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Kenya: Public petition for the Freedom Of Information Bill, 2007

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/43196

The FOI Bill of 2007 is an Act of Parliament to enable the public to access to information in the possession of the Government and public authorities, to establish systems and processes to promote proactive publication and dissemination of information; and for connected purposes. This petition asks the Kenya National Assembly to pass the FOI Bill 2007. It will be tabled in the House pursuant to Standing Orders 163-167.
FOI NETWORK
ICJ-Kenya

PETITION TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

PURSUANT TO THE PARLIMENTARY STANDING ORDERS NUMBER 163

We the undersigned citizens of Kenya and the Freedom of Information Network members humbly petition as follows:-

1. The National Assembly to pass The Freedom of Information Bill, 2007. The Bill was published in the Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 44 (Bills No. 18) of 2007 on 27th April 2007 pursuant to a motion unanimously approved by the House on 18th October 2006. The Bill was tabled for first reading on 17th May 2007 and the Departmental Committee on Energy Communications and Public Works discussed it on 3rd- 6th June 2006 with stakeholders invited. The report of the Departmental Committee was tabled before the House on 15th August 2007. The Bill is awaiting consideration by the Committee of the Whole House and the Third Reading.
2. Freedom of information is a fundamental human right protected under Section 79 of the Constitution of Kenya that will facilitate enjoyment of all other rights.
3. The Freedom of Information Bill, 2007 when enacted will usher a culture of openness, transparency and accountability in Kenya that will spur economic development and promote effective participatory democracy for all Kenyans.
4. This Bill will enable access to information in the possession of the Government and public authorities and will establish systems and processes that promote proactive publication and dissemination of information stemming the culture of official secrecy and opaqueness.
5. The Bill is urgent as poverty, insecurity, disease, unemployment, famine, corruption and mal-administration continue to thrive in Kenya due to lack of free flow of information from government and public authorities to the citizens.
6. The National Assembly will propel Kenya into a democratic, accountable, corruption free, open and secure, African tiger through passage of the Freedom of Information Bill 2007.

THEREFORE your petitioners most humbly call upon the National Assembly to pass the Freedom of Information Bill, 2007

DATED at NAIROBI this 6th day of September 2007

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION NETWORK STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists (Leading the FOI Network)
Kenya Human Rights Commission
Transparency International – Kenya
Institute for Law and Environmental Governance - Kenya
Media Council of Kenya
African Women’s Development & Communication Network
FAHAMU
Legal Resources Foundation
Kenya Correspondents Association
Association of Media Women in Kenya
Kenya Parliamentary Journalists Association
Centre for Law and Research International
Name and Shame Corruption Networks Campaign

Blue-Hatting Darfur

Mahmood Mamdani

2007-09-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/43158

Mahmood Mamdani writes about the dangers of the UN’s new role in Darfur. The balance between the military and political dimensions is crucial, and the UN tends to privilege the military dimension.


Significant changes are currently taking place on the ground in Darfur. The peacekeeping forces of the African Union (AU) are being replaced by a hybrid AU-UN force under overall UN control. The assumption is that the change will be for the better, but this is questionable. The balance between the military and political dimensions of peacekeeping is crucial. Once it had overcome its teething problems – and before it ran into major funding difficulties – the AU got this relationship right: it privileged the politics, where the UN has tended to privilege the military dimension, which is why the UN-controlled hybrid force runs the risk of becoming an occupation force.

The AU’s involvement in Darfur began a year after the start of the insurgency, when in April 2004 it brokered the N’djamena Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement between the Sudanese government and the rebel movements. The result was the setting up of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), which started with a group of 60 observers in June 2004, and expanded to 3605 by the end of the year: 450 observers, 2341 soldiers and 814 police officers. The troops came from six countries – Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Senegal, Gambia and Kenya – and the police from Ghana. There were also military observers from Egypt and Libya, among others. A Joint Assessment Mission, led by the AU with participants from the UN, the EU and Canada, followed in March 2005. It called for an increase in the numbers of soldiers and police to a total of roughly eight thousand, and for civilians to be brought in as humanitarian officers.

One member of the assessment team was Major General Henry Anyidoho from Ghana, who was UN deputy force commander in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. I met him in Khartoum in May this year, and asked what he thought of AMIS. ‘I got to Darfur in January 2005,’ he said. ‘I found out they were doing an incredibly good job. First, the rebel movements were still intact, so it was easy to deal with the government and the two rebel movements. Second, the Janjawiid were pretty well under control. Third, the ceasefire agreement was being observed.’ This positive view was shared by Refugees International, which reported in November 2005 that earlier in the year, AMIS had been able to provide some security and deterrence. Displaced persons were congregating near AMIS bases, the UN World Food Programme started parking its vehicles at AMIS sites, AMIS escorted humanitarian convoys, and helped victims of attacks get to hospitals. The round-the-clock presence of civilian police in some IDP [Internally Displaced Person] camps has provided a greater sense of security to a population that is distrustful of the Sudanese police. AMIS forces have helped to restore order and provide security during the very difficult IDP re-registration process.[1]

By the time the Refugees International report appeared, however, it was clear that the rebel movements were beginning to split. AMIS had succeeded – and this was a major political achievement – in negotiating a Declaration of Principles and getting all the insurgent factions and the government of Sudan to sign it on 5 July 2005 in Abuja. That declaration remains the only political basis for peace in Darfur. But only three months later, when the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) held its conference in Darfur, Abdel Wahid, its leader, anticipated problems and did not attend. His suspicions proved justified when Minni Minawi, the commander of the movement’s field forces, was elected to replace him. The AU decided to invite both men to peace talks in Abuja, where Minawi signed the Darfur Peace Agreement in May 2006. But the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the other original rebel movement, refused to sign, as did 19 representatives of the SLM, who defected to follow Abdel Wahid.[2] The so-called Group of 19 wielded a lot of influence among the fighters, who soon began to degenerate into tribal groupings. The difficulty for the AU now was how to get all these groups together, but it remained committed to a political solution, knowing that only a renegotiated ceasefire would provide protection for civilians in Darfur.

Another unfortunate development was that support for AMIS from Western donor countries began to weaken just as the going got rough. The N’djamena Ceasefire Agreement had involved a formal collaboration between the AU, the UN and leading Western powers. According to Anyidoho, ‘Canada was to provide aircraft and maintenance, the UK vehicles, the US camps, and the EU soldiers and police.’ Donors eager to be seen to pledge money early in 2005 were reluctant to release it once the mission ran into difficulties. The US had promised $50 million to support AMIS at the donors’ conference in May 2005, but didn’t deliver. By November the following year, Congress had removed the funds from the 2006 Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill. Around the same time, the EU announced that salary payments would be made only on a quarterly basis and demanded proper financial accountability before releasing funds for the next quarter. When the paperwork didn’t arrive, the EU suspended the provision of funds.

‘Donors call the shots,’ Anyidoho told me. ‘When donor fatigue set in, the world began calling for UN forces. The AU force has not been paid since January 2007. It is short of aviation fuel from time to time. Donors have provided the AU with commercial, not military, helicopters, so the pilots must decide whether or not to go to an area.’ In July, when I made my second visit this year to Sudan, the AU force still hadn’t been paid. AMIS has faced a series of problems of this sort. As early as 2005, when Refugees International sent a mission to assist AMIS in North Darfur, it noted that ‘all of AMIS’s local interpreters were on strike because their salaries had been cut in half following a restructuring of salaries . . . for all AMIS personnel.’

The AU had assumed that the ceasefire would be observed by all parties, and expected that its mission would be needed for only a short time. As the rebels began to split, and the political agreement underlying the ceasefire to unravel, fighting resumed and the inadequacy of AMIS’s mandate became apparent. There were demands that it be expanded so that the armed peacekeepers could protect not only the unarmed observers, who were supposed to monitor the ceasefire, but also the civilian victims of the conflict.

The AU itself had quickly become a target both for the belligerents and for anybody agitated by the conflict – including the media, the international NGOs (INGOs) and the IDPs they had come to ‘save’. Throughout the second half of 2005, there were attempts by all sides to murder or kidnap AU soldiers. According to Refugees International, Janjawiid attacks on villages in North Darfur, which killed ten people and displaced nearly seven thousand more, also wounded three members of an AMIS patrol; a rebel splinter group kidnapped nearly forty AMIS troops in West Darfur; four Nigerian AMIS troops and two of its civilian contractors were killed when they intervened in an attack, reportedly by the SLA, on another contractor; the next day, a JEM splinter group kidnapped an entire AMIS patrol of 18, including its American monitor, in Nana, near Tine in West Darfur.

There were other problems too. In September 2005, two AMIS soldiers died of Aids-related illnesses, sparking public anxieties. In March 2006, Channel 4 reported that women and girls as young as 11 at the Gereida IDP camp in South Darfur were claiming that AU soldiers had offered them money in exchange for sex. The AU set up a committee to inquire into alleged ‘sexual misconduct including rape and child abuse’ carried out by its forces.

AMIS has responded ineptly to such problems. It has almost no appreciation of the critical role of spin in shaping public opinion in modern Western democracies and has neither a public relations office nor a legal department. Instead of releasing its version of events in a convincing way, it always communicates in the form of a short press release. Refugees International reported incredulously that when they asked for ‘a brochure describing their mission, officers handed RI a printed copy in English and Arabic of the Declaration of Principles . . . with photos of the signatories’.

The powerful, usually well-intentioned INGO community in Darfur has added its voice to those who see the presence of the UN, and of the Western powers in particular, as the only viable solution to the crisis. Refugees International wants the UN to take charge of African peacekeepers, on the grounds that ‘“blue-hatting” a mission . . . has worked in the past in such places as Burundi and Liberia, where the AU or Economic Community of West African States, after providing initial stability, handed over a mission to the UN.’ They argue, above all, that the UN has the resources to support more troops on the ground, and to furnish them with superior weaponry. RI has even called on the UN Security Council to establish a no-fly zone over Darfur and on Nato and other forces to assist AMIS in enforcing it. There are concerns, naturally, that such measures would ratchet up the military element of the ‘humanitarian intervention’, but there has been hardly any discussion of their potential political consequences. It is this tension between the military and political aspects of intervention that explains the contradictions in Security Council Resolution 1769 of 31 July on the United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID).

Resolution 1769 begins by affirming that this ‘hybrid operation should have a predominantly African character and the troops should, as far as possible, be sourced from African countries’. It calls on the secretary-general to ‘immediately begin deployment of the command and control structures and systems necessary to ensure a seamless transfer of authority from AMIS to UNAMID’, and leaves no doubt about the meaning of ‘immediately’: ‘as soon as possible and no later than 31 December 2007’. At the same time, the resolution ‘emphasises there can be no military solution to the conflict in Darfur’ and stresses the importance of the Darfur Peace Agreement as the basis for a ‘lasting political solution and sustained security in Darfur’. It deplores the fact that ‘the Agreement has not been fully implemented by the signatories and not signed by all parties to the conflict,’ and calls for an immediate ceasefire, including a stop to the government’s aerial bombings. Here, then, is the contradiction at the heart of Resolution 1769: it aims to enforce a ceasefire that does not exist. It sets a firm deadline for the transfer of authority to UNAMID, but suggests no deadline for either a ceasefire or a political agreement to be reached by the warring parties. An external force can monitor a ceasefire agreed by belligerents, but only if such an agreement exists. The collapse of a ceasefire is evidence that there is no agreement. It was, after all, the breakdown of the N’djamena ceasefire that reversed the fortunes of AMIS.

‘The AU has become part of the conflict,’ Mohamed Saley, the leader of the JEM splinter group that allegedly abducted the AMIS patrol in October 2005, told Reuters at the time. ‘We want the AU to leave and we have warned them not to travel to our areas.’ Trying to keep the peace in the absence of a peace agreement made the AU ‘part of the conflict’. There is no reason to believe that the fate of the UN will be any different. To strengthen the mandate in the absence of a political agreement is more likely to deepen than to solve the dilemma. To enforce the ceasefire will mean taking on the role of an invading – and not a peacekeeping – force. Darfur, which is a bit smaller than France – and larger than Iraq – will surely require a force of more than the 26,000 currently planned by the UN.

Abdu Katuntu was chair of the African Union Parliament’s Select Committee on Darfur between 2004 and 2006, during which time he made six lengthy visits to Darfur, including stays in IDP camps. I met him in Kampala a few weeks ago and asked him why the UN could not have given AMIS more resources and made its mandate more robust, instead of ‘blue-hatting’ it. ‘It would have rendered them irrelevant,’ he answered, ‘because the international community would have said the Africans have sorted out their own problem.’ I have also spoken to UN personnel who are puzzled by the organisation’s focus on only one set of belligerents. ‘There is something wrong with the UN Mission,’ an Afghan security officer in the UN’s Department of Safety and Security reflected. ‘Everyone knows that for the UN the problem is only the government and the Janjawiid. They are here to disarm them and not the rebel forces. How then can you get a political solution between them?’

The AU’s political vision is encapsulated in a provision in the Darfur Peace Agreement that calls for a Darfur-Darfur Dialogue and Consultation (DDDC). The AU distinguishes between the processes of dialogue and consultation: although the formal dialogue can begin only after a comprehensive peace agreement is in place, the AU is committed to an informal consultation intended to pave the way to such an agreement. The consultations began in July last year. The first meetings were held in cities in each of the three states of Darfur: Nyala in the south, Zalingei in the west and El Fasher in the north. They brought together grassroots activists and leaders representing many different groups: the Native Administration regime in the rural areas that was displaced (into the towns and cities) by the 2003 insurgency, local voluntary organisations, political parties (both government and opposition), intellectuals and academics (each of the three states has a university), and the more than two million displaced people living in camps in Darfur.

The first rounds of discussion in Nyala and Zalingei had produced a consensus on one issue: the DDDC should not be a top-down affair but should rather include all political and tribal affiliations (even those implicated in providing recruits for the Janjawiid). It would have to be independent of any political party or group (including the government). But the consultations produced a double shock for the African Union. A large majority at the El Fasher meeting in July this year called for an intervention by forces who would not only be ‘external’ but non-African. Most participants identified the AU as the root of their problems and the UN as the most likely source of an effective solution. ‘The AU is like the Arab League,’ the representative from El Fasher Call, a voluntary organisation, explained. ‘It responds to governments, not public pressure. All African governments are dictatorships, which is why people look at the AU with suspicion. The UN also represents governments, but most states in the UN are democratic.’ ‘We want the UN to come,’ the sultan of El Fasher added. ‘It has mercy.’

The naivety of these assumptions was typical of the discussions at El Fasher. Just as they identified the UN with Western democracies, and talked as if democracies cannot be empires, every speaker who called for UN intervention seemed to assume that UN forces – unlike those of AMIS – would be white. They did not appear to have grasped that what will change in the transition from AMIS to UNAMID is the command much more than the troops on the ground.
The discussion on UN intervention ended in a cul-de-sac. On the one hand, the call for external intervention was backed up by a strong feeling that all internal avenues (national and African) were exhausted. On the other hand, those most vociferously calling for external intervention seemed to see the UN as a benign agency without any political agenda of its own – even though it is clear that a UN intervention would be guided by the big powers of the Security Council. Many supporters of external intervention saw it as an extension of a local practice, ‘ajawiid’, whereby a third party intervenes in a conflict that cannot be resolved. But the lesson of ‘ajawiid’ is that the intervention can only be credible and effective if the third party’s interests are compatible with those of the belligerents. In El Fasher no one questioned the politics of an intervention driven by the major powers.

Local voluntary organisations were critical of the growing dependency of IDPs on international NGOs. The representative from El Fasher Call made the point with some bitterness: ‘IDPs are trying to endear themselves to international NGOs but don’t want to deal with national NGOs.’ ‘IDPs don’t believe in anything Sudanese any more,’ a representative from a Fur charity added. One participant from a construction NGO observed that the war had made people adopt a ‘consumer mentality’. The disaffection with INGOs was shared by all local voluntary organisations, regardless of their ethnic affiliation or political inclination. ‘National NGOs lack the capacity to provide necessary services,’ a representative of Sudan Development Organisation explained, not least because they are excluded by INGOs: ‘They make no attempt to acknowledge that we know the ground better, and also the demands of the people. No wonder most national NGOs have been rejected by the IDPs. If international NGOs gave us a chance, people might appreciate us more.’ One participant, however, reminded his colleagues that, without the INGOs, ‘you would not have found any IDP alive in Darfur.’ As he saw it, the problem was twofold. First, the INGOs have a short-term perspective: they may leave after peace is established, and national NGOs should be ready to fill the gap. Second, each INGO has its own agenda that limits its perspective: ‘Every organisation has its own programme for each place. There should be a dialogue among organisations to co-ordinate a programme.’

Summing up the discussions at El Fasher, the AU mediator, Salim Ahmed Salim, made the crucial point that for external intervention to work it would have to reinforce an internal process, not be a substitute for it. What matters, he argued, is ‘not how large a force it is but what they have come to defend’, since ‘without an agreement on peace, even a force of fifty thousand can’t change the situation here radically.’ He meant to caution Darfurians that to pin all hopes on the hybrid force would be tantamount to abdicating their own responsibility. But he was in a minority.

Salim reflected more widespread agreement when he remarked: ‘Even if those who have taken up arms have a cause, it is important to consult those who have not taken up arms, the civilian population.’ The point of the consultations should be ‘to show them an alternative to armed struggle: dialogue, persuasion, organisation’. Earlier negotiations, he argued, should have involved more civilians. But if civil society is to be more than a mere appendage to the second round of negotiations involving armed groups, the DDDC talks will need to be the beginning of a far more ambitious process.

No internal force appears capable of effective leadership. Even the SPLA, which is in political control of the South of Sudan and has been guaranteed, under the terms of the separate Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005, 10 per cent representation in every parliament in the northern states, doesn’t have the human resources necessary for effective leadership. Like the UN, the INGOs seem to have no patience with an internal political process. For them, the people of Darfur are not citizens in a sovereign political process so much as wards in an international rescue operation with no end in sight. They are there to ‘save’ Darfur, not to ‘empower’ it. This is why many of the big INGOs and some of the American and British staff at the UN offices in Khartoum are sceptical about the DDDC. They worry that bringing together political figures and representatives of civil society for an open discussion risks conveying a feeling that normality is returning to Darfur, when it is actually the depth of the crisis that should be emphasised. The ‘humanitarian’ effort is itself based on the conviction that both the crisis and its solution are military, not political; accordingly, there is little appetite for an internal political process designed to strengthen democratic citizenship.

‘What is the solution?’ I asked General Anyidoho, who has recently been appointed joint deputy special representative for the hybrid force. ‘Threefold,’ he replied, military fashion. ‘First, a complete ceasefire.’ (This would require a political agreement among all the fighting forces.) ‘Second, talks involving a cross-section of Darfurians. They must agree. And third, the government has a big role to play. This is not a failed state; there is a sitting government.’ What about the Janjawiid? ‘They are nomadic forces on horseback; they have always been there. They are spread across Sahelian Africa: Niger, Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic. The problem is that the AK-47 has replaced the bow and arrow. The Janjawiid should be disarmed before the rebels turn in their arms.’

What about the camps? ‘The camps are becoming militarised. Women go out to collect firewood and they are raped. Rape has become a weapon of war. It is meant to destroy a people’s moral fabric: in an Islamic society, rape is a big blemish. The AU police used to provide firewood patrols and they were successful. But if there is security in future, men will join their women in going to collect firewood. The objective should be to close the IDP camps.’

What about the American threat to ‘take steps’ – a no-fly zone, sanctions? ‘It is not the way to go. Americans give deadlines all the time. The threat of sanctions is also not enough. They have lived under these for so long that they have become normal. They are used to living in seclusion. Now, they have oil and a friend in the Security Council . . . We can’t solve these problems through weapons. We have to sit and talk, which is why it is important to look at how Côte d’Ivoire was solved after four years of fighting. Outsiders can never solve the problem for us. It’s a distant misery for them. We have to do it for ourselves.’

Footnotes
1. No Power to Protect: The African Union Mission in Sudan by Sally Chin and Jonathan Morgenstein (Refugees International, November 2005).
2. Alex de Waal wrote about this in the LRB of 30 November 2006.

* This article first appeared in the London Review of Books vol. 29, no. 17, 6 September 2007 and reproduced here with the permission of the author.

* Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology and Political Science at Columbia University in the United States. He is also the Director of Columbia's Institute of African Studies.[ He is also the current President of the Council for Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Dakar, Senegal.

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Cartographers of the Imaged Africa

Annwen Bates

2007-09-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/43155

Western visual paradigms are obsessed with the body. Annwen Bates asserts that in the imagery of the “Black African other” and HIV/AIDS, this translates into a mixture of “ghoulish fasincation and horror when confronted with the body’s demise”


“There are only two kinds of people in Africa: those infected with HIV, and those affected by it.”
These are the words of dedication in a booklet entitled Positive Health, which is filled with practical hints and tips for living with HIV. The dedication continues, “If you are infected, this book is for you. If you are not infected, this book is for a friend, a loved one or a colleague.” Even within our own ranks, we have become a continent defined by a virus.

This definition of Africa and Africans worries me, a lot. Partially because the reality is that many people are both infected and affected by the virus, but also because HIV and AIDS are the reductionist buzz words that have settled on this continent. To define a whole continent and its people by a virus and a body degenerating, immune-depleting virus, recalls the whispers of Africa/ns ever lacking. There are many mental and physical health conditions affecting our communities: various depressions, cancers, organ malfunctions and failures, STDs, common colds and ‘flu that get out of hand. All our bodies are affected in sickness and health by poetics and politics. When last was there a global outcry over the limited availability of donor organs in Africa, or the exorbitant immuno-suppressant drugs necessary for transplants? (It is ironic that this goes out in the wake of the recent Tshabalala-Msimang debacle. Perhaps organ donations will become a hot topic.)

Maybe these medical conditions don’t make for good photo-journalism stories. In the discourse of Western visual paradigms, there is an affinity with the body. This affinity turns into ghoulish fascination and horror when confronted with the body’s demise. In imagery of the Black African Other in a state of decay (and our 21st century world is far from cutting the ties of these stereotypes), affinity and horror mingle into grand humanitarian urges. This, I propose, has given the HIV/AIDS ravaged body great visual – and media- currency in the West. Not to undermine the suffering of those who have died AIDS-related deaths or are still suffering. The medical reality is that with the compromised immune system, AIDS does spiral often curable conditions out of the control of modern doctors, drugs and solutions. And it is control of life itself that is the ultimate frontier.

The West may no longer be political colonial masters, but there is a territory they claim to know well: science, medicine and the ‘able-body’. It is not surprising that in visual images of Africa, the potential of science, medicine and the ‘able-body’ seldom feature. The image canon of Africa as lacking still fuels Afro-pessimism, in the West and elsewhere. Over the last three years, I have collected posters, brochures, comic books, leaflets – any printed public health material to do with HIV/AIDS in my home corner of the world, Cape Town. I have come developed an interpretation that South African organisations are attempting to tackle what one might suggest as a ‘counter-narrative’ of the HIV/AIDS situation. My point of departure is the poetics of the situation: how the hopes, realities, concerns and underpinning ideologies spill into public health material (both from government and NGOs) in language and particularly images. It is particularly interesting to look at this material in it's visualising of action: informing, preventing, supporting and acting.

The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) provides a fine case study of an organisation that visualizes this counter-discourse of Afro-empowerment. Moreover, this visualization is intentional. Like any brand-name campaign, they have recognised the value of a good image. A picture is worth a 1000 words, if not a $1000. On their website they acknowledge the power of visual images in furthering their cause by offering free use of their images, as long as the organisation is acknowledged. This is (South) Africans doing it for themselves. Such is one of the narratives around the materiality of the wider HIV/AIDS situation in South Africa. Indeed, there are more; some hopeful, others heartbreaking.

Visual representations of (South) Africans active in the face of a destructive virus delineate a social psyche trying to move forward. It is not a luxurious or distracting social dream, but part of a very real and hopeful social truth. Like the truth of fighting for political freedom that fuelled so many movements on our continent.

What the HIV/AIDS situation has brought to our attention is the politics of health- and consequently, the very politics of life. In our increasingly visual age, we reflect these politics in the subtle meanings invested in images. For a long time, post-colonial studies have lobbied for previously silenced voices to be heard. I propose the image as the new voice, so that it might be said: there are two types of people in Africa, those who are represented by others and those who choose how they represent themselves.

* Annwen E. Bates is a visiting lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. She holds degrees from UCT and the University of Oxford. With regret she writes above about ‘Africa’ as a cohesive whole, a strategy she often criticises, and is open to invitations that will guide more

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Democracy in my Experience

Philani Zungu

2007-09-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/43157

Democracy has many different meanings. To Philani Zungu, a shackdweller in Durban, democracy means “accepting the unacceptable”.

People have different definitions of democracy. Some people say that democracy means freeing everyone to do whatever they want, regardless of rule or controls, with no instructions or boundaries, no importance to whether what is done is wrong or right.

Some people say democracy is the power of the state to decide things, acting in the interests of those who hold state power, its behaviour designed to suit their demands. In this vision, society is always in a position of compliance with orders from the state.

Some people say democracy is about rights. After the Freedom Charter was created, people came to know about their particular rights. The more they understood their rights, the freer they became. We never expected to be disappointed in turning these rights into reality. But we were.

Some people say democracy is for all of us - as society. They say it is a reason to improve and protect our lives. It is equality, whereby all should participate in building a better society and achieving a better life for all.

Let me share my experience of democracy since 1994 as a shackdweller in Durban.

I stayed with my mother, step- father and my younger brother in a small house, four by four meters. We were tightly squeezed up. The eThekwini Department of Housing decided that we could no longer build or extend shack structures. We had no choice. If we built, they would come and demolish the same day, or soon after.

I also felt the shame of women giving birth in the shacks. This they did after not attending clinic for a long time, because nurses shout at them, and when they are admitted, are not being attended to in good faith.

New to unemployment, my parents had no finance to support us; so I had to come from school and look for work, such as car washing and gardening.

I had to stop school at grade 9. When I was 20 years old, I needed to be independent, so I tried to build a house. It was demolished, and inside it was everything I owned. I was was assaulted by the land invasion unit, and had to be admitted to Addington Hospital. I was denied a right to housing.

This happened purely because it was already decided for me, in advance,without any redress or consultation, how I could live.

I was arrested for demonstrating against the lack of delivery, and lack of of consultation in 2005.

In 2006, I was arrested again. This time, I was being searched by a police officer on the way to a radio interview. I asked why I was being searched. It was a relevant question to ask, in case I might have some information to assist on a particular case. But the policeman replied that a black man is always a suspect. And then they arrested me. This time I was arrested for asking why I could not be treated like a human being, with rights, in a democracy. Once again I was assaulted, this time in the Sydenham Police station.

In 2007 I was arrested for not agreeing to be treated like an animal by the police. The police had come to my home and demanded to search me after I had built myself a new home so that I and my wife and child could move out of my mothers' house where I had lived for 16 years. I had nothing to hide. I had written a letter to the Land Invasions Unit and the Housing Department telling them that I was going to build my own house and why. I just asked the police why they wanted to search me and their response was arrest. Formal warnings were issued by the Sydenham police Station.

I can see that in the future, I'm expected to accept the unacceptable. That is the reality of democracy of the state and democracy of human rights in my experience. My only remaining hope for an acceptable future is hope in the democracy of society.

* Philani Zungu is Deputy President of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers' movement with members in almost 40 settlements in South Africa.

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Muslims in Tanzania

Aaliyah Bilal

2007-09-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/43156

Underneath signs of economic progress in Tanzania, religious tensions persist, which threaten social cohesion and the political stability of the nation.


It was a case of petty arson turned media spectacle. Amidst the violence of the 2005 Zanzibar elections, the Janjaweed militia— loyalists to the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party—were charged with vandalizing and setting fire to a Kinuni residence by Civic United Front sympathizers. As cyberspace is a preferred platform for political protest throughout East Africa, one need look no further than the message boards of CUF activists to gauge the tone of this ideological duel. Speaking about the fire, one impassioned commentator writes, “Even the Holy Quran was not spared” beneath the image of a few charred pages.

Through a broader lens, coverage of the event serves the CUF in an effort to redress voting irregularities they claim have kept them from power since the introduction of multiparty democracy in the early 1990’s. Religious references add another layer of meaning. With Muslims accounting for 98% of Zanzibar’s population, this is not a typical case of Muslims vs. Non-Muslims. This is a case of secular Muslims against their radical brethren. Despite a shared creed, religion remains the symbolic fault line of Zanzibar’s political fallout expressed through CUF suspicions around of CCM pieties.

The religious dimension of politics in Zanzibar and throughout Tanzania cannot be overstated. A general survey of Tanzanian politics airs a religious subtext that, in the light of recent provocations, inches into the foreground, posing a significant challenge to the long-term stability of the nation. More specifically, the grievances not only of the CUF but of groups throughout the country are reaching a crescendo as many assert their rights as Muslims.

These tensions are not a recent apparition, but have grown steadily over decades. British colonial rule, in its support of Christian mission schools, impaired Muslim access to educational opportunities. Muslim apologists cite this as resulting not only in the under-representation of Muslims among Tanzanian’s educated elite, but also within the civil service and parastatal institutions. This process was cemented with the undoing political ties between Muslim organizations and the government under Nyerere. More recently, the participation of Tanzania in the US-led war on terror is interpreted as a means to suppress the political opposition by linking would-be competitors with terrorist activities.

While this substantiates perceived discrimination, there is much concrete evidence to support these suspicions. In 1992, the Tanzanian government acknowledged after many years the educational disparities between Christians and Muslims. Years later, only 20% of secondary school students in Dar es Salaam—a city where 80% of inhabitants claim Islam as their religion-- are Muslim.

The perceived marginalization of Muslims in Tanzanian can be juxtaposed with the enabling of other special interest groups. The multiplication in number and grandeur of churches in Dar Es Salaam occurs within the bounds of religious freedoms granted by the constitution. However, when read against the 2004 closure of the renowned al-Furquan Islamic Primary School and the suspension of the Islamic press, a confounding portrait of the “secular” state comes into focus. It is difficult to refute that a special brand of discrimination preoccupied with the habits of Muslims forms the crux of religious tension in Tanzania.

In the grand scheme, with macroeconomic indicators suggesting upward turn in the country’s fortunes, Tanzania appears to be doing well. While we can all look with pride on its successes, enthusiasm over recent advances in Tanzania must be read cautiously against religious tensions percolating beneath. The consolidation of economic gains in the long term will require serious efforts to redress persisting disparities.
Aaliyah Bilal

* Aaliyah Bilal is a masters student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Supporting the Millennium Development goals

Tajudeen Abdul Raheem

2007-09-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/43175

For the past 6 weeks I have been travelling in the West, East and Southern parts of Africa. The mission (as these trips are grandiosely described in UN vocabulary) has been to assess situations on the ground with regards to the implementation and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in the various countries.

This being the mid year in the 15-year terminal date set for the achievement of the goals. The other and more immediate reason for the travels is to see what preparations are being made by various partners of the UN Millennium Campaign for this year’s Guinness Challenge to beat the record set last year for Standing Up against poverty.

The UN Millennium Campaign’s Global Director, Salil Shetty, led the missions. It involved meeting with various UN country teams, Government officials, National Coalitions for the Global Call Against Poverty (GCAP) / MDG campaigners, Local and International NGOs, Other CSOs, Media, other opinion moulders, etc. We have been in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya,Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi.

There have been a number of activities; reports and media focus during July (the exact midpoint of the MDGs being, July 7 2007, i.e. 777) in many countries indicating slow progress on a number of the goals. But there is a general pessimistic consensus that on current pace most of our countries may not achieve the goals by 2015.

A disproportionate focus on what has not been achieved may actually make one lose sight of the progress being made and what more could be done. For instance all the countries we visited have made tremendous progress in the area of increasing access to education for both Boys and girls. Millions of children who could not have passed by the gates of a school are now in School. In some countries they are moving access beyond Primary school to secondary school.

While it is true that there are issues about retention and quality the minimum threshold is being pushed. It is now up to citizens to press harder for better education through a general improvement in teaching and learning conditions. In a country like Kenya the provision of Mosquito nets has dramatically brought down the number of people especially children dying from Malaria. Malawi today is only second to Peru globally in the most dramatic reduction of infant mortality. In the past four years infant mortality has come down by more than 1/3.

In Ghana and Malawi the interlink age between poverty and lack of access to education even when it is officially free and universal has led to complimentary programmes including giving children from poorer homes a decent meal in school and also providing transport. These successful initiatives proof the integrated nature of the MDGs. They are not cocktails that states and communities can cherry pick as they go along. Progress in one goal must demand progress in others if the success is to be sustainable. In all the countries there are sad paradoxes that both governments and campaigners have to focus upon. As infant mortality is coming down maternal mortality remain scandalously high. In Zambia, Nigeria, Malawi and Tanzania, they are so high that it is really amazing that there is no public outrage about them. If our children are living longer why are our mothers dying often so young? Who is going to look after these children? How can we achieve the lofty goals on Gender and women empowerment if so many women continue to die in childbirth?

While we welcome the patchy and slow progress that has been made so far it is important to use this mid point year to realign our national priorities to ensure that the MDGs are met and even surpassed. As a foot ball supporter and a life long Liverpool one, at that, the analogy I can draw is that of the European finals of 2005. At half time Liverpool was trailing AC Milan 3:0. As the whistle was blown both managers went into the dug out. Liverpool Manager was furious and he read out the riot act to his players. On resumption we saw a changed team who had levelled the scores by full time and refused to concede any even at the extra time. Finally in the Shoot out Liverpool won.

We should use the same tactics for our governments. The fact that they are making uneven progress at mid point should not mean that the outcome is necessarily doomed. More can be done. One of our Key partners, The Micah Challenge (a global group of ecumenical churches campaigning on MDGs) has dubbed their campaign: blowing the Whistle. We need to blow the whistle on our political leaders at local, national, Pan African and globally that they fulfil the commitments made under the MDGs.

There is no point in being cynical. 7 years may be short but it is long enough for all states to meet these goals if citizens insist and continue to put pressure on the policy makers whether government or parliamentarians or politicians at all levels. Indifference is the enemy of delivery and a great ally of insensitive politicians.

On October 16/17 every one of us will have the opportunity to show we care about the poor and support the MDGs by helping to beat the Guinness record that we set last year. Over 23.5 millions of people around the world stood up against poverty in support of the MDGs. You can do so anywhere you are. Look at WWW.STANDUPAGAINSTPOVERTY.ORG or www.millenniumcampaign.org for details.

* Tajudeen Abdul Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in a personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Blame the Colonizers

G D Z Phiri

2007-09-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/43159

When will we Africans get over this "blame the colonizers" culture for everything that is wrong with Africa?

The inability for the security guard mentioned below to effectively deal with the situation is an educational matter that has nothing to do with Zambia's colonization, which ended 43 years ago. This man is uneducated because for 43 years successive inept regimes have seen this country's educational system all but collapse. Do you honestly expect him to know better or have the ability to distinguish between various cultural attires and fashion statements?

For your information I was preventing from entering the same establishment for wearing a wooly hat. I explained that this was a physical requirement as it was June and I am naturally "follically challenged". However, I did not ridicule the guard nor blame colonizers for the event. I simply referred the decision to a level where it could be dealt with effectively.

My Zambian people remain poor and uneducated, even more so than when we were colonized, because we have condoned incompetent leadership. Donor agencies, including the UN, must shoulder some of these responsibilities because they seem to not want to tackle the real issues driving Africa backwards.

The root cause of the problem remains our inability to add value to the opportunities we have as a country. Donors continue to treat the symptoms – mopping the floor when someone should be asking why the tap isn't being turned off. The "value" of being African is being diminished by ourselves – not by anyone else. We accept our politicians being late for every function they attend, we don't complain when our whole cabinet waits in the baking sun for the presidential jet to arrive for hours on end. It is this mindset that keeps us poor and the "butt" of every joke.

My success as a man of colour from Africa (I made my first million dollars by the age of 31 and never looked back) was achieved by replicating work ethics and disciplines engrained in other cultures. I create my own destiny as a person and certainly do not but myself in a box with a label. Nobody is "anti-African" as the author makes out – they just play on stereotypes we create for ourselves. Malaysia certainly doesn't wallow in self pity point a finger at anything and everything being the reason for their failure.

Food for thought I hope!

Governments and Restaurants

Japhet Makongo

2007-09-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/43160

Ningefurahi kama baadhi ya mawazo ya wasomaji katika baadhi ya hizi makala zinazohusu Afrika mashariki zingetafsiriwa kwa lugha ya kiswahili kama jina la jarida lilivyo. Hii inasaidia "Kuwezesha Sauti yako Kusikika" kwa usahihi na kwa watu wengi zaidi.

I like the story about governments and restaurants. The question is, Are the fcustomers including the frogs any better than the managers of the restaurants?

From what the article says, it seems that the customers, even though complaining are still content with the culture of managers. It is suprising that it is the managers who are expected change, and actually some have changed and are working hard. What about the people themselves, those who are hungry and angry? Why dont they just stop paying the bribes so that there is no incentive for the bad managers? Why dont they just boycot eating as it has been the cases where people felt the need to do so in past? A few deaths? Yes, malnutrition? that is also obvious and innevitable but a worth price to pay for the future generations. Why dont these people remember the few brave customers who refused the promises and even boycotted to eat bad and smelling food in South Africa, Angola, Liberia, Zaire and other palces?

I think the customers, especially those making the loudest noises in the media, workshop and seminars, and the frogs at the edge of the restaurant have found an alternative to get better food. That is why they have the energy to make the noises about the poor quality of food. I feel some go to neighbouring restaurants for better services for their children. I do not blame them, as one of them once retorted "..... You are right my friend, but I cannot dare see my child just about to be eaten by a greedy crocodile and do nothing, just because I am a believer in the rights of animals!

In my opinion, I may not want to continue blaming the managers and waiters at the restaurant, but the customers.......... amka kumekucha is the right slogan then. and then tuache kupiga kelele kwa kiingereza kwa vile siyo wengi wataamka, na wale watakaosikia wamekwisha amka lakini wanaenda kwenye migahawa mbadala.

Japhet Makongo Is an Independent Consultant, Ubunifu Associates, Dar es Salaam

An unbroken agony

Sokari Ekine

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/43205

In the early hours of February 29th 2004, democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his wife Mildred were forced to leave their home under escort of US military and summarily marched onto an unmarked plane whose destination they did not know and were not told.

An Unbroken Agony presents a detailed day by day and hour by hour account of the immediate events leading to the kidnapping and removal of President Aristide. Noted activist and one of the few truly progressive African American voices, Randall Robinson, sets down the facts of the Coup D’Etat, side by side with his own commentary. He provides the evidence that the US was actively involved while France was directly complicit in the Coup that ousted Aristide and saw him flown, along with his with wife to the Central African Republic. Once there, they were literally dumped off the plane and for all intense and purposes held prisoner.

Robinson begins with an historical overview of Haiti from “the most fateful of days” in 1492 when Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of the island he named Hispaniola but which the indigenous people called Ayiti to the only successful slave revolt in history which led to an independent nation in 1804. The struggle for emancipation by the Black Jacobins was led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines and denied France the most profitable slave economy in the world. Not only was Haiti the most profitable, it was also arguably the most cruel. For example slaves were slaughtered for the amusement of their French masters and on one occasion, men were bayoneted and then dogs were let loose to rip them to shreds and devour them.

The history of Haiti is often a tale of history repeating itself. In response to the creation of the “first free republic in the Americas” the US and Europe imposed a global embargo and France demanded that Haiti pay $21 billion (in today’s dollars) as compensation for loss of it’s slaves and territory. Thus right from the beginning the new country found itself in a debt which it has never recovered from. In 1915 the US occupied Haiti for 19 years and, despite independence, the wealth of the country was held in the hands of a tiny minority and remains so till today. Robinson spends a whole chapter discussing class and caste in Haiti from it’s historical roots to the present. A society that saw itself as almost “a race apart from the large majority of Haitian people”.
“In Haiti today color remains as insuperable a barrier to social progress as ever”. ….Not even the least controversial of President Aristide’s proposed social reforms were conceded by his lighter-skinned and more privileged fellow citizens. Not even his proposal to strike the word peasant as a category of citizenship from the national birth certificate for that all rural blacks bore.”

He continues with a quote from Langston Hughes:

“It was in Haiti that I first realised how class lines may cut across color lines within a race, and how dark people of the same nationality may scorn those below them”.

Robinson chronicles the rise to power of Aristide from his early days during the Duvalier years, as a young priest in La Saline, a poor neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince to the populist and much loved leader of the Lavalas family. He details the actions of the various rebel groups supported by the Haitian moneyed classes and businesses and trained and armed by the US.

“Over the course of 2003, the Bush administration broadened its assault on Haiti into a crippling, multipronged campaign. In addition to arming the Duvalierist insurgents and organising Haiti’s tiny, splintered political opposition, the administration moved apace to strangle Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, into a state of economic, social and political collapse.”

President and Mrs Aristide’s last 24 hours in Haiti are detailed hour by hour moving back and forth between their activities and the whereabouts and manoeuvring of the rebels 100km from Port-au-Prince. Robinson goes into great detail to show that neither President Aristide nor his wife changed their routine or cancelled scheduled appointments including an interview with US radio journalist Tavis Smiley. That they were under great pressure during that period is a fact but until the early hours of the morning of the 29th both insisted they were not leaving Haiti. He also shows that despite warnings from the US that Aristide was going to be shot and the rebels were on their way to Port-au-Prince, they were in fact in the area of Gonaives and not moving.

Robinson’s presentation of Aristide is almost saintly. He does not try to hide his unwavering support of Aristide and his Lavalas party. I’ve read criticisms that Robinson does not address Aristide’s governance and there is only one good guy here and that is Aristide. Whilst I agree he does not cover Aristide’s governance and that the book is partisan, I do not take that as a failing as some have said. Randall Robinson, Maxine Waters and Amy Goodman have time and time again proved their honesty and determination to see justice done. The US on the other hand has a record of lies, deceit, assassinations and attempted assassinations of leaders it does not like, support of rebels against governments it doesn’t like whether they are elected democratically or not. The US has a record of supporting undemocratic oligarchies, monarchies and dictatorships when it suits them.

Randall Robinson set out to write about the history, oppression and punishment of a nation of Black people who dared to resist White Supremacist hegemony and in this he succeeded. The purpose of the book is to chronicle the US government’s actions in the support and removal of a democratically elected President. One who was escorted in the dead of night on a US military plane by US military personnel and unceremoniously dumped in Central Africa. As Robinson points out, the irony was that his host/jailer in the Central African Republic was an unelected ruler who came to power via a coup but who was supported financially by the US and whose country was and remains under French ownership.

The book sets the record straight and acts as a counter balance to the wall of untruths and misinformation presented by the US, other Western governments and the media which continues to present the Bush government’s version of events without question.

* An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President” Basic Civitas Books, New York, 280 pages, USD $26. http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/civitas/home.jsp
* Randall Robinson: http://www.randallrobinson.com/
* Sokari Ekine is online news editor of Pambazuka News
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Rural Women's Radio

2007-09-06

http://www.cmfd.org/cmfdprojects/ruralwomen.html

As part of a three-part project with FAHAMU and local partners, CMFD is working with rural women in Southern, East and West Africa to produce radio/ podcast prgrammes about women's rights, especially related to rural women.

In collaboration with the Rural Women's Movement a, an 8-day training took place from 19 - 26 August 2007. Over the course of the workshop, women from rural communities in Kwa-Zulu Natal and a representative from the Centre for Public Participation planned, researched, conducted interviews, wrote scripts and created a series of features covering a range of issues such as evictions of widows from their marital homes, women’s inheritance rights and the impact of HIV/AIDS, sexual violence against girl children, forced/arranged marriages, young women and employment and grandmothers and orphans - all issues that receive little mainstream media attention. Each had never made a radio programme before. The programmes will be made available to local radio stations, as well as being distributed over the internet as ‘podcasts’. The workshop is part of the UmNyango Project, an innovative project to use ICTS to promote and protect the human rights of rural women in KwaZulu Natal.

Africa: Dancing with the Dragon: Africa’s Courtship with China

2007-09-07

http://www.zeleza.com/blogging/african-affairs/dancing-dragon-africa-s-courtship-china

Africa’s courtship with China, a captivating dance between the elephant and the dragon, has intriguing implications for all concerned and the world at large, assetrs PT Zeleza. It is marked by, on the one hand, the grand political theatre of elaborate presidential tours and lavish summits, with their lofty declarations of equal partnership between the distant peoples of these two ancient lands, by all those dramatic and diplomatic displays of statehood beloved of postcolonial or postrevolutionary societies enchanted by their sovereignty.

Sudan: Darfur groups ask U.S. funds to drop Chinese oil majors

2007-09-07

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=39159

Activists have launched a bid to shame some of the world's largest mutual fund companies into dumping Chinese oil majors they accuse of complicity in what the U.S. government calls genocide in western Sudan's Darfur region. "The American people do not want to invest in genocide," Zahara Heckscher, divestment campaign manager at the Save Darfur Coalition, said Wednesday as coalition members said they would target five investment firms with a mix of negative advertising, protest, and investor pressure.

Weekly Roundup

Issue 102, 2007

Hakima Abbas

2007-09-05

http://www.aumonitor.org

In this week's AU Monitor, we bring you news and documentation for forthcoming AU meetings on children, industry and of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council. In addition, the AU Monitor features interviews from the African Development Bank (AfDB) with resource mobilization lead expert, Boubacar Traoré, who sheds light on the Multilateral Development Banks’ meeting on debt-related issues held at the World Bank and with Ms Motselisi Lebesa, Principal Public Utilities Economist at NEPAD’s Regional Integration and Trade Department, who talks of Africa's infrastructure deficit and the approaches developed by NEPAD and AfDB in two recent studies. Also at the African Union, the President of the African Union, Ghana’s Head of State, John Kufuor, has appointed Cameroonian Vice President of Transparency International, Barrister Akere Tabeng Muna, as a member of the African Union Audit Commission, in conformity with the Accra Declaration in which Heads of States and Government agreed that, in order to attain the Union Government, "an Audit of the Executive Council in terms of Article 10 of the Constitutive Act, the Commission as well as the other organs of the African Union" be conducted prior to the January summit of the African Union in Addis Ababa.

In Asian-African news, the AU Monitor brings you an important article by Mills Soko on African and Indian economic ties, enunciating the potential for lessons and skills sharing, Dr. Soko states: "Africa has become the emerging market for Indian products and enterprises and an alternative source of energy for India, while African exports, including natural resources, agricultural goods and household consumer items, have grown exponentially." Further, in Sino-African relations, the African Union announced this week the donation of $300,000 by the Chinese government for peacekeepers in Somalia. Also in peace and security news, the AU Mission in the Sudan has condemned an attack by the Justice and Equality Movement and the Unity faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA-Unity) on a Sudanese army base in Kordofan while the United Nations Secretary General also condemned the government bombings on Southern Darfur on Tuesday.

In regional news, President of the ECOWAS Commission, Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas, urged the European Union to show understanding and flexibility in the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations, while, in a communiqué of the SADC Civil Society forum on “Ensuring Effective Civic Participation in Development and Democratic Governance”, Southern African civil society call upon heads of states and government to institutionalize and operationalize the participation of civil society in decision making at the national and regional levels; take concrete and urgent action related to the violations of human rights in Zimbabwe and Lesotho; and to enter trade negotiations, particularly with the EU, as a united bloc for the benefit of the region.

Horn of Africa: Women bear the brunt of Somali conflict

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74174

Zamzam Abdinoor, a 16-year-old orphan, has already been married and widowed twice and is now a single mother of two. She was first married off to a militiaman in the port town of Kismayo. He was killed in one of Somalia's many factional confrontations just a year into the marriage. Her uncle then found another militiaman and she was soon married off again. The second husband also met with a violent death.

Global: Gender-budgeting to reduce gender disparities and improve economic outcomes

2007-09-07

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2007/06/stotsky.htm

This article argues that the understanding of how public policies have different effects on men and women has improved in recent years and is influencing macroeconomic policymaking. Reducing gender disparities can lead to improved macroeconomic performance. The recognition that gender disparities are harmful and that government budgets are not gender neutral implies a need to incorporate gender considerations into the budgeting process.

Southern Africa: SADC Summit postpones signing of Gender Protocol

2007-09-07

http://www.sardc.net/Editorial/Newsfeature/07400907.htm

SADC leaders have deferred the signing of the Protocol on Gender and Development because some member states need more time to conclude internal consultations following late changes to the document. A communiqué presented at the end of the 27th SADC Summit of Heads of State and Government in Lusaka on 17 August 2007 read, "...Summit noted progress on the negotiations of the protocol on gender and development and agreed to defer its signature to allow some member states to conclude their internal consultations".

South Africa: Gender audit to assess water, forestry projects

2007-09-07

http://www.buanews.gov.za/view.php?ID=07090515451002&coll=buanew07

South Africa's department of Water Affairs and Forestry is conducting a gender analysis audit, to assess the efficacy of their programmes specifically for women. The audit, which kicked off in July and will conclude at the end of September, will show the impact the department's projects have had on ordinary South African women. Speaking at a committee meeting on Women in Water and Forestry Wednesday, the department's Deputy Director-General Nobubele Ngele said this was an important piece of work that looks specifically at gender issues.

Rwanda: French troops 'raped girls during genocide'

2007-09-06

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2914409.ece

French soldiers stationed in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994 have been accused of "widespread rape" by a Rwandan commission investigating France's role during the conflict. The commission, which is due to publish its final report in October, will also provide fresh evidence that French soldiers trained the Interahamwe, the extremist Hutu militia responsible for most of the killing, and even provided them with weapons.

Botswana: Government bulldozes Intelligence and Security Services Bill

2007-09-07

http://africa.oneworld.net/article/view/152785/1/

A coalition of Botswana Civil society organisations that include the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Botswana , the Ditshwanelo-Centre for Human Rights and the Botswana Council of Non-Governmental Organisations (BOCONGO) have expressed disappointment following the refusal of the ruling party members of parliament to grant the opposition members a postponement of the discussion and voting on amendments to the Intelligence and Security Services Bill.

Horn of Africa: Crackdown on people smuggling in Puntland

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74158

Somalia's self-declared autonomous region of Puntland has cracked down on people smugglers who have been using its ports as a springboard to get illegal migrants into the Gulf States, the head of police said. The crackdown is intended to stop the smuggling of Ethiopian and Somali migrants to countries like Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a phenomenon that peaks at this time of the year.

Zimbabwe: Opposition leader charged over price freeze

2007-09-07

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318509

Zimbabwe's police formally accused the country's main opposition leader on Thursday of "disorderly conduct" in connection with his recent tour of stores hurt by the government's controversial price freeze, his lawyer said. Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the biggest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was quizzed by police for nearly an hour in the capital, Harare, and then released from custody, one day after being instructed to appear.

Chad: U.N. seeks funds for refugees

2007-09-07

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L06885699.htm

The United Nations appealed for emergency funds for Chad to feed thousands of refugees from regional violence as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon arrived on Friday to pave the way for international peacekeepers. Most of the 380,000 civilians sheltering in eastern Chad fled civil war at home in Sudan's Darfur region, but 150,000 of them are local people forced from their homes as ethnic conflict has spilled over the border in a regional spiral of bloodshed.

Southern Africa: No progress or clarity on SA permits for Zimbabweans

2007-09-06

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news030907/SAPermits030907.htm

Last week South Africa’s Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula raised the hopes of millions of Zimbabweans living in that country after suggesting her government might consider granting them temporary residence permits. In what many said was a tacit admission Zimbabwe’s crisis has gone out of hand, Mapisa-Nqakula told reporters the government needed to adopt a new approach to deal with Zimbabwean citizens flocking into South Africa. She said deportations were a waste of money as people were going back within days of being kicked out of the country.

DRC: Rising tensions in North Kivu push more Congolese from their homes

2007-09-07

http://www.hrea.org/lists2/display.php?language_id=1&id=5728

People are again fleeing from their homes in North Kivu as tension and terror return to the border province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Petronilla Nsiya watched in horror early last week when armed men entered her village, Sake, frogmarched her neighbour from his hut, tied him to a tree and then butchered him. The man's wife was shot in the stomach.

Western Sahara: Funding crunch for confidence-building programme

2007-09-07

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/46dd7b944.html

The UN refugee agency said on Tuesday it feared that a lack of funding could bring a halt to confidence-building measures connecting Sahrawi refugees in Algeria and their relatives in the Western Sahara Territory. In January, UNHCR appealed for nearly US$3.5 million to continue the family visits and telephone services initiated in 2004 between refugees in western Algeria's Tindouf camps and their kinfolk across the border.

Botswana: IOM to open centre for undocumented Zim migrants

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74108

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is establishing a second reception centre in Zimbabwe to provide a 'soft landing' for undocumented Zimbabwean migrants being deported from neighbouring countries. Last year 38,000 Zimbabweans were repatriated from Botswana to Zimbabwe. Earlier this year President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF government requested the IOM to assist in setting up the country's second reception centre, in the Matabeleland town of Plumtree near the Botswana border, to assist undocumented migrants repatriated from Botswana.

South Africa: Cabinet to probe service delivery protests

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/43199

A cabinet committee will investigate the violent countrywide service protests and MPs lack of basic services might lead to social instability. Government spokesman Themba Maseko yesterday said the committee was probing the causes of the protests and would determine what steps needed to be taken to resolve the issue. The announcement came amid reports that at least 11 protesters in Soweto had been arrested for burning down the home of a councillor this week.
The Mercury
Cabinet to probe service delivery protests

September 07, 2007 Edition 1

Wendy Jasson da Costa and Chiara Carter

A cabinet committee will investigate the violent countrywide service protests and MPs lack of basic services might lead to social instability.

Government spokesman Themba Maseko yesterday said the committee was probing the causes of the protests and would determine what steps needed to be taken to resolve the issue.

The announcement came amid reports that at least 11 protesters in Soweto had been arrested for burning down the home of a councillor this week.

Maseko said the cabinet had expressed its concern about the matter a while ago and the committee's work would be led by Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi.

IFP MP Inka Mars said in the National Assembly that the debate about human settlement could not have come at a more appropriate time as public frustration with the government's lack of service delivery was "reaching boiling point in numerous communities".

She said this spelt a danger for democracy as social instability could lead to destabilisation.

Public frustration was understandable because the housing backlog was not being eradicated quickly enough and many still did not have basic services and the pace of provision was too slow, she said.

At the same time, the office of Public Protector Lawrence Mushwana is preparing for its own investigation into the matter which will focus on four municipalities in different parts of the country where people have made their dissatisfaction known at demonstrations.

Responding to questions by the DA and UDM in the National Assembly last week, President Thabo Mbeki downplayed the size of the protests, saying they did not involve entire communities and could not be seen as a "mass rebellion".

The DA's Sandra Botha said there had been 5 000 service protests in the past year, the highest in the world.

"To me, that sounds like a crisis," Botha told Mbeki.

Mbeki admitted there were challenges and said there was "some way to go"
for the government to provide basic services.

South Africa: Municipal protests: A call for support

2007-09-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/43178

Over the past 2 months, as communities all over the Gauteng again take to streets in protest against the pace and neoliberal frame of service delivery, there has been an unprecedented escalation of state violence, repression and the criminalisation of protest. While the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) has managed to provide activists with legal and jail support, this has been severely circumscribed by the limited financial means of the organisation.
Over the past 2 months, as communities all over the Gauteng again take to streets in protest against the pace and neoliberal frame of service delivery, there has been an unprecedented escalation of state violence, repression and the criminalisation of protest. While the APF has managed to provide activists with legal and jail support, this has been severely circumscribed by the limited financial means of the organisation. As these protests spread, the brutality and arrests that have characterised the state's response thus far are likely to intensify as well. With at least 14 people arrested yesterday alone (see APF press statement below), and dozens more injured, the mounting costs of legal representation (both for defence of those arrested and for the preparation of civil action against the police) is a disabling weight on the APF and it's affiliates from poor communities across the province.
Believing that voices of these communities should not be muted with state violence and repression, the APF calls on all those who are able to, and are interested in supporting the defence of communities in struggle, to make contributions the APF legal war chest.

Money can be directly deposited in the APF account (be sure to stipulate that the money is for legal defence when making deposits) and will only be used for the purpose for which it was given.

The APF's account details are as follows:

Account Name: Anti-Privatisation Forum
Bank: First National Bank
Branch: Bank City
Bank Address: Block A, #3 First Place,
Bank City, FNB,
Johannesburg, 2000
Branch Code: 250805
Account Number: 62027851452
Type of Account: Cheque
Swift Code: FIRN ZAJJA046
Telephone: (27 11) 352 1338/492 3321/492 3345
Contact Person: Vanitha Maharaj/Mabel
Foreign Transfer Desk: 352 8290 (tel), 352 8219 (
Fax) - Attn: Paulina e-bus: 083 123 3000 Bank and ABA # for US wire transfers - J.P. Morgan-Chase Manhattan (021000021)

Thank you for your support

Sierra Leone: Oposition pulls out of peace rally

2007-09-07

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L06825017.htm

The opposition frontrunner in Sierra Leone's presidential election pulled out of a peace rally to have been held with his ruling party rival on Thursday, citing fears of renewed violence before a weekend run-off vote. The opposition All People's Congress (APC), whose candidate Ernest Bai Koroma led in a first round poll, said the ruling Sierra Leone's People's Party (SLPP) was arming supporters and had denied it campaign access to a contested eastern district.

Zimbabwe: Opposition candidate murdered in Marondera

2007-09-06

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news050907/mdcdead050907.htm

Those predicting a free and fair election next year were left re-evaluating their optimism after an opposition candidate was stabbed to death last Friday. Jabulani Chiwoka, an MDC candidate in next year’s rural district council elections, died from stab wounds after suspected Zanu PF thugs attacked him at a beerhall in the Svosve communal area of Marondera. Another party activist, Tafiranyika Ndoro, is in a Marondera hospital recovering from stab wounds.

Morocco: Clash of conjectures could create surprise in vote

2007-09-07

http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2007/09/06/feature-02

Predicting what the ballot boxes may yield at the closing of the September 7th elections is near impossible. Opinions vary, and citizens are split between optimists with a bright outlook on the country’s future and pessimists who refuse to engage in politics at all. One Democratic Social Movement candidate said it is truly difficult to know the coming political map in any way. "The method of voting, the abundance of political parties and the multiplicity of election symbols, in addition to the similarity between the platforms of some parties … make it difficult to predict any result."

Kenya: Report reveals scale of corruption

2007-09-06

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2917392.ece

The scale of corruption carried out in Kenya by family and associates of its former president, Daniel Arap Moi, has been revealed in a secret report which alleges that more than £1 billion of government money was stolen during his 24-year rule. Mr Moi’s regime, which came to an end in 2002, has long been regarded as one of Africa’s most corrupt, but the extent of the graft has never been exposed in so much detail.

Global: Corruption and armed conflicts; some stirring around in the governance soup

2007-09-07

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/pubs/ph/details.cfm?lng=en&id=32007

This paper explores the causal linkages between corruption and civil wars. It discusses the impact of corruption on the probability of violent conflict events and traces the shifts in the composition of corrupt transactions during and in the aftermath of violent conflicts. The author brings the two strands of empirical research of corruption and civil wars together and argues that anomalies arise that would have been difficult to detect within each field in isolation.

Zimbabwe: Crumbling country ripe for corruption

2007-09-07

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318503

Zimbabwe's failing economy and collapsing services have provided an environment ripe for graft, with the impoverished country's woes facilitating an ever-worsening slide towards corruption. Despite setting up a local graft-busting body in 2004, Zimbabwe appears to be losing the battle against corruption, with President Robert Mugabe's economic policies seen to promote corrupt behaviour, according to a leading watchdog.

Africa: Accumulation by Dispossession: False diagnoses and dangerous prescriptions

2007-09-06

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/glocalization/rc/ItemDetail.do?itemId=1112488

Unequal trade and investment relationships are nothing new for Africa, although beginning in 2005 the world’s attention was drawn to Africa’s plight as never before. However, in contrast to the neo-orthodox strategy implied by Gordon Brown, Bono, Bob Geldoff and other mainstream campaigners, Africa’s deepening integration into the world economy has typically generated not wealth but the outflow of wealth, says Patrick Bond.

Global: Developing nations 'need genetic resources rules'

2007-09-07

http://tinyurl.com/ywsrh5

To benefit from genetic resources, developing countries need to improve their governance, a meeting in Beijing was told this week. Developing countries are losing out because their laws do not specify which resources should be paid for and how, said Gurdial Singh Nijar, a law professor at the University of Malaya in Malaysia. He made his remarks at an international workshop on genetic resources and indigenous knowledge, supported by the UN Convention of Biological Diversity.

Africa: World Bank Commits Record $5.8 Billion to the continent

2007-09-07

http://go.worldbank.org/2NVAYJ9Z40

The World Bank Group committed a record $5.8 billion in International Development Association (IDA) resources to Sub-Saharan Africa in the last fiscal year, $1 billion more than in the previous year. In addition, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Bank Group’s private sector arm, provided $1.38 billion in financing for its own account and mobilized an additional $261 million in financing through syndications.

Malawi: Helping small-scale farmers go commercial

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74056

A joint project by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Malawian government is helping small-scale farmers to expand into commercial food production. Initially, 50 "lead farmers" from around the country will receive training in business management skills and planning. "The project intends to equip farmers with knowledge that would enable them to take farming as business," said Mazlan Jusoh, the FAO's country representative in Malawi.

Global: At the heart of change: The role of communication in sustainable development

2007-09-06

http://panos.org.uk/extra/heartofchange.asp

Development efforts are not fulfilling the promises made in the Millennium Development Goals, to reduce poverty and improve poor people’s lives. Why not? One fundamental reason is that policymakers and development experts do not recognise the essential role that information and communication play in development. In this landmark publication commissioned by the UK Department for International Development, Panos London sets out what it believes should be the role of communication in long-term, sustainable development.

Zimbabwe: Fake ARVs threaten lives

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73965

The high cost antiretroviral (ARV) drugs and inadequate control mechanisms in Zimbabwe are driving a flourishing trade in fake ARVs by unlicensed dealers, activists have warned. The Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe (MCAZ) recently issued a statement warning the public that the dealers were importing and selling counterfeit ARVs to unsuspecting HIV-positive people who needed the life-prolonging medication.

Kenya: Nairobi sex workers show sustained reduction in high risk sex

2007-09-07

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/ABB5E7EE-A0EA-4DE3-85C9-13DB415DEF5A.asp

Providing risk reduction services to female sex workers leads to sustained changes in behaviour, even after the level of that service is substantially reduced, according to follow-up data from a Kenyan trial published in the August 15th edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

Kenya: Slow response to high HIV rates in prisons

2007-09-07

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74055

The problem of HIV in Kenya's prisons - where prevalence is about twice the national average - will remain unsolved as long as homosexuality is illegal, and prevention efforts remain out of reach, experts have warned. "We know homosexuality exists in the prisons, but our hands are tied because of the illegal nature of sodomy under our laws," says Mary Chepkong'a, head of the Kenya Prisons Service AIDS Control Unit.

East Africa: In the wake of the LRA: HIV in Uganda and Sudan

2007-09-07

http://www.plusnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=62&ReportId=73960

In Uganda, the areas worst affected by the violence were close to the border with Sudan, far from the urban centres around which most camps for internally displaced persons (IDP) grew. It is the urban areas, such as Gulu in northern Uganda and Yei in southern Sudan, which have the highest HIV prevalence rates. Years of encampment and dependency on relief handouts have had a profound effect on the traditionally conservative Acholi.

Nigeria: Schools to benefit from Universal Service Provision Fund

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/education/43221

A total of 109 primary and secondary schools have been selected as beneficiaries of the first phase of the 'Schools, University Access Programme to Digital Lifestyle' project of the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) an initiative of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). The projects to be completed in the next six months would include equipping the benefiting schools with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools.
Highway Africa News Agency

A total of 109 primary and secondary schools have been selected as beneficiaries of the first phase of the 'Schools, University Access Programme to Digital Lifestyle' project of the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) an initiative of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

The projects to be completed in the next six months would include equipping the benefiting schools with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools.

The Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of NCC, Dr. Ernest Ndukwe, revealed this on Thursday while on a courtesy visit to the Osun State Governor, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, in Osogbo, the state capital.

He said that out of the 109, three schools have been selected from Osun, namely the Odo Otin Grammar School, Okuku, Ansar-UD Deen Primary School Iwo and Community Grammar School, Ipetu-Ile.

As said by him, other schools in Osun and other states not listed in the first phase, would benefit subsequently as NCC has advanced plans to collaborate with various states of the federation, especially in close identification and monitoring of the new forthcoming beneficiaries.

The digital lifestyle programme, according to him, was part of the five-year strategic plan of the fund aimed at extending Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) access to the rural and underserved areas of the country, mainly through schools.

Some of these projects, he outlined, are the Community Communication Centre (CCC), Accelerated Mobile Phone Expansion Project (AMPEP) and National Backbone Infrastructure Project (NBIP).

Ndukwe said, USPF was a creation of the Nigerian Communications Act of 2003, as a vehicle for driving the achievement of national policy goals on universal service and access to ICT.

USPF governing board, he stated has an 11-men team drawn from NCC, Federal Ministry of Information and Communications, Federal Ministry of Finance, National Planning Commission and private sector representatives.

He added that USPF was currently funded through a portion of the annual operating levy charged to telecom operators in the country.

Dr. Ndukwe solicited the support of Osun government to ensure rapid implementation of the proposed projects in the state, through catering for telecom installations both at the state and local government levels.

The collaboration from state governments and its agencies at all levels, he said, would determine the level of benefit to the people. Responding, Prince Oyinlola assured the NCC team of his administration's support at any time, saying he is impressed with NCC under Ndukwe's leadership.

"Our cooperation is just for the asking,? he declared, adding ?There?s nothing that you (Ndukwe) touches that does not excel."

He also advised telcos in the country and the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) operators, in particular, to ensure improved quality of service before further expansion to the hinter lands.

Gov. Oyinlola accompanied by his cabinet members including special advisers, lamented that from 7.30 am to 10pm it is difficult to make a successful call on all the GSM networks, stressing that often after a long trial, the O?Net, owned by Oodua Telecoms comes to the rescue.

South Africa: Mainstreaming 'pink' news

2007-09-07

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=13&set_id=1&art_id=nw20070831145601280C305506

Independent Newspapers in Cape Town has launched a monthly niche publication aimed at Cape Town's gay and lesbian readership this week called The Pink Tongue. With a print run of 15 000 it would be distributed to selected vendors throughout the city and aimed to give gay and lesbian readers a "non-trashy" read, Sandy Naude, advertising and marketing director for Independent Newspapers in Cape Town, told Sapa.

Kenya: Africa welcomes US gay-bashers

2007-09-07

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=allafrica&id=1685

Bernard Nzimbi, head of the Anglican Church in Kenya, entrenched his anti-gay position by consecrating Anglican clerics Bill Atwood and Bill Murdoch as bishops last Thursday in Kenya. Atwood and Murdoch, from the United States, oppose gay unions, which have been authorized by certain Anglican dioceses in North America.
Nzimbi insisted in an interview with news agencies that the consecration would not widen the rift between the Anglican Church in North America and African Anglicans who oppose gay unions. “Since the talk about gay marriage started, many congregations in America have been looking for oversight from overseas,” he said.

Global: Biodiversity requires global monitoring mechanism

2007-09-07

http://tinyurl.com/2pdbm5

With global diversity increasingly at risk, a mechanism like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is required, argues Michel Loreau. Biodiversity has received increasing attention from scientists, governments and the public since the 'Earth Summit' at Rio de Janeiro and the establishment of the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992. There are local conservation successes to celebrate as a result, but global threats to biodiversity are still on the rise.

Uganda: The other side of carbon trading

2007-09-06

http://tinyurl.com/2ffcyy

Planting trees in Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda seemed like a project that would benefit everyone. The Face Foundation, a nonprofit group established by Dutch power companies, would receive carbon credits for reforesting the park's perimeter. It would then sell the credits to airline passengers wanting to offset their emissions, reinvesting the revenues in further tree planting. The air would be cleaner, travelers would feel less guilty and Ugandans would get a larger park.

Kenya: Communities come together to protect water sources

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73740

Car washer Githogori Maina remembers swimming in the "Indian Ocean" – the nickname of a once flowing part of the Nanyuki River in Kenya’s Laikipia district that now runs almost dry. "Back then, you could see the water. We also used to fish here," he said, pointing to a shallow part of the river. "Now you have to walk several kilometres to catch a single fish." The Nanyuki River has become shallow and full of stones. Sometimes, there is no flow downstream, and the remaining water is stagnant and dirty.

Kenya: How to clean up the slums -- cook on rubbish

2007-09-07

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=317990

Entering Nairobi's fetid slums the senses are first assaulted by a gagging stench and the sight of rubbish everywhere, some even hanging from trees or smouldering in acrid fires. The city government does not recognise the "informal settlements" where more than 60% of the population live, so no services are provided and no garbage collected. The result is frighteningly insanitary conditions.

Botswana: Bushmen hunting charges withdrawn

2007-09-07

http://www.survival-international.org/news/2498

Twenty-one Botswana Bushmen arrested in June and July for hunting to feed their families are celebrating after all charges against them were dropped. They appeared yesterday before a magistrate in Gantsi. After an attorney had presented arguments on their behalf, the police withdrew all charges. However, six Bushmen arrested last week, also for hunting, are still waiting for their case to be heard.

Southern Africa: The Tonga: Left high and dry

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74139

Fifty years after the Tonga people were forcibly removed from the Zambezi Valley to make way for the Kariba Dam between southern Zambia and northwestern Zimbabwe, the community is still trying to find its feet. Over the past decade a number of development programmes have been initiated to improve the Tonga people's lives, after their eviction by the former governments of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to make way for the hydroelectric power project that created Lake Kariba.

Kenya: It's our land - it belongs to us.

2007-09-06

http://www.imani-development.org/News002.html

The seizure of prime land in Kenya by white settlers taken during the colonial era and the land grabbing which occurred post independence by powerful black elites are responsible for abject poverty amongst indigenous and nomadic communities in Kenya today. The story of the poverty caused by land dispossession, abuse of local workers by ranch owners, harassment, intimidation and other human rights violations are told in a new documentary called 'Stolen Heritage: Land, Poverty and the Legacy of British Colonial Rule in Kenya', released by Imani Development Ltd.

Niger: Gaddafi attacks the free and independent press of Niger

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/43229

The West African Editors Forum (WAEF) has learnt that the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has filed a suit against three independent newspapers in Niger. The weeklies Le Canard Déchaîné and L’Evénement, as well as the bi-monthly Action, are being accused of “defamation” and “publication of false news that could undermine the honour of the leader”.
The West African Editors Forum (WAEF) has learnt that the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has filed a suit against three independent newspapers in Niger. The weeklies Le Canard Déchaîné and L’Evénement, as well as the bi-monthly Action, are being accused of “defamation” and “publication of false news that could undermine the honour of the leader”.

The hearing of Le Canard Déchaîné et L’ Action is set for 17 September and the one of L’Evénement is set for 28 September.

As a matter of fact, the Libyan leader is suing the three newspaper for having reported on sensitive issues linked to the activities of the “Mouvement des Nigériens pour la Justice” (MNJ) rebel group based in northern Niger, on the border to Libya. The three papers have in a series of articles reported on the attempts by Libya to push the State of Niger to no longer grant permits to seek for oil in the Manguéni tableland; that armed fighters of the MNJ have been trained in Libya; that a rebel uprising erupted the day after the Mouloud celebration that the Libyan leader organised in Agadez, which was also the case in Kidal in Mali last year; that Libya has expressed an interest in the Nigerian uranium for its future nuclear plants.

The Libyan leader is asking the tribunal to fine each of the newspapers 100 million CFA (150,000 Euro), which his lawyers claim would be donated to Niger’s National Hospital in Niamey.

“This case is a show orchestrated by Gaddafi to divert the attention of Nigerians away from national questions, but we will not let ourselves be distracted,” said Malla Cheffou Ligari, Publisher of Le Canard Déchaîné, to the Arab Press Network (APN).

The West African Editors Forum (WAEF) is convinced that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi does not understand the notion of media that are free to the point of having the courage to criticise his administration and what seems to be a weak hegemonic will in the region.

The West African Editors Forum calls on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to drop the charges against the three newspapers. WAEF reaffirms its solidarity with the newspapers and the professional media organisations in Niger. Their struggle and aspirations are the ones of WAEF.

WAEF launches an appeal to all those committed to freedom of expression to mobilise to protest this attack on the free and independent press in Niger.

WAEF calls upon all its national sections and all members of the African Editors Forum (TAEF) to express their disapproval of these recent detentions through sending protests to the authorities in Niger and Libya (contact details below).

On behalf of the executive secretariat
Cheriff M. Sy
Charged with the media strategies and development.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi
info@algathafi.org
The Embassy of Libya BP 683
Niamey Niger
Tél. : +227 20724019
Fax : +227 20732636

Saif El Islam Muammar Al Gaddafi
E-Mail : info@gaddaficharity.org <mailto:info@gaddaficharity.org>
Fax : 00218 - 21 - 3351373 / 00218 - 21 - 3331509

The Ministry of Communication of Niger:
Tél: + 227 72 28 21
Fax: + 227 73 36 85 / 72 23 36

Please send copies of your protests to sycheriff@gmail.com <mailto:sycheriff@gmail.com> , boubacardiallo@cararamail.com, diallosouleymane2001@yahoo.fr, abdousmane@cooperation.net <http://fr.f233.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=abdousmane@cooperation.net> , albchaib13@yahoo.fr

Morocco: King scolded on press freedom violations

2007-09-07

http://www.afrol.com/articles/26668

The King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, has been scolded on press freedom violations since he took over the kingdom from his father. At a news conference in Casablanca, the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) Secretary General, Robert Ménard, told King Mohammed to understand that “one is free to comment.” he news conference was held to raise concern about the decline in press freedom in the run-up to the 7 September legislative elections. It was a follow up to a letter the RSF chief wrote to King Mohammed on 27 August.

USA: International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

2007-09-06

http://internationaltribunal.org/

Between August 29, 2007 and September 2, 2007, a Tribunal of 16 esteemed jurists from nine countries, including Algeria, Brazil, France, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mexico, South Africa, Venezuela, and the United States, convened in New Orleans to hear testimony by experts and survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After hearing nearly 30 hours of testimony by hurricane survivors and experts – covering government neglect and negligence in 15 areas, ranging from police brutality to environmental racism, from misappropriation of relief to gentrification, the jurists announced their preliminary findings.

Sudan: Date for Darfur peace talks set

2007-09-06

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN647844.html

Sudan and Darfur rebels will hold talks on October 27 in Libya to push for peace ahead of the expected deployment of a 26,000-strong peace force in Darfur, a U.N.-Sudanese government statement said on Thursday. The statement said the United Nations "expresses the hope that parties will cooperate fully" with U.N. and African Union (AU) mediators.

Chad: More aid needed now but peacekeepers not expected for months

2007-09-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74163

Peacekeepers are unlikely to arrive in Chad for at least three months, according to senior UN diplomats who spoke following a joint military mission to the country by representatives of the European Union and the UN. Meanwhile the World Food Programme (WFP) is launched a new appeal for funds to assist Darfur refugees in Chad and victims of inter-communal clashes in Chad.

Burundi: Rebel factions clash, 20 fighters dead

2007-09-07

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318298

At least 20 Burundi fighters were killed on Tuesday in heavy clashes between two rival rebel factions that sent scores of residents fleeing the capital's northern suburbs, witnesses said. Machine gunfire and explosions shattered the air as insurgents opposed to Agathon Rwasa, the leader of the rebel Forces for National Liberation (FNL), battled fighters loyal to him.

DRC: Rebel calls for truce as fighting worsens

2007-09-06

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN625353.html

A dissident Congolese general called for African mediation to broker a ceasefire in eastern Congo as fighting between his forces and government troops neared the provincial capital on Thursday. New clashes broke out before dawn around Karuba, a village about 30 km (19 miles) west of Goma, the capital of troubled North Kivu province, after President Joseph Kabila's government rejected talk of negotiations.

DRC: Long-awaited peace under threat

2007-09-07

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318383

In August, Uganda's Security Minister, Amama Mbabazi, threatened to re-enter the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following two cross-border incursions by Congolese gunmen thought to have been linked to the army. Kinshasa stands accused of killing a British worker from the oil-exploring Heritage Corporation after a 15-minute exchange of fire with the Uganda People's Defence Force and private guards.

Togo: E-agriculture for farmers

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/43224

A 'Center for Commercial and Agricultural Information' (PICA) for the collection and the publication of price lists via the internet has been launched in Togo to enable farmers and traders to interact over prices and availability of products.of the products by ICT. The center is equipped with computer and Internet facilities with a web page www.tradenet.biz with a strong integration of data and mobile technology.
Highway Africa News Agency

A 'Center for Commercial and Agricultural Information' (PICA) for the collection and the publication of price lists via the internet has been launched in Togo to enable farmers and traders to interact over prices and availability of products.of the products by ICT

The center is equipped with computer and Internet facilities with a web page www.tradenet.biz with a strong integration of data and mobile technology.

The center will allow producers and tradesmen to consult in real time over price lists that are in conformity with the ECOWAS region.

Farmers will also consult over business opportunities in the area -the availability of products and stocks - in short farmers and traders will be able to conclude commercial transactions with partners from West Africa and other destinations.

The platform is also equipped with a system that makes it possible to send SMSees to producers, to salesmen and to purchasers.

The center will also equip farmers with packages to receive free information on mobile phones on the prices of 400 agricultural producers of the regional markets in West Africa, that is Benign, Burkina Faso, Cap Verde, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Togo.

Dété Yachina, the webmaster of the www.tradenet.biz explained that in fact , people will know at home or their fields how much a product costs and where to get it if not available in one's country.

"Via this facility, one will seek the market where one can find it and where one can better sell, by selling their products, one has enough money and that can contribute to the improvement of our living conditions" said Denis Mbadia chair regional Rooms of agriculture of Togo

"The project has placed at our disposal an electronic facility to break down information concerning the agricultural produce and to seek markets abroad, we received formations on the use of the machines and the setting on line of information", said Akouété Foly chair grouping of the market-gardeners farmers of south Togo.

Denis Mbadia said that the project will contribute to the promotion of the agricultural sector of Togo and will promote research of markets where to sell products.

"For having produced, it is necessary to sell and monetarized its production and the market should be sought", explained Mbadia.

This project is supported by the regional network of information systems of market and agricultural trade in West Africa (MISTOWA) www.mistowa.org and its aims are to increase regional agricultural trade and food security by improving and linking the existing regional efforts to generate, disseminate, and make commercial use of market information.

The center will also help the regional networks of Market Information Systems (MIS) and trade partners to address other constraints, so that strong and dynamic commodity chains emerge that will use the information to enhance production, handling, credit, and trade; and value added services such as post-harvest, processing, packaging, and quality control.

Cameroonian: Telecentres - Farce or Reality?

2007-09-07

http://africa.oneworld.net/article/view/152780/1/

The populations of the rural areas where telecentres exist are not sensitised enough on the importance of such technology. The multipurpose community telecentres is an infrastructure which offers telecommunication services, computer science, audiovisual and Internet services from a terminal or terminals given to a community to enable them communicate at a cheaper rate. The telecentres are associated with proximity community services. However, the existence of the multipurpose community telecentres still remains a farce for many Cameroonians, argues Kelvin Chibomba.

South Africa: Government's OSS plans revealed

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/43222

Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita (the South African State Information Technology Agency), has announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference. While many welcomed the February announcement of government's intention to adopt and promote open source software, the subsequent months saw disillusionment within the open source community that very little had actually happened.
Highway Africa News Agency

Doctor Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita (the South African State Information Technology Agency), announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference on Thursday.

While many welcomed the February announcement of government's intention to adopt and promote open source software, the subsequent months saw disillusionment within the open source community that very little had actually happened.

Mashao addressed these worries, describing what had been happening behind the scenes and showing a systematic timetable of how this process will indeed be implemented. He outlined the government's policy, which came into being with government's February 22 announcement. The five key points are:

-Choose FOSS -Migrate to FOSS -Develop in FOSS -Use FOSS/open content licensing -Promote FOSS in South Africa "That is a very strong statement," he said, expressing his confidence in the policy. However he also quoted the minister of public services, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, saying that the implementation would not be a "big bang", but rather a gradual process.

"I feel I am very fortunate, I was not there when people were fighting about it," he said, referring to the long process of decision making over open source's adoption that began in 2000.

"I don't have to say we must use open source. The government policy now says that we are migrating... I don't see any reason that we won't," he added.

Under the policy, when introducing new software, the SA government will implement open source solutions unless a proprietary option is demonstrated to be "significantly superior".

In any instances where proprietary software is implemented, reasons must be given to justify its use. Migration of current systems is also planned. This will be done in a phased approach, beginning with applications such as replacing MS Office with Open Office or KOffice and replacing Internet Explorer with Firefox.

This will in time lead up to the operating system, replacing Windows with a Linux distribution. Migration to Apache for the running of government websites has already occurred within a number of departments.

Mashao said that the Sita CEO's office was already running open source applications. "We at Sita have already tested the main government systems on open source... what it means is that we do not have to go and do any new work," he revealed.

All new software developed for or by the government is to be based on open standards and licensed under an open source licence where possible He outlined the plans of the FOSS Programme Office (FPO), which is to begin operating in September, and the current status of open source implementation.

The FPO will be established on September 3, when Arno Webb, formerly the chief information officer of the department of arts and culture, begins in his position as programme manager.

The role of the FPO will be to coordinate all FOSS work in government, create FOSS skills, ensure that government procurement is FOSS compliant and to partner all migrations of government departments.

The first of these departments to migrate will be Sita itself, where the CEO has already been using a number of open source programs.

This year's target is to migrate two agencies, starting with Sita within the next three months. The other department, although not confirmed, is likely to be that of science and technology, where Mashao said there has already been a pilot migration. For 2008, a further four departments will be migrated, then 15 in 2009 and 50 in 2010.

Talking on the challenges faced, he said that the CSIR had made progressive steps but that it was halted due to problems with the document management system.

"If you are secretary in a normal office, migration is very easy, you don't even see anything, you use open office evolution and firefox," he said, adding that it was backend issues such as the conversion of the document managemet system that presented more of a challenge.

In order to help facilitate these plans, eight tender companies have already been appointed to supply open source solutions. These are Choice Technologies, Impi Linux, GijimaAST, Obsidian, SourceCom, BCX, Novell and IBM.

Sita is currently in the process of training 30 students with computer science diplomas to become LPI certified.

As Mashao explained, there is a chicken and egg challenge in that in order for OSS to be adopted, the necessary support skills have to be available, but until there is the demand for skills, they will not be developed.

This first wave of students will address this problem. For next year it is planned to train a further 100 students and 1 000 the following year.

While training of 10 000 is planned for 2010, Mashao expects that by this point there will be sufficient demand that the private sector will have caught up and these skills will be fairly commonplace.

Zimbabwe: Shortwave radio comes to the rescue

2007-09-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/43223

Since its launch last year in December SW Radio Africa has become an alternative source of news and information using the short message sending (SMS) system directly to mobile phones. With many Zimbabweans struggling to get basic commodities from the shops, the short message sending system allows them to get news at any given time without having to peruse a newspaper or go to the internet.
Highway Africa News Agency

Since its launch last year in December SW Radio Africa has become an alternative source of news and information using the short message sending (SMS) system directly to mobile phones.

With many Zimbabweans struggling to get basic commodities from the shops, the short message sending system allows them to get news at any given time without having to peruse a newspaper or go to the internet.

Despite the frustrating slow speed to connect to the internet the service has however given Zimbabweans a relief and an alternative media that can link them to the breaking stories as they unfold.

Asked about how it works, the station manager at SW Radio Africa, Gerry Jackson hailed the facility as a success. "We have a service on the net that keeps our database of all our subscribers' mobile numbers. We log onto that website, write our headline or breaking news, punch our database of numbers and by just clicking the button 'send' all our subscribers automatically receive the news. It is very simple but effective in sending out critical information" she said.

Since its launch the facility now boasts of more than six thousand five hundred subscribers (6 500). Jackson the number of subscribers is still growing everyday.

Asked about how effective this facility is in reaching out to the rural populace, she explained that the facility is there to compliment their shortwave radio station that beams across the country.

An expert in Media and Development, Mr. Denford Damba described the system as unique and worthwhile.

"One good thing about this facility is that it is not confined to Zimbabwe alone, but to all masses of the world who are concerned about the crisis in Zimbabwe and its manifestations", he said.

SW Radio Africa is one of many Zimbabwean radio stations that broadcast outside the country as a result of lack of media freedom in Zimbabwe.

The shortwave radio service was founded by former owners of Capitol radio that was banned in Zimbabwe by the government of Zimbabwe for speaking against state repression.

Africa: Africa's Health in 2010 - Website launch

2007-09-06

http://africahealth2010.aed.org/index.html

Africa's Health in 2010 is pleased to announce the launching of its website. The site provides information about the project's purpose, a description of the technical areas in which the project works, information about the African partners with which the project works, and the capability to download publications produced by the project. The purpose of Africa's Health in 2010 project is to provide strategic, analytical, communications and advocacy, and monitoring and evaluation technical assistance to African public and private institutions and networks to improve the health status of Africans.

Africa: The State of Philanthropy in Africa - Call for Abstracts

2007-09-06

http://www.trustafrica.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=106&Itemid=69&lang=en

TrustAfrica is pleased to announce the first in a series of publications on the state of philanthropy in Africa. We are now soliciting abstracts of papers that can help measure the state of philanthropy in Africa. Successful abstracts will be developed into book chapters that will be published in the beginning of 2008. Abstracts (250 words maximum) are due no later than September 15, 2007.

Global: Application call - Voluntary Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery

2007-09-07

http://www.ohchr.org/english/about/funds/slavery/

The United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery allocates small project grants, for programmes of humanitarian legal and financial assistance to individuals whose human rights have been severely violated as a result of contemporary forms of slavery. Application forms should be duly completed and submitted by 31 December 2007 to the secretariat of the Fund.

Finance Training for NGOs

2007-09-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/43161

Mango training is delivering two of our most popular courses for NGO managers in Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Botswana during October and November 2007.

A few bursaries are available to poorly-resourced local NGOs. We are also able to offer more bursaries for the Botswana course this year due to a generous supporter. - more details from http://www.mango.org.uk/training/coursefees.asp#bursary

All of Mango’s course can now be booked online. Please go to www.mango.org.uk/training/book.aspx or contact Erica Howe on training@mango.org.uk who will be happy to deal with your enquiry.

Global: Annual Global Learning Programme on Human Rights in Development

2007-09-07

http://www.dignityinternational.org/dg/page.php?117

For the sixth consecutive year, Dignity is proud to invite applications to the Annual Global Linking and Learning Programme to be held from 30 November to 11 December 2007. This programme will build on the successes of the previous learning programmes on “Human Rights in Development”, and on “Economic Social and Cultural Rights” organised by Dignity International with a range of national, regional and international partners including the International Human Rights Internship Program and the International Network on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net), People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning, Forum Asia, Hakijamii Trust, Kenya, and Tanzania Council on Social Development.

Global: Civil Society Practitioners Programme (CSPP) - University of Oxford

2007-09-06

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/cspp/

The Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) invites applications from the global South to fill two places in its Civil Society Practitioners Programme. This visitor programme is intended for Civil Society Practitioners of distinction or outstanding promise who wish to visit the Institute for a period of six weeks between February and December 2008, to undertake research concerning the social impact of the Internet and related ICTs.The deadline for applications is September 26 2007.

Zimbabwe: Information technology seminars for visual artists

2007-09-07

http://www.africancolours.net/content/14444

The Africancolours Artists’ Association (AAA), sponsored by the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust (CFoZT) will be conducting visual arts seminars around the country starting in Harare on 17th of September 2007 at the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe. The main objective of the seminars is to encourage the country’s visual artists to use the various forms of Information Technology around to publicize their work to a global audience and help contribute to the growth of the country’s culture sector.

Global: Senior Associate (Africa) - Crimes Against Humanity Program (New York)

2007-09-06

http://tinyurl.com/3bkq8a

Reporting to the director of the Crimes Against Humanity (CAH) program, the Senior Associate-Africa will play a key role in formulating and achieving program goals and objectives; conducting research; writing reports, web site content, and press materials; conducting advocacy; fostering relationships with staff members of nongovernmental organizations, governments, and international organizations; and developing specific projects. Deadline for applications is September 14, 2007.

Fahamu