High Atop the Ducor

Speaking of the Ducor, I had long ago posted some renderings from the ill-fated, aborted attempt at resurrecting the Grand Dame of Monrovia Hotels, back when the Libyan Investment Authority was expected to take over the property and redevelop the complex. That the Ducor is still vacant is surely one of the more tangential footnotes of the Libyan Revolution.

I was recently at a government office in Monrovia which still, either through neglect or persevering optimism, still had some printed-out elevations and renderings of the revamped Ducor taped to the wall. Slightly faded, they nonetheless revealed the name of the Italian architecture firm responsible for the proposal.

I hadn't seen these images of the reborn rooftop restaurant before; they weren't included in the press pack that accompanied the media blitz of the original announcement, I suppose. Not only do I particularly like the drama of the exterior fly-over, but also the Ducor's rooftop terrace is, in a certain sense, already a destination for evening revelry: there are near-weekly sunset gatherings on the two-level rooftop of the Ducor; they've occurred more times than I can remember during my time in Monrovia.

Not sure when the old hotel will finally be refurbished, or what its fate will be. There was a very prominent rumor over the last few months that “Hilton was taking the Ducor” but I'm not convinced as there's not even the slightest official hint of that, I am not even certain that a major hotel brand like Hilton would even really be in the business of taking over a decrepit property, especially in a peripheral frontier market, more common nowadays would be for a hotel chain to agree to manage a hotel as one of the later steps in a project. I should note that there is already a Hilton in Liberia: The Hilton Garden Inn, at the airport in Liberia, Costa Rica.

Liberia to Have a Sovereign Wealth Fund?

A surprising phenomenon has been growing across the African continent over the last few years: plans by more than a dozen African governments to develop Sovereign Wealth Funds. These large pools of government revenues, which are diverted from the current budget and instead invested offshore in financial markets for future savings, rather than spent currently or in-country.

These investment vehicles are much associated with affluent economies such as Singapore, China, or the UAE, and not the desperate circumstances of the world's least developed countries. But they have spread across Africa this decade, and Liberia could be considering establishing its own fund. Below is the better part of a February 13th Reuters article:

Resource-rich African countries are busy setting up sovereign wealth funds, but critics say the funds may not serve the long-term interests of poor countries that still need to invest in basics such as schools and roads. 

Three oil producers, Angola, Ghana and Nigeria, started funds in the last two years. Before them, only Botswana, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea had such schemes. Other countries are following. Zambia and Liberia announced plans for funds last month. Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have similar intentions. 

The funds can serve useful purposes, analysts say. Commodity earnings can be split into one fund for infrastructure and another for savings that can be used as collateral for even bigger amounts. 

"Africa needs higher savings," said Razia Khan, the head of Africa research at Standard Chartered Bank. "If it is done properly, the sovereign wealth fund and the accumulation of long-term savings essentially means that countries are improving their creditworthiness and opening up access to bigger sources of financing on more favourable terms. It does not preclude investment in infrastructure." 

But critics say Africa could reap more from its resources by investing in education, energy, and transport to feed other industries, rather than parking the money in liquid but low-yield assets in safe havens, as sovereign funds tend to do. Many successful wealth funds belong to countries with surpluses and rich citizens, which can afford them. That is not the case with many sub-Saharan African governments struggling to feed or educate their people, said Kwame Owino, the chief executive at the Nairobi-based Institute of Economic Affairs. 

"It would be a luxury to have. The political will may exist, but the economics of it suggest that a sovereign wealth fund is not a good idea for many sub-Saharan countries," he said. 

"In many of these countries as well, transparency is a big problem and the amount of leakage that takes place in public funds is a reason to be concerned." 

Liberia is looking at various models of wealth funds, including Norway's, the world's most transparent sovereign wealth fund, Finance Minister Amara Konneh said. The west African country also wants to avoid the so-called "Dutch disease", where a dependence on resource extraction causes other industries to wither. 

Botswana's $6.9 billion Pula Fund was the continent's most transparent on the Linaburg-Maduell index, with a rating of 6 out of 10. Nigeria's $1 billion kitty had a rating of 4 in the third quarter of 2013. The country added $550 million to the fund in February. 

"We have a real governance deficit," said Aly-Khan Satchu, a Nairobi-based independent analyst. "My concerns are that in a majority of these countries where there is a commodity-related windfall, it is proven already that in those countries the governance is the poorest of all the African countries." He cited Nigeria and Angola as example. 

Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in power for more than three decades, appointed his eldest son to run the country's $5 billion fund in 2013. That undermined confidence in how it will be managed, given the country's reputation for squandering or siphoning off petrol dollars...Angola's money bags have been stuffed with cash since the end of the country's civil war in 2002. It is now investing in developed-market equities and bonds issued by sovereign agencies, investment-grade companies, high-yield emerging market assets and Africa's hotel sector. Nigeria's reserve was created in 2011 for three main purposes. One is infrastructure, another is a collective savings account and another is a so-called stabilization fund, to cushion against commodity price shocks. A remaining 15 percent is unallocated.

The brief mention of Liberia is attributed to this January interview with Finance Minister Konneh, in which he states that Liberia is ‘looking’ at a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Liberia is a long way off from having one, and is obviously a much smaller, much poorer, and much less developed economy than even Nigeria, with all that giant country’s poverty, inequality, underdevelopment and other major problems. Yet Nigeria has staggering poverty, but instead of injecting its oil revenues in its own development, it has in the last few years opted to set up a separate, off-shore fund.

While some of the funds may be invested in capital projects, like public infrastructure or stakes in private ventures, a good portion of it stays outside of Africa, invested in bonds and stocks. Instead of investing in children’s health or education, the money purchases US Treasuries. Instead of teachers’ and nurses' salaries, the profits from the crude are going into the pockets of fund managers in fees paid in Geneva, London, and New York. From a Bloomberg report from February on Nigeria’s new fund set-up:

Goldman Sachs, UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG were among four managers named in August to help run a $200 million fixed-income fund. Eight more managers will be appointed before the end of June, with two expected to be announced next month, Orji said.

So, not only is the money not injected into the domestic economy, it is sucked up into the global banking industry and first-world finance markets.

This is not necessarily inherently evil: prudent savings for future generations, and global expertise in managing and allocating the proceeds from extractive industry could do a lot of good. The Center for Global Development has covered this topic in some detail over the last few years. In October 2011, it published a brief paper, “What Role for Sovereign Wealth Funds in Africa's Development?” that surveyed the proliferation of Sovereign Wealth Funds across Africa, looking at established funds like those in Botswana, and more recent developments such as those in Angola and Nigeria.

The paper raises a lot of the structural problems latent in a undeveloped, resource-rich economy, such as an inability to accept large injects of capital and the high likelihood and risk that such big accumulations of government cash and authoritarian attempts to disperse that cash within the country’s administrative budget would end badly. The heart of the paper sets out the ideal best practices for a successful SWF.

Which all sounds good, but starting point in so much of the discussion of African SWFs (and much else in the world today) remains the unchallenged notion that global financialization is good.  While acknowledging how incongruous it is for the world’s poorest countries to be launching investment funds, there is little exploration in all this discussion of whether or not more current spending, on infrastructure, on education, on health care, would be a better “investment” in the future than offshore investments in U.S. Treasuries or even just in foreign currencies—piles of cash.

The paper was also published before the launch of Nigeria’s fund, which has hardly been immune from Nigeria’s notorious politics, but more positively may direct some of its investment into Nigeria’s decrepit power sector. In the case of Angola’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, most of what has happened thus far is that the President’s son was appointed manager last June, a controversial Swiss firm as given a huge contract to manage the fund, and a massive expensive London office building was purchased as the fund’s office. The result on the streets of Luanda? The city’s street vendors were harassed by the police and banned from trading.

I know little about economics, but even after reading these papers, the drive to funnel resource revenues into offshore funds still seems a bit shocking, especially in our current age when the over-financialization of even the U.S. economy is widely questioned.

Most startling, and difficult to accept, is the idea that rather than better-paid teachers or more paved roads or clinics, megabanks like Goldman Sachs or politically-connected Swiss-registered outfits will be receiving their fee for managing the assets of the world’s poorest people, who are excluded from enjoying the benefits of their country’s natural resources, and that rather augment public and private spending, by buying low-risk assets such as government bonds or foreign currencies, the world's poorest are essentially lending the world's richest money. 

Plan for Rail Network linking West African Capitals

Yesterday's post on the development of actual, non-fictional regional railways reminded me of this Reuter's report from February 4th, a month ago, detailing plans to upgrade and expand the railway line that runs from Abidjan to Ouagadougou, primarily for mining operations but also for passenger services. Reprinted in full, with emphasis added:

Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast have decided to turn over operation of the Abidjan-Ouagadougou railway to mining company Pan African Minerals, and the line will be extended to its planned manganese mine, Burkina Faso's prime minister said.Burkina's premier Luc Adolphe Tiao told Reuters that French conglomerate Bollore's contract to operate the 1,260 km railway from the Ivory Coast port of Abidjan to Burkina's capital Ouagadougou had expired. 

"We've decided to create a new railway company. This company will be in charge of rehabilitating and operating the line," Tiao said in a recent interview.Pan African Minerals, which is developing a large manganese mine at Tambao in the northeast of Burkina Faso, will control 55 percent of the new operator, Tiao said. 

The start-up of production at Tambao is a priority for the government of Burkina Faso as it seeks to diversify its economy and tax revenue away from reliance on gold and cotton.Tiao said the governments had sent a letter to Bollore last week to notify it of their decision. The railway currently handles 40 freight trains and 12 passenger trains a week, according to Bollore's Web site. 

Bollore will hold 25 percent in the new rail operator, and the two governments will each control 10 percent, he said. 

A spokesman for Ivory Coast's Transport Ministry confirmed that a letter was sent to Bollore last week with the plans for the new company. 

An official spokesman for Bollore Africa Logistics, the transport and logistics division of the French conglomerate in Africa, could not immediately be reached for comment.A source at the French firm confirmed, however, that a new company would be created, in which Bollore would hold 25 percent and Pan African minerals 55 percent, to renovate the railway line and extend it as far as the town of Kaya, which lies some 100 km northeast of Ouagadougou and 210 km south of the Tambao mine. 

The source said the contract for Bollore's Sitarail unit to provide freight and passenger services on the Abidjan-Ouagadougou line runs until 2035. The new operator will be in charge only of manganese shipments from the mine, the source said. 

The prime minister said that Pan African Minerals, which is controlled by Romanian-British entrepreneur Frank Timis, was expected to start production at its manganese mine in 2017. 

An extension of the rail link from Ougadougou to Tambao should be completed by 2017 in time for the start of production, he added. The Tambao mine has raised its estimate of reserves to a total of 100 million tonnes of manganese and will produce 5 million tonnes per year, Tiao said. 

The extension of the Abidjan-Ougadougou railway is part of ambitious regional plans to create a rail networking [sic] linking several capitals in West Africa.Technical studies are underway to extend the planned line from Kaya to Niger's capital Niamey, according to the government of Niger. The study is due to be completed in March 2014. 

Studies are also underway to extend an existing line in Benin, which runs from the port of Cotonou to the town of Parakou, as far as Niamey.

 The background story on the switch control from French industrial giant Bollore to Romanian-British billionaire Frank Timis's Pan African Minerals is also intriguing.

Lagos Underground

Yesterday's spoof on an imagined Monorail transit system for Monrovia, something I have had hanging around for years, reminded me of Jeremy Weate's 2007 remaining of the London Underground system. As seen in a six-year old post on the Naijablog, Weate took the famous tube map and simply replaced the station names with locations across Lagos.

As excerpted from that blogpost:

As with the London version, I have taken quite a few geographic/artistic licences for the purposes of design clarity and readability. My thinking is ppp: companies with deep pockets could sponsor the design & build of some of the stations to reduce the strain on the public purse, and in return pick the name of their choice (see Zenith, Silverbird, IBTC). On the other hand, some of the station names strongly signal a poetic sense of place, as with Palace (for the Oba’s Palace on Lagos Island), and 1004, standing for the eponymous flats. Again, for ease of use, I have left out the Five Cowrie Creek that separates Lagos Island from Victoria Island below it – those familiar with the morphology of Lagos can project it onto the map in their imagination.
What a joy Lagos would be with this metro system (it could be part overground, and part underground, depending on geology). As with the London version, I have kept a light rail system heading due East towards Ajah and Epe from the shared stations of Lekki/The Palms – this is it to cater for the marshy terrain along the Lekki peninsular.
Just imagine how convenient it would be if Lagos had this metro. The highbrow set could take the Falomo line (Piccadilly renamed) from their Bourdillon mansions to catch a classical music concert at Muson – at last not having to worry about parking and ‘settling’ awon boys; one could shop for a picnic at The Palms, then drink and eat it all on the new-look Bar Beach; or one could stock up on no-one-need-knowjuju fetish-wear at Oyingbo market before heading for the Silverbird cinema (connecting onto the Circle line at Kuramo Waters).

While this is all fun, as in my own case, would that we lived in a world where such public works projects were reality, rather than bloggers' graphic follies. More positively, a light-rail system is in the works for the urban area, supposedly set to open imminently, and various high-speed rail projects are advancing in Nigeria.

A Far West, A Mushroom City

I think I bought these flashcards on eBay a couple years ago. Printed in Italy in 1978-79, they must be part of a larger set of fast-fact cards on places around the world. They would suggest something educational, although in reading the short summary on the back suggests that either these were for an adult audience in the pre-digital age or that pupils from thirty years ago were under a much higher expectation for reading comprehension than would be the case today—with terminology like “autochthonous peoples” and “insalubrious districts” casually included the explanatory text. 

The card presents a dynamically industrializing state, with the orderly and ultramodern Freeport on the front, and much of the back discussing trade and economics. The tabulation of figures is also remarkable: Liberia exported 250 million dollars worth of goods in that year, 90% of which was iron and rubber, or around 800 million dollars in 2013 inflation adjustment. 

As mentioned in a post from a few months back, 2010's figure was 823 million dollars, although a third of this was the offshore ship registry. The whole country had only 1.2 million people; Monrovia only 180,000. There are probably more than 1.2 million people in greater Monrovia today. My favorite sentence, unquestionably, is “…Monrovia, which until then had looked like a Western film city with twisted wooden posts, developed and acquired one of the finest ports of West Africa, which became a free port.” Great sentence, although I cannot imagine that the unfamiliar reader would be able to understand the connection between a wild west film set and pre-modern Monrovia. Although this was enough for the front of the card to declare Liberia “An African ‘Far West.’”

The card for Abidjan is perhaps even more fascinating. First, the image itself is so banal as to be mesmerizing; it seems to be calling attention to how remarkable such an ordinary scene of an office building parking lot was in sub-Saharan Africa before 1980. The back caption states that the block is “the Ivory Coast data-processing centre at Abidjan.”

The remainder of the back text is mostly devoted to an unusual description of Abidjan's socio-economic  “hierarchy” —the Europeans concentrated in the more attractive districts of Plateau, Cocody and Marcory, the industrial zone in Petit-Bassam. Then there are the majority-African districts: Adhamé, Koumassi— “high-rise towers of rented flats,” an intriguing image; and then “the ‘areas of spontaneous settlement,’ or shanty-towns.” 

Then: “as fast as these insalubrious districts are renovated to clear them of the slums, new ones spring up alongside to house the influx of immigrants from Upper Volta, Mali, Nigeria, etc.” The echo of an earlier, imperially-sactioned racism informs a modern sociological assessment. The final two paragraphs summarize the economic sectors in almanac form. “Abidjan really is a mushroom city,” it declares. 

These cards not only recall the pre-decline era of post-independence, when Africa hummed with progress and industrialization; for me they also remind me of early childhood memories, flipping open the family Atlas or taking down a volume from the Encyclopedia set, to look up a distant, exotic city or country, described in a handful of paragraphs. The brief, essential words conjured the cityscapes in my mind: “a tourist complex on the lagoon,” —what would a ten year old American kid see? Rare was the encyclopedia image of an African city in those days, and even if the entry had an illustration, it was but one small photograph in the decades before Google image search. It was left to interpretation, and the imagination.

Employment and Growth

John Page, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out in a post from this Spring, titled Africa's Jobs Gap, that "Africa Rising" does not necessarily mean Africans are rising. Employment statistics are not encouraging: 

Eighty percent of job seekers find themselves in informal employment, self-employment or family labour. These are not good jobs... 

Africa’s lack of good jobs reflects a feature of the region’s growth often overlooked in accounts of its success: Africa’s economic structure has changed very little. The region’s share of manufacturing in GDP is less than one half of the average for all developing countries, and it is declining. The sources of Africa’s recent growth – improved economic management, strong commodity prices and new discoveries of natural resources – are not job creators. 

While manufacturing is most closely associated with employment-intensive growth, there are also ‘industries without smokestacks’ in agriculture and services that can create good jobs. Investors in these industries, however, do not see Africa as an attractive location. Domestic private investment has remained at about 11 percent of GDP since 1990. This is well below the level needed for rapid structural change. Foreign investment is overwhelmingly in oil, gas and minerals. Industry in Africa has declined as a share of both global production and trade since the 1980s... 

For poor countries the export market is the main source of industrial growth. Africa has had little export success: manufactured exports per person are less than 10 percent of the average for low income countries. Breaking into non-traditional export markets will demand a coordinated set of public investments, policy reforms and institutional innovations more characteristic of Asian than African economies. 

Excellent Podcast: Peter Day's World of Business in Zambia

One of the best podcasts that I've heard in a long time was broadcast in two parts last month. The slightly unlikely platform for this insight into African development was Peter Day's World of Business on the BBC.

It seems precisely because Peter Day, an intelligent, experienced broadcast journalist who appears to possess no particular Africa experience and no apparent "aid/development" mindset, comes with his questions and observations without any preconceptions, that he was able to conduct such straightforward, revealing interviews.

What follows over two 20+ minute reports about the inadequate supply of power, drinking water, and transport both within Zambia and crossing its borders, as well as quick, perceptive dives into the country's rocky but stabilizing economic, political, and infrastructural scenes, and how these all interact. The interviews include the US Ambassador and the Zambian Vice President Guy Scott but many are by and large discussions with regular Zambians, from a truck driver, who can drive from South Africa in two days but has to sometimes wait five days sitting around because of transport bottlenecks, to poor people in peri-urban communities of Lusaka searching for clean drinking water.

There is also an insightful analysis of Zambia's copper mining industry, illustrating the challenges of transfer pricing, tax evasion, over-reliance on a single extractive sector with a fluctuating commodity price.

Well-worth listening to both parts of this podcast, first broadcast on 31 August and then 7 September, and available for listening online or download.

Kendeja Hotel on CNN

Another segment from CNN's recent Inside Africa report from Liberia, interviewing the new-ish GM of the RLJ Kendeja Resort & Villas, located beachside in Paynesville on the RIA Highway. The property looked good despite the cloudy weather, with the interview taking place by the pool under one of the nice thatched huts which is one of the best places in the city to eat a burger on a weekend afternoon.

While having been on the job for, as he reports, only 9 months, the GM doesn't seem like the best to have a perspective on how Liberia is changing, as he reports a shift since being on the ground in the type of visitor, from NGOs and faith-based travelers to investors and miners, in truth both groups make up the vast majority of the Kendeja's non-local clientele and have been since the resort opened in 2009.

The part where they show the on-site electricity and water treatment is also interesting.

What does Liberia Export?

In 2010, the value of Liberia's rubber harvest was nearly equal to the value of its cruise ships.

That's one potential headline that could be derived from playing around with The Observatory of Economic Complexity, a web-based visualization app that is co-hosted and developed by Harvard and MIT, holding trade data for most countries. Liberia, along with most of the world's countries, has data on imports and exports available for years 1995-2010. It's fun to play around with and it's macro-economically enlightening.

Rubber should be unsurprising, and although Liberia has no shipbuilding industry above Fanti fishing boats, it does continue to offer one of the world's favored flags of convenience with the Liberia Ship Registry, which I've mentioned before.

Just based on legibility of text size as an indication of significant exports, its curious and fascinating that  Liberia's exports were by and large just three classifications: Cruise Ships (31%) Rubber 30%, Petroleum (26%). As Liberia is and has always been an importer of fuel, the third category is a bit strange.

Diamonds, Cocoa Beans and Scrap Iron are the only other categories that can even be seen without zooming in, the latter not exactly being a growth industry. Raw iron ore should have significantly displaced these other categories the next year with ArcelorMittal's resumption of ore exports.

The Wealth of Liberia

To-day, businessmen and investors from all parts of the world have discovered the commercial and industrial potential that is the Wealth of Liberia"

Big thanks to Twitter bud Chris Carnel for immediately alerting me to this YouTube posting from Pepperbird Studios: a restoration of a c.1974 newsreel on Liberia, released to Yor-El Francis of Pepperbird from the Tolbert family's private collection. 

Every once in a while a vintage film or photo surfaces which embodies this blog better than a thousand word post. This grainy, colorful, 22-minute archival gem seems tailor-made for this blog, starting off with a Swissair DC-8 landing at Robertsfield, and from there launching right into a sightseeing tour of the landmark buildings of central Monrovia, most of them barely 10 years old at the time. It almost recalls this blog's Architectural Tour of third of a century later. 

Monrovia reflected in a graceful cultural heritage, but a city, as modern as To-day... Buildings steeped in the traditions of Liberia's rich history...Building reflecting the country's promise of a rich future. As with the imposing Executive Mansion, home of the country's president, William R. Tolbert...Buildings that reflect the civic dignity of the city, its commerce and industry... For the well-being of its people, the JF Kennedy Memorial Hospital..The renown Ducor Intercontinental Hotel also looks out to one of the islands first sighted by those early settlers, 150 years ago.

Its a glowing overview of the Camelot that was Late Classic Liberia wonder-story, the High-Tolbertian boom of Rally Time, raw commodity exporting, rapid industrialization, all narrated in an infallibly clipped mid-Atlantic accent, blaring trumpets heralding the excitement of an economy on the move in between the frenetic reporting. Act One is made up of several minutes of luscious street scenes of bustling mid-1970s Monrovia, looking spotless and state-of-the-art: leafy Broad Street lined with fine-looking buildings, all recognizable today.

There's current no information about who the customers for the film-making were, but presumably this was a governmental commission, although the Tolbert family's now-somewhat infamous Mesurado Group of Companies features more than prominently throughout the feature, almost to the point where the film becomes indistinguishable as a promotion of the conglomerate or of the country itself. In those days, as in other times, investing in the Liberian economy meant investing in, or at least closely alongside, prominent and elite families. 

That contentious issue aside, the film spends a good deal of time noting many of the government programs aimed at assisting the general population, in skills training, employment and the advancement of agriculture through higher education twinned with research and development. Tobacco, processed crepe and latex rubber, cocoa, coffee and timber seem to pour out of the Liberian hinterlands and through the humming, orderly ports of Buchanan, Greenville, Harper, and of course the Freeport. It's undeniably impressive. 

There are also some delightful scenes of Swissair's glass-fronted ticket office in the Palm Hotel, at the corner of Broad and Randall Streets, as well as the busy Air Liberia office, whose location was presumably on Broad Street as well, but this is a new one for me. Later in the film, the Wings of the Pepperbird are shown linking the bustling port of Buchanan and to the industrial hive of Mount Nimba to Spriggs Payne.

The entire film is quite astonishing. In its economic overview, a sequence of scenes breeze through factories and finishing lines for cigarettes and soap, paint and packaged seafood, window frames and wood products, none of which exist 39 year later. Only Cemenco is recognizeable, although the legacy of Parker Paint and others live on in place names. Likewise lost to war and history are the refining capacity of the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company. 

 Outside of the industrial zones, the Agricultural educational farms decentralized in Virginia, Lofa, and Grand Bassa, as well as the Liberia Feed Mill Company, provide a quasi-statal architecture of agricultural advancement, with a goal of not only building export volumes, but becoming self-sufficient in rice production. The Liberia Produce Marketing Corporation, like so many of these ventures, has since ceased to exist. Even these structures and facilities have disappeared. 

In contrast, the gleaming towers of commerce, culture and industry are all recognizable, standing today either as shabby shadows of their former selves, albeit serving the exact same purpose as they did originally (the Masonic Temple, Chase Manhattan Plaza, Centennial Pavilion, the Executive Pavilion, the Executive Mansion, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Finance, Monrovia City Hall, JFK Hospital) or standing as shameful shells of once-boastful monuments, like the E.J. Roye Building and the Ducor Hotel. 

Indeed, the early shot of businessmen arriving at Robertsfield almost exactly matches the picture on RIA's Wikipedia page: the airport's facility is the same building today as it was in those days. 

The entire feature is an amazing gem for Liberiophiles and history buffs. It's entirely preciously-rare footage of Liberia's golden era, from the sunny scenes of the new Gardnersville and Amical Cabral housing estate to the incredible breadth of Liberia's industrial facilities. Of course, the film is painfully bittersweet, as it speaks of the Wealth of the Future and Progress, barely five years before President Tolbert was assassinated in the Executive Mansion, the opening violence in a horror which erased every inch of Liberia's progress, much of which, astoundingly, has yet to return. 

Francafrique on Al Jazeera

Following on the last post about the corruption scandal in Guinea, a recently-broadcast 3-part Al Jazeera documentary is especially well-timed (now that Al Jazeera America has launched and subsequently Al Jazeera's website has been blocked in the US, I may be just teasing Moved 2 Monrovia's American readers). This excellent three-part exposé, The France-Africa Connection, can be accessed online in three 45-minute episodes on the Al Jazeera website.

While reading up the topic will give interested viewers more depth into the long, sordid, shocking relationship between France and its colonies, documentary programming like this are electrifying for their vintage footage, however fleeting. Anyone interested in African history can only dream of having hours to look through all these archive news reels. 

In this respect, Episode Two is especially riveting, concentrating on the shocking "Elf Affair," which revealed how metropolitan French politics were infused with dirty money from oil exploitation from Francophone Africa, especially Gabon. Included here are brief glimpses of rare footage of Brazzaville, pockmarked by gunfire in the wake of the Nguesso-Lissouba conflict. 

Legendary prosecutor Eva Jolly also makes an appearance at the end, calmly recounting her life-risking exposure of the Elf scandal. 

All three episodes reference astonishing chapters in this complex, often ugly history, such as the mention in Episode 1 of the now openly-admitted poisoning of Cameroonian opposition candidate Félix Roland Moumié, and the counterfitting of the Guinean currency to destablise the regime of its democratically elected leader, as well as some disturbing retelling of the Biafran crisis, where France tried to undermine British power in the Gulf of Guinea.  

Across the entire broadcast, the grey-haired, liver-spocked old men, sitting in their gilded salons in Paris, could not be more frank in admitting to and confirming the malfeasance and shenangians that went on for decades in French West and Equatorial Africa, from Conakry to the Congo. 

One of the more compelling interviews is Jean Pierre Cot, who, as a young public servant was named Minister of Cooperation in the early days of the Mitterand cabinet. Having never been to Africa, much less positioned within the corruption networks, Cot's year in office was a rare, brief moment of reform, retold in his own words from 30-year old footage as a baby-faced Cot steps off an Air Afrique jet to visit a village, and speaks of a new era of fairness and partnership that never came.

The third episode is especially fascinating. In post-cold war era, as realpolitik pros age and die and new powers, especially China, arrive on the continent, and the traditions of feality to Paris slacken. The bonds with metropolitan France aren't exactly broken, but in some cases are reversed. 

Gabonese President Ali Bongo's endless suitcases of cash, stashed in corners of Crillion Hotel suites, not so much lubricated French party politics, but became one of the post important power nodes in the entire country, hand selecting freshman ministers across the political spectrum. Rather than simply being an industrial-commodity exploitation, now cash was the main extraction flowing out of Africa with the Presidents-for-life playing their former colonial masters.

Just as this bizarre arrangement reached its sprawling, viscous apex, its main underwriters, the founding father of Cote D'Ivoire and Françafrique itself, Hophouët-Biogny, passed away. The other pillar of Françafrique, Ali Bongo, died in 2009, succeeded by his son. 

This last episode includes several pristine panoramas of the Basilica in Yamoussoukro... 

...but more memorably features some shocking footage of the night-time bombing of Gbagbo loyalists on bridges Abidjan, and hundreds scattering and falling as French forces fire on protesters outside the Hotel Ivoire. 

Rather than being the final unravelling of Françafrique, the arrangement seems to live on in a post-classic form, as French intervened in the Gbagbgo-era Ivorian crisis, and its commercial tentacles still firmly grip the economic levers of West and Central Africa in the Sarkozy era, when ministers who spoke ill of Françafrique found themselves suddenly without portfolio.  While Hollande has declared a new era, French companies still operate ports and mines from Cote D'Ivoire to Congo.