In 1969, when the British were obsessed with the future of whites in central, eastern and southern Africa, Richard Hall, a former editor of The Times of Zambia, wrote a book called The High Price of Principles, in which he discussed Africa’s belief that morality might end white rule in Rhodesia and apartheid in South Africa.
“It was an exciting vision, fanciful in retrospect but important to recall: at that time moral pressure appeared more real than military arithmetic or the influence of international finance. It was a matter of 250 million Africans against four million defensive whites, whose policies had been repeatedly condemned at the United Nations; there was a powerful Illusion that mere numbers and distant resolutions created a tide of history.”
Forty years on, a journalist suggesting that morals might one day break the cycle of poverty, corruption, ignorance and disease in the world’s hungriest continent would be laughed out of court.
Hall wrote at a time when British readers were fed material out of Africa that left them with the impression that Africa was little more than a tribal, white-hating lunatic asylum with the lunatics in charge. The deep grievances of men, women and sometimes children who walked the earth with hatred in their hearts and guns in their hands, flirting with a Marxist ideology that many neither understood nor wanted to understand, was for the most part left unexamined.
How to make money
Under the microscope of the mass-circulating press was a single slide – the future of the whites in Africa.
Now, the days of British newspapers worrying too much about the future of Europeans in Zimbabwe or South Africa is over. The new slide under the microscope is money and how to make lots more of it.
But the danger for journalism is similar – an obsession with a single subject while problems go almost unnoticed, with potentially disastrous consequences.
In 1986, a celebrated cover of The Economist showed a map of Africa framing a youth with an assault rifle with the headline “The Hopeless Continent”.
This February, 27 years later, that same magazine gathered at a London hotel an audience of 180 delegates comprising leading figures from business, banking, government and various consultancies for its 2013 summit.
President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, a country recovering from a vile and costly conflict over diamonds, followed up her recent meeting with Prime Minster David Cameron and shared her belief that Africa is on schedule to reach the 2015 UN Millennium Development Goals, thanks to unfaltering growth across the continent.
Tiger nation
So, while the British press is full of stories about how Europe is lurching from crisis to crisis and how the US economy starts and stutters and starts again, Africa stands to become a tiger nation. According to Standard Bank, 60 million African households have annual incomes greater than $3,000 and by 2015 that number is expected to reach 100 million, equating to a middle-class consumer market close to that of India, according to Aidan Heavey in The Thunderer column of The Times (25 June, 2012).
This financial story is gaining traction.
Steven Kennings, CEO of the large investment fund Renaissance Capital, said in an interview with Global magazine this year: ”Remove Africa from the global equation today and look upon a landscape of broken and ruined economies.” Renaissance Capital predicts that by 2050, Africa’s GDP will equal that of the USA and the EU combined in today’s money. The lead author of a report by the investment fund contends that Africa is at a similar stage in development to South East Asia in the 1990s.
The investment message is spreading. Even Sunderland football team trot around the Stadium of light with “Invest in Africa” on their red and white striped shirts.
Untapped market
Africa has a population of a billion people with an average age of 20, as compared with 40 in the developing world. This gives
Africa a huge potential consumer market that has so far remained largely untapped. The continent has 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land and 30 percent of its minerals, including large amounts of platinum, gold and iron ore, and in recent years energy companies have found significant deposits of oil and gas.
Between 2001 and 2010, six of the fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa and today the region is growing at a rate of about six percent a year, says Mark Mobius, an emerging markets specialist at Templeton Africa Fund.
Versi explains how the continent will change:
“Urbanisation is a vital component in wealth creation as it tends to flatten out ethnic and regional differences, generates productive ideas and new skills, vastly increases demand (and supply) of goods and services and produces greater efficiencies of scale and productivity. UN Habitat estimates that 11 African cities will see population growth rates of over 50 percent from 2010-2025, a rate similar to that prevailing in China today.”
The task for journalists
There is a huge task here for journalists in monitoring how all this will work out in practice. Who makes the money? What are the social consequences? Who takes the power?
In West Africa recently with the Commonwealth Journalists Association and the Commonwealth Secretariat, I spoke to people who said they would sooner have their teeth removed without a pain killer that return to the fast developing Lagos, Nigeria.
The thought of 11 African cities growing at more than 50 percent or more is brain-damaging.
Congo contradictions
An article in Global (fourth quarter 2012) by the BBC’s, Humphrey Hawksley, spoke of the appalling contradiction of having eastern Congo generating billions of dollars of wealth every year while the region remains one of the poorest, most unstable places on earth.
‘Hear the growls of the real beast? The more it is ignored, the more we are in danger’
He writes: “If we are to take into account the use of child labour, poor safety conditions and low incomes, the emerging picture verifies the long-standing allegations of Western economies exploiting poor communities in the developing world. The price of gold has gone up five times over the past 10 years, whereas the miners’ wages have gone down.”
These are the stories the media must talk about. Otherwise, as we place a new slide under an old microscope – Africa not as the world’s most hopeless continent but Africa, the new field for investment and vast profits – we will miss the human consequences.
But it can be a thankless task, as Aidan Hartley, who covered the terrible Rwanda bloodbath explained in The Spectator (25 August, 2012):
“I finally returned to Rwanda to do business, not to cover a war. For decades I’ve worked as a hack and lived off the sniff of an oily rag. For far too long I wandered about getting hit by IEDs, shot at, infected with dysentery, forced to doorstep officials or listen to foreign NGO idiots in their 20s talking nonsense about Africa. No more. Forget it. It’s over. It’s time to join the gravy train.”
The real beast
Half a century ago, the popular British press’s obsession with fun and farce in Africa led to a serious neglect of the rise to power of men and women who appeared to be able to live reasonably happy and productive lives when – let’s say – the Central African Federation was launched in 1953.
Today, we need well-paid and full-time staffers in many different parts of Africa who can really tell us and the people and the politics, about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism (and why) the aspirations of ordinary, hidden people in nations with colossal wealth.
Now, as the world sees Africa through sterling and dollar tinted glasses, we need dedicated, experienced and intrepid reporters on a complicated, hard to grasp continent which is branded as the new tiger – still a paper one at the moment.
Put your ear to the ground. Hear the growls of the real beast? The more it is ignored, the more we are in danger.
Post published in: News