Only 2,600?

A kind-of weird report from the Economist from November 6th, which mentioned Liberia, but in a way that is either unhelpful or incorrect. The article is about ending civil wars and armed conflicts, and features the above chart, showing civil wars and internal fighting from 1946-2012, all over the world.

The first problem with regards to Liberia is it shows the Liberian Civil War's duration as 2000-2003, which is a curiously narrow definition of the country's civil conflict. More bizarrely, it lists the total combatant deaths at 2,600. Not 260,000 or even 26,000. The definition of a relevant death is "in battle government troops and troops of politically organized rebels." 

I don't see how that definition is illuminating or even how it is measurable: who arrived at this number of Twenty-Six-Hundred for Liberia, and how? The most common number is an estimate of a quarter-million dead in Liberia's Civil War, which is usually considered to have begun in it's first phase in 1990 and continued until 2003. So the Economist's estimate counts a third of that time and only 1% of those dead, even if they are only focussed on militia deaths.

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.”