Latest Developments, June 28

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In today’s news…

As expected, Christine Lagarde has become the new head of the International Monetary Fund. The position came up for grabs when her predecessor resigned after being charged with sexual assault. But Lagarde may not be above reproach either, as she is currently under investigation for her her involvement in a questionable legal settlement involving 403 million euros in public money.

In the US, the trial of businessmen caught in a sting trying to defraud the people of Gabon is a sign of an increased willingness to crack down on Americans who try to bribe foreign officials. At the same time, an unassuming house in Cheyenne, Wyoming suggests tax havens are not just islands in the Caribbean.

British Prime Minister David Cameron reminds us his government is taking the lead on aid transparency. So far, only 12 governments are signatories to the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Germany is the only other G8 country among them.

Britain also found itself in a minority position when its delegates recently opted not to support a proposed International Labour Organization convention aimed at protecting the rights of domestic workers. Although the motion passed, the US, Canada and the Netherlands made it clear that in spite of their votes of support, they were unlikely to ratify the convention.

Argentina is not the only G20 country struggling to tackle money laundering. Up to $15 billion is laundered annually in Canada. And new statistics show its police only manage to identify a suspect in 18 percent of money laundering cases and prosecutors secure a conviction in just a third of trials in which money laundering is the most serious charge.

A number of civil society organizations have signed an open letter calling for the UN to establish an international tax cooperation body, while Christian Aid’s Julian Boys blasts the International Accounting Standards Board for secrecy he argues harms both the world’s poor and the IASB’s own interests.

Libya says the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued against Gadhafi and his sons end any possibility of a negotiated settlement to the current conflict, thereby providing additional ammunition for those who argue international justice in its current form may actually harm the cause of peace in Africa.

Despite much fretting in wealthy countries about perceived mass influxes of refugees, a new UN report shows 80 percent of the world’s refugees are in poor countries, with Pakistan, Iran and Syria leading the way. The findings prompted UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres to speak of a “worrying unfairness in the international protection paradigm.”

The Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie, a vocal proponent of “beyond aid” thinking, writes about reducing aid dependence rather than reducing aid. The former requires replacing aid money with other sources of revenue. The article draws extensively from a recent talk by a Uganda Revenue Authority official who asks: “Is foreign aid to Africa promoting the strengthening of tax administration or simply having a substitution effect?”

 

From the vaults: Religion and politics in Senegal

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At the risk of deviating slightly from my mandate, I’ve decided to post an unpublished piece I wrote in 2007, shortly after covering Senegal’s last presidential election and one of the country’s major religious pilgrimages. I feel that the burning of a Jehovah’s Witness temple in suburban Dakar (in the very suburb where my narrative begins) over the weekend, as well as the recent controversy over proposed constitutional changes in the run-up to next year’s election, makes the piece timely again and I hope it can give a small insight into Senegal’s complex politico-religious culture.

But please do bear in mind the text is four years old, so the statistics at the very least are out of date. For an update on the interplay of politics and religion in Senegal, read this.

Dakar, Senegal – On the western edge of a city and a continent, a green-domed mausoleum sits just beyond the endless pounding of Atlantic breakers. “Sacred place. No sports allowed,” reads a sign in hand-painted French, staking out a little piece of sand for a 19th Century holy man to rest in peace. On either side of the shrine, teams of young boys chasing footballs mirror the ocean’s ebb and flow. A little further, Western tourists loll about in Speedos and bikinis, partially veiled only by a thin salt mist.

In this West African nation of 12 million, a secular constitution combines with intercommunal marriages and cultural traditions – most notably teranga, or hospitality – to foster tolerance and blur the lines separating the estimated 95-percent majority Muslims from the Christian and animist minorities.

“Everybody pretty much practices their religion without worrying about what others are doing,” said Abass Fall, a 40 year-old teacher, fresh from an annual pilgrimage which draws hundreds of thousands of devotees to the holy city of Tivaouane just northeast of the capital. “And during religious holidays, each community invites the other to join in the festivities.”

Senegal may have its share of problems – it ranks below Sudan, Haiti and Zimbabwe on the UN’s Human Development Index and has an estimated urban unemployment rate of nearly 50 percent – but religion is not a major fault line, according to a Western official in Dakar who spoke on condition of anonymity. While he did not know whether to attribute Senegalese tolerance to the influence of the country’s dominant brand of Islam – an unorthodox form in which charms and icons are widespread and the majority belong to mystical Sufi brotherhoods – or vice versa, he said there was no recent history of religious radicalism or fanaticism.

This apparent absence of radical Islam is good news in intelligence circles increasingly concerned northwestern Africa’s porous borders and vast unpoliced areas are ideal for recruiting and training terrorists. But Senegal’s own brand of Islam produces its own set of challenges.

Though a devout member of the Tijani brotherhood, Abdoul Aziz Kébé, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Civilization at Dakar’s Cheikh Anta Diop University, fears the increasing political role of religion in the country may threaten the republican values of equality and legality. He believes Senegal is sliding towards a dangerous situation under President Abdoulaye Wade who was reelected for a five-year term earlier this year. His allegiance and submission to the head of the Mouride brotherhood – the most powerful Senegalese order both politically and economically but second to the Tijani in numbers – is typical of its adherents but when Wade behaves in this way, he is choosing religion over the very constitution that is intended to leave people free to worship as they choose.

“If the president submits to another power,” Kébé said, “he places all Senegalese people under the power of that authority, even if they don’t belong to that brotherhood.”

In the lead-up to last month’s parliamentary elections, a number of media voices condemned Wade’s open patronage of Mouride leaders who have the power to deliver huge numbers of votes to friendly politicians. The country’s much vaunted democracy – Senegal is the only West African nation never to have experienced a military coup – lost some of its lustre due to the opposition’s boycott of the vote. But in Kébé’s view, Wade’s favouring of one brotherhood over the others can have consequences long after election day.

“The impression that one group or another is the chosen people is very dangerous in a republic,” he warned. “It marks everyone else out as the damned.”

Still, it is not just Muslims who feel that Senegalese Islam is for the most part getting things right. Given the country’s demographic realities, Christians benefit from the maintenance of a secular, tolerant society. For now, they do not seem too worried about their lot.

“Fundamentalism gets drowned in Senegal’s culture of openness and respect for others,” said Reverend Gabriel Sarr who leads the congregation at Dakar’s oldest church. But despite the constitution and the fact that Easter Monday is a national holiday and street vendors peddle inflatable Santas and miniature Christmas trees every December, he guards against complacency. “Sometimes a small thing can undo a whole tradition of peace.”

Latest Developments, June 27

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In today’s news…

The UN Security Council has voted unanimously to send 4,200 Ethiopian peacekeepers to Sudan’s disputed Abyei region. As a neighbouring country that has been involved in military conflicts with two of its other neighbours – Eritrea and Somalia –  in recent years, Ethiopia is an interesting choice. David Shinn, a former US ambassador to Ethiopia, is not worried but he discusses the Ethiopia-Sudan relationship’s past and future challenges.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has just chosen a new head and the International Monetary Fund is about to do the same. The weekend’s FAO vote went against wealthy donor countries preferring a Spanish candidate to the Brazilian who won on the strength of wide support from the Global South. Given the divisions within the FAO and how far the Millennium Development Goal to halve world hunger by 2015 has gone off track, José Graziano da Silva’s job is unlikely to be an easy one. “Along with tackling the linked problem of climate change, delivering global food and nutrition security is the challenge of our time,” former UN secretary general Kofi Annan said over the weekend, as the number of chronically hungry climbs above 1 billion. At the same time, the number of obese people is closing in on 2 billion. Not surprisingly perhaps, new data on diabetes trends over the last three decades are all over the map. Among the big winners with an overall decreased incidence: Poland, Myanmar and Zambia. Among the big losers with increases of more than 60 percent: the US, Papua-New Guinea and Spain.

After the FAO disappointment, the North is expected to fare better in the IMF thanks to that organization’s vote-as-you-pay scheme, in which the US alone holds 17 percent of the votes and Europe close to 50. Tomorrow’s anticipated election of French finance minister Christine Lagarde will continue the exclusive ownership of the IMF leadership Europe has enjoyed since the organization’s inception. Despite growing pressure to relinquish this hold, European leaders have argued that the body’s primary focus is currently the eurozone crisis and its leadership should reflect that fact.

(As an aside, the International Criminal Court’s latest weekly update is out. Apart from an item on a visit from the Dutch foreign minister, the entire issue pertains to Africa. It remains to be seen whether European leaders will follow their IMF logic by pushing for an African to become the next chief prosecutor.)

While the IMF waits for official word of its new leader, it may have lost a customer, as Egypt appears to have decided it does not want a loan after all. And a number of Arab NGOs are accusing donors, such as the IMF and World Bank, of undermining the Arab Spring by imposing excessive conditions on loans.

The IMF’s sister institution, the World Bank, wants to include anti-corruption lessons in the curricula of poor countries. There is no word at present of a complementary initiative to teach rich countries how to tackle the supply side of graft.

In the private sector, Wal-Mart is heading to Africa where it is encountering considerable resistance. And the government of Peru has just revoked the license of Canadian mining company Bear Creek, following protests in which police killed at least five demonstrators. The company whose share prices tumbled on Monday vowed to take action against the government under the Canada-Peru bilateral free trade agreement which passed though the Canadian Parliament in 2009, just days after dozens were killed in protests over planned resource exploitation in the Amazon.

Finally, and appropriately for this first edition of Latest Developments, a plea to make fighting global inequality a priority.

Introducing Beyond Aid

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Sustainable development. Is there such a thing in a global economic system where perpetual growth is the only way to avoid crisis? Can this planet sustain 7 billion people living like the average Dane or Canadian? Or how about the 10 billion projected by the end of the century?

Encouraging more people to live destructively seems like a questionable evolutionary tactic. But the prevailing levels of inequality suggest a profoundly unjust, and possibly dangerous, world order. If current poverty is unacceptable and current wealth is unsustainable, especially if extended to billions more, perhaps we should seek a compromise entailing upward movement from the bottom and downward movement from the top.

Without such a compromise, it is difficult to imagine the level of global cooperation required of an era in which, according to Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, “our security, even our survival, will depend on the world forging a triple commitment: to end extreme poverty; to ensure human rights for all; and to protect the natural environment from human-induced crises of climate change, destruction of biodiversity, and depletion of fresh-water reserves and other vital resources.”

For all the attention it garners, aid is only a small piece of the puzzle. Even if all wealthy countries met their pledged target of 0.7 percent of GNP, 99.3 percent of their economies would still be geared toward “wining the future.”

If we want fundamentally different results, it may be time to make fundamental changes to a global system in which poor countries have little say and their people almost none. In other words, wealthy countries and their citizens may have to change as much as their less prosperous counterparts do. At the very least, we surely need to start asking more questions…

This post marks the start of Beyond Aid, a journalistic blog that will ask questions about global inequality. By “journalistic,” I mean I will be asking questions rather than offering my own solutions. I feel my credentials are insufficient to present my own thoughts as answers, but sufficient to ask questions that too rarely enter the discussion about poverty and development. I will leave it up to the experts to provide answers.

Initially, the content of Beyond Aid will consist mainly of Latest Developments, a daily summary of news and analysis relating, in my view, either to the perpetuation or reduction of global inequality. I hope these summaries will encourage readers to view the problem in a more holistic manner by examining the positions of wealthy nations in areas such as trade and immigration – whether expressed through their own foreign policy or the policies of the international institutions over which they hold so much sway – as well as the actions of transnational corporations and NGOs whose role in poor countries sometimes exceeds that of the state.

Once Beyond Aid has been up and running for a few weeks, I will supplement these daily posts with regular “Ideas” features consisting of book reviews, Q&As with individual experts, or surveys of a number of experts and thinkers on one particular idea. These posts will aim to take “beyond aid” thinking to the next level by delving into questions of global democracy, science and media discourse.

But my most ambitious objective is to provide original reporting on “beyond aid” issues, using Canada’s foreign footprint as a case study. Although I have an international audience in mind, as will be reflected in the Latest Developments and Ideas posts, I feel a case study will provide the grounding necessary to avoid excessive abstraction. As this reporting will require overseas fieldwork, it will be largely dependent on my ability to secure research grants. I will keep readers posted on what they can expect and when. In the meantime, I will produce occasional travel-free investigative pieces resulting from freedom of information requests, financial record analyses and the like.

I have chosen Canada for a number of relatively straightforward reasons. First, I live in Vancouver and due to linguistic, geographic and economic factors, the majority of my research must logically focus on Canada and the US. Second, I have spent much of the last two years researching Canadian policies, companies and development discourse. And third, I believe the sorts of tough questions I have are best asked of one’s own country.

My intention, however, is not to single out Canada as a great enemy of the world’s poor. While every country has its policy strengths and weaknesses, Canada’s Commitment to Development Index score places it ninth out of 22 wealthy donor countries. I hope this averageness will help to provide a relatable, middle-of-the-road case study from which both Canadians and non-Canadians can draw lessons. Perhaps it will even inspire others to examine their own country’s foreign footprint.

Finally, I should anticipate a couple of inevitable criticisms. By focusing attention on the role of wealthy countries in perpetuating global poverty, I open myself up to attack from at least two very different corners. The first will say that my Western-centric approach disempowers the world’s poor by denying them agency in their own lives. The second will say I am a self-hating Westerner glossing over the endemic reasons for ongoing extreme poverty. To both I would say that I believe the governments and inhabitants of poor countries bear a large share of responsibility for their current predicament and their future solutions. Nothing can improve without their will and determination. At the same time, the countries that set the rules of the game have to accept at least some of the blame for negative outcomes

Extending the argument to journalism, if Western journalists are objective in their treatment of poor countries, theirs is an asymmetrical objectivity that dispassionately presents root problems as residing in Nigeria and Bangladesh, and the solutions as coming from France and Australia. While I too strive for journalistic objectivity, my focus on rich-country policies no doubt represents another form of asymmetry, but one I hope can provide a reasoned counterweight to the often one-sided discourse on poverty and inequality.

The extent of the inequality in the world today is not an unavoidable fact of life. But I believe there is a gap in the public discourse of the countries that represent one half of the equation. I hope Beyond Aid can contribute in some way, however small, to filling that gap.