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The Black Middle Class: fact or fiction?
Friday, 11 May 2007


"The Black Middle Class is a mirage,” a caller emphatically announced as I tuned into a radio talk show recently. What was being discussed was BusinessMap’s recent research report BEE 2007 - Empowerment and its Critics. The report analyses the number of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) equity deals that have taken place over the past year. However the interview didn't really focus on this aspect, but rather around whether a significant Black Middle Class was emerging in South Africa.

As many callers phoned in to say it was a mirage, as phoned in to say it was a reality.

Clearly it would be inappropriate to use as the measure the number of BEE deals brokered, but are there other measures that give real evidence of this emerging group of people?

Let's begin by agreeing that the middle-class is generally accepted as Living Standards Measures (LSM’s) 7, 8 & 9, families that earn between R6,880 and R12,647 per month. LSM’s are researched annually by the South African Advertising Research Foundation and range from Level 1 to Level 10 with Level 1 and 2 being extreme poverty, Level 3 being poor, Level 4,5 & 6 being lower income, Level 7, 8 & 9 being middle income and Level 10 being upper income.

The chart below was produced by the South African Advertising Research Foundation and illustrates how the demographics of families residing at each level have changed between 1994 and 2006.



The rich have become richer and the poor, poorer,” another caller announced as I listened further on the radio talk show. But the table above tells a different story. Yes, the richer have become richer, but the poor have not become poorer. On the contrary, it is estimated that some 500,000 families have moved out of LSM’s 1, 2 & 3 in to LSM’s 4, 5 & 6 and that some 400,000 families have moved out of LSM’s 4, 5 & 6 into LSM’s 7, 8 & 9. What has happened though is that the rich have become richer faster than the poor have become less poor. This was covered recently in the Sunday Times in a report which stated that South Africa is one of the most upwardly mobile societies in the world!

Is there evidence of this? Absolutely. Car sales in South Africa have gone from 365,000 new units in 2003 to 730,000 new units sold last year (2,000 new cars on our roads each day!). What’s more, eighty percent of the buyers were black. The sale of home appliances is also exploding and our property price improvement tops the global rankings. While there is a reasonable supply of houses in the R2m plus bracket at the top end, and in the R50 000 to R400 000 bracket at the bottom end, there is a chronic shortage of mid-priced houses - further evidence of a growing middle class. Once again, most of these aspirant owners are black. There are an estimated 23 million cell phone users in the country. The tax net has grown from 2.3 million taxpayers in 1994 to nearly 7 million today, and this is expected to grow to 10,5 million by 2010. Do the maths - the numbers indicate a growing middle class!

Need further evidence? Read the article in the FM entitled Soweto rising which tells us that there has been a huge economic turnaround in Soweto, most evident in the dramatic growth in retail space. Shopping malls are popping up everywhere, with more planned. Until about five years ago, infrastructural development and private investment was considered too risky. This perception changed when studies showed that the living standards of many blacks were moving up to the “middle class level”. Various malls around Soweto are now providing shopping and entertainment previously only available in the leafy suburbs.

Our economy is now growing at around 5%, whereas our population is predicted to stabilise at between 45m and 48m people over the next 20 years. (Our population is growing at less than 1% per annum, not because of HIV/Aids - although that has an influence - but mostly because of rapid urbanisation and improved education opportunities). Our economy is growing five times faster than our population and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what the implications are. Most economists feel that our economic prospects will remain good for the next 20 years!

Clearly we still have a massive problem in respect of poverty in South Africa with at least 20% of our population languishing in LSM levels 1,2 & 3, but 10 years ago that number was approximately 40%. I have written much about poverty previously and I certainly do not underestimate the challenge that this presents. Having said that, the fact that the government spends R80bn a year on social grants, benefiting approximately 11 million adults and children “at the bottom of the pile” (surprisingly this is not taking into account when poverty levels are measured) must be factored into the "poverty debate", and “measure” for that matter.

Is a middle-class important in our fledgling democracy? Well, what is happening in South Africa, unlike many other African countries is that economic opportunity, as opposed to political connectedness, is increasingly being realised as an opportunity for prosperity. It is often said that in developing countries, politics drives economics, whereas in developed countries, the opposite holds true. Obviously, the greater the size of the middle-class, the more this pendulum will shift in favour of the latter.

It goes without saying that middle-class people have a lifestyle they wish to protect against the uncertainties of boom/ bust economic practice, rampant inflation and deteriorating currency valuation. Hopefully they will use their vote to ensure this.

The middle-class has a vested interest in the future, the future of their children, of schooling, of health institutions, of infrastructure, of political stability and of economic well-being. This creates upward pressure on delivery; better shops, higher quality entertainment, working infrastructure, good schools, safe amenities, and professional healthcare.

THIS IS WHERE JOBS FOR THE “LOST GENERATION” ARE CREATED.

The South African economy is increasingly becoming service oriented, only 12% of GDP is contributed to by the mining sector, and 20% of GDP by manufacturing. A substantial 68% of GDP is therefore contributed to by the services sector.

What kind of people are employed there? Skilled professionals.

What group of people is unemployed in South Africa? Largely unskilled people with a poor education, the "lost generation" as they are often referred to. How will they be employed? By middle-class people who have a requirement for the services they can offer as waiters, shop assistants, domestic helpers, gardeners, cleaners, security guards etc. (These may be considered to be ordinary jobs, but they do represent the first rung on the ladder out of the poverty trap and they do give the incumbents a real chance to give their children a chance. For more on this, read Jeffrey Sachs’ book The End of Poverty.)

It is often said that for every skilled person entering the economy between four and six unskilled jobs are created. That is why the growth of a middle-class is so important.

Various estimates indicate that our economy currently has a million jobs unfilled. (Wake up Home Affairs, go away those naysayers who argue that whites can't get jobs!). Imagine if these jobs could be filled in the next five years. Imagine how that would dent unemployment!

Is there a growing middle-class? Absolutely.

Is it the solution to poverty and unemployment? Only partially.

Is it good for our country? Fundamentally.

Will it continue to grow? Sure, provided we can produce the skills and maintain economic growth levels and between

between 4% and 6%.

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http://www.sagoodnews.co.za/newsletter_archive/the_black_middle_class_fact_or_fiction__2.html


SA's big spenders drive economic growth

Wednesday, 07 November 2007
Over the past seven years South Africa’s black population has steadily risen in high income earning brackets
and has also become South Africa’s biggest spenders, aMarket Research (BMR).according to the University of South Africa’s Bureau of
The BMR’s integrated model of the South African population, labour market and income and expenditure
revealed that the white population still remains the wealthiest in the country. But the survey also shows some
parity between black and white income earners particularly in the R100K - R300K bracket. Blacks account for
1.4 million of this group and whites, 1.3 million. Project Leader Professor Carl van Aardt highlights this as an
indication of dramatic economic growth in the black population.
The report also shows that the black population leads the pack in household expenditure, spending R550

billion this year, followed by whites whose expenditure amounted to R506 billion
Van Aardt believes that the BMR’s investigation into income and expenditure is a more realistic assessment of
the affluence of South African consumers, the sophistication of the markets and a more comprehensive
estimate of the actual size of the country’s GDP and thus allowing for more accurate future projections.
We can expect South Africa’s current growth rate at 4.5% to sustain itself over the medium term due to the fact
for more accurate future projections.


“We can expect South Africa’s current growth rate at 4.5% to sustain itself over the medium term due to the fact
South Africa is a consumption driven economy and black consumers will keep growing,” says van Aardt.
Medium to long term growth will be driven by government capital expenditure as we progress towards the 2010
World Cup, explains van Aardt.
Van Aardt confidently states that South Africa is not headed in the direction of Zimbabwe. “The Zimbabwean
economy is dependant on basic commodities, agriculture and mining while the South African economy is very
diversified. Even if one sector took a knock there would be other factors in place to hold our economy together.”
Though we face positive prospects, van Aardt warns that some of South Africa’s biggest problems could
threaten economic growth. Both foreign portfolio and direct investment are vulnerable to crime. A loss in these

foreign investments could see South Africa experience a big “economic hiccup”.
The Human Sciences Research Council’s HIV Prevalence Report (2002 and 2005) showed that infections are
on the rise amongst the affluent and skilled. This is a major threat to the economy.

Though the number of historically disadvantaged South Africans moving into higher earning brackets is on the
increase, “the number of people in poverty has stagnated. We have people trapped in poverty,” says Van Aardt.
He attributes this to the skills shortage in South Africa and the mismatch between skills available and skills
required.

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Wednesday, 05 March 2008
Economic freedom in South Africa is considered to be higher than that of the world average, according to

Heritage Foundation’s 2008 Index of Economic Freedom.
With a score of 63.2%, South Africa’s levels of economic freedom are above the world average of 60.3%. South
Africa earned a global ranking of 57, making it the fourth freest economy of the 40 African countries that were
surveyed. The Africa rankings were topped by Mauritius (18), Botswana (36) and Uganda (52).
South Africa ranked higher than emerging market competitors Brazil (101), India (115), China (126) and Russia
134).

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Blacks flourishing
SOWETO, South Africa - Black South Africans are reaping the benefits of a growing economy,
and at the heart of it is Soweto, where Nelson Mandela presided over the gala opening of a
multimillion-dollar mall yesterday. The sprawling township that was the center of the anti-apartheid
struggle is being transformed, with new houses, new parks and paved roads.

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The current government has ruled out nationalization for now, but the country's powerful unions are working to keep the issue alive. In April, Zwelinzima Vavi, head of Cosatu, said the state should carry out strategic nationalization as a means to "drive the radical economic shift" to alleviate poverty. A rival union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, has said that if mining companies such as Anglo American Platinum want to close mines, the government should take control of them.

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The government already owns the rights to the country's minerals—mining companies pay royalties to the government—but that hasn't pacified the unions and other proponents of nationalization. There is a state-owned mining company, which has one coal mine under development.

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Originally posted by Firewall:
[qb] An Obituary:
The long walk is over
Dec 5th 2013, 22:10 by The Economist


The man who freed South Africa from apartheid died on December 5th, aged 95. We assess his claim to greatness


WHO was the greatest of the statesmen of the 20th century? Discard the mass murderers such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong; set aside the autocratic nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser and the more admirable but probably less influential anti-communists like Vaclav Havel; then winnow the list to half a dozen names. On it would perhaps be Mohandas Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Jack Kennedy and Nelson Mandela. For many people, in many lands, the most inspirational of these would be the last, who died on December 5th, aged 95.

Mr Mandela’s heroic status is a phenomenon. For years his fame was largely confined to his own country, South Africa. He did not become widely known abroad until his first trial, for high treason, ended in 1961. Though acquitted, he remained free for little more than a year before being convicted on sabotage charges at the Rivonia trial, which began in 1963. During his long subsequent confinement, more than 17 years of which were spent on Robben Island, a wind-scorched Alcatraz off the Cape coast, little was heard of Mr Mandela and nothing was seen of him. When he emerged from captivity on February 11th 1990, no contemporary photograph of him had been published since 1964; the world had been able only to wonder what he looked like.

He was by then 71 years old, and barely ten years of semi-active politics remained to him. Nonetheless, more than any other single being, he helped during that decade to secure a conciliatory and mostly peaceful end to apartheid, one of the great abominations of the age, and an infinitely more hopeful start to a democratic South Africa than even the most quixotic could have imagined 20 years earlier.

A pattern of paradox

That someone who had been in enforced obscurity for so long could exercise such influence suggests a remarkable personality. Personality alone does not, however, explain the depth of the outpourings of affection he met on his later travels, whether touring Africa, greeting 75,000 fans in a London stadium or sweeping down Broadway in a motorcade festooned by more ticker tape, it was said, than had ever fluttered onto a New York street before.

Mr Mandela was a celebrity, and this is an age that sets a high value on any kind of fame. When every pop star is “awesome”, reality television makes idols out of oafs and “iconic” is so freely applied that it has become meaningless, it would be absurd not to see in the lionisation of Mr Mandela some of the veneration that came to attend Princess Diana: the world needs heroes, or heroines, and will not always choose them wisely. In Mr Mandela, though, the need for a hero was met by the real thing.

Like most great men, even apparently simple ones, Mr Mandela was complex and often contradictory. He had granite determination: without it, he would have left prison years earlier, just by agreeing to renounce violence or make some other concession. Yet he was by nature a compromiser and a conciliator. In the 1950s he would often argue for restraint against more headstrong colleagues, and throughout most of his life he fought to keep his movement, the African National Congress (ANC), non-racial, though at times he had reservations about Indians and much stronger feelings about whites. When he came to accept the principle of armed struggle, his strategy was not to seize power by force but rather to make the government negotiate. And when, in turn, the government eventually yielded, Mr Mandela showed neither bitterness nor vindictiveness, but an astonishing capacity for forgiveness and conciliation.

He was a guerrilla, the commander-in-chief of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which, as the “Spear of the Nation”, was supposed—however implausibly—to lead an armed insurgency, organise an invasion by sea and bring the government to its knees. It was this commitment to armed struggle that made Margaret Thatcher shun the ANC and dismiss it as “a typical terrorist organisation”. But that was always too simple a view. Chief Albert Luthuli, the president of the ANC from 1952 to 1967, though not a pacifist, was a staunch believer in non-violent resistance, as at the outset was Mr Mandela.

Mr Mandela changed his mind only reluctantly, insisting at first on sabotage that would involve no casualties (liberation without bloodshed) rather than direct attacks on people. When he did come round to guerrilla warfare, it was partly because he concluded that the government’s increasing repression left no other way to bring about change (“The attacks of the wild beast cannot be averted with only bare hands”), partly because he feared that the ANC would lose out to more militant rivals, notably the exclusively black Pan Africanist Congress.

His views about communism were less evolutionary. In the 1950s he had pictures of Lenin and Stalin on the walls of his home in the Johannesburg township of Orlando. He was influenced by Marx and made common cause with the Communist Party of South Africa; his writings then were full of sub-Marxist drivel (I'd actually love to see evidence of this. Madiba too precocious to write drivel). And he continued to the end to hold in deep affection such people as Joe Slovo, the chairman of the party, who was to him “dear comrade, dear brother, dear friend”, but to his opponents the “KGB general”.

Mr Mandela insisted he was not a communist, though. He saw the ANC’s bond with the communists as a link with the only group that would treat Africans as equals and as a natural alliance with his enemies’ enemy. He showed no desire for Soviet models, often speaking admiringly of British institutions, even to the point of calling the British Parliament “the most democratic institution in the world”. Moreover, he was consistent both in the 1950s, when the ANC was debating its objectives, and 20 years later, when the aims of the “liberation movement” were under discussion, in holding that the movement’s great statement of principles, the Freedom Charter adopted in 1956, was not a commitment to socialism but “a step towards bourgeois democracy”.

A more blatant conflict of principles and practice could be seen at the end of Mr Mandela’s life in his attitude to countries like Cuba, Libya and Syria. For years he had fought to place human rights at the centre of the ANC’s political philosophy, and as president he even sought to define his country’s national interest to include “the happiness of others”. With characteristic courage, he openly criticised Sani Abacha, a brutal and egregiously corrupt dictator of Nigeria in the 1990s, thus breaking the lamentable code that no African head of government criticises another African head of government. But would he likewise condemn Fidel Castro or Muammar Qaddafi? No. These men had long supported the anti-apartheid cause and, for Mr Mandela, gratitude to loyal friends trumped all other considerations. The Americans were appalled.

This episode involved a straightforward clash of principles, in which one triumphed: “To change Mandela’s mind about a friend is virtually impossible,” said Ahmed Kathrada, one of the seven others sentenced to life imprisonment with him at the Rivonia trial. Other apparently out-of-character actions were more easily explained by Mr Mandela’s general adaptability, which may have been forced upon him by his separation from his family as a child. At first he was looked after mainly by his mother and then, after the age of ten, when his father died, by the regent of the Thembu, one of a dozen Xhosa-speaking groups, who accepted him as a ward. If this disturbed upbringing bred a capacity for accommodating to events, it often served him well, but it sometimes made his behaviour hard to predict.

Mr Mandela was, for example, a patrician, almost aloof young man. Some of his colleagues considered him remote, even authoritarian, with a strong sense of proper behaviour. But that did not mean he was conservative or socially stuck in the mud. It was Mandela who, to the dismay of some of his fellow prisoners, was prepared to regard tolerantly the angry young members of the Black Consciousness Movement when they started arriving on Robben Island in the mid-1970s, preaching a gospel of black exclusiveness. Later, when the townships were in turmoil, he was to be consistently conciliatory towards discontented youth.

Some of his own children might not have agreed, or perhaps they would have said that his efforts to understand other people’s children were an acknowledgment of his failures with his own. For the contradictions and paradoxes in his views and politics were matched in his character, and nowhere was this more evident than in his relations with his family.

His first son, Thembi, had become estranged from his father several years before his death in a car crash in 1969 (a daughter had died at nine months in 1948). Thembi had sided with his mother, Evelyn, when Mr Mandela divorced her in 1958 after a marriage of 14 fairly unhappy years. His brother, Makgatho, failed to live up to his father’s expectations and moved away; he died of AIDS in 2005. Maki, Evelyn’s surviving daughter, remained on better terms but also felt neglected.

Trouble and strife

Matrimony proved just as difficult as fatherhood. At the age of 22 he had run away to Johannesburg to escape a marriage arranged for him by his guardian, the Thembu regent. Three years later, in 1944, he would marry Evelyn, the first cousin of his lifelong friend Walter Sisulu. A nurse, she bore him four children, but was drawn more to religion than politics, and politics was by then his all-absorbing concern.

Winnie, his second wife, whom he married in 1958, came to share his political cause, but from the first realised that “he belongs to them”, the public. This was a complaint of the children too, as Mr Mandela himself confessed. He was, one told him, “a father to all our people, but you have never had time to be a father to me.”

Despite his devotion to the courageous Winnie—in his 1994 autobiography he would publish for the first time some of the poignant letters he had written to her from Robben Island—the second marriage also failed. Winnie suffered almost all the blows that apartheid had in its arsenal: banishment, imprisonment, remorseless harassment. But suffering did not ennoble her: just the opposite, and in the end she did her utmost to humiliate her husband. He was wounded, but also guilt-ridden, conscious of his failings with his wives and his children. Not until he married a wary Graça Machel, widow of Mozambique’s first president, on his 80th birthday did Mr Mandela find enduring wedded fulfilment.

In love, at least, the private man was the very opposite of the public. Mr Mandela inspired affection among millions he had never met and, among those he had, few failed to remark on his extraordinary ability to empathise and in return command respect. Most striking among these, perhaps, were his political opponents, especially Afrikaners, the descendants mainly of the country’s early Dutch settlers.

One of the first was P.J. Bosch, the prosecutor at his 1962 trial (for leaving the country illegally and incitement to strike), who before his sentencing asked to see him alone, shook his hand and wished him well. That was not exceptional. Throughout his career, he would be sharing his food with his police escort (after arrest in 1962), helping warders with their essays (also 1962), and earning the respect of their Robben Island counterparts by speaking to them in Afrikaans, which he studied assiduously. Later, summoned from prison to take tea with President P. W. Botha, he would show that he could charm even one whose defence of white supremacy had earned him the name of “the crocodile”. And then, when he was at last released, came the grand gestures of reconciliation: the honouring of the Boer-war guerrilla, Daniel Theron, as an Afrikaner freedom-fighter; the donning of a Springbok rugby shirt, hitherto a symbol to blacks chiefly of white nationalism; and the visit to Betsie Verwoerd, widow of Hendrik, the uncompromising architect of apartheid.

Some manifestations of empathy were harder for him to make. When he came out of jail the subject of sex was awkward for him. Whether that was because he had been behind bars for most of the 1960s sexual revolution, or because the many years of isolation had made him unused to female company, or because some element of reserve had remained in his character since childhood, is not clear. But he plainly found it difficult to overcome, most seriously, by his own admission, in his reluctance as president to take up the issue of AIDS. Eventually, he did so, however, openly siding in 2002 with the campaigners who were fighting for wider provision of drugs in the face of President Thabo Mbeki’s cranky resistance. A lesser man might have chosen to stay silent.

Modesty, humility, vanity

Mr Mandela startled ANC colleagues when, at 33, he announced that he looked forward to becoming South Africa’s first black president. Yet he did not expect rewards; even when he was a figure of world renown he was modest, and seldom took his authority for granted. Time and again in jail he would refuse privileges if they were offered to him but not to other prisoners. He complained, for instance, about having to wear shorts, one of the ways in which the government humiliated and emasculated black prisoners, but rejected the long trousers he was then given—until two years later when the authorities agreed to let his colleagues wear them too.

He was proud, it is true, to be a member of a royal family, as a descendant of Ngubengcuka, one of the Thembu kings from whom he took the traditional name, Madiba. Yet he disdained to behave like some African “big men”, always being embarrassed on Robben Island that he received more visits than other prisoners, one of whom saw only three visitors in 15 years. As a free man in the 1990s, he chose to live in suburban comfort rather than palatial luxury in Johannesburg, and in the holidays returned to Qunu, where he had spent the happiest days of his childhood, to build a house based on the design of his quarters in the Victor Verster prison that had held him during his final years of captivity. He encouraged no cult of personality. Grandiose museums, reverential monuments and statues were alien to him.

But flash suits, white silk scarves and a physical-fitness regimen at least partly designed to maintain a boxer’s muscular physique were not. He was no stranger to vanity, and would make good use of his appearance. In his youth, his looks and smart suits had done him no harm among female admirers. He was then considered more at ease with women than with men. Later, when he donned a kaross, a traditional Xhosa leopard-skin cloak, to appear in court, he knew it would “emphasise the symbolism that I was a black African walking into a white man’s court.” This proved electrifying.

It suited the ANC to make a messiah, and if necessary a myth, out of Mr Mandela, first to galvanise the masses at home, then to keep spirits up during the long years of repression, military impotence and political hopelessness. It could have ended badly. The mythic figure whose defiance so captured the public imagination—Prisoner 466/64 on Robben Island—could have turned out to be a broken man or a paper hero. Instead, he proved to be a remarkably effective politician.

Mr Mandela made political mistakes. The decision to abandon non-violence lost the ANC some support abroad, put no real military pressure on the government and, most seriously, diverted the movement’s energies from the task of organisation at home, which was essential if strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience were to be effective. Mr Mandela, who had set so much store by strengthening the ANC, a small and weak organisation when he joined it, might have foreseen that.

But without him the transition to majority rule would almost certainly have been a bloody shambles. First, he decided in 1985 to ask for a meeting with the minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, who had become interested in his case. Mr Mandela did this without telling his colleagues, let alone seeking their approval, since he knew it would not have been given. But, as he later explained, “There are times when a leader must move ahead of his flock.” He then played a vital role in ensuring compromise during the negotiations that preceded the constitutional settlement of 1993-94 and the election that followed.

He alone could sway opinion for or against the acceptance of agreements, which was crucial in the case of the constitution, greeted by many ANC supporters with disappointment. He alone could assuage the fury of the crowds after Chris Hani, a popular ANC hero, was murdered by a right-wing Polish immigrant. He was also central in securing the support of General Constand Viljoen and thus the Afrikaner far right. Later he was equally influential in the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when a different man who had been through the same experiences might have been calling for war-crimes tribunals.

In place of retribution

Mr Mandela did not single-handedly end apartheid. The collapse of communism, yoked to African nationalism by white opponents, played a part; so did international sanctions, domestic economic pressures, non-ANC internal resistance and the person of F.W. de Klerk, president from 1989 to 1994, whom Mr Mandela did not treat altogether well. But Mr Mandela’s symbolic role was hard to exaggerate.

His greater achievement, though, was to see the need for reconciliation, to forswear retribution and then to act as midwife to a new, democratic South Africa built on the rule of law. This was something only he could do. He gave hope to millions of Africans and inspired millions of others elsewhere, but if his successors in government have been less admirable, and if his example has not been followed in countries like Zimbabwe, that should not be surprising. Heroic though he was, he did not have the messianic powers some attributed to him, nor could others be expected to match his capacity to hold high principles, to live by them and to use his moral stature to such effect. Circumstances, after all, could hardly suit everyone so well. Hard though much of his life had been, Mr Mandela lived long enough to see his work through. That gave him his great achievement, and the story of his long walk to freedom a happy ending. And the modern world loves a happy hero even more than a tragic one.

Correction: Chris Hani was murdered by a Pole, not an Afrikaner as we originally wrote. This was corrected on December 9th.

Long Walk is Over
http://www.economist.com/blogs/baobab/2013/12/nelson-mandela

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Originally posted by Firewall:
[qb] I go this info from another website

Nyumba-

The first beneficiaries of the bad image of Africa portrayed in the medias are NGOs

[QUOTE]


something like a month ago I saw a news about Nigeria on TV, they transmitted images of

Darfour
Ethiopian famine
some donkeys in a West African region

as the natural images to be associated with a news story from Nigeria.

And who benefits from such ignorance?

the NGOs

how can I say this? We absolutely need them: they are westerners, they are trained, they are good-hearted people...

the reality is different:

- ONU FOOD is rotten
- NGO financed schools are PRIVATE and nevertheless they give ONU FOOD to students
- most of them simply build a CHURCH and take 20 photos of African children, then they print a calendar and sell it in western countries earning 200'000

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Why NGOs prefer bad news

By: Karen Rothmyer
And now for some good news out of Africa. Poverty rates throughout the continent have been falling steadily and much faster than previously thought, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. The death rate of children under five years of age is dropping, with “clear evidence of accelerating rates of decline,” according to The Lancet. Perhaps most encouragingly, Africa is “among the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions,” according to the McKinsey Quarterly.


Yet US journalism continues to portray a continent of unending horrors. Last June, for example, Time magazine published graphic pictures of a naked woman from Sierra Leone dying in childbirth. Not long after, CNN did a story about two young Kenyan boys whose family is so poor they are forced to work delivering goats to a slaughterhouse for less than a penny per goat. Reinforcing the sense of economic misery, between May and September 2010 the ten most-read US newspapers and magazines carried 245 articles mentioning poverty in Africa, but only five mentioning gross domestic product growth.


Reporters’ attraction to certain kinds of Africa stories has a lot to do with the frames of reference they arrive with. Nineteenth century New York Herald correspondent Henry M. Stanley wrote that he was prepared to find Zanzibar “populated by ignorant blacks, with great thick lips, whose general appearance might be compared to Du Chaillu’s gorillas.” Since the Biafran War, a cause célèbre in the West, helped give rise in the late 1960s to the new field of human rights, Western reporters have closely tracked issues like traditional female circumcision. In the 1980s, a famine in Ethiopia that, in fact, had as much to do with politics as with drought, set a pattern of stories about “starving Africans” that not only hasn’t been abandoned, but continues to grow: according to a 2004 study done by Steven S. Ross, then a Columbia journalism professor, between 1998 and 2002 the number of stories about famine in Africa tripled. In Kenya, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s and where I returned to live four years ago, The New York Times description of post-election violence in 2007 as a manifestation of “atavistic” tribalism carried echoes of Stanley and other early Western visitors.


But the main reason for the continued dominance of such negative stereotypes, I have come to believe, may well be the influence of Western-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international aid groups like United Nations agencies. These organizations understandably tend to focus not on what has been accomplished but on convincing people how much remains to be done. As a practical matter, they also need to attract funding. Together, these pressures create incentives to present as gloomy a picture of Africa as possible in order to keep attention and money flowing, and to enlist journalists in disseminating that picture.


Africans themselves readily concede that there continues to be terrible conflict and human suffering on the continent. But what’s lacking, say media observers like Sunny Bindra, a Kenyan management consultant, is context and breadth of coverage so that outsiders can see the continent whole—its potential and successes along with its very real challenges. “There are famines; they’re not made up,” Bindra says. “There are arrogant leaders. But most of the journalism that’s done doesn’t challenge anyone’s thinking.”


Over the past thirty years, NGOs have come to play an increasingly important role in aid to Africa. A major reason is that Western donors, worried about government corruption, have channelled more funds through them. In the mid-1970s, less than half a dozen NGOs (like the Red Cross or CARE) might operate in a typical African country, according to Nicolas van de Walle, a professor of government at Cornell, but now the same country will likely have 250.


This explosive NGO growth means increasing competition for funds. And according to the head of a large US-based NGO in Nairobi, “When you’re fundraising you have to prove there is a need. Children starving, mothers dying. If you’re not negative enough, you won’t get funding.” So fierce is the competition that many NGOs don’t want to hear good news. An official of an organization that provides data on Somalia’s food situation says that after reporting a bumper harvest last year, “I was told by several NGOs and UN agencies that the report was too positive.”
Rasna Warah, a Kenyan who worked for UN-Habitat before leaving to pursue a writing career, says that exaggerations of need were not uncommon among aid officials she encountered. “They wanted journalists to say ‘Wow.’ They want them to quote your report,” she says. “That means more money for the next report. It’s really as cynical as that.”


Western journalists, for their part, tend to be far too trusting of aid officials, according to veteran Dutch correspondent Linda Polman. In her book The Crisis Caravan, she cites as one example the willingness of journalists to be guided around NGO-run refugee camps without asking tough questions about possible corruption or the need for such facilities. She writes, “Aid organizations are businesses dressed up like Mother Teresa, but that’s not how reporters see them.”
Pushed and pulled by slashed budgets and increased demands, journalists are growing increasingly reliant on aid groups. Sometimes that involves not just information or a seat on a supply plane, but deep involvement in the entire journalistic process.


In an online essay written in 2009, Kimberly Abbott of the International Crisis Group discussed a 2005 Nightline program on Uganda that her NGO helped to produce and fund. It was hosted by actor Don Cheadle, the star of Hotel Rwanda. Nightline’s Ted Koppel explained in his introduction, as retold by Abbott: “Cheadle wanted his wife and daughters to get a sense of the kind of suffering that is so widespread in Africa. The International Crisis Group wanted publicity for what is happening in Uganda. And we, to put it bluntly, get to bring you a riveting story at a greatly reduced expense.” According to Abbott, “versions of such partnerships are happening now in print and broadcast newsrooms across the country, though many are reluctant to discuss them too openly.”
Daniel Dickinson, a former BBC reporter who is now a communications officer for the European Union in Nairobi, has seen the impact of technology and economics on reporting on Africa first-hand. “The big difference in the past five to ten years is the expansion of the Internet,” he says. “Journalists have got to feed these animals. Add to that the financial crash, and more and more internationals are taking the content we offer them.”


Ben Parker, co-founder and head of IRIN, a news agency that is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, admires Dickinson’s success. “He does stories and they’re picked up whole,” Parker says. IRIN itself can point to many similar successes in finding takers for its stories on aid projects. “The Western media won’t reprint us verbatim,” he says. “But some plagiarize.”
Lauren Gelfand, a correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly who is based in Nairobi, says most reporters she knows string for three or four news organizations to make ends meet, and can’t afford to do time-consuming stories. She saw the effect when she took a year off from journalism to work for Oxfam. “If reporters were going to cover a development story it had to be easy,” remembers Gelfand, noting that the simplest sell was a celebrity visit to an aid project.


Gelfand says that her Oxfam experience helped her to understand just how much attention ngos put on getting their story told. “All the talking points are carefully worked out…. It’s a huge bureaucracy and there are as many levels of control as in any government,” she says of Oxfam, adding that many NGOs are reluctant to cooperate with media unless they know they’ll be shown in a positive light.


To be fair to the NGOs, Gelfand says, “It’s easier to sell a famine than to effect real, common-sense policy change.” And, she says, she continues to believe that most aid workers do what they do because they want to make a difference. Nonetheless, “A lot of what Oxfam does is to sustain Oxfam.”


Stories featuring aid projects often rely on dubious numbers provided by the organizations. Take Kibera, a poor neighborhood in Nairobi. A Nexis search of major world publications found Kibera described as the “biggest” or “largest” slum in Africa at least thirty-four times in 2004; in the first ten months of 2010 the claim appeared eighty-three times. Many of those stories focused on the work of one of the estimated 6,000 or more local and international NGOs working there, and cited population figures that ranged as high as one million residents. Recently, however, the results of Kenya’s 2009 census were released: according to the official tally, Kibera has just 194,269 residents. In 2010, Rasna Warah wrote in the Daily Nation, a Kenyan paper, that while working for the Worldwatch Institute, an NGO, she had published inflated population estimates using UN-Habitat data, despite knowing there was no consensus on the numbers among her former colleagues at the organization. Sometime after 2004, she wrote, population estimates for Kibera started to rise, and “Before we knew it, the figure spread like a virus.” She added, “The inflated figures were not challenged, perhaps because they were useful to various actors…. They were particularly useful to NGOs, which used them to ‘shock’ charities and other do-gooders into donating more money to their projects in Kibera.”Questionable figures of another sort are to be found in reports on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets on poverty reduction and other measures of well-being. UN and NGO officials routinely describe Africa as failing to meet the goals, and the press routinely writes up this failure.


But some experts, among them Jan Vandemoortele, one of the architects of the MDGS, have expressed concern that the goals are being misused. He wrote in 2009 that the MDGS were intended as global targets, but have been improperly applied to individual countries and regions. “It is a real tragedy when respectable progress in Africa is reported as a failure by international organizations and external observers,” Vandemoortele wrote, voicing the suspicion that particular measurements have been selected “so as to present Africa as a failure, solely to gain support for a particular agenda, strategy, or argument.”
Nonetheless, when the UN met in September, The Associated Press quoted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as saying, “Many countries are falling short, especially in Africa,” while the Los Angeles Times quoted an Oxfam report as saying, “Unless an urgent rescue package is developed to accelerate fulfillment of all the MDGS, we are likely to witness the greatest collective failure in history.”


The consequences of skewed or incomplete reporting on Africa are not just a disservice to readers but also have the potential to influence policy. “The welfare model [of Africa] is still dominant on the Hill and in Hillary Clinton’s world,” according to van de Walle.Among corporate officials, says Catherine Duggan, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, the perception is still that “Africa is where you put your money once you’ve made it somewhere else.” Moreover, such reporting is demoralizing to Africans working for change. Martin Dawes, a unicef regional chief of communication for West and Central Africa, says that when there is a disaster, journalists “come to us as aid workers but often don’t talk to the government, which is often what we’re working through. It means that the chances for Africans to show an engaged response is limited. They are written out of their own story.”


Even with shrinking resources, journalists can do better than this. For a start, they can stop depending so heavily, and uncritically, on aid organizations for statistics, subjects, stories, and sources. They can also educate themselves on how to find and interpret data available from independent sources. And they can actively seek out stories that deviate from existing story lines.


But in the end, it will probably take sustained economic progress to break the current mold. Sunny Bindra, the Kenyan management consultant, recalls that in the 1980s, “Japan got attention because it was whacking the US. It’s the same with India and China now.” Until that happens, a sick African woman in labor will continue to be treated as poverty porn, and most Africans will have to starve in order to make it onto the evening news.

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Posts: 2560 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012  |  IP: Logged | 

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Uganda has set up a rapid response centre to get soldiers operational as soon as possible to intervene in regional conflicts, an official says.

The way its forces recently deployed to South Sudan to fight rebels was an example of how it could work, he said.

The BBC's Catherine Byaruhanga says Uganda may want to be involved in similar missions in the future.

The African Union has been planning to create a rapid reaction force but has yet to finalise the proposals.


Ugandan troops deployed to South Sudan in December to fight alongside government forces after a political dispute escalated into full-scale conflict, with reports of ethnic killings.

Col Felix Kulayigye, political commissar for the Ugandan army, said the intention was for its forces to be a "provider of peace in the region" by deploying within 14 days to trouble hotspots.

"No other country has done what we've done in South Sudan," he told Uganda's Radio One station.

"In a few days we were on the ground to secure Juba airport and everybody else benefitted from that deployment - that capability is what Africa has been lacking."

He said the rapid response centre had been built so the region did not have to "wait for Europe or the United States to do the deployment when Africans are dying".

Our reporter says Ugandan soldiers have been fairly active in Africa and are part of the AU force in Somalia.

Uganda recently had troops in the Central African Republic tracking down members of the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebel group.

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Uganda’s new African rapid response force
If Uganda hadn’t already raised enough eyebrows with its robust military backing of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, its announcement that its armed forces are setting up a rapid response center to intervene in regional conflicts is sure to cause a stir. Indeed, it is Uganda’s response to the violence in South Sudan that is serving as a blueprint of how this force will function, with troops at the ready to be instantly deployed to trouble spots within Africa.

According to Col Felix Kulayigye, the Ugandan army’s political commissar, Uganda is looking to be a “provider of peace in the region” by equipping itself with the capability to rapidly intervene in conflicts. Speaking to Uganda’s Radio One station, Kulayigye notes:

No other country has done what we’ve done in South Sudan… In a few days we were on the ground to secure Juba airport and everybody else benefitted from that deployment – that capability is what Africa has been lacking.

It is an interesting response to the criticism of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s unequivocal backing of Kiir. Rather than getting defensive over Uganda’s compromised mediator status — something that was vocally decried by opposition leaders within the country — the government is literally going on the offensive and using their South Sudan response as a model for broader Ugandan regional involvement.

This will not sit well with those wary over Uganda’s already extensive regional military entanglements. The Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) is currently deployed in four different African states — including Somalia and the Central African Republic. The idea that the small, East African nation is equipping itself with the capability of intervening in even more situations should make apparent the Museveni government’s strategy of expanding Uganda’s international profile through military or “peacekeeping” engagements. And by transforming Uganda into an African military heavyweight, Museveni also ensures the longevity of his National Resistance Movement (NRM) party in a political setting that prizes external military involvement.

Kulayigye’s justification for the force — as a means to ensure that countries in the region would not have to “wait for Europe or the United States to do the deployment when Africans are dying” — adds another interesting dimension here as it plays off of widespread disillusionment with international (mainly Western-backed) mediation efforts on the continent. By framing this as a point of pan-African pride, Uganda simultaneously sidesteps the question of its own hegemonic ambitions while subtly reminding Western governments of its regional strategic significance (something it might be keen to assert after the sustained political outcry from Western powers around its Anti-Homosexuality Bill).

Whether Uganda can financially sustain this sort of extensive military engagement is another question entirely. But a winning gamble on Kiir would nonetheless affirm the credibility of the Museveni’s government’s major regional ambitions.
http://blogs.blouinnews.com/blouinbe...esponse-force/

Posts: 2560 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Firewall:
Thanks for the links.

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Originally posted by Firewall:
EDITED-

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Originally posted by Firewall:
Nobody takes mike seriously anyway so he thinks he could take over every thread now.

You ruin another thread mike THE WHITE EUROPEAN,so that's it for me here.

Mike is really a racist white man by the way.He is not black,well i don't think so,there is no proof anyway if he is really black.

He might be a undercover agent to start trouble,who knows.


Mike loves telling fake history and lies and has DIGUSTING MOUTH.

Mike go gargle your mouth with razor blades.

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Bye.

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Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Firewall:
MAYBE I DID NOT MAKE MYSELF CLEAR,LEAVING THAT THREAD,NOW GO AWAY FROM THIS THREAD,YOU AND YOUR LIES.
What a sorry little mongrel you are.

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Posts: 2560 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012  |  IP: Logged | 

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quote:

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Originally posted by Firewall:
MAYBE I DID NOT MAKE MYSELF CLEAR,LEAVING THAT THREAD,NOW GO AWAY FROM THIS THREAD,YOU AND YOUR LIES. What a sorry little mongrel you are.

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Posts: 2560 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012  |  IP: Logged | 

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President Uhuru Kenyatta has backed the call by the African Ministers of Defence for all countries to meet their obligations in ensuring an African Standby Force is ready for deployment by 2015.

The president has at the same time challenged African countries to scale up their contribution to peace and stability in the continent.

“Our partners and friends have been of great help to us. But to rely on outside help for our security would be to sully our independence.

In any case, the help is often inadequate to our needs and its application inflexible,” President Kenyatta said.

The President was addressing the 22nd Ordinary Session of the African Union Heads of State and Government Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Thursday.
As part of Kenya’s 50th anniversary and an expression of solidarity with the continent’s determination to secure its future, President Kenyatta announced a voluntary contribution of $1 million (Sh86 million) to the AU Peace Fund.

He said the contribution can be used to make a reality the ‘Exercise Amani Africa’ or to set up the African Standby Force.

“Whichever way it is used, we have made concrete our commitment to solidarity and peace in this time of conflicts,” President Kenyatta said.

On the Central Africa Republic and South Sudan, the President said the conflicts have reminded the continent of the need to galvanise support to pre-empt political differences before they deteriorate into full-blown wars.

“These conflicts, so near to us, remind us that we must join hands with our neighbours to prevent them from breaking, and respond to them when they do break, as occasionally they will,” the President said.

He disclosed that, with partners in East Africa, Kenya is building a Rapid Deployment Capability as part of the East African Standby Force.

The President said his government already has a fully-fledged Rapid Deployment Capability to be activated in times of emergencies.

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I agree with the president in this matter why do we need outside help to quell rebels or to patrol our streets with foreign armies in the name of peace. If such a force was in place African countries would be able to look after one another just like in the recent cases in south sudan with uganda. And such an army would be beneficial to lets say South Africa, Morocco or Egypt because they would be able to sell military hardware to keep the force in tip top shape and it would get the money locally.

What do you guys think?????????

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Uganda's Museveni already created one.

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Whoever the conceptor is, I'm not fussed. Just want a strong, competent, unified African Defence Force.

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i couldn't agree more

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Every region should focus on development and security of it own region. wasting time on talking about unrealistic things of continental scale when have accomplished much regionally.

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Africa isn't so strife-torn that each region needs its
own
defence force. It wouldn't be an efficient way of doing things.

We have an African Union, with different economic blocs within it. Let the regions compete and grow from an economic standpoint, but let's all be in union when defence is concerned.

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I guarantee you western powers will do their best to stop this from happening. It's threatening to think of a new permanent military let alone one encompassing over a billion people. I think it's a neat idea, so long as it's kept reasonably small and well equipped/trained, and maintains a strict code of conduct.

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Posts: 2560 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Child Of The KING:
Yeah FINALLY Some blessings in this evil world.


The New Uyo Nigeria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rN07cbRdT8


Ondo...CITY WITHOUT SLUM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfMb5OB9Ets


Episode 103 Updates on roads development in Ogun State
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFNwA7xpntA


Episode 105 Agricultural Development in Ogun State

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYo0uCkj83A


Africa with China ep. 3 | Angola Rising
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdkD8WxeZjE


Africa with China ep. 2 | Kenya's geothermal energy revolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySMntxPn1Bo&list=PL17w8se20yIU6MEBT1

Nairobi - Kenya Africa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiZHfo4pIk4

A tourist Guide to Mombasa, Kenya

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLG8VI0TqfQ

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Posts: 2560 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012  |  IP: Logged | 

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Pan-African TVC News to Start 24-Hour Broadcasting From November

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- TVC News, a 24-hour news channel owned by Continental Broadcasting Service Nigeria Ltd., will begin airing across Africa from November and will compete with international broadcasters for viewers.

TVC News, which will be based in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, will have offices in Abuja, the capital, and the southern oil hub of Port Harcourt, Nigel Parsons, chief executive officer of CBS, said in a Sept. 21 phone interview. The company will also have offices in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Accra and Dakar, he said.


TVC News will join other pan-African stations, such as Johannesburg-based eNCA, which became South Africa’s first 24-hour news channel four years ago. eNCA has bureaus across Africa’s largest economy, as well as in Lagos, Nairobi and Beijing and correspondents in Zimbabwe, Ghana and Tanzania, according to its website.

“Part of the reason of this channel is too many foreign channels just cover death and disaster in Africa,” Parsons, who is a former managing director at Al Jazeera English, said from Lagos. “There’s a lot to celebrate, business is booming in Africa.”

Sub-Saharan Africa’s economy will probably expand 5.4 percent this year as rising commodity prices and increased oil production help to offset a slowdown in Europe, according to the International Monetary Fund.

TVC News has secured agreements to air on British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc in the U.K., Naspers Ltd.’s DSTV in Nigeria, Multi TV in Ghana, said Parsons. The channel is also in talks with TopTV and DSTV in South Africa, DISH Network Corp. in the U.S. and Wananchi Group Ltd. in Kenya, he said.

Revenue will come from a mix of sponsorship and advertising, as well as being supported by CBS’s existing TVC Entertainment channel and Radio Continental, said Parsons.

The channel employs about 350 people, which includes editorial, technical, management and administration workers, he said. Parsons declined to comment on the amount invested in the station.

TVC News will follow “a similar model” as other international 24 hour news channels, like the British Broadcasting Corp., Cabel News Network Inc. and Al Jazeera, said Parsons.

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Posts: 2560 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012  |  IP: Logged |