Nigeria’s second largest city and its most ancient, Kano, is suffering so much from rapid development that its essential history and culture is threatened.
All of Africa is developing rapidly. I can’t remind my American friends enough how quickly we’re being left behind by multitudes of foreign societies dedicated to infrastructure expansion and cultural well-being. A perfect example of this is Kano but it’s only worthy of celebration if you don’t mind losing a millennia of history.
Imagine driving through a parched landscape and seeing little except a few abandoned huts. Continue a few more kilometers and suddenly there’s a blur in the still sky. It’s dust. Drive a few more kilometers and you see the flat land is actually starting to roll.
Into deep pits. Fourteen to be precise. Wooden scaffolding goes deep, far below the noon day sun over the hole, raising the temperature in the dark to the mid nineties. Only men are working, some very young.
The developing global trade war has already reversed a downwards trend in the price of African vacations and will likely spurn increases.
Unilateral tariffs of the sort imposed by Trump always stifle international trade. When international trade declines leisure travel declines. Sectors with relatively small volumes of business – such as adventure and exotic travel like African safaris – react to these sudden declines with price increases.
The Maasai of East Africa, the Rohingya of Myanmar and even the 4th generation Rhodesian farmers of Zimbabwe are inhumanely imprisoned in modern societies incapable of figuring out how to assimilate them.
No better example of this conundrum than America’s own native Americans. We visited the site of Little Bighorn. It’s one of the most moving national monuments in our country.
How can you own the most of something extremely precious to the world and yet grow sick and poor because of it? That’s the story of South African gold.
Seven of 13 miners who were trapped in yet another gold mine catastrophe in South Africa died over the weekend. Gold is the reason South Africa is what it is economically, and right now what it is isn’t too good.
A young African Sudanese man seen riding a truck carrying bananas in Juba, the capital of the Republic of South Sudan. South Sudan became an independent state on July 09, 2011, and soon thereafter also a United Nations member state. South Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world.
August 20, 2011. Photo by Moshe Shai/FLASH90
**MAARIV OUT**
Food security is now threatened by something far more onerous than Mother Nature: a debate about whether to tinker with Mother Nature, because many scientists believe there is a reasonable defense: GMO. But will Africans starve before embracing GM foods?
In this topsy turvy world developing countries with huge social needs like Kenya are much more aggressively pursuing organic farming and containing climate change than the U.S. Do they know something we don’t?
Yes, or stated more correctly, they know something we stubbornly refuse to see at the tip of our nose.
I was in Nairobi yesterday watching a brilliant protest backfire miserably.
“Rowdy Kenyan youths” (as described by the police) deflated the tires of more than 200 vehicles on Kenya’s main highway at the peak of rush hour causing a nightmare traffic jam that backed up the city for nearly a whole day.
Rolex, Pandora, Cartier … Valentine’s approaches. This year, if you’re basically a moral and just person, you might want to stick with chocolates.
Those are just some of the companies that Human Rights Watch (HRW) says may be obtaining their gold and diamonds from the use of more than a million child workers, most abused in Africa.
There’s a lot in common between South Africa and the U.S. Among the very most important and very least spoken is their shared agricultural power.
South Africa outperforms the U.S. producing oranges and performs about two-thirds as well for barley. South Africa outperforms China and India in corn, barley, oranges and fresh milk as well.
So agricultural companies pay a lot of attention to South Africa, and especially after last weekend’s seed conference at the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) which focused on defeating a proposed South African law heavily favoring GM seed companies like Monsanto.
Anything happen this year?
Sorry. Perhaps a poor attempt for just a bit of relief. End-of-the-year analyses are coming out. I sit in a little world of Africa news and things, but I expect all the little worlds feel the same thing I do: the universe is tanking. Now if you’re sitting at a big desk on Wall Street you see it otherwise, because the rich world is doing just fine. But time’s have changed. The world is starting to move as one, and how Africa or Taipei or the Ukraine or Latvia goes, so eventually does the whole world, even eventually the rich.
“The West’s loss of moral authority… has created a vacuum,” says Nairobi’s Daily Nation today. “The rise of far-right movements… and the election of President Donald Trump… has buoyed the anti-democratic forces in Africa.”
Digital and financial connections were developed in the west. Free speech and aggressive, daringly imaginative entrepreneurship was born here. Emerging nations were attracted by these bold opportunities. Africans especially loved everything western. Now that’s changing.
The best taxi service is still Uber… in Nairobi, Joburg, Cape Town, Lagos, Kampala, Cairo, Dar… but … not in London or Amsterdam. Uber lost its license in London and its customers in Amsterdam.
The Uber controversy is fascinating, and a perfect example of what’s to come in a better world. (You’ll be surprised what I mean.)
The lofty positions held by a number of Africans in both government and business is jeopardized by the Paradise Papers expose, and for exactly the same reason that Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, is on the way out.
Nothing illegal is alleged in the Paradise Papers’ leaked business deals, mostly with Cayman Island banks. Nothing illegal is alleged in the Times’ expose of Apple’s tax havens in Britain and Ireland.
But legality isn’t the issue. Morality is. Wealth of this magnitude should not be held by so few.
Democracy isn’t working, anywhere. South African Richard Pithouse predicted all of this in his summary of Trump’s election: “The Donalds are Everywhere.” Since that analysis nearly a year ago, Kenya, Spain, Italy, South Africa, the U.S., France, Britain and probably to some degree every democratic nation on earth has grown increasingly tumultuous.
Be prepared, folks. If you think the hurricane season is just about wind and rain, you’ve got another thing coming.