By 2050, just 32 short years from now, Africa’s growing population will tip the scales at a whopping 2 billion, with a youth of 840 million. In the process, the continent will overtake the populations of China and India combined.
Financing Africa’s development needs will require an estimated USD 600-700 billion per annum. According to the African Development Bank’s African Economic Outlook 2018, of this, about USD 130-170 billion a year in infrastructure will be needed.
To address these challenges, the African Development Bank has launched the Africa Investment Forum, a platform to mobilize private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds and the private sector to facilitate infrastructure projects with the capacity to transform the continent.
The Premier of Gauteng Province, Africa’s seventh largest economy, David Makhura, endorsed the Forum as a game changer for financing Africa’s infrastructure development at the launch of the African Investment Forum in Johannesburg.
“It’s an honour to receive a vote of confidence from one of the most influential, respected and credible institutions of our continent. I want to assure the African Development Bank, and members of the African and global investor community that we are ready to host a highly successful Africa Investment Forum in November. We have an impeccable track record of hosting continental and global events of the magnitude and significance represented by the Africa Investment Forum,” Makhura said at the formal launch of the Forum.
The Bank and the Government of Gauteng Province on Tuesday signed a memorandum of agreement to host the inaugural edition of the Africa Investment Forum from November 7 to 9, 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Africa Investment Forum endorsed as a game changer for financing Africa’s infrastructure development
New USAID project to continue fight against HIV in Ethiopia
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) recently concluded its Mulu Most At Risk Populations Project to combat HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia and is announcing the launch of a new follow-on project, HIV Services for Key and Priority Populations Activity.
Over the past five years, USAID’s Mulu Most At Risk Populations Project provided community-based HIV services through a network of public and private facilities. The project also established drop-in centers that offered comprehensive and confidential HIV testing, care, and treatment reaching more than 600,000 female sex workers and other individuals at high risk of contracting HIV infection. The Mulu Most At Risk Populations Project was part of USAID’s comprehensive support to fight HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
To build on this progress, USAID is launching its new five-year HIV Services for Key and Priority Populations activity. Through community-based clinical services and public laboratory facilities, the project will continue to improve HIV testing, link people to HIV treatment, and track viral load suppression. In doing so, the project will aim to help Ethiopia reach the UNAIDS and PEPFAR goal of having 90 percent of people living with HIV diagnosed, 90 percent of diagnosed people on antiretroviral treatment, and 90 percent of people in treatment with a fully suppressed viral load by 2020.
African Development Bank approves USD1.5 million for Jigiwa on-grid IPP solar power procurement program
The Board of Directors of the African Development Bank has approved a USD 1.5-million grant from the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA) to support the Nigerian Government’s implementation of Phase 1 of the Jigawa 1-GW Independent Power Producer (IPP) Solar Procurement Program. This approval reaffirms the underpinning principles of the Bank’s New Deal on Energy for Africa and its commitment to developing renewable energy and increasing energy access on the continent.
At full 1 GW capacity, the program will assist the government to achieve its national goals of reaching 75 percent electricity access by 2020 and electrifying unserved and underserved areas, particularly in northern Nigeria where access rates are lowest and increasing the share of renewable energy in the energy mix to 30 percent by 2030.
The approved SEFA grant will support the completion of outstanding technical and feasibility studies and the design of a masterplan for the entire program site. Subject to the outcome of the technical and feasibility studies, the Bank will provide additional support to the government in the form of funding of a transaction advisor to design and launch the competitive IPP procurement. The government has committed to de-risking the program through the provision of land and common facilities including transmission facilities.
Commenting on the project, the Bank’s Vice-President for Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth, Amadou Hott, stressed that the approval solidifies the Bank’s commitment to Nigeria in resolving the chronic power shortage and ensuring increased access to sustainable and cost-efficient power. He added: “It is important for us to deliver a seamless implementation and provide necessary support to the government to conduct an effective IPP procurement process.” An intergovernmental team led by Rural Electrification Agency of Nigeria will be the implementation agency for the grant.
Capitalism and Political Participation
For the first time in human history, a system that can be called capitalist is dominant over the entire globe. Such a system is conventionally defined as consisting of legally free labor, private ownership of capital, decentralized coordination and pursuit of profit.
One does not need to go far back into the past, or to have a great knowledge of history, to realize how unique and novel this is. Centrally planned socialism was only recently eliminated as a competitor. And nowhere in the world can be found un-free labor playing an important economic role, as it did until some 150 years ago. Such is the hegemony of capitalism as a worldwide system that even those who are unhappy with it and with rising inequality whether locally, nationally or globally have no realistic alternatives to propose.
“De-globalization” and a focus on the “local” is meaningless because it would do away with the division of labor, a key factor of economic growth. Surely, those who argue for “localism” do not wish to propose a major drop in living standards. Forms of state capitalism, as in Russia and China, do exist, but this is capitalism nevertheless in which private profit motive and private companies are dominant.
Increasing inequality of income, however, undercuts some of capitalism’s mainstream ideological dominance by showing its unpleasant sides which is the exclusive focus on materialism, a winner-take-all ideology, and disregard of non-pecuniary motives. But since no ideological alternatives currently exist and even less, political parties or groups to implement them, the hegemony of capitalism looks pretty unassailable. Of course, nothing guarantees that it would look like that to the coming generation, for new ideologies can be invented. But this is how it looks to a reasonable observer today.
One of the most basic principles of democracy is the notion that every citizen’s preferences should count equally in the realm of politics and government. A key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals. But there are a variety of good reasons to believe that citizens are not considered as political equals by policy-makers in real political systems.
Research findings shows that wealthier and better-educated citizens are more likely than the poor and less-educated to have well-formulated and well-informed preferences and significantly more likely to turn out to vote. They are much more likely to have direct contact with public officials, and much more likely to contribute money and energy to political campaigns. These disparities in political resources and action raise a profound question. In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs?
One aspect of political inequality is the disparity between rich and poor citizens in political participation. Studies of participatory inequality seem to be inspired in significant part by the presumption that participation has important consequences for representation. Inequalities in activity are likely to be associated with inequalities in governmental responsiveness.
Meanwhile, statistical studies of political representation have found strong connections between constituents’ policy preferences and their representatives’ policy choices. However, those studies have almost invariably treated constituents in an undifferentiated way, using simple averages of opinions in a given district, on a given issues, or at a given time to account for representatives’ policy choices. Thus, they shed little or no light on the fundamental issue of political equality.
The sustainability of democratic capitalism is already a different question. Note first that these two words – democracy and capitalism – were not often combined in history. Capitalism in the absence of democracy has been a common feature throughout history. This was the case not only in Spain under Franco, Chile under Pinochet, or the Congo under Mobutu, but also in Germany, France and Japan. It even occurred in the United States via the exclusion of blacks from the body politic and in England with its severely limited franchise based on ownership of property at levels sufficient to include only the elite.
Thus, it does not take huge leaps of imagination to see that capitalism and democracy can be decoupled. And inequality can play an important role in that. It already does so by politically empowering the rich to a much greater extent than the middle class and the poor. The rich dictate the political agenda, finance the candidates who protect their interests, and make sure that the laws that are in their interest are voted in (not in our country).
The American political scientist Larry Bartels finds that United States Senators are five to six times more likely to listen to the interests of the rich than to the interests of the middle class. For the poor, there is no discernible evidence that the views of low-income constituents had any effect on their Senators’ voting behaviour. Both democracy and the middle class are being hollowed out.
In effect, it is not for nothing that since Aristotle, and more recently since Tocqueville, the middle class was seen as the bulwark against nondemocratic forms of government. It was not by some special moral virtue, embodied among the “middlemen,” that a person who has, for example, ceased to be rich and become middle-class would suddenly prefer democracy.
It is simply that the middle class had an interest in limiting the power of the rich so that they would not rule over them and of the poor so that they would not expropriate them. Large numbers of a middle class also meant that a lot of people shared similar material positions, developed similar tastes and tended to eschew extremism of both the left and the right. Thus, the middle class provided for both democracy and stability. All of this is under attack by rising inequality. The middle class in Western democracies is today both less numerous and economically weaker relative to the rich than it was 20 years ago.
