Who’s listening to Mo Ibrahim Foundation?

Britain’s Royal Geographical Society had a membership of businessmen, industrialists and traders who marvelled at traditions of Spanish travellers who slaughtered inhabitants of exotic lands in the Americas and brought back to Europe gold, silver in huge quantities. John Hawkins and his lot are accused of journeying to India and hacking gold bracelets from ankles […]

Britain’s Royal Geographical Society had a membership of businessmen, industrialists and traders who marvelled at traditions of Spanish travellers who slaughtered inhabitants of exotic lands in the Americas and brought back to Europe gold, silver in huge quantities. John Hawkins and his lot are accused of journeying to India and hacking gold bracelets from ankles of delicate women.
 Africa supported human-traffickers – like the political philosopher John Locke – who grew sugar on plantations in the Caribbean and for whom productive knowledge of other lands was the way to wealth. The oil giants Shell, Chevron, Total and Eni are today prospecting for oil deposits all across Africa.
The Royal Geographical Society offered travel to the River Gambia and its hinterland by Mungo Park soon after he earned a degree in medicine. His mission was to find which plants that grew in various soils. Of particular interest were lands supporting the cotton plant, since textile manufacturers in Manchester needed to replace cheap cotton they lost after the war of independence won by American colonies. Charles Darwin travelled on a ship as a young biologist to gather species of plants and creatures as potential sources of biochemical products for industries and scientists to turn into new manufactured products. Those who ruled over these products; how they ruled and their capacity for military resistance to conquest also became nutrition for the discipline of comparative political economy.
British colonial officials and the Royal Geographical Society did not support this tradition among their colonial subjects. The huge bank of plant species from all over the world built over the centuries in London has no equivalent in former colonies in Africa. The discipline of comparative political studies of African countries remains severely malnourished. The effort to build an East African Community and federation has not been as vibrant in academic research as in the wills of politicians. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has not been accompanied by a flourish in studies of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger or Benin in Nigeria’s universities and schools. That favour is returned by all member states.
Banks like Barclays, and mining giants like Anglo-American and de Beers – with big colonial footprints ranging from South Africa to Ghana – have been strangely inactive in supporting comparative political economy studies across Africa. New adventurous banks like Zenith, Oceanic, United Bank for Africa and Stanbic have not reached out to build capacity for trans-Africa research in Africa’s universities. The promise which magazines like Africa, Afriscope, New Africa, West Africa, and African Guardian waved to their readers in the 1970s and 1980s withered under sand dunes of early success and failure to keep quality staff.
Itinerary traders remain unmatched. Traders use bicycles to carry beans and chicken from Malawi to markets in Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Uganda’s customs officers were so fascinated by the exotic car being used by a team of Senegalese and Malians to carry a coffin from Zaire (now Congo DR) into Uganda – en route to Kenya – that they insisted on paying their respects to the dead person. On opening the fine linen draped on the deceased, they saw long stitches across the stomach. Beyond the stitches were diamonds and gold nuggets.  That piece of oral history contaminated the business of giving visas to visitors from Mali and Senegal at airports.
It is in this area of blindness that the Mo Ibrahim Foundations stands out as bars of sunlight entering through a crack in a hut, as Angola’s poet president, Agustinho Neto, put it in a poem about the value of political education for the masses of Angolans. The Foundation’s most ambitious work of conducting research on governance in each African country, each year, from 2000 to 2012, is a window for looking at Africa with comparative eyes.
 Their report on the performance of governments on ‘’Sustainable Economic Opportunity’’ in the ECOWAS region is compared among the individual member states; and with states in southern Africa. A quick rating shows that in southern Africa 3 states are among the top ten – with  Botswana in second place; Namibia in 9th place, and South Africa in 5th place among all African countries. In ECOWAS the top flyers are Gambia in 11the place, Senegal in 12th, Ghana in 13th and Burkina Faso in 14th place. The bottom has Guinea-Bissau in 48th place; Guinea in 45th and Togo in 43rd. Niger at 31st spot touches the tape before Nigeria at 34th ranking.
The categories used in the study are fascinating. The sector on ‘’business environment’’, for example, include: ‘’investment climate for rural businesses’’, and ‘’rural financial services’’. Considering the resistance Nigeria’s governor of the Central Bank has met in getting commercial banks to lend to rural communities huge chunks of money he has allocated to that sector, it is little wonder Nigeria scores low marks there. Due to the ‘’brain drain’’ of talented researchers to Southern Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and North America, it is not surprising that ‘’agricultural research and extension services’’ would also yield low scores. A senior staff in the Federal Ministry of Agriculture told me as far back as 1997 that Extension Staff could not afford bicycles, let alone tires for motor cycles, for them to take inputs to villages. Also, a low culture of citizens paying taxes and officials translating tax funds into productive investments earns low scores.
The report finds inc-reased performance in this category in all African countries; even though the scores are the lowest among all the four items researched. It is worth asking if Africa’s media are helping the public to know and use the report for interrogating governance.