The increasing role of social media in political developments in Africa gets underlined in this week’s top blog contributions from across the continent. We also look at improper payments from Nigeria, a diverse but uniform African population and new insights from the World Bank’s report on global poverty.

Voice of America has fired 15 employees in a Nigeria bribery scandal

Qz.com

Since Nigerian newspapers reported that 15 employees had accepted improper payments of around $5000 from a Nigerian state governor, Voice of America, an US government-funded broadcaster, has terminated their services from its Hausa language international radio service in Washington, D.C. The Hausa service of Voice of America broadcasts to 20 million people weekly in Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Chad and Cameroon. Accepting payments known as “brown envelopes” in Nigerian journalist circles is a common practice in the country to supplement paltry or unpaid salaries. To safeguard its reputation, Voice of America has launched a separate investigation to determine if any other coverage was improperly influenced as well and if so, to deal with it promptly.

Zimbabwean Twitter is shifting the country’s political landscape

Africasacountry.com

Contrary to assumptions arguing that social media proved to be irrelevant and overstated in determining electoral results in Zimbabwe since most voted along traditional demographic and party lines, social media nevertheless played an important role in the recent re-formulation of the country’s politics. The article states that over the last two years a socio-political transformation has taken place online, which means outside a formalized, state-sanctioned political forum. Twitter feeds, WhatsApp and Facebook have become digital town halls for activism as well as a space for engagement between citizens and state which would have been unimaginable only few years ago. The political change of Zimbabwe in November 2017 was digitalized before it was televised!

Africa: Out of many, one people

Africablogging.org

Besides emphasizing the huge cultural diversity across the African continent, #Africablogging’s Jimmy Kainja argues that Africans are after all one people who can identify with one another’s experience. He underlines his statement by giving examples of African leaders who are mostly copying one another’s bad ways and call that ‘benchmarking’. This way of working represents the reason it is difficult to find positive stories from the continent. The post critically questions why thriving African economies like Ghana and South Africa are still struggling to organize its informal sector and uplift the living standards of its ordinary citizens who make up the majority of the population. To start forcing positive narratives about Africa and its people, they have to benchmark on each other’s strengths and positive ways – the leadership as well as the population.

Why the World Bank’s optimism about global poverty misses the point

Theconversation.com

Surprisingly, the latest World Bank annual report on poverty and shared prosperity states that in 2015 only 10% of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty, which represents the “lowest poverty rate in recorded history”, according to World Bank’s President Jim Yong Kim. The author questions the truth of this report since he doubts that measuring extreme poverty in terms of the number of people who live on less than US$ 1.90 a day is in fact a meaningful measurement of poverty. Moreover, two big factors are completely missed out by the World Bank’s rhetoric: first, the majority of the world’s poor live in countries that have experienced strong economic growth and second, the growth strategies these countries have practiced create and reproduce poverty.