Manuel and Ramaphosa - ANC stalwarts now fighting structural inequality and poverty in South Africa

Over the years, the South African government has released a plethora of strategies and initiatives in its post-apartheid policy reforms. Many of these recommendations and programmes have evidenced middling success, and even outright failure. The latest such proposal is the National Development Plan, issued by the National Planning Commission of South Africa, an advisory body in the Office of the Presidency with a 5 year mandate.

In 2009, one of South Africa’s longest-serving former finance ministers, Trevor Manuel, was appointed to head up the NPC in President Jacob Zuma’s inaugural cabinet reshuffle. Manuel is assisted in his task by a cohort of high-profile commissioners, including ANC stalwarts Cyril Ramaphosa and Joel Netshitenzhe, and Elias Masilela from the Public Investment Corporation. But while the Left and Labour welcomed the commission’s appointment of serious local talent over the “Harvard technocrats” the government usually hauls in to advise, it has grumbled that the “over-representation” of business people will undermine working-class interests. And South Africa’s second-largest trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), was especially acerbic in its condemnation of the NPC being headed up by Manuel, whom they largely see as an enemy of the poor.

The NPC highlights not only some important issues about South Africa’s political economy, but also Manuel’s legacy in it.

The National Development Plan is not official government policy. It is a blueprint of recommendations to eliminate poverty and sharply reduce inequality through the “virtuous cycle of growth and development”. In addressing this, the NDP has identified 9 key problems requiring urgent attention in its diagnostic report: high joblessness; poor education; poor infrastructure; spatial inequality in human settlements; an unsustainably resource-intensive economy; a high-disease burden compounded by a failing health-care system; uneven public services; widespread corruption; and social division. The plan provides comprehensive statistics to support these assertions, as well as key targets and recommendations, and it is also self-conscious in its acknowledgement of the challenges to overcome, particularly the weakness of government to co-ordinate, and the uncertainties represented by the current financial crisis.

Importantly, the NDP has highlighted that although poverty is multi-dimensional; South Africa has never had an official poverty definition, and recommends it be those living on less than $50 per month, and to reduce the percentage of South Africans living below it from 38 to 0 per cent by 2030. It also aims to reduce South Africa’s GINI co-efficient (a measure of inequality), one of the world’s largest, from 0.7 to 0.6, while creating 11m jobs over the same time frame.

The NDP is an impressive document, presenting real solutions – both Zuma and the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) have come out in support of the debate it has started, but it is not without its detractors. Basic education minister, Angie Motshekga, slammed the Plan’s proposals for competency and compensation of teachers as unrealistic. And there have already been vociferous condemnations of the plan by Labour and Black Business for its lack of support for robust redistribution and economic transformation.

Reg Rumney, director of the Centre for Economic Journalism at Rhodes University says “It is a very intellectually rich document, and it does not ignore the politics of change for mere technical solutions. It promotes accountability and fighting corruption.”

The ideological context and an ANC Big Beast

Since the ANC took the reins of government in 1994, South Africa’s macroeconomic policy has been highly contested. The ANC inherited an economy riddled with debt and capital flight, and the 1998 Asian crisis added fuel to the fire. The currency saw dramatic rises and falls, and the economy held to ransom by speculative global financial capital. On top of all this, the ANC also had to balance intense lobbying by business for trade liberalisation and privatisation, with the demands of the Left for more redistribution and transformation. For better or worse, this setting resulted in the government adopting a relatively conservative macroeconomic policy approach, reducing the deficit in favour of borrowing. This long-term strategy and its outcomes for growth and redistribution raised tensions with the Left.

The political economy of South Africa has since oscillated between perceptions of a supposedly ‘neo-liberal’ agenda on the one extreme of macroeconomic policy, to that of a ‘nationalist’ programme on the other.

In 1996, the deficit busting and GDP-oriented Growth Employment and Redistribution plan (GEAR), replaced the short-lived, more distributive, but overly-optimistic Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP). Allegedly, the ANC’s National Executive Committee had approved it before COSATU could get its bearings around GEAR’s wider implications. The Left thought GEAR indicated that macro-economic policy had been hijacked by these ‘neo-liberal’ prerogatives.

Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, says that the debate between nationalisation and neo-liberalism has been painted as a highly stylised clash of ideas, with the nationalisation debate, in particular, having been blown out of proportion. Friedman is adamant that the main point is substantive: “Let’s get the debate right. It’s not a matter of policy mix A or B. It is about a government that can deal with the problems. You can’t say if we follow x policy cocktail, we will get full employment.”

It seems worth reiterating here ‘nationalisation’ has never been official government or ANC policy. But says Adrian Saville, chief investment officer of Cannon Asset Managers and visiting professor at the Gordon Insititue of Business Science: “I don’t think the stance is clear. I suspect that government has a clearer view in its own mind about the perception. I don’t think that nationalization (as markets commonly imagine it) is a likely outcome. However, either way, investors and markets will be happier with certainty.” While the ANC has been quick to pacify investors that nationalisation is not on the agenda, it did, however, appoint a team of experts to look into the effects of nationalisation in 14 countries, after its Youth League had raised the issue for discussion. While that report is largely expected to say a course of expropriation is very much ill-advised, it remains instructive of the ANC’s kowtowing to the divisive influence of suspended ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema in exploiting the debate to gain political support.

The inability of government to clarify the perceived division and incoherence of its policies lies at the heart of the confusion over whether the NDP duplicates the functions of other government departments and commissions, or competes with them.

Manuel will have to continue to stand firm in the face of competing interests, and doubts concerning his ability to bring South Africans out of poverty, while he succeeded in reducing the deficit, unemployment rose to frightening levels under his watch. His legacy in South Africa’s political economy will receive mixed reviews. He remains popular with business, but has made some powerful enemies on the Left. There is speculation on his political future and ambitions, made more opaque by the ANC’s treacherous infighting on the road to its potentially bloody leadership battle at Mangaung in December.

Certainly when Zuma became president, there would have been hell to pay in the international financial markets if Manuel had left, yet his appointment to the NPC was perceived as an odd sideways move. Current finance minister’s Pravin Gordhan’s competence has allayed investors’ fears, and it may be that Manuel’s presence is no longer a big factor for capital markets.

But whether Manuel and Zuma survive Mangaung in December this year, the key issue is that South Africa’s inequality and poverty is undoubtedly an urgent long-term project. In this, the NDP is a step in the right direction. And even though there are other pressing trade-offs between poverty alleviation and external drivers of monetary and fiscal policy, can the South African government remain steadfast in getting its policy message coherent and continuous enough for the central aims of the NDP to succeed? At a practical level, corruption and financial mismanagement must be overcome by legal sanctions with teeth, and support for whistleblowers. The ANC must also appoint the appropriate people to important government positions, instead of merely settling its political debts.

The main challenge will be getting the Left and Labour firmly on board, and this requires recognising that their concerns about joblessness are justified, albeit polemical. Unless all South Africans can pull together in the face of structural inequality, as the NDP itself proposes, it will once more be the poor who lose out, and that prospect is unsustainable for the country’s long-term stability.

Desné Masie is a journalist and academic. She is a former senior editor for the Financial Mail in South Africa, and is currently studying towards a PhD in finance at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

DR Congo: Beyond  the 2011 elections

Date/Time: February 14th

- Panel 1: 16:00 – 17:30

-Panel 2: 18:00 – 19:30

Venue: School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Lecture Theatre G2, Russell Square Campus

The official results of the recent presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) gave incumbent Joseph Kabila victory with 48.95% of the vote against 32.35% for the runner-up, Étienne Tshisekedi.

President Kabila campaigned for his second term in office under the slogan “for a united Congo”. However, the country now stands divided into two camps, between those who believe his re-election to be legitimate and those who don’t.

International observers have also cast doubts over the integrity of the polls, citing allegations of vote-rigging, reports of electoral violence and media restrictions.

DR Congo is a vast, resource-rich country with a painful history of international interference – from Belgian colonialism and Cold War politics to war with Uganda and Rwanda and the recent economic partnership with China.

How then can the people of Congo build a more stable and effective democracy? Is there scope to find long-lasting solutions to the many challenges facing the country – from reform in the natural resource sector through improved infrastructure and wealth distribution to putting an end to the on-going violence?  What can both domestic and international actors do to this end?

Join the Royal African Society and the Oxford Central Africa Forum in this high profile event, which will consider the consequences of the DRC’s 2011 elections both at home and abroad and discuss the possibilities for the country’s future.

Panel 1  –  THE ELECTIONS AND THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY, 16:00 – 17:30

Professor Koen Vlassenroot, Director of the Conflict Research Group, Ghent University
Koen Vlassenroot is the Director of the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University. He is a political scientist specialising in the political economy of conflict, non-state armed actors, the processes of identity formation, land access and food security. His work has mainly focussed on Central Africa, especially the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Théodore Trefon, Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa
Théodore Trefon is a Congo expert specializing in the politics of state-society relations. He has devoted the past 25 years to Congo as a researcher, lecturer, author, project manager and consultant. He heads the Contemporary History Section of the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa and is Adjunct Professor of International Relations at Boston University Brussels. Trefon is also the author of Congo Masquerade: The Political Culture of Aid Inefficiency and Reform Failure (African Arguments / ZED Books).

Madame Marie-Thérèse Nlandu Mpolo Nene, human rights lawyer & political leader
Marie-Thérèse Nlandu is a leading human rights lawyer from the DRC. She is also the President of Congo-Pax, the Party for Peace in Congo. Due to her work as a political leader and lawyer, Marie-Thérèse has been in exile twice: From 1993-2002 in Belgium and from 2007-present in the UK. In November 2006, Marie-Thérèse was arrested by agents of the Special Services police and charged with “organising an insurrectionary movement” and “illegal possession of firearms”. She was subsequently detained in Kinshasa’s central prison and became an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience. Pressure from Amnesty International and other human rights groups allowed for her eventual acquittal and release. Marie-Thérèse is married with 4 children.

Chair: Harry Verhoeven, Oxford University
Harry Verhoeven has just finished a doctorate at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, St Cross College. Harry has a keen interest in the issues of regional conflict, relations between regimes and rebel movements and natural resources, writing on Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. He is the Convenor of Oxford University’s China-Africa Network (OUCAN) and Oxford’s Central Africa Forum (OCAF) and is writing a book on the internal dynamics of Africa’s Great War.

Panel 2  – THE FUTURE OF CONGO POST-ELECTIONS – 18:00 – 19:30

Kris Berwouts, Director of the European Network for Central Africa (EurAc)
Kris Berwouts studied African languages and history at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Over the past 25 years, he has worked with both Belgian and international NGOs on peace and reconciliation, security and democratic processes. Since 2007, he has been the director of the Belgian-based European Network for Central Africa (EurAc).

Eric Joyce MP, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region of Africa
Eric Joyce has been a Member of Parliament for Falkirk since 2005. As well as having an interest in defence and military issues, Eric is also interested in Africa and development issues and he is currently the Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Devon Curtis, Cambridge University
Devon Curtis is a University Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and has been a Fellow of Emmanuel College since 2007. Both her research interests and written work have largely focused on power-sharing and governance, post-conflict, rebel movements in Africa, conflict, peace-building and development. Her field research has taken her to various parts of the Great Lakes Region, including Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has also worked with both the Canadian government and the UK’s Department for International Development (DIFID) as well as the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

Chair: Marco Jowell, School of Oriental and African Studies
Marco Jowell is a former Senior Research Analyst at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with a particular focus on Central Africa. He is currently a doctoral candidate at SOAS.

Please rsvp to rsvp@royalafricansociety.org

If 2011 was a record year for elections in Africa, it was also the year frontier exploration for oil and gas came of age. Global crude oil prices have risen steadily since mid-2010, and with annual growth in Africa’s oil production likely to be 4 percent over the next 5 years, the long-term triple digit oil price environment likely to stay, and proven oil reserves reaching 132.1 billion in 2010 (from and estimated 53.4 billion barrels in 1980), Africa has never been more attractive for the ambitious explorer. Buoyed by the prospect of being able to book thousands of barrels in reserves, untapped markets, and generally benign regulation – compared with the tightening regulatory environment elsewhere in the West – experienced majors, independent explorers and indigenous companies are lining up to exploit these opportunities.

New finds fuel oil sector

In an emerging market, Ghana has recently joined the continent’s ‘generation X’ of oil producers, with current daily production of around 70,000 barrels per day (bpd) from the 2 billion barrel Jubilee offshore field. Landlocked Niger also commenced its first oil production of around 20,000 bpd at the Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC)-operated Agadem oil field in October 2011. Output from new producers however still trails behind sub-Saharan Africa’s largest producers – Nigeria and Angola – which have a  daily combined production of over 3 million bpd.

Further new discoveries by Jubilee partners since the initial find in 2007 stand Ghana in good stead to gradually join the ranks of mid-tier African producers such as Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville. Indeed, annual change in production growth in Ghana will outpace some of the other minor producers in the next 3 years, if recent discoveries are fully commercialised and brought into production.  Africa’s East coast is also getting itself a piece of the action – gas discoveries by international oil companies (IOCs) in Tanzania and Mozambique have re-ignited investor interest in this previously under-explored region. Oil production is already expected to take off in Uganda’s Lake Albert region in 2012 following the major discovery there in 2006.

New offshore discoveries in Angola’s pre-salt basins could steal some of the shine from West Africa’s Transform Margin and the East African Rift System in 2012. In late 2011, Statoil, ConocoPhillips, ENI, BP and Total were amongst several IOCs that secured licenses off Angola’s coast, The high signature bonuses – US$1bn in one case – paid on those Angolan oil stakes are not atypical for Africa. However, in the context of recent publicity of over an alleged US$32billion accounting discrepancy linked to ‘quasi-fiscal operations’ by Angola’s oil parastatal, Sonangol, there is likely to be renewed spotlight on oil revenue management, transparency and regulatory issues.

Upstream regulation in sub-Saharan Africa had a slow and painful year in 2011. Laws governing exploration, production and fiscal regimes have been hotly debated. There is renewed optimism about the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) in Nigeria by the end of the first quarter of 2012, but momentum could slip if big players negotiating the bills’ terms dig their heels in.

Gas on the rise

Gas is now, globally, the fastest growing fossil fuel. Discoveries in Mozambique and Tanzania are positioning the East African region as a new gas frontier. Gas will likely emerge as a crucial source of energy for local use and to meet export demand in Africa, with a 25 percent production growth forecast over the next 5 years by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Potential Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects in places like Tanzania could open up exports markets to the Middle East and Asia. Tanzania’s EAC neighbours are enthusiastic about the prospects for future gas exports to the region, though the government is likely to seek to prioritize the domestic over regional markets in the short-term.

On Africa’s west coast, which holds 32 percent of natural gas reserves, increases in gas production between now and 2015 will mostly be driven by LNG exports. In 2010 Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea exported 39.30 and 8.28milliion liquid cubic metres respectively. Production at Angola’s 5.2 million LNG plant is expected to commence in February.

So far, Shale and other unconventional gas searches in Africa have been focused mostly in South Africa, but there is evidence of coalbed methane deposits in West Africa and some tight gas sands along West Africa’s coast. Not without its environmental controversies, ENI’s planned 2012 launch of a pilot project centred on an estimated 2.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil sands in the Republic of Congo, is the clearest sign yet that Africa north of South Africa and south of the Sahara may have more robust unconventional gas prospects. Africa’s gas exports however face a new challenge. Demand for LNG from North America could slump in the long-term as a result of growing shale gas production in the US. This surge of unconventional production in North America has already driven gas prices down. As a result, Angola’s state oil firm Sonangol is now considering other export markets focused on Asia, such as Japan.

Globally, oil continues to experience a decline in market share, while gas has steadily gained. Africa may be playing catch up in enabling a more diversified fuel mix, but the proportion of the continent’s consumption of gas as a percentage of its total energy mix will still rise faster than that of oil between now and 2030. At least $230 billion will be required to develop LNG capacity and $22.6 billion to develop gas-to-power projects over the next five years. For now, infrastructural limitations, uncompetitive gas pricing, and the capital intensive nature of gas projects have kept large-scale gas investment limited to a handful of African countries. But domestic and regional requirements for gas are obvious, given the growing importance of gas to Africa’s overall energy mix.

Political problems – to subsidise or not?

Explorers may be happy at rallying crude oil prices, but downstream, the energy story will be more challenging in 2012. The controversies surrounding subsidy reforms in Nigeria, which unsuccessfully attempted to follow a continental trend towards market liberalisation, are a timely reminder that the freewheeling oil business of explorers, refiners, speculators and traders is now firmly rooted in a political context that is hard to divorce from the commercial.

Fuel subsidies are being phased out in many African economies, largely due to sustained fiscal pressures on governments and the disincentives they create for would-be refinery investors.  Improvements in refining capacity across the continent would go some way to lessening petroleum product import dependence and thus exposure to crude oil price volatility. If African refineries ran at a minimum of 75 percent capacity, the continent would actually be a net exporter rather than a net importer of refined products.

Foreign v. domestic markets

Africa’s subsidy challenges underscore a more dynamic trend in African oil and energy consumption.  By 2013, Africa will account for 12 percent of daily global oil supplies – a production volume of almost 12million barrels per day. Africa’s share of global oil consumption is currently only 5 percent, but the continent will also see the fastest global increase in oil consumption between now and 2030. Much of that will be driven by GDP growth –  estimated at an average of 5.75 percent by the IMF for 2012. Demand for the continent’s oil and gas in recent years has been driven mostly by the US and China, but Africa’s own growing consumer, markets, emerging industrialisation and urbanisation are becoming increasingly important for the sector.

Growing domestic consumer markets are triggering new flows of refined petroleum products. Uneven resource distribution facilitates an inter and intra-regional push for crude and petroleum products within Africa. While the import of petroleum products to Africa has risen dramatically over the last decade, the intra-regional trade has also grown, with new smaller players becoming important export hubs to other African countries. Cote d’Ivoire has traditionally been West Africa’s largest intra-regional exporter of refined products, but to its east, the tiny country of Benin, has gained considerable market share as an important re-export hub of petroleum products from places like Nigeria to the landlocked countries of West Africa’s Sahel region. Uganda also fulfils a similar role with regards to Southern Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi. In the southern Africa region, outside of South Africa, the biggest flows of refined products are between Zambia and the DRC, an oil products trade hub that was worth $23million in 2010.

Still, only 6 percent of petroleum products exported from Africa are destined for other African countries (compared with the 41 percent of refined products exported from Africa to Europe). There was also a dramatic rise in the value of refined petroleum product exports in Africa between 2009 and 2010, from US$15bn to $29bn worth of products, likely underlining increased oil consumption as the global economic recovery sets in.

The prospect for new refining capacity could see individual countries export their surplus refined output to neighbouring countries with growing demand. Ecobank Research estimates that with new additional refining capacity Ghana could have a surplus of up to 148,000bpd in petroleum products by 2016, allowing it to exploit the West African regional market.

Conclusion

Arguably, the new investment opportunities opening up in African oil and gas also reflect wider investor sentiment on the continent’s much-touted ‘investment frontier’ status. Equally important should be the realisation that the continent’s energy potential is blossoming at a time when global demand is rising faster than new discoveries. Since 2005, global conventional oil supply has not grown and it may never grow again.  Indeed, the world is losing four million barrels a day to depletion, which is estimated to be at a rate of 5-6 percent of consumption.  In the throes of the Arab Spring, and consequent disruption to Libyan oil supplies, the importance of West African oil was underscored.  Africa’s hydrocarbons resources can fill a crucial gap given comparatively lower oil consumption in the region than elsewhere.

At current production levels there are at least 40 years of reserves remaining in sub-Sahara Africa. However, if governments’ sustainable economic development and good governance goals trail behind the commercial imperatives that drive oil and gas investment on the continent, then oil will remain a very sticky endeavour for years to come.

Rolake Akinkugbe is Oil and Gas Specialist at Ecobank Capital, the investment banking arm of pan-African banking group Ecobank, www.ecobank.com Ecobank’s research can be accessed at www.ecobank.com/research_capital

It’s always been hard to find a framework for analyzing Somalia.  It has one of the most ethnically homogenous populations in Africa – Somalis share the same language, culture, religion and clan structure – yet the country seems constantly riven by conflict. Somalia has long been viewed in the West as the basket case state in a basket case continent, as peace conference after peace conference and foreign interventions came and went while clan fighting continued. Maybe the answer is ditch your frameworks and read Mary Harper’s new book on Somalia.

Her informed, perceptive and empathetic book could not be coming out at a more apt time, with the country experiencing a major Kenyan military incursion and a continuing African Union military mission in support of a vulnerable and probably unviable government.  It’s a work that demonstrates the importance of engaged but impartial journalism and clear, uncluttered thought expressed simply but effectively.

Harper’s analysis supports the argument made by Richard Dowden (African Arguments, 20 Ooctober 2011) about not forcing statehood on Somalia.  He rightly points out that “Strong centralized states are the legacy of colonial rulers and unsurprisingly the inheritor governments have kept it that way.” This has been tried in Somalia and failed.  If the African Union and the West, fearful of a Somalia without a strong centralized authority, try to smash not just the Islamists like Al Shabaab, but also other autonomous forces in order to artificially maintain in power an unrepresentative and largely unwanted central government, they will just replicate the errors of the past and prolong conflict. Centralized authority is not part of Somali political culture – only the Islamic courts movement had any real success with unification.  This was a totally Somali answer to the problems, but one which did not please the United States or Ethiopia and so was swept away by outside intervention.

All this is clearly understood by Harper, a journalist with the BBC African Service for more than 20 years and one who had reported from Somalia and regularly visited the country since 1991. Above all in her work she tries and succeeds in conveying understanding, and where understanding is difficult or impossible, to convey why this is so.

Harper describes the negative images that fight each other to get on TV screens or newspaper pages on the few and inevitably sensationalized occasions when events in Somalia are reported – drug-crazed teenagers with guns, cut-down Land cruisers with weaponry mounted on the back, pirates, skeletal women and children. She rightly says of Somalia that ‘these images act as barriers to other ways of seeing Somalia”.  They dominate the news to the exclusion of all others representations of Somalia or Somalis, especially the signs that amid the conflict and crisis, Somalis are themselves inventing alternative economic and political systems and effective survival strategies

Somalia is the ultimate image, for many, of the failed state. It has seen almost constant conflict since the overthrow of Siad Barre in 1991. It has also suffered a series of ill-conceived, poorly executed and severely damaging foreign interventions – from the disastrous US intervention ending after the now infamous Black Hawk Down episode, via the US-backed Ethiopian invasion to overthrow the Union of Islamic Courts, to the endless and largely pointless peace conferences held in plush hotels around East Africa.

These events are described clearly in their historical, political and international contexts and show how a lack of understanding of Somalia, its history, culture and political development led to attempts to force change that were doomed from the start as they worked against reality – ‘Outsiders tend to find it a hard place to understand, and there is generally a wide gap between the various attempts made to introduce solutions to its problems and the reality lived by its population’.

This gap in understanding is not just a European or American phenomenon. Somalia differs hugely in its culture, traditional structures, economy and informal political/social institutions from much of Africa. The clan-based pastoral system that encompasses the economic, social and political spheres makes Somalia a poor environment for centralised government on a Western or hybrid Western/African pattern.

Siad Barre failed to forcibly centralise the state. Peace conferences based on the participation of elites distanced from the grassroots, trying to hammer out Western-backed deals involving centralised transitional governments have produced weak regimes that have not only failed to end conflict but have all too often worsened it. These attempts are described, picked apart and roundly and cogently criticised by the author, as is the tendency to view Somalia through the prism of the ‘War on Terror’.

For me, the most valuable section in what is a well-written and very well-informed study, is that dealing with Somaliland and its slow, careful and, above all, Somali-generated progress from a break-away state beset by competing clans or movements to one of the most stable and inventive polities in Africa. Denied international recognition, but also largely free of outside interference, Somaliland has developed a working economy and an indigenous hybrid system of representative government that involves but doesn’t just centre on the clans and which is increasingly accountable –  ‘Because Western models of peace-making and state-building have not been imposed from the outside, Somaliland has in many ways saved itself from the fate of Somalia. The example of Somaliland has demonstrated that when left to themselves, Somalis can form a viable nation state’.

This is a book that must be read by those who want to understand Somalia. It is engaged but balanced and very clear in its well-founded belief that ‘until Somalia is more clearly understood and a different approach is found, it will continue to perplex, alarm and threaten the international community, and it will be very difficult to find a way forward for the counter which works for the Somalis themselves and for the outside world.’  And, as Harper rightly concludes, the world needs to be more creative, like the Somalis themselves, in its dealings with the country and ‘recognize that Somalis can be very good at doing things for themselves’.

Keith Somerville runs his own website Africa, News and Analysis –www.africajournalismtheworld.com – and teaches in the Politics and International Relations Department at the University of Kent, Canterbury.  K.Somerville@kent.ac.uk

Tecumseh Roberts - Liberia’s own Michael Jackson - 'charged homosexual' and murdered

Clearly, in times of chaos and anarchy, the vulnerable and powerless are always attacked. It’s a short step from there during a fragile peace to judgments like: “Who is causing the decay in society? Who is upsetting the social order?” The master narrative is, “If we can just get rid of those people, we can go back to achieve our ideal existence.”

In 2001, while insurgent gay voices were speaking out across the continent, Liberia’s then President Charles Taylor threatened heightened surveillance to flush out homosexuals. The deviant sodomite archetype served Taylor’s psychological drama, but he was inciting an internal conflict that hadn’t existed. Gay and lesbian Liberians generally did not disclose their identities in public. And though penal law forbids any act between individuals considered “deviant” by definition, overt discrimination in relation to sexual orientation wasn’t practiced. But Taylor the warlord could not invent himself as a moral leader, a statesman, without targeting an opposite. If you need to reconstruct yourself like Taylor had to, after so much killing, it serves you well to use a buffer. There’s always an absolute positive and negative extreme in identity politics. The gender binary — the idea of a split (you’re either this or that)—supported Taylor’s grandiose self-perception.

He was exceptional, Taylor claimed, not only in contrast to the other warlords he’d outsmarted to seize the presidency; he was also man enough to cleanse the land of walking, breathing abominations. The unspoken subtext was, “I may not be perfect, I may have committed massacres, unspeakable atrocities, but I’m not a pervert. At least everybody knows I’m not gay.”

Before Taylor’s sinister pronouncement, there was Tecumseh Roberts, Liberia’s own Michael Jackson, a beautiful songbird trapped during the war in territory controlled by warlord Prince Yormie Johnson (now a senator, the man who filmed, directed and starred in the infamous video of President Samuel Doe’s slow torture to death).

Charged a homosexual, Tecumseh was subjected to a voyeuristic anal examination, then murdered. A well-loved human being, an important and respected artist was butchered for no reason by inquisitors whose extremist ideology was predicated on fundamentalist ethnocentric politics. What Liberians remember most today is the obscene story Johnson told about Tecumseh’s murder during his testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that Tecumseh had a “rotten” body cavity, conjuring an image that violated Tecumseh’s personal dignity and exploited his naked body even in death.

To declare yourself gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender in Liberia today you have to be willing to risk your life in daring to claim full citizenship. If not an actual death, you are condemned to suffer social death and religious alienation. Incendiary language will be used against you in God’s name. The constitution will not protect you. If you accept the premise that God has supremacy, the collective will also use your faith against you: not only will you be denied your humanity, you will also be denied access to God.

FrontPage Africa online reports that Presidential Press Secretary Jerolinmek Piah told journalists at a press briefing in mid-January that President Sirleaf would veto any legislation associated with gay rights or same-sex marriage. Writing from the epicenter, Liberian feminist poet, social critic and rights activist Korto Williams states, “The rights of sexual minorities are threatened by dutybearers, including the government of Liberia and the national parliament. Homosexuality is criminalized and religious institutions use their influence to marginalize the LGBT community, with the media (social media included), government and legislature taking defined, homophobic positions on the decriminalization of homosexuality.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted the first ever UN resolution on the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons in June of 2011. This resolution finally recognizes the human rights abuses and violations that LGBT people face around the world. Liberia is a founding member of the UN and has ratified major international instruments on women’s and people’s rights, including the African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Rights of Women in Africa, which is significant considering the current volatile homophobic climate in Liberia.

Hate speech in Liberia is however allowed to proliferate largely unimpeded, as the following excerpt culled from an online newspaper article shows: “Gays are abnormal sexual agents of obliteration that have been assigned by the kingdom of darkness to undermine and thwart the progressivity, productivity, and transformation of mankind. People who involve themselves in this harmful misdeed and transgression must be denied, exposed, disgraced, arrested, prosecuted, ostracized, ex-communicated and ridiculed by their non-gay colleagues, families and society at large. Our foreign partners must understand that same-sex marriage is an offense to our religious and cultural principles.”

Anything goes. And of course such people believe they are the keepers of ethics and morality, and with God on their side, they can do and say just about anything they want to.

Vocal activist Archie Ponpon of the Movement for the Defense of Lesbians and Gays Rights sent out this message in a recent press release: “We have gone into hiding because of public outrage and threats of attacks on our lives.” A member of his group was stoned the week before on the University of Liberia campus.

There is a new group called the National Movement Against Same Sex Marriage in Liberia (NAMASSEM). A spokesperson for another group, the Indigenous Movement of Liberia, said in a statement to the press: “Homosexuality is ungodly and against Liberia’s cultural tradition. Gay right advocates, including Archie Ponpon, must not take their campaign to the indigenous people who strongly believe in their tradition, the Holy Bible and Holy Koran. The Indigenous Movement is about to launch a nationwide anti-gay campaign to avoid what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, during the days of Old.”

According to a reporter, Legislator George Blamoh Wesseh said:  “It is demonic and evil. It actually beats my imagination for any young man and woman to think of same-sex marriage. Are they real human beings or what?”

Speaker of the House of Representatives Alex Tyler, Representative Prince Tokpah, and Representative Edward Karfiah have all assured their constituents, according to news reports, that no LGBT rights bill will ever pass on their watch.

The Masses Against Gay Activity in Liberia (MAGAL) openly urges the government to “relentlessly wage war against homosexuality and lesbianism.” They propose that the “government establishes a rigorous Task Force or Special Unit to expose and arrest Gays and lesbians who are operating underground”; that “The views and opinions of so-called gay-advocates be barred and banished totally from the Liberia society”; that “Anyone caught in the act of homosexuality be arrested and prosecuted” and “imprisoned for twenty years with hard labor.”; that “Anyone caught promoting gayism and lesbianism through any medium be arrested and prosecuted; and if found guilty be imprisoned for ten years with treatment of hard labor.”: that “Anti-gay lessons be embedded in Health Sciences of our National Curriculum for our students in primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions.”

It is urgent that those of us truly committed to a new political imagination act now to ensure that the human rights debate currently taking shape in Liberia respects the rights of all citizens regardless of sexual orientation. As New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker insists, “We should not be putting civil rights issues to a popular vote.  No minority should have their rights subject to the passions, the sentiments, of the majority.” These rights should be guaranteed, rather than their withholding used as political leverage in debates divorced from the reality of LGBT peoples’ daily struggles.

It is the duty of the government to serve and protect its entire constituency. I call on you to sign the petition asking the Executive Mansion to end discrimination against LGBT Liberians.

May this storm be brief and our unity strong when the skies clear.

Sign the petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/the-executive-mansion-end-discrimination-against-gay-and-lesbian-liberians

Stephanie C. Horton is a Liberian writer and editor who has worked as a girls’, women’s, men’s and LGBT advocate, counselor, workshop facilitator and staff trainer for survivors of sexual violence.

Public enterprise Minister Malusi Gigaba's instincts lie with more centralised control over state-owned firms

In mid-January while much of the country’s business community was still on or returning from summer holidays, Fitch Ratings revised its outlook for South Africa’s credit rating to ‘negative’ from ‘stable’. In doing so it seemed to be issuing a ‘welcome to 2012’ flag on what it thinks will be a period marked by continued policy uncertainty and challenges for the ANC-led government in meeting both its political spending (wage and social payments) commitments and its deficit management targets.

Ahead of the 2012 budget and around the time of President Jacob Zuma’s ‘state of the nation’ address on 9  February, one can expect the release of draft ANC discussion papers ahead of the party’s much-anticipated mid-year policy conference. Related to the ‘nationalisation’ debate and the state’s role in mining, of particular interest to business will be the tone adopted on the relative roles of the public and private sectors in providing the jobs and capital investment needed for South Africa to meet its potential and its existing plans, without compromising its narrow fiscal base and deficit projections.

The previous sentence contains a catch, which I’ll nevertheless put to one side: one of the major policy struggles going on (and yet to be tested on government service unions) is the Treasury’s plan to begin directing spending away from the public wage bill and towards infrastructure. As the editorial in yesterday’s Business Day newspaper pointed out, the rate of job-creation and payment in the municipal, provincial and national civil services is unsustainable.

This points to a policy debate occurring at the heart of cabinet (which, unnervingly, is too easily described interchangeably with the party leadership, reflecting the ongoing blurring of party and state in South Africa). Inspired by what it perceives as the successful model deployed in other BRICs, and prone to seeing the 2008 credit crunch as evincing the flaws of market economics, many in the ANC-led alliance find the ‘state capitalism’ idea of centralised economic planning intuitively attractive. As the imperative to create jobs and skills for unemployed young South Africans grows, so does the belief that the solution lies in the state doing more. This is the case despite the fact that many critics think Pretoria should take an opposite and economically more ‘relaxed’ approach, for example enabling more flexible labour market regulations.

Given the rhetoric around state-led initiatives, many would be surprised to read that in Davos last week President Jacob Zuma suggested that the state should not be the primary job-creator but only ensure a policy environment in which the private sector was able to flourish. Is this just Zuma being ‘all things to all audiences’ from unions to business, or has this policy pragmatist reached a point where cabinet centrists have persuaded him that his priority for political survival — to be seen to decisively address unemployment — requires being prepared to put the interests of the not-yet-employed on a par with the already-employed (and unionised)?

An emerging player in Zuma’s cabinet, Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba has been reaching for an answer that comprises a middle way economic policy promising job-creation benefits as one incidental benefit from addressing infrastructure deficits. Since at least June last year, he has been promoting his views on public-private ‘development partnerships’ to revitalise (and recapitalise) the country’s significant state-owned utilities. In principle, this gives private actors the security of having the state as a direct partner in major public projects such as export transport networks critical to private firms’ ability to compete globally. On June 7 last year he spoke of the state giving private partners political reassurance and long-term ‘consistent demand platforms’.

Many will say the problem in contemporary South Africa is not the plans, but the planning. Since June last year Gigaba has not fleshed out his vision much further, especially how it relates to the National Planning Commission’s ‘Development Plan’ which points — rather like Zuma’s Davos remarks — towards freeing state-owned firms from too much political steering. Reports this week following his visit to view Chinese parastatals suggest that his instincts lie with more centralised control over state-owned firms. Such control is not necessarily incompatible with the partnerships he has envisaged. But the result is that we are no clearer on the overall policy orientation of this administration, creating challenges for groups like Business Unity South Africa (itself recovering from internal difficulties) in engaging government on exploring the potential for more decisive action where public and private interests coincide.

Jolyon Ford is a senior analyst at Oxford Analytica, the global analysis and advisory firm.

The below op-ed contribution was published online by the International Herald Tribune–Global Opinion, on January 24, 2012.

South Sudan was born as an independent nation on July 9, 2011, with good will and a bounty. Three hundred and fifty thousand barrels of oil per day provided the government with $1,000 per year for each of its 8 million citizens.

But the only pipeline to market runs through northern Sudan, giving the government in Khartoum control over South Sudan’s economic artery. And on independence day there was no agreement on the terms of pipeline use.

When Sudan was still one country, 50 percent of the revenue from southern oil went to the central treasury, comprising 40 percent of its budget. After July 9, Khartoum received nothing — not even a transit fee. International promises of debt relief and lifting economic sanctions, to fill a part of the budget gap, came to nothing. Continued negotiations — convened by the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel on Sudan, which is headed by former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and to which I am an adviser — have failed to resolve the issue.

On Jan. 20, South Sudan announced the dramatic step of shutting down oil production, with immediate effect. As oil money comprises 97 percent of the South’s budget, it seems a suicidal step. The rationale is that for the last month, Khartoum has been diverting the oil to its own refinery and filling three tankers.

A year ago, President Omar al-Bashir congratulated his southern counterpart, President Salva Kiir, on independence and promised a new and peaceable chapter in the troubled history of north-south relations. This quickly turned sour, particularly with the outbreak of war in two areas of northern Sudan — Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile — where about half of the population is loyal to the former rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, who are now the government in the South. Although the northern branch of the party supposedly split off, the South does not disguise its solidarity with its former comrades in arms.

Khartoum’s delegates to the just-concluding talks in Addis Ababa complain bitterly. “Why should we allow Southern oil to go free to market, when the money from its sales is used to arm rebels who want to destroy us?” They follow it up with a promise — we will reconcile our respective claims after we agree on a transit fee that matches a third of the budget gap.

The South counters, “Why do we allow our oil to be stolen and the money used to buy weapons to kill our comrades in arms? Khartoum has always wanted to control the South and its readiness to strangle us financially shows that they will never allow us to be truly free.” The Southern government in Juba has floated plans for a new pipeline through Kenya. Optimistically, this may cost $3 billion to $4 billion and take three years to build, but many Southern leaders would rather leave their oil in the ground than submit to Sudan’s coercion.

So South Sudan has set off its economic doomsday machine. The shutdown of wells is already beginning and within a week the oil companies will begin flushing the pipeline with water, so that the oil it contains doesn’t jam and turn into a 600-mile asphalt tube. After that, the best case would be six months’ work to reopen exports.

The South’s lead negotiator, Pagan Amum, said he was at peace with himself when he explained: “This is a matter of respect. We may be poor but we will be free.”

But South Sudan is a fragile state, as the recent interethnic killings in the Jonglei area show, and it will need massive foreign aid to compensate for the lost $650 million per month.

A northern general remarked, “The shutdown will hurt us but it will kill them.” But Sudan cannot be stable if its southern neighbor is in crisis.

Based on its principle that Sudan and South Sudan should be two viable states, at peace and mutually supportive, the African Union panel has proposed an agreement. This will keep the oil flowing, stop the unilateral diversion of southern oil by the north, and provide enough funds to cushion the economic crisis in the north. China — the main buyer of Sudanese oil — the United States and the United Nations have endorsed the African Union’s plan.

President Bashir and President Kiir are due to meet in Addis Ababa on Friday. This is the last chance, not only for the two to snatch a deal on oil, but also to stop an escalation into a wider north-south war. The two must step back from the brink.

Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation.

Interest in West African oil acreage has steadily increased in recent years and governments along the Gulf of Guinea have sought to benefit. Sierra Leone is no exception in that regard. On 29 December 2011, authorities announced the launch of a new oil licensing round covering nine blocks across 21,242km (most of which are in deep water) – bidding will be held open until March 2012.

This present round distinguishes itself from earlier ones in April 2002-May 2003 and October 2004-May 2005 respectively, in that it has been preceded by successful drillings by Anadarko (US) and its partners in 2009 and 2010. Additionally, this round will be much shorter – lasting only three months – and whereas previous rounds came a year and more in the wake of regulatory changes, this one comes in the midst of a rebalancing.

Existing Regime

President Ernest Bai Koroma began a review of the oil and gas legislative framework in 2009, the government has laid out plans to create a National Minerals Agency to “ensure proper governance of the mining sector” and amendments were adopted by parliament in July 2011. The latter included provisions to

• Create a new Petroleum Directorate with oversight responsibilities
• Allow the state an automatic 10% stake in any oil block through a national oil company (Sierra Leone National Petroleum Company) not yet in existence.

However, the 2011 bill was rushed through parliament by way of a “certificate of emergency” and passed on the back of the ruling All People’s Congress (APC) parliamentary majority. The opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party boycotted the vote and some civil society groups complained that they were insufficiently consulted. President Koroma reportedly suggested the act be amended further, and in our conversations there appears to be some confusion as to whether or not the act is as yet law.

Despite the confusion we encountered locally, going by the President’s October 2011 speech to parliament, the law has in fact been enacted. However, bringing it into effect before the September 2012 general elections is unlikely, adding an additional layer of uncertainty to the regulatory outlook.

Songhai Advisory LLP is a bespoke business intelligence consultancy providing critical insight on market opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The next book in the African Arguments series is Getting Somalia Wrong by BBC journalist Mary Harper. It is a complex account of a country too often stereotyped by one or two of its most notorious characteristics – recently these being the Islamist insurgency of Al-Shabaab, piracy off its Indian Ocean coast and terrible famine.

Harper’s book has grown out of 20 years working on and in the country, and functions not as a conventional history of Somalia, but rather as a discussion of several key themes central to its present state. Pleasantly surprising was the thread of black humour that runs throughout, created by the description of several historical events that exemplify an admirable, and slightly crazed, Somali independence of spirit. First is the story of the ‘Mad Mullah’ – warrior poet Seyyid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan – who fought the British to a standstill in the early 20^th century and described himself as ‘a stubborn he-camel’ from whom the British would get ‘war and nothing else.’ When his troops killed a British commander sent to pursue him, he penned ‘a brutal celebratory poem’ detailing how his dead body would be ‘left to the carrion eaters.’

In a neat historical parallel, eighty years later, warlord General Mohamed Farah Aideed had a $20,000 bounty placed on his head by Admiral Jonathan Howe – commander of the US ‘humanitarian’ mission Restore Hope. Aideed responded by promising to pay $20,000 to anyone who brought him the actual head of Admiral Howe. Whilst such violent reactions might seem anathema to us, they underscore a fundamental self-confidence that Harper clearly respects. Long-time scholar of Somalia, Ioan Lewis, puts it another way – Somalis have ‘an open contempt for other people.’

What Harper is trying to do is to resurrect a basic level of respect in discussions about Somalia. From its portrayal as a lawless place, riven with fundamentalist Islam, and latterly suffering the effects of a terrible famine, she argues that these aren’t the only things that happen in the country. Her real interest, I think, was in profiling modern-day Somalia where ‘more than two decades of conflict and crisis have forced Somalis to invent alternative political and economic systems.’ These innovations in the economy, the livestock trade, money transfers and telecommunications reveal something that will be new to many readers – successful Somalis making money. She also clearly admires the political developments in Somaliland – the northern territory that seceded from the Somalia after the collapse of the country’s central government in 1991. Still unrecognised by the international community, Somaliland has slowly developed its own hybrid democratic system with some traditional structures still in place, and is generally peaceful and heading in the right direction.

In conversation Harper refers to Somalia as being “like a complex mathematical equation” – the moving parts being the country’s bewildering clan system, and although some Somalis reportedly deny its modern-day importance, Harper “would take any Somali on who said the clan system was not relevant.” Whilst clans were suppressed under Siad Barre’s pseudo-socialist regime, and their resurgence in the 1990s is sometimes seen as the cause of the civil war, they remain the shifting bedrock upon which Somali society is built. I ask what she thinks defeat of the Islamist group Al-Shabaab would do for the country. The answer is perhaps surprising – far from ending the violence, Harper predicts that Somalia might, at least initially, take a step backwards, as the more ingrained divisions would resurface and regional clan-based groups take up arms again against each other. Whilst she deals harshly with the violent and reactionary Islam of Al-Shabaab, she states that their presence has softened the influence of the clan in Somalia. Whilst this has been achieved “largely through fear,” she also argues that there might be some things to learn from this about the way Somali society works.

This desire to develop a new ‘take’ on almost all facets of Somalia’s poorly reported public profile is nowhere more in evidence than in her chapter on the pirates. Harper is blunt in her statements to me that Somali pirates are “common criminals”, and does not accept the fashionable counter-narrative that they are coastguards or fishermen driven to piracy through foreign exploitation of their fishing grounds. She seeks to write about Somalia’s most notorious product “on their own terms”, and includes several interviews with people who have been pirates. Piracy is clearly a profitable business, and is a product of both the Somali entrepreneurial élan, and the lack of economic opportunities on land due to chronic political instability, banal as this explanation may sound.

Harper evidently has a love and fascination for Somali people. She tells me that “Somalis give me massive freedom as both a journalist and human being.” Whilst she inhabits a position somewhat elevated from the average Somali women, whose opportunities are limited in what is a conservative, male-dominated society; she doesn’t recognise the real bitterness against this culture characterised in the writings of Ayan Hirsi Ali, and a string of western commentators on the ‘Islamic world’.

In this, and many other topics, Harper isn’t necessarily positive about the country’s future, and is wary of making fashionable predictions, she is however keen to show that not everything about the place is broken.

Magnus Taylor is Managing Editor, African Argumeents Online.

Getting Somalia Wrong is being launched by the Royal African Society at SOAS on the evening of 7th February – click here for more information.

President Wade and son Karim could both be out of power after Senegal's elections in March

On 26 February, presidential elections are due in which President Abdoulaye Wade will run for a third term, if the Constitutional Court rules Wade’s candidacy is legal, which is likely. Wade will be able to mobilise rural support, but he is unlikely to win the endorsement of all the influential Sufi brotherhoods. He also faces growing unpopularity, particularly amongst youths and in urban areas, due to the rising cost of living and economic mismanagement. The elections are likely to go to a run-off, increasing chances of an opposition win. This would heighten contract risks in important sectors for foreign investors like  construction, transport and tourism.

Divisions within the opposition and the lack of a nationwide base for most of the candidates will limit their chances of a win in the first round. However, the growing importance of the urban vote and a very likely rallying behind the leading opposition candidate after the first round – expected to be Moustapha Niasse, Macky Sall, Idrissa Seck or Tanor Diang – would increase their chances in the second round. Popular singer Youssou N’dour, who announced his candidacy on 2 January, is unlikely to win political support among the elite but is popular amongst the youth, making him a possible kingmaker for the opposition in the second round.

An opposition victory would increase risks of corruption investigations and contract cancellations targeting major infrastructure contracts pursued by Wade and his son, powerful Transport and Infrastructure Minister Karim Wade. These include the new airport in Dakar or Dubai Ports World’s contract for Dakar Port’s development. Tourist resorts owned by consortiums in which Karim Wade is involved would also be at risk. Revisions would be likely to contracts recently signed by the Wade government, including the awarding of two oil exploration licences to African Petroleum in late November 2011. While contract and regulatory risks would be lower under another Wade term, he would most likely promote populist policies like increasing subsidies and revising contracts in the ailing power sector.

Protest risks will be high during these closely-contested elections, especially in the event of voting fraud allegations, further arrests of opposition leaders and Wade’s re-election. Risks will be highest in Dakar, Thies, Thivaouane and Kaolack. Protests could escalate into riots, which would pose high risks of damage to government buildings, public transport and public utilities assets. Fighting between opposition and ruling party supporters will also pose moderate risks to individuals. On 22 December, a Wade supporter was shot dead in fighting between youths outside the Mermoz-Sacre Coeur city council.

Exclusive Analysis is a specialist intelligence company that forecasts commercially relevant political and violent risks worldwide.