From Church and Mosque to WhatsApp—Africa Check’s Holistic Approach to Countering ‘Fake News’

False claims and misinformation spread in Africa not only on Facebook, in WhatsApp groups or on the dark web, but also in political meeting rooms, churches, mosques, and community gatherings. To reduce the harms caused by misinformation, Africa Check, the leading independent fact-checking organisation on the continent, believes a four-pronged, or holistic approach is needed: identifying and reducing the circulation of harmful misinformation; ensuring accurate information is more widely available; ensuring a more accurate understanding of topics it covers; and fostering fact-checking skills among the public. To achieve this, it reaches out and engages with a wide range of on- and offline communities and networks. The UK could learn from this approach to tackle the ways that misinformation continues to spread offline today.     

Eastern Africa’s tobacco value chain: links with China

Abstract

While debates continue about China’s role in sub-Saharan Africa, there is growing consensus that China is a different kind of development partner. One distinct feature of Chinese partnerships is that they include support for the tobacco industry, a sector other donor states and institutions shun. Not only is tobacco a primary agricultural export in a number of Africa states, the state-owned Chinese National Tobacco Corporation is the largest tobacco company in the world. This paper analyses Chinese support for the tobacco industry in three states – Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia – documenting how co-operation is shaped by Chinese state capitalism and assessing the development and governance implications. Following an introduction situating the analysis within the context of China–Africa co-operation and tobacco’s global value chain, Chinese engagement in each country is analysed. Findings indicate that, despite differences across case studies in terms of development outcomes, common governance implications are apparent. African elites initiated tobacco-related co-operation to meet their interests, but Chinese interests dominated implementation. Consequently, Chinese investments have maintained hierarchal governance of an exploitive and harmful industry. Analyses of Chinese African co-operation need to move beyond public–private paradigms and interrogate the nuances of Chinese state capitalism in Africa.     

Weep for the One Who Descends? African Democracies,Politics of Stomach Infrastructure,and Homology of Corruption

This article discusses contemporary African democratic practices vis-à-vis politics of stomach infrastructure that debilitates sustainable infrastructural development in the region. In this article, clarifications are articulated within four interlinked phenomena: the enthusiasm for democracy, its collapse, and the resurgence of hybrid-democratic order that metamorphosed into politics of stomach infrastructure that facilitates corruption in African postcolonial state. It unravels the existing democratic prototype against ideal democratic order. The article considered the prevailing democratic inclination moseyed through citizens and political elite’s armistice that presage democratic peril. The article argued that unscrupulous political collaboration and democratic debauchery that exist between the political elites and the electorates craft an opportunity for institutionalized corruption in the region. Finally, the article found homogenous paradigms of corruption in the selected African states, including South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria.     

Understanding Sub-Saharan Africa’s Extreme Poverty Tragedy

Motivated by a recent World Bank report on achieving of Millennium Development Goals which shows that poverty has been declining in all regions of the world with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this study puts some empirical structure to theoretical and qualitative studies on the reconciliation of the Beijing model with the Washington Consensus. It tests the hypothesis that compared to middle-income countries, low-income countries would achieve more inclusive development by focusing on economic governance as opposed to political governance. The empirical evidence is based on interactive and noninteractive fixed effects regressions and 49 countries in SSA for the period 2000–2012. The findings confirm the investigated hypothesis. As the main policy implication, in order to address inclusive development challenges in the post-2015 development agenda in SSA, it would benefit low-income countries in the subregion to prioritize economic governance. Other theoretical and practical contributions are also discussed.