By Carol Pineau
Sunday, April 17, 2005;
In the waiting area of a large office complex in Accra, Ghana, it's
standing room only as citizens with bundles of cash line up to buy
shares of a mutual fund that has yielded an average 60 percent
annually for the past seven years. They're entrusting their hard-
earned cash to a local company called Databank, which invests in
stock markets in Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana and Kenya that
consistently rank among the world's top growth markets.
Chances are you haven't read or heard anything about Databank in
your daily newspaper or on the evening news, where the little
coverage of Africa that's offered focuses almost exclusively on the
negative -- the virulent spread of HIV/AIDS, genocide in Darfur and
the chaos of Zimbabwe.
Yes, Africa is a land of wars, poverty and corruption. The situation
in places like Darfur, Sudan, desperately cries out for more media
attention and international action. But Africa is also a land of
stock markets, high rises, Internet cafes and a growing middle
class. This is the part of Africa that functions. And this Africa
also needs media attention, if it's to have any chance of fully
joining the global economy.
Africa's media image comes at a high cost, even, at the extreme, the
cost of lives. Stories about hardship and tragedy aim to tug at our
heartstrings, getting us to dig into our pockets or urge Congress to
send more aid. But no country or region ever developed thanks to aid
alone. Investment, and the job and wealth creation it generates, is
the only road to lasting development. That's how China, India and
the Asian Tigers did it.
Yet while Africa, according to the U.S. government's Overseas
Private Investment Corp., offers the highest return in the world on
direct foreign investment, it attracts the least. Unless investors
see the Africa that's worthy of investment, they won't put their
money into it. And that lack of investment translates into job
stagnation, continued poverty and limited access to education and
health care.
Consider a few facts: The Ghana Stock Exchange regularly tops the
list of the world's highest-performing stock markets. Botswana, with
its A+ credit rating, boasts one of the highest per capita
government savings rates in the world, topped only by Singapore and
a handful of other fiscally prudent nations. Cell phones are making
phenomenal profits on the continent. Brand-name companies like Coca-
Cola, GM, Caterpillar and Citibank have invested in Africa for years
and are quite bullish on the future.
The failure to show this side of Africa creates a one-dimensional
caricature of a complex continent. Imagine if 9/11, the Oklahoma
City bombing and school shootings were all that the rest of the
world knew about America.
I recently produced a documentary on entrepreneurship and private
enterprise in Africa. Throughout the year-long process, I came to
realize how all of us in the media -- even those with a true love of
the continent -- portray it in a way that's truly to its detriment.
The first cameraman I called to film the documentary laughed and
said, "Business and Africa, aren't those contradictory terms?" The
second got excited imagining heart-warming images of women's co-ops
and market stalls brimming with rustic crafts. Several friends
simply assumed I was doing a documentary on AIDS. After all, what
else does one film in Africa?
The little-known fact is that businesses are thriving throughout
Africa. With good governance and sound fiscal policies, countries
like Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and many more are bustling,
their economies growing at surprisingly robust rates.
Private enterprise is not just limited to the well-behaved nations.
You can't find a more war-ravaged land than Somalia, which has been
without a central government for more than a decade. The big
surprise? Private enterprise is flourishing. Mogadishu has the
cheapest cell phone rates on the continent, mostly due to no
government intervention. In the northern city of Hargeysa, the
markets sell the latest satellite phone technology. The electricity
works. When the state collapsed in 1991, the national airline went
out of business. Today, there are five private carriers and price
wars keep the cost of tickets down. This is not the Somalia you see
in the media.
Obviously life there would be dramatically improved by good
governance -- or even just some governance -- but it's also true
that, through resilience and resourcefulness, Somalis have been able
to create a functioning society.
Most African businesses suffer from an extreme lack of
infrastructure, but the people I met were too determined to let this
stop them. It just costs them more. Without reliable electricity,
most businesses have to use generators. They have to dig bore-holes
for a dependable water source. Telephone lines are notoriously out
of service, but cell phones are filling the gap.
Throughout Africa, what I found was a private sector working hard to
find African solutions to African problems. One example that will
always stick in my mind is the CEO of Vodacom Congo, the largest
cell phone company in that country. Alieu Conteh started his
business while the civil war was still raging. With rebel troops
closing in on the airport in Kinshasa, no foreign manufacturer would
send in a cell phone tower, so Conteh got locals to collect scrap
metal, which they welded together to build one. That tower still
stands today.
As I interviewed successful entrepreneurs, I was continually
astounded by their ingenuity, creativity and steadfastness. These
people are the future of the continent. They are the ones we should
be talking to about how to move Africa forward. Instead, the media
concentrates on victims or government officials, and as anyone who
has worked in Africa knows, government is more often a part of the
problem than of the solution.
When the foreign media descend on the latest crisis, the person they
look to interview is invariably the foreign savior, an aid worker
from the United States or Europe. African saviors are everywhere,
delivering aid on the ground. But they don't seem to be in our
cultural belief system. It's not just the media, either. Look at the
literature put out by almost any nongovernmental organization. The
better ones show images of smiling African children -- smiling
because they have been helped by the NGO. The worst promote the
extended-belly, flies-on-the-face cliche of Africa, hoping that the
pain of seeing those images will fill their coffers. "We hawk
poverty," one NGO worker admitted to me.
Last November, ABC's "Primetime Live" aired a special on Britain's
Prince Harry and his work with AIDS children in Lesotho. The
segment, titled "The Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho,"
painted the tiny nation as a desperate, desolate place. The
program's message was clear: This helpless nation at last had a
knight -- or prince -- in shining armor.
By the time the charity addresses came up at the end, you were ready
to give, and that's good. Lesotho needs help with its AIDS problem.
But would it really have hurt the story to add that this land-locked
nation with few natural resources has jump-started its economy by
aggressively courting foreign investment? The reality is that it's
anything but a "forgotten kingdom," as a dramatic increase in
exports has made it the top beneficiary of the African Growth and
Opportunity Act (AGOA), a duty-free, quota-free U.S.-Africa trade
agreement. More than 50,000 people have gotten jobs through the
country's initiatives. Couldn't the program have portrayed an
African country that was in need of assistance, but was neither
helpless nor a victim?
Still the simplistic portrayals come. A recent episode of the
popular NBC drama "Medical Investigation" was about an anthrax scare
in Philadelphia. The source of the deadly spores? Some illegal
immigrants from Africa playing their drums in a local market,
unknowingly infecting innocent passersby. Typical: If it's a deadly
disease, the scriptwriters make it come from Africa.
Most of the time, Africa is simply not on the map. The continent's
booming stock markets are almost never mentioned in newspaper
financial pages. How often is an African country -- apart, perhaps,
from South Africa or Egypt or Morocco -- featured in a newspaper
travel section? Even the listing of worldwide weather includes only
a few African cities.
The result of this portrait is an Africa we can't relate to. It
seems so foreign to us, so different and incomprehensible. Since we
can't relate to it, we ignore it.
There are lots of reasons for the media's neglect of Africa: bean
counters in the newsroom and the high cost of international
coverage, the belief that American viewers aren't interested in
international stories, and the infotainment of news. There's also
journalists' reluctance to pursue so-called "positive stories." We
all know that such stories don't win awards or get front-page, above-
the-fold placement. But what's happening in Africa doesn't need to
be cast in any special light. The Ghana Stock Exchange was the
fastest-growing exchange in the world in 2003. That's not
a "positive" story, that's news, just like reports on the London
Stock Exchange. I imagine a lot of consumers would have found it
newsworthy to learn where they could have made a 144 percent return
on their money.
My independent film was made possible by funding from the World
Bank, for which I am extremely grateful. But the bank wouldn't have
had to step in if the media had been doing their job -- showing all
Africans in all facets of their lives. In a business that's supposed
to cover man-bites-dog stories, the idea that Africa doesn't work is
a dog-bites-man story. If the media are really looking for news,
they'd look at the ways that Africa, despite all the odds, does work.
Author's e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Carol Pineau, a journalist with more than 10 years of experience
reporting on Africa, is the producer and director of the
film "Africa: Open for Business," which premiered last week at the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58294-2005Apr16.html
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