To eat or not to eat; that is the big question corrupt Africa faces today

US President Barack Obama speaks during a press conference with his Kenyan counterpart following their talks at the State House in Nairobi on July 25, 2015. PHOTO | JOAN PERERUAN | NATION MEDIA GROUP 

In Summary

• On the same weekend cousin Barry was in Kenya, Kenyan-born British cyclist Chris Froome won the Tour de France (TDF), the world’s most gruelling and prestigious cycling race, for the second time.
• Mr Obama had a few very good days, and between his visit to Kenya and Ethiopia, he got more applause and crowd love than he has in the past five years in America, despite the fact that he presides over the lowest level of unemployment in the US since 1973.

By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
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The last week was a good one for flag-waving Kenyan patriots. US president Barack Obama (or “cousin Barry” to many Kenyans) visited the land of his father, becoming the first sitting American president to do so.

On the same weekend cousin Barry was in Kenya, Kenyan-born British cyclist Chris Froome won the Tour de France (TDF), the world’s most gruelling and prestigious cycling race, for the second time.

For the point we are going to make here, it is worth noting that this year’s TDF also saw the first entrance by an African team, South Africa’s MTN-Qhubeka. Two Eritrean members of the team became the first black Africans to race in the TDF.

Mr Obama had a few very good days, and between his visit to Kenya and Ethiopia, he got more applause and crowd love than he has in the past five years in America, despite the fact that he presides over the lowest level of unemployment in the US since 1973.

He pressed all the right buttons, acknowledging the progress that many of the continent’s leaders have overseen in their countries, while chiding them for corruption, repression, and changing constitutions so that they can become presidents for life.

He spoke up for the continent’s long-suffering women and talked up its youth and their entrepreneurial spirit. But this is the external and frustrating contradiction in Africa; you have a breakout by an MTN-Qhubeka on the biggest cycling stage in the world, happening at the same time with the most savage forms of violence in South Sudan. You get a flourish of enterprise and innovation happening at the same time with gravity-defying corruption.

Thus this week, Kenya’s Auditor-General revealed that nearly a third of the Sh1.2 trillion (about $12 billion at today’s exchange rate) spent in the 2013-14 financial year could have been stolen.

Also, Nigeria’s new president, Mr Muhammadu Buhari, was in the US and met Mr Obama just before he left for his African tour.

A Buhari aide says US officials told his president that a minister in Goodluck Jonathan’s government robbed the country of $6 billion!

There is a lot of bad news, but also good news. Among the bad news is that corruption in Africa defies the usual prescriptions. Many say democracy will reduce corruption, but Nigeria is quite a democracy that holds free elections, but it is as corrupt as authoritarian Equatorial Guinea.

Then you have Botswana and Mauritius, among the least corrupt in Africa and the world, and also the most democratic on the continent, but then you also have Rwanda, with a mixed democratic-authoritarian model, being the most honest nation on the continent.

The second depressing thing is the cost. Mr Obama noted that corruption costs Kenya 250,000 new jobs a year.

Two days earlier, Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero had said that Kenya produces one million job-seekers a year, 800,000 of whom head to Nairobi.

However, the country only creates 50,000 formal jobs a year.

So, without corruption, there could be at least 300,000 jobs.

The good news is that limiting the damage of corruption does not take much. First, in Kenya for example, there is an Auditor-General who is able to reveal the extent of the problem. Secondly, and the thieves might like this, they do not have to stop all their corruption. They only need to chew less.

Some years ago, Uganda’s anti-corruption czar, an economist called Augustine Ruzindana, calculated that if the country reduced corruption by just 10 per cent, it would not need donor aid. There would be enough to keep everyone well fed.

Recently, the African Development Bank (AfDB) approached the issue rather cleverly. Today 70 per cent of the population of Africa does not have access to electricity. The continent requires more than $300 billion in investment to achieve universal electricity access by 2030.

The AfDB said if the continent reinvested just 5 per cent of oil and coal export revenues every year, it would have enough money to build the infrastructure to power every home on the continent.

In other words, if just 5 per cent of natural resource revenues were not stolen, there would be light all around and factories could have enough to work three shifts and make us all happy and rich. But rarely has a simple job been so difficult.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3