A couple of weeks ago in the small, poor Sahelian town of Dori in northern Burkina Faso, we were sitting at a roadside stall having a breakfast of coffee and dry bread. As we sat with our backs to the road, a group of five young boys, aged no more than twelve, hovered behind us like seagulls waiting for scraps. From time to time one would move closer, as if making to pounce on a morsel of bread, before retreating again when we looked round. They stood there for twenty minutes. After we got up and left, one of them ran to the table and downed the dregs of Ebru’s coffee.
These are the talibe children of West Africa. They are ubiquitous. In the towns of Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, posses of these young boys – uniformly skinny, dirty and covered in dust – have been constant companions on our trip. They roam the streets in packs, carrying empty, lidless tomato tins or little plastic buckets, and approach everyone they see for money or food. You never get used to the sight of them.
The boys’ story is grim. Many have been sent from their villages at the age of five or six by destitute parents to live with marabouts, Muslim “holy men” who promise to feed and shelter them and teach them about the Koran. ‘Their parents are too poor to look after them,’ says Karim, a Dori yoghurt seller, ‘and they are uneducated, so they believe the marabouts when they tell them they will house and clothe their kids.’ A few of these marabouts are genuine, and the children combine work in the fields with Arabic and Koranic education. But most are charlatans. ‘They go to the market, buy a cap and a gown and a Koran and say they are Koranic masters,’ Karim, a devout Muslim explains, ‘but it’s pure child exploitation.’
The children are sent out into the streets every morning. They are expected to earn 150 or 250 CFA francs per day (about 20-35p, or 50 cents) from begging. A former talibe child from Niger tells me that if they do not hit their target, the marabout beats or tortures them. Many therefore take to stealing if they haven’t begged enough near the end of the day.
Few receive any form of education, because their masters want them on the streets. Some of these Fagins have twenty or thirty boys. Twenty children can mean 5000 CFA (£8/$12) per day, huge money in these parts, so they do not waste time with teaching.
At night, the children sleep together on crowded floors in marabouts’ homes. Few get enough rest – we often see boys sleeping in the dust under trees in the afternoons. Those who surrounded us at the breakfast table were seriously underfed. In Ouagadougou a few days later, another feral-looking child asked us for money. When we refused, he began staring feverishly at Ebru’s bag and then made to snatch it – I pushed him away, and felt his ribs like a radiator through his T-shirt.
Karim is pessimistic about the children’s future. ‘They get used to this life of begging and stealing, so when they eventually grow up and escape they can only slip into a life of delincuency.’ The boys would make easy prey for extremists and warlords. The Burkina Faso government does occasional round-ups and places them in workshops so they can learn a trade, but this risks encouraging more parents to abandon their sons to the marabouts. Karim believes it is a ‘river that can’t be damned.’ Universal free education with meals seems the most promising solution, but Burkina’s performance in this area is abysmal – fewer than half of rural children are enrolled in school.
April 13, 2010 at 8:00 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
Back in January, I posted the text below (I subsequently took it down for re-posting at a later date because of a bizarre and unnerving incident that happened to me in Dakar):
“The airstrip on the island of Bubaque in Guinea-Bissau’s Bijagos archipelago is, appropriately, a white line cut out of the bush, a narrow sandy strip hemmed in on both sides by thick forest. Only small planes can land there, but small planes can carry large quantities of cocaine.
The Guinean government claims that the drug trade through the islands (which South American dealers have adopted as a transit point on the way to the lucrative European market) has abated in recent months. The country’s leaders are reluctant to forfeit European Union aid, so they are keen to show that they are fighting this new scourge.
I spent ten days on Bubaque over the Christmas period and heard a dozen or so planes in the night. More may have arrived while I was asleep. Given that the airstrip sees no commercial traffic, with the islands’ few visitors and provisions being shipped in on pirogues and the weekly ferry from Bissau, the obvious conclusion to draw is that the planes were from Latin America.
Nor are there signs in the capital, Bissau, of any let-up. The city is in the midst of a minor building boom, as smart new villas spring up, with gardens, fences and security guards – all funded, according to locals, by drug money.
But even if it does show resolve, the government’s capacity is limited. Only around twenty of the eighty Bijagos islands are inhabited, so they are extremely difficult to police (more so when your navy has no ships and your air force no planes). And the resourceful South Americans are putting in contingency plans to pre-empt EU and government pressure. Two of them, I was told, recently scoped out a hitherto unused island, posing as tourists and asking villagers if there was an airstrip (there isn’t) or a forest clearing (there is) where they can land small jets or helicopters. But even landing areas are not essential – the traffickers can also drop the drugs into the sea for collection.
In the islands, few are willing to discuss the drug trade – many believe Colombian or Venezuelan drug lords killed their president, Nino Vieira, last year after he failed to pay them for a consignment of cocaine, so they are understandably fearful. But the return to the country of Admiral Bubo has put the cat among the pigeons and sent tremors through the highest levels of government.
Before he fled into exile after a failed attempt to topple Vieira, Admiral Bubo was head of the Guinean navy. This position gave him privileged access to the narco-traffickers, who use boats as well as planes to transport cocaine across the Atlantic. Admiral Bubo therefore knows many things, which is why the government was so keen for the UN to hand him over, which it agreed to do last week. He knows the extent of Nino’s involvement in the trade (some believe the president carried cocaine to Europe himself, taking advantage of his immunity from customs searches). He knows who killed Nino, and whether senior members of the new government are involved in drug trafficking.
But Bubo is playing a dangerous game. Guinea-Bissau has no prisons, so he will either be freed or “disappeared”. It is almost certain that he profited from the drug boom himself, so if the government doesn’t protect him he will be at the mercy of rival navy or army factions and of the Latin Americans. How Bubo is dealt with will be a test case of the government’s seriousness in combating the trade.”
Last Thursday, the Admiral Bubo story took a new twist. Bubo was taken into the protection of a group of soldiers headed by a General Antonio Indjai, who at the same time arrested the Prime Minister, Carlos Gomes, and forty army officers including the army chief, who had opposed Bubo’s release. As Indjai took control of the armed forces, Bubo announced that Gomes is “a criminal who must be judged.”
When news of the PM’s arrest broke, hundreds of Guineans took to the streets to demand his release. The plotters relented, placing him under house arrest instead.
Admiral Bubo, as I suggested in January, was likely to have been implicated in the cocaine trade. Vincent Foucher, a researcher with the Bordeaux-based Centre d’etudes d’Afrique Noire, claimed in this weekend’s Libération newspaper that Carlos Gomes had been trying to sideline General Indjai because of the latter’s involvement in drug trafficking. The alliance between the admiral and the general is not surprising, therefore.
But what of the Prime Minister himself? Vincent Fourcher believes he is taking a strong hand against the narco-traffickers. Bubo, who knows exactly who is involved, argues the opposite. While in Guinea-Bissau myself in December and January, I heard many conflicting opinions over whether or not Gomes was abetting the traffickers – some even believe he had Nino Vieira killed in the turf war for control of the trade.
Whatever the truth, it seems that battle lines are being drawn, with Bubo and Indjai on one side, Gomes on the other. Where the country’s president, Malam Bacai Sanha, stands is not yet clear, and nor, perhaps most crucially for the future of Guinea-Bissau, is the allegiance of the Latin American drug cartels…
April 3, 2010 at 7:13 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security | 4 Comments
Business is slow at Dori’s spectacular weekly livestock market. The crowds of turbaned Fulani nomads and bejewelled Bella and Tuareg are as dense and colourful as ever, but although a few goats and sheep change hands, trade in cattle – for so long the stars of the show – has ground to a halt. Huge herds of powerful horned beasts led in from across the Burkinabe Sahel stand uninspected, undisturbed, unsold. Admiring Fula, whose love for cattle can be as intense as their love for their wives, look on wistfully from a distance, not daring to get involved.
‘It’s very hard to sell cows these days because people no longer have the confidence to herd them,’ says a young Fula who is trying in vain to offload some of his ten-strong brood. ‘There’s not enough rain and boreholes are drying out, so keeping a large herd is difficult. Sometimes you have to travel for three or four days to find water. Some animals don’t make it. So it’s risky to buy cattle, for both economic and emotional reasons: you don’t want to see the animals suffer.’
It is not only business that is under pressure. Hunger stalks the towns and villages of northern Burkina Faso. In 2005, a million people needed emergency food relief as the prices of maize and millet doubled. In 2008, riots protesting the high cost of food rocked the country. Poverty in Dori is Dickensian – large gangs of scrawny kids forage for food; toddlers’ stomachs are bloated by kwashiorkor. In the villages, theft from granaries has increased as the contest for food intensifies. ‘Famine has become cyclical,’ says a nurse, adding that last year’s shorter than usual rainy season has left many thousands vulnerable in the coming months as their stocks of grain run out.
Fula and Tuareg cattle herders are especially exposed – they have no tradition of growing crops as they must spend all their time finding pasture for their livestock. To obtain essential carbohydrates, they must buy them, and when crop prices rise in a drought many starve.
The main cause of food insecurity here is population growth. The population of the Dori district has tripled in the past forty years. As well as meaning that water and pasture have to be shared more thinly, this increase has also hastened deforestation and desertification. Wood is the only source of fuel, so more people means fewer trees and a clearer path for the encroaching desert. The Sahara is advancing into the Burkinabe Sahel at a rate of 10cm per year, reducing the land and water available for herding and farming. Periodic conflict breaks out between roaming herders and settled agriculturalists over access to these precious resources.
Climate change, which everyone here blames on the West (‘you caused it, we’re suffering from it,’ is a common and irrefutable accusation) could be the final nail in the coffin of the nomadic herding lifestyle. This year, the harmattan wind which deposits huge clouds of sand from the desert is still blowing, over a month after it normally stops. Rainy seasons are starting later and finishing earlier. The Sahel is expected to be one of the world regions hardest hit by climate change: rainfall could decrease by a quarter in the next eighty years.
Adapting to the increasingly challenging conditions will not be easy. As an older Fula man in the oasis village of Oursi (whose large lake has virtually dried out) explains, ‘People here don’t know how to do commerce, they only know herding.’ He himself used to have forty head of cattle, taking them north to Mali in the dry season and returning to Burkina for the rains, but many died through lack of pasture and water and he is now left with just ten cows. He has been forced to take up a menial job at a campsite to make ends meet, and spends hours sitting and staring into space, dreaming of cattle and long journeys. His peers are moving to the cities, quitting their quiet wanderings for a grim life spent hawking the roaring streets of Ouagadougou.
Back at the market in Dori, the young herder is reluctant to accept the new reality. ‘People are keeping their money in their pocket in the hope that the climate will improve,’ he says, desperation cracking his voice. It is likely to be a long wait.
March 31, 2010 at 12:32 pm | More on Africa, Climate and resource scarcity | Comments Off
We are now in Burkina Faso, the last stop on what has been a fascinating and somewhat challenging tour of West Africa. Here’s a beginner’s guide to one of the world’s poorest countries:
1. Located in the heart (and heat) of West Africa, between the Sahara desert and the forests of the south, Burkina Faso has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. The average Burkinabe woman has six children. As a consequence, the population has increased five-fold in the past half-century. At 15 million, however, it is still under-populated compared to Great Britain, which is of similar size but has four times more people. It’s still too crowded though for the 3.5 million Burkinabe who live and work in neighbouring Ivory Coast.
2. Known in colonial times as Upper Volta, Burkina Faso means ‘Land of the Honourable People.’ Burkinabes are known as among the most honest folk in Africa.
3. The country has arguably the world’s best place names. Its capital – one of the oldest cities on Earth – is Ouagadougou. Leafy Bobo-Dioulasso, from where I am writing this, is the second city. It also boasts the desert market town of Gorom-Gorom (so good they named it twice), Bouroum-Bouroum (ditto), Fada N’Gourma, Tin-Akof, Niangoloko and, er, Rambo.
4. Burkina has few natural resources. The French only colonised it because it was a bridge between their coastal territories of Benin and Ivory Coast and their desert holdings in modern-day Mali and Niger. It even stopped being a country for 15 years from 1932, when it was carved up between its more important neighbours. The French made good use of Upper Volta’s human resources, however, forcing hundreds of thousands to build railways, farm cocoa and fight in the First World War trenches.
5. The country is dominated by the Mossi ethnic group. A tribe of brilliant horsemen (which may account for the profusion of betting shops in Bobo), the Mossi repelled slave raiders and other rivals and remained intact for 400 years until their kingdom fell to the French. Captain Paul Voulet, who led the French expedition, was a real-life Kurtz figure, who stuck victims’ heads on poles, roasted children over fires, and strung up soldiers who displeased him at a height where their feet could be reached by hyenas’ hungry jaws. When his superiors tried to rein him in, he told his troops he was no longer French but a “black chief,” who would found his own empire. After he was killed, the French, embarrassed that their civilising mission in their colonies had gone awry, attributed Voulet’s activities to the maddening heat of Africa.
6. Burkina Faso is one of Africa’s least urbanised societies. Despite plagues of locusts, catastrophic droughts, desertification, and the fatal effects of US cotton subsidies (Burkina produces cotton at one-quarter the cost of American cotton, but subsidies mean US producers can undercut Burkinabe farmers), over three-quarters still live in the countryside. The French colonial administrator R Delavignette wrote in 1946 that, ‘We came from an industrialised Europe where factories are joyless affairs, and found people who worked to music. Communal labour had its drums and tom-toms, its orchestras to cheer the workers on.’ Drummers still accompany farmers at planting and harvesting times today.
7. Burkina hosts Africa’s most important film festival, the biennial Fespaco (the next one is in 2011). Cinema attendances are falling, however, because of the proliferation of pirated DVDs.
8. Burkina was home to the ill-fated revolutionary Thomas Sankara, who as president alienated the French by calling them neo-colonialists, told the country’s creditors he wouldn’t pay them back (‘you played the game, you lost,’ he explained), slated African leaders for their corruption, and practised what he preached by ditching the ministerial Mercedes for a Renault 4, taking out a $2,000 mortgage to buy a house, and cycling around Ouagadougou on a rusty old bicycle (is David Cameron a secret fan?). Cheques he wrote often bounced. Sankara was killed in 1987 by soldiers close to his friend Blaise Compaore, who many suspect ordered the assassination. Frequently described as Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara, who unlike most African revolutionaries died before he could sully his reputation, remains a hero to young idealists from all over the continent.
9. Blaise Compaore is still the Presdient of Burkina Faso today. Something of an eminence grise, as well as being linked to Sankara’s death he was also implicated in civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and is a longstanding supporter of the vicious Liberian warlord Charles Taylor (currently on trial in The Hague for war crimes). On the other hand, Compaore has also helped broker peace, for now, in Guinea. In the 2005 election, judged ‘free and fair’ by the 1500 (count ‘em) international observers who were flown in to watch, he gained 80% of the vote.
10. Burkina’s main cities saw violent street protests in 2008, as food and fuel prices climbed beyond the reach of most urbanites. As Compaore has loosened his dictatorial grip on the country, protests of all kinds have increased. One year, the authorities in Ouagadougou tried to force motorcycle riders to wear helmets. Vigorous rioting forced them to back down.
March 14, 2010 at 1:19 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | 2 Comments
“You wouldn’t understand this country if you stayed here for five years. I don’t understand it,” says Nestor Cummings-John, the head of the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (“faute de mieux,” he replies when I ask why the group is run by a man).
I take his point. After six weeks in Guinea-Bissau (plus a lot of background research), I felt I had a fairly good grasp of how the society worked, why things are as they are, and what the prospects are going forward. But after six weeks in Sierra Leone, my mind is full of confusion, as chaotic as Freetown’s deranged street markets. I can only hope that a few weeks of quiet reflection somewhere sane like Burkina Faso will help me sort through the jumble of impressions, fears, questions and competing explanations that are clattering around my head.
One of the questions I’m grappling with is whether Sierra Leone is knitting itself together after Siaka Stevens’ ruinous dictatorship and the even more damaging civil war, or if in fact the country is in danger of slipping back into conflict.
Tony Blair, who visited Freetown last year, believes Sierra Leone is “thriving.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on the other hand, which was set up to investigate the causes of the war, argues that the same levels of poverty, corruption and youth alienation pertain today as prevailed twenty years ago, before the war started. As Paul Collier showed in The Bottom Billion, moreover, most countries that go through one civil war endure another within a decade or two.
Blair’s view is buttressed by the fact that the country has been at peace for nine years, that it held uneventful elections in 2007 which were widely judged to be fair, and that dangerous neighbours like the Liberian thug Charles Taylor are off the scene. Exiles are returning, drawn by peace and the still-tantalising prospect of mineral riches. And many Sierra Leoneans have told me their compatriots have learned their lesson from the war and are extremely reluctant to go down that road again.
Not everyone is so sanguine, however. While the wealthy are generally quite optimistic about the future, the poor remain disgruntled, railing against the corruption of the rich and the ineffectiveness of government. “The poor don’t love their country,” says Joseph, a young Freetonian working with Amnesty International. Edward, an old man in a Freetown slum, says the poor have no reason to be patriotic. Most young people I’ve met have asked me to help them acquire visas for Britain.
Society, rent apart by the war, still seems deeply fractured. Just as the poor bemoan the greed of the rich, so the latter berate the lower classes for laziness, dishonesty and incompetence. In cities and villages, angry arguments in the street are nerve-gratingly regular. In an eastern village, a young teacher complains that “people don’t understand how to resolve disputes by dialogue: they always want to use violence.” Many of the secret societies that held rural communities together through slavery and colonialism, moreover, were destroyed by the civil war, in which rebel soldiers deliberately targeted the chiefs and elders who were the repositories of traditional knowledge.
The insurance and savings schemes of the dollar boys and market traders are all too rare examples of social capital being rebuilt (albeit by groups working illegally), as are village cleansing ceremonies for women abducted and raped in the war. Nestor’s Women’s Movement, on the other hand, used to have thousands of members but now has only ten. He can’t find a woman to take it over: “Joining this movement would require having ideals,” he explains plaintively, “but today people only think about their personal gain. They can’t see beyond themselves to issues.” Tales of efforts by jealous neighbours, friends or relatives to use witchcraft to prevent others attaining wealth, success, or happiness, meanwhile, are frighteningly common.
Nestor believes corruption and selfishness worked their way down to all levels of society from the highest echelons of Siaka Stevens’ government. They even infected the one significant social movement of the last thirty years – the Revolutionary United Front militia, which began as a justifiable response to inequality and venality but ended by causing terrible and wanton carnage.
There are a number of potential flashpoints that could precipitate a return to conflict. War in neighbouring Guinea could have serious repercussions for Sierra Leone, which is ill equipped to house a flood of refugees, or to root out combatants who base themselves in its border areas or target its diamond fields. The 2012 elections are an even greater threat: the SLPP ceded power peacefully in 2007, but may not have gone so quietly had its leader not been retiring. The APC may not yield so willingly in 2012, and there are rumours that it is preparing for possible defeat by training its own militias. And the pressures of Sierra Leone’s demography are unrelenting: huge numbers of young people, few jobs, little in the way of public services, and limited youth representation in power make for a potentially explosive cocktail, particularly in the chaotic, crowded capital.
In this judderingly unstable part of the world, other threats to stability may yet emerge – as one angry young dollar boy warned me with foreboding recently, “When there’s a pool of oil on the ground, you don’t know where the spark that sets fire to it will come from.”
March 8, 2010 at 4:36 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security | Comments Off
When I arrived in Sierra Leone six weeks ago and encountered its friendly people, spectacular beaches, lively nightlife and mysterious traditions, I wondered why the country has so few tourists (in our six weeks we have met a total of three, with three or four other possible but unconfirmed sightings).
It didn’t take long to find out. A nation that should be eager to attract tourists seems to be making systematic efforts to keep them out. If you were trying to make it as difficult as possible for foreigners to visit your country, I could recommend the following measures, which all work brilliantly for Sierra Leone:
- Charge an exorbitant sum for visas (£50 for a month, compared to, say, £10 for three months in Turkey, a much more tourist-friendly destination)
- Make obtaining the visa more complicated than for any of your neighbours by forcing applicants to produce a letter of invitation from a Sierra Leone national
- Encourage customs officials in the airport to be as surly as possible, and fail to punish them for extracting bribes from new arrivals for performing the simplest of procedures
- Build your airport thirty miles away from the capital city, on the opposite side of a giant river mouth, forcing visitors to cross either by helicopter, which regularly crashes, or ferry, which often breaks down or sinks. Make sure, too, that the ferry departure times do not coincide with incoming flights, so that your visitors will have to wait for hours in the burning sun (you will of course already have ensured there is no shade at the dock)
- Allow dozens of hustlers to converge on new arrivals as they exit the airport, giving preference to pickpockets and con merchants
- Refuse to harness the torrential rain in the rainy season to provide water and electricity to visitors at any time of year. This will ensure they cannot take respite from the heat with the help of fans, cold drinks, air-conditioning or showers. It will also mean restaurants and food stores will be unable to refrigerate food, thereby increasing the risk that your visitor will fall sick
- In the event that he does fall sick, make sure you spend none of the billiions of pounds of aid you receive on building effective hospitals or recruiting competent doctors to treat him
- Make your public transport system as slow and uncomfortable as possible, by failing to maintain vehicles so that they break down often, waiting until they are full before departing hours behind schedule, and packing two people into seats designed for one
- Enhance the effect of the above by allowing roads paid for by foreign donors to deteriorate and then failing to fill in the hundreds of resultant potholes
- Should a tourist somehow manage to shrug off these obstacles and apply for a visa extension (you have no psychiatric hospitals to house him, of course), redouble your efforts to force him out. To do this, hire the least friendly, most corrupt people to work in your immigration department. Extort money from your visitor for a visa extension that is officially free, then smile smugly at his distress
- As a final punishment for having the cheek to visit your country despite all your efforts to stop him, charge the departing, browbeaten tourist a £50 airport tax
NB: For foreign investors, multiply your efforts tenfold.
March 1, 2010 at 8:26 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | 11 Comments
“It’s not diamonds that are the problem,” says Ali, a Lebanese diamond dealer in eastern Sierra Leone. “Diamonds are just stones. It’s people that are the problem.”
Sierra Leone has some of the highest quality diamonds in the world. Like a lottery winner who wastes his fortune and sinks into misery, however, the country has been unable to cope with its windfall. “Blood diamonds” have been blamed for causing its horrific civil war, which saw rebel militias, Liberian thugs, mercenaries, Sierra Leone’s army, and UN and Nigerian “peacekeepers” killing and maiming in a desperate struggle to gain control of the gem trade.
Since the war finished in 2002, Sierra Leone has languished among the world’s poorest countries, with nothing to show for its rich treasure trove of minerals. Economists see it as a classic example of the resource curse, which plagues many poor nations endowed with valuable natural commodities: mineral wealth allows governments to neglect the rest of the economy, enrich themselves, and ignore those outside their circles, forcing the excluded to resort to violence to obtain a share of the loot.
But the failure of resource-rich nations is not inevitable. Botswana has thrived on the back of its diamond mines. South Africa, brimming with gold and diamonds, is Africa’s largest economy. Australia, another diamond producer, doesn’t do too badly.
Earlier this week we spent the day at a diamond mine near Kenema. Johnny, a Sierra Leonean who has spent most of his life in England, has come back with his wife Suzy to dig for diamonds. Using borrowed money, they have leased an acre of land deep in the jungle and hired fifty men from surrounding villages to dig a forty-foot-deep pit and sift through the mud and gravel it throws up.
It is easy to see the allure. When we arrive, Johnny shows me yesterday’s haul of eight small stones. The first looks like an undistinguished lump of glass, but the second, flawless, looks like a diamond and, although rough (it will be cut in India or Antwerp), its different facets glitter as I turn it around in the sun. It is worth about £1,000. On the neighbouring plot last year, a Lebanese found a thirty-carat diamond worth £4 million. From one moment to the next, Johnny could get rich.
Or die trying. Another nearby plot was mined for two years by some Americans. They didn’t find a single gem. Prices fell by 80% in the recession, prompting many miners and dealers to switch to gold, which provides a steadier, less risky income. Ali’s business partner almost bankrupted him by giving him a fake cheque for £100,000-worth of diamonds. “We say the profit from diamonds reaches from your toes to your knees, but the losses reach up to your throat,” he says, making a strangling gesture. He is currently pursuing the man through Interpol.
Nearly everything at Johnny’s mine is done by hand. The only sound other than the chink of pickaxes on rock is the drone of the baling machine, which pumps water from the bottom of the pit and spits it out in the washing area, where four muscly young men, bent at the waist, shake mud from large flat sieves and peer intently at the residue, searching among the pebbles and gravel for that elusive glint.
It is sweltering, backbreaking work, but the miners are well remunerated by local standards and are promised significant bonuses if they find something big. Everything is above board: Johnny and Suzy acquired a licence to mine from the government, and every diamond they find is certified, packaged and sealed with a wax stamp under the UN-approved Kimberley Certification Scheme before being shipped to Europe.
The Kimberley Process was initiated in the wake of Sierra Leone’s civil war. It aims to show that a diamond has not come from a conflict zone. Sierra Leone is currently at peace and legal diamond exports have increased since the scheme began. It was not the gems themselves that caused the war, however, but the venality surrounding them, and Kimberley does nothing to tackle corruption.
To acquire a mining licence, you must pay a £70 bribe. If you find a large stone, locals advise you to take it away from your mine immediately, before government helicopters arrive to seize it. Although the diamonds are conflict-free today, therefore, the Kimberley Process will not stop them sparking a new war tomorrow.
On our day at the mine, we don’t bring Johnny and Suzy, who are as superstitious as any gambler, much luck. The washers find four small one-carat stones and a couple of tiny grey specks that can be used industrially. The most valuable is worth about £500. It would take the washers nearly a year to earn that amount, so it is not surprising at the end of the afternoon to hear one of them grumbling that what he has just found in the sieve could be worth trillions of leones (he earns 10,000 a day, about £1.70). The miners may be well paid by Sierra Leonean standards, but they are very cheap labour for their employers. Worried that the washer is planning theft, Johnny relieves him of his duties and sends him to dig in the pit.
February 20, 2010 at 10:42 am | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development | 3 Comments
The leone, Sierra Leone’s currency, is not highly prized abroad. Nor is it especially strong compared to more established currencies: in 1978 when it broke from its sterling peg, the leone was worth 50p; buying 50p today would set you back 3,000 leones.
Sierra Leoneans with cash, therefore, along with importers of goods and those travelling overseas, are eager to get their hands on dollars, pounds or euros. Foreign diamond dealers, the legions of UN and NGO workers, local people who receive remittances from abroad, and the country’s dribble of masochistic travellers need leones in cash because there are no ATMs and nobody accepts credit cards.
If you don’t mind the 250-leone to the dollar spread, you can change money at foreign exchange bureaus or banks. But whereas the latter buy dollars for 3850 leones and sell them for 4100, the spread with Freetown’s Dollar Boys is a much more generous 4000-4050.
You can’t move more than a few yards in downtown Freetown without hearing the words, “Hello sir, change?” as a Dollar Boy accosts you, brandishing a large wad of leones or dollars. Dollar Boys are illegal, but their clients include government officials and ministers, big businesses and even banks in need of a liquidity top-up. The governor of the Central Bank sends someone onto the streets every day to find out how much his currency is worth. When I mention to Ahmed, a Dollar Boy of my acquaintance, that I’ve been to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he tells me he knows the building well as he provides a delivery service to ministry officials. “Even if they wanted to, the police couldn’t stop us,” he says. “We have too many customers.”
Ahmed makes around 20,000 leones (£3.30) a day – a decent sum by local standards. On his best day ever, someone (probably a diamond dealer but he doesn’t ask questions) changed $15,000 into leones – lacking that much cash himself, he had to bring in other Dollar Boys to make up the shortfall. He delivered the money in a huge box that he carried on his head through the streets of Freetown.
Although illegal, the Dollar Boys are well organised. Each one has his own patch, or “Base” – Ahmed loiters outside a bank – and each area has its own “committee,” with one central committee overseeing all the others.
The committees, which were set up on police advice after a Dollar Boy was murdered by Nigerians a few years ago, protect their members against violence and fraud (according to Ahmed, most of those who try to exchange counterfeit money are women). They also run an insurance pool, into which all members make regular payments so that if one is cheated for a large sum or suffers a family disaster, he has a cushion against bankruptcy.
The committees have two other important roles. The first is to protect the industry’s image, by investigating customer complaints, punishing bad behaviour and weeding out bad apples. The second is to vet new entrants to the market. As in the formal sector in Sierra Leone, you can only become a Dollar Boy if you have the right connections. Incumbents collude to keep out potential competitors (too many Dollar Boys, of course, would reduce each individual’s profits). Unwanted newbies – and Ahmed reports that competition to enter the fray is fierce – are told to keep away. If they refuse, the committees take them to the police and report them for acting illegally (yes, really). The police respect the committees – many of them use Dollar Boys’ services themselves – so they are usually sympathetic.
February 15, 2010 at 12:33 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | 3 Comments
This morning, presumably because of a burst pipe, a trickle of water was bubbling up through a hole in the surface of a busy Freetown street. Next to the hole, a man in rags was on his hands and knees, lapping at the water like a dog.
February 8, 2010 at 5:19 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
Mobile phones are spreading through Sierra Leone like a cholera epidemic. Everyone either has one or aspires to one. Phone theft is common (my own lasted a week). People will sacrifice meals or school fees to buy credits (everyone is on pay-as-you-go, and stalls selling top-up scratch cards are ubiquitous, as are recharging shops, since few have electricity at home).
There is keen competition among the major mobile networks – Zain, Africell and Comium adverts adorn billboards, bars and houses, whose owners charge a monthly rent for you to daub your logo over their walls. They sponsor pop concerts, sports events and even Freetown’s venerable cotton tree, under which the first freed slaves congregated to plan their new lives.
As in Europe, the operators do not shirk from sharp practice. Calls to someone else on your network are cheap, but if you call a Zain phone from an Africell sim your costs soar. To combat this, Sierra Leoneans buy a sim card for each network and give out three numbers to contacts – a sim costs a dollar, and phones are sold unlocked. Some have handsets that can carry two cards at once, and you press a button to choose which to use for a particular call. Others have three phones with a different sim in each. The less affluent have to open up their phone to change the card each time they call another network (this of course means that you often have to dial three different numbers before you can get through to someone).
The mobile exerts a dictatorial hold on social intercourse. Nothing is more important than an incoming call. Businesspeople interrupt meetings to take calls from friends, family and colleagues; the judge in a court case we observed last week kept halting proceedings whenever his phone rang; a beer with a Sierra Leonean friend is a series of stops and starts as he or she fields calls or replies to texts.
Phones reflect social status too. The powerful screen contacts by giving their regular number only to a select few, with a number they rarely answer used to fob off unwanted hangers-on. Those lacking funds will “flash” wealthier peers, dialling and hanging up before the latter answers in the expectation that he will return (and pay for) the call.
The next big battle in the mobile sphere will be over mobile payments. These are a new thing in Sierra Leone, but Africa is the world leader in this fledgling industry, with Kenya’s M-PESA already boasting 8.5 million subscribers.
Mobile payments are Africa’s version of online transactions. Few people on the continent have bank accounts, let alone regular and secure internet access, but many have phones, and cash. Until recently, if you wanted to get money to someone you couldn’t hand it to in person (and as well as buying and selling goods, Africans with jobs send money to relatives all the time), you either had to send it with a friend (not always secure) or use a professional middleman like Western Union or a bank (expensive and often absent outside the main cities). Mobile payments are both secure and cheap, and they do not rely on the availability of banks.
To make one, you take cash into a payment outlet – the latter can be anywhere that holds cash, from banks to shops to bars to hotels. You then text your PIN number and transaction details to the payment company, which sends a message to the recipient. The recipient can then collect the cash from his own nearest outlet. The outlet owner and the payment company take a commission.
Mohammed, an illegal money changer on Siaka Stevens Street in Freetown, used to get money to his grandmother in the provinces by either taking it himself, which meant transport costs and taking valuable time off work, or sending it with friends, who sometimes “lost” the money in transit. He now uses mobile payments instead, and says it’s a much safer way of ensuring his grandmother “eats” the money.
At present, only transactions within the country are possible, but with Sierra Leoneans receiving $150 million a year in remittances from abroad (and that is just those that are recorded), it is not surprising that a couple of entrepreneurs I’ve met are staking out the territory for cross-border payments.
February 8, 2010 at 11:41 am | More on Africa, Economics and development | 6 Comments
Had a surprisingly interesting tour of Freetown’s port yesterday. It’s the world’s third largest natural harbour.
Seventy years ago, the ship carrying my grandfather to the Far East during the war anchored briefly off Freetown. He remembered the oppressive heat and humidity, and the hawkers who rowed out to the ship in dugout canoes to sell their wares to British soldiers (plus ça change). The soldiers would lower buckets down to the canoes and haul up fresh fruit and snacks. For entertainment, some would drop coins into the sea, which intrepid young boys would dive down to retrieve from the seabed.
The port is a pretty modern affair these days. A couple of hours there gives you some insight into the workings of the country. A huge Norwegian vessel was unloading limestone to make cement (the post-war rebuilding of Freetown continues); another ship was being emptied of flour; dockers employed by the day were asleep in the shade of Maersk containers. Rice, bizarrely in such a hot and wet country, is the main import commodity, followed by wheat and iron rods for construction. Iron ore (processed elsewhere – Sierra Leone lacks the industrial capacity to process anything), timber, bauxite and rutile are the main exports (diamonds and gold are exported by other means). The World Food Programme has its own depot there, half-full of sacks of corn and flour.
We were shown round by a security guard, Alex, who has worked at the port for twenty years, including during the war when RUF rebels took it over and looted all the containers. His main duties include checking departing ships for drugs and stowaways. He says about half of the ships bound for Europe contain four or five stowaways. They row in in the dead of night, climb into the rudder hole, and sit tight – for weeks.
Sitting forlornly at the far end of the dock is a medium-sized Chinese fishing vessel. On it are a couple of Chinese men and a Sierra Leonean soldier. The boat was caught and impounded last autumn for fishing in Sierra Leone’s waters without a license (a common problem in West Africa). Seven Chinese fishermen have languished in a Freetown prison ever since – those who remain on board take them food every day but are not allowed to leave the country. To obtain his and the boat’s liberty, each prisoner must pay a $25,000 fine, but the shipping agent has failed to cough up. The vessel, guarded round the clock, is quietly rusting.
February 5, 2010 at 1:09 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
I’ve been in Freetown for a couple of weeks now and am starting to get my head around the place. Sierra Leone has only recently climbed off the foot of the UN Human Development Index, but signs of poverty, which people in the West – where its most abject form is mostly confined to society’s margins – can go long periods without glimpsing, are everywhere.
Among the most arresting are the crowds gazing at DVDs playing in shops; the emptiness of markets after festivals; the accused dressing up for court in clean T-shirt and flip flops; young African girls on the beach with old white men; the hordes of disabled people – not just amputees from the war but also victims of polio, leprosy and unhealed fractures; beggars of all ages on every street corner; the ubiquity of slums, which as well as having whole districts to themselves also fill in the gaps in more affluent areas; billboards telling people to beware of counterfeit medicines; people collecting used plastic water bottles; the popularity of lottery outlets; car engines being switched off going downhill; children outside a bar at night using the electric light from inside to see their homework; stalls selling individual cigarrettes, pills and teabags; incessant and insistent requests for money or help with getting to the UK, even by people who work; the huge number of working children; and, of course, the proliferation of NGOs.
And finally an audible indicator of poverty, in the shape of a complaint made to me last weekend by an old man in a slum: “We should be shitting four or five times a week,” he said, “but people here only shit twice a week.”
February 5, 2010 at 12:42 pm | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
Of course, traditional banks like Ecobank look down on microfinance as a small-fry, over-risky industry. In Freetown I met SB, who heads a not-for-profit microfinance institution (MFI).
Set up in 2002 by a large American NGO but now self-sustaining, it has 20,000 members in four Sierra Leonean cities. It lends sums of between $120 and $2000 – in a country where most people live on a dollar a day, this means the loans are too large for the poorest people to access (SB says small loans are too costly to administrate).
Loans are for “income-generating activities” only. That is, not for weddings, funerals, medical bills or luxuries, for example, although SB is receptive to my argument that the first three of these can indirectly lead to improved income-generating capacity by relieving stress and strenghtening health (he also admits that some loans probably end up being spent on consumption rather than investment).
Most of the loans are repaid over 6-10 months, with repayments made weekly. They do not come cheap. The monthly interest rate is 3% – with inflation at around 11% this works out at an annual rate of 25%. And to this must be added the cost of travelling to the MFI’s office to make repayments (my medicine seller friend Musa said he gave up his membership because having to pay every week was too tough – his business is collapsing, and he asked me to fund him last week instead). Clients put up with these rates because they are poor, and cannot access cheaper loans because they lack collateral and credit ratings – SB’s MFI relies on word of mouth references, visits to inspect businesses, and guarantors.
Eighty per cent of clients are self-employed businesspeople, who borrow to buy palm oil for cooking businesses, refrigerators for storage, baskets and trays for hawking, and stock. The other twenty per cent are salaried but moonlighting. Eighty per cent of clients are women because, as SB says, men want to shoot for the big pot so they look down on small loans. Women are also much better payers.
The recession has hit the MFI’s clients hard. Remittances and investment from abroad have slumped, and the increased costs of food and fuel have hit customers. Many small enterprises, says SB, have gone to the wall. The normal default rate on loans is 3-4%, but in 2009 11% of money loaned was not repaid. As SB put it, “You might want to pay back a loan but if you have the choice of maintaining your credit rating or feeding your family, you don’t worry about not being able to borrow again in the future.”
If clients do default, the MFIs have limited options for chasing their losses. SB threatens to take bad debtors to the police but never carries it through because he knows it won’t help him recover the money. He worries that “clients talk to each other,” and come to see not-for-profit MFIs as a soft touch. Readers of Hernando de Soto will not be surprised to hear, moreover, that in many cases SB can’t even find his errant clients – some don’t have identity cards, and changes of address are frequent and go undetected by officialdom.
SB’s profits (which are all reinvested) have halved in the past year. Other MFIs have seen similar or worse slumps – in Morocco, once the poster child of African microfinance, the government has had to step in to help as several MFIs went bankrupt after defaults soared to 30%.
Because of the recession, many MFI clients have resorted to “multiple borrowing.” They join several institutions at once, borrow money from all of them, and often fail to repay. The problem is so serious that SB’s MFI has stopped taking new members until it figures out a way to stop the multiple borrowers. Such is people’s desperation, he says, that “if we opened up our membership now, we’d have 200 applicants queuing outside our office every day.”
February 4, 2010 at 11:15 am | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
Last week I met someone high up in the Sierra Leone branch of Ecobank. He proudly told me the history of his bank.
In the 1980s, because of widespread instability and the collapse of most African economies, Western banks like Barclays and Citibank pulled out of the continent. West Africa was left bankless.
Seeing this, West Africa’s chambers of commerce got together and decided that instead of allowing the Westerners’ withdrawal to cause further damage to African businesses, they would set up a bank of their own. The chambers of commerce didn’t have any money, however, so ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) stumped up the initial capital. The chambers of commerce didn’t have banking skills either, so they talked to Citibank in New York and drew up a contract whereby Citi would set up the new bank, run it for its first four years, and train Africans to take it over after they left.
Lome, the capital of Togo, was chosen as Ecobank’s headquarters, as Togo was the only stable West African state at the time (it was ruled by a dictator). After four years, and having made good money out of the deal, Citibank handed the new entity over to Africans. Ecobank now has branches in thirty African countries, Paris and Dubai, and is planning to open up in London and New York. And it’s still run entirely by Africans.
February 4, 2010 at 10:46 am | More on Africa, Economics and development | 1 Comment
“The nature of the ties linking the African with the European has not really changed since the first Portuguese ships went sailing down the west coast of the continent: the sophisticated magic of the white man remains irresistibly alluring to the black.” (Shiva Naipaul)
In all the debates about aid, its visual impact is rarely remarked upon. In rural areas, aid probably looks like a good thing. When you see that a donor has dug a well for your village, you may feel grateful to and enthusiastic about the donor (that is, if you don’t feel embarrassed that your community has failed to dig its own well – a fact rammed home in nearly every village in Guinea-Bissau by a billboard placed next to each well proclaiming that it was a gift of the Kuwaiti, Spanish, Portuguese or American people).
But in cities, to which young Africans are migrating in droves, the visual effect is more ambiguous. When the urban African looks at aid, he sees aid workers and missionaries driving around in brand new Toyota Land Cruisers or Hiluxes. He sees them staring at laptops or chatting on snazzy mobile phones. He sees them dining in expensive restaurants or drinking in smart cafes. And he sees their glittering air-conditioned offices and villas, with iron gates and security guards.
In countries like Senegal, where there are tourists and Western businessmen, aid workers do not stand out. But in poor, remote, unvisited Guinea-Bissau they play an important part in shaping perceptions of the developed world (Guinea-Bissau has no cinemas, precious few internet cafes or televisions, and no press to speak of). And, as they have done for centuries, Africans see all this opulence and want a part of it. Guinean politicians, grown rich on drug money, purchase Land Cruisers and build gated villas. Ordinary citizens spend more than they can afford on mobile phones. And young Guineans, who until recently have not joined the West African exodus to Europe, have begun to talk about taking the boat to Spain – a journey which at least one in six of the many Senegalese who attempt it does not survive.
Of course, foreign aid workers are not the only cause of this new yearning, but it is likely they play some role. Many young Guineans I spoke to, who do not want to risk the trip to Spain, are desperate instead to work for foreign NGOs or the UN. It could be argued that giving young Africans something to aspire to will hasten progress and encourage hard work. Maybe so, but is owning a mobile really progress when you can’t afford your daughter’s $10-a-month school fees (as one mobile-owning mother in Bissau complained to me recently)? And in a country like Guinea-Bissau where aspiration is outpacing people’s capabilities and even well-intentioned governments are struggling to manage expectations, are ostentatious displays of affluence the best way of promoting peaceful development rather than the violent upheavals Nigeria, Guinea-Conakry and others are beginning to experience?
January 13, 2010 at 11:31 am | More on Africa, Economics and development | Comments Off
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