The Bright Continent

This weekend, Nairobi hosted TED. The famous conferences on “technology entertainment and design” are nothing new, but only in the last five years has the informative output of these events been online for anyone to watch. More recently, ”TEDx” events threw the doors open even wider, allowing individuals and groups to host their own events and to make the TED brand local. I attended TEDxNairobi on one of my first weekends in Kenya back in 2010.

Two years later, I was one of about 25 speakers who had six minutes to share, per TED’s parlance, “an idea worth spreading.” TED showed up in Nairobi because the organizers felt that the annual conference has become overly “established.” In response, they’ve trained the searchlight outside of America, looking for ideas worth spreading from the whole world. In Africa, events have been held in Tunis, Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Here’s a shot of most of the gang (my leg is through the “D”):

I spoke about my (forthcoming) book, and the need for the world to embrace and learn from the informal networks and innovations that Africa does best. Participating really brought home TED’s awesome convening power. The crowd was electric. All of my fellow speakers were rock-stars and inspirations in diverse fields. I came away with a stack of cards and great new friends from the region. Some standouts:

Saki Mafundikwa has done the most wonderful in-depth work on Afrikan Alphabets: writing systems built in Africa. Some are centuries old.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu leverages the phenomenal reach of radio in Africa to help hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in Nigeria.

Richard Turere, only 13 years old, stole the whole show with his tale of innovation to stop lions from attacking his family’s cattle near Nairobi National Park.

All the talks, including mine, will be on the web in June, I’m told. Definitely worth your time.

The WSJ is all over the future:

[T]he appetite for new world cuisines will only grow. Generation Y has an even greater appetite for ethnic novelty than baby boomers or Generation X. They’ve grown up on pad thai and baba ganoush and sushi—culinary adventure is part of their DNA. They expect to taste ever more diverse cuisines.

There is only one largely unexplored continent left—and it isn’t Antarctica.

Obviously African food is delicious. I, for one, will leap and laugh when egusi retails like risotto or tikka masala. Read the whole thing. 

In keeping with my untoward fixation with forms of organization other than the state, a new fact: Crime is among the top 20 largest economies in the world. And of course, criminals are hip to the distributed, decentralized new century:

“Today, most criminal organizations bear no resemblance to the hierarchical organized crime family groups of the past,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Brian Nichols said, according to a copy of his speech.

“Instead, they consist of loose and informal networks that often converge when it is convenient and engage in a diverse array of criminal activities,” Nichols, of the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, added.

Suggestion for the flag: 419!

I like David Brooks, who is doing less frequent violence to the best real estate in journalism than, say, Dowd and Friedman, but I often add that it’s because he’s unpredictable. Sometimes this translates into inconsistency. Here is a strange column on “Sam Spade at Starbucks”:

If you attend a certain sort of conference, hang out at a certain sort of coffee shop or visit a certain sort of university, you’ve probably run into some of these wonderful young people who are doing good. Typically, they’ve spent a year studying abroad. They’ve traveled in the poorer regions of the world. Now they have devoted themselves to a purpose larger than self.

Often they are bursting with enthusiasm for some social entrepreneurship project: making a cheap water-purification system, starting a company that will empower Rwandan women by selling their crafts in boutiques around the world….

Yet one rarely hears social entrepreneurs talk about professional policing, honest courts or strict standards of behavior; it’s more uplifting to talk about microloans and sustainable agriculture.

In short, there’s only so much good you can do unless you are willing to confront corruption, venality and disorder head-on.

Leave aside his leaving aside of those who don’t “attend a certain sort of conference.” Below is an op-ed, “The Rugged Altruists,” Brooks wrote only last August, while visiting my present home in Kenya. It’s a love letter to the “service religion” in lean economies that he disdains today.  

Very few nongovernmental organizations or multilateral efforts do good, many Kenyans say. They come and go, spending largely on themselves, creating dependency not growth. The government-to-government aid workers spend time at summit meetings negotiating protocols with each other.

But in odd places, away from the fashionableness, one does find people willing to embrace the perspectives and do the jobs the locals define — in businesses, where Westerners are providing advice about boring things like accounting; in hospitals where doctors, among many aggravations, try to listen to the symptoms the patients describe.

What accounts for the turnaround?

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Somaliland, in northwestern Somalia, is an incredible natural experiment in self-governance—the majority of its people have agreed to share a political community. This is both unusual and usual in Africa, where preexisting and sometimes baffling colonial arrangements are expected to carry the day. Like South Sudan, Somaliland is begging for something different. I don’t know if Somaliland will become a new nation, or whether it will help their development, but their attempt is deeply exciting.

My piece for the International Herald Tribune:

HARGEISA, Somalia — If a country isn’t recognized, does it make a sound? Here in Somaliland, the semi-autonomous northern part of the failed state of Somalia, I discovered that the answer is an emphatic yes.

The government in Mogadishu has virtually no influence in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, or over the territory’s 3.5 million residents. Since 1991, when the end of Said Barre’s dictatorship plunged Somalia into anarchy, Somaliland has written its own Constitution, held four peaceful elections, established a central bank that prints its own currency, built schools and universities, and created an elaborate security apparatus that has managed to keep at bay terrorist groups like the Shabab, a Wahhabi group that operates with impunity in southern Somalia.

Though Somaliland also borders the tempestuous Gulf of Aden, virtually no pirates haunt its coast. In fact, the maximum-security prison in Hargeisa currently holds some 70 accused pirates. During the drought that thrust the Horn of Africa back into the news last year, Somaliland dodged the worst effects of famine by spending around $10 million — a combination of government, private and diaspora resources — while in the south tons of food given by foreign groups were stolen.

About 50 percent of the $43 million budget (pdf) goes to security and policing. When I left Hargeisa, the government mandated that I travel with an armed guard. Shukri Ismail, the only female on the first National Electoral Commission, told me locals tolerate such arrangements because “if you don’t live in peace, everything else is trivial.”

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The FT has a brief on ten boomtowns in Africa:

The ‘Big 5′ - cities which are broadly politically and economically-stable, and already major FDI destinations. They are:

- Accra, Ghana

- Johannesburg, South Africa

- Lagos, Nigeria

- Luanda, Angola

- Nairobi, Kenya

No major surprises here. Johannesburg is the biggest city in sub-Saharan Africa’s leading economy, and, as Frontier notes, is reaching the size of a large European city. Its nominal ‘GDP’ output is $51bn; Munich, in Germany, has a GDP of $64bn. Lagos has a smaller economy, at $40bn – but that is expected to jump when Nigeria rebases its economic statistics this year. By 2015, Frontier says, “risk-weighted business opportunities in Lagos will far outpace that of the city’s nearest competitor” (Johannesburg).

It’s the ‘Next 5′ – large cities with rapidly expanding economies, but serious business climate deficiencies – that offer some of the biggest potential rewards – provided multinationals can stomach the risks. They are:

- Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

- Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

- Ibadan, Nigeria

- Kinshasa, Congo-DRC

- Mombasa, Kenya

I’ve been to all these cities, save Luanda and Kinshasa*. I’m heartened to see Ibadan—where my parents went to college, and where they have a house—on the list. Africa’s second cities (like Mombasa, for example) are still among some of the fastest growing in the world. Any global businessperson would be delighted to have the young human capital,  intense entrepreneurialism and increasing spending power present in these cities and the mainstage metropolises. So get on it—I daresay in ten years you’ll be too late.  

*soon!

In a new piece for the Latitude blog, I wrote about the explosive and controversial documentary video featuring Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. I’m anti.

DJIBOUTI — The only person I’ve ever met who was in the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) is a Ugandan man named Francis. He was abducted by the group sometime in the late 1990s, when he was a teenager, and forced to march from central Uganda to what is now South Sudan. During a firefight with the Ugandan national army, Francis escaped with his best friend. They had never spoken aloud. The L.R.A. enforced silence on marches.

The older Francis is a soldier again. But he isn’t in Uganda. He’s in Iraq. Like many well-trained local fighters, he’s gone to fill the vacuum left after the United States military fled its war of choice.

I met Francis only once, last summer, in passing, but “Kony 2012” made me remember his story. The viral video by the American nonprofit Invisible Children showcases Joseph Kony, the madman at the helm of the L.R.A. who has been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The video calls for his arrest this year and for public pressure on the U.S. military to stay in the hunt. Thanks to it, some 50 million viewers, mostly non-Ugandans who understood nothing of Kony, now have the knowledge to despise him as much as a generation of Northern Ugandan families.

Except that hardly anyone in Uganda is talking about him. I spent most of February in Kampala and environs, and there Kony was a whisper on nobody’s lips. Even since the United States sent 100 Special Forces (pdf) to Central Africa in the fall to assist in the chase, both he, and the L.R.A., remain far from a mainstream concern.

Ordinary Ugandans are worrying about other things. The government needs a strategy for assessing its capital needs by sector. Should Uganda build an oil refinery or forgo the profits and send crude to Kenya for processing? And if it’s Ugandan children in peril you’re looking for, there are those suffering from “nodding disease” — an unusual neurological disease that’s killed hundreds of children in the very region Kony once terrorized.

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prettymilitant asked: Hi! Do you do speaking engagements or lectures?

Alas, I am in the midst of drafting the book manuscript, and so don’t have any bandwidth for speaking. But there will be a book tour! No details yet, but contact my agent at howard@rossyoon.com.

A new post for the IHT’s “Latitude” blog.

Click through for the dope slideshow…

NAIROBI — What if the New York City subway disappeared tomorrow? This is the situation facing Kenyan commuters. The government has proposed a law to phase out the vans used by privately run transportation services in favor of smaller taxis and larger buses. And the operators of those classic 14-seaters, the matatus, are threatening a massive general strike across the country next week.

The attempt at regulation looks like sour grapes from a state that was too late to the transportation game. And abolishing the matatu system, a network both comprehensive and affordable, would hurt the Kenyan commuter-consumer. Here, as across much of the continent, matatus are the primary means of conveyance for millions of Africans with minimal income.

Matatus are both notoriously reckless and completely indispensable. The word “ma tatu” — “for three” in Swahili and referring to shillings — comes from the price it cost to travel Kenya’s roads in the 1950s. The minibuses log hundreds of miles per day, along informally agreed-upon routes, on no set schedule and for negotiable fares. In Uganda, they’re also called “matatus”; in Nigeria, they’re “danfos”; in Tanzania, “dala-dalas.”

On pocked roads and in traffic jams, the best that can be said of matatus is that they work. In the right frame of mind, however, they are charming. Many have flamboyant décors: loud paint and prayer beads, louder reggae music, even backseat television screens. “Follow us on Twitter,” read one in Nairobi.

In some Kenyan towns, the official state-run buses roll by like staid battleships; in most, there is no centralized system for moving people. Matatus fill the gap. Few hard statistics exist on the scope of the sector, but 10 years ago there were 24,000 matatus in Kenya. The industry has boomed since then: matatu owners and their allies claim that today 500,000 jobs are directly or indirectly associated with the massive private endeavor.

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