Intriguing Chart: African Dependence on Official Foreign Aid

From here

Note that despite Kagame's frequent protestations against foreign aid, his is the largest recipient by this measure on the continent

What if anything Can VOA and HRW Learn from #Kony2012?

Human Rights Watch posted a six-minute video on the urgent need to arrest Bosco Ntaganda three days ago; so far it's gotten 2,500 hits. The Voice of America posted its latest video on rape in eastern Congo, part of a series it's been working on for over a year. So far, it's been seen 74 times.

How depressing. It's numbers like these that remind me of just how remote the Congo is for most Americans; how distant from our concerns. I wonder if there's something to be learned from #Kony2012 after all, in spite of everything that we found objectionable about it.

World Bank Says Congo's Transition from Conflict Exemplary, Government Now Democratic and Legitimate

You may have heard that the World Bank just published a new report on #DRC predicting that growth will average seven percent for the next couple of years. The Bank says it is the first comprehensive economic analysis for the country in more than twenty-five years; it is certainly an impressive-looking document. I am keen to read the entire manuscript, but the first sentence brought me up short. In fact, I thought at first I must have clicked on the wrong country document. Take a look for yourself:

This book pulls together an impressive body of research on the exemplary transition of a country from a state of conflict to a postconflict situation, and from there toward becoming a country with legitimate institutions created by free, democratic, and transparent elections.

 Hallucinatory.

Twittersphere Panties in Bunch over Latest JM Coetzee Provocation

(N.B., any similarity to the current scandale-du-jour is purely coincidental.)

The "Twittter-verse" erupted in a cacophony of outrage and indignation last week over the latest JM Coetzee essay in the New York Review of Books. The essay, a colloquy on some of the more obscure incidents in the life of the poet John Clare, including his alcohol-addled attack on the actor playing Shylock during a North London production of Merchant of Venice in 1835, has some in the blogosphere crying foul. "Coetzee is clearly bullying his way onto the public stage with this recycling of Clare's well-known struggles with mental stability--and at a time when Clare himself is no longer here to defend himself.. I expect Coetzee will soon be holding forth on the hegemonic blah blah of something" declared Wendy Bazimu in the online version--gated, subscription required--of Marxism Today. Se added that the reader should feel free to finish the sentence with her own favored expression of ritual indignation.

Coetzee is well known for his provocative, sometimes histrionic presence, lighting up journals such as Mind and the Times Literary Supplement with provocative--some say needlessly self-promoting--takes on  Turgenev's original publishing house or the dilemmas posed by artificial fertilization usage for Australian rutabaga yields. The question, this time, is whether his contentious style has crossed a heretofore invisible line, now heavily policed by a growing community of online skeptics ready to pounce on what they believe to be instances of poor taste and "badliterocracy."

As a white, South African male, Coetzee has long probed the moral corruptions of and by pity and shame, in works of withering, sometimes baffling spareness. His millions of online devotees have responded to his words in the traditional style of literary fans everywhere--by bracelet buying and postering. Some credit the massive online petition drive of 2003 for Coetzee winning the Nobel Literature Prize later that year.

Still, no one--not even Coetzee himself, it seems fair to say--expected the shitstorm that erupted last week when he first posted his thoughts on Clare's peculiar unraveling. The day after the essay was posted it had earned a respectable 20,000 "hits"--the number of independent viewers "clicking" on the web site. Days two and three saw those numbers climb somewhere north of the hundred thousand mark. Then came the deluge: twitters on accounts maintained by the PR companies on behalf of P. Diddy and Justin Bieber linked to the essay, causing the New York Review's web site to crash; gap-jawed editors at the venerable publication watched in awe as thousands turned into tens of millions. As of this publication, Coetzee's essay has been read by over 80 million people.

Where Now with DF-1502 and the #ConflictMinerals Campaign?

A conference on conflict minerals at the Center for Global Development last week revealed that the gulf between advocates and critics of DF-1502 remains as wide as ever. The speakers were Corinna Gilfillan of Global Witness,  Mvemba Dizolele of Stanford, Laura Seay of Morehouse, and Enough's Sasha Lezhnev. To my mind, the most revealing statement of the day came from Corinna, who at one point plaintively asked the room, "Can anyone honestly say that having people with guns running around in mining communities is a good thing?"

I won't attempt to summarize the meeting, mostly because I was in and out for chunks of it. I'll cover a couple of the highlights in a bit, but let me go straight to the bottom line: With all props to CGD for sponsoring this debate, I don't think that discussions about DF-1502 are particularly relevant any more.

Let me explain. Western-oriented firms more or less stopped sourcing minerals from eastern Congo in April 2011. That's when they instructed the two or three dozen smelters of the world that turn the mineral ore into tin and tantalum to stop accepting shipments from the region. The firms can't yet officially certify that their products don't contain Congolese minerals because they haven't got the policing mechanisms in place to prove it. The shouting match you are hearing right now between them and the advocates is over just how much policing they should be required to do. But the fact that companies don't want to spend money proving a negative doesn't mean that they are surreptitiously doing it. They're not. On the contrary, companies are getting all the minerals they need from safe-harbor countries such as Australia and Brazil. And nothing--absolutely nothing--is going to induce them to go back into eastern Congo any time soon. Quite apart from what the law says, the companies are immensely worried about their public image. It will be years before they're willing to turn the Congo spigot back on. [1]

So, yes, we can debate what impact the law has had on local communities; we can argue about whether civil society groups were properly consulted; we can have our Talmudic discussions about whether companies need to file rather than furnish their reports or whether mining can properly be said to be a form of manufacturing. But nothing that we decide regarding these questions is going to make any appreciable difference to what is happening on the ground in eastern Congo--either for the better or the worse.We have taken ourselves out of the game, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that we are no longer able to affect the outcome.

Which is a shame. Because, as I've argued at length elsewhere, there was at one time a realistic alternative to DF-1502. We could have focused first on establishing mechanisms on the ground capable of distinguishing clean from dirty minerals, and used those mechanisms to delegitimize and slowly push to the perimeter the involvement of armed groups. How much that would have helped end the wars I don't know. But it certainly wouldn't have made things worse, which is exactly what DF-1502 has done.

With that bit of bellyaching out of the way, let me make a few random observations:

First, it seems clear to me that if we'd had the debate we are having now about DF-1502 while the bill was still under discussion, it would never have passed out of committee. The idea that wiping out one of eastern Congo's only viable economic sectors on some highly questionable theory that it might help end the wars there would have been laughed out of the room. Congress just flat-out failed to do its due diligence here, which is why the responsibility for this mess belongs far more to them than the advocates.

Second, I sort of regret that public policy students aren't required to take more English classes. They might learn a little about the seductions of rhetoric. For example, if I had a dime for every time I heard from an advocate that DF-1502 was "never meant to be a panacea," I'd buy a coffee at Starbucks. If I had a second dime for every time I was told that the legislation was never meant to be more than "one piece of the puzzle," I'd make it a grande. And if I had a third dime for every time an advocate justified DF-1502 by explaining that the situation was so dire that something needed to be done--well, in that case, I'd ditch the coffee and buy a bottle of tequila.

What Now with #Kony2012?

Imagine you work in the development office of an NGO. Your job is to beg from the rich to give to the poor. Anywhere from a handful to several hundred people depend directly on you to raise money so that they can do their job. More importantly, thousands or millions of people depend on the work your NGO does.

Now ask yourself what Kony2012 taught you.

Sure, you heard the criticism; it wasn't exactly whispered. The video is self-involved sentimental crap. Auto-hagiographical. The sort of thing for which the word "jejune" was invented. Insulting to the people it would defend. Even Jesus, the twits say, had the good taste to let Paul do his deifying for him.

So what?

Let's do the math. On the one hand, you have one hundred million hits, $40 million in donations, the cover of Time, and a commitment of 5,000 soldiers. On the other, you have the carping of a few dozen armchair critics who won't be satisfied until they force you to sit through a 17-hour cinema verite about manioc production.[1]

So again: What has Kony2012 taught you?

Did it teach you to listen attentively to and scrupulously convey the complex and contradictory desires of local people? Did it teach you the importance of intellectual rigor and emotional honesty? Did it teach you that the way to proceed is to challenge people's preconceptions, to remind them of the hundred complexities that accompany the achievement of any goal, no matter how mundane, and to mute the Western interlocutor, no matter how attractive he or she may be?

Can you hear me?

Is this thing on?

As some of you know, my blog has been having technical problems for a while. If you can, please tweet or email me at daronson69 at yahoo.com to let me know if it's working.

Thank you!

How Many Wars Have there Been in Congo Anyway?

Tatiana Carayannis, over at the World Peace Foundation, has written an interesting article urging us all to think more clearly about the nature of the conflicts in the Congo. Because I woke up early this morning, with pressing assignments that I'm trying to avoid, I thought I'd write a short response. Five hours and 2,000 words later, here it is, my embarrassingly long (because uninvited) response.

Hi Tatiana,

 I think you are absolutely right to insist that we need to do a better job of conceptually disaggregating the wars in the Congo. We speak of the First (96-97) and Second (98-99 or -03) Congo Wars, as if there were only two, when in fact hostilities of various kinds continued long after the second war could be said, by whatever criteria, to have ended. Lumping what is and has been a complicated mess of disparate events into discrete categories can seem like an academic exercise. But failing to do so can result in something between confusion and blindness. Lacking the right “label-concept” to speak about the ongoing hostilities, we don’t really know how to talk about them–with the result that oftentimes we simply don’t.[1]

 That said, I’m not convinced that it’s quite correct to speak of three wars, either, with the third ongoing since Lusaka. (And don’t most accounts mark the end of the second war with the formation of the all-inclusive transitional government?) Or if we do want to talk of three wars, I think we should add the caveat that the third war, to a greater extent than the first two, has been characterized by several distinct phase changes.

 The first was from Lusaka in July 1999 to Laurent’s death, in January 2001. This was a period best described, I think, as a phony peace. None of the signatories believed (I don't think) that the Lusaka Agreement was anything other than a makeshift truce representing the realities of the current military impasse. The belligerents continued to probe the “frontlines” seeking weaknesses in the other sides and fought pitched battles to consolidate their position. (An example would be the fights between Rwandan and Ugandan forces over the gold mines of Kisangani of 1999 and 2000--an example that also gives lie to the contemporaneous claim, nauseatingly repeated, that the whole thing was about the FDLR.)

 The second period was from Joseph’s accession to the Sun City Accords. This period was marked by a genuine search for peace, at least on Joseph’s part. (His quest for peace during that period is still, I think, the best thing that can be said about the man’s career, and is on its way to becoming the only good thing.) What I thought was odd about the Accords–which you rightly put your finger on–was the extent to which everyone pretended this was really all about domestic power-sharing, when, as we all knew, Rwanda and Uganda still had major stakes in the country directly and via their support for the RCD and MLC. In retrospect, the Accords did succeed in laying the groundwork for the departure of (most of) the “negative” elements and for the de jure and de facto re-incorporation of the break-away regions (excepting the Kivus and Maniema) back into the country.

 The third period was from Sun City to November 2008, with the startling rapprochement of Kinshasa and Kigali. The hostilities during that period were confined largely to Ituri and the Kivus, and gradually devolved from opposing blocs of foreign-supported militia into something of a free-for-all. It was during this period that the proliferation of armed groups and the absence of a central governing authority combined to create a Hobbesian-like environment, akin to what we see in Somalia. Grievances formerly settled by local mechanisms or suppressed by the central government (Lendu-Hema or Banyamulenge-”authochtones”) predominated.

Swimming Upstream

For all I know Felix Salmon is one of the most brilliant financial journalists out there. But his piece yesterday pairing Mike Daisey’s fraudulent reporting on Foxxconn and Invisible Children’s documentary on Kony is a mess. In it, Salmon argues that the controversy generated by the two pieces reveals the weakness inherent in narrative--as opposed to ordinary--journalistic non-fiction:

One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is. Daisey stepped way too far over the line when he started outright lying to his audience and to the producers of This American Life. But all of us in the narrative-nonfiction business (I’ve written such stuff myself) are faced at some point with a choice between telling the story and telling the whole truth, or the whole truth as best we understand it. . . . 

 Salmon concludes that it’s wrong to hold these sorts of stories (narratives, that is) to the same standard of accuracy that we hold daily journalism: “Maybe the mistake was made even earlier, when This American Life decided that a theatrical monologue could ever be held to standards of journalistic accuracy. This one certainly couldn’t, and in that I think it’s more the rule than the exception.”

 It is not entirely clear to me what Salmon means by “narratives” as opposed to “stories,” or “nonfiction” versus the “whole truth.” Nor do I entirely understand what he means when he says that the best narratives aren’t messy or complicated. (What is Hamlet, but one damn complication after another?) In fact, I suspect Salmon himself doesn’t really know what he means. He's too smart not to know that terms like "the whole truth" are essentially meaningless. The whole thing seems to be a loosey-goosey way of saying something provocatively PoMo: that the fault, dear reader/viewer/listener, lies not in the storytellers but in the genre.

 If that’s what he’s arguing—and like I say, who knows?—he’s wrong. First, I think we have to make a distinction between Daisey and IC. IC was manipulative and auto-hagiographical and vulgar, but Daisey made shit up. There’s a world of difference, and Salmon is flat-out mistaken to say that the two pieces are “equally problematic.”

 Second, I think Salmon’s claim that narratives are best when they aren’t messy and complicated is half right. It’s true that nonfiction--ie., life--is inherently “messy.” There’s always way more miscellaneous stuff going on in the world and in people’s heads than you could possibly convey. But selecting the details that are important and germane to the story, and omitting the rest, doesn’t make you a liar; it makes you a story teller.

Complications, on the other hand, are pretty much of the essence. Salmon is right that stories shouldn't be messy,  in the sense of containing unnecessary clutter, but he's wrong to say the best aren't complicated. Of course they are. They're as complicated as they need to be, which is to say, they include whatever information the reader needs to develop his or her own thoughtful reaction to the piece. We don’t need to be told everything, but we do need enough of the relevant facts to make a considered judgment. Good story tellers give us that.

The Old Fools

I don't know when, exactly, the TED talks went from being nerd cool to being the nerd musical; perhaps they always were, but at some point in the last two or three years the lights went out for me. So much hope in tomorrow! So much faith in cool gadgets! So much belief in belief itself! "We can change the world if we defy the impossible," declares one speaker on this autotune remix of the TED 2012 conference, expressing what might be the universal theme of technocrats and thespians everywhere. Isn't it pretty to think so! And how poorly equipped that fantasy leaves you for this cold intractable world. No wonder I've felt the need to read Philip Larkin after watching a TED talk or two, just to recalibrate afterwards.

So it was a relief to come across this article in New York Magazine, with its knowing take on the allure and the hollowness of TED: "Until recently, the universal self-actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them." And even more fun to watch this: