the real contexts the logic pursued is not always in a positive direction. In most African countries there's civil law, and those laws have to accommodate the traditional sectors, for example in dealing with property. Mostly these arrangements seem awkward, and the governments--often corrupt as they are play the traditional sectors corruptly to assert power. In Uganda The Buganda had a King; the Acholi once had a king, but abandoned that model prior to Arab and European encroachment. In modern Uganda the traditional sector must be accommodated, but doing so often leads to intrigue. Fitting the traditional sector is not a simple matter. I very much agree that investments that target small enterprise and village-based economies can yield positive results for many. But those commentators who argue that it's impossible to ignore the Hippos entirely make a good point too. Some large capital investments are necessary, and in any case the governments aren't going to go away any time soon. African people do have a stake in creating more effective governments. ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:45:47 PDT John, I understand that you are quite rightly flagging up differences and I'm not sure how far George Ayittey is actually going with a 21C Pan-Africanism but I do get nervous about your immediate inferences about *limited government* and markets and civil law. Surely, the neo-liberal echoes that I'm hearing don't require explanation ? I think George Ayittey is actually saying something much simpler when he talks about traditionalism and informal markets. Isn't he really talking about 'bottom up' democracy ? Isn't that why he is appealing to the *Cheetahs* to challenge the 'top down' *Hippos* ? But I would guess that he also recognises the difficulties of his own sound bite descriptions because the list of great (post colonial) African leaders he quotes also includes those who were once *Cheetahs* who then became Life Presidents who could not be removed. A deliberate irony that tells its own subtle story and also poses the greatest challenge to the rising generation ? ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:01:10 PDT What me a neo-liberal! LOL, John, I'm not that together. I really should read Ayittey's "Africa Unchained." to get a more current handle on his thinking. Another link that may be of interest is Emeka Okafur's blog dedicated to discussing the solutions put forth there, `Africa Unchained`_ In the book "Africa in Chaos" in the chapter "Alternative Solutions to Africa's Crisis" Ayittey wrote: "As we have argued in chapter 3 and elsewhere, all Africa needs to do is to return to its roots and build on an modernize its own indigenous institutions [footnote to "Indigenous African Institutions. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers 1991] There is now a greater awareness of the need to reexamine Africa's own heritage. A return to traditional institutions will ensure not only peace but stability as well..." What I was trying to do is to point out that Ayittey's "all Africa needs to do..." point needs to be unpacked. It's not as if these "indigenous institutions" have been mothballed just waiting to be brushed off and they'll work as good as new. But that's what Ayittey seems to say over and over. There are problems with the how to, for example a widow's right to the property with the death of her husband. In most African countries traditional institutions still exist and have real legal power. But the institutional mechanisms which limited and controlled this power often have not remained robust as the relative strength of traditional institutions has been diluted. In Uganda, a very multi-ethnic country, the role of traditional institutions is often a political football. Imagine being a Ugandan. Well, I've never been to Uganda, so there's a whole bunch that I don't know that makes my imagining really difficult. But I know that I would be part of a clan. I would also have an ethnic identity within the culture. Where I live, I would be subject to civil laws, and also customary rules, that might or might not be governed by people of my own ethnic identity. Now consider an issue in Ugandan politics: `Federalism`_. The rhetoric of Federo is very much in keeping with Aiyettey's rhetoric. Maybe if I were Buganda (some Ugandans say I've got the nose to be), I would be a strong supporter, after all it seems it would probably serve my interests well. But what if I identified as one of the more than fifty other ethnic groups in Uganda? Well, then probably not so much. And what of my clan which is likely composed of people with several ethnic identifications? Warning: I'm a white American, and my understanding of Uganda is limited. I certainly mean no offense if my choice of words, like ethnic group, clan, identity, etc. is inelegant. What I'm trying to show in my imagining myself as a Ugandan is that while the traditional sector is enormously important to me, building and modernizing indigenous institutions is quite political with winners and losers (probably sore ones). In my imaging I didn't mention religion, but it's important to consider too. How to fit the notion of traditional African institutions with modern religious expression isn't an easy nut to crack either. Ayittey may well recognize the limitations of his sound bite descriptions. However, I think it's clear that spreading his sound bite descriptions far and wide is a central mission of his. He's best at critique, not at building solutions. That's not a criticism, and maybe an ill-formed opinion anyway. .. _`Africa Unchained`: http://africaunchained.blogspot.com/ .. _`Federalism`: http://www.federo.com/ ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:01:11 PDT John, you can duck the 'flattery' if you like. :) But I agree with you that Ayittey's point about traditional institutions or social relationships needs to be unpacked because it's either a polemical device which is intended to be a nudge and a wink to those in the know or he is saying something much more specific and concrete. He is obviously marking the difference between American (or European) notions of individualism and the African sense of community but I think he skips the politico-economic conclusions that might follow from those differences. A 21C emphasis on collective rather than individual social values could hold great promise and it would be interesting if the exploration of current (rather than historic) *traditionalism* opened up insights into valid social solutions based on co-operation rather than competition - but I suspect George Ayittey's argument is simply steering us back towards the 'answers' of civics and free markets. Maybe an enquiry which enabled us to look again at 'bottom up' democratic social solutions that have been chucked out with the state socialist bathwater would be even more invigorating and productive - but, despite the rhetoric, I don't think George Ayittey is travelling on that road. ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:10:22 PDT Very interesting comments John and John. I claim no deep understanding of Africa's situation - but I found the description of "vampire governments" interesting and not so different from our own - government by for and of the campaign contributor. I am also interested in the idea of the need for the cheetahs to take matters into their own hands - rather than waiting for the government to solve their problems. That is the idea behind the `Self-help Corporation`_ - and `Local Organizing and the Planetary Mind`_ to move as much decision making as close to the people affected as possible. .. _`Self-help Corporation`: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Self-help_Corporation .. _`Local Organizing and the Planetary Mind`: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Local_Organizing_and_the_Planetary_Mind ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 12:45:10 PDT :Modified: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 12:51:50 PDT After I wrote about Federalism in Uganda here I got a chance to hear what a friend in Uganda had to say about it. Funny that we'd never talked about it before. Something I find over and over is the more I know, I discover how little I know. I'm an American. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that as a people and as an idea, we're horribly off-course now. I think when people are lost it's very hard to figure out where we are, but we try to find out. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote: "Europe is the source--the unique source--of the idea of individual freedom, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom. These ideas are European, not Asian, or African, or Middle Eastern, except by adoption." I got that quote from Caetano Veloso's book "Tropical Truth" and Veloso is in turn quoting Samuel Huntington quoting Schlesinger. Ayittey's point about the good in traditional African institutions is counter Schlesinger's insistence on the European origins of liberal values. Ayittey's point is very valuable to an American feeling that we have lost our way. One reason I think so has to do with appropriate responses to violence called terrorism. I abhor violence, but lately have found myself listening to what military theorists have to say, and I find what `John Robb`_ has to say often quite cogent. Robb stresses the importance of resiliency. In learning more about the history of African people, their genius for living well in small societies becomes evident. So Ayittey makes an important point that Africa has lessons from its traditions about liberalism (for lack of a better word). Feeling lost as an American, "individual freedom, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom" are all part of what course I think we should be traveling, and the path we seem to be diverging. Ayittey's bit about coming up with a list of African leaders is a trick question for Westerners for how little our media has paid attention to Africa; and when it has the distorted lens used to project its image. I thought of one of the blogosphere's best writers, Koranten Ofosu-Ammah. If you don't already know `Koranteng's Toli`_ a great pleasure awaits there. Koranteng is Ghanaian, living in the US. In the spring, around the commemoration of Ghana's 50th celebration of independence, he `posted`_ about Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia. Not all the links in the piece seem to work, so I want to point to one 1979 by Busia Koranteng links, `Is Democracy of Universal Application?`_. Busia provides a list of essential democratic principles: * the recognition of the essential dignity of the individual and the equality of all men; * the acceptance of the principle of free and fair elections with the offer of genuine choice; * the derival of the just powers of government from the consent of the governed; * the accountability of these governments to their electorate and the acceptance of the right of genuine opposition; * the principle of justice and equity before the law, * and the cherished freedoms of speech, association, movement, conscience and religion. He then adds Tolerance and expands a bit on that. Part of Ayittey's rhetoric about traditional African institutions seems to me really to say that liberalism is not foreign to Africa. Ayittey is pointing to the principles Schlesinger and Busia are pointing to too. These principles are fundamental, but not in themselves solutions. Our task is to build institutions upon these fundamentals. Right at the end of the Reagan years, Frances Moore Lappe wrote a book "Rediscovering America's Values." It's a difficult book, as a Socratic dialog, that in some way doesn't quite work. It's very important because Moore Lappe addresses the crisis with the failure of a liberal worldwiew and the urgency for a better worldview. "Frankly, my hope in writing this book is to assist us in letting go of a worldview that I believe no longer serves us, a worldview I believe constricts our capacity to find answers to our most pressing problems. My charge will be that this worldview has failed us, both because it profoundly misunderstands our nature and because it is dogmatic, accepting, as it does, certain human-made rules as absolutes." Frances Moore Lappe is hardly: anti-individual freedom, anti-political democracy, anti-rule of law, anti-human rights, nor anti-cultural freedom. The book is not entitled "Returning to American Values" rather "Rediscovering." In a similar way, Ayittey isn't saying that all Africa need to do is to return to traditional African institutions. He's expressing that the way forward entails rediscovering deep values. Have mercy! I've blathered on so long and don't think I've made much sense. But, I thought just now of the Langston Hughes `poem`_ "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Man, do I ever get into trouble when I get into discussions with black Americans online! Part of it is a contention that all of us American are "colored people." Oh yes, there are great troubles caused by blurring distinctions. Still Hughes' poem moves me so. Something that bothers me about Schlesinger's quote isn't of course the liberal principles he espouses, but the "ownership" he insists is important. Moore Lappe's critique that we've reified, and thereby ossified, values when we should imagine them more as living and growing qualities. Actually, I think Ayittey understands this distinction between returning and rediscovering when he talks of traditional African institutions. I maybe really wrong about that. He travels in right-wing circles in the USA. Still, my hunch is that the right wingers don't really understand how subversive Ayittey's views are to their privileged interests. "A Negro Speaks of Rivers" sings out Soul Power. I like Soul Power, that what some back in the Civil Rights used to render the Gandhian construct `satyagraha`_. The ways of satygraha in the American context is a good example of how Ayittey's traditional African institutions might be interpreted in the new African reality. So I say: Ungawah--Soul Power! .. _`John Robb`: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ .. _`Koranteng's Toli`: http://koranteng.blogspot.com/ .. _`posted`: http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/03/busia-papers.html .. _`Is Democracy of Universal Application?`: http://home.comcast.net/~amaah/writings/democracy-universal.html .. _`poem`: http://www.duboislc.org/ShadesOfBlack/LangstonHughes.html .. _`satyagraha`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:08:58 PDT :Modified: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:10:00 PDT haven't been able to watch the video, but I read some of the terms I am seeing in the following ways: 1. **the informal market** is a term commonly used for businesses that operate beneath the radar of national tax authorities. You can call it black market, but in Africa (unlike in Europe or the USA) it's not an intentionally dodgy state of affairs on the part of the small business-person. Quite simply put, many countries in Africa have very week tax administration and collection systems. So the result is that the vast majority of African business activity happens beyond the governments' capacity to record and follow it. Tax administration systems were typically introduced by the colonialists, who simply didn't design those systems to take the small African traders and market sellers into account. In today's African market setting, such traders expect to pay a small market fee that contributes to running of a market they participate in, but their incomes from doing business at those markets are never recorded or taxed, or counted into GDP. They are the informal sector, they are *everywhere*, but they do not represent a tax base for the government budgets. Small home based businesses are also everywhere - in the same black hole of unrecorded *informality*. 2. The **traditional African economy** revolves around and is driven by ONE thing: family values. In the USA, we use the term in political rhetoric. In Europe, many countries have tried to incorporate family values into government policies. In Africa, every single person from a peasant farmer to the President is expected to share what s/he's got to contribute to the well-being of their extended family. The clan owns and apportions to you the land you live on in the village you come from. No matter if you were born somewhere else, you are *always* from the place where your clan's land lies. If you leave that place (ostensibly for better opportunities), you simply can not ever come back empty handed. When someone from the clan has achieved a high position, it is UNTHINKABLE that they would not do whatever they can to improve their family and clan's wellbeing through that position. In the west, we call it nepotism. In Africa, they call it family duty - and the pressure on public servants and business people to share with their families in the village is very, *very* high. Now combine that with low salary levels and *voila* you've got the perfect conditions for seeing what we in the west call corruption. And it's not just at high levels of influence. When it's school fees time for their kids, the traffic police stop more cars and collect more bribes *in order to afford to send their kids to school.* On their $100/month salaries, they would not be able to otherwise. From one angle it seems slimy, but through another lens that policeman who collects a bribe is being a good father. More on clans that I've been learning about lately.... to post later. Fab discussion all! ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:15:45 PDT Linda Nowakowski said: This is precisely, exactly what I see happening in Opok Farm Village. Linda, since I can't see the video, can you expand on this thought? ---- :Author: Rory Turner :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:33:44 PDT http://www.jstor.org/view/00104175/ap010075/01a00060/0 I wish this link gave the whole of this marvelous article. Christina is as usual on the mark about the deep problems that the two publics (One official and post colonial, the other local and thickly stranded) have on politics and action. That's why Ayittey's approach and Christina's is so critical, look to the strength and virtues of partnerships with true muscle whether informal or traditional, and build on them. ---- :Author: Rory Turner :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:37:00 PDT From this (http://www.codesria.org/Links/conferences/accra/osaghae.pdf) nice commentary on Ekeh's work: As Ekeh points out, a plunderer of funds in the civic public “would not be a good man were he to channel all his lucky gains to his private purse. He will only continue to be a good man if he channels part of the largesse from the civic public to the primordial public…The unwritten law of the dialectics is that it is legitimate to rob the civic public in order to strengthen the primordial public” (p.108). ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:02:49 PDT Christina's post is so great. Speaking about the kinship system as a white no-nothing American like me is just so hazardous, I keep stepping in it. But it's good to learn and so hazards come with the territory. It's hard to talk or listen to talk about African issues without the issue of what Christina is talking about with the traditional African economy coming up. When I hear "the big man" school of governance, my American-centric racism detector sounds an alarm. Goodness knows that much written and said about Africa IS racist but all that sounds racist often does not have a racist intent behind it. From the comments left at Dani Rodrick's `blog post`_ I referenced earlier was a link to a paper dealing with these kinship systems having an adverse impact of economic development, `The Kin System As Poverty Trap?`_ It's very important to find ways of talking and thinking about these values. Of course much more important for Africans to talk. Aiyttey's emphasis on traditional values is very important, but complicated. For example the situation in Uganda where people from the western part where Museveni hails are often thought to hold too much power by virtue of patronage. But when I read the World Bank piece I just linked to about kin systems, I thought of a 1968 book, "Pigs for our Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People" by Roy Rappaport. Rapapport worked to develop a cybernetic anthropology. The article at Wikipedia `Human ecosystem`_ is a good primer. It seems equally absurd to me to say that all Africa needs to do is to return to a traditional system as it does to say that all Africa needs to do is to let go of the mores that hold Africa back. The cybernetic approach that Rappaport pioneered provides a way to begin to understand complex systems like the traditional sector. There is great power in Aiyttey's thesis, but it's a mistake I think, to take what he says about the traditional sector on surface value. We get stuck when we imagine culture as a thing fixed. The focus on functional relationships that Rappaport used provides a clearer understanding of of dynamic information systems. .. _`blog post`: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/08/chinese-entrepr.html .. _`The Kin System As Poverty Trap?`: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2005/05/03/000012009_20050503101120/Rendered/PDF/wps3575.pdf .. _`Human ecosystem`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_ecosystem ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:09:11 PDT :Modified: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 03:11:54 PDT The basic asset that every family has is land. On or associated with adding value to that land (and thereby increasing the wealth of the whole clan) we also have traditional assets that are commutable: people and livestock. Traditional marriage is an economic exchange between families. We'll give your family one of our daughters if you give us some of your livestock. If she's actually leaving the clan (sometimes encompassing thousands of families), the price should be higher, because of the loss she represents to the clan. If she's been educated, the price will also be higher, because the value she adds to the family she's joining is higher. The traditional clans are like ethnically based states within kingdoms (or tribes/nations). In the old days arranged marriages were also a form of diplomacy. So when we talk about traditional African economies, it's not about crafts & agriculture. Those are simply commodities from the traditional systems which can carry over into a western system. For me, when you talk about traditional African economies, you're talking about whole different systems of exchange, where the extended family unit (the land-owning clan within a linguistically homogenous kingdom) is a self-governing socio-economic whole. I've even heard of clans who specialize - one example is the clan in the Baganda tribe that makes the royal drums. No drum will ever be used by the royal family that is not made by that clan. It would greatly upset the order of things. In an office setting here, you find people expecting transport and food allowances in addition to their salaries. At the beginning I found this ridiculously difficult to understand, until I realized that it has roots in the traditional system of clan/family based governance. When your elders are called for a meeting to discuss an issue that's relevant to your life (your marriage, a dispute you are in, an opportunity you are considering), it's on you or your parents to provide the food and drink - a goat to slaughter, some local brew maybe. It's also upon you to honor their time with a gift (their only compensation), and to pay their transport costs. That's how the community governance system sustains itself. So when people go to work, they expect the same thing from an employer. Either food or a food allowance, your gift of compensation, and a transport allowance. I've often thought about the kinship system as a poverty trap, but I am actually not so sure that's really it. It's not the kinship system that keeps people poor, but rather the conflict between the kinship system and western property systems that messes things up. In our system we measure success by how much you've personally gained; in the African traditional system your success is measured by how much value you've added to the clan. I can think of a concrete example where this clashes all the time: imagine a family member from the village comes unannounced to a small business person's home in a town somewhere to ask for help for - say - a sick child who needs medical attention back in the village. They have (typically) come without the return bus fare to get back home, and without means to sustain themselves in town. As a family member who has a business, you absolutely can not say "I don't have the money to help you" and put that day's earnings back into your business. Your duty is to share what you have with your family... and you will have to host that person in your home until you've come up with a way to give them what they need. In terms of western measures of success, you are doomed. But in terms of African traditional values it's the *right* thing to do to help a sick child in the village who is, after all, your family. ... more to share on the effort to rejuvenate the clan system in Northern Uganda. Fascinating stuff, IMO. ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:43:16 PDT Oh - but then there are also the nomadic tribes. I wonder how they differ. and a caveat - my observations are only that - an attempt at making sense out of what I *think* I've learned about Uganda... but it's so different and often hard to understand on some levels that I really could have it all wrong. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:51:47 PDT "It's not the kinship system that keeps people poor, but rather the conflict between the kinship system and western property systems that messes things up." That's such a good observation. Aiyttey makes the point too. But somehow western property systems have to be accounted for in the system. I don't think that such accommodation is only a matter for African people to figure out. The disastrous American invasion and occupation of Iraq really highlights the failures of thinking as we tend to about globalization. The folly of imagining Iraq as a freemarket nirvana seems incredible. Yet most Americans, still think it's "our way or the highway." John Firth's "neo-liberal echoes" he was hearing from me gave me pause, because I'm desperate to find out how we've gone so wrong and to learn changes myself. I didn't like The Kin System As Poverty Trap? paper. I have to say that plainly because I realize that it may have seemed as if I was holding up that article as an example of Rappaport's emphasis on functional relationships in information flows. The authors of that paper proceed from the premise that a modern economy functions with the "right" rules, and foremost the paramount value of efficiency. If Christina is right--and I think she probably is--that it's, "the conflict between the kinship system and western property systems that messes things up" it doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is simply to banish western property systems. Another way is to look at where the conflicts are in functional relationships and to improve their functionality. ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:58:10 PDT For Christina: Identifies the Cheetah generation - a new breed of Africans who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what Accountability and democracy are. THey do no wait for government to do things for them. Hippo generation - the ruling elite who are stuck complaining about colonialism and imperialism. You can not ask them to change things because they benefit from the status quo. Africa is rich in mineral resources but these resources are not being used to lift Africa out of poverty. People want to help. Help has been turned into a theatre of the absurd - the blind leading the clueless. Africa's begging bowl leaks. Wealth made in Africa leaves Africa. Each year: Corruption - $148 billion Capital flight - $80 billion Food imports - $20 billion In the '60s Africa not only fed itself, it exported food. Something went wrong. We could spend all day talking about how. FOrget it. Move on to the next chapter. Who do we want to help in Africa? The people or the government (leaders)? A previous speaker referred to the past leadership in Africa as abysmal - that is a charitable characterization. Since 1960 there have been 204 African heads of state. Asked people to identify just 20 good leaders. Came up with Mandela, Kruma, Arrera, Kinyata and someone even suggested Edi Amin..... They couldn't get past 15. The leaders of Africa have been a group of military foo-foo heads, Swiss Bank Socialists, Crocodile liberators, vampire elite sucking the economic vitality out of their people. Bandits enriching themselves and their cronies. They are all rich. Where does the wealth come from? Wealth creation? No. It is scraped off of the backs of their people - wealth redistribution. The second false premise: We sometimes think there is something called a government that cares about the people and serves the interest of the people. It has been said that in Africa there are two problems: rats and government. If we want to help Africa, we need to know where Africans are. There are 3 sectors in Africa: 1. Modern - The abode of the elites, the seat of government. In most of Africa it is not functional. It is rather the source of the problems. This is where development money and aid has gone. 2. Informal - 3. Traditional - Where Africa produces agriculture. Why it can't feed itself. Most of the people, the real people are in the informal and traditional sectors. You can not help Africa by ignoring the traditonal and informal sectors. We need to know how they work. Indigenious political heritage - Traditionally Africans hate governemnts. Traditionally Africans are organized into tribes and want to have nothing to do with central authority. No chiefs. These are represented by the Ibu and the Somali. There are tribes with chiefs but they have made sure that the chiefs are surrounded with council upon council to prevent them from abusing power. For example: in one tribe the chief can't pass a law without approval of the council of elders. If the chief doesn't rule for the people, the people remove or abandon the chief and go someplace else and set up a new settlement. Africa has been a model of confederacy characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority and decentralization of power. In the traditional sector the means of production is privately owned in an extended family system. In the west the basic unit is the individual. In America things center on I. In Africa it centers on we. The extended family pools resources together. They decide what to do. They decide what to produce. When they produce, they sell in the market and the profit is theirs to keep...not to give to the chief. We had a free market system for a long time. Market activity has been dominated by women. WHen the west came it became a different kind of capitalism, a western capitalism. Then the leaders said that Africans were ready for socialism. But a particular kind of socialism - Swiss Bank Socialism which allowed the leaders to take the money and deposit it in Switzerland. We must go back to African's indiginous systems. Go back to find the Africans in the traditon and informal sectors. He is trying to get the African diaspora to invest in these sectors - for example big boat building that they can catch bigger fish and employ more people and generate wealth and have external effects in the economy. There is also traditional medicine. And investment in agriculture. Also invest in change and take Africa back one village at a time. The develpment of Opok Farms Village will be an investment in agriculture. The investment in the learn by doing educational system will be grass roots and usable and will empower the people from the grass roots. The biggest concern that I have is how much of the traditional knowledge has been lost. This kind of development can be revolutionary in that it empowers the people to success without outside assistance and govenment intervention. This is powerful stuff. Does that help, Christina? You explanation certainly makes it much clearer! ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:57:17 PDT Wow Linda, if you ever need a second job, doing close captions for TV shows might be a good fit. What's above seems an accurate transcription of Aiyttey's talk. So cool that you post it here. ---- :Author: David Frayne :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:54:36 PDT Christina, the problems you describe are so fascinating. 10 years ago I came up with the idea of eradicating poverty through real estate investment, which works in the USA and other countries which treat land as a productive commodity and people as inherently "placeless". But I can see it wouldn't work in Africa, or any place which treated people as somehow inherently connected to land. I am working on a variation now not based on monetizing the value of real estate. The idea is to look for ways to unleash people's capacity to make other people's lives wonderful. (Like the story about hell being where people try to feed themselves with 3 foot chopsticks and heaven being where people feed each other with 3 foot chopsticks. You can't make your own life wonderful. You can only do it for others.) ---- :Author: Jim Carroll :Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 23:35:55 PDT Thank you everyone, I have just learned (what feels like) critical underpinnings of understanding a whole culture that up until now just seemed 'poor.' With this understanding, every once in a while, I see a glimpse my own western ways as poor with regard to family and community. ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 01:32:30 PDT Some years ago a friend, also from Ghana explained the extended family system to me and at the time I found it difficult to understand. He'd been asking me to save old shoes which he'd take back on his next visit. What he described at first seemed like his moderately wealthy family had obliged all their relatives to work as servants. On the contrary, they had been taken into the extended family when parents had died in the absence of a formal welfare system. It's come back to me now because It's just dawned on me that this Traditional family culture and welfare is exactly where I've been heading, while thinking of it as somethibg new. African traditionalism is inherently people-centric and pro community investment. It is us who need to catch up with their way of thinking. True enough, real estate investment won't do much for poverty in Africa but intiatives on land ownership/usage such as the UN Habitat's Global Land Tools Network might well provide us with new tools to develop opportunity. ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 02:12:55 PDT :Modified: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 02:16:18 PDT *John Powers said:" "If Christina is right--and I think she probably is--that it's, "the conflict between the kinship system and western property systems that messes things up" it doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is simply to banish western property systems." I know I've truncated that quote but my simple question is : *Why Not?* One of the pressing problems for the developing world (not just Africa) is the issue of traditional land rights and the conflict with Western notions of property ownership and markets which, in too many countries were used by the ruling elite to simply steal development land from settled communities that had traditional 'ownership' or occupation of the land. This was/is happening, for example, in the 'reconstruction' after the Tsunami when fishing communities with established 'traditional' land tenure were faced with eviction from prime beach locations as developers laid claim to their land using state/national property laws. I think this example highlights a key point of conflict and also tests our own assumptions. On the one hand we recognise a social injustice and we might also romanticise lost concepts of ownership (*ask the Native Americans - watch some Westerns !* ) but we then start using terms like 'traditional' which seem to be loaded with implicit patronising judgments. Aren't we often really saying: Well, it's *traditional* - meaning quaint - but that's not how we do business any more. Maybe we should pause to consider that *traditional* may simply be right when it places value on the collective and the social inclusiveness of the group - however that group may be defined. But, once we do, then we have to carry the logic through into political and economic solutions from a completely different perspective. The World Bank certainly does not share that perspective - but do the Cheetahs ? Proudhon famously claimed that all property is theft - and when it comes to the conflict between the notion of *land rights* and *land ownership* that assertion would unfortunately still ring true in much of the developing world. But how do you protect traditional land rights in the face of *enforced* free markets and conflicting free market values ? ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 02:57:49 PDT :Modified: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:35:24 PDT The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) aims to establish a continuum of land rights, rather than just focus on individual land titling; improve and develop pro poor land management as well as land tenure tools; unblock existing initiatives; assist in strengthening existing land networks; improve global coordination on land; assist in the development of gendered tools which are affordable and useful to the grassroots; and improve the general dissemination of knowledge about how to implement security of tenure. Read more... http://www.unhabitat.org/categories.asp?catid=503 ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 03:20:59 PDT :Modified: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:34:42 PDT someone (at) btinternet.com said: *How? Why not look into what I mentioned in the preceding post?* I will do that. It's just that I was writing my contribution while you were posting so I hadn't read it. :) _________________________________________________________________________ *Edit*: Removed reference to contributors need to use real names on but as the 'someone' has now materialised as Jeff I've changed the entry . :D ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 03:39:21 PDT :Modified: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:36:24 PDT BTW - The presence of the Community Land Partnership described as one of the tools is a little know success of networking with Omidyar which brought Islamic finance advocate Chris Cook into contact with Henry Georgist Alanna Hartzog who leads the project in Kenya. ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 05:10:55 PDT Jim thank you for starting this discussion. It's a delight to try and put some of this into words because it's been an issue that is very real in my work right now. Recently in Gulu I was seriously starting to think the clan system would blow a hole in the Opok Farms concept. I'd `started out`_ with the premise that many of the child headed families didn't have a place to go. When I started interviewing people about the problem I started hearing for the first time about local government and religious leader efforts to sensitize people in the IDP camps about how the traditional clan systems used to work, and what they need to do to reinstate those systems. One of the key messages being delivered is that the clans need to track down their missing children and clan members and start to reapportion their land so that everyone has enough. There is evidence of that happening. A priest told me of being encouraged by the clan committees starting to visit the orphanage at Lacor hospital. He knew of two cases just the previous week where children had been identified and taken to live with family members. We've heard about several clan meetings taking place to discuss land issues. LiA's Morris Okello was very excited when his father called him a few days ago with news that their family had received a few thousand acres. People are taking this very seriously. So to say right now that these orphaned families don't have a place to go is technically not true. If all goes well with revitalizing the clan system, then they will have a place to go. The question remains, what will they do when they get there? The other question is, is all going well? In an interview with an organization that supports child-headed households in Gulu, we learned that the problems I'd thought were there actually *are* there... the process of revitalizing the clan welfare system is a process in which the child-headed families often don't have anyone representing them. The process has really just stareted in the past few months, but already the sense is that too many are getting left out. The relatives who traditionally should care for them (normally the uncles on their father's side) see them as a heavy burden. And you can forgive that at a certain level, since for the past 20 years they've *not* had the land as an asset and are, indeed, some of the most poverty-afflicted people on the planet. The traditional Acholi clan system in Northern Uganda became completely handicapped to function as it should when everyone moved away from the land and into the camps. And in a war-zone, anything goes. Idleness, moral corruption, horrendous health and sanitation, rampant HIV/AIDS, petty gossip, conspiring to taking sides in the war, dealing with the pain and loss of death, intense desires for vengeance, the trauma of child abduction and disturbing rates of defilement and teenage pregnancies with untraceable fathers. The war and it's resulting poverty in terms of both western and Acholi systems has ripped the fabric of Acholi society to shreds in many ways. Another very pressing problem is, so many people have spent so long in the IDP camps (20 years for some!) that they do not know what to do with their land. jumping into the Western style economy of earthly errors offers the easiest immediate answer to improving the family's immediate well-being. so they chop down the forest for firewood and charcoal, then slash and burn to make cash crops while our families are still living in the camps. sounds easy enough, especially since the children and youth don't know how to farm - they have no experience living on the land. Their people are also dispersed, so they are short on labor to make much else happen. But of course, in doing that, they destroy the productivity of the only asset they really have. I've even been approached on the roadside in IDP camps by young men telling me they wanted to sell me their land. The counter-current is a strong fear that "investors" will wrestle the land away from the clans. So the Opok Farms concept has evolved a bit. in the local culture it can't be conceived of in terms of a place where anyone (except our family) would be expected - from the outset - to resettle to indefinitely. Some people might stay on, but what's really needed (we feel) is a transitional oasis where the most vulnerable children (the boarding school), IDP camp youth (vocational training), and long idle adults (contracted farm workers with additional acreage to farm for their own gain) can come and learn *how* to manage and add value to their own family land, in ways that don't destroy the most valuable core asset they have. Here's the latest `project description`_. My objective for the child families in this context has become to make sure that when the children leave the school they will no longer be seen as a burden to the overstretched clan welfare system, but as assets in terms of the value they can add to the clan. Youth and adults who pass through the programs will radiate the concepts and values out to their own families, villages and clans as those structures continue to be restored. Northern Uganda offers such a fascinatingly interesting blank slate for making everything re-newed. The war has been terrible - no doubt about that - but the one GOOD thing that's happened is that the (incredibly rich and fertile) land has been restored to such a pristine natural state. The clan leadership and governance systems have never disappeared, so are easy to bring back into active play in revitalizing and administering traditional acholi economics. And since under that system every farmer can do what he wants to do with his land (including sell his produce in very western seeming ways), it's completely conceivable to me to imagine a peaceful coexistence of the two systems emerging there in the post-war era. Community based asset management, where governance structures are family based and trade opportunities are potentially worldwide. Thanks again, Jim, for the opportunity to share on this interesting set of very timely issues for us working on the Opok Farms project. I promise not to be so wordy in my next post to this thread! .. _`project description`: http://www.ned.com/group/opokfarms/ws/index/ .. _`started out`: http://www.omidyar.net/user/u618296607/news/18/ ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 05:33:00 PDT Hi 'Jeff Someone' and welcome to ! ;) I understand and can see how the UN initiative promotes the continuation of existing land rights. Immediately after the Tsunami I was involved in helping flag up the importance of protecting land rights for devastated communities. No great deal on my part but I mention it here because it highlights the problems that arise when, as in the case of the Tsunami, the slate is literally wiped clean. `The Oxfam Report on Land Rights in Aceh`_ is worth reading to drive this point home. But the removal of land rights by imposing markets in real estate based on private or corporate ownership can be as devastating as natural disasters for communities in Africa whose collective social values and relationships revolve around their land rights. I am in broad agreement with the UN initiative but I wonder if it fits and possibly works best where existing land rights are not rubbing up against the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation. Surely those are the pressure points where the 'traditional' rights and values come into the sharpest conflict with the whole apparatus of 21C capitalism ? `The International Alliance of Inhabitants`_ are one of the many organisations speaking for the slum dwellers and the dispossessed in the developing world and I think their grievances should at least be noted here as a warning for the Cheetahs if they really do want to stop the social fractures that follow when 'traditional' land rights are ignored. .. _`The Oxfam Report on Land Rights in Aceh`: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/conflict_disasters/downloads/bn_tsunami_twoyears.pdf .. _`The International Alliance of Inhabitants`: http://www.habitants.org/article/frontpage/15/140 ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 07:32:53 PDT Thank you Christina and others for the information on the clan system. I have been reluctant to speculate on how the `Self-help Corporation`_ would work in other cultures because I know that I do not understand those cultures. Reading this discussion it occurs to me that I am trying to import aspects of the clan system into the western property system. In the SHC it is the corporation/clan that acquires assets and the corporation/clan that takes responsibility to see that each of its members can contribute to the well being of the whole. From SHC: For conceptual purposes you can compare a self-help corporation to the immigrant family that starts a restaurant as a family business. Father takes odd jobs to supplement the income, mother works in the kitchen and the kids wait tables. Everyone involved gets fed and a place to sleep but most of the cash goes back into the business. In this way, and with other kinds of businesses, many immigrant families in the US have bootstrapped their way to financial security. A self-help corporation has the same goal. Further, to the extent that cash proceeds can be reinvested in the business, and not disbursed to pay for labor, a self-help corporation has the same economic advantage. So a traditional Acholi clan - once they regain their land - would decide as a group how they would employ their collective resources as an investment in selected members of the clan - who would then be obligated to share their success with other clan members. That process in my family, and the fact that many people I dealt with had problems because they did not have those family resources, is the core idea that led to the SHC. The biggest problem I see is that the clan system is inherently divisive in that each of us would be in a clan that was more or less successful - and members of the less successful are likely to be envious of those in the more successful. That is why I like a "community investment enterprise" for each `locality`_. .. _`Self-help Corporation`: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Self-help_Corporation .. _locality: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_locality ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 07:49:25 PDT *In his closing remarks David said:* *The biggest problem I see is that the clan system is inherently divisive in that each of us would be in a clan that was more or less successful - and members of the less successful are likely to be envious of those in the more successful. That is why I like a "community investment enterprise" for each locality.* Can I question this ? Aren't there assumptions here that 'competition' and 'social envy' will automatically arise as if they were part of some universal natural order ? It could be argued that the concepts are products of our individuated societies and they are not necessarily part of societies based on collective values. Now, it may be true that the concepts of 'competition' and 'social envy' *are* universal but I am simply suggesting that the assumption would need to be tested - just as the assertion that "the clan system is inherently divisive" might also require further supporting evidence. ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 07:58:02 PDT John said: just as the assertion that "the clan system is inherently divisive" might also require further supporting evidence. Point taken - although I only asserted that "members of the less successful are likely to be envious" :) ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:10:47 PDT I would also challenge the assumption the competition_ is bad. Competition does not lead to "conflict" so long as all the competitors agree that the rules are fair and agree to play by those rules. .. _competition: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_conflict_competition_and_symbiosis_synergy ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:22:32 PDT I know, but I was also asking if that was necessarily true ? In theory, if all of the clans can meet all of their basic needs and have sufficient surplus to provide security for the future and to meet some of there immediate 'wants' can we assume that they will still be envious of the more 'successful' ? More successful at what ? Envious of whom ? The members of the other clan (to whom your clan is probably related through marriage) who have more cattle ? I'm not trying to be clever here and I don't have the answer to my own questions - but Christina has already pointed out some of the difficulties that can arise when we don't pause to challenge our own baggage of assumptions ........so I'm just trying to apply that challenge. No more, no less ! :) ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:32:55 PDT :Modified: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:33:19 PDT David Braden said: *I would also challenge the assumption the competition is bad. Competition does not lead to "conflict" so long as all the competitors agree that the rules are fair and agree to play by those rules.* David, I don't disagree with that although it does, of course, reflect the ideal and maybe even provides a reasonable rule of thumb for measuring a just society. ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:36:13 PDT John said: . . . it does, of course, reflect the ideal and maybe even provides a reasonable rule of thumb for measuring a just society. This is where I like the idea of cheetas. As each of us makes choices on who we will deal with and how we will spend our lives, we create the world for ourselves and everyone around us. I am saying that We should not wait for someone else to create the world we want - and understanding how conflict, competition and symbiosis/synergy work in the whole system is one of the steps for more and more of us making better choices. ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:42:03 PDT Looks like we're agreeing to agree ! :D ---- :Author: Chris Cook :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:20:54 PDT My ears are burning! Just assimilating what Christina was saying in connection to the total mismatch between "Western" property rights and traditional African "community/clan" - based methods. The very idea that individuals can "own" land absolutely and permanently is incomprehensible to most Africans. I think that the key to success lies in the use of "Open" Corporate entities to encapsulate the bundle of rights and obligations that constitutes the "Property" relationship. The "Community Partnership" is in essence not only a simple, consensual and collaborative concept but one which has existed for thousands of years. It's a matter of finding the right language, I think. Jeff Mowatt said: BTW - The presence of the Community Land Partnership described as one of the tools is a little know success of networking with Omidyar which brought Islamic finance advocate Chris Cook into contact with Henry Georgist Alanna Hartzog who leads the project in Kenya. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:38:09 PDT John Firth quoted me: "If Christina is right--and I think she probably is--that it's, "the conflict between the kinship system and western property systems that messes things up" it doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is simply to banish western property systems." The he asks: "I know I've truncated that quote but my simple question is : Why Not?" My point is that the place to look for solutions isn't in the clashing systems, but in the functional relationships between the systems. Perhaps I'm too simplistic, but I rather take for granted that the two systems exist and getting rid of either of them is just to big a task to contemplate. A couple of weeks ago I had visitors here. My brother and his wife brought their two girls and a couple of my adult nieces from my sister's family came up. I was particularly charmed by my nine year old niece. There is something truly miraculous about children my niece's age. When I taught elementary school third grade teachers would talk about the children towards the end of the year catching fourth-grade-itis. Children that age are figuring things out and no longer in thrall of adults. Silly uncle that I am I tried to get Emma to bark like a dog. I slyly brought up the subject of animal communication and then asked, "How does a dog sound?" My niece gave me a greasy eyeball. She thought something strange about my question. Noting her hesitation I turned and looked at my sister-in-law then back at my niece and said "Didn't your parents ever teach you animal sounds?" That little bit of parental guilt did the trick and got my sister-in-law barking. But wise Emma demurred. It's a silly story, but illustrates how people negotiate through the world very aware of meta-representations. When it comes to holding two contradictory notions in our heads, it seems that's a feature not a bug. Frances Moore Lappe's book "Rediscovering America's Values" was important for me because she squarely looked at the fact that the Liberal tradition just isn't functioning well enough nowadays; that is functioning well as a worldview. A worldview is a set of interlocking ideas. As people we need consistency and coherence in the ways our ideas fit together. Some people think the moon is made of cheese. I know that the moon is not made of cheese, but I also know that some people believe so. We need a worldview. Moore Lappe points out that a worldview, at least of the sort we need, is not dogma. Rather examining premises and a willingness to probe the component values distinguishes a worldview from a fixed idea or dogma. There are two threads to this mess: first that people operate with a set of ideas about how things work, and with an awareness that part of the way things are is people have different sets of ideas. Busia's list of essential democratic values that I quoted and including tolerance are values that Ayittey advances too. A value that Ayittey would be sure to include would be: "People respond to incentives." Ayittey and Busia also advance the notion that these values are not foreign to Africa. Busia asks: "Is Democracy of Universal Application?" I'd answer, "yes." But that answer is not to say that all democracy will look the same. Overwhelmingly I identify more with the Cheetahs. But the way I see it is Cheetahs and Hippos exist in a complex human ecosystem. As much as I'd feel comfortable putting "Death to the Hippos" in Ayittey's mouth; I realize such sentiment is besides his point that we actually pay attention to human empowerment instead of focusing on governments and high capital technical solutions. I think he's saying the good fight is not so much to battle the Hippos as to make sure the Cheetahs are well fed. People are good at negotiating various thought systems. Changes to the thought systems happens, like most change, from the margins in. It's the actual doing that gets the changes done. Ayittey is very concerned with values, but not so much concerned with ideologies. On the radio earlier this week I heard excerpts from a speech given by Wangari Matthai at the University of Pittsburgh where she received here masters of science degree. I've heard Matthai speak before and am always moved. She talked about after her Ph.d. and working on the faculty at university she and other women faculty were working on programs for a UN Year of Women. They were concerned with equitable treatment at the university. But about that time she met with a group of Kenyan women also working to develop programs. What they were concerned with were life and death issues. That was part of her movement towards her involvement of the Green Belt Movement, but there's so much more. Nonetheless, the basic problems of survival the women she met with were struggling became for Matthai the most pressing ones. They agreed to plant trees, one of the women said they didn't know how. Matthai answered that she didn't either, but they could find out how. Most of you probably know Matthai's story better than I. What I take from her story, and how she was oppressed for her efforts to plant trees, concerns this interaction between traditional and modern. A story of conflict, yes, however the important part is not the conflict but ultimately figuring out ways that work. She didn't start out with the intention to start a Green Belt Movement. The movement grew out of actions that worked to cope with realities at hand. All my blather to make the same point that John Firth already has that Ayittey is talking about building democracy form the bottom up. Geez! ---- :Author: Mark Grimes :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:58:49 PDT BTW, the beaded bracelet Dr. Ayittey is wearing in the photo for the video are called CEDI beads made in Ghana. Obo and Susan Addy have brought back many of those from Ghana in years past, I've got a few dozen in the house here. Hey, someone should invite Dr. Ayittey into this conversation. :: Dr. George Ayittey Distinguished Economist in Residence Tel: (202) 885-3779 Fax: (202) 885-3790 ayittey@american.edu ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:40:12 PDT John Powers said: . . . I rather take for granted that the two systems exist and getting rid of either of them is just to big a task to contemplate. and We need a world view. . . . examining premises and a willingness to probe the component values distinguishes a world view from a fixed idea or dogma. I would offer a `Better Map`_. .. _`Better Map`: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Better_Maps ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:13:47 PDT Mark wrote: BTW, the beaded bracelet Dr. Ayittey is wearing in the photo for the video are called CEDI beads made in Ghana CEDI is their unit of currency in Ghana. I wonder why such a choice? ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:13:55 PDT Done! Dear Dr. Ayittey, There is a group of committed individuals discussing your TED presentation and considering the implications in a situation in Uganda that a number of us are involved in. Someone was so bold as to suggest inviting you. I was so bold as to take them up on the suggestion. You can find our discussion at http://www.ned.com/group/econo-politics/news/0/ I do look forward to seeing you there but will certainly understand if you have other pressing matters. .. line-block :: -- Linda Nowakowski Faculty of Management Science Ubon Ratchathani University Warin Chamrab Ubon Ratchathani 34190 THAILAND ---- :Author: Mark Grimes :Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:25:07 PDT >>CEDI is their unit of currency in Ghana. I wonder why such a choice?<< I'll ask Susan Addy if she knows... I thought it was the main bead-maker guy's name :-/ ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2007 01:56:39 PDT btw Linda - thank you so very much for the summary of Dr. Ayittey's presentation. The cheetahs and hippos are alive and well in Gulu! That distinction very precisely characterizes my own observations of 2 levels at play in the local leadership. The local district administration in Gulu is largely made up of cheetahs - they are multiparty and committed to changing the old ways that dominate the hippos in the national administration. But hippos will be hippos - they are there and sometimes it seems there's not much you can do about them. Self-aggrandizement and bullying seems to be a common hippo trait. *Perhaps* this is a actually a human symptom of the intense inferiority complex inflicted on African culture by the rest of the world for more than a century. Anyway, thanks too for inviting Dr. Ayittey to join us here. I'm wondering if he believes the hippos have any chance of transforming into cheetahs, and how we might facilitate that. And also what kinds of things should those of us who want to see the cheetahs free to take over hippo territory do to make that happen more often? Or should we simply accept that the hippos will always be there and work with them? (caveat - maybe some of these issues were covered in the presentation - still sorry I haven't been able to view it!) ---- :Author: chris macrae :Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2007 10:50:42 PDT I am not sure if I agree with this but it seemed to offer a framework of some value in translating across countries. It comes from the parallel conversation on the video over at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/151 by someone in name George Wonderwheel: The fundamental problem is that people confuse form with function. As Ayittey points out, the form of current modern African governments totally fail to provide any functional democracy. (The USA government is just as corrupt and anti-democratic, but hides it better, but that is for another blog.) The traditional African systems that Ayittey discusses may or may not have been more democratic and the question is how can we tell? Fortunately, we can judge between traditional and modern systems and their degrees of democracy by applying a simple ruler to measure the system for its democratic factors. There are six primary factors in democracy that can be arranged in three pairs or polarities: 1. People as sovereign - 2. Rule of law; 3. Majority rule - 4. Minority rights; 5. Separation of powers - 6. Checks and balances. By asking how any particular system measures up to these six factors we can easily judge the democratic principles at work in the system. Here is one example; a free press is a primary social structure that guarantees minority rights within a majority rule system. If a minority can not put their views forward, then they have no opportunity to persuade the majority and therefore even if there is majority rule, without a free press there is no democracy because there is no protection of this essential minority right. In any country, even the U.S.A., where there are only five or less of these factors, then it is not a complete democracy, and it will be seen that the missing factor shows the hole where fascists and gangsters have inserted themselves like a wedge to corrupt and misguide the democratic principles and undermine the democracy for their own personal ends. Ayittey describes, for example, the council of elders who can remove a chief who is unresponsive to the will of the people. This is the function of factors 5 and 6, separation of powers and checks and balances. These two factors work together and by observing this functioning in traditional systems is one way to determine that the traditional systems are working democracies. If a chief understands that he or she is not soverign and it is the people who are soverign (factor 1), and the chief doesn't get to make up the law but has a rule of law to abide by (factor 2), then the chief is not a monarch but a leader based in democratic principles (of course, as long as the chief also recognizes the other 4 factors as well). Listening to Ayittey's brief descriptions, it is easy to see that the confederacy principle is a basic democratic heritage of Africa and is present as a traditional cultrual base upon which to buld viable democracies that embody the six primary factors. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:04:49 PDT After Linda's great transcription of Ayittey's talk, it occurs to me to mention that `Ethan Zuckerman`_ live blogged the conference. On the side bar he has a Ted Global link. But for some reason it appears to me to yield only a single page of entries. So I went simply to his June 2007 archives. I keep getting so far afield in my comments. And I was very happy for the link to the the the `Better Map`_ I agree that the metaphor of an ecosystem is a better map. But one of my points is that people are able to keep in mind multiple metaphor systems. Indeed something we're sometimes good at doing is figuring out when someone is trying to trick us. Hence my story about my little niece. I enjoyed George Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live By" so I was delighted to seen in the run up to the 2004 presidential elections that Lakoff waded into the political scene with some ideas about framing in a book called "Don't Think of an Elephant." But Frances Moore Lappe wrote a good criticism of it in an essay called `Time for Progressives to Grow Up`_ If I see a problem with "A Better Map" it is that we all exist with multiple maps to use. It would be good to have a single one, I suppose, except that we have to negotiate in a world where people have mapped things out quite differently than that. So it helps to have a map for understanding that too. Among the many great talks at Ted Global, I was very moved by `Chris Abani's`_ In June when I read Ethan's live blogging, he reproduced a poem, "Ode to the Drum" by Yusuf Kumanyaaka which Abani recited at the end of his talk. The final lines of that poem took my breath away. You can read `Ethan's blog`_ post of Abani's talk and see the whole poem there. I haven't found the right word yet for the way I see Ayittey's "traditional African institutions." I tried to make a distinction between "returning" and "rediscovering" but that doesn't quite get at it. What I'm pointing to is the creative acts inherent in whatever we do. That old line from a Faulkner play: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." bites into this conundrum I'm trying to express. Watch Chris Abani's video if you can, or read Kumanyaaka's poem at Zuckerman's blog. It seem very relevant to what Ayittey is talking about, or at least the way I'm understanding him. There's an academic paper on Fela Kuti and Yourba story telling I'd like to link to but can't find. LOL a relef I suspect to most of you. Obviously including links means they're entirely optional. And in that vein of optional links I was interested in a blog post by a provocative Ugandan blogger the `27th Comrade`_ today. On the one hand the 27th Comrade might be understood to be precisely contrary to Ayittey's contention that Africa's problems are internal not external. I see the 27th Comrade working with the narrative and trying hard to compose an African story. It may not be along the lines of the story Ayittey would tell, but it does seem a part of the process of the process of claiming the narrative that essential for rediscovering traditional African institutions. .. _`Ethan Zuckerman`: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/ .. _`Better Map`: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Better_Maps .. _`Time for Progressives to Grow Up`: http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/article.php?id=1010 .. _`Chris Abani's`: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/155 .. _`Ethan's blog`: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2007/06/06/three-voices-listen/ .. _`27th Comrade`: http://dying-communist.blogspot.com/2007/09/forget-history-please.html ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2007 08:11:20 PDT Haven't gotten through all your links yet John - but I liked this from Lappe: Second, the ecological revolution is infusing our consciousness with an awareness of our interrelatedness far wider than our immediate family. Ecology teaches us that there is no single action, isolated and contained; all actions have ripples – not just ripples up through systems in hierarchical flows, but out through webs of connectedness in what we might think of as lateral flows. Ecology teaches us that the world is co-created through complex networks of relationships, no one of which is dominant. ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2007 10:29:15 PDT Watched the Chris Abani video - I'm not sure he is taking the idea of story as far as I would. The stories we tell create the world in which we live - and we need a new story - not just about Africans for Africans - but about people for humanity. This new story needs to be based on our `essential unity`_ and be: the story of "How Humans came to Live in Peace and Plenty". It begins . . . There was a time when humans did unspeakable things to one another, and that led to scarcity and privation, that led to more cruelty, in an unending cycle . . . Of course, we do not know the details of the story, but it involves coming to understand and honor the gift of the least among us . . . .. _`essential unity`: http://www.aboutus.org/essential_unity ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2007 12:33:24 PDT I love the story in Abani's talk about the Pakistani Muslim teacher teaching his Ibo students about the Biafra war. And then how as a young man he wrote a new story. They always say stories have a beginning middle and end. Since there are three time parts to stories it begs comparison to the way time is broken into past-present-future. Part of the power of stories is that time isn't fixed, all time can be invented, past, present and future.So in David's story the past is invented as well as the present and future. When Abani talks about how important stories are for understanding, on one hand it seems he's saying we have to know the past as if it's a fixed thing, the past as still and unmoving--dead. But then he tells his story about his teacher and makes plain that stories are a living way for understanding. Always we find, as living beings, that the present is the time we have the most influence over; the present is where are doing is manifest. But it seems to me our being requires all of time for meaning. That's why I found Abani's talk of stories so powerful. ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:27:29 PDT I got the following response from Dr. Ayittey: Linda, I have read through most of the postings and they are very insightful. I have signed in and waiting for my password. In the meantime, please find attached the transcripts of my speech. You did a great job tryng to transcribe it. Will join you guys soon. Best, George Ayittey, Washington, DC **Transcripts of speech by Dr.George Ayittey** ----- at TED Global, Arusha, Tanzania (June 5, 2007) First of all, let me thank Emeka for a, as a matter fact TED Global, for putting this conference together. And this conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century. Think African governments will put together a conference like this? Think the AU (African Union) will put together a conference like this? Even before they do that, they will ask for foreign aid. I will also like to pay homage and honor to the TED fellows -- June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew, and the other TED Fellows. I call them the Cheetah Generation. The Cheetah generation is a new breed of Africans, who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what accountability and democracy is. They are not going to wait for government to do things for them. That is the Cheetah generation. And Africa’s salvation rests on the backs on these Cheetahs. In contrast, of course, we have the Hippo generation. The Hippo generation are the ruling elites. They’re stuck in their intellectual patch, complaining about colonialism, and imperialism. They wouldn’t move one foot. If you asked them to reform their economies they are not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo. Now, there are lots of Africans who are very ANGRY – ANGRY at the condition of Africa. Now, we are talking about a continent which is not poor but is rich in mineral resources -- natural mineral resources. But the mineral wealth has not been utilized to lift its people out of poverty. That’s what makes a lot of Africans very angry. And in a way Africa is more than a tragedy in more ways than one. There is another enduring tragedy and that tragedy is there are so many people, so many governments and so many organizations who want to help a people in Africa they don’t understand. Now, we are not saying don’t help Africa. Helping Africa is noble. But helping Africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd. It is like the blind leading the clueless. There are certain things that we need to recognize. Africa’s begging bowl leaks. Did you know that 40- percent of the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa? It is taken out of Africa. That’s what the World Bank says. Look at Africa’s begging bowl. It leaks -- horribly. There are people who think that we should pour more money – more aid -- into this bowl, which leaks. What are the leakages? Corruption alone costs Africa $148 billion a year. Put that aside. Capital flight out of Africa: $80 billion a year. Put aside. Let’s take food imports. Every year Africa spends $20 billion a year to import food. Just add that up. All these leakages – that’s far more than the $50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa. Back in the 1960s, Africa not only fed itself but also exported food. Not any more. We know that something has gone fundamentally wrong. You know it, I know it. But let’s not waste our time talking about these mistakes because we will spend all day here. Let’s move on and flip over to the next chapter. That what this conference is all about: The Next Chapter. The next chapter begins with first of all by asking ourselves this fundamental question: Whom do we want to help in Africa? There is the people, and then there is the government or the leaders. Now the previous speaker before me, Idris Mohamed, indicated that we’ve had abysmal leadership in Africa. That characterization, in my view, is even more charitable. I belong to an internet discussion forum -- an African internet discussion forum – and I asked them that since 1960, we have had exactly 204 African heads of state – since 1960. And I asked them to name me just 20 good leaders – just 20 good leaders. Maybe you may want to take this leadership challenge yourself. I asked them to name me just 20. Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course. Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta. Somebody mentioned Idi Amin. I let that pass. Fact is, they could not go beyond 15. Even if they had been able to name me 20 what does that tell you? 20 out of 204 means that the majority – the vast majority of the African leaders failed their people. If you look at them, the slate of post-colonial leaders is an assortment of military fufu-heads, Swiss bank socialists, crocodile liberators, vampire elites, quack revolutionaries. Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders Africans have known for centuries. The second false premise we make is that, sometimes we think there is in Africa something called a “government” that cares about its people, serves the interest of the people and represents the people. There is one particular quote. A Lesotho chief once said that: Here in Lesotho we have two problems: Rats and the governments. What you and I understand as “governments’ doesn’t exist in many African countries. In fact what we call our governments are “vampire states.” Vampires states because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is the problem in Africa. A vampire state is government which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies, and tribesmen and exclude everyone else. The richest people in Africa are heads of state and ministers. And quite often the chief bandit is the head of state himself. Where did they get their money? By creating wealth? No, by raking it off the backs of their suffering people. That is not wealth creation; that’s wealth redistribution. The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people we must know where the African people are. Take any African economy. An African economy can be broken up into three sectors: There is the modern sector, there is the informal sector and the traditional sector. The modern sector is the abode of the elites. It is the seat of government. In many African countries, the modern sector is lost; it is dysfunctional. It is a meretricious fandango of imported systems which the elites themselves don’t understand. That is the source of many of Africa’s problems -- where the struggles for political power emanate, and then spill over onto the informal and traditional sectors, claiming innocent lives. Now, the modern sector, of course, is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into. More than 80 percent of Ivory Coast development went into the modern sector The other sectors, the informal and traditional sectors, are where you can find the majority of the African people. The real people in Africa – that’s where you find them. Obviously it makes common sense that if you want to help the people you go where the people are. But that’s not what we did. As a matter of fact, we neglected the informal and traditional sectors. The traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture, which is one of the reasons why Africa can’t feed itself. And that’s why it must import food. Alright . . . You cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and traditional sectors And you can’t develop the informal and traditional without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work. These two sectors, let me describe to you, have their own indigenous institutions. The first one is the political system. Traditionally, Africans hate government; they hate tyranny. If you look into their traditional systems, Africans organize their states in two types. The first one belongs to those ethnic societies who believe the state was necessarily tyrannous. So they didn’t want to have anything to do with any centralized authority. These societies are the Ibo, the Somali and the Kikuyu, for example. They have no chiefs. The other ethnic groups which did have chiefs, made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power. In the Ashanti Kingdom, for example, the chief cannot make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders. Without the council, the chief can’t pass any law. And if the chief doesn’t govern according to the will of the people he would be removed. If not, the people will abandon the chief. Go somewhere else and set up a new settlement. And even if you look into ancient African empires they were all organized around one particular principle: The confederacy principle, which is characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority, decentralization of power. Now, this is what I have described to you -- this is part of Africa’s indigenous political heritage. Now compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established upon Africa, on Africans. – a total far cry [from the traditional system]. In the economic system, in traditional Africa, the means of production are privately owned -- owned by extended families. See, in the west, the basic economic and social unit is the individual. The American would say: I am because I am and I can damn well do anything I want anytime. The accent is on the “I.” In Africa, the Africans say I am because we are. The “we” connotes community-- the extended family system. The extended family system pulls its resources together; they own farms; they decide what to do; what to produce. They don’t take any orders from their chiefs. They decide what to do. And when they produce their crops, they sell the surplus on markets places. When they make a profit, it is theirs to keep; not for the chief to sequestrate from them. In a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free market system. There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. Timbuktu was one great big market town. Kano, Salaga, – they were all there. Even if you go to West Africa, you will notice that market activity in West Africa, has always been dominated by women. So it is quite appropriate that this section of the conference is called the Marketplace. The market is not alien to Africa. What Africans practiced was a different form of capitalism. But then after independence, all of a sudden, markets, capitalism became a Western institution and the leaders said Africans were ready for socialism. Nonsense. And even then what kind of socialism did they practice? The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of “Swiss bank socialism” which allowed the head of state and his ministers to rape and plunder Africa’s treasury for deposit in Switzerland. That is not the kind of system Africans have known for centuries. What do we do now? Go back to our Africa’s indigenous institutions. This is where we charge the Cheetahs to go into the informal sectors and traditional sectors. That’s where your find the African people I would like to show you a quick little video about the informal sector, about the boat-building I myself am trying to mobilize Africans in the diaspora to invest in. Could you please show that? [Video runs] Here is a Ghanaian entrepreneur, using his own capital without any assistance from the government and is building bigger boats. Bigger boats means that more fish can be caught and landed. It means that he would be able to employ more Ghanaians. And it also means that they will be to generate wealth. And then have, what economists call, “external effects” on the local economy. All that the elites need to do is to move these operations into something that is enclosed so that the operations can be made more efficient. Now, it is not just this informal sector, there is also traditional medicine. 80 percent of Africans still rely on traditional medicine. The modern health care sector has totally collapsed. Now, this is an area, I mean there is a trover – trover treasure of wealth in traditional medicine area. This is where we need to mobilize Africans in the diaspora especially to invest in this. We also need to mobilize Africans in the diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors but also into agriculture and also to instigate change from within. We were able mobilize Ghanaians in the diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana and I know that with the Cheetahs we can take Africa back – one village at a time. Thank you. ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:25:49 PDT Linda, thank you for taking the initiative on this and for posting the transcript of George's speech here. We are all grateful to you for that. I see that George has now logged on as a member and I would also like to take this opportunity to jump the queue and ask a couple a questions. George, you refer to *Vampire States* and suggest that the vampire governments can be removed and the traditions of a more democratic Africa can be restored one village at a time. I like the notion of creating a 'social bypass' that rebuilds power from the bottom up but I wonder if you believe that this kind of change - which may challenge not just the elites but also Western interests - can be achieved peacefully ? I also wonder if you could expand on your references to the 'informal economy' as we may have misread your meaning and that led to some debate at the beginning of this discussion. ---- :Author: Jim Carroll :Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 06:17:59 PDT Dr. Ayittey, it's wonderful to have you here. When you say, "All that the elites need to do is to move these operations into something that is enclosed so that the operations can be made more efficient." Are you talking about putting a roof over their head? I can imagine that scaling the boat building business might need to move from the informal market to the modern market, and that would give them more economic resources to build their own roof (metaphorically or not.) So that leads to another question, How big can a business grow, and still avoid the modern economy? Thank you. In community, -Jim ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 10:30:57 PDT Somewhere along the line in my bloviating in this thread the thought came: "What if Dr. Ayittey were to read this?" I reassured myself that was unlikely, so when I that read Linda had written George Ayittey, my stomach sunk. When I began talking about African issues with friends, over and over their response was that I should contact Black organizations. Also, usually they say I should contact Oprah. In a segregated society like the USA one great benefit about the Internet is that white Americans can engage with black Americans more regularly. I do and sometimes those conversations are very painful. Racism in America is broken bones in the skeleton of our structure. The process of realigning bones is never painless. In a different, but similar way, when Americans an others begin to think about Africa and engage with Africans, the broken bones in our feeble and often stereotypical thinking have to be reset. My stomach sunk. Nevertheless, I invite Dr. Ayittey's participation here. What do they say? No pain no gain. I understand the academic schedule and how intense it is. At least Linda Nowakowski has a good handle on that here. Even if you don't have time for this thread, I would encourage you to look around the discussions here. Perhaps one way to is to open the profile of a young man from northern Uganda named `Munnu Morrish`_ and skim over his comments in discussion threads. What is most important for us is constructive engagement with the people we collaborate with. I've corresponded for years with a Ugandan friend who started a community based organization in the Iganga region of Uganda. All along I've told him to be skeptical of anything I say, and for the most part I think we've got an understanding about that. The conversation your Ted talk has provoked, not just here but all over, is so important. One of the great strengths of your Internalist versus Externalist diagnosis is that your Internalist position encourages responsibility. I don't imagine the meaning of "responsibility"as synonymous with "fault" but rather meaning the ability to respond. When we, as many here have, engage with African people to collaborate on projects in Africa acting responsibly becomes particular; real people matter. Understanding your ideas has practical significance; a good reason they've engaged so many. .. _`Munnu Morrish`: http://www.ned.com/user/u413552474/ ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:03:42 PDT :Modified: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:05:16 PDT Deleted entry. ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 04:19:19 PDT :Modified: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 04:20:38 PDT I have been doing some more reading on the notion of the 'informal economy'(as it is used by economists) and the broad brush definition normally refers to the 'informal' as that part of the economy which is unregulated and untaxed and - whilst the activities may be illegal - they are not criminal. If, for example, I make a net to start fishing or use my bike to make money running messages for cash (or goods) then I am part of the informal economy. On a larger scale, I could run a taxi business or be a builder in a township or a slum settlement (or a refugee camp) but - and this seems to be missed in some accounts - I could also be the owner of a sweat shop. The description seems to be used to demonstrate an intrinsic entrepreneurial spirit (usually in the developing world) and - although it wouldn't be put so bluntly - the term has also been used to bolster arguments that 'free markets' are part of the natural order. On the other and more positive hand, I guess the term 'informal markets' can also be used to refer to a more human formal of social relations and exchange and maybe this is what George Ayittey is referring to when he says that Africans once practised a different form of 'capitalism'. ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:29:38 PDT John Firth said: Linda, thank you for taking the initiative on this and for posting the transcript of George's speech here. We are all grateful to you for that. I see that George has now logged on as a member and I would also like to take this opportunity to jump the queue and ask a couple a questions. George, you refer to *Vampire States* and suggest that the vampire governments can be removed and the traditions of a more democratic Africa can be restored one village at a time. I like the notion of creating a 'social bypass' that rebuilds power from the bottom up but I wonder if you believe that this kind of change - which may challenge not just the elites but also Western interests - can be achieved peacefully ? I also wonder if you could expand on your references to the 'informal economy' as we may have misread your meaning and that led to some debate at the beginning of this discussion. John, Thank you for your questions and I apologize for the delay in responding. I am still learning how to navigate the system. One of the things I like to avoid in my writings are such terms as "Western interests." I don't even use the term "capitalism" because it is an emotive word and grossly misunderstood. I think you will agree with me that an African government must serve first and foremost the interests of its African citizens and must be held accountable by them. The problem with African governments is that they serve not Western interests nor Eastern interests but the interests of the ruling vampire elites. The West often deludes itself into thinking that it has "friends" or "allies" in Africa. Museveni of Uganda, Zenawi of Ethiopia Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the others serve no other interests except their own. I am scathing in my criticisms of these leaders because I use, not Western or Eastern standards to judge them but Africa's own indigenous standards. Traditional African governments and chiefs are held accountable and can be removed if they fail to perform or do not govern according to the will of the people. Even kings can be removed. Back in the 18th century, they can be removed by "regicide." African kings had no political role. Their role was to seek a balance of cosmological forces: the sky, the world and the earth. Each was represented by a god and the king's role was to mediate between these gods. If the sky god was "angry" there would be no rain, harvests would be poor, and the king was blamed for that. Off went his head. Mugabe never had it so easy. But we can effect change peacefully. We did that in Ghana when we tossed out the brutally repressive regime of Jerry Rawlings and instituted democracy. More on this later but we want to repeat this feat in Zimbabwe and other African countries as well. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:02:06 PDT Thank you George and welcome. I'm sure everyone will be grateful that you've taken the time to both reply and to come to terms with all the 'bells and whistles' around here. I take your point about use of the term 'capitalism' and agree that the term carries so much historical baggage that it becomes loaded with misleading resonances when used in the wrong context. I think that's why I used inverted commas when I suggested (or speculated) that you may have been talking about a different kind of 'capitalism' in the context of informal and traditional markets in African economies. Possibly an economy based on traditional collective social values ? Please correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption because it would be interesting if you could expand on this and, particularly, if you could explain how you see an African market economy as being different from 'Western market economies' ? And finally - Mugabe! Of the old African leaders at least Nyere moved to remove Idi Amin. It is sometimes difficult to understand why in more recent times other African nations have effectively sustained Mugabe through their inaction. Still too many *hippos* ? :) ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:04:51 PDT Jim Carroll said: Dr. Ayittey, it's wonderful to have you here. When you say, "All that the elites need to do is to move these operations into something that is enclosed so that the operations can be made more efficient." Are you talking about putting a roof over their head? I can imagine that scaling the boat building business might need to move from the informal market to the modern market, and that would give them more economic resources to build their own roof (metaphorically or not.) So that leads to another question, How big can a business grow, and still avoid the modern economy? Thank you. In community, -Jim Jim, The formal economy is where the production of goods and services is more formally organized. Salaries are paid, receipts are given upon purchase of commodities, taxes are paid, and where one talks about life insurance, pensions, where legal issues, property rights are clearly defined, etc. In the informal sector, things are not so clearly demarcated. Contracts are by word of mouth and are not legally enforceable. Wages are paid but no taxes. [I like that!] I hope you get the idea. I think of the informal sector -- which comprises of 85 percent of Ghana's economy and at least 90 percent of Nigeria's economy -- as a "transitional sector." Transitional from the traditional/rural to the modern/formal sector. Now, the boat building operations I talked about in the video is about an entrepreneur who has the skills and a little capital. He found some spot near the beach and set up his operations. He has no title to the land. He employs about 20 people. I visited the place and it is filthy. It takes them 4 months to build one big boat, which sells for $45,000. When it rains, work stops. Obviously, the operations are not efficient. What I have done is to reach a partnership agreement with the boat builder. I went to see the Chief of the area and he has agreed to give us "tribal" land for free. We will build a hangar-type of structure and move the operations indoors, supply electricity and some basic tools. This way, they will be able to produce one big boat a month. My calculations indicate that one big boat can haul in 700 pounds of fish on one trip. In a year, the boat can bring in $90,000 in gross revenue. I am mobilizing Ghanaians in the diaspora to put up $1,000 each for this venture. So far, 15 people have paid up. I need 100. With $100,000, we will purchase 2 boats and give them to two crews of 8 fishermen. Each crew will be asked to work and pay back $150,000, after which the boat becomes theirs. Since the prospect of ownership is a powerful INCENTIVE, they will work very hard to finish paying it off quickly. In two years, we will have $300,000 from the two boats and then buy 6 boats, which in 2 years will bring $900,000. A reverse Ponzi scheme, if you may. Notice that we have not done anything radically new; just re-organize the EXISTING operations. It will be called CHEETAH FISHING, which will become part of Cheetah Entities.Hence, my mantra: Go back and IMPROVE upon the existing ways of doing things. Africa's ruling elites never did this. When I was in Ghana in August, I read in the papers that the Government of Ghana has signed an agreement with the Dutch and Philippine governments to have bigger boats build in the Philippines and shipped to Ghana. I hope you now understand the expression "the blind leading the clueless." George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:54:15 PDT George, great *kudos* to you for getting involved in the Cheetah Fishing project. I can't recall too many economists from my old school (the LSE) actually rolling up their sleeves and getting involved in the development of 'grass roots' businesses. But, do you have any thoughts about why the African diaspora has been slow to pick up on this project ? ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:55:48 PDT John Powers said: Somewhere along the line in my bloviating in this thread the thought came: "What if Dr. Ayittey were to read this?" I reassured myself that was unlikely, so when I that read Linda had written George Ayittey, my stomach sunk. When I began talking about African issues with friends, over and over their response was that I should contact Black organizations. Also, usually they say I should contact Oprah. In a segregated society like the USA one great benefit about the Internet is that white Americans can engage with black Americans more regularly. I do and sometimes those conversations are very painful. Racism in America is broken bones in the skeleton of our structure. The process of realigning bones is never painless. In a different, but similar way, when Americans an others begin to think about Africa and engage with Africans, the broken bones in our feeble and often stereotypical thinking have to be reset. My stomach sunk. Nevertheless, I invite Dr. Ayittey's participation here. What do they say? No pain no gain. I understand the academic schedule and how intense it is. At least Linda Nowakowski has a good handle on that here. Even if you don't have time for this thread, I would encourage you to look around the discussions here. Perhaps one way to is to open the profile of a young man from northern Uganda named `Munnu Morrish`_ and skim over his comments in discussion threads. What is most important for us is constructive engagement with the people we collaborate with. I've corresponded for years with a Ugandan friend who started a community based organization in the Iganga region of Uganda. All along I've told him to be skeptical of anything I say, and for the most part I think we've got an understanding about that. The conversation your Ted talk has provoked, not just here but all over, is so important. One of the great strengths of your Internalist versus Externalist diagnosis is that your Internalist position encourages responsibility. I don't imagine the meaning of "responsibility"as synonymous with "fault" but rather meaning the ability to respond. When we, as many here have, engage with African people to collaborate on projects in Africa acting responsibly becomes particular; real people matter. Understanding your ideas has practical significance; a good reason they've engaged so many. .. _`Munnu Morrish`: http://www.ned.com/user/u413552474/ John, I understand where you are coming from but skeletons of racism have very little to do with most of Africa's problems. The white man's contrition over the iniquities of the slave trade and colonialism may be long overdue but that have little to do with Africa's current crises. Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Sudan all blew up because of the adamant refusal of their respective military GENERALS to relinquish or share political power. I call them military coconut-heads or fufu-heads. The implosion of these countries had nothing to do with racism, the slave trade or colonialism. It may be politically correct to say that and Oprah and Rev. Jesse Jackson may be pleased to hear it but that is not the truth. Black Americans mean well for Africa but you should know that there are 4 fundamental differences between black Americans and black Africans. 1. Throughout their history, lives and experiences, black Americans have always seen their exploiters and oppressors to be white. In Africa, we have seen BOTH black and white oppressors and exploiters. Black Americans have never lived under black despots like Idi Amin and therefore cannot relate to black tyranny. They did help in the dismantling of apartheid, which they rightly saw as white oppression of blacks. But they couldn't see the equally heinous tribal apartheid system in Rwanda, Burundi, Arab apartheid in Sudan, Mauritania or the other de facto regimes elsewhere in Africa. 2. In America, the GOVERNMENT enacted civil rights laws, affirmative action, and other social programs. As such, black Americans tend to see the government as the "solution" to their problems. In Africa, we see our governments as the "PROBLEM." 3. Whereas black Americans tend to see racism as their number one problem, we black Africans tend to see TRIBALISM as the scourge. Here again, tribalism is something black Americans cannot relate to. 4. Black Africans still cling to their traditional values and heritage. Having been painfully uprooted and brought to America, I think I would be correct in saying that many black Americans are still not sure if they should embrace Western values. Their rejection of Western values is still strong, evidenced by the adoption of Islamic names. The irony of this is that the Arabs have never been friends of Africans. In fact, strictly from the African point of view, the Arabs in Africa were no different from the Europeans. BOTH were enslavers, colonizers, exploiters and oppressors. While the Europeans were running the West African slave trade, the Arabs were running the East African slave trade. But you will never hear anything about the latter, do you? And should black Africans forget that aspect of their history? You see, if Europe had not colonized Africa, the Arabs would have. And for beating them to the punch, the Arabs never forgave the West. But all this is history. Today, the new "colonizer" comes from the East. China does it with a bow in what I call "chopsticks mercantilism." George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: Jim Carroll :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 05:48:58 PDT Thank you George, *So* nice to have you here. The fishing business sounds very lucrative for the Ghanaians, are those numbers in US dollars? (please excuse my inexperience.) ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:25:40 PDT Thank you so much Dr. Ayittey for joining the conversation. One of the refreshing aspects of the Internet is "nobody knows you're a dog." So sometimes conversations can go on without race, gender, weight, age or nationality taking center stage. When I've talked to friends "about Africa" generally I've been talking about things like increasing profits of poultry production through reducing chicken morbidity and mortality. So the very common response to such talk that I should contact Black organizations rather takes an egg-beater to my brain. Another thing that turns my head around when I talk with friends is the impression that because I've taken an interest in a few things going on in one district of Uganda that I'm some expert on Africa. The problem of conversations turning from ordinary to meta-dialogs would be kind of funny except for the kinds of passions these meta-dialogs so often release. Having read your excellent book, "Africa in Chaos" the points you so succinctly make here about Black Americans in re Africa are familiar. My stomach sunk with the idea of you reading what I had written not because I imagined you'd accuse me of racism, but rather you'd slam me against the wall for suggesting that we not take too romantic a view of traditional African institutions, and that the need for large infrastructure investments can't be ignored. It's a great challenge to find ways that people of goodwill to collaborate to create something good. I've linked to you and to Emeka Okafor's Timbuktu Chronicles much more often than to One or Oprah. You are very adept in saying a lot in a few words. Somewhere I heard you say in response to question about advice for Africans you said: Produce something, even if it's only charcoal. I've borrowed your "Produce something" many times, now I'll be more careful about attribution. I'm glad about your fish boat plan and interested that you're mobilizing fellow Ghanaians in the diaspora for investment capital. Americans can help build in Africa from an Internalist perspective by collaborating with American Africans. A Web site some here might enjoy is `AfricanLoft`_ an online network stretching across many borders. .. _`AfricanLoft`: http://community.africanloft.com/ ---- :Author: Rory Turner :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:46:24 PDT I'm very appreciative of this dialogue, and of the depth and and precision of Dr. Ayittey's analysis of these critical issues. We are so grateful for your participation! I offer a question: The question concerns the issue of trust as it pertains to African business. I spent about a year in Nigeria in the early 1990's, and along with research on traditional expressive culture, I became very interested in both the dynamism of the informal economy, and the tremendous challenges faced by some pretty remarkable entrepreneurs. One huge problem my friends faced was in being able to trust others in a context where the legal system was very inefficient and contracts were hard to enforce. This led to some business practices and decisions that were not so helpful. Without the solid "trust infrastructure" of a developed economy (though some would question how solid it is and for whom), people made do, and were able to create some pretty workable relationships and effective businesses. Still, it strikes me that this is a major challenge in the transition Dr. Ayittey describes from the informal to the modern economy. Its here that some of the tools of reputation systems might have some value. I imagine certifications or other external validations that could serve to create an extended business community where transactions could be undertaken with a higher degree of confidence than they can be done now. What would such a system look like in the realities of Africa's informal sector? Do churches and other institutions serve this function? This is one thought, but I would love to hear what Dr. Ayittey and the rest of us think of the trust issue. Is trust a problem in the growth of "what works" in the African informal sector, and if so, what can be done to change this? ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:48:37 PDT John Firth said: Thank you George and welcome. I'm sure everyone will be grateful that you've taken the time to both reply and to come to terms with all the 'bells and whistles' around here. I take your point about use of the term 'capitalism' and agree that the term carries so much historical baggage that it becomes loaded with misleading resonances when used in the wrong context. I think that's why I used inverted commas when I suggested (or speculated) that you may have been talking about a different kind of 'capitalism' in the context of informal and traditional markets in African economies. Possibly an economy based on traditional collective social values ? Please correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption because it would be interesting if you could expand on this and, particularly, if you could explain how you see an African market economy as being different from 'Western market economies' ? And finally - Mugabe! Of the old African leaders at least Nyere moved to remove Idi Amin. It is sometimes difficult to understand why in more recent times other African nations have effectively sustained Mugabe through their inaction. Still too many *hippos* ? :) John, The last question first. Several reasons why African leaders won't condemn Mugabe: 1. The African Union (AU) is a den of hippos (autocrats). They protect one another. 2. Many of these leaders are doing the same thing in their own countries. So who are they to criticize Mugabe? 3. Southern African leaders -- especially South Africa -- are "indebted" to Mugabe who provided them with sanctuary when they were fighting their wars of liberation. 4. Mugabe is adept at OVER-playing the "colonialism-imperialism-racism" card. That still resonates with some of the Southern African leaders, who face similar land distribution problems -- Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique and even Kenya. 5. That region of Africa has only had limited (about 20 years) of post colonial experience. Therefore, it has not had sufficient time to exorcise the colonialist bogeyman. In West Africa, for example, the rantings of Mugabe would draw a yawn. Now to your primary question about collective social values. There is much mythology about traditional Africa and it originates from the inability to distinguish between the existence of an institution and DIFFERENT FORMS of the same institution. Money is one example. It is a medium of exchange. Before the Europeans arrived in Africa, the natives were using cowrie shells, gold dust, etc. as money. The Europeans introduced paper currency -- a different form of money. If you went to Africa in 1450 and were looking for paper currency you wouldn't find it. But that did not mean Africans were not using money or had no conception of money. Nor would that mean the Europeans "invented" money. The market is another example. Economists define a market as any set-up that brings buyers and sellers into close contact. Africans had their open air village markets. There were even market towns such as Timbuktu. Markets are such ancient institutions in Africa. The Europeans arrived and built super-markets -- different forms of existing institutions. Obviously, if you went to an African village in 1450 and were looking for a SUPER-MARKET, you wouldn't find one. But that wouldn't mean Africans had no idea what a market was. Nor is a market a "Western institution." The institution of marriage is yet another example. The way Americans marry is different from the way Africans marry. If you went to an African village looking for a church wedding, you wouldn't find one. But that doesn't mean Africans don't marry. Yet another example is the institution of democracy. You can take democratic decisions in two ways: 1. By majority vote. This is fast, transparent and objective. Count the yeah votes against the nay votes. The downside is, it IGNORES minority position. Unless safeguards are in place, you can have the "tyranny of the majority." 2. By consensus. The advantage here is that it takes all minority positions into account. So once a consensus has been reached, you can be sure that ALL will go along with it. The WTO and the Nobel Committee take their decisions by consensus. The downside is it takes an awfully long time to reach a consensus, the larger the group becomes. Decision-making in traditional Africa at the village has always been by consensus under Africa's chiefs. Obviously, if went to an African village looking for a box with "ballot" written on it, you won't find it. But that does not mean decision making is by autocracy. Failure to make these distinctions, not just by Westerners but African leaders as well, led to much misconception and mythology the more so in the economic arena. [As an aside, I often cringe when I hear the Bush administration seeking to "export" democracy. Which form? One reason why Afghanistan is relatively peaceful than Iraq is because, to map out a new political dispensation, a LOYA JIRGA -- an ancient tribal conclave which reached its decisions by consensus -- was convened in Germany. Please search for the term "loya jirga." The loya jirga chose delegates to write the constitution, set the date for elections, etc. No such "loya jirga" was convened for Iraq.] To continue, there is much mythology about Africa's indigenous economic institutions. In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the INDIVIDUAL. In Africa, it is the EXTENDED FAMILY. The American would say "I am because I am." In Africa, the peasant would say "I am because WE are." The "WE" connotes the extended family. The means of production in traditional Africa are owned by the extended family. Land is family owned or lineage-controlled. When the first European asked an African: "Who does this land belong to?" the African replied: "It belongs to ALL OF US." The European misinterpreted that to mean the "entire village or tribe" when the African meant his extended family. Thus an innocent misinterpretation morphed into he MYTH of "communal ownership" of land. Note, the extended family owns the land, not the chief or the tribal government. They may own "tribal lands," that have been acquired by right of first occupation or by conquest. But those are different from family-owned land. Centuries ago when there was plenty of land in Africa, ownership was established by right of first occupation or settlement. Back then, families traveled together to settle and thus became the first owners of the land. What they did with the land was their own business. What type of crop they planted was their own decision to make. You could say it was their "collective" decision to make but the term "collective" has some ugly connotations. It implies decision making by an entire village, which was not the case. Each extended family in Africa has a HEAD, who makes those decisions. The important point to note is that the extended family is a PRIVATE ENTITY, completely separate from the chief or the tribal government. Thus land in traditional Africa has always been PRIVATELY-OWNED -- by the extended family -- as are the other means of production. Obviously, if you do not understand the traditional economic system, ownership of the means of production, etc. you CANNOT develop traditional Africa, which was exactly the case with most of Africa's post colonial leaders. Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kaunda, for example, misread the native African ethos of communalism (not the same as communism)and the myth of "communal ownership" as signs that Africa was ready for socialism or communism -- that is, state ownership of the means of production. They were DEAD wrong. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:53:31 PDT Jim Carroll said: Thank you George, *So* nice to have you here. The fishing business sounds very lucrative for the Ghanaians, are those numbers in US dollars? (please excuse my inexperience.) Jim, The numbers are in dollars. The big boat costs $45,000 can generate $90,000 in revenue in a year. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:09:39 PDT John Firth said: George, great *kudos* to you for getting involved in the Cheetah Fishing project. I can't recall too many economists from my old school (the LSE) actually rolling up their sleeves and getting involved in the development of 'grass roots' businesses. But, do you have any thoughts about why the African diaspora has been slow to pick up on this project ? John, None of the economists from LSE would get their hands dirty. It is an elite taboo in much of British colonial Africa and also Francophone Africa. The snobbish elite shunned the informal and traditional sector, preferring jobs in air-conditioned plush government offices in the cities. Eventually, they turned the government sector into an arena for SELF-ENRICHMENT. The richest persons in Africa are heads of state and ministers. So every educated African, including those in these diaspora, who wants to be rich, heads straight into government. That is where fierce competition for government posts occurs. And once a post is secured, one would never let go. Not even bulldozers can dislodge presidents and ministers. I want to change all that. I regularly enjoin young African Cheetahs to take the "Ayittey Vow" -- that is, seek their wealth in the PRIVATE sector -- preferably in the informal and traditional sectors. That's where wealth is created. Government does not create wealth. Africa will write a better economic report if the elites were to seek their wealth in the private sector, not in the government. And it will be safer for them too because, come a change of government, nobody will haul them before a commission of enquiry to probe their assets. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:29:16 PDT Dr. Ayittey, Thank you ever so much for joining this discussion. I have been sitting back and lurking and thinking and twisting and turning.... I came to this discussion by way of a project that will be my PhD thesis in Buddhist Economics. We are looking to see how to modify a sufficiency economy model presented by the King of Thailand and promoted by the UNDP to be helpful in the resettlement and recovery from the war in northern Uganda. The original wording on this was as a resettlement village for child-headed households with a school and other supports. The Catholic Church in northern Uganda has apparently (and surprising to me) been going into the IDP camps encouraging the people to revive the old clan ties and responsibilities. This certainly does not mean that the need for the work that we want to introduce has diminished but it does change how the project is framed and I have found your insights valuable in considering this. It is the week-end and that means it is time to be a graduate student rather than a faculty member. I will have lots of material to work with thanks to you. Maybe questions and clarifications a little bit later! ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 07:28:00 PDT Linda Nowakowski said: Dr. Ayittey, Thank you ever so much for joining this discussion. I have been sitting back and lurking and thinking and twisting and turning.... I came to this discussion by way of a project that will be my PhD thesis in Buddhist Economics. We are looking to see how to modify a sufficiency economy model presented by the King of Thailand and promoted by the UNDP to be helpful in the resettlement and recovery from the war in northern Uganda. The original wording on this was as a resettlement village for child-headed households with a school and other supports. The Catholic Church in northern Uganda has apparently (and surprising to me) been going into the IDP camps encouraging the people to revive the old clan ties and responsibilities. This certainly does not mean that the need for the work that we want to introduce has diminished but it does change how the project is framed and I have found your insights valuable in considering this. It is the week-end and that means it is time to be a graduate student rather than a faculty member. I will have lots of material to work with thanks to you. Maybe questions and clarifications a little bit later! Linda, You are very welcome. The most tragic mistake we – African elites and leaders – made after independence was that we never realized the value of the indigenous institutions. We shunned them, castigating them as backward and primitive. And then we rushed off to blindly copy foreign models and systems. Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that foreign models are unsuitable for Africa. Nor am I trying to glorify ancient Africa. But to reject something that is time-tested and has helped people survive for centuries just for the simple reason of “modernity” makes little sense. This wholesale rejection of indigenous systems is largely responsible for the mess Africa finds itself today. Dr. Adebayo Adedeji, former executive secretary of UN Economic Commission for Africa and director of the African Center for Development and Strategic Studies in Nigeria, explained: "Unfortunately, the leadership that took over from the departing colonial authorities did not go back to our past to revive and revitalize our democratic roots. They took the line of least resistance and convenience and continued with despotism, autocracy, and authoritarianism. But the basic democratic culture is still there" (Africa Report, Nov/Dec 1993; p.58). Clearly, a new Africa must make a quantum leap back to its roots and build upon its own indigenous foundations. This dictum could not have come at a more auspicious time. The collapse of Marxist systems in Eastern Europe where they were manufactured has proven that these systems will never work in Africa, no matter how innovative and determined African leaders are in adapting them to Africa. Nor should African leaders rush off to copy Western or other foreign systems. Said The New York Times (June 21, 1994): "Everywhere the point is the same: African cannot just transplant foreign models, like the (Western) parliamentary system, and hope it will take root in native soil. `It's a mistake to copy Western democracies because it's artificial,' observed Cyril Goungounga, an engineer and national assembly deputy in Burkina Faso. `Look at the U.S. You elect a President. He's in office for four years, eight years. Then he's out. That's what the Constitution says. `We have a Constitution too,' he said. `But it doesn't work. It's just a piece of paper. Because we have two civilizations here: The Western one on top, where everything is fine and differences are submerged in talk of national unity, and a parallel one underneath, an African one, where ethnic groups are a reality (p.A8). Africa's salvation does not lie in blindly copying foreign systems but in returning to its own roots and heritage and building upon them. Institutions that have helped Africans survived for centuries cannot be that deficient. At least, they are superior to the hastily imported systems that could not last for even 30 years. According to Hitchens (1994,) "The Swahili word for this concept, now coming back into vogue after a long series of experiments with foreign models, is majimbo. It stands for the idea of local initiative and trust in traditional wisdom" (Vanity Fair, November 1994, 117). The same idea is conveyed by the mantra, African renaissance. E. F. Kolajo of Thoyandou, South Africa, concurred: "The Japanese, Chinese, and Indians still maintain their roots, and they are thriving as nations. Africa embraces foreign cultures at the expense of its own, and this is why nothing seems to work for us" (New African, February 1995, 4). In fact, according to The Bangkok Post, "Japan's postwar success has demonstrated that modernization does not mean Westernization. Japan has modernized spectacularly, yet remains utterly different from the West. Economic success in Japan has nothing to do with individualism. It is the fruit of sheer discipline -- the ability to work in groups and to conform" (cited by The Washington Times, 9 November 1996, A8). Robert Guest, editor of the Africa region for The Economist magazine, offered this perspective: "When Japan’s rulers decided in the nineteenth-century, that they had to modernize to avoid being colonized they sent their brightest officials to Germany, Britain and America to find out how industrial societies worked. They then copied the ideas that seemed most useful, rejected the Western habits that seemed unhelpful or distasteful, and within a few decades Japan advanced enough to win a war with Russia – the first non-white nation to defeat a European power in modern times. Japan’s example should be important for Africa, because it shows that modernization need not mean Westernization. Developing countries need to learn from developed ones, but they do not have to abandon their culture and traditions in the process. Africans face the same challenge now that Japan faced in the nineteenth century: how to harness other people’s ideas and technology to help them build the kind of society that they, the Africans, want” (Guest, 2004; p.23). In the late 1990s, stymied by the dizzying economic growth of China, economists were at a loss groping for an explanation. It was a communist dictatorship and the standard tenets of economic development theory were of little help. It increasingly dawned on economists the critical importance of the role of institutions in providing the correct incentives for economic growth. Nobel laureate, Douglass North, noted that there are many paths to development and institutions are important but not just any institutions. According to North, “the key is creating an institutional structure from your particular cultural institutions that provide the proper incentives – not slavishly imitating Western institutions” (The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2005; p.A14). In addition, the institutional structure must readily adapt to changing circumstances in the global economy. He noted that: “After a disastrous era of promoting collective organization, in which approximately 40 million people died of starvation, China gradually fumbled its way out of the economic disaster it had created by instituting the Household Responsibility System, which provided peasants with incentives to produce more. This system in turn led to the TVEs (town-village enterprises) and sequential development build on their cultural background” (The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2005; p.A14). Institutions are established rules, codes and norms by which human behavior or interaction (political, economic and social) are governed, as well as the incentive structure of society. They are made up of formal rules, (constitutions, laws, and rules), informal constraints (norms, conventions and codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics. Together, they define the way the game is played, whether as a society or an athletic game. Take professional football. They are formal rules defining the way the game is supposed to be played; informal norms – such as not deliberately injuring the quarterback of the opposing team; and enforcement characteristics –umpires, referees – designed to see that the game is played according to the intentions underlying the rules. But enforcement is always imperfect and it frequently pays for a team to violate rules. Therefore the way a game is actually played is a function of the underlying intentions embodied in the rules, the strength of informal codes of conduct, the perception of the umpires, and the severity of punishment for violating rules. It is the same way with societies. Poorly performing societies have rules that do not provide the proper incentives, lack effective informal norms that would encourage productivity, and/or have poor enforcement. Underlying institutions are belief systems that provide our understanding of the world around us and, therefore, the incentives that we face. Creating institutions that will perform effectively, is thus, a difficult task” (The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2005; p.A14). There is nothing wrong with Africa’s traditional institutions. They provide the necessary incentives and are acknowledged to ensure not only peace but stability as well: "Malians are quick to remind visitors that they were a nation long before they embraced democracy. Their 12 ethnic groups governed themselves for centuries before French colonization. Each ethnic group governed a region of the (Mali) empire. The governors of each region had to work together to preserve economic and political balance. The result: one of Africa's more stable and powerful empires. Such history has helped Mali resist ethnic tensions: When the Tuaregs of northern Mali rebelled against this government, they found no allies among the other ethnic groups. "Ethnicity cannot be manipulated in this society," said educator Lalla Ben Barkar. "The people may be from the north or the south, but in the end they realize they are one nation, and that is Mali" (The Washington Post, March 24, 1996; p.A28). Botswana was the only black African country in the post-colonial period that went back and built upon its indigenous roots and it paid off handsomely. In elegant brevity, Newsweek (July 23, 1990) put the issue poignantly: “Botswana built a working democracy on an aboriginal tradition of local gatherings called kgotlas that resemble New England town meetings; it has a record $2.7 billion in foreign exchange reserves (p.28). George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: Chris Cook :Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 09:13:58 PDT Dr Ayittey Thank you for your contribution to this fascinating thread. I have been observing for some time the emergence of new partnership-based legal tools, and corporate forms. The characteristics of these are of: - custodianship / stewardship of property (a Gandhian approach, but quite congruent with your account of the African approach) - collaboration/ co-operation, rather than competition; - consensual "two way" agreements - "Contrats de Societe" - as opposed to "one way" - "Contrats de Mandat" - imposed by Statute or (judge-made) Common Law and the outcome is to enable the encapsulation of that bundle of rights and obligations - which is the Relationship (and NOT an "Object") we think of as "Property" - in simple new ways. I am working on developing new partnership-based financial tools involving the sharing of risk, through "Guarantee Societies" and the sharing of reward through "Capital Partnerships". I have thought for some time that the absence of "First World" infrastructure actually gives Africa an advantage in adopting such simple but radical models, because they there are not the same barriers to entry. In the same way, Africa has been able to jump straight to mobile telephony, bypassing the copper wire cartels that bedevil the UK, for instance. If you are interested, my site www.opencapital.net has some relevant material. For what it's worth I was, in a former incarnation, a Director of the UK's International Petroleum Exchange, and I am involved, inter alia, in assisting a Middle Eastern government set up a new oil exchange NOT dominated by investment banks and intermediaries. But my real interest lies in sustainable development. Thank you once again for your participation Best Regards Chris cook George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. said: Linda Nowakowski said: Dr. Ayittey, Thank you ever so much for joining this discussion. I have been sitting back and lurking and thinking and twisting and turning.... I came to this discussion by way of a project that will be my PhD thesis in Buddhist Economics. We are looking to see how to modify a sufficiency economy model presented by the King of Thailand and promoted by the UNDP to be helpful in the resettlement and recovery from the war in northern Uganda. The original wording on this was as a resettlement village for child-headed households with a school and other supports. The Catholic Church in northern Uganda has apparently (and surprising to me) been going into the IDP camps encouraging the people to revive the old clan ties and responsibilities. This certainly does not mean that the need for the work that we want to introduce has diminished but it does change how the project is framed and I have found your insights valuable in considering this. It is the week-end and that means it is time to be a graduate student rather than a faculty member. I will have lots of material to work with thanks to you. Maybe questions and clarifications a little bit later! ---- :Author: David Frayne :Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 23:41:53 PDT my real interest lies in sustainable development Speaking of "sustainable", I am wondering if Africa may be in a position to leapfrog the USA. In the USA we seem to have mastered the art of using lots of resources really fast, in ways that make our quality of life seem momentarily better. However, if we judge whole processes (e.g. cars including mining and manufacturing and fuel delivery and emissions causing asthma and cancer) Nairobi is probably wealthier than Los Angeles. We tend to think of the people of Los Angeles as "richer", but that's because we are ignoring most of the picture, like the guy who buys everyone drinks using a credit card. ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2007 01:06:58 PDT I have been working on a paper for the 3rd International Conference on Gross National Happiness. I don't think that the GNH people have it right but they have more loudly than most called the metrics used to measure development into question. For years the level of development of a country was determined by the growth of its per capita Gross Domestic Product....that is kind of a joke! GDP is interesting because it doesn't count some things that it should (if we are interested in measuring development or well-being) and it includes things that probably should reduce it. Say I have a job and I commute 1.5 hours each way to a high stress job. I am making ok money, but I have to pay for that commute, I have to pay for those fancy business clothes, and maybe parking and lunch...the baby sitter....day care... the cleaning service. All of those expenses (plus what I pay the doctor to treat the ulcers and the shrink for the therapy) go into the GDP. Now...I just can't take it any more. I quit the job and buy a small house on 2 acres of land. (It cost much less than the "keep up with the Jone's" place I sold.) I start growing my own food. I have more vegetables than I can use so I take some of them to the local farmer's market and that gives me cash for the things I can't grow. I don't have to have to pay for the commute or the fancy clothes. No need any more for the baby sitter, the day care or the cleaning service. I find that the ulcer isn't bothering me any more and I suddenly don't need the shrink. None of those things go into the GDP. If everything else stayed the same, my changes would have reduced the GDP. Did it reduce development? Did it reduce happiness? Did it reduce well-being? (....well it might have reduced the happiness of those 2 doctor's!) (And I don't believe I am pretending to talk economics on this thread! I need a shrink!) ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2007 13:28:30 PDT One of my favorite books addressing the points Linda is making about how Western economies really work is "Gender" by Ivan Illich. It's not still in print. Quite a bit of Illich's work is available online, but I don't think this book is. Illich had a great knack for pissing people off, and that this book angered so many women, it's probably considered not worthwhile to keep in print. Still the book contains very important but neglected insights. I have a feeling that Dr. Ayittey and I are on different pages; having more to do with rhetoric common in the USA than our views about Africa: the stereotype of right wingers and dirty hippies. But I also imagine that as Dr. Ayittey crosses two cultures, he's more aware than ordinary scholars are of both the convenience and hazards of such stereotyping. Something immediately obvious to Dr. Ayittey when he speaks of traditional African institutions, but not always so obvious to his audiences in the West, is that these institutions are gendered. So when he talks about the ways that political power is traditionally limited, or about traditional markets, he is talking about special roles of women. Traditional African institutions are gendered. Whereas industrial societies impose certain unisex assumptions. Illich talks about shadow work: "the consumer's unpaid toil that adds to a commodity an incremental value that is necessary to make this commodity useful to the consuming unit itself." Shadow work is what Linda is pointing to, and she's quite right to note how important it is. Illich makes the point that women will always get screwed in the industrial economy for reasons having to do with shadow work. In order to solve problems it's often desirable to focus by cutting off areas to not look at. So there's a great advantage in Dr. Ayittey creating focus by emphasizing an Internalist versus an Externalist diagnosis for African problems. I was pleased to see Dr. Ayittey raise the issue of colonialism in this discussion particularly in re Chinese in Africa. Not so much because I want to discuss colonialism here, and I'm sure Dr. Ayittey doesn't either, but because his comments show that while colonialism is not his area of focus, it is a legitimate territory for study. Post-Colonialist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes that the "Third World" is a creation of the West that locks the dialog into an imperial representation. Conversely, she observes how people in the West often idolize "the natives." Heavens knows I'm not well-read in Post-Colonial studies, or that I really know what `Gayatri Chakovorty Spivak`_ really says. For this conversation it seems worthwhile to note that colonialism works both on the colonized and colonizer. As Chakovorty Spivak notes that when Western feminism insists on promoting individualism they are unconsciously promoting imperialist values. Chakovorty Spivak also observes how the two sides of the imperialist coin denies Western cultures to create their own worlds. I think people of goodwill wherever they are have much to lend one another. We can do this best when we see that we are all trying to compose our lives. Uzodinma Iweala's July oped `Stop Trying To Save Africa`_ generated a lot of online discussion. But nothing I read mentioned the opportunity in what Iweala was saying. I might paraphrase this opportunity as: If you'd stop being so boneheaded about saving Africa, you could also begin to imagine composing better lives in the West. How can people of goodwill collaborate to make the world we want? That's a salient question. People in the West--or the Great White North as I like to refer to it-- don't seem to be Dr. Ayittey's primary audience. But what he is saying is of great relevance to us. We need to question our assumptions so all of us can begin to productively go about repairing the world and composing better ways of living. .. _`Gayatri Chakovorty Spivak`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayatri_Chakravorty_Spivak .. _`Stop Trying To Save Africa`: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301714.html ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2007 13:38:27 PDT John Powers says: We need to question our assumptions so all of us can begin to productively go about repairing the world and composing better ways of living. here here!! ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:22:10 PDT ... or even 'there there' ! :D ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:36:57 PDT Dr. Ayittey `wrote`_: The important point to note is that the extended family is a PRIVATE ENTITY, completely separate from the chief or the tribal government. Thus land in traditional Africa has always been PRIVATELY-OWNED -- by the extended family -- as are the other means of production. Obviously, if you do not understand the traditional economic system, ownership of the means of production, etc. you CANNOT develop traditional Africa, which was exactly the case with most of Africa's post colonial leaders. Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kaunda, for example, misread the native African ethos of communalism (not the same as communism)and the myth of "communal ownership" as signs that Africa was ready for socialism or communism -- that is, state ownership of the means of production. They were DEAD wrong. (sorry I've yet to learn to do quoted text) Clearly Dr. Ayittey signals points of importance by raising his voice. Something I don't understand is the construct that the extended family is a "PRIVATE ENTIY." The implication is that the extended family exists not relative to other things. I'm not sure how to imagine this? But clearly understanding the quality of relationships between extended families is central to understanding Dr. Ayittey's critique of Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kaunda as "DEAD WRONG." What is the nature of the traditional African relationship between extended families and to the broader society? What in this relationship did Nkruma, Nyerere, and Kaunda get so wrong? Clearly Dr. Ayittey identifies socialism as being an improper relationship. It certainly seems as though global corporatism would receive a similar scathing critique from his perspective. But I get confused, because in speaking to Western audiences, Dr. Ayittey seems to embrace the rhetoric of free markets and anti-taxation of the global corporatism. In the Western Liberal tradition freedom means individual autonomy. Thus we are used to thinking of freedom being a holding off of something else or others. The assumption is that at base we are all self-seeking. Wherever possible choices are reduced to cost/benefit analysis--rational actors and all that. In general in the West, most of us rather take for granted the premises of the Liberal Tradition. One place cracks in the foundation are beginning to show is in our relationships to global corporatism. At least here in America recognizing these cracks has little to do with Marxism, as much as corporation PR raises the bogeyman. It seems to me that Dr. Ayittey asks us to transplant the Western Liberal traditional notion of the individual whose primary relationship to society is defensive against it, with the extended family replacing the individual as the primary unit of analysis. In other words, to keep the relationship "against" and somehow we'll find freedom. My view is that the quality of relationship between what is private and what is public is the essential part to consider and discuss. Are there ways of building upon our social nature as human beings which can envision freedom beyond the zero-sum contests of the Liberal paradigm? Slightly off topic, but in re Ivan Illich's book "Gender" I was interested to see `Chris Clarke`_ link to it in his essay today. The essay is well worth reading. .. _`wrote`: http://www.ned.com/group/econo-politics/news/0/66/ .. _`Chris Clarke`: http://faultline.org/index.php/site/quality_of_whose_life_again/ ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:06:43 PDT I wanted to alert everyone that Andrew Mwenda's Ted talk is posted. A good place to see it is over at Eric Hersman's `White African`_ because he also links to Ethan Zuckerman's live blogging of it. Eric doesn't really link to the right Zuckerman post, but it is the right one for understanding the controversy with Bono, and that's important for the context of Mwenda's remarks at the conference. Right at the bottom of Zuckerman's post you'll see a link to his live blogging Mwenda. I've read Mwenda in The Monitor for years and read so much about him too. It's so nice to actually hear his voice. Mwenda's talk is indeed relevant to this discussion. .. _`White African`: http://whiteafrican.com/?p=745 ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:53:56 PDT John, for me the path to understanding the role of the private family unit is to understand the family's traditional relationship to land, people (labor) and livestock (tradable investments) as family owned assets. In the west, a company owns assets, and the people employed by that company work together to see that the company's assets grow in value to serve employees and shareholders. In Africa, a family owns assets, and the people who are part of that family work together to see that the family's assets grow in value to serve the family members. Asset owning companies are governed by corporate bylaws and national legislation. African families are governed by traditional structures. Both are active economic players in today's landscape - how they obtained their assets and how they operate internally is different, but they are essentially playing the same free market game. ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:36:31 PDT Thanks for the link to Mwenda's stuff. In the last line of Zuckerman's blog he says Asked point blank whether he opposes all aid by Chris Anderson, Mwenda makes an important distinction - he thinks it shouldn’t be given to governments and should be given directly to indigenous groups and entrepeneurs. I would argue further that it shouldn't be given *by* governments or by institutions controlled by governments. I've always been a proponent of opening resource flows grassroots to grassroots, and IMO the best resources out there aren't necessarily financial. There is a fine line though, at which that can also spin out of control. Perhaps it is incumbent upon those of us who want Africa to be a part of the "better world" we imagine we are working toward, to try to understand where that line lies. another one of Mwenda's rants I've heard about locally is about all the very young people (arrogant, inexperienced, primarily out to glorify their own experience & find themselves) coming to "volunteer" their wisdom about how the world should work, all in the name of helping Africa. Quite simply put, kids will often behave childishly, and today's young (post-high school/college age) volunteers are getting themselves labeled a pretty childishly behaving group as a whole. I agree with Mwenda that the new fad in youth driven international grassroots "aid" is indeed showing itself to have some inherent drawbacks. Maybe the problem is in the premise that it's Africa who needs help - I don't really think it is. I think most of the Western kids who come to Africa today are looking for something, and they think they are going to find it here by "helping" Africa become more like them. Arguably what they really need to be doing is *looking* at what Africa has to offer in terms of lessons about what their own lives are missing. It occurs to me the way to find the right approach is to reframe the question completely - not what can we do to help Africa and how do we make that happen, but what can Africa offer to help us improve our societies, and how do we make *that* happen? ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:16:01 PDT Christina raises so many good points! Contrarian as I am I want to quibble. She wrote: *Asset owning companies are governed by corporate bylaws and national legislation. African families are governed by traditional structures. Both are active economic players in today's landscape - how they obtained their assets and how they operate internally is different, but they are essentially playing the same free market game.* I take issue in the nature of the "free market game." We take for granted certain ideas about "the free market" but whose rules are increasingly dictated by large globalized corporations. Many of these corporations' primary customers are governments. They are often vertically integrated businesses of extraction, communications- especially with space-based capacity, weapons and private armies. These corporations embrace free market rhetoric, but hardly are playing the game by the rules we imagine as the "free market game." In Mwenda's talk he bemoans the fact that Uganda hasn't attained sugar export quotas. Does the sugar business in Uganda operate in the same free market game that farmers in northern Uganda do? Does the sugar business operate under the rules of the traditional African institutions Dr. Ayittey regards as the solution? Christina's point that corporations and African families are "both active economic players in today's landscape" seems a very important point. One reason is because the relationships between these "players" seems properly a political one. Criticisms of African governments is very important, but such criticism argues for political more political engagement not less. Christina wrote: *I agree with Mwenda that the new fad in youth driven international grassroots "aid" is indeed showing itself to have some inherent drawbacks. Maybe the problem is in the premise that it's Africa who needs help - I don't really think it is. I think most of the Western kids who come to Africa today are looking for something, and they think they are going to find it here by "helping" Africa become more like them. Arguably what they really need to be doing is looking at what Africa has to offer in terms of lessons about what their own lives are missing.* I am genuinely moved by this. I like young people very much and I know that childish behavior is not the sole province of the young. Christina Jordan's work in Webbed Empowerment is ground breaking, and often under recognized. Blogger `Phil Jones`_ made a very important point a while back: *The more effective the internet and the web are at helping us communicate and co-ordinate, the less money will be involved. Because ultimately the economy is a communication network and money is its protocol* *The network is not the means to the end of money.* *Instead, money and IP are rival protocols in rival networks which are means to the same end : that of articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity. Money isn't wealth, it's just a kind of signal which can be used to help identify good ideas and channel more resources to them. On the internet we are increasingly finding alternative ways of identifying and signalling what things are worthwhile.* *And the better the network does this, the less need there is for money to be involved at all.* Most of us here at take this idea of wealth creation via a communication network very seriously. And I think it's the heart of Christina's vision of Webbed Empowerment. She is so right in pointing out that Africa holds lessons for our own lives. "Helping Africa" implies a linear direction: handing out or handing down. Webbed Empowerment implies multi-directional communications. When we engage we are prepared to be changed by the engagement. Christina is right that resource flows are not just about money. How we invent ways of creating wealth by Webbed Empowerment will say much about how much wealth we can create together as people. Mwenda asks us to consider reframing the challenges of Africa: From Despair: Poverty Reduction; To Hope: Creating Wealth. If we take seriously Christina's ideas of Webbed Empowerment, we see that wealth creation is not only about money. Money as Phil Jones says "money is a kind of signal" and that the "peerosphere"--a term Jones coined elsewhere--is a rival communication network capable of creating wealth. .. _`Phil Jones`: http://platformwars.blogspot.com/2006/07/tcpip-vs-dollar.html ---- :Author: David Frayne :Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 01:09:49 PDT How can people of goodwill collaborate to make the world we want? The first step is declare what "the world we want" is. The next step is to share that declaration with others such that they are inspired to declare the same thing. In that context, of two or more people declaring a shared vision that inspires them, the question of "how" answers itself. Asking and answering "how" questions outside that context, with everyone wondering whether there truly is a shared and inspiring vision, is like spending lottery winnings before buying the ticket. (For new users, if you type a space (" ") before a line it gets indented and the font is reduced, like the first sentence of this comment. This is a convention for quotations on ned.) ---- :Author: Rory Turner :Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:25:46 PDT David said: The first step is declare what "the world we want" is. The next step is to share that declaration with others such that they are inspired to declare the same thing. In that context, of two or more people declaring a shared vision that inspires them, the question of "how" answers itself. I think it is a mistake to require a prior unanimity to action. The world has always been a stage of countervailing, conflicting and simultaneous agendas acted upon, precipitating these present moments. Would that it were tidier, but it is not. Good things can happen with provisional not fully articulated or understood alignments. Some have said that this is part of the power of public ritual -- that we act together and affirm together though we don't really know what it is we are affirming. This gives people space to connect without the insistence of perfection. Best then to begin, and discover as you go along. (Of course, part of beginning is rallying partnership -- David's shared and inspiring vision) : ) ---- :Author: Rory Turner :Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:31:38 PDT Back to Ayittey. I agree with him, Trade not aid, attention to the traditional and informal sectors, investment in what works. I would add attention to refinements of effective processes to allow them to scale better -- perhaps a management theory dealing with issues such as trust and collective affiliative social arrangements like extended families. Also helpful I think would be ways to link together such efforts in a visible and praisable way. Know the Cheetahs! Feed the Cheetahs! My question. How could Ned help with this? ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:34:52 PDT I am going to take a risk of speaking out of lack of knowledge and reaction to written words. I am currently working on a paper for the 3rd International Conference on Gross National Happiness on evaluating development. As part of my research for that paper I have started reading a book "Maldevelopment - Anatomy of a global failure" Samir Amin, UN University / Third World Forum, Studies in African Political Economy. The title alone riled me. In reviewing the table of contents, Chapter 1: Africa's Economic Backwardness. (As a bit of a disclaimer - that's not the correct word - I think the content in the book is going to wend its way to something much more constructive.) My point is that measures of development have been defined by the west. As an example: Some of you know that I have been studying Buddhist Economics and Sufficiency Economy. Thailand is a star in developing countries. On the HDI list for 2007, Thailand is #74 of 177 countries. The image below shows Thailand's HDI progress relative to other regions in the world. In 2001, agricultural products represented 11.7% of Thailand's exports and resulted in Thailand having the 10th largest trade surplus in the world ($4.5 billion). .. Image :: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1404/1369128097_277f2b7b84.jpg Imagine what would happen if Thai farmers who are currently mono-cropping (at considerable risk), followed the suggested advice of the government and the King and converted a portion of their farms to sufficiency agriculture. The effect of that would be that the farmers would be protected against financial devastation in the situation of a crisis (such as 1997) and there would be a significant reduction in the GDP. Since per capita GDP remains a significant factor in HDI Thailand would fall in those ratings. The question then becomes, would Thailand really be less developed? And if so, less developed by what standards? Relative world development has always been looked at through a lens of western neo-classical economics. This is what led to the development of GNH and many other alternative indicators. Many of these indicators have been criticized for having fuzzy standards (What is happiness? Who defines it? Does it mean the same thing to a Thai as it does to an American or a Kenyan?), and subjective rather than objective measurements. Can we even develop a metric that allows international comparison of development when there are different cultural definitions of that? Is there a way that we can find a metric that allows us to indicate basic well-being? Does basic well-being have to be limited to physical well-being to allow international comparisons? Can we develop metrics that will help communities to evaluate their progress and help guide their development efforts and still be culturally sensitive. For sure I have no answers but I think the questions are important in this discussion .... maybe not ...I am just a student! ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 05:32:59 PDT That surplus is agricultural surplus...sorry about that... ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 06:28:06 PDT Linda said: Can we even develop a metric that allows international comparison of development when there are different cultural definitions of that? Is there a way that we can find a metric that allows us to indicate basic well-being? Does basic well-being have to be limited to physical well-being to allow international comparisons? Can we develop metrics that will help communities to evaluate their progress and help guide their development efforts and still be culturally sensitive. I would be interested in working with you on this. I have been working with the concept of `human needs`_ and I think we all need and want the same things - cultural differences reflect the different strategies that have developed to meet those needs. Gross domestic product (as your examples show) does not reflect the percentage of the population having their needs met. Market systems of production are designed to minimize cost and maximize profit and will provide for human needs to a greater or lesser extent as a function of the scarcity of labor. Sufficiency agriculture is one way to utilize "excess" labor (now that is a phrase from a money centric world). Another way is to design systems_ that use that labor to provide for the otherwise unmet needs in the community. I would also be interested in a metric for the degree that people felt they were in control of their lives and/or their expectation for improvement in their lives and that of their children. My experience with people who have resigned themselves to a life on government assistance indicates to me that the assistance may be necessary but it is not a contributor to human happiness. .. _`human needs`: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Human_Needs .. _systems: http://www.aboutus.org/3DN_Self-help_Corporation ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:00:51 PDT This discussion has really drawn my attention to traditional African institutions--here I'll second Linda's observation of not having answers; I'm a student too. It's easy to embrace the idea of supporting the informal sectors because my attention has mostly been on micro-enterprises anyway. One of my friend Nathan's projects in the Iganga district of Uganda is to help increase the incomes of widows caring for dependent children orphaned by AIDS through maize growing and marketing assistance. Something that's come up is Nathan pointing out to me that I don't have a clue what it means to live in a village. The point is that informal sectors of the economy are closely linked to traditional structures and institutions. So the question this thread raises is the relationship between traditional institutions and the modern economy. It is useful to consider ownership; i.e. the discussion of the fundamental unit as the family versus the individual. But that isn't the whole of the disconnect. I was quite interested in Linda's reading and the term "maldevelopment" because in trying to think more carefully about the relationship between traditional institutions and the modern economy, I was reminded of Ivan Illich. Yesterday I looked up an essay, `Beauty & The Junkyard`_. In it Illich notes that we need a history of disvalue. Illich points out that Aristotle observed something new when some merchant offer their goods in the market at a price varying by offer and demand. We are so used to "the law" of supply and demand, that we imagine it as an eternal verity. But Illich points out that Aristotle was surprised by these merchants' behavior, it was something new and previously unheard of. Illich observes: *Here I began to see the first lineaments of what today is called the economy--a system resting on scarcity.* Illich notes that this way of selling was unheard of because societies had generally been arranged so that scarcity would not emerge. We imagine that wealth comes from the economy, but Illich turns this notion on its head and questions whether the primary product of the economy is waste. He introduces the term "disvalue." Illich observes that waste is not just entropy, rather it is a social program--a culturally determined pattern of behavior--which has a history. Illich writes: *The expansion of economic relations into ever more aspects of everyday life does not produce values; rather, it concentrates privilge.* What money can buy in the economies of scarcity is escape from disvalue. What money can buy is the "luxury" of gated communities. Illich sees Earth Wisdom as necessary for life: *"the water cycle through the atmosphere, the topsoil and human culture, the earth live in a kind of open system. Now we see that the contribution of culture is decisive fot this system's life."* In other words Illich makes the case that we cannot afford an economy whose primary product is disvalue. Linda asks about a metric of "development" that can take into account different cultural definitions. Illich suggest that metrics of "development" as a measure of the spread of disvalue through the society. I hadn't thought of Ivan Illich for a while; I'm happy that this thread has reminded me. I hadn't thought of him because to a certain extent couldn't figure where his ideas fit. Here the point about economics as scarcity as opposed to the cycles of materials--water and soil--necessary for life resonates. In economic terms, measures of progress are "more," the steady, and preferred steep, line upward on a graph. Life requires the circular actions of cycles to which our cultures are inextricably a part. The problem isn't just definitions of development, but the idea of economy rooted in scarcity. .. _`Beauty & The Junkyard`: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n73/ai_11692199 ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:41:59 PDT In the situation we have here in Thailand, we are not talking about sufficiency agriculture to utilize excess labor. We are talking sufficiency economy that, whether you are farming or running a small business, or even a large business, provides people with a sufficient life style first and foremost and does so with wisdom and safety. Mono-culture for is not a wise strategy when you are near the poverty level. This approach suggests that perhaps it is wiser to start small and build a self-immunity system, i.e. being able to cope with shocks from internal and external changes, rather than going into serious debt. (And serious debt is not a lot when you are poor.) Sufficiency economy entails three components: 1. moderation 2. reasonableness 3. a self-immunity system, i.e. being able to cope with shocks from internal and external changes. and two underlying conditions are necessary to achieve this sufficiency: 1. knowledge (breadth and thoroughness in planning, and carefulness in applying knowledge and in the implementation of those plans are required) 2. morality (people are to possess honesty and integrity, while conducting their lives with perseverance, harmlessness and generosity) ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:06:39 PDT In terms of metrics this `Global Projection of Subjective Well-Being`_ may be of interest; if for no other reason than for the citations. `The Happy Planet Index`_ is also of particular interest because the measure show that resource consumption doesn't make people happiest; this "more" may be what we want but more doesn't guarantee happiness. *The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.* Of course, `Gapminder`_ provides interesting insights with statistics. Hans Rosling's talks are particularly engaging. Illich railed against "disvalsue" *the social program of degrading the cultural patterns through which people have traditionally found joy and meaning in the name of a reified ideal called development.* The outlines of sufficiency economy might well be applicable everywhere in the world, but I have the feeling that the ways in which they are expressed are in some ways uniquely Thai. These qualities are hard to point to--especially for me who knows hardly anything of Thailand. Ayittey also seems to be pointing to qualities which are uniquely African. Indeed these may follow from such fundamentals as the extended family being the unit of production. But these qualities are not defined by their roots alone. Brazilian poet `Oswald de Andrade`_ wrote a polemic published in 1928, "Manifesto Antropófago" (`Cannibal Manifesto`_), that became a foundation for some Brazilian artists in the 1960's. Oswald de Andrade's manifesto exposes the metaphor of devouring--cultural cannibalism. Obviously this is a Brazilian idea, but it strikes me that in this inter-connected world of real time communications, that the metaphor of devouring has some importance to everyone. I don't post to my blog `Bazungu Bucks`_ very much, and I really can't imagine why anyone reads it. But one of the happy reasons for having a blog is meeting people. Recently I got a comment from a Ugandan Christian Rapper. Something else is going on than mere imitation. The metaphor of the Brazilians of eating and digesting as cultural encounter seem apt. There's something of this "devouring" in what I pointed to earlier in how Ghandi's satyagraha took root among the American Civil Rights Movement. Or how a young Kenyan writer would tell me that when young he bounced back and forth between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. until he discovered satyagraha at last finding an idea to make his own. Devouring and digesting is something different than the old game of Telephone where a message degrades whispered along a row of children because it incorporates local knowledge. The message doesn't degrade so much as transmutates. Ayittey is surely correct that traditional African institutions cannot be neglected in any solutions for Africa's problems. But a simple "return" to traditional African institutions doesn't seem conceivable in this world of real time communications. Everything is mixed up. Surely the metaphor of cultural cannibalism is offensive in a context of talking about Africa in that it brings to mind awful and untrue Western stereotypes of Africans. But the notion of a "mash up" is too new and connected to technologies rather than to the ecology of life. I'm not coming up with a suitable metaphor, nevertheless accounting for this process of cultural exchange while being uniquely African seems important. Ayittey's insistence on the Internalist position; that Africa's problems are rooted in Africa as are any solutions defends what is essentially African. It's very difficult to say what is essentially Thai, essential American, essentially African, or essentially any culture, in part because culture is living. Because it is hard to say, doesn't mean that what is essential can be imagined unimportant. .. _`Global Projection of Subjective Well-Being`: http://www.le.ac.uk/pc/aw57/world/sample.html .. _`The Happy Planet Index`: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/ .. _`Gapminder`: http://www.gapminder.org/ .. _`Oswald de Andrade`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_de_Andrade .. _`Cannibal Manifesto`: http://www.pataphysics-lab.com/sarcophaga/manyfestos/de%20Andrade,%20Oswald%20-%20Cannibal%20Manifesto.html .. _`Bazungu Bucks`: http://bazungubucks.blogspot.com/ ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 03:22:04 PDT I wonder if I can roll back a few posts here. I've started reading George's book *Africa in Chaos* (had to wait for a US Edition to arrive in the post) and will come back on that but - before the point disappears entirely - I wanted to pick up on the Andrew Mwenda speech at TED. John Powers refers to the speech and says: *In Mwenda's talk he bemoans the fact that Uganda hasn't attained sugar export quotas. Does the sugar business in Uganda operate in the same free market game that farmers in northern Uganda do? Does the sugar business operate under the rules of the traditional African institutions Dr. Ayittey regards as the solution?* Mwenda actually went further than John suggests. He was referring specifically to the duty free quotas agreed by the EU on imports of foodstuffs from African countries. He refers to the "failure" of Uganda to export a single kilo of sugar to take advantage of the duty free quotas. He also says the same thing about Botswana's beef exports to the EU. I looked into this and I'll put it bluntly: George Mwenda is being disingenuous and I think this is one *Cheetah* that may just be showboating to impress the TED audience. Let's take Ugandan sugar. From my brief research it seems that the Ugandan sugar industry was decimated by war. The country is therefore still reliant upon imports of sugar. Uganda first has to deal with competition from imported sugar and deal with growing domestic demand before it could even dream of taking advantage of export markets - duty free or not. As increased domestic production of sugar will also support the growth of the Ugandan soft drinks industry it seems that export of sugar is probably not even a desirable current priority. To imply, as Andrew Mwenda does, that the Ugandan government or foreign aid (I'm not sure which) is somehow to blame for the 'failure' to take advantage of EU sugar quotas seems bizarre. Andrew Mwenda also levels similar charges against the beef industry in Botswana. He again says that Botswana has not exported a kilo of beef to take advantage of EU quotas. This is simply not true and, again, he uses his throwaway condemnations to gloss over the complexity on the ground. First, according to the figures I googled, Botswana exports around $100 millon of beef to the EU per annum. Second, Botswana is heavily reliant upon imports of dairy products and one of the key problems for the Botswana livestock industry is how to increase dairy production (thereby reducing imports) without impairing the export income that comes from beef production. Apparently Botswana has a highly developed veterinary and slaughter programme (to meet EU meat production standards) but they have also suffered from outbreaks of foot and mouth disease which immediately put a stop to exports. This is not a peculiarly 'African problem' - there is currently an EU ban on the export of UK beef following a (hopefully isolated) outbreak of the disease in the south of England. I stand to be corrected on all of these points and I have no doubt that, if I were to probe deeper, that I could come across specific problems that arise from concentration of ownership, nepotism, incompetence and maybe even corruption. But similar charges are often made against some global corporate players - let alone African countries. And that's not to excuse either ! :) But that is not my key point here. My point is that the 'truth' about Africa can only be found in the whole story and that causes us problems because there are no sound bites and the whole story is often dull. The problems of the beef industry in Botswana or the Ugandan sugar industry provide good examples because, whilst they are unlikely to excite most of us, it is often in these kinds of unsung and unsexy arenas where real development work is taking place. I think we need to take account of this when we listen to people like Andrew Mwenda and I think we also need to get past being beguiled by an obviously charming and persuasive young African and look critically at what he is actually saying - just the same as we would with anyone else espousing a cause. Finally, I would like to pick up on Andrew Mwenda's criticisms of foreign aid because I don't think the term (or at least the way he uses it) is particularly helpful. 'Aid' may encompass a lot of sins but the term is also used to include a lot of support and development work - often administered locally - that bears no relation to the kind of aid that Mwenda is dismissing as problematic. And, even if this were not the case, is the obviously well nourished Andrew Mwenda suggesting that we should withdraw famine relief or food programmes where they are desperately needed and simply allow 'the market' and entrepeneurs to find a solution ? ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 06:28:05 PDT Some extra information here to emphasise my point. A bit more reading on Ugandan sugar and it seems that one of the major investors and engines for growth in the Ugandan sugar industry is the Indian corporation Mehta Industries who want to encroach into protected rainforest to establish sugar plantations. This 'development' is being opposed by Western environmental groups on the grounds that Ugandan ecological services including water, climate and biodiversity are more important than sugar which can be grown elsewhere. This may be true and sugar should obviously not be planted in protected areas - but this highlights one small part of the African dilemma. Western ecologists are telling Uganda that sugar can be grown elsewhere in the world but they fail to point out (as they would in another context) that imports add to the carbon footprint. Reliance on imports can also contribute to a widening trade gap between imports and exports - but protection which might enable the development of sensible self-sufficient sugar production would be opposed as being anti-market. And then Andrew Mwenda implies that Uganda should be producing sugar as an export 'cash crop' to take advantage of EU duty free quotas. Square that circle ! ---- :Author: Munnou Morrish :Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:20:07 PDT Abit off topic Investors should learn how to be in harmony with the enviroment,I believe the western ecologist are abit sensible in that nature because without distroying the forest would mean a disaster tomorrow and I believe Mweda( I have not yet read is speech if am right) but this is inresponse to meta sugar group and our envoroment. ---- :Author: John Firth :Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 08:05:02 PDT Munnu, I agree that sugar should not be planted in protected or environmentally sensitive areas - but I assume that does not prevent sugar being planted elsewhere. I was also simply using the point to highlight the conflicting pressures that can arise just on an apparently simple issue like sugar production. Andrew Mwenda might well support the environmental argument but - during his speech to TED - he was castigating Ugandans (or the government) for failing to export sugar to take advantage of EU duty free quotas. I hope that clarifies my points. :) ---- :Author: Munnou Morrish :Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 08:26:14 PDT Yeah.thats why I said abit off topic. Thanks Firth ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:05:26 PDT Munnu, you're point: *Investors should learn how to be in harmony with the environment, I believe the western ecologist are a bit sensible in that nature because without destroying the forest would mean a disaster tomorrow* is really important and on topic. Dr. Ayittey in his talk said (using Linda's `fine summary`_): *People want to help. Help has been turned into a theater of the absurd - the blind leading the clueless.* Sometimes here in the West when conversations stop making a lot of sense people say: "They're arguing about `how many angels`_ can dance on the head of a pin." I don't mean to make such nonsense, but I know too often I do. Your point about caring about the environment is very good, and not because Western ecologist say so, but because you say so. You see Munnu, you're one of the Cheetahs, the new generation Dr. Ayittey is talking about. And everyone here at Ned is trying to figure out how to help you and all the other Cheetahs create good things in your community. Dr. Ayittey is saying that our attention and investments should be in people like you. None of us can make happy lives, and happy lives for our children and our children's children if we destroy the land water and air that support life. Dr. Ayittey points out that traditionally Africans have invented ways to make happy lives from the air, water and soil. It's time to remember those ways. Some of the ways are different than ways in other places. Those differences are important, but there is also much important knowledge that is shared across many places and cultures. We all need to live in harmony with the natural world. There is much in your experience and the methods and businesses you create to teach us outside of Africa. .. _`fine summary`: http://www.ned.com/group/econo-politics/news/0/20/ .. _`how many angels`: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_132.html ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:14:03 PDT John Powers said: In terms of metrics this `Global Projection of Subjective Well-Being`_ may be of interest; if for no other reason than for the citations. `The Happy Planet Index`_ is also of particular interest because the measure show that resource consumption doesn't make people happiest; this "more" may be what we want but more doesn't guarantee happiness. *The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.* Of course, `Gapminder`_ provides interesting insights with statistics. Hans Rosling's talks are particularly engaging. Illich railed against "disvalsue" *the social program of degrading the cultural patterns through which people have traditionally found joy and meaning in the name of a reified ideal called development.* The outlines of sufficiency economy might well be applicable everywhere in the world, but I have the feeling that the ways in which they are expressed are in some ways uniquely Thai. These qualities are hard to point to--especially for me who knows hardly anything of Thailand. Ayittey also seems to be pointing to qualities which are uniquely African. Indeed these may follow from such fundamentals as the extended family being the unit of production. But these qualities are not defined by their roots alone. Brazilian poet `Oswald de Andrade`_ wrote a polemic published in 1928, "Manifesto Antropófago" (`Cannibal Manifesto`_), that became a foundation for some Brazilian artists in the 1960's. Oswald de Andrade's manifesto exposes the metaphor of devouring--cultural cannibalism. Obviously this is a Brazilian idea, but it strikes me that in this inter-connected world of real time communications, that the metaphor of devouring has some importance to everyone. I don't post to my blog `Bazungu Bucks`_ very much, and I really can't imagine why anyone reads it. But one of the happy reasons for having a blog is meeting people. Recently I got a comment from a Ugandan Christian Rapper. Something else is going on than mere imitation. The metaphor of the Brazilians of eating and digesting as cultural encounter seem apt. There's something of this "devouring" in what I pointed to earlier in how Ghandi's satyagraha took root among the American Civil Rights Movement. Or how a young Kenyan writer would tell me that when young he bounced back and forth between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. until he discovered satyagraha at last finding an idea to make his own. Devouring and digesting is something different than the old game of Telephone where a message degrades whispered along a row of children because it incorporates local knowledge. The message doesn't degrade so much as transmutates. Ayittey is surely correct that traditional African institutions cannot be neglected in any solutions for Africa's problems. But a simple "return" to traditional African institutions doesn't seem conceivable in this world of real time communications. Everything is mixed up. Surely the metaphor of cultural cannibalism is offensive in a context of talking about Africa in that it brings to mind awful and untrue Western stereotypes of Africans. But the notion of a "mash up" is too new and connected to technologies rather than to the ecology of life. I'm not coming up with a suitable metaphor, nevertheless accounting for this process of cultural exchange while being uniquely African seems important. Ayittey's insistence on the Internalist position; that Africa's problems are rooted in Africa as are any solutions defends what is essentially African. It's very difficult to say what is essentially Thai, essential American, essentially African, or essentially any culture, in part because culture is living. Because it is hard to say, doesn't mean that what is essential can be imagined unimportant. .. _`Global Projection of Subjective Well-Being`: http://www.le.ac.uk/pc/aw57/world/sample.html .. _`The Happy Planet Index`: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/ .. _`Gapminder`: http://www.gapminder.org/ .. _`Oswald de Andrade`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_de_Andrade .. _`Cannibal Manifesto`: http://www.pataphysics-lab.com/sarcophaga/manyfestos/de%20Andrade,%20Oswald%20-%20Cannibal%20Manifesto.html .. _`Bazungu Bucks`: http://bazungubucks.blogspot.com/ *************** John, You wrote this: Ayittey's insistence on the Internalist position; that Africa's problems are rooted in Africa as are any solutions defends what is essentially African. It's very difficult to say what is essentially Thai, essential American, essentially African, or essentially any culture, in part because culture is living. Because it is hard to say, doesn't mean that what is essential can be imagined unimportant. ************* My call for a return to and building upon Africa's indigenous institutions is often misinterpreted by many who are not familiar with these institutions. I do not make normative judgment -- how a society SHOULD be run. Every society has its own unique problems. Africa is not an exception. The problem is, we (African elites and leaders) have often applied foreign solutions to our problems in Africa, which have not worked well. Hence, my call for "African solutions." Let's take conflict resolution, for example. Since 1970, more than 40 wars have been fought in Africa. Year after year, one African country after another has imploded with deafening staccato, scattering refugees in all directions: Sudan (1972), Angola (1975), Mozambique (1975), Ethiopia (1985), Liberia (1992), Somalia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Zaire (1996), Sierra Leone (1997), Congo DRC (1998), Ethiopia/Eritrea (1998), Guinea (1999),Ivory Coast (2001), and now Sudan (Darfur), Congo DR, and Somalia. And year after year, grisly pictures of emaciated bodies of African famine victims are paraded on Western television in urgent appeals for humanitarian assistance. More than 40 such peace accords have been brokered in Africa since the 1970s with abysmal success record. Only Mozambique's 1991 peace accord has endured, while shaky pacts hold in Chad, Congo, and Niger. Elsewhere, peace accords were shredded like confetti even before the ink on them was dry, amid mutual recriminations of cease-fire violations. The most spectacular failures were: Angola (1991 Bicesse Accord, 1994 Lusaka Accord), Burundi (1993 Arusha Accord), DR Congo (July 1999 Lusaka Accord), Rwanda (1993 Arusha Accord) and Sierra Leone (1999 Lome Accord). All collapsed because they adopted the Western approach to conflict resolution. The cornerstone of this approach, often foisted on Africa by well-intentioned Western donors, is direct face-to-face negotiation between warring factions. It works if factional leaders want peace or must pay a price for the mayhem they cause -- assumptions, which grotesquely confute reality. Fact is, war is "profitable" to warlords as conflict situation provides them with the opportunity to rape women, pillage villages and plunder natural resources, such as gold and diamonds. For rebel soldiers, their weapons are often their livelihoods and many government soldiers live by looting too because they have not been paid by their commanders. Several officers have grown rich by seizing control of diamond fields. The war also gives the government an excuse ("national security") to suspend development projects, provision of social services and keep its defense budget secret, thereby shielding padded contracts to cronies from scrutiny. None of the war combatants pay any price for the destruction they wreak. Rather, they are "rewarded," gaining respectability. Back in 1993, the late Somali warlord, Mohammed Farar Aideed, was transported in U.S. military aircraft to Addis Ababa to take part in peace negotiations. [Aideed forces were subsequently responsible for the deaths of 18 U.S. Rangers in Mogadishu.] The most outrageous appeasement, however, was that of Foday Sankoh, the barbarous warlord of Sierra Leone, whose band of savages (the Revolutionary United Front) chopped off the limbs of people, including women and children who stood in their way. The 1999 Lome Accord rewarded RUF with four cabinet positions and Sankoh himself with the ministry of mines. Africa's own indigenous conflict resolution mechanism provides a better approach. It requires four parties: An arbiter, the combatants AND civil society or those directly and indirectly affected by the conflict (the victims). For example, in traditional Africa, when two disputants cannot resolve their differences by themselves, the case is taken to a chief's court for adjudication. The court is open and anyone affected by the dispute can participate. The complainant makes his case; then the defendant. Next, anybody else who has something to say may do so. After all the arguments have been heard, the chief renders a decision. The guilty party may be fined say three goats. In default, his family is held liable. The injured party receives one goat, the chief another goat for his services, and the remaining goat is slaughtered for a village feast for all to enjoy. The latter social event is derived from the African belief that it takes a village, not only to raise a child but also to heal frayed social relations. Thus, traditional African jurisprudence lays more emphasis on healing and restoring social harmony and peace than punishing the guilty. Further, the interests of the community supersede those of the disputants. If they adopt intransigent positions, they can be sidelined by the will of the community and fined say two goats each for disturbing social peace. In extreme cases, they can be expelled from the village. Thus, there is a price to be paid for intransigence and for wreaking social mayhem -- a price exacted by the victims. African jurisprudence stresses restitution, reconciliation and restoration of social harmony (3 Rs). Somali law, for example, is restorative rather than punitive. Western jurisprudence, on the other hand, stresses punishment and rehabilitation of the guilty. In recent times, a return to African jurisprudence is being made. After apartheid was dismantled in South Africa, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up. Whites guilty of apartheid crimes were given the opportunity to confess and for their "sins" to be forgiven. They were not hunted down as the Nazi fascists were. Rwanda also discovered that it would take the country more than 120 years to try the genocidaires (the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide) using a Western-style court system. So it changed to the traditional gacaca courts. I am not saying one approach is superior to another but if it works in restoring social harmony and, above all, is CHEAPER, why not use it? It may interest you to note that there is a new movement in the U.S., partly funded by international financier George Soros, that aims at “Restorative Justice.” It views punishment as “bad” and seeks to integrate the criminal into the community through “victim-offender reconciliation programs.” It claims that punishing people harms people and people who are harmed are more likely to commit crimes. Therefore, the Western emphasis on punishment may be considered as “iatrogenic justice.” Iatrogenic means “doctor induced” and, hence, iatrogenic justice means criminality induced by the treatment (punishment). Vermont and Minnesota are U.S. states which have adopted restorative justice as policy but whether it will work in the U.S. is a different matter. In traditional Africa, although the criminal is not punished, it is the responsibility of the lineage or clan to rehabilitate him. In the U.S., the clan or lineage has nearly vanished as a social unit. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:36:01 PDT Rory Turner said: Back to Ayittey. I agree with him, Trade not aid, attention to the traditional and informal sectors, investment in what works. I would add attention to refinements of effective processes to allow them to scale better -- perhaps a management theory dealing with issues such as trust and collective affiliative social arrangements like extended families. Also helpful I think would be ways to link together such efforts in a visible and praisable way. Know the Cheetahs! Feed the Cheetahs! My question. How could Ned help with this? ************** Rory, GOOD QUESTION. On my recent trip to Africa in August, I went to Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria to see how we can implement some of the ideas I raised in my book, Africa Unchained and the TED Global conference in Arusha. I am working with a Nigerian, a Ghanaian, Ethiopian and a Kenyan to establish a network of the “Cheetah Generation.” As you know, the “Cheetahs” are the young, educated and dynamic African entrepreneurs who brook no nonsense about corruption and economic mismanagement. They are intellectually agile and understand what accountability, democracy and rule of law are. They don’t sit there waiting for government to come and solve problems for them. Like I said in my speech, it is on the backs of these Cheetahs that Africa’s salvation rests. By contrast, you have the “Hippos” – the ruling elites. They are stuck in their intellectual patch, always complaining about colonialism, imperialism, the World Bank, etc. They are not interested in cleaning the pond (reforming their abominable political and economic systems) because they benefit from the rotten status quo. Ask them to develop their countries and they will develop their pockets. Ask them to seek foreign investment and they will seek a foreign country to invest their booty. Ask them to cut bloated state bureaucracies or government spending and they will set up a “Ministry of Less Government Spending.” Ask them to establish better systems of governance and they will set up a “Ministry of Good Governance” (Tanzania). Ask them to curb corruption and they will set up an “Anti-Corruption Commission” with no teeth and then sack the Commissioner if he gets too close to the fat cats (Kenya). Ask them to establish democracy and they will empanel a coterie of fawning sycophants to write the electoral rules, toss opposition leaders in jail, and hold coconut elections to return themselves to power (Ivory Coast, Rwanda). Ask them to reduce state hegemony in the economy and place more reliance on the private sector and they will create a Ministry of Private Enterprise (Ghana). Ask them to privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises and they will sell them off at fire-sale prices to their cronies. Such was the case in Uganda. In 1992, the Government began a privatization effort to sell-off 142 of its state-owned enterprises. However, in 1998, the process was halted twice by Uganda’s own parliament because, according to the chair of a parliamentary select committee, Tom Omongole, it had been “derailed by corruption,” implicating three senior ministers who had "political responsibility" (The East African, June 14, 1999). The sale of these 142 enterprises was initially projected to generate 900 billion Ugandan shillings or $500 million. However, by the autumn of 1999 the revenue balance was only 3.7 billion Ushs. That’s the Hippo generation. In the “Atinga development model,” that I crafted in my book, Africa Unchained, the traditional chief plays a pivotal role in development. He is respected and accepted. In addition, he serves as a custodian of the land and, thus, allocates land. I met with several traditional rulers during my visit to seek land for cottage industries. • Cheetah Hut: The Mantse of Nungua, a suburb of Accra and his Traditional Council has agreed to allocate land to us for the construction of a food court/market. A percentage of the profit will go to traditional council, which will use it to provide clean water, electricity and other social amenities for the people. This venture is for-profit and the investment capital will be paid back in three years or less. There is no government involved in this and, moreover, it empowers the local community (the traditional council) to do more for themselves, instead of relying on corrupt and incompetent governments. The food market will be called “Cheetah Hut” (rhymes with Pizza Hut). Cheetah Fishing: Native fishermen for centuries have gone to sea in narrow dug-out canoes, which limit the size of the catch and how far out to sea they can go. Bigger boats can raise the output of the native fishing industry. There is a chap who builds such boats but the operations outdoors on the beach are not very efficient. Mr. Efum, the boat builder told me that it takes him four months to build one such large boat. I have formed a partnership agreement with him to build such bigger boats. The traditional chief of Elmina has agreed to give us land for the construction of a hangar-type of structure to build these boats. In such a structure, productivity can be raised to one big boat a month, instead of four months. A percentage of the revenue will go to the traditional council for the provision of social services, as in the food court venture. • Cheetah Bio-Fuel/Palm Oil: Palm oil can be turned into bio-diesel and West Africa is an important palm oil producing area. In fact, it was Ghana which sent Malaysia its first palm oil seedlings. The world demand for palm oil, especially in Europe, has skyrocketed and it is now fetching $845 per metric tonne. However, production is not well organized in West Africa. There is a huge potential here if West Africa can increase its production of palm oil. On my August trip, I visited more than 20 villages in Ghana and spoke with several groups of farmers, who already grow the palm fruit. Their complaint is that, they can grow all the palm that we want but their problem has always been lack of buyers. I told them that their problem would be solved if they would be willing to be organized in to cooperatives, which will serve as their guaranteed buyer. The coop will grant them micro-credit loans or advance to expand or improve their farms but it will be the sole buyer of their produce. The micro loans will be deducted when they sell their produce to the coop. When the coop makes a profit, a percentage will be given to the local traditional council to provide clean water, electricity, health clinics, schools, etc. to the farming communities. When I left Ghana on August 24, after a three-week visit, over 2,000 farmers had signed up. I spoke with Mr. Gilbert Owusu, my local coordinator two days ago and he informed me that the number of farmers has grown to more than 9,000. If we succeed in organizing the farmers, they will produce more palm oil, earn more money, with which to send their children to school, pay for electricity and take care of themselves when they get sick. Our approach seeks to re-write the book on African development or, if you may, turning development thinking on its head. Conventional development thinking conceives of the poor as hapless people to be pitied and assisted through government intervention programs with massive infusions of foreign aid. “Poverty-reduction” has been the rallying cry of these conventional development models. We would like to banish the term “poverty-reduction” and replace it with “wealth creation,” which has a more positive ring to it. We believe the poor are not to be pitied; they are hard-working and entrepreneurial. Quite often, it is governments that impede their progress or stand in their way. For example, the informal sector is always bustling with entrepreneurial activity and constitutes the mainstay of many African economies – about 85 percent of Ghana’s economy and nearly 90 percent of Nigeria’s. Therefore, we believe that with a little bit of capital and little re-organization, we can unleash the entrepreneurial energies of the informal sector to create massive streams of wealth and, by extension, lift millions out of poverty. The approach taken by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Bono, Geldof and other do-gooders is “top-down” – handing money to corrupt and incompetent African governments to initiate development in the hope that it will reduce poverty. This approach did not work in post colonial Africa. Ours is a “bottom-up” approach that seeks to empower the poor to help themselves through entrepreneurship. It differs from the “Asian Tiger model,” which was “state-led.” Our approach calls for no government intervention. Our approach has not been tried before for the simple reason that, to start anything from the bottom, one has to know what’s at the bottom. But the multitude of development experts, World Bank officials, and foreign aid donors who descended on Africa in the post colonial period, bearing goodies never knew squat about what was there at the bottom – the peasants and their indigenous systems. Nor were African government officials, leaders and elites any better informed. They shunned the informal and traditional sectors, castigating what was there as “backward and primitive.” Then they went abroad and blindly copied all sorts of foreign systems to impose on Africa. Rome has a basilica; so they built one in Yamassoukrou (Ivory Coast). The Soviet Union was a one-party socialist state; so they established one-party state systems across Africa. France once had an emperor; so Bokassa spent $25 million in 1979 to crown himself “emperor” to prove that Africa had come of age. The U.S. has a space center; so Nigeria has built an $89 million space center! This model of “development-by-imitation” left Africa littered with the putrid carcasses of failed foreign systems. The Hippos can wallow in their putrid pond, choked with failed imported systems. We will establish Cheetah Enterprises in the informal and traditional sectors. We will like to prove that you can make money in these sectors by helping the poor help themselves. Today, every educated African who wants to make money heads straight into government. If the elites had sought their wealth from the informal and traditional sectors, Africa would write a better report card. We are working to set up a "Cheetah Fund" which will finance various enterprises in the informal and traditional sectors as enumerated above. Contributions to the Fund will be regarded as loans to be paid back. This is not charity. And enterprises will be given to Cheetahs to run them. There is no government involvement here. We have registered company caled Cheetah Entities in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. It will serve as a holding compny with several subsidiaries. The whole idea is to create wealth at the BOTTOM. I leave for Mali to speak to a group of Malian Cheetahs on Sept 27. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: Rory Turner :Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 08:58:31 PDT This is brilliant and inspiring Dr. Ayittey, thank you so much for your work! I can attest to what you say of local govenrment vs. traditional institutions. In Nigeria Local Government offices were dismal tired places doing next to nothing to really help the people. It was through traditional chieftaincies, age grades, and collectives that actual development took place, things of real substance like electrification and road construction. There were also some local businessmen coming out of the informal sector that built critical enterprises that were profitable and that created wealth and jobs for the community. Unfortunately, these achievements were largely overshadowed by the enormous wealth of those who hijacked the aid and oil money flows. This created a challenging cultural dynamic that became part of my research -- a conversation was going on in Igboland about what it means to be a good man that answered in practice the question how can modern Igbo culture work. We need to sing the praises of such men, like ny late friend Okpatu Dunu of Ukpo who built a nation spanning business the old fashioned way. We also need precisely as you say, to flip development on its head. ---- :Author: Mark Grimes :Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 09:30:18 PDT Dr. Ayittey, this thread has been such a welcome addition to the new launch of the website, very glad you are here with us. The Ned business model(s) are very much in alignment with the grassroots bottom up business as development model that Cheetah Entities and the Cheetah Fund is developing. If you would care to take peek at two one page flowcharts you can get a glimpse of the Ned.com, and Ned/Coop business models. (Nods to Linda for taking a first pass at the coop flowchart prior to meeting in Kampala in February and really digging deep into it) I've found people get a lot out of them (given they are just each one page), but get much more once there is more dialogue. I've spoken with `Susan & Obo Addy`_ regarding a Ned/Ghana coop location and things look compelling. `Ned.com Flowchart V8`_ `Ned Coop Flowchart V5`_ Regarding Ned, Zeke Poutine said "In a nutshell the vision is to have real life global centers in the developed and developing world that are interconnected and internet connected. Kind of like a mashup of better world retail/local marketplace/coffee shop/internet café/community centre/ngo melting pot/social enterprise/hangout." *But does it come with curly fries?* In addition to ned.com, ` Uganda`_ in both Kampala and Gulu and ` Oregon`_ in Portland should all have physical spaces built out sometime between now and end of the year. Ghana? It could really be worth exploring. Well, please feel invited to noodle around the two flowcharts. Also, here are a couple of Ned specific related discussions: `The elevator pitch`_ and `[Visioning] as path and destination - A journey`_ .. _`[Visioning] as path and destination - A journey` : http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/news/21/ .. _`The elevator pitch` : http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/news/4/ .. _` Uganda` : http://www.ned.com/group/neduganda/ .. _` Oregon` : http://www.ned.com/group/nedoregon/ .. _`Susan & Obo Addy` : http://www.oboaddy.com/ .. _`Ned.com Flowchart V8` : http://www.ned.com/group/ned/file/9.40.11881412409/get/Ned.com%20Flowchart%20V8.pdf .. _`Ned Coop Flowchart V5` : http://www.ned.com/group/ned/file/4.83.11881411834/get/Ned%20Coop%20Flowchart%20V5.pdf ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 12:32:03 PDT Dr. Ayittey you are inspiring and have really inspired me. Thanks! The idea of the Cheetah Fund is one which will surely grow and make a huge difference. Readers of this thread may enjoy going over to `Nubian Cheetah`_ to read entries in the 4th Edition of The Carnival of African Enterprising. Dr. Ayittey's Ted talk has had repercussions all over really changing the focus of attention. .. _`Nubian Cheetah`: http://nubiancheetah.blogspot.com/ ---- :Author: Christina Jordan :Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 04:47:03 PDT I'd love to know more about the Cheetah Fund, Dr. Ayittey. Especially how the funds will be raised and how the cheetahs to benefit will be determined. I have many ideas to possibly share in those 2 areas but would like to understand more about what you've already got planned before confusing you with them :) ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:03:25 PDT Dear Dr Ayittey, This is very inspiring for me too and I hope to explain how. Many miles away in the former Soviet Union we too do battle with corrupt regimes and the failure of trickle down development, none more obvious than the funds that were poured into Russia in what was called the Defense Enterprise Fund, which under the guidance of Harvard did little more than empower the Russian mafia. Recognising that even in the most democratic countries, where moral conscience is codified and enforced by the rule of law, trickle down proves inadequate, failing to reach more than 75% of a given population. At the extreme, one will find starved and dead frozen children on the streets in a land of abundant agricultural production. An alternative proposing to "replace revenue drains with revenue gains" was offered. Bottom up, targeted microeconomics. Funding leveraged from government to be paid back with more than full cost recovery over 5 years. So, with regard to a Cheetah fund, it should be regarded as a possibility to leverage funds for African bottom-up invest ment, in addition to any private resources. What was also said back then was that for economic development to be established in a given location, it would need to driven by information resources which could help identify local materials and target external markets. In Ghana, one man took this on board and began a dialogue on the Omidyar network about creating an information led farming initiative. The distinction being that tackling the digital divide wasn't being seen as catalytic to the trickle down process, it would become a revenue generator reinvesting in other community centric projects to produce food. http://www.omidyar.net/group/farming/news/0/ He'd managed to take the effort as far as a proposal for funding to Bidnetwork without success. Even now, I feel the concept of profit for social purpose hasn't been entirely grasped by the development community. He seems now to have dropped out of discussions. I hope this means he's become one of Accra's Cheetahs. You may also be interested in the subject of Community Land Partnerships for the housing project described. Recently the mayor of London announced the first of these schemes in our capital and there is a UN backed project working right now on the Global Land Tools project in which this is also being evaluated as a means to allocate farming land to impoverished people. Ultimately this may provide the vehicle needed for external investment. http://www.gltn.net/ The concept of Open Capital is one of shared risk and reward in an asset rather than debt based approach to investment. As an illustration, we in the UK for instance have a pensioner population owning 1 trillion pounds worth of equity in their own homes and that kind of money could be put to good use helping others put a roof over their heads. http://www.opencapital.net/ ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:15:55 PDT Rory Turner said: This is brilliant and inspiring Dr. Ayittey, thank you so much for your work! I can attest to what you say of local govenrment vs. traditional institutions. In Nigeria Local Government offices were dismal tired places doing next to nothing to really help the people. It was through traditional chieftaincies, age grades, and collectives that actual development took place, things of real substance like electrification and road construction. There were also some local businessmen coming out of the informal sector that built critical enterprises that were profitable and that created wealth and jobs for the community. Unfortunately, these achievements were largely overshadowed by the enormous wealth of those who hijacked the aid and oil money flows. This created a challenging cultural dynamic that became part of my research -- a conversation was going on in Igboland about what it means to be a good man that answered in practice the question how can modern Igbo culture work. We need to sing the praises of such men, like ny late friend Okpatu Dunu of Ukpo who built a nation spanning business the old fashioned way. We also need precisely as you say, to flip development on its head. Rory, My apologies for this late response. Yes, I agree. It is people like your late friend, Okpatu Dunu that we should should sing praises of. There are millions of them in the informal and traditional sectors in Africa. BUT we don't hear of them. World Bank officials never know of them. Nor do United Nations officials. The STATE-CONTROLLED media in Africa doesn't write about the "Dunus," preferring to serve the populace the stale fair of what the president of the country had for lunch that day. Yet, the purview of all these officials is "development." Totally clueless. If you look at the economic history of the West,you will find that the Industrial Revolution was started by many "Dunus" -- the tinkerers working long hours in the basements, garages, ramshackle shops in somewhat unsanitary and even dangerous conditions until "Eureka!" Similarly, Africa's informal economy is bubbling with entrepreneurial activity and energies. But the "Dunus" are daily crushed by the jackboots of the State Leviathan. The government provides no services for them: no water, no electricity, etc. Then their shops are razed to the ground with bulldozers and themselves clubbed by baton-wielding policemen. Please read this: __________________ Zimbabwe Police Raze Poor Towns In Rampage Government Says Homes Being Destroyed Are Illegal By Craig Timberg (The Washington Post, June 5, 2005; p.A23) HARARE, Zimbabwe, June 4 -- Six days after teams of police officers ordered the residents of Hatcliffe Extension, a squatter village, to tear down their homes, the destruction still looks startlingly fresh, the former tenants dazed and weary. Where houses once stood are piles of plastic sheeting and splinters of lumber. Shops built of concrete have been reduced to rubble. A Catholic day-care center for AIDS orphans has been destroyed. And the residents, worn out after days of living among the ruins and nights spent outside in the cold, sit mournfully among the shattered remnants of their lives. "I have no options. I have nowhere to go," said Catherine Tangara, 58, a round-faced widow who cares for her four grandchildren because both of her daughters have died. The story is the same in urban areas throughout Zimbabwe, an economically and politically troubled southern African country of 12 million. Thousands of police officers have spent the past two weeks on a rampage of destruction that officials call a campaign to clean up illegal housing and markets. At least 22,000 street traders have been arrested, police said in government-owned newspapers, and tens of thousands of people have been left homeless. Though the full extent of the operation remains unknown, opposition leaders say as many as 1.5 million people in Harare alone may have lost their homes. President Robert Mugabe has dubbed the campaign "Operation Murambatsvina," which the state-owned press translates as "Operation Restore Order" and portrays as a necessary effort to curb crime, garbage and the other excesses of rapid urbanization over the past several years. But in Shona, the dominant language in Zimbabwe, it has a more sinister translation, given that most of those targeted are poor: "Operation Drive Out the Rubbish." _______________ Such economic insanity. When it was over 800,000 informals have been rendered homeless. And could the government feed them? The ruling elites have it backward. To them, "development" means developing their pocket and "foreign investment" means investing the loot in a foreign country! George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:32:24 PDT Dear Dr Ayittey, I saw you on-line as I was preparing to leave my computer for a "stimulating" day of reading (ah the perils of a student!), and I wanted to offer you an invitation. I know that you are headed out later in the week for your trip to meet with some of the cheetahs in Mali. I would like to invite you to consider meeting some of the cheetahs in Uganda! (Note that I haven't talked to any of them about this!) These people have awed me in their strength in spite of overwhelming obstacles. If I were to be very selfish (and I certainly can be at times) I would like to invite you to meet them when I am there during March, April and May. But your meeting them is more important than my meeting you! If you would be able to fit that into your schedule at some point, I would be more than happy to help you make the connections. ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:37:24 PDT Linda Nowakowski said: Dear Dr Ayittey, I saw you on-line as I was preparing to leave my computer for a "stimulating" day of reading (ah the perils of a student!), and I wanted to offer you an invitation. I know that you are headed out later in the week for your trip to meet with some of the cheetahs in Mali. I would like to invite you to consider meeting some of the cheetahs in Uganda! (Note that I haven't talked to any of them about this!) These people have awed me in their strength in spite of overwhelming obstacles. If I were to be very selfish (and I certainly can be at times) I would like to invite you to meet them when I am there during March, April and May. But your meeting them is more important than my meeting you! If you would be able to fit that into your schedule at some point, I would be more than happy to help you make the connections. Linda, I will be more than happy to meet with Ugandan "Cheetahs." Please send me a private mail so that we can work out the details. March (spring Break) would be best for me. Hope to hear from you soon. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:40:29 PDT Mark Grimes said: Dr. Ayittey, this thread has been such a welcome addition to the new launch of the website, very glad you are here with us. The Ned business model(s) are very much in alignment with the grassroots bottom up business as development model that Cheetah Entities and the Cheetah Fund is developing. If you would care to take peek at two one page flowcharts you can get a glimpse of the Ned.com, and Ned/Coop business models. (Nods to Linda for taking a first pass at the coop flowchart prior to meeting in Kampala in February and really digging deep into it) I've found people get a lot out of them (given they are just each one page), but get much more once there is more dialogue. I've spoken with `Susan & Obo Addy`_ regarding a Ned/Ghana coop location and things look compelling. `Ned.com Flowchart V8`_ `Ned Coop Flowchart V5`_ Regarding Ned, Zeke Poutine said "In a nutshell the vision is to have real life global centers in the developed and developing world that are interconnected and internet connected. Kind of like a mashup of better world retail/local marketplace/coffee shop/internet café/community centre/ngo melting pot/social enterprise/hangout." *But does it come with curly fries?* In addition to ned.com, ` Uganda`_ in both Kampala and Gulu and ` Oregon`_ in Portland should all have physical spaces built out sometime between now and end of the year. Ghana? It could really be worth exploring. Well, please feel invited to noodle around the two flowcharts. Also, here are a couple of Ned specific related discussions: `The elevator pitch`_ and `[Visioning] as path and destination - A journey`_ .. _`[Visioning] as path and destination - A journey` : http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/news/21/ .. _`The elevator pitch` : http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/news/4/ .. _` Uganda` : http://www.ned.com/group/neduganda/ .. _` Oregon` : http://www.ned.com/group/nedoregon/ .. _`Susan & Obo Addy` : http://www.oboaddy.com/ .. _`Ned.com Flowchart V8` : http://www.ned.com/group/ned/file/9.40.11881412409/get/Ned.com%20Flowchart%20V8.pdf .. _`Ned Coop Flowchart V5` : http://www.ned.com/group/ned/file/4.83.11881411834/get/Ned%20Coop%20Flowchart%20V5.pdf Mark, Thanks for the links. I will follow up them. Have already checked NED coop model. It has some interesting aspects we certainly can use and benefit from. Will check out the other contacts. Thanks. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:43:10 PDT John Powers said: Dr. Ayittey you are inspiring and have really inspired me. Thanks! The idea of the Cheetah Fund is one which will surely grow and make a huge difference. Readers of this thread may enjoy going over to `Nubian Cheetah`_ to read entries in the 4th Edition of The Carnival of African Enterprising. Dr. Ayittey's Ted talk has had repercussions all over really changing the focus of attention. .. _`Nubian Cheetah`: http://nubiancheetah.blogspot.com/ John, Nii Simmonds who operates the web site: Nubian Cheetah is one of those helping me put together the Cheetah Fund. Will update. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:53:44 PDT Christina Jordan said: I'd love to know more about the Cheetah Fund, Dr. Ayittey. Especially how the funds will be raised and how the cheetahs to benefit will be determined. I have many ideas to possibly share in those 2 areas but would like to understand more about what you've already got planned before confusing you with them :) Christina, Thanks for your response. For obvious reasons, it is important that this initiative (Cheetah Fund) be “African-led.” Therefore, our prime targets will be rich Africans or Africans in the diaspora. The latter group, for example, sends back to Africa over $35 billion in remittances, much of which is used to finance consumption. We seek just one percent of these remittances, which will yield $350 million, for investment. We can also start with as little as $20 million and constantly re-invest the profits to build up the capital base. We ar considering allowing former heads of state to make a contribution to the Cheetah Fund, a decision which will be controversial. But if a former head of state has a change of heart and would like to make atonement, he should be allowed to. The amount of money African heads of state have stolen from their people since independence in 1960 exceed $500 billion. In Nigeria alone, more than $450 billion in oil money flowed into Nigerian government coffers between 1970 and 2004. But, according to Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, $412 billion of that was stolen by Nigeria’s rulers. If former heads of state are willing to return the loot and do some good with it – for example, initiating real development – I am sure the African people will forgive them. It is a cultural trait which informed the establishment of South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Of course, Western charities and corporations can also contribute to the Cheetah Fund. Soliciting funds from Western charities and multi-national corporations will also be controversial as radical left-wingers will attack the scheme as a “vehicle for neo-colonialism.” Nevertheless, we are open to Western entities who want to help Africa but their contributions will not be considered charity but a loan or investment since the Cheetah Fund is set up for profit. As such, a loan from a Western entity will be paid back. I would welcome any suggestions you may have. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: Mark Grimes :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 19:24:51 PDT Dr Ayittey I'm heading to DC for the first time next Tuesday (thru late Friday) to do some consulting with this gang - http://www.unity08.com/ If I get any free time (they're controlling my entire sked, so who knows) and you have any time and would like to try to grab a coffee/lunch please `PM me`_ the best phone to reach you at. (My phone is always under my profile here) .. _`PM me` : http://www.ned.com/user/u513094538/msg/new ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 19:45:26 PDT Mark.... Dr. Ayittey is leaving for Mali on the 27th. See this_. .. _this : /group/econo-politics/news/0/98/ ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 20:44:42 PDT In my reading this morning, I came across this: * `Transcript of Bill Moyer's interview with George Ayittey`_ Video Resource * `Bill Moyer's interview with George Ayittey`_ .. _`Bill Moyer's interview with George Ayittey` : http://www.pbs.org/cgi-registry/mediaplayer/videoplayer.cgi?playeraddress=videoplayer.cgi&media=%2Fwnet%2Fwideangle%2Fepisodes%2F403interview-lo.rm%2C%2Fwnet%2Fwideangle%2Fepisodes%2F403interview-hi.rm%2C%2Fwnet%2Fwideangle%2Fepisodes%2F403interview-lo.wmv%2C%2Fwnet%2Fwideangle%2Fepisodes%2F403interview-hi.wmv&title=Professor%20George%20Ayittey%2C%20distinguished%20economist%20from%20the%20American%20University%20in%20Washington%2C%20DC%2C%20discusses%20social%2C%20political%2C%20and%20economic%20development%20in%20Africa%20with%20Anchor%2C%20Bill%20Moyers.&playertemplate=%2Fwnet%2Fwideangle%2Fmedia_players%2Fvideo_template.html ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:30:58 PDT I just assembled a resources_ page. I ordered a number of the books on the list but have 4 on a Christmas list (in case any one talks to Santa Claus) as they are totally outside of my budget! And if any one has access to any of the journal articles...well...none of them are available in Thailand! ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 06:22:09 PDT Jeff Mowatt said: Dear Dr Ayittey, This is very inspiring for me too and I hope to explain how. Many miles away in the former Soviet Union we too do battle with corrupt regimes and the failure of trickle down development, none more obvious than the funds that were poured into Russia in what was called the Defense Enterprise Fund, which under the guidance of Harvard did little more than empower the Russian mafia. Recognising that even in the most democratic countries, where moral conscience is codified and enforced by the rule of law, trickle down proves inadequate, failing to reach more than 75% of a given population. At the extreme, one will find starved and dead frozen children on the streets in a land of abundant agricultural production. An alternative proposing to "replace revenue drains with revenue gains" was offered. Bottom up, targeted microeconomics. Funding leveraged from government to be paid back with more than full cost recovery over 5 years. So, with regard to a Cheetah fund, it should be regarded as a possibility to leverage funds for African bottom-up invest ment, in addition to any private resources. What was also said back then was that for economic development to be established in a given location, it would need to driven by information resources which could help identify local materials and target external markets. In Ghana, one man took this on board and began a dialogue on the Omidyar network about creating an information led farming initiative. The distinction being that tackling the digital divide wasn't being seen as catalytic to the trickle down process, it would become a revenue generator reinvesting in other community centric projects to produce food. http://www.omidyar.net/group/farming/news/0/ He'd managed to take the effort as far as a proposal for funding to Bidnetwork without success. Even now, I feel the concept of profit for social purpose hasn't been entirely grasped by the development community. He seems now to have dropped out of discussions. I hope this means he's become one of Accra's Cheetahs. You may also be interested in the subject of Community Land Partnerships for the housing project described. Recently the mayor of London announced the first of these schemes in our capital and there is a UN backed project working right now on the Global Land Tools project in which this is also being evaluated as a means to allocate farming land to impoverished people. Ultimately this may provide the vehicle needed for external investment. http://www.gltn.net/ The concept of Open Capital is one of shared risk and reward in an asset rather than debt based approach to investment. As an illustration, we in the UK for instance have a pensioner population owning 1 trillion pounds worth of equity in their own homes and that kind of money could be put to good use helping others put a roof over their heads. http://www.opencapital.net/ Jeff, I checked your website and your "Open Capital" concept is an idea which will work well in Afica or, should I dare say, the Third World. Please correct me if I am wrong but I see it as a very sophisticated version of a profit-sharing scheme -- "a shared risk and reward in an asset rather than debt based approach to investment." It might interest you to know that the cocoa farmers of West Africa have operated a similar scheme since the late 19th century. Profit from cocoa farming is divided into three: One part goes to the owner of the farm. Another third goes to the workers of the farm and the remaining third is set aside for farm maintenance and expansion. It is called the "abusa" system. It is also common in retail trading. Less common is the "abunu" system whereby the profit is divided into two. This business model is different from the standard Western model where profit is appropriated by the OWNER/S of the business and it explains why many development projects and business ventures failed in Africa. In dealing with Africa's peasant farmers, the plantation model did not work well because it envisaged employing these farmers to work on plantations for wages the profit being appropriated by the owner/s of the plantation. Clearly, this model was ALIEN to them. African governments, under various ideological guises (socialism, Marxism) introduced the STATE FARM model which was also ALIEN to them. Under that model, the farmers were to work for wages and profits, if any, were appropriated by the STATE. The amazing thing is, the peasant farmers have their own model in which profit is shared. No one is "exploited." And we thought we knew better and had a better model to impose on them. Disaster was the result. The kicker is that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with their profit-sharing scheme. In fact, it was the same profit-sharing scheme that corporate Japan used to transform itself into economic titans. A Japanese corporation operated, for a long time, like a giant "extended family system" with workers singing company songs and sharing in the profit of the company. The moral of this story is the critical importance of developing "culturally-relevant" development models, which is why I have been insisting that Africa returns to its roots and builds upon its own indigenous institutions. We never built upon the peasant's "profit-sharing schemes" in Africa. The one who did in Bangladesh -- Dr. Yunus Muhammad -- won a Nobel Prize. Since colonial banks won’t lend to them (they have no collateral), peasants raised start-up capital in several ingenious ways their fishing and commercial operations. One traditional source of finance was the "family pot." Each extended family had a fund into which members made contributions according to their means. Coercion was not applied but non contribution effectively extinguished one's access to the "pot." Members borrowed from this pot to purchase their fishing nets and paid back the loans. The second source of finance was a revolving credit scheme which was widespread across Africa. It was called susu in Ghana, esusu in Yoruba, tontines or chilembe in Cameroon and stokfel in South Africa. Typically, a group of say 10 people would contribute say $100 into a fund. When it reached a certain amount, say $1,000, it was handed over to the members in turn. Such a scheme required a liberal dosage of trust among members to be operational and somehow the natives managed to make it work. In fact, for many businesses in the indigenous and informal sector, the loan club was their primary source of capital. One could also borrow money by pledging farms, a practice which was common in Ghana and Nigeria (Hill, 1987; Von Pische, 1983). If borrowing was not possible, one could form a partnership with a person with capital. A common arrangement involved three partners who shared the returns from a venture equally. In trading ventures, one partner supplied the capital, one transported the goods and braved the hazards of the trail, and the other organized the partnership, which in some cases involved little more than getting the capitalist in touch with someone who had the stamina and courage to make the trip (Miracle, 1971). But back to the revolving credit scheme. Four observations regarding the tontines may be instructive. First, the term “tontine” originated from Europe. During the 1600s, when European treasuries were depleted by a series of protracted religious wars, their monarchs sought new ways of raising funds. In France, King Louis XIV directed his minister of finance, Cardinal Mazarin, to come up with a fundraising scheme to supplement the revenues generated by taxes. In 1652, Mazarin consulted with an Italian banker, Lorenzo Tonti, who developed what become known as the tontine. It was a form of group lifetime annuity or lottery which participants bought into with a 300 livre payment to the French government. A participant could buy multiple shares and a beneficiary for each share, was selected (which was often a child). Each beneficiary received a payment each year for life, and as more of the other participants died, each surviving participant's payment grew larger. Upon the death of the last participant the government's debt would be considered paid in full. England offered its first tontine in 1693 and the U.S. president, Alexander Hamilton, adopted it to a limited extent in 1790 (http://www.annuitymuseum.org/tontines/). What obtained in traditional Africa was not exactly an annuity scheme but the error had already been made. Nonetheless, and second, they are not unique to Africa alone. Similar schemes exist in other parts of the Third World. These are called hui in China and Vietnam; keh in Korea; tandas in Mexico; pasanaku in Bolivia; san in the Dominican Republic; "syndicate" in Belize; gamaiyah in Egypt; hagbad in Somalia; xitique in Mozambique; arisan in Indonesia; paluwagan in the Philippines; chit fund in India and Sri Lanka; pia huey in Thailand and ko in Japan. Third, if the same susu scheme of the African natives were organized in the United States, it would be called a credit union! A credit union is simply an association of individuals who pool their savings together to lend only to themselves (the members). Fourth, these indigenous saving clubs still exist. Local tontines in Cameroon, small, informal savings and loan associations, are proving to be still the main grassroots financing system. The people handle about 90 per cent of their financial transactions through them. By comparison, the formal and semi-formal finance sector, meaning commercial and savings and loan banks, achieves a volume of only about 10 per cent of national loan business ( http://www.inwent.org/E+Z/1997-2002/de101-8.htm) What Dr. Yunus Muhammad did was to transform a tontine into a GRAMEEN BANK to give our "micro-credit loans." For Africa or the Third World, the rest of the story should be easy. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: Chris Cook :Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 07:59:55 PDT Dear Dr Ayittey In fact I have been working in Scotland and Norway to develop the new partnership-based "microfinance" tools Jeff mentions. I met the Norwegian junior development minister - Anne Stenhammer - in this connection recently and one of the Directors of Norfund, since then. Naturally they wish to see working "pilot schemes" before committing themselves, and we plan these in Rwanda, where we already have an "outpost" and a commitment from a Norwegian "venture philanthropist" to invest some 2.5m NoK ie perhaps $400k. I was aware of the pervasive use of tontines in Cameroon, and this incorporates much of the "Guarantee Society" ("GS") I envisage. However, I believe the GS is in fact a new concept in the way that it mobilises mutualised and "disintermediated" credit and minimises the costs of operation. The additional factor of a GS is in fact the ability of a Seller to give credit to Buyers which may be settled not just in convenmtional Money, but also - with the permission of the Seller, in "Money's worth" of barter. Think of a Grameen Bank with the possibility of barter settlement,. and with the Bank as a service provider, as opposed to a lender. While a GS is used to mobilise "working capital", fixed capital investment is possible through production-sharing/ revenue sharing "Capital Partnerships" and the combined results of the two mechanisms working in tandem could be extremely powerful. In neither case is a bank necessary as a credit intermediary/ middleman creating credit based upon a small amount of capital: instead the Bank serves as a service provider, without putting any Capital at risk to underpin credit created based upon it. In the case of a GS, a bank manages the creation of credit, the operation of a "default fund" and the handling of defaults: in the case of a Capital Partnership, the bank may bring investors together with investments. If you have any contacts in Rwanda who may be of assistance, please let me know. Best Regards Chris Cook George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. said: Jeff Mowatt said: Dear Dr Ayittey, This is very inspiring for me too and I hope to explain how. Many miles away in the former Soviet Union we too do battle with corrupt regimes and the failure of trickle down development, none more obvious than the funds that were poured into Russia in what was called the Defense Enterprise Fund, which under the guidance of Harvard did little more than empower the Russian mafia. Recognising that even in the most democratic countries, where moral conscience is codified and enforced by the rule of law, trickle down proves inadequate, failing to reach more than 75% of a given population. At the extreme, one will find starved and dead frozen children on the streets in a land of abundant agricultural production. An alternative proposing to "replace revenue drains with revenue gains" was offered. Bottom up, targeted microeconomics. Funding leveraged from government to be paid back with more than full cost recovery over 5 years. So, with regard to a Cheetah fund, it should be regarded as a possibility to leverage funds for African bottom-up invest ment, in addition to any private resources. What was also said back then was that for economic development to be established in a given location, it would need to driven by information resources which could help identify local materials and target external markets. In Ghana, one man took this on board and began a dialogue on the Omidyar network about creating an information led farming initiative. The distinction being that tackling the digital divide wasn't being seen as catalytic to the trickle down process, it would become a revenue generator reinvesting in other community centric projects to produce food. http://www.omidyar.net/group/farming/news/0/ He'd managed to take the effort as far as a proposal for funding to Bidnetwork without success. Even now, I feel the concept of profit for social purpose hasn't been entirely grasped by the development community. He seems now to have dropped out of discussions. I hope this means he's become one of Accra's Cheetahs. You may also be interested in the subject of Community Land Partnerships for the housing project described. Recently the mayor of London announced the first of these schemes in our capital and there is a UN backed project working right now on the Global Land Tools project in which this is also being evaluated as a means to allocate farming land to impoverished people. Ultimately this may provide the vehicle needed for external investment. http://www.gltn.net/ The concept of Open Capital is one of shared risk and reward in an asset rather than debt based approach to investment. As an illustration, we in the UK for instance have a pensioner population owning 1 trillion pounds worth of equity in their own homes and that kind of money could be put to good use helping others put a roof over their heads. http://www.opencapital.net/ Jeff, I checked your website and your "Open Capital" concept is an idea which will work well in Afica or, should I dare say, the Third World. Please correct me if I am wrong but I see it as a very sophisticated version of a profit-sharing scheme -- "a shared risk and reward in an asset rather than debt based approach to investment." It might interest you to know that the cocoa farmers of West Africa have operated a similar scheme since the late 19th century. Profit from cocoa farming is divided into three: One part goes to the owner of the farm. Another third goes to the workers of the farm and the remaining third is set aside for farm maintenance and expansion. It is called the "abusa" system. It is also common in retail trading. Less common is the "abunu" system whereby the profit is divided into two. This business model is different from the standard Western model where profit is appropriated by the OWNER/S of the business and it explains why many development projects and business ventures failed in Africa. In dealing with Africa's peasant farmers, the plantation model did not work well because it envisaged employing these farmers to work on plantations for wages the profit being appropriated by the owner/s of the plantation. Clearly, this model was ALIEN to them. African governments, under various ideological guises (socialism, Marxism) introduced the STATE FARM model which was also ALIEN to them. Under that model, the farmers were to work for wages and profits, if any, were appropriated by the STATE. The amazing thing is, the peasant farmers have their own model in which profit is shared. No one is "exploited." And we thought we knew better and had a better model to impose on them. Disaster was the result. The kicker is that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with their profit-sharing scheme. In fact, it was the same profit-sharing scheme that corporate Japan used to transform itself into economic titans. A Japanese corporation operated, for a long time, like a giant "extended family system" with workers singing company songs and sharing in the profit of the company. The moral of this story is the critical importance of developing "culturally-relevant" development models, which is why I have been insisting that Africa returns to its roots and builds upon its own indigenous institutions. We never built upon the peasant's "profit-sharing schemes" in Africa. The one who did in Bangladesh -- Dr. Yunus Muhammad -- won a Nobel Prize. Since colonial banks won’t lend to them (they have no collateral), peasants raised start-up capital in several ingenious ways their fishing and commercial operations. One traditional source of finance was the "family pot." Each extended family had a fund into which members made contributions according to their means. Coercion was not applied but non contribution effectively extinguished one's access to the "pot." Members borrowed from this pot to purchase their fishing nets and paid back the loans. The second source of finance was a revolving credit scheme which was widespread across Africa. It was called susu in Ghana, esusu in Yoruba, tontines or chilembe in Cameroon and stokfel in South Africa. Typically, a group of say 10 people would contribute say $100 into a fund. When it reached a certain amount, say $1,000, it was handed over to the members in turn. Such a scheme required a liberal dosage of trust among members to be operational and somehow the natives managed to make it work. In fact, for many businesses in the indigenous and informal sector, the loan club was their primary source of capital. One could also borrow money by pledging farms, a practice which was common in Ghana and Nigeria (Hill, 1987; Von Pische, 1983). If borrowing was not possible, one could form a partnership with a person with capital. A common arrangement involved three partners who shared the returns from a venture equally. In trading ventures, one partner supplied the capital, one transported the goods and braved the hazards of the trail, and the other organized the partnership, which in some cases involved little more than getting the capitalist in touch with someone who had the stamina and courage to make the trip (Miracle, 1971). But back to the revolving credit scheme. Four observations regarding the tontines may be instructive. First, the term “tontine” originated from Europe. During the 1600s, when European treasuries were depleted by a series of protracted religious wars, their monarchs sought new ways of raising funds. In France, King Louis XIV directed his minister of finance, Cardinal Mazarin, to come up with a fundraising scheme to supplement the revenues generated by taxes. In 1652, Mazarin consulted with an Italian banker, Lorenzo Tonti, who developed what become known as the tontine. It was a form of group lifetime annuity or lottery which participants bought into with a 300 livre payment to the French government. A participant could buy multiple shares and a beneficiary for each share, was selected (which was often a child). Each beneficiary received a payment each year for life, and as more of the other participants died, each surviving participant's payment grew larger. Upon the death of the last participant the government's debt would be considered paid in full. England offered its first tontine in 1693 and the U.S. president, Alexander Hamilton, adopted it to a limited extent in 1790 (http://www.annuitymuseum.org/tontines/). What obtained in traditional Africa was not exactly an annuity scheme but the error had already been made. Nonetheless, and second, they are not unique to Africa alone. Similar schemes exist in other parts of the Third World. These are called hui in China and Vietnam; keh in Korea; tandas in Mexico; pasanaku in Bolivia; san in the Dominican Republic; "syndicate" in Belize; gamaiyah in Egypt; hagbad in Somalia; xitique in Mozambique; arisan in Indonesia; paluwagan in the Philippines; chit fund in India and Sri Lanka; pia huey in Thailand and ko in Japan. Third, if the same susu scheme of the African natives were organized in the United States, it would be called a credit union! A credit union is simply an association of individuals who pool their savings together to lend only to themselves (the members). Fourth, these indigenous saving clubs still exist. Local tontines in Cameroon, small, informal savings and loan associations, are proving to be still the main grassroots financing system. The people handle about 90 per cent of their financial transactions through them. By comparison, the formal and semi-formal finance sector, meaning commercial and savings and loan banks, achieves a volume of only about 10 per cent of national loan business ( http://www.inwent.org/E+Z/1997-2002/de101-8.htm) What Dr. Yunus Muhammad did was to transform a tontine into a GRAMEEN BANK to give our "micro-credit loans." For Africa or the Third World, the rest of the story should be easy. George Ayittey, Washington, DC ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 04:34:44 PDT Chris Cook, I am not exactly sure how the Guarantee Society (GS) is supposed to work from the information that you provided; perhaps I will need additional information. Am I wrong in seeing it as a “clearing house of debt/credit” or a guarantor/insurer of debt, whereby GS acts as a service provider – the service being to facilitate the extension of credit and ensure its repayment, even in kind (barter)? Where would this scheme be targeting: the informal or the rural sector or both? I ask this question because there are traditional sources of trust and guarantors that you can take advantage of or incorporate to minimize your costs of operation. African societal organization is based upon kinship or group attachment and solidarity. In particular, “group solidarity,” the extended family system, and the tribal government are still powerful socio-economic forces. Group solidarity is central to the survival of the community with scarce resources. Conflicts in Africa, even if of individual origin, always carried the risk of escalating to pit one group against another. "Conflicts between individuals have been known to expand in a flash and involve all market sellers, or all women, or all youth, or all soldiers (warriors)" (Kopytoff, 1989; p.24). Consider: On Jan 31, 1994, at the village of Nakpayili in Northern Ghana, a disagreement erupted between a Konkonba and a Nanumba over the price of a guinea-fowl. In the ensuing heated exchange, the Konkomba man killed the Nanumba and his son. Other Konkombas joined in and an immediate massive Konkomba offensive was launched against the other ethnic groups and soon the Konkombas were fighting against the Nanumbas, Dagombas, Gonjas, Mamponsis and Chokosis. But the time the fighting subsided, over 1,200 people were dead, nearly 5,000 injured and over 10,000 displaced. Scores of villages were razed to the ground, including Lanja, Nakpakye, Lepusi, Pulnyasi, Nakayilli, Kpabe, Welensi and Chauba Bakpabe (Ghana Drum, March 1994; p.10). A curfew was imposed on the northern Nigerian city of Kano on May 30, 1995, after a row over a tip for car parking sparked clashes between indigenous Hausas and Igbo settlers. The riot started when a man of the Hausa tribe, which is native to Kano, and an Igbo from eastern Nigeria argued over who should receive the tip for parking the car at a mall. A scuffle ensured with Hausas and Igbos joining on the sides of their tribesmen. Hundreds of shops were destroyed and independent newspapers put the death toll at up to 100 (African News Weekly, June 16, 1995; p.3). A successful credit scheme would work if it capitalizes on the positive aspects of these forces as a “guarantor.” For example, the Grameen Bank works because it operates on “group solidarity.” It requires clients to be members of a “group” and the group is held jointly or severally liable in case of a default on a loan. Therefore, the individual who borrows knows full well that members of his group will be held liable if he defaults on a loan. The extended family system is another powerful force. Each extended family system has a “head,” who can be a guarantor of credit to its members. In default, the head can be held liable. There have been numerous cases in Africa, where heads of extended families have mobilized funds from their members to post bail, pay fines, etc. I can envisage your GS in the informal sector being an amalgamation of tontines and/or extended family systems. The tontines and heads of extended families would be the guarantors of credit. In the villages (rural areas), we found the sources of trust to be embedded in the traditional government: The Chief, the Queen Mother and Elders. Please note that some tribal societies in Africa do not have chiefs. In 2006, we, the Free Africa Foundation, established a “Malaria Free Zone” at the village of Teacher Mante in Ghana. We fumigated the village, provided the villagers with free insecticide-treated bed nets and anti-malarial drugs. In profound gratitude, the villagers made me a chief and gave me three wives. But two of them ran away! The other one came a boxing gloves stuck in her back pocket! Seriously, their main complaint, the villagers told me, was that they have no buyers for their oranges. After harvesting their oranges, nobody comes to buy them and the oranges are left to rot. So, if we could establish an orange juice factory for them, it would greatly help boost their incomes. The factory would cost something like $30,000 but before we make that investment, we decided to test them. We would provide 100 village women with a $50 micro-credit loan and give them 6 months to pay it back. If they all pay it back on time, then we will go ahead and build them the orange juice factory. The real chief of the village (not me) was to supervise the scheme. We thought this set-up had all the ingredients for success. The first was “collective responsibility.” If the scheme failed, the entire village would suffer and lose an orange juice factory. Second, the traditional authority was involved. How did it turn out? Well, not very good. We got a repayment rate of about 60 percent. The main problem was the chief. He is a scoundrel, who never spent much time in the village. He is an absentee chief who stayed in Accra, the capital, most of the time and therefore exercised little supervisory role. One person got the micro loan and spent it on the lottery! Lord save us. Worse, the chief picked his “favorites” for micro loans, collected the repayments and never turned them in. The youth of the village have vowed to remove the chief. What to do? We felt it would be unfair to punish the whole village on account of the bad chief. Besides, we made some errors on our own. First, the amount of the loan was too “small” to support any viable economic activity. Second, the repayment period was too short. So we decided to give them a second chance. This time around, we are giving them an amount which is a little “heftier” -- $100 – to be paid back in a year at an interest rate of 20 percent. The original interest rate was 25 percent but the villagers asked it to be lowered to 20 percent. The borrowers are to organize themselves into groups of 6 or 7 and the group will be held severally liable in case of default. And each borrower must be vetted by the Queen Mother and she would be responsible for making sure that the loans are repaid. The chief of the village is coming nowhere near the scheme this time around. We are eagerly awaiting the results of this. In short, the Queen Mother or the chief, if credible, could also act as a guarantor in your GS model. George Ayittey, Washington, DC PS: I am still looking for my two “wives.” ---- :Author: Chris Cook :Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:48:29 PDT Dear Mr Ayittey I will send some more comprehensive information by e-mail, but in a nutshell we are developing and piloting TWO separate mechanisms aimed at keeping "economic value" (and by this I mean "Money's worth" rather than "Money") in the area which generated it. Firstly, "risk sharing" through the "Guarantee Society": this aims at providing a form of "mutualised" credit creation. The members of a GS are united by a "Common Bond" which may be family, tribal, geographical, or functional (eg people with the same job or business). Credit is extended within the GS, so perhaps a business A gives individual B 60 days to pay for fixing his bicycle. B does not pay "interest" but does pay a provision in to a "default pool" for the use of the community's guarantee. ie members have a "Guarantee Limit" rather than a "Credit Limit". When the 60 days are up, B (if he has not already done so, which it is in his interests to do) must pay either in cash OR (with the permission of the seller) in barter acceptable to the seller, eg fish: or both. If B is unwilling or unable to pay, then the Default Pool/Fund will pay business A, and collect from B in accordance with their policy. This may include accepting payment in "money's worth" of barter, and in particular, in community service at an agreed hourly/daily rate. Possibly the debt is written off. Or a combination of the above. All that is required is an accounting system and a "service provider" - which is to all intents and purposes a bank - except that unlike "conventional" banks, this one is a pure banking services provider which does not risk a penny of its capital, and has no depositors... Secondly, there is the "Capital Partnership", which is essentially a partnership wherein the financier and the user of finance share the production and/or revenues from the sale of production from a "Co-owned" productive asset. So for the orange juice factory, the investor would invest $30,000 in the factory, which pays for the necessary land and machinery, and the labour and services to set it up. The Investor becomes: (a) "Capital Partner" Member; alongside (b) "Capital User" Member, which consists of a "cooperative" of those using the asset to produce orange juice. The Capital Partner and Capital User agree to share the production (opening the way for an overseas stakeholder to invest with a demand for orange juice to pay now for future production), or the revenue from the sale of production, in agreed proportional "units" or "Equity Shares". ie these are shares, but not as we know them. It will be necessary to put an amount of production/ revenues to one side for maintenance/ replacement of the machinery and buildings (although not, of course, of the land). You will see that interesting possibilities open up to bring in "stakeholders" as investors. So rather than buying the land, a proportional share of production (a "tithe" ?) could be provided to the Community for the use of community owned land. Rather than buying the equipment, the producer is invited to consider "investing" its value on what is essentially an "evergreen lease" basis, again in return for revenues or production. At the very least, the equipment manufacturer would be asked to reduce the price (ie receive his "costs") and to invest his "profit margin" while also receiving payment for maintenance etc In this way, his interests lie in providing and maintaining good quality equipment. Essentially the outcome is of a new "asset class" of units of orange juice production which have a value in exchange. In my view, this simple form of "Asset-based" finance (based upon "ownership" in an equitable legal form, as distinct from the conflicted and often sociopathic "Equity" in a "Corporation") is capable of revolutionising investment generally, but in Africa and the Middle East (you will have observed the Capital Partnership is almost identical to the form of Islamic finance known as "musharakah") in particular. The sooner that African countries with crude oil cease to export it, but instead build modern modular refineries (counter-intuitively, it is often more economic to build many small refineries than one or two large ones) and instead refine products, exporting the balance after satisfying local demand, the better. Particularly in relation to small scale discoveries such as those in Uganda and Africa. The key to this is to enter into suitable "Capital Partnerships", bringing in oil companies as development partners, rather than selling oil to them as now. Note that I say this as a former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, currently advising the Iranian government in respect of new market infrastructure. http://greatreporter.com/mambo/content/view/1535/6/ may be of interest in that respect. I hope you find the above of assistance. Best Regards Chris Cook George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. said: Chris Cook, I am not exactly sure how the Guarantee Society (GS) is supposed to work from the information that you provided; perhaps I will need additional information. ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:36:04 PDT There is one other aspect to a shared ownership of productive assets of potential use. That is the differential value of production for internal consumption as opposed to production for "market". I believe that is what Chris refers to when he talks about trading in "money's worth" and barter exchanges. In that instance, we can think of a "community" of people owning certain assets and producing goods and services for internal consumption. I would focus on basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter, education and health care. Those things produced for internal consumption can be produced without regard to market price because use value is independent of market value. Further, the community has the opportunity to apply integrated production techniques in which each asset can be used in multiple ways. Ideally, every community would have a balance of production for internal consumption, providing stability against global economic disruptions, and production for the market based on competitive advantage. ---- :Author: Chris Cook :Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:00:38 PDT David Not quite: it depends how we define the "market". I think that the "external" market price which would be denominated in something that is "fungible" across borders (currently the dollar, now in terminal decline) may not necessarily be the same as a domestic "internal" market price by reference to something with value only within national borders. In that context I have thought for some time that an energy unit is the obvious candidate for a cross border means of exchange, while domestically we could see "land rental units" becoming a form of currency - pretty much the land-backed money postulated by John Law in 1705. The requirement then is for a generic "transaction engine" and messaging system which together form a "Clearing Union", and if credit (time to pay) is created subject to mutual guarantees the result is a new - asset-based - monetary system, quite close to the International Clearing Union proposed by Keynes at Bretton Woods with a "Bancor" as "Value Unit". Best Regards Chris David Braden said: There is one other aspect to a shared ownership of productive assets of potential use. That is the differential value of production for internal consumption as opposed to production for "market". I believe that is what Chris refers to when he talks about trading in "money's worth" and barter exchanges. In that instance, we can think of a "community" of people owning certain assets and producing goods and services for internal consumption. I would focus on basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter, education and health care. Those things produced for internal consumption can be produced without regard to market price because use value is independent of market value. Further, the community has the opportunity to apply integrated production techniques in which each asset can be used in multiple ways. Ideally, every community would have a balance of production for internal consumption, providing stability against global economic disruptions, and production for the market based on competitive advantage. ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:22:17 PDT I would love to explore those details further - why is a "universal currency" desirable? - when such as a "share" of the production from specific assets can be readily traded? But perhaps we are off topic - would you like to start a thread in your new Open Capital group? ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:42:02 PDT There's a discussion now on the Guarantee Society. It originated and was brough across from Omidyar where I began asking Chris Cook how it worked. The more recent posts arise from this discussion: http://www.ned.com/group/open_capital/news/0/ ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:59:05 PDT Hum, this is a bit off topic, but tonight I noticed some discussion about AFRICOM. `scout prime`_ got a laugh when she read a headline in Stars and Stripes: "New AFRICOM staff to be mainly situated outside Africa" and remembered president Bush's announcement early in the year: "We will also work closely with our African partners to determine an appropriate location for the new command in Africa." She wondered whether the two were related, indeed they are. So `emptywheel`_ weighed in and as it goes in the blogosphere people point to great conversations already going on about the subject. A new blog to me is `Crossed Crocodiles`_ and from there I linked to a piece earlier this month by `Uzodinma Iweala`_ I suppose the only connection to this thread is `Realpolitik`_ in Hippoland. Something I haven't quite got straight in my mind is what approach Dr. Ayittey takes towards hippos, except it seems he'd prefer not to approach them at all. I don't get around much, but on occasion I have heard State Department Africa hands speak. I've been impressed with their knowledge and presentation of American policy. But there's a disconnect when even as a casual reader of Ugandan newspapers I see what looks to actually be happening on the ground there vis a vis the USA. A good American friend, very much smarter than I, doesn't vote in elections saying: "Why encourage them?" For various, probably sentimental reasons, her position is anathema to me. Although increasingly I imagine my government is corrupt beyond redemption and seemingly immune from public opinion. Is there an American equivalent to the Cheetah generation? The widely praised student-led groups in the USA point to success in raising money and moving American political leaders. It seems we're still imagining what the government will do. `Web2fordev`_ conference is finishing up lots of links in that post. Civil society may be where the real people can exert some influence. .. _`scout prime`: http://www.first-draft.com/2007/09/made-me-laugh.html .. _`emptywheel`: http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/09/afri-um-euroafr.html .. _`Crossed Crocodiles`: http://www.crossedcrocodiles.blogspot.com/ .. _`Uzodinma Iweala`: http://wiredscout.blogspot.com/2007/09/re-nigeria-moves-to-halt-united-states.html .. _`Realpolitik`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik .. _`Web2fordev`: http://www.netsquared.org/blog/tobias/web2fordev-remixing-web-international-development ---- :Author: David Braden :Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2007 05:43:18 PDT John Powers said: A good American friend, very much smarter than I, doesn't vote in elections saying: "Why encourage them?" I still vote. I do believe in effective government - or perhaps that "government could be effective". My primary focus right now - since it feels like we, the little people, have little influence on what happens in Washington - is on exercising more power at the local level. I think that is similar to Dr. Ayittey's approach of encouraging the cheetahs to take matters into their own hands. ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:36:07 PDT "Let them eat infrastructure" writes the Accra Daily Mail referring also to the "Capital Controls" which helped the Marshall Plan become a success by codifying the retention of capital into law. http://www.accra-mail.com/mailnews.asp?id=2950 ---- :Author: George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D. :Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:42:29 PST John Powers said: Hum, this is a bit off topic, but tonight I noticed some discussion about AFRICOM. `scout prime`_ got a laugh when she read a headline in Stars and Stripes: "New AFRICOM staff to be mainly situated outside Africa" and remembered president Bush's announcement early in the year: "We will also work closely with our African partners to determine an appropriate location for the new command in Africa." She wondered whether the two were related, indeed they are. So `emptywheel`_ weighed in and as it goes in the blogosphere people point to great conversations already going on about the subject. A new blog to me is `Crossed Crocodiles`_ and from there I linked to a piece earlier this month by `Uzodinma Iweala`_ I suppose the only connection to this thread is `Realpolitik`_ in Hippoland. Something I haven't quite got straight in my mind is what approach Dr. Ayittey takes towards hippos, except it seems he'd prefer not to approach them at all. I don't get around much, but on occasion I have heard State Department Africa hands speak. I've been impressed with their knowledge and presentation of American policy. But there's a disconnect when even as a casual reader of Ugandan newspapers I see what looks to actually be happening on the ground there vis a vis the USA. A good American friend, very much smarter than I, doesn't vote in elections saying: "Why encourage them?" For various, probably sentimental reasons, her position is anathema to me. Although increasingly I imagine my government is corrupt beyond redemption and seemingly immune from public opinion. Is there an American equivalent to the Cheetah generation? The widely praised student-led groups in the USA point to success in raising money and moving American political leaders. It seems we're still imagining what the government will do. `Web2fordev`_ conference is finishing up lots of links in that post. Civil society may be where the real people can exert some influence. .. _`scout prime`: http://www.first-draft.com/2007/09/made-me-laugh.html .. _`emptywheel`: http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/09/afri-um-euroafr.html .. _`Crossed Crocodiles`: http://www.crossedcrocodiles.blogspot.com/ .. _`Uzodinma Iweala`: http://wiredscout.blogspot.com/2007/09/re-nigeria-moves-to-halt-united-states.html .. _`Realpolitik`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik .. _`Web2fordev`: http://www.netsquared.org/blog/tobias/web2fordev-remixing-web-international-development ********** John, I have been out of the country on travels, so excuse this lateness in responding. Regarding the Hippos, AVOID them. Don't engage them directly; just drain their "swamp." And don't worry about the Cheetah Generation in America. They are coming. See the pasting below. George Ayittey, Washington, DC **************************** http://www.simontbailey.com/newsletters/brilliant_carat_68.htm Move Over…the Cheetahs are Coming! Simon T. Bailey I’ve been thinking about cheetahs and hippos recently. No, I didn’t visit the zoo. I listened to an online presentation given by distinguished Ghanaian economist George Ayittey (pronounced I-yit-tey) who is in residence at American University in Washington, D.C. In his presentation, Ayittey stated that the future of Africa rests on the shoulders of the emerging Cheetah Generation rather than the current Hippo Generation. He then went on to describe the Cheetahs as a new breed of Africans who take their future into their own hands and don’t wait to be empowered by government. The Hippos, in Ayittey’s opinion, have ruined postcolonial Africa. He describes them as stuck, lazy, slow, ornery, complacent and greedy. Well, as you can imagine, I was intrigued by Ayittey’s passionate and inspired description of an emerging generation that will forever change the face of Africa. Something leaped inside of me as I thought about my country, The United States of America. I wondered, how many people – in both the current and emerging generations – see themselves as Cheetahs? By now, I’m sure you’re wondering why the reference to cheetahs. What makes them so fantastic? The cheetah is indeed a truly amazing animal. According to the Cheetah Conservation Fund, the cheetah is the swiftest land mammal on the planet and can reach speeds of 70 mph in mere seconds. It covers 20 to 25 feet in a single stride, with only one foot touching the ground at a time. In fact, at two points in the stride, none of its feet touch the ground! However, what most fascinates me about this protected species that lives primarily in Africa are its unique physical characteristics: • Flexible spine; • Oversized liver; • Enlarged heart; • Wide nostrils; • Increased lung capacity; • Black “tear” marks under its eyes. For just a moment, reflect on these characteristics of the cheetah, and how they relate to humans: Flexibility is the key quality of all globalization and Life 2.0. As you encounter and experience change personally and professionally, can you mimic the cheetah? Can you contract, expand, bend and turn in any direction? Increase your personal productivity in business by being flexible in your decision making and moving swiftly to meet the needs of your external and internal customers. If you don’t, they will find someone else to do it for them. The liver has an almost miraculous ability to biochemically transform virtually any chemical it’s exposed to. It not only breaks down, stores and eliminates toxins, but also produces beneficial chemicals the body needs in order to function. The cheetah’s oversized liver is a crucial component in its highly efficient and effective physiological system. What about you? Is transformation a part of your daily language and consciousness? Are you able to transform yourself so that you can efficiently and effectively adapt to any given situation? Never be satisfied with the status quo. Instead, be a seeker of the unknown and commit to ongoing transformation. While the cheetah's enlarged heart pumps more blood to give it additional speed and power, an enlarged human heart overflows with abundance. It seeks to give rather than receive, to serve rather than be served. Enlarge your heart and infuse those around you with your spirit of optimism. Infuse your community with a spirit of service. Infuse your business culture with a “can do” attitude. How big is your nose? Smile! Having wide nostrils is in vogue. Why? It means that you can pick up on the scent of opportunity and the smell of possibility. You must sense where things are heading and make split-second course corrections that will take you into the future. Improvise and innovate. Stop waiting for someone to give you the green light. You have to make something happen for yourself. The cheetah strategically stalks its prey. It carefully maneuvers into a position to pounce and then gives chase with a burst of blinding speed made possible by its increased lung capacity. Do you methodically stalk what you want? Are you expanding your capacity so that when the time is right, you can muster the speed and the skill to give chase and capture your dreams? Expand your capacity by improving yourself one day at a time. Identify the cheetahs in your life and learn from them. Do what is in front of you with all your might. Take on what you have rejected in the past for what you will become in the process. You may be wondering about the black “tear” marks which run from the inside corner of the cheetah’s eyes down the sides of the nose to the outside of its mouth. Their purpose is to keep the sun out of its eyes to aide in hunting. How do you keep the sun – i.e., distractions – out of your eyes so that you can stay focused on your heart’s desire? Ignore the naysayers and Brilliance Blockers. Rid yourself of all excuses that prevent you from stepping into your brilliance. Accept personal responsibility for where you are and how you think. The Cheetahs are coming – into your organization, your community, your social circle – and they are hungry, focused and willing to step up. Will you be one of them? If you’re not one already, decide today to become a cheetah. Move it…Move it…Get to it! If you don’t, you will forever stare at the rear end of a Hippo! Simon Believes…Hippos will soon be obsolete. Cheetahs are the future. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:19:31 PST Dr. Ayittey, thanks for your post! I trust your travels were fun and exciting. Glad you're home safe. I love Simon Bailey's observation: If you’re not one already, decide today to become a cheetah. Move it…Move it…Get to it! If you don’t, you will forever stare at the rear end of a Hippo! Yes, your advice to avoid hippos is good. I do think it's worth watching what hippos do, and not just to stare at their rears. Your TED talk really inspired so many, and of course this thread. Those who enjoyed it will also enjoy reading Emeka Okafor. Recently he posted at `Timbuktu Chronicles`_ about how FGC has provided all of Freetown Sierra Leone with WIFI/WIMAX. This really impressed me and I'll contrast it to Rwanda's push to be a `High Tech Hub`_. Okafor also writes the blog Africa Unchained--to discuss ideas around your book. In a recent post he looks at the `dangers of plutocracy`_. One of the exceptional things about Okafor's reporting is how he links. In this case to rent-seeking, which, I guess, is a pet peeve of mine. Your challenge in your TED talk has relevance to us here in the USA. Simon Bailey's post, like your talk is both challenging and encouraging. .. _`Timbuktu Chronicles`: http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com/2007/11/fgc-wireless-wifiwimax.html .. _`High Tech Hub`: http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com/2007/11/fgc-wireless-wifiwimax.html .. _`dangers of plutocracy`: http://africaunchained.blogspot.com/2007/11/oligarchs-contddangers-of-plutocracy.html ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:28:21 PST (a total aside - after my trip through Murchison Falls National Park....trust me...you don't want to be anywhere near the rear end of a hippo....if you don't believe me ask Mark!) ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:03:38 PST We discussed the informal economy earlier in this thread. Emeka Okafor in a blog post `Lagos's Informal Economy`_ points to an article (PDF) by `Robert Neuwirth`_. Neuwirth is worth a listen at `TED`_ or reading his blog `Squatter Cities`_ and of course following Okafor's links to him. Dani Rodrik's blog is a great model of how economics can be talked about in the public square across economic perspectives. `Pro-poor growth, social growth, or just growth?`_ is a recent post. It's not directly relevant to the subject of the informal economy, except to say that it seems the informal economy must be taken into account to begin to answer questions like Rodrik poses. .. _`Lagos's Informal Economy`: http://africaunchained.blogspot.com/2007/11/lagoss-informal-economy.html .. _`Robert Neuwirth`: http://www.brightsightgroup.com/WordDocs/RobertNeuwirthLagos.pdf .. _`Ted`: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/36 .. _`Squatter Cities`: http://squattercity.blogspot.com/ .. _`Pro-poor growth, social growth, or just growth?`: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/11/pro-poor-growth.html#comments ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:29:44 PST I tried to respond with the missive below: We've been involved in promoting pro-poor strategies for the last decade in a for-profit approach which advocates the use of development aid as investment capital. It's been demonstrated in Russia with a five year project with full cost recovery and now we've scaled up. we completed a 'Marshall Plan' proposal, yes this is actually a plan and not a call for a plan, based on a microeconomic development strategy. It's designed to return nil overall cost over 5 years by engaging multiple components, some yielding profit and more that full cost recovery to offset the less than full cost recovery components. In this holistic approach way we can both eliminate the digital divide and at the same time render profit to build group care homes for institutionalised children. It's a microeconomic 'Marshall Plan' because the tools available now , microfinance in particular, weren't available 60 years ago when infrastructure building was the only way to go. We know trickle down fails consistently, even where democracy is strong, far more so where it isn't because we can look amongst ourselves and find those without adequate healthcare and living conditions without stepping into the developing world. People-Centered Economic Development is how we describe it. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 12:30:36 PST `Cheetah Index`_ .. _`Cheetah Index`: http://www.cheetahindex.com/ ---- :Author: Jon Alexander :Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:27 PST Interesting link John - thanks! I've had a browse through the site. ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 05:16:37 PST Christmas has come and gone and under my tree I found: * Africa Unchained - George Ayittey * Africa in Chaos - George Ayittey * Development as Freedom - Amartya Sen * The Elusive Quest for Growth - William Easterly * Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions Ed. Peggy Morgan and Clive A. Lawton * Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh * Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers - Thich Nhat Hanh. Can I get them all read by Tuesday? Two down and 5 to go with 5 days to go. (The 2 Hanh books are incredible!) ---- :Author: Jon Alexander :Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:52:37 PST Wow Linda - an enviable holiday reading list! Congrats! ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 15:38:06 PST 3 down 4 to go...I am not going to make the one book a day goal :-( ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:22:57 PST Books are so wonderful, I wonder why I don't read them very much anymore? For one thing books are a bit expensive so it's so lovely to get them as gifts. Among the wonderful books you got, I'm happy to see "Development as Freedom" by Amartya Sen. Online I'm always interested to read Sen, he seems to take the "road less traveled." Marxists find Sen lacking in not taking class sufficiently into account, but the world of economics is expanded on his insistence that more than individual self interest motivates people. Dr. Ayittey by calling attention to indigenous African institutions makes distinctions that Westerners like me often don't hear; `for example`: To continue, there is much mythology about Africa's indigenous economic institutions. In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the INDIVIDUAL. In Africa, it is the EXTENDED FAMILY. The American would say "I am because I am." In Africa, the peasant would say "I am because WE are." The "WE" connotes the extended family. It's these sorts of distinctions which I'm convinced will be important to you in your work in Buddhist economics and my hunch is the path that Sen has trod will be enlightening. Have you read Sen's `More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing`_? That to me is a great example of how Sen has looked where few were paying attention. Much of what Sen writes receives push back. And another reason I admire Amartya Sen is how engaging and kind he is in argument. One of these days I'll have to read "Development as Freedom." I'm so very glad you are generous in sharing what you're learning, Linda; it's a thrill. .. _`for example`: http://www.ned.com/group/econo-politics/news/0/66/ .. _`More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing`: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/Sen100M.html ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:08:21 PST :Modified: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:09:38 PST Visit a library, John. That is a gift that Pittsburgh and Andrew Carnegie left you! How I wish I had access to a good library here... **EDITED** - to add whining ;-) ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:38:25 PST You are right there are some wonderful libraries in Pittsburgh. I live rather in the sticks. The best chance to go to the library is to travel along with my father to his exercise in Beaver. I'm not so fond of that library really, but I do have a card. Once a week when my grandmother was alive a lady would come to her door--she lived in rural New Hampshire--with a basket of books she could choose from. I like that model of lending, and think it quite appropriate for lending books in villages. A friend lives in New York City. That's the best situation for lending I know of. The New York City Library catalog is online. She specifies the book and the branch--just a block from where she lives--and picks it up there. I did get a nice stack of books for Christmas too, none of them have anything to do with this thread--I suppose this rant doesn't either. ---- :Author: David Frayne :Date: Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:11:57 PST I just read the following by Daniel Quinn: 1. Ishmael 2. Providence 3. The Story of B 4. My Ishmael This series of books offers a fascinating alternative view of this whole issue. I highly recommend them. Quinn argues that our culture's ideology (that the world and all the plants and animals in it were created to be exploited by man) puts us on a collision course with mass extinction. He points out that our culture (by which he means the heirs of the agricultural revolution) is the only one that believes this, and we know of thousands of other cultures whose people are not destroying the planet, and yet we seem hellbent on converting them all into followers of our culture, which will basically turn them into enemies of nature. There doesn't seem to be any escape valve on this process. What do you think? ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:40:49 PST There doesn't seem to be any escape valve on this process. What do you think? Somehow that "What do you think?" is like a red cape to a bull for me. Geez, another opportunity to show off my disordered mind. I haven't read Daniel Quinn, but obviously he's got quite a following of readers, so it's hard not to have some contact with the ideas. People of all stripes know that what we're doing isn't working; there are cracks in our model and we worry it will fly apart at any time. I read `Dave Pollard`_ and respect him. Ishmael 16 was important to his views presented on his blog. Pollard is sure civilization will end and is engaged in with inventing new models. Not that he thinks that's what everyone should be doing, or even that's what needs doing the most, simply building models is what he does. Pollard's got a `diagram`_ he uses to show where people are at relative to "the system." I think I'm in the second most outside band which Pollard estimates accounts for about 30% of Americans and Canadians, the light green band. The term "co-opted counter culture" kind of pegs me, although I'm so half-assed I'm not sure "co-opted" really fits. In any case Pollard's heart bleeds for people like me because we haven't quite faced up to the inevitable--or something like that. He ends today's post: It may be hopeless, but we still hope. What else can we do? I met a very nice university student through a local project. He was really into Quinn and into the idea of hastening civilization's demise. I've got to admit that part gives me pause, even while I'm sure this fellow is peaceful. And the notion of the `Neo-Tribalism`_ is both attractive and unsettling. I think this discussion of Quinn is worth a thread of its own. Make it and we will come. Trying to tie this topic to this thread,ideas of tribalism seems a bit connected. Ayittey makes an interesting point that many institutions the West considers quintessentially theirs, like democracy and markets, have another history in indigenous African institutions. But we in the West, and even some African leaders have failed to observe while there are similarities there are differences which make not not automatically compatible. One such difference is that where in the West the individual is seen as the producer, in Africa it is the family and clan. My short version doesn't really "get" Ayittey, but I think it's fair to say that he warns people watch out for distinctions. More positively, that Africans have to re-discover their indigenous institutions and make them vital in the present context. Now another area which Dr. Ayittey deserves plaudits is in his criticisms of corruption and efforts to invent ways make corruption history. It's rather fraught with danger for a middle aged white guy like me to make personal observations about ways that some black Americans think. I hope people understand I'm willing to be set straight. In any case sometimes it's a bit jarring for me to hear black Americans say something along the lines of: "We was once the kings and the queens." More generally, I'm a bit put off by the veneration of Egypt in so much Afrocentric literature and rhetoric. It's not that I imagine Egypt isn't on the continent of Africa. Africa, as I'm sure all of you have noticed, is a huge continent home to a rich diversity of human culture. And I find Egypt fascinating. But since I was a kid what really captured my imagination was the populating of sub-Saharan Africa by Bantu speaking people. What stands out to me is the genius of people living in small societies. What seems so remarkable is the relative lack of government bureaucracies and standing armies. So when I hear the "kings and queens" bit I want to say: "But what about a history that figured out a system where people had such great liberty?" I don't usually open my mouth and insert my foot so quickly, I usually do manage to insert my foot at some time in such conversations. The point is, and Dr. Ayittey makes it well, indigenous African institutions provide models to build societies where people thrive. But we have to wrestle to bring them forth in the present context. So the situation in Kenya has me so worried and on edge. It makes me happy there's an Internet. Tonight I received a message from a friend who is safe. What I like is we hardly ever correspond, but somehow he knew that I would want to know and touched base. I've been interested how the Internet is being used to keep people connected in the crisis. I've also been appreciative of the blogs I read. But I also know that as an American I don't see things so clearly. What I find particularly helpful is having read some of the Kenyan bloggers for a time, I know them in some ways. So it's easier to put what they are saying into some context. Somehow some of my friends imagine me as some expert on Africa, I am most certainly not. So for example people have asked me lots of questions about Sudan. And I have always felt it important to point out that the simple categories the media here presents of "Arab" vs. "African" can rather distort understanding. The American press has presented the conflict in Kenya as ethnic conflict. Sure that's true to an extent, but that lens also distorts. `Bankelele`_ I think is one of the African Cheetahs. I don't get to pick, but in any case his blog is surely one of the best African banking blogs going. That post I just linked to gives a much more nuanced view of how ethnicity plays in this crisis. The whole thing is well worth reading. He writes: The answer is in the citizens themselves. That's not to say that ethnicity isn't important and highly relevant to the situation. But I think Bankelele is pointing to something very important too. He's not proposing to cast ethnicity into the trash bin of history. Rather that people honestly see who they are. Kenyans are multicultural. Keguro wrote today `Against Normal`_: A “return to normal” would keep sotto-voce or unspoken conversations we need to have about ethnicity. We cannot ignore it nor should we try. We cannot “get over it” nor should we try. We can forge something powerful and wonderful, and, indeed, many of us have in our multi-ethnic schools, neighborhoods, intimate homes, churches, and organizations. We need to stop believing and acting as though the only way ethnicity can function is as a deeply divisive element. Bringing Quinn back into this, he has brought tribalism into the conversation in a new way. Military theorist `John Robb`_ broaches the subject from a different angle when he talks about "networked tribes." What's interesting is how thinking about coping with asymmetric threats or terrorism, and how it can be perpetrated by "networked tribes" his solutions involve understanding how the connections we make matter very much. His thoughts are much deeper than "if you can't beat them join them" but that captures something of the flavor. It's not just Kenyans, or Pakistanis or anyone else we here in the West want to call "them" Rob is talking about. Networked tribes are a global phenomena and not without a bright side. We all are wrestling with how to make a way of life that makes sense. Some of us in the West really are beginning to see the cracks, while the rest of the world is wondering what took us so long. Which leave us to roll up our sleeves and get to work. What to do is the big question. As David says: "There doesn't seem to be any escape valve on this process." My sense is that if enough of us can change our minds; that is, to embrace an idea of ourselves as part of it, rather than us against the environment; us against others; that we have control and must strive for control; and a host of other pathological ideas, then perhaps we can slow this juggernaut. It is daunting, but like Pollard, I still hope and wonder what else we can do? Dr. Ayittey believes that the main source of Africa's problems are African. Likewise he envisions indigenous African solutions. But he generously joined this conversation. The thing is, while what we do may indeed be local and particular, we are all in this together. Exploring the are crisis and triumphs together is worthwhile. There are ways to resolve conflicts, and many of the tools for conflict resolution are old and venerable. Bankelele points to neighbors in mixed neighborhoods in Kenya shoring up their connections often across ethnic lines, to join together to protect their neighborhood, and coordinating with police. Kenyans can find ways, all of us must find ways to build peace where we are. Somewhere I read a great post about the attributes of cheetahs. There are so many to admire, but I can't find the post. Suffice it to say violence is not one of the attributes of cheetah's in Dr. Ayittey's use. .. _`Dave Pollard`: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/ .. _`diagram`: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2007/12/19.html .. _`Neo-Tribalism`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Tribalism .. _`Bankelele`: http://bankelele.blogspot.com/2008/01/elections-derail-kenyas-vision.html .. _`Against Normal`: http://gukira.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/against-normal/ .. `John Robb`: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:11:58 PST This thread is over, but I came across a link to share that seemed to fit, a Like to a recent speech by `Jerry John Rawlings`_ making some very good points about good governance. At another thread, on AFRICOM, a subject I'm trying to get my head around Linda Nowakowski `wrote`_: However, I am almost finished with Africa in Chaos by George Ayittey - you remember him, right?... Dr. Ayittey's reporting, historical and social analysis is amazing. It has created as many questions in my mind as it has answered questions. Now I want to find some one here (HAHHAHAH!!!!) who would think with me in terms of what Dr. Ayittey's analysis means in terms of Thailand, because I believe there are interesting parallels but also really valuable lessons to be learned from the differences! Linda always gives me things to think about. But this sort of cross-cultural look at Ayittey's ideas would interest many. Certainly many Africans who are looking at Asian countries by way of comparison. So here's a brief snippet to give a flavor of the things that Rawlings said in his `speech`_: The lapses in the practice of democracy in Africa can be attributed to many factors, both internal and external to our respective countries, but there is the unquestionable evidence that the lapses are mainly as a result of bad political leadership. At the top of this failure of leadership is the scant respect that many of our leaders have for constitution and constitutionalism. The ease with which extra terms of office are pursued by certain leaders and the ruthless manner in which the illegal or unconstitutional objective is pursued has made this failing particularly objectionable and attributable to failed leadership. Something I'll commend Rawlings for is that he did step aside when his constitutional term ended, even when the opposition party prevailed in the elections. And I commend this speech, but don't think I can confuse a hippo with a cheetah. Could I? Politics isn't easy to get a handle on. My heart is very heavy about Kenya these days. In a general way the situation makes me worry about the primary loyalties we all have, or imagine we have. When I read Rawlings speech I was reminded of a couple of post written by Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, a Ghanaian living, working and writing in the USA. The title of the post is *Strange Bedfellows And The Journalistic Impulse*; the subtitle is `100 issues that the journalist in me feels the media should investigate`_. Yes it's long, but Koranteng has helpfully linked to the chapters of the post. If you have an hour or so, the whole post is truly worthwhile. I think Koranten Ofosu-Amaah is one of the very best writers online. But the chapter I was thinking about in regards to Rawlings is `Determined to Bear Witness`_. Koranteng spent part of his Christmas vacation a few years back reading the report of The National Reconciliation Commission. (Opps I just realized that the part I want to quote is in the next chapter, just scroll down.) About market women: These women, who constitute the hardest working sector of our society, weren't mere collateral damage of Rawlings' regime. Rather they were convenient scapegoats for the madness that transpired in Ghana. They were easy targets to blame for the high prices of food, for kalabule and for one's own poverty and lack of industry. In 1979, they were simply stripped and beaten in the streets ("Let the blood flow!") In 1982, this was repeated ("We no go let them pass") and their market stalls were burned down (as if food would magically reappear as manna from heaven). Skipping a bit, actually the part about what the soldiers did... There was a method to the madness of these folks, it would be too easy to rape (although much of that went on, as say in the Rwandan Genocide). Perversity is to be expected and "they" tolerated that from the lower-ranking soldiers they set upon us. Rather though, this was about **humiliation**. I can't think of worse outrages one could do to a middle-aged African woman. **This was about conquering a country and thoroughly breaking its spirit**. Such things can only be achieved by a calculated and systematic pandering to a society's baser instincts. In addition to his wonderful writing and great photographs Koranten Ofosu-Amaah provides a soundtrack for his posts. In that spirit I offer a YouTube video `Harvest for the World`_ .. _`Jerry John Rawlings`: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1050310.stm .. _`wrote`: http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/news/122/3/ .. _`speech`: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=138296 .. _`100 issues that the journalist in me feels the media should investigate`: http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/04/strange-bedfellows-and-journalistic.html .. _`Determined to Bear Witness`: http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/04/strange-bedfellows-and-journalistic.html#bear-witness .. _`Harvest for the World`: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_kQ0bqBaxY ---- :Author: Jeff Mowatt :Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:27:18 PST I saw Rawlings on BBC TV as a "progessive" passing critical comnent on another government where market traders had been bulldozed away. I remember at the time he did precisely the same thing, friends whose family businesses were ended there in Accra. So, if the theme of that above is hypocrisy, ditto John. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:47:43 PST Via `Kabissa`_, a great new oline forum for social change in Africa `AN OPEN LETTER TO AFRICA’S PRESENT AND FUTURE LEADERS`_. The letter can be downloaded (PDF) `here`_. As young leaders in our own various spheres of influence, we as the 2007 Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellows[1] find silence at this critical moment inconvenient. We believe that silence and inaction in the face of yesterday’s challenges are responsible for the anomalies we see across the continent today. We lend our voices to the call for African leaders – today, and in the future – to consider the common good over personal fears or greed. We are proud of those who have shown us that leadership is about service and call on all other leaders to remain true to the spirit of purposeful leadership. .. _`Kabissa`: http://www.kabissa.org/blog/demanding-more-africas-leaders .. _`AN OPEN LETTER[2] TO AFRICA’S PRESENT AND FUTURE LEADERS`: http://www.gbengasesan.com/blog/?p=236 .. _`here`: http://www.gbengasesan.com/atlf-letter.pdf ---- :Author: chris macrae :Date: Mon, 05 May 2008 01:29:46 PDT Could George A recommend which other alumni at the ted conference in tanzania he sees as most worth connecting chnage around africa with? And where does one join in discussions with these other alumni on how to multiply the imacts of their work and causes? Is there anyone from the tanzania network who could act as a bridge with the world entrepreneur summit in Kenya later this month http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%2Bkenya+%2B%22rebecca+harding%22+OR+%22perez+ochieng%22+%2Bentrepreneur+&btnG=Search ----