Africa, some sobering numbers (9)
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Dear Colleagues
I might have missed some of the messages on this thread. So some of
what I am sending now may have already been said.
I think some of you may know me as someone who likes to use numerical
analysis, and especially financial information and economic statis-
tics. If you look at Africa using some of the more solid data that
are available you conclude that Africa ought to be one of the
wealthiest places in the world.
To put this in perspective. Africa (the whole of it) is bigger than
China and India and Europe and the USA and Argentina combined. It
will also fit in New Zealand. That is a huge amount of real estate.
It has every imaginable natural resource. Gold, diamonds and a huge
range of other minerals. It has energy resources, oil and coal. It
has water resources, many of the great rivers of the world. It has
biodiversity... tropical forests... savannah.... It lacks for noth-
ing.
And an interesting history and culture that should not be underesti-
mated.
How many people in Africa? About 800 million. Very small in relation
to the size and the resources.
SO WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?
Simply put.... the process is all wrong and it has been since Africa
first became part of the European mercantile world several centuries
ago. Everything has been "economic value destruction" for Africa and
"value gain" for somewhere else.
This was meant to end with independence. But it might have become
worse. Instead of colonials who planned on staying for ever, the mod-
ern development expert has only a "project" time horizon and the for-
eign direct investment (FDI) fund managers only have an interest in
very short term management performance and stockholder value (nothing
else) and their ethics are driven by what decision makers can get
away with. Not a great process. And easy to see why "development" has
failed.
The ODA community dare not work with the numbers. They are essen-
tially bankrupt organizations with very limited resources and every-
one working in them trying to hang on for dear life to the few jobs
that are around until retirement. They have guided resources to
mainly failed projects for thirty years or so, and then they wonder
why development is not working. (see PS below)
And the NORTH's academic and consultancy community has collaborated
with the ODA funders to create a veneer of respectability on top of
terrible failure. The people of the NORTH do not know quite what to
make of it. They know that funds have been going SOUTH for decades,
and every single ODA organization publishes year after year after
year an annual report that shows how dramatically the process has
failed.
Oh. I forgot. The real reason for failure in the SOUTH is the corrupt
government leadership and staff. ABSOLUTE B.... S... The problem is a
process that takes perfectly good resources and ends up with very
little or nothing of value. I call it economic value destruction, and
it is all over the development assistance world. And it is deeply en-
grained in the foreign direct investment world as well, especially
big oil, and big mining. And it is evident in a lot of global trade,
especially big pharmaceuticals, big military suppliers, big construc-
tion, big equipment, big food.
With the resources that are in Africa, it makes no sense that Africa
cannot be wealthy. It needs paradigm change. And this is now possible
because we have the people in Africa who can drive the process for-
ward, and there is information so that this value destruction problem
can be weeded out and replaced by value creation in Africa and for
Africa.
Development has got to be about people, process, resources and infor-
mation. The current dominant ODA and FDI and Trade paradigm does not
have it right.
It is going to change.
Stay tuned
Peter Burgess
ATCnet in New York
Tel: +1-212-772-6918
Fax: +1-707-371-7805
mailto:peterb@iitc.safe-mail.net
PS:
To clarify... the ODA organizations have a lot of great staff who
work hard and with tremendous motivation and quite often in harm's
way. But they are tremendously constrained by the policies and proce-
dures and rules and regulations of their organizations....... and the
end result is development disaster. Nobody's fault.... and that is
part of the problem.
--
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