South Africa: The bread and the spread

A communion in disparate communities

There was a time when everyone broke the bread, even though the larger part of the loaf went to the few as freshly baked and the leftover part of the loaf that went to the most was stale and barely edible.

Yet, the many were hungry and made do with the piece of bread they got whilst asking for more of the loaf and a having it fresh too.

Besides that unequal sharing of the loaf, the few that had the fresh loaf also had butter and jam to spread on their slices of bread, it was a good life for them.

The thinner spread of yummy

Then there came a more equitable sharing of the loaf, not necessarily equal, not by any stretch of the imagination, however, there was no increase in the jam and butter spread, this meant that for every slice of bread there was a thinner spread and less of a satisfactory bite for all.

Yet, to compare the confectioners before equity to those after would be to miss the point that more jam had to be made and more butter churned to give a healthier spread to all.

The scale of the problem then

That, in a nutshell, is the story of South Africa in the Apartheid times when infrastructure and services were built to serve the minority and then post-Apartheid the same infrastructure was to stretch to serve all.

It has meant the black majority government has been met with challenges of inheriting working infrastructure and scaling that up with the same standard to serve all South Africans. However, this knowledge and plausible excuse can only go on for so long, we are 21 years into black majority rule and the need for seriously noticeable change for the better for the majority cannot be overlooked.

The time for excuses is fast ending

The need for greater accountability of the leadership that has taken the larger racial constituency for granted is more pressing than ever, the opposition also needs to up their game and begin to present themselves as a real and viable alternative for leadership, government, progress and development.

South Africa has both promise and potential, it needs to touch the seemingly inconsequential that for whatever reason lives from hand to mouth, whose future only appears to extend to the next minute and it would be ambitious to see beyond the next hour.

We cannot avoid it

Those realities cannot be ignored, as we cocoon ourselves in the prosperous areas, we have to traverse the pathways between the conurbations of the privileged where we see a grimmer reality and the temptation to say, South Africa is not working for the majority.

That is the lesson I learnt from my fellow passenger as I was flying from Paris to Johannesburg.

Opinion: Questions abound for Nigerians

Not suffering fools gladly

This week had a number of events lighting up Twitter about Nigeria, it got so serious that I was fully persuaded to block a cantankerous buffoon pretending to smarts and a busybody whose alignment with the former elicited the advice that she stop following me forthwith.

Life must be easier than walking into idiots on the street or even worse, engaging them online where one’s belief in the best of everyone challenges the better judgement of just ignoring them.

Allegations are tough luck

The first news story was about the alleged arrest of the wife of the Oyo State governor for money laundering in London. This probably was the low-hanging fruit dropping on our heads despite the fact that it all appeared to be malicious.

The governor immediately slammed a suit demanding atrocious damages of the newspaper failing to realise the subtlety in the headline, it was alleged, allegations are just allegations, even the courts would have agreed that allegations could be made however vilifying, that is just the nature of the use of the various forms of allege.

However, there were more substantive issues to discuss as to whether she did make 52 trips out of Nigeria in 17 months considering the wives of the legislators of the same state had months before visited London a few months before to attend courses to make them better politician wives.

On further scrutiny

As a Nigerian, I can be persuaded to believe that after a certain number of trips to the United Kingdom the immigration officials will have their interest piqued to at least ask a few questions as to why the frequency of visits, for what purposes and to what ends.

We are not particularly aware of what particular profession she has to make her such an enviable globetrotter but when a close relation of someone in public office who apparently had also made over 40 trips out of Nigeria in the 17 months of his tenure, some answers are required to pertinent questions.

Girl alone abroad

Along with the strident denials came another snippet of information, in the words of the governor’s wife, she has an under-aged daughter attending school in the UK; the obvious question to ask is whether the schools are not good enough in Nigeria but that will be facetious.

However, the poor girl has being shunted out to the UK since the age of seven with the aim of probably making her a dysfunctional high achiever being so devoid of essential family life but she might well turn out to be a tough cookie being reminded constantly that daddy and mummy are putting all they have into her education that poor grades will be untenable.

This is all conjecture and it could all be far from the truth, but in the age of the lack of transparency from our political leaders, imagination is one virtue of man that cannot be trammelled.

PhD in steering

Did we not get agitated when the richest man in Africa suggested he will be asking university graduates to apply for jobs as truck drivers? One can assume with all the sophisticated technology installed on trucks for tracking, logistics, navigation and so on, a certain level of aptitude is required to operate the trucks beyond mitts on steering wheels and feet on pedals.

However, when the news came that of the about 13,000 applications, 6 had PhDs and over 50 had MBAs, even if just for a second the world had to come to a standstill to appreciate what all this meant.

The plausibility

Now, there are many who said they could not believe that such highly qualified persons would apply for such jobs. I doubt the said applicant will come forward to tell anyone that they did except if years hence their circumstances changed so radically that they had a different story to tell.

The matter however should not be the believability of the story but that there could be any circumstances where such could be possible.

Why a seemingly growing economy like the one of Nigeria cannot absorb talent at the level where they can be challenged, utilising their acquired skills beyond the optimum becomes a pressing question.

The missing fundamentals

The stark reality is the growth is only in the oil industry and probably in the religious industry and nowhere else.

The fundamentals for real growth are missing – infrastructure, industry and education. I say education because I believe the best education one can get is primary school education that involves helping pupils be daring, adventurous, precocious, inquisitive, questioning, challenging, curious and interrogating – such an environment can make a whole lot of difference to the kind of outlook the adult will end up having regardless of academic achievement.

Our educational system is in a mess, and only today I saw a video of a vice chancellor of a university with a curriculum delivered in English who could not string together grammatically correct English sentences – we have a problem.

Do good with them

My hope is that Mr Dangote will identify these highly academically qualified candidates and put them on some fast track management program either for his industries or for export to other African countries needing such expertise.

The individuals themselves do need to look at African possibilities and it is not beyond the African Union to sign treaties that allow for easier migration of highly skilled personnel between countries. Europe and the United States already recognises the need to retain highly qualified people for growing their economies.

Greater concerns

There is no doubt that we do need the Chinese in Africa but one million of them is probably 900,000 too many, our governments need to see the emergency that this is – the inability to get qualified personnel for the basic jobs and the waste of amazing talent on somewhat menial jobs.

Wages do have to be earned but the downward trend that might make Africa’s middle class highly qualified truck drivers is too worrisome for words.

Africa: China in the minds of impressionable African kids

We are going to ABC school

My less than salutary views of China’s apparent invasion of Africa are continually reinforced with the bits of news that seem to show that China’s activities in Africa are not entirely for the long-term good of Africans.

I was irked this time by a tweet that came into my Twitter stream minutes ago.

It started with this tweet

@eolander If you don't think #China is moving to a soft-power strategy in #Africa: read this - they plan to build 1000 schools: http://bit.ly/g6x3Es [1]

To which I responded

@eolander Building primary schools is commendable http://bit.ly/g6x3Es but that is hardly the vehicle for knowledge transfer, is it?

I got this response

@eolander @forakin Africa's development needs extend beyond pure knowledge transfer. Building schools seems to be a wonderful price of entry to the African market.

There are so many strands of discourse with this development, the idea that the Chinese would build 10 ICT driven model primary schools in Kenya is quite commendable and must be applauded, and this intent would be scaled out to 1,000 such schools across Africa giving the lucky pupils a basic educational grounding in life.

One basic context

This however throws up a host of issues, one of which was exemplified in Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy for Girls [2] (OWLAG) in South Africa, the benevolent lady shelled out $40 million of her own money to build that school and it drew a number of plaudits and condemnations.

In my view, I felt building one $40 million school where she had complete control of quality, management and oversight was something she could well do and it might serve as a model for schools that the government and other philanthropists might build in the future.

The other view was that she should have contributed the $40 million for 40 $1 million schools and that would have spread the opportunity but depreciated the quality because spread so thin we would have had to rely on the failing governments who are not making adequate provision for schooling in the first place to provide infrastructure, staff, support, inspection, monitoring and all.

It would have had all the makings of a logistical nightmare and prone to failure if standards could not be synchronised across the whole franchise compared to focus on a single school.

Extrapolating this view, for governments to welcome this idea at this level of the education ladder shows obvious and probably unforgivable failings of African governments to address the need for good primary school education.

Another Sino-African job imbalance

The standard of those schools might well be such that the staffing would not be by Africans but the opening for another influx of the Chinese of another profession – this time, teachers rather than engineers and entrepreneurs. To the million add another 50,000 Chinese ready to mould the minds of our dearly impressionable children.

In the meanwhile, we all think our children are getting a good education which they are, but whose minds would they have when they have finished?

Africans in the Chinese mould

The next stage to this is the building of model secondary schools that would take in the graduates of the primary schools, those who fail to make the grade would be a ready under-skilled workforce for the many Chinese industries that are growing around the continent.

Having been imbibed with the “Chinese Work Ethic”, they would be sophisticated sweatshop fodder for scandal-prone FoxConn-like [3] organisations, herded, kettled, run like the typical country folk of China that man the manufacturing lines of Chinese industry, living in atrocious bomb shelter conditions [4].

{Foxconn has seriously improved its human resources management in China but would Chinese companies have that kind of scrutiny in Africa? Where they do would we trade-off the opportunities they bring for the welfare of our people?}

Indeed, we need our African children at work, the good primary school graduates are 6 years away, then the secondary school intakes have another 6 years of reinforcement to make up the probably shift-leader and foreman class of the industry.

The risk of higher education

One would suppose universities would be the next stage but that is the dangerous part, that is where real knowledge and technology is transferred, that is where the spirit of independence is cultured, that is where ideas, solutions and entrepreneurs will emerge from and that would be the stiff competition to the Chinese Industry Complex [5] that is laying foundations as solid as pyramid bases all around Africa.

Again, on the surface it is all for the good, but the long term considerations of this seemingly “good intentions” use of soft power cannot of essence be for the noblest and altruistic reasons.

Africa already has many universities, they need funding, they need endowment, they need good management, I would rather we had Chinese money flow into those institutions, the Chinese brain-boxes join the faculties, Chinese professors of renown bring their wealth of knowledge just as they are bringing their money to give Africa the kick start it really needs.

Graduates of these universities would have more affinity for their localities; they will contribute to their communities, encourage development in their countries and be the kind of role models worthy of emulation that would really lift both our educational standards and the people in general out of poverty.

A fisherman without a boat or a lake

We are constantly told of the Chinese proverb – Give a man a fish, you feed him a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him his whole life.

That would be too simplistic a recipe for success, they have fed the man a day, even taught him how to fish, but there are no lakes to fish in and where there is water he has a rod but no boat – that is the context of this incipient soft power offensive that looks so commendable if it were not cynically sinister on closer scrutiny.

Sources

[1] Kenya Broadcasting Corporation - KBC News - China to build primary schools in Kenya

[2] Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls [akin.blog-city.com]

[3] Scandal-hit Foxconn sets sights inland - People's Daily Online – Other related articles on the page point to serious human resources issues.

[4] Underground world hints at China's coming crisis - Telegraph

Addendum giving context to this blog.

[5] China's economic invasion of Africa | World news | The Guardian

Analysis of this news story requires another blog but a few interesting excerpts for starters.

"If you want to start something – and be the boss – Africa is the place to do it."

"Chinese work very hard, very quickly," he says. "But here we are training local people to do the work, and if someone does not understand, he works slowly. You have to watch." Read in the context of the engineer in charge who speaks halting English.

Other Sino-African blogs I have written

Nigeria: NaijaLeaks and why China is bad for Africa

South Africa: Why again China is bad for Africa

Comments: Why China is bad for Africa

Africa: How to make China good for Africa

Africa: How to make China good for Africa

Preamble

This is my third blog on why China is bad for Africa, it could be counted as the fourth but my last posting showcased comments that were posted with regards to the second blog I wrote.

Now, I would hate for any of these views to be misconstrued as a hatred of China and their activities in Africa, far from inciting Sino-phobia my intention is highlight areas in which Africa should improve their negotiating stances with China leading to lasting progress derived from the ready and attractive solutions the Chinese bring to Africa without caveats or requirements.

Ndubuisi Ekekwe wrote a blog for the Harvard Business Review starts with the headline Before Your Next African Investment [1] to which I contributed the following re-tweet.

RT @HarvardBiz Before Your Next African Investment http://s.hbr.org/gxykbE The Chinese have come for the mines and nothing for our minds.

Take it all in context

This blog must be read in the context of all the blogs listed below that I have written on this topic, or else it would be difficult to appreciate the issues raised in this blog.

Nigeria: NaijaLeaks and why China is bad for Africa

South Africa: Why again China is bad for Africa

Comments: Why China is bad for Africa

They speak English there

This time it is Sierra Leone where an English speaking country has taken on a Chinese makeover with its hotel sporting television remote controllers with Chinese labels.

In my last blog, referenced the issue that the Chinese create isolated enclaves for themselves meaning they fail to integrate with the host countries they have emigrated to.

The fact that television remote controllers are in Chinese begins to illustrate the glaring divide that is between the Sierra Leoneans or even Africans and the Chinese, very few of the locals would have any knowledge of Mandarin or Cantonese and it creates a barrier in communication and the generation of relationships which I highlighted in my first blog where Chinese managers who spoke no English could not be engaged when it came to industrial disputes.

Working Chinese and worked Africans

With a million Chinese in Africa, they are in no way helping create an African elite through the transfer of knowledge or skills, what the writer saw was young Chinese men getting ready for work, one can only wonder how many local people were getting ready to work in these Chinese operations who were of similar or higher cadre than their guests.

History seems to be repeating itself in Africa; though this is anecdotal, the Europeans of old that came to Africa cannot be said to have been the cream of the crop of their societies, though they did eventually make big names for themselves and probably a lot of money, gaining status and recognition back at home whilst sometimes doing commendable things for the Africans.

In the same vein, these Chinese young ones cannot have been sent out to Africa if they were the brains, the innovators, the thinkers and the geniuses, obviously, this assumption can be challenged but it is a valid premise to have.

These people who were hardly relevant at home come to Africa to become chiefs with “Indians” at their beck and call to be shot at like vermin as was the case in Zambia – one risks the accusation of wiping up a form of xenophobia but the facts are becoming evident on the ground.

Communication is key to knowledge transfer

The underlying problem is this, at best, the communication between many Chinese and Africans would be Pidgin English, poor French, or passable Portuguese depending on if you are in Anglophone, Francophone or Lusophone Africa; in the extreme it would be barking monosyllables with frantic gesticulations; hardly the means for technology or knowledge transfer – Africans will then be left none the wiser as the young ones build their profile to return to their home societies hopefully with the respect and authority they once did not have, having earned their stripes and medals from faraway Africa.

This is the crux of the problem, the Chinese are buying up access to resources, building infrastructure peopled and managed by themselves with Africans doing the graft work in miserable working conditions without adequate safety, human resource relations or developed management structures – there might be the token African face somewhere to offer the pretence of partnership but we should see through that.

When Africa runs out of the opportunities the Chinese are so ready to exploit, one does wonder what Africans would be left with as the Chinese leave to seek other lands to rape, albeit with consent and compensation.

Kill two birds with a Chinese funding

Indeed, we need infrastructure development and it is the failure of our African governments that has led to needing the Chinese to build our roads, our power installations, our railways, our stadiums, our critical infrastructure for economic progress and other aspects of real estate that seem cater to foreigners rather than the locals.

However, where our governments have failed us most is in healthcare and education, the headlines of disease and famine can become something of Africa’s past with good hospitals and good schools; this is where our governments should begin to direct their negotiating prowess with more finesse.

Take the money if you must but add conditions that would make for a lasting legacy for Africa and Africans, link the number of Chinese being brought in with numbers of Africans who need to have jobs, link infrastructure projects with community development for primary healthcare and good primary and secondary education along with scholarships to good Chinese universities.

Get tough with the immigrants

More so, use a percentage of the deals to endow impoverished local universities making them centres of excellence on African soil and finally require that no more than a certain percentage of Chinese immigrants are allowed to stay in African for more than a stipulated period without learning the official language of the country.

Short-term the visa requirement that at renewal a test of language proficiency is passed before their stay is extended.

It is not enough to receive Chinese funds, Africa should make good use of the influx of Chinese investment with radical changes to the lot of Africans in general – and then we can begin to see reasons beyond why China is bad for Africa to a longer term benefit for Africa.

Source

[1] Before Your Next African Investment - Ndubuisi Ekekwe - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

No safer than a bridge of rotten planks

Lay me down before it lies down

Many would have hummed if not sung along whenever the whiff and strains of the Simon & Garfunkel classic Bridge over Troubled Water song comes to ones hearing.

The calming effect of relaying the importance of humans to other humans would really make you want to lay down in the comfort of comatose repose away from the troubles of this wicked world.

At last count, five had entered into permanent repose as strains of neglect found them on a troubled bridge over roaring waters as their confidence in being borne over a solid structure from one bank to another over the Mississippi River was dashed as the structure gave way to lay down onto land and water below.

Falling apart, falling down

Alas! This is no unique event but a litany of events that are beginning to catch the eye of those who really matter; American infrastructure built by generations long gone is coming apart.

It would appear that regimes of inspections over the proper repair of these infrastructure has lead to assessments of "structurally deficient" but seemingly posing no immediate danger to the public.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has been warning of these problems, they have become more of an activist agency for a change of perspectives, but the political masters have ignored these men of "bricks, mortar, concrete and steel" because there is no need to panic.

But, panic we must, because, for a major bridge and traffic artery to fall to pieces without the influence of unusual weather patterns or some seismological event on a cool calm day in a major metropolis or two as is the case of the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, there must be something seriously wrong.

Bridges, rails, roads and dams

We saw the breached levees following Hurricane Katrina, dams are falling and quite a few, a third of recent rail accidents have been due to track failure, a bursting steam pipe in the middle of Manhattan and we begin to see a trend, a pattern and something endemic.

If all this does not in some way fall under Homeland Security, I would wonder what does if people are afraid to go out or even stay in for the fear of something collapsing, all because it has not been proper maintained.

In the midst of this quagmire, the contract probably still exists to build the "bridge to nowhere" rather than larger contracts to service and repair the many thousands of bridges to somewhere in America where you can safely go to work and return home to your loved ones.

This is an emergency as major as any war America has ever fought, it should not take the demise of a landmark bridge like the Golden Gate or the Brooklyn before these structures are propped up and self-supporting under maximum strain by the sweat and blood that built the great nation of the United States of America - Get to it and fast.

References

Broken Bridges, Lost Levees and a Brutal Culture of Neglect

States with the most deficient bridges

Historical collapses