By Michael Madill

The al-Shabab militia, which is making life miserable for everyone in Somalia while it tries to impose a totalitarian dictatorship on the country using Islam and the cultural codes of eighth century Arabia, has just declared banking illegal.

The militia has decided that transferring money from one person to another using your mobile phone is un-Islamic and therefore haram or forbidden, on pain of death. It is a sign that their hold on the country is slipping, that Somalis are gradually releasing the grip of fear which al-Shabab thinks it still has.

The militia has not banned hawala, a traditional system of money transfer popular in the Muslim and Arabic-speaking worlds and which it tightly controls in the parts of Somalia within range of its guns. Mobile phone banking, in which users transfer plan minutes or electronic credits directly between two accounts via text message or infrared network, is fast becoming the principal method of payment in Mogadishu.

By Michael Madill

Poor neighborhoods might just be the best hope of poor African countries.  The rich ones certainly aren’t up to the job.  You can find wealthy people and big governments in every country on the continent, but they have done little to make their neediest people better off in the fifty years since many of them got their independence.  There are arguments about how much of this problem is their fault or even their responsibility, but we can look back at half a century of attempts to mitigate poverty and suffering and see only modest, irregular gains.

Today two-fifths of a country’s income vanishes into corrupt practices and politicians’ pockets in places like Uganda.  Official development assistance makes up more than half the government’s budget in Niger, the Central African Republic and Liberia just to name a few.  Countries with relatively more exposure to the world economy like Nigeria and South Africa are struggling to close budget gaps like their poorer neighbors.  And in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea-Bissau it’s hard to distinguish government employees and soldiers from petty thugs and criminal warlords because they are often the same people.