Giant and Dwarf
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Juraj Mesík Giant and Dwarf “New Europeans” and Perspectives of Africa Juraj Mesík was involved in ecological issues for many years; first as consultant for the then Czechoslovak Minister of the Environment and later as director of the Ecopolis Foundation. He worked for the World Bank in Washington from 2003 until 2008. Currently, he teaches about global problems and challenges at the Palacký University in the Czech Republic and at the Comenius University in Slovakia. Juraj Mesík Giant and Dwarf “New Europeans” and Perspectives of Africa Giant and Dwarf Juraj Mesík Published by the Pontis Foundation, Bratislava 2013. Edition no. 1 © All rights reserved. ISBN 978-80-971310-0-5 This publication was produced within the Knowledge Makes Change! project that is supported by the European Union. The information and views set out in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. To my father (1933 – 2011) Contents Preface ...........................................................................................................................................................7 Why Should We Be Interested in Africa? ....................................................................................................9 SECTION ONE: CONTINENT OF GIGANTIC PROBLEMS Population Growth: A Thorn in Africa’s side ............................................................................................ 16 Could Malthus Be Right? Memento from St. Matthew’s Island ...............................................................25 When Ideology Rules Over Reason and Sensibility ..................................................................................32 The First Bounce from the Tropics: South Africa—a Fragile First World in the Third One ....................36 The Second Bounce from the Tropics: Population, Oil and Climate Change or When the Dust Settles over Arabia ........................................................................................................47 The Third Bounce from the Tropics: China, Africa and Pakistan Memento ............................................56 Nigeria: Disaster Waiting to Happen ..........................................................................................................63 South Sudan or “Be Careful about What You Wish For—The Gods May Fulfill Your Wishes!”.............80 Damocles’ Sword of Food Crisis: Climate, Oil, Water, Phosphorus and Africa’s Prospects...................90 SECTION TWO: FROM DIAGNOSING THE PROBLEMS TO REMEDIATION The White Man’s Burden: Europeans on the Road to Development Aid ..............................................106 Vanitas Vanitatum?....................................................................................................................................109 The Dark History of Europe in Africa: Slavery and Slaves ..................................................................... 112 From Colonization to the Millennium Development Goals .................................................................... 118 Millennium Development Goals ...............................................................................................................124 Why Africa Remains Impoverished: Collier’s Bottom Billion and the Four Development Traps ......... 131 How to Get Africa Out of the Development Traps .................................................................................. 147 Military Intervention as Development Aid? ............................................................................................165 Who Helps More? .....................................................................................................................................175 Schweitzer’s Dream ................................................................................................................................... 181 Stop the Aid! Radical Criticisms of Development Aid .............................................................................185 SECTION THREE: LOW HANGING FRUIT. CENTRAL EUROPE AND DEVELOPMENT AID FOR AFRICA Central Europe, Slovaks, Czechs and Development Aid: Old News or New News? .............................196 An Individual Face to Face with the World: A Passive Bystander of Development Actor? ...................200 Primum Non Nocere—First Do No Harm; When Ideology Rules over Logic and Feeling ....................203 Money Is Not Everything ..........................................................................................................................208 Turning Over What We Know: Save Him, White Doctor! Doctors and Women in Africa................... 211 Atheism, Sexuality and Homosexuality, or Cultural Wars and Differences ...........................................223 Doing a Lot with Very Little and the Lone Soldier on the Battlefield ....................................................229 From Engaging Individuals to Engaging Cities and Communities ...........................................................235 Local Non-Governmental Development Organization Scene..................................................................242 Official Development Assistance ..............................................................................................................246 Making SlovakAid more Effective .............................................................................................................255 A Few Words in Closing ............................................................................................................................264 Biographical Note .............................................................................................................................. 267 Photos ................................................................................................................................................268 Preface At the time when I started to work on this book, Africa was again on the front pages of the newspapers. As usual when it comes to African news, it was not good news. Head- lines of summer 2011 reported about 10 to 12 million people in East Africa, in particular in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, were being threatened by famine. Newspapers, even tabloid TV stations, broadcast pictures of vast landscapes burned by an unforgiving sun and cov- ered by skeletons of dead cattle and shots of skinny women and children creeping through the semi-desert to the “promised land”. The promised land of salvation presented itself as refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, where people had the chance to at least get water and one meal a day. Stories spread to the world about women, who had to leave their weak- est children dying alongside trails in the bush, so at least the stronger ones would have a chance to survive. One of them was a story of a mother who lost four of her children on the march, another about families that lost all their cattle—their only property. The larg- est refugee camp of the current era was their desired goal, laying out there in Kenya, near the border with Somalia—a fictitious country that has not existed for many years and was ruled by chaos, misery, violence and desperation. Dadaab was the name of camp. It was designed to provide shelter for 90,000 people, but 440,000 people were staying in this tent city in the middle of semi-desert in 2011. It is a city of tents larger than Florence, Bonn, Toulouse, Graz, Brno or Bratislava. 1,300 new people were arriving at Dadaab every day dur- ing the summer of 2011 at least 800 of them were children 1. Famine is also in Eritrea, but 1 Somalia: Increase in refugees fleeing to Kenya. BBC, 2011-06-28. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13937486. 7 Giant and Dwarf the military regime there is so oppressive that very little information is finding its way out of country 2. Another piece of news reaching the headlines in the summer of 2011 was one about the split of Sudan, until then the largest country in Africa. This split is the result of the longest civil war in the history of the continent: around 2 million people fell victims to the hostili- ties between the north and the south since 1955. The new state, established by separation of the southern part, chose to name itself Southern Sudan. It covers 620,000 km2—almost as much, as Germany and Poland combined. It has only 8 million inhabitants, but 200 ethnic groups, or as Africans say, tribes. As soon as this state was formally established, it became one of the poorest in the world: 90 % of its citizens live on less than 1 dollar per day. Fanfares were still sounding when the Murle tribe attacked the Lou Nuer tribe. 600 people were killed, 1,000 wounded and victorious Murle took 38,000 heads of cattle with them as a spoil of war. 3 By the spring of 2012, a border war with Sudan was added to ethnic fights— aerial bombardments, oil supplies cut; a free-fall of the new country’s shaky economy. Over the last few years most of the news from East Africa you find in Europe is about Somali pirates and also tourists’ stories from Kenya and Tanzania. But if you dig deeper you can also find reports about election violence in Kenya, genocide in Rwanda and AIDS epidemics in Uganda. Africans do not like our description of their continent as a world of poverty, desperation, vio- lence, corruption and backwardness. They would love to get rid of these negative stereotypes and see the world appreciate their positive side—the amazing nature of the African savan- nas, rivers, mountains and