This video interview shows Derick Ashong, an Obama supporter, getting approached by a (presumably pro-Clinton) interviewer outside Obama and Clinton’s third debate in February last year.  Here’s how the New York Times described what happened next:

“So why are you for Obama?” he asked. It was clear from his approach that he expected a dimwitted answer, an expectation that he was about to talk to another acolyte smitten by Senator Obama’s rock star persona.

But, as it turned out, Mr. Ashong, who was raised in Ghana and elsewhere, was glad to be asked. For almost six minutes — about a century in broadcast television years — Mr. Ashong, who has an immigrant’s love of democracy and the furrowed brow of a Brookings fellow, held forth on universal health care, single-payer approaches and public-private partnerships.

“A lot of these H.M.O.’s are publicly traded companies anyway, but I don’t think we want to create a market for health care per se, like we don’t want to create a futures market in health care,” he said. And so on.

Cute stuff. Highly informative. But not the kind of political discourse that generally captures a wider audience.

But here’s the weird part. On Feb. 2, the interview of Mr. Ashong was posted on a YouTube channel called “The Latest Controversy,” where supporters of both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Obama are asked very aggressively to justify their choice of candidates. The video blew up, drawing more than 850,000 views. And after that huge response to his policy analysis, Mr. Ashong decided to double down and explain the emotional component of his support for Obama in a follow-up video that was posted Feb. 11 and received 300,000 views.

Taken together, that means a guy who was looking to (anonymously) show a little love for a candidate was able to look into the camera for more than 13 minutes combined and draw in more than a million clicks with an impassioned but reasoned pitch.

Ashong will be in the UK next month, and speaking at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues.  Details: 6.30pm on 26 February in the Grand Committee Room in Parliament. More from the NYT piece after the jump. (more…)

One of Africa’s few shining lights, Ghana, is on tenterhooks as it awaits the result of an incredibly closely-fought general election. Publication of the results has been delayed, as the remote outpost of Tain in the west has yet to vote in the second round because of problems with voting materials. The national result is so tight that Tain, with just 23,000 voters, could be decisive. The poll there will open on Friday.

Ghana is important not just because it is one of very few West African countries that is not mired in corruption, civil strife and abject poverty (although there is plenty of the latter and not a little of the former if you look hard enough). It is also one of only a handful of countries on the entire continent that has regular peaceful democratic elections (it has had five since 1992). After the debacles in Kenya and Zimbabwe in the last two years, and after the recent coups in Guinea and Mauritania, it is crucial that Ghana’s poll passes off peacefully.

So far, there has been relatively little unrest, but as Chris Blattman reports, tensions are rising by the day:

My friend Naunihal sends me this dispatch, cobbled together hastily this afternoon (he urges me to tell you):

The situation is starting to look like Bush v. Gore. The election commissioner just said that the opposition leads by 23,000 votes and that there is one constituency where there was no election for security reasons which has over 50,000 votes that will vote just after new years.

But it gets messier. The incumbent party (NPP) points out that 2 big constituencies in Kumasi (its key area of support) were not included in the officially counted votes (probably because they are contested) and that it won one of those by over 51,000 votes.

In addition, they point out that in 11 constituencies in the opposition’s key area of the Volta region, NPP poling agents were thrown out and did not sign the election returns. I’ve seen the violence done to one of the party election observers – he was beaten and stoned and may lose his eye.

Right now fear is running high in Accra. Makola Market, the main market, is closed because of fear of violence. I’m getting reports right now from people aligned with the NPP, so I’m only hearing about NDC “Machomen” riding around in empty streets.

The constituency that has yet to vote for the President, voted against the incumbent party at the Parliamentary level, thus kicking out the incumbent MP. So it looks good for the opposition in that area, but everything is really too close to call.

And rumors are spreading that the election commissioner is under pressure from the incumbent government to throw things their way.

None of this is good in terms of street level tensions and legitimacy for whichever candidate gets declared.

Update: Fortunately, the election concluded peacefully, as Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party graciously conceded defeat to John Atta Mills’ National Democratic Congress. A rare example of a peaceful democratic transition, then, from one African party to another, and further evidence that Ghana really is a beacon of hope for the region. Let’s hope leaders in other parts of the continent take note.

Defying the global financial crisis, Guinea-Bissau, Gambia and Guinea have recorded sharp rises in foreign direct investment in recent months. Trouble is, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, most of the increase is drug money. “Foreign direct investments in these (three) countries, unexplained so far by their economic performance, have exploded. Remittances have grown. Even the currencies of the region are being revalued,” says the beleaguered head of the organisation, Antonio Maria Costa. “This is a form of money laundering, it comes in as foreign direct investment, it goes into rural real estate, purchase of land, hotels, tourism,” he told West African leaders in Cape Verde, who are meeting to discuss the problem.

As well as the above three countries and Sierra Leone, which I wrote about in July, a researcher who works for Kofi Annan claims that Ghana has become another hub for the drug deluge, which he believes will affect the country’s current election campaign. Here’s a helpful map of West Africa’s Cocaine Coast – expect Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, which like Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau are struggling to rebuild after devastating wars and which are surrounded by drug havens, to be next.

Imagine you’re advising China or India – or perhaps a poorer developing country such as Ghana – on their preparations for the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. What sort of deal should these countries be prepared to accept? What would seem fair?

Nick Stern sidles up to these questions in his paper – Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change. His starting point is that global emissions need to drop to around 20 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (and then further to around 10GT CO2e in the decades that follow) – that’s around 2 tonnes of CO2e in 2050 for each of the world’s 9 billion people or so.

Stern believes that there is no choice but for countries to converge on this per capita average:

This target for per capita emissions by mid-century is so low that there is little scope for any major country to depart significantly above or below it. If one or two large countries were to manage only to reduce emissions to, say, 3T or 4T per capita, then it would be difficult to see which other major grouping of countries would be able to get emissions close to zero: and the global target would be unlikely to be reached.

So…let’s imagine the Americans have accepted this logic (suspend belief for a moment) and have a proposal for reducing their emissions from over 20T today to Stern’s 2T by 2050. They enter the negotiating room expecting other countries to do the same.

How would you advise China, India or Ghana to respond? They start from a very different point – around 5T per Chinese citizen, 2T for an Indian, and maybe around 1/2 tonne for a Ghanaian.

Now, as Stern admits, for them, simple convergence would be a pretty rough deal.

All major groups getting to 2T/capita is a pragmatic approach and not a strongly equitable one. It takes little account of the greater per capita contributions of the developed countries to the historical and future contributions to the stock of GHG emissions.

My instinct would be to urge the Chinese, Indians and Ghanaian to forgo what might be a fun, but ultimately unproductive, squabble about historical emissions. Be magnanimous about the past, I’d suggest. Instead focus on what really matters – who’s going to be allowed to emit what over the next forty years.

Because however far Chinese, Indian or Ghanaian emissions are allowed to increase before they start to drop towards 2T – its absolutely certain that their total emissions between now and 2050 (on a per capita basis) will be significantly lower than America’s.

In other words, there’s no trajectory that can be drawn that gives these countries a fair share of the next generation emissions ‘cake’.

So what deal would you advise them to strike?

Among the most popular policy responses to recent rises in food prices are export bans. Cambodia has banned rice exports, for example. Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Iran have refused to export wheat to hungry neighbours like Afghanistan. And Burkina Faso, one of the West African countries that has been hardest hit by the price rises, has banned cereal exports to neighbouring Ghana.

Such measures have been widely criticised, but they are not new. I recently came across FJ Pedler’s ‘Economic Geography of West Africa’, published by Longmans in 1955. Among many other interesting topics, he writes about the maize shortages of 1947. He notes the wildly fluctuating price of guinea-corn in the Zaria region of Nigeria, which rose from £8 per ton in 1946 to £38 per ton a year later. “These price movements,” he says, “are an indication that too little food is produced to meet the needs of the people throughout the year.” Traders take advantage of this, buying up food at harvest time to sell it later when prices rise (a bit like today’s commodities traders, who have been stocking up on food): “They are often blamed for high prices and scarcity [plus ça change...], but their action is the result of shortage, not the cause of it.”

As in today’s crisis, Mr Pedler reports that governments “often get frightened by the high prices and shortages…and prohibit the movement of food from one place to another.” Like Burkina Faso today, West African governments in the 1950s banned the export of guinea-corn from one state to another – in this case, from Katsina Province into Zaria Province. It didn’t help then either, and Pedler explains why the approach is flawed:

It is difficult to defend these bans on economic grounds. If they are effective, they prevent food from moving to the place where people will pay most for it. This must drive prices even higher in the needy area: while in the producing area an artificially low price is maintained, so that there is less economic incentive for farmers to increase their production.

Little has been learnt, it seems, in the intervening half-century. However, as Mr Pedler observed back then, the bans are easily evaded; “their principal effect is to add to the cost of transport by making it necessary for traders to avoid control posts or bribe the guards.” Good news for the corrupt, then, but bad news for the hungry.

I had a long chat with Pascal Fletcher at Reuters on Friday while he was writing this article on the effect of price rises for food and fuel in west Africa, where he’s based.  He clearly knows the region back to front, and as his piece makes clear, the outlook isn’t good:

Africa’s cocoa makes the world’s chocolate, its fish, fruit and vegetables reach tables around the globe and its oil powers vehicles and factories from China to the United States. Yet far from benefiting from soaring commodity prices, African states are being squeezed as hard as any by the costs of fuel and food imports. Their desperate moves to cushion the impact for potentially restive populations threaten to wreck already stretched budgets, slashing receipts and swelling state spending.

As far as I can tell from the rough tally I’ve been keeping over the last few months, west Africa’s been one of the regions hardest hit by civil unrest related to food and fuel inflation, and Pascal’s article seems to confirm this.  As a result, many governments have been under pressure to subsidise prices for both.  Problem is, that doesn’t do their exchequers any good at all – quite apart from the inflationary impact of such measures.

The unplanned contingency measures, on top of global food and oil prices far above what most imagined a year ago, are wreaking havoc with governments’ finances. “This trend is throwing the budget out of gear,” Ghana’s President John Kufuor lamented last month when he unveiled a package of actions to mitigate the price rises …

As I argue in Pascal’s piece, the expense of subsiding goods across the whole economy, coupled with the inflationary impact, are two of the reasons for the current enthusiasm for social protection systems – be they food aid, vouchers or straightforward cash transfers – that are targeted at the poorest people.  Expect to hear a lot about such ’social protection systems’ at this week’s UN food summit. 

But there’s a catch, too: in many places, the infrastructure for administering these systems just isn’t in place.  Helping countries to get it set up has to be a top priority for donors – starting right now.

“If you see people throwing stones, it means if they had guns, they would have been shooting”, observes Frederick, an economics grad who drives a motorcycle taxi in Douala, Cameroon. 

The FT’s Matthew Green explains:

Only a few crumbs were left on the counter at the Boulangerie du Rail delicatessen in Douala after looters swept the shelves of cake, croissants and champagne… “People are hungry, they have nothing to eat,” said Felix Djoyo, the manager, who had locked himself behind a metal door while shanty dwellers ransacked his bottles of Bordeaux.

The crisis in Cameroon might have generated few headlines abroad, but the violence shows how soaring oil and food prices on global markets are threatening the patronage systems propping up some of Africa’s longest-serving leaders.  Protests linked to surging inflation have broken out in Guinea and Burkina Faso in recent months, where presidents have ruled for more than two decades. Niger, Ghana and Senegal have also seen demonstrations …

The government has agreed to a small reduction in fuel prices to placate protesters, saying it cannot afford the kinds of subsidies needed to shield the economy from global market forces. But many residents blame Mr Biya for the hardship, saying years of venal rule have skewed the economy to favour a tiny elite.

So, another point to add to the growing list of what rising food and energy prices mean for Africa: patronage systems come under increasing stress in conditions of scarcity.  Look at Kenya.  People at the tops of agencies are acutely aware of the problem – DFID’s Douglas Alexander and the World Bank’s Bob Zoellick both returned from Davos fired up about the political impacts of scarcity issues, for instance.  Some people in country offices get it, too. 

But the underlying problem is still that many donor agencies’ culture is all about disbursing cash - rather than having a really sophisticated analysis of endogenous drivers of change and a theory of influence to go with it.  Neither the old problem of patronage nor the newer problem of scarcity issues is really that well understood in donor agency cultures.  We’d better hope they get up to speed pretty fast…

No ho-ho-hos from the International Energy Agency this Christmas. They chose December 27th, of all days, to announce that, er, their reserves data is – how to put it? – rather Enronesque. 

As the FT says, the Agency “has been paying insufficient attention to supply bottlenecks as evidence mounts that oil is being discovered more slowly than once expected”.  The article continues: “To make amends, the International Energy Agency has started work on a new study to be published next year that will rework its long-term projections for global oil reserves”.

Alongside a plan to build a new set of data for the decline in production rates in the world’s top 250 oilfields, the IEA is also ready to reassess its own forecasts for projected oil discoveries, which it based on estimates by the US Geological Survey.

Any downward revisions in oil discoveries or upward revisions to decline rates will in theory increase the probability that global oil reserves will be smaller than expected and that global oil supply will peak much sooner than expected.

Natural decline rates for discovered fields are a closely guarded secret in the oil industry, and the IEA is concerned that the data it currently holds is not accurate.

Doubts are also surfacing about the original estimates for new oil discoveries around the world that were calculated by the USGS in 2000. A USGS re-assessment of these statistics in 2005 showed that actual new oil discoveries averaged only 9bn barrels a year between 1996-2003, 60 per cent less than the average annual estimates for the forecast period of 1995-2025. Just a few months ago, the USGS also downgraded its estimates of future new discoveries around Greenland by 38bn barrels.

“Insufficient attention to supply bottlenecks”?  Call me lacking in seasonal goodwill, but wasn’t the whole point of creating an International Energy Agency to have organisation whose job it was to pay attention to supply bottlenecks? 

What’s all the more alarming about the IEA’s Yuletide admission is that the Agency was already sounding alarm bells and pointing to flashing red lights on the dashboard even before this announcement.  Regular GD readers will recall that November 16 saw the publication of the latest World Energy Outlook, when the Agency said that over the next 25 years some $22,000 billion – just under half 2006 world gross product – would need to be invested in supply infrastructure.  If even that astronomical figure was based on an over-optimistic assessment of reserves data, then – ?

Nor was this even the end of the IEA’s Christmas message to the world.  The following day, it announced its finding that the rising cost of oil has already wiped out the benefits of increased aid and debt relief to non-oil producing African countries, according to an IEA survey of 13 countries including South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Senegal.  According to the IEA, the increased cost of oil bought by these countries since 2004 was 3 per cent of their combined GDP: “more than the sum of debt relief and aid received over the past three years by the countries, which have a combined population of 270m, of whom 104m live on less than $1 a day”.  One implication:

The situation is raising fears that, in spite of the strong growth many African countries have seen in recent years, there could be a repeat of the 1980s’ debt crisis in the developing world that was caused in part by the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Research into voting patterns in Ghana:

This article explores voting behavior in one of Africa’s new democracies. Recognizing that much of the literature assumes African political behavior to be subsumed in ethnic ties and clientelism, we ask if individual voting behavior in Africa is driven by evaluative rationales based on retrospective or prospective judgments of the performance of parties or representatives, or by non-evaluative rationales characterized by clientelism and proxy voting. Based on a survey of voters in two recent elections in Ghana, one of the most surprising findings is that an overwhelming majority of the respondents do not vote based on clientelism, or due to ethnic or family ties but cast their ballots after evaluation of candidates and parties. Despite the significance of ethnicity among elites in Africa, voters are seemingly not influenced primarily by it.

Noah Pollak’s National Review article, posted on Michael Totten’s blog today, reminds me of our internal debates during the Lebanon war last summer (when I was working for the UN) about peacekeeping options for south Lebanon.

Pollak’s article, subtitled “The UN organisation is ineffective as it is unaccountable” is a standard piece of UN-bashing. Pollak argues that unlike the Israeli government, which is being thrashed by the Winograd Commission and its fallout, the UN has “quite remarkably escaped any opprobrium for its own important contribution to the outbreak of war last summer”.

Pollak recalls that since 1978, when UNIFIL was established, “a concatenation of nearly identical UNIFIL-related resolutions has been issued by the Security Council, always with one thing in common: Events on the ground are never permitted to affect UNIFIL’s mandate. Through a combination of diplomatic foolishness and bureaucratic inertia, UNIFIL has remained impervious to any evaluation of its actual utility in bringing peace and security to southern Lebanon.” Pollak recounts a “long history of terrorist provocation in southern Lebanon”, from the PLO to Hezbollah, throughout which “the world’s diplomatic corps has maintained the self-congratulatory fantasy that more extensions of UNIFIL’s mandate will help the region”. (more…)