Does the Arab Spring portend a hot African Summer?
Ty McCormick, writing in Foreign Policy online, sees growing signs of unrest in Sub-Saharan Africa:Driving south from central Cairo along the corniche that hugs the east bank of the Nile, there's a giant billboard for Mercedes-Benz's newest toy. A gleaming, red, gullwing sports car -- which hovers ostentatiously above the dusty road, not a quarter mile from where beggars and street children mingle with haggard vendors hoping to pull in a few Egyptian pounds -- is framed by a simple, penetrating message: "Have it all or nothing." While many more Egyptians still have nothing today than have it all, things get substantially worse as you travel further south along the Nile, from the iconic heart of the Arab Spring into the heart of Africa.
In the last decade, give or take, the African continent has experienced tremendous economic expansion, clocking in at an average 5 percent annual growth in the 10 years before the 2008 economic meltdown. But as growth has accelerated, bestowing tremendous wealth on the fortunate -- and more often, the corrupt -- so has the gulf between those that drive fancy sports cars and those that must walk beneath them.....
But robust growth and the conspicuous consumption that inevitably follows can be risky when there are few political safety valves. The result, as we have seen in Egypt and elsewhere, is that authoritarian regimes that have allowed their economies to open up have become ripe for revolution. As John Githongo, chief executive of Inuka Kenya Trust, argues in the New York Times, "inequality, unlike poverty, is far more easily politicized, ethnicized and militarized.... It is also far more combustible because it creates an identifiable enemy -- a class that benefits disproportionately because of its unfair access to those who wield power."
There are always signs of unrest in Sub-Saharan Africa - is this time different? Where else are there clouds on the horizon?
Anthropologist Daniel Hoffman has studied the diamond miners of Liberia and Sierra Leone for the past decade and documents how casual labor can be exploited for political unrest. With elections looming in Liberia, the availability of cheap young underemployed muscle for campaign staff is a worry. (Check out Hoffman's new book The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia, coming in late August from Duke University Press).
In Mozambique, historic tensions between north (where the resources are) and the south (where the power is) continues to smolder. Some argue that the question is "when" rather than "if" an eruption will take place. For a nation that lost perhaps as much as 10% of its population in a brutal civil war, and displaced much of the remainder, one hopes that the national appetite for civil strife is small and that the answer to the question is "never". But could instability in Zimbabwe or South Africa tip the balance?
From a historic perspective, free Africa is still in the throws of a violent birth. Economic growth is not necessarily anodyne, as McCormick demonstrates.
Prof Calestous Juma, also writing in Foreign Policy online, takes a countervailing view. The conflicts described are evolutionary, not revolutionary, "offshoots of internal processes that have been underway for decades" and presumably part of the historical process leading to an African renaissance. Juma sees positive signs - "The prospect of joining larger economic trade areas already seems to be influencing the way countries resolve long-standing internal conflicts and embark on democratic transitions. In Burundi, for example, a decades-long civil war fueled by ethnic tension has been ended in part due to the country's aspirations to join an emerging East African Community (EAC) and embark on a new path of economic reconstruction. South Sudan, which has its own internal conflicts, plans to join the EAC as well, hopefully a move that will have a positive influence on political conduct in the new country."
The economic growth of Africa requires two contrary forces - order and freedom. Will African leaders be able to strike a balance between security and political freedom, or will the drive for security throttle both political opposition and political growth? The answer - yes.
Breakthrough in combating infectious disease possible
Clipped from Seed Magazine, this interview with Kary Mullis about a new kind of drug with the potential to cure infectious diseases. A 100% cure rate for mice infected with anthrax is discussed. If it pans out, this is a game changer in so many ways. It could boost productivity and life expectancy tremendously in Africa, for one thing, which potentially could lead to smaller more resilient families.
This is a tremendously good thing. That doesn't mean that Sevareid's Law doesn't apply (every problem begins as a solution). There will be consequences. For one, I would expect that the Pareto principle applies here - 80% of the effects from 20% of the causes - meaning tremendous effort will be required to reach the most unreachable 20%, with the usual implications for fairness. It's analogous to the "last mile" problem in communications. Another thing to consider could be the gradual loss of resistance to disease, meaning that control of such drugs could become a means of exercising power and social control. (These by the way are good reasons why public financing of such a breakthrough is a good idea). As usual, when you win at one level in this great video game of life you're kicked up to a faster harder tougher level. But let's not wish for bad luck - this is great news. Let's use it wisely.Amplify’d from seedmagazine.com
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis offers a radical new way to treat infectious diseases as the effectiveness of our current antibiotics wanes.
Kary Mullis, a self-proclaimed non-specialist, won the Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that allows researchers to quickly and cheaply make many copies of single strands of DNA. For the past decade Mullis has been using PCR to create new types of drugs that could soon provide a cure for everything from malaria to anthrax. He tells Seed how he is bridging the gap between disparate scientific fields to devise a radical new way to combat infectious diseases.
Kary Mullis: Many pathogens are becoming resistant to our antibiotics. Consider penicillin, for example. We took it from a fungus that grew in the soil and killed bacteria for food. Because of this warfare, some bacteria had developed a resistance via DNA, to penicillin. Over time, they passed this resistance via DNA up to the pathogens that infect our bodies. So now many organisms—like Staphylococcus aureu, the cause of Staph infections—are, in large part, unaffected by penicillin. In this way a lot of bacteria have mutated around our antibiotics.
The standard pharmaceutical response is to go stomping through the jungle trying to find extracts of all the organisms and see if one of them will inhibit the growth of particular bacteria. And that of course will get more and more difficult as time goes on. It is clear that we need another solution.
My work with PCR allowed for the invention by Craig Tuerk of nucleic aptamers, which are tiny binding molecules that can be designed to attach themselves to harmful bacteria. However, instead of attaching a poison to the other end of the aptamer—as the silver-bullet strategy would call for—I put something on there that is a target for our immune system, a chemical compound with which the immune system is already familiar and to which it is very strongly immune. What you end up with is a drug that will drag this thing to which you are highly immune over to some bacteria you don’t want in your body. And your immune system will attack and kill it.
What we should be asking about a brand new idea is, “Does it have a chance of ever working?” And if the answer is “yes,” we should consider supporting it. We don’t need to give it a million dollars, just enough money to prove itself. Because today, by the time you get most science prizes, you already have 200 people working on an idea. That’s not when the idea is delicate.
Seed: You have said that you are not a specialist. The non-specialist is an increasingly rare breed in science. What do you understand your role to be in today’s highly specialized scientific research community?
KM: I am undisciplined—a loose cannon on deck is one way to talk about me. The positive spin you can put on it is that I can say to one specialist, “You have got some knowledge that, put together with this guy who is an organic chemist and with this guy who knows about influenza in chickens, can accomplish something that none of us could do on our own.” That sounds corny, but it takes years to make those kinds of connections—and doing so requires people wide open with their interests.
Communities striving for resilience in Africa
Vimeo's Gaia channel, created by the Gaia Foundation and the African Biodiversity Network, has a short collection of well-done videos documenting the efforts of people to restore resilience to their communities and their environment. Here you can find some examples of how participatory governance is restoring hope to the disempowered. Mapmaking figures prominently. Watching these videos, you can see hints of some of the ways in which resilience is lost - insecure tenure, the constant need for cash for food, medicine, energy and education, and the food insecurity when you've given up local production in favor of cash crops, volatile governments and shaky economies. Cripes, it sounds like California... They've already tried importing shamans. Community mapping may be a better way to go.
