How New York City Got Its Juicy Nickname “The Big Apple” — And What It Means To The World

 

What comes to mind when you hear the word Africa for those who don't know much about the continent.

I imagine it would be words of entrenched poverty, famine, wars, and diseases like Ebola and malaria or even malnourished children with flies buzzing around their faces.

Even some well-educated people would at times have a massive gap in knowledge or blind spot when it comes to Africa. The image of Africa became so bad at some point that The Economist in 2000 labeled Africa the hopeless continent with a bad reputation in almost all spheres of life.

 Many questions come to mind why is it that Africa as a region is rich, but her people are poor precipitating a paradox of plenty to answer this we must first seek to understand even more weighty questions.

Why is Africa poor? What strategies can be implemented to end this poverty? Who really is responsible for the poverty we see in Africa and who has the power to stop it.

Why is it that the world's richest continent in terms of natural resources is home to some of the world's poorest people by today's standards, according to the World Bank the poverty rate in Africa has gone down, but the number of African people living in poverty has increased and more people are spending less than $2 a day?

Short global poverty is increasingly becoming African, of course, there is some element of truth in all of these statements. Some parts of Africa are poor and some parts of Africa do have starving children, but reducing the experiences of a tiny minority of Africans to represent over 1 billion people in 55 countries to a single story of poverty and misery is a massive disservice.

A good example would be to forever label China a diseased country due to the deadly SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, the southern province of Guangdong in China was the epicenter of the epidemic and it spread rapidly to other parts of the world affecting a record 32 countries in its wake.

Amid claims that true case numbers were being concealed by the Chinese government in a bid to avoid mass hysteria in comparison the recent deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa broke out in  Guinea and was the largest outbreak in history, according to the World Health Organisation over the duration of the epidemic, the virus spread to nine more countries.

China's population is about 1.3 billion people while Africa's is about 1.2 billion, but the entire continent of Africa was branded a diseased continent yet the epicenter was a small corner of Africa in Guinea the same size as were dong province where the SARS outbreak was first reported.

The only difference is SAR spread to almost four times more than the number of countries affected by the Ebola outbreak, however, one chooses to look at it to understand and probe a continent as a whole in matters of poverty or any other metric rather than an in-depth study of a specific country is in itself a blanket generalisation.

The question about Africa's poverty assumes two things that there is no variance in the economy's politics by way of life in the 54 distinct countries of Africa and second that there is a country called Africa that speaks a language called African.

Stereotypical statements about African poverty might seem to be simple clichés but repeated again and again through countless images street corner billboards, newspaper stories, and thousands of charity advertising each year perpetuating the narrative of African poverty.

These statements start to replace what we know as true about Africans they take the form of hypnosis the long-running and most successful propaganda campaign of all time assumptions and stories about Africa being less than or not as good as have become part of life.

However, the truth about Africa is not only stranger than fiction, it is most times less believable. Do we get our facts straight about Africa what do we really know about Africa's poverty and how do we know what we know is true.

Everyone seems to have a plethora of explanations about the poverty in Africa blaming the widespread corruption of democratic institutions and a dysfunctional judicial systems unscrupulous multinational corporations, local and international dynasties with an unquenchable appetite to multiply their wealth, underhand international aid agencies.

The partition of Africa during colonialism and finally neo-colonialism of Africa by alleged Chinese debt traps the common perception that Africa has an unquenchable past for aid, but the truth is it is Africa that is aiding the rest of the world. More money is taken out of Africa in what is known as capital flight than the aid that Africa receives. Capital flight is defined in economics as a situation that occurs when assets or money rapidly flow out of a country due to an event of economic consequence.

These unrecorded and illegal capital flight severely affects Africa through money laundering, tax evasion diverted revenues, and offshore investments in tax haven these phenomena shines a light for us to understand how African governments are hemorrhaging debt payments and are deprived of the ability to utilize domestic resources for economic development.

The highly complex capital flight systems have flourished for decades with a devastating impact on Africans' efforts to extricate themselves from poverty this eats into the GDP of African countries draining foreign exchange reserves, and reducing tax collection.

According to a report dubbed Honest Accounts developing countries received a total of 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars including all aid investment and income from abroad by the same time 3.3 trillion dollars flowed out of them, meaning developing countries gave out two trillion dollars more than they received. That's 39 per cent more than the aid budget.

Since 1980 the combined illegal capital flight piles up to a staggering 4 trillion U.S. dollars. Every year the continent loses at least a hundred billion U.S. dollars in this financial bloodletting. A recent report also estimated that illegal logging, fishing, and trade in wildlife losses to Africa about 29 billion U.S. dollars per year.

What this means is that the usual aid narrative is upside down, sideways or backward depending on how you look at it either way in every bit of money that comes into the continent from aid much more money is leaking out.

While lending nations would like to be seen as generous this capital flight system makes the borrowers seem like the lenders and the lenders as the borrowers all the while keeping the masses from understanding how the system really works.

Africa doesn't need aid. Africa needs justice. When global corporations and the super-rich used tax havens to avoid paying their fair share, it is the poor who lose the most. The truth is Africa is still being pillaged.

Africa is rich, but it is foreign corporations and nations that are making it poor. For instance, it is estimated that Nigeria lost at least 250 billion US dollars between 2000 and 2009 through capital flight. South Africa, which was the continent’s biggest economy until it was overtaken by Nigeria came second with a loss of at least 170 billion U.S. dollars over the same period. Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Angola, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, and Cameroon are also high on the list.

If African countries were able to keep and manage transparently the resources that they collect they would not need aid. In the early 1960s, resource-rich African countries had a similar poverty level to those of Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, yet this group has been successful in reducing poverty while the African countries haven't.

So why this disparity and how can poverty reduction in Africa be accelerated - clear sound economic policies matter beyond resource availability.

Some African governments have recently introduced initiatives with the aim of lessening the impact of capital flight. Nigeria's voluntary assets and income declaration scheme program allowed high-net-worth Nigerian citizens who have not paid taxes to pay what they owe without paying penalties.

Kenya, Ghana, and Angola are working on policy initiatives to combat corruption and calm illicit outflows however, to date these efforts are still in embryonic stages. According to studies by 2030, Africa will reduce the ranks of its extremely poor by 45 million and relative poverty will decline from 33.5 per cent today to 24 per cent.

However, this still means that the continent will fall short of achieving sustainable development goals. By eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 approximately 377 million Africans will still be living on less than 1.90 dollars a day.

Technology and internet access are increasingly becoming affordable in Africa from the telecommunication sector with the smash success M-pesa mobile money transfer in Kenya - mPedigree Network, a unique system that fights counterfeit drugs in Ghana.              

But Africa's current problem however is that the global information age has seen increasing wealth matched by increasing social inequality because it is countries that are getting rich and not the people. It can certainly be part of the solution to the problems that do exist but it won't solve everything and is often counterproductive.

Many well-intentioned attempts to help do the opposite and end up operating the same old stereotypes about helpless Africans needing a foreign saviour.