Abstract
Africa needs journalists to tell the real story of how people, politics and power affect a continent bulging with wealth
In 1969, when the British were obsessed with the future of whites in central, eastern and southern Africa, Richard Hall, a former editor of The Times of Zambia, wrote a book called The High Price of Principles in which he discussed independent Africa's belief that morality might end white rule in Rhodesia and apartheid in South Africa. “It was an exciting vision, fanciful in retrospect but important to recall: at that time moral pressures appeared more real than military arithmetic or the influence of international finance. It was a matter of 250 million Africans against 4 million defensive whites, whose policies had been repeatedly condemned at the United Nations; there was a powerful illusion that mere numbers and distant resolutions created a tide of history.”
Forty years on, a journalist suggesting that morals might one day break the cycle of poverty, corruption, ignorance and disease in the world's hungriest continent would be laughed out of court. Hall wrote at a time when British readers were fed material out of Africa that left them with the impression that Africa was little more than a tribal, white-hating lunatic asylum with the lunatics in charge or about to be in charge. The deep grievances of men, women and sometimes children who walked the earth with hatred in their hearts and guns in their hands, flirting with a Marxist ideology that many neither understood nor wanted to understand was left unexamined.
Under the microscope of the mass-circulating press was a single slide – the future of the whites in Africa. Now, the days of British newspapers worrying too much about the future of Europeans in Zimbabwe or South Africa is over. The new slide under the microscope is money, and how to make lots more of it in a continent that many bankers and financial pundits predict will become the African Tiger within the next 20 to 30 years. But the danger for journalism is similar – an obsession with a single subject while problems besetting millions of people well away from celebrity or wealth go almost unnoticed, with potentially disastrous consequences. Africa is a huge continent with diverse populations that we do not do enough to understand.
I spent 30 years in central, eastern and southern Africa as a reporter. My bookshelves are full of works by famous, and not so famous, British journalists who lived and worked in that rarely dull place during Britain's withdrawal from Empire. My favourite is by The Daily Telegraph correspondent Christopher Munnion. He tried, in Banana Sunday, to show the fun and farce of reporting in Africa, as well as the cruel and tragic events reporters were asked to cover of a continent besieged by war, famine, corruption and rule by tyrants from the end of the 1950s through to the end of white rule in Africa in 1994.
Superb writing from the foreign correspondents
Another, Wise after the Event, by the journalist Don Wise, reprints headlines from many of his best stories for the Daily Express and Daily Mirror. They reflected what most British editors and proprietors were after during that time, when some of the best known and most highly paid correspondents gave their readers the impression that most of Africa was an extension of Brownsea Island, viz “Headhunters' war – see the hills of the naked and the dead”, from the Daily Express, then a drum-beater for the retention of Empire in the face of an onslaught from a largely non-white Commonwealth.
Of course there was superb writing from Munnion, James MacManus of The Guardian, Nick Ashford of The Times, Michael Holman and Brigit Bloom of the Financial Times, and many others. Kenneth Kaunda, the president of Zambia, told a group of us at State House in Lusaka that he'd sooner miss his supper than miss the BBC's Focus on Africa. In 1986, a celebrated cover of The Economist showed a map of Africa framing a youth with an assault rifle with the headline “The Hopeless Continent”.
This February, 27 years on, that same magazine gathered at a London hotel an audience of 180 delegates, comprising leading figures from business, banking, government and consultancies from the 2013 Africa Summit.
President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, a country recovering from a vile and costly conflict over diamonds, followed up her recent meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron and shared her belief that Africa is on schedule to reach the 2015 UN Millennium Development Goals, thanks to unfaltering growth across the continent. So while the British press is full of stories about how Europe is lurching from crisis to crisis and how the U.S. economy starts and then stutters and starts again, Africa stands to become a tiger nation. According to Standard Bank, 60 million African households have annual incomes greater than $3,000 and by 2015 that number is expected to reach 100 million, equating to a middle-class consumer market close to that of India, according to Aidan Heavey in the Thunderer column of The Times last summer.
This financial story is gaining traction. Steven Jennings, CEO of the large investment fund Renaissance Capital, said in an interview with Global magazine this year: “Remove Africa from the global equation today and look upon a landscape of broken and ruined economies.” Renaissance Capital predicts that by 2050, Africa's GDP will equal that of the USA and the EU combined in today's money. The lead author of a report by the investment fund contends that Africa is at a similar stage in development to South East Asia in the 1980s and India in the 1990s. Commenting on the report, Anver Versi, editor of the London-based African Business and also African Banker, wrote: “Growth follows youth, both in terms of productivity and consumption and Africa's population, unencumbered by the need to provide for an ageing, unproductive population, will have greater surplus income and energy, to push growth charts further.”
The investment message is spreading. Even Sunderland football team trots around the Stadium of Light with “Invest in Africa” on their red and white striped shirts. Africa has a population of a billion with an average age of 20 years, as compared with 40 years in the developing world. This gives Africa a huge potential consumer market that has so far remained largely untapped. The continent has 60 per cent of the world's uncultivated arable land and 30 per cent of its minerals, including large amounts of platinum, gold and iron ore, and in recent years energy companies have found significant deposits of oil and gas.
Between 2001 and 2010, six of the fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa and today the region is growing at a rate of about 6 per cent a year, says Mark Mobius, an emerging markets specialist at Templeton Africa Fund. Versi explains how the continent will change: “Urbanisation is a vital component in wealth creation as it tends to flatten out ethnic and regional differences, generates productive ideas and new skills, vastly increases demand (and supply) of goods and services and produces greater efficiencies of scale and productivity. UN Habitat estimates that 11 African cities will see population growth rates of over 50 per cent from 2010–2025, a rate similar to that prevailing in China today.” There is a huge task here for journalists in monitoring how this all works out in practice. Who makes the money? What are the social consequences? Who takes the power? In West Africa recently with the Commonwealth Journalists' Association and the Commonwealth Secretariat, I spoke to people who said they would sooner have their teeth removed without a pain killer than return to the fast-developing Lagos, Nigeria. The thought of 11 African cities growing at 50 per cent or more is brain-damaging.
The appalling contradiction of the Congo
A recent article in the Commonwealth magazine Global by the clever and canny observer of Africa, the BBC's Humphrey Hawksley, spoke of the appalling contradiction of having eastern Congo generating billions of dollars of wealth every year while the region remains one of the poorest and most unstable places on earth. He writes: “If we also take into account the use of child labour, poor safety conditions and low incomes, the emerging picture verifies the long-standing allegations of Western economies exploiting poor communities in the developing world. The price of gold has gone up five times over the past 10 years, whereas the miners' wages have gone down.”
At the Nyamurhale Gold Mine, young men scramble down deep, narrow shafts to hack gold out of a mountain. The gold is then taken down to a river where children break and wash the rocks. Soldiers watch over the process and collect a percentage of the profits. Vincent Djuma Bigirinama, the miners' president in that part of eastern Congo, explains: “Our children, when they grow up, won't have any other jobs. So they will have to do the same work in the same way. Why can't we train them to do something else and find a career and make money in another way? We're born into this, and I tell you many of the miners are crying at the lives they have to lead.”
These are the stories the media must tell. Otherwise, as they place a new slide under the microscope – Africa not as the world's most hopeless continent but Africa, the new field for investment – they will miss the human consequences. It can be a thankless job. As Aidan Hartley, who covered the terrible Rwanda bloodbath at a time most of the world and its un-caring politicians looked further south to where Nelson Mandela was about to become the first black president of South Africa, explained in The Spectator: “I finally returned to Rwanda to do business, not to cover a war. For decades I've worked as a hack and lived on the whiff of an oily rag. Along the way, I've picked up disease, an alcohol problem, debts, but I've also found myself in the trenches with interesting people. They fought to overturn dictatorships and to introduce a degree of democracy in Africa and become the leaders of their countries. I never thought of using my contacts. For far too long I wandered about getting hit by IEDs, shot at, infected with dysentery, forced to doorstep officials or listen to foreign NGO idiots in their 20s talking nonsense about Africa. No more. Forget it. It's over. It's time to join the gravy train.”
Half a century ago the popular British press's obsession with fun and farce in Africa led to a serious neglect of the rise to power of men and women who appeared to be able to live reasonably happy and productive lives when the Central African Federation started in 1953. Today we need people who can really tell us about the people and the politics, about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the aspirations of new nations finding wealth. Now, as the world begins to look at money, we need dedicated, experienced and intrepid reporters on a continent which may be seen as a tiger, but which is still a paper one. If you put your ear to the ground you can still hear the growls of the real beast: the more it is ignored, the more we are all in danger.