Global Wellbeing and the Media

7/30/2019 Global Wellbeing and the Media

1/16

Global wellbeing and the Media

New Orleans: a vibrant city, bursting to the seams with culture, the birthplace of jazz and legends

like Louis Armstrong, and the gateway to the Mighty Mississippi River. No other city is quite like it,

with its scintillating nightlife and burlesque shows, waterways that criss-cross the entire city, a mix

of races and culture too numerous to quantify, all fused into one city. The temperature is just

perfect. The most unique multicultural city in the US which has both sweeping plantation homes as

old as the city on one part; and some slightly less grand city dwellings on the other. A democratic

political system where people can aspire to be presidents and marvel at the distinct French-creole

architectural style. The name alone conjures up new beginnings and a bucketful of hope.

Ive never been there though. How is it that I can describe the architecture, history and social life

as a native inhabitant might? How did I know about the Mardi gras celebrations and the French-creole architectures? The more I thought about it the more I realised, I hadnt set out to broaden

my horizons, and neither did I find out about New Orleans to be able to participate in a discussion

about American carnivals. In fact I hadnt actively sought out information about it. I hadnt googled

it and sat through page after page of interlinking Wikipedia articles. It was simply there. A huge

database of information consisting of random snippets from various films, documentaries and

cartoons condensed into a general knowledge of the city. I didnt know about the Mardi Gras until I

watched the Disney film: The Princess and the Frog. (Twins, 2010) As a result I didnt have to

think to describe New Orleans, even though Id never tasted the air or smelt the Mississippis

unique scent.

Trying to visualise an African city however posed a different set of challenges. It wasnt a lack of

information or underexposure to stories from the continent. The crux of the problem was

negativity. I had to consciously sift through the countries to find the most positive. Every time I

tried to think of a city in Africa my mind immediately started playing back documentaries about

desertification, famine, civil war, genocide, even the Hollywood film: Black Hawk Down. (Pathay,2001). I realised that my subconscious was selecting the country I knew most about. My mind was

stuck on Somalia. I was halfway into my brainstorming before I realised my level of ignorance on

the small matter of cities within Somalia.

It occurred to me that while the media brought stories about the country they never described the

country farther than on an international level. Apart from Mogadishu I had no idea of the other

cities. I was guilty of failing one of the fundamental judging points I used for strangers. On my first

day of secondary school in the UK a well-meaning girl came up to me and gently asked where I

came from. To which I replied Nigeria. After elaborating further, she was able to get a grip on the

location. Puzzled, she asked me how a country could exist within another country. This was when


2/16

I realised that she had a view of Africa as a country not a continent. I cant blame her for it though

as we were both young and nave. However a similar occurrence happened in year 10 when a girl

asked me which type of hut I used to live in as she had seen some on holiday to Tanzania. This

question I found much more difficult to understand. A quick Google search reveals why she asked:

The similar results section in Google asked me to specify my search result even farther to Kenyan

poor houses. Whilst this was no fault of Google, it was simply displaying the most common

search terms to do with Kenya. People do not generally expect much in the way of infrastructure

from Africa, this stems from the images beamed to us through our news channels and television

screens. Ultimately when they search for Kenyan houses on Google they specify the search to

show what they perceive as a normal African houseor poor house My father once cried out in

exasperation when a BBC correspondent was interviewed in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. He was

moved to tears of frustration when the correspondent was interviewed in front of an open market in

the rundown outskirts of the city. I was younger then and I did not realise his frustration. The BBC

chose to show archive footage of a run-down area to support the correspondents report on the

countrys politics. The city of Abuja is a mega-city custom built out of the lush savannah, a similar

feat to the construction of Las-Vegas with stunning architectures and it is one of the most

modernised in Africa. Whilst the BBC may have not acted deliberately, they inadvertently fed into

the belief that Nigerias flagship city is nothing to write home about. It was then that I realised that

our perceptions of the Third World, especially Africa are mostly shaped by what we see, hear and

read in the media. The media does not deliberately go out of its way to portray Africa in a bad light;

it reports on the latest famine in Somalia, the latest genocide in Rwanda and atrocities in Libya

because it wants to inspire, it wants people to act and donate or buy fair-trade because it cares to

make a difference. The problem however is that too much of the same kind of story is not good for

Google search about New Orleans houseGoogle search about Kenyan house

First image of a house that comes up in Google with the

search: typical Kenyan House. The other images before and

after consist of huts and other rudimentary dwellings

Image similar or identical to Google search results of

t ical New-Orleans house

Original source:

http://www.seeya-

downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.html

Original source:

http://www.dongo.org/kenya-

france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1

.html
http://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.htmlhttp://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.htmlhttp://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.htmlhttp://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.htmlhttp://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.htmlhttp://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.htmlhttp://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.html


3/16

a place. Just as my description of New-Orleans sounds too sweet and sickly, so does my

description of Somalia sound too violent and harrowing. I dont advocate that we simply bury our

heads in the sand and pretend that people are not threading a fine line between life and death in

Somalia. Neither am I suggesting that we go out of our way to portray Somalia as a Garden of

Eden, like my idealised view on New-Orleans. In reality New-Orleans is still recovering from the

destruction caused by hurricane Katrina, race equality is one of the worst in America and many

ethnic minorities live in places similar to a Third World city.

On September 22 the Census Bureau released information from their 2010 annual American Community Survey

based on a poll of 2,500 people in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, the report was ignored by the local mainstream

media since it speaks volumes about the inequality of the Katrina recovery. The survey revealed that 27% of New

Orleans adults now live in poverty and 42% of childrenThe new spike in poverty signal that blacks are not sharing

equally in the employment benefits of recovery dollars. Indeed, the city may be creating a new generation of

chronically unemployed poor who were previously part of the low-wage working poor.(Hill, 2011)

For a MEDC the figures above are unacceptable and it shows the gap between minorities. As

stated The media largely ignored this as it portrayed the city in a bad light. Without doing any

independent research of my own I would not have known that such levels of inequality exist in the

United States. Yet I know that thousands of people have fled Somalia due to conflict and even

more have died from famine and related causes. I know that as recently as a few weeks ago,

hundreds of people died and thousands were displaced when a tribe went to war with a

neighbouring tribe over stolen cattle (ABC, 2012). I didnt research it but the news media chose to

broadcast it. The danger in press practices like this is that people fall into the trap of a single

story. According to a prominent Nigerian authorChimamanda Ngozi Adichie; a single story is

dangerous as it only shows one perspective and the audience have to form their own perceptions

from a narrow point of view. (Tunca, 2009) She goes further to say that most people in the

developed world have a single story of Africa.

My roommate had a single story of Africa:a single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibilityof

Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a

connection as human equals. (Adichie, 2009) (FULL ARTICLE IN APPENDIX I)

In the speech she implies that the media is guilty of perpetuating a single story of less developed

countries. They might be well meaning but ultimately through the use of terms like tribal which

depict a backward race they are helping to form stereotypes about Africa.

Ultimately we need to ask ourselves what part the media plays in forming our ideas and

stereotypes about wellbeing in LEDCs. Are we guilty of fostering our perceived notions aboutwellbeing and wealth on a different culture? In the UK, to marry a woman a man might have to

produce an engagement ring and the bigger the stone, the better according to conventions. This
http://www.ted.com/talks/290000http://www.ted.com/talks/290000http://www.ted.com/talks/293000http://www.ted.com/talks/296000http://www.ted.com/talks/298000http://www.ted.com/talks/298000http://www.ted.com/talks/302000http://www.ted.com/talks/305000http://www.ted.com/talks/305000http://www.ted.com/talks/305000http://www.ted.com/talks/305000http://www.ted.com/talks/302000http://www.ted.com/talks/298000http://www.ted.com/talks/298000http://www.ted.com/talks/296000http://www.ted.com/talks/293000http://www.ted.com/talks/290000


4/16

society puts value on precious stones, jewellery, houses the ultimate holiday to the Bahamas etc.

It is a product of the countrys history and geography. In the UK water is seen as a common

commodity as we have rivers of it. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, to marry a woman you needto

provide the family with a certain number of livestock, tubers etc. In countries like that holidays,

diamonds, big houses with the latest gadgets and fashionable clothes are not valued as they are

not of top priority. This is not because some cannot afford it. But it is because by its very nature a

society values what it does not have an abundance of. For example in the UK precious stones and

gold are status symbols because they have to be imported making them expensive. In Somalia

land is not valuable but water is, if a rural living Somali man was given diamonds it would be more

worthless than water, it does not feed his prized cattle or make the rains fall. We cannot judge a

countrys level of wellbeing by comparing what they have with what we have, as cultures are the

product of environment.

In developed economies virtually every activity has been commercialisednational accounts of any western nation

include payments for personal beauty care, which for the US is around $60 billion a year. Such an item would hardly

feature in the accounts of African nations. However, this does not mean that African men and women living in villages

do not enjoy 'beauty' treatments - activities are not commercialised. In 1996 Britain spent some $33 billion on beer,

wine and spiritsthe consumption of palm wine, local spirits and other indigenous alcoholic brews in African villages

is not incorporated in national accountsin capitalist societies, virtually all aspects of culture is monetized and

incorporated in the national accountstotal annual expenditure on marriages and funerals in the US runs into several

billions of dollars a yearpeople marry in African societies in elaborate and joyful ceremonies and the dead are buried

with appropriate ritual, little of these activities get into the national accounts... Leisure and entertainment sectors

account for a large proportion of the GDP of western nations, but in the GDP of poor countries these universal

components of life hardly figureWhen considering the material conditions of people in Africa, a distinction should be

made between absolute poverty and relative poverty...(Obadina, 2008) (FULL ARTICLE IN APPENDIX II)

There is no denying the levels of absolute poverty in Africa but is the media guilty of perpetuating

a single story to us in the information they choose to show. Are we guilty of succumbing to the

single story? Maybe we should ask ourselves, how many times we have seen pictures of Africans

living in poverty and assumed the continent is a single story of catastrophe. Although well-

meaning, how many of us have fallen into the trap of the single-story portrayed by the media and

changed our default position to one of pity? In this are we guilty of robbing a continent of its

dignity? Our generation and the generations before got it wrong, however we can still try to

rewrite history. By re-educating the new generation of children and teaching them the dangers of

single stories, it might be too late for our generation but we have the opportunity to mould the

future of our children. As countries become more diverse we need to teach our children the

dangers of a single story so they do not get left behind in the ever evolving politics of the dynamic

modern world we live in.


5/16

ResearchWorks CitedAdichie, C. N. (2009, October 7). Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story, TED Global. (TED Talks)

Retrieved January 25, 2012, from TED Talks:

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Correspondent, A. (2012, January 31). Scores dead in catle raid in South Sudan. Retrieved January 31, 2012, from ABC

news: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-31/scores-dead-in-sudanese-cattle-raid/3801634

Hill, D. L. (2011, October 18). Poverty Skyrockets in New Orleans: 65% of Black Children Under Age of Five Living in

Poverty, By Lance Hill . Retrieved January 25, 2012, from The Louisiana Justice Institute blog:

http://louisianajusticeinstitute.blogspot.com/2011/10/poverty-skyrockets-in-new-orleans-65-of.html

Obadina, T. (2008, January 1). Getting a measure of African poverty. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from Africa

Economic Analysis: http://www.africaeconomicanalysis.org/articles/gen/povertymeasurehtm.html

Pathay, M. (2001, January 18). Black Hawk Down. Retrieved January 26, 2012, from IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265086/

Tunca, D. (2004-2012, unknown unknown). Biography. Retrieved January 26, 2012, from The Chimamanda Ngozi

Adichie Website: http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/cnabio.html

Twins, T. M. (2010, Febuary 5). The Princess and the Frog. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780521/

Images retrieved from Google original URL

New-Orleans house:

Great River Road Part 1. (2007, May 19). Retrieved January 24, 2012, from seeya down the road:http://www.seeya-

downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.html

Kenyan house:

unknown. (2008, January 7). Travel pictures Country next to Country. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from Dongo.Org:

http://www.dongo.org/kenya-france/list_7_en/a_kenyan_house_1_and_a_french_house_1.html
http://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.htmlhttp://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/GreatRiverRoadPart1.html


6/16

APPENDIX I

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY

SPEECH BY:

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of

the single story. I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading

at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I

read were British and American children's books.

I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon

illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading:

All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot

about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.(Laughter)Now, this despite the fact that I

lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never

talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger

beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.(Laughter)And for many years afterwards, I would

have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story,

particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become

convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with

which I could not personally identify. Things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't

many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception

of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not

form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.


7/16

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new

worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in

literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single

story of what books are.

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an

administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby

rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my

mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old

clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say, Finish your food! Don't

you know? People like Fide's family have nothing. So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.

Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket

made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his

family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were; so that it had

become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19.My

American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was

confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could

listen to what she called my "tribal music, and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my

tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter)She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me,

as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a

single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in

any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didnt consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever

Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did

come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get

quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise

wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about

the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries."(Laughter)

So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to

me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too wouldthink that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people,


8/16

fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for them and waiting to be saved by a

kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the

writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to West Africa in 1561and kept a fascinating

account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses, he writes,

"They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."

Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what

is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the

West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who,

in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child."

And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and hearddifferent versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not

"authentically African. Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with

the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving

something called African authenticity. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor

told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove

cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I

visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates

going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with

Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system,

sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up

tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then I was

overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that

they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans

and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as

one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word that

I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world and it is "nkali. Its a noun that

loosely translates to "to be greater than another. Like our economic and political worlds, stories too aredefined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are

told, are really dependent on power.


9/16

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that

person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest

way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly. Start the story with the arrows of the Native

Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story

with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an

entirely different story.

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were

physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called American

Psycho --(Laughter)-- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial

murderers.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.(Laughter)

But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was

a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person

than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I

had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.

When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be

successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to

me.(Laughter)But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-

knit family.

But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get

adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did

not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes

my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then

margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a

kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my

experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and

the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story

become the only story.

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in

Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5, 000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But

there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talkabout them.


10/16

I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of

the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity.

It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how

we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the

Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an

African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian

writer Chinua Achebe calls a balance of stories."

What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable man who left his

job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that

Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people, who could read, would read, if you made

literature affordable and available to them.

Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman

who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending.

Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..."(Laughter) and she went on to tell me what to

write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary

masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had

taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.

Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda,a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in

Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the

heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about

contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,

mixing influences from Jay-Z to Felato Bob Marley to their grandfathers? What if my roommate knew about

the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women

to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew aboutNollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they

really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about

my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or

about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse

ambition?

Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed

infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the


11/16

government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing

to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.

My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of

building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't

have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for

all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been

used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can

break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She

introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had leftbehind: They sat around, reading the

book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained. I would like to end

with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story

about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)

APPENDIX II

GETTING A MEASURE OF AFRICAN POVERTY

BY:

TUNDE OBADINA

Africa is clearly a land of extreme poverty. The continent epitomises destitution, its images commonly usedby media and charity organisations to depict human want and suffering. But precisely, how poor are African

countries?

One of the most commonly used indicator for expressing the wealth or poverty of nations is Gross National

Product (GNP), which is the sum of the value of a nation's output of goods and services. This is calculated

by adding up the amount of money spent on a country's final output of goods and services or by totalling the

income of all its citizens, including the income from factors of production used abroad. The measure of

progress, or lack of it, is indicated by GNP growth rates, i.e., the percentage change in GNP over a period of


12/16

time, usually a year. The average income of a country's citizens is contained in the GNP per capita, which is

the GNP divided by the population.

Structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are

predicated on the assumption that progress can be measured in terms of movements in the GNP or the Gross

Domestic Product (GDP), which is similar to GNP but does not include income from abroad. Governments

everywhere judge their performance by changes in economic growth rates, congratulating themselves when

they achieve or surpass their GDP growth targets.

Using these indices as currently calculated by governments and international organisations African nations

are many decades behind developed nations. In 1996, the average of GNP per capita in the industrialised

world was $27,086, compared with $528 in Africa. This means that industrialised countries are roughly 51

times wealthier than African nations. At an annual growth rate of three percent it would take Africa about120 years to reach today's level of wealth of the West. Of course, western nations are unlikely to stand still

in the 21st century, so, it seems that African societies striving to catch up with the west have an impossible

mission.

How relevant are GNP and GDP data to economic development? Do improvements in GDP growth rates

necessarily reflect greater prosperity for the general population? Should African governments give weight to

economic growth as presently constructed? These are questions that all who are concerned with

development in Africa should seriously ponder.

In recent decades some people have challenged the importance of economic growth, the foundation of

classical and orthodox economics, with its roots in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.

Some writers questioned the validity of the system for accounting the size of economies and asked whether

the benefits of growth are wisely distributed.

With respect to developing countries, particularly in Africa, there are a number of flaws in the prevailing

method of measuring the size and growth of economies. Firstly the system reflects the general preoccupation

of orthodox economics with monetary transactions. The obsession is for what is bought and sold for money,

as distinct from the actual output of a community. It means that in developing nations, where a large

proportion of economic activity takes place outside the market, GDP figures tend to be understated. Modern

conventions of national accounts do not adequately recognise economic activities in the household and

community that do not involve the exchange of money.

In developed economies virtually every activity has been commercialised. For instance, the nationalaccounts of any western nation include payments for personal beauty care, which for the US is around $60

billion a year. Such an item would hardly feature in the accounts of African nations. However, this does not


13/16

mean that African men and women living in villages do not enjoy 'beauty' treatments - it's simply that such

activities are not commercialised. In 1996 people in Britain spent some $33 billion on beer, wine and spirits,

larger than the GDP of most African countries. But the consumption of palm wine, local spirits and other

indigenous alcoholic brews in African villages is not valued and incorporated in national accounts.

In Western capitalist societies, where everything is priced, virtually all aspects of culture is monetized and

incorporated in the national accounts. For instance, the total annual expenditure on marriages and funerals in

the US runs into several billions of dollars a year. Yet, people marry in African societies in elaborate and

joyful ceremonies and the dead are buried with appropriate ritual, but little of these activities get into the

national accounts. Leisure and entertainment sectors account for a large proportion of the GDP of western

nations, but in the GDP of poor countries these universal components of life hardly figure.

GDP statistics of African nations and other non-western societies do not adequately reflect their culturaloutput, whilst cultural output forms a significant proportion of the GDP of western nations.

Another reason why prevailing accounting conventions underestimate the national income of developing

countries is that a very large proportion of economic activity in these places takes place outside the recorded

sector. The so-called informal sector is responsible for most economic activity in African nations but does

not appear in the national income sheet because its transactions are unrecorded. The sector, ranging from

illegal black market activities, to tax evaders and small-scale producers using simple technology, is

essentially defined as economic activity that is unmeasured, unrecorded and, in varying degrees, illegal.

No one knows the size of this sector, also called the black economy or the second economy. Some

economists have estimated that it may be as much as two or three times the size of the official GDP. With

the rise in corruption and the alienation of the indigenous business community from the state, the size of the

informal sector has grown. It does not comprise only of small producers, but includes businesses with large

turnovers which to avoid paying taxes or escape stifling state bureaucracies, operate outside the formal

recorded economy. With the virtual collapse of the formal sector, tied to external economy, during the past

two decades, many producers in the sector have crashed and others have moved into the informal sector.

If African policymakers do not know the actual size and dynamics of their nation's real economy, i.e., the

combination of the formal and informal, they cannot properly assess changes in national output to determine

whether their society is progressing or regressing. It is possible that an increase in output in the formal sector

is more than offset by a decline in the informal sector, meaning that the real economy is actually in

recession, as opposed to the official increase in GDP growth. Similarly, when formal sector growth slows, it

is possible that the performance of the informal sector is strong enough to push up the growth rate of the real

economy.


14/16

According to official figures, Nigeria's GDP grew by an average 2.5 percent between 1994-1998, largely

reflecting movements in the country's oil export earnings, said to account for about 40 percent of the

national output. But no one really knows how Nigeria's real economy fared during this period of heightened

corruption and economic demoralisation. Many private sector operators believe that the economy was in

recession. In reality, we do not know the truth because a reliable measure of Nigeria's real economy does not

exist.

The World Bank and IMF frequently produce GDP data showing that nations that follow SAP prescriptions

perform better than those who do not, but these claims are made without information on the output of the

informal sector. GDP growth based on the building of new restaurants in urban areas and destruction of

indigenous industries hardly amounts to progress.

By arguing that African economies are larger than official GDP statistics suggest, we are not denying theexistence of severe poverty in the continent. However, Africa's poverty is so glaring that it does not need to

be overstated. To say that Nigeria's GDP per capita is $250 and Mozambique's is $80 as stated in official

data is clearly absurd. Given the unequal distribution of income, where the richest 20 percent of the

population gulp half or more of the national income, official GDP per income would give an income for the

majority of Africans on which it would be impossible to survive. Anyone visiting Nigeria will see evidence

of intense poverty, but they will not see millions of people dying of starvation.

To account for differences in the purchasing power of the dollar in different countries, economic agencies

publish national income figures that have been adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP). This is a method

of measuring the relative purchasing power of different countries' currencies in order to compare living

standards. Using PPP results in substantial increases in the GNP per capita of African countries. For

instance, according to World Bank date standard GNP per capita and GNP per capita PPP adjusted for

Nigeria was $260 and $1,220 respectively in 1995 and $80 and $810 respectively for Mozambique. On PPP

basis, the US per capita income is 24 times Nigeria's, compared with 116 times when standard GDP per

capita is used.

Though using PPP allows more accurate comparisons of standards of living across countries, it does not

address the question of the under accounting of national economies in Africa and elsewhere in the

developing world. It could be argued that it makes no difference whether Britain's GDP per capita income is

78 times bigger than Nigeria's or 17 times larger when GDP is adjusted for PPP or perhaps only five times

larger when Nigeria's informal sector and cultural output are incorporated into its national income. But it can

make a difference.


15/16

Getting a more accurate picture of the size of African economies will give us a better perspective on the

challenge facing African governments and development agencies. The exaggeration of the wealth gap

between Africa and the West has the effect of making the prospect of Africans achieving a standard of living

comparable to what exist in the West seem almost impossible. When faced with GDP data that suggest that

their nations are a century behind developed countries, Africans understandably feel overwhelmed or

defeated by the enormity of the task of catching up, and some opt for personal short-cuts to the higher living

standards.

We may find that after the formal and informal sectors are integrated into one measured real economy, and

financial value is ascribed to non-monetized cultural output of the population, the actual size of African

economies are significantly larger than indicated by current GDP data. Furthermore, if the cost of industrial

growth, such as environmental degradation, were deducted from the GDP figures of western economies, the

prosperity gap between developing and developed nations will narrow further. The GDP of industrialised

nations could be discounted for waste of world resources due to over-development, i.e., producing beyond

the needs of society.

When considering the material conditions of people in Africa, a distinction should be made between

absolute poverty and relative poverty. The former relates to the absence of basic social facilities, such as

access to safe water, education, health services and reasonable nutrition. While the latter relates to the lack

of access to living standards that are available in modern industrialised societies.

Though abject poverty is widespread in Africa, it does not require decades or a century to eradicate it. With

political will and increased investment in human development, within a generation it can be drastically

reduced if not eliminated. The costs will be substantial, but not beyond the means African countries.

According to the World Bank, in 1988 the estimated cost of providing safe water supplies in Nigeria's rural

and urban areas within 20 years was $4.3 billion. This was a piffling amount compared with the more than

$200 billion of public funds that has been stolen or squandered on inessential projects since the 1970s,

including more than $8 billion spend on a steel industry that has produced little or no steel.

Rather than follow GDP statistics that tell us little about the real economy, African governments should

concern themselves with the quality and structure of the growth they pursue. We should focus on those

aspects of human existence that define our poverty and ignore those aspects of wealth in the west that are

cultural. Africans are not poor because they do not eat beef-burgers, have private cars or attend beauty

saloons. They are poor because they lack access to basic social utilities. This requires channelling resources

into human development, especially improving the health, education and skill levels of the people as well as

expanding job opportunities.


16/16

In presenting Africa's poverty relative to the rich west, we should be careful not to devalue the culture of

African people. By using GDP statistics which give little or no recognition to the everyday toil and output of

ordinary Africans, both the friends and enemies of the continent present Africans as hapless, lazy and

unproductive people. Africa's poverty does not need to be overstated or the output of its people ignored to

make a case for debt relief or aid for the continent.

Global Wellbeing and the Media

Documents

Transcript of Global Wellbeing and the Media