Tyson's ECOWAS Occasional Journal - Politics in West Africa

I need to grade final exams today, but wikipedia has a pretty good summary of what's been going on in Tunisia over the past month or two. Long story short: President Ben Ali ran the country for 23 years, in party with the help of support from France and the US, who liked that he kept the country from being taken over by Islamic extremists.  Of course, to do that he had to use a little bit of repression, which doesn't always go over well with the locals (note that the above description, with different names and dates, also describes Egypt and other countries in the region).   Usually Tunisia is pretty calm, thanks in part to government subsidies for basic life needs, but the government started pulling back on that.  In late December, young people started rioting in response to joblessness and so on.  By early January, the protests had spread - 95% of lawyers went on strike, teachers went on strike, etc.  The police, who had started off breaking up riots pretty...

Reuters reports that turnout has already passed the 60 percent threshold required for the referendum to be binding.  Voting will continue until this Saturday (I think - it says it's a week-long voting period) and preliminary results won't be available until February.  This is a reminder that infrastructure in a lot of Africa isn't great, and in South Sudan it's particularly bad.  It's about 25,000 square miles in size (about the size of West Virginia) and has only 40 miles of paved roads, that's a road density (road miles per 100 square miles) of about 0.2.  Sudan as a whole has the lowest road density in Africa (0.5), and most of the roads are in the north.   For comparison, West Virginia has a road density of 7 road miles per 100 square miles. This being Sudan, Reuters also reports 46 deaths in clashes between Northern nomads and southerners. Jonathan Chait at tnr.com is one of my favorite bloggers, and I was glad to see that someone (Martin Peretz) at T...

The Economist notes that 6 of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa, and 7 of the 10 countries with the best predicted economic growth in the next 5 years are in Africa.  Three of the fastest 6 are big oil producers (Angola, Nigeria, and Chad - not a big oil producer yet but recently discovered oil so growing from a very low base) and Rwanda grew quickly because it was playing catchup from destroying its economy in the civil war. Still, though, Africa has historically been somewhat of a basket case, so this is definitely good news.  But are these exceptions or is Africa as a region doing better?  The Economist article notes that Africa as a region did better than Latin America in the 2000s (although still trailed Asia), whereas Latin America grew faster than Africa in the 1990s.  So Africa is definitely doing much better than it has in the past, thanks to improved economic policies and so on. One thing to note is that the Economist listed ...

Here is a Monkey Cage post by a doctoral student, Cameron Wimpy, in Southern Sudan. And here is Cameron's blog, including his impressions of the referendum process in Southern Sudan and some photos.

The next thing I plan to blog a bit about when I have time is elections in Nigeria - voting started today for the governorship in Delta state, one of Nigeria's main oil-producing states, and how that election goes will impact the presidential election that is coming up in April. Rivals are trying to block frontrunner President Goodluck Jonathan from running.

http://aidwatchers.com/2010/12/aid-watch-rerun-african-leaders-advise-bono-on-reform-of-u2/

I don't have time to write about this, but this is pretty big news - South Sudan may become country #193 this month. See Economist article. Wikipedia has more info with lots of links to articles, and if you want more you can go to southsudannation.com . UPDATE: In preparation for voting on the referendum for independence, which starts Sunday January 9, the army of Southern Sudan signed a ceasefire with a renegade general's fighters.  This is a reminder that conflict in Sudan is not only between the central government and southern Sudan, or between the central government (and its proxies) and Darfur, there is also conflict within southern Sudan. Scholars such as Zachariah Mampilly have been writing about these conflicts for years, but they don't get as much attention in the popular press. Anyway, if South Sudan becomes its own country, this will be huge news, not just for its inhabitants, but also because it is a major exception in the history of independent Africa....

Gbagbo agreed to lift a blockade(!) on Ouattara's temporary headquarters in the Hotel du Golf and to negotiate with Ouattara, who agreed to give Gbagbo a face-saving exit, as long as Gbagbo admits he lost the election. As this short piece points out, however, Gbagbo appears to be in the company of rulers such as Mugabe who care about almost nothing else but staying in power, no matter how much their legitimacy has evaporated and how bad it is for their country.  So I won't feel too optimistic until Gbagbo physically leaves the building.

Laurent Gbagbo, who has been president of Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) since 2000, refuses to recognize the results of the election held November 28, which international observers agree was won by his opponent, Alassane Ouattara . "Ivory Coast's constitutional court, run by a staunch Gbagbo ally, reversed the U.N.-ratified electoral commission results showing a Ouattara win, citing massive evidence of fraud." The irony is that when Gbagbo was first elected, the head of the state at the time,  General Robert Guei , claimed that he had won the election, but Gbagbo insisted that he was the true winner, and street protests of Gbagbo supporters convinced Guei to recognize the results.  Furthermore, the only reason Gbagbo won in the first place was because Guei had outlawed the other competitors, including former president Henri Konan Bedie (who was overthrown by Guei in 1999) and Ouatarra.  Ouattara may be the most viable presidential candidate since Félix Houphouë...

 The BRIC group is Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs invented "the BRIC term in 2001 to describe the four nations that he estimates will collectively equal the U.S. in economic size by 2020." At the time it was intended to be a term used for investors but since then it has taken on meaning as a political group as well. The BRIC countries had their first official summit in Russia in June 2009 and are meeting in China in 2011.  South Africa is invited to this summit , and there is speculation that the name will be changed to BRICS.  Jim O'Neill doesn't consider South Africa, with an economy and population much smaller than the other four, to be a viable candidate for the group. South Korea, Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico are more reasonable candidates by those measures.  But South Africa adds a new continent to the group, and China wants to expand its role in the economy of Africa in general. "China emerged as Afric...

I waste too much of my time looking at blogs on American politics, especially Jonathon Chait and Ezra Klein.  Since my primary geographic research focus is Africa, I should spend more time than I do following African politics.  I looked for a blog on African politics that I like as much as the blogs I read on American politics, but couldn't find one.  If someone knows of one, please let me know.  In the meantime, starting in 2011, I will try to transfer some of the time I waste from reading American politics blogs to writing an African politics blog. Since it is the start of the year, I was going to try to start off with something that kind of summarizes the past year, but I need to do some other things today and that sounds time consuming, so I'll just start with some of the interesting stories of the day.