Today, Benin Republic is the main supplier of secondhand clothing to Nigeria, a country in which the importation of secondhand clothing is banned. Igbo traders, who form a transnational trade network that spans the eastern part of the West African coast and that extends to Europe and North America, dominate the import and retail trade in the commodity in Benin Republic. This is a network that could be described – depending on the side from which one chooses to look at it – either as an agent of development or as a predator on the state’s resources. The exercise here is to move beyond those arguments and to show the current configurations of the trade network as it has responded to a changing global political and economic landscape, and as it has been modified by the changes in the political economy of the West African countries that it spans.

For more on the conference [pdf].

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The Chinese market in fake European classical art is growing. Steadily. Something they bring to it? Industrial efficiency.

The village of Dafen in southern China has become the centre of a big industry, with about 8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 per cent of the world’s oil paintings.

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Sport has infected other fields with its values. Everything from hairdressing to accountancy now has its own awards ceremony, making mere workers into winners and losers. The recent British election was dominated by televised debates between the main party leaders, which turned a four-week campaign into a three-set match. Heavily previewed and then exhaustively dissected, the debates were sport without the drama, the athleticism, the crowd reaction or even the scoreboard. In the messy aftermath, the place to find out what was happening was not the lead stories, which were often bland and clueless, but the minute-by-minute updates, supplied by deskbound reporters—a trick imported from sport.

A winner-takes-all culture, which would have been abhorrent a generation ago, has spread outwards from banking, with its eight-figure bonuses. It is harder to protest against that when we swallow the extreme economics of sport. Cristiano Ronaldo is paid an estimated £11.3m a year by Real Madrid, or £217,000 a week. And that’s before he slips on his Y-fronts. Tiger Woods was still valued at $82m as a brand byForbes in February, even after 14 mistresses’ worth of dirty laundry.

As a whodunnit, this is “Murder on the Orient Express”. Every suspect had a motive: they all dunnit. And we have let them. Sport, more than most things, is what we make of it. It plays on a screen not just in the corner of the room but in our heads. Its significance largely consists of what we project on to it. We may be watching in much the same numbers, but we are doing so with greater intensity, and inside a wider penumbra of collective consciousness. We all dunnit.

Check it out here.

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The government will sell 11 distribution companies created out of Power Holding Co. of Nigeria, the state-owned utility, and allow private companies to set up power plants using natural gas, hydro-electric dams and coal-powered stations, Jonathan said in a speech in Lagos, the commercial capital, broadcast on state television today [yesterday].

Listen to excerpts of the speech. Also, check out Saratu’s analysis.

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Sigue, a US money-transfer company strong in Latin America, is buying the money-transfer business of Coinstar for $41.5m. Coinstar’s network allows users to transfer cash to 23,000 points worldwide – and Sigue’s CEO, Guillermo de la Viña, says the acquisition will make his company “one of the largest global money transfer companies with pay out locations in over 130 countries.”

More deals may follow this year. Unistream, a Russian money transfer company with 30 per cent market share in former Soviet countries, is looking towards the Gulf, the second-largest source of private financial transfers after the US. Reuters recently reported that Western Union and MoneyGram were looking at ways to expand into Asia.

The moves testify to remittances’ resilience. Flows to developing countries shrunk in 2009, down 6 per cent to $307bn, as immigrants in the US and elsewhere lost jobs (particularly in construction) and, in many cases, returned home. However, a new World Bank report forecasts that remittances will rise by over 6 per cent in 2010 and over 7 per cent in 2011.

All that is well and good, but how long is it going to take for someone to figure out how to include everyday Africans in the global, ‘borderless’ world of finance? I am thinking of payment services, not remittances services. In the past one month, three friends who are based in Nigeria have asked me whether I can help them open a Paypal account. Some people they are doing some work for agree to pay only through Paypal. They refuse to use Western Union because, well, they don’t trust the Nigerian end of the service.

Don’t tell me that nobody thinks that there might be some money to be made in Africa from that. Or that they are too scared of bad, fraudulent Nigerians to try and introduce such services there. We all know that no matter how sophisticated and bad you think Nigerian fraudsters are, the ones in developed countries are much worse. If those services can be made to work securedly in developed countries, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to get them to work in African countries.

Or am I missing something?

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2. What percentage of salary increase would satisfy Indian lawmakers? (This is not a tip for Nigerian lawmakers.)

3. On the importance of field research for development economics (Almost there, economists, almost there.)

4. What about the foreskin? (On male circumcision.)

5. A Beninese Ponzi scheme that may cost a presidency

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Check out this series of cartoons accompanying a Human Rights Watch report on police corruption in Nigeria.

You know what’s most sad about it? Everyone is in on the game.

H/T Elizabeth Dickinson, who writes:

Like all corruption, there is an element of victimization on both sides of the equation, unfortunately. The people who are extorted from are, obviously, suffering. But so too are the low level policemen in many cases. How can I best illustrate this? Perhaps the fact that the officers were forced to buy their own bullets, uniforms, and pay for their own transportation because the upper ranks had taken the bulk of the funding for themselves or other pet projects. The majority of the officers also likely believed in being policemen, and wanted to be a positive force for their countries. They were proud of their roles and sought to do the best job they could. But they were also pretty hungry sometimes. And as I was once wisely told, a hungry man will do anything you ask.

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Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk of not finding a job.

The whole column.

One of my colleagues, Anja Peleikis, found out the same thing about Lebanese migrants in West Africa. See this article [pdf]. It is also somewhat similar to the case of the Igbo traders that I work with. One finds that the trade in a particular product is dominated by people from the same village, either within or outside the country.

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Considering that Rwanda witnessed one of the most appalling waves of barbarity in history just 16 years ago, when around 800,000 people were hacked to death in three months, the efficiency is extraordinary. So much has gone admirably right in terms of development. But a lot is going depressingly wrong in politics. Mr Kagame has become more ruthless and authoritarian. In the run-up to the election on August 9th the opposition has suffered grievously. So where should the balance between development and freedom lie? Can democracy be shoved aside in the battle against poverty? And what should outsiders do to tilt the balance back?

In full from The Economist here. Also check out the newspaper’s article on the presidential elections of tomorrow.

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Helon Habila is a Nigerian novelist and poet. His first novel Waiting for an Angel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best First Book, Africa Region) in 2003.

His three choices for Nigeria are;

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

2. The Man Died by Wole Soyinka

3. The Famished Road by Ben Okri

From the BBC Worldservice (with audio). Why can’t one embed BBC media anymore?

I can’t quarell with the list and his reasons for choosing them. I remember the pleasures of reading the first two on the list, and the struggles of reading the third.

Habila himself is one of the better contemporary Nigerian writers. See this review of his new book, Oil on Water.

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