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Sweet deals reported, sourness in reality

Thursday, November 27, 2008

DATELINE: Windhoek, Namibia  --  I write this dispatch, a world away from the terrorist attacks in India, directly beneath a now-emblematic African sight - one that's multiplying throughout the continent's' capital cities. Opening shots in TV reports from such cities often capture this feature en masse, for there are forests of them.

They are construction cranes, helping to transform urban skylines with fast-rising buildings. Close up, though, a telling detail that the scene-setting wide-shots miss, is that so many are emblazoned - like the one above me (top left) - with Chinese lettering, spelling out the names of Chinese companies.

 

Not since Chairman Mao Zedong’s not altogether successful efforts in the 1970s to win African friends and influence African people (such as by building the ambitious TanZam Railroad, to link landlocked Zambia to Tanzania’s coastal capital of Dar-es-Salaam) has China’s staking of an indelible presence in Africa’s soil been so determined.

 

As previous editions of THE MEDIA BEAT have highlighted, Chinese investment in Africa has been, with western media coverage drawing far too little attention to it, vaulting upward by leaps and bounds. In Namibia’s case, trade with China has more than doubled year on year, to approximately $400 million now - after getting a special boost from a state visit last year by Chinese President Hu Jintao. He extended an interest-free loan - plus badly needed money for schools - to this sparsely populated, mineral-rich country (rich, that is, in uranium, zinc and cobalt, as well as in the inevitable diamonds of the region).

 

But every developing country knows that there is no such thing as a “free loan”, and sure enough China is reaping its own benefits richly – those benefits accruing in large part via the fairly recently-formed Namibia-China Mineral Resources Investment and Development Corporation. The demerits, as Namibians see them, were spelled out for me by Phil ya Nangoloh, Executive Director of Namibia’s National Society for Human Rights.

 

"Workers bitterly complain about slave-like and exploitative labor practices” says Nangoloh, “while Namibian consumers have expressed deep concern about the import and dumping of cheap and unreliable Chinese products in the country."

 

I got to see at least one of these imported products. The roads here, like those in neighboring South Africa (until 1990 this country’s oppressive and illegal rulers) are crawling with “bakkies”, the South African argot for pick-up trucks. The latest addition is the Chinese-made Cam Leo, a diesel-powered double-cabbed truck to compete with rugged Isuzu models from Japan. (Detroit’s failing giants lost out here long ago.)

 

I didn’t dare try it, but the bold auto-reviewer of The Namibian newspaper, Torsten Schidlowski, had to of course, and he couldn’t avoid pointing out that while the Cam Leo is an inexpensive vehicle at $17,000, the rubber surrounds for its doors are “misaligned” and don’t even fit the doorframes, as well as there being other “fit and finishes that could have been done a lot better”.

 

It is with such shabby short-changing in its dealings with African states (including, notably but shamelessly, with those that abuse human rights and have poor relations with the West, like Zimbabwe and Sudan) that China is relentlessly gaining a hold on its essential supplies of oil and vital minerals for the future.

   

 

**CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN EVERY WEEK - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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IN THE SCANT TWO DECADES SINCE gaining independence under the legendary liberation fighter Sam Nujoma (pictured above left) who then made way, somewhat in the Nelson Mandela manner, to his successor Hifikepunye Pohamba (both pictured above, Nujoma to the left), Namibia has struggled to become a dignified, non-racial society among the free democratic nations of the world. Its national press (whose best examplar is that country-wide daily, The Namibian) works much of the time to hold the government to account for its policies, but as in many young countries, there is also a lot of nationalistic boosterism on display.

 

Local papers, radio and TV this week made much of the country’s being declared almost atop a league table prepared by the continent-wide African Child Policy Forum, which rated countries according to how “child-friendly” they are. Namibia, coming second in fact to Mauritius, was cited for its “appropriate laws to protect children”.

 

But laws are one thing … actual protection is another.

 

I am haunted this Thanksgiving by a visit to a handicapped children’s center in Rehoboth, about 50 miles south of the capital, which operates - like all social agencies do here - against a backdrop of one of the world’s starkest income disparities, and a complete decimation of the younger adult population, with more than 20% suffering from HIV/AIDS.

 

A nine year-old orphaned girl who has grown up in desperate poverty, and also suffers some mental retardation, caught my attention with her forlorn and at times anxious look, even among the fun of a casually organized “sports day”. Center workers told me they had discovered she had been raped twice in the last three months. And she is far from being unusual among this population, and those of other children’s centers around the country.

 

I am thankful for having journalism as a mainstay in my life. I am forced sometimes to face human realities so unwelcome that I want to turn away, and can’t. I’m grateful too for all the readers, listeners and viewers who don’t turn away from unwelcome news. And for strong souls like the Rehoboth center’s staff who also refuse to turn away, and do take action as well.

 

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