On August 4 Washington
think tank the Atlantic Council held a presentation to publicize the release of
“its new Issue in Focus report, ‘Morocco’s Emergence as a Gateway to Businessin Africa’ … coauthored by Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham and Senior
Fellow Ricardo René Larémont. “
Moderated by Dr. Pham,
panelists included H.E. Moulay Hafid Elalamy, minister of industry, trade,
investment, and the digital economy for the Kingdom of Morocco; Mohamed El
Kettani, chairman and CEO of Attijariwafa Bank; Karim Hajji, CEO of the
Casablanca Stock Exchange; Nabil Habayeb, GE’s president and CEO of Middle
East, North Africa and Turkey; H.E. Moustapha Ben Barka, minister of industry
and propaganda investment promotion for the Republic of Mali.
Despite the
impressive economic star power here, the event amounted to little more than a
Moroccan propaganda love fest and the Pham/Laremont report’s conclusion that
Morocco provides a potential solution” for African “corruption, burdensome and
ambiguous regulation, undeveloped human resources, poor infrastructure, and
insecurity, ” is delusional. Anyone who thinks that Morocco is emerging as a
gateway to business in Africa should have his head examined.
1. Morocco is the
only African country that is not a member of the African Union. What is
actually amazing is how few people at the event even realized this. I brought it
up with pretty much everyone I spoke with, and not one even knew that Morocco
dropped out of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1984 over the admission
of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (as the government of Western Sahara)
in 1982. With the transformation of the OAU into the African Union (AU) in
2001, Morocco has remained the only African country that is not a member of the
union. This fact, alone, is hardly a good start for being a gateway for
business in Africa.
2. Morocco is the
only African country that is illegally occupying an ex-colony. The UN’s Fourth Committee on
decolonization has only one African territory left on its list of
non-self-governing territories (ex-colonies). That territory, of course, is the
Western Sahara, which has been illegally occupied by Morocco for almost 40
years now, in defiance of innumerable UN resolutions and an International Court
of Justice Opinion. It is a great mystery to me why a continent made up
predominantly of colonies that have gained independence would see Morocco as a
gateway to anything other than neo-colonization.
3. Morocco is the
world’s largest drug trafficker into Europe. Even with large governmental
attempts to crack down on drug trafficking, Morocco remains among the largest exporters of hashish in the world, coming out of its
legendary hippie haven in the Rif Mountains. Since we are talking
about Morocco as a gateway to Africa, you might want to take a look at Drug Trafficking in Northwest Africa: The Moroccan Gateway. A pretty raunchy gateway I would say.
4. Morocco
continues to have a serious corruption problem. Freedom House and
Transparency International tell you all you need to know: "Despite the
government’s rhetoric on combating widespread corruption, it remains a problem,
both in public life and in the business world. In the 2012 book, Le Roi
Prédateur, journalists Catherine Graciet and Éric Laurent leveled sharp
charges of corruption at the palace. Morocco was ranked 91 out of 177 countries
and territories surveyed in Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption
Perceptions Index."
And Wikileaks has even more to say about all this.
And Wikileaks has even more to say about all this.
5. Freedom House’s
respected Freedom of the World and Freedom of the Press ratings are not kind to
Morocco and are scathing on Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara.
Morocco’s Freedom Status in the 2014 Report is “Partly Free,” with a combined
score for Political Rights and Civil Liberties far worse than South Africa, slightly
worse than Nigeria, and with the same score as Madagascar and Mali. Morocco’s Freedom of the Press rating is even worse, with a status of “not Free,”
which puts the country in pretty nasty company both in Africa and the world.
Finally, Morocco’s occupation of part of the Western Sahara gets them a Freedom of the World rating with the status of “not free” and “Worst of the Worst”
alongside Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, North Korea,
Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tibet.
The Atlantic Council’s conclusion that Morocco is “an especially attractive
portal for investment and a significant US partner in Africa” looks a bit fishy
to me.
6. Morocco,
through OCP, its national office of phosphates, has been systematically and
illegally looting the phosphate wealth of the illegally occupied Western
Sahara, and King Mohammed VI has been systematically looting the wealth of OCP making
him one of the wealthiest people on earth. The international law case against Morocco’s
plunder is extensive. Western Sahara
Resource Watch’s Recommended Reading on The Plundering is a good place to start
on all this, and
Mohammed VI’s plunder has been extensively reported. See in particular Forbe’s King of Rock and The Predator King: an Expose about Graciet and Larent’s book The Predator
King: Plundering Morocco. All of this is rather disgusting stuff. Is there any
wonder why, with all this plunder taking place in Morocco, literacy remains at
least-developed countries’ levels.
7. Morocco has a “mediocre” record of resource governance based on its
“overall lack of effective resource governance” over its phosphate sector.
“Morocco is the world’s largest phosphate exporter and holds three-quarters of
global phosphate reserves.” The respected Revenue Watch Institute gives Morocco
“mediocre scores on all components of its Resource Governance Index (RGI)." If
Morocco has anything to teach to the rest of Africa, it is how to thoroughly
mismanage, steal, and waste its abundant resources.
8. Morocco is among the world’s largest incubators of terrorists. In
a 2011 Brookings study by Anouar Boukhars, we learn that “The
involvement of many Moroccans in international terrorism has raised pressing
questions about the efficacy of the Moroccan regime’s strategy in preventing
the spread of extremist ideology among the population.” In a similar vein, in
the United States Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism 2010, we learn that despite huge Moroccan
government counter-terrorism efforts “Reports of Moroccans either preparing to
go or going to terrorist fronts in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan to receive
training from al-Qa-ida (AQ) linked facilitators and/or to conduct attacks
suggest Morocco remained a source for foreign fighter pipelines.”
9. Morocco’s refusal to hold a referendum on independence in the
Western Sahara, that it agreed to hold as part of the 1991 cease fire with the Polisario
Front, has scuttled all attempts to get the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) off the
ground. Morocco’s invasion and illegal occupation of part of the Western
Sahara has created a situation where “Intra-regional merchandise trade has languished
at 1.3 percent of the region’s total trade, one of the lowest rates of any region
in the world.” Given Morocco’s miserable record of fostering trade in the
Maghreb, it’s hard to see how, according to Atlantic Council and Rabat, Morocco
could or would be a lovely gateway for trade in sub-Saharan Africa.
10. Finally, “Morocco’s
Emergence as a Gateway to Business in Africa” is a joke because J.
Peter Pham co-wrote this brief for the Atlantic Council. Pham’s long history of dishonesty, misinformation,
bias, propaganda, and misanalysis on the Western Sahara and Morocco guarantees
that everything he writes or says on this topic is totally false. In other
words, if he says that Morocco is emerging as a “gateway to business in Africa”
you can be sure that the opposite is true – that Morocco is the gateway to
hell.
No comments:
Post a Comment