> The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) is a trade agreement which is in force between 24 African Union member states,[1][8][9][10] with the goal of creating a single market followed by free movement and a single-currency union.
Wikipedia says they are also looking to create an Africa currency.
Ghadaffi wanted to create an African currency as well [0]. I wonder if the African countries will now succeed. I feel it will definitely be in their interest as it seems currently France has control over African monetary policy [1] which (I feel) could still be considered some form of colonialism.
As your own source notes, France does not control the policy of either of the two separate CFA franc zones, but does have preferential access to resources resulting from the deal setting up the currency arrangement, which is the actual benefit it gets from the deal.
Isn't it very common for a currency to be pegged to another, though? Dozens of currencies are pegged to the EUR or USD, and the two CFA francs are not very different, except that the French treasury is legally bound to guarantee free convertibility between CFA franc and euro, unlike say the US federal reserve with Cuban peso.
Yes, it is common. There are even countries that officially adopting a currency they do not control, e.g. Croatia uing the euro. But this has the very real drawbacks that the previous comments mentioned.
> It's their own national bank which buys and sells tons of Euros to keep the exchange rate stable.
The two CFA franc zones have zone central banks (which aren't exclusively controlled by countries in the respective zone, since France has a seat on each), it's not individual national central banks issuing currency or managing the peg.
That's nonsense. Zimbabwe (like the famous Weimar republic, by the way) had a extreme fall in the real productive capacity of the economy (1). Inflation was going to happen nevertheless the monetary policy they adopted.
>Food production halved in the 1990s as a result of [Mugabe's] decision to strip white farmers of their land and hand it to members of the black population who, in many cases, had no farming experience.
We will see. Right now when Spain buys oil from Norway (EU member and European Economic Area member) they (have to?) use US Dollars, which is insanity from the perspective of both countries.
Ghadaffi wanted to trade oil for Euros and we all know how it end up.
>Right now when Spain buys oil from Norway (EU member and European Economic Area member) they (have to?) use US Dollars, which is insanity from the perspective of both countries.
Instead of converting from Krone to Euros and vice versa, you convert into the largest, most stable, most liquid currency on the planet. What is insane?
>Ghadaffi wanted to trade oil for Euros and we all know how it end up.
Ah yes, Ghadaffi, Sadam Hussein...good men overthrown because they wanted to "trade oil for Euros".
Wait; why couldn't they again? What, precisely was stopping them from dealing in Euro, besides the seller or buyer of oil demanding to be use USD? Right, nothing.
The idea that the US forces people to trade in USD as opposed to it working out that way because it's a stable currency of a powerful nation is a fallacy that won't die. Just like within the country, you are free to trade in whatever the hell currency you want...if you can find a willing counter-party.
I'm not sure if you're referring to Gaddafi's death, but there's strong suspicion he's dead because he talked a bit too loudly about financing the campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy
They don't have to use dollars. I'm sure Norway would accept Euros. They may well use dollars for convenience as it's the most common currency for oil trading.
I'm glad to see this mentioned. Ghadaffi had big plans for uniting Africa, which would have been horrible for the Europeans who have been plundering the continent for centuries.
I've always felt that was the real reason the he was ousted. Other national leaders, both in and outside Africa, have done far worse than him yet have never been invaded.
Ghadaffi's relations with the Europeans had actually improved substantially in the run-up to the civil war. Even the UK was moving to normalise relationships, which was a pretty big deal given the bombing of the plane over Lockerbie.
It was the Arab Spring and internal strife which kicked off Ghadaffi's downfall with the events at Benghazi getting the international community - lead by France, ISTR involved.
The UN kicked Libya off the Human Rights Commission, following a report by Amnesty documenting warcrimes on the government and rebel sides and it all degenerated into a nasty civil war. I don't think it is correct to say that he was "ousted" by Western forces in any particularly meaningful way.
And the context of those 6 words is? It could easily be her ridiculing a claim that American forces waltzed in and killed him (which they didn't from what I have read)
I'm skeptical that uniting Africa would be horrible for Europeans. Most of the interaction I've seen in my lifetime has been trying to help them - overseas aid, band aid and all that. We weren't fans of Gaddafi's dictatorship and sponsoring of terrorism but that's another issue.
Can't say I'm an expert on all of it but as David Cameron put it
>I would say it is not only a moral obligation that the better-off countries have to tackle poverty in our world when we still have over a billion people living on less than a dollar a day, but it's also in our interests that we build a more prosperous world.
> which would have been horrible for the Europeans who have been plundering the continent for centuries.
For european corporations and shareholders, that is. It would probably be better for the majority of people, because higher stabilityand prosperity in Africa will result in fewer refugees, which results in fewer issues with rightwing nutjobs.
I dunno, the fact that he was an authoritarian quasi dictator akin to Putin might've had something to do with it. He destroyed and oppressed anyone who opposed him, shelled civilians in the civil war, and let's not forget his personal guard, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazonian_Guard , which was straight out of a supervillain handbook.
I agree, but if you read about him a bit "wider", including periods before and some time after he came into power, it does seem like there were some really good things there that he tried to do, both in Libya and broader region (which were not in the interest of foreign powers, though). Afterwards, you start to see elements of insanity and paranoia and things getting much worse, but it does seem to an extent that those were a result of the hostile environment around him and maybe of failure to do things more "normally".
Given that decolonization ended more than 40 years ago, "the Europeans who have been plundering the continent for centuries" are either dead or retired. How is African countries reaching an agreement would be horrible to anyone, including them?
The notion of individuals being responsible for exploiting Africa and them being dead meaning the exploitation no longer exists is like saying USA ceased to exist when founding fathers passed away.
Newer history of Africa is almost exclusively defined by consequences of external manipulation, driven by financial interests.
In general, you can look up the definition of "neocolonialism".
That’s true to an extent, but “almost exclusively” gives very little agency to the people. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were colonies until the middle of the 20th century.
It is now a nation in continual civil war between a warring bunch of factions. People are desperate to emigrate from there and a lot of area is controlled by human traffickers. This is the end result of military intervention against Gaddafi. This was a nation that had free health care for the public. A lot of people are dying daily, but you don't hear about it since international journalists are afraid to enter the area - they will be taken as hostages by one group or another immediately.
Instead of waging War, international negotiation for the succession of power with guarantees of safety should have been performed painstakingly - with lots of carrots offered, but there are just too many warmongers in the US and even the UN.
When one faction rules out negotiating any outcome that doesn't involve Gadaffi's removal (and doesn't have much unity beyond that) and the other faction is Gadaffi and his loyalists that don't want to move, the chances of negotiating a peaceful transition were always going to be slim. Revolutions often don't have happy endings. Libya had free healthcare, but it also was also the fiefdom of a dictator who said that those who didn't love him didn't deserve to live.
Not every violent conflict has to be the fault of the US and the UN, and the argument they ought to have intervened more to stabilise the country afterwards is at least as plausible as the argument that they intervened too much.
(The conspiracy theory that Western intervention had something to do with Gadaffi's gold dinar idea doesn't have much to rest on either. Round about the time Gadaffi was talking up one of the oldest ideas in Islam as part of his vision for Africa and not getting anywhere even when he was the African Union president, a Malaysian state actually introduced one and was roundly ignored, even by the Malaysian government.)
If you have to choose between one evil and another - its probably better not to choose at all. Non-intervention would have been the best policy to follow here. Hysteria raised by journalists should not be the primary motivating factor for waging war. No one did the cost analysis for lives ended by anarchy and extra-ordinary poverty and suffering caused by complete national economic breakdown.
This is just my personal opinion - but military intervention should be only used for self-defence and the defence of one's allies. And for nothing else.
It's not our fault, until we get involved. This faux crusade of democracy our politicians use as justification just reeks of imperialism, destablising these countries so they are no longer able to sustain any form of government without a puppet government backed by our nations.
In a democracy we as the electorate like to pretend we have no involvement in this decision making, yet we pride ourselves on the system of government that apparently represents 'the people' the most. "Don't blame us, it's just our government!"
Libya was in the midst of a civil war before the UN military intervention you referred to. In fact, the military intervention occurred mere hours before Gaddafi's plans to obliterate Benghazi could be implemented. The military intervention was a no-fly zone to prevent Gaddafi's forces from killing civilians [0]. So people are dying daily, not because of a UN intervention, but because Gaddafi's ouster created a vacuum that resulted in a power struggle. Note that the only other alternative would have been for Gaddafi to retain power at the cost of significant loss of life.
The other point is that the people desperate to emigrate are non-Libyan Africans using Libya as a port of departure. These people have suffered rape, mutilation etc at the hands of the various warring factions.
Mussolini was invading other nations. Which nation was Gaddafi invading ? If Mussolini wasn't carrying out invasions, he would have definitely got a pass.
There must be a better way of dealing with murderous dictators. Though it's politically incorrect these days there might be something to said for something like the old British colonialism in those cases where you go in and take over the country under foreign governance for a while. Maybe governance by some UN body rather than Brits and for a limited time, say 10 years, followed by elections.
Ukraine is at least way more stable than Libya is… There’s still serious violence going on in Libya all the time.
Ignoring Libya is more of a regional thing as well. Being seen as part of the middle east / North African mess which the whole American public got their fill of for two decades.
If there was still airstrikes happening in Ukraine it’d certainly get more coverage than Libya.
They enthusiastically tried democracy for a while, but quickly learned that it doesn't really work when the country consists of many factions that have no shared values. After multiple weak coalition governments that could get absolutely nothing done, in the last elections many of the previously governing parties were voted out in an election that had a turnout of 18%.
This lead to the start of the second Libyan civil war. The newly elected House of Representatives, (from now on, "Tobruk government") wanted to take power, but the parties that lost the elections refused to yield it, passing a measure that granted them temporary special authority, and formed the "National Salvation Government". The various Islamist groups in the country declared that neither government represented them, and took the black flag as many different factions, most important of them being "The Libyan provinces of ISIL" and "The Shura council of Benghazi revolutionaries".
The war from then on had many twists and turns, with the UK, US, France, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Jordan, Belarus, Italy, Germany, EU, Qatar and Iran supporting a faction or another at any time. The only really consistent part of this was that the western powers were stumbling over each other to bomb ISIL and other Islamists.
The end result was that a shrewd Libyan-American warlord named Khalifa Haftar (his tagline being that he fought with and against every major faction at some point or another) essentially took over the Libyan National Army (LNA) and the Tobruk Government (they still exist and maintain all the trappings and procedures of democracy, but do so in a building where the security is provided by Haftar, and would never go against his will), and conquered most of the country, including most of the economically significant oil and water resources.
Haftars winning strategy was largely realizing that the western powers would support anyone fighting Islamists, so instead of directly challenging his main opponents, he cleared out all the Islamists he found and took their territory. He might have "encouraged" areas that would not otherwise have flown the blag flag to do so, before crushing them.
He had a lot of western support on the way, but his policy of not taking Islamists prisoner and just having them summarily executed seems to have cooled those ties. Since 2016, he's been courting for Russian support, and seems to have gained it.
If you asked this question in early April, I'd have said that it seems like Haftar will be the next Gaddafi, as his forces were finally moving on the capital and the remaining territory not held by him, but this offensive seems to have failed because of strong Turkish support. LNA withdrew for a time, and Haftar ordered LNA to target any Turkish ships, companies and arrest Turkish nationals found in the country. It seems like he's building up for attempt two.
Also, Haftar is 75 years old, and no-one has any clue what would happen to his forces if he died.
Please see notahacker’s comment below for some much needed clarity in this thread. Gaddafi had become a laughingstock on the continent well before Arab Spring. His grand vision was an Africa with him as king. There was zero chance that he would have been able to build a coalition around his currency.
>> A French official sits on the boards of both central banks, which suggests France retains at least some influence over the decision making process.
>> Participation in the currency is voluntary.
>> In 2018, Guinea was the largest country of origin [for European migration], followed by Morocco - both former French colonies that don't use the CFA franc. Cote d'Ivoire and Mali are the only countries of origin using the CFA franc that have contributed significantly to migration across the Mediterranean, accounting for 14.4 percent of the total last year.
The data in the article runs counter to the complaint against CFA currency, that it causes poverty and therefore migration into Europe. Two of the highest migration sources were ex-CFA members who now use their own currency and only 14.4% came from CFA members. Ending CFA is not some panacea.
But that said I very much favour local control of currencies in almost every case as it's one of the great benefits of global capitalism being (voluntarily) given away by these countries. Currencies and market value should be tied closely to local market conditions rather than orchestrated and centrally balanced across a massive network of countries with stark economic differences.
Trade deals (plus reducing protectionism and corporate welfare in general) are sufficient to lower barriers to entry into markets which is where it pays off to be liberal and global. Giving up control of your currency should be at most a temporary measure when local state bodies aren't stable enough to have a healthy market. Not some long term arrangement. Inefficiencies of currency conversion are problems that can be solved by healthy financial markets (futures) and technology.
Plus there are better examples of bigger economies having a strong monetary influence over smaller countries governments without the whole colonial image that putting a European bureaucrats directly on central banks gives off. The best example is governments taking on massive amounts of foreign loans - which is still in de jour for some reason. For ex: China controls significant amounts of debt across Africa and Latin America which is arguably a stronger lever of influence than France has in Africa.
"The data in the article runs counter to the basic complaint against CFA currency, that it causes poverty and therefore migration into Europe. Two of the highest migration sources were ex-CFA members who now use their own currency and only 14.4% came from CFA members."
You're assuming the main cause of migration is poverty, that people from poorer countries emigrate more, and that since emigration is lower the countries are less poor.
The former might be justified, but the two latter arguments are definitely false[0], in fact 'richer poorer' countries have larger emigration!
"Just the opposite: Those richer countries have three times the average emigration rate of the poorer countries.... Somewhere roughly around $7,000–$10,000 per capita, there is a turning point: Emigration from the average country starts to fall with greater economic development, as we might expect. Today’s poor countries are generations away from that level."
So the data cited does not contradict the CFA criticism that it causes countries to be more poor than they otherwise would be. Another criticism might wonder what 'voluntary' means with such power differential and historical relations.
I'm not assuming anything. That was the evidence provided by OP's sources. The other examples in the article were posed as questions, not data. Otherwise my comment is largely anti-CFA and foreign controlled currencies.
Still the 'poverty leads to migration' theory is not quite true (in fact arguably the reverse in these particular circumstances), and therefore the fact some CFA countries have less emigration than some ex-CFA countries does not show that they are less poor or that the CFA is beneficial compared to non-CFA case.
I agree with your premise and I think there are two main reasons for this behavior.
Firstly even to migrate you have to have access to information and brain cycles to process it. Real poor are too busy to have that kind of time at hand.
Secondly even illegal immigration requires spending some money upfront and of course poor don't have it.
If you in the middle income range, it does make sense to move up the ladder by immigrating to a better place. If you are super rich, you can just buy citizenship.
CFA Franc countries can't leave because 1) France holds their foreign reserves so France holds the upper hand, 2) France actively works against countries trying to leave.
Countries have left the CFA Franc so it’s obviously possible. If France had held onto their foreign reserves I imagine that would have been mentioned somewhere so I doubt it’s true.
Half of the reserves of each CFA franc country have to be deposited to the French treasury - which is responsible for ensuring that euros can be exchanged for CFA franc, so obviously it has to hold a significant amount of CFA.
They can be withdrawn whenever the country leaves the CFA franc. But in the recent past, countries have been more eager to join than to leave.
Nonsense: many countries have left the CFA Franc (like Guinea, Madagascar and Mauritania), and others have joined (like Equatorial Guinea or Guinea-Bissau). Some have left and joined again (like Mali). I wonder if you have actual example of France actively working against countries trying to leave? Or even a pointer to countries trying to leave?
I'm not competent to judge whether the CFA Franc is a good currency or not for the countries using it. No doubt it is a compromise with good sides and bad sides. The obvious good side being that it certainly makes trade easier within the CFA Franc zone. The obvious bad side is that the Euro top priority being fighting inflation, it can hinder exportations from countries that are not very competitive. A complaint often heard about the Euro from European countries (especially France, sweet irony).
Hopefully African nations will manage to create their very own currency, and will manage it well.
Yeah, I'd bet on that whole FB thing to come to a screeching halt pretty soon. The Africans have been smitten by the allure of the Chinese protectionist model. One of the biggest mistakes I saw when I was in energy was how we were not providing Africa with a sufficiently attractive alternative model. All the Africans were about was, basically, "Money talks and BS walks." And the Chinese system just looks so attractive because of all the money, and how many poor people they've lifted, and yada yada yada.
Ever try to compete with a dream? And it's good for people to have dreams. Don't misunderstand me. I think we in the West need to offer Africa an equally attractive dream. Because right now all we've been slogging the past 60 or 70 years has been "democracy will make your life better". We shouldn't be too surprised that they are starting to run off the reservation.
How about offering them the dream of the rule of law? Arbitrary enforcement of capricious legal codes is the biggest hurdle keeping the people, and hence the economies, of these countries down.
The rule of law comes when people try to protect their properties. It is hard to apply when you have nothing to lose. If you want to apply it from the top, you will need a dictator to do that. Take Chinese IP issue as an example, there are more and more laws to protect IP (of course, still not as good as western standard), the reason is that Chinese companies start to develop their own IP, and they need to protect them. The same for private properties, there was no law before 90s I believe, now people own things, their properties will be protected.
Rule of law is another one though that no one really has. The best you can say is that there is a spectrum. And on that spectrum you have a place like, say, Norway, where only a very few people will get preferential treatment. And on the other end you have places like EG, where arbitrary treatment is essentially enshrined in law in the personage of the head élite.
You could argue we don't even have rule of law in the US ourselves, since we definitely live in a place where laws will be enforced against some but not others. At least we have the democracy we've been trying to sell them on. So in the case of slinging democracy, regardless of what you think of the health of our own democracy, we're able to give a message consistent with deed.
Gerrymandering, regulatory capture, and a massive and growing class gap want to talk to you about this "Democracy". (not to be construed with being pro china by any means, but I think we can set our sights a little higher than the current sh*t show)
If the solutions presented all seem to be more regulatory capture and information/market asymmetry for the big companies with gov connections, I’d rather not.
The thing that has exploded in size since the 1960s no one talks about is the size of nation states across the western world and their direct involvement in countless markets. From education to big banks to defence contractors to Boeing, they are some of the worst examples of mixed state-capitalism and a great way to become wealthy while providing little value to the population.
Not to mention the explosion of private equity in gov projects leeching off tax payers. We need less mixing of the big players with gov force and have either public companies (ie public health insurance) or markets. The direction the US is going in by continually mixing the two has done little to help the “little guy”. Yet the markets and rich get all the blame, but there’s no way universities can charge 4-20x more for the same product without cheap gov backed debt, nor the housing market boom that generated tons of poverty.
China just sent its police force into Vanuatu to extract 6 people (mostly Vanuatu citizens) who they claim broke Chinese law. These people were deported without trial.
This comes after they did the same last year in Fiji, when they kidnapped and flew out 77 people without trial.
African nations had better be careful. Their sovereignty is at risk.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you unfamiliar with the concept of dual citizenship?
Their nationality outside of the State of Vanuatu is irrelevant. They are Vanuatu citizens, had not been charged with a crime in Vanuatu. Countries don't just deport their own citizens.
My point is that the situation is much more grey than you're painting it. From what I've read about the situation, it was the Vanuatuan authorities themselves who arrested the six suspects. The Chinese government merely filed a complaint. They were then deported back to China, escorted by Chinese law enforcement. Many countries (including the U.S) assert that their laws apply to their citizens even when travelling overseas.
Also, all of these suspects are Chinese nationals who applied for Vanuatuan citizenship. Four out of six of them were granted citizenship. One out of the four forged his criminal record check form in order to obtain citizenship [1]. It sounds as though they were trying to use Vanuatuan citizenship as a shield against criminal deportation, which clearly the Vanuatuan government wants no part of. Vanuatu has been quite blatant in citizenship-for-money exchanges [2][3][4] in recent years and many Russian and Chinese crime syndicates have been taking advantage of this.
In addition, all of this has been done with the explicit cooperation of the Vanuatuan government, legally, under Vanuatu's Immigration Act which gives them the right to deport without notice [5]. All this is not to argue that there should or shouldn't be some kind of due process, but it's far from the extra-judicial kidnappings which you are insinuating. I would view it more as an informal, case-by-case extradition treaty.
As if that's the significant point. You don't get to just kidnap your own citizens no matter what they've done. (In this case, the local cops participated. That still doesn't make it right. Extradition and deportation should go through the courts.)
I think rule of law is supposed to be about non-enforcement of non-existent rules rather than enforcement of existent rules? i.e. the rules you have to follow are those codified in the law, rather than whatever e.g. the executive happens to declare. You lose rule of law when they start to impose different rules rather than when they merely decide not to impose the ones in the law.
Otherwise... who wants to live in a world where e.g. every single jaywalker gets fined? If you require enforcement of existent rules, you reduce rule of law to something that pretty much nobody wants, rendering it a pretty poor concept to define in the first place.
>who wants to live in a world where e.g. every single jaywalker gets fined?...
I don't know? But I'd bet you could sign the vast majority of people up for a world where every single child rapist goes to prison.
But debating behavioral extremes as we did right there is useless. The real issue is whether or not all people are treated equally under the law? If all people aren't, then the law does not rule. Those people who are above the law rule.
There is no such thing as part time rule of law. Again, the best you could do is put it on a spectrum. This one is more rule of law oriented, this one is less.
It's like being pregnant. A girl can be further along, or less far along in her pregnancy.
But I mean really, she can't call herself a virgin because she didn't do doggy. That's not really how virginity works.
> But I'd bet you could sign the vast majority of people up for a world where every single child rapist goes to prison.
Depends how many innocent people also go to prison, doesn't it? At one end of the scale you have Benjamin Franklin's "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved" and at the other end you have China's pragmatic take that a few broken eggs is the price of an omelette.
>At one end of the scale you have Benjamin Franklin's "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved" and at the other end you have China's ...
But you're still arguing at the extremes and evading the central question of whether everyone is treated equally under the law. If the law rules, then everyone will be treated equally under it. Yet we find that in nearly every place on Earth, the law does not rule, because not everyone is treated equally under it. (And I only say "nearly" because I'm not 100% sure that there isn't some society out there that treats everyone equally. I'm 99.99% positive there is not, but I've not been everywhere in this world. But I'm 100% sure we don't have such a system in the US, because I'm an American, and I know America.)
All that said, even debating the extremes, I mean, how many times you see some old black guy getting out of prison after 31 years or whatever because he didn't do it? You say, "See! He got out. So there must be Rule of Law!" But that's not how it works, because if there was Rule of Law, it would have been illegal to put him into prison in the first place. It was not.
So again, we, ourselves, don't practice the whole "...better 100 guilty persons escape..." maxim. You can say, "Well, there are racial complications." or "Well, there are financial issues that go into legal representation too." or etc etc etc. But that's the same as saying that the law is not paramount.
TFA mentions the big problem with "enforcing" this agreement is that the infrastructure is so poor, it's physically hard to just trade the good directly.
There's a hierarchy of needs, and only China is contributing (not without return) on the bottom parts.
Free trade helps to build the roads and infrastructure needed. The cost of building roads needs to be paid for, if it isn't worth transporting things from point A to point B the road is pointless. As the cost of trade goes down it self-reinforces by making people willing to contribute to better infrastructure. Of course when the road doesn't exist at all sometimes the investment to make the road is too high for people to realize that it is worth it.
China contributing is potentially a good thing (or potentially bad for reasons others have debated). This trade zone doesn't need their contribution to be successful, but it helps.
Actually China is the reason I believe Africa has a real chance of success in the future. China knows how to develop, and it needs a market, and a strong African economy to continue fuel China's growth. You can be all hippie about how to make the world better, but in the end, it is just sweat and tears. And China knows it.
No non-African country can claim they will bring Africa into the modern world without vested interests. The best result for Africa is if they can achieve some general stability across the continent without puppet governments backed by foreign governments that will sell themselves short. Saying choose your master doesn't resonate well with the freedoms we cherish.
Africa can offer to be a great economy and help the world growing. History will tell. When British went around and loot the world, no one would think they would represent human rights standard now, right?
I don't believe that they do represent a human rights standard.
They've spent decades eroding their education system, they're increasingly moving towards the privatisation of state assets and services and their media largely consists of a great propaganda machine.
I upvoted this comment and it went back to grey immediately, and I wonder how the people voting this comment down are want to explain themselves, what counter-arguments they care to offer and what their motivations are because the Facebook currency question and its relationship to economics in Africa are not mutually inflammatory topics of discussion--it absolutely needs to be talked about and highlighted.
There wasn’t an argument to counter, it was a throw-away piece of hyperbole. It didn’t vote either way, but I can see people down-voting simply because it looks like trolling.
If you want to make a proper argument about Facebook taking over African economics, go ahead. But so far the main ‘argument’ seems to be that it must be evil, because Facebook.
The original comment I replied to, when I replied to it seems like it was edited by the poster and--as written, was asking what the Facebook currency could portend for emerging economies in Africa. I found it odd that the question would get pushed so far down into almost invisible greyness.
As it's written now a lot of that focus and nuance is gone, which is a shame because it was a very good question IMO.
You realize that many people in Africa still live in huts without electricity? Facebook currency being widely used in Africa is no more absurd than asking all Indian citizens to receive all their income via a bank account.
This might blow your mind to hear but the continent of Africa is comprised of many countries, several of which have had electricity for a long damn time, my friend.
Some even have, wait for it, CITIES. That people live in. With houses made from brick. And internet access. The fast kind even!
You'll have to do better than acting as if Africa can be sufficiently defined by its least developed nations.
Or, at least, you should have actually read the link--at least then you would have seen how the "many people in Africa live in huts" line isn't really a helpful assertion to the discussion the rest of us were trying to have about Pan-African economics.
And they charge their phones how exactly? At work? Using solar panels? I've also seen roma communities in Europe that live in huts but almost every one of these huts as a sat TV antenna and an illegal electricity connection. But what happens when your village doesn't even have an electricity infrastructure?
There is a lot of voting manipulation that occurs on HN (despite the best efforts of the HN crew and algorithms). Facebook actively manages its public image and that extends here as well. Mainland China does it too. And there are many others. /tinfoil
Please don't make such claims unless you have a good basis for them (this is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). They're corrosive to the community, and usually there's nothing more to it than that people saw comments on HN that they strongly disagreed with. In such a case it often seems like there can't be any reason why someone would post such things in good faith, so they must be fake—but of course that isn't evidence, other than of the topic being divisive.
I hear you regarding conjecture though I believe it is important for people to be skeptical of what they read. People have become more aware about this regarding the Main Stream Media and Amazon and Yelp reviews over the past few years but this perspective is also needed when reading things like Wikipedia and HN.
The point, that I pray you aren't missing by being deliberately obtuse, is that for as bad as things may be today it's possible for things to become worse. And giving American corporations free reign to run social experiments in Africa, like creating their own currency, is a quick path to discovering ways to make it worse.
If Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece or Spain had retained their own currencies they’d have depreciated substantially, raising the competitiveness of their exports compared to the Northern European countries with sound fiscal policies and integrated trade for whom the Euro made more sense. Joining the Euro was a disastrous decision for Greece. They got under a decade of low borrowing costs and lost huge amounts of autonomy. Spain, Portugal and Italy lost access to their traditional means of dealing with the fact that they’ve grown too expensive to be competitive, devaluation, and they’re not politically capable of labour market reform so their levels of growth are probably permanently lower because they can’t give the whole country a pay cut every ten to twenty years by making imports more expensive, while boosting exports as well.
> The European debt crisis (often also referred to as the eurozone crisis or the European sovereign debt crisis) is a multi-year debt crisis that has been taking place in the European Union since the end of 2009. Several eurozone member states (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus) were unable to repay or refinance their government debt or to bail out over-indebted banks under their national supervision without the assistance of third parties like other eurozone countries, the European Central Bank (ECB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Of the five only Ireland made a huge unforced error in guaranteeing the banks’ bonds. The other four borrowed money on favourable terms they likely thought they’d be able to pay back given continued economic growth (as did Ireland). They were wrong about the continued economic growth but they weren’t the only ones. Plenty of German banks agreed with them; that’s why they lent them the money. Not being able to reform labour markets in Southern Europe isn’t the mark of idiots. If the voters won’t stand for something it isn’t happening no matter how brilliant the politicians they elect.
The root cause is widely agreed to be that putting vastly different economies like Germany and Greece on the same currency without have a unified economic policy etc, made the whole construct a disaster waiting to happen.
Resurgente of right wing nationalism? In Spain it's been alive before they even joined the European Union with regional nationalism (Catalonia nationalism has been always mostly right wing). And besides, during the crash the major resurgence was in the left, extreme-left.
Spain, Portugal and Greece's crash were going to happen with or without Euro, the only thing problem is how the Euro afected their recovery.
I can tell you Spain hasn't recovered, and won't be, they are still managed by idiots.
> Resurgente of right wing nationalism? In Spain it's been alive before they even joined the European Union with regional nationalism (Catalonia nationalism has been always mostly right wing).
Up until recently with the rise of Vox Spain was the only major Western European country without a far right party. Catalan nationalism is marked by its close association with anarchism, syndicalism and willingness to accept any immigrant who’ll speak Catalan and join the fight against the Castilians so on that level at the least it’s not exactly right wing.
> And besides, during the crash the major resurgence was in the left, extreme-left.
Again, Vox.
> Spain, Portugal and Greece's crash were going to happen with or without Euro, the only thing problem is how the Euro afected their recovery.
That makes joining the Euro, if not a disaster, a mistake.
Hope this helps Africa develop its economy in a way that's positive for the people that live there, all of them. Not sold on the idea of a single currency, that hasn't worked so hot for Europe, especially the weaker economies like the mediterranean countries.
Aren't they repeating the same mistake Paul Krugman refers to as "original sin of monetary policy"?
It's much worse for Africa than the EU. Here are the ratios of GDP per capita of the highest to lowest states in each region, excluding outliers DC and Luxembourg:
Africa (PPP): 50:1 (Equatorial Guinea $35,000 : Central African Republic $700)
CAR isn't even an outlier. There are several African countries with less than $1000 GDP(PPP) per capita and several with over $10,000. So it's much more diverse than the Eurozone.
According to wikipedia Guam has a GDP per capita of $30,500 and American Samoa has an even lower GDP per capita of $13,000 so 5:1 is closer to reality for the US.
That said. The US is not the only country to oficially use the US dollar. Among others, Ecuador has a GDP per capita of just under $12,000 and uses the US dollar, Palau $16,000, East Timor $5,500, and lowest are Marshall Islands and Micronesia both with GDP per capita under $4,000 bringing the ratio closer to 1:18.
Also there are plenty of counties with even lower GDP that uses the dollar unofficially, so I don’t see a problem with a high GDP per capita ratio.
Edit: Equatorial Guinea is also an outlier with high GDP and low population. We could arbitrarily decide to include San Francisco in the US example with a GDP per person of over $100,000 bringing the US ratio up to 1:7 and the US dollar ratio to 1:25
It's not as if most people are rich in Equatorial Guinea. It's an appalling outlier in terms of inequality, even on such an unequal continent as Africa.
"Only about half of the country’s population has access to clean drinking water, overcrowded living condition is—surprisingly given the country’s low population density—rampant and very few children enjoy the advantages of urban life such as education, medical services and recreational facilities." https://borgenproject.org/equatorial-guinea-poverty/
Is state-level GDP per capita the correct model to use? Why not compare, for example, city-level GDP per capita? After all capital and workforce are free to move between cities not just countries.
(Plus the whole fun where American member states are not entirely sovereign, while EU member states are countries in their own right, and in the case of e.g. Germany are themselves federal nations with multiple constituent states)
Well yes. And I don't really understand why a common currency between rich and poor countries is a problem. But people are saying that it won't work. I suppose it won't work if you depend on the government to be able to control the money supply to fool people into thinking they have more or less money than they really do. But is that really necessary?
One (arguable) difference is that the weaker African economies can't really borrow in their own currencies and therefore can't inflate currency to deal with debt burden. Thats what Greece couldn't do, because of the euro.
Previously, their debt would ha e been in local currency. In times of debt crises the value of the currency would have (even without explicit government action) declined (inflation). This makes the debts smaller, both formal national debts and private debts. It also (this get more Keynesian & controversial) creates a way to lower sticky prices (especially salaries).
Say you charge £100 per month for software and inflation eats 25% of this, the contract is still for £100. It is also tricky to "raise" prices while the economy is in trouble and people/businesses are cutting costs. The biggest place where this applies is salaries. Inflation cuts salaries, which in practical terms is near impossible to do otherwise.
But, if local currency is very weak, debt tends to be denominated in foreign currency anyway... even salaries. The only prices denominated in local currency are flexible anyway (eg carrots at the market).
They can inflate their currencies just by printing more of it. Currently that sort of quantitive easing is restricted to the specific country that does it. A future African Union would make the EU look like a pillar of stability in comparison - stronger countries like Kenya, South Africa would want more stable lower inflation currencies and basket cases would want to run the mint at full speed.
Yup, but in all cases the currency will be responsive to the aggregate economy, not the local economy.
I'm not very knowledgeable about African economics, but that said, I think that the downsides to a common currency experienced by Greece will be a much smaller issue in Africa, because stability is more important than monetary policy tools and "natural" inflation during debt crisis. The monetary solutions (market and/or policy solutions) just aren't available to most of the smaller African economies anyway. OTOH, currency stability is a problem and common currency generally helps with this.
I'm not sure that's a big difference. I doubt investors were very keen to hold Greek drachma debt in a similar way that they aren't keen on weak African currencies.
They were borderline... in that Drachma denominated bonds generally carried slightly higher interest rates, but in practice a good portion of national debt was in Drachma. Salaries were certainly Drachma denominated. It may not have been USD, but it was a lot stronger than many/most African currencies.
Besides all the complex economic reasons, Africa just has a lot of very small countries/economies. That makes it hard for them to operate in local currencies and most debt (also salaries, real estate) effectively or explicitly get denominated in foreign currencies anyway. A European equivalent might be Montenegro of Kosovo, but there are 20-30 African countries in that position. Some are reasonably wealthy/developed, but small. Some are very low GDP per capita. Some are both.
Africa is even more diverse than the EU in terms of languages, cultures, size, climates, and histories. So, you'd think that a single currency union would then be even more difficult to pull off.
However, Africa is set to grow by 3 Billion people (~300%) in the next 80 years or so, and their standard of living is set to be on par with ~2005 Europe as well.
Africa has also had a series of very brutal wars in the past few decades that have devastated the countries and their peoples.
As other commentors have pointed out, though Europe has had a lot of troubles with their economies with the Euro, they have thus far avoided wars like the ones we saw less than 80 years ago.
If currency unions help avoid wars like the few we've seen in the Congo (sometimes termed the African World Wars with 2.7 to 5.4 million deaths) then I'd think all the countries would be very much for such a union.
I would call the euro a smashing success to be honest. Small countries, especially the ones that came out of the old ussr, seem to be very susceptible to their leaders playing with the currency to further their immediate goals, to the detriment of long term prosperity. Namely they like to print money.
Countries that pegged their currency to the euro, or outright started using it got measurably better than the one that didn’t.
Counties that had “troubles because of the euro” would have most definitely had them even without, but the problem would have surfaced much later, when the damage would have been done.
It’s just so easy to solve economy problems with devaluing a currency and most, especially populist governments just can’t help themselves but do it, ending in huge nation wide catastrophes - see a lot of latin america, pre-euro ex-ussr countries etc.
Having a stable currency is just vital to the long term health of a country, and the euro has certainly helped with that immensely. It does remove a tool from a government’s toolbox, but a dangerous one that I wouldn’t trust most of them to use anyway.
As for Africa, with the amount of financial education the populace has at large, I would presume a stable currency would do wonders to their economies long term, at least for several generations ahead.
A bit oversimplified but very accessible source of info for geopolitical economic stuff like this would be VisualPolitik youtube channel.
So does the EU though. This doesn't seem like an especially great plus point for the Euro, given the QE (money printing) on a truly vast scale carried out by Mario "whatever it takes to save the euro" Draghi and likely to be continued by his successor.
Basically the eurozone stays unified by having local governments borrow money from the ECB, which is willing to engage in apparently unlimited bond purchases to ensure yields stay low and pro-EU governments stay in power. This amounts to massive wealth transfers from (primarily) Germany to the rest of the eurozone for purely political reasons. Germany is willing to tolerate this because of its past: German national pride has been transferred nearly wholesale to the EU's desired future nation of "Europe". Would African nations tolerate the same? Seems very dubious.
The euro sure has its problems with the uneven power distributions of its users, but wouldn’t you call the same for the us dollar or the yuan for that matter? I’m sure there would chinese be provinces that tolerate their underperforming neighbors for similar political reasons.
Maybe Africa will show us what a more equitable power distribution looks like? I’d love for them to try. But I would predict that it would be vastly beneficial for capital flowing into that African union to have a stable currency. People with money usually don’t want their capital to evaporate for frivolous reasons.
Perhaps, its all a trade off. Maybe you lucked out with your governments. Having your own currency is a tool that _can_ be used wisely to great effect. It’s just that the modern world is filled with examples of the opposite.
And it has been just a couple of decades. Over the long run, stable currencies usually outperform their capricious rivals. Mostly because investors want stability, and so they flock to places where it is present.
There are numerous examples of countries with their own currency doing well, or doing very very poorly. But there are few examples of countries doing very badly _because_ they adopted a union currency.
Imagine Alabama stating they’ll quit the US dollar and get their own alabamians or something - it might go great, it might go badly, but you sure know it would be risky. And investors by and large
wouldn’t like that.
You're saying that there is no threat in accepting Euro? There definitely is - as you said, investors don't like uncertainty, and in our specific case that makes great uncertainty. Imagine a country saying they will abandon their 100+ years old currency in favor of much younger and worse performing one that the country has no control over, forever tying it to risky economies. Union currencies have usually been formed in times of either crisis or rapid growth which of course changes the risk calculation, but we're somewhere in the middle between these two and not after any destructive war.
Well, as an individual eurozoner I vastly prefer a single currency and for me personally it certainly reduces the friction of cross-border trade (I both buy stuff and sell services).
I understand that many eurozone countries could be helped by currency tools like devaluing, but I'm not sure if anyone can really know how the tradeoffs vs. smoother commerce pan out and conclude authoritatively that the whole thing is a net negative.
How do currency policies even work? Isn't it like the state forcing exporting and tourism companies to lower their prices (by devaluating the currency)? Why is that the states job instead of the individual companies'?
Also the state can scam buyers of state bonds by inflating the currency, which also has the sideeffect of meddling with it's own economy.
It's not a silver bullet, it's just different cancer.
"Isn't it like the state forcing exporting and tourism companies to lower their prices (by devaluating the currency)? Why is that the states job instead of the individual companies'?"
With a free-floating currency, prices for foreign buyers can change overnight. This can allow quick responses to shocks. In contrast, internal devaluation (deflation) is a very slow process (how do you coordinate everyone in a country to reduce their prices).
e.g. for the UK circa 2008 the economy had problems (more reliant on finance sector than most other countries) and the currency dropped, making UK exporters more competitive. Italy or Greece a few years later would have also seen their currencies fall, had they not been locked into the same currency as Germany. Instead, their exporters have problems with competitiveness which take many years to equilibrate (they must have lower inflation or deflation relative to Germany).
There is a subject called 'Optimum Currency Areas'. As always, there are tradeoffs, more homogeneous economic areas face this particular problem less and so are more likely to benefit from a single currency.
When I read economics textbooks, I see a marked contrast to physics textbooks. e.g. in physics, they might explain about a pendulum using equations etc, but then they show you real experimental data, to show that your equations about period vs pendulum length are correct. I have not found economics textbooks that do that.
The more basic thing that economics gives me is akin to this: when iron ships were first proposed, sceptics might say 'iron sinks, so iron ships are impossible, you are crazy'. You can answer this by putting an iron saucepan in the kitchen sink, and showing that it floats.
So (macro) economics can tell me some basic things about 'which way is up'. But putting even half-accurate numbers on things is difficult. imo economics is often done best when you view it using historical case studies + theory to know which way each effect acts.
This is not to say that what you ask is impossible, but when that is done (by experts, not me), it is not convincing enough to convince others that it is right.
> Instead, their exporters have problems with competitiveness which take many years to equilibrate (they must have lower inflation or deflation relative to Germany).
Then why don't they lower their prices? Why do they need to rely on a devaluating currency (which might come automatically from the market, or from the central bank actively buying foreign currency at high price)?
So, you need to lower all prices - i.e. as an exporter you ask your workers to take wage cuts, they must ask their landlords to reduce their rents, shopkeepers to reduce prices etc. This is a slow process (especially because many contracts run for a fixed period so cannot be changed until the next contract is signed).
Internal devaluation can be done, it is just a slow and painful process (usually including higher unemployment).
Currency devaluation happens automatically regardless of government intervention. Where did you get the idea that it's just a currency policy? Currency devaluation and appreciation are purely market driven depending on supply and demand. If you have two countries trading with each other and one of them has a surplus like the trade between Germany and Greece. Greece has to borrow money from Germany for a surplus to happen. The market automatically compensates for this. What happens is that the demand for the German currency shoots up and demand for the Greek currency goes down. This means that eventually German products are no longer affordable because the Greek currency has been devalued and Germany won't lend money to Greece anymore because they can't pay it back. This also means that suddenly Greek labor is much cheaper than German labor despite the productivity gap. Therefore there is now an incentive to start more Greek businesses.
Anyway the takeaway is that there is an upper bound to how much Greece can borrow from Germany before local industry becomes more cost effective. The goal is to trade as much as possible but to also support the local economy.
Now the same scenario with the Euro results in no appreciation or devaluation. Greece borrows money from Germany. The exchange rate doesn't change because it's the same currency. Greece's ability to repay the loan did not change but there is now no economic pressure to not lend money. Greece can lend as much as it wants and since German products are always more cost effective it will use that borrowed money to always buy German products. The local economy languishes and eventually Greece has borrowed so much that it can't pay off it's debt. Then all you need to do to finish off Greece is to launch some kind of austerity policy that decimates what little local economy has managed to survive.
There is no working solution for the problems a unified currency causes. The best thing that one could possibly do is to have transfer payments to cancel the surplus but there is no way to force people to spend that money in the local economy and there is still the perverse incentive to increase the surplus to get more transfer payments.
> Where did you get the idea that it's just a currency policy?
Not just, but it is.
E.g. Switzerland has actively tried for years to peg 1.20 CHF to 1 EUR, to ensure that exports would not be hurt by a strong CHF. ... Until it suddenly didn't anymore.
I also buy stuff and services frictionlessly being outside of the EZ. Why trade away your country's monetary sovereignity for the convenience of currency exchange? We all know what happened to Greece and to the Italian economy.
Monetary sovereignty is an ambiguous concept here in Africa. Many countries use the Dollar as acceptable forms of payment, and countries surrounding South Africa are susceptible to the strength of the Rand compared to say the Namibian Dollar, Botswana Pula or Zim Dollar.. So when many nation's already rely on a secondary currency, why have that currency be the Dollar? Make it a single currency, which works across borders (a major factor for Africans as many work in other countries and send money home) and begin to stabilise African economies together, rather than one at a time via the China/IMF's predatory loans.
I can understand this. But it doesn't have to be te sole currency. Give contries the option of either running their own currency or using a single AU currency both by participaring in the AU or using it unilaterally like Montenegro is using the Euro.
The Greece and Italian economies were mismanaged. The Euro, in and of itself, had little to do with it. At worst, it removed one tool for dealing with the mismanagement. Far better to manage it well in the first place.
To put it into the words of my father (Italy early 90s), "the Euro will be good for us because our politicians will have to stop stealing". But they didn't and we kept voting for them. This is the problem in Italy. Internal, not external. Then other countries can take advantage of it, that's the way the world works.
Sure, we were growing, but more than that we were growing our public debt. I'm no economist, but this doesn't seem the sign of a healthy economy to me.
Maybe the businesses in your country improve their conversion rates ever so slightly because of said convenience? We spend time and money to optimize for far sillier things in our funnels.
I do not claim to know the aggregate effects, but I would guess it is not as simple as convenience vs. sovereignity.
Not really. Visa and the banks do take a cut. But there is Revolut now if you want to give them the middle finger. They will be forced to adapt and offer similar services or at least non-ripoff exchange rates. I always prefer a free market solution to an EU buceaucratic solution. Such as EU mandated zero transaction fees in order to convert the bulk of the transactions to cashless, be able to track them and "prevent money laundering", which of course isn't true (eg. Danske bank scandal).
> Why imitate the Euro when that experiment has gone badly?
Because the Euro solved a problem that did not exist in the EU. Every nation that joined was able to convert their currency to other EU currencies at reasonably low cost, and because each currency was relatively stable, at a low risk too. Africans do actually have high currency conversion costs, and some of the currencies are risky.
To put it in Krugman's terms, the African nations have mostly committed the 'original sin' anyway, and this is a way of making a bad situation better. Italy was free of the original sin and was making a good situation worse by joining the EU.
Realistically it’s probably London. You can fly from Cape Town in 12 hours and they already have the expertise and trust. If it’s an African city Lagos or Johannesburg.
In Tokyo in the 80s, and probably now, the median financial professional could not work in English, and that’s probably still true now. Tokyo has an enormous and liquid financial market but Japanese is not a regional language, never mind a global one. Paris has a better shot at being the go to place for African finance than Tokyo did of being Asia’s.
You still need a trustworthy legal system and confidence that the local leaders won't swipe your assets. It'll be a while till Africa can compare with NYC/London/Sing on that front.
"History teaches us that unity is strength, and cautions us to submerge and overcome our differences in the quest for common goals, to strive, with all our combined strength, for the path to true African brotherhood and unity.”
People who preach unity are people who wish to consolidate power, because they are the same thing. Unity tells you nothing about what principles you are to unite under.
Recently someone put forward the theory that now that globalism is dead, there would instead be multiple competing factions with which countries would align. They proposed that the factions would be: The USA, the EU, and China.
Looks like we may now need to add the AU to the list.
Its very much alive. Except in case of actual WW3 (in which case all bets are off), globalism and the integration of the global economy is proceeding at an unprecedented pace. There is a reason why tariffs are only temporary and there is no legislation to enshrine them into law.
The biggest economic winners in the past 70 years or so have been economies which have integrated their supply chains with the global one in some way or the other. Its the golden goose that keeps giving (although what the countries end up doing with that wealth, whether they distribute it well, is another question).
The goal of the AU is to build better efficiencies within the African continent to the benefit of African economies. This may e.g. make African manufactured goods more competitive than the ones imported from abroad. It allows for easier building of supply chains within the continent itself.
As the article points out though, the main roadblocks are
> Poor roads and railway lines, violence-hit areas, strict border controls and rampant corruption are some of the obstacles to an effective continental free-trade zone.
These are all very serious (but not insurmountable) problems. The best outcome I can imagine is that as the AU supply chains are built and bring economic efficiencies, they can tap into the global supply chain to really supercharge them, make other AU countries realize free trade makes economic sense and encourage it. But I am being wayy too optimistic, seeing the history of the continent...
Consider for e.g. the ancient silk roads. The owners of the territory over which the trade route ran realized its economic importance and invested a lot in making it a conflict-free and protected zone.
> These are all very serious (but not insurmountable) problems.
Africa faces far bigger challenges than simply infrastructure and corruption.
1) There's massive cultural, ethnic, and economic diversity. The continent spans countries which are middle income to the lowest in the world. Unity and cohesiveness are difficult regionally, less across the entire continent. Looking at Europe's issues as a proxy, it's hard to see anyone agreeing on much.
2) Manufacturing, traditionally the ladder that countries climb to prosperity is being automated at an unprecedented rate. It's uncertain how Africa will pull itself up without this.
> There's massive cultural, ethnic, and economic diversity. The continent spans countries which are middle income to the lowest in the world. Unity and cohesiveness are difficult regionally, less across the entire continent.
You could replace Africa with India / EU / China / US the same properties exist.
Who created the borders of African countries ?
Most African if asked the question.
"Are you African ?" would answer yes.
So please give African some credit ?
> Manufacturing, traditionally the ladder that countries climb to prosperity is being automated at an unprecedented rate.
Hold your smartphone right there. Most of this narrative is driven by media in the West to placate their population, so that they dont form labour union.
Travel anywhere in the world with the labour part of the supply chain. Most manufacturing still requires 100s of million of workers. You just cant see it in the West due to ships bringing it to them.
Humans are cheap - much more than robots. You can keep humans alive in the developing world for 100 dollars / months (its not starving wage for them ). For 100 dollars / month you are getting the most advanced robot any company can build.
Total factor productivity has been declining for a while, regardless of how much automation you bring to the table you cannot solve for human entropy ( death catches up with everyone eventually, even the most advanced human roboticist dies eventually or has to retire ).
My kids still need a lot of manual human labor to be educated ( services ).
You still need a lot of manual labor to create roads, bridges and apartments.
People were talking about flying cars 50 years ago, all those flying car investors must be billionares ?
On the ground things haven't progressed much, regardless of how much you would like to believe it.
Cape Town literally ran out of water !
If you mean automation for producing cheap plastic toys for Westerns ? If I was African why should I care about being exploited for white skinned consumers ?
China pulled a fast one, with selling cheap plastic goods to move up the value chain, steal technology and create Huawei.
African countries should do the same. If the US/EU imposes tariffs due to to currency devaluation. Africans should band together and only sell their natural resources in a new currency. Lets see how long the EU/US lasts when the most resource rich continent pulls a King Faisal.
I don't think US/EU has anywhere near the influence in Africa as China. They seem to be playing by entirely different rules - specifically their brand of money up front with cost later is hugely alluring to poor African states
I'm pretty sure by that whole 2063 thing, China will pretty much imply the AU. I'm fair certain China figures prominently in the AU's strategy for getting to 2063. In truth, so does the EU. It's just that China is thought to be the less risky long term partner.
This will all change when loan repayments are due and China insists on no-forgiveness and asks for more control of the actual infrastructure, and ultimately ownership. That kind of thing is frowned upon by Western governments because it is eerily similar to the colonialism playbook but China is unfettered by that past and can thus move ahead. Also, China is a totalitarian state so even if the State committed atrocities abroad there would be little to no domestic repercussions anyways.
>This will all change when loan repayments are due and China insists on no-forgiveness and asks for more control of the actual infrastructure...
Only they won't. When I was at Halliburton you could see the insidious brilliance of the Chinese strategy in Africa. Sure, there is support for rail everywhere. Support for roads everywhere. Factories everywhere. Resource extraction. Etc.
But ask yourself this, where does it all go? Follow the map of their rails and roads and you'll see that a lot of them just go to ports. I mean, you can't even complain about it, because, of course, where else would it go?
But I have a final question for you, will Africans own the freighters?
My boss at Halliburton was a brilliant strategic thinker. Was basically 100% sure that by 2100 there'd be so much freight traffic that you'd be able to walk from East African ports, to Shanghai, via the Indian Ocean, without getting your feet wet.
So the Chinese are effectively giving the Africans loans and whatnot in name only. Really it's a trap. Only the trap is not monetary, it's a physical logistics trap. They don't care if you pay for the roads or not, they only care that the roads go to the port. That's the evil of it, if the roads go to the port, you've probably already paid for them.
But, West and South Africa are the most developed stable parts. The parts facing China are the unstable and poorest, also lacking in natural resources in some places. Specifically Somalia and Sudan. It's conceivable that the West could forge ties with West and North Africa, especially North Africa, which already has strong ties to Europe. It seems unlikely that China would be able to freeze the West out of the entire continent with infrastructure alone.
It feels like treating Africa as a single unit is the issue here. More than likely, an "economic cold war" is the future of Africa, with North and Western African nations being Western aligned and Eastern African nations being Chinese aligned, with some variance and side flipping being inevitable. Similar to how the cold war was fought.
North Africa won't even be a factor. It's really kind of a non player.
Consider this, how you gonna move resources from Central Africa to North Africa without enormous investment in infrastructure? Crossing the Sahara at scale will not be cheap.
Same issue with sudan and somalia. They will be non players. Kenya is just better situated for extraction ports geographically speaking. What logistics expert is going to build roads or rail from central african resources to somalia, when they have to traverse kenya to get there? They'll just make kenya the extract point. Really it doesn't even have anything to do with security, or politics, or ideology, or what not all. It's just cheaper. Simple as that.
That's still money and infrastructure in Africa's pocket in the short term, and perhaps another freight company will visit Africa if the price is right.
Of course, this all makes sense until China makes a navy for the Indian Ocean.
Africa doesn't care, it's roads and railways they wouldn't have otherwise. As an added bonus, they get linked into the global supply chain. Which really gets their economies going. It's probably a fair trade?
I'm just pointing out that the Chinese are not doing what they are doing because they want to make 1.8% on some infrastructure loan to Africans. They have a plan. An insidious and evil plan, breathtaking in its scope, to link themselves to Africa in a way that is not easily de-linked.
It's not some monetary link that they are going after here.
They don't even try for a monetary link, likely because Africans are already trapped in a monetary link to us. So they flank us, and secure the logistics link. It's all very Chinese.
"To be certain you take what you attack,
attack only that which is undefended."
If you are in agreement with the parent poster that the Africans receive tangible benefits from Chinese infrastructure development, can you help me understand why you characterize the Chinese plans as "insidious and evil"?
It's evil in its intent to freeze the West out of Africa. Or rather, not to freeze us out, but to push us out of the the driver's seat so to speak. At the end of the Chinese strategic vision, is an Africa independent of the West. With either Africans in the driver's seat, or Chinese in the driver's seat. Or both. But no one else.
Now reasonable people can debate if we deserve to lose that seat. There certainly are good arguments that we do. But the irony, and the insidiousness here, is that the Chinese are being every bit as colonial as we were, they're just being a bit less greedy. Colonialism is not only evil when the West practices it, it's evil when China practices it as well.
Of course that sounds self serving coming from a Westerner at this point, and maybe it is a bit? But it's just how I see it.
I have to disagree with the first part of this following sentence:
> the Chinese are being every bit as colonial as we were, they're just being a bit less greedy. Colonialism is not only evil when the West practices it, it's evil when China practices it as well.
In my opinion, the problem with this view (and it's a very common view in the West) is that it downplays the ability of Africans to make a good deal for themselves. I think they are perfectly capable of understanding their own needs and forming strategic partnerships that are in their own best interests.
What China is offering is a simple business proposition: You need infrastructure, we need resources -let's make a deal if you find the terms palatable. They are free to take the deal or not. They are free to choose amongst any other creditor willing to loan to them. In fact, studies have found that China's leverage in trade negotiations is actually very limited due to the fact that most of these countries have access to alternative sources of financing and can (and do) demand the renegotiation of deals all the time with outcomes more favourable for themselves (for example when there is a change in government) [1].
I very much doubt that it is China's evil intent to freeze the West out of Africa, though that would probably be a nice bonus for them if it were to happen. China can't freeze the West out anymore than it can impose its own will upon Africa. It's Africa's choice. For the first time probably in history, Africa is in the driver's seat.
China's intentions are very simple and straightforward: to facilitate energy and resource security for themselves, and perhaps to build a manufacturing base for the future once it transitions into a consumption-driven economy. All of these intentions are rooted in mutually beneficial arrangements, not exploitative ones. Here's another tangible benefit besides infrastructure: in a survey by Mckinsey, they found that 89% of employees of Chinese firms in Africa were local, amounting to nearly 300,000 African jobs with 66% of them receiving skills training [2]. If this holds true of the 10,000 Chinese firms operating in Africa, that’s several million jobs created and workers provided with skills and apprenticeships.
I'm not trying to paint too rosy a picture here because obviously no relationship is ever perfect. There will always be some bad actors on both sides trying to get the upper hand. But from my point of view, this could not be more different from the colonialism practiced by western powers / corporations in Africa over the past few decades.
If you saw the growth of Chinese and African independence as a threat to your own perceived dominance you would. The poster seems to think of that as bad for the west.
...as "low hanging fruit" is shipped out the infrastructure will push further inward. This happened in Europe, then the Americas, and soon it appears it will happen in the "AU". Hopefully the local governments will grow with it and it will help Africans for Africans eventually.
PS: Thanks for downvoting. Please show that you are not familiar with major concepts that shaped many of the last conflicts we have seen. Take this as a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
The idea that the geopolitics of the world in 1904 are the same as that of 2019 is silly. It's quite clear that the US is no longer an "outlying island" on the world stage.
> Right. So why the obsession with Russia? In this book?
Because the author's a Polish-American, writing not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and whose job responsibilities dealt a lot with said Soviet Union?
The book doesn't say dominating Europe means you dominate the world. The book says the US ignores Europe at its peril, as a challenger could easily arise there. In the years since 1997, the EU has largely proven to be an ally, not a challenger. The world's not the same place it was in 1997, just like it's not the same as 1904.
Russia is irreverent. No strong economy, little innovation and corrupted political system mentally in soviet era. Whole heartland theory is silly, population centres are moving to coastal, technology and innovation is more important than total land area and most importantly there is nothing interesting in Siberia.
As I was saying, size is not most important. If anything Russia enormous size is a liability. Infrastructure costs are enormous. For example GDP of Italy is larger than Russia.
I wonder how much China was involved in this. We may never know but this feels like a play they would push. That way, China can form a "TPP of the East" easily without having to negotiate with countries individually. Lock out the West and extract natural resources at their leisure.
And it's not hugely different than Europeans. I mean, when I lived there how many told me that Tasmania wasn't a part of Australia or they were downright shocked that Christmas is in summer like they've never heard that before. You don't even need to follow anything to have a clue about that.
Hey, let's not get orangutans into this. They're pretty chill and tolerant, not really known for their antics-- Maher should apologize to them, since he was so unfair as to suggest that Trump might share any commonality with such remarkably peaceful and nature-loving creatures!
Now is the time to put pressure on China with regards to human rights and trade. With this organization this African Union has the potential to open a huge market of labor and consumers with ultra high growth potential.
This African Union (AU?) is likely going to be quite friendly with China given Chinese investment in the area, so I doubt they'll be the ones to put pressure on China.
Indeed -- can anybody provide more details on the agreement? The only policy detail the article lists is that the deal eliminates "most tariffs". Is that the entirety of the project? Are the goods for which tariffs remain critical ones like oil, minerals or food? How is "most tariffs" even measured --as classes of goods? trade volume in dollars?
Africa of course already has 3 regional currency unions (West CFA, Central CFA, Common Monetary Area) and I wonder if that would have worked better in Europe as well. Call it an intermediate step if you want, with the united Euro a kind of nice ideal to strive towards, once all EU economies are on the same footing and have well-correlated economic cycles (so basically a long long time in the future).
And conversely - as many an African government likes to demonstrate - refusing to honour the title deed after the sale of the land is the best known way to get really poor, really quickly.
This is what Africa always needed. Large federation or empire. If they had large empires hundreds of years earlier, they’d have large sectors that would speak the same language, stop tribal warfare, invest in the common defense, and lots of that money would go towards science centers and dissemination of information. Instead, other empires ran roughshod over them over the years.
Are you joking? There was no stable political culture in (sub saharan) Africa to speak of - it was primarily tribal and ad-hoc. Colonialism had indeed some serious disadvantages, but it's also primarily the reason why modern cities with infrastructure and major industries exist in Africa.
“Within two years, Shaka had defeated Zwide at the Battle of Mhlatuze River (1820) and broken up the Ndwandwe alliance, some of whom in turn began a murderous campaign against other Nguni tribes and clans, setting in motion what became known as Defecane or Mfecane, a mass-migration of tribes fleeing the remnants of the Ndwandwe fleeing the Zulu. The death toll has never been satisfactorily determined, but the whole region became nearly depopulated. Normal estimates for the death toll during this period range from 1 million to 2 million people. These numbers are however controversial.[3][4][5][6] By 1825, Shaka had conquered an empire covering an area of around 11,500 square miles (30,000 km2).”
The cities as they exist today may have been augmented and developed in part through European effort, but they are a far cry from what would have been there had the preexisting social orders not been intentionally decimated and if their resources had been spent on their own development rather than Europe’s. Your belief about African societies is a product of after-the-fact justification of the destruction and attempted erasure of the preexisting civilizations.
I'd say it's highly likely there would be not much else than warring tribes and the most basic of technology (such as agriculture and mining). Africa is a really tough place by definition, and for civilizations to thrive you need not just political stability, but also a cultural inclinations that are mostly lacking in sub-saharan society.
First off, if you are just trolling, well done, this is top shelf stuff.
If not could you expand on the following points?
What does “tough place by definition” mean?
Which “cultural inclinations” are missing in Africa? Are there any other places that you think similarly don’t have them or this only the case in Africa?
Probably the most extreme example of the horrors of colonialism is Belgian Congo.[1] No surprise that this is one of the most unstable and violent places in the world. [2]
I am not trolling - and I understand we are approaching an emotional threshold here for some.
Lots of factors ranging from hostile climates, tribal/ethnic wars, political issues, language barriers ... the list goes on.
In addition to this, you have cultural traits that simply make it harder to build (or rebuild) a civilization. I think many people living on the continent would understand what I mean.
Nobody in their right mind denies the horrors of colonialism, but one should not consider all historic events as exclusively negative.
Not much of technology was invented over thousands of years (in sub-saharan Africa). Without colonialism (of some sort), it could be very possible that Africa would have remained in the stone age for the next thousand years.
> but they are a far cry from what would have been there had the preexisting social orders not been intentionally decimated and if their resources had been spent on their own development rather than Europe’s.
That's a big if. Of course they would be much richer if they were organized and stable enough to manage mineral resources in way that the profits went to their own development. But the whole problem is they didn't have that organization, so they couldn't. How do you pay for public services when you don't have a strong enough government? How do you secure the money when everyone is a sell-out?
It’s fairly amazing ... this post was +4 and then in about a minute became 0 points. So, 5 points cast against it in the span of a minute, about half an hour after it was posted and amassed 4 points. I wonder about the dynamics.
You can't criticize the history of "European" culture or the racist ideology of "European" imperialism here without significant backlash. You can't even refer to "Europeans" except through proxy terms, to avoid triggering people.
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Wikipedia says they are also looking to create an Africa currency.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Continental_Free_Tra...
It seems the news today is Nigeria (the biggest African country) signing it