Notes on the Ivory Coast
mattlakeman.org
mattlakeman.org
That being said, if you treat it as literally just his experiences, then they're fantastic reads.
P.S. His notes on Mauritania [https://mattlakeman.org/2023/08/16/notes-on-mauritania/] is really interesting for the train story. I had never heard of such a thing before.
> I'd say the article omitted the animus towards Nkrumah from the UGCC (his former party). This opposition was manifested in their attempts to derail his rule from independence to his overthrow (there is some evidence they were in cahoots with the CIA et. al). Thus, the popular reactions to Nkrumah's policies were not only based on their merits. Most Ghanaians actually think pretty well of Nkrumah's development trajectory.
This opposition, which forms the basis of one of Ghana’s main political lineages, called the UP tradition, is partly tribal in motivation. The Akans (the main ethnic group, who mostly support the UP tradition) see themselves as the central core of the nation, but their allegiance is mostly to the King. They have this sense of needing to take back control of the country, similar to the way white Americans might feel threatened by a supposed loss of control to minorities. But while the Akans have a can-do attitude, they are usually not good administrators and planners.
So I'd say this rivalry, based on resentment of the initial success of Nkrumah’s tradition in particular, and resentment of uppity minority ethnic groups in general, is a major factor in Ghana's perennial inability to realize its full potential.
This factor in Ghana's politics continues down to this day. Rawlings’ was a Ewe, as the article notes, and his (P)NDC was the third major political lineage in Ghana (after the UP and Nkrumah’s CPP). The UP tradition was again a thorn in their flesh, even before multi-party democracy was restored. The current president (from this same political lineage) is hated by many for taking the country back to a period of massive corruption and economic malaise. I'm not too political, but I tend to agree; he gives off the air of a 70s era politician, radically unprepared to lead a 21st century country, very corrupt, intolerant of criticism, not in control of things, and afraid of a coup. Many Ghanaians would claim that he was elected primarily based on support emanating from this conflict, and not because of demonstrating any competence.
It's interesting that people read a blog by a someone who visited for 10 days, instead of someone who has lived there their entire lives or otherwise has far more experience.
The author even starts by disclaiming interest in calling them by their name or good knowledge of their language (French), showing that he doesn't seem to consider the impression that gives to readers.
(Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on officially being called “Côte d’Ivoire.” But I don’t know how to make that accent on my keyboard and I don’t feel like copy-and-pasting the name over-and-over, so I’m just going to call it the “Ivory Coast.”)
2. "disclaiming interest in calling them by their name... " Excuse me? Do you have a bone to pick, what even are you trying to say here? You want the author to speak French before writing the blog post?
3. I am a reader and did not get any negative impression from his quip about not knowing where the accent key is, what are you even going on about?
The situation is not quite analogous however, since Germans generally don't mind us calling their country "Germany" (I have never heard of any dislike of the name) whereas (quoting from Wikipedia)
> Therefore, in April 1986, the government declared that Côte d'Ivoire (or, more fully, République de Côte d'Ivoire) would be its formal name for the purposes of diplomatic protocol and has since officially refused to recognize any translations from French to other languages in its international dealings. Despite the Ivorian government's request, the English translation "Ivory Coast" (often "the Ivory Coast") is still frequently used in English by various media outlets and publications.
Its similar to nicknames with real people. Some people don't mind having their name shortened or adapted however people like, while others people really don't like nicknames. You use nicknames with the first group and call the second group by their formal names.
It's New York, not Nueva York! Fix your ...blog.
It's Australia, not Australie! Fix your ...blog.
Both of the above would probably come across as culturally insensitive but in the other direction.
Because they found the one and not the other. Matt Lakeman is someone whose blog I follow; if he posts something I'm going to read it. A number of other people found this because it was on HN. It's not like I decided "I will learn about Ghana!", searched, looked over the results, found both Lakeman and some Ghanaian writer among them, and decided to go with the former over the latter; I encountered Lakeman's post, and have not encountered any Ghanaian writers writing about Ghana among the places I usually read.
And like, let's be honest -- I'm just not interested enough in Ghana to go searching out writing on the history of Ghana and find the best one. The realistic alternative to me reading Matt Lakeman on the history of Ghana isn't that I read someone else on the history of Ghana, it's that I don't read about the history of Ghana at all, because the topic doesn't even occur to me as something to read about!
Agreed. That means there is something wrong with our discovery mechanisms.
What a weird comment. The French couldn't care less how foreigners call us, and we don't pretend we can choose the name of France in any other language than French. Most other languages have they own name for France.
So that's really not "very French in culture".
When I give talks about my 3 years driving right around Africa I use Ivory Coast as the example of road conditions. A road where trucks were stuck for two weeks [2], potholes and broken pavement so bad I was in first gear for days, and then some of the best freeways on the entire continent. All in the same country, sometimes only hours apart.
The story of the The Basilica of Yamoussoukro [3] is insane. It's the world's biggest Catholic monument, costing around $600 million USD. The final cost doubled Ivory Coast’s national debt. Seriously.
Before the Pope would sanction such a thing, he insisted a hospital also be built to help the citizens of the country. Strangely enough after the Pope visited the Basilica and gave his blessing, the hospital was never finished, and still sits half finished, closed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUGJLcHUDEg
https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2015/10/24/yamoussouk...
The powers that be absolutely will not allow countries like Ethiopia to process the coffee they grow any more than they will allow Ivory Coast to process cashews.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1096413/main-export-coun...
And invited them back with the Moi reforms in 1986.
> relatively free of foreign influence
They got a massive FDI influx from Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China - especially after China began boycotting Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese firms in the 2013-2017 period.
This is why VN's first SEZ (Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park) was devoted to food processing.
A leadership crisis has also been brewing in the VCP for that reason, as the Southern cadre leans pro-SK and the Northern cadre leans pro-PRC.
On the other hand, countries like Vietnam, China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea listened to the IMF in the 1990s and worked on reforming institutions.
CdI's economy only recently started to get on track after Ouattara came to power. It didn't hurt that he is an actual trained economist who has worked at the IMF and WB.
> being adjacent to PRC
French investment in the CdI in the 1960-70s is similar to Chinese and Korean investment in Vietnam in 2023, and American, Japanese, and Korean investment in China in the 1990s and 2000s
The PRC's GDP per Capita didn't catch up to CdI until 2005 when their civil war entered full gear.
The only difference is CdI's institutional capacity was crap compared to plenty of similarly poor Asian countries in the 1990s (China, Vietnam, India)
The Phillipines is a similar story as well btw. In 1990 Phillipines and Turkiye had the same standard of living. In 2023, Türkiye's HDI caught up with Hungary and most of Central Europe, while Phillipines fell behind Vietnam and Indonesia - two countries that have historically been much poorer than PH.
Yeah....no.
Ethiopia doesn't do processing because there isn't enough capital or stability to justify a multimillion investment in processing.
Vietnam was in the same position developmentally as Ethiopia today in the 1990s, but had a relatively stable government that began working on expanding credit and entrepreneurship.
Ethiopia literally had a civil war barely a year ago, a massive civil war in the 90s, and multiple insurgencies in between.
There just isn't capital in Ethiopia. It's literally one of the least developed countries on earth.
The country had a civil war from 1974-1991 that killed 1.7 million people, a civil war/war of independence by Eritrea from 1961-1991 that killed 225k people, a second war with Eritrea from 1998-2000 that killed 300-500k people, a civil war from 2020 to today that has killed around 200k-600k people, 2 wars with Somalia that killed 35k people, and a number of ethnic insurgencies
In 2000, it's HDI was 0.292 and in 2021 it barely reached 0.498, which is where Vietnam was in the 90s and barely above Afghanistan and the DRC (I'd have compared Ethiopian numbers from the 90s but those don't exist due to the wars above). It's human capital is some of the least developed in the world.
They will get more development in food processing (and in general) because the UAE has been cultivating Abiy, but out of all commodities producers, they are one of the less developed ones.
> protected their domestic agricultural industries
Not at the processing level. Domestic agricultural tariffs are meant to protect commodity prices for farmers, not the processing capacity.
Most low level food processing is now Asian and Brazilian, with multibillion conglomerates like CP Group (Thailand), IndoFood (Indonesia), Mayora (Indonesia), Golden Hope (Malaysia), Kulim (Malaysia), ITC (India), Hindustan Unilever (India), COFCO (China), Foshan Haitian (China), and dozens of SOEs from those countries.
You need an industrial base to process food at an industrial scale.
One reason is that the resources are much greater - if one place has a bad year, another can have a good year. Also, each location can produce what it does best, what its land, capital, skills, and infrastructure best support. Then other locations do what they do best, and we get the most economical, the best of everything.
Economic nationalism is, among other things, a ruse by some businesses to monopolize markets (not having competition) and get subsidized by the public.
While there are still remnants of colonialism at play, in theory capitalism would prefer to do processing as near to production as possible... but that's hard to do in Ethiopia or most other African countries with a really unreliable electricity grid [1]. Ivory Coast has it different - they massively built out power generation [2], but it takes time and money for investments into processing facilities flow in.
Additionally, political stability is one of the largest issues impeding many African countries. Many of them are actively at war, undergo civil war or separatist movements, are governed by dictators or went through prolonged periods of instability. All of this isn't exactly helpful when looking for investors that have to invest millions of dollars up-front - investors want the guarantee that there won't be some government nationalizing away their investment or war destroying it.
[1] https://www.sinalda.com/world-voltages/africa/voltage-ethiop...
[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/07/23/the-sec...
You yourself wouldn't invest your own money into an authoritarian country with an unreliable power grid and a penchant for useless wars, civil or external. Well, other people think along the same lines. No need to drag sinister powers that be into the calculation.
Beans do stay okish for a year or so if in a sealed package.
Your vague claim about the powers that be is (I suspect) a common and popular leftist trope even today that a vast global, neocolonial conspiracy of mysterious western power centers crushes the poor helpless third world into oppresion at every turn and is responsible for its many dysfunctions, while often conveniently ignoring contrary examples of success stories or internal sources of fault and problems.
A curious detail of this notion is just how implicitly condescending its proponents assumptions about agency and self-administration with people and institutions in these developing country are.
> To the Ivory Coast’s west, Ghana went from one of the best African economies to one of the worst, culminating in the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in 1968. Farther west, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria...
These countries are East of Ivory Coast.
He mentions that it is 'literally impossible' to get a tourist visa other than by coming through the airport in Abidjan. Yet, in 2023 I did get one outside of Côte d'Ivoir, at the Ivorian consulate in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Go west c. 30Mm and you get to Ghana, a total of c. 60Mm and you get to nigeria.
I'm also quite inspired to visit the Ivory Coast for myself and see the giant basilica in Yamoussoukro. Perhaps in the modern age, "corruption tourism" will help bolster these types of places.
To me, though, he seems to adopt the usual sophomoric mistaken approach of identifying the cause of a calamity in many different places, which is what I did in my IB extended essay about the fall of Suharto in Indonesia. Now I feel a little embarrassed looking back on this: I was trying too hard not to be wrong, and covering all of my bases in accordance. Of course, that was sixteen years ago, and I was in high school.
In so doing, he buried what seems like the biggest mistake at the end: Côte d'Ivoire bled its own economy nearly to death when cacao prices collapsed in the '80s by internally subsidizing exports of its theretofore most profitable crop. Then they killed the whole industry while trying to set up a cacao OPEC, forgetting that it would be a lot easier for rich countries to just go without chocolate than to live without oil. Sure, war and corruption are bad, but plenty of countries had better performance despite them than CdI did during its long fall. In some sense, the logical comparison is Venezuela's self-sabotaging response to the PDVSA strike of 2002 [1].
It's also another case study in the enduring power of roads: for all the mistakes, CdI built the best road network in West Africa, and those roads are mostly still there, probably helping propel its recent recovery at a faster pace than its neighbors. Almost like a tiny Rome.
The rich countries didn't go without chocolate: other cacao producers were more than happy to pick up the slack and collect the extra profits.
OPEC is remarkable mostly as a rare example of a successful international cartel, and even then its history is riven with constant squabbles, sales off the books etc, and these days it's a shadow of its former self because Russia and now the US (thanks fracking) don't play ball.
For example, last month: "Oil prices edged higher on Monday after top exporters Saudi Arabia and Russia reaffirmed their commitment to extra voluntary oil supply cuts until the end of the year."
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/oil-nudges-highe...
Sounds like Yugoslavia to me. Minus the balkanization and the tidal forces of EU.
> he was massively corrupt and likely looted billions of dollars from the Ivory Coast.
Funnily enough, we never seem to see any track of these money over and over again (and such stories are aplenty), and especially not in the hands of that dictator's children, clan or followers. Leading to suspicion that it is not "looting" but maybe the old colonial power using the local quasi-independent government to siphon money out of their former properties. This way, these dictators have to send money back to the mother ship, "or else"; themselves getting peanuts - but at least after hedonistically partying in Paris.
You know that specific game mechanic if you ever played the original Dune from 1992.
An counterexample to this rule (that confirms its existence) is Dos Santos' daughter who exists, owns significant capital, and is a target of boring stuff such as lawsuits. This is opposed to when these billions simply disappear for good.
> The Balkan country was “liberated” by communists, either by the Soviet army (which didn’t give a shit about them)
This is measured, I presuppose, in comparsion with the Old Europe with its uncanny taste for all countries outside the Old Europe, though, sometimes they do devour each other as well.
France has many other investment options with much better expected returns, especially once you account for the cost of maintaining a military presence. There is much to criticize about recent French policy in Africa, but charges that the French government is cynically enriching itself by exploiting these countries just don't match observable reality; talking with people who have spent time working there will quickly confirm. Additional evidence comes from China's attempts to enrich itself in Africa, which have mostly failed to produce the desired riches in the expected amounts.
And some former French colonies are relatively stable, for example Morocco and Vietnam.
>France demanded payment from Haiti for recognition of its independence in the early 19th century. The demand for reparations was made shortly after Haiti declared independence in 1804 following a successful revolt against French colonial rule. The negotiations and the subsequent agreement for reparations occurred between 1825 and 1838.
> The first annual payment alone was six times Haiti's annual revenue.[1] The payment was later reduced to 90 million francs in 1838, equivalent to $32,535,940,803 in 2022, with Haiti paying about 112 million francs in total.[3] Over the 122 years between 1825 and 1947, the debt severely hampered Haitian economic development as payments of interest and downpayments totaled a significant share of Haitian GDP, constraining the use of domestic financial funds for infrastructure and public services.
Billions of dollars would allow them to own serious chunks of First World industry, have stuff such as investment funds or charity non-profits. That's a different kind of money.
Where's the money, Francois?
> By 1968, there were 48 cinemas in the Ivory Coast. In my own experience, cinemas are still quite rare in West Africa. I almost went to one in the Ivory Coast, but I didn’t want to see anything that was playing.
All those Nollywood films! They can't all be for export.
Weird how it's not polite to write about the indoctrination aspect of modern western schooling...
Also astonished at the anglo refusal to acknowledge any other languages and orthographies exist. You are not being cute when you refuse to even try to correctly reproduce "those weird apostrophes and accents" or when you "apologize for butchering the pronunciation!"
> Despite giving me Marxist vibes
So the author is ideologically opposed to the type of economics that is precisely concerned with this sort of analysis? I stopped reading here, I don’t need analysis from those who believe in fables of invisible hands and shy away from any analysis that could be considered to bite it!