The world has begun to wake up to Africa and its enormous potential. Images of fierce battles between French troops and jihadists in northern Mali and of unspeakable horrors in Darfur and Eastern Congo now have to vie for the world’s attention with pictures of gleaming skyscrapers, shopping malls, cell phones, and new ports and roads, and with reports of stunning rates of economic growth and innovative new solutions to age-old problems of poverty. Ten  of the 20 fastest-growing economies are in sub-Saharan Africa, and not all of them are big energy or mineral producers. Consumer spending is expected to double over the next ten years and the number of countries with average household incomes of more than $5,000 will also double.

The Palms Mall in Lagos, Nigeria

Kenya has what may be the world’s most advanced mobile payments system, developed by the leading mobile phone operator, Safari.com, and used by everyone from gardeners to executives to pay their electric bills, send money to their parents in the village, and pay the housekeeper. According to some estimates, one-third of Kenya’s GDP flows through the system. Jumia.com, a Nigerian company, has slick online retail web sites in Nigeria, Egypt, and Morocco, selling everything from electronics to shoes and promising door-to-door delivery, no small challenge in countries where few people have fixed street addresses. To get around the payment problem, people go online and use their domestic debit cards or a bank transfer to pay for goods. A Jumia affiliate in North America then buys the stuff from Amazon and other online retailers, using U.S. and Canadian funds, consolidates the goods, and ships to Lagos three times a week via Fedex. Local knowledge is important: without it, these shipments might take ages to clear   customs and cost substantial amounts of baksheesh. It’s not exactly Amazon Prime free overnight delivery, but it works, and it shows a way for companies to cater to the large and growing African middle class, people who can’t afford to fly to London or New York to do their shopping but who want, and have the means to pay for, a wide array of consumer goods. 

The Nigerian Stock Exchange Index is at a 52-week high and is up nearly 65% over the past year, so regional insecurity has yet to translate into economic instability, and indeed the links between the two can be tenuous. Only a little farther afield, Egypt’s CASE (Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange) Index has been a star performer, up over 57% in local currency terms and 41% in dollar terms over the past 14 months, even as the Arab Spring has turned into what looks to be a long winter of discontent.

Over the long run, though, political instability and civil unrest tend to take their toll on economic growth and investment performance. If for no other reason, a country like Nigeria, whose economic prospects are bright, needs to address the problems caused by its homegrown radical Islamists. I have written previously in this space about Indonesia, another huge, ethnically and religiously diverse country, which appears to have dealt fairly successfully with a militant separatist Islamist movement in the northern province of Aceh by giving the province a substantial degree of autonomy to impose its austere version of Sharia law. The Philippines, similarly, appears to have neutralized the 40-year insurgency by the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front on the southern island of Mindanao, granting the region significant autonomy in a peace agreement signed last October.

Each country is different, of course, and there is no guarantee that what seems to work in Indonesia and the Philippines will also work in Nigeria. Nine northern Nigerian states have already instituted full Sharia law, while another three have given wide authority to Sharia courts to adjudicate family and commercial disputes between Muslims. But Boko Haram is based in Borno, one of the nine Sharia states, and has carried out some of its most vicious attacks in the state capital of Maiduguri. Granting additional autonomy to Borno State may be insufficient to pacify the group. At the same time, trying to crush Boko Haram militarily could instead aggravate the situation, victimizing and radicalizing innocents and swelling the ranks of Boko Haram supporters.

One problem is Nigeria’s federal system, which grants a tremendous amount of power to state governors, who control most state revenues, dispense vast patronage, and typically pick their own successors. Greater state-level autonomy means little if Boko Haram remains locked out of power.

A three-pronged approach, while it does not guarantee success, seems the only reasonable way forward. It would entail a concerted but highly-disciplined effort by the Nigerian military to weaken the group militarily – one source of popular grievance has been looting and other abuses committed by Nigerian troops in prior anti-insurgency campaigns – accompanied by efforts to prise away less radical elements with bribes and offers to share power, thus isolating the more intransigent factions and also weakening the links between Boko Haram, a homegrown movement, and international jihadists affiliated with Al Qaeda. A special, even more autonomous, status for Borno State – similar to the special status granted by Indonesia to Aceh Province – and a political dispensation which guarantees the Islamists a real voice, would also help, provided it comes with strict prohibitions on the state becoming a haven for terrorist adventurers, backed up with military force. Finally, although he has so far done a good job, President Goodluck Jonathan should consider announcing that he will not run for re-election in 2015.

Nigerian presidential politics is governed by an unwritten rule that the presidency should alternate between the Muslim north and the largely Christian south. This rule was broken when Umaru Yar’Adua, the northerner who succeeded outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo after Obasanjo had completed two full terms in office, fell gravely ill only two years into his term and then died following six months during which Vice President Jonathan served as Acting President. Jonathan, a southerner, served out the remainder of Yar’Adua’s term and then won election in his own right in 2011. 

Although Nigerian presidents are subject to a two-term limit, the Nigerian High Court recently ruled that Jonathan could run for another term because, in the words of the ruling, “after the death of Umar Yar’Adua, there was no election. President Jonathan was merely asked to assume the office … in line with doctrine of necessity…He is therefore currently serving his first tenure of office and if he so wishes, he is eligible to further seek his party’s ticket … to run for office in 2015.” Northerners felt, and still feel, short-changed. If Jonathan were to run and serve another four-year term, a southerner would have ruled Nigeria for 18 of the previous 20 years. There is no guarantee that a legitimately elected northerner in the state house in Abuja will soften Boko Haram’s stance, but it could make some difference.

Nigeria, as Africa’s biggest country by population and its second-largest economy, is too big to ignore. We don’t know what a Boko Haram-ruled Borno State would look like, and we can’t exclude the possibility that it would entail the death penalty for apostasy, stoning of adulterers, and denial of education to girls. This could be hard for most Nigerians – not to mention the rest of the world – to accept, but the alternative could be far worse for everyone. 

According to Sachs, “[T]he fact is that from the start of his presidency Mr. Obama has planned a steep reduction in discretionary spending as a share of national income.” The narrative accompanying Obama’s draft budget, presented in mid-2012, boasted that the plan “would bring domestic discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration.” The roots of this plan go back to July 2009 and Obama’s 10-year budget framework, which called for both defense and non-defense discretionary expenditures to fall from 7.9 percent of GDP in 2008, the last full year of the George W. Bush presidency, to 6.3 percent in 2019, the plan’s final year.

In retrospect, it seems obvious. The centerpiece of Obama’s 2008 campaign was his promise that taxes would not increase on any American earning less than $250,000 a year, which effectively made the Bush tax cuts permanent for all but a tiny sliver of the population. Without this promise, it’s unlikely he would have been elected. At the same time, ruling out any cuts in Medicare and Social Security entitlements – and with Obamacare arguably increasing the long-term cost of medical entitlements – the only way to balance the budget would be to come up with entirely new revenue sources such as a national value-added tax or carbon tax, or to cut discretionary spending to the bone. Obama may have thought that faced with this prospect the American people would opt for higher taxes, but he never came up with any solution other than to raise taxes on the top one per cent of earners and to cut payments to Medicare providers, which by themselves can’t come close to making up the shortfall.

Half of the cuts will come out of military spending, but the other half will cut many of the really useful things government does, things like scientific and medical research, maintenance and repair of roads and bridges, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, air traffic control and air traffic safety, food safety inspection, issuance of passports, flu vaccinations and other disease control and prevention, Coast Guard rescues, keeping national parks open, diplomatic representation, issuance of oil and gas exploration and production permits, mine inspections, and disaster relief. Cuts to spending on the war on drugs, domestic wiretapping, cyber-surveillance, and airport passenger screening, though welcome, can hardly compensate for losses to these essential services and investments.

Congressional Republicans (and Democrats) can hardly be held blameless, but President Obama’s timid proposals and lack of leadership bear an equal or greater share of the responsibility for this predicament. Unfortunately, the personality traits and political calculations that got us into this mess are far from likely to get us out of it. 

Some traditions are best abandoned. I, personally, am happy Olympic athletes no longer compete in the nude, their bodies glistening with olive oil, though I would make an exception for women’s beach volleyball. The modern Olympics themselves are to a large extent based on a misreading of the role of the original games in ancient Greece. Pierre de Coubertin, who created the modern Olympic movement, was, unusually for a Frenchman, strongly influenced by English ideas of education and sport, especially those of Dr. Arnold of Rugby School, a proponent of the notion that “organised sport can create moral and social strength,” and that, as de Coubertin put it, “L’important dans la vie ce n’est point le triomphe, mais le combat, l’essentiel ce n’est pas d’avoir vaincu mais de s’être bien battu.” (The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well). De Coubertin would have had little use for Vince Lombardi’s world view (Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing), but then he also had little regard for women in sport and believed that they should be excluded from the Olympics. 

There is evidence that de Coubertin misinterpreted, and excessively romanticized, the ancient Olympics. Scholars have argued whether ancient Olympic athletes were amateurs or professionals – after 480 BCE, at least, most were professionals –  and have disputed de Coubertin’s belief in the contribution of the games to the prevention of war, arguing that a limited truce was declared only to permit athletes to travel to and from the Olympic site and protect the venue from attack during the festivities. What’s more, the idea that, as American sportswriter Grantland Rice put it, “For when the great scorer comes to write against your name, He marks not that you won or lost but how you played the game,” would probably have been quite alien to contestants in the ancient games. The ancient Greeks may have competed for glory, not reward, but the glory came in winning, not in being a good loser. Both Hector and Achilles, after all, were revered for their victories, not their defeats.

Still, some traditions are worth holding on to just because they are ancient and venerable. The modern Olympics are descended directly from the ancient Olympics, however much of the latter may have been lost in the translation. Wrestling was one of the core events of the ancient games and of the modern games, at least until now. Wrestling is one sport in which contestants compete purely for the glory. A few wrestlers may go on to fame and some degree of fortune in pro wrestling, but most of these guys, winners as well as losers, go on to earn a living doing something totally unrelated to the sport in which they have excelled. I have never seen a wrestler pictured on a Wheaties box, sponsored by a major shoe company, or advertising prescription drugs on TV. Some things are valuable precisely because they have no value outside themselves.

The ancient Greeks invented the concept of hubris – defiance of the gods – which typically led to nemesis, or divine retribution. Abandonment of wrestling, an ancient sport one can imagine the Greek gods watching and betting on, in favor of, say, artistic roller-skating, would be hubris at its worst, ditching whatever remains of Olympic ideals to pander to the TV networks’ eternal request for ratings. If this decision stands I fully expect nemesis to follow, perhaps in the form of a bolt of lightning that wipes out the next meeting of the International Olympic Committee. 

Although no Western power has yet – officially, at least – supplied arms to the rebels, the idea seems to be gaining currency in both Western and Arab capitals, especially in the wake of the December conference in Marrakech, which declared the Syrian National Coalition “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” For those who remember the U.N. declaration declaring the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, this too has an Orwellian tint. With the death toll in the conflict standing at an estimated 60,000 it is tempting to conclude that it is time for some kind of intervention: supplying arms at a minimum, but potentially declaring a no-fly zone over portions of the country to protect rebel-held territory from aerial attacks. But it would be a terrible mistake.  

Today’s New York Times, in one of the very few Western articles I have seen that do not explicitly take the side of the rebels,  reports on the large number of people in Syria, especially in Damascus,  who have no love for the Assad regime but who worry about the consequences of a rebel victory. These people include business owners and civil servants, many but not all of them Alawites and Christians, who fear persecution by a future Islamist government as well as a settling of scores by various groups that may not care to lay down their weapons once the regime is deposed. Considering the turn of events in Libya, Egypt, and Iraq, their concerns are far from misplaced. The possible replacement of Syria’s multi-religious character with a monolithic Sunni identity or, worse, the potential partition of the country into ethnic enclaves ruled by warlords ought to give pause to the most enthusiastic supporters of the rebel movement. Women especially may not relish giving up the substantial equality they have enjoyed under the Assads’ secularist government.

What, then, is the solution? UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has announced a new peace plan, which he says has at least tentative backing from the Russians. No details have yet been released, but the plan is likely to involve some kind of transitional unity government that will prepare the way for a new elected government. The opposition has been adamant that no peace talks can take place as long as Assad remains in power, but this may not be the stumbling block it has been in the past, Russia having recently indicated that it is largely indifferent as to whether Assad stays or goes. The offer of a safe haven in Moscow for the Assad family and the ability to spirit out however many millions of dollars they may need to live in their accustomed style could do the trick, especially if the Russians threaten to stop supplying the regime if he doesn’t accept their offer and if the alternative is to end up in the dock of the International Criminal Court or to be gunned down by the side of the road like Muammar Qaddafi. Many of those close to the Assads, seeing an opportunity to escape the worst consequences of a military defeat, would almost certainly be willing to give him an additional push.

This is far from a perfect solution. Even if Bashar and his wife agree to go quietly, his younger brother Maher, who commands the Republican Guard and the Army’s elite Fourth Armored Division, could decide to fight on. But even Maher’s agreement to leave the country would not guarantee a happy ending. After 42 years of authoritarian and often brutal rule by the Assad clique, whatever democratic habits and institutions Syria once possessed have atrophied. Our experience in Iraq shows us how hard it is to build a nation and to graft democracy onto a country with no experience of it. Both Iraq and Egypt demonstrate that even free and fair elections are by themselves no guarantee of liberty.

Still, the available alternatives appear far worse. It is time to start talking to the Russians about engineering an end to the conflict and supporting Syria’s reconstruction.

Turkey’s AK (Justice and Development) Party government, which bien pensants like The Economist and the Brookings Institution insist on referring to as “mildly Islamist,” grows more authoritarian and less tolerant by the day. Under AK Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey is reckoned to have imprisoned more journalists in recent years than China or Iran, using sweeping media laws, some of them on the books for years, as a pretext to imprison journalists for allegedly disseminating statements and propaganda from terrorist organizations. In September a Turkish court convicted and imposed heavy sentences on more than 300 active and retired military officers for plotting to overthrow the government in proceedings widely considered a politicized effort to diminish the influence of the military, which has played an important role as the guarantor of secularism and democracy since Ataturk’s reforms of the 1920s. The Turkish government, formerly Israel’s only ally in the Muslim world, has lately missed few opportunities to criticize and confront Israel in international forums.

Prime Minister Erdogan is almost certain to run for President in 2014, and he is now trying to push through constitutional changes that will transform the presidency from a largely ceremonial office into one with substantial executive power. Turkey remains a linchpin of NATO and especially of any potential international effort to unseat Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria, and it is a longstanding partner – and potentially, one day, a member – of the European Union, but there is widespread unease about AKP’s long-term commitment to both alliances. None of this means that Turkey is going to start lopping off people’s hands or stoning adulterers, but it does challenge some long-held assumptions about the Turkish model.

As an alternative, I’d like to suggest Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation that certainly has its problems, but which appears to have devised workable solutions to many of them, not least on the always touchy subject of religious tolerance.

All is not perfect: in May Lady Gaga cancelled a planned concert after some Islamist groups had threatened violence if she went ahead with her performance. The past decade has seen a number of terrorist attacks, most notably the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing that killed over 200 people, but also several more recent fatal car and suicide bombings of Western targets in Jakarta and on Bali. There have also been numerous localized disputes in different parts of the country, some of them deadly, among different religious and ethnic groups.

But tolerance and diversity have deep roots in Indonesia, reflected in the country’s resolutely secular constitution, the diverse strains and sects of major religions that generally rub along together without much friction, and the flexibility the government has shown to resolve local issues in innovative and locally appropriate ways. A prime example is the 2005 peace accord in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra, followed by direct elections in 2006, which put an end to a violent insurrection dating back to the 1970s and gave the province a high degree of autonomy, reflected in its strict application of Sharia law. Gamblers and drinkers are caned, and one of the big issues in the April 2012 provincial elections was public flogging should remain the official penalty for adulterers or should be replaced by stoning. Incumbent Governor Irwandi Yusuf, who pronounced himself strongly in favor of Sharia though against stoning, was in the event ousted at the polls by former separatist leader Zaini Abdullah, who advocated a more progressive interpretation of Sharia, stressing prevention of un-Islamic behavior rather than punishment.

The latest cause célèbre in Aceh over a bunch of self-styled “punks” sporting tattoos and piercings, who sing anarchist-tinged songs to ukulele accompaniment in public squares in the capital, Banda Aceh and who pledge allegiance to the cause of Pussy Riot, shows this prevention principle at work. The local gendarmes recently rounded up a bunch of them, shaved off their Mohawk hairdos, and sent them to a boot camp for ten days to get them to shape up. They emerged unrepentant though they maintain they have always been good Muslims who remove their piercings before going to pray at the mosque.

Aceh is not a place I’d care to live, but anyone in Aceh who feels the same can easily move to a different part of the country, just as a North Dakota farm boy with a passion for Judy Garland may find New York or San Francisco more congenial. In Jakarta you can see women wearing the hijab head scarf, but they are in a minority, and in any case they mix freely with men and with unveiled women in a way that seems perfectly normal.

The Jakarta Post reports that on December 1 in the Central Java city of Semarang a group of sex workers and transvestites, in celebration of World AIDS Day, conducted a competition, complete with practical demonstrations and audience participation, to encourage their customers to use condoms.  Sekar, one of the contestants, said, “We have to be really good with seducing the customers, so they are willing to use condoms voluntarily and yet can still feel satisfaction.” In Surakarta, another Central Java city, several dozen members of the local transvestites association gathered at a main traffic circle to campaign for condom use. Louisiana Margherita, one of the Association members, said the group requires its 97 members to use a condom every time they have sex, partly to counter the image of transvestites as vectors of HIV transmission. According to Association chairperson Fernandes Chintya Maramis, 99 percent of transvestites in the area are commercial sex workers, but he said that in his 18 years in the profession he had always used condoms.

A Muslim country in which prostitutes of both sexes can ply their trade openly and with pride is a model worth emulating. Afghanistan, take note.