Thursday, August 11, 2005
Africa should learn the Botswana message
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Africa should learn the Botswana message
A local reader, who, knowing of my interest in mystery fiction, asked whether a current series about a lady detective in Botswana was based on fact, prompted this discourse.
Anyone who picks up a copy of No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith, or one of its four sequels, in their bright yellow covers, is bound to be charmed by Mma Precious Ramotswe. her assistant Mma Makutsi who graduated from the Botswana Secretarial School with the unheard-of average of 97, and her husband Rra J.L.B. Matekone, owner of the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, who pines for the old days of uncomplicated cars for Botswana’s dusty roads. They all speak in a curiously stilted and formal English, direct translation from the native Setswanan by their creator, author Smith, the law professor who helped set up the Law School at the University of Botswana.
This is a different Africa, of dignified middle-class people who eke out an unsophisticated professional existence on the 1950s level of technology, of their homely problems and positive solutions that leave you with an upbeat feeling about survival of civilization in a complex techno world. Poor Third World countries can rise and survive, despite AIDS and corruption, with or without outside assistance.
Alexander. Smith, born in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, came back to Botswana, former British Bechuanaland Protectorate, to help. The county has a history entwined with that of its legendary founder, the late Sir Seretse Khana (1921-80), a hereditary chief who shocked his world by marrying a Scottish wife while at law school. His regent-uncle disowned him, the Brits, courting the South African Boers and other racist colonialists, exiled him in 1951. But the world opinion rose, Seretse returned, formed a democratic party and pressed for independence, which Botswana attained in 1966, with Seretse as the President, in charge until his death of pancreatic cancer in 1980. He fought off the violent independence seekers of South Africa and Rhodesia who wanted him involved, and built a national economy for the Bantus and the Bushmen of the Kalahari in a hostile environment, on the crossroads of Africa. Diamonds, Botswana’s natural resource, provided the stepping stone, ant Botswana now is a middle-income ($6.6K) country despite an adult lifespan of 37 years due to AIDS.
Why such a shocking carnage, in this now prosperous country, size of Texas, with a thin population of 1.5M? Where are the IMF, World Bank, the UN and the US with its AIDS program?
Let’s get the historical overview from economist Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard wunderkind of post-Soviet economies. In the 1950s the West started feeding the newly decolonized countries with development assistance, for humanitarian reasons as well as an antidote to the USSR’s Marxist propaganda, a mixed and confused effort. In the 1970s-‘80s the World Bank, IMF and regional development agencies, prompted by the US and the UK, reformatted the effort as a “structural adjustment” (or Washington Consensus) requiring that aid recipients adhere to specified market-oriented conditions, such as deregulation of domestic markets, enforcement of state budgets, privatizing of state-owned enterprises, and free access for foreign investment capital. The theory behind the actions promised private investment and successful economic development. In practice the underdeveloped recipients ran up huge debts, spent their income in debt service and sank deeply in distress, and in the 1990s the World Bank and IMF abandoned the structural adjustment practice in favor of a poverty-reduction strategy, China and India, not using the WB/IMF resources, pulled up by themselves, like Botswana, while the former USSR, exposed to the shock therapy of a reborn structural adjustment regime, suffered greatly. As to combating AIDS, there was much denial in the aid recipient nations, deep-set cultural obstacles, and lack of communications, understanding and of everything else that let the epidemic settle in.
Is there an answer? President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are in a dispute over one. Sachs has a technocratic solution, in End of Poverty, Economic Possibilities for Our Time, and his new book. It is a continuation of an UN-based donation program called Millennium Development Goals, with its objective to cut poverty in half now extended to 2025. Preliminary aims are to cut disease, build skills, and improve agriculture.
James Shikwati, an economist with the Kenya-based Region Economic Network, strenuously objects to the gifts, which discourage the African governments from building their countries’ own resources, and encourage the begging for aid, with the politicians getting rich as a side benefit. Booming population growth, with consequent depletion of resources, revolts and internecine warfare contribute to the trouble. The current disaster is Niger, with two million people starving, due to draughts and locust attacks on crops. African economies are strange, agricultural goods imported from neighbors incur an average 33% tariff (ridiculous, Sachs agrees), while European food is charged only 12%. Botswanans spend much of their income in policing the country’s borders, discouraging refugees from starving neighbor states, particularly Zimbabwe. The solution? A blend of Shikwati and Sachs, and less denial from the 53-member African Union.
Africa should learn the Botswana message
A local reader, who, knowing of my interest in mystery fiction, asked whether a current series about a lady detective in Botswana was based on fact, prompted this discourse.
Anyone who picks up a copy of No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith, or one of its four sequels, in their bright yellow covers, is bound to be charmed by Mma Precious Ramotswe. her assistant Mma Makutsi who graduated from the Botswana Secretarial School with the unheard-of average of 97, and her husband Rra J.L.B. Matekone, owner of the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, who pines for the old days of uncomplicated cars for Botswana’s dusty roads. They all speak in a curiously stilted and formal English, direct translation from the native Setswanan by their creator, author Smith, the law professor who helped set up the Law School at the University of Botswana.
This is a different Africa, of dignified middle-class people who eke out an unsophisticated professional existence on the 1950s level of technology, of their homely problems and positive solutions that leave you with an upbeat feeling about survival of civilization in a complex techno world. Poor Third World countries can rise and survive, despite AIDS and corruption, with or without outside assistance.
Alexander. Smith, born in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, came back to Botswana, former British Bechuanaland Protectorate, to help. The county has a history entwined with that of its legendary founder, the late Sir Seretse Khana (1921-80), a hereditary chief who shocked his world by marrying a Scottish wife while at law school. His regent-uncle disowned him, the Brits, courting the South African Boers and other racist colonialists, exiled him in 1951. But the world opinion rose, Seretse returned, formed a democratic party and pressed for independence, which Botswana attained in 1966, with Seretse as the President, in charge until his death of pancreatic cancer in 1980. He fought off the violent independence seekers of South Africa and Rhodesia who wanted him involved, and built a national economy for the Bantus and the Bushmen of the Kalahari in a hostile environment, on the crossroads of Africa. Diamonds, Botswana’s natural resource, provided the stepping stone, ant Botswana now is a middle-income ($6.6K) country despite an adult lifespan of 37 years due to AIDS.
Why such a shocking carnage, in this now prosperous country, size of Texas, with a thin population of 1.5M? Where are the IMF, World Bank, the UN and the US with its AIDS program?
Let’s get the historical overview from economist Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard wunderkind of post-Soviet economies. In the 1950s the West started feeding the newly decolonized countries with development assistance, for humanitarian reasons as well as an antidote to the USSR’s Marxist propaganda, a mixed and confused effort. In the 1970s-‘80s the World Bank, IMF and regional development agencies, prompted by the US and the UK, reformatted the effort as a “structural adjustment” (or Washington Consensus) requiring that aid recipients adhere to specified market-oriented conditions, such as deregulation of domestic markets, enforcement of state budgets, privatizing of state-owned enterprises, and free access for foreign investment capital. The theory behind the actions promised private investment and successful economic development. In practice the underdeveloped recipients ran up huge debts, spent their income in debt service and sank deeply in distress, and in the 1990s the World Bank and IMF abandoned the structural adjustment practice in favor of a poverty-reduction strategy, China and India, not using the WB/IMF resources, pulled up by themselves, like Botswana, while the former USSR, exposed to the shock therapy of a reborn structural adjustment regime, suffered greatly. As to combating AIDS, there was much denial in the aid recipient nations, deep-set cultural obstacles, and lack of communications, understanding and of everything else that let the epidemic settle in.
Is there an answer? President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are in a dispute over one. Sachs has a technocratic solution, in End of Poverty, Economic Possibilities for Our Time, and his new book. It is a continuation of an UN-based donation program called Millennium Development Goals, with its objective to cut poverty in half now extended to 2025. Preliminary aims are to cut disease, build skills, and improve agriculture.
James Shikwati, an economist with the Kenya-based Region Economic Network, strenuously objects to the gifts, which discourage the African governments from building their countries’ own resources, and encourage the begging for aid, with the politicians getting rich as a side benefit. Booming population growth, with consequent depletion of resources, revolts and internecine warfare contribute to the trouble. The current disaster is Niger, with two million people starving, due to draughts and locust attacks on crops. African economies are strange, agricultural goods imported from neighbors incur an average 33% tariff (ridiculous, Sachs agrees), while European food is charged only 12%. Botswanans spend much of their income in policing the country’s borders, discouraging refugees from starving neighbor states, particularly Zimbabwe. The solution? A blend of Shikwati and Sachs, and less denial from the 53-member African Union.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 5:26 AM 
