For Africa, 2008 will be the year of the jobless. Millions of rural poor will, as ever, go hungry and perish from curable diseases, but the focus in 2008 will be on the continent’s cities and towns. The failure to create new jobs in the slums will lead to strikes, riots and a further rise in violent crime and political instability. Africa’s economies will grow, many by 6% or more, but the urban underclass will grow still faster. The African Union, in its attempt to be taken more seriously on a range of political and economic issues, will launch discussions on how to increase the workforce, but little clear action will be taken.
 |  After a golden year in 2007 China will suffer a reverse in popularity in Africa |
As a result, gangs will prosper. Kenya’s Mungiki gang started decapitating its enemies in 2007. More terror is in prospect in 2008 as gangsters take a potent mix of tribal history and popular culture, drawing on American and Jamaican swagger, to recruit more disaffected young men.
Foreign investment will remain too small to have much influence on Africa’s population. Most of it will continue to be extractive: oil and gas in west Africa; gems, ores and logging in central and east Africa. Some progress will be made in securing rights to Congo’s trove, but not in the building of the new roads and railways needed to bring the minerals to market. Outside South Africa, Egypt and the Maghreb, manufacturing will remain limited. In several countries the dumping of cheap manufactured Chinese goods will become an issue. Indeed, after a golden year in 2007 China will suffer a reverse in popularity in Africa. Enthusiasm for turning over large parts of tropical Africa to biofuels will also falter in 2008.
Immigration policies will restrict the number of work visas available to foreigners. A similar populism, fuelled by unemployment, will also work against potentially useful measures to legalise dual citizenship and finally capitalise on Africa’s large and increasingly wealthy diaspora. At the same time, new biometric passports and more forceful policing of borders will make it much harder for undocumented Africans to get into and stay in the European Union. Record numbers of young Africans drowned or were otherwise killed in 2007 trying to escape the continent. More will die in 2008.
The city of Mwanza, population around 500,000, can serve as a benchmark for Africa’s challenges and opportunities. There has been hope of remaking this capital of Tanzania’s Sukumaland, on the south shore of Lake Victoria, as the new metropolis of east Africa. That will remain a dream, but tower blocks will go up in 2008 and a new lakeside park will be opened. Swanky villas will be built on the rocky points overlooking the lake, to make the most of the sunsets. The region’s eerie beauty has unrealised tourism potential, but malaria, AIDS and also bilharzia mean that it will remain untapped.
This kind of disease-burden matters, as does the mud-hut poverty of Mwanza’s hinterland, but more telling is the state of the local shipping. Ferries ply routes across Lake Victoria from Mwanza as far as Kenya and Uganda. The larger vessels are old and decrepit. Rusting on their moorings, they ask a question: how did they make it overland to Lake Victoria in the first place? In fact, they were built in Glasgow and Belfast, came in pieces, and were reassembled by shipbuilders during the colonial period. Those kinds of skills and capital are long gone. Newer boats are smaller and less impressive.
The fishing trade, similarly, has failed to move on. It is rudimentary and dominated by middlemen—the same middlemen who own the villas. But the modest attractions of Mwanza are such that it will suck in new poor in 2008. Mwanza’s officials are caught, like Africa at large, between boosterism and desperation. The city needs to create several thousand new jobs in 2008 just to keep up with the inflow—and the chances are poor.
No comments:
Post a Comment