Being There [Tuesday, July 10]

Today was thankfully uneventful - I went in to HU and did some work on the fuel logs before going over to iEARN to teach for a bit. Dabney, a just arrived iEARN intern from the US, returned to the YMCA with us for dinner at Kiemans. Other than that, it was just another normal day in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

A friend sent me a New York Times article about African development; while some of its arguments are problematic, it does bring up some interesting points about development:

In Africa, One Step Forward and Two Back

By STEPHEN KOTKIN

Angola is sizzling. Its gross domestic product is on pace to expand 30 percent in 2007, making the economy of this oil-soaked African country perhaps the fastest-growing in the world.

Then again, in 2004, the combined gross domestic product (in constant 2000 dollars) for all the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa was $385.6 billion, or about that of New Jersey. And in Angola, up to 12 percent of G.D.P. vanishes, unaccounted for, each year, according to Transparency International, a global watchdog group.

Africa is enormous, and varied. Tiny Botswana, with 1.5 million people, is a success story, and big, post-apartheid South Africa is complex but inspiring. Still, by and large, Africa is struggling.

And more than ever, it appears to be everybody’s business. (Vanity Fair has a special Africa issue this month.) From celebrities and economists to economists who are now celebrities, the concerned want us to know that they have the answers to Africa’s challenges: more aid and microloans, antimalarial bed nets and mobile phones, debt cancellation and discounted drugs.

But here is a head scratcher: although globalization has transformed Asia, decades of assisted development have not produced sustained prosperity in Africa. Any more goodwill from the African aid industry, it sometimes seems, and the continent may be condemned forever.

Enter the judicious Paul Collier, a former research director at the World Bank and an economist at Oxford University who has long studied Africa. He previously wrote about a “conflict trap” — self-perpetuating civil wars that sidetrack development. But now, in “The Bottom Billion” (Oxford University Press, $28), he concedes that Malawi has been “conflict-free for its entire post-independence history, yet it still has not developed.” The book takes due account of other economic traps and fills out an ambitious Africa agenda.

Development, Dr. Collier argues persuasively, is both too narrow and too broad; too narrowly focused on aid, which often causes rather than cures problems, and too broadly focused on the entire developing world. Poverty has been plummeting for most of that world — a first in history — but circumstances for about a billion people continue to deteriorate. He wants to redirect development promotion to this bottom billion, 70 percent of them in Africa, despite the uphill rock-push that would be involved in relocating development types from Rio to, say, Bangui.

Four conditions can become economic traps: abundant natural resources, which emancipate elites from investing in and being accountable to the citizenry; landlocked geography amid underdeveloped neighbors (Switzerland can depend on Germany to build ports, but Uganda depends on Kenya); unchecked violence; and poor institutions, which convert what otherwise should be a boon — foreigners eager to invest — into a nightmare.

Free trade, for all its benefits, cannot lift the bottom billion out of these traps, Dr. Collier points out, not least because soaring, cheap-labor Asia now stands in Africa’s way.

He proposes a four-instrument tool kit. First (and least important) is smarter aid, linked to other tools. Second is well-executed military interventions. He celebrates Britain’s unheralded operation to bring security to Sierra Leone as “cheap, confident and sustained.” But many other blundered armed interventions, in Africa and elsewhere, would seem more predictive of future efforts.

About three-quarters of the Africans in the bottom billion, have lived through a civil war, which Dr. Collier estimates typically costs a country and its neighbors $64 billion. And once a state fails, it takes 59 years, on average, to return to functionality, at a cost of $100 billion, he says. These numbers (detailed calculations are omitted) undergird his view that it is more economical to act to forestall civil war or state failure.

Of course, the costs of intervention are chiefly borne by the taxpayers and the troops of rich countries, while the costs of failures are mostly borne by the bottom billion. But if you do not buy the economic argument, Dr. Collier also invokes security. “A cesspool of misery next to a world of growing prosperity,” he argues, “is both terrible for those in the cesspool and dangerous for those who live next to it.”

A third tool for Africa is governance charters, Dr. Collier says. He envisions the creation and adherence to such a set of standards as analogous to qualifying for entry to the European Union, without actual integration, whereby norms are made clear and governments are rewarded for adhering to them.

Finally, Dr. Collier proposes an adjustment in global trade policy so that wealthy countries open their markets by removing tariffs against the bottom billion in cases where tariffs are in place against Asia, giving Africa a temporary leg up.

No world government exists to enact Dr. Collier’s nuanced proposals. International nongovernmental organizations (the ersatz world government) often have their heads in the Sahara, he shows in the book’s liveliest passages.

So he pitches his recommendations to the Group of 8 industrialized nations, which he identifies as one of the few global bodies with ostensible clout, and which has already put Africa on its plate.

Still, Dr. Collier soberly observes that “change in the societies at the very bottom must come predominantly from within.” In that light, we might be tempted to ask everyone just to leave Africa alone, to see if it can make it on its own. The problem is, cutting off aid would not remove outsiders’ hands.

That is where John Ghazvinian comes in. In “Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil” (Harcourt, $25), he reports on a six-month jaunt in 2005 through 12 countries and their putschists, preachers, kleptocrats, activists, child soldiers and foreign “oilfield trash” — that is, pot-bellied white men bar-hopping “with 19-year-old Naomi Campbell look-alikes.”

From Nigeria, where oil was first tapped in 1958, through the more recent gushers off Equatorial Guinea and into Chad and Sudan, the scrappy author, who has a doctorate in history from Oxford, details how every recalibrated program to finally enable the African masses to share in a hydrocarbon mother lode has crashed and burned.

Today, Dr. Ghazvinian notes, the United States is all over Africa, come what may, as a crude-oil alternative to the Middle East. And with China, the world’s second-biggest oil importer, also in the search — alongside South Korea, India and Brazil — the scramble is on. In Africa, things may get a lot worse before they get a lot worse.

Dr. Ghazvinian’s perceptive, at times self-dramatizing rough guide lacks the enduring sparkle of “Tropical Gangsters,” by Robert E. Klitgaard (1990) or the scholarly wallop of “African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis,” by Nicholas van de Walle (2001).

Still, “Untapped” drills home the point, acknowledged by Dr. Collier, that a thoughtful strategy to lift the neglected bottom billion must compete against the global oil giants going about their business — and the one billion people in countries at the top, and the four billion in the middle, whose consumption habits stand behind these multinationals.

As big consumers of oil, you and I are intervening powerfully in Africa — and perhaps unwittingly furthering graft and bloodletting. That meddlesome Africa industry that is helping to cause so much added grief? Look in the mirror.

If that was too much development-speak for you, here's an email a friend from home sent me. Hopefully the author won't mind too much that I'm sharing it:

I was on a run this evening, and I was thinking about experiences. What exactly are they? I mean, in American culture, we go places to experience things. New Orleans to experience poverty. The drop-inn center in inner-city Cinci to experience homelessness. But really, most of the time we don't need to go anywhere. As long as we be where we are, we can be changed. And we can change the world. I just wanted to remind you of something that I continually have to remind myself: we change our corner of the world simply by being in it. You are doing beautiful things simply by being Paul in Sierra Leone. If the cameras don't get returned or the kids don't pay attention exactly during your lessons, that's probably the perfect activity for them to do. And by being there with them while they experience life... that is enough.