nairoberry
September 6th, 2009, 09:32 PM
ACCORDING TO THE FAILED STATE INDEX (FSI) produced by the Washington-based Fund for Peace, Kenya is the 14th country globally most likely to fail.
This is a controversial ranking for East and Central Africa’s largest economy.
Kenya, as United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed recently in Nairobi, is also the largest non-mineral economy in sub-Saharan Africa, and the fact that it was awarded such a low ranking is intriguing, to say the least.
According to the American NGO, “the FSI focuses on the indicators of risk and is based on thousands of articles and reports that are processed from electronically available sources.”
Using these reports, the organisation ranks a country’s perceived threat of becoming a failed state using such criteria as mounting demographic pressures, uneven economic development, suspension or arbitrary application of the rule of law and widespread violation of human rights.
This methodology — relying on what is reported — raises pertinent questions about the reliability of the FSI. Reports appearing in the media and the web are a factor of such variables as media freedom, a country’s international visibility, and economic visibility.
There are, in any one day, more reports posted on the Internet on Kenya, for example, than are posted on Djibouti. Many of them are invariably negative.
What’s more, in a free media environment such as that obtaining in Kenya, reports published by local media are likely to be more critical of the government and its institutions than in a dictatorship.
Those emanating from less free countries would be laudatory of government, giving the wrong picture of the actual state of affairs.
The point here is not to deny Kenya’s vulnerability to social strife and the challenges the country faces in its efforts to become a modern nation-state. These are self-evident.
Rather, it is to raise the important issue of the credibility of the multiple reports emanating from Western capitals. While some can form the basis of sustainable international engagement, others are simply rubbish.
This is a controversial ranking for East and Central Africa’s largest economy.
Kenya, as United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed recently in Nairobi, is also the largest non-mineral economy in sub-Saharan Africa, and the fact that it was awarded such a low ranking is intriguing, to say the least.
According to the American NGO, “the FSI focuses on the indicators of risk and is based on thousands of articles and reports that are processed from electronically available sources.”
Using these reports, the organisation ranks a country’s perceived threat of becoming a failed state using such criteria as mounting demographic pressures, uneven economic development, suspension or arbitrary application of the rule of law and widespread violation of human rights.
This methodology — relying on what is reported — raises pertinent questions about the reliability of the FSI. Reports appearing in the media and the web are a factor of such variables as media freedom, a country’s international visibility, and economic visibility.
There are, in any one day, more reports posted on the Internet on Kenya, for example, than are posted on Djibouti. Many of them are invariably negative.
What’s more, in a free media environment such as that obtaining in Kenya, reports published by local media are likely to be more critical of the government and its institutions than in a dictatorship.
Those emanating from less free countries would be laudatory of government, giving the wrong picture of the actual state of affairs.
The point here is not to deny Kenya’s vulnerability to social strife and the challenges the country faces in its efforts to become a modern nation-state. These are self-evident.
Rather, it is to raise the important issue of the credibility of the multiple reports emanating from Western capitals. While some can form the basis of sustainable international engagement, others are simply rubbish.