artigo sobre as classes médias africanas

New York Times
Africans Open Fuller Wallets to the Future
By NICHOLAS KULISH JULY 20, 2014


JOHANNESBURG — Across sub-Saharan Africa, consumer demand is fueling the continent’s economies in new ways, driving hopes that Africa will emerge as a success story in the coming years comparable to the rise of the East Asian Tigers in the second half of the 20th century.

After seeing years of uninterrupted economic expansion across Africa, governments, analysts and investors are focusing on this fast-growing continent’s shoppers and workers rather than just the usual upswing in commodity prices that have driven past cycles of boom and bust.

The African Development Bank projected in its latest annual report in May that foreign investment in Africa would reach a record $80 billion this year, with a larger share of the money going to manufacturing and not just the strip-mining of resources.

“The development is real, and on the back of that, there’s a lot of commercial opportunity that’s emerging,” said Simon Freemantle, senior political economist at Standard Bank here.

At times messy and difficult to quantify, Africa’s economies give pessimists and optimists plenty of statistical ammunition to support their narratives of the future. Growth is uneven. Inequality is rising in many corners. Millions of people still live in extreme poverty. With violence simmering in the Central African Republic, South Sudan and elsewhere, it’s easy to fall back on the old pessimistic plotline for sub-Saharan Africa

The middle class has expanded rapidly across the continent, but the population has grown so quickly that the absolute number of impoverished Africans has gone up at the same time. Sushi restaurants in Dakar, Senegal, and fancy coffee shops in Kigali, Rwanda, do not improve the lives of subsistence farmers in the hinterland.

Yet a sign of confidence is the success with which African countries have been able to tap international capital markets of late. In spite of recent terrorist attacks, Kenya sold $2 billion worth of bonds to international investors last month, which will be used in part to pay for infrastructure projects; two months earlier, it was Zambia with a $1 billion offer.

Exports from sub-Saharan Africa leapt from $68 billion to more than $400 billion from 1995 to 2012. A total of $300 billion of that came from natural resources, the extraction of oil, natural gas, precious metals and diamonds. Angola pumps 1.8 million barrels of oil a day which is why its capital, Luanda, hosts fancy designer boutiques.

But some of the most rapid growth is now coming from other sectors. In South Africa, for example, the broader economy has been sluggish, but the black middle class now spends more money than the white middle class.

For decades, this country’s long-neglected black consumers spent their money on the far edges of the economy, buying necessities like soap, salt and milk at informal convenience stores called spaza shops. During the hard years of apartheid, Itumeleng Mothibeli’s grandparents ran one such shop in a township, the peri-urban communities to which blacks had been exiled under the racista system.

Now Mr. Mothibeli manages 14 shopping centers spread across four provinces of South Africa for the Vukile Property Fund. The company targets the long-shunned township market for its high volume, turnover and foot traffic. Instead of the one-story brick stand adjacent to his grandparents’ house, these are enormous Western-style shopping malls that are doing brisk business.

“In the old days, you had cathedrals in the middle of towns,” said Mr. Mothibeli, 30, as he drove a gold Toyota Corolla company car into the parking lot of the Daveyton mall. “Now you have shopping centers.”

The African Development Bank gave the so-called Africa Rising debate a significant jolt in 2011 with a report declaring that the African middle class had grown to 350 million people in 2010 from 126 million in 1980. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development put the figure in 2010 at a mere 32 million, “or roughly the same as Canada.”

Middle class is a fraught, even political, expression. In the United States, it conjures the image of a suburban house with a white picket fence and a car in the garage. The African Development Bank, on the other hand, defines someone as middle class if he earns $2 a day or more.

“The future is about that lower middle class that’s expanding quickly,” said Staffan Canback, managing director of the consultancy Canback & Company, who has done business in Africa for decades. He was talking about the people with enough money left over for small packets of detergent or who can save money for name-brand shoes.

“You’re starting to see a middle class even in a place like Angola,” Mr. Canback said. “There’s a long way to go, but I think it’s incorrect to say that it’s only a few families that make all the money and no one else makes money. That’s definitely not true.”

Businesses alert to the opportunities are setting up shop in Africa.

In April, Marriott closed a deal to buy the 116-hotel Protea Hospitality Group, based in South Africa. Clothing companies like Forever 21 and Sweden’s H&M plan to open their first shops here as well. Wal-Mart’s South African arm, Massmart, has stores in a dozen African countries, including Uganda and Mozambique, and plans to expand into Angola next year.

Last year, Honda opened its third motorcycle subsidiary in Africa, based in Kenya, including a new assembly plant. Heineken plans to invest nearly $700 million a year in Africa to keep up with the demand of the continent’s beer drinkers. The Chinese shoemaker Huajian is spearheading the construction of a $2 billion special economic zone in Ethiopia that will focus on light manufacturing.

Perhaps no country illustrates the pitfalls and opportunities quite as starkly as Nigeria. Even as the country is projected to grow at a swift 7.3 percent clip this year and next, the kidnapping and murdering by Boko Haram militants, who operate with impunity in Nigeria’s northeast, transfix the world.

Adewale Opawale, executive director at Strategic Research and Management (Stream) Insight, a market and social research company in Lagos, said he had witnessed drastic change not just in the number of cars on the streets and airplanes taking off from the international airport there, but in the way that people do business.

Consumers are moving from running around with cash for purchases to using their Internet-enabled cellphones (many with more than one phone) to place orders from online retail chains that have started to cash in on the country’s rising middle class.

“It’s loads of opportunity in the Nigerian consumer market,” he said. “Nigeria is on track to become one of the 20 largest economies in the world.”

The commercial gains are not spread equally across society or across the continent. A study of the top African brands found that of the top 25, all but one — Kenya’s Safaricom — came from Nigeria or South Africa. Seven of the top 10 brands were South African. How the spoils of growth are shared is as important as the national averages that mask deep inequality. The goal is a broad-based improvement in the lives of the masses, which has proved elusive.“The question of how the poor fared in the period of rapid growth in the last decade in Africa is a subject of controversy,” said Mthuli Ncube, chief economist at the African Development Bank. “The precise relationship between poverty and growth in the long term depends crucially on a growth pattern that is accompanied by structural shifts where labor moves from a low productivity to high-productivity sectors.”

That means more good jobs in manufacturing and services and fewer subsistence farmers. But that has been a goal for leaders across Africa since the dawn of the postcolonial period.

Whether the continent’s governments are up to the task, there is no question that the individual, entrepreneurial drive is present and pushing Africa ahead.

“There’s just this amazing determination to get places,” said John Simpson, director of the Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing at the University of Cape Town.

“It’s a relentless desire to make more, to get better, to have a better lifestyle.”

Arriscar Tudo

Helly Luv, cantora do Curdistão iraquiano, ameaçada pelos islamistas extremistas em virtude de seu clip "Risk It all" (Arrisca Tudo), diz não ter medo e vai seguir na vida conforme o título da musica (2,9 milhões de visualizações no You Tube até aqui). Mistura de rock com ritmo curdo, roupas inaceitáveis para os fundamentalistas e exibição de simbolos nacionais curdos, estão na base das  ameaças. Reproduzo a musica tal como está no You Tube.   

Helly com uma unidade curda de combate

Ubaldo foi embora

Decorre no mausoléu da Academia Brasileira de Letras, cemitério de São João Batista, o funeral de João Ubaldo Ribeiro, autor de "Viva o Povo Brasileiro", "Sargento Getúlio", "A Casa dos Budas Ditosos", etc. Ficou inacabado um romance que escrevia há algum tempo. Faleceu ontem de embolia pulmonar, aos 73 anos. Um dos maiores escritores brasileiros de sempre.

próximo Conlab

Prorrogado até 18 de agosto o prazo para envio de resumos sobre comunicações ao XII Congresso Luso Afro Brasileiro de Ciências Sociais que se realizará em Lisboa, de 1 a 5 de fevereiro de 2015. Informações sobre os eixos temáticos e os grupos de trabalho no site www.ailpcsh.org

um dia de cão

Avião da Malaysian derrubado por missil nos céus da Ucrânia, perto da fronteira russa e se há envolvimento russo, direto ou indireto, a sua posição no conflito ucranianao vai ficar seriamente abalada, pelo menos a nivel da opinião publica mundial.
Israel ataca  a faixa de Gaza por terra mar e ar. Vai fazer limpeza de muitas rampas de lançamento de misseis e roquetes, vai destruir alguns tuneis, mas rapidamente o Hamas refará sua capacidade em material. É um ciclo que se repete e cujo fim ninguém vê.
No Brasil, a economia encolhe 0,18% em  maio, apenas cresce 0,38% em relação a maio de 2013 e a criação de empregos é a pior para um mês de junho desde 1998.

A derrota no contexto

Reproduzo opinião de Elio Gasperi no New York Times de hoje:

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor 

                                             Brazil’s Dance With Defeat

By ELIO GASPARI
JULY 14, 2014


SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Last week, with great solemnity, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that “being able to overcome defeat I think is the feature and hallmark of a major national team and of a great country.”
So what happened to Brazil that was so dreadful? Was it something similar to the 1940 defeat that drove Charles de Gaulle to call for French resistance? Thankfully, it was nothing of the sort. It was just a soccer game — a national nightmare, during which Germany scored seven goals, four of them in under six minutes. Fortunate is a people that is capable of such commotion over a simple soccer match.

Since its independence, the nation of Brazil has suffered only two terrible defeats — both on home turf, in soccer. Headed for a draw with Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final, the Brazilian team left itself open to a goal that silenced the country.
Six decades later, it was expected that Brazil, as the host nation, would finally vindicate itself in the eyes of the world. Last week’s loss to Germany, which went on to defeat Argentina and win the championship, was arguably worse than 1950. Goals ceased to be surprising; they took on a humiliating regularity. The word “humiliation,” recalled during the game and repeated throughout the world, informed Ms. Rousseff’s conversation with CNN. It would never occur to a Brazilian to emotionally distance herself from what had happened to the national team’s players. It’s basically a question of patriotism.
It may seem naïve to argue that the soul of a country can be deeply entwined with the result of a sporting event. Maybe so, but Americans still take pride in Jesse Owens’s victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Hitler’s nose and Joe Louis’s knockout of the German boxer Max Schmeling during the height of Nazism. And in terms of cultural competition, Americans felt a sense of triumph when the pianist Van Cliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 just months after the Soviet Union had shocked and shamed the United States by putting the Sputnik satellite into orbit.

Many nations identify with sporting victories but seek military successes above all. Sometimes this is for the good of humanity, like the allied efforts in World War II. Sometimes it is a terrible waste, like French and American actions in Vietnam. No nation likes to talk about its military failures. Americans don’t like to remember that in 1814 the British torched the White House.
Brazilian national humiliations tend to occur within the four corners of the soccer field. Perhaps we can chalk this up to geography — after all, Brazil is far from that cauldron of trouble called Europe. Or perhaps it’s luck. Since the end of the 19th century, no Brazilian soldier has died in a war that expanded the nation’s borders. Nine generals have governed Brazil. Six of them never fought a war. It’s better that way.
Before the World Cup began, opponents of the government bet on the event’s infrastructural weakness. Later, the government got drunk on the fleeting success of the team, despite having little to do with it.

Today it’s generally believed that the “7-1” debacle (and a 3-0 drubbing by the Netherlands in the third-place match) will influence the results of the presidential election in October. Behind this conviction lies a certain skepticism toward the universal right to vote, or worse, a disbelief in Brazilians’ capacity to intelligently exercise it.
Brazilian governments that have seen World Cup defeats have won elections. And others have lost elections despite World Cup victories. Add it up, and you’ve got nothing. Soccer depends on a ball in a goal. Elections, a ballot in the box. One requires the prevalent use of one’s feet; the other, one’s head.
The World Cup has been awarded, but Brazil’s problems will remain just as they’ve always been. Ms. Rousseff will seek re-election amid dismal economic indicators: too little growth (1.4 percent in 2014), too much inflation (6.4 percent according to forecasts by the central bank). And, above all, she will rely on a religious faith in marketing.

Her victory would increase the Workers’ Party’s run in government to 16 years. Never before in the history of Brazil has a political party with this degree of cohesion held on for so long in government.
The two candidates running against Ms. Rousseff have not yet made their campaign platforms clear. If they are thinking about education, health care or transportation, her adversaries Aécio Neves and Eduardo Campos haven’t said so — despite the fact that tens of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets one year ago to demand better services in precisely these three areas. As with the failed national team, the opposition is running a hollow campaign.
If the soccer team’s performance teaches us anything, it’s to remember the familiar aphorism: You can’t win before the game is played.

Elio Gaspari, a columnist for the Brazilian newspapers O Globo and Folha de São Paulo, is the author of a multivolume history of Brazil’s military dictatorship. This essay was translated by Alexandra Joy Forman from the Portuguese

Novo Livro

Adolfo Maria, amigo de  décadas, de grandes papos, debates e combates, acaba de publicar este romance: