quote:
Originally posted by ausar:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58294-2005Apr16.html washingtonpost.com
The Africa You Never See
By Carol Pineau
Sunday, April 17, 2005; Page B02
In the waiting area of a large office complex in Accra, Ghana, it's
standing
room only as citizens with bundles of cash line up to buy shares of a
mutual
fund that has yielded an average 60 percent annually for the past seven
years. They're entrusting their hard-earned cash to a local company
called
Databank, which invests in stock markets in Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana
and
Kenya that consistently rank among the world's top growth markets.
Chances are you haven't read or heard anything about Databank in your
daily
newspaper or on the evening news, where the little coverage of Africa
that's
offered focuses almost exclusively on the negative -- the virulent
spread of
HIV/AIDS, genocide in Darfur and the chaos of Zimbabwe.
Yes, Africa is a land of wars, poverty and corruption. The situation in
places like Darfur, Sudan, desperately cries out for more media
attention
and international action. But Africa is also a land of stock markets,
high
rises, Internet cafes and a growing middle class. This is the part of
Africa
that functions. And this Africa also needs media attention, if it's to
have
any chance of fully joining the global economy.
Africa's media image comes at a high cost, even, at the extreme, the
cost of
lives. Stories about hardship and tragedy aim to tug at our
heartstrings,
getting us to dig into our pockets or urge Congress to send more aid.
But no
country or region ever developed thanks to aid alone. Investment, and
the
job and wealth creation it generates, is the only road to lasting
development. That's how China, India and the Asian Tigers did it.
Yet while Africa, according to the U.S. government's Overseas Private
Investment Corp., offers the highest return in the world on direct
foreign
investment, it attracts the least. Unless investors see the Africa
that's
worthy of investment, they won't put their money into it. And that lack
of
investment translates into job stagnation, continued poverty and
limited
access to education and health care.
Consider a few facts: The Ghana Stock Exchange regularly tops the list
of
the world's highest-performing stock markets. Botswana, with its A+
credit
rating, boasts one of the highest per capita government savings rates
in the
world, topped only by Singapore and a handful of other fiscally prudent
nations. Cell phones are making phenomenal profits on the continent.
Brand-name companies like Coca-Cola, GM, Caterpillar and Citibank have
invested in Africa for years and are quite bullish on the future.
The failure to show this side of Africa creates a one-dimensional
caricature
of a complex continent. Imagine if 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and
school shootings were all that the rest of the world knew about
America.
I recently produced a documentary on entrepreneurship and private
enterprise
in Africa. Throughout the year-long process, I came to realize how all
of us
in the media -- even those with a true love of the continent -- portray
it
in a way that's truly to its detriment.
The first cameraman I called to film the documentary laughed and said,
"Business and Africa, aren't those contradictory terms?" The second got
excited imagining heart-warming images of women's co-ops and market
stalls
brimming with rustic crafts. Several friends simply assumed I was doing
a
documentary on AIDS. After all, what else does one film in Africa?
The little-known fact is that businesses are thriving throughout
Africa.
With good governance and sound fiscal policies, countries like
Botswana,
Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and many more are bustling, their economies
growing
at surprisingly robust rates.
Private enterprise is not just limited to the well-behaved nations. You
can't find a more war-ravaged land than Somalia, which has been without
a
central government for more than a decade. The big surprise? Private
enterprise is flourishing. Mogadishu has the cheapest cell phone rates
on
the continent, mostly due to no government intervention. In the
northern
city of Hargeysa, the markets sell the latest satellite phone
technology.
The electricity works. When the state collapsed in 1991, the national
airline went out of business. Today, there are five private carriers
and
price wars keep the cost of tickets down. This is not the Somalia you
see in
the media.
Obviously life there would be dramatically improved by good governance
-- or
even just some governance -- but it's also true that, through
resilience and
resourcefulness, Somalis have been able to create a functioning
society.
Most African businesses suffer from an extreme lack of infrastructure,
but
the people I met were too determined to let this stop them. It just
costs
them more. Without reliable electricity, most businesses have to use
generators. They have to dig bore-holes for a dependable water source.
Telephone lines are notoriously out of service, but cell phones are
filling
the gap.
Throughout Africa, what I found was a private sector working hard to
find
African solutions to African problems. One example that will always
stick in
my mind is the CEO of Vodacom Congo, the largest cell phone company in
that
country. Alieu Conteh started his business while the civil war was
still
raging. With rebel troops closing in on the airport in Kinshasa, no
foreign
manufacturer would send in a cell phone tower, so Conteh got locals to
collect scrap metal, which they welded together to build one. That
tower
still stands today.
As I interviewed successful entrepreneurs, I was continually astounded
by
their ingenuity, creativity and steadfastness. These people are the
future
of the continent. They are the ones we should be talking to about how
to
move Africa forward. Instead, the media concentrates on victims or
government officials, and as anyone who has worked in Africa knows,
government is more often a part of the problem than of the solution.
When the foreign media descend on the latest crisis, the person they
look to
interview is invariably the foreign savior, an aid worker from the
United
States or Europe. African saviors are everywhere, delivering aid on the
ground. But they don't seem to be in our cultural belief system. It's
not
just the media, either. Look at the literature put out by almost any
nongovernmental organization. The better ones show images of smiling
African
children -- smiling because they have been helped by the NGO. The worst
promote the extended-belly, flies-on-the-face cliche of Africa, hoping
that
the pain of seeing those images will fill their coffers. "We hawk
poverty,"
one NGO worker admitted to me.
Last November, ABC's "Primetime Live" aired a special on Britain's
Prince
Harry and his work with AIDS children in Lesotho. The segment, titled
"The
Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho," painted the tiny nation as
a
desperate, desolate place. The program's message was clear: This
helpless
nation at last had a knight -- or prince -- in shining armor.
By the time the charity addresses came up at the end, you were ready to
give, and that's good. Lesotho needs help with its AIDS problem. But
would
it really have hurt the story to add that this land-locked nation with
few
natural resources has jump-started its economy by aggressively courting
foreign investment? The reality is that it's anything but a "forgotten
kingdom," as a dramatic increase in exports has made it the top
beneficiary
of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a duty-free,
quota-free
U.S.-Africa trade agreement. More than 50,000 people have gotten jobs
through the country's initiatives. Couldn't the program have portrayed
an
African country that was in need of assistance, but was neither
helpless nor
a victim?
Still the simplistic portrayals come. A recent episode of the popular
NBC
drama "Medical Investigation" was about an anthrax scare in
Philadelphia.
The source of the deadly spores? Some illegal immigrants from Africa
playing
their drums in a local market, unknowingly infecting innocent
passersby.
Typical: If it's a deadly disease, the scriptwriters make it come from
Africa.
Most of the time, Africa is simply not on the map. The continent's
booming
stock markets are almost never mentioned in newspaper financial pages.
How
often is an African country -- apart, perhaps, from South Africa or
Egypt or
Morocco -- featured in a newspaper travel section? Even the listing of
worldwide weather includes only a few African cities.
The result of this portrait is an Africa we can't relate to. It seems
so
foreign to us, so different and incomprehensible. Since we can't relate
to
it, we ignore it.
There are lots of reasons for the media's neglect of Africa: bean
counters
in the newsroom and the high cost of international coverage, the belief
that
American viewers aren't interested in international stories, and the
infotainment of news. There's also journalists' reluctance to pursue
so-called "positive stories." We all know that such stories don't win
awards
or get front-page, above-the-fold placement. But what's happening in
Africa
doesn't need to be cast in any special light. The Ghana Stock Exchange
was
the fastest-growing exchange in the world in 2003. That's not a
"positive"
story, that's news, just like reports on the London Stock Exchange. I
imagine a lot of consumers would have found it newsworthy to learn
where
they could have made a 144 percent return on their money.
My independent film was made possible by funding from the World Bank,
for
which I am extremely grateful. But the bank wouldn't have had to step
in if
the media had been doing their job -- showing all Africans in all
facets of
their lives. In a business that's supposed to cover man-bites-dog
stories,
the idea that Africa doesn't work is a dog-bites-man story. If the
media are
really looking for news, they'd look at the ways that Africa, despite
all
the odds, does work.
Author's e-mail: capineau@aol.com
Carol Pineau, a journalist with more than 10 years of experience
reporting
on Africa, is the producer and director of the film "Africa: Open for
Business," which premiered last week at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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