Buried deep below Niger’s Sahel desert, uranium may change this West African country’s fortunes. Despite environmental fears, more and more nuclear plants throughout the world may be coming on line. Niger is capitalising on this growing demand, issuing more and more mining permits and hoping these radiating riches will lift it out of poverty. Richard Stupart looks at the scramble in the sand for nuclear fuel. Niger is at an economic crossroads: its colonial history is colliding with the realpolitik of future energy security. Niger came under French rule in the 1890s and gained independence in 1960. During much of…
Richard Stupart
Historically, the emergence of large middle classes is a recent phenomenon. Africa is late to the party and Richard Stupart argues it may be too soon to break out the champagne. Africa is a continent often maligned for the huge divide between its miserable poor and bloated rich, but its emerging middle class is now the subject of optimistic chatter. Several reports on the middle class in Africa paint a picture of an African golden age full of possibilities for driving growth through middle-class consumption. They have unleashed a Pollyannaish glee among corporates who are salivating over the opportunity of…
Humanitarian aid and the media: making money from misery by Richard Stupart In 2004, Sudanese soldiers surrounded and laid siege to the town of Kailak in Darfur. Its residents soon began to starve and die. But somehow, foreign reporters covering the Darfur crisis failed to file stories on this tragedy. The void on Kailak’s deliberate starvation is sadly emblematic of the persistent failure of western media to shoulder its responsibilities when covering humanitarian disasters. Reporting is all too often shallow and insubstantial. Mainstream journalism’s stories on famine, in particular, are often too simplistic. They frequently fall into stereotypical sentimentality, describing…
