What’s holding back South Africa’s economy?

Over the past few years South Africa’s public finances have come under more and more strain, as the size of the economy per person declines and there is rising unemployment. These hard times have three main origins: the economic legacy of apartheid, the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the massive damage done by inaction and state capture during President Jacob Zuma’s tenure. 

Apartheid limited development for the majority of the population in South Africa. It created many negative implications for the country including high unemployment, high transport costs for workers, dependency on the state as well as high crime rates. This consequently destroyed communities, created costly spatial inequalities and led to extreme inequality between race groups. 

Even so many years after the apartheid, the country remains in debt despite different measures put in place. This has resulted in worsening finances that has caused public finances to become a burden on the economy due to the tax revenues required. 

This has resulted in South Africa to be faced by a combination of challenges, making the country’s economic problems vastly more difficult. Policies that have been used in other countries cannot be used or imitated in South Africa, as it is not that simple. 

South Africa lacks financial and economic experts making it difficult for political leaders to come up with policies. Such as former deputy finance minister, Mcebisi Jonas’ idea of “shock therapy”, to introduce various aspects of capitalism. This would be inappropriate for South Africa, where the private sector controls more of the economy than the state. This ignores the harm caused by austerity measures and fails to acknowledge the structural origins of South Africa’s high unemployment rates. 

Due to high levels of debt and non-existent economic growth means that there is very little room for creativity in public finances. Instead, reports attempt to paint a positive picture of future prospects, when they should be focused on crisis management. In the absence of a clear-eyed vision for the role of the state in relation to the economy and socio-economic outcomes, only good fortune will spare South Africa from stagnation, or further worsening of public finances. 

Struggle to leave Tripoli

There are still people who have fled their own countries because of war who are now seeking further to leave Libya where their lives are miserable because of the turmoil of the ongoing civil war. There are still repercussions from the air strike on Libyan rebel forces in July 2019 which hit a military compound near the capital city, Tripoli. Some of the survivors walked themselves to a transit camp but even there they are still living in war zone which they want to escape.  

The UN want people to move out of the camp and live elsewhere – they are providing the people with aid and the place to stay but they haven’t given them any protection.  

Most of the people who have been affected by the bombings of July 2019 can only remain in the camps in Tripoli and elsewhere in Libya where they are still at risk of being affected by more air strikes. However, there is still hope for a few people to emigrate. For example, last month 500 people were moved to Rwanda. 

Miss South Africa asks men to write love letters against violence

One of the many impacts of the violence of colonialism and the apartheid law on South Africa’s psych is claimed to be the maintained high cases of gender based violence. A recent campaign which caught my eye this week regarded Zozibini Tunzi, South Africa’s ‘Miss Universe’, who is running a social media crusade to stand up for women’s equality and publicly fight against victimisation.

On the 9th August Tunzi was asked in an interview why women should keep smiling, and her response was that women shouldn’t keep smiling when they are still getting beaten with society not doing anything about it. She took this answer and decided to ask people to join her advocacy against gender based violence, whilst aligning herself with the UN to do so, through her popularity on social media. This has culminated the ‘He for She’ campaign, which asks South African men to stand with her in particular; pointing out that it is often too often that women are probed on how they can keep themselves safe from predators – rather than asking men how they can help. Thus, Tunzi wants to change that narrative, and asks to spread a message of love throughout South Africa through the use of the internet, Twitter, Instagram and sharing posts through hashtags.

The campaign seems like a positive way to try to spread awareness of the blatant and reoccurring gender based violence issues that South Africa have maintained for a substantial amount of time. In September President Cyril Ramaphosa described South Africa as one of “the most unsafe places in world to be a woman”. It will be interesting to see if a modern spin on spreading publicly serious current affairs will have any impact on the statistics concerning gender based violence any time soon.

Climate Activism

The Russian Scramble for Africa

The Russian government has been showing increased interest in Africa over the last few years. Its past relations with Africa were mostly focused on the sale of weapons to the continent and guaranteeing security if a war was to break out. Not much interest was given to actual occupation, as Russia was more focused on establishing its countries own position amongst the world leaders. 

The scramble for Africa led by European powers was an economic advancement. Africa has been seen as a low-cost investment with great prospects for the Europeans. Although most African countries have now been given their independence, world leaders, including China, Europe and the US, still have a strong-hold over the continents economic position. 

Russia has recently noted that Africa today is still providing “low-cost, high-profile” opportunities. Russia aims to loosen the Chinese hold on African countries and overtake with Russian developing programmes that will benefit both Russia and Africa. 

Russia’s influence in Africa so far hasn’t been spectacular, nor revolutionary. Their interest has been viewed with scepticism by many. According to Proekt (The Project), an independent Moscow-based online investigative news outlet, Kremlin-linked teams have used social media “troll farms” and spin doctors to interfere in politics and elections in 20 countries on the continent. These were unsuccessful attempts. Similarly, in 2018, Russia failed to engineer the re-election of President Erie Radzaunarimampianina in Madagascar. They have also been linked to the interference during the elections in Zimbabwe. 

The Russian government has also deployed teams of military commanders to train presidential guards in Africa. Also promising to build a new nuclear power plant and develop oil wells and diamond mines. 

Consequently, Russia’s efforts remain focused purely on limiting the influence of others on the African continent. Russia has always had a self-idealistic approach, with the idea that bigger is better, and the African continent is indeed very big. 

Telemedicine in Ghana

Bima Telemedicine Centre in the Alajo neighbourhood of Accra, October 2019.

Ghana has to face a shortage of practitioners, indeed in 2017, there was one doctor for 8437 people and a nurse for about 627 inhabitants. In rural areas the situation is worst so people have to travel to the city for being able to see a doctor and can lose one or two days of work, healing becomes expensive. That is why the Swedish insurance company Bima, originally specialized in providing affordable insurance solutions in developing countries, began telemedicine in 2015 in Ghana. Bima ensures about 4 million people out of 30 million inhabitants and the majority are in major cities such as Accra, Kumasi or Takoradi but assure to serve rural people too. Its health insurance, whose costs vary between 2 and 10 cedis per month (between £0.30 and £1.45 ), makes it possible to cover any hospital costs and to have access to the telemedicine service.

The company works with 29 doctors and 19 nurses, the doctors must have two years of experience and one of the prerequisites is also language. Each of their practitioners speaks Twi ( most spoken language in Ghana) and some of them even talk Ewé and Ga to be understood by many people as possible. People are mainly contacting the department because of malaria, typhoid fever or cholera cases. In 80% of cases, they can handle it and respond to the situation but for the rest of the time, they have to refer the person to an appropriate care facility. When the patient needs blood analyses, he is referred to partner laboratories. The results are sent back to Bima’s doctor who calls back the patient to talk about it and send him the prescription by text message.

Bima is not the only actor in the Ghanaian telemedicine market. In 2011, the Swiss Novartis Foundation launched a pilot center in the District of Amansia in the north of the capital Accra. Some 35,000 people were covered by the scheme. Since 2018, the Ghanaian Ministry of Health has taken over the management of the center. The country’s authorities hope in the coming years to be able to generalize coverage to the entire territory because it favors the decongestion of the emergencies.

Conservation in Africa: why certain forms of hunting can actually be beneficial.

Many conservation projects throughout the world aim to confront the problem of poaching in an effort to save the animals. While this tends to go against initial ideas of conservation, controlled trophy hunting can be beneficial to both the wildlife and local community. For example, in a national geographic article on trophy hunting they give an example of a rhino shot on a hunt, but with a tranquilizer dart instead of normal bullets – ‘such hunts offer the thrill of the chase without the kill’. While rules have now changed so that only vets are authorised to fire tranquilisers, there are other options e.g. vitamin shots. Efforts to make trophy hunting a viable solution to conservation can have positive effects on both the lives of local people (by bringing in tourism and money), and conservation. 

Not all conservation areas are necessarily suitable for tourism, but these places can host shoots, allowing local communities to benefit from the industry rather than being negatively affected by conservation efforts that only benefit the wildlife. These controlled forms of hunting give the locals potential jobs, to use the knowledge that they have gained from growing up in the area to carry out hunts properly. This means that people can have the thrill of the hunt but are under obligation to stick to rues and guidelines over the amount of animal deaths and the way the killings are carried out. A key issue with unsupervised hunting is that shots may injure an animal but not necessarily kill it and if these animals are not found and either saved or properly killed causes problems.

Sadly, many hunts are carried out following the expectations of westerners, imitating the large-scale killings of those such as Roosevelt who during his safaris killed animals in the hundreds if not thousands. Many western conservation projects find fault with African hunting habits yet are seemingly blind to the effect that their practices have on the conservation of animals.

Trophy hunting also brings in a huge amount of money that goes towards the conservation effort. Whether this is in the case of the killing of the animal or not these prices can be pretty big. Prices range up from the thousands with the bigger more demanded animals such as elephants reaching prices of even $80,000. Undoubtedly this kind of money can and should help conservation and therefore arguably, done right, hunting can certainly be beneficial to conservation.

While hunting does have its advantages, it would be naive to leave out the fact that hunting does ask questions about the morality of hunting and killing potentially endangered animals.  Other obvious issues over population depletion and protection of species are also factors not to be ignored. 

Hunting also leads to the proliferation of illegal hunting for things such as rhino horns, something used particularly in Asia for medicine and increasingly for decorative purposes. Such issues have also been prolific with ivory trade and the mass elephant slaughters carried out in order to supply vast quantities of ivory all around the world. While there are initiatives in place that aim to reduce the scale of such hunting by using poison injections or dye to deter hunters, as well as a ban on the ivory trade in the late 20^thcentury, many of these options aren’t viable in the long term. Price, continued demand and lack of universal laws all mean that poachers still have a market to sell to. In some cases, measures such as poison or dye have actually pushed up the price due to the higher demand for products free of these deterrents.

While our perception of hunting and the killing of animals in Africa is generally seen as wrong and immoral, benefits of controlled trophy hunting such as money and jobs. In addition to this, there is actually a need to control populations of animals as they can be detrimental to crops and to many people’s safety. In this sense, having a quota of animals that can be hunted per year can help sustain the balance between wildlife conservation and human existence within these areas.

Therefore, I think it is important to look past the classic negative view on hunting in Africa and understand how, while from an outsider’s point of view hunting is bad, within Africa it can have many positive outcomes. Hunting should not be dismissed by conservation groups and programmes completely because as long as it’s gone about in the right way in could be part of an effective conservation programme.

Residents of Tambacounda

Self-employment, a solution to curb unemployment in Africa

Samuel Mathey teaching women in Abidjan

Samuel Mathey a Togolese economist is president of the African Foundation for Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (Fafede) and the creator of the Starting from Zero-Franc (EZF) initiative. He is established in the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, Abidjan, and believe in the eradication of unemployment by promoting self-employment and entrepreneurship.

At the present time, about 51% of the African population is living under the poverty line, there is no reliable welfare system, unemployment benefit, and no retirement or redistribution of wealth. This lead to the conclusion ending “endemic unemployment” in Africa is necessary. For this reason, Samuel Mathey thinks it must been made through entrepreneurship for the empowerment of the youth population and women. The main advice he gives is to “find your specialty, value it and then start your project with the means at hand, and then find funding”. The economist also want to end those informal migration’s road which led to the death of numerous African in the Mediterranean sea.

The typical EZF process is as follows: community radio calls on volunteer women to register for the program, then they learn for a week the techniques to start without outside funding. Those technics can be making a budget, managing profits, opening a bank account, writing files and business plans, structuring their ideas… However, not all women have the same profile and are all unemployed. Some have a job and are looking for a bigger picture. To conclude, according to the African Development Bank (BAD), 30% of those who took EZF training were able to develop their own business over the long term.

Changing traditional African education

Traditional African education is an important part of the local life in many African rural communities. As well as adults expanding their knowledge of Africa’s history, there are many children who are brought up learning new aspects of society too. Traditional African education has been passed down through generations of communities either by word of mouth or by rituals. Over time, African education has evolved and the level of it has improved dramatically from the beginnings of teaching. 

 When the European influence began to take over from the 15^th Century, the teaching of African children became less traditional and more Eurocentric. In urban areas this has been happening for a long time but the introduction of this method of teaching to the children in rural areas in less helpful. In a way that their minds were bound to adapt to a European way of thinking and living, which of course is very different, and not as useful to them as their own would be. By teaching African children distinct subjects such as Physics and Geography, their minds will not reflect on some of the topics of their lives which are more useful to them for example the planting season, identifying the traditional gods, methods for harvesting and fishing. Of course, for children who wish to work in a city or in the ‘western’ world, more academic subjects will be of use to them because they will need these skills to get a better job but for those whose aim is to maintain their family’s agricultural life, these subjects will evidently not be as useful.  

The same can be said for the recent rise in young adults’ volunteer tourism to ‘third world countries. Many European young volunteers who work in Africa teach the children differently to how they should traditionally be taught. English football chants as an example, are obviously not a useful form of education to many of the young children.