Aaronsross's Blog

Young and restless in Ivory Coast

Cross-posted from Global Post.

Ebrie laguna in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, April 15, 2011.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — On a searing Monday morning, Okaiconi Abe Cyrcille takes shelter from the sun against the wall of a ramshackle residence in Abobo, an impoverished district of Ivory Coast’s commercial capital.

A high school dropout, Cyrcille, 24, has never held a job. And by the sound of it, he doesn’t plan to anytime soon.

“It’s too hard,” he replies when asked why he stopped looking. “I’d like to fix automobiles,” he half-heartedly suggests, before conceding he has no experience working with cars.

The jobless, dispirited young person cuts a common figure here. Like much of Africa, Ivory Coast is home to two starkly divergent economic narratives.

On the one hand, macroeconomic indicators are soaring: In 2012, GDP growth hit an eye-popping 9.8 percent. For most Ivorians, though, those widely touted gains are mere abstractions.

Up to 5 million of the Ivory Coast’s more than 20 million people are unemployed, according to the Ivory Coast General Confederation of Companies, an umbrella organization for businesses, unions and professional groups.

Nowhere is this more evident than among young people in the West African country. Last year, the government pegged the unemployment rate for 15- to 35-year-olds in Ivory Coast at 60 percent.

Africa’s youth population in general is expected to double by 2045. Already, young people comprise about 40 percent of Africa’s working-age population but 60 percent of its unemployed, according to the Brookings Institution, a DC-based policy group.

Ivory Coast is intimately familiar with the perils of mass youth unemployment. It helped feed the ranks of the militias and rebel groups that waged an on-and-off civil conflict throughout the 2000s.

Those tensions exploded into a full-blown crisis in November 2010 following a disputed presidential election. More than 3,000 people died in the ensuing five months of clashes between supporters of defeated incumbent Laurent Gbagbo and challenger — and current president — Alassane Ouattara.

More from GlobalPost: International Criminal Court: Former Ivory Coast president’s appeal rejected

In the two years since the end of the crisis, Ivory Coast has made considerable strides toward stability. But its abundance of unemployed young people threatens to upend that progress.

“It’s a time bomb, a social time bomb,” said the commerce minister, Jean-Louis Billon, in an interview.

Many of the unemployed are barely removed from their fighting days. Not far from where Cyrcille sits, Yaya Diara, 31, roams an informal market in a black T-shirt and tattered jeans.

In 2002, he joined the rebel forces that helped install Ouattara into power. After a decade of fighting, he has few employable skills. “There is nothing. Nothing to eat. I only have 500 francs [$1],” he says, waving a handful of coins in the air.

ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM 

Arguably the most worrisome trend, however, is unemployment levels among some of the best-educated young people.

The percentage of 20- to 24-year-olds across Africa with secondary educations will increase from 42 percent today to 59 percent by 2030, according to an African Economic Outlook report, published by the OECD Development Center, the African Development Bank, the United Nations Development Program and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

Economists predict that this swell of educated young workers will accelerate many African countries’ drive toward middle-income status. But high levels of education commonly fail to translate into employment.

University students tend to view education as a ticket to a comfortable position in the public sector. But today, civil service offers relatively few employment opportunities due to downsizings of bloated bureaucracies.

The best prospects for jobs in Ivory Coast lie in labor-intensive and growing sectors like IT and agribusiness. The skills most Ivorian university students acquire in school, though, are poorly tailored to the demands of the market. Just 18 percent of recent graduates in Ivory Coast obtained diplomas in science, engineering or agriculture-related fields.

More from GlobalPost: Ivory Coast: refugees still fear returning home

Even those who do enter the job market with training in technology or engineering lack basic skills, owing to a university system that has resisted accommodating the job market and suffered deeply from the prior decade’s upheavals.

“They are asked to do things and they don’t where to start,” Diaby Cheick Mohamed, 32, the founder and CEO of technology firm, Waelya, says of Ivory Coast’s young graduates. After one to three months of flailing about, the new hires are often fired.

As the country stabilizes, international investment and jobs are slowly returning to Ivory Coast. And the government has partnered with organizations like the World Bank to train and place young workers.

But the magnitude of the crisis, analysts agree, requires both the government and young Ivorians to embrace an entrepreneurial culture that has long been treated as foreign.

Ivory Coast has a long way to go on that front. The World Bank ranked it 177 out of 185 countries in 2013 for ease of doing business. It fares especially poorly in the categories of “starting a business” and “dealing with construction permits.”

There have been hints of progress. The government recently streamlined the registration process so that new businesses can be established within 48 hours. Before, the process usually took three weeks to a month.

Henri-Bernard Solignac-Lecomte of the OECD Development Center stresses that young people must start creating their own jobs. They could take a page out of Mohamed’s playbook. He founded Waleya in 2000 as a 19-year-old college student, capitalizing on his rare knowledge at the time of web design. Since then, he has expanded the company into marketing, public relations and research and development.

Not all young Ivorians can emulate Mohamed’s example, but even in the trash-ridden streets of Abobo there are signs of life.

Twenty-year-old Miriame Soumahoro sits in front of her wooden stand behind a neighborhood mosque eating lunch. She left her job as a supermarket cashier not long ago to start her own business selling wigs. Sales, she reports between bites of fried plantain, have been brisk.

More Economist

From the last two weeks for The Economist’s Baobab blog…

A rising star – my mini-profile of the Ivorian government’s free-market guru, commerce minister Jean-Louis Billon

The calm and the storm – a recap of Ivory Coast’s calm elections and their not-so-calm aftermath

Link to Economist story on Ivorian justice

This week in The Economist, I write about the Ivorian government’s decision to begin exhuming the bodies of victims of the 2010-11 post-election crisis.

Report: Uneven justice could hurt stability in Ivory Coast

Cross posted from The Christian Science Monitor.

Africa plans for a new industrial revolution

Cross posted from GlobalPost.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Europe’s Industrial Revolution spurred unprecedented technological and economic progress. It also inflicted a tremendous human cost. Millions of workers toiled in dangerous conditions. The same would hold true some two centuries later in East Asia, where explosive industrial growth was coupled with sweatshops and child labor.

Now African leaders are plotting their own era of mass industrialization. In the Ivorian capital Abidjan this week, delegates from across the continent and beyond gathered for a six-day conference themed, “Industrialization for an EmergingAfrica.” A high-powered panel of speakers declared Africa primed to take off as the new “workbench of the world.”

“Industrialization cannot be considered a luxury but a necessity for the continent’s development,” said Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, the new head of the African Union Commission.

Carlos Lopes, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), declared Africa primed for a “structural transformation,” with industrialization and value-added activities supplanting agriculture and raw commodities exports as the cornerstone of the continent’s economic activity.

The lofty rhetoric masked a distinct lack of specific proposals for achieving such goals. But the conference reflected a growing consensus among African leaders and observers that to sustain its high levels of growth beyond commodities booms, industrialization must be prioritized—and the sooner the better.

For Africa’s workers, the prospect of sweeping industrialization carries promise and peril. On a continent that has simultaneously recorded some of the world’s highest rates of growth and unemployment, labor-intensive industry could bring millions of new jobs for Africa’s bulging youth population. But labor rights activists raise concerns about what exactly those jobs will look like.

Imani Countess, the African Regional Program Director at the Solidarity Center, an international labor rights organization affiliated with the AFL-CIO, noted the downward pressure on wages and working conditions in Africa’s most industrialized country, South Africa.

Manufacturers, she said, are telling the South African government, “If you want to be able to employ the large numbers of people who are unemployed, then you have to allow a differentiation. You have to allow for, for example, textile manufacturers to set up a different standard that isn’t in line with South Africa’s national labor standards.”

Governments and unions that insist on higher wages and better working conditions risk being passed over in favor of cheaper industrial hubs. Indeed, Africa’s greatest potential appeal to manufacturers is its supply of inexpensive labor.

“These multi-national corporations—they look at where they will be competitive and where they can have cost advantage,” said Kandeh K. Yumkella, Director-General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). “Our people must make an effort to lower the cost of doing business, reduce bureaucracy, invest in other enablers.”

Those realities place labor advocates like Countess in a tough spot. She readily acknowledges that wide-scale industrialization is the only way to lift millions of African out of poverty. She insists, however, that companies can both hire and provide adequate working conditions.

“The argument that companies put forward is such a false one,” Countess argued, citing the benefits of a better-motivated workforce, increased productivity, and a positive public image. “Because the kinds of investment that we’re talking about on the part of manufacturers and global corporations isn’t one that negatively impacts their bottom line.”

Chris Elias, President of Global Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, added that industrialization need not visit the same human toll on Africa that it has elsewhere. In realms like occupational safety, manufacturers now have extensive experience to draw on. He also pointed to the proactive stance many African employers have taken in the last two decades against HIV/AIDS to educate their employees.

Still, the future of labor rights will depend largely on the oversight of individual governments and international organizations. Asked by GlobalPost at a press conference whether the issue had been broached in Abidjan or would be at future gatherings, Lopes of the ECA only replied that the delegates “didn’t discuss labor rights as such,” although they did emphasize equitable growth. An African Union conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in April will address labor issues.

Despite the challenges ahead, Countess is confident that African trade unions are poised to fight for their interests. Unions in the agricultural and mining sectors have notched several notable victories in recent years. In Liberia, for example, the union at the Firestone rubber plantation won a series of concessions in its last round of collective bargaining, including a more than doubling of salaries and a ban on child labor.

“I think that if you were to look behind this meeting and look behind the push toward industrialization, you would find the very heavy footprint of trade unions,” Countess said.

‘Jews of Egypt’ Rides Bumpy Road to Premiere

Cross posted from The Forward.

A controversial documentary on Egypt’s expulsion of its long-resident Jewish population opened despite an initial effort by the Egyptian government to block its release.

“Jews of Egypt” opened on March 27 at three movie theaters in Cairo and Alexandria after official permission was first granted, then withdrawn and then granted again.

When the initial scheduled opening on March 13 was forbidden, director Amir Ramses filed a lawsuit and planned to project his film in defiance onto the wall of a National Security Agency building in Cairo. Several days later, after a domestic and international media storm, government officials reissued documents permitting the film to be shown.

In interviews with the Forward, Ramses discussed the film and the limits on expression that are ongoing — indeed, he said, worse — two years after the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship.

“What kind of people could be pissed off by my film?” asked Ramses, whose documentary portrays the tolerated, even comfortable position of Jews in Egypt well into the 20th century, until their expulsion after Israel’s founding in 1948. Ramses quickly answered his own question: “Racists. That’s one perspective, obviously.”

But, he said, “People are not giving up. Just because the film is out, I’m not stopping the exposure of the influence of state security over the ministry of culture.”

“Jews of Egypt,” which had a pre-release screening in October at Cairo’s Panorama of the European Film Festival that drew overflow crowds, was banned just before the planned mid-March opening despite two previous authorizations the film had received from Egypt’s official censorship agency. In response, Haitham Al Khamissi, the film’s producer, posted the authorization documents on the film’s website along with a furious statement vowing to sue “the Ministry of Culture, the Supreme Council of Culture, the Egyptian Censorship Bureau, the Ministry of Interior and the National Security Agency.”

Ramses explained that Egyptian security authorities had no power to interfere once a film has been approved by the Censorship Bureau. “National Security is just like my aunt in this case,” he said. “She can like the film, she can not like the film. But she has absolutely no legal right to ban it.”

According to Ahram Online, the separately edited English language outlet of Egypt’s semi-official newspaper Al Ahram, the first news of a problem with the film came just two days before its initial opening date, during a meeting between Al Khamissi and Egyptian censorship committee director Abd El-Satar Fathi.

The film producer requested the work file for his film, the news outlet reported, and when the censorship official obtained it, he found a note in the file from national security officials forbidding the film’s screening “because it is a documentary.”

Fathi was quoted in Ahram Online saying that he himself “supported the film all along.” When he contacted national security to ask for details, he was told that “the film’s title might cause public uproar… in light of the tension on the street,” Ahram Online reported.

Yet at the film’s October preview, the only uproar came from Egyptians clamoring to get in. The packed audience included at least one prominent Egyptian politician, scores of older Egyptians who recalled living alongside Jewish neighbors and younger Egyptians curious about the history of Egypt’s Jews. Organizers had to scramble to arrange a second screening later that evening to accommodate everyone who showed up.

The audience viewed a film that features interviews with Jews who were forced to leave their homeland in the 1940s and 50s. About 80,000 Jews lived in Egypt before this exodus. Those interviewed recalled a cosmopolitan, tolerant country until frictions stemming from Israel’s founding and ensuing conflicts between the two nations led to waves of expulsions. Today, Egypt’s Jewish population is believed to number a couple hundred at most.

Despite its controversial (for Egypt) subject matter, the film steers well clear of anything overtly political. In an interview with the Forward the day after the film’s preview at the October film festival, Ramses said that his goal was to distinguish Judaism from Zionism. He argued that the conflation of the two has spawned much of the anti-Semitism prevalent in Egyptian society.

Since the Cairo festival, the film has been screened at festivals in Rotterdam and Palm Springs as well as before critics in Cairo.

For months now, Egyptian artists and journalists have complained about a crackdown on free expression by the government of President Mohamed Morsi, who was a longtime senior official of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, before his election in 2012.

Under the current regime, prominent actors and writers have been charged with defaming Islam. Media outlets critical of the government have also been targeted. Free speech advocates have warned that Egypt’s new constitution, ratified in December, undermines core freedoms.

In his October interview with the Forward, Ramses called censorship under Morsi’s democratically-elected government even more restrictive than under Mubarak. Now, he sees the aborted crackdown on his own film as an indication of just how blatant the suppression of certain artistic forms has become.

“It’s even beyond censorship this time,” said Ramses. “What used to happen during the ex-regime was that… they would never officially say to you that the film was banned by national security and definitely not after you got the permit. They would do this in secret even before they give you the permit.”

As a self-described secular advocate of religious tolerance, Ramses is alarmed by the current government’s course. He says the Brotherhood has not reconciled itself to divergent points of view from other Muslims, let alone from those of other faiths.

“How are you treating diversity in Egypt already?” Ramses said. “How are you handling even Muslims who think differently than the regime? You can’t even start talking about the Jews until you talk about Muslims who don’t share your convictions in the first place.”

Morsi and other prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood have been harshly condemned for comments they have made about Jews and Israel. In a video that surfaced in January of a speech from 2010, Morsi called on Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.” He went on to describe Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

Amid a firestorm of criticism from Western governments, Morsi did walk back his remarks, insisting that they had been taken out of context.

Yet Ramses hesitated to pin blame for his film’s travails on Morsi or the Brotherhood, given the apparent role of Egypt’s national security agency in its censorship. Indeed, Morsi’s own relationship with Egypt’s military and security forces remains extremely tense.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a far-fetched possibility,” Ramses said when asked about Morsi’s responsibility. “But I wouldn’t say it’s 100%.”

Whoever bore that responsibility, Ramses credited the government’s about-face on his film to “media pressure” generated by the vocal protests he and his colleagues raised. Thanks to that response, he said, “I have an official document stating that I can screen it for 10 years.”

Ghana: a model of interfaith tolerance

Cross-posted from GlobalPost.

A man walks on February 17, 2013 toward the St. Frances de Sales Cathedral in Cape Coast, Ghana.

ACCRA, Ghana — Ghanaians wear their faith on their sleeves — and on car windows, storefront signs, t-shirts, and just about anywhere else one could conceivably affix a religious message. In the capital Accra, there is the “Jesus is Alive Wheel Alignment and Tyre Balancing” shop. Near the Ivorian border, one can find “Jesus Jesus Enterprise.” Common messages include, “Everything by God” and “God Time is the Best.”

Such public professions of faith are not limited to the Christian majority. Muslims, who constitute almost 18 percent of the population, drive cars with stickers declaring “Allah is 1” and “Ya-Allah 01.”

But while these messages suggest a heated competition for souls among Ghana’s diverse religious communities, their relationships with one another are anything but. On the contrary, this most outwardly of religious West African countries is considered a model of interfaith tolerance and cooperation in the region.

Christians and Muslims host their counterparts for major festivals like Easter and Eid. Churches and mosques offer social services to people of all faiths. One of Ghana’s two major political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has adhered to a tradition in recent decades of having a Muslim running mate alongside a Christian presidential candidate.

Former President John Agyekum Kufuor responded to a recent controversy over whether a Muslim could ever be elected president tartly. “I don’t know how it could get into anybody’s mind to say that a Muslim could not be the president of Ghana,” he said.

Media reports on West Africa often conjure images of Christian-Muslim conflict. Violent inter-religious clashes have long plagued nearby Nigeria. The Islamist terror group Boko Haram has waged a relentless campaign of bombings and kidnappings in that country’s north with the stated aim of creating an Islamic state under sharia law. The seizure of northern Mali by Al Qaeda affiliates last year further bolstered impressions of the region as rife with conflict among religious zealots.

Overwhelmingly, those perceptions are inaccurate. A Pew survey in 2010 of 19 sub-Saharan African countries—including Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, and Mali—concluded: “Insofar as the conventional wisdom has been that Africans are lacking in tolerance for people of other faiths, it may need rethinking.” The study found that Africans typically views members of the other faith in a positive light. In most countries, a majority of respondents said they are okay with a political leader of the other religion.

Ghana, like the region as whole, is not without tensions. In the mid-1990s, small bands of Muslim vigilantes harassed Christian preachers who allegedly insulted the Prophet Mohamed. After the 2000 census, Muslim leaders claimed they had been grossly undercounted. Christians have complained about so-called positive discrimination in support of Muslim missionary schools. In one alarming statistic from the Pew survey, 61 percent of Ghanaian Christians said they viewed Muslims as violent.

These sentiments, however, have rarely translated into actual interfaith conflict. In fact, a more serious problem has arguably come from intra-religious squabbles. Ahmadi Muslims, adherents of a stream of Islam that originated in 19th-century India, have had a tense—sometimes violent—relationship with mainstream Sunnis in Ghana’s north.

Meanwhile, the former mayor of Accra, Nat Nuno-Amarteifio, frets about the “arrogance” of the dominant Charismatic churches, who “scream and rant and rave at two o’clock in the morning” in working-class areas. “I expect that someday government will have to take action or otherwise you’ll start seeing vigilante activities,” he warns. “But Ghanaians are so superstitious that they will tolerate a lot,” he adds with a sigh.

Still, Ghana’s tolerance shines, though its people struggle to pinpoint what accounts for it. Mustapha Abdul-Hamid, a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast in southern Ghana, points to a familiarity and trust bred by a long history of interaction between the two faiths. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the powerful Asante kingdom welcomed Muslim migrants from northern Nigeria as protectors and advisers to the court. In the 20th, Muslims struggled alongside Christians for independence.

“These incidents have been escalated into forms of what I call the dialogue of life,” says Abdul-Hamid.

The country’s religious situation also echoes its political openness. Ghana is widely hailed as one of Africa’s model democracies. Although Ghana’s Muslim population in the north tends to be poorer and more socially-marginalized than its Christian counterpart, it has, according to Abdul-Hamid, been given a voice in the political discourse. Mahamadu Buwamia, the vice presidential candidate on the losing NPP ticket in 2012, is seen as the presumptive flag-bearer of his party moving forward.

That spirit of compromise pervades both politics and religion. Reflecting on Ghana’s tradition of religious tolerance, Nuno-Amarteifio recalls a parable a friend once told him. “When three Nigerians need to decide who is chief, they fight,” he says. “When three Ghanaians must decide, they organize an election.”

Economist Story Links

Greetings from Abidjan! It’s been an exciting first few weeks in West Africa, full of new experiences, great food, lots of beer, a new apartment, and a series of long bus rides to and from Ghana. So far, I’ve been writing mostly for the Economist. As most of you know, that means no bylines. Nor can I post pieces in full until a month after publication. Nevertheless, I will be sure to use this space to post links to my most recent work. Below are three stories I either wrote or contributed to–the first a blog post from the Abidjan neighborhood of Yopougon, the second an Economist report on the state of the Catholic church with some of my reporting from an Abidjan monastery, and the third my report on Ghanaian Catholicism from Cape Coast and Accra. Thanks for reading.

Laurent Gbagbo and the ICC: Watching and Waiting (March 4)

The Roman Catholic Church: Flocks and Shepherds (March 9)

Catholics in Africa: Boomtown Church (March 16)

Remembering Anthony Shadid

For the one-year anniversary of Anthony Shadid’s untimely death in Syria, I’m re-upping this interview I did with him weeks earlier. It goes without saying for anyone who ever read a story of his that Anthony was the best, combining all the highest qualities of reporting and storytelling. Anyone who had the privilege of speaking to him can tell you something else–that despite being the greatest foreign correspondent of his generation, he was one of the warmest, most selfless people you’re liable to ever encounter. As a young journalist about to make my first foray abroad at the time, I found talking to Anthony the biggest motivation to not just get out there, but to do great journalism. More than a year on, I’m still a long way from fulfilling that charge, yet I find myself returning regularly to his timeless words: “It’s important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.” Anthony did that better than anyone. We all remain indebted to his legacy.

To read the interview at Mother Jones, click here.

Story on Egyptian football in “When Saturday Comes”

With the Port Said verdict just four days away, and Morsi’s government scrambling to curry favor with the Ultras fans whose reaction to the decision will be closely watched, check out my rundown of the last year in Egyptian football–and the key issues moving forward–in February’s When Saturday Comes. You can buy the issue at the link here. Not sure if there will be an online version available. If there is, I will post as soon as possible. On a side note, apologies for the lack of posting lately. I’ve been doing some housekeeping and traveling lately ahead of my move to Ivory Coast next month. I should be up and posting again shortly. Thanks as always for reading.