Free Inquiry beyond Risk: Reporting from the Field

Befekadu Degefe Free Inquiry beyond Risk Reporting from the Field I COME FROM AFRICA, SPECIFICALLY THAT PART OF AFRICA THAT IS SOUTH of the Sahara and north of South Africa. Further designation is neither necessary nor of much value since the conditions obtaining in any one of the 47 countries into which the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) landmass is divided are the same. If there is any difference between them it is more of degree rather than substance. Some may be worse than others, but all are in bad shape. I attribute the misery of the African people to the lack of academic freedom in the countries of Africa. I assign culpability to academic free­ dom not because its presence would have emancipated Africa from its poverty, but for two reasons. One is to tie my discussion with the object of this volume, which is free inquiry at risk. The second and the more germane is because lack of academic freedom is a symptom of the most fundamental, but not the only, malaise in society. If a society has deprived its academics of the freedom of inquiiy, it must have denied itself the same freedom. One cannot have academics unfree in a society where the rest of the population enjoys freedom, since it is impossible to have an environment where institutions of higher learning enjoy academic freedom while the whole society is denied that luxury. Where a nation has denied or has been made to deny itself freedom of inquiry, it has surely deprived itself the opportunity to generate and make use of “ideas” or knowledge to further its welfare. In the following comments I will reflect on conditions extant in SSA, explore their causes, and put forward tentative suggestions to reverse the declining trend. social research Vol 76 : No 2 : Summer 2009 601 CO N D ITIO N S IN SUBSAHARAN AFRICA SSA is a region of despair for its people and an enigma to the rest of the world. The region is poor and growing poorer. The countries that make up the region occupy the lowest rung in all global development rankings. According to the UN Development Program’s Human Development Report, the latest Human Development Index (HDI) for SSA (including the Republic of South Africa) stands at 0.493 (UNDP, 2008, table 1: 232), the lowest of all the world’s regions. Because scores less than 0.5 in HDI is defined as “Low Human Development,” the SSA as a whole falls into this category. At the micro level, the same report lists 22 countries in the Low Human Development category. Needless to say, all are from SSA (232). Of the 50 countries designated as “least developed” by the United Nations General Assembly, 34 are from the SSA (UNCTAD, 2008: xii). The World Bank (2008) reports that 782 m illion sub-Saharan Africans produced goods and services valued at $650 billion in 2006 (most recent available data). This amounts to a per capita income of $830 annually, or $2.3 or 4.6 international dollars per day.1By compari­ son, in 2006 the minimum wage in New York City was $7.15 per hour (US Department of Labor, 2009). There is another and a more telling dimension to SSA’s income poverty. According to the World Bank there were nearly 400 million Africans surviving on less than one international dollar a day, and 750 million on two international dollars a day in 2006. This roughly trans­ lates to .50 per day and $1.00 a day, respectively. Not only is SSA poor, but it starts the third millennium as the most backward of the regions. The information communication index (ICI) prepared by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) shows that the digital divide between the SSA and the rest of the world is not only wide but is getting wider. Of the 44 countries with low ICI, 35 are from SSA (ITU, 2009, table 4: 22 and table 5.1: 46). The same tables shows that 22 SSA countries were ranked lower in 2007 compared to 602 social research their position in 2002, implying that the rest of the world has bettered itself faster than these countries. The...