Brother Lamin,

Unravelling the puzzle around Africa's poverty is itself a knotty affair. 
Yes, indeed, it crossed my mind to insert into the piece Gambia for 
Cameroon, Serre-Kunda for Douala, and Jammeh for Biya.But then I thought 
again, that everyone would see the continental universality anyway.

The NADD splinter is a major setback for all progresive forces in our 
country; and unfortuantely, coalition-building against the APRC will be an 
impossible enterprise for a long time to come.

Many thanks,
momodou sidibeh


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lamin Darbo" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 8:05 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Why Poor Countries Are Poor


>
>
>  "But perhaps Biya is not in control as much as it first appears. A little 
> traveling in Cameroon reveals that whether or not Biya is the 
> bandit-in-chief, there are many petty bandits to satisfy".
>
>
>
>
>  "Government banditry, widespread waste, and oppressive regulations are 
> all elements in that missing piece of the puzzle".
>
>
>
>
>  "A project that should never have been built was built, and built badly. 
> The lesson of the story might appear to be that self-interested and 
> ambitious people in power are often the cause of wastefulness in 
> developing countries. But self-interested and ambitious people are in 
> positions of power, great and small, all over the world. In many places, 
> they are restrained by the law, the press, and democratic opposition. 
> Cameroon's tragedy is that there is nothing to hold self-interest in 
> check".
>
>
> Brother Sidibeh:
>
>  The piece has virtually universal application to Africa
>
>  I like to think Gambia 2006 is about rectifying the key issues isolated 
> in the piece as factors underlying our condition.
>
>  Sad that NADD has splintered
>
>   I thank you for a great and germane forward
>
>
>
>  LJDarbo
>
>
>
>
>  Momodou S Sidibeh <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>  Fellow Travellers,
>
> If you are used to reading Mr. Pembo's useful Friday allhamdulillahs, I am 
> sure will enjoy reading this innadillahi. Mind you please, I am not 
> writing arabic but mandinka!
> But should in case you dislike it, I profusely apologise for the clutter.
>
> modou sidibeh
>
>
>
> Why Poor Countries Are Poor
> The clues lie on a bumpy road leading to the world's worst library.
> Tim Harford
>
>
>
> They call Douala the "armpit of Africa." Lodged beneath the bulging 
> shoulder of West Africa, this malaria-infested city in southwestern 
> Cameroon is humid, unattractive, and smelly. On a torrid evening in late 
> 2001, I was guided out of the chaotic Douala International Airport by my 
> friend Andrew and his driver, Sam, who would have whisked us immediately 
> to the cooler hillside town of Buea if Douala were at all conducive to 
> being whisked anywhere. It isn't. Douala, a city of 2 million people, has 
> no real roads.
>
>
> A typical Douala street is 50 yards wide from shack to shack. It's packed 
> with street vendors, slouched beside a tray of peanuts or an impromptu 
> plantain barbecue, and with little clusters of people, standing around a 
> motorbike, drinking beer or palm wine, or cooking on a small fire. Piles 
> of rubble and vast holes mark unfinished construction or demolition work. 
> Along the middle is a strip of potholes that 20 years ago was a road.
>
>
> Down that strip drive four streams of traffic, mostly taxis. The streams 
> on the outside are usually made up of cabs picking up fares, while the 
> taxis on the inside weave in and out of the potholes and other cars with 
> all the predictability of ping pong balls in a lottery machine. Douala 
> used to have buses, but they can no longer cope with the decaying roads. 
> So the taxis are all that's left: beaten-up old Toyotas, carrying four in 
> the back and three in the front, sprayed New York yellow, each with a 
> unique slogan: "God Is Great, " "In God We Trust," "Powered by God, " 
> "Toss Man."
>
> Nobody who sees a Douala street scene can conclude that Cameroon is poor 
> because of a lack of entrepreneurial spirit. But poor it is. The average 
> Cameroonian is eight times poorer than the average citizen of the world 
> and almost 50 times poorer than the typical American. And Cameroon is 
> getting poorer. Can anything be done to reverse the decline and help 
> Cameroon grow richer instead?
>
> That's no small question. As the Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas put 
> it, "The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these 
> are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to 
> think about anything else."
>
>
> The Missing Jigsaw Piece
>
> Economists used to think wealth came from a combination of man-made 
> resources (roads, factories, telephone systems), human resources (hard 
> work and education), and technological resources (technical know-how, or 
> simply high-tech machinery). Obviously, poor countries grew into rich 
> countries by investing money in physical resources and by improving human 
> and technological resources with education and technology transfer 
> programs.
>
> Nothing is wrong with this picture as far as it goes. Education, 
> factories, infrastructure, and technical know-how are indeed abundant in 
> rich countries and lacking in poor ones. But the picture is incomplete, a 
> puzzle with the most important piece missing.
>
> The first clue that something is amiss with the traditional story is its 
> implication that poor countries should have been catching up with rich 
> ones for the last century or so-and that the farther behind they are, the 
> faster the catch-up should be. In a country that has very little in the 
> way of infrastructure or education, new investments have the biggest 
> rewards.
>
> This expectation seems to be confirmed by the experience of China, Taiwan, 
> and South Korea-not to mention Botswana, Chile, India, Mauritius, and 
> Singapore. Fifty years ago they were mired in poverty, lacking man-made, 
> human, technical, and sometimes natural resources. Now these dynamic 
> countries, not Japan, the United States, or Switzerland, have become the 
> fastest-growing economies on the planet.
>
> Since technology is widely available and increasingly cheap, this is what 
> economists should expect of every developing country. In a world of 
> diminishing returns, the poorest countries gain the most from new 
> technology, infrastructure, and education. South Korea, for example, 
> acquired technology by encouraging foreign companies to invest or by 
> paying licensing fees. In addition to the fees, the investing companies 
> sent profits back home. But the gains to Korean workers and investors, in 
> the form of economic growth, were 50 times greater than the fees and 
> profits that left the country.
>
> As for education and infrastructure, since the returns seem to be so high, 
> there should be no shortage of investors willing to fund infrastructure 
> projects or lend money to students (or to governments that provide 
> education). Banks, domestic and foreign, should be lining up to lend 
> people the money to get through school or to build a new road or a new 
> power plant. In turn, poor people, or poor countries, should be very happy 
> to take out such loans, confident that investment returns are so high that 
> the repayments will not be difficult. Even if, for some reason, that 
> didn't happen, the World Bank, established after World War II with the 
> express aim of providing loans to countries for reconstruction and 
> development, lends billions of dollars a year to developing countries. 
> Investment money is clearly not the issue; either the investments are not 
> being made, or they are not delivering the returns the traditional model 
> predicts.
>
>
> A Theory of Government Banditry
>
> As our car slowly bumped and lurched through the crowds, I tried to make 
> sense of it all by asking Sam, the driver, about the country.
>
> "Sam, how long was it since the roads were last fixed?"
>
> "The roads, they have not been fixed for 19 years."
>
> President Paul Biya came to power in November 1982 and had been in office 
> for 19 years by the time I visited Cameroon. Four years later, he is still 
> in power. He recently described his opponents as "political amateurs"; 
> they are certainly out of practice.
>
> "Don't people complain about the roads?"
>
> "They complain, but nothing is done. The government tells us there is no 
> money. But there is plenty of money coming from the World Bank and from 
> France and Britain and America-but they put it in their pockets. They do 
> not spend it on the roads. "
>
> "Are there elections in Cameroon?"
>
> "Yes! There are elections. President Biya is always re-elected with a 90 
> percent majority. "
>
> "Do 90 percent of people vote for President Biya?"
>
> "No, they do not. He is very unpopular. But still there is a 90 percent 
> majority. "
>
> You do not have to spend a long time in Cameroon to realize how much 
> people resent the government. Much of government activity appears to be 
> designed expressly to steal money from the people of Cameroon. According 
> to the global watchdog Transparency International, Cameroon is one of the 
> most corrupt countries in the world. I was warned so starkly about 
> government corruption, and the likelihood that officials at the airport 
> would attempt to relieve me of my wad of West African francs, that I was 
> more nervous about that than the risk of malaria or a gunpoint mugging in 
> the back streets of Douala.
>
> Many people have an optimistic view of politicians and civil servants-that 
> they are all serving the people and doing their best to look after the 
> interests of the country. Other people are more cynical, suggesting that 
> many politicians are incompetent and often trade off the public interest 
> against their own chances of re-election. The economist Mancur Olson 
> proposed a working assumption that government's motivations are darker 
> still, and from it theorized that stable dictatorships should be worse for 
> economic growth than democracies, but better than sheer instability.
>
> Olson supposed that governments are simply bandits, people with the 
> biggest guns who will turn up and take everything. That's the starting 
> point of his analysis-a starting point you will have no trouble accepting 
> if you spend five minutes looking around you in Cameroon. As Sam said, 
> "There is plenty of money.but they put it in their pockets."
>
> Imagine a dictator with a tenure of one week-in effect, a bandit with a 
> roving army who sweeps in, takes whatever he wishes, and leaves. Assuming 
> he's neither malevolent nor kindhearted, but purely self-interested, he 
> has no incentive to leave anything, unless he plans on coming back next 
> year. But imagine that the roaming bandit likes the climate of a certain 
> spot and decides to settle down, building a palace and encouraging his 
> army to avail themselves of the locals. Desperately unfair though it is, 
> the locals are probably better off now that the dictator has decided to 
> stay. A purely self-
> interested dictator will realize he cannot destroy the economy and starve 
> the people if he plans on sticking around, because then he would exhaust 
> all the resources and have nothing to steal the following year. So a 
> dictator who lays claim to a land is a preferable to one who moves around 
> constantly in search of new victims to plunder.
>
> I cannot confirm that President Biya fits Olson's description of a 
> self-interested dictator. But if he did, it wouldn't be in his interest to 
> take too much from the Cameroonian people, because then there would be 
> nothing to take next year. As long as he feels secure in his tenure, he 
> will not wish to kill the golden goose. Like the virus whose very 
> existence relies on the bodies it afflicts, Biya would have to keep the 
> Cameroonian economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it. This 
> suggests that a leader who confidently expects to be in power for 20 years 
> will do more to cultivate his economy than one who expects to flee the 
> country after 20 weeks. Twenty years of an "elected dictator" is probably 
> better than 20 years of one coup after another.
>
> Staying with the simplifying assumption that Biya has absolute power over 
> the distribution of Cameroon's income, he might decide to steal, say, half 
> of it every year in the form of "taxes" that go into his personal bank 
> account. That would be bad news for his victims, of course, but also bad 
> news for Cameroon's long-term growth. Think of a small business owner 
> considering an investment of $1,000 in a new power generator for his 
> workshop. The investment is expected to generate income of $100 a year. 
> That's 10 percent, a pretty good return. But since Biya might take half of 
> it, the return falls to a much less attractive 5 percent. The businessman 
> decides not to make the investment after all, so he misses out and so does 
> Biya.
>
> Olson does not predict that stable dictatorships will do good things for 
> their countries, just that they'll damage the economy less than unstable 
> ones. Of course, Biya might make his own investments-for instance, 
> providing roads or bridges to encourage commerce. While they would be 
> expensive in the short term, they would help the economy to prosper, 
> leaving Biya with more opportunities to steal later. But the flip side of 
> the businessman's problem applies: Biya would be stealing only half of the 
> benefits, not nearly enough to encourage him to provide the infrastructure 
> that Cameroon needs.
>
> When Biya came to power in 1982, he inherited colonial-era roads that had 
> yet to fall apart completely. If he had inherited a country without any 
> infrastructure, it would have been in his interest to build it up to some 
> extent. Because the infrastructure was already in place, Biya needed to 
> calculate whether it was worth maintaining, or whether he could simply 
> live off the legacy of Cameroon's colonial rulers. In 1982 he probably 
> thought the roads would last into the 1990s, which was as long as he could 
> reasonably have expected to hold onto the reins of power. So he decided to 
> live off the capital of the past and never bothered to invest in any type 
> of infrastructure for his people. As long as there was enough to get him 
> through his rule, why bother spending money that could otherwise go right 
> into his personal retirement fund?
>
>
> Bandits, Bandits Everywhere
>
> But perhaps Biya is not in control as much as it first appears. A little 
> traveling in Cameroon reveals that whether or not Biya is the 
> bandit-in-chief, there are many petty bandits to satisfy.
>
> If you want to drive from the town of Buea to Bamenda, farther north, the 
> most popular way to make the trip is by bus; minibuses ply all 
> long-distance routes in Cameroon. Designed to seat 10 people in comfort, 
> they will depart as soon as 13 paying passengers have boarded. The 
> relatively capacious seat beside the driver is worth fighting for. The 
> vehicles are old bone-shakers, but the system works pretty well. It would 
> work a lot better if not for all the roadblocks.
>
> Bullying gendarmes, often drunk, stop every minibus and try their best to 
> extract bribes from the passengers. They usually fail, but from time to 
> time they become determined. My friend Andrew was once hauled off a bus 
> and harassed for several hours. The eventual pretext for the bribe was his 
> lack of a yellow-fever certificate, which you need when you enter the 
> country but not when riding a bus. The gendarme explained patiently that 
> Cameroon had to be protected from disease. The price of two beers 
> convinced him that an epidemic had been prevented, and Andrew caught the 
> next bus, three hours later.
>
> This is even less efficient than Mancur Olson's model predicts. Olson 
> himself would have admitted that his theory in its starkest form 
> underestimates the damage that bad governments inflict on their people. 
> Biya needs to keep hundreds of thousands of armed police and army officers 
> happy, as well as many civil servants and other supporters. In a "perfect" 
> dictatorship, he would simply impose the least damaging taxes possible in 
> whatever quantity was necessary and distribute the proceeds to his 
> supporters. This approach turns out to be impracticable, because it 
> requires far more information about and control over the economy than a 
> poor government can possibly muster. The substitute is 
> government-tolerated corruption on a massive scale.
>
> The corruption is not only unfair; it is also hugely wasteful. Gendarmes 
> spend their time harassing travelers in return for modest returns. The 
> costs are enormous. An entire police force is too busy extracting bribes 
> to catch criminals. A four-hour trip takes five hours. Travelers take 
> costly steps to protect themselves: carrying less money, traveling less 
> often or at busier times of the day, bringing extra paperwork to help fend 
> off attempts to extract bribes.
>
> The blockades and crooked police officers comprise a particularly visible 
> form of corruption, but there are metaphorical roadblocks throughout the 
> Cameroonian economy. To set up a small business, an entrepreneur must 
> spend on official fees nearly as much as the average Cameroonian makes in 
> two years. To buy or sell property costs nearly a fifth of the property's 
> value. To get the courts to enforce an unpaid invoice takes nearly two 
> years, costs more than a third of the invoice's value, and requires 58 
> separate procedures. These ridiculous regulations are good news for the 
> bureaucrats who enforce them. Every procedure is an opportunity to extract 
> a bribe. The slower the standard processes, the greater the temptation to 
> pay "speed money."
>
> Inflexible labor regulations help ensure that only experienced 
> professional men are given formal contracts; women and young people have 
> to fend for themselves in the gray market. Red tape discourages new 
> businesses. Slow courts mean that entrepreneurs are forced to turn down 
> attractive opportunities with new customers, because they know they cannot 
> protect themselves if they are cheated. Poor countries have the worst 
> examples of such regulations, and that is one of the major reasons they 
> are poor. Officials in rich countries perform these basic bureaucratic 
> tasks relatively quickly and cheaply, whereas officials in poor countries 
> draw out the process in hopes of pocketing some extra cash themselves.
>
>
>
> Institutions Matter
>
> Government banditry, widespread waste, and oppressive regulations are all 
> elements in that missing piece of the puzzle. During the last 10 years or 
> so, economists working on development issues have converged on the mantra 
> that "institutions matter." Of course, it is hard to describe what an 
> "institution" really is. It is even harder to convert a bad institution 
> into a good one.
>
> But progress is being made. We've just seen one kind of institution: 
> business regulations. Sometimes, it can be improved with simple publicity. 
> After the World Bank revealed that entrepreneurs in Ethiopia couldn't 
> legally start a business without paying four years' salary to publish an 
> official notice in government newspapers, the Ethiopian government 
> scrapped the rule. New business registrations jumped by almost 50 percent 
> immediately.
>
> Unfortunately, it is not always so easy to get corrupt governments to 
> change their ways. Although it is becoming clearer and clearer that 
> dysfunctional institutions are a key explanation of poverty in developing 
> countries, most institutions cannot be described with an elegant model 
> like Mancur Olson's, or even with careful data-gathering by the World 
> Bank. Most unhappy institutions are unhappy in their own way.
>
> Such a uniquely backfiring setup was responsible for the world's worst 
> library. A few days after I arrived in Cameroon, I visited one of the 
> country's most prestigious private schools-Cameroon's equivalent of Eton. 
> The school boasted two separate library buildings, but the librarian was 
> very unhappy. I soon understood why.
>
> At first glance the new library was impressive. With the exception of the 
> principal's palatial house, it was the only two-story structure on campus. 
> Its design was adventurous: a poor man's Sydney Opera House. The sloped 
> roof, rather than running down from a ridge, soared up in a V from a 
> central valley like the pages of an open book on a stand.
>
> When you're standing in the blazing sunlight of the Cameroonian dry 
> season, it's hard to see at first what the problem is with a roof that 
> looks like a giant open book. But that's only if you forget, as the 
> architect apparently did, that Cameroon also has a rainy season. When it 
> rains in Cameroon, it rains for five solid months. It rains so hard that 
> even the most massive storm ditches quickly overflow. When that kind of 
> rain meets a roof that is, essentially, a gutter that drains onto a 
> flat-roofed entrance hall, you know it's time to laminate the books. The 
> only reason the school's books still existed was that they'd never been 
> near the new building; the librarian had refused repeated requests from 
> the principal to transfer them from the old library.
>
> I was tempted to conclude that the principal was in an advanced stage of 
> denial when I stepped inside the new library to see the devastation. It 
> was in ruins. The floor contained the stains of countless puddles. The air 
> carried the kind of musty smell associated with a damp cave. The plaster 
> was peeling off the walls. Yet the library is only four years old.
>
> This is a shocking waste. Instead of building the library, the school 
> could have bought 40,000 good books, or acquired computers with Internet 
> connections, or funded scholarships for poor children. Any of these 
> alternatives would have been incomparably better than an unusable new 
> library. The school never even needed a new library in the first place-the 
> old library works perfectly well, could easily hold three times as many 
> books as the school owns, and is waterproof.
>
> If the library was such a pointless endeavor, why was it built at all? 
> It's all too tempting for the visitor in Cameroon to shrug his shoulders 
> and explain the country's poverty by presuming that Cameroonians are 
> idiots. Cameroonians are no smarter or dumber than the rest of us. 
> Seemingly stupid mistakes are so ubiquitous in Cameroon that incompetence 
> cannot be the whole explanation. There is something more systematic at 
> work. We need to consider the incentives of the decision makers.
>
>
> === message truncated ===
>
>
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