A Second Hand Conjecture

with do it yourself adjustible strength glasses.No optician needed.

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(NYT)

The New York Times has a fascinating little chart today, illustrating the primary sources of nuclear weapons proliferation over time. In looking at the diagram, one cannot escape the overall impression that until recently the West has been the main and long-enduring source for most of the world’s nuclear proliferation. Given our traditional focus on authoritarian rouge states when it comes to proliferation threats –and our obsession with Russia and the former Soviet republics as potential proliferating agents– this might prompt us to reexamine some basic assumptions about where the sources of danger lie in technology transfer.

When considered, it shouldn’t really be surprising that the West is or was the top proliferator. There are several factors we could readily identify which would have made getting nuclear secrets in a Western democracy far easier than within the USSR. Among them might be:

1. Unregulated communications make it easy to operate covert networks with little fear of detection.
2. Relatively open borders facilitate easy transportation of personnel and material.
3. Integrated trade alliances dedicated to industrial products make the shipment of advanced technology between countries relatively unremarkable.
4. A cosmopolitan scientific community which publishes and socializes in a consolidated cross-cultural milieu, in which technical information exchange between countries is also unremarkable.
5. An educational experience and civic culture that encourages individualism which can create rogue actors more easily.
6. A shared lingua franca among an international scientific elite that makes it easy for them to converse and exchange ideas one-to-one, without need of translation services.
7. Being the focal point for scientific and technology origination attracts attention from foreign intelligence services and black market operators.

Closed off and regimented societies prohibit or severely curtail most of these facilitating characteristics, and this fact might represent the disqualifying criteria that made a country like the USSR a virtual non-proliferator. Conditions more commonly associated with proliferation risk in policy debates such as malicious government, poverty and political repression, do not historically appear to be the primary risk points. Indeed, such characteristics might lead us to target the wrong societies for technology transfer such as Russia and North Korea.

But if the above list better reveals vulnerability points to proliferation, the country most likely to proliferate inadvertently or intentionally outside of the West would have to be China, with targets being her integrated East Asian and African alliance states. Increasingly China satisfies almost all of the requirements. Her massive communications architecture is becoming increasingly unmonitorable (even if the government tries), she is expanding her transportation links with the world at a rapid pace and making it easier to come and go, she has a large and increasingly cosmopolitan scientific community that is English speaking and mobile, she is a major commercial technology exporter and an origination point of primary scientific research.

Perhaps it should therefore not be surprising that the most recent proliferation vectors in the diagram above emanate from the PRC. Something to consider.

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I was sitting in an airport lounge yesterday and got to chatting with a member of the self-described “oilfield trash” who was bound for Lagos, and then for an FPSO in the Gulf of Guinea. These are rough and ready guys who lead the sort of perilous commercial-adventurer lifestyle that one has the mistaken tendency to think went extinct with the age of empires. Thus it’s always an interesting conversation when you run into them…and invariably, an intoxicated one. To form, I was soon quite drunk.

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David Saks reflects on a vanishing community. Down to 260 individuals by some estimates.

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I’d heard that Hitch addressed the situation in Zimbabwe in his introductory remarks at the Freedom Fest 2008 debate with Dinesh D’Souza, but I hadn’t seen the video of it until today. It’s worth a watch.

The subject of the debate itself wasn’t Zimbabwe, but the general subject of conflict and religion. If you’ve seen one D’Souza/Hitchens debate on God and man, you’ve seen everything that follows this clip, so I’ll only post the first part.

Hitch takes the opportunity to examine his marginal complicity in fostering the Western mythology of Robert Mugabe as a heroic anticolonial guerrilla leader resisting Rhodesian tyranny. A Western moral investment that Mugabe has been trading on ever since, to the unbelievable misfortune of his people.
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Geography, people:

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sent extra diplomatic and police officials to west Africa to help investigate the kidnapping in Somalia of a group of reporters, including an Australian photojournalist.

“We have deployed additional staff from our mission in Pretoria to our High Commission in Nairobi,” Rudd told reporters in Canberra today. “This is a sensitive and difficult case. We are engaged at every level.”

Australia doesn’t have diplomatic representation in Somalia and its officials in neighboring Kenya are making contact with Somali authorities as well as the Canadian, French and British embassies to help locate Nigel Brennan, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.

Both Somalia and Nairobi, Kenya, are in East Africa.

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photo: Isuru Senevi | site

And so ends Mauritania’s brief experiment with constitutional democracy. The AFP has a source in the new ruling junta who says there will be new elections in two months. We shall see.

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Namibian supermarket selection (photo: Olivier Peyre)

One of great inequities in the modern world is that in relative terms, food in poor and starving countries often costs far more than in the wealthy developed world. That’s because industrial countries tend to be dominated by large supermarket chains, which can achieve enormous economies of scale in volume sales, and thus are able to offer dramatically cheaper food prices to consumers.

The difference between the benefits of traditional and supermarket retail food sales can be staggering even within the same country. In an unevenly developed country such as India, which is divided between urban chain supermarkets and rural traditional markets, the cost of vegetables is 33% cheaper in the city than for the rural poor dependent on small local stores.

This has larger economic implications than is generally acknowledged, as food purchases consume a far larger share of national wealth in the developing world. In poor countries such as Nepal, food spending can account for as much as 50% of consumption expenditure in middle income households, compared to 15% in the United States. Thereby a cruel kind of trap is created through high food prices, which precludes consumer spending on goods and services that command higher wages than agriculture can provide.

Thus, if you were able somehow to reduce the cost of food in the developing world, and thereby the share of consumer income it eats, you could free up large reservoirs of capital to the benefit of the broader economy’s development.

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Anti-Wal-Mart hysteria seems to have curiously abated somewhat since the corporation started giving more generously to the Democratic Party. Not an uncharacteristic phenomenon for the centralized extortion tactics –er, “grassroots activism” of such campaigns.

But there are still some people creatively fighting the not-so-good fight against your freedom to choose where to shop. This is a good example. A fascinating little animation showing the viral growth of Wal-Mart locations since 1962.

The poster describes the visualization as “worse than AIDS in Africa,” and thereby demonstrates only an incredible capacity for delusional inhumanity. But while some like he will recoil in horror at the vision of Wal-Mart’s geographic expansion from a humble rural backwater to national predominance, to me it’s entirely impressive and worthy of congratulation (for both Wal-Mart and the critical animator).

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(photo: William Bedzrah)

One of the traditional problems of economic development in sub-Saharan Africa is that internal African investment dollars tend to be spent outside the continent. Thus it’s interesting to see Nigerian investment in Ghana has now reached $580 million. Something that has sparked quick calls for a Nigeria-Ghana Chamber of Commerce and further liberalization of trade laws.

[George Kumi, Ghana’s High Commissioner to Nigeria] noted that what Nigeria and Ghana need is increase in trade investment and not foreign aids, said the business cooperation between the two countries would go along way in alleviating poverty.

“We need to move away from the old way of over protecting our internal trade. There should be free flow of goods from Ghana to Nigeria and vice versa.”
(BusinessDay)

Good stuff, to be sure.

One of the factors that makes these two countries compatible investors in each other is monetary policy and the (new) tendency of their currencies to retain value. Nigeria’s inflation rate which was as high as 16% in 2005, fell to 6.5% this year (comparable to Chile). Ghana has been experiencing an equally dramatic fall in inflation, from an astronomical 26.7% in 2004, to 11% in 2008 (better than Russia).

With falling inflation of this kind, the temptation to send your profits to Switzerland as soon as you make them is substantially reduced.

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David Axe writes on one of the world’s biggest ignored crises—right next door to the much more hip, much more visible crisis in Darfur. The Central African Republic has been spiraling into conflict, forcing over 60,000 people into refugee camps… which are in close proximity to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled Darfur. The refugees from Darfur, however, receive nearly 3 times as much aid per capita as the refugees from Chad—making the situation in the technically smaller Chadian camps far worse in terms of resourcing and resilience. Read it in full.

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Very cool t-shirts with inventive visualizations of statistics on African countries.

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A short portrait of President Bush from Sir Bob Geldof, on the Presidents recent trip around Africa. Really shows what we’ve been accomplishing in Africa the last several years.

In 2003, only 50,000 Africans were on HIV antiretroviral drugs — and they had to pay for their own medicine. Today, 1.3 million are receiving medicines free of charge. The U.S. also contributes one-third of the money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — which treats another 1.5 million. It contributes 50% of all food aid (though some critics find the mechanism of contribution controversial). On a seven-day trip through Africa, Bush announced a fantastic new $350 million fund for other neglected tropical diseases that can be easily eradicated; a program to distribute 5.2 million mosquito nets to Tanzanian kids; and contracts worth around $1.2 billion in Tanzania and Ghana from the Millennium Challenge Account, another initiative of the Bush Administration.

Read the rest…

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photo: Martin Dixon

Here’s a grim laugh for your Friday morning. A Muslim propaganda video which preposterously seeks to explain the death and burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1st century, as the result of the wrath of Allah against the decadent Roman empire. The video marvels at how people were struck down with little warning by the eruption of Vesuvius, and cites the Quran as evidence of divine retribution. Particularly offensive is the implication that slavery was a uniquely Roman institution. Something that no doubt would come as a great surprise to slaves who suffer to this day, under cruel ownership by devout Muslim masters in Africa and Saudi Arabia.

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photo: Vearl Brown

Uganda’s elephants have made a marvelous comeback, after having been nearly wiped out for their ivory, as part of Idi Amin’s many efforts to systematically plunder his country into ruin. It’s estimated there were once 30,000 elephants in Uganda before Amin came to power. By the time the Tanzanian army liberated the country from his despotic rule in 1979, their numbers had dwindled to a mere 2,000. Now, through conservation efforts, the long-lived slow-multiplying giants have increased to a population of 5,000.

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Gas flaring in the Niger Delta (photo: Ellie)

John Ghazvinian is a journalist and historian of considerable insight into African affairs. He also happens to have written one of the best recent books on the emergent international struggle for African petroleum: Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (the paperback edition is due out in April). Whilst being an enormously valuable investigation of a very serious issue, it is also a page-turning and literate adventure into exotic and dangerous places. Indeed, one that’s practically impossible to put down once you’ve picked it up.

As John writes therein, since 1990 the oil industry has invested $20 billion in oil exploration and production in Africa, with $50 billion more planned before 2010. Over the next five years Chevron alone is devoting $20 billion in investment for Africa. Taken collectively, this exercise represents the largest commercial investment in African history. But such a spectacular windfall for some of the world’s most impoverished countries can be a poisoned chalice, where the brutal economic forces of the so-called “resource curse” hollow out states, eviscerate agricultural economies and break traditional cultures.

Populous and promising Nigeria for example, is one of the oldest and most well established oil producing countries in Africa. But with the expansion of Nigeria’s oil extraction industry, she has seen only the systematic erosion of her economic and civil society. As well as witnessing the transformation of her oil bearing region in the Niger Delta (one of the richest in the world), into a vast social wasteland of extreme poverty, rapacious crime and guerrilla warfare. As John notes, “Nigeria” is now a shorthand expression in Africa for what everyone with oil desperately wants to avoid.

John took some time out of his morning yesterday to sit down with me for a telephone interview. We were able to discuss a variety of subjects related to issues raised in his book. Including among other things, US oil supply diversification, the political consequences of offshore exploration in the Gulf of Guinea, the resource curse and rentier states, instability and post-nationalist militancy in the Niger Delta, oil field subculture, the labor problem, Chinese energy strategy in Africa and the difficulty of talking about Africa “without lapsing into sanctimoniousness” (as John puts it in the preface of his book). As I did, I believe you’ll find this to be a rather rewarding and unconventional discussion.

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Somewhat dated but excellent documentary on the psychopathic depravity of Amin’s rule. The moment of macabre high comedy, in which Amin declares he has unilaterally withdrawn his army from Tanzania in the name of neighborly brotherhood during the Ugandan – Tanzanian War (when in fact his forces had been annihilated by the Tanzanian army’s counterattack), is particularly well handled.
Part I :: Part II :: Part III

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Hat tip: Tyler.

Chris Blattman has a conjecture, possibly high wages in Africa are holding back growth:

One thing that has always struck me in the African countries I have worked is that the real wages (i.e. wages adjusted for the cost of living) of African formal sector workers seem to be incredibly high, at least compared to that of workers in China or India. Given that firms in China and India seem to be more productive than their African counterparts, it creates a double disadvantage for African workers, and raises the question of why the situation continues. Why don’t manufacturing wages fall in Africa, stimulating more jobs for more people at wages still higher than those available in agriculture or informal business?

Why, when I run a survey in rural Uganda, do youth with the same education and experience expect a wage three to four times higher than the youth I worked with in India? I don’t begrudge anyone anywhere a living wage. It’s the relative differential that puzzles me, and that could be keeping Africa from doing business globally.

There are probably lots of plausible reasons. Perhaps we ought to consider (and get data on) the informal sector in Africa, which could be larger and have more moderate wages than the formal sector ones. It may be that all my notions and data about African wages are erroneous.

Another possibility, however, is that the largest employers of skilled workers in most African countries are international NGOs and the local government. They are competing, in many cases, for the same pool of skilled and semi-skilled workers as the manufacturers and service sector firms. Neither the government or NGOs, moreover, seem to set wages according to the local market or local conditions, and it requires little imagination to wonder whether they set their wages higher than the market would normally do.

Bonus, Tyler has now introduced me to Chris’ great blog, which I haven’t read before. Given my and Lee’s interest in the Dark Continent, I am putting it on the blogroll.

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(photo: enric/baldiri)

Nigerian magazine editor Madam Adunni Adediran, is appalled by the decline of traditional moral conduct in her country. In particular she’s concerned about rampant promiscuity and abortions among young women. To combat the trends she’s helped organize a ceremonial celebration called “Nigerian Virgin Girls” this month in Lagos. Prizes for participation include certificates of virtue, gold jewelry and university scholarships, if the girls can establish they’ve had no carnal knowledge of a man.

Well, remembering college life quite well, it seems to me that if you want to keep women virgins, sending them to college might not be the wisest idea in the world.

Not to make too much light of the problem of youthful promiscuity in Nigeria or the commendable effort to promote chastity against it. Even though the HIV epidemic in Africa is substantially less serious in Nigeria, in 2005 it was estimated there were 2,900,000 people living with the disease there. A sobering figure. And while group celebrations of a rather private matter such as sexual indulgence might seem peculiar in the West (even though it happens), it’s far easier to accept within the communal traditions of Africa.

There was also this peculiar remark from Madame Adediran:

“Last year October was when I got the initiative. I found out that men use the blood, pure blood from virgins for money rituals But if a girl is being disvirgined by her husband, it’s a pride for the family, and respect for the family members.”
(Vanguard)

While that’s new to me (and would tend to suggest an advantage for losing one’s virginity), there’s also the horrifying problem of a common belief among many Nigerian men that sleeping with a young virgin can cure HIV and other diseases. Prostitution and international sex slavery are also among the many hurdles young Nigerian women face.

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Kenyan Justice Minister Martha Karua has charged Barack Obama’s cousin, ODM leader Raila Odinga, with ethnic cleansing. Tourist bookings to Kenya have suffered 90 percent cancellations. Kenyan blogger Girl in the Meadow wonders why the election dispute is being settled in the streets instead of the courts. Why indeed. And such a pity that all this is happening just as Kenya is emerging into sustainable economic growth (or perhaps because of it?).

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(photo: Jonathan Boeke)

The latest 419 scams aren’t the only nuisances for American businesses emerging out of Nigeria this year. Using the vast archive of documents made public during the 1990s epidemic of class action lawsuits against tobacco companies, Nigeria has decided to get in on the gravy train. The BBC is reporting today that Nigerian prosecutors are seeking an astronomical $44 billion in damages against American and European cigarette makers, for the costs supposedly sustained by their health care system. To put this allegation in some perspective, that’s approximately 43 times the entire 2007 Nigerian national health budget.

The government seems confident enough though, describing the tobacco companies as “dead on arrival” in court. I don’t envy the firms after hearing such definitive assessments from the state. In May of last year when prosecutors were beginning work, 23 Nigerian judges were removed from the bench on charges of bribery and corruption.

For Nigeria it would be an interesting approach to federal revenue diversification. Presently the country derives 80% of its fiscal budget from oil exports. At 2007 levels of expenditure victory in this suit could finance the entire Nigerian state for three years.

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Japan runs the world’s second largest economy with 17 cabinet ministers. Ghana, one of the world’s poorest, currently has 70. Why? Ben Ofosu-Appiah examines the question and argues the need for the dramatic downsizing of African governments. Shakara then offers an interesting counterpoint.

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(photo: Michael Deeble)

With heavy rains flooding Southern Africa and displacing thousands, surely saving graces must be found in parched and dying Swaziland, a country long thirsting for a drop of rain. But somewhat typically, that oppressed country’s autocrat King Mswati III, has taken the event of the rain for more than it is, and in so doing has begun another trek away from the path of reform.

The other day Mswati delivered a speech in the rain to army cadets, saying that salvation had finally come. The king believes that now is the time for his citizens to give up living off donor food from the international community and return to agricultural self-sufficiency:

“The time has come for us to come out of the dependency syndrome and start eating our own food that we have cultivated in our fields instead of depending on the donor community,”

Were it only so simple.

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