This first appeared on Africa in Transition and the Future Forum.

John Campbell has regularly made the point that from 1999 to 2007  increasingly bad elections led Nigerians to withdraw from the political process. Despite official proclamations, the 2007 elections were thought to have had an extremely low turnout.

A recent paper (PDF) by the National Bureau of Economic Research (h/t to Chris Blattman), “Looking Beyond the Incumbent: The Effects of Exposing Corruption on Electoral Outcomes,” provides what could be some empirical evidence from their randomized experiment in Mexico to support this observation.

To conduct their experiment, researchers deployed varying levels of information on candidates’ corruption to different groups of voters in municipal elections in Mexico–and then measured voter behavior. Specifically, the researchers were interested in whether knowing more about corruption would cause voters to cast their ballot for the opposition candidate or not to vote at all. They found that “exposing rampant corruption leads to incumbents’ vote loses, but it also leads to a decrease in electoral turnout, and a decrease in challengers’ votes… Thus, under some circumstances, information about corruption disengages voters from the political process.”

Underlying their findings is the idea that “flows of such information about corruption are necessary but not sufficient to improve the governance and responsiveness because voters may respond to information by withdrawing from the political process rather than engaging to demand accountability.”

While clearly Mexico and Nigeria have distinct political, economic, and social contexts, I think the authors’ findings fit the pattern in Nigeria. The Giant of Africa’s well-known culture of impunity, coupled with an increasingly disenchanted (and even alientated) electorate, culminated in what came to be known as Nigeria’s 2007 “election-like” event. (It would be interesting to replicate their experiment in Nigeria. Among other difficulties, we don’t have much information on how much money local government areas receive or spend, which researchers did have through Mexico’s Federal Auditor’s Office.)

While Nigeria’s 2011’s electoral turnouts were considered better (and in some cases, too high to be credible), this can be at least partially explained by a newfound credibility bestowed by Attahiru Jega’s INEC leadership as well as the end of “zoning,” (power alternation between North and South) and overt appeals to ethnic and religious identity.

Read the paper here (PDF).

This piece is coauthored with Melissa Bukuru. It first appeared on Africa in Transition and the Future Forum.

Like mobile statistics (which Asch wrote about yesterday), information on social media use can also be thin. A communications firm, Portland, has set out to address this deficit and measure just how prevalent Twitter and how it is being used across Africa. They analyzed about 11.5 million geolocated tweets across the continent (including North Africa).

Unsurprisingly, South Africa dominated the African Twitter landscape with over five million geo-located tweets (not users) in a three month period. Nigeria came in third, with just over 1.6 million tweets in the same period, putting it behind South Africa and Kenya.

While the 140-character missives have been lauded for their role in building social movements, in Kenya, tweets are being used for a smaller but also important impact. Francis Kariuki (@chiefkariuki), the administrative chief of a Western village in Kenya uses the medium to warn the area’s residents about crime and other happenings in the area. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the tech-savvy chief once tweeted about a robbery in progress at 4am, and “within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.”

Chief Kariuki also uses Twitter for more optimistic purposes by tweeting the residents inspirational quotes (“We’ve been destined to live in victory, destined to overcome, destined to leave a mark on this generation”) or encouragement to get involved in government proceedings (“Our MP is coming today at 2:00pm to issue cheques to some CDF projecst [sic] at DO office Gathioro. U R WELCOMED [sic]“).

So, not really the stuff of revolutions, but still, Erik Hersman, founder of the popular Ushahidi, a non-profit software company based in Kenya (which our own Nigeria Security Tracker uses) concluded from Kariuki’s tweeting that “if a chief in upcountry Kenya is able to use and have an impact with his constituents by using tools like Twitter, it’s not too long before we see a massive movement in the country with these types of social media.”

That said, lacking from Portland’s analysis is the number of twitter accounts on the continent—a number that we were unable to find as Twitter is famously private about its user data. (If anyone has any good estimates, please send them our way.) We do know that many users surveyed in the study said that at least half of the accounts they follow are based in Africa. This might plant the grains for what Hersman is alluding to.

Facebook statistics, on the other hand, are more abundant. The continent boasts over 38 million users, but North Africa accounts for more than fifty percent of those users. And Egypt is by far the dominant user with almost ten million users.

Add Nigeria’s four million users and South Africa’s five million users with North Africa’s usership, and you can account for 80 percent of all Facebook accounts on the Africa continent. (North Africa plus Nigeria and South Africa account for about 37 percent of the continent’s billion plus population.)

If we look at per capita, Tunisia tops the entire continent with 30 percent, followed by Egypt with about 12.5 percent, and South Africa at about 10 percent. While Nigerians compromise the greatest absolute number of Facebook users in sub-Saharan Africa, its gigantic population means that only about 2.5 percent of Nigerians are using it.

Nevertheless, as these tools become more entrenched, as access to mobile phones and internet improves, and Africans become more aware of their potential, we think we will continue to see continued rapid adoption across the continent.

This first appeared on Africa in Transition and the Future Forum.

A comment was recently made to me citing the huge number of mobile phones in Nigeria—over 90 million—as an indicator of that country’s budding middle class. However, in this conversation, my interlocutor failed to make the distinction between mobile phones and mobile phones subscriptions, which turns out to be important.

In most of Africa, prepaid SIM cards dominate and, almost always, mobile phone statistics refer to subscriptions. A person can have a mobile phone subscription without having a mobile phone; or multiple mobile phones and multiple subscriptions; or a subscription without any minutes. Bottom line: mobile phone statistics can be misleading. We don’t know how many actual handsets are out there. Nor do we know how many subscriptions are not being used or how many are being shared.

Jeffrey James and Mila Versteeg, in a 2007 paper (pdf), “Mobile Phones in Africa: How Much Do We Really Know?”, go a step further to show how much we don’t know. They make the argument that we must differentiate between “mobile phone subscribers, mobile phone owners, mobile phone users, those who benefit from usage and those who have access to this technology.” These differences have implications for mobile phone impact, and whether we can equate mobile phone subscriptions with a middle class.

They conclude that “it is on usage (rather than ownership) that data collection needs to focus, because this concept comes closest to capturing the benefits that are actually derived from mobile phones.” As they point out, it is also the most difficult.

What we do know is that the number of mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa has exploded, and will most certainly impact development.

_This first appeared on Africa in Transition.

The National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and Internews hosted an excellent discussion on “Can media development make aid more effective?”, which I was able to catch part of via a live stream on the CIMA website. You can watch it here.

The speakers’ discussions of the impact of media on economic growth, political stability, and governance were of particular interest to me. Two of the speakers, Tara Susman-Pena and Mark Frohardt, presented an invaluable tool they helped build, the Media Map Project, where you can “explore, interact with, and analyze data on media and development.” It is a one-stop shop for all the data you could hope for on press freedom, and worth checking out.

In addition to presenting the Media Map Project, Tara Susman-Pena discussed some statistical work (PDF) showing a correlation between a free press and political stability, good governance, and economic growth. A freer press, by increasing transparency, can have a positive impact on “development.”

This got me thinking about how press freedom in Nigeria, or lack thereof, has impacted, political stability, governance, and development in that country. The Nigerian press is considered generally free. (Freedom House gave it a “partly free” rating.) There doesn’t appear to be any significant systematic oppression and the country has a multitude of newspapers, television channels, and radio stations, as well as relatively high levels of Internet and mobile phone penetration (recent raids on CNN and BBC notwithstanding). A few western news outlets have correspondents stationed in Nigeria, and Diaspora-run news services based in New York and London, like Sahara Reporters, have mobilized their connections at home to report breaking news (and often have information that cannot be found in the Nigerian or international press).

Bigger challenges to press freedom revolve around elite media ownership, underpaid and under-trained journalists, and concentration of media in Abuja and Lagos. Nevertheless, compared to other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, at the very least, Nigerian coverage is thorough enough to conduct open source analysis, which has made our media-driven Nigeria Security Tracker possible.

But what about the political stability that should accompany press freedom? Recent fuel subsidy strikes and major attacks in Kano as well as daily violence by Boko Haram have put the country on shaky footing.

The third speaker, Brookings senior fellow Daniel Kaufman, provided the answer–more transparency accompanied with impunity will not “deliver the goods.” Media freedom, while necessary, cannot guarantee stability without other important conditions. For example, Kaufman singles out the rule of law, which arguably is weak in Nigeria.

This has implications for the impact of social media, which, by virtue of its role as an alternative means to communicate and transmit info, often gets credited with enabling uprisings around the continent. Without other essential conditions, such as the rule of law, media freedom, even when enhanced by social media, cannot alone deliver better governance. But it clearly is a necessary component.

h/t Daniel Morris

_This first appeared on Africa in Transition.

Judges at the International Criminal Court delivered their long awaited decision to move forward with charges of crimes against humanity against four of the six accused Kenyan political figures implicated in the 2007/2008 post election violence. Charges will be against former minister of education William Ruto, radio host Joshua Sang, head of civil service Francis Muthaura, and deputy prime minister Uhuru Kenyatta. Read the decision here.

As Human Rights Watch notes, the verdict represents a step forward in addressing Kenya’s culture of political and criminal impunity. But, it also presents a number of challenges for the Kenyan judiciary as well as the peace and reconciliation process in the run up to presidential elections, to be held in March 2013 (unless the ruling coalition collapses before).

In an insightful piece on African Arguments, Ken Opalo notes the first challenge will be whether Muthaura and Kenyatta, who are both still active in public office, should resign. Of course, the ICC judges have emphasized that both are innocent until proven guilty. Nevertheless, this issue will be put to the Kenyan judiciary.

Can Ruto and Kenyatta still run for president, given the ICC charges? As Opalo argues, the ICC decision poses enormous challenges for Kenya’s ethnically charged politics, particularly because no one has yet been brought to justice for the violence that left more than one thousand people dead and six hundred thousand displaced in the aftermath of the 2007 elections.

Read Opalo’s piece here.

_This originally appeared on Africa in Transition.

The International Criminal Court is expected to announce its decision (possibly next week) about whether to proceed with its charges against the “Ocampo 6,” the Kenyans accused of involvement in provoking violence following that country’s 2007 elections.

In anticipation, the International Crisis Group has issued a brief emphasizing the potential impact of these proceedings on Kenya’s upcoming elections.

Specifically, the report acknowledges the importance of the ICC to send a signal that “entrenched impunity for wealthy and powerful politicians will not be permitted to endure.” However, given the possible consequences on ethnic tensions, “if the ICC process is to contribute to the deterrence of future political violence in Kenya, the court and its friends must explain its work and limitations better to the public.”

The ICC regularly is accused of having a bias against Africa. (Currently, all its cases are in Africa.) As the Economist notes, “these days the ICC’s biggest opponents are in Africa,” and the African Union has spoken out against its proceedings.

The ICG’s recommendations are worth noting, particularly as the ICC’s new chief prosecutor and former Gambian justice minister Fatou Bensouda will replace Luis Moreno-Ocampo in June, giving the court a new opportunity to position itself as an objective arbiter of justice.

_This first appeared on John Campbell's Africa in Transition.
 
Yesterday, I had a discussion with a few students about the various lenses through which different American communities view sub-Saharan Africa. I chose to talk about the business community, civil society, and the federal government.

One view that seems to be quite common among the American business community is Africa’s enormous untapped economic potential. However, clearly, that hasn’t translated into the investment necessary to tap that potential. I speculated that this timidity was related to a number of issues, including the widespread poverty of African consumers and our lack of nuanced understanding of the African business climate.

Interestingly, South Africa, despite its highly developed (and Westernized) business climate, has also failed to attract significant foreign investment.

In the most recent installment of the World Bank’s biannual “South Africa Economic Update,” released last week, the authors emphasize that now is the time for South Africa policymakers to start focusing on the country’s medium term growth prospects, including working to attract more private investment, to reduce its sizable unemployment.

The authors note that South Africa actually provides favorable and rising returns on investment but that “risk perceptions or structural barriers to investment” likely impede foreign firms.

However, the report’s authors believe that South Africa’s economic problems can be overcome by promoting policies that generate higher employment, productivity, savings, and investment to kickstart a "virtuous cycle of inclusive growth.”

An added advantage for American business is that establishing a foothold in South Africa could make it easier for private firms with little or no Africa experience to begin expanding into the continent, helping to provide the much needed investment and employment that Africa needs.

Read the report here.

_This first appeared on "Africa in Transition."

The day before last, I attended an on-the-record discussion with two African heads of state here at the CFR. One talking point was a pitch for foreign investment in their countries. This brings us back to the debate over “Africa’s untapped potential,” and the costs and benefits of doing business on the continent. Responding to a previous posting on this topic, a blog reader commented tongue-in-cheek “Africa may not be a ready market for Western businesses because the West produces mainly higher added value products. But from where I type in Enugu, Nigeria, it is a goldmine for Chinese and Indian manufacturers,” whose products are much cheaper.

A recent Financial Times article suggests that Africa is, indeed, ready for products produced by Western companies—and that they should be thinking hard about ways to make their businesses on the continent work. The author quotes Nestlé’s head of emerging markets that there are three hundred million to four hundred people in Africa who can already afford his companies products, and within a few years that could increase to six hundred million.

The many challenges of doing business in Africa—underdeveloped infrastructure and supply networks, political and financial constraints, not enough skilled workers—do not lend themselves to conventional business models. However, motivated companies have begun to find innovative solutions.

Food and drink companies that already have significant operations in Africa–Heineken, Nestle, Unilever, SABMiller, and Diageo (Guinness)—for example, are overcoming sourcing problems by purchasing from local farmers and, in exchange, providing training and a guaranteed price for the finished product. In some cases, the company will also provide seeds, fertilizers and even microfinance.
SABMiller is trying to create new products with locally available crops. For example, the company is using locally produced cassava in beer that will sell for seventy percent less than other types. Nestle has responded to supply network and transport issues by setting up smaller and cheaper “finishing” factories close to customers, which gives Nestle the flexibility to increase production when demand rises.

Who knows? Perhaps we will see cassava beer on the shelves in the United States before too long—or even Nigerian-brewed Guinness, which I’ve heard has acquired something of a cult following in the UK