Air Service to Liberia, forty years ago

A smartphone photo from an African year book from about 1973, which I discovered when suddenly finding myself in the Library of the Nigerian Embassy earlier this year (which maybe could make the subject of a separate post). Monrovia was served by six African airlines, six European airlines (SAS from Scandinavia, and flew from Zürich to Monrovia on the way to Brazil. UTA is French), MEA (Middle East Airlines) from Lebanon, as well as its own domestic airline, and of course Pan American. Today it is served by nine, one of which, Delta, is leaving.

A better comparison than number of carriers would be to tally the number of weekly seats on planes departing the country; many of these 1970s flights were not on jets, and even the single isle DC-8s and B707s from New York and Europe are comparable in size to the 150-seat B737s that Kenya uses to Accra today, rather than the two-aisle wide body A330s and B767s that British Airways, Delta, Air France and Brussels use on their routes to RIA, which typically have capacity of up over 250 passengers. So the total passengers numbers may have grown, even if the number of airlines and destinations is smaller (and continues to shrink).

Note in the short section under tourism the paltry number of tourists in previous years: only 250 in 1971, rising four-fold the next year, although the fact that the address is provided as “Government Wharf, Freetown” means they mixed up this entry with Sierra Leone, so who knows.

Lastly, I didn’t know Hughes Air West was involved in Air Liberia. At times it really seems as though all of corporate America was lending a hand to Liberia in those days. I'd love to dig into the Hughes company archives and see how that partnership transpired.

It Seems Official: Delta Departing Liberia

Arriving in Atlanta from Monrovia on one plane, December 2011.

This weekend the Monrovian flying public was wracked by news reports indicating that Delta Air Lines, would be ending its services to Liberia. Delta has served Robertsfield since September 2010 with multi-week wide body flights to the U.S. via Accra, first from Atlanta, then more recently from New York-JFK.

While one of the more credible publishing houses cites credible sources in its reporting, there was initially no official word from Atlanta. Normally, news of withdrawal from markets is reported after an official press release from the airline itself, and even though FrontPage Africa has now reprinted a statement to the paper directly from Delta headquarters, the airline has made no official general public announcement.

Presuming it is 100% verified, Delta's departure at the end of August would leave Liberia with weekly service by just two intercontinental carriers, whereas in May there were multi-week options to three cities in Europe and one in the U.S. on four different global airlines. Now there will be just a pair of choices: British Airways to London-Heathrow and Brussels Airlines, which is Liberia's longest serving long-haul carrier with its Sabena-heritage going back decades. Neither of the remaining airlines, of course, offers a critical trans-Atlantic link to the United States.

Air France, which had flown twice-weekly from Paris CDG to Monrovia for over three years, stopped its service at the end of June, citing weak passenger numbers of poor revenue volume. It is likely that Air France headquarters looked not only at mostly-empty Airbuses but also its regional developments: in terms of its airline alliance and owned-carriers, it is still possible to fly to Monrovia via its network: Skyteam member Kenya Airways still flies to Monrovia via Accra, where Air France's Dutch subsidiary, KLM, takes a planeful of people to Amsterdam every single night. Likewise, Air France has been steadily upgrading its service to neighboring Abidjan, and as of this autumn will rotate in an A380 super jumbo thrice-weekly on its route from Paris, in the face of the rapid regrowth of Cote D'Ivoire, where it recently invested in the new national carrier, Air Cote D'Ivoire, which itself now flies non-stop to Monrovia several times per week. From Air France's perspective it probably makes more sense to have passengers connect in Abidjan rather than sit through a same-plane stop in Sierra Leone.

The good old days, c.2010

As for Delta, its ambitious, circa-2009 expansion plans across the African continent, from Luanda to Malabo to Nairobi, have been greatly curtailed. Visitor numbers from the U.S. to Africa peaked in 2010 have actually declined significantly in the past three years (I was shocked to learn: see below), and instead of spreading farther Delta has withdrawn from markets in the face of low passenger numbers, or security concerns: Monrovia joins an forlorn crowd of Cape Town, Cairo, and Abuja, have all fallen off Delta's map since 2009.

In looking at the last five cities those reductions left on Delta's African route network, it is amazing that tiny Monrovia has lasted as long as it has when compared to much larger, more important cities: Accra, Dakar, Lagos, and Johannesburg.

In fact, this is not the first time that I've remarked that it is astonishing that Delta actually started flying to Monrovia at all, much less flying past much bigger markets like Casablanca to do so, and it surely can be understood that passenger numbers do not justify what is surely a high-cost operation, in terms of security and crew management alone for such a small, distant destination. Ultimately, the Monrovia flying public is just too small for a three-times per week wide body to JFK.

Slower economic growth, most notably the still-lengthening trough between the frenzied exploration phase of extractive projects and the revenue-generating production phase of most of them, and of course Ebola have all surely contributed to a deterioration in passenger numbers. Most ironically, an improving socio-political situation has surely meant a decline in NGO activity (do such statistics exist?) which means fewer World Bank suits in the front and fewer save-the-world backpackers in the back of the planes.

Delta's arrival to Liberia in September 2010 was one of the high-water marks of Liberia's post war redevelopment; the first time since Pan Am departed in 1986 that an American commercial passenger plane scheduled service to Liberia. This blog has been progressively running a series of "Flying to Liberia: Its Getting Easier" posts over the years. Now that situation is rapidly retrograding.

The Going Rate for Office Space in Monrovia Is...

…$385,000 per year?!

In what seems to occur with ever-increasing regularity, the Liberian government was exposed in a shocking headline, the boldface type squeezed together to fit in all the zeros. Such an eye-popping figure jumped out of the latest j'accuse on one of the most recent controversies: the Liberia Telecommunications Agency supposedly signed a multi-year lease for a newly-built office compound in Congo Town, priced at $1,155,000.

How could any property, no matter how grand, command such a price in the world's fourth-poorest country? But the seven-figure phalanx is only the most densely-formed particular of the tale, which perfectly reflects both the artifice and the reality of this city’s social and political transacting.

Monrovia, like many African cities, is a place where astronomical real estate prices, rivaling office and residential rental rates in American cities, spike above a dismal landscape of unlit, unplumbed $10-per-month rooms, home the vast majority of the city's residents. The elite amalgamation of government, philanthropy and diplomacy, which is meant to serve these desperately poor people, sprays enormous volumes of expenditure, not towards their desperate constituents below, but high aloft into this stratosphere, above the zinc roofs and over the walls into the freshly-finished, $3,000 per month sea view apartments and quarter-million-dollar per year office compounds.

Another gated compound. Photo courtesy FrontPageAfrica.

What makes the situation, if not worse, than at least politically expedient, is these huge windfalls are initially captured by the tiny foreign commercial class, whether Lebanese, Syrian, Spanish, Chinese, Egyptian, Turkish, or American. Only secondarily does this non-citizen strata remit the ultimate rent to the Liberian elite: most of whom are currently or recently in government. It is not just a fact but a common practice that many of the tenants and ultimate landlords are one and the same. It is no wonder, then, that for decades and decades the Liberian government is constrained of office space, and must perennially turn to the private market to find suitable accommodation, and must pay the prevailing price.

The LTA saga casts all the usual characters precisely in this reinforcing relationship: the quasi-regulatory agency, headed by a returnee with an only-famous-in-this-town last name; the landlord-builder, not Liberian but a semi-mysterious, Chinese firm with a participation rate in the post-conflict boom that dubiously prolific, who together strike a deal for one of the plethora of "Upstairs Buildings" which have risen up across Monrovia since 2006 by the dozens.

Then, there are the brass tacks: the sums, the numerals, the commas, the zeros. And why not? It is a difficult country, hard to secure land, hard to build, hard to wait for a return on investment. Hard to trust someone. So it's the logic of the market, the invisible hand(s). It is the fee that is commanded. Who’s to say if it is a waste? There is no alternative.

And so, in one of the few remaining countries in the world where the GDP works out to less than one dollar per person per day, a million dollars doesn't buy you very much: a few years at your appointed office, high aloft with a view to the ocean, the air-conditioning floating down from the wall-mounted unit, relentlessly holding back the tropical heat outside the walls. After a few seasons, time is up, the keys are turned over, and it is someone else's turn to pay fictitious lease rates, and feel the artificial air soothe their skin.

The rent is so like that man-made cold air. It doesn't last long, and has to be relentlessly replaced. As soon as the machine is shut off, the oppressive heat outside leaks through the cracks. Like that cold, the rent is gone; it’s floated away into the atmosphere.

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. 

Yak Hunting in Liberia

 All Photos in this post are the property of Patrick Smith.

“Yak Hunting in Liberia” is the brilliant title of a post by Patrick Smith on the blog Ask The Pilot. Although Paul’s not referring to Tibetan pack animals in the title, he is talking about something nearly as exotic: a vintage Russian-made jet, a Yakolev Yak-40, which was used for short, regional flights across the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world. Almost a 1,000 of the 30-seaters were manufactured in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Read his post for more details and photos, but I am reposting here as I have long seen this disused, slowly decaying aircraft, lying forlornly in the overgrowth at the edge of RIA's runway. I've never approached the aircraft, the way Paul did, but I could read the faded “Weasua Air Transport” markings along the fuselage, and knew this to be an erstwhile air operation in Liberia which only lasted until about 2006, but remains the current local service agent for Kenya Airways, KLM, and Air France. The plane clearly will never fly again, but it’s unclear what will become of its remains, or whether Weasua will revive as an airline—as Liberia currently doesn't have a national carrier.

For more about Patrick, see his Flickr page.

A Pessimist's Response to Bill Gates

I am not a scholar nor an expert on aid, and actually find that debate tired and dull. Despite living and working in Liberia, I have not paid much attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Health, women's issues, diseases, and the other topics foremost in the Gates Foundation's efforts are probably the furthest outside of my orbit of familiarity and knowledge. My impression is that this type of work is both effective, and has seen enormous and commendable results in eradicating global epidemics and improving conditions for the world's poorest.

So, I was only half-aware that the couple issued a widely-distrubuted annual letter, so this year was the first time I read it.

What I read surprised me, and predominantly not for very positive reasons. The letter sets out to debunk several “Myths” about aid and development work that Bill and Melinda frequently encounter, which they find variously frustrating, baffling, and/or false.  As the letter begins, “By almost any measure, the world better than it has ever been,” and they feel anyone who thinks otherwise is misinformed and pessimistic.

I think I might be one of the people Gates is talking about, although I would qualify the label Those Who Think The World Is Getting Worse, more eagerly accepting an invitation into the club of Those That Are Worried That The World Might Run Out of Time Before Solving Civilization-Threatening Problems.

So, although I am no Chris Blattman, much less a Bill Easterly, I am writing this brief response to Mr. Gates Annual letter, not only as someone who may be a bit pessimistic about the world, but also as a reader surprised by the way the letter's arguments were framed, or more precisely, how the “myths” it calls out were characterized, and what evidence was used to refute them.

I don’t actually believe any of the myths that the letter seeks to debunk, but I do think the way the letter’s arguments are framed suggests a false choice between Believing the World Is Getting Worse and Supporting the Eradication of Extreme Poverty and Disease. It’s actually possible to both worry that many of the world’s problems may prove insurmountable, and being in favor of eradicating extreme poverty and disease as quickly as possible. In fact, it’s logical that one of the problem’s that pessimists are impatient about it’s the progress in alleviating extreme poverty.

According to the World Bank’s statistics from 2011, and excluding mainland China, the world’s poverty rate has only decrease by 10% from 1981 to 2005, with well more than a billion people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day, and the absolute number of people in abject poverty holding stubbornly steady for decades, as the world’s population has burgeoned. This is not just a problem in the least-developed world, by the way the total population of poor people in our own United States is at an all-time high. So there’s not very much to feel overly proud about.

Not too far into the letter, I was floored by the incorporation of juxtaposed pictures of Mexico City, Shanghai and Nairobi as proof of humanity’s progress. “These photos illustrate a powerful story: The global picture of poverty has been completely redrawn in my lifetime,” the letter states.

This statement may be true, but not in the way Gates intends it, I think: the concentration of wealth into a constellation of cosmopolitan enclaves does demonstrate a radical change in the picture of global poverty, but I doubt it reflects the high summit of human achievement. A panoramic view of Nairobi, Mexico City or Shanghai in 2014 would surely encompass more poor people between the picture plane and the vanishing point of the photo than an identical aerial shot from 1980. Also, a lot of those high-rises in Nairobi were built twenty- or thirty years ago. In short, I am baffled that this before-and-after stuff made the final edits of this letter.

Also included here is a little anecdote of Bill and Melinda’s visit to Mexico City in 1987 versus more recently, and how much nicer it was and how “everyone was middle class.” This is Tom Friedman column territory. 

The next section of the letter breezes through some statistics about income per person in some of the world's poor countries and how these have skyrocketed. I am astonished both that Gates puts forth per capita GDP as a stand-alone measure of progress and that the letter so casually equates per capita GDP to per person income, much less ignores the major contemporary issue of inequality. I say, tell that to the people of Gabon.

Oh wait, Gates actually uses Gabon as a supporting example for his case. Next to Equatorial Guinea, there is hardly a worse case of a nation that is wealthy per capita but scandalously under-developed in terms of human progress. Also, Gabon also only has 1.4 million people, or roughly the population of Hawaii.

Gates also repeatedly sites Botswana, which has about 2 million people, Mauritius, a small island with less than 1.3 million, and Singapore with its 5.4 million, and Costa Rica, with about 4.5 million. It might seem impressive to alphabetically list aid-free countries, but not so much when the population of half the list adds up to metro Los Angeles. Those ruled by hereditary kleptocrats are also not impressive when trying to convince us that we are living in an era of humanity’s unquestionable zenith.

Gates does mention corruption, but again conflates terminology in a way that is unhelpful. I know there are technical definitions of official corruption that basically mean, graft, but in the global corruption debate, the world also encompasses a wide range of theft and tax evasion. This is what pessimists are concerned about: the vast shadow world of hidden billions illicitly flowing out of every countries into elite centers and offshore havens. The example Gates provides, of a bureaucrat's phony expense report, falsely narrows people’s impatience with the fight against global corruption with henny-penny knitpicking over rounding errors on a spreadsheet of a single implementation project. I’ll skip the corruption tirade for now, and also spare conjecturing on reasons why Gates might avoid talking more broadly about corruption, but I wholly do not agree with Chris Blattman and others that those illicit acts that are associated with the term corruption have only minor and discrete effects on the development of mankind.

The last part of the letter is perhaps it’s most harmful and poorly reasoned.  I certainly hope that there aren’t armies of skeptics rooting for millions of the world’s poor to die to stave off overpopulation. But even if there are, it is hardly fair to lump people worried about overpopulation into the same grouping, or to dismiss them as “Malthusian.”

In the 21^st century, it is simply irresponsible not to contemplate the absolute limit to the number of humans that this planet’s life-sustaining systems can support. While Malthus and his disciples may have gotten the number or timing wrong in the past, that doesn’t mean the general concept should be abandoned—or that we are already past the point of too many humans consuming too much of the planet’s finite resources.

Chief among the fears of the world getting worse are the questions of climate change, habitat loss, and overexploitation of the world’s natural provisions. People like me are worried about the plastic in the oceans, the loss of forests and glaciers.  Gates simply breezes through any concerns of this variety: he sees a future simply made of happier, more prosperous people, without addressing our century’s great conundrum: that only current model that we have to pull people out of poverty results in more pressure on the Earth’s natural habitats and systems.  That is an important and necessary concern.

People like me worry about humanity’s negative impact, and how we as a civilization evolve our economic and social systems past perpetuating destruction. Labelling people like me as a group who might prefer babies to starve to death is not just unhelpful but irresponsible. While I applaud the work of the Gates Foundation, and I am glad for their strong advocacy, this letter ignored more issues than it addressed, and invented more myths than it disproved.

Building of the Month: Renovated Labor Ministry

 I've spent some time in my photo archives, looking to see if I happened to have taken a photo of this building before, but it doesn't seem that I had. Surprising, given its prominent location at the city-side foot of Capitol Hill, at the terminus of a high-traffic intersection where U.N. Drive intersects with the “Bassa Community Short-Cut” –a steep, busy hill that connects to Jallah Town Road, which means it’s nearly impossible not to pass this building heading into central Monrovia. Secondly, it is relatively prominent in its former role as the Ministry of Labor. Yet the building is so indistinct that I never lifted my lens to capture it in five years of taking pictures of the city. It was just another peeling, chipping, multistory rectangle of hulking concrete without present purpose.

And yet suddenly, the building's notability is not only its location but its envelope. Like an increasing number of buildings in central Monrovia, the erstwhile Labor Ministry has emerged from its cracked concrete cocoon to reveal the iridescent scales of a beetle-green glass façade. The effect is dramatic.

This rehab is the latest work of the CNQC Qingjian International, which is one of the massive Chinese infrastructure companies which has had a major presence in Liberia in the reconstruction period, as it has in dozens of African countries from Mali to Lesotho.

I don't have more information on the building's future use for now–for all I know at present, the Labor Ministry could be moving back there–but the choice of materials is striking both visually and in terms of what this new stylistic paradigm continues to say about Liberia.

On the one hand, the proliferation of shiny glass sheeting down the fronts of the city's buildings, a startling phenomenon that began about five years ago and had been noted on M2M before, speak to investors' confidence in the economy and security situation at street-crossings that ten years ago were war zones, with nothing but shattered windows. Secondly, however, this paradigm of throwing up expensive, flashy envelopes to cover over cheaply-constructed concrete shells to make glasshouse bubbles of class-A office space, sucking up air conditioning from diesel generators, is not exactly a contribution to a long-term future. Not that buildings are built differently elsewhere.

In the here and now, these Dubai-style glass boxes stand in stark contrast the the other 99% of the building stock. While I haven't had time to find out more about the plans for the building, I was able to shoot the picture below from Redemption Road, looking at the backside of the new block. It is a somewhat astonishing juxtaposition of the new building and its neighborhood, Buzzy Quarters–the traditionally-Lorma-dominated enclave of informal housing, wedged along a swampy creek between the mighty edifices of Capitol Hill and the vast fortification of the Barclay Training Center, which is home to the Ministry of Defense (many early soldiers were Lorma, hence the development of the community decades ago). The old Labor Ministry's new skin shimmers like a pair of polarized Oakleys, one of several new buildings rising over the cityscape, which still consists of rusty corrugated zinc roofs, just as it has for decades.

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. 

Employment and Survival

The on-going pehn-pehn ban is causing a confused situation in Monrovia. As referenced in a blog post on The Economist Baobab column filed today, just what the young motorbike drivers are supposed to do without their former source of income seems to be just one of the several major issues not being recognized in this situation, especially when many in this group may have been actors in the former conflict.

This seems like to a good time to quote from an article on remarks made by the European Commissioner for Development, Andris Piebalgs, speaking at an international youth job creation summit in London earlier this fall:

Sub-Saharan Africa’s relatively low youth unemployment rate of 3 per cent, compared with the 50 per cent in some European countries, disguised the scale of the issue… 

“Most of the jobs are in the grey or informal economy. They work to survive, or to work on their parents’ farm,” 

At the same time, their expectations were rising and many of them saw economic growth rates averaging 4.5 per cent as inadequate compared with the 10 per cent achieved by some other emerging economies.

“If these countries get a positive growth agenda, I believe they will come over the hill,” 

 “In a worst-case scenario, there would be instability, conflict between groups and a lot of refugees in all directions.”

The Problem is not the Pehn-Pehn

"These guys are like suicide bombers," my Liberian friend sighed from behind the wheel as our car slowly made our way through central Monrovia recently. Outside of our vehicle, an kamikaze-like swirl of motorbikes flitted within inches of our car, seeming to bounce off the fenders of the vehicle in front. Any gap between cars of more than a few feet was ample territory to be conquered, and was soon filled with buzzing bikes.  In what has become a typical scene on Monrovia's streets the motorbikes, known locally as pehn-pehns (or pen-pens), for the sound of their endlessly repetitive bleating horns, created a chaotic choreography set to their own cacophony, making the movement of the car down the block stressful and difficult.

Pehn-pehns have never been widely beloved among Liberians, but seem to be particularly loathed by those Monrovians who have the luxurious option of moving around by private vehicle. Even among Liberians who take pehn-pehns regularly, pehn-pehn operators are held somewhere between a head-shaking disregard and a teeth-clenching outrage. There seen as lawless, senseless. Although the streets of many African cities swarm with motorbikes, they are a particularly notable feature of Monrovia, a city whose contemporary crowding seems most noticeable in three expects: its sprawling suburbs, its overstuffed slums, and its standstill street traffic.

As Monrovia's economy has burgeoned in the last few years, the capital's once-potholed and empty main roads, now smoothed over with recent tarmac, have filled with vehicles, resulting in crawling congestion during daylight hours, particularly during an increasingly-epic rush hour along the city's spine, Tubman Boulevard, from the city's eastern residential fringe into the commercial center. While these jams pale in comparison to the legendary Lagosian go-slows or Accra's dawn-to-dusk parking lots, in the last few years have Monrovians partaken in that most mundane of moans: complaining about the endless traffic.

Partly, geography is to blame: stretched across a long peninsula, Monrovia now spills across the swampy plains to its north and east. Connected by a single road, the city is poorly-equipped to handle commuter traffic from its historic central area to the now-burgeoning suburban areas such as Paynesville and Duazohn, which stretch for as much as twenty miles from the heart of the city. The traffic problem worsens each month as each container ship full of cars unloads at the city's Freeport, and has grown noticeably worse, somewhat ironically, with the addition, starting last year, of a series of low-function traffic lights at major intersections along Tubman's length, which seem to ensure bottlenecks along the city's single street.

Packs of Pehn-pehns dart dangerously through this traffic, riding the double-yellow line down the center of Tubman as if they were merely inches wide, "playing chicken" with oncoming traffic as they rush head-on towards a line of side-view mirrors. There's no question its dangerous and annoying.  It's also envy-inducing to see travelers zipping past standstill vehicles, their ride costing less than a dollar.

Much is made in the press about the background of pen-pen drivers, most of whom are young and male. I've read countless press reports that declare pehn-pehn riders to largely ex-combatants, or mostly foreigners from Nigeria, or criminals. Speculation that drivers are drunk or high are frequently voiced-who knows if its true. I've never seen any survey statistics to back this up, much less a count of just how many pen-pens operate in Monrovia, although the riders are organized into a union.

What's less disputable is that pehn-pehns, despite their dangers and annoyances, constitute an essential form of affordable transportation for a great number of Monrovians, and are therefore an irreplaceable component of the transport infrastructure of a fast-growing city where there are few forms of public transport. Even if Liberia's National Transit Agency doubled the fleet of Indian-donated buses that ply Monrovia's streets, pehn-pehns would remain a vital form of transport for the vast majority of the city. The result is an inverse relationship between their irreplaceability and the scorn they engender.

The demographics of the drivers aside, an unaddressed issue in the loathing the pehn-pehns bring, is that their role in the city's transport system has not been formalized and integrated thoughtfully. The placement of traffic lights at many intersections has further impeded traffic movement; many big intersections are crowded and impassible not necessarily because of the volume of automobiles, but due to curbside taxi and pehn-pehn parking areas, where commuters switch between shared taxis and motorbikes to continue their journey. These intermodal zones are not officially designated or set aside, and so slowing taxis and rows of parked motorbikes block a lane, causing cars to squeeze by.

Image courtesy FrontPageAfrica 

Authorities in Liberia have often taken an adversarial approach to the pen-pen drivers and their representatives, seeming to transform the general public's dislike into draconian (and vague) regulations. In the last few years, the government has imposed a series of increasingly-aggressive restrictions on pen-pen movement, of which last week's sudden ban is the most severe. In 2011, the Liberian National Police imposed a night-time curfew for motorbikes, supposedly in to thwart armed robbers from their get-away vehicles of choice. Perhaps surprisingly, this curfew has held.

"Our biggest problem is motorcyclists. The Motorcycle Union is growing almost every day. You have new riders coming on the streets every day, and many of them are not trained. They do not understand the traffic rules, and they don't want to protect themselves," --Minister of Transport Tornorlah Varpilah, October 29th

In a city still mostly devoid of formal or even informal employment opportunities for the undereducated youth of the city, hopping behind a pehn-pehn and immediately collecting 20 or 50 LD per ride is an all-too-rare means to find enough to eat rice each day, if not a rung on the ladder to any kind of economic self-sufficiency.

I've had my run-ins with pehn-pehns, quite literally: for every 18 months that I've lived in Monrovia, I've had a motorbike crash into my car, sometimes while I was driving. No one has been hurt, thankfully, but the aftermath of each has been a highly unpleasant confrontation in which I was threatened with physical violence and monetary pay-offs were demanded, even though it wasn't my fault that my vehicle was hit and damaged. I wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone. Nearly every car trip in the city features an aggressive encounter with a motorbike, whether a close cut-off or near-collision. It is this disregard for the rules of the road that partly explains the widespread disdain for pen-pen drivers, but equally, I think, is the class distinction between the possibly-ex-rebel drivers and the rest of the public, be they office workers or ministers. Many Liberians abhor disorderliness, which the risky, careless motorbikes seems to embody.

I am fully supportive of regulations for the motorbikes, including those that are being debated this week: ensuring that drivers are licensed and trained, that helmets are worn, and safe driving is practiced. But this latest edict, effectively outlawing most journeys by motorbikes, seems not so much an attempt to improve safety but to rid Monrovia's auto lanes of a pestering annoyance of having to share the road with pehn-pehns. This has its connotations in the canyon-like class divides in this city, where the better-off openly disdain their poverty-stricken fellow citizens, who struggle to get by. Rather than decreeing that motorbikes (and the people that operate them and reply on them) disappear, Monrovia would be better off if it developed a comprehensive plan to carve out dedicated space for the city's motorbikes, and their users, and recognized how both are vital and beneficial to this city and its residents.

"Ducor Hotel's Misfortune Resonates"

Going from the present state of the art of Liberia's hospitality scene to the glories of the past, is this fantastically written article published in the New Republic newspaper in May of this year. It's a tremendous town cry on the sad state of the Ducor Hotel, which is in an even more perilous position than it was previously, due to the demise of its recent benefactor, Muammar Qaddafi, whose government investment unit had taken up plans to redevelop the hotel (covered in earlier years on this blog here). 

This grandiose work of journalism is unmissable in full, for the reporter's singular reporting style alone, but also because the article references this very blog, albeit a bit confusingly (emphasis added below). Also, the lamentable language of the journalist suggests that the Ducor is in its present, ruinous condition as much because of Qaddafi's recent death, rather than all the other causes of the property's destruction and decay.

I've excerpted most of it below, but again, click the link and don't miss even one of the rambling, laconic sentences. Aside from this journalism, there is no update on commencing construction to refurbish what was once West Africa's finest accommodations. 

Lastly, oh the irony of the present that this web advertisement for present-day Intercontinental Hotels popped up at the bottom of the article: 

...From North Africa, East Africa, Central Africa and West Africa, the symbol of his might protruded, and he proportionately responded with frolicsome display of generosity, undertaking projects in dimensional quality. Liberia had its share in Kaddafi's cascading generosity. Since his demise in 2012, most of the projects including the rehabilitation of the Ducor Palace Hotel are a standstill, an indication that they have also demised with him.The New Republic was at the site of the once hilltop, five-star hotel to ascertain what is now considered its misfortunes. Ducor Palace Hotel should have been fully salvaged, well and kicking as it was in pre-war Liberia had Libya, whose former leader was instrumental in extending helping hands to needy African countries, not endured a costly political upheaval. He felt victim to the Arab political tsunami (Arab Spring as it is termed today) that began in Tunisia.From the look of things, it is guessable that the Hotel has died with the former Libyan strongman who did not survive a nationally-ignited but internationally-backed insurrection.The government of Muammar Kaddafi, then considered a friend to Liberia, had agreed to renovate the building after years of neglect, but that openhandedness was asphyxiated when his government was dethroned, thus turning the Hotel's fortunes into unbearable misfortunes. 

Present State of the HotelIt is now lying abandoned. Approaching the wide courtyard of the once blossoming and captivating hotel - an unassailable national shrine -and noticing the depth of damage evoked ominous feelings.Besides the general state of devastation in which it is, its once appealing surroundings, parking lots have become garages, playing fields for children, most of them students, while the two main streets leading to the main building have been turned into latrine sites. The amazing swimming pool which captivated tourists from far and near is a pond of tadpoles.During a visit there to ascertain its present state, our reporter said he noticed overgrowing trees overwhelming the entire scenery of the surroundings, making distance viewing completely tetchy.The more the devastation to the building is likely to become, the more the resources needed to revamp it surge if it is not attended to now, this paper was informed when it toured the facilities recently.During the tour, our reporter said he saw the street leading to the right wing of the building awash of human feces, while the main security check point is now being turned into business booth by residents of the Snapper Hill community.Residents there did not feel comfortable speaking to our reporter who endeavored to inquire from them why they were using the security check point for business purposes and who authorized them to do so.Our reporter said, however, he noticed few security officers - three gentlemen -from a private security officers sitting on the ground floor of the building, close to the main entrance."Hello, I am from The New Republic Newspaper. My mission is to capture the present landscape of the building, get some photos and talk to some people here," our reporter divulged his mission.Apparently overwhelmed by awe, one of the officers took in deep brief before responding. "You are welcome. We are here on behalf of a private company. The government turned over the building to a company," he said without calling his name."For me, I don't like to speak to press people; I am afraid of them because sometimes when you say something to them, they paraphrase it."After the fleeting interaction between the two, the officer granted our reporter permission to take some photos, but refused to grant him interview.Amidst the negative aspect of the dilapidation and the incorrect and unkempt use of the premises of the hotel by "elements of griminess", others are getting very good glances of some of the beautifully still-in-tight symbols such as the J.J Roberts monument.People from all walks of life, especially students, trooped there everyday for several reasons: for photographing, for relaxation, for recreation amongst others. These events point to the rather ever-living significance of the Hotel to the national emblem.A case in point is that several school-going children were seen playing soccer on the grou8nds of the hotel complex. 

War era usefulnessBesides its antebellum elegance that attracted thousands to it, Ducor Palace Hotel headquartered the Amos Sawyer-led Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU) from 1990-94.Most of Sawyer's officials resided there and even ran the various offices from there because most government ministries were either looted not secure to be occupied...Dozens of Liberians occupied the building the demise of the interim government...It was during this period that it suffered the worst of devastation occasioned by another period of massive looting of its assets. 

Historical backgroundResearch records show that the design of the "to the Moved 2 Monrovia postcard collection sent in 1964. It depicted the hotel when it was nearly brand new, and shows how denuded the hill was when the hotel finished.Neil Prince is credited with designing the Ducor in 1962 as part of his worldwide portfolio of properties for Intercontinental Hotels, which was at the time the hospitality arm of Pan American Airways, which was obviously very focused on Monrovia.A Pan Am's 1963 World Guide, seemed to have recommended the "brand new Ducor Hotel" so it seems the property was originally called the Ducor Palace, then called the Intercontinental, then back to the Ducor Palace.In 2008, under this present administration, Ducor Hotel gutted fire, thus exacerbating its conditionsEarlier in 2007, the Liberian Ministry of Justice began to evict the Ducor Hotel's residents, and in 2008, the Government of Liberia signed a lease agreement with the Government of Libya, who began clearing the property of debris in 2010 in preparation for a bidding process to be completed by June 2010.However, the project was delayed several times before finally being abandoned upon Liberia's severing of diplomatic relations with the Gaddafi government following the outbreak of the 2011 Libyan civil war.Following the restoration of diplomatic relations with Mohammed Kaddafi's Libya, the Liberian Government sought its intervention to resuscitate the building to its pre-war status.After months of negotiations, a formal agreement was signed and the building was accordingly turned over to the Libyans to rehabilitate and run it for a period of time.Immediate work did not start on the building due to strong opposition from residents who lived in the proximity of the building who the government had earlier asked to vacate the premises to allow the reconstruction work on the building.'Again, after months of hauling and pulling, the government managed to calm the situation, paid some of the residents to relocate and even bulldozed buildings whose owners did not comply with the arrangement.Official reconstruction work began on the complex in 2010 but short-lived due to the uprising against the Kaddafi regime in 2011.The Liberian government, perhaps bowing to the whims and caprices of the US government and other western nations, severed diplomatic ties with Libya, thus bringing an end to efforts toward reconstructing the building.Now that the government last year restored ties with Libya in 2012, the state of the building remains the same.Ducor Palace Hotel, then Liberia's hilltop five-star hotel, would have been an oasis of comfort, realization and a hub of adventurism had it not been destroyed.It is gathered that its antebellum comfort, elegance, luxury, status and protruding first-class quality drew many to Liberia. The scenery was also added value. All of this is historyOperated by the Intercontinental Hotels chain, the Ducor Hotel was the first hotel constructed in Liberia, and one of the few five-star hotels in all of Africa.Its various amenities, including its three hundred rooms, pool, tennis courts, and a French restaurant, made it popular with tourists from the Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, as well as visiting professionals from the US, Europe, and Asia.This paper also gathered that the building was closed in 1989, just before the coup led by Charles Taylor which ousted President Samuel Doe and marked the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War.At present, according to information available to this paper, the building is being turned over to a private company, but could not establish which company is it and how the process was conducted.Most Liberians who are concerned about the state of the hotel are beginning to interject that it is another "white elephant' of Liberia.Several historic complexes remained unattended to, either due to the lack of interest on the part of the government or lack of resources.Hotel Africa, another five-star hotel built in 1979 during the administration of President William R. Tolbert is completely ruined and the government is yet to see reasons to rescue it despite several calls from Liberians.The Unity Conference Center, another landmark nation shrine, is gradually getting into a state of oblivion. The building is partially destroyed and there are that reports conditions could get worst if nothing is done about it.Of course, Ducor Palace Hotel is one of Liberia's proudest landmark complexes that represented its image across the globe. As it is, millions of dollars are needed to get the building back to its prewar status, and this is task so huge for the government to handle.Until then, Ducor is history and it could remain as such during the lifespan of this government which is already struggling with its own budget, analysts have hinted.