Brains Like a Shoe

Yesterday, Mo Ibrahim – the Sudanese philanthropist and mobile phone mogul – issued a new challenge to African leaders: integrate politically and economically now or else.

“Intra-African trade is 4-5 percent of our international trade. Why? This is unacceptable, unviable, and people need to stand up and say this… Who are we to think that we can have 53 tiny little countries and be ready to compete with China, India, Europe, the Americans? It is a fallacy.”

“Some of our countries, and I’m really sorry to say this, are just not viable…We need scale and we need that now — not tomorrow, the next year or the year after.”

Rather than making headlines with those words, Ibrahim had originally intended at the conference in Tanzania to award this year’s winner of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Prize – an annual award that is given to African heads of state who rule wisely and hand over power to elected successors.  The Foundation though could not agree on a worthy recipient of the prize.

So instead of highlighting a success story, he chastised the leadership in Africa: ”We are poor, we are hungry, we are going without…Something is drastically wrong. I think we have the right to ask our leaders: are they really serious?”  This gripping analysis does not need much further commentary.  The daily exploits of leaders like Omar al-Bashir in Sudan and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe against their people are well known.  Likewise, the daily hardships imposed on people throughout the continent by more subtle forms of political repression, corruption, and state decay are also well documented.  But what of the issue of state size and Ibrahim’s call for greater political and economic integration?

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Finishing up my second full day in Pittsburgh.  I am here with the Save Darfur team for the G-20 Summit. Yesterday, we organized a great policy briefing entitled, “Sudan and the G-20: what the world’s richest countries can do”.

The three other panelists and I had a really interesting conversation on the issue for about an hour.   We discussed the various ways that the G-2o countries can collectively support peace and political reform in Sudan.  I specifically drew attention to the possible use by the United States and other partners of an internationally-brokered  debt relief package for Sudan as innovative new leverage point with the regime in Khartoum.  If President Bashir and the National Congress Party truly commit to peace, then debt relief should be on the table.  But if they continue to obstruct peace and commit grave human rights abuses, their recent appeals to the international community for relief from their burdensome $34 billion in debt should be roundly ignored.  I will be blogging more on this topic tomorrow.

Until then, you can watch a webcasting of the discussion here.