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Kenya: Investigate police brutality

2008-08-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/49994

The Kenyan government should immediately open an investigation into the recent beating and sexual assault of civil society activists by police, the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) said Tuesday. "We join Kenyan human rights leaders in strongly condemning the police attacks on civil society activists as they prepared to hold a peaceful rally," said Suliman Baldo, Director of ICTJ's Africa Program. "The government must immediately investigate the attacks, as well as end the growing trend of police brutality and intimidation against Kenyan civil society."
The Kenyan government should immediately open an investigation into the recent beating and sexual assault of civil society activists by police, the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) said Tuesday.

"We join Kenyan human rights leaders in strongly condemning the police attacks on civil society activists as they prepared to hold a peaceful rally," said Suliman Baldo, Director of ICTJ's Africa Program. "The government must immediately investigate the attacks, as well as end the growing trend of police brutality and intimidation against Kenyan civil society."

On August 4, 2008, the 400 member organizations of Kenya's National Civil Society Congress demanded action from Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga in an open letter condemning "documented and verified acts of police terror, intimidation, violence and impunity."

In one such incident on July 8, 2008, Kenyan police stormed into a Nairobi hotel where a group of civil rights activists were planning a peaceful anti-corruption rally. Police beat seven of the activists, and one officer also sexually assaulted Anne Njogu, Executive Director of the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness in Nairobi.

Ms. Njogu and her colleagues were taken to a police station in Gigiri, where police again attacked the activists, beating them with police batons and kicking them.

"The sexual assault against Ms. Njogu is part of an appalling wave of violence against women in Kenya," said Debra Schultz, Acting Director of ICTJ's Gender and Transitional Justice Program. "The Kenyan government must take steps to end impunity for gender-based crimes wherever they are committed."

Kenyan Civil Society calls on the global progressive community to join its struggle against police brutality. See details in statement below, issued by the International Center for Transitional Justice.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1) Send a text message TODAY, to Kenya's President and Prime Minister. Use the one below, or craft your own.

"Mr. Kibaki / Mr. Odinga - we hold u accountable 4 police violence n sexual assault against Ann Njogu n other civil society activists. Act NOW 2 uphold human rights 4 all Kenyans!"

To President Mwai Kibaki (via his spokesperson, Alfred Mutua):
Cellphone number + 254 721 240 443

To Prime Minister Raila Odinga
Cellphone + 254 733 620 736


2) Send an email to Prime Minister Raila Odinga
railaodinga@yahoo.com

No email contact is available for President Mwai Kibaki or his office.

Suggested Message:

Forward the press statement from ICTJ below, with the opening line:

"Mr Odinga, I urge you to act immediately and decisively to address police violence and sexual assault on Kenyan civil society activists. Please see the statement below from the International Center for Transitional Justice."

Signed: Name, Organization / Affiliation (if any), City, Country

3) If you are a Kenyan repeat steps 1) and 2) with your own MP and other parliamentarians. Look up their contact details on the link below:
http://shailja.com/news/newsletterblog/2008/04/talk- to-kenyan-mps-and-ministers.html

4) If you live outside Kenya, repeat steps 1) and 2), directing the texts and emails to the Kenyan Ambassador or High Commissioner in your country. Look up their contact details on the link below.
http://www.mfa.go.ke/mfacms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=29

5) If you are a foreign national living in Kenya, repeat steps 1) and 2) with the Ambassador or High Commissioner of your country in Kenya. Look up their contact details on the link below:
http://www.mfa.go.ke/mfacms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=66

Kenyan activists barred from Zambia

Onyango Oloo

2008-08-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/49999

I am jotting these few lines from the offices of the Centre for Multiparty Democracy-Kenya here in Nairobi. It is almost 16:00 Kenyan time. I have just been informed by Mr. Omweri Angima the CMD-K Program Officer that the centre's Executive Director, Ms. Njeri Kabeberi and Mr. Cyprian Orina Nyamwamu, the Chief Executive Officer of NCEC are currently confined at the Lusaka Airport having been barred entry into Zambia where they were going to attend a conference/meeting convened by Freedom House on the Zimbabwean Crisis. Haron Ndobi the well known human rights lawyer walked into the office and briefed me further on the situation, revealing that he had spoken to Njeri over the phone. Mr. Ndobi in turn called up Kenya's Foreign Affairs minister, Mr Moses Wetangula who has since called the country's High Commissioner to Zambia to give the Kenyan government a full briefing. In the meantime, K24, the 24 hour Nairobi-based television station has carried a live telephone interview with Njeri Kabeberi who basically reiterated that they were barred from entering Zambia.

In terms of details, Njeri Kabeberi and Cyprian Nyamwamu were delegates to a meeting entitled "Civil Society Conference on Transitional Processes in Zimbabwe" organized by Freedom House Southern Africa slated to take place in Lusaka, Zambia from 7th to 9th August, 2008.

Among the participating organizations are the following:
Bulawayo Agenda (Zimbabwe) Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (Zimbabwe) Centre for Multiparty Democracy (Kenya) Christian Alliance (Zimbabwe) Combined Harare Residents Association (Zimbabwe) Community Action for Popular Participation/Transition Monitoring Group (Nigeria) CounselinG Services Unit (Zimbabwe) Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (Zimbabwe), Electoral Unit of Southern Africa (with a rep from Cameroon), Foundation for Democratic Process (Zambia), General Agriculture and Plantation (Zimbabwe), Insitute for Security Studies (reps from Zambia and South Africa), Institute for Democracy Assistance in Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe), International Commission of Jurists (Zimbabwe) International Centre for Transitional Justice ( reps from Liberia and Sierra Leone)), Law Society (Zimbabwe), Lawyers for Human Rights (Zimbabwe), Lesotho Council Association of NGOs(Lesotho), Media Institute of Southern Afirca (Zimbabwe) Media Monitoring Project (Zimbabwe) National Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (Zimbabwe) National Constitution Assembly ( Zimbabwe) NCA/NCEC (Kenya), Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, Radio Dialogue (Zimbabwe), Student Solidarity Trust(Zimbabwe), The Evangelical Alliance of South Africa, Trust Africa (Zimbabwe) University of Witwatersrand, WOZA, Women's Coalition of Zimbabwe, Youth Initiative for Democracy in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Zimbabwe Election Support Network, Zimbabwe Human RIghts Association, Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, Zimbabwe Nationla Association of Student Unions, Zimbabwe Peace Project and the South African-based SADC Council of NGOs.

Topics of the sessions ranged from "Transitional Governments and Governments of National Unity-Lessons Learned", "Transitional Processes that bring healing to a Country-Can Zimbabwe Get There?" with case studies from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and South Africa. Cyprian was scheduled to present in this session; "Unpacking Technical Processes of Transition" and "Civil Society's Role in Catalyzing a Democratically Acceptable Transitional Process of Zimbabwe".

Given the above topics and the range of civil, peace,democratic, student, women's, workers and other organizations invited to the conference, it is mystifying, to say the very least to fathom the reasons why the Zambian government decided at the eleventh hour to cancel the conference, bar African civil society members from entering another African country among the other draconian measures taken.

Writing as a Kenyan social justice activist and former political prisoner, and more particularly as the Secretary General of the Social Democratic Party, one of the founder members of the Centre for Multiparty Democracy in Kenya, I would like to condemn, in the strongest possible terms the harassment of Njeri Kabeberi, Cyprian Nyamwamu and all those civil society attendeee at the abruptly cancelled conference.

I call upon all those who are reading this to contact the Zambian authorities directly in Lusaka and through their diplomatic representatives around the world to express their outrage, concern, disappointnment or whatever reaction/feeling they have towards today's repressive state measures on the part of the Zambian government. I reaffirm my solidarity with and support for Njeri Kabeberi, Cyprian Nyamwamu and all those Pan Africanist sisters and brothers whose only crime it appears to be to have the temerity of gathering in an African country to seek peaceful and democratic solutions to African problems.\


A lutta continua!

Thursday, August 7, 2008

* Onyango Oloo is Secretary General Social Democratic Party of Kenya Nairobi

What's next for Durban's best-known institute of social and environmental justice?

Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond

2008-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/49938

University of KwaZulu-Natal vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba is expected to deliver an edict that the Centre for Civil Society will close on December 31.

The reason given by dean Donal McCracken to a sceptical School of Development Studies (where the centre is housed) is that staff do not have "permanent" funding. But neither do most of the university's research units, and there is money in centre reserves for at least a couple of years, plus ongoing donor support for many of our projects.

Hence this "execution" will be doggedly resisted in the Memorial Tower Building, because UKZN still has many staff and students who remember the struggle for non-racial democracy and don't mind speaking out to challenge misguided decisions.
As the two most senior academics in the centre, holding an honorary professorship and tenured research chair, respectively, we will resist, despite what a UKZN internal report recorded - an environment of "intimidation and bullying", in which management "deploys power rather than intellect", as Rhodes professor Jimi Adesina put it.

The decision is misguided for many reasons, not least for overturning the official recommendation of a five-month University Research Review finalised in February, which advocated strengthening the centre and giving it more autonomy: "Closing down or removing the centre from UKZN does not appear to be an option as it was rejected by all interviewees and panel members. Through its international recognition and standing, the centre has put UKZN on a world map in social science, a position the university dare not risk to lose."

NEWSMAKERS

On the local map, the centre has offered nearly 100 free events a year, including seminars, conferences, micro film festivals, literary celebrations and the Harold Wolpe Lecture, Durban's main lecture series.

In Howard College, several hundred community residents join academics on the last Thursday of each month to debate newsmakers and intellectuals, global and local - such as, this year, commentator Xolela Mangcu, Soweto activist Trevor Ngwane, filmmaker John Pilger, Kenyan feminist Eunice Sahle and Zimbabwe democracy activists Judith Todd and Joy Mabengwe, as well as local anti-xenophobia campaigners Baruti Amisi, Pierre Matate and Orlean Naidoo.

Among our inspirations is Fatima Meer, whom we host this Sunday in Chatsworth in celebration of her 80 years of commitment and wisdom, as well as her decade of support to the "new social movements" in the original Concerned Citizens Forum which in 1998 helped renew urban justice advocacy across South Africa.

Meer's Wolpe lecture last year called for a progressive, post-nationalist liberatory politics to emerge from the grassroots, like the creative spark generated in 2001 when the World Social Forum in Brazil rose against the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

With our centre's assistance, the Social Movement Indaba network and Diakonia Council of Churches hosted a local equivalent in January, drawing 400 community and labour leaders.

Among those present were many who resisted Inanda Dam displacement, Treatment Action Campaigners and Congolese inner-city traders who hang in against all odds.

Evidence of abuse in the authorities' diktat to shut the centre ranges from a flawed process, to extreme race and gender implications, since contract termination affects a dozen black staff, most of whom are working-class. The only paid staffer who should retain his job, McCracken told us, is the sole white expatriate (a writer of this article, Bond, whose government research subsidies more than pay his salary).

In addition to UKZN's threat to this centre and a generation of new critical scholars, a great deal of concrete research activity is now at risk.

UKZN claims it has South Africa's "second best" research profile (after the University of Pretoria).

A modest contribution comes from our centre staff's peer-reviewed articles, chapters and books - 58 in 2007 with an average 50 a year since 2005 (and no, these fortnightly Mercury columns don't count) - which rank us at the top of the university, measured per academic employee.

High productivity arises from documenting and interrogating the social laboratories of Durban, South Africa, Africa and the world, where contradictions generated by globalisation and the flawed character of post-colonial politics create conflict.

We have sought sites and research areas - climate, energy, water/sanitation, global and national political economy, survival strategies and community philanthropy, the rise of social movements in Africa - where these contradictions tell us more about society, politics, economy, gender, race, environment and other social relations than we would normally get from our academic armchairs.

CONFLCITS

Beyond merely trying to understand the conflicts, serious scholars will contribute to addressing them in a non-violent manner, such as through international legal strategies that the other writer of this article, Brutus, contributes to.

He does this with the Jubilee and the Khulumani Support Group, aiming for $400 billion (R2 951billion) in reparations to be paid by apartheid-era US and EU corporations - which hopefully will frighten them enough to think twice about their next investment in the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma and the like.

The danger of the centre's approach to knowledge production, "praxis", is that the research generated sometimes threatens the privileges of power.

Two years ago, the same authorities banned Ashwin Desai from continuing employment at the centre and at UKZN, amidst a haze of confusion and weak excuses.

We lost a major Human Sciences Research Council "Race and Redress" grant as a result of this interference.

In 2003, the US Agency for International Development retracted a multimillion-rand donation after centre founder Adam Habib spoke out against the Iraq war.

That sort of style the centre encouraged from the outset: honest and courageous, combining the left brain's love of rigorous detail, and the left side of the body's beating heart.

UKZN management has stabbed this centre, but it cannot be allowed to die.

So this is really all about politics, and whether a university can host a critical mass of professional academics and community scholars devoted to social justice.

*If you have testimonials about the wisdom of closing CCS, for or against, please let us know, at dennisbrutus2002@yahoo.com and pbond@mail.ngo.za - or fax to 260 2052 - and these will be posted at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs

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

Haiti: Save SOPUDEP School

2008-08-07

http://sopudep.org/

SOPUDEP is a private non-profit school in Haiti that has served the poorest and most vulnerable children of the community of Petion-Ville since 2001. On Tuesday, August 5, 2008, the SOPUDEP school will begin the procedure to file an injunction against Mayor Lydie Clark Parent and ask the court to uphold their binding 12-year lease at their current location. In an effort to show Mayor Parent and the Haitian court the importance of the SOPUDEP school, they ask that all people of goodwill and solidarity please write a letter expressing their support for the school and its more that 450 students.

The destruction of African agriculture

Walden Bello

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/49919

Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.

Whether in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, the story has been the same: the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets.

African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base.

FROM EXPORTER TO IMPORTER

At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.

Agriculture is in deep crisis, and the causes are many, including civil wars and the spread of HIV-AIDS. However, a very important part of the explanation was the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the structural adjustment programs to which most African countries were subjected as the price for getting IMF and World Bank assistance to service their external debt.

Instead of triggering a virtuous spiral of growth and prosperity, structural adjustment saddled Africa with low investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption, and low output, all combining to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline.

Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced applications, lower yields, and lower investment. One would have expected the non-economist to predict this outcome, which was screened out by the Bank and Fund’s free-market paradigm. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that the withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market and private sector to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector believed that reducing state expenditures created more risk and failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the predictions of neoliberal doctrine yielded precisely the opposite: the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. In those instances where private traders did come in to replace the state, an Oxfam report noted, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.”

What support the government was allowed to muster was channeled by the Bank to export agriculture – to generate the foreign exchange earnings that the state needed to service its debt to the Bank and the Fund. But, as in Ethiopia during the famine of the early 1980s, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into more and more unsuitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the Bank’s encouraging several economies undergoing adjustment to focus on export production of the same crops simultaneously often led to overproduction that then triggered a price collapse in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s program to expand cocoa production triggered a 48% drop in the international price of cocoa between 1986 and 1989, threatening, as one account put it, “to increase the vulnerability of the entire economy to the vagaries of the cocoa market [1]." In 2002-2003, a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in many other regions, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Latin America and Asia, the Bank and Fund confined themselves for the most part to macromanagement, or supervising the dismantling of the state’s economic role from above. These institutions left the dirty details of implementation to the state bureaucracies. In Africa, where they dealt with much weaker governments, the Bank and Fund micromanaged such decisions as how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired, or even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom. In other words, Bank and IMF resident proconsuls reached into the very innards of the state’s involvement in the agricultural economy to rip it up.

THE ROLE OF TRADE

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair trade practices on the part of the EU and the United States. Trade liberalization allowed low-priced subsidized EU beef to enter and drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, U.S. cotton growers offloaded their cotton on world markets at 20-55% of the cost of production, bankrupting West African and Central African cotton farmers in the process [2].

These dismal outcomes were not accidental. As then-U.S. Agriculture Secretary John Block put it at the start of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1986, “the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at lower cost [3]."

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of U.S. products stemmed from subsidies that were becoming more massive each year, despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase out all forms of subsidy. From $367 billion in 1995, the first year of the WTO, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Subsidies nowaccount for 40% of the value of agricultural production in the European Union (EU) and 25% in the United States.

The social consequences of structural adjustment cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africaadmitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming [4]."

That was, however, a rare moment of candor. What was especially disturbing was that, as Oxford University political economist Ngaire Woods pointed out, the “seeming blindness of the Fund and Bank to the failure of their approach to sub-Saharan Africa persisted even as the studies of the IMF and the World Bank themselves failed to elicit positive investment effects [5]."

THE CASE OF MALAWI

This stubbornness led to tragedy in Malawi.

It was a tragedy preceded by success. In 1998 and 1999, the government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after, however, is a story that will be enshrined as a classic case study in a future book on the 10 greatest blunders of neoliberal economics.

The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About1,500 people perished. The IMF, however, was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program with the government on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets…crowd out more productive spending.”

When an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government finally had enough of the Bank and IMF’s institutionalized stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy program, enabling two million households to buy fertilizer at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The results: bumper harvests for two years in a row, a surplus of one million tons of maize, and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to other countries in Southern Africa.

But the World Bank, like its sister agency, still stubbornly clung to the discredited doctrine. As the Bank’s country director toldthe Toronto Globe and Mail, “All those farmers who begged, borrowed, and stole to buy extra fertilizer last year are now looking at that decision and rethinking it. The lower the maize price, the better for food security but worse for market development.”

FLEEING FAILURE

Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today. Owing to the absence of any clear case of success, structural adjustment has been widely discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments that once subscribed to it have distanced themselves from the Bank, the most prominent case being the official British aid agency that co-funded the latest subsidized fertilizer program in Malawi. Perhaps the motivation of these institutions is to prevent the further erosion of their diminishing influence in the continent through association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions. At the same time, they are certainly aware that Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to the conditionalities of the World Bank, IMF, and Western government aid programs.

Beyond Africa, even former supporters of adjustment, like the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington and the rabidly neoliberal Economistacknowledged that the state’s abdication from agriculture was a mistake. In a recent commentary on the rise of food prices, for instance, IFPRI asserted that “rural investments have been sorely neglected in recent decades,” and says that it is time for “developing country governments [to] increase their medium- and long-term investments in agricultural research and extension, rural infrastructure, and market access for small farmers.” At the same time, the Bank and IMF’s espousal of free trade came under attack from the heart of the economics establishment itself, with a panel of luminaries headed by Princeton’s Angus Deaton accusing the Bank’s research department of being biased and “selective” in its research and presentation of data. As the old saying goes, success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan. Unable to deny the obvious, the Bank has finally acknowledged that the whole structural adjustment enterprise was a mistake, though it smuggled this concession into the middle of the 2008 World Development Report, perhaps in the hope that it would not attract too much attention. Nevertheless, it was a damning admission:

Structural adjustment in the 1980’s dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs, and cooperative organization. The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private actors to take over these functions—reducing their costs, improving their quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. Too often, that didn’t happen. In some places, the state’s withdrawal was tentative at best, limiting private entry. Elsewhere, the private sector emerged only slowly and partially—mainly serving commercial farmers but leaving smallholders exposed to extensive market failures, high transaction costs and risks, and service gaps. Incomplete markets and institutional gaps impose huge costs in forgone growth and welfare losses for smallholders, threatening their competitiveness and, in many cases, their survival.

In sum, biofuel production did not create but only exacerbated the global food crisis. The crisis had been building up for years, as policies promoted by the World Bank, IMF, and WTO systematically discouraged food self-sufficiency and encouraged food importation by destroying the local productive base of smallholder agriculture. Throughout Africa and the global South, these institutions and the policies they promoted are today thoroughly discredited. But whether the damage they have caused can be undone in time to avert more catastrophic consequences than we are now experiencing remains to be seen.


*Walden Bello is a senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, a program of Chulalongkorn University's Social Research Institute, and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) where this article first appeared under the title, "Destroying African Agriculture."

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


Notes:

1. Charles Abugre, “Behind Crowded Shelves: as Assessment of Ghana’s Structural Adjustment Experiences, 1983-1991,” (San Francisco: food First, 1993), p. 87.

2. “Trade Talks Round Going Nowhere sans Progress in Farm Reform,” Business World (Phil), Sept. 8, 2003, p. 15

3. Quoted in “Cakes and Caviar: the Dunkel Draft and Third World Agriculture,” Ecologist, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 1993), p. 220

4. Morris Miller, Debt and the Environment: Converging Crisis (New York: UN, 1991), p. 70.

5. Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: the IMF, the World Bank, and their Borrowers (Thaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 158.

Food shortages: stories of strife across the globe

Azad Essa

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49918

The current food crisis has been heralded as the worst since the 1970s. Ordinary people, from South Africa to Egypt, India to Turkey, have been forced to make severe adjustments to their lives to deal with food hikes that continue to rise exponentially since late 2007. A combination of complex factors, including poor harvests, higher energy prices and unprecedented demands exceeding supplies, amongst other contributing factors have led to the current condition. The world is a different place compared to the 1970s though; it is a vastly connected and interdependent globe, highly networked, largely dependent on the dictums of the logic of globalization, where chinks in supplies have a ricocheting effect across the globe, including the first world. We know that such increases have resulted in lifestyle changes and increased vulnerability for those at the bottom, but how similar are these struggles and experiences? The IOLS-Research Unit, UKZN bring together a collection of real stories of how ordinary people are being affected by the current spate of food and oil hikes, compiled by Azad Essa.

MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA by Nomkhosi Xulu

Margaret Shabalala*, 85, is a pensioner and the breadwinner of her household. She lives with two of her unemployed children who are in their mid 40s. She has four grandchildren, all high school graduates, but unemployed, except one. "Whenever I get my pension I have to carefully distribute each and every cent so that all in the family gets some share, said Ms Shabalala. "Obviously my pension is unable to cover buying the food for such a big family. From my pension at the end of the month, I try to buy basic foodstuff like rice, flour, maize meal, oil and sugar. These are the kind of things that should last us for the whole month, but that does not really happen. Sometimes I am left with nothing and I can't even go to church as taxi fares are also increasing with everything else."

"Things are not the same anymore," she continues, "our life situation just keeps on getting worse. I only wish that things were different. I am old and sick and have hardly anything to eat because of rising food prices. My daughters and grandchildren are looking for employment but that is not helping as well. Instead it is emptying our pockets for bus fare and photocopying, faxing and posting of CVs. I even tried looking for land in order to plant vegetables but have not yet succeeded. Every now and then I try to encourage my family to boil food as that will save oil. Things are really bad."

*name changed
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA by Samira Banoo

Busi Mhlongo*, 30, a Malawian national, is employed at a carwash in one of Durban's suburbs. Unable to support her family with the basic income earned in Malawi, she chose to emigrate to South Africa in 2007, in search of better employment opportunities. When she first arrived in Durban she rented a bedroom in a house near her workplace. Today, the same room has to be shared by two more women. Busi confirmed that the reality in South Africa is not any different than in her country, "When I arrived I could afford my own room but today it's almost impossible; I barely managed to pay my rent, most of my money goes in food."

Her reality, like that of many others is mainly due to the fact that she has not received a raise in the last year. As she says, 'I only earn R300 per week with which I have to pay for food, rent and send money back home. It's hard because everything is gone up, rice, maize, milk and bread, but my wages hasn't. Even the price of cooking oil has trebled since January, we have to use the same oil three times.''

*name changed

ISTANBUL, TURKEY by Tamer Söyler

Derya Gundogan, 56, a retired government clerk, complained that his pay was Ytl.1.200 ($970) in 2007, and after one year he had only Ytl.70 ($56) increase in retirement salary whereas fuel increased by 15%. He manages a smile as he explains, "After the economic crisis of 2001, all of us became economy experts, and this had a direct effect on my life. They say, the transportation costs had raised and this triggered the food prices. Come with me I'll show you." Derya dragged me to the closest food market to prove his point. He asked the manager of the food store, a friend of his, to give us the exact prices of some of the food items from June 2007 and June 2008. "Look, you know in Turkey there are typical things we eat, I will just ask him about these only" he said. He starts reading from a list, "Bread, from Ytl. 0.40 ($0.32) to Ytl. 0.50 ($0.40); sugar, Ytl 1.80 ($1.45) to Ytl 2.15 ($1.73); 5 kg olive oil, Ytl. 35 ($28) to Ytl. 41 ($33); 5 kg sunflower oil, Ytl. 20 ($16) to Ytl. 28.90 ($23); rice, Ytl. 2.95 ($2.37) to Ytl. 3.75 ($3) etc."

Derya continued, "you don't need to be a genius to see the problem. Today my monthly expenses, meaning just my basic living expenses, have gone up to Ytl 1.300 ($1044) in total. This is more than my income! This means we are having a diet, but an unhealthy one!" When asked about the Turkish government's attitude regarding the economic condition, Derya became angry, "I don't like the ideology of (the ruling) Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) and Prime Minister Erdogan, but because they did well with the economy I voted for them the last time. But their second term is totally different to their first term. After the 2001 crisis the priority was economy. Now, God knows what their priorities are!"

DAMASCUS, SYRIA by Bilal Randeree

Abu Maajid*, in his 80s, runs a small supermarket, selling basic groceries, cool drinks, snacks and odds and ends. He used to sell Egyptian rice (Zarzour) for SYL30 ($0.59) per kg and claims that the price has increased steadily to SYL90 ($1.77) per kg. 'But not for long, it will go up again soon. I just know it!' He used to sell 100kg of rice a week and now he sells anything around 5 to 10 kg a week.

Many people have stopped eating rice and now eat local wheat known as 'Burghur'. Even this has gone up from SYL20 ($0.39) to SYL50 ($1) per kg so sales have only marginally increased. 'One customer is my friend- he told me he is now eating just tomato and bread! Things are really bad and people are suffering', says Abu Maajid in broken English.

Canisters of gas used to sell for SYL175 ($3.50) when the cost price was SYL150 ($3). Now the government outlet is selling it for SYL275 ($5.50), the man who transports it adds on SYL25 ($0.50) and it's sold for SYL325 ($6.40) with a SYL25 ($0.50) mark-up. 'Petrol is the problem', he says. But he has no idea why the petrol price has gone up or who is to blame. There is no time to worry about that and there is nothing one can do but just try to work harder.

In some shops the employees make more than the owners. But jobs are not easy to find - his four married sons are all struggling to get proper jobs. The supermarket used to give him SYL10 ($0.20) profit for every SYL100 ($2) of sales- this has now dropped to 5%, and with the drop in sales, it is really tough to make ends meet. He has not paid the last four electricity bills and his phone has been cut because he couldn't pay the bill. He forces me to take the phone and listen - the line is dead and I'm greeted only by silence.

*name changed

CAIRO, EGYPT by Julten Abdelhalim

Muhammad Yusuf, 28, works as a janitor in a residential building in Cairo. Though he has an intermediate Diploma in Technical Education, he could never find any job that uses his qualifications. He earns less than a hundred US dollars per month He is responsible for a family composed of 8 individuals; his parents, his wife, his baby daughter, and his younger siblings whose education he is supposed to pay for. Since the age of 15, he has been working in low paid blue-collar jobs to ensure that his family meets their basic needs of food and education. He stresses that wages in Egypt, for the majority of the population, are ridiculously low. This is if anyone finds a respectable job in the first place. His wife has a BA in literature, however, it is impossible for her to find any job. He works 18 hours a day, and still he cannot afford to get a medical radiological examination for his wife who is sick. He says he cannot even describe his situation. It is not just food prices, all prices are soaring and wages remain low. No words can depict the suffering of young people of his age. He stresses the fact that he is simply "too exhausted and suffocated from everything".

CAIRO, EGYPT by Radwa Rabie

Nadi Atteya, 44, a doorman, lives in the security room at the bottom of an upmarket residential building in modern Cairo. Nadi has been living with his wife and four young sons in Cairo for the last 17 years. He left his small village a long time ago, and worked for some years as a builder, but after his contract ended he battled to find another job.

Nadi's monthly payment from guarding the building is 200 EGP ($38). This is supposed to cover their livings, food, buying clothing, and paying the school fees for his three young boys. "A few good people help me with it, otherwise I could not make it." Nadi says. Nadi explains further, "One kilo of meat is EGP40 ($7), but my monthly income is just EGP200 ($37), and the prices of everything else is increasing, like sugar, oil, meat, but my payment has not increased. It was increased a year ago from EGP150 ($28) to EGP200 ($37) and it remains there. Honestly, we have not tried the apricots this year still. One kilo is EGP4 ($0.75), and I have growing boys, and one kilo of such a fruit will not be enough. They used to like it, but now I have to substitute fruit with other basic items."

To provide protein for his growing boys, Nadi has begun resorting recently to substituting their meat diet with beans and potato. Once a week they could get a chicken, but in a family of six, it is hard to imagine one chicken weighing 1.5 kilos filling the hunger or appetite of all.

TUNIS, TUNISIA by Sebastian Veit

Sabrina Hajri, 26, a single mother in Tunis, struggles to survive. Although some prices like baguette and fuel are controlled and subsidised, the recent increase of prices effecting people in the low income groups is taking its toll. In Tunisia, there is no support program for single mothers; women support groups do not practically exist. The average wage for someone in Tunisia without any significant educational background is around US$200 to 300.

She explains her situation, almost reduced to tears, "Life is very tough for us here. I don't know how to make ends meet even though I am working hard every day cleaning other people's houses. I am counting every cent, but food & transport and rent are exceeding the little I am making". Often, during our conversation, she reminds me that she can no longer afford basic essentials like milk or tomatoes.

KAKOLA, TANZANIA by Mohamed Raiman

Caleb Lukaka, 28, works as a casual employee wherever he can find work. He lives with his wife and two children, aged 8 and 6, in a rented two-room, mud brick house. He has worked as a gardener and as a cleaner but has spent large periods of time either unemployed or doing odd jobs. Currently, he works as a cleaner in a clinic and earns 647 shillings an hour (50 US cents). He works 12 hours a day, with a 1 hour unpaid lunch break, and no benefits. He earns about TZS150 000 ($127) a month, of which TZS30 000 ($26) goes for taxes and rent. He buys all the food for his family of four from the village market – a diet that comprises largely of vegetables with the occasional meat or fish. Food costs about TZS3000 ($2.60) a day, amounting to 75% of his remaining salary. About a year ago, the same food was costing him about half of what he pays today (TZS1500 ($1.27) per day) or 38% of his salary. His salary has increased only slightly since last year, and now, with the majority of his income going to food, he has little money for clothing, medical expenses, school fees, books etc. Caleb doesn't always have a stable income, but he always has hungry mouths to feed.


ASIA:

BHOPAL, INDIA by Reva Prakash

Irawati Yadav, age 50, is a homemaker. She sometimes helps her son look after their small vegetable shop in Chunabhatti, Bhopal. The increases in the price of essential commodities have made life very difficult over the last few months. Earlier, the profit margins were modest and earnings amounted to around Rs.100-150 ($2.30 - $3.50) per day. But now, Irawati laments that it is difficult to even recover the amount spent on buying the vegetables. Potatoes have doubled in price in the last three months, while prices of tomatoes and onions have skyrocketed, trebling in the same duration. As there are no savings, the family can only afford to buy enough for a few days. They do not have enough money to buy wholesale in order to partially insulate themselves from prices that are increasing by the day. Irawati knows fully well that they are at the receiving end of processes over which they have no control but wonders why the prices of big cars haven't risen the way it has for essential commodities.

Buyers troubled by the price rise themselves bargain with Irawati, to decrease the price even if by one rupee. But she is relentless and says, "Buyers do not understand that the prices are not under my control. I go with my husband every morning to mandi (wholesale market for vegetable, fruit and grains) on a bus to buy the little that we can from his daily earnings, which range from Rs65 to Rs100 ($1.50 – $2.50) per day. These days we buy only five kilos of each vegetable because people everywhere are cutting corners to make ends meet. Then the cost of bus tickets has also increased by one rupee. The rent for the shop is fixed at Rs500 and I suspect that it might also increase in the days to come. I do not understand how I will be able to recover the cost if I sell for less. I, also, have to feed my family." She is worried that they might be pushed to the brink of hunger and poverty in the months to come

JAIPUR, INDIA by Nishtha Prakash and Flora Saint-Sans

Gayatri Sharma, 47, guard of the Sun Temple in the Pink City, runs her home through chadhava (offerings) and her husband's income as a clerk in one of the government banks. The family struggles between making ends meet, and maintaining their social status.

"The poor can live on onions and bread. We can't. We live on the most simple diet, but we make sure that our guests are served the best meals. She continues, "The prices of oil, pulses, wheat and salt – all indispensable ingredients in Indian cooking – have doubled in just one year. In just two months, sugar price has gone up from Rs16 ($0.37) to Rs20 ($0.46) per kg. Most of the spices cost twice as much today as they did a year ago. If food prices rise further, we cannot possibly cut down more on our basic diet – all the family members will have to work and contribute to the family income".

Sunil, a relative of Gayatri's, used to come up to the temple with his friends often and cook daal-baati (a Rajasthani delicacy made out of pulses and flour) for dinner. Now they don't do that anymore – they would rather save the money. Gayatri doesn't buy fruit as she used to before. Both Gayatri's and Sunil's families stick to their staple diet – delicacies like kheer (an Indian dessert made of rice and milk) are not affordable. They also go without an air cooler even on the hottest days for it saves the electricity costs. Unable to save anything, both Gayatri and Sunil's only investment in the future is investing in their children.

SUZHOU, CHINA by Huang Yue

Min Li*, 40, has been working as a taxi driver in Suzhou, a city in South East China, for the past six years.

Every alternate day, Min awakens at 7am and gets into his blue Santana car with anxiety on his face. He needs to work till 1 or 2am the next day to make ends meet. He normally takes the next day off to recover before he goes to work again, and continue the cycle: every week, every month, every year.

Supporting his nuclear family was relatively under control, until last year, that is. Since 2007, food prices have increased exponentially in China, Min points out, especially basic necessities like vegetables and meat. What has been the killer though, is the sudden rise in petroleum prices to unbelievably high levels, which has obviously hit taxi drivers very hard.

"We used to pay about RMB200 ($30) for gas everyday. And now we need to pay RMB250 ($36) or more, which is almost one third of our daily turnover. Apart from the cost of other things, we will lose RMB40-50 ($5-7) per day, RMB700-800 ($100-120) per month and RMB8000-10000 ($1200-1500) per year after the oil price markup", complained Min, knowing well that life must simply go on.

*name changed

SINGAPORE CITY, SINGAPORE by Karen Yeo

KK Yeo, 58, runs a transportation services business. KK is still servicing a mortgage for his flat, which he bought 9 years ago. He has three children in their late-twenties and early thirties. Desiring to be financially independent from his children, KK Yeo does not want his children to help service the mortgage for his flat. Therefore, he continues to provide a one-man transportation services, including the transportation of recycled goods for import and export.

He said that the increased prices, particularly fuel prices, have drastically affected his business. He used to own 3 trucks and hire 2-3 drivers for his transportation business 4 years ago. However, he had to sell off the trucks and let the drivers go due to increased overhead costs. Although he continues to meet his target revenue of SGD$3000 ($2200) monthly, KK Yeo says that it is no longer possible for him to save the SGD$1000 ($734) monthly that he used to save previously. Instead, he is finding it difficult to save even SGD$500 ($367) per month. When asked about what he intended to do with his savings, he replied that he had to prepare for "rainy days", including possible medical bills, which continue to soar. He sardonically commented that, "In Singapore, if you have no money, you better not fall sick. It would be better to die than to be suffering, broke and being a burden to everyone else around you."

His truck runs on diesel fuel and a full tank used to cost SGD$180 ($132), but now costs SGD$360 ($264). With this 100% increase in his fuel costs, he has chosen to mark up his service charges from the previous SGD$50-80 ($36 –$58) per trip to the current SGD$80-100 ($58-$73) per trip. To cut fuel usage, he avoids making multiple trips, but instead plans his routes carefully such that he can service 5-6 customers per trip. These, he concedes, means that the customer volume has dwindled. To meet his target revenue each month, he works 12-16 hours daily. He has also secured a contract transporting goods and materials to and from the port and the warehouses every Thursday from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. KK Yeo cuts down his personal expenses by buying cheaper food from canteens and coffee shops. Instead of buying cigarettes which costs about SGD$11 ($8) per packet of 20 from the shops, he has chosen to purchase contrabands at half the price. He admits that this is illegal, but says that, "everyone is doing something illegal to cut costs. It is a risk I am willing to take."


AUSTRALIA:

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA by Elizabeth Lyburn

O.J., in his fifties, operates a small business in Sydney, Australia, of home-delivering fruit and vegetables to clients in the cities' southern suburbs. Four mornings each week, he makes the trip out to the produce market at Flemington, hand-picks the necessary items, returns home to pack the orders over lunch, and delivers them in the afternoons when his clients arrive home from work.

While the rise in oil prices, the global food shortage and – in Australia – the on-going drought have been cited in the media as responsible for the rising price of fresh produce, O.J. says this is largely "rubbish". His fuel costs, he estimates, have risen only AUD$ 7 ($6.70) per week – which he says he could easily off-set by picking up one or two more customers – but he concedes for major transport companies it is much more of a burden, and likely to be reflected in rising supermarket prices for such items.

He still believes we are paying too much for our food though, but have other culprits to blame: the stall holders at Flemington markets. How? According to O.J., most of the stalls have belonged to the families who run them for a hundred years or more; and it is very tough to buy in. Flemington is also the third largest market of its kind in the world: overkill for a city of only 4 million people. Most food bought in Sydney will thus come from there. The result is lack of competition, and allegations of informal price fixing.

The much-hyped drought has largely affected livestock and grain farmers, making meat and cereals more expensive but not causing serious harm to the fruit and vegetable sector. The biggest threat he sees come from freak natural occurrences, such the recent floods in Queensland, that effectively wiped out a seasons' worth of mandarins and caused the price to triple overnight – a phenomenon that he laments city people simply can't understand because they don't bother to think about it.


EUROPE:

BERLIN, GERMANY by Katharina Weltecke

Firat Kurt, 24, runs a small döner kebab diner named Ali Baba together with his father Kemal and brother Cahit, one of many families of Turkish migrants in Kreuzberg, Berlin. All three acknowledge that their business is going slow. The price of dairy products and meat are becoming unbearable. As Firat says, "the cost for meat jumped up € 0.20 ($0.36) per kilo at least'. Once upon a time döner was prepared with more luxurious lamb, but tradition is proving to be too expensive; chicken will have to do. The anxiety of the Kurt family isn't an irregularity in Germany. The situation has even given birth to a new word in the press to describe the situation, 'Lebensmittelkrise' or food crisis.

"The price I pay for a box of salad varies from € 6 ($9.50) one week to € 12 ($19) the next. I can't make a calculation on the basis of such chaos'. A growing question is whether to raise the price of their döners, but Firat says making this decision is difficult, "the competition in Berlin is tough, too many of us migrants are involved in the same business". Consequently, customers rarely experience the increases. They come and go every week paying the same € 2.50 ($4) for döner. Firat argues that they do not want to risk losing their customers, but this does come with consequences. All seven employees are brothers, cousins and uncles coming from the same village close to Konya, and the small family business earns less to support them all.

Firat now regrets not completing secondary school and says he lacks skills dealing with wholesale and retail. 'I don't have proper training, nobody ever told us how to react in a situation like this'. He fears he does not have enough knowledge or background information and is at the mercy of international politics. "We are angry, very angry. Also about ourselves because we feel helpless" Firat admits.

MEDIAS, ROMANIA by Ercument Celik

Dumitru Popescu*, 50, works in the construction sector. A few years ago he wanted to apply for early retirement, but after seeing that the retired have the worst living standards in the country he decided to keep on working. Although Romania has rich natural gas resources, he says the increase in food prices in the country is mainly due to the price increases in natural gas and petrol, which are used in production and in the transport of processed food items such as sugar and sunflower oil. The price of 1kg of sugar has increased from Lei 2.70 ($1.20) to Lei 3.8 ($1.65) in one year. As they cannot afford olive oil they primarily use sunflower oil whose price has doubled as well. He is thankful that the bread has a constant price because of government's subsidies. Dumitru remarks that eating is culturally very important, that is why they have to accept these prices and try to save money from other expenditures. But he and his wife have already forgotten what healthy food is. They can go to a restaurant only once or twice a year. Like many other people they try to grow their own vegetables and fruit in their small garden. However, they still have to buy some of them. For example, they used to buy tomatoes from the local market, but now it is cheaper in the new supermarket-chains, which sell imported ones of poor quality. In general, they look for discounts in various supermarkets to fight price increases, but it actually does not help. Dumitru drives to the villages close to the city to buy milk directly from the farmers since he pays Lei 2.50 ($1.10) for one litre instead of paying Lei 3.70 ($1.60) at the supermarkets. He says "I cannot believe how everything became so expensive in the last year. In Romania nobody is dying from hunger at the moment, but I feel very sad when I see my retired colleagues fighting hard to survive".

*name changed

TRENTO, ITALY by Arianna Baldo

Armando Pedevilla, 57, is the owner of a little transport company situated in northern Italy, that imports/exports perishables all over Europe. Armando deals daily with the problems related to oil prices.

He argues that, "in the last six months the oil price increased by over €0.30 ($0.47) per liter. One single truck needs hundreds of liters of fuel daily […] then you have to think that my trucks transport mostly fruit and vegetables, which, in addition, need to be stored in refrigerated trailers that work with fuel as well." Armando tries to explain how hard it is to continuously bargain and re-bargain freight charges with clients vis-à-vis the higher transport costs due to fuel price increases. This, according to him, also explains why wholesale dealers are gradually less keen to buy imported goods and, at the same time, consumers are less tempted to buy as much as they used to do.

"Fruit and especially vegetables have become luxury goods" continues Armando, "and transporting them around is getting difficult. It is a paradox that me and my family are living in everyday life: on one hand I have to ask for higher transport prices in order to give my business a chance to survive, and on the other I have to suffer from the same cause when going to shop at the market, and my wife has to spend at least a couple of extra Euros just to buy bread…just to buy the most essential elements: flour, water and salt. We transporters are probably going to strike again at the end of the month. Food is becoming so expensive that the entire population should strike!" suggests Armando, leaving aside for a moment his entrepreneur's seriousness to give a bittersweet laugh.

*name changed


AMERICA(2):

BOGOTA ORTEGA, COLOMBIA by Ana MacNaught

Hugo*, 54 of Bogota, Colombia says that from July 1st, the price of fuel that is due to go up once more, is sure to add to his economic woes. In the past year, it has increased by more than 10%. While he does not own a car, his wife's vehicle is costing more and more, becoming quite a burden on the monthly family budget. To deal with the increase in general goods, Hugo and his wife have switched supermarkets, shopping in less hygienic but cheaper stores.

He says that supermarkets they used to frequent are today owned by European trans-nationals and the prices of all goods have increased to the point that buying goods in such supermarkets is often more than 400% more. Hugo says that it is a misconception that just the lower classes are being affected by such shifts in prices, the middle classes are feeling the pinch as well, many of whom are rapidly changing the way they live and spend.

*name changed

TORONTO, CANADA by Aimee Holmes

Wazhma, in her early thirties manages a small variety store in Toronto, specializing in a variety of fresh produce and foods from around the world. The rise in food prices have not spared her shop. "Tomatoes have gone through the roof," she laments, citing customer concern with a recent salmonella outbreak in the United States. Most of the produce she gets from the States has gone up in price, some rapidly. "We used to buy a case of watermelons for $200. Now it's $400." Customers seem willing to accept the price increase in some foods but simply refuse to buy others. A year ago she was selling two cases of flat beans a week. These days it's one every two weeks. "People don't want to spend $2.99 a pound for beans." With tangerines it's even worse and she may have to stop stocking them altogether as the minimal profit margin is simply not worth the trouble. Still, the prices in her shop are notably lower than what the major grocery stores offer. She returns to her work with a smile, "We're trying."

*Azad Essa is a journalist and researcher at IOLS-Research, UKZN.

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

Food crisis: Where is the African strategy?

Mammo Muchie

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49921

“The elevation of an agricultural people to the condition of countries at once agricultural, manufacturing and commercial, can only be accompanied under the law of free trade, when the various nations engaged at the time of manufacturing industry shall be in the same degree of progress and civilization; when they shall place no obstacle in the way of the economical development of each other, and not impede their respective progress by war or adverse commercial legislation.” - Friedrich List, in the National System of Political Economy

People often say when Africans argue for an integrated national African economy, they are self-indulgent entertaining nothing but a futile illusion. They claim that to argue that Africa must unite economically, ‘knowledge-ically’, politically, and ’society-ically’ is to day-dream and to give in to fantasy. They assert that Africa does not exist in anything, form or shape other than as a geographical accident.

Of course, they would hardly say this of the USA, for example, where 'the tribes of the whole world’, and people have united under one constitution and national flag, and right now seemingly poised to electing an African –American with a father from Kenya! To claim more than a geographical reality to Africa is often condemned and reproached. The pursuit of African integration is said to be a too pie in the sky dream, fantasy, utopian, unrealistic, which distracts from taking realistic incremental actions. Thus, going for unity on a big scale is pronounced dangerous!
AFRICA IS TO RICH BUT ALSO SO POOR!

A brief overview of the African economic picture reveals a paradox where the continent that has rich mineral resources, nearly a billion people and a land mass which can contain China, USA, India, Western Europe, and Argentina all together is in the unacceptable state of being an object of aid, debt and loans.

Africa should have been a production and innovation centre not a charity and aid centre of the world where currently ‘donorship’ has sadly replaced African national ownership’ of not just Africa’s resources, but even worse Africa’s own agency, autonomy and independence to shape and determine policy and direction to undertake national development.

The main thrust of the African quest to unite such key ideas, projects, programmes and infrastructures connecting its politics, knowledge and the economy flows from a recognition that Africa must organise a production, economic and innovation system by integrating consumers with suppliers, producers with users, users with other users in Africa and for Africa. This is both desirable and possible and knowledge of how to do it- know-how- can be cultivated so that the continent emerges fully as a region free from the ‘donorship’ gaze it suffers from so cruelly at the moment under the enormous burden of a crippling fragmentation and dependency myopia.

It is no exaggeration to state that African political and economic arrangements today are characterized by pervasive internal and schizophrenic disconnections, mismatches, fragmentations and external dependence. Nearly 70 % of Africa’s overall population exist in subsistence and primary resource and agrarian condition. Where a region has the overwhelming portion of its production as agricultural, that region invariably remains vulnerable even in being able to feed itself.

Africa will remain permanently vulnerable unless it changes unequal primary agriculture and mineral exports for the production of knowledge, technology and innovation value added manufactured elsewhere. African countries produce similar primary products for the same market and compete against each other thus accentuating and deepening their fragmentation. A key example is the horticulture produced by many East African countries today!

Africa faces a true dilemma: if it is able to insulate itself from the world economy, it can incur possible welfare, income and knowledge losses. If it continues to integrate as it does now based on current dominant patterns of relating on the basis of primary commodity transactions with the world economy, it faces continued economic dependence and fragmentation and lack of structural transformation of its fundamental economic, social and knowledge infrastructure.

Africa’s current pattern of insertion in the world economy comes at the cost of fragmenting the African economic, knowledge and political space. It appears the continued cost of fragmentation is supposed to be offset by Africa being in the international aid system. Whether African fragmentation can be offset by dependence on aid or national development should be a genuine issue for deep reflection and foresight for the AU and others with broad commitment to African freedom and unity.

WHERE IS THE AFRICAN STRATEGY?

An African national project is necessary for launching the infrastructure for a comprehensive structural transformation of African economy, state, society, communities and people. What seems lacking is exactly what is most needed: an African national project and national spirit first and foremost to anchor the evolution and dynamics of an African strategy!

Africans continue to experience fragmentation that reproduces dependence on outside powers. But they have not tried a unified African national project yet that inspires their self- composition, self-organisation and self-definition and self-recognition as Africans in order to undertake challenges together - deal with those that they have to deal with and respond to opportunities together. Their ‘advisors’ provide hundreds of reasons why Africans are different from each other. Why they cannot come together. The fact that under conditions of fragmentation and dependency, the existing fractured states have not succeeded to transform structurally and undertake a credible national development strategy is very often conveniently ignored. Strategies that accentuate fragmentation continue to be devised.

No one says or counsels that going on a path of fragmentation that leads to nowhere is even more unrealistic and utopian than a united strategy that can work which has not been tried yet in spite of the compelling recognition over half a century now that either Africa unites or perishes!!

Instead the search for a united African national alternative gets castigated for being futile and utopian. But when too many fragmented states scramble for resources carefully doled out to them from an international aid regime to pursue goals they can hardly meet, no one dares to say this path is even more utopian than the alternative African national project that has never been tried. Where there is no African national project in place there exists a a big void and vacuum at the heart of Africa’s confident march to the future where there will be no clear African national strategy to guide policy and practice!

Africans are now treated to admonishments from the likes of Bono and Wolfensohn, who are calling openly for African unity. At the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Lecture in Accra, Ghana under the title “Africa in the Global Century: Partnerships for Success”, the former World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, argued for Africa to unite saying: “Africa can make the best of the opportunities and wealth available to it to grow its people and economy if it unites.” (Wolfensohn quoted in Dogbevi, 2008)

The World Bank has also begun to echo the ‘integration line’ by recognising that the flow of goods, capital and people are so limited that inter-African collaboration and integration remains largely untenable. Also it has produced the [url=go.worldbank.org/U0V68KDLL0]New Development Strategy Focuses on Regional Integration in Sub-Saharan Africa[/url].

In addition, a number of countries far and near to Africa appear to develop their own Africa strategy based on their understanding or mis-understanding of what they think Africa is and may or may not be, or become. The list continues. The EU has had an Africa strategy since 2005. The Chinese have theirs. The Indians had a Summit in March 2008. The Japanese held a summit on May 28, 2008. Even a small country- Denmark, has set up an Africa Commission like the Blair commission before it, to organise its own mode of intervention in Africa. It looks more countries will develop strategies on, for and to Africa and probably not with Africa despite the abundant talk of partnership, national ownership the Paris terms and such like rhetoric and discourse.

What seems to be lacking is the African strategy for Africa and a combined African strategy from those who make strategies for Africa and others involved and continue to do their business to, for and in Africa.

The time is long overdue to make each of the nearly billion Africans in the continent develop an African national spirit and unite on the shared experience, challenges and a grand national project to transform Africa from an agrarian economy to a knowledge-service and knowledge- industrial economy to achieve food security and improve the health, education and well being of all the people, and not just a few elites. Only then can Africa achieve the freedom, security and stability to emerge with its own voice and act with policy and practice to secure its independence without fear or favour in a complex world.

NATIONAL SPIRIT NECESSARY TO OFFSET PERVASIVE FRAGMENTATION AND DONOR DEPENDENCY

The problem is that after nearly 50 years of post- colonial independence African economies continue to be fragmented in spite of the AU/NEPAD salutary processes. The more the fragmentation amongst African economies deepens the harder for each of the fragments not to be supplicants to the aid system. Africa thus also faces another critical dilemma of being an unequal ‘partner’ with the burgeoning aid industry that has created a business of what is known as ‘technical assistance,’ where those who provide the aid consume a sizeable portion of the resources allocated, and the recipient Africans continue to be in a vulnerable position as long-term the aid receivers are unable to get out of this dependency situation.

In general, it may not be easy to disprove that aid is not useful to some within the recipient countrie. But,this does not validate, however, aid or the international aid system per se, since it is not also difficult to show, that the long term impact of aid is negative - If we proceed from the normative preference that the recipient countries options to plan their development free from conditions imposed that often do not take the specific context of the countries can be misdirected by the international aid system. In the long term, it is better to take the suffering and learn how to fish rather than receive fish for a day. Recently Tanzania announced to all the donors that they want time to think and cope with the influx of hundreds of donor inputs. They said they needed time to work out what this all means and even made a moratorium on donors’ visits to Tanzania!

It is thus no exaggeration that a country relying on aid is most likely not to develop a national strategy without the interference and the factoring of the interests and policies of the aid system. Being a recipient in an international aid system for many African countries has not brought development but corruption and poverty. It undermines a given state in Africa from making mistakes and learning from the routines and practices of creating an integrated African national economy. Africa cannot afford to continue to suffer the opportunity cost of receiving aid only to defer building the much needed ability to create the capacity, capability, competence, learning and innovation to transform the largely agrarian and subsistence economic system.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Over half century has passed; Africa suffers from myopia of a particularly pernicious 'fragmentation-dependence.' The root problem for this unchanging predicament lies in the state of fragmentation that invites dependency that conversely continues to prevent the evolution of an African national spirit, purpose, project and strategy.

There is need for a fresh approach, a new departure to embark on a roadmap to convert the 'fragmentation-dependence' dilemma into an enabling integration-self-sustaining, innovative, learning, capabilities building' national project - and re- launch African development on a secure pedigree with confidence and inspiration.

*Mammo Muchie is the coordinator of DIIPER, Research Centre on Development Innovation and IPER and also the NRF/DST SARCHI Chair Holder, TUT, South Africa.

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

Violence against women in Africa: from discrimination to impunity

A call for ratification and implementation of the Maputo Protocol

2008-08-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49990

African Women’s Day gives us the opportunity to remember that gender-based violence is one of the most serious and widespread violations of the basic rights of women, particularly on the African continent. Gender discrimination is both one of the causes and an aggravating factor of the consequences of violence against women, thus contributing to the perpetuation of impunity of such cases.

The signatory organizations call on African States to ratify the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on women’s rights (the “Maputo Protocol”), harmonize national laws with international standards and take all necessary measures to fight against violence against women by tackling the general context of discrimination which encourages such violations and which perpetuates the marginalization of women, particularly as regards their access to justice.

In this context, the signatory organizations want to draw the African States’ attention to the need to tackle the general environment of discrimination, which leads to such violence against women, generally of a sexual nature, perpetrated by the State but also within the community or in the private sphere.
This general discriminatory environment, which affects women from a very young age, is reflected in positive and national customary law rules that must be brought into compliance with international law and national constitutions. These rules legitimate and perpetuate the subordination of women in all areas. State obligations in this field include the adoption of specific measures to increase public awareness of this issue, training of state officials, as well as positive measures concerning access for girls to education and for women to employment and to positions of responsibility and decision-making. States must guarantee women’s legal capacity, which is needed to empower them. Women’s empowerment also entails unhindered access to reproductive and sexual health services and protection of girls from forced marriage and other harmful practices.

Further, we should note that, in addition to being a vehicle for violence, this general context of discrimination against women also has a direct effect on women’s’ access to justice and their right to an effective remedy. Thus, in many African States, there is still impunity for cases of violence against women, not because there is no legal framework, but because of the lack of political will to implement the law.

This reality is highlighted by the all too many cases of women who, due to pressure or even threats by family or law enforcement agents, withdraw proceedings against their aggressors. In the same way, the financial dependence of a woman on her husband constitutes an insurmountable hurdle to her starting legal proceedings against him for domestic violence.

States must, therefore, put an end to this culture of impunity which serves only to re-victimize female victims of violence, a situation made only worse by armed conflict in certain African countries.

Antananarivo-Brazzaville-Bujumbura-Geneva-Kinshasa-Lusaka-Nairobi-N’jamena, 31
July 2008.

Contact:
OMCT – Mariana Duarte, md@omct.org / Orlane Varesano, ov@omct.org
ACAT-Burundi – Lucie Nizigama, nizigama_lu@yahoo.com
ADHUC (Congo-Brazzaville) – Moké Loamba, adhuc_congo@yahoo.fr
ASADHO (DRCongo) – Amigo Ngonde, amtshatsho@yahoo.fr
Marie Mossi Mota, motadok@hotmail.com
CIRID (Burundi) – Joël Hakizimana, burundi@cirid.org
CODHO (DRCongo) – NS’ii Luanda, nsiiluanda_codho@yahoo.fr
COVAW (Kenya) – Grace Kimani, gkimani@covaw.or.ke
LIZADEEL (DRCongo) – Madeleine Madilu, lizadeel2@hotmail.com
LTDH (Chad) – Masslabaye Ténébaye, ltdh_tchad@yahoo.fr
SOAT (Sudan/UK) – Hannah Logan, hannah@soatsudan.org
SVND (Madagascar) – Mathilde Rabary, rabary@moov.mg
WILDAF-Zambia – Muziula Kamanga, muziula8@yahoo.com

Recent reports by OMCT and its African counterparts on the status of women and violence against women in Africa:
Benin: http://www.omct.org/pdf/UNTB/2007/BEN_report_UN_CAT_11_2007_eng.pdf
Burundi: http://www.omct.org/pdf/VAW/2008/CEDAW40th_Rep_alt_Burundi_fr.pdf
English executive summary:
http://www.omct.org/pdf/VAW/2008/CEDAW40th_Rep_alt_Burundi_eng_summary.pdf
Kenya: http://www.omct.org/pdf/procedures/2005/s_violence_kenya_6_2005_eng.pdf Madagascar:
http://www.omct.org/pdf/UNTB/2007/unhrc_89th/rapport_alt_madagascar_89th_hrc_07_fr.pdf
DRCongo: http://www.omct.org/pdf/VAW/2006/CEDAW_36th/CEDAW36_DRC_en.pdf
Togo:
http://www.omct.org/pdf/procedures/2006/CAT_36th/altern_reports/togo_cat_0406_violences_etatiques_fr.pdf
Tunisia: http://www.omct.org/pdf/UNTB/2008/report_tunisie_2008_12_unifie_2.pdf
Zambia: http://www.omct.org/pdf/UNTB/2007/unhrc_90th/Zambia_OMCT_alt_report_HRC_Women.pdf

Enforcement of the Sexual Offences Act in Kenya

Anne Kithaka

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49923

INTRODUCTION

Is the criminal justice system in Kenya well equipped to protect women from gender-based violence? This a critical question because in July this year, the Sexual Offences Act (SOA) is celebrating two years of existence having came into force on 21 July 2006.

It has been lauded as an evolutionally piece of legislation that provides for the prevention and protection of all persons from harmful and unlawful sexual acts. It expanded the definition of rape to comply with jurisprudence that is evolving from the international arena and introduces new crimes that did not exist in the previous legal framework.
The Office of the Attorney General has formulated a Reference Manual [1] that expounds the Act as well as setting standards and recommendations on best practices to various key service providers. The target is not only the police investigator and prosecutor, but also medical practitioners, civil society, gender activists and general consumers of criminal justice services.

If used well, the manual can become an important tool in achieving the objectives set out in the preamble of the Act as well as sensitizing communities through outreach programs.

This discussion paper is going to examine the shortcomings encountered by women who seek redress within the criminal justice sector as well as making recommendations to counter them. The right to development, to peace and to justice cannot be overemphasized [2].

Violence against women denies women peace of mind, bodily integrity and a sense of development, curtailing their contribution to development.

INADEQUACIES WITHIN THE NATIONAL LEGAL FRAMEWORK

According to international practice, it is the duty of states to promote and protect human rights at the national level. In its 85th Plenary Meeting held on 20th December 1993, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.

It encourages governments to take steps to ensure that women are protected from all forms of violence be it of physical, sexual psychological nature. Among specific acts of violence delineated in the declaration are sexual offences, battering, marital rape, FGM, dowry related violence etc.

Kenya has a legal framework that purports to comply with the above declaration and other related instruments. Unfortunately, it has failed to go the full mile and criminalize all the offences envisioned in the Declaration.

I think it is correct to say that there appears to be subtle discriminations within our legal framework that blatantly refuses to recognize that all women, no matter marital status, are equal before the law and should therefore get equal treatment and protection. The status quo is that marital status and cultural relativism are being used to deny a certain section of the women constituency a sip from the communal calabash of justice.

There is no justification for the continued failure to criminalize domestic violence and marital rape. Our sisters from the SADC countries seem to be steps ahead in this thrust and heave for the ultimate price that is equality in justice.

Already, six countries; Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, and Tanzania have taken the cue from international organizations and agreements and passed legislation that criminalizes marital rape.

The truth is that rape is rape, is rape; whatever name may precede it.

Pamela Mhlanga observed that "Rape in all its forms can be a matter of life and death, causes untold trauma on survivors and in some cases social ostracizition including permanent scars, aside from destroying the essence of their life [3]."

PRACTICAL PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED WHILE ACCESSING PROTECTION UNDER THE SEXUAL OFFENCES ACT

Even for those women who have a ‘legitimate’ right not to be raped; (because their experience of rape fall under the legislative mandate) their road to legal redress is not smooth sailing. Apart from the high cost of accessing justice, ignorance and technicality of the court process, they risk falling foul to rogue police officers who may take advantage of their vulnerability to extract the ‘extra pound’ of flesh before they receive services.

It is unfortunate that although section 24 of SOA prohibits law enforcement officers extracting sexual favors from people who seek their services, there is no enforcing and monitoring mechanism in place to ensure compliance.

Women who seek services at the police station have get sexually attacked; harassed or simply forced to give bribes in order to receive services. Take the case on Sarah, a woman who had complained against her estranged husband for assault. Every time the case came for hearing it got adjourned. When she made inquiries from the prosecutor, she learnt that the magistrate was waiting to be ‘seen’. The prosecutor asked for her mobile number and she began to receive very seductive messages from the trial magistrate. He wanted to have sexual relations with her and at one time told her that her case would not ‘go’ anywhere unless she complies. Although the matter was referred to police for investigations, nothing happened. They alerted the rogue magistrate who stopped sending the offensive messages. They also claimed that they did not have the technical know-how to extract the previous messages from Sarah’s phone. In the end, the matter fizzled to oblivion after the case got transferred to another court. The trial magistrate later got disciplined by getting a transfer to a remote area, where it is feared, he may be continuing his wayward ways against defenseless, disempowered and ignorant women.

At the worst, a woman who is a victim of violence also risks being victimized under section 38 of the SOA which criminalizes the offence of making false allegations. Many police investigators and prosecutors are categorical that they would not hesitate to charge complainants in sexual offences case if the trial magistrate failed to place an accused on his defense. To them failure of a prosecution case at this stage showed that the complainant had given false allegations. The police need to be disabused from this hackneyed interpretation of section 38. They should know that a criminal prosecution can flounder for other reasons. Sometimes a crucial witness such as a doctor can fail to appear in court and exhibits can get misplaced.

Another problem facing women in Kenya in their quest for justice is lack of specialization and sensitization of police investigators and prosecutors. Police prosecutors carry out most prosecutions before subordinate courts where most sexual offences are prosecuted. State counsels who are trained lawyers handle the more serious crimes like murder and treason in High court.

Many factors contribute to the high rate of acquittals in sexual offences. In a system where access to justice is based on dichotomies of whether one is rich or poor, man or woman, health or sick; with the first variable almost always getting the upper hand, women are bound to suffer.

This makes nonsense the doctrine of equality and non-discrimination in justice, which is the cornerstone of international, regional and national jurisprudence.

Also heavy work loads on the part of prosecutors lead to shoddy prosecutions. In a day, a prosecutor may handle 25 cases, so he is not able to give focused attention on any particular case. Logistics deny him research facilities, which put him at a disadvantage when compared with sharp defense lawyers who have all the time and facilities to prepare for their cases. There is no opportunity for holding pre-trial interviews with witnesses or even visiting the scene of crime in preparation for the hearing. Most prosecutors’ offices are one room affairs tucked in a corner of the court premises and sometimes it is shared between two to five prosecutors. This makes it impossible to comply with the good practices recommended to services providers in cases of violence against women [4].

DORMANT ‘WHITE ELEPHANT’ PROVISIONS

It is laudable that the Attorney General has appointed a multi-sectoral task force that is now in the process of developing a National Policy Framework to guide in the implementation and enforcement of the SOA. Once the policy is formulated, the Attorney General will have complied with the provisions of section 46 of the Sexual Offences Act.

Unfortunately, there are many sections existing in our current legal framework, which are not yet operational for lack of regulations to make them effective. Designated officers who are mandated to formulate rules and guidance to trigger their operation have failed to do their duty.

I have in mind section 39 of SOA, which places the onus of keeping a register and a data bank of convicted sexual offenders on the registrar of the high court. Section 47 likewise gives the implementing minister power to prescribe regulations on what is to be contained in this data bank. I am not sure such regulations have been formulated so far. Perhaps they will be included in the National Policy Framework.

Another glaring example is section 329 (A) which was introduced by a 2003 amendment of the Criminal Procedure Code. The Chief Justice is required to make rules and regulations to guide the manner in which Victim Impact Statements can be received and their use by courts. Such statements are intended to guide the court in its exercise of sentencing discretion as well as assessing damages that can be ordered against convicted accused person. Attempts by prosecutors to produce such statements in spousal battering cases get rejected because courts are of the opinion that ground rules have not been legally defined.

THE PROBLEM WITH CIVIL SOCIETY, NGOS AND GENDER ACTIVISTS

Agitators for equality and justice among the justice system are ignorant about the law, the legal process and the court procedure.

Many members of civil society do not appear to know that the office of the Attorney General can help in cases where victims feel they have been short charged by first line service providers.

A good example is a recommendation appearing in COVAW report entitled; ‘In pursuit of justice’, Recommendation Number 5.3.2 advices women to seek other supportive mechanisms ‘be they social or legal from the civil society or other higher ranks within the provincial administration.’ Should they feel that the services they are getting ‘wanting’

How is an ignorant and non-legal person to know that a service is wanting if no parameters are defined to show them what to expect? Secondly, which specific ‘high’ rank officers should these women approach at the provincial level? Would it not have been better if the report had identified some particular officers within the provincial administration who can be approached for help?

One such officer should ideally be the state counsel who ideally monitors the administration of justice within a province or even district.

Gender activists need to do more in monitoring the quality of services that victims of violence receive from service providers. My experience with most civil societies is that they come into the scene when it is too late. Even when they do, they concentrate on raising their public profile through postulating to the media and international press at the expense of seeking real justice for the victim.

Many do not take the trouble to observe and monitor the case through the various criminal justice stages. Perhaps it due to lack of knowledge about procedure and processes applied in court of law or even lack of sufficient funding that is the culprit here.

Where a gender activist in not well versed in legal procedures, it would be advisable to get a trained lawyer or even a paralegal who can ‘watch legal brief’ during the day to day hearing of the case in order to protect the interests of the victim. This effort would force the magistrate and prosecutor to be on best professional behavior because they are ‘aware’ that they are being watched. It minimizes opportunities for mischief, which would favor the accused defendant.

There is more to case monitoring than just appearing from the blues after an accused has been acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence and threatening magistrates to hold demonstrations to protest release of dangerous criminals.

Apart from this, gender activists need to familiarize themselves with post trial process. They should know the ground rules for appeals and the role of Attorney General in criminal appeals. Appeal is a creature of statute and the A-G can only appeal on grounds of law not facts.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

It is evident that the office of the Attorney General has taken the initiative to initiate a national policy framework that will aid justice consumers access justice. Until the task force completes it work, it is not possible to know what practice tools will be developed. Apart from making the policy framework, it is recommended that a gender unit be established in the department of public prosecution. Its work should be to monitor how cases that are brought under the Act are dealt with through the various stages of our criminal justice system. One of the greatest bottlenecks facing research in Kenya is lack of information on court cases. There is no established mechanisms for addressing existing bottlenecks because there is not data to go by. Other suggestion are as follows.

- To win the war against violence against women, we must first have a paradigm shift in our service delivery system.

- We must make our services consumer friendly and sensitive.

- Gender focal points manned by specialized officers should be available in all police stations.

- Gender mainstreaming within the police department should be taken seriously, so that more women get appointed as prosecutors and officers commanding stations (OCS).

- Model One-stop centers ought to be introduced at select police stations, preferably in every province.

- Community outreach programs during chiefs barazas so that women and communities at large can be sensitized about VAW.

- Human rights training for women’s groups and service providers should be given.

- Training of paralegals within society and encouraging volunteering by key community leaders can effectively protect wome

- Monitoring of out come of criminal cases in court should be done as a matter of routine by the A-G.

- Simple guidance manuals that can aid consumers of justice in understanding court process so that they can adequately represent their interests.

- Which brings me to my final recommendation: we must have an oversight body to police the police and other service providers in order to stop the impunity with which violence against women is treated.


*Ann Nyambura Kithaka is a Judicial System Monitor in the Legal and Judicial System Support Division (LJSSD), United Nations Mission Mission in Liberia (UNMIL)

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

Notes:

1. The Reference Manual on the Sexual Offences Act, 2006 for Prosecutors which a product of joint collaboration between the Office of the Attorney General, in particular the Department of Public Prosecutions and Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF).

2. Koffi Annan; in Larger Freedom 2005 available at www.un.org

3. An article entitled ‘South Africa: Justice for survivors of marital rape, how far has SADC come?’ by Pamela Mhlanga Reported in www.pambazuka.org/16 days of activism against gender violence last accessed 22.01.08

4. www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/egm/vaw-gp-2005/doc/finaldoc/goodpractices.pdf last accessed on 26-1-08

Ending Impunity for Sexual and Gender Based Violence conference Communiqué

SGBV Conference

2008-07-31

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49800

Sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) is a scourge on Africa; a pandemic that has undermined women and girls’ rights to autonomy, bodily integrity, human dignity, sexuality, security and tranquillity. SGBV has, and continues to be a major hindrance to rights and justice. It is prevalent in all our societies across the continent, including non-conflict situations. It is repeatedly used as a weapon against girls and women in conflict/crisis situations. SGBV, including intimate partner violence, is a leading factor in the increasing "feminisation" of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa.

The inadequacy of our societies’ responses has cast SGBV as an abuse we are willing to live with. Women and girls, regardless of their race, age, social and economic status, live in perennial fear of violation.

We, the delegates of this conference say ENOUGH.
As representatives of parliaments, regional institutions and civil society organizations in the Great Lakes, East, West, Southern and Horn of Africa regions, after three days of deliberation, identify these critical actions to ensure we are collectively and individually accountable. We determine together to effect a major push forward in ending impunity and promoting accountability.

We commit to:

1. Ending impunity through accountability and implementation

2. Centring on women survivors of SGBV in conflict and non conflict situations

3. Mobilizing popular support in the fight against SGBV

4. Securing adequate human, financial and material resources in fighting SGBV

5. Building bridges across sectors and within movements

6. Developing a new cadre of leadership

These commitments include the following specific actions:

1. Ending impunity through accountability and implementation

- Law is as useful as we make it. We determine to use the laws we have, including national laws, regional and international instruments, to demand accountability. We will engage in strategic litigation at national and regional levels to enforce implementation.

- We will hold our Executives accountable for decisive action against SGBV. We will require them to uphold and enforce legislation against this pandemic.

- We will prominently, publicly and consistently underscore that violence against women and girls is a major driver and consequence of HIV&AIDS on the continent. It must be addressed as such.

- We will ensure the development of a gender violence index to hold governments accountable to consistently work to reduce the prevalence of SGBV. At a regional level we will name and shame nations that take inadequate action to deter SGBV. At the same time, we will seek the enforcement of the reward system proposed in the AU Solemn Declaration 2004 for nations with progressive gender records.

- We will ensure that our governments ratify and report on conventions that protect and promote the rights of women and girls. As civil society, we vigilantly submit shadow reports on our governments’ record on implementation of conventions, treaties, and international instruments that protect and promote the human rights of women and girls. We will specifically focus at a regional level on domestication and implementation on the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa.

2. Centring on women survivors of SGBV in conflict and non-conflict settings

- We will scale up our efforts and support our governments in providing universal access to social services, including but not limited to education, post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), emergency contraception and mental health and trauma support for survivors of sexual violence.

- Transitional justice processes in post conflict settings must address SGBV. Women and girls must be central in defining what justice means for them in a transitional justice process. We will reject the pattern of developing reparation priorities on behalf of survivors and seeking to impose these ‘solutions’ on them.

- Drawing on the Nairobi Declaration on the Right of Women and Girls to Reparation, we will insist on reparations and compensation for women and girls that enable them to move forward with their lives. This includes state support for women and girls who have been raped, and support for the children born out of these rapes.

- We will support survivors to give voice to their ideas on justice and reparations as well as their experiences. This means desisting from appropriating the stories of survivors, but rather, enabling survivors to exercise their agency.

- We insist on a gender-conscious state approach to reparations. Post conflict initiatives of disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation, reconstruction and reintegration must acknowledge the unique situation and needs of women victims and survivors. Equitable attention must be paid to disarmament and demobilization as to rehabilitation and reintegration. Women must be involved in designing, implementing monitoring and evaluating post conflict reconstruction, development, assistance and restoration packages

3. Mobilizing popular support in the fight against SGBV

- SGBV is a vice that affects the entire community. We will focus on reviving communities’ outrage at SGBV and prompting public outcry against the vice. We will work to ensure that SGBV is addressed at all societal levels.

- We acknowledge the need to redefine the concept of masculinity in our communities to embrace the inherent value of women and girls as equal members of society. We recognize that the family as the basic unit of society is an important site for transformation. Thus our collective efforts to engage societal commitment to change will include strategies that tackle attitudes, ideologies and practices that drive and sustain SGBV at this level.

- We will elucidate SGBV in the context of other areas of activism that inspire passionate outrage by society, including rape as torture, and women’s right bodily integrity as a human security concern.

- We will campaign for a sustained approach to change attitudes, beliefs and myths that perpetuate SGBV. We determine that civic education, public education and institutional education must begin to promote human rights and women rights as critical components of citizenship. We commit to supporting the development of model codes of conduct for teachers and curriculums that will enable such education.

4. Securing adequate human, financial and material resources in fighting SGBV

- We commit to harmonize and better coordinate our SGBV focuses as civil society. We will focus on building complimentary approaches, including databanks of actors, that allow us to maximize the human and financial resources at our disposal in fighting SGBV.

- We will seek to ensure dedicated resources for interventions that prevent SGBV across the spectrum and transparent tracking mechanisms to evaluate their success. Similarly in national action pertaining to HIV/AIDS, we will seek to ensure targets and indicators around SGBV and preventative measures taken.

- We will intensify our advocacy to hold accountable all parties to conflict, particularly ensuring that financing for reparations is made by states, international community, non-state actors, responsible multinational corporations and all who ‘benefit’ from conflict and war.

5. Building bridges across sectors and within movements.

- We will use the technological and multimedia facilities available to us to generate public consciousness on the inhumanity of SGBV. We will use our efforts to generate consciousness in the legislative (parliamentary) and public arenas

- We will work to mobilize male parliamentarians, who are already sympathetic to the cause, to draw more men in parliament and in the community into the discussion on and engagement with the problem of SGBV. We call on male MPs to initiate constituency discussions on SGBV.

- We will bring our respective strengths as civil society actors and government actors and fuse these into multipronged, multilevel actions to end impunity for SGBV within our societies.

6. Developing a new cadre of leadership

- We are taking responsibility for the leadership of our communities. We will invest in feminist leadership development at national and community levels for the promotion of women’s rights and welfare. To this end we are committed to a continental target of 50% representation of women in national assemblies by 2015.

- We commit to strengthening women’s leadership capacities to effect change that is pro-women by equipping them with knowledge and skills. We commit to providing autonomous spaces that allow us to continuous set, validate and launch our agenda for ending SGBV.

The waiting must end. Women’s rights movements in Africa have long fought for concrete national actions against SGBV that promote and protect the human rights of all women – including the rights to be free from violence, coercion, fear and impunity. We are determined to see a translation of the rhetoric, policy and legal frameworks into practice.


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

Politics at stake: a note on stakeholder analysis

Mark Butler and David Ntseng

2008-07-31

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49799

People in government, business, and political and civil society organisations routinely talk about 'stakeholders'. They do exercises in stakeholder analysis to inform their 'strategic planning'. Invariably they use the stakeholder language to advertise claims about the inclusivity of their thinking, their processes, and their practice. The organisation we work with [Church Land Programme (CLP)] was asked recently to prepare an input for a 'stakeholder analysis' for a collegial NGO and this forced us to reflect on why we were so uncomfortable with the very idea. We presented some of our thinking as the basis for discussions at the NGO meeting. It was good that there was a mix of people there including grassroots militants as well as civil society employees.

The note below includes some thoughts we had prepared, as well as things we learned from people at the meeting. It outlines why we conclude that the stakeholder discourse, and the practices that go along with it, are in fact part of an order that functions to exclude and silence. For those at the meeting who came from grassroots formations, it was clear that this approach fitted very much with their analysis and experience. Summarising their key points, it was said that the stakeholder approaches exclude, enslave, silence and demobilise. The combined effect is to try and reduce their struggles to what can be managed within the terms set by the rich and powerful.

STAKEHOLDERS = THOSE WHO COUNT and EMANCIPATORY POLITICS = MADE BY THE UNCOUNTED

By definition, stakeholders must mean those people or groups who are recognised as having a stake in something. Part of CLP's evolving way of understanding the world we're in has meant moving decisively away from the assumption that we get toward good praxis by analysing, and working with, relations with 'stakeholders'. It's not that we think stakeholders don't matter – on the contrary, they constitute 'what is' and they therefore affect a lot of things that people have to deal with. But they cannot constitute spaces for a liberatory politics. The 'stakeholders' are those who are counted and who are qualified to speak – their counting, qualifications and speaking being constituted by and within the terms of the existant order (of 'the police' as Rancier would have it). A liberatory politics is the opposite – it is precisely the disruption of those terms by those who are not counted, not qualified, and therefore, should not be speaking. In short: naming the stakeholders is in order – liberatory praxis is the 'out of order' of those who do not qualify to be stakeholders.
This critique of stakeholder (anti)politics seems to us in line with the analysis of the French philosopher, Jacque Rancier. Luka Arsenjuk, says of Rancier's thinking that he is opposed to kind of politics "that makes decisions on the people, for the people, instead of the people; a politics that holds that in the political order, all sections of the community have been assigned their proper place." The critique in turn finds support in the experience of those whose struggle and are, as a result get 'assigned their proper place' as stakeholders. Mama Rose who is a street trader argued that:

“For us street traders, being a stakeholder is a slavery term. This is because government and big business think for us, plan for us and all we are left with is to fit in their plan and do as we told, even if we feel hurt and oppressed by their plans”.

Rancier himself says:

"There are two ways of counting the parts of the community: The first only counts empirical parts - actual groups defined by differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body. The second counts 'in addition' a part of the no-part. We will call the first police and the second politics.

... there is politics inasmuch as 'the people' refers to subjects inscribed as a supplement to the count of the parts of society, a specific figure of 'the part of those who have no-part.'

...Politics exists as a deviation from this normal order of things. It is this anomaly that is expressed in the nature of political subjects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscription of 'the (ac)count of the unaccounted-for.' The 'poor,' ... does not designate an economically disadvantaged part of the population; it simply designates the category of peoples who do not count, those who have no qualifications to part-take..., no qualification for being taken into account” (Ten Theses on Politics).

Ironically of course, notwithstanding the claims of liberal apologists (including those on the left in civil society) for the inclusivity of the “stakeholders + state” machinery, that machinery actually really excludes nearly everyone by now - if inclusion meant more than managing them and their opinions! As Alain Badiou has it: “Today the great majority of people do not have a name; the only name available is 'excluded', which is the name of those who do not have a name. Today the great majority of humanity counts for nothing”.

Mr. Ndlovu, who is a street trader activist stated:

“we are being used under the banner of being stakeholders. Whenever the government makes a policy they consult us individually and say different things to us. Having caused enough chaos among us, they say they have consulted stakeholders. Whereas those among us who are not well learned they are often ignored”.

EMANCIPATION IS NOT A 'DELIVERABLE'

For our context, it is for these sorts of reasons we agree with the analysis of Michael Neocosmos that the terrain of (anti)politics established by, and in relation to, the state project is essentially dead. At a certain level, so many people's experience and analysis shows this to be so – the list of un-met expectations of what the state promises and consistently fails to deliver is so long, that most people really do feel deep anger or despair. But the space where the possibility of actual emancipation emerges, is constituted in the moment when people's movements and actions proceed from the brutal truth that “we are on our own” and move forward only once they have clarified that we are finished with (anti)politics of the state project. In a similar way, Franz Fanon observed so long ago that:

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the magic hands of the people” (The Wretched of the Earth, 159).

This break is decisive – it is a movement from illusion to truth. The illusion is that the state project as a vehicle for delivery is also the vehicle for human liberation (an illusion absolutely necessary for perpetuating the tyranny of the liberal democratic rule). Truth is in the insight that the reinvention of politics through the out-of-order actions of the uncounted on the principle of a genuine, living democracy (that everyone really matters) is the meaning, means and content of human emancipation. On the basis of that insight, people first announce their humanity and, as a consequence, make explicit their prescriptions on the state. Perhaps from that point on, they may establish a sequence of politics and action where they are 'stakeholders' – but they must first (or at least simultaneously through their action/struggle) make everyone see that they are precisely those with no stake in what exists! It is their status as non-stakeholders that explains the contempt and disregard of the rich and powerful and that makes the people's reclamation of humanity and dignity so scandalous that it cannot but be out-of-order and unable to be accomodated without a rupture to the existing order.

In our own searching for a better praxis, we have concluded that we only find a certain kind of human freedom and solidarity in and through our connection with politics defined as the disruption of the order of the existant by those who are excluded - and in working with the processes that flow from, and that remain in fidelity to, these moments. The clear implication is that, to define our own praxis on the basis of a stakeholder analysis would be to inevitably inscribe our praxis as part of the existing order – precisely the dead-end that we needed to break with!

So we needed to clarify for ourselves: what can it mean to make a contribution to a 'stakeholder analysis'? What is more important?:

- to try to list those groups, classes, categories that make up 'what is'; to analyse what they are doing or trying to do; to make informed guesses about who's likely to win and lose what given the current balance of power ?;

OR

- to analyse 'what is' by showing how all these different groups and 'forces' are in fact simply part of a moribund system of unfreedom, stultification, oppression and exploitation – even though some of them imagine themselves as part of its opposition?;

- perhaps to try and describe what we have learned about 'what is' from the perspective of the politics of those who are not, those whose politics would establish something actually new and liberating?.

WHO COUNTS?

Perhaps first we must remember the inappropriateness of a civil society or NGO elite sitting around discussing and analysing 'stakeholders' – inappropriate because it still assumes that the real agency for change is located in this civil society. In the liberal and neo-liberal discourses of this civil society, what are counted as the stakeholders are the 'interest groups' who engage with (and include) the state. From our experience, the typical stakeholder list would be something like: labour, business (black and white, big and small), churches, universities, womens organisations, 'communities', political parties, the media, NGOs, and so on. In our discussions at the meeting, Rev. Willem said: “It seems that the poor and excluded are perpetually being fragmented by the authorities in the name of being stakeholders”.

Underpinning this approach has to be the rule that there are grounds for the justification of each stakeholder and each interest group's voice. But this reduces all 'politics' to the management of partial claims within the ambit of the terrain of the state. A proper politics is the opposite – it exists only in the universal truth claims implied in the political actions of those who have no 'place', no justification. Thus in Neocosmos' rendering of Badiou:

“an emancipatory politics is universal and not linked to any specific interest, it is 'for all' never 'for some'. It follows we can say that for Badiou emancipatory politics does not ‘represent’ anyone: 'Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims [...] but to be faithful to those events during which victims politically assert themselves [...] Politics in no way represents the proletariat, class or nation [...] it is not a question of whether something which exists may be represented. Rather it concerns that through which something comes to exist which nothing represents, and which purely and simply presents its own existence" (Michael Neocosmos “Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today”).

It would be more appropriate to recognise that these questions can only be answered in specific contexts of specific people's struggle. When those who suffer it lead self-initiated action/s against it, then part of that process might presumably look something like a 'stakeholder analysis'. But the stakeholders that matter in that analysis would be those that actually affect the real situation of the people and that actually feature in the thinking and analysis of that situation by the people.

It might be possible to try and make some very tentative notes about what the kinds of stakeholders that do seem to feature in many such struggles at the moment in our context. Of necessity, what we hint at here is incomplete. Nonetheless, it seems to us that what people fairly consinstently name in this regard are what we might call the apparatus of the liberal democratic state – including its armed wing/s. (It is noticeable that this conclusion is systematically ignored, mis-read and/or ridiculed by all the elite observors, commentators, analysts and practitioners – including those of the Left.) The most common targets of critique and rebellion are thus: local councillors, local government (and often too, the provincial – less often, national government), local activists and fora of the political parties, the police. Then there is a layer of stakeholders that, often together with players in the preceding list, shape local spaces of democratic discussion and politics – especially elites who oppress the majority (whether these are purely political elites tied to the parties or those with very localised economic interests – e.g. shacklords, landowners, etc – or those with power derived from other resource bases like formal education, connection with mainstream churches etc.) Perhaps another layer of stakeholders that seems to emerge again and again are those from civil society, who try to mediate and control the relation between people's action and the state project – lawyers, churches, NGOs, Left activists, etc..

Fanon stessed that “The nation does not exist in a programme which has been worked out by revolutionary leaders”; it is created by “the muscles and brains of the citizens”. Abahlali baseMjondolo President, S'bu Zikode, has articulated a powerful extension of this idea in his commentary on a discussion of globalisation in the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo (i.e., a learning space constituted and populated by shack-dwellers) during September 2007. Regarding globalisation, Zikode said:

“It was clear to all that you have to approach it from the bottom, start small in a form like struggling against Baig, Mlaba etc, because in no ways you can jump into the World Bank while failing to identify a close enemy that you can see, touch, an enemy that denies us a right to life. Thus as much as all debates are good, fighting only by talking does not take us much further. Sometimes we need to strengthen our muscles for an action debate, that is a living debate that does not only end on theories [Zikode 2007]."

Indeed, as Fanon insists: “we must rid ourselves of the very Western, very bourgeois and therefore contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves”.

Under current conditions then, emancipatory politics can only be initiated by those who are not stakeholders. The basis of any decent politics that is faithful to the universal principles elaborated in their thinking and struggles is that everyone counts (i.e., the opposite to what currently obtains). What kind of analysis could be done under that assumption? Surely not an analysis by elite analysts of the stakeholders who currently count? Surely only by and with those who speak and act out-of-order?

Even if we began with an idea that presumes everybody is or should be somehow a stakeholder of the state system (on the democratic basis that they are here and are human), we still reduce politics and people to the idea that they are recipients of something that the state will 'deliver' to them (a toilet, freedom, whatever). This is the deadening impact of both the 'human rights' and 'basic services' discourses – both of which, when applied to the massive number and scale of rebellion and action across the country, function to hide the demand for a human(ising) politics which is usually at the top of what the people actually involved in these actions list! It is also the deadening effect of conscripting those rebellions and voices into the 'stakeholder forums' that are the 'in order' channels for sustained enslavement.

It is necessary to repeat and clarify that by talking of the 'state project' and the (anti)politics it establishes, we include (most of) civil society which, even in its apparently oppositional roles, is very much part of what is counted. Discussions with grassroots militants helped us to see that civil society organisations often land up playing a key role in de-politicising their struggles by jumping in with 'capacity building' and 'education' interventions that are designed not primarily to strengthen the poor in their own struggles but to bring them into order and to play according the rules and expectations of the dominant order by teaching them to be better 'stakeholders'. Dudu from the Eastern Cape NGO Coalition asserted: “having observed social formations and their politics, I have this question to ask: Why is it that every time the Poor come together, NGOs and Leftists jump in and take over? In their conventional praxis they provide capacity building. Whereas my observation is that capacity building demobilises people, it takes them away from their original agenda”.

With this sort of 'help' from civil society, it can hardly be surprising that the experience of grassroots militants was that the move from being part of the -not-counted' to being a 'stakeholder' is not really a move from exclusion to real inclusion – it is is just a move to another kind of enslavement and exclusion: “They bring us into these structures and then they tell us what must be conveyed down to our people! This keeps us in a kind of slavery”. Mr. Mqabi (also a street trader activist) correctly concluded: “We need to look within ourselves to find strength and courage to fight our own battles first, and then look outside for additional support”.


* Mark Butler and David Ntseng are connected with an organisation called the Church Land Programme (based in kwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) and try to learn this work in conversation and solidarity with actual and democratic movements."

* Mark Butler and David Ntseng are connected with an organisation called the Church Land Programme (based in kwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) and try to learn this work in conversation and solidarity with actual and democratic
movements."

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

Mediterranean Union or neutered talking shop?

Stephen Marks

2008-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49939

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has repeated his rejection of the ‘Union for the Mediterranean’, launched last month in Paris on the initiative of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Speaking on a visit to Tunis, Gaddafi, - the only leader to stay away of the 44 invited - claimed the project would seperate North Saharan countries from the rest of Africa. "I do not agree to cutting up Africa for hypothetical prospects with Europe" he added, and went on to characterise the Union as a violation of AU resolutions, a threat to Arab unity, and a return to colonialism.

Ironically however, his fears of ‘division’ had already been mirrored by many of France’s EU partners. As a result the original ambitious French plan for a ‘Mediterranean Union’ has been watered down to the point where it is unlikely to be more than a talking shop, equally incapable of fulfilling either Sarkozy’s dreams or Gaddafi’s fears.
The French president first launched his plan in his 2007 election victory speech, proposing a union limited to countries bordering the sea, and invoking grand ambitions "to end all hatreds, to make way for a great dream of peace and a great dream of civilisation."

But almost at once other European nations lined up to voice their various objections to the idea. In particular German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to a scheme that would call on EU support and funding while locking out Germany, the EU’s biggest funder.

Not surprisingly, other Northern EU member states joined the objectors. So did the newer EU member states, fearful that available assistance funding would be redirected southwards.

Spain feared that the proposed new union would divert attention from the already-existing Barcelona process in which it saw itself as crucial, and which had been set up in 1995 with a very similar remit. And Turkey saw the initiative as an attempt to fob it off with an alternative arrangement to full EU membership.

As a result, when the European Council met in May it effectively diluted the French plan and brought it within the existing EU structures. Renamed ‘Barcelona Process - Union for the Mediterranean’, it would now include all the 27 EU member states as well as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Monaco and Mauritania.

Instead of an ambitious new and free-standing structure, it was clearly labelled as a relaunch of the existing Barcelona initiative. Originally floated in the days of optimism about the Oslo ‘peace process’, the initiative was generally conceded to have lost impetus along with Oslo, proving unable, for example, to agree on a joint definition of ‘terrorism’.

Nonetheless as talking shops go, ‘Barcelona’ is well established and substantial by comparison with its new adopted offspring. It has its own structures and officials, a budget to which the EU has contributed €16bn since 1995, , and a €2bn annual line of credit from the European Investment Bank..

The new structure by contrast has no source of funding yet identified - a problem already highlighted by Algeria’s President Bouteflika, who was one of a number of Arab leaders in any case hesitant about any involvement in the plan because of the fear that it would imply normalisation of relations with Israel.

"Difficulties will begin with funding," he told APS, the official Algerian news agency. He was "not clear" what resources would be available to fund the new projects because the European Union does not plan any "important financial commitment" for several years. "This attitude raises questions about whether the EU really wants to contribute to bringing southern Mediterranean countries up to speed," he said.

A French diplomat was quoted by Der Spiegel as dismissing these fears. ‘It’s not a problem - the money is there when you go looking for it’. The EU, the World Bank and the Gulf States were airily suggested as possible sources of funding.

Nor are the structures of the new ‘Union’ any clearer than its finances. There will be a ‘joint permanent committee’ based in Brussels to assist in preparing meetings of senior officials, and a ‘Joint Secretariat’ - whose political mandate, as well as the nationality of its Director, is still to be determined. So is its location, variously reported to be Malta, Morocco or Tunisia.

The leaders did unanimously adopt a declaration deciding to work on six "concrete projects." These include:

- cleaning up Mediterranean pollution;

- development of maritime and land highways;

- setting up a joint civil protection programme on prevention and response to disasters.

The Secretariat will also aim to "explore the feasibility, development and creation of a Mediterranean Solar Plan," looking into solar power as an alternative source of energy.

A Euro-Mediterranean University, whose seat will be somewhere in Slovenia, hopes to "contribute to the establishment of a Euro-Mediterranean Higher Education, Science and Research area."

And a ‘Mediterranean Business Development Initiative’ will support small and medium-sized enterprises.

All of which worthy initiatives, assuming that funding for them is to be found, could easily be organised through existing structures. And the most contentious issue - immigration - was not mentioned at all.

But what of the diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East which were also trumpeted at the launch by the French spin machine? Israeli Premier Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared that they had "never been closer to agreement." And at the end of the conference President Sarkozy announced that in an ‘historic’ decision, Syria and Lebanon had agreed to establish diplomatic relations.

The scepticism which greeted both ‘achievements’ at the time has only been confirmed since. The always feeble ‘peace process’ must now surely be on the verge of expiring, as Olmert has fallen in a corruption scandal with Netanyahu his most likely successor.

And Syria’s President Assad’s own words as quoted at the time by French news agency AFP were significantly more cautious. "Our position is that there is no problem with the opening of embassies between Syria and Lebanon … If Lebanon is willing to exchange embassies, we have no objections to doing it" But the two countries must "define the steps to take to arrive at this stage" before mutual recognition, he stressed.

None of this is to say that the inital scepticism of most North African leaders was not well founded. But grand plans for imaginative and even much-needed united continent-wide initiatives are often ship-wrecked by internal national rivalries and suspicions - as Africa itself well knows.


*Stephen Marks is the co-ordinator of the Fahamu China in Africa project.

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

Somalia: Time to pay attention

Frankie Martin

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49922

While the world looks elsewhere, Somalia is in flames. The nation just topped a list of the world’s most unstable countries by Foreign Policy magazine, and the United Nations has declared the humanitarian situation there “worse than Darfur.”

In the next three months the number of people requiring immediate food aid will reach 3.5 million. Over one million refugees have fled their homes. Due to a raging insurgency against the current transitional government – which has support from both the West and Ethiopia – Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, has earned the nickname, “Baghdad on the sea.”

In Somalia, there are no diplomatic superstars like Condoleezza Rice or Kofi Annan, who rushed to Kenya to settle its election crisis; there are no celebrities like Mia Farrow or Jim Carrey to urge international action and awareness as they did in Sudan and Burma.
Instead, Somalia’s crisis has elicited a collective yawn of indifference. Just mentioning the country’s name is enough to cause even the most dedicated diplomat or aid worker to throw up their hands in desperation.

Ironically, unlike the above conflicts, the current crisis in Somalia has developed in part due to America’s "war on terror" and failure to grasp some of the nuances of Islam.

The Muslim world is not a monolith; there is an ongoing struggle among Muslims with differing interpretations of the religion. Somalia is a traditionally Sufi country – the mystic, open form of Islam distinct from more conservative interpretations as those seen in places like Saudi Arabia.

But in Somalia, a more conservative movement developed under the secular dictatorship of President Siad Barre and during the anarchy that followed his ouster in 1991. The resulting Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) implemented Shari’a law, and although its stricter tenants were opposed by many Somalis, the grassroots movement gained strength because people sought order and justice in a country marred by starvation, warlord violence, and tribal conflict.

Despite internal differences in the interpretation of Islam, the UIC created a state of relative stability that led to the return of Somali businesses, united conflicting tribes and ended piracy off Somalia’s perilous shores.

But the ascension of the UIC worried the United States, which believed the group was sheltering Al-Qaeda members seeking a safe haven in Somalia. The United States intervened by backing secular warlords – reportedly some of the same individuals it had fought during 1993’s “Black Hawk Down” incident – against the UIC, strengthening, rather than isolating, extremism in Somalia. Despite their ample firepower, the warlords were defeated by the UIC in mid-2006.

In December 2006, UIC extremists threatened Somalia’s traditional archrival Ethiopia, which they accused of intervening in Somali affairs. Already concerned the UIC would support a domestic ethnic Somali insurgency, Ethiopia invaded. The United States backed Ethiopia’s invasion and its ensuing occupation with intelligence, air strikes, Special Forces, and rendition of terror suspects to Guantanamo Bay.

An Iraq-style insurgency soon began inside Somalia, mainly drawn from UIC elements but also members of the Hawiye clan, the tribal base of the UIC. These tribesmen believe the United States and Ethiopians are attacking them by supporting the Somali transitional government, run largely by tribal rivals the Daarood. Because they are Muslim, they believe Islam is under attack and seek to defend it.

Somalia faces many profound challenges, but a recent ceasefire – which calls for an end to the insurgency ahead of an eventual Ethiopian troop withdrawal in favor of U.N. troops – has brought some hope.

The recent momentum in Somalia for a shift to religious conservatism – and sometimes militant extremism – mirrors similar shifts around the Muslim world. However, with quick and responsible action, the United States can still help shift it back.

The United States should first pressure Ethiopia to withdraw and bring all Somali factions to the negotiating table.

It can also work within traditional tribal structures to reach out to Somalia’s people, effect political change and distribute aid. By reaching out to Somali moderates who would be happy to challenge the extremists themselves, and funding development programs that show a renewed respect for local customs and religion, the United States can help swing the pendulum away from extremists who preach that Islam is under attack from the West.

To do this, the United States must immediately change a failed policy. Instead of effectively fighting those individuals who wish America harm, it has taken on the Somali people. The United States should learn from its disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan that using force to myopically crush “terrorists” at the expense of entire populations only strengthens extremists.

These days any attention given to Somalia is encouraging. But to create a stable society that would alleviate the suffering of Somalis and address Western security concerns, something more is required: a true understanding of what has gone wrong and the will to effect positive change.

*Frankie Martin is Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He did field work among Somalis in Kenya for the book 'Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization' by Akbar Ahmed (Brookings, 2007). This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

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

African writing: When the dispossessed don't know they are dispossessed

Obi Nwakanma

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/49920

Modern African literature was the child of a renaissance. The roots are to be found in the movement of revendication that began from Olaudah Equiano’s 18th century literary activism, to the work done in the Harlem renaissance in the early years of the 20th century, particularly embodied by two eponymous figures of that movement: the Jamaican Claude McKay, tortured and alienated, and the African-American, Langston Hughes, first discovering his roots on a difficult train-ride from Mexico, and by which he resolved his conundrum through an embrace of Africa. He sang, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Not for him the ambiguity or ambivalence of a Countee Cullen, who asks in a very laden tone, or in the pregnant rhetoric, “What is Africa to me?” Like Claude McKay’s Banjo, Langston Hughes The Weary Blues belted a jazzy affirmation of his debts both to sundered memory, and to the same blood that flows through the veins and rivers of Africa and its humanity. These two became the crossborder figures that helped to animate the conscious movement of ideas, that led Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor, and of course Alioune Diop, to construct “negritude” as a conscious act of self-reclamation: the bold and auspicious move to retrieve, from the cemetery of French assimilation, the identity of the African and the disaporadic scattering, wherever the spirit of the race found new fertile moorings: from the American South to Haiti; from Harlem to Martinique; from Cartegena, Colombia, to Havana, Cuba, and so on as so forth.

From the inspiration of negritude and the work of Presence Africaine, just at the cusp of decolonization, emerged the Black Orpheus magazine of the German-Yoruba, Ulli Beier, and the Mbari movement in Ibadan from 1957; and in 1961, the Transition magazine, published by that Indian Rajat Neogy, all inspired by the African possibility – a moment of renaissance, foregrounded by the inspiring work of the great African icons of pan-Africanism in the 20th century: Nnamdi Azikiwe, George Padmore, I. Akunna Wallace-Johnson, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda - such eponymous figures of modern African history, who dreamed, however the limitations of their later abilities, of a great African century; a century which Spengler had predicted belonged to Africa, given the enui of Europe exhausted by war and by its own linear modernity.
Modern African literature emerged out of that quest to rediscover Africa – the authentic and vital essence of a thoroughly misread, misunderstood, and indeed utterly misrepresented continent, whose new voices began to be heard, starting with Chinua Achebe’s pathbreaking novel, Things Fall Apart in 1958. By 1963, following the famous conference of African Writers and Artists in Makerere, sponsored by the Mbari club and the Congress For Cultural Freedom, the question had arisen, “what is African literature?” A question of which the Nigerian critic, Obi Wali engaged, and I should say, very productively, in his very controversial essay, “Dead End of African Literature?” by proclaiming that modern African writing would inexorably enter a cul-de-sac, for as long as it is produced in European languages. Obi Wali’s argument remains, in my view, the foundational text of modern African literary criticism, and the master text to which the remarkable Kenyan novelist, Ngugi Wa Thiongo has unarguably based his critical theories, particularly on the language question, more fully explored in his famous book, Decolonizing the Mind.

These backgrounds remain fundamental to any discussion of African literature. They are, yes, the unfinished business of African writing. But I have sketched its brief history, only prefatory to responding to Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s essay, African writing in our time, on the contemporary condition of African literature. And also, although I’m in agreement with the Irish writer, Eavan Boland’s eloquent statement that the greatest duty one generation of writers owes to the older generation is, in her words, “to bury the dead and compose their elegies,” I think it is equally important to show the contiguities of the time of the writer. The central issue in African literature remains Africa’s historical dialogue with the rest of the world, particularly the west. The fact is singular: Africa’s exchange with the west is the situation of unequal exchange. It has remained so for the last five hundred years, at least.

So, Baldwin, whom Mukoma Wa Ngugi quotes in his essay, may indeed be right, about the impossibility of a writer writing outside of his/her time, and could have been paraphrasing Fanon about generations and historical consciousness; and the dialectical tension that Mukoma Wa Ngugi discerns between the old and new has been explained by Freud and his new disciples, including Foucault. Yet what I see, in the condition of African writing today is a far deadlier question: the inability to interpret the current time and occasion of new African writing. The problem with the current generation of African writers is a profound inability to provide a stable interpretive sense of what it truly means to be an African today, in the 21st century. There is a problem of locality and location; there is as a much a question of interpreting the world from a recognizably African prism. There is also the problem of how the rupturing of identities signal disjunctions; how displacements, especially within the new African metropolis break down our emotional hold on land; on its rituals and cycles; on its meaning that have fed generations with myths and ceremonies; on the ancestral anchor on which the African unconscious has remained vital and survived the terrifying onslaught of abduction; subjection and dispersal; how our spirits are thrust into the ambiguous space of the global megapolis, in which we have become wanderers: exiles, refugees, rootless beggars for charity; guests of city soup kitchens, NGOS, the IMF and the World Bank, and the new world order: Africans have become victims of all sorts of tyrannies – domestic and international. The African subject seems to, like all those acted upon, become a ventriloquist for all sorts of dubious funding agencies and “Charities” to which s/he depends for his occasional bread and wine – and therefore speaks, not of Africa, but of what must be said of Africa to continue the commerce of African under-dogging.

The trouble with African writing today is that the new African writer had proved singularly unable to “read the minutes of the last meeting” as the eminent Nigerian economist and modernist, Pius Okigbo, brother to the poet Christopher Okigbo used to say. The effect is quite plain: we have abandoned the space of the production of the image of Africa, to the selections made for Africa in London, New York, Paris, and so on. It is of particular interest to me that all the books by African writers published by the major international publishers, starting with the Abyssinian Chronicles by the Ugandan writer, the first major breakthrough by a new generation of African writers, have a sustained pattern. There are never any happy endings.

Indeed in all these novels, Africa is always such an happy and dreary place; a pathology of failure in the postcolonial era, marked by hunger, tyranny and dictatorship; disease; in short a failure of humanity that circumscribes even the African victim as an impotent actor in history. It is Africa of genocides and religious fundamentalists, like Eugene in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, who is unredeemed, even by his own sort of unfinished modernity. There he was: a figure of the double consciousness: half-Christian, half-savage; the classic image of the African sambo in the blackface minstrel shows: white mask, black skin; a man of deep public charity and equally profound private cruelties of demonic proportions. His is of course, the demon of a history of indoctrination, and his inability to comprehend the ancient, dignified truths of his own father, papa Nnukwu. But Papa Nnukwu’s character is not the chief appeal to the western mind reading Purple Hibiscus – not that redemptive dignity of old and vanishing Africa: it is the intriguing product of the modern African – Eugene: outwardly western, but in all material particular, savage: a true, contemporary African. Send him to Oxford, he’d remain that African “other.” That was the chief appeal, at least to the former South African, now Australian writer, J.M Coetzee.

I have nothing against showing the side of Africa that warrants critical introspection: it is just that Africa is not just one linear story of savagery and failure As the Igbo say, “atara tu uru, atara tu okpukpu”. A little bone here, a little flesh there, creates enough meaty harmony. Even in the surge of the decadent crowd of Lagos, there is something carnivalesque and celebratory of life. Africa is not a dead or dying place. It is vital and alive. It is resplendent with human spirit: this is one aspect of the story of Africa that these publishers tend to obscure by their selective readings and publishing of their African reality. Increasingly such depiction of Africa in the new literature is also structuring what the eminent Nigerian poet and critic, MJC Echeruo once called the “conditioned imagination” to consent to negation as the primary condition of Africa. African writers and critics, and here is my point, have allowed this discussion of what African literature, and the African world that it imagines means, to be expropriated from us. If the imaginative and critical enterprise of African writing is not in the New Yorker magazine, or the Times of London, or the New York Times it is no longer great or authentic. This is the symptom of the dispossessed and a continuation of the unequal dialogue between Africa and the West. No work of literature is innocent. We must be clear on this. So too, is its acts of affirmation, never innocent. It is value-laden. It is called canon making. The making of the canon of contemporary African writing is also quite clearly made in London, Paris and New York. Not in Lagos or Enugu or Nairobi or Cairo or Capetown or Dakar. There, is where we have not learnt the lesson, which Chinua Achebe laboured to teach us in 1985 when he wrote that letter to the Swedish Academy rejecting the invitation sent to him and other African, and so-called third world writers, to a writers conference to discuss African literature in Stockholm.

Achebe’s rejection of the invitation was on account that it had come time for Africans to begin to discuss their literature and other matters where it mattered most. To be clear, there is nothing absolutely wrong in discussing African literature in Stockholm or wherever, especially when it is hardly the subject of postprandial talk in Accra or Freetown or Kampala. In other words, wherever anyone chooses to discuss African writing should be alright. However, it is equally important to occasionally look the gift horse steadily on the mouth, because sometimes, it may turn out to be Balaam’s beast, and we need to listen closely to hear its utterance. MukomaWa Ngugi writes eloquently about the absence of great journals and magazines, and prizes for the affirmation of African literature. Incidentally, this was the subject of breakfast talk I had recently with the Malawian poet, Frank Chipasula and Juliane Okot B P’tek – yes Okot’s poet daughter currently living in Vancouver – at the Nutibara Hotel, in down town Medellin, at the recently concluded Medellin International Poetry Festival.

It is true that there ought to be a great prize for new African poetry or fiction or Drama or even criticism, endowed out of Lagos or Capetown or Nairobi, and administered from thence. The last such prize was announced in 1966 at Dakar, and it was also the age of those two inimitable journals – the Black Orpheus and the Transition magazine. These provided the strategic mediation fundamental for the thriving of any autonomous cultural selfhood. It is time for someone in Africa, perhaps Thabo Mbeki’s government, with its mantra of an “African renaissance” or the governments Senegal to endow an inaugurate the Aime Cesaire International Prize for Poetry, to honour the occasion of the passing of this great poet, humanist, spokesman for the black race, and freedom in the 20th century. Perhaps a Mandela Prize or a Leopold Senghor Prize, or a Zik/Osadebe Prize for African writing. There is no shortage of symbolism out of Africa around which such honors can be framed. There is also, I suspect, not a shortage of potential sponsors who might find such endowments worthy. But I suspect that, that problem is far more drastic: it is the situation of the dispossessed. A mentality of dependence in which we need our regular fixes of charity, in order to feel our humanity. We may endow these prizes, but not until they are affirmed, and given the legitimacy or charitable nod by the BBC, the New Statesman or by the New York Times, or by some critic in New York, acting on Gods behalf to define what African writing truly is, does the African writer and intellectual, and reader, takes them seriously. Prizes given from outside, it seems, however its provenance, is given greater estimation than prizes endowed in Africa and made to writings by Africans.

I make this point on the following claims: one, there is the All-Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize, administered by the Association of Nigerian Authors, but hardly any contemporary African poet enters for the prize, not since it was first won by the Guinean poet, who has also remained silent ever since. Not many African writers, critics, or journalists pay attention to the national prizes – like the ANA prizes in Nigeria – with as much interests as they pay to the prizes announced from London or New York. There, indeed, is the conundrum: African literature written and circulated in Africa is consigned to the ghetto; and it becomes invisible. This pall of invisibility makes it impossible for a cross-continental dialogue about the real nature of the contemporary African imagination, and the value of the writing produced by a contemporary generation of writers. It seems such a long time now, since African writers of just a generation ago, knew who was writing what, and engaged in fruitful dialogues that shaped the discourse of African modernity from a profoundly African standpoint.

Today, the discourse of new African writing is done mostly, irrespective of Africans think, in these metropolitan cafes, where Africa is continually “othered.” In a fundamental way, new African writing suffers from the nature of the African traffic: to get to Nairobi or Cairo from Lagos, you must first fly to London. To make a call to Lusaka from Accra, you must route your international call to London. There is no epicenter or backbone: not with the collapse of such critical centers as Ibadan or Legon or Makerere or Fourah Bay or Nsukka. There is in all these, what Achebe calls the condition of the dispossessed: it is frightening because it reproduces itself. It is the reality of the margins that works in the motion of the widening gyre of history; that produces that frightening vision in which W.B.Yeats saw all the ungainly futility of human history. To break from it would require an act of will.


*Nigerian poet, Obi Nwakanma was the Group Literary Editor of the Vanguard Newspapers, Lagos, Nigeria where he continues to write the weekly column, the “Orbit” on Sundays. He is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Postcolonial Literature at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. His new collection of poems, The Horsemen & Other Poems (2007) was published by the Africa World Press, New Jersey, USA.

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

An eye for an eye

Malika Hamid

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49924

In response to The case of the severed penis:I believe there is nowhere in the holy books that justifies mens' unruly behavior if anything their behavior nowadays is disturbing as compared to other times. An eye for an eye should be the best treatment.

Keep up Angelina even though your daughter will take time to recover but one day she will acknowledge you a hero.

Blame the dog!

Nafisa Ado

2008-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49942

I do thank God for mothers like this one who takes swift sensible response when and where necessary: see, The case of the severed penis.

I know some will say it will not bring her daughter's viginity back,but at least it will save other children from falling a prey to such animals! As for the man, he should blame the dog for his misfortune!!!

Castration should be the first penalty

Hilda

2008-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49940

I enjoyed reading the article, The case of the severed penis as it exemplified empowerment for many women who can not fight. As a young African woman, I believe African tradition and culture has for a long time accepted violation and abuse of women through various practices e.g. female genital mutilation.

In addition to some African man believing its their God given right to litre their manhood everywhere i believe its a violation against women. Its very interesting that Africans always seem to have negative conotations about woman in the "West" who are perceived to be individualistic and not submissive. However, Ithink woman in the West are aware of their sexual rights and the law is supportive and prosecutes violent behaviour against women.

I totally advocate for emasculation of man especially if the lives of babies and young children are involved. Castration should be the first penalty.

Disarm and demobilize!

Lemlem Tsegaw

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49925

Even though I do not advocate for anarchy and individuals taking the law in their hands, the statement in, The case of the severed penis is well said: "Feminists are not calling for the castration or emasculation of men. Our position is a lot simpler than that. If men decide to use certain parts of their anatomy as weapons of mass destruction to wage wars on the bodies of women and girls, they will be disarmed and demobilised." I pray to God for His help and forgiveness of the evil doers, help them to return from their evil ways, and put their energy to serve and protect all people.

Also, I say let us support Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, the Executive Director of the African Women's Development Fund. It is important to understand that success breads success and others' success is our success.

If your arm causes you to sin

Anonymous

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49927

I agree, The case of the severed penis. If your arm causes you to sin cut it off - isn't it? If they wont cut it off themselves we should help them.

No to impunity

Anne Kithaka

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49928

Great! To the ladies of FIDA-UGANDA, please ensure you give good legal representation to the lady of the moment, and also that the young girl gets all support she can get to get over this ordeal- The case of the severed penis.

Let us all say no to impunity, especially the one of the rape and beg variety. Let us ensure that justice takes its full course instead of compromising our daughters dignity and virginity for a few coins and goats. And seriously, to whom does all these 'compensation' money and goods go to? - To men, to the fathers, uncles, brothers; the village elders and opinion leaders. Here in Liberia, most rape cases get 'compromised' at the community level and police station.

But we are keeping watch, we are vigilant and we are monitoring all these cases to ensure that they dont get 'compromised' at whatever level. Away with any penis that dares defile our little girls; away with it.

The price of justice delayed

Sophie Ngugi

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49926

Women cant wait anymore for justice that is too delayed. I salute that woman in, The case of the severed penis who took the law into her hands in the best way she knew how. She did not need to contemplate over this,it was a crime, committed against her daughter and nothing, nothing even the cutting of the pennis will bring back what was taken away from her daughter, but this will ensure the perpetrator will not do this to any other girl. Aluta continua!

Urgent appeal to French authorities

Betty Makoni, Director and Founder of Girl Child Network

2008-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/49934

Greetings from Betty Makoni Director and Founder of Girl Child Network as well Local Lead focal Point Person for Grassroots Organisations Operating Together In Sisterhood (GROOTS Zimbabwe)

I am now in Mexico and am shocked with the news that the French authorities allegedly deported two grassroots women from Zimbabwe who were on their way to Mexico for the AIDS conference taking place until 9 August 2008

Last week our staff members went to the French embassy and insisted that we needed transit visas for France and the French authorities in Harare told them and insisted that there was no need for transit visas for Zimbabweans and that the two women could leave and would not have problems.South African Airways cleared the two women at the Harare International Airport and the two women were even allowed to travel all the way to France on Air France on Thursday last week only to be deported back to Johannesburg on Friday .

What has left us shocked is the unlawful kind of detention of the two women at the Johannesburg airport and the interrogation they have been subjected to by authorities at the French International airport.The two women cannot speak French or English and they have letters from our organisation and AIDS Conference organisers and GROOTS International requesting for assistance and the letters are very clear that they are part of a grassroots women team attending the AIDS conference to share their experiences

What has pained me most is that for one of the women she is handicapped having suffered polio as a child.She cannot walk and she was coming here to join sessions on HIV and AIDS and the handicapped and also she wanted to speak to the world about the struggles of poor rural women and the daily struggles they go through.The world is still waiting to hear from her here in Mexico .For me to understand that the French authorities denied her a transit visa entry for a life time opportunity is the most painful story in my life

Now the other issue is that despite all the required papers the two women have ,they have disappeared and we cannot locate them.The last time some people saw them they were at the Johannesburg airport and my appeal to authorities of France and the two airlines is that there is no need for them to punish the women holding them like semi slaves after denying them a life time opportunity to be at a conference where they could have gained a lot and even taken such opportunities to other women in the world.We plead with all men holding these women to set them free and return them to Zimbabwe .My appeal is that they stop harassing them because they were not going to France but to Mexico and since they have lost so much please set them free because right now they are at the Johannesburg airport

Please can anyone in the world appeal to French authorities in Paris ,we want them to know such treatment of women passing through their borders to important conferences like the AIDS conference taking place in Mexico deserve better treatment especially if the women are handicapped

Please pass on this appeal to anyone you feel will help free the women who have been denied a life time opportunity to be in Mexico .The pain and trauma the women suffered is beyond comprehension.I understand women from Cameroon went through the same and my plea is that HIV and AIDS is no new subject and anyone seeing letters stating women are travelling to do something about HIV and AIDS must be touched and act immediately

Lets all treat women humanely and especially those who are poor,marginalised and handicapped .They cant do much about their situation but honestly we can help!
The two women were denied the right to travel because they are poor and illiterate and many borders have allowed many robbers traffickers etc but for poor harmless women the struggles to travel decently is not allowed

Anyone who can help on this matter please contact me on 52 55 33 0 535 and ask for Limota or Betty Makoni

Graham Thom 1966-2008

Anil Naidoo

2008-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/49917

Graham Thom died in his home in London on 10 July 2008.

Graham a graduate from Cambridge University, made a significant contribution to developing a vibrant and strong civil society sector both in England and in Africa, and was much loved and respected by his colleagues for his creativeness, his passion and boundless compassion. Graham co-founded Link Community Development and became its first Director. He went on to lead the Transform Programme, a consortium of Oxfam, Christian Aid, Education Action International and CAFOD, providing capacity building services for NGOs in Southern and East Africa. Graham also worked as Chief Executive of the Back-Up Trust, a charity working with people with Spinal Cord Injury, overseeing the growth of the organisation. He also worked as Director of Fundraising for Haven House. At the time of his death, Graham was Director of Fundraising at Computer Aid International. It was Graham’s dream to bring greater stability and sustainability for the civil society sector, particularly in Africa, as this sector continues to strive for social justice for citizens, in an ever increasingly hostile and resource starved environment. His work has not gone unnoticed,

Graham is survived by his wife Rajani, parents Denis and Jane and sister, Caroline.

Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves - By Kevin Bales

Reviewed by Becky Bavinger

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/5som2l

After hundreds of books, documentaries, sermons, and even university courses on modern slavery and human trafficking, people have begun asking, "What can I do to help?" In his latest book, Kevin Bales responds to that demanding question. Ending Slavery surveys the history of various anti-slavery movements, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of their strategies, as well as their failures and successes.

Transforming Cape Town

2008-08-04

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11134.php

This study provides a window into the lives of ordinary South Africans more than ten years after the end of apartheid, with the promises of the democracy movement remaining largely unfulfilled. Catherine Besteman explores the emotional and personal aspects of the transition to black majority rule by homing in on intimate questions of love, family, and community and capturing the complex, sometimes contradictory voices of a wide variety of Capetonians.

African Blog Review – August 7, 2008

Dibussi Tande

2008-08-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/49987

Naama Chronicle
http://www.naamachronicle.com/nigeria-food-supply-the-problem-and-its-cause/
The Vigilante Journalist
http://www.vigilantejournalist.com/blog/
Mzati Nkolokosa
http://mzatinkolokosa.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-goes-back-to-lilongwe.html
Neba Fuh
http://www.nebafuh.com/2008/07/compromise-poli.html#more
The Sword of Truth
http://sofawarrior.blog.com/3456392/
Constitutionally Speaking
http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/?p=635
Naama Chronicle writes about Nigeria’s failure to achieve food self sufficiency:

“Nigeria - the country with vast natural resources that could serve as a large base for commercial agricultural activities and turning it into completely self-sufficient on food supplies - imports $3 Billion worth of rice, wheat and fish.

When you think about Nigeria’s geographical location and land and water resources, the thought of importing rice, wheat and fish to this country is almost inconceivable...

According to [Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources, Dr. Abba Sayyadi Ruma… Nigeria has the capacity to produce five million metric tonnes of fish but could only achieve a dismal 500 metric tonnes annually.

Apart from poor resource management, here is another reason behind the stalemating agricultural development of not Nigeria alone, but of many other African countries: the lack of the desire on the part of the local commercial banks to participate in agricultural development, thus significantly limiting (or degrading to zero) the access to the sources of financing for medium and small- scale farmers.”

Mzati Nkolokosa
http://mzatinkolokosa.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-goes-back-to-lilongwe.html

Using Malawi as an example, Mzati Nkolokosa argues in favor of the incorporation of elements from Africa’s indigenous culture and political systems into the modern African state:

“Weeks ago, Michael Jana, a lecturer at Chancellor College, wrote in defense of the involvement of traditional leaders in local governance. His argument was that Malawi does not need ward councilors because there is an established local structure of traditional leaders....

Village heads are best suited to represent people in development matters. They know every person in their areas... Your village head knows the needs of the people better than a ward councilor. The challenge is that we have copied what we think are democratic structures from the West at the expense of our own democratic structures. This assumes that democracy is not African which is not true.

‘Who killed African democracy?’ asks Professor Ali Mazrui, one of Africa’s brilliant minds. ‘The cultural half caste who came in from western schools and did not adequately respect African ancestors. Institutions were inaugurated without reference to cultural compatibilities, and new processes were introduced without respect for continuities. Ancestral standards of property and legitimacy were ignored.’”


Neba Fuh
http://www.nebafuh.com/2008/07/compromise-poli.html#more

Blogging from Norway, Neba Fuh wonders why Africans generally lower the bar when it comes to analyzing the actions of African leaders:

"Generally, Africans have a vexing tendency to always dwell on the 'bad, worse and worst' comparison. They rarely dwell on positive comparison, that is,' the good, better and best' situations. When established dictators are under all kinds of pressure to relinquish power, fellow Africans come out with defensive negative comparisons insinuating that, these autocrats are not worse than their contemporaries. It is like the student who took the last-but-one position in his end of year class exams, but was quick to point out that at least, he wasn't the last in the class!

When we decry the dictatorial rule of the Biya regime, some analysts rush to point out that he is not worse than his neighbours. When there is an opportunity to oust dictators like Mugabe of Zimbabwe who has plunged his country into an economic quagmire coupled with extreme brutalization of his people because of their political opinions, fellow Africans come out with all kinds of negative comparisons and hypotheses…

I strongly believe that any pressure to force a dictator to relinquish power, no matter where it is coming from, should not be compromised. Any African dictator who is forced out of power brings a smile to at least one hopeless African. Africa's future rests not on this cream of dictators! They are of no use! They can't bring the momentum Africa needs to move from its present inertia to a more progressive track, comparable to the South East Asian boom. The talk about African unity remains a fictional gaffe, except these greedy autocrats quit. The Biyas, Obiang Nguemas, Bongo, Qhaddhaffis, Mubaraks, Mugabes, El Bashirs, Kibakis etc can not execute any African vision.”


The Vigilante Journalist
http://www.vigilantejournalist.com/blog/

The Vigilante Journalist attempts to explain why Kenyan youths are alienated from Kenyan society:

“In the absence of a culture that is sustaining hope both at home, in school and post school, the youths are creating their own brand and merchandising wholly hinged on destroying everything their pseudo-society market sees as supreme. The pressure to be achievers, the incompetence of their political system, the poverty in their society and the emergence of a quasi-celebrity culture in this landscape has given birth to the emergence of the school as sub-culture. And it is a culture rooted in resistance. Burning and mayhem has become a badge of honor and no amount of colonial era subjugation tactics or traditional African nostalgia tidbits from the mouths of also-rans, is the remedy.
...
As mainstream Kenya grapples with the tools of conspicuous consumption, mis-governance and modern day capitalistic mythologies of achievement, so too has it to grapple with the price and consequences - the alienation amongst its youth. These are the kahluas we drink when we fail to provide vision and an inclusive culture to our youth and the necessities and security to life: the obligations of every legitimate state. We will not succeed by marketing state and patriarchal hegemony. Youth anywhere will always be amenable to brands because it’s a time of identity formation and brands sure do help. When our national brand is impunity, incompetence, consumption and chest thumping, our youths are simply buying in. Any student of the nineties in Kenya would have known it would be the fire next time.”

The Sword of Truth
http://sofawarrior.blog.com/3456392/

Writing on The Sword of Truth, Sofa Jawaro comments on this week’s military coup in Mauritania:

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has always condemned military coups as a barrier and a fundamental obstacle to democracy. This was manifested when a supplementary protocol was signed in Dakar, Senegal in 2001... The background of the Protocol stems from violent conflicts in post-independence West Africa as a result of widespread military coup d’états.

... the Military coup should be condemned in all possible ways. Firstly, it contravenes ECOWAS protocols. Secondly, the ousted President leads a democratically elected government which is a ‘legally constituted political authority’

In an already politically volatile region due to threats of extremism and illegal drugs trade, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union (AU), the United States (US), the European Union (EU), and the United Nations (UN) must condemn the coup as a blatant contravention of the Mauritanian peoples will."

Constitutionally Speaking
http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/?p=635

South African blogger Pierre de Vos argues that while Jacob Zuma should be considered innocent until proven guilty as he goes on trial for corruption, this should not prevent the public from making value judgments about his person:

“Mr. Zuma – and the ANC leaders who support him in his dark hour – is therefore correct to insist that no one should assume that Mr. Zuma is guilty of an offence merely because he was accused of wrongdoing by the NPA. They are correct, also that he should not be treated as a criminal merely because he is an accused in a criminal trial.

However, does this mean that we should be prohibited from making any value judgment about Mr. Zuma’s character and his fitness for high public office until such time as he is either acquitted or convicted by a court? I think not.

When we make value judgments about an individual – especially individuals in the public sphere – we are not required to establish beyond reasonable doubt that any allegations of wrongdoing by that person are true or not – just as we are not required to establish beyond reasonable doubt whether an individual is a good or bad person, a kind or nasty person, a good or bad leader, before we decide whether we want to befriend that person or elect him or her to high public office.”

* Dibussi Tande, a writer and activist from Cameroon, produces the blog Scribbles from the Den

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

Black History Month - Interview with Horace Campbell

Contact FM

2008-08-07

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/broadcasts/podcasts.php

The final interview of the Black History Month series is with Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies at Syracuse University, and author of Rasta and Resistance, from Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, and Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation.

This episode was produced by Contact FM 89.7

The China-Zambia interaction

2008-08-08

http://www.eldis.org/go/topics/resource-guides/aid&id=38751&type=Document

The paper aims to provide information on the size, structure and significance of China-Zambia relations. It specifically studies the nature and scope of Chinese investment in Zambia, the pattern and magnitude of trade between China and Zambia.

BP deal to supply fuel to Zimbabwe falls through

2008-08-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimbabwe/50070

Negotiations between the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (NOCZIM) and two international petroleum companies to supply fuel to the country have collapsed over pricing, sources told ZimOnline.
Negotiations between the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (NOCZIM) and two international petroleum companies to supply fuel to the country have collapsed over pricing, sources told ZimOnline.

Sources in the oil industry said NOCZIM was about to clinch a fuel deal with Independent Petroleum Group of Kuwait and BP Shell of South Africa, but it fell through after NOCZIM insisted that the landing rate be US$0,60 a litre.

“Negotiations collapsed. The two international companies were adamant that the cost of landing must be between US$0,70 and US$0,90 a litre if they were to make profit, but government was adamant that it should be US$0,60” said a sources, who declined to be named.

As a result, the source added, the two companies opted out of the deal forcing NOCZIM to look for other alternative sources of fuel, including Equatorial Guinea.

Last year, a high-powered government delegation went to Equatorial Guinea to hunt for fuel. The team was headed by Energy and Power Development minister Mike Nyambuya, and included Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono.

Government has been on the hunt for fuel in Equatorial Guinea and Libya in recent months.

In the past, President Robert Mugabe’s government obtained but failed to pay for fuel from Kuwait, Libya and other countries resulting in supplies being stopped. Efforts to secure fuel from Iran, Sudan, and Angola also failed because of Harare’s poor payment record.

The country has been without adequate fuel since 1999 due to lack of foreign currency and the severing of lines of credit by foreign banks and international money-lenders.

Zimbabwe cannot get lines of credit due to its poor credit rating and high political risk.

Zimbabwe consumes 3,5 million litres of diesel, three million litres of petrol and five million litres of Jet A1 daily. The country needs about US$130 million a month to import fuel.

In March, government came up with a plan to use diamonds illicitly mined from Marange in Manicaland province in exchange for fuel from Equatorial Guinea.

The two countries developed strong diplomatic and trade relations after the arrest in 2004 in Harare of alleged mercenaries led by Simon Mann who were purportedly en route to Equatorial Guinea to overthrow that country’s government.

Zimbabwe received fuel worth US$24 million from Equatorial Guinea which it was unable to pay for, resulting in the government coming up with three options to settle the debt.

The options were: sourcing the fuel through the purchase and sale of diamonds; NOCZIM supporting the Minerals and Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe with financial resources to mop up diamonds for resale; and the state-run oil procurement company going into diamond mining.

While the energy ministry was in support of the first option, the central bank opposed it saying the process was flawed.

In turn, the RBZ said it could come up with a debt settlement agreement with the West African nation “rather than be part of an illegal process”.

It was reported recently that government was negotiating with a Libyan bank for a fuel line of credit, but the deal was said to be far from being sealed after the financial institution demanded guarantees for loan repayments.

The National Economic Recovery Council reportedly recommended the use of diamonds, beef or tobacco to back up the line of credit.

Efforts to get a comment from NOCZIM chief executive officer
Zvinechimwe Churu were in vain yesterday as he was reportedly out of
his office.

-
Cuthbert Nzou- ZimOnline

Mbeki fails to arrive for talks in Harare

2008-08-08

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news070808/mbekifailstoshow070808.htm

South African President Thabo Mbeki was expected to meet Zimbabwean political leaders in Harare on Thursday and the red carpet was rolled out for him, but it was rolled up again when Mbeki did not show. Reports now say he is expected at the weekend.

Violence continues Mashonaland West

2008-08-08

http://www.swradioafrica.com/pages/mashwest070808.htm

Persecution of MDC supporters still continues but on a smaller scale. In Kazangarare area, near the town of Karoi Malberiegn Kauchivenga, a 53 year old MDC supporter was seriously assaulted by Jawet Kazangarare on 25 June 2008. The victim had approached Kazangarare at his homestead claiming money for a goat allegedly forcefully taken from him by the perpetrator as a form of punishment and sign to show that he had repented from being an MDC supporter.

Zimbabwe power-sharing deal close

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/68qn6y

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai will hold a make-or-break meeting in Harare on Sunday aimed at finalising a power-sharing deal, a South African newspaper reported on Friday.

Africa and HIV/AIDS

AU Monitor Weekly Roundup: Issue 146, 2008

2008-08-08

http://www.aumonitor.org

The decisions of the executive council and the assembly of heads of state and government from the recently concluded African Union summit in Egypt are now available for download.

The AU Commission chairman Jean Ping has welcomed the accord between Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai to begin negotiations on power sharing. While Ping called it ‘a significant step in the efforts aimed at overcoming the crisis facing Zimbabwe and promoting national reconciliation in the country’, the US insisted that the talks should lead to new elections. Meanwhile, African civil society organisations have welcomed attempts being made by Zimbabwean political parties to end the current crisis and have called on African leaders of all levels, the Southern African Development Community and the AU to demand an end to serious human rights violations in the country and publicly denounce the violence.

African trade ministers, meeting at an annual general meeting of the African trade insurance agency, agreed to remove barriers to regional trade and work towards improving regional transport and telecommunication infrastructure to bolster trade within Africa. The AU, regional economic communities, development partners and NEPAD’s comprehensive Africa agriculture development programme have ‘kick-started initiatives aimed at staving off the high food prices’. As the third Accra High Level conference (HLF-3) on aid effectiveness approaches, it is suggested that the scope of the application of the Paris Declaration principles should be broadened beyond Official Development Assistance and should govern all aid flows. HLF-3 is expected to focus on the building of more ‘effective and inclusive partnerships through constructive engagement of new and emerging donors, private foundations, global funds and civil society’.

As Africa celebrated pan-African women’s day on July 31, African Union chairman Jean Ping conveyed his special greetings and congratulations to all women of Africa recalling the history of ‘gender consciousness’ within the institution.

The ‘Making the eHealth connection: global partnerships, local solutions’. conference began in Italy this week. Meanwhile, Aids activists from francophone African countries warned that ‘the continual and growing outbreaks of violence against members of the gay community in Africa are jeopardising efforts undertaken to combat HIV both within that group and across the population as a whole’. Further, in order to achieve an Aids-free generation, African governments will need to change the political culture and, in particular, ‘African parliaments need to play a more assertive role in exercising oversight over how state funds are expended – and in ensuring HIV/Aids funding is put to its intended use’. In addition, Africans should partner with countries such as Cuba who have expertise in tackling the pandemic and have shown solidarity in with the continent in a myriad of ways.

Lastly, the AU commission is assessing the progress made in implementing the ‘plan of action on the family in Africa’, adopted by the assembly of the heads of state in 2004. Country responses to the evaluation will be submitted to the first AU conference of ministers in charge of social development to be held in October 2008.

Global: Innovative funding for women’s organisations

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6rlv89

Funding support for women’s organisations and for non-governmental organisations working to achieve gender equality is an important element in many donors strategies. These organisations often have detailed knowledge of social and cultural barriers to gender equality. They can also recognise and address the impact of gender inequalities at local, national and international level.

Global: Long-awaited UN Women's Agency Now Within Reach

2008-08-07

http://www.aids-freeworld.org/content/view/173/132/

The creation of a new UN agency for women would dramatically improve the international response to the AIDS pandemic, said AIDS-Free World at the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico. Until now, the UN response to women has been fragmented and incoherent. But UN Member States are poised to adopt a resolution at the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly this September to establish a new agency.

Kenya: Give women land rights and make poverty history

2008-08-08

http://www.awcfs.org/content/view/468/1/

The recent statement by the Minister for Lands, Hon. James Orengo that the National Land Policy is ready for cabinet deliberation and final approval is something that is overdue. But for the majority of Kenyan women who wallow in poverty and are destitute, the announcement has generated a lot of excitement as they have for a long time been culturally prohibited from inheriting this critical factor of production and source of wealth.

Kenya: New report identifies gender inequality as barrier to development

2008-08-08

http://www.awcfs.org/content/view/464/103/

The Institute of Economic Affairs’ (IEA) latest report on the socio-economic status of women in Kenya says women have made minimal strides in their quest to bridge the inequality gap. However, this state of affairs is not blamed solely on women but on the prevailing political system.

Tanzania: Poverty and witch killing

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6k2lz3

here are twice as many "witch" murders in years of extreme rainfall, in certain parts of Tanzania, than in other years. The victims are nearly all elderly women, typically killed by relatives. Witchcraft beliefs are widely held throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, serve a variety of social purposes, and have not shown a tendency to lose salience.

Tanzanian: Parliament signs onto UNIFEM's Say NO to Violence against Women Campaign

2008-08-07

http://www.unifem.org/news_events/story_detail.php?StoryID=704

Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda led the Tanzanian National Assembly in signing onto UNIFEM's Say NO to Violence against Women campaign at a ceremony on 22 July 2008, which was witnessed by UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha Rose Migiro. The Speaker of the National Assembly Samwel Sitta, Deputy Speaker Anna Makinda, leader of the opposition Hamad Rashid Mohamed and all of the other MPs assembled followed the Prime Minister's lead, making the Tanzanian National Assembly the first parliamentary body in the world to offer its full support to the campaign.

Zimbabwe: Militias accused of raping dozens

2008-08-08

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08472630.htm

More than 50 women, some as young as 13 and others as old as 60, have been gang raped and tortured by government-backed militias in Zimbabwe because of their support for the opposition, rights groups and victims say.

Africa: Rwanda accuses France directly over ‘94 genocide

2008-08-08

http://www.thefrontiertelegraph.com/?p=123

Rwanda formally accused senior French officials on Tuesday of involvement in its 1994 genocide and called for them to be put on trial. Among those named in a report by a Rwandan investigation commission were former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and late President Francois Mitterrand.

Global: Annan named president of foundation supporting OMCT

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/5ngeue

On October 4, 2007, Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, became the new President of the Foundation supporting the World Organization against Torture (OMCT). Kofi Annan has always demonstrated a strong commitment to human rights and has stated his total opposition to torture. In accepting to become the new President of the Foundation supporting OMCT, he expressed his wish to be actively involved in initiatives defending human rights.

Liberia: Firestone workers sign historic contract

2008-08-07

http://tinyurl.com/5rh8pk

Workers on the world’s largest rubber plantation owned by Firestone in Liberia will sign a new collective bargaining agreement today at a ceremony with company management and the Labor Minister of Liberia. In Firestone’s 82 year history in Liberia, this is the first time that workers have been represented by an independent and democratically elected union leadership during contract negotiations.

Sierra Leone: Former rebel commanders awaiting judgment

2008-08-08

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=43481

Final arguments in the lengthy trial of three former commanders of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) have ended in Freetown, making way for judgment which is expected by the end of this year. The three -- Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon and Augustine Gbao -- have been on trial since July 2004, following their arrest and indictment by the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone on an 18-count charge of war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian laws.

Sierra Leone: Special court gets new Deputy prosecutor

2008-08-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/49997

Joseph F Kamara Appointed Deputy Prosecutor of the Special Court Prosecutor Stephen Rapp announced today the appointment of Sierra Leonean lawyer Joseph F Kamara as Deputy Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Mr. Kamara is the first Sierra Leonean to occupy the post. He succeeds Dr. Christopher Staker who has held the position since July 2005.
SPECIAL COURT FOR SIERRA LEONE
OFFICE OF THE PROSECUTOR
PRESS RELEASE
Freetown, 6 August 2008

Joseph F Kamara Appointed Deputy Prosecutor of the Special Court Prosecutor Stephen Rapp announced today the appointment of Sierra Leonean lawyer Joseph F Kamara as Deputy Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Mr. Kamara is the first Sierra Leonean to occupy the post. He succeeds Dr. Christopher Staker who has held the position since July 2005.

Mr. Kamara, a Senior Trial Attorney in the Office of the Prosecutor, joined the Special Court in 2004. Most recently he led the Prosecution team in the successful prosecution of two former leaders of Sierra Leone’s Civil Defence Forces militia.

“Mr. Kamara is an individual of outstanding legal ability and integrity,” said Mr. Rapp. “I look forward to working with him as my Deputy Prosecutor to complete the mission of achieving justice for the grave and massive crimes committed against the innocent people of this country.”

Joseph Kamara said he was looking forward to the challenge. “This is a significant milestone in the history of the Court,” he said. “I promise to work to promote the protection of fundamental human rights and to bring the workings of the Special Court closer to the people of Sierra Leone”

Under the Special Court Statute, the Deputy Prosecutor is appointed by the Government of Sierra Leone in consultation, with the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Prosecutor. His appointment has been approved and will take affect on 15 August 2008. “This appointment reflects the close partnership between the government and the international community that has become one of the hallmarks of this institution,” said Rapp.

The Prosecutor also recognized the significant contribution of Dr. Staker to the work of the Prosecution. “Dr. Staker has provided tremendous service during his tenure as Deputy Prosecutor. His expertise has proved invaluable, not only in leading the appeals proceedings but also on a wide array of legal issues that have arisen during the trials.”

Before joining the Special Court Mr. Kamara served for eight years as a prosecutor in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions of Sierra Leone, where he rose to the rank ofSenior State Counsel. He later worked in private practice, both domestically and for several firms in Washington, DC.

Mr. Kamara is a graduate of the Faculty of Law at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone. He also holds a Masters in Law from Southern Methodist University in the United States.

Sudan: End sham trials by anti-terror courts

2008-08-08

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/08/06/sudan19549.htm

Sudan’s Anti-Terrorism Special Courts in late July sentenced 30 alleged rebels to death in trials that fell far short of international fair trial standards, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch urged the government to abolish the hastily created special courts and instead prosecute all cases in the regular courts according to the 2005 National Interim Constitution.

Sudan: Top UN envoy urges review of death sentences

2008-08-08

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=27621

The top United Nations envoy to Sudan has called for a review of the death sentences passed by the country’s counter-terrorism courts against 30 members of a Darfur rebel group found guilty of participating in an attack near the capital in May, amid concerns that they did not receive a fair trial.

Africa: Egypt arrests 587 migrants at Israel border this year

2008-08-08

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL8637097.html

Egyptian police have arrested 587 mostly African migrants caught trying to slip over the border into Israel since January, and shot and wounded a Sudanese man at the frontier on Friday, security sources said. The sources said Eritreans made up the largest group of those detained trying to sneak into the Jewish state, at 249 since the start of the year. Significant numbers also came from Sudan, Nigeria and Ivory Coast.

Somalia: Aid delivery problems for rural IDPs

2008-08-08

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=79683

Much of Somalia's displaced population has scattered across rural villages, which are hard to reach because of rampant insecurity and limited resources, an international agency said, impeding aid delivery.

South Africa: Nearly 500 km off Zimbabweans' asylum journey

2008-08-08

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/489ae61d4.html

For Absalom Moyo* the relief in getting his asylum seeker permit is obvious. "It's like a dream come true," exclaims Moyo, who recently entered South Africa illegally, fleeing violence in his native Zimbabwe. "Receiving this so quickly has taken me by surprise and it has definitely made up for the horrible experience I went through when coming to South Africa," he says, displaying the permit he says has allowed him to relax and not always be on his guard.

"Hands off the MST Brazil!" say South African social movements

2008-08-08

http://www.abahlali.org/node/3880

To the poor of the world, to all people of good will who work for progressive change... We, the landless and homeless people and associated activists of South Africa, decry the secret campaign by the so-called Workers' Party (PT) government of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to criminalise, outlaw and otherwise illegitimately harass our landless comrades of the MST.

Somalia: Bomb blast kills civilians

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/59pp9h

At least 20 people have died after a bomb hidden under a pile of rubbish exploded in Somalia's capital, according to witnesses. Witnesses said the dead in Sunday's blast in Mogadishu's southern K4 neighbourhood were mostly female civilians, 10 of them street cleaners.

South Africa: Call for a shack-fire summit

Abahlali baseMjondolo

2008-08-08

http://www.abahlali.org/node/3882

This weekend the eight people that burnt to death in two shack fires in Cato Crest will be buried. This weekend we will continue to rebuild the Kennedy Road settlement after two fires in two weeks. We do not accept that the poor must burn in shack fires. This is not God’s will. We cannot be silent while facing these fires. If we were silent we would have no right to exist.

South Africa: Housing protesters tell of ‘horror’ attack

2008-08-07

http://tinyurl.com/5cnplg

Gugulethu backyard dwellers who tried to occupy unfinished flats in Langa at the weekend, on Sunday told of the “horror” they experienced when people armed with knobkieries and bricks launched a violent attack on them. Saturday’s occupation, led by the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC,) was meant to be peaceful and to protest against the long wait for housing, but a number of its supporters have told how the vicious attack left them with bruised limbs, fractured ribs and head injuries.

Egypt: Mubarak may seek new term - protest leader

2008-08-08

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL8669609.html

The new leader of the Egyptian protest movement Kefaya, which tried to prevent the re-election of President Hosni Mubarak in 2005, said on Friday Egypt now faces the possibility that Mubarak will seek another term. "Our original aims are still valid, because he may be re-elected in 2011," Abdel Gelil Mustafa told Reuters.

Ghana: Pre-election violence and irregularities worry watchdogs

2008-08-08

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=79703

Independent observers and civil society groups in Ghana say voter registration, the first major step towards landmark general elections in December, is being marred by violence and irregularities. In the north of Ghana supporters of the two main political parties – the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) - vandalised registration centres on 2 August and gun shots were heard in Tamale, the capital of the northern region, during voter registration.

Malawi: Government embarks on 2009 fresh voters' registration

2008-08-08

http://www.afrol.com/articles/30209

Malawi has a tough mission ahead of 2009 general election, to register afresh seven million people on to its new voter's roll. Registration for elections, which is expected to take three and half months, starting from 18 August and close on 29 November will cover the country's 28 districts, Fegus Lipenga, spokesperson for Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) reported.

Mauritania: Defiant junta to form new government

2008-08-08

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL8558024.html

Mauritania's coup leaders have announced they will appoint a government to run the country until new elections, defying a chorus of international demands to restore the first democratically elected president. Soldiers in the northwest African country toppled Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi on Wednesday after he tried to sack senior officers.

Mauritania: Military coup overthrows president

2008-08-08

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/19815

The president of Mauritania, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh (photo), has been overthrown in a military coup following his decision to sack some senior members of the army, including the presidential guard chief Mohamed Ould Abdulazizz. Shortly after announcing the sacking of the military brass soldiers from the presidential guard gathered at the presidential palace seized Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallah, other Government officials and replaced the sacked army chiefs.

Morocco: New party seen as challenge to Islamists

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/638xf6

Moroccan politician Fouad Ali El Himma has long been a media sensation, thanks to his close association with King Mohammed VI. His announcement that he will lead a new political party is widely seen as a direct challenge to Islamist opposition party, the PJD.

Senegal: Parliament extends presidential terms, after Wade

2008-08-08

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN949912.html

The Senegalese parliament has passed a law extending the presidential term to seven years from five, but the ruling will not apply to sitting President Abdoulaye Wade, a Justice Ministry official said on Tuesday.

Sudan: Deal reached on disputed oil region

2008-08-08

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L8240328.htm

Sudan's former north-south foes have agreed on an administration for the disputed oil-producing Abyei region, where clashes this year had threatened to derail a 2005 peace deal, officials said on Friday. Clashes in Abyei in May killed scores and drove 50,000 from their homes. Abyei is home to oil wells that have fuelled an economic boom in Sudan, Africa's biggest country.

DRC: government should cancel most logging deals - report

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/63k8q7

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) should cancel more than three quarters of its logging deals for not meeting necessary standards, a government-sponsored working group looking into the forestry sector said on Wednesday. The country, home to the world's second largest tropical forest, launched a World Bank-backed review of all timber contracts last week in an effort to recoup millions of dollars in lost taxes and clean up a business rife with corruption.

Sierra Leone: Aviation Minister sacked

2008-08-08

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/19799

Sierra Leone's Transport and Aviation Minister Mr. Kemoh Sesay has been sacked yesterday following the landing of an unauthorized antonov plane which forcefully landed at the Lungi international airport with 700kg cocaine, arms and ammunitions on July 12th this year.

South Africa: Zuma case ruling in September

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6ze34d

Jacob Zuma, leader of South Africa's ruling party, has appeared in court for a second day to get corruption and fraud cases against him dropped. If the judge agrees, then Zuma can contest to become South Africa's president. If not, he may go on trial later this year.

Africa: Trade talks collapse 'welcome'

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6b4z6p

The collapse of the World Trade Organisation negotiations in Geneva recently lifts the threat of millions more people facing hunger and poverty as a result of trade liberalisation, the charity War on Want has said. Trade ministers had gathered for marathon talks aimed at concluding the seven-year negotiations.

Global: Africans played pivotal role at turning point of WTO talks

2008-08-07

http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/wto.info/twninfo20080806.htm

As the dust settles over the failed WTO talks in Geneva of the last fortnight, a fact that has been under-highlighted has become more clear. That is the important and even crucial role that the African and other smaller economies played in the mini-Ministerial process. Much of the media publicity has focused on the role of the United States and European Union on one hand, and on India, China and Brazil on the other hand.

Nigeria: World Bank acknowledges serious flaws in WAGP project

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/63vjzp

Civil society activists in Nigeria are welcoming the World Bank’s acknowledgement of a series of damaging mistakes during the building of the World Bank-financed West African Gas Pipeline (WAGP) running from Nigeria through Benin, Togo, and Ghana. But they also say the report does not go far enough in answering crucial questions.

South Africa: Time for grassroots urban planning

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/56zxpg

The crisis of social exclusion in South Africa's cities is a key factor in the ferment in grassroots political society, argues Richard Pithouse. It has been central to much popular protest in recent years, to the emergence of well organised grassroots movements to the left of the ANC and, also, the catastrophic pogroms in May.

Africa: Moms, babies to benefit in new UN HIV initiative

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6pwwsb

Six African nations are among nine that will benefit from a 50 million-dollar initiative by UN agencies aimed at halting mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The agencies made the announcement Thursday, ahead of the biennial global conference on HIV and AID that opened in Mexico last Sunday.

Global: Africa 'must not stop HIV vaccine trials'

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/5lrzdz

Shutting down clinical trial centres in Africa in response to continued failure of HIV vaccine candidates would be a big mistake, researchers warned at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City yesterday (5 August).

Global: AIDS in segments of Black America as severe as many African countries - report

2008-08-04

http://tinyurl.com/6xsop7

In a new report, "Left Behind!", the Black Aids Institute in Los Angeles documents the neglect of extent of the AIDS epidemic namong Black Americans. According to Phill Wilson, CEO of the Black AIDS Institute and one of the authors of the
report, "More Black Americans are infected with HIV than the total populations of people living with HIV in seven of the 15 countries served by PEPFAR [President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief."Wilson and a wide range of other experts involved in the report applaud the efforts to treat AIDS in Africa, but call for a comparably urgent response at home.

Global: Criminal HIV transmission and exposure laws spreading

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6phs2o

Concern over the growing international trend towards the criminalisation of HIV transmission or exposure was documented in a Wednesday morning session at the XVII International AIDS Conference that highlighted “criminalisation creep” in Europe and Central Asia as well as the rapid spread of “highly inefficient laws” in West and Central Africa.

Global: Heated debate about male circumcision

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/58cm7g

There has been heated debate at the International AIDS Conference about how male circumcision should be promoted, following research that shows circumcised men have far less chance of getting HIV. The main fear is that, if promoted as a means of prevention HIV infection, men will believe that they are immune to HIV after circumcision.

Global: HIV/AIDS: Time to base public policy on rights

2008-08-08

http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/6938.html

Preaching abstinence to the young has not worked, nor has sex work been eradicated. Experts gathered in Mexico City for the 17th International AIDS Conference say it is time to put public policies under the microscope and see why they have failed.

Cameroon: New health centre for gays

2008-08-08

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=cameroon&id=1929

For the first time, the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people in Cameroon will be treated as priority in a newly established Health Care centre in Douala by Alternatives-Cameroun, a gay organisation in Cameron. Funded by a French group, Sidaction, and the American Foundation for AIDS Research, AMFAR, the centre has been named Access Centre.

Global: Aids conference seeks end to discrimination

2008-08-08

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=AfricaAbroad&id=1926

At the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City this week, there has been a great deal of discussion about violence and discrimination directed at homosexuals and lesbians, often based on the mistaken assumption that they are responsible for the disease. Public health officials and organizations working to diminish the impact of AIDS around the world agree that more tolerant societies have better programs to combat AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases.

Global: Facebook to help prove gay refugee claimants' sexual orientation

2008-08-08

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=AfricaAbroad&id=1928

Gay and lesbian refugee claimants struggling to shed old-world views of their sexuality are turning to new-age technology to make their case. Facebook, the popular online social network, is being used as a tool by some claimants to help prove their sexual orientation to immigration officials in Canada. "Sexuality has always been very complicated and when you have to prove it as a matter of life and death you will use any resource you have available to you," says Diego Macias of Among Friends, a Toronto-based gay and lesbian refugee support group.

Côte d’Ivoire: UN human rights expert on toxic waste holds talks

2008-08-08

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=27578

A United Nations human rights expert has held talks in Côte d’Ivoire with senior officials from the UN peacekeeping mission in the West African country at the start of a week-long visit to investigate the illegal movement and dumping of toxic wastes.

North Africa: Morocco, Polisario determined to pursue Sahara talks

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6dpsq4

Despite a series of stalled talks in New York, Morocco remains committed to the process of negotiations with the Polisario, in pursuit of a lasting solution to the dispute over Western Sahara. That was the message conveyed by King Mohammed VI in a royal address last Wednesday (July 30th) in Fez. "The relentless efforts of our bold diplomacy have resulted in substantial positive development," said the king.

Ethiopia: Court Case to test the limits of press freedom

2008-08-08

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/europe/article.aspx?id=6387

A legal battle in Ethiopia over what constitutes contempt of court is likely to test the boundaries of free speech in a country where the liberty of press has deteriorated over the last three years. Abiy Teklemariam, managing editor of privately-owned weekly Addis Neger, said in an emailed statement that the paper would appeal the conviction of its editor in chief, Mesfin Negash, for contempt of court at the country’s supreme tribunal.

Gambia: Court discharges fired newspaper manager

2008-08-08

http://www.afrol.com/articles/30204

The fired managing director of The Gambia's pro-government 'Daily Observer' newspaper has been discharged by the court. Mr. Dida Halake, whose nationality remains unclear, was discharged by a local magistrates' court after the prosecution filed an application to withdraw criminal case against him. The prosecution said this will allow it to put its house in order.

Mauritania: IFJ Calls for release of journalist and publisher

2008-08-08

http://tinyurl.com/6kadps

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called for the release of Mohamed Nema Omar the publisher and Mohamed Ould Abdelatif journalist of the Arab language weekly newspaper Al Houriya. The two are jailed since 21 July over defamation and insult of three judges. "This long and painful detention looks like reprisals for our colleagues," said Gabriel Baglo the Director of IFJ Africa office. "We condemn the bad detention conditions of Omar and Abdelatif. We call for their immediate release and a fair trial."

Guinea-Bissau: Soaring prices could trigger social conflict

2008-08-08

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=79696

Rising food and fuel costs could trigger social conflict in Guinea-Bissau according to the latest report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), published last week. The warnings come just as Guinea-Bissau has been plunged into a political crisis with President Joao Vieira dissolving parliament and appointing a new prime minister on 5 August. A new government is expected to be formed in a matter of days.

Africa: New technology to sever timber’s link to conflict?

2008-08-08

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=43490

While conflict diamonds or blood diamonds, as they are known, have gained attention the world over in terms of the role illicit gems play in fuelling warfare, the role that the timber trade has played in abetting conflict has received considerably less consideration. That may be beginning to change.

Ethiopia: Emergency needs "set to increase"

2008-08-08

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=79714

The number of people requiring emergency food aid is expected to increase as food security has not improved, according to the latest assessment of drought-affected areas, a senior government official said.

Nigeria: Court denies bail to prominent oil rebel

2008-08-08

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL8670711.html

A Nigerian court has denied bail to the suspected leader of the main militant group in the oil-producing Niger Delta, defence lawyers said on Friday. Henry Okah is believed to be the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), whose campaign of sabotage against Africa's biggest oil industry has cut output by a fifth, helping to push up global energy prices.

sudan: Attack on convoy leaves six civilians dead

2008-08-08

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=27609

A civilian convoy with seven vehicles was attacked on Monday, leaving six dead and 28 wounded, the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) has reported.

Africa: Africa still dependent on satellite net access

2008-08-06

http://tinyurl.com/5jw96v

Africa still relies heavily on expensive satellite connections to gain access to the Internet, according to a report released in July. Over 80 per cent of African Internet use is routed through satellite connections, says the report by the South Africa-based telecommunications analysts BMI-TechKnowledge, who work in 40 African countries.

Nigeria: Globacom's submarine cable to berth next year

2008-08-08

http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/current1.html#internet

After a long wait, Globacom has announced that its Glo cable will reach Ghana by May 2009 and Nigeria shortly thereafter. It is still not clear when the cable will become operational and although company is talking of 14 West African landing points, it seems unlikely that this will happen.

Rwanda: Telecom companies raise questions over access to fibre backbone

2008-08-08

http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/current1.html#internet

Recently, the digging started on Rwanda's new fibre optic network. Local telecom companies want their piece of the ICT pie. Rwanda is getting wired. By the end of next year, the government's new 2,000 kilometer fibre optic network should increase broadband access to the country, linking all districts to high quality voice, data, and video services, according to officials.

Sudan Open Archive

2008-08-06

http://www.sudanarchive.net/

An expanded version of the Sudan Open Archive (SOA) is now online. The new version - SOA 2.0 - features an improved user interface and open access to a thousand books and documents on all aspects of Sudan. The Archive makes a wide range of material available - and searchable - in digital form for the first time. It also incorporates an internet guide with links to several hundred Sudan-related websites. SOA 2.0 includes dictionaries, material on human rights and environmental issues and a collection of reports on local peace meetings in north and south Sudan.

Free software resources- Free software Foundation

2008-08-06

http://www.fsf.org/resources

The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).This site catalog useful free software that runs under free operating systems — particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants. Licenses are verified for each and every program listed in this directory.

Global: 2008 HREOC Photo Competition

2008-08-06

http://www.humanrights.gov.au/photo%5Fcomp/

To celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) is holding a photo competition based on the theme - ‘Dignity and justice for all of us’.nThe theme reinforces the vision of the Declaration as a commitment to universal dignity and justice, and reinforces how human rights are an inextricable part of our lives – for everyone, everywhere, everyday.

Global: Banking on social change: Seeking financial solutions for all - Ashoka Changemakers

2008-08-04

http://changemakers.net/competition/bankingonsocialchange/

On July 16th, Changemakers launched the 'Banking on Social Change' competition, an exciting new initiative that seeks innovative, cutting edge methods that allow financial security to become a reality for everyone. Join Changemakers and Citi in the search for innovative and cutting-edge methods that allow financial security to become a reality for everyone. Enter and showcase your work to key decision-makers and investors.

Global: CACIM Forum Fellowships

2008-08-08

http://cacim.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=Fellowships

CACIM (Critical Action - Centre in Movement), based in New Delhi, India but active in local and global networking, and an initiative towards promoting criticality in socio-political action and movement by promoting a culture of critical engagement and reflection, is again offering four Fellowships on the World Social Forum process.

Third International Congress on Islamic Feminism

Barcelona (Spain), 24th-27th October 2008

2008-08-06

http://www.feminismeislamic.org/eng/

The Third International Congress on Islamic Feminism has been announced by Junta Islàmica Catalana (Catalonian Islamic Board). The conference will be focused on the problems of Muslim women in the Global era. Many Muslim women today are facing a double oppression: economic (neo-liberalism) and political (religious fundamentalism). The Congress will consider the responses given by Islamic feminists to this situation, and their contribution towards the construction of a new civil society worldwide, based on a culture of human rights and Qur'anic values such as democracy, social justice, freedom of conscience and gender equality.

Global: Strategic Partnership Development Post - GCE

2008-08-07

http://www.campaignforeducation.org/about/about_jobs.html

The Global Campaign for Education is looking to recruit someone, to coordinate the development of a large funding proposal for the Education For All Fast Track Initiative. This proposal will be focused on supporting civil society advocacy work on education and creation of national Civil Society Education Funds. It will involve close collaboration with national education coalitions / campaigns across Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as strong partnership with regional education platforms (ASPBAE, ANCEFA and CLADE).Deadline: 3pm GMT 12th August.

Kenya: Executive Director - Urgent Africa Fund

2008-08-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/49998

The Urgent Action Fund-Africa (UAF-Africa), based in Nairobi, Kenya seeks an ExecutiveDirector (ED) to take up the post by April 1 2009. The Executive Director is a dynamic leader who ensures UAF-Africa’s strategic vision, mission and goals. S/he is responsible for the consistent and effective delivery of the organisation’s programmes. Supported by a team, s/he has experience at senior management level, knowledge of and commitment to feminist movements and women’s human rights issues, and a sophisticated ability to network with other organisations, funders and donors.
Vacancy Announcement for Executive Director
Urgent Action Fund–Africa (UAF-Africa)

The Urgent Action Fund-Africa (UAF-Africa), based in Nairobi, Kenya seeks an Executiveb Director (ED) to take up the post by April 1 2009.

Guided by feminist principles, UAF-Africa advocates for women’s equality, not only as a matter of human rights, but also as a fundamental prerequisite for social justice, global security, and sustainable peace. UAF-Africa supports women activists in Africa through Rapid Response Grantmaking in three contexts: defense of rights in situations of armed conflict, escalating violence or repression; potentially precedent setting legal actions; and protection of women human rights defenders.

UAF-Africa also implements collaborative initiatives with other organisations including groundbreaking initiatives, research and publications- to deepen understanding on gender dimensions and implications of particular conflicts and marginalised sexual rights; providewomen with tools needed for strategic actions and policy advocacy and to encourage knowledge and information sharing in critical areas affecting women’s rights.

The Executive Director is a dynamic leader who ensures UAF-Africa’s strategic vision, mission and goals. S/he is responsible for the consistent and effective delivery of the organisation’s programmes. Supported by a team, s/he has experience at senior management level, knowledge of and commitment to feminist movements and women’s human rights issues, and a sophisticated ability to network with other organisations, funders and donors.

S/he must be willing to undertake frequent travel sub-regionally, regionally and internationally. S/he will have extensive knowledge of international donors. The ED reports to the Board of Directors. S/he has experience in fundraising and financial management, proven management of staff and volunteers, excellent communication including written and verbal skills. Respect for diversity and a collaborative working style are essential.
The Executive Director assumes the following responsibilities
1. In conjunction with the board of directors, provides overall leadership and strategic vision for the organisation
2. Supervises and ensures effective and efficient programme delivery and management of UAF-Africa’s systems and operations including collaborative initiatives with partner organisations
3. Ensures sound financial management of the organisation
4. Takes primary responsibility for UAF-Africa’s fundraising and ensuring that fundraising needs are fulfilled in order to maintain a sustainable organisation with a diverse funding base.
5. Ensures a participatory and healthy work environment, guided by approved policies governing the work of staff, interns and volunteers
6. Acts as the principal spokesperson for UAF-Africa in the public domain
7. Facilitates the effective functioning of the board of directors and UAF-Africa’s
advisory network.

Essential Qualifications, experience and aptitudes
Advanced degree in law or social science
7 – 10 years management experience
5-10 years working on women’s human rights in Africa
Proven aptitude for strategic thinking and planning
Proven ability to diversify funding sources
Excellent communication skills
Strong political analysis and knowledge of the African context in politics, conflict
and women’s rights
Aptitude to nurture organisations and people
Cross cultural competency
Established credibility in the management of public/not for profit institutions
Excellent English –other major African language skills desirable
Desirable Experience
Experience of the global and African funding context for women’s human rights
Activism background
Feminist organising
Work in Social justice philanthropy
Desirable Qualities
Innovative, visionary, gutsy
Dynamic, willing to think outside the box
Ability to lead new teams, promote and create new leadership

To apply:
Applicants are requested to email their CV’s with details of three references and a cover letter in support of their application to jobs@urgentactionfund-africa.or.ke

Short-listing and interview process: applicants short-listed for interviews will be informed by September 30 2009. Final interviews will take place in Nairobi Kenya on 30 October 2009.
The successful candidate will be expected to take up the post by April 1 2009.

Feedback: Unfortunately UAF-Africa is unable to respond to each application and therefore will only respond to candidates who are short-listed for interview. Deadline for applications is 8 September 2008. All applications will be confidential.

Regional representative, Africa - HelpAge International

2008-08-06

http://tinyurl.com/5m4c96

Ageing is a triumph of our times, yet over 100 million older people live on less than a dollar a day HelpAge International works to ensure everyone knows how much older people contribute to society and must enjoy their rights to healthcare and social services and the economic and physical security they need. Established in 1983 our global network today spans more than 70 affiliate organisations in 50 countries.

Our Africa Regional Development Centre (ARDC) has grown rapidly over the last few years. It works with a range of partners across Africa to deliver programming in a number of key areas: HIV/AIDS; social protection and social pensions; emergency response and disaster risk reduction; rights of older people; and livelihoods.

You will be responsible for leading and guiding HAI strategic planning in Africa and expanding its programmes and network. You will also lead a highly skilled influencing and advocacy team working to raise the ageing agenda in the continent. You will provide strategic management support to ARDC staff and HAI country offices and be responsible for the financial and budgetary controls of the organisation.

Fahamu