Rebranding Africa
July 13, 2009
This one from Bono makes me feel good about my country………..
Enjoy!
July 10, 2009
The New York Times
OP-ED GUEST COLUMNIST
Rebranding Africa
By BONO
DATELINE: Imminent. About now, actually.
Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana; Africans will be welcoming the first African-American president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal weight on both sides of the hyphen. And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited Ireland in
1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very, very good.) But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased down some of those dreams from his father.
He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories
against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them. Not defiantly or angrily, but in that cool, offhand Ghanaian way. This is a country whose music of choice is jazz; a country that long agoinvented a genre called highlife that spread across Africa — and, more recently, hiplife, which is what happens when hip-hop meets reggaetón meets rhythm and blues meets Ghanaian melody, if you’re keeping track (and you really should be). On a visit there, I met the minister for tourism and pitched the idea of marketing the country as the “birthplace of cool.” (Just think, the music of Miles, the conversation of Kofi.) He demurred … too cool, I guess.
Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa. Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago. Though it has been a little battered by the global economic meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. I don’t normally give investment tips — sound the alarm at Times headquarters — but here is one: buy Ghanaian.
So it’s not a coincidence that Ghana’s making steady progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Right now it’s one of the few African nations that has a shot at getting there by 2015. No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in Ghana, but it’s
pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities of an Africa on the rise. If that’s
what he does, the biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.
I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency. And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa a day die of a
mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of human capital is not something we can accept as normal.
But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for investment and growth —
investment and growth that won’t eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and Africans yearn for it to end, but that in
time can build roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals and
home-grown income. President Obama can hasten that day. He knows change won’t come easily. Corruption stalks Africa’s reformers. “If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” a former Nigerian anti-corruption official has said.
From his bully pulpit, the president can take aim at the bullies. Without accountability — no opportunity. If that’s not a maxim, it ought to be. It’s a truism, anyway. The work of the American government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation is founded on that principle, even if it doesn’t put it that bluntly. United States aid dollars increasingly go to countries that use them and don’t blow them. Ghana is one. There’s a growing number of others. That’s thanks to Africans like John Githongo, the former anticorruption chief of Kenya — a hero of mine who is pioneering a new brand of bottom-up accountability. Efforts like his, which are taking place across the continent, deserve more support. The presidential kind. Then there’s Nigeria’s moral and financial fist — Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, a managing director of the World Bank and the country’s former finance minister — who is on a quest to help African countries recover stolen assets looted by corrupt officials. And the ExtractiveIndustries Transparency Initiative, which is helping countries like Ghana clean up the oil, gas and mining business, to make sure that profits don’t wind up in the hands of kleptocrats.
Presidential attention would be a shot in the arm for these efforts — an infusion of moral and political amino acids that, by the way, will
make aid dollars go further. That should be welcome news to the Group of 8 leaders gathered in Italy to whom Mr. Obama bids a Hawaii-via- Chicago-inflected “arrivederci,” as he leaves for Africa. This week’s summit meeting looks as if it will yield some welcome new
G-8 promises on agriculture. (So far, new money: America. Old money:everyone else.) This is the good news that President Obama will bring from Europe to Ghana.
The not-so-good news — that countries like Italy and France are not meeting their Africa commitments — makes the president’s visit all the more essential. The United States is one of the countries on track to keep its promises, and Mr. Obama has already said he’ll more than
build on the impressive Bush legacy. President Obama plans to return to Africa for the World Cup in 2010. Between now and then he’s got the chance to lead others in building — from the bottom up — on the successes of recent efforts within Africa and to learn from the failures. There’s been plenty of both. We’vewitnessed the good, the bad and the ugly in our fraught relationship with this dynamic continent.
The president can facilitate the new, the fresh and the different. Many existing promises are expiring in 2010, some of old age and
others of chronic neglect. New promises from usual and unusual partners, from the G-8 to the G-20, need to be made — and this time
kept. If more African nations (not just Ghana) are going to meet the millennium goals, they are going to need smart partners in business
and development. That’s Smart as in sustainable, measurable, accountable, responsive and transparent.
Africa is not just Barack Obama’s homeland. It’s ours, too. The birthplace of humanity. Wherever our journeys have taken us, they all
began there. The word Desmond Tutu uses is “ubuntu”: I am because we are. As he says, until we accept and appreciate this we cannot be
fully whole. Could it be that all Americans are, in that sense, African-Americans?
Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy
group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Time
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5 Responses to “Rebranding Africa”
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The big-screen shots have always been good, haven’t they? In these shots our not-so-white shirts look as unblemished as our second-hand suits look like they’ve just been delivered from Saville Row. iT IS THE SMALLER PRINT THAT MUST CAPTURE OUR ATTENTION NOW. We’ve known mosquitos cause malaria; we’ve known where they breed but we’ve always been badly beaten in all our battles with these tiny insects. We’ve boasted of fertile lands and a good human resource base but we’ve woefully failed to attain food security and, surprisingly we import food items that grow everywhere in Ghana from neighbouring countries that cannot boast of better soils.
WE NEED TO RETURN TO USING OUR BRAINS MORE THAN OUR HEARTS. Our brains can supply most of the little things that make us weaker than we should ever be. We can be strong, very strong! But our potential . . ? They cannot be attained with our hearts !
I was trully disappointed to see ministers of state take out their phones to take shots of Mr.Obama.Is it that they felt it was cool to do it or it was just out of excitement?To be honest I couldn`t believe what I was see when the saw them in that way.To be candid it was as bad as hell.I don`t know but it seems protocal was also nothing to write home about.It was just disgusting.
………..Mediocrity, low self esteem, nepotism,……. When are we going to get out of these black societal cankers. It’s killing the pride of the youth.
Mills was great but he needs to lift up his ego. Did especially the ex- Prez. have to take fotos himself. Couldn’t someone else do that for him?
The bottom up approach means that the youth shd start been responsible towards in little things. The so called powerful nation slogan that America has imposed on itself is artificial. Nevertheless, Obama’s speech is what i termed “THE APOCALYPSE” - meaning lifting of the veil. Ghana can be more powerful than the US if we believe in ourselves
hat we need to turn our fortunes around as Ghanaians is attitudinal change by most of us.
1. Let us all resolve to shun corruption. None politicians accuse politicians for being corrupt meanwhile they do not have good conduct themselves. It is the ordinary person who becomes a politician and if you do not cultivate good conduct before getting there can you behave well? Most of us condone corruption by putting undue pressure on politicians to satisfy our personal needs instead of solving our common problems for which we vote them into office. Let us help put our people seeking to represent us into office so that we can hold them responsible when they are falling short of expectations. The constitutions must therefore make it possible for us to be able to impeach our representatives before their terms of office ends.
2. Most of us think it is all rosy overseas. That is far from the case. In UK here people are struggle to make ends meet - both citizens and immigrants alike. People work very hard to make ends meet. IMF and the World Bank are in Ghana not necessarily because they want to help us develop. They are there for business to satisfy their shareholders most of whom are in the developed countries. If things were well in those countries they would not have been bordering us the way they do. So what we need to do is to make sure when we need their support in terms of loans we get competent people to negotiate with them. They will always do everything possible to ensure they get the best deal and we must try to do the same. One reason why we do not have enough resources to solve our development problems is because we spend so much of our limited internal resources to pay loans.
3. Several factors account for the success story of the Asian Tigers. They benefitted from strong leadership, citizen committed to the state, citizens were thrifty. Due to US’s quest to contain communism, it was not strict to ensure that the Tigers follow the market economic policies to the letter so while they exported to the US and Europe they did not open up their economies to imports. So let us stop ostentacious lives and save to invest. Let us learn to support our politicians to be able to hold them responsible.
Let us use the current foreign publicity we are getting to bargain with our development partners. They should not shower praises on us while we have serious challenges to graple with. All said and done, the onous rests on us as a people to shape our own destiny the way we want it because every country will do everything to protect their interset when dealing with us because they also have problems just as ours to graple with. They may appear to be ok as we are being seen to be but the reality is messier.
PhD student, Uni of Lincoln.