Figures Feed Africa"s Potemkin Lie (Very Good)

Original Post Date: 2004-01-22  Posted By: Jan

From the News Archives of: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Date & Time Posted: 1/22/2004 9:10:45 AM
Figures Feed Africa"s Potemkin Lie (Very Good)

[Note. I wouldn’t blame the West for the wrong figures. Its the Africans who’ve gone backwards. As the author says, the last reliable census in Nigeria was held by the British more than 50 years ago. Is it the white’s fault that blacks messed things up afterwards? I think not. Also, remember that the blacks themselves manufacture lies about their supposed “progress” – it happens all the time. .e.g In Zimbabwe “inflation is slowing”, in South Africa, crime is going down. These are government-invented lies. You can’t blame the white man or the Western world in general. Let the blacks start taking some responsibility for a change. I will hand it to the author of this piece – I agree with him: I think the crisis in Africa is far worse than people outside it believe, and yes, a lot of it is hidden in statistics. Jan]

IT HAS been more than 200 years since Prince Grigori Potemkin is supposed to have created mock villages in the Crimea to persuade Catherine the Great her empire was thriving. Although the techniques are different now, the tactic is still in use. The victim is Africa, and the perpetrators and benefactors are those who claim to be the continent’s friends.

Behind bogus statistics, misleading language and misguided concepts lies sub-Saharan Africa, crippled by debt, disease and disaster. Wishful and self-serving thinking by western governments, aid donors and charity givers conceals the depth of the region’s crisis and the ineffectual nature of policies intended to reverse its decline.

Africa’s “Potemkin deception” begins with statistics.

It is accepted, for example, that Nigeria is the continent’s most populous nation. But there could be anything from 120-million to 140million Nigerians. The last reliable census was conducted by British colonialists about 50 years ago. Post-independence counts have been distorted by rivalry between the Christian south and the Muslim north, and tension over distribution of the country’s oil wealth among the states.

If we do not know something as fundamental as the number of Nigerians, who account for one in six Africans (or five, or seven) and we guess at their birth rate, every statistic about Nigeria cited by its development partners is not a fact, but an assumption .

And can we believe World Bank figures, often based on decades-old extrapolations, on Mali or Malawi or Mozambique, whether they are about radio sets per 1000 households or literacy rates?

Language compounds the problem and abets the deception. We have words for participants in conflict, but none for the consequences of poverty. So we read about terrorists, or guerrillas, or freedom fighters, depending on the writer’s sympathies. But we have no words for schools that lack books, clinics without medicine, roads with no bridges and collapsed public services . Yet communiques and policy statements from Africa’s western partners are too often based on assumptions that these words mean the same thing to a reader on Wall Street and a nomad in Mali.

With the help of such misunderstandings, or deceptions, the policies that emerge along with claims of their success gain a credibility they do not deserve. To demand elections without a census, to be run by a public service that does not function, in a country that has never known good governance, does not make sense. Yet this is what western governments urge Democratic Republic of Congo to undertake within a couple of years.

One reason western policymakers have been able to get away with applying such misdirected pressure is the Potemkin factor. They use statistics that are treated as facts, yet are no better than broad and often misleading assumptions, to sell schemes that are insupportable all wrapped in an unwarranted belief that Africa is slowly, albeit erratically, “getting better”.

I would be contradicting my own argument to claim as a certainty that the region is slowly, albeit erratically, getting worse.

I cannot use the statistics I deride, the sources of which I doubt, even if many of them bear out my case. Nor is my personal anecdotal evidence any more persuasive.

The gap between us Afro-realists and the Afro-optimists could well be explained by the “cocoon factor”. Things in Africa have deteriorated, I believe, but the conditions under which journalists, diplomats and aid officials do their jobs have certainly improved. Planes are more comfortable, computers and satellite phones make communications easier, hotels are more attuned to our needs. If you observe Africa from within this cocoon, it may well seem a better place.

There is, of course, more to it than that.

The difference between me and my fellow sceptics, on the one hand, and spokesmen for western governments and aid agencies on the other, is that if we pessimists are wrong, we merely end up with egg on our face. But we have no failed policies or vested interests to defend, no constituents to answer to.

For overseas aid ministers and others of their ilk, the stakes are much, much higher. If they are mistaken in their optimism, they have some awkward questions to answer: they will be called on by their constituents and Oxfam supporters alike to explain why they have got Africa so wrong, for so long.

Two decades after Africa’s crisis was recognised, and multibillions of aid dollars later, the Potemkin facade is crumbling. Financial Times

Holman was Africa editor of the Financial Times from 1984 to 2002

Source: AllAfrica.com
URL: http://allafrica.com/stories/200401210103.htm…br>

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