• Chinese president meets Chinese, Nigerian businessmen

Telecommunications are just as important, and in many countries where landlines are impractical, cell phones are beginning to transform people’s lives. Corruption, civil insecurity, disease and poverty are still major factors. Today, a look at the promise and the problems of infrastructure in Africa.
Later in the program, a history lesson from an anti-immigration campaign in the 1930s and a remembrance of pop star Gene Pitney, the man who shot Liberty Valance, remember? But first, practical help in Africa. If you’re investing your time and money in Africa or if you’ve traveled there, our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. That’s 800-989-TALK. E-mail us, [e-mail].
Our first guest is Stephen Morrison. He’s director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He’s with us here in studio 3A. Thanks very much for coming in today.
Mr. STEPHEN MORRISON (Center for Strategic and International Studies): Thank you very much, Neal. I’m happy to be here.
CONAN: In preparation for this program, I read a statistic which astonished me. The mileage of paved roads, this is just a few years ago, in Africa, outside of South Africa, was less than the mileage of paved roads in the country of Poland which is about the size of Zimbabwe.
Mr. MORRISON: Yes, those are startling facts, and if you, you can go through many countries in Africa, where you have weak states or where you’ve had civil unrest and the like, and you can look at the statistics in terms of paved roads or roads that are workable and, at some level, and you can find that actually the numbers compare very negatively against the colonial era, as well, which is a very startling and disturbing fact.
CONAN: It’s hard enough to build these structures in the first place. Also difficult to have the money to maintain them.
Mr. MORRISON: Right. This has been one of the big dilemmas for road and port infrastructure, as well as power infrastructure in Africa, is that when there were big investments made in the ‘60s, the ‘50s and ‘60s in these sectors when it, where it was much more fashionable in terms of foreign aid to be putting money into these large projects, they proved to be non-sustainable.
They proved to be very expense in order to maintain and preserve and keep them going. Often times you didn’t have a sufficient state fisc, a base, a tax base, in order to have the maintenance bureaucracy and capacity to keep them going. There was a tendency to move them off of bilateral donor programs into multilateral donor programs where they came to be a bigger priority with some specialization in water and the like and even there, you had a falloff of interest over time as it became clear how difficult they were.
They when you had the end of the Cold War, of course, there was a broader disengagement for a period from Africa in the ‘90s, and there again, you had a further diminution of interest, and much greater focus today on really the private sector coming in and having a role, and now, of course, the Chinese have emerged and others as major players, operating with a slightly different model around infrastructure, so there’s a whole new debate around infrastructure in Africa.
CONAN: Well, let me just ask you a question. I mean, there seems to be a perception that most of the money that is sent to Africa is to resolve these crises, hunger, malnutrition, disease, as opposed to things like infrastructure. Is that accurate?
Mr. MORRISON: Well, it’s true that if you just look at the U.S. foreign assistance program, the bilaterals foreign assistance program, the U.S. is consistently investing around a billion dollars a year in emergency humanitarian programs, but of late, in the last few years, and this is a surprising development, you see a return to much higher development assistance commitments by the U.S. government, including when you have the creation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a new interest in putting significant resources against infrastructure in countries, in select countries that are seen as good performers on both economic and political grounds.
And so you see now countries like Benin, Senegal, Ghana, Madagascar, countries which are seen as on the path to reform and deserving and capable of coming forward with large-scale plans for upgrading their infrastructure, getting, you know, now being in the queue, if not already awarded major grants towards infrastructure.
CONAN: Telecommunications in Africa is gaining a lot of momentum these days, no longer seen as a luxury for developing countries but as a prerequisite for economic growth. Joining us now by phone from here in Washington, DC, is Mohammed Ibrahim. He’s the chairman of the board of Celtel. Nice of you to be with us today.
Mr. MOHAMMED IBRAHIM (Chairman of the Board, Celtel): Hello.
CONAN: Tell us why cell phones have become so universally popular in Africa.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Well, phones really fill in a gap which is really needed. Over a hundred years of operation, the fixed operators really failed to provide Africa with a credible infrastructure, mainly because of lack of investment and mismanagement, over employment, et cetera, and the cell phones came really to fill in a huge gap, and it proved to be very successful, and we built the infrastructure without resort to aid or help from anybody and actual built successful businesses there.
CONAN: Successful business, so this is private, all.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Yes, absolutely private.
CONAN: And wireless, is wireless easier to develop than the old system of landlines with, you know, towers?
Mr. IBRAHIM: Absolutely. Given the distances in Africa, I mean, you, you’re, Africa really is a huge continent, and many African countries are, you take the Congo, Sudan or, these are bigger than the whole of Western Europe. It’s very difficult and uneconomic to bury cable throughout. Wireless proved to be the solution. The cost per subscriber for developing advanced wireless GCM network there is well below $150 per subscriber. It costs three times that to build a fixed operation.
CONAN: I understand that it has been especially helpful to people in rural areas, farmers, who are suddenly able to contact, they’re not limited to just the person who comes around to buy their crops. They can get prices from town.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Absolutely. It is essential for everybody. Africa is huge. I mean, I always say equity, what is equity in a phone call? What is the value of a phone call? If you are in DC here or in New York or somewhere, you can send a letter to boss information somebody. You are sure it’s gonna be arrive next morning. You can use a fixed line. You can pick up a taxi, a cab, and go there. You can use Underground, you can, but not of these alternatives are available in Africa.
None of these are working, so the equity of a phone call is extremely valuable. It saves so much in fuel and time and just communicate from one place or another, and this is correct for a fisherman as it’s correct, a fisherman, at the end of the day, want to work, to land his catch, you know. He phones three or four harbors and find what is the price of sea bass here, what is the price of the labia there, and he goes and sell over there.
Is no longer possible to con people into, you know, the role of the middleman dictating the market price is finished, and --
CONAN: Yet your investment is in itself pretty risky. As I understand it, for example, you are erecting a network, cell phone towers and what not, in Sierra Leone, in the middle of a civil war.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Yes, we (unintelligible) done that. But what has happened, I think people over exaggerate the, what is happening in Africa. Yes, there is strife in one of two countries, there is a problem here or there. But that is a huge place. Nobody says Africa, sorry, Europe is unsafe because there is a problem in Bosnia.
That is the issue in Africa, not everywhere in Africa there’s conflict. Where there are conflicts, they are contained in central areas. Even in the areas of conflict, combatants don’t poison water wells, which, you know, both sides will need to drink from. This is the etiquette of war if I --
CONAN: So, in the same way, they’re not going to knock cell phone towers.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Everybody lives off their telecommunication.
CONAN: Well, that that’s some --
Mr. IBRAHIM: None of our towers were touched. None have never lost a single dollar in infrastructure throughout this year. And we operate in 14 African, 14, one, four, in South Africa.
CONAN: I regret to say, I think there are examples of wells being poisoned, but nevertheless it is a risky investment, high risk, high return, quite lucrative.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Right, I would argue it was not high risk. I am happy that it’s a perceived high risk, because this kept the big operators out of Africa, because it’s perceived this is too risky. That gives chance to small companies, so I’m very grateful for those guys who thought it was risky.
CONAN: I’ve read a quote --
Mr. IBRAHIM: Between you and me, it was not risky.
CONAN: I’ve read a quote from you that this is the first time in your career in which your heart and wallet have been in the same place.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the job we’ve done in Africa was wonderful. We created so many high-quality jobs, direct employment, then indirect employments, because we use scratch cards, prepaid systems. All our customers have to go out in the morning to buy scratch cards. And, of course, in 14 countries we have, there is a business of over $3 billion a year.
There is 120,000 points of sale, can you believe that, 120,000 points of sale. How many entrepreneurs sprang out for action in our 14 countries? These are all private businesses.
CONAN: Mohammed --
Mr. IBRAHIM: The people who build our towers, people who refuel them, the batteries, the, a lot of jobs was created around us.
CONAN: Mohammed Ibrahim, thank you very much. We know you’re busy and have to run off to a meeting, we appreciate your time today.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Thank you very much.
CONAN: Mohammed Ibrahim, chairman of Celtel, Africa’s largest pan-African wireless company, he joined us today by phone from here in Washington, D.C. We did want to get the chance to speak with him before he went away to make another speech. And, therefore, we’ll have to start with your calls after we come back from the break.
If you’d like to join the conversation about infrastructure in Africa, both the promise and the problems, our number is 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK, e-mail us, [e-mail]. I’m Neal Conan, we’ll be back after the break. It’s TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan in Washington. We’re talking today about Africa, specifically the practical aspects of economic development, including roads, telecommunications, infrastructure.
With us is Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Of course, you’re welcome to join us as well: 800-989-8255, e-mail is [e-mail].
Let’s go right to the phones. This is Chris, Chris calling us from Lansing, Michigan.
CHRIS (Caller): Yeah, I was a Peace Corp volunteer in Togo and then I was a journalist doing freelance with BBC all around West Africa. And I drove my motorcycle linking village to village, crossing borders.
CONAN: You’re a brave man, Chris.
CHRIS: I had some fun. And, yeah, not as brave anymore. But one of the things you think of is where can I get a nice clean road to drive on? And usually the best roads, if they were just done, usually by like a French or foreign, Italian construction, road construction company, were only about two inches thick. Now if you can imagine a road that’s got to handle a bunch of trucks, within a couple of weeks of making a brand new road that’s two inches thick, it’s already broken up. Just a snapshot there.
CONAN: Stephen Morrison would you say that that’s accurate?
Mr. MORRISON: It’s accurate in many poor countries. It’s not just limited to Africa, but perhaps it’s more pronounced where budget considerations limit you. If you were to drive around the outskirts of any major metropolitan area in Ethiopia, for instance, where you have very severe climate changes in the course of the year and you have lots of roads washed out every year and you have to go back and do major repair and you have very long distance, heavy trucking patterns, you get into a habit of simply refinishing them on a superficial basis with the full expectation you’re going to be back doing this again in another nine to 12 months.
CONAN: Another of those sobering statistics I was reading in preparation for this program, traffic fatalities per 10,000 vehicles in the 10 most developed countries in the world is something like 2.3. In Africa, it was 339. Chris, that’s why I said, Chris, you have to be a brave person to drive a motorcycle on some of those roads.
CHRIS: Yeah, there’s a fellow Peace Corp volunteer from Zaire, a guy named Peter Chilson, I’ll plug his book, he’s a good buddy and he wrote a great book called RIDING THE DEMON: ON THE ROAD IN WEST AFRICA. Basically, the harrowing taxi rides that he took, he made a book out of because so much of people’s life and death are staked out in the road.
CONAN: Chris, thanks so much for the call, we appreciate it.
CHRIS: Okay.
CONAN: Bye-bye. Let’s turn to Zellato (ph). Zellato, I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly, is with us from Seattle.
ZELLATO (Caller): Correct, I was born in Africa, Neal, (unintelligible). The one big part in Africa is that we would all, actually the corrupt government there, and I’m embarrassed to say that I’m from there, I wish the European, U.S., western nations, perhaps come hard on that. They instead look the other way and let it happen to people. But people are the same anywhere. But the government’s corruption there, everywhere in Africa, is creating this ongoing problem.
CONAN: Is corruption, Stephen Morrison, a difficulty when you’re trying to erect these very expensive projects, roads, telecommunications, things like that?
Mr. MORRISON: Well, certainly any major infrastructure project, if it’s roads or ports or power generations, where you’re putting out huge contracts, has the very, very strong invitation for corruption. And so it requires very strong oversight. And the gentleman, Zellato’s comment is one that’s made very often.
The counter to that is to say, is to point out the many different points of promise in Africa and elsewhere, where governments have come to power with a very strong determination to curb corruption and where donors have begun to put money behind those governments which are showing a record of achievement and are willing to begin to, to reengage on infrastructure because they have a higher level of confidence.
This is certainly true when you look at the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the approach taken in places like Benin and trying to clean up the corruption around the port and road system, in and around that site.
CONAN: And, Zellato, as we heard earlier from Mohammed Ibrahim and just now from Stephen Morrison, Africa’s a big place not every place is as bad as every other.
ZELLATO: I agree and I thank you for having Mr. Mohammed Ibrahim. He is one of the very respected entrepreneurs there. We need, I myself an entrepreneur, we need more of them to help that devastated continent, I should say.
CONAN: Thanks very much for the call.
ZELLATO: Thank you.
CONAN: Good luck. Let me ask you, you mentioned earlier, Stephen Morrison, the Chinese who are investing in a lot of economic development, particularly extraction in terms of materials in which they want to use in, for manufacture in China and that sort of thing. What kinds of projects are they involved in, why are they involved in them?
Mr. MORRISON: Well, the Chinese have, along with the Indians, Malaysians, South Koreans, are coming into Africa and have been now in a very accelerated pace in the last few years. They’re coming in search of scarce commodities in the energy, hard rock minerals and the like. They’re coming in to strike political relationships. And they’re coming in to make investments and to engage in trade. And they’re putting a much bigger emphasis on infrastructure, unlike what we’ve seen from the Western donors.
And part of it is that they come in in a packaged approach. The business model that might be applied by a Western European, or North-American donor or a private investor in how they go about doing the business is quite different with respect to the Chinese.
The Chinese are making a very long-term, generational investment in these countries. They believe that they will be generating jobs for their own corporations, which often come in with the laborers and with the inputs. So there’s very direct, home-tied benefits to their own industries. They believe, in some cases, that they can bring strong controls over the quality of what they produce. But they’ve also been criticized in many places for low quality in the construction standards that they have pursued.
CONAN: There’s also been accusations that they are less concerned, perhaps, with human rights and corruption than Western governments. Is that accurate, or is that sour grapes?
Mr. MORRISON: Well, they’ve come under very strong criticism, deservedly so, with respect to the Sudan and their indulgences of Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I think, though, we have to be careful in looking at the, in making categorical statements at this point, about Chinese behavior in Africa.
Because the Chinese are making very sizable investments in places like Nigeria and Angola and elsewhere and I don’t believe they have an interest in seeing those investments squandered in a short period of time. That will only burn out the goodwill for them and their own interest in continuing. And as I said earlier, this is a long-term, generational investment that they’re making.
CONAN: Let’s get another caller in, Sarah, Sarah’s with us from Tallahassee, in Florida.
SARAH (Caller): Hi, I am an undergrad at FSU. And I’m studying telecommunications. And speaking about the infrastructure, the telecommunications, I guess I was wondering what is the protection of the underprivileged people here? Is there a safeguard against money coming in and creating sort of a huge capitalistic machine? And, you know, these people can’t, these people, the people who maybe can use the internet for help won’t be getting it and they’re just worried about food.
What are some of the, what can these elements of the infrastructure bring to less privileged people instead of just sort of an economic capitalist machine for foreigners?
CONAN: Stephen Morrison?
Mr. MORRISON: Okay, let’s, let’s look at two pieces of this question. On the cell phone technology and the rather remarkable and surprising spread of that technology into poor settings in Africa. It’s had a very broad, democratizing and leveling impact in the sense that poor people have demonstrated their interest in picking up that technology, making it part of their lives and it’s been affordable. And, in that sense, you can say it’s had a liberating and empowering impact in bringing greater economic life, economic vitality and access to information and the like.
It has not yet though, translated into really broad equitable access to the internet, in the same way that it has in other settings like in Asia. And that has to do with the further, the enduring limitations in terms of infrastructure on technology side within Africa as compared to many places in Asia and the like.
Now, on the other question on roads, let’s take the Chad Cameroon Pipeline as an example. Here is an instance where oil corporations, the World Bank, NGOs come together with the government of Chad and put together a $3.7 billion pipeline to bring oil forward. And the earnings from the oil are supposed to be dedicated towards schools, education, road building and the like for broad beneficial impacts.
Now this has been going on for about a year and a half, it’s in a bit of crisis right now. There’s been a lot of questions around the equity. Some of the most recent investigations in The New York Times and elsewhere have shown that, in fact, the big contracts on road construction that have come out of that experiment, which is a very promising experiment, have, in fact, lined the pockets of relatives of President Deby of Chad and raised the whole question that Sarah brings forward, which is, at the level of this average citizen, how much benefit actually accrues to the citizen in terms of access to well paved roads that weren't there before that could connect them to markets.
So, even under the most carefully managed projects, things can go off the rails.
CONAN: Sarah, thanks for the question.
SARAH: Thank you.
CONAN: Alright, joining us now is someone who also knows a bit about roads. Eloho Otobo is chief of the policy analysis and monitoring unit in the office of the special advisor for Africa at the United Nations. He joins us now by telephone from New York City.
Very good of you to join us today, sir.
Mr. ELOHO OTOBO (United Nations): Thank you very much.
CONAN: I wanted to ask you about some of the projects Stephen Morrison was just referring to. The difficulty of building such capital intensive projects in these regions, it's daunting.
Mr. OTOBO: Absolutely. It is daunting from every perspective. It's daunting from the point of view of mobilizing the finances and I think it give the figure of $3.7 billion as the cost of that project. It is also daunting from the point of view of managing them, and it's daunting from the point of view, also, of building partnership.
Nonetheless, the size of the challenge or the scale of the challenge should not be an excuse for inaction, and I think the power plant which you talked about and other projects under, (unintelligible) does an underlying commitment of African leaders to grapple with that challenge.
CONAN: The importance of these projects cannot be underestimated. Again, reading statistics, the difficulties of internal transportation within the continent of Africa has been described as adding like a 10 percent tariff to every African export.
Mr. OTOBO: Right. Absolutely, and that is even true of the landlocked, least developed countries. As you know, quite a number of African countries are landlocked, and these landlocked countries have to transit through what you call the coastal states and that means that because you just identified, is in fact, mostly with those landlocked countries that have these greater constraints on transportation.
For the coastal states, the problem is less so. But that having been said, it's also true even for the coastal state that in some cases, they find it difficult to move goods from the hinterland, right, to the coastal. The key challenge to address here is improved road transportation and where possible rails, some of the countries have rail lines, which suffer from bad maintenance policies.
Therefore, it is a two-track approach that we are talking about that can revive that. One, maintain the existing rail and road links and build new ones in order to get good from the hinterland at a cheaper cost.
CONAN: We're talking today about infrastructure in Africa. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR news.
And let's get another caller on the line. This is Eric. Eric's with us from Cincinnati, Ohio.
ERIC (Caller):
Yeah, this is Eric from Cincinnati. I'm an African from Ghana. And I want to thank you and your guest for identifying the few success stories in Africa and that it's not a miserable continent.
And what I want to say is that, I think some of the time Africans take ownership of their problems and reduce that dependency on Western countries as (unintelligible) all, all the time come in. I remember one time on your program, you discussed about west, I mean (unintelligible) care companies spending more on potential drugs than on tropical diseases.
CONAN: Yes.
ERIC: This shows that if we don't take ownership of our problems, nobody's going to solve it for us. Nobody's going to come in. Look at what's happening in Sudan, in Niger, in all those places. People are dying. We have to come up with solutions to help ourselves rather than depending on western countries to pour out manna from heaven. Thank you.
CONAN: Thank you very much for the call, Eric. But let me ask both of our guests, isn't this to some degree a chicken and the egg problem? You need large capital to begin some of these huge infrastructure projects. Where else is that capital going to come from? Of course, if you have them, then maybe Africa can start its own development and generate more income of itself. Mr. Otobo?
Mr. OTOBO: Yeah, well, you see, the question --
First of all, let me reply to the last caller, because he said something which is interesting about the ownership. He is from Ghana and Ghana is an exemplary contributor in the (unintelligible) countries. It is the first country that has a completed peer review mechanism under the African Peer Review, under the APR and cultural initiative under (unintelligible).
And ownership is the central organizing principle of (unintelligible). Now, it is true, historically, if you look at the economic history of all the countries, including your own country, United States, when a country is at a developing stage, there is no question that they will need foreign capital. When the United States was developing, it needed money from England. At that time, England, the United Kingdom was the financial hegemony, so there is no inherent incompatibility between ownership and looking for external resources. I think what would be a pity is to be completely and perpetually dependent on external resources, but insofar as this capital come, either in