By Charles Onyango Obbo
DAILY NATION
Wednesday, August 19 2009

IF YOU KILL MY CAT, I WILL KILL your dog” – a statement seen on the back of a Zairean-registered lorry on Uhuru Highway on Wednesday morning.

Every other day, from Zimbabwe, to Nairobi and Addis Ababa, you can be sure there will be a bitter exchange of words between a diplomat (usually from the West) and the local President, Prime Minister, or Foreign Affairs minister who is angry at being “lectured to about democracy”.

This is totally unnecessary. I say let the evidence tell us whether Britain is more democratic than the African countries its ambassadors lecture to about good governance.

You will have read in the papers or watched on TV the scandal that enraged the British public about their MPs who claimed expenses for nearly everything from pornography, dog food, manure for their flower gardens to hair cuts.

Now something is happening in the UK that gives us a very good chance to measure its democracy against what we have in East Africa. When the British MPs went for their summer holidays, they were confronted by angry constituents who gave them “bad eyes”.

Partly in shame, at least a record 200 MPs – nearly 30 per cent of the 647 member House of Commons – are planning to stand down at the next general election.

There are 210 directly elected MPs in Kenya’s Parliament. If they acted at the British rate, we would see about 63 standing down in the 2012 election. With 237 directly elected MPs in Tanzania, it would be 77 standing down at the next election. What is the chance of that happening? Zero.

However, there are more things to worry about in Africa. In many parts of the continent, we now have new conflicts fuelled by, of all things, charcoal!

In most of Africa, charcoal use outstrips electricity, batteries and oil as a source of energy. The numbers are staggering. A report cited by The Independent says that in 26 African countries, both legal and illegal, trade in charcoal is worth $2 billion (Sh154 billion) a year!

In Chad, 60 per cent of the trees have been lost to the kilns. A desperate Chad government earlier this year tried to impose a charcoal ban. It was met with angry protests, and fearing a political disaster for itself, it backed off. Chad would have become the first country where the government was ousted over charcoal.

In the DR Congo, the charcoal business is estimated to be worth $30 million (Sh2.3 billion) a year, which helps fund the various armed groups that destabilise the country.

AFRICA’S STRUGGLES TO GET THINGS to work has attracted all sorts of solutions. One of the problems that most people agree bedevils planning in the continent is the unreliability of statistics.

For example, The Economist recently noted that going by the latest version of the Penn World Table (PWT), the most comprehensive source of figures about countries’ GDP since 1950, Equatorial Guinea’s GDP grew by four per cent a year between 1975 and 1999.

However, the data for the 2002 version of the PWT had suggested that the annual rate for that period was two per cent. So, Equatorial Guinea may have had the second-fastest growing economy in Africa – or the slowest.

One reason for this is because the PWT works on the assumption that data for most African countries have margins of error of 30-40 per cent. Researchers have been trying to find alternative, more reliable data, without much success.

Enter Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard and David Weil of Brown University, who suggest an alternative source of data: outer space.

In particular they track changes in the intensity of artificial light over a country at night, which should increase with incomes. American military weather satellites collect these data every night for the entire world.

The Economist notes that there might be problems with this method, but the average of the growth implied by changes in the intensity of artificial light and official GDP growth rates ought to improve the accuracy of estimates of economic growth. You can cook the books, but you can’t lie about how lit your streets and homes are at night.

Burma’s (Myanmar’s) economy grew at an official but very unlikely 8.3 per cent a year in the 10 years to 2003. However, if you adjust for brightness at night, the data suggests that it grew by a more realistic 5.8 per cent.

But, then, something strange happens in our charcoal-burning Congo if you use night-light data. It suggests that official figures are under-reporting growth rates. One reason is that while official data often doesn’t measure the Jua Kali economy, the night-light approach does.