Ghana reflects progress led by Africans

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) -- Coby Asmah is a success in a part of the world that is hardly ever equated with success.

The design and printing business he launched from his dining room table 14 years ago now employs 54 people. He drives a new gold SUV, dresses as sharply as any Madison Avenue executive and vacations in the United States. And despite winning U.S. citizenship, he has chosen to stay in Ghana.

Asmah belongs to an Africa all but unknown outside the continent -- one of growth and business opportunity, with a tiny but rapidly spreading middle class.

Fifty years after Ghana became the first African country to gain independence, Africa's economies are expanding by 5.4 percent a year -- compared to a world average of 4.2 percent -- and are projected to hit almost 7 percent next year. Investments are up. Banking firm Merrill Lynch & Co. concluded that Africa now offers investors as much potential as Russia.

These signs of economic hope come as the world is increasingly aware of its broader stake in Africa. Rich countries fear any disruption in the flow of resources out of Africa, which now rivals the Middle East in the quantity of oil it sends to the United States. Terrorism has revealed the danger of failed states, and hundreds of thousands of African immigrants flee to America, Europe and the Middle East every year.

The picture across the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa is still very much a patchwork. But a yearlong exploration by The Associated Press shows that progress -- while fragile -- is finding a foothold, in spheres ranging from democracy to education. Perhaps most strikingly, after few results from five decades of advice and $568 billion in aid, today's developments in business, education, government and other areas are being led by Africans themselves.

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The cruellest voyage

In 1992, Kingsley Ofosu fled poverty in Ghana for the promised land of Europe. But the journey had barely begun when he witnessed the callous murder of his fellow stowaways. He escaped, and an article in the Guardian brought his story to the attention of the world. Hollywood and fame followed, but now he is back in Ghana, living in poverty again. Nick Davies, who wrote the original story, visits him in Accra and hears how it all went wrong

Monday December 3, 2007
The Guardian

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Ghana to UK: the new trail of misery

With the trial of two British girls accused of smuggling drugs set to resume this week, Dan McDougall in Prampram reveals how cartels move their cocaine to Europe by exploiting the vulnerable and the poor
Sunday November 11, 2007
The Observer

THE condoms are smeared in margarine or local vegetable oil, 'to help them slip down', says Kawko, holding out the white grains of pure cocaine in his scarred palm. Behind him, on the palm-tree fringed beach of Prampram village, dozens of colourfully painted longboats make land; the bulky wooden vessels heaved and roped out of the roaring West Atlantic by slender teenage boys.

'There are many other couriers here in Ghana; some have made a dozen journeys to London and Amsterdam. You can see the benefit it has brought to their families, even here in our village. Their mothers have stopped working; some have motorbikes and have bought fishing boats. Some have also died. A schoolfriend of mine swallowed over 50 condoms and died within an hour. He dipped the condoms in honey and they ruptured. He was foolish; the condoms were local, not imported.' Kawko gestures to where his youngest son is playing in the sea with a yellow plastic oil drum. 'I wouldn't want this life for him.'

Over the past few years a concerted shift in trafficking routes has transformed West African countries like Ghana, Senegal and Guinea Bissau into volatile hubs for cocaine smuggled from South America to a booming European market. Using sophisticated transportation networks and the latest communication technology to elude woefully inept coastguards, Colombian traffickers are establishing transit areas along the Gulf of Guinea that can only worsen lawlessness in countries already overwhelmed by crime, poverty and instability.

For locals the route opens up a risky but tempting way out of poverty. A single flight to Amsterdam from Ghana, via Morocco, earlier this year carried 32 West Africans, all of whom had swallowed cocaine packets or concealed them in their luggage. Impatient with the increasing arrest rates of mules, the South American cartels have recruited London-based Nigerians and Ghanaians to scour Britain's capital for gullible teenage drug couriers.

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Floods devastate northern Ghana

By Will Ross
BBC News, Accra

The severe flooding in several West African countries has seen Ghana hit hardest.

In the north of the country at least 20 people have died and an estimated 400,000 have been affected. Many of them are now homeless.

It is feared that outbreaks of diseases such as cholera are likely due to the contamination of the water supply.

The north of the country is relatively poor and most rural homes are built from mud and thatch.
The floods have washed away many such homes and they have also destroyed crops and people have lost livestock.

The whole country's food supply will be affected.

Dam released

The head of the government's national disaster management organisation, George Azi Amoo, said that in some areas whole villages had been washed away.

He said a relief effort had now been intensified and food and clothing were being distributed.

Materials to rebuild homes are also being delivered and the country's small navy has sent two boats to help ferry people to safety.

The homeless have been relocated to schools and other government buildings awaiting assistance.

The flooding in Ghana intensified when water was recently released from a hydro-electric dam in neighbouring Burkina Faso.

This may have partially eased the problem there but the consequences downstream have been catastrophic.

Floods have also been a major problem in Mali and Togo but in recent years this region has been battling not with floods but drought, with electricity supply badly affected due to the impact on hydro-electric dams.

Sam Jonah in The Economist

The sunny continent
Aug 21st 2007

From Economist.com
Africa’s optimistic businessmen

...Mr Jonah is a larger-than-life hail-fellow-well-met Ghanaian, who made his first fortune by selling Ashanti Goldfields, a Ghanaian mining company, to South Africa’s mighty AngloGold. (He jokes good-naturedly about The Economist’s somewhat sceptical coverage of his business dealings several years ago.) He is now doing well in private equity. As evidence of his bullishness, Mr Jonah is trying to raise $250m to build long-distance roads across Africa—the lack which is one of the most obvious failures in the continent’s infrastructure. His goal is to find 50 successful African business people, each willing to invest $5m in the fund, and then to use multilateral funds to leverage the money into the billions. “People in Africa, if they come together, can make a big difference,” says Mr Jonah. “What I want to do is put my money where my mouth is.”

There is increasingly a pro-African mood in the global business community nowadays, says Mr Jonah. “Access to finance is much better; now when I go to New York seeking a lot of money, I get a warm welcome.” Admittedly, much of this warmth is focused on the mining and natural-resource sectors that are Mr Jonah’s base—although, like Mr Ibrahim, he says enthusiasm is starting to spread to entrepreneurial parts of the economy. Strikingly, Alan Patricof, a veteran American venture capitalist, has reportedly been raising a venture-capital fund for Africa, and is not alone in seeing new opportunity in small and medium enterprises there.

One reason Mr Jonah is optimistic is that he regards Africa’s post-colonial difficulties as not particularly surprising or problematic. “People fail to appreciate the huge challenges African countries faced at independence,” he says. “When you think where we have come from, there has been tremendous progress.”

Moreover, much of the “help” Africa has had from outside has been of the wrong sort. By way of illustration, Mr Jonah points to three once impoverished European countries—Spain, Portugal and Greece—that might have stayed poor had they not been “rescued by their sugar daddy, the European Union.” The point, he says, is that richer European countries invested in these poor countries, “not as charity, but because they saw a win-win opportunity.” The same is now true of Africa, he argues. With a handful of headline-grabbing exceptions, “everyone in Africa is now getting their act together, with free markets and democracy.

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Independence recollections from H.E. Annan Cato

EXTRA! Click here to listen to extracts from our interview with Ghana High Commissioner to the UK, H.E. Mr Annan Cato as he recollects memories of Independence Day 1957.

Preview: In the hot seat with Joy's Golden Boy

Listen to extracts from our exclusive interview with Joy FM's Super Morning Show host, Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah as he discusses life as Ghana's top radio broadcaster, filling Komla Dumor's sizeable shoes and why he left the UK for Ghana... and never looked back.

You can read the full article in the forthcoming issue of What's On Ghana magazine, out next week and available to buy online at http://www.whatsonghana.com/.