Liberian Observer (Monrovia)
Randolph Bell
29 June 2005
opinion
As reporting on Africa's disasters obscures its successes, Randolph Bell, Executive Director of the World Affairs Council of Greater Richmond and former Ambassador and Special Envoy at the Department of State, offers this commentary:
News reporting on Africa conveys a one-sided view of developments there. American media, especially cable TV and the consumer press, do a decreasingly thorough job of reporting international news and have been cutting their international news staff and correspondents. If that affects reporting on Europe and East Asia, just think what it does to portrayal of Africa. Often, the only things that make the cut are disasters like Darfur and outrages like Zimbabwe leader Mugabe.
There is, however, decidedly another Africa. It is a continent of economic growth, enterprise, and civil society, and it almost never makes it into the U.S. media.
Consider economics. The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation finds that Africa offers the highest rate of return on direct investment in the world. The Nigerian firm Databank invests ordinary Africans' money in the Nigerian, Ghanaian, Botswanan, and Kenyan stock markets. It has provided its investors a 60 percent annual rate of return for the past seven years. Botswana, with its A+ credit rating, has a per capita rate of government savings higher than almost every other country on earth, save only Singapore and a very small number of other unusually frugal countries. Economic growth rates in Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and Kenya are significantly higher than are growth rates in the developed world.
Consider politics. In Kenya, where corrupt dictator Daniel arap Moi lost power in 2002, the new government is writing a new constitution in close consultation with ordinary citizens. Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, a member of the elected cabinet, is determined that this effort should succeed. Kenyans are not alone in their sense of revulsion at the dictatorship, corruption, and brutal venality which descended on Africa following decolonization. President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria has joined his Kenyan, South African, and other colleagues in a determined effort to bring Africa out of the era of Idi Amin, Mobutu, and Bokassa. Ms. Maathai stresses the role of civil society in this effort and the importance of initiatives like her Green Belt Movement, which unite Africans in the restoration of their land, forests, and farms. She notes the importance of African solutions to even the severest of crises, including that in Darfur. President Obasanjo wants the African Union to provide a real solution for the strife-torn Sudanese province.
For Barclays Bank, driven out of South Africa during the apartheid era because of its cozy relationship with white supremicists, the politics and the economics have come together sufficiently that it is laying out $5.5 billion to purchase a 60 percent share of South Africa's Absa Group retail bank. Barclays will now emphasize black empowerment in its enterprises and hopes to extend the new network across the entire continent.
Whether these hopeful trends continue and flourish does indeed depend first and foremost on Africans. But if no one knows about them, then their prospects will be much dimmer. That will be the case particularly, and most importantly, in the matter of investment. What media coverage there is of Africa displays it as the home of endless suffering, death, strife, and corruption. And there is indeed much misery there. Interviews during reporting segments on disasters are almost invariably with Americans or Europeans describing the need for aid-rarely with the thousands of Africans devising African solutions.
Alongside the Africa of misery, there is also an Africa of stock markets, cell phones, high rises, and the Internet. Western media could do more to help it grow-and in the long run more for Africa-than can all the foreign aid and assistance programs combined, needful as those are. That they do not is a real tragedy of our age of news as entertainment.
About the Author: Ambassador Bell was formerly Special Envoy in the Bureau of European Affairs at the State Department.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2005 Liberian Observer. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
