There was never a better time to prove the point - Governor Palin, are you paying attention? - that Africa is a continent and not a country. The news coming from two widely separated corners shows the contrast:
Ghana: the country's fifth democratic, contested presidential elections are taking place today, and the country is debating how best to manage an oil bonanza due to start in the next two years
Zimbabwe: starvation has exacerbated the cholera epidemic, which is added to the endemic hyper-inflation and political violence. Now even some African leaders are calling for armed international intervention to save the country from Robert Mugabe's calamitous rule.
If you are looking for the latest information on Ghana's elections, check this wonderful page from the BBC World Service, which provides audio and text background and results starting 1830 GMT on Sunday. For local flavor and minute-by-minute updates, read "Think Ghana" and its Decision '08 blog, by three enterprising young Ghanaians.
Personally, I want Ghana's winning streak to continue, for it is a very impressive country. Airports tell you something about a country, and Accra's international airport is clean and calm - extremely reassuring in a region where air travel is sporadically deadly. Ghana - even before the discovery of oil - was fast on its way to becoming a regional center; French is increasingly overheard, thanks to francophone businessmen seeking a safe place to do business near sometimes war torn Ivory Coast.
But it was not always so. I returned from a series of trips to Ghana a couple of years ago, and was enthusing about the country's progress with a friend who had served in the Peace Corps in the French-speaking Sahel in the Eighties. She was surprised at the change from her time in the region, as Ghana's reputation then was one of military coups, corruption, instability, and firing squads. Today, an interested visitor might see the seaside firing ranges that the very professional Ghanaian Army now only uses for target practice. In 1979, that's where they carried out the execution of the losers in a military coup.
This oscillation in the reputation of African countries is nowhere more evident than in Zimbabwe, which was known as the "jewel of Africa" in better days. Before its 231 million percent annual inflation rate and $200 million Zimbabwe Dollar note (AFP photo at left from yesterday is already outdated). For an idea of the extent of the paradise that was lost, read "How To Kill a Country" in the December 2003 Atlantic by (current Obama State Department Transition Team adviser) Samantha Power:
The country's economy in 1997 was the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women. How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent's basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe... who by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national destruction.
Dr. Power likely thought that five years ago Zimbabwe had reached its nadir; today it's impossible to say just how much lower the country can go. And unless Mugabe himself contracts the rampant cholera, it's hard to imagine what - short of his army turning on him - can put an end to the misery.
"Nation branding," or the cultivation of a country's reputation, requires more than a marketing effort for African countries. No PR campaign on CNN International or BBC World can erase the total failure of governance and the evident misery of Zimbabwe's population. But Ghana, which returned from the precipice of failed statehood, offers hope to a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. The question is: what will be left to govern?