Opalo's weblog

• quick hits

  Posted: May 31, 2011, 10:40 am by kenopp

  What disasters reveal. Excellent read. From disasters we get to know more about the societies that experience them. Perhaps the glaring international example of this was the difference in destruction and response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Haiti’s non-existent state capacity was exposed for the whole world to see. Facebook diplomacy. Are freedom [...]

• double standards

  Posted: May 31, 2011, 8:36 am by kenopp

  The Times has a nice story on Obiang’s Equatorial Guinea that is worth reading: Officially and unofficially, Americans do business with one of the undisputed human rights global bad boys, Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s fourth biggest oil exporter. Its widely criticized record on basic freedoms has offered little barrier to broad engagement by the United States, [...]

• Judges reject kenya’s bid to stop icc case

  Posted: May 31, 2011, 7:38 am by kenopp

  The government of Kenya has lost in its bid to convince the ICC that it has the political will and capacity to try key perpetrators of the 2007-08 post-election violence (PEV). Kenya had asked for six months to get its justice system in order and convince the ICC that it could bring to book those [...]

• Who will stop khartoum?

  Posted: May 30, 2011, 2:02 am by kenopp

  It appears that the war between north and south Sudan is inevitable. The north overran the disputed town of Abyei last week and now is angling to take over two border states. The Times reports: Now, according to a letter from the Sudanese military’s high command, the northern army, in the next few days, plans [...]

• A medieval sociology of IR

  Posted: May 29, 2011, 7:01 am by kenopp

  HT Melissa. I found this rather fun to read. Here is my favorite bit of it all: Like medieval priests, or oratores, the formal theorists in international relations claim special access to divine knowledge, available not through observation of the corrupt and impure world but though revelation and contemplation of the perfection of the divinity. [...]

• food for thought

  Posted: May 27, 2011, 6:22 am by kenopp

  UPDATE: Gelman responds with the question: Why are there IRB’s at all? Ted Miguel and other similarly brilliant economists and political scientists (in the RCT mold) are doing what I consider R&D work that developmental states ought to be doing themselves. Sometimes it takes intensive experimental intervention to find out what works and what doesn’t. [...]

• perspective

  Posted: May 26, 2011, 11:24 pm by kenopp

  UPDATE: According to the Economist: In Nigeria “Parliamentarians are paid up to $2m a year—legally.” Kenyan Members of Parliament take home US$ 174, 400 a year (about on par with US rank and file congresspeople. Cabinet Ministers make even more). Their Ghanaian counterparts make US$ 24,000. Although there might be an upside in paying the [...]

• whiggish history of kenya

  Posted: May 26, 2011, 4:07 am by kenopp

  The caution in the title of this post applies. A few good things have happened in Kenya since 2001: The powers of the presidency have been dispersed. Many tend to forget that Kibaki inherited the same powers as Moi. The only difference was that by 2002 the elites around the president had accumulated enough wealth [...]

• blurring the line between church and state

  Posted: May 25, 2011, 3:08 am by kenopp

  The Catholic Church has urged Parliament to interrogate the moral values and family principles of two judicial nominees before approving them. The Church came short of rejecting the nomination of Dr Willy Mutunga and Ms Nancy Barasa for the positions of Chief Justice and Deputy Chief Justice respectively, over questions raised about their controversial moral [...]

• Dictatorship and Disease

  Posted: May 24, 2011, 9:33 pm by kenopp

  Most Bad things go together. Like Keating at FP, I am unwilling to make any causal claims linking dictatorship to disease or vice versa but suffice it to say that most people who live under dictatorships – in Chad, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, North Korea, etc – do live despite great odds occasioned by their respective governments’ incompetence [...]

• khalwale re-elected

  Posted: May 23, 2011, 10:22 pm by kenopp

  Bonny Khalwale has won back his Ikolomani parliamentary seat. Mr. Khalwale lost his seat after the courts nullified his election in 2007 on account of irregularities. What does this mean for Kenyan national politics? My answer is that it is hard to tell. The results will certainly dent Deputy Premier Mudavadi’s claim to be the [...]

• Spring quarter WGAPE Conference, UCSD

  Posted: May 20, 2011, 9:54 pm by kenopp

  I am currently in San Diego attending the Spring Quarter WGAPE conference at UCSD. WGAPE  (the Working Group in African Political Economy) brings together west coast-based faculty and advanced graduate students in Political Science and Economics who combine deep field research experience in Africa with training in political economy methods (Just one more reason why [...]

• Aid Watch winds up

  Posted: May 19, 2011, 9:19 am by kenopp

  I hope that William Easterly and Laura Freschi of Aid Watch will reconsider resuming blogging in the near future. Their insights on development matters have been most valuable. I remember, as a college student in wintry New Haven, experiencing a change in my approach to development issues after reading The White Man’s Burden. I read [...]

• will the latest land grab help africa?

  Posted: May 17, 2011, 12:32 am by kenopp

  I am on record as having reservations about the latest scramble for Africa African governments leasing vital arable land to foreign companies and governments (esp. in the face of high levels of food insecurity in the region). Like many, my first reaction was to protest against these land deals. Like most natural-resource concessions on the [...]

• democracy and inflation in africa

  Posted: May 14, 2011, 1:55 am by kenopp

  UPDATE: A related paper is here. [HT Julie] Central bank independence is still the exception rather than the rule in most of Africa. This then raises the question of what effects elections – with the high associated costs of buying votes – have on the inflation rate. For instance, Uganda has been experiencing inflation (a.k.a [...]

• tapping africa’s potential

  Posted: May 14, 2011, 11:56 am by kenopp

  As promised here’s a brief note on the conference on Africa at Stanford. Most of the speakers (esp. Fred Lwaniker of the Africa Leadership Academy and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina) reiterated Achebe’s take that the trouble with Africa is simply and squarely a problem of leadership. There is hope though. People like Lamido Sanusi, [...]

• africa is open for business

  Posted: May 13, 2011, 12:03 am by kenopp

  There has been a lot of positive talk about business in Africa lately. Mckinsey came out with its big report in June 2010. That was followed by the release of Steve Radelet’s Emerging Africa, a story of the 17 African countries that have the political and economic fundamentals right. Most recently the Economist has highlighted [...]

• general kianga should be a little bit embarrassed by this

  Posted: May 12, 2011, 12:30 am by kenopp

  The Kenyan army is one of the most professionalized on the Continent. When their counterparts across the region were going nuts with politics through most of the 60s, 70s and 80s they opted instead to stay in the barracks. The coup attempt of 1982 died before it began. Just to illustrate how disinterested they are [...]

• africans should hold their noses and support the icc

  Posted: May 12, 2011, 9:22 pm by kenopp

  Quoting the Economist: These days the ICC’s biggest opponents are in Africa, which provides the court with its biggest group of members (31 out of 114) and is the scene of all the cases currently being investigated or prosecuted: in the CAR, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Libya, Sudan and Uganda. Accusing the court of unfairly [...]

• development in southern sudan

  Posted: May 12, 2011, 9:04 pm by kenopp

  Blattman stresses the importance of security, stability and predictability over other forms of intervention. States, like people, have attention problems, only more extreme. The new government may only accomplish one or two big things in their first five years. If, fifty years hence, we want the poor of South Sudan to prosper, paradoxically the last [...]

• perspective: land issues in Kenya and zimbabwe

  Posted: May 11, 2011, 4:14 am by kenopp

  This quote made me pause for a moment: “As seen in this work, the naked exploitation of land rights has a far longer and more illustrious history in Kenyan than in Zimbabwe. Further, the human cost of such exploitation of land rights in Zimbabwe pales in comparison to Kenya. Human Rights Watch, which is not [...]

• Kenya: The Private Sector Still Has Faith in the system

  Posted: May 11, 2011, 2:57 am by kenopp

  The Kenyan economy is expected to grow by 4.3% this year. That is a downgrade from 6%, as had been projected by the treasury. Erratic rains, high cost of fuel (Kiraitu Murungi should resign), and general inflation are to blame. The Shilling has also had a beating in the last few months. While a weak [...]

• foreign acquisitions of land in africa

  Posted: May 9, 2011, 3:00 am by kenopp

  For half a century they have done nothing but run their economies aground, jail, kill or exile dissidents and steal as much as they could from their economies. All in the name of the people. Now (a subset of) African leaders are busy selling or facilitating the sale of arable African land away – for [...]

• giving thanks for all the wonderful mothers out there

  Posted: May 8, 2011, 3:35 pm by kenopp

  Happy Mother’s Day Filed under: africa

• drug trafficking and african politics

  Posted: May 6, 2011, 1:54 am by kenopp

  Kenya, Gambia, Ghana, South Africa, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea. All these countries have experienced allegations that people high up in government – sometimes individuals very close to the heads of state – are involved in drug trafficking. Africa is a major transit point for drugs from Latin America and Asia into Europe. The latest news on this [...]

• africa’s Middle class

  Posted: May 6, 2011, 1:08 am by kenopp

  Elizabeth Dickinson at FP reports: Given all this, perhaps the only thing about Africa that isn’t changing quickly is our perceptions of it. There’s an image impressed in all of our minds of a starving child, symobilizing an impoverished continent. If that was ever true, this is an excellent reminder that today, it’s at most [...]

• quick hits

  Posted: May 6, 2011, 9:33 pm by kenopp

  The long awaited discussion about the real content of higher education in Africa is underway. Be a part of it. The DRC is getting ahead of itself with elections. One wonders whether holding elections is the wisest thing to do right now. Wars raging in the east. A country the size of western Europe but [...]

• fuel shortage in kenya: kibaki administration on the spot

  Posted: May 5, 2011, 1:06 am by kenopp

  The Kenyan government is frantically trying to avert strikes and demonstrations over the rapidly rising cost of living. State House and Agip House certainly don’t want a repeat of the recent events in Uganda where inflation demonstrations have turned bloody. Mr. Atuoli, the number one Kenyan trade unionist, has given the government a three-week strike [...]

• Malema on trial

  Posted: May 1, 2011, 10:14 am by kenopp

  The video is worth watching. The lawyer cross-examining Malema actually makes the buffoon leader of the ANC youth league seem sane. The South African land issue is a Zimbabwe waiting to happen. The sooner everyone accepts the truth the better. Malema’s buffoonery is founded on real grievances about the distribution of productive land in South [...]

• mbeki’s take on the ivorian crisis

  Posted: May 1, 2011, 3:23 am by kenopp

  Ouattara’s victory over Gbagbo in Cote D’Ivoire is quickly generating winner’s remorse. The coalition of disparate rebel forces that united to oust Gbagbo is already breaking apart. Just this past week Ibrahim Coulibaly, a rebel commander, was killed after he refused to obey Ouattara’s order to disarm his units. Mr. Ouattara himself is facing the [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes