During my rural homestay, I had an idea for an article to write and submit to Wash U's newspaper, Student Life. Here is the text of the draft they printed in today's edition. This is a lot more political than any other post I've made, so I hope you take it for what it is :)
If you're interested in seeing the article on its original site, just go to studlife.com and search my name.
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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S SHAMEFUL DOUBLE STANDARD
I recently started classes at the University of Nairobi in Kenya to study culture, environment, and development in one of the most beautiful countries I've ever seen. Unfortunately, if you wanted to come visit me, the U.S. Government would say no.
The State Department issued a travel warning against Kenya following a 1998 bomb blast at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. In 2002, terrorists bombed a hotel in the coastal city of Mombasa, killing 15 people. However, the past four years have been incident-free. Even with a fairly elected democratic government and one of the most thriving economies in East Africa, Kenya remains on the U.S. State Department's travel warning list.
I understand the need to warn Americans of danger when traveling abroad. I even partially understand why over one third of the countries on the list are in Africa. Sure, parts of Africa have problems. Here's what I don't understand: where's the United Kingdom?
Several weeks ago, I spent five hours in a tent outside Heathrow airport in London with hundreds of other people just to see if my flight was going to leave that morning. The night before, dozens of stranded people had spent the night in the lobby of my airport hotel buying food and drinks so they would have a place to stay. Earlier that day I had taken the Eurostar (Chunnel) from Paris to London amidst the longest lines they had seen in years. People were sleeping on the floor of the station, and every train was full.
The cause of this chaos was that terrorists had targeted nearly ten planes traveling to the U.S and possibly even my train to London, according to some sources. The terrorists planned to trigger liquid explosives on board and kill over one thousand passengers. Fortunately, British law enforcement just barely stopped the plot.
Unfortunately, they didn't stop a plot last summer that blew up three subway trains and a tour bus, killing 52 people and injuring over 700. In both incidents, dozens of London citizens with links to Al-Qaeda were arrested in connection with the attacks and charged accordingly.
Kenya's most significant terrorist attack in the last decade happened in 1998 and the targeted building was technically U.S. property on U.S. soil.
I have yet to hear a convincing reason why Kenya should be on the travel warning list and the United Kingdom should not. Even if the U.S. Government claims that Kenya may have "limited ability" to detect and to deter a terrorist attack, we know Great Britain's limitations. Sure, maybe they stopped the plane bombings last month. But they didn't stop the train blasts last summer and they may have "limited ability" to prevent such acts in the future.
Blatant and unwarranted discrimination is apparent here. Obviously, the U.S. can't post a travel warning against Great Britain. That would be devastating to our crucial partnership in the war on terrorism. Plus, we have too much interest in their economy and the commerce between our two great nations. Most importantly, Great Britain is too "civilized" to warrant a travel warning.
Kenya, on the other hand, is just an insignificant little country on a continent that exists primarily for our exploitation and to make us feel better when we can afford to give a little money away. Indeed, our buddies at the World Bank and IMF have devalued their currency to a point where even the smallest scraps of change go a long way and make us feel great about being charitable.
What I'm not saying here is that Kenya is immune to terrorism or terrorist activities. What I am saying is that maybe the U.S. government should re-evaluate the criteria they use to impose travel warnings. For a country that relies on tourism as the biggest sector of the economy, Kenya suffers from our arrogant discrimination. When Illinois Senator Barack Obama toured the country a few weeks ago, Kenyan politicians pleaded with him to urge the U.S. government to lift the travel advisory. They pointed out that the only reason Kenya would be targeted for attacks in the first place is their partnership with the U.S.
I'm having the time of my life over here, and I feel safe everywhere I go. It's time for our government to grow up and end this shameful double standard by either lifting the travel ban on Kenya or imposing one on Great Britain. It's time to stop labeling Africa as a dangerous place to go simply because it's Africa.
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7 comments:
just a good life
Reynolds,
I would urge you to withhold too strong a judgment on the IMF and World Bank. Though they have fouled some things up royally in the past, I give them the benefit of a doubt. Considering that most of the people working there could be making much more money with much less hassle and vilification as stock traders or consultants, their personal altruism, however haphazardly applied, must have something to do with their motives. And please consider that the failure of these projects initiated by the advocates of market capitalism, however spectacular, only shows that those projects were poorly planned and executed, as you have pointed out. It does not invalidate the economic ideas that underlie market capitalism.
On that note (keeping in mind my complete unfamiliarity with your instructor or which concepts of development he or she is challenging), I would warn you to proceed with caution if people say they have new ideas that challenge fundamental economic axioms. All over the world, in every time and place, the laws of economic behavior apply: if you raise the price of an item, people will buy less of it; if you lower the price, they will buy more. Interpretations and measures of "price", "value", and even "buy" vary between cultures and individuals, but at the end of the day, people respond to incentives based on these concepts.
Maybe (in fact, certainly) Kenyan concepts of property and ownership differ from American concepts so radically that simply instituting American-style contract and property laws in Kenya would cause major consternation. But in Kenya, too, the concept that we call "property rights" applies: that is, that giving people a stake in the benefits of a resource (which is the function that property law performs in this country) encourages them to invest in its care and development. The social and legal institutions that guarantee that the benefit of a person's (or family's, or village's) efforts flow back to them differ between cultures, but they are everywhere crucial to development. More on this later, though.
So, if a teacher tells you that Kenyans value some things or weight some costs and benefits differently than Americans, they s/he is resoundingly correct. That is why the institutions underpinning economic development are best grown as locally and organically as possible. To simply take some western nation's constitution (as Hernando de Soto has suggested some economic reformers tried to do), cross out "Switzerland" and write in "Kenya" is obviously doomed for failure. But to suggest that Kenyans are mystically and spiritually different from people in "western" countries (and Japan, and South Korea, and Taiwan, and Singapore, and Chile...) in such a way so that the laws of economic behavior (properly understood) do not apply to them isn't new and challenging – it's racist. Each culture, subculture, and individual applies the fundamental laws of economics in their own terms and subject to their own unique value structures. But the whole human family obeys those laws.
Returning to property rights, in particular: you mentioned earlier that you think IMF/World Bank-inspired property reforms led to "wildlife degradation in Kenyan game parks". I don't know much about the Kenyan experience, but my understanding was that in other countries in the region (Botswana, Namibia, Malawi), in response to elephant poaching in the eighties, handed over "ownership" of elephants to the villages and farmers on whose land they roamed, as if the elephants were just big, wild cattle. Elephant populations boomed. Why? Because when no one "owned" the elephants, no one had incentives to protect them from poachers – why become an eco-tour guide if you know that poachers are coming tomorrow, or the next day, or the next? Why not just do the poaching yourself, then, and get the money for the ivory for yourself? (Look up "tragedy of the commons" on Wikipedia). But when one person or group could say "These are my/our elephants", then they could rightly claim the money that ecotourists and big game hunters would pay for access to those elephants. As their owners, the people stood to benefit from the sustained health of their elephant herds, and so the elephants became worth protecting. It was no longer just a race to kill as many as you could before someone else did. Call it crass and capitalistic – it is. But more elephants in those countries are alive today because of those property rights, and because of the same fundamental economic ideas that motivate the IMF and World Bank. If crass capitalism saves endangered species (and it can and does – see also chapter 25, "Bye Bye Bison", in the book I gave you), then I'm happy to be a crass capitalist.
Economics offers powerful tools for understanding the world and for designing and evaluating programs to achieve the goals we have as individuals, as societies, and as a planet. Don't be soured on economics and those tools because of the IMF's failures.
PS: I was the one with the deleted comment earlier -- I had to delete the whole thing to make an paragraph indentation correction.
Also, I think it's silly that I had to get a blogger account to post comments, but I'll do it, for you, Reynolds, and for economics.
Andrew Langan is amazing. That is all.
i miss reading your blog updates, reynolds!! :(
Andrew, I responded to your comment on the Hadzabe, so check that out if you get a chance.
I just want to say that I agree with a lot of what you posted here and that I never claimed that economics doesn't translate to Kenyan society. I simply pointed out a specific failure that has caused a lot of damage to a big part of a globally-marginalized continent. Obviously I couldn't go into all the good things World Bank and IMF have achieved in an article of this length, nor would it be appropriate in this context.
Looking back on the article, my tone was unreasonably demeaning and I probably should have just left that sentence out. In the grand scheme of things, it just offends people and offers a shallow criticism of people I don't even know. I apologize.
Unfortunately, I have to go to bed soon :) But we should definitely discuss certain other aspects of your post in more detail soon.
For instance, "property rights" at least in relation to land, had an entirely different meaning to the Maasai people of Kenya before European influence. As pastoralists, they did not see the land as something one could own, but merely a resource for their only form of property: cattle. Therefore, land did not belong to anyone. Land belonged to the cattle. As I'm sure you know, ideas of individualized land tenure was a completely foreign concept to many African societies and presented a huge problem when it was forced upon them by colonialism. None of this is in contrast to anything you proposed, just something interesting to consider.
Also, we should discuss the issues of elephants in national parks. I recently visited Amboseli National Park, which has one of the highest concentrations of elephants in the world. In fact, it's a huge problem. By being limited to one area, the population has raged out of control and is destroying the environment, causing massive soil erosion and deforestation. The elephants are also destroying crops of nearby agriculturalists and killing livestock and people at an alarming rate. This issue is extremely complex and I'm not even sure if there's a solution. I would love to talk to you about it soon.
With that, I need to get some rest. I have three papers, an hour long presentation on civil society education in Kenya, two Swahili exams (a fifteen minute oral exam and a written one), and more than a few blog entries to write this week. I look forward to talking to you.
Your friend,
Reynolds
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