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Kenya: Another silent genocide: Human rights violations in Samburu

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/55045

On Wednesday, Feb 25, 2009 Somali bandits raided the Samburu tribe near Lerata, Kenya, a small community between Archer's Post and Wamba located in the Samburu District, northern Kenya, once known as the Northern Frontier District. Bandits took hundreds of cattle, shot two men, stole a local conservancy vehicle, and kidnapped two Samburu children. The response of the Kenyan government has shocked Samburu victims and their advocates.
Another Silent Genocide: Human Rights Violations in Samburu Kenya

On Wednesday, Feb 25, 2009 Somali bandits raided the Samburu tribe near Lerata, Kenya, a small community between Archer's Post and Wamba located in the Samburu District, northern Kenya, once known as the Northern Frontier District. Bandits took hundreds of cattle, shot two men, stole a local conservancy vehicle, and kidnapped two Samburu children.

The response of the Kenyan government has shocked Samburu victims and their advocates.

“Rather than locating our children and recovering our cattle, the Kenyan government sent a special police force into Lerata and surrounding communities, flew over the village, and proceeded to shoot innocent people in the community from helicopters,” a witness stated. “Police were firing into the school yard, at women walking their goats, people getting water at the well, and at the small rural medical clinic,” reported medical personnel at the local medical dispensary.

“At first, the community thought the police were here to help us find our lost children and ran out to greet them,” stated Sammy Lepurdati. “When they initially started shooting, everyone tried to convince them they were making a mistake, but instead the police kept circling the bomas, firing deliberately at innocent people.”

“It was a nightmare,” he stated. “People were screaming, running in every direction. Those who survived fled to the bush and nearby mountains.”

Police also beat over 30 women, children, and the elderly with clubs, according to one witness, who asked to remain anonymous. “My mother was walking to the bore hole with my 4 year-old sister and 10-month old brother, who was wrapped on her back, to water our goats and calves,” the 15 year-old reported. “She turned around to take my sister’s hand when police approached her, told her to give over the calves and goats to him and, when she pleaded with him that it was our only source of food, he began beating her with his club.”

“When the baby started crying, he pushed my mother to the ground and began hitting her over and over again on her back until the baby stopped crying. My sister screamed and then he began beating her, too.” All three sustained life-threatening injuries according to the rural dispensary’s nurse practitioner, Edward Letalama.

“The police then proceeded to confiscate all the village’s remaining cattle, including those owned by the local orphanage, and transported them to Archer’s Post, 28 km away,” according to Titus Letaapo Saayio, Director of the Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust, one of the most successful community conservation programs in Kenya, which is run by Samburu communities under the direction of Northern Rangeland Trust.

“We are shocked and feel betrayed that the police and Kenyan government are not even trying to bring these shiftas [bandits] to justice and have, instead, turned against their own people.”

Survivors fled to the mountains or followed their cattle to Archer’s Post and then to Isiolo, 40 km away in another district. “By taking the cattle out of the district, we realized they had no intention of returning these cattle or to carry out the policies of a democratic society,” reported Member of Parliament Raphael Letimelo, Samburu District, “Instead, the special police force brought them across district lines where local District officers and representatives would be powerless.”

Hundreds of the cattle confiscated had been donated by an international humanitarian aid NGO to the orphanage to replace cattle to local orphans and families recovering from the 2006 drought in which 85% of their livestock perished. Independently audited records and photographs of this livestock are kept, proving ownership of this stock.

“Without milk from their cattle, the community members will die.” Dan Letoiya, Director of West Gate Wildlife Conservancy stated. “We are experiencing another severe drought and this is their only source of protein and liquid. The milk from their livestock make up 90% of their dietary intake.”

The Samburu pastoralists have herded cattle in this region for centuries and are some of the most marginalized people in all of East Africa, with no political voice, advocacy, or means to defend themselves. This situation, combined with the maize shortage caused by a Kenyan governmental corruption scheme, means thousands could face starvation.

In fact, Rosemary Lekali from Save the Children urged public government officials to intervene. “The Samburu are certain to perish from dehydration and starvation in the absence of their livestock. Cattle not only represent their most important food reserve, but it is also their primary livelihood and currency,” she said.

“When a parent wishes to send a child to school, the bursary or tuition is paid with the sale of cattle. When a family member has to be hospitalized, a cow is sold. These livestock provide cultural and traditional ceremonial purposes as well, which Kenya should embrace and preserve as part of its cultural heritage.”

On Feb 28, thousands of cattle, including those belonging to the local orphanage and humanitarian aid organization, were simply handed over to the Borana and Somali people. Police claim they 'recovered' these cattle as those stolen in the initial raid by bandits, but records show otherwise. Documents prove that the confiscated cattle belong, in fact, to local familes and the orphanage, and that those who were beaten, killed and shot at were citizens innocent of any wrongdoing.

“It is shocking that the Kenyan government could support the Somali people who have consistently terrorized both sides of the border as well as their coastline.” said Peter Leshakwet, Director of the Kalama Wildlife Conservancy."One wonders about the possibility of covert affiliations with terrorism or other black market trades."

Hundreds more special police forces are being sent to Samburu this week with intentions to round up thousands more head of cattle. On March 2, 2009, another 2000 head of cattle were given to the Somali, as hundreds of local citizens witnessed the transaction. One respected elder of the community, Lelaekai Lekurinai, in his late 70’s, was gunned down by police in front of those witnesses in the Isiolo city limits as he begged the police to release his cattle.

To date, estimated value of cattle confiscated and released to Somali bandits is in excess of 5 million USD. This activity is not localized, but has now spread district-wide. In addition, all local conservancies in the Samburu District have been immobilized and disabled by the police.

“The police dismantled all radio communication devices and security equipment for our anti-poaching units,” stated Tom Lesarge, Director of Community Relations and Security at the Northern Rangelands Trust, who has been working on mitigating inter-tribal conflict, land-use disputes, and increasing security in the area. He reported that five Northern Rangeland Trust conservancies were essentially terminated, including the Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust, Kalama Community Wildlife Conservancy, Sera Conservation Trust, Meibae Conservancy, and Westgate Wildlife Conservation Areas.

“This could have devastating impacts on the rare and endangered species found in this area, and essentially overturn everything we’ve accomplished thus far to protect wildlife and bring security to this region,” he stated.

The situation is worsening with each passing day. “There have been reports and threats of possible mass executions and removal from of indigenous people from their traditional homelands throughout the Samburu District in the next few weeks,” stated Letimelo, “Many of us feel as if the police are treating our district as a foreign country they are invading, not as their own northern district and citizens, which they are assigned to protect.”

Ironically, on Wednesday top UN investigator Philip Alston issued one of the UN's strongest indictments against Kenyan security forces, charging that police are carrying out heinous acts against innocent citizens with complete exemption from punishment. He noted the brutal series of hundreds of executions carried out by special police forces across the country in recent months, all conducted abruptly without due process. He stated, "Kenyan police are a law unto themselves. They kill often, with impunity."





Please contact or contact the following individuals for statements, photos, and/or video footage:

Ironically, this UN statement was released just before this incident occurred: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/25/un-kenya-executions

Raphael Letimilo,

Member of Parliament Samburu District

011.254.722.972.996

Tom Lesarge, Director

Northern Rangelands Trust

011.254.721.641.990

tlsarge@yahoo.com

Titus Letaapo Saayio, Director

Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy

011.254.723.222.664

letaapos@yahoo.com

Dan Letoiya, Director

West Gate Wildlife Conservancy

011.254.721.797.587

danletoiye@yahoo.com

Peter Leshakwet, Director

Kalama Wildlife Conservancy

shakwetp@yahoo.com

David Leleikai

Lieutent, Kenya Army

011.254.724.345.300

Tina Ramme

Wildlife Biologist

President, Lion Conservation Fund

tina@kenyalions.org

906.367.5466

Craig Halbmaier,

Vice Consul and Minister of Security, IV Chief,

US Embassy Nairobi

Cell: 254-(0)734-000-8020. HalbmaierCA@state.gov

Sierra Leone violence against women in political clashes condemned

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/54974

We the women of Sierra Leone are horrified and shocked by the alleged rape, sexual violence and physical assault of a number of women during the recent clash in Freetown between the two political parties.

An injury to one woman is an injury to all women. We are appalled by the fact that after the women of this nation have endured over a decade of violence and trauma during the war, women’s bodies continue to be targeted. The violence this week follows numerous national commitments made by this and the last government to end violence against women. We recognise that the government has put in place laws and policies to prevent these abuses. Now is the time to prove that they will be enforced.

We therefore demand:

- A proper investigation of the alleged crimes to ensure that the criminals responsible for these heinous acts are brought to justice. The inspector general of police, Mr Acha Kamara must act to ensure this happens.
- Statements from the minister of social welfare, gender and children’s affairs, and the leaders of all political parties condemning the blatant use of violence against women on 16 March 2009 and within the context of political conflict more generally.

The president has championed the cause of Sierra Leone’s women. We hope that he too will forcefully condemn these abuses against women.

There is no peace if women are not safe. There is no development when women continue to live in fear. We call on the women and men of Sierra Leone to join together to end the culture of impunity.

Women’s Forum
The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone
The Talking Drum Studio
ENCISS
International Rescue Committee
Campaign For Good Governance
Bambara Town Women’s Association
Forut Sierra Leone
Centre for the Coordination of Youth Activities
WIMSAL
International Alert
SLADEA
FAWE
50/50 Group
GEMS
YWCA
MARWOPNET
Action Aid Sierra Leone
Network Movement for Justice and Development
Sierra Leone Teachers Union

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

Sierra Leone: Unprecedented political violence

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/55029

The West African Network for Peacebuilding-Sierra Leone (WANEP-SL) is concerned and completely disturbed about the spate of unprecedented political violence that erupted and continues to erupt in Pujehun, Koidu, Kenema and Freetown leaving properties looted and vandalized thereby leading to abuses and violations of human rights on peaceful and unsuspecting citizens in Sierra Leone.
PRESS RELEASE 16/03/09

UNPRECENDENTED POLITICAL VIOLENCE

The West African Network for Peacebuilding-Sierra Leone (WANEP-SL) is concerned and completely disturbed about the spate of unprecedented political violence that erupted and continues to erupt in Pujehun, Koidu, Kenema and Freetown leaving properties looted and vandalized thereby leading to abuses and violations of human rights on peaceful and unsuspecting citizens in Sierra Leone.

As a national civil society peacebuilding organization striving for consolidation of peace in Sierra Leone, we urge the APC led government to re-double their efforts in the protection of life and property as enshrined in the 1991 constitution of Sierra Leone.

It would be recalled that in his last presidential address to the nation on 5th October 2007, President Ernest Bai Koroma on peace and national security stated that “The maintenance of law and order in our nation is a necessary ingredient for peace and tranquility”. Equally, the opposition, SLPP has been preaching national reconciliation; therefore, WANEP-SL urges the leadership and membership of these two political institutions to stay committed to the culture of peace in the best interest of Sierra Leone.

WANEP-SL is therefore very categoric in stating that “We shall no longer sit idly by; repeat “shall not sit down again and allow this country to be enveloped in state violence and reverse the gains that we have already fought for after eleven years of civil war with our blood and sweat.” “Violence begets violence.” In using violence as a tool for expressing frustrations and anger only exacerbate dire consequences for all concerned.

Today, we are calling on all WANEP –SL network members and other civil society coalitions/groups to constructively engage all stakeholders at national and local levels for full commitment and responsibility not to slide this nation back into conflict.

We also hasten to point out that the media should shy away from taking sides in conflict to avoid deepening violent situations. We all know how the media can play both positive and destructive roles in the dynamics of peacebuilding and conflict. Additionally, we are calling on the Sierra Leone Police to stay professionally neutral in handling and resolving conflict situations nation wide.

In conclusion, WANEP-SL calls on the Government, Political Parties, Political Parties’ Registration Commission, International Community and civil society to promote principles of dialogue instead of violence to resolve indifferences at national and local levels. However, if this situation goes unaddressed, WANEP-SL is prepared to undertake intensive mediation through informal dialogue, inter and intra-party negotiations and encourage the effective use of non-violence approaches to conflict and support the institutionalization of the culture of peace.

To US Senator Russell D. Feingold

Statement for the record of Congress

Mars Group

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/54972

Mr President, two human rights defenders, Oscar Kamau King’ara and John Paul Oulu, were murdered in the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, two weeks ago. I was deeply saddened to learn of these murders and join the call of US Ambassador Michael E. Ranneberger for an immediate, comprehensive and transparent investigation of this crime. At the same time, we cannot view these murders simply in isolation; these murders are part of a continuing pattern of extrajudicial killings with impunity in Kenya. The slain activists were outspoken on the participation of Kenya’s police in such killings and the continuing problem of corruption throughout Kenya’s security sector. If these and other underlying rule-of-law problems are not addressed, there is a very real potential for political instability and armed conflict to return to Kenya.
In December 2007, Kenya made international news headlines as violence erupted after its general elections. Over 1,000 people were killed, and the international community, under the leadership of Kofi Annan, rallied to broker a power-sharing agreement and stabilise the government. In the immediate term, this initiative stopped the violence from worsening and has since been hailed as an example of successful conflict resolution. But as too often happens, once the agreement was signed and the immediate threats receded, diplomatic engagement was scaled down. Now over a year later, while the power-sharing agreement remains intact, the fundamental problems that led to the violence in December 2007 remain unchanged. In some cases, they have even become worse.

* The Mars Group’s full statement can be read on its blog.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

The global financial crisis: Lessons and responses from Africa

Demba Moussa Dembele

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/54982

cc Tristam SparksAs the international financial crisis points to the collapse of laissez faire economics and discredits market fundamentalism, Africa and the global South should break free from failed neoliberal policies and the institutions that have promoted them and define their own paths to development, writes Demba Moussa Dembele, director of the Forum for African Alternatives.

The crisis provides fundamental lessons, says Dembele, the first being that markets do not have self-correcting mechanisms, and that market failures are not less costly than state failures. Secondly, "the collapse of the neoliberal dogma is a major blow to the international financial institutions. What is even more devastating to them is the reversal of most of the policies they had advocated for decades in Africa and in other ‘poor’ countries under the now discredited SAPs (structural adjustment programmes). The IMF and the World Bank are supporting fiscal stimulus – expansionary fiscal policies – in the United States, Europe and Asia."

Thirdly, its clear that the state remains a central player in solving crises caused by markets, and is not the sole cause of economic and social problems in Africa that neoliberal policy has categorised it as. Dembele notes that many development agencies do not have Africa’s best interests at heart, citing failures to cancel debt and to dedicate 0.7 per cent of GDP to official development assistance budgets, along with restricting the access of African exports to Western markets. In contrast, US$4 trillion was made available in matter of weeks to tackle the international financial crisis, 45 times the total aid budget of the European Union and the USA for 2007.

Dembele calls for Africa and Africans to forget neoliberal capitalism and explore new paths to ‘an endogenous development for and by its people’, recommending that Africa should restore capital controls and reject unfavourable trade liberalisation policies, as well as reversing the privatisation of key sectors and natural resources. Likewise, the author calls for African governments to restore the role of the state in the development process, reclaim the debate on African development while learning from the experiences of other countries in the global South, and to build an alternative means for financing development including South–South co-operation and the integration of diaspora remittances into a coherent strategy.
_____________________________________________________
The global financial crisis: Lessons and responses from Africa

The international financial crisis reflects the collapse of laissez-faire economics and the growing discredit of market fundamentalism. What was being hailed yesterday as the only road to ‘growth and prosperity’ is now under fierce attack by the same countries and institutions that promoted it for years. In leading developed countries, states have drawn up massive rescue plans to bail out industries or nationalise banks and financial institutions.

FUNDAMENTAL LESSONS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

The crisis has shattered all the myths associated with the neoliberal paradigm. It has provided fundamental lessons for Africa and the global South. These lessons should lead to one simple conclusion: a rejection of failed and discredited neoliberal policies and the institutions that promoted them over the last three decades, namely the IMF and the World Bank.

1) The collapse of market fundamentalism

The first important lesson is the collapse of market fundamentalism. The crisis shows that the emperor has no clothes anymore. Market fundamentalists claim that markets should be left to their own devices because whatever happens, they have self-correcting mechanisms and that market failures are less costly than state failures. But the reality shows otherwise. The devastations caused by the financial crisis are staggering, as evidenced by the trillions of dollars needed to clean up the mess they spread to the entire globe. And these costs will be ultimately borne by the taxpayer, that is, the state.

Even the most zealous market fundamentalists must have lost their illusions about the ability of markets to discipline themselves and correct their own mistakes. Markets are not impersonal forces, believed to be all powerful and placed above human beings. They are man-made forces whose decisions are ultimately influenced by selfish vested interests.

With the collapse of market fundamentalism, it is the legitimacy of the entire neoliberal system that is being questioned. Even some of its most fervent ideologues are now in disarray. Some of its most sacred myths and dogmas are falling apart. Things that were unthinkable just a few months ago have become a daily reality. Nationalisations of banks and financial institutions, rescue plans for industrial companies, strong state intervention everywhere and attacks against ‘unbridled capitalism’; all this is being observed in Europe and even in the United States. The ghosts of Keynes and even Marx are coming back to haunt Western leaders and neoliberal ideologues.[1]

2) Further discredit of the IMF and World Bank

The collapse of the neoliberal dogma is a major blow to the international financial institutions. What is even more devastating to them is the reversal of most of the policies they had advocated for decades in Africa and in other ‘poor’ countries under the now discredited SAPs (structural adjustment programmes). The IMF and the World Bank are supporting fiscal stimulus – expansionary fiscal policies – in the United States, Europe and Asia. They are supporting rescue plans, including nationalisation of private banks and other financial institutions. The priority of the day is no longer inflation but jobs and economic recovery.

Since the 1980s, all these policies were denied African countries in the name of market fundamentalism. Does this mean that what is good and acceptable for Western countries is not for African countries? Whatever the case, one thing is clear: neoliberal policies advocated by the IMF and the World Bank have never been built on ‘scientific’ arguments but on purely ideological grounds in order to protect and promote the interests of global capitalism. All the neoliberal stuff peddled by these institutions in the South is crumbling with their own benediction. What African countries had been told and forced to implement was standing on shaky ground.

There is no doubt that the financial crisis and the other crises are a major blow to the credibility of these institutions and will deepen their crisis of legitimacy, even if they are attempting to use these crises to make a comeback, like the IMF.[2] But whatever happens, things will never be the same again.

One major lesson for Africa is that they should no longer trust the IMF and World Bank and for that reason they should not listen to their ‘advice’ anymore. This is why it is incomprehensible and even a shame to see African countries hold a meeting with the IMF in Tanzania with the aim of building ‘a new partnership’. In the statement issued after that meeting, African countries are calling on the IMF to extend its ‘experience and expertise’ as if African leaders and policy makers had not learned enough lessons from the experience of nearly 30 years of ruinous IMF policies from SAPs to PRSPs (poverty reduction strategy papers).

3) The state as central player in the development process

Another major illustration of the crisis of legitimacy of the neoliberal system is the strong recognition that the state is a central player in solving the crises brought about by unfettered markets, and it will remain a key actor in the development process, whether in developed or developing countries. Some may recall former US President Ronald Reagan’s assertion in the 1980s that the state was ‘part of the problem, not of the solution’. This signalled the era of massive deregulation and the assault on the state and public service and ownership. It opened the door to some of the most sweeping and devastating structural adjustment policies in Africa. African states came under vicious attacks as ‘predatory’, ‘wasteful’, ‘rent-seeking’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘inept’.[3]

All these qualifications were intended to discredit the state as an agent of economic and social development and the experience of state-led development that took place in the post-independence period up to the late 1970s.[4] Despite the remarkable achievements of that period, the IMF and World Bank used every possible negative example to blame the state for all Africa’s crises. They told African leaders that the state was the main, if not the unique, cause of the economic and social crisis in Africa.[5] Accordingly, the solutions they advocated included withering away the state by eliminating or limiting its intervention in the economic sphere. Hence the imposition of fiscal austerity programs, the downsizing of the civil service and the dismantling of the public sector with the privatisation of state-owned companies.

But the financial and food crises show that the state is an indispensable and indisputable agent of development and part of the solution to the current global crises. It is deregulation and market fundamentalism that are part of the problem.

4) Africa cannot count on so-called ‘development partners’

For years, Western countries and IFIs (international financial institutions) failed to heed calls to cancel the illegitimate debt of African countries – debt that has been paid many times over – and that was exacting much suffering on millions of people by virtue of a massive transfer of wealth from ‘poor’ to wealthy countries. For over 35 years, Western countries have failed to dedicate 0.7 per cent of their GDP to official development assistance (ODA). Over the last several years, ODA figures have been declining, or stagnating at best, despite repeated claims that commitments would be met. On top of that, it is now a fact that most African countries will not achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in large part due to lower external funding and declining export revenues as a result of restricted access of African exports to Western countries’ markets.

The failure to fulfil commitments toward Africa and other countries is in sharp contrast to Western countries’ mobilisation of more than US$4 trillion to bail out or nationalise their banks and financial institutions and rescue their companies in order to save jobs and mitigate the impact of the crisis on their population. And all this money was mobilised in just a few weeks! This massive bailout was 45 times the US$91 billion promised by the European Union and the United States for foreign ‘aid’ in 2007. The bailout of AIG alone (US$152 billion) is even higher than this ‘aid’.[6]

WHAT SHOULD BE THE RESPONSE FROM AFRICA?

The message from the lessons examined above is unambiguous: this is an opportune time for Africa to free itself from the shackles of neoliberal capitalism and explore new paths to an endogenous development by and for its people. Everywhere, in the rest of the world, countries and regions are moving away from the discredited neoliberal paradigm. Africa has been the main victim of ruthless neoliberal policies imposed by the IMF and World for nearly three decades, with catastrophic economic, social and political consequences that the African people are still witnessing.

Remaining within that paradigm and continuing to listen to the IFIs will only worsen the situation in Africa. Therefore, it is time for African countries to make bold and decisive moves toward an alternative development paradigm. Political will is the key to such moves. Without a leadership willing and able to explore alternative development policies, little will happen. So, the fundamental question is whether African leaders have learned enough of the current debacle of neoliberal capitalism. The other question is whether they are ready to break with it and explore an alternative development paradigm.

1) Discard failed and discredited neoliberal policies

The first step in that direction is to challenge and reject all the failed policies advocated and imposed by the IFIs and which have cost so much to Africa.
During its first meeting, the Stiglitz Commission stressed that ‘developing countries should have expanded scope for establishing policies and institutions appropriate for their conditions. This includes developing frameworks that help insulate themselves from regulatory and macroeconomic failures in systematically significant countries.’[7]

Everywhere, countries and regions are just doing that. In Asia and Latin America, they are taking monetary, fiscal and other measures to mitigate the impact of the financial turmoil on their economies. African countries should also heed this call and take any measures deemed necessary to protect their economies from external shocks.

In this regard, African countries should move to restore capital controls and reverse liberalisation of the capital account. These policies opened the door to speculative capital flows, tax evasion and increased capital flight, thus contributing to lowering Africa’s domestic savings while increasing its dependence on external financing.

African countries should also discard fiscal and monetary austerity as prescribed by the IMF, because these policies tend to choke off economic growth by limiting public investments in key sectors and by drastically reducing social spending. The stimulus policies, adopted by the United States, Europe and other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, show that in times of crisis, fiscal restraint has no economic logic. So why should African countries accept fiscal austerity when their countries are in an even worse shape than the developed countries?

Another imperative is the rejection of trade liberalisation and the restoration of protection for domestic markets. In the name of ‘free trade’ and ‘comparative advantage’ African countries were forced to accept sweeping trade liberalisation that has been very costly in economic and social terms. Trade liberalisation has increased Africa’s external dependence, destroyed domestic industries, accelerated deindustrialisation and led to the deterioration of its terms of trade. While African countries were being told about the virtues of ‘free trade’, OECD countries were provided huge agricultural subsidies erecting disguised or open protectionist policies, all of which have made ‘free trade’ a joke.

Still in the name of ‘comparative advantage’, African countries were forced to give priority to cash crops at the expense of food production. The food crisis and Africa’s great dependence on food imports illustrate once again that the IFIs have misled African countries into adopting policies that are detrimental to their fundamental interests. The IMF and World Bank, which bear a great responsibility in the food crisis in Africa, are now all too happy to ‘assist’ African countries in proposing them ‘emergency loans’ to buy food from Western countries.

The same IFIs are behind the attacks against the state that translated into the destruction of the public sector to the benefit of foreign capital. They imposed the privatisation of state-owned enterprises in the name of ‘private sector development’ and ‘efficiency’. And private sector development required engaging in a race to the bottom in order to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). To that end, African countries raced to sell off state-owned enterprises, mining industries and natural resources. In several countries, there were even ‘ministries of privatisation’ whose main mission was to sell off some of the most profitable public assets with little positive return for their countries.

On the contrary, privatisation translated into massive job losses and social exclusion. It may be argued that there is some correlation between the aggravation of poverty and the growing foreign control of resources and assets, because this control is associated with repatriation of huge profits and tax evasion. In a sense, privatisation can be assimilated to a robbery of national patrimony – including strategic sectors – through the transfer to foreign control of assets built throughout years of sacrifices by the people.

Therefore, reversing privatisation is necessary in order to restore people’s sovereignty over a nation’s resources. It is time for African countries to put back into public and collective hands the control of key sectors and natural resources. No genuine endogenous development is possible without control of a nation’s wealth. So Africa should learn from the lessons being given by capitalist countries, including the United States, which are nationalising their banks and financial institutions. But more importantly, African countries should learn from the examples of other southern countries, like those of South America and Asia, where governments are taking back what was sold off to multinational corporations.

2) Restore the role of the state in the development process

Reversing privatisation and regaining control of key sectors and natural resources requires a strong and active intervention of the state. Proponents of such intervention have been vindicated by the conspicuous failure of laissez-faire policies and the resurgence of state intervention in developed countries. In Africa, there has been a correlation between state retrenchment, poverty and social exclusion. In a sense, market failure is worse than state failure. The national security of a country requires a strong and active state. In fragile nations, state intervention is indispensable to the process of nation-building. African countries should defend public ownership and state-owned enterprises without stifling the private sector. This is one of the key lessons of the failed neoliberal policies and of the current financial crisis.

3) Reclaim the debate on Africa’s development

All the above policies have one single objective: Africa and Africans should reclaim the debate on their development. They should never accept again that others speak in Africa’s name. Genuine development is an endogenous process. No external force can bring development to another country. So, Africans should restore their self-confidence, trust African expertise and promote the use of African endogenous knowledge and technology. Since development should be viewed as a multidimensional and complex process of transformation, there can be no genuine development without an active state. However, the state is no longer the only player. It has to contend with civil society, which has become a key player in the debate on Africa’s development.

In the search for an alternative paradigm, Africa should revisit key documents, such as the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA), the African Alternative Framework to SAPs (AAF-SAPs), the Arusha Declaration on popular participation, and the Abuja Treaty, among others. An update of these documents and the integration of contributions made by the struggles of civil society organisations in the areas of gender equality, trade, finance, food sovereignty, human and social rights should help Africa come up with its own development paradigm.

Is it necessary to stress again that Africa’s regional and continental integration is one of the keys to its survival and long-term development? Because only a collective and concerted effort can help Africa overcome the multiple obstacles that lie on the road to an endogenous, people-centred, democratic and sustainable development. So Africa should learn from the experiences of other regions of the global South. The Chiang Mai Initiative in Asia has been strengthened and a new step has been taken to make it a full-fledged monetary fund. In Latin America, the Bolivarian Alternatives of the Americas (ALBA) and the South Bank are strengthening the solidarity of the region through closer economic, financial and political ties. These instruments help these countries to resist in a stronger position. Africa has wasted so much time in the process of integration. The crisis should once for all open the eyes of African leaders and citizens that the only way for Africa to survive is to move toward a genuine integration of states and peoples.

4) Financing Africa’s development

The external debt crisis, the declining trend of ODA and the low level of FDIs, all this shows that Africa cannot count on external sources to finance its development. Reclaiming its sovereign right to design its own policies goes with vigorous efforts to raise resources internally and shoulder a greater part of the resources needed to finance its development. The African Development Bank (AfDB) rightly claims that ‘The continent needs to boost domestic resource mobilisation – through financial and fiscal instruments – to support growth and investment. Addressing these issues require strategic interventions at various levels.’[8]

So, the priority should be domestic resource mobilisation. African countries should adopt new monetary and fiscal policies aimed at increasing domestic savings. And the potential is huge indeed, if African countries give themselves the means to achieve this objective. In a study, Christian Aid indicates that African countries are losing billions of dollars in tax revenues for lack of enforcement of agreements with foreign companies investing in various sectors, especially in the mining industry. Confronted with weak and ineffective states, these companies resort to various means to avoid paying taxes or pay lower taxes. It is estimated that African countries are losing close to US$160 billion each year, as a result of tax avoidance and tax exemptions.[9]

Therefore, to compel foreign companies to fulfil their obligations and expand the tax base, African countries need to reorganise their states and make them genuine instruments of development. In other words, they need effective states able to enforce agreements and mobilise resources for development. This is a key recommendation made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in its report on Africa.[10] It argues that it is time to build developmental states and put them at the centre of the development process in order for African countries to recover the policy space lost to neoliberal institutions over the last three decades. The report says that such states should help African governments improve tax collection, formalise the sprawling informal sector, stop capital flight, make more productive use of remittances from African expatriates and adopt effective measures to repatriate resources held abroad.

Remittances from the African diaspora have become a growing source of financing. In 2007, they were estimated at US$27.8 billion. They represent 3.9 per cent of GDP for North African countries and about 2 per cent for the rest of the continent.[11] But for some countries, remittances account for up to nearly a third (30 per cent) of GDP. In many countries, remittances are higher than ODA and FDIs.[12] In addition, they constitute a more secure source of financing for development, almost cost-free, while both ODA and FDIs are associated with political, economic and financial costs that are much higher than their potential ‘benefits’. So, integrating remittances into a coherent development strategy would reduce external dependence and make expatriates contribute more to Africa’s development.

Another channel through which Africa can find non-traditional financing is South–South cooperation. With the rise of new powers sitting on top of huge cash reserves and willing to build a new type of cooperation with African countries, it is an opportunity that should be used wisely. Already, several African countries are turning more and more to these powers, like China, India, Iran, Venezuela and Gulf countries, for loans, direct investments and joint ventures. South–South trade has increased from US$577 billion to US$1,700 billion between 1995 and 2005 and it keeps rising.[13] In 2008, trade between Africa and China was estimated at US$107 billion, with a favourable balance for Africa. By developing its economic and financial ties with the rest of the South, Africa will strengthen the policy space it needs to weaken the influence of ‘traditional partners’.

African countries should pursue more forcefully the call for the unconditional cancellation of the continent’s illegitimate debt. The multilateral ‘debt relief’ initiative (MDRI) is not an adequate response to Africa’s demand. Only a few countries are included and they have to comply with crippling conditions dictated by the IFIs. If Western countries and institutions do not heed the demand for debt cancellation, African countries should have the right to take unilateral actions to stop debt payments because they violate the basic human and social rights of their citizens.

Along with debt cancellation, African leaders and institutions should join civil society organisations in calling for reparations for centuries of slavery, colonialism, domination, exploitation and plunder of the continent’s resources. This is a protracted struggle, but one which can be won if Africa is willing to sustain that struggle for as long as it takes.

Likewise, Africa should launch another major struggle for the repatriation of the wealth stolen from the African people and illegally kept abroad with the complicity of Western states and financial institutions. Tax evasions, capital flight and transfer pricing have deprived African countries of billions of dollars that should be returned to serve the continent’s development. Therefore, Africa, through its regional and continental institutions, should launch a campaign for the repatriation of that wealth and seek the help of the United Nations institutions, the solidarity of the global South and the support of progressive public opinion in the North.

CONCLUSION

The financial crisis has accelerated the discrediting of the international financial institutions and deepened the crisis of legitimacy of the neoliberal system. This offers Africa a unique opportunity to free itself from the influence of the neoliberal ideology and the control of these institutions. African countries should have the courage and political will to break with failed and discredited policies. Never before did they have such an opportunity and strong reasons to explore alternative policies. It is time for Africa to reclaim the debate on its development and take responsibility for it. Examples from other regions of the global South provide important lessons that African countries could learn from and use to their benefit.

* Demba Moussa Dembele is the director of the Forum for African Alternatives, Dakar, Senegal.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

NOTES

[1] See, among others, The Economist (18–24 October 2008) with this headline: “Capitalism At Bay”; Time (2 February 2009), with Marx on the cover page and this question: “What Would Marx Think?” Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2008, with a lead article titled “The day Wall Street became socialist”
[2]The financial crisis has signaled a revival of the IMF which becoming irrelevant in many parts of the world. It has extended loans to several countries (Georgia, Island, Pakistan) and set up “emergency funds” for “poor” countries. The G20 ministers of finance, meeting in the UK on 13-14 March 2009, have agreed to increase its resources.
[3] See Thandika Mkandawire (2001), “Thinking about developmental states in Africa”, in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 25, No.3 (May), Special Issue on African Economic Development in a Comparative Perspective, pp. 289-313
[4] The World Bank was the first to launch the assault on the State-led development with the infamous Berg Report titled Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action, Washington, DC, 1981. As it turned out, World Bank policies ‘accelerated’ poverty on a massive scale!
[5] See, among others, The World Bank, Bureaucrats in Business: The Economics and Politics of Government Ownership, (1995) and Adjustment in Africa: Reform, Results and the Road Ahead, (1994).
[6] See Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Bailouts Dwarf Spending on Climate and Poverty Crises. Washington, DC, December 2008.
[7] Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, chaired by Joseph Stiglitz. This Commission has more legitimacy than the G20 because it represents all UN members (192 countries & territories) and calls for the participation of civil society organizations in its discussions.
[8] Ibid
[9] Christian Aid (2008), Death and Taxes: the true toll of tax dodging. London, A Christian Aid Report (May)
[10] UNCTAD (2007), Economic Development in Africa. Reclaiming Policy Space: Domestic Resource Mobilisation and Developmental States. New York & Geneva: United Nations
[11] AfDB (2008), op.cit.
[12] See Le Monde Diplomatique, ‘Convoitises sur l’argent des émigrés’, Paris, January 2009, p. 12.
[13] Le Monde Diplomatique, L’Atlas, February 2009, p. 183

Making the best of a bad situation in Guinea Bissau?

Waly Ndiaye

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54983

The assassinations of President João Bernardo Vieira and military chief General Batista Tagmé Na Wai, although regrettable and worthy of reproach, may be the final episode in the ‘battle of the Mandjua’ that has raged since June 1998, (on the eve of the publication of a report by the ‘independent commission’ set up to investigate arms trafficking between the Guinea-Bissau armed forces and the Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de Casamance (MDFC)). Overall this conflict has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of fighters, as well as the murders of Brigadier Ansumana Mané, General Verissimo Correi Seabra and, in January 2007,‘Commodore’ Lamine Sanha, a former navy chief.

Without going into in an exhaustive analysis of the underlying causes of the country’s chronic political instability, it is important to note that the history of Guinea-Bissau has been dominated by a fratricidal war within the ruling classes from diverse ethnic groups. These groups have, since independence in 1974, dominated the armed forces, the ruling party politburo, and the government of the new republic.

The purges of 14 November 1980 and 17 October 1986 were the efforts by one group of elites to impose a new kind of leadership and a modern state, while at the same time attempting to impose the ‘Mandjuadade’ form of equality.[2] It is important to note that the bloody events of 17 March 1993, 7 June 1998, 20 November 2000, 14 September 2003, 6 October 2004, and 4 January 2007 were all precipitated by the inability of the PAIGC (Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) to come to terms with the new democratic dispensation and the subsequent regression to ethnicity-based politics.

The complex nature of relations between the various ethnic groups, political parties and military factions, especially in the wake of the June 1998 war, has made the country ungovernable and attracted intense international attention. Adding to this complexity is the recent establishment of Colombian and Mexican cocaine cartels.

Without a doubt, the death of these two key political leaders is a major blow. However, it offers a unique opportunity to rebuild a modern state from the smouldering and bloody ruins of what has been nothing but a quasi-state, held together by fragile compromises and plagued by ethnic and racial mistrust and hatred, and violence since the overthrow of Luiz Cabral in 1980.

THE RECENT ASSASSINATIONS IN CONTEXT

1) Political and institutional developments and uncertainties[4]

A few weeks ago, on 7 January 2009 a new government under Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior came to power following parliamentary elections won by the PAIGC. It was during this time that an attack was launched on the residence of Nino Vieira (23 November 2008). Suspicion fell heavily on former navy Chief Amerigo Bubo Na Tchutu (whose name has, rightly or wrongly, been regularly associated with cocaine trafficking). He remains holed up in Banjul where he fled after being placed under house arrest following the failed coup d’état of August 2008.

A few days after the 23 November attack on the Vieira’s residence, General Tagmé claimed that a ‘militia’ in the form of the presidential guard had targeted him. This gave him the opportunity to disarm this presidential guard, thankfully without resorting to violence.

Although it holds a majority of 67 out of 100 seat in the National Assembly, the PAIGC seemed to have problems getting its development plans through parliament, until 26 February 2009.

Raimundo Parreira, the constitutional successor to Vieira (sworn in despite the boycotting of the ceremony by PRS officials), was elected by 60 votes to 37 for Helder Proença (a member of the PAIGC Politburo and close ally of the late president and bitter rival of the current prime minister). Parreira had been the defence minister in the Aristides Gomes government, set up shortly after the election of independent candidate Nino Vieira as president in June 2005. This government was subsequently dissolved in March 2007 under the transient National Stability Accord signed by the PAIGC, the PRS (Party for Social Renewal) and the PUSD (United Social Democratic Party).

The new government started off on the right track, in particular with regard to the finance minister’s organisation of the payment of salary arrears. This inspired public confidence, despite the PAIGC's internal squabbles, the extremist stance of the PRS, and a string of other problems, including a general lack of openness, an excessive number of members and the rehabilitation of controversial individuals.

To the keen observer, the past three years have been marked by negative undercurrents within the two major parties, the PAIGC and the PRS. These have frequently taken the form of adversarial positions and institutional sabotage, but also of power disputes between small renegade factions. These disputes led certain militant factions of the PRS to seek legal recourse in May 2007 to set aside the party’s congress resolutions. These were clearly signs that internal democratic processes were under siege.

The challenge of stabilising Guinea-Bissau’s political terrain is evident in the position of the PRS (28 of whose MPs boycotted the presidential inauguration, and whose leader Kumba Yala declared that he deserved leadership as the last democratically elected president), and in the lack of discipline within the PAIGC, where three top members all wanted to lead parliament.

2) Deplorable interpersonal relationships have made the country ‘ungovernable’

The well-known mutual hatred between the late President Viera and the current Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior has played itself out in parliament, with alliances forming between PRS MPs and the PAIGC dissidents, thus complicating governance. Nino Vieira claimed that while he was in exile, his property was appropriated by Gomes Junior.

The differences were so bad that at one point Gomes Junior publicly accused Vieira of having ordered the assassination of Lamine Sanha. This resulted in an arrest warrant for Gomes that forced him to seek refuge at the UN offices in Bissau. It was at this point that the president publicly accused Gomes of ‘financial treachery’.

The differences between the late president and the head of the military seem too complex to understand from the outside. The following facts may however cast some light on the matter. Firstly, General Tagmé was one of the most affected by the purge of 1986 by Nino Vieira following an alleged coup plot by the Balante, Guinea’s largest ethnic group.

Secondly, Nino Vieira returned to power in 2005, thanks in a large part to Tagmé, a former member of the junta that removed him from power in the first place following the war of June 1998. It was Tagmé who, together with Helder Proença, visited him secretly in Conakry where he spent his exile and prepared his return to Bissau. Tagmé also arranged for a safe landing in the Bissau football stadium, where he declared his candidacy for the 2005 election.

During Nino’s tragically-ended tenure, military chief General Tagmé (following the assassination of Verissimo Correia) declared to everyone that there would never be a coup d’état in Guinea under him, while nonetheless continuing to hamstring efforts to reform the security sector and interfering with the functioning of the executive and the judiciary.

Relations between Carlos Gomes Junior and the late Tagmé, which had never been great, worsened significantly when the latter orchestrated the return of Nino. This was in spite of bitter opposition from the former, who was already prime minister of the PAIGC government following parliamentary elections held in 2004 after the military removal of Kumba Yala and the subsequent transition period.

How was it that a military chief could oppose the will and determination of the prime minister despite the weakness of Guinea-Bissau’s institutions? Tagmé was appointed military chief after the assassination of general Verissimo Correia Seabra (an ethnic Pepel and the vanquisher of Kumba Yala, a Balante president), under the transitional government of Enrique Rosa, whose term was extended through to the presidential elections in 2005. Given his weak parliamentary position, Carlos Gomes found himself forced to accept Tagmé’s appointment. Gomes’s party held only 45 seats, while the PRS of Kumba Yala (a Balante, like Tagmé) held 35 seats. In addition, Tagmé’s appointment was endorsed by the chiefs of staff.

3) The intricate and nebulous web of ethnicity politics and the military

Among the political elites of the country, only a small minority would admit that ethnicity underpins interactions between political parties and branches of the military, as well as the openly racist positions held by politicians towards their ‘mixed’ compatriots. The majority of the population firmly believes however that these ethnic and racist positions are the cause of the chronic frailty of the state institutions.

On this note, the following considerations may clarify the difficulties that Guinea-Bissau faces.

After the liberation struggle the same comrades occupied the ruling party central committee, the top military posts and the government. Besides that, the electoral law granted the vote to members of the armed forces. In a context characterised by an ethnic imbalance within the armed forces, especially at the officer level, this law opened the door to an ‘ethnicisation’ of politics and an intertwining of politics and the military.

It thus comes as no surprise that the Balante, who form the bulk of the upper echelons of the military, rallied behind the PRS, a party formed in 1992 and whose leader Kumba Yala in turn built strategic alliances with the military under erstwhile chief Tagmé. The Balante have historically felt marginalised by the Portuguese colonial education system, and were subsequently persecuted under the Nino dictatorship during which their few elites were eliminated (in 1986, following the Paolo Correia ‘plot’).

Although he was removed from power in October 2003, Kumba Yala remained politically formidable, having forged an alliance with elites from the northern Foulah ethnic group (the second largest in the country). He retained 35 seats in the post-transition national assembly (which constituted a majority, even after the exclusion of 21 MPs loyal to Nino), he came third in the first round of the 2005 presidential election (returning from two years of exile in Morocco), and he was decisive in the defeat of Malam Baci Sanha (the PAIGC candidate) by independent candidate Joaõ Bernardo Vieira, whom the PRS had vigorously backed in the second round.

The 1998 war pitted troops loyal to Vieira against a junta composed of Balante, Mandingo and Fulah. This made it imperative for anyone aspiring to leadership to either form an alliance or seek protection from one faction or the other.

Given the traditional nature of Guinea-Bissauan society, any alliance was bound to take on an ethnic character.

Following the end of the June 1998 war, mutual suspicion remained between the loyalists and the members of the junta, despite numerous reconciliation efforts.

Today, certain political stances adopted, the conflictual nature of relations between the country’s major institutions and the inability to engage in any sincere collaboration by elements of the same sector (as in the case of the security cluster, where, for instance the police crack unit viciously cracked down on the judicial unit to avenge one of their own, just last year), is all due to the ethnic, political and military cleavages that exist.

4) The impact of the drug trade on institutional functions

It has become clear that the Colombian and Mexican cartels have set up an operations hub in Guinea-Bissau and are using their connections within the armed forces to benefit from the situation on the ground. Without delving into the drug networks and connections to the political elites, suffice it to say that a number of recent events point to the potential damage these nefarious networks can cause to the political and institutional system of the country.

In June 2008, an aircraft landed at Osvaldo Viera in Bissau, ostensibly to deliver a donation of medicine for the military. The aircraft was impounded and the pilot was arrested. The pilot later ‘escaped’ from his lawyer, who was accompanying him from one office to another. All the while, the chief prosecutor had received an arrest warrant from the pilot’s home country and was awaiting instructions from the head office.

Stories about tonnes of cocaine impounded that then ‘disappeared’ often fill the local press.

Whereas two former Prime Ministers Aristide Gomes and Martinho Ndafa Cabi were always quick to vaunt their achievements in the fight against drug trafficking, curiously President Nino Vieira rarely spoke out on this.

A little more than a week before the tragic events of 20 February and speaking at a passing out parade for graduates of the Portuguese High Institute for Judiciary Police and Criminal Science, Prime Minister Gomes Junior stated that the ‘war against drugs must become a key national objective’ within a very specific context.

In June 2008, there were robust exchanges around this time between the prime minister and the office of the public prosecutor following the former’s recommendation to set up an inter-ministerial commission to re-examine the case of the two planes suspected to have been carrying drugs; the public prosecutor decided to close both cases under the pretext of a lapsed statute of limitations.

5) Challenges to re-establishing the state

There are many reasons to view the two assassinations as an extended final episode of the June 1998 war. One would equally be inclined to surmise that the loyalists emerged victorious, especially if one was fortunate, as I was, to have seen one of the rare photographs depicting the key players in the tragedy that has played out in Guinea-Bissau since 1998.

This particular photograph was shown to me by a young muslim Fulah warrant officer at the Djalicunda Centre in the Oio region, who seemed sympathetic to the junta. On the yellowing photograph she had placed crosses over the images of those who had been killed: a red cross over the face of Ansumana Mané, another over the heart of Verissimo Correia Sabra, and yet another one over the Lamine Sanha’s stomach. I can only imagine that she has since placed two final crosses (over which body part, alas, I cannot guess) on Tagmé and Nino.

Does the assassination of the final two thus mean an end to the war, given that there are no more ‘warlords’? And why shouldn’t the end of the war signal the rebirth of a modern and democratic Guinea-Bissau?

In our view, there are two key characteristics of Guinea-Bissau’s political terrain that make it particular difficult to analyse, let alone amenable to any kind of prediction.

Firstly, it is practically impossible to grasp the precarious interplay between ethnicity, political and military interests from the outside. It is this ambiguity that largely explains the chronic fragility of the state, whereby the different institutions are mismanaged and run by partisan individuals who are appointed based on ethnic and military considerations.

There is also a marked lack of public confidence in the political actors (even among members of the same party, ethnic group, or military faction). This is due to the long history of political treachery and vendettas in the country. This has made it very difficult for any political actor to rally support for the public good.

Civil society is also weak because its leaders are not viewed as being impartial (in an environment characterised by a small and sharply divided population). This, coupled with an unprofessional public service, leaves very little hope for the country’s future.

In spite of all of this, there have been certain positive developments within the political parties, and some senior members of the military have sought to distance themselves from political intrigues. I convened a workshop in August 2008, focusing on improving collaboration within the security cluster. The international community has also shown an eagerness to bolster poverty alleviation and the democratisation process, giving us hope that it will still be possible to save Guinea-Bissau.

In our view, it is possible to transform Guinea-Bissau into a peaceful, prosperous and democratic country, provided that concrete initiatives are implemented in the following ways:

1) Firm commitment and support for the transition leading up to the next presidential election, in terms of consultation, resources and communication
2) Commitment by political parties, the armed forces and civil society to support the current reform process
3) Establishment of an international commission of inquiry whose findings will be made available to the country’s authorities to aid in the process of national reconciliation. Certain political actors are opposed to this, citing issues of national sovereignty.
4) Establishment of a ‘peace building programme’ to begin at the end of the transition period, aimed at reforming the security and justice sectors. It is imperative that the nation’s leaders themselves drive this process.
5) Incorporation of capacity-building, post-conflict transformation and consolidation of democracy within political parties, all as part of the peace building programme. This would go a long way in changing the attitudes and behaviour of the political actors, building a shared vision, and deconstructing the ethnic–political–military complex.
6) Greater openness of the executive to alternative political views, and an accelerated process of administrative decentralisation
7) Bolstering the state with the resources to pay civil service salaries and jump-start the education and health sectors
8) Deep reflection on the process and modalities of national reconciliation, in order to end the political vendetta that has plagued the country since the assassination of Amílcar Cabral in 1973
9) Exploring the possibility of revising the constitution and the electoral laws through a wide consultation with diverse groups.[5] It would be important to consider the establishment of a second house of parliament, or an economic and social council, where traditional leaders would be represented.
10) Solid international support for the war against drug trafficking and the proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW).

We are under no illusion that these recommendations alone will be enough to save Guinea-Bissau. However, we feel that taking these steps would be far less costly in human and material terms than falling under a UN mandate, which remains an option if violence and political disorder persist and drug traffickers strengthen their hold on the country.

* Waly Ndiaye is director of programmes at the Gorée Institute. Translated from French by Josh Ogada.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

NOTES

[1] In an article appearing in Soronda (Special Edition, 7 June), December 2000, entitled ‘The war of the Mandjua: Crisis of governance and the failure of a resolution model’, Fafali Koudawo expalians that the Creole term ‘mandjua’ refers to a traditional age-set system that promotes equality and mutual recognition among members of the same age-set.
[2] ‘Mandjuadade’ is a category of the age-set system
[3] There are several key dates that endure in the country’s memory, each corresponding to a period of upheaval that claimed lives, left widows and orphans, and created tensions between different ethnic groups, military factions. These upheavals divided the leaders and the people, destroying the trust built since the wars of liberation and untouched even by the stunted nation-building project, just as in other parts of Africa.
[4] In this paper, we deliberately choose not to talk about the ‘hunt’ for drug-traffickers taking place in Guinea-Conakry, or the relations between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.
[5] See the work of Delfim da Silva ‘Guiné-Bissau: Paginas de historia politica, rumos da democracia’, September 2003 par, Firkidja Editora(397p.)

Guinea-Bissau: Perspectives on a crisis

Carlos Cardoso

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54979

cc Jim FrazierIn an interview with Pambazuka News, CODESRIA researcher Carlos Cardoso analyses events leading up to the assassinations of both Guinea-Bissau’s military chief General Tagme Na Wai and President Nino Vieira within hours of each other on 1 March, and charts out his thoughts on what lies ahead for the country.

On 1 March 2008, a bomb exploded at the army headquarters in Bissau, killing military chief General Tagme Na Wai. The conflict between the general and President Nino Vieira had at this point reached its apogee. A few hours later, assailants as yet unidentified, but doubtless members of the security forces, assassinated Vieira at his residence. With the subsequent power vacuum, Guinea-Bissau is living through the bloody epilogue of a conflict between two men that has dominated the country’s political life. CODESRIA researcher Carlos Cardoso analyses the events leading up to this dramatic end and charts out what lies ahead for the country.

Pambazuka News: The political and institutional crisis engulfing Guinea-Bissau has long revolved around the rivalry between President Nino Vieira and the military chief Tagme Na Wai. Does their simultaneous and violent death present a chance at stability for the country?

Carlos Cardoso: I don’t think we should overestimate the impact of the recent event. Other factors must come into play for the political space to change. Bad governance generally afflicts Guinea, but needless to say, the elimination of Na Wai and Vieira will lead to dramatic changes given that they had an enormous influence on political and military life. It is also important to point out that these two men were the embodiment of the intractable contradictions that have characterised the instability in Guinea-Bissau.

Pambazuka News: What was the nature of their conflict?

Carlos Cardoso: This goes back a long time. Tagme Na Wai and Nino Vieira share a long history in the politics of Guinea-Bissau, but also personal ties dating back to the liberation struggle. One can speak of rivalry between two men who distinguished themselves as soldiers. In spite of the personality and stature of men like Amílcar Cabral and others at the forefront of the liberation struggle, Nino was able to build up his own personality cult. Along with others like Tagme Na Wai, these personalities grew over the course of time.

Relations worsened during the 1985 coup d'état against Nino, when Tagme Na Wai was fingered as one of the key role players.[1] Again, during the 1998 rebellion, Tagme Na Wai sided with Ansumana Mané.[2]

In spite of all of this, when Tagme Na Wai was appointed military chief [following the assassination of General Verissimo Correia Seabra in 2004] and Nino Vieira was elected president [in 2005], the two men maintained a fractious relationship. Each knew that he could not stand, but also could not do away with the other. There were two centres of power; one political, the other military. These relations were so intricate that the politics of Guinea-Bissau was plagued with strong interference by the armed forces as a result.

This said, it is true that the deaths of these two men will change things in Guinea-Bissau, but to what extent, we are still not sure.

Pambazuka News: Why is it that 30 years after the liberation struggle, the army still holds such sway in political life?

Carlos Cardoso: This is in large part due to the violent heritage that characterises Guinea-Bissau’s society. This is particularly the case because after independence, the new government did not set in place mechanisms to redefine the role of the military in a civilian state. Furthermore, there was the tendency by political leaders to either claim or cling to power by co-opting the military. The military thus occupied a central role, whereby political differences were no longer settled peacefully, but with their involvement. Politicians were thus accustomed to using the military to their own ends.

This combination of factors has placed the military in a very influential political position.

Pambazuka News: Are there countervailing forces that can help Guinea-Bissau out of the current situation?

Carlos Cardoso: It is possible, but only if the politicians take account of the enormous responsibilities they have. For years, the need to reform the armed forces as a prerequisite for political stability has been discussed. The inherent obstacles do not necessarily mean it is altogether impossible. Everything hinges on political will. And I believe things will get easier, now that there is a new and focused generation, a generation who were not a part of the liberation struggle. In this generation, Guinea-Bissau has well trained cadres with a different understanding of politics, governance and civil order. They still have to contend with the old guard, but the change will happen. The change can start now, if the military is reformed into a modern institution that can rise above the challenges facing the country.

Pambazuka News: At the end of the 60-day transition period with Raimundo Pereira at the helm, elections are scheduled to take place. Do you think this will happen?

Carlos Cardoso: I had indeed foreseen a scenario where a transition period would take place in a power-vacuum. But again, I remain optimistic that the constitutional timeframe will be respected if the political will exists. Granted, there are structural deficiencies. Guinea-Bissau is practically bankrupt, with huge deficits, but in life, where the will to do right exists, financial means are not the sole determinant.

I am gratified that the prime minister reaffirmed plans to hold elections in the stipulated period. If the international community comes to the party with the necessary support, if ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) commits itself to the process, it can be achieved. I am however, under no illusion that, in a country with such structural and administrative problems, it will be smooth sailing. I just think that the challenges are surmountable, and everything else is open to conjecture.

Pambazuka News: If the elections do take place, do you foresee real political stability holding?

First and foremost, the current government elected in November 2008 must remain in place. If a dialogue takes place now with other political actors (this is necessary during the transition period), it will be possible to hold free and fair elections. I do not think the opposition is strong enough to mount an upheaval.

The November 2008 elections, in my opinion, demonstrated that the opposition had lost traction. And contrary to conventional logic, the PAIGC [African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau, the majority party] is likely to become even stronger following Vieira’s death, because he embodied the very contradictions that weakened his party, in particular, leadership differences between himself and Carlos Gomes Junior [the current prime minister]. With the demise of Vieira, it will be easier for the PAIGC to heal itself and govern the country with a stable parliamentary majority.

But I am basing this on the assumption that the PAIGC wins the upcoming elections. At the moment, we do not know who the candidates will be. If the eventual winner is not from the PAIGC, he will have problems governing. But then again, this depends on the personality of the winning candidate.

Pambazuka News: You have touched on the contradiction between the political and military spaces in explaining the power crisis in Guinea-Bissau. Are there, in your view, other factors contributing to the violence?

Carlos Cardoso: Indeed, there are many other factors. But I do not subscribe to the notion that Guineans are naturally violent, hence the violent culture. This kind of determinism is neither justified, nor justifiable. It is true that violence as means of resolving disputes has entrenched itself and become a political reality. One could also point to the culture of machismo that may have led to certain violent behaviour. But it is more a tradition of violence than a culture of violence.

Also, the majority Balante ethnic group have a warrior heritage, and played a major role in liberation struggle. In the estimation of some, the Balante, who Amílcar Cabral singled out as having been a significant force,[3] were never fully compensated for their part in the struggle. After independence, leadership and all its trappings went to the intelligentsia, consisting mainly of the ethnic Pepel. This in part explains the situation, but this is not enough to justify the labelling the society as violent.

Pambazuka News: Guinea-Bissau is currently seen as a narco-state. What impact has the drug trade played in the current violence?

Carlos Cardoso: It is indeed a key factor in the current crisis. Drug trafficking seems to involve the military. Given the ubiquity of the military in political life, anything that affects it, affects the state. Tagme Na Wai put on a public show of fighting the drug scourge. Nino Vieira, by contrast, was not as visible. It is possible that they had differences on this score.

All the same, Nino’s negative image came from the manner in which he returned from exile to contest the 2005 elections, and won. He arrived in Bissau by helicopter, even though the airspace was closed to him. This was a blatant challenge to the country’s laws. In the same way, drug traffickers seem to be able to land their small planes anywhere and leave undetected.

Pambazuka News: In Angola, the death of Jonas Savimbi was a major factor in the re-establishment of peace and political stability. Do you think the demise of Tagme Na Wai and Nino Vieira could have the same effect?

Carlos Cardoso: There are limits to this comparison. In Guinea-Bissau there was a political polarisation that translated into the personalisation of power by two individuals. And it was clear that each sought to eliminate the other from the public stage. In fact, Tagme is credited with stating that if he died in the morning, Nino would be buried in the evening. This was the prevailing situation in Guinea-Bissau. In Angola, the death of Savimbi weakened UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), while the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) still had dos Santos. In Guinea-Bissau, both protagonists are dead.

Furthermore, let us not assume that Angola’s problems went away with the death of Savimbi. The country continues to face serious problems linked to resource distribution, notably petroleum revenues. The stability of a state cannot be reduced to politics and the military.

* Philosopher and anthropologist Carlos Cardoso is a researcher and programme officer at CODESRIA. Translated from French by Josh Ogada
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

NOTES

[1] On assuming power in 1980 through a coup d’état that deposed first president Luis Cabral, Nino Vieira survived three coup attempts in 1983, 1985 and 1993 before being removed in 1999. Tagme was detained and subjected for a long time after the 1985 coup attempt.
[2] In 1998 an armed revolt led by military chief Ansumane Mané failed to remove Nino from power, thanks to the intervention of Senegalese troops.
[3] Amílcar Cabral, assassinated in 1973 by Portuguese forces, was the head of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau), that fought the liberation struggle leading to independence in 1974.

International law, torture and Britain’s gulag in Kenya

Nicole K. Parshall

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54962

© Magna VerseContrasting governments' public willingness to show revulsion to the practice of torture with their reluctance to offer redress for their own pasts, Nicole K. Parshall discusses the actions of the British colonial authorities during the suppression of the Mau Mau movement in 1950s Kenya. While acknowledging that the need for truth and reconciliation around state-perpetrated atrocities has seen increasing recognition in recent years around the world, Parshall argues that the reluctance of the UK government to face up to its past actions represents a clear example of not practising what you preach.

Acts of torture and mass brutality are not events new to the historic memory of the human race. The willingness of the international community to address such atrocities, perpetrated by or with the knowledge of states and state actors is however. In the current global climate, images, debates and high rhetoric, all centred on the subject of torture, have grown commonplace. And yet despite this, one cannot help but notice the uneasy footing on which the entire debate stands; the international community screams with abhorrence at the mention of torture, and yet, torture happens, often going unpunished. Individual states speak adamantly against the practice, and yet often do little when the issue arrives at their doorstep.

BRITISH HOUSE OF LORDS MOVING IN WRONG DIRECTION

The British House of Lords offers us an apt example. On 14 June 2006, the United Kingdom’s highest court decided a civil case, in which four British citizens sought redress for acts of torture committed upon them by actors of the Saudi Arabian government. In its decision, the House of Lords ruled that no such redress could be obtained through the British courts against a sovereign nation. The Lords weighed more heavily a state’s sovereign immunity than they did the international laws prohibiting torture, and which call for states to take punitive measures against those accused of such acts.

The ruling of the House of Lords would seem to come into direct contradiction with not only the growing international stance against torture, but also with past opinions of the House of Lords itself. While hearing a suit in 2005 that dealt with issues of torture, Lord Nicholls commented, ‘Torture is not acceptable. This is a bedrock moral principle in this country. For centuries, the common law has set its face against torture… Torture attracts universal condemnation.’ Lord Bingham in that same case stated, ‘The English common law has regarded torture and its fruits with abhorrence for over 500 years…’, and Lord Hoffman observed, ‘The use of torture is dishonourable. It corrupts and degrades the state which uses it and the legal system which accepts it.’

And so, the high rhetoric continues, though the willingness of states to take action against torture remains uncertain. Despite this however, strides have been made.

NUREMBERG AND BEYOND

The 1940s illuminated both the horrors of which the human race is capable, and the willingness of global society to address and condemn such incomprehensible acts. The Holocaust shocked the conscience of the world, and in its wake, the world sought to ensure that such horrors would never be repeated. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal that was created to try those individuals accused of what have come to be called ‘Crimes against Humanity’ and ‘War Crimes’ was the first court of its kind, hearing and sitting in judgment of those accused of ‘murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts.’

Since that time, the global community has acted in a mostly unified way to wholeheartedly condemn acts of torture, ill-treatment and offences constituting violations of international humanitarian law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950 and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1984 are but a few of the international instruments addressing these issues.

Furthermore, recognition of the need for truth and reconciliation following state-perpetrated atrocities, as well as reparations, has grown over the past decade. The International Criminal Tribunals of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, as well as the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, which sat in Japan, have all worked to strengthen the international community’s awareness of and willingness to make greater strides in dealing with issues of torture and mass brutality.

Despite movement in the right direction, starting with the Nuremberg trials and continuing with the growing number of tribunals convened in the last decade, individual states and the international community at large continue to foster a selective memory of past atrocities however. The brutal actions taken by the government of the United Kingdom in Kenya in the 1950s represent one such set of memories selected for erasure.

KENYAN STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

The 1950s ushered in a period that should be viewed with disgrace by the United Kingdom, and the world, as a systematic campaign of torture and brutality was carried out in colonial Kenya, coming on the heels of an international push to address such atrocities. The struggle for independence in Kenya – what came to be called the Mau Mau rebellion – was countered by the government of the United Kingdom with the plundering of ‘public and private property’, ‘devastation not justified by military necessity’, ‘crimes against humanity…including murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations before and during the war’, the ‘confiscation of property and legal discrimination’, as well as ‘concentration camps for the purpose of incarcerating and liquidating all political opposition’, all of which actions were enumerated as crimes in the indictments of German war criminals, which the government of the United Kingdom had helped to initiate only years earlier. The mass brutality that was wrought down on both civilians and military persons, both within and without the detention camps, is not a memory that can be erased from the minds of those who lived through it. Neither should it be erased from the collective memory of human history.

GROWING AWARENESS AND THE MAU MAU REPARATIONS SUIT

The atrocities committed on Kenyan soil by the British government have received new and renewed interest, as scholars have re-examined the history of Kenya’s struggle for independence. Caroline Elkins’s book, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, and David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire have shone new light on a period of British and Kenyan history that many would likely prefer to remain in the dark.

Survivors of British atrocities, together with The Mau Mau War Veterans Association and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), are fostering awareness and awakening the memory of British injustices through a different avenue. Together, these individuals and organisations are demanding reparations from the government of the United Kingdom for the torture suffered and the losses sustained at the hands of the British colonial empire. Individual survivors are coming together to file a class action suit in the British court system, seeking corrective justice.

While the international community is in fact opening its eyes to the importance of reparations for past injustices committed by or with the consent of states and state actors, the likelihood of success in the British courts is not certain. What is nearly certain is that the British government’s defence lawyers will try their best to have the case thrown out of the British court system altogether, claiming that the statute of limitations has tolled, or that the United Kingdom is the wrong venue in which to file suit. Failing those arguments, it cannot be doubted that the British will have an arsenal of others ready through which to attempt to deny wrongdoing and hence, liability.

It would appear, however, that the law is on the side of the victims seeking justice. By the time the British colonial government declared a state of emergency in 1952, the precepts of international humanitarian law had been laid. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, it was recognised under the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 that any belligerent party who violated the laws and customs of war would ‘be liable to pay compensation’ and be ‘responsible for all acts committed by persons forming part of its armed forces’. The crimes punished under the Nuremberg Charter were codified as such in numerous national and international laws following the Second World War, and the decades since have seen an expansion and strengthening of those laws. While the government of the United Kingdom will have to answer only to those laws that were in existence at the time of the atrocities, those laws were explicit and concrete.

Whether or not the Kenyan survivors of British brutality are successful in the legal arena is only one aspect of the achievement of reconciliation. Recognition of the atrocities perpetrated against the Kenyan people is essential.

As for the present and future standing of the doctrine of law addressing torture, and the willingness of national and international bodies to take affirmative action against torture and for its victims, the British House of Lords will likely be given another chance to demonstrate to the world that its declarations against torture are more than mere high rhetoric.

* Nicole Parshall is a law student at the Buffalo School of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is currently an intern at the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC).
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Kenyans due reparations for dispossession and disruption

Leigh Brownhill

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54968

cc WikimediaExploring the Mau Mau reparations case and Kenya’s subsequent decades-long struggle with the politicisation of land, Leigh Brownhill advocates the importance of social reparations and individual compensation for atrocities committed under British colonial policies, programmes, soldiers and settlers. British land reform policies implemented to punish the Mau Mau ultimately contributed to the impoverishment and social inequality of wide segments of Kenyan society. Although Brownhill believes that individual reparations for Mau Mau survivors and their families are necessary and appropriate – particularly with regard to Kenyan women continuing to carry the burden imposed by British counter-insurgency – she argues a more inclusive, social reparations-based approach will curb inequality in a way faithful to original Mau Mau principles.

The Mau Mau reparations case highlights both the atrocities suffered by Kenyans struggling for freedom in the 1950s and the long-lasting impact of the socio-economic structures that the British left firmly in place when they finally ceded control over the country in 1963. Of all who survived the atrocities meted out by British soldiers and their settler and Home Guard allies, women carried the heaviest burden. This is especially clear once we take into account the British policy of land privatisation. The White Highlands had been expropriated decades earlier, but the enclosure policy was implemented in the native reserves in earnest only in 1954. These enclosures dispossessed many Mau Mau men, and all women, by redrawing boundaries and redistributing properties. Grossly unequal distribution of land has amounted to collective punishment of the individuals who were divested of their interests in land, and all of their subsequent generations who have inherited the poverty that the British imposed in their anti-Mau Mau land policy.

Systematic murder, rape, torture, mutilation, forced confinement, forced labour, collective punishment, theft, destruction of property and mass incarceration were all used by colonial soldiers and civilians in the course of mounting a counter-insurgency war against the Mau Mau. To justify their actions at the time, the British called the Mau Mau terrorists. For the torturer, the term terrorist dehumanises the victims and legitimises any form of violence against them; it announces to members of the public that they should be grateful that someone is willing to exterminate the supposed terrorist threat against them. The use of the term also implied that anyone caught sympathising with or supporting the aims, goals, and objectives of the Mau Mau was liable to be deemed a terrorist too. By calling them terrorists, the colonial regime sought to silence questions about the legitimacy of the grievances of the Kenyan peoples and the illegitimacy of the colonial occupation, which the British maintained in Kenya by force of arms.

Kikuyu women, in particular, suffered all of the same injustices as their men-folk during the 1950s. In addition, women experienced forced marriages, rape-induced pregnancies, and the crushing of women’s customary controls over fertility, controls which were always tied up with women’s rights in land and were operable, only jointly, in common with others. Women across Kenya were excluded from land ownership despite being the main farmers. To this day, women comprise the majority of the landless in Kenya’s rural and urban areas. They are the majority among the very poor. They continue to carry the bulk of the burden imposed by British counter-insurgency policies and programmes. At the same time, they remain responsible for the subsistence and well-being of their families. Mau Mau women deserve special attention in the reparations case; in fact, an even more inclusive approach is critical.

For reparations to deliver justice, they must include social reparations that address the vast social problems rooted in the inequalities constructed during the colonial era. Alone, individual reparations – or payments to individual survivors and their families – are likely to exacerbate inequality and injustice because, by definition, only a limited number of survivors could be recognised, while the majority would be excluded. The example of the reparations paid in the landmines case offers a caution. Many of the Maasai and Samburu who received reparations in the form of individual compensation for deaths and injuries from British landmines were swindled by conmen, or otherwise lost the funds through speculation and outright binge-spending. A similar fate faced Canadian aboriginal people, who recently received individual reparations from the Canadian government for abuse suffered in church-affiliated residential schools. Worse, in the Canadian case, a number of recipients committed suicide because the reparations payments forced them to confront once again, in isolation, their memories and long-buried pain and suffering.

Another reason for including social reparations in this case, rather than individual reparations alone, concerns the very goals of the Mau Mau struggle. The militants of the Kenya Land Freedom Army and their wide network of supporters certainly did not fight solely for their own little piece of land, or their own individual rights. They fought for land for all, freedom for all and rights for all. If reparations for the wrongs committed against Kenyans are to recognise the spirit and intent of the freedom struggle, they should centre on the extension to all Kenyans of horizontal, participatory democracy and universal access to life’s necessities.

This brings us to a final reason that social reparations promise to deliver justice in ways that individual reparations alone cannot. It is not only Mau Mau fighters, but also much wider segments of Kenyan society who have suffered the impact of British colonial policies originally designed to punish the Mau Mau. Land privatisation led to high and growing levels of landlessness among almost all of Kenya’s ethnic groups, and contributed to Kenya being one of the most unequal societies in the world.

DISPOSSESSION AND SOCIAL DISRUPTION

The 1954 Swynnerton Plan for the Intensification of African Agriculture reorganised African land relations and farming toward exclusive, private male ownership, and export cash-crop production. The plan involved a massive redistribution of land, which was also used as collective punishment and furthered the colonial efforts to break up collectivity, unity and solidarity among the Kikuyu. The plan called for the ‘consolidation and enclosure’ of all land, and the boundaries of every farm in Central Province were redrawn between 1954 and 1960. The new owners were encouraged to fence in their property, and title deeds were issued only to male heads of households.

The plan entrenched the power of African loyalists, protected the settler political economy, and laid the foundation for the post-colonial integration of Kenya as a subordinate player in global agro-industrial markets.

The East Africa Royal Commission (EARC), a body set up in 1953 to consider how to ‘develop’ land in east Africa, originally promoted the establishment of a small landed class of African men. The commission sought to provide title deeds to a cluster of loyalist chiefs and traders in each ethnic area. The Kikuyu loyalists’ moderate demands for title deeds looked especially reasonable to the British, particularly at a time when the Mau Mau had taken up arms to abolish British private property in Kenya altogether. With the declaration of a state of emergency (basically martial law) in 1952, the colonial administration was keen to reward those few men who stayed loyal to the Queen. At the same time, the administration took off the gloves when dealing with those who threatened to topple the colony by equal force of arms. Ghai and McAuslan note that:

[B]y authorizing the round up and detention of thousands of Africans, mainly Kikuyu, by requiring those that remained in the Central and Rift Valley Provinces to be grouped together in fortified villages, by restricting movement, by forfeiting the land of those who joined the rebels, and by increasing the use of forced labor, all actions taken in order to meet the challenge of Mau Mau, the administration at the same time gave itself the opportunity of replanning the holdings, and remoulding the tenure system of much of Central Province on a scale which could not have been, indeed was not by the EARC, envisaged for in normal conditions (Ghai and McAuslan 1970, p. 117).

Ruthenberg also recognised that emergency powers made it easier for the British to enforce policies that the people opposed. He noted that colonialists in Kenya ‘no longer feared to push aside traditional customs. The British were – at least in Central Province – in a position of absolute authority and thus able to carry out and control development measures with hardly anybody in a position to object’ (Ruthenberg 1966, p. 9).

The British government supported the Swynnerton Plan with a £5 million fund. The changes the plan effected in the reserves included the loss of customary land rights of the ahoi (tenants), and the creation of landlessness and all forms of insecurity amongst women and poor men. This result was expected by Swynnerton himself, who saw landlessness and social inequality as a normal part of the ‘modernisation’ process. The plan’s focus on cash cropping led to a flight from food production in the reserves. By the mid-1960s, food shortages and hunger resulted from this overemphasis on cash crops. This trend worsened over the years of neoliberal structural adjustment programmes and reached disastrous proportions most recently with the 2008 and 2009 global financial meltdown.

The European settler community supported the Swynnerton Plan because it protected the colonial economy. They hoped that ‘the development of the vast potential of the Non-Scheduled areas [native reserves] would lessen the desire for land in the Scheduled areas [White Highlands] and would thus give long-term stability to the large farm economy’ (Ruthenberg 1966, p. 14). Consistent with the policies of the colonial administration throughout its years in Kenya, the Swynnerton Plan disrupted Africans’ subsistence political economies in order to better secure the property rights and commodity production regime of Europeans.

Okoth-Ogendo argued that the land reform program began as a ‘counter-revolutionary measure’ of rewarding Home Guards and punishing Mau Mau. It soon took on ‘a broader political objective, i.e. the creation of a stable peasantry’ which could quiet the general clamour for land and produce high value crops for export (Okoth-Ogendo 1978, p. 163). Okoth-Ogendo spells out some of the consequences of the land reform process carried out in Kikuyuland in the 1950s and in other areas of the country throughout the 1960s:

The very narrow view taken on land rights in the statutes made it virtually impossible to bring to the register all the multiple rights claimable under customary law. In almost all communities public grazing lands disappeared as people moved in to claim every bit of land under the rubric of cultivation… Those who were most directly affected were people such as women and children, both of whom had actual or potential rights of access to the use of the land, but were without the power of ultimate control over it (Okoth-Ogendo 1978, p. 177–178).

Emergency-era land consolidation policy negatively impacted the subsistence options of hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu for generations to come. Land consolidation was carried out in the reserves of other ethnic groups in the 1960s. As the cash economy could not possibly employ or sustain all of those made landless during the land privatisation exercise, a general crisis of subsistence was set in motion. This crisis is evident in the 21st century in the growing numbers of malnourished Kenyans, falling life expectancy rates, and the unhealthy conditions prevailing in both city slums and many rural villages.

Given the upsurge of violent politics in Kenya leading up to and following the 2007 general election, we can see that it is not only the landless who have inherited the strange fruits of the land policy that the British used to fight Mau Mau. Representing a key legacy of the Swynnerton land policy, the independent Kenyan state has found itself obliged to use large amounts of force against dispossessed people – some of whom actively resist their utter exclusion from any legal means of livelihood – in order to maintain a grossly unequal distribution of land. Kenyan statesmen have inherited the British colonial administration’s disrespect for human rights. Philip Alston’s report confirms this.

Reparations can go farther than compensating individuals. They can also rebuild community relations between women and men, and among ethnicities. Social reparations are due to the whole of the Kenyan people for the damage to social relations of trust, solidarity, and mutual care that resulted from the land privatisation policy the British imposed in the native reserves under a state of emergency. Generations suffered direct and injurious losses to their life possibilities and well-being when their fore-parents were dispossessed. Social reparations could be delivered in kind, in the shape of water systems, micro-power generation, housing, land for small-scale and cooperative farming, free schools, clinics, sports facilities and other shared, common amenities. The prominence of women’s groups in Kenya, focusing on environmental, economic and social reconstruction, and more recently on peace-building and conflict resolution, suggests that channels already exist for social reparations to be managed and disseminated fairly in a bottom-up manner likely to evince the confidence of governments and community members.

If both individual and social reparations are pursued simultaneously, reparations can work to mend past harms and contribute to rebuilding current social ruptures. Individual reparations alone may exacerbate inequalities by excluding the majority from recognition and compensation. On their own, individual reparations might also violate the intent of the Mau Mau freedom fighters, which was to obtain ‘land for all’, not special recognition for the few. Finally, the long-term negative impacts of the land privatisation policy pushed during the emergency (especially in the form of landlessness and impoverishment) have been felt by almost all Kenyans. Whether called ‘willing seller willing buyer’, a land market, land grabbing, or politically motivated ‘ethnic clashes’, the politics of Kenya have for decades revolved around this burning question of land. Land policy devised by the British to subjugate Kenyans to a world commodity market, and imposed upon them at the point of a gun in the 1950s, continues to define relations of ownership and dispossession in the 21st century. Perhaps by recognising and repairing the lingering effects of these past injustices, including homelessness, landlessness, and hunger, some of the most serious threats to Kenyans’ collective well-being can simultaneously be addressed.

* Leigh Brownhill is a writer, editor and researcher interested in social movements, feminism, and the political economies of food and energy in a global context, with particular reference to the African continent.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

REFERENCES

Ghai, Y.P. and McAuslan, J.P.W.B. (1970) Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the Legal Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present, Nairobi, Oxford University Press
Okoth-Ogendo, H.W.O. (1978) ‘The Changing System of Land Tenure and the Rights of Women’, in Okeyo, A.P., et al (eds), The Participation of Women in Kenya Society, Nairobi, Kenya Literature Bureau
Ruthenberg, H. (1966) African Agricultural Production Development Policy in Kenya, 1952-1965, Berlin, Springer-Verlag

Pope’s comments on condoms are wrong and irresponsible

Nathan Geffen and Rebecca Hodes

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54977

cc flickr.comFollowing the Pope’s discouraging comments in Cameroon over the use of condoms in relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Nathan Geffen and Rebecca Hodes of Treatment Action Campaign charge that such papal views are misguided and fly in the face of evidence around the efficacy of both condom use and sex education for adolescents.

On Tuesday 17 March, Pope Benedict XVI visited Cameroon and told reporters, ‘You can’t resolve [AIDS] with condoms… On the contrary, it increases the problem.’ (Source: CNN)

The Pope’s comments are irresponsible. The evidence that consistent condom use is effective at reducing the risk of HIV transmission is incontrovertible. We’ve reprint the abstract of a scientific meeting that analysed 138 peer-reviewed articles to determine the effectiveness of condoms at reducing the risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV. A key finding of the meeting was that the results of ‘longitudinal studies of the sexual partners of HIV-infected persons indicate that consistent condom use reduces the risk of HIV/AIDS transmission by approximately 85%.’

The evidence is considerable that abstinence-only programmes, apparently favoured by the Pope, are ineffective. The AIDS Research Institute of the University of California, San Francisco, published a monograph in March 2002 that states:

An assessment of the peer-reviewed, published research reveals no evidence that abstinence-only programs delay sexual initiation or reduce STIs or pregnancy. By contrast, credible research clearly demonstrates that some comprehensive sex education, or ‘abstinence-plus’, programs can achieve positive behavioral changes among young people and reduce STIs, and that these programs do not encourage young people to initiate sexual activity earlier or have more sexual partners.

The evidence shows that it is important to distribute condoms and that it is also important to provide sex education to adolescents, including accurate information on how to use condoms.

In Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists distribute over 500,000 condoms every month. A dedicated Khayelitsha activist is nicknamed the ‘Condom King’. A study conducted by Dr Virginia Azevado proved that scaling-up the distribution of condoms to over a million a month in Khayelitsha resulted in a remarkable 50 per cent decline in STI incidence between 2004 and 2007.[1] This is further evidence of the efficacy of condoms as a means of preventing STI infection in poor, African communities.

Preaching abstinence to many communities in Africa is alienating and irrelevant. Many sexual encounters in marginal communities with high rates of HIV infection are coercive or transactional. In contexts in which gender inequality is rife, to instruct women to abstain from sex or to remain faithful to only one partner demonstrates an ignorance of their sexual realities.

The South African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) is a large provider of HIV services in South Africa, including antiretroviral treatment. It is concerning that the views of the leader of the Catholic Church are incongruent with the good work being done by the SACBC.

* Nathan Geffen and Rebecca Hodes are with South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

REFERENCES

[1] V. Azevedo, ‘Scaling-up Male Condom Distribution in Cape Town Metro Region’, poster presented at a Department of Health Conference in Johannesburg, 2009.

Bashir warrant won’t help resolve Sudan crisis

Alex de Waal

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54975

cc WikimediaThe International Criminal Court’s (ICC) issue of an arrest warrant against President Omar al-Bashir is a gamble with the future of Sudan, says Alex de Waal. De Waal cautions that with this warrant, the ICC – with its objective of representing principles upon which no compromise is possible – threatens to unravel eight years of efforts to accommodate diverse and distrustful people, all with the capacity to return Sudan to war. De Waal argues that there is little evidence for the effectiveness of arrest warrants in triggering regime change, and notes that since Bashir is not a one-man dictatorship, replacing him with one of his colleagues would not represent democratic transformation for the country.

The die is cast. Sudan has entered uncharted waters as a result of the ICC (International Criminal Court) arrest warrant against President Omar al-Bashir. And indeed it is a nothing less than roll of the dice, a gamble with unknown consequences. Yesterday marks a turning point. We cannot say for sure in which direction Sudan will turn but there are many reasons to be fearful.

Conflict resolution is in part an exercise in reducing uncertainty, bringing former enemies together, and finding a solution that everyone can live with. For the last eight years, a great deal of effort by Sudanese and their international partners has gone into trying to accommodate diverse and distrustful people, all of whom have the capability to bring the country back into the abyss of war and destruction, within a common agenda of making Sudan function. Incentives, sanctions and pressure were all part of the package. But key to success was a shared vision, often blurry but nonetheless real, that solving the Sudanese problem was a common national challenge and that all without exception have a place in the new Sudan which arises from this effort.

The ICC is the reverse, a human rights absolutism that demands that some people be ruled out entirely. The ICC pretends to be outside politics, representing principles on which no compromise is possible. The key word is ‘pretence’, to paraphrase David Kennedy: it is a nice fiction for the human rights community to believe that it is ‘speaking truth to power’ and not actually exercising power. The ICC arrest warrant is a real decision with real consequences in terms of lives saved and lost and the political life of a nation.

I for one cannot see a political way out of this mess. The International Crisis Group (ICG) writes that ‘the NCP (National Congress Party) is likely to look for a way out of a situation, by changing its policies or leadership. To succeed, it will need to change both.’ This is groping in the dark. What is ICG actually advocating here? It seems to me that it is calling for a coup. An internal coup is possible though unlikely and not, to my mind, a solution.

Since the issuing of the warrant, everything that any commentator or expert thinks he or she knew with confidence about Sudan has become moot. Wishful thinking has taken the place of analysis. Nick Kristof wrote that fears of aid agency expulsion were ‘overblown’. He got it wrong. Many among the advocacy groups in Washington, DC, see this as an opportunity for leverage, a chance for peace. I fear not; the ICC is a terribly bad instrument of pressure, because a) the pressure can never be removed and b) pressure only works if the end point to which the pressure is applied can be accepted by the party being pressured. The ICC indictment meets neither of these criteria.

The examples of the arrest warrants against Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia are routinely held up to demonstrate that good outcomes can prevail against sceptics such as myself. I don’t believe it. Milosevic was in the process of losing a war against NATO and Taylor was in the process of being eased out of power (with a promise of safe asylum). The one international policy towards Sudan that has really worked – the CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement) – is focused on a negotiated transition. Milosevic and Taylor ran one-man dictatorships which crumbled when they were removed. Bashir is not a one-man dictatorship, on the contrary he has been overshadowed by his lieutenants for most of the last 20 years, so the idea that his replacement by one of his colleagues would represent a democratic transformation is not well-founded. The precedent of Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda is more pertinent. The ICC arrest warrant against Kony initially galvanised the peace process, but when Kony realised the warrant could never be lifted it became an obstacle to an agreement. Ugandans who initially celebrated the ICC have become disillusioned.

The international community is playing its second highest card by demanding an arrest warrant (the highest card would be invading the country). That card is a dud. The Sudanese government will ignore it and the leverage that the internationals possessed is shrinking fast. I suspect that we will look back on the last few years as a time when things worked as well as they ever did in contemporary Sudan, when the CPA was implemented as well as could be expected, when death rates in Darfur fell from levels of famine and war to just 150 per month, when there were numerous opportunities for international engagement in moving things forward, slowly and imperfectly, but nonetheless forward.

Perhaps it will revert to this after a hiatus. Perhaps, with a wave of a magic wand, all of peace, justice and democracy will be realised in an instant. Possibly, some unexpected benefit will arise. Most likely, not. Yesterday was a sad day for Sudan.

* Alex de Waal is the director of Justice Africa. This article was posted at www.justiceafrica.org by Alex de Waal as part of the ‘Making Sense of Darfur’ blog.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Finding justice in a power-asymmetrical world

Vikas Nath

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54976

cc WikimediaA just world is a noble goal, but in a ‘power-asymmetrical’ world in which richer nations mete out inappropriate measures for developing countries – from sanctions to arrest warrants – international rather than home-grown attempts to deliver justice can themselves easily become unjust, cautions Vikas Nath. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) recent issue of an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, for example, is widely seen across the African Union as likely to inflame rather than resolve the Darfur conflict. Nath underlines that each of the existing 13 arrest warrants issued by the ICC have been solely for citizens of four African countries, despite the perpetrating of crimes against humanity in Iraq, Gaza, Colombia and the Caucasus region, and concludes that solutions native to the African continent represent a far more appropriate means of resolving conflict.

We do not live in a just world. Delivering justice to those who are repressed and have no voice is a noble goal. It is only when justice starts to become a political tool that things start to become nebulous. And the act of delivering justice itself becomes unjust when it is not immune to power asymmetries and is only used against weaker parties.

We are increasingly witnessing this trend where justice is becoming subservient to a power-asymmetric world in which rich and powerful developed countries have many more possibilities for wielding the tool of justice than poorer and weaker developing countries. For one, developing countries are not able to put economic sanctions on developed countries when the latter do not meet their binding commitments, on climate change or trade issues, say. Developing countries, however, have on several occasions been victims of economic and political sanctions slapped onto them by developed countries.

Another case in point is the recently issued arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Omar al-Bashir, the sitting president of the largest country in the African continent, Sudan. The International Criminal Court, which is not a part of the United Nations, has issued warrants against 13 people so far, all of whom are either from Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR) or Sudan.

It was in 1998 that 120 countries adopted the Rome Statute with the idea of establishing an international court to judge genocides, crimes against humanity and war crimes happening anywhere in the world. Four years later, the ICC became operational in The Hague. One hundred and eight countries are currently party to the Rome Statute, including roughly half the countries in Africa.

Significantly, within a month of the ICC’s becoming operational, in August 2002 the United States passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA), also known as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, which protects US government officials from criminal prosecution by any international criminal court to which the US is not party. It authorises the US president to use all possible means to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained by, or at the request of, the International Criminal Court. It then negotiated the ‘Article 98’ bilateral-immunity agreements with almost 100 countries to further protect US citizens from facing trial at the ICC, threatening the suspension of military assistance and US Economic Support Fund (ESF) aid to countries which do not sign these agreements.

This has rendered the US above the law and beyond the reach of international justice, giving them such rights as Europeans were once given under the ‘unequal treaties’ with various developing countries.

A legitimate question to be asked – and that is being asked by some Africans – defies answer: Why is the ICC focusing mostly on African leaders and African warlords? Several groups and countries, including the African Union (AU), the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and China have expressed strong disappointment over the arrest warrant issued by the ICC.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference, headquartered in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, has strongly rejected this move and called it void of sound reasoning. The secretary general of this 56-member body, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, has rejected the kind of selectivity and double standards applied by the international community in dealing with issues of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which directly affect the credibility of the international legal system.

The quest for justice is important. But it is equally important that the quest for justice is not pursued in a manner that impedes or jeopardises the promotion of peace. Peace takes precedence over justice. It was the objective of ensuring peace that led to the creation of the United Nations, and its preamble clearly states that the United Nations was founded to prevent and resolve international conflicts and help build a culture of peace in the world.

‘The African Union’s position is that we support the fight against impunity, we cannot let crime perpetrators go unpunished’, said AU commission chairman Jean Ping. ‘But we say that peace and justice should not collide, that the need for justice should not override the need for peace.’

Africa is being selectively targeted. What we see is that international justice seems to be applying its fight against impunity only to Africa, as if nothing were happening elsewhere, in Iraq, Gaza, Colombia or in the Caucasus region.

‘The situation [in Sudan] is very serious and very dangerous. At the same time we are not convinced that the decision taken, or the steps taken, within the criminal court have been well considered. That is why we need to consult and take a collective stand in cooperation with the African Union and in consultation with the United Nations’, said Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, at a press conference after the emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on 4 March.

China too has expressed its regret and worry over the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. In a statement available on the foreign ministry's website, Qin Gang, the ministry’s spokesman said, ‘China opposes any acts that might interfere with the peaceful overall situation of Darfur and Sudan. All parties should think carefully before taking actions.’

Sudan is an African country and the stability of Sudan is the responsibility of the AU. This is the message being hammered home by Ramadan al-Amamra, the AU commissioner for peace and security.

The African continent is fully capable of achieving its goal of a peaceful, stable, and secure Africa. The 2008 Kenya peace accord is holding strong and was brokered by none other than African leaders Kofi Annan, Graça Machel and Benjamin Mkapa.

Home-grown solutions – and in the case of Africa, attaching that jurisdiction to the African Union – would be a more appropriate way to look for solutions in a power-asymmetric world, and to ensure peace in Sudan.

* Vikas Nath is the head of media and communication at the South Centre in Geneva.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Landless People’s Movement leader seeks support in face of threats

Calls for solidarity and advice from all comrades

Bongani Xezwi and Luke Sinwell

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54978

cc Abahlali BaseMjondoloFearing for her life, South African activist Maureen Msisi is calling for support in the face of a petition from bond homeowners for her removal from Protea South, where she campaigns for fellow residents of informal settlements. Msisi’s efforts to ensure that residents can chose whether or not to be relocated elsewhere have put her in conflict with local government and middle-class homeowners in the area, who want to see all informal settlements eradicated. The petition alleges that Msisi is ‘promoting violence, only represents foreigners, and is blocking development in the area’. Msisi’s son, Bongani Xezwi, believes that her removal would not stop people from organising and fighting for their rights, but that without her community leadership abilities, chaos and aggression would be more likely.

As a single mother of five and a prominent activist who has faced threats from the police, government and now even the middle-class in her own community, Maureen Msisi is asking for solidarity and advice to give her more courage to push forward the struggle of the poor.

This is not the first time that Maureen’s life and family have been in danger because of her campaigns for the interests of poor people. In 1995, Maureen formed the branch of the African National Congress (ANC) in Protea South, hoping it would bring about a change that would better our lives. But members of the local civic centre at the time felt that she was challenging their power, and they responded violently by attacking her. She was shot in the back and stabbed three times with a machete, breaking her leg and scarring her neck and hand.

Almost 15 years into our new democracy, she continues struggling for the same changes in the lives of her people in Protea South, but now under the banner of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM). Today, she fears that if she continues on with the struggle, her life and her children’s futures will be in danger.

On the 1 March 2009, Maureen and seven others were arrested and charged with public violence, assault, GBH (grievous bodily harm), intimidation, and unlawful gathering. It will soon be made clear to the public that the eight are innocent of all charges. The LPM in Protea South views these arrests as a method by the local government councillor to suppress any activism that undermines the government’s plans to remove all informal settlements from Protea South to a far away place called Doorenkop.

Now that Maureen and the seven other comrades are going to court on 25 March, the people in the bond houses in Protea South – the middle-class – are taking an additional step to ensure that Maureen does not remain in her community. They are signing a petition to say that she must be removed because she is promoting violence, only represents foreigners, and is blocking development in the area. The petition will submitted on the 25 March at Protea Magistrate Court as a piece of evidence to ensure that she is proven guilty.

It is believed that this will assist the middle-class bond house owners because the informal settlements will go away, the bond houses will remain, and their property values will go up. The people in the bond houses seem to think that if our leader no longer lives in Protea South, the demands of the people to remain there will disappear and that people will live peacefully there.

But in reality, if Maureen is forced to leave Protea South, this will not stop the people from organising and fighting for their right to choose whether or not they want to stay or go to Doorenkop, and it will not stop the government from neglecting other basic demands that are made by the poor in Protea South. If Maureen is forced to leave, the government, the police, and the community, including those who own bond houses, will be in danger because chaos and aggression will win our people over.

The truth of the matter is that Maureen has been at the forefront of maintaining peace and stability at a time when Protea South has been bordering on the edge of war. Maureen was responsible for stopping community members from attacking each other and burning each other’s shacks after a conflict on 1 March when Community Policing Forum (CPF) members started to sing with the local government councillor while the LPM community were reading their memorandum. She convinced the community members that fighting another poor person weakens the struggle and strengthens the government’s system.

After this, members of the community left Protea South to destroy the transit shack camps across the road, which are intended to accommodate people before they move to houses in Doorenkop. When the local government councillor of Protea South learned about this, even she acknowledged Maureen’s power to maintain peace in her community when she called Maureen – who was in her home at the time and did not know about the incident – to stop this destruction.

Yesterday we had an urgent executive LPM meeting in Protea South to address the petition that was being made by the people living in the bond houses. Some members suggested that we call a mass meeting in Protea South to explain the truth behind the petition against Maureen. But Maureen felt that if we were to call a mass meeting, it would create further divisions and also a war between the informal settlement and bond houses of Protea South. While the people living in the bond houses want the informal settlement to be removed, those in the informal settlements have actually been living there since the 1980s. The people living in bond houses are now claiming the land as their own, based on the fact that they own property, when in fact we arrived here first. Like our current government, they have made it a matter of who has money and who doesn’t, because the informal settlement-dwellers, those who are poor and landless, are now being asked to leave. By claiming that Maureen only represents foreigners and is promoting violence, the owners of the bond houses hope to suppress our basic demands.

To achieve our demands without spilling blood in Protea South, the LPM has begun to create a counter petition that depicts the truth. The truth is that since 1995, Maureen has risked her life, and even been attacked, in order to represent the interests of the people living in Protea South. She continues to do so today, and remains committed to her people’s futures, despite the threats that she, and her family, are faced with. Her commitments, both as an activist and as a single parent of five, have placed her in a situation that puts great pressure on her as an individual, and it is taking all of her strength to keep her morale high. She is calling upon all comrades to display solidarity with her if possible, and wants to know if there is some advice or assistance she can get from comrades to make her more encouraged in this tough time.

Words of advice or solidarity can be sent to Maureen on + 27 (0)82 337 4514, or emailed to Luke Sinwell.

* Bongani Xezwi is youth organiser of LPM Protea South Branch and the eldest son of Maureen Msisi. Luke Sinwell is an activist and a researcher at the University of Johannesburg.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Reduce executive incompetence not SOSPA sentences

Salma Maoulidi

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54973

cc Women's NetFollowing a recent Tanzanian parliamentary session in which the minister of justice and constitutional affairs sanctioned a review of the Sexual Offences Special Provision Act (SOSPA) – with the intention of reducing the sentences of perpetrators – Salma Maoulidi examines the prevalence of gender-based violence and its impact upon women. Though a legitimate and profound issue, gender-based violence is rarely reported, and minimal action is taken against sexual offences at both the unofficial and official levels. Through a study Maoulidi conducted in Zanzibar, the author affirms that gender-based violence is frequently perceived as a moral rather than a legal crime, thus making prosecution difficult. Maoulidi is concerned with the influence which public officials and other figures of authority have in drafting and passing laws related to gender-based violence, and suggests that the minister did women and their struggle against sexual offences a disservice through his harmful and reckless remarks.

During the January 2009 Tanzanian parliamentary session, to my shock and that of fellow activists and sane citizens, I listened to the incomprehensible. The minister of justice and constitutional affairs dared to suggest that the law related to sexual offences – the Sexual Offences Special Provision Act (SOSPA) of 1998 – be reviewed, not because it was failing to serve the victims and survivors of violence, rather because the sentences were deemed too high for the perpetrators of violence.

In democratic countries, public officials are asked to resign for blunders of lesser importance. How does an officer whose primary duty is to ensure the rule of law and that those aggrieved have access to justice dare advocate for those who have been found in violation of the law? I must remind the reader that the primary mission of the Ministry of Justice, as indicated on its official website, is the administration of justice through the prosecution of criminal and civil cases.

Thankfully, women, human rights activists, and the media recognised this contradiction and voiced their disapproval. Among others, Rai, ThisDay, and Tanzania Daima covered the actual remarks and the ensuing retort in their papers. In addition to voicing our horror, I would like our activism to move to censoring public officials as well as the governments under which they serve for breaching national, regional, and international commitments, particularly in regard to women. Actively seeking to enforce accountability is the only means of ensuring that these commitments will be taken seriously, as observed by many representatives attending the 53rd session on the ongoing Commission of the Status of Women.

Tanzania recently relinquished the chair of the African Union, an entity which passed the African Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa in 2003, and which came to force in November 2005. Moreover, a Tanzanian, Dr Asha-Rose Migiro, serves as the deputy to the UN, an institution which in the last few years has spearheaded a global agenda against gender-based violence. Also, our very own Gertrude Mongella, the secretary general of the Fourth World Conference on Women, is now the president of the African Parliament. Do we not have a moral obligation to discuss respectfully, with our leadership, an issue of global significance?

In fact, during his recent visit to Tanzania, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon underscored the importance for governments to deal effectively with acts of violence committed against women. Furthermore, on 8 March, International Women’s Day, Ban Ki-moon reminded governments of the year-long campaign to end violence against women. Importantly, he emphasised that violence against women cannot and should not be tolerated, particularly because it is an attack on humanity, and defeats the objectives of equality and empowerment pursued by the community of nations. If anything, both the secretary general and women want more to be done against gender-based violence, not less.

So, what may have informed the conclusion of the minister of justice and constitutional affairs? It may be that government officials are ill-informed of the reality of the situation. Perhaps it may be attributed to the deep-rooted sexism in our political and governance culture, and an obliviousness to the atrocities committed against women’s bodies in their own homes and communities, the very crimes which often go unpunished simply because they concern women. Possibly, part of the resistance in acknowledging crimes committed against women is the perception, even among legal practitioners, that gender-based violence (GBV) law favours women and seeks to prosecute men. However, are these perceptions accurate? Such a conclusion cannot be reached without measured and thorough research, as I will demonstrate below.

Suffice to say, the conclusion which the minister arrived at in front of parliament is unfathomable and unconscionable, particularly when one considers the troubling figures of violence against women available to the UN, and which the secretary general cited in his remarks on 8 May. Ban Ki-moon stated that one in five women worldwide suffers rape or attempted rape. In some countries, one in three women are beaten, forced into sex, or abused. Tanzania is not immune from this reality. Data gathered in the World Health Organization (WHO) Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women (2005), the International Violence against Women Survey (2002), the UN secretary general’s database on violence against women, and the Tanzania Health and Demographic Health Survey of 2004–05 are all useful reference points for the minister as he considers this ill-advised move.

A study I undertook in Zanzibar between 2006 and 2007 found that over 75 per cent of all public institutions interviewed report receiving cases involving gender-based violence. In over half of these institutions, GBV matters comprise 41 per cent of the caseload, while in four of the 12 institutions interviewed they constitute over 50 per cent of the caseload. Women are more likely to report GBV crimes to institutions.

All of the institutions identified sexual assault as the most frequent form of complaint. Eleven institutions further identified attempted rape to be of high concern, comprising 30 per cent of the caseload in some institutions. In 58 per cent of the institutions, sexual assault comprises about 30 per cent of the caseload.

Girls are more likely to be victims of sexual violence than women or male children. Interviews held with medical personnel in various district hospitals in Unguja and Pemba confirmed that a high number of female children exhibit prolonged sexual activity, indicating a prevalence of protracted incidences of sexual abuse which are largely unaddressed. The same information was confirmed in law reports.

While the few cases reported to institutions hardly reflect the actual scale of crime, the files of cases involving sexual crimes attest to the preponderance of sexual health issues among young girls in Zanzibar. In regard to the fact that young women are most at risk of HIV/AIDS infection, there should be more done to protect women, especially young women, from sexual predators.

Most activists are perpetually faced with scepticism when advocating for action against GBV. Religious quarters, the media, and politicians often ridicule and blame women for the violence perpetrated against them, suggesting that the predominance of violence may not be an issue as we live in a violent culture.

The study in Zanzibar found that 67 per cent of respondents indicated that physical violence is often used to coerce others or make them submissive; this was suggested in a culture where violence is more verbal than physical. Seventeen per cent of respondents reported experiencing sexual violence, 6 per cent of respondents reported being fondled or touched inappropriately on the breasts or buttocks and 5 per cent were raped.

Similarly, 17 per cent of respondents indicated having a sibling subjected to GBV, especially sexual abuse. About 41 per cent of the cases concerned female relations, including those with disabilities. In fact, most siblings suffer sexual violence above other forms of violence, with at least half of the respondents whose siblings have experienced GBV citing sexual crimes such as rape (27 per cent) and sodomy (21 per cent).

During focused group discussions carried out across the island, it was revealed that approximately 29 per cent of GBV in the community affects young girls, 10 per cent impacts women, and about 12 per cent of cases affects male youth. An alarming 28 per cent of the cases involve children. Forced marriages are also reported in 55 per cent of communities interviewed. In at least four communities, it did not appear uncommon for girls to be taken out of school to be married off, contradicting national laws and opposing Millennium Development Goal 3.

While evidence suggests that gender-based violence is a legitimate and profound problem, the study did not find a single institution that was uniquely and systematically working on GBV advocacy or GBV services in Zanzibar. The Zanzibar Female Lawyers Association (ZAFELA) has only recently taken the issue into consideration. In such an atmosphere, one wonders what happens to victims and survivors of violence.

Largely, there is very little willingness to take action against GBV at both official and unofficial levels. Only 16 per cent of GBV cases were reported to the police for further action. In 47 per cent of the GBV cases reported by individuals, nothing happened to the abuser. Commonly, no action is taken against perpetrators of violence. About 10 per cent of respondents indicated that the issue is normally resolved within or between families.

In 18 per cent of the recorded incidents of abuse, the abuser was forced to marry the girl through a private arrangement. In order to protect the honour of a sexually abused young woman, particularly if she is pregnant, marriage is perceived as an appropriate response for 38 per cent of cases in the study. More parents want the option of marriage over prosecution or imprisonment, giving little consideration to the fact that forcing a young woman into marriage, especially if the sexual act was not consensual, is doubly traumatising for the victim of the sexual crime.

Although activists in Zanzibar, like those on the mainland, celebrated the passage of SOSPA, they are dismayed that sexual violence continues to be viewed more as a moral crime rather than as a legal crime. It is thus not surprising that about 34 per cent of respondents consider sexual crimes as private issues. Only 16 per cent think that it is a criminal offence, affirming that more needs to be done in the area of legal literacy. While there are provisions to address GBV, only 50 per cent of functionaries interviewed indicated using the Penal Decree in matters concerning GBV, the remaining 31 per cent used religious laws, and 18 per cent used medical guidelines when dealing with GBV cases.

The study found knowledge of laws related to GBV to be very low in communities. Over 65 per cent of individuals interviewed were not aware of any law related to GBV. Largely, local customs and religious law are used to solve GBV matters. In so doing, perpetrators of violence escape criminal prosecution and thus defeat the intent of the law.

Equally, few functionaries in public institutions were familiar with the content of GBV related laws. Over 70 per cent of functionaries interviewed during the study reported not having copies of any of the relevant laws, as opposed to 30 per cent with access to these laws. Also, an equal percentage of functionaries report never having read any of the laws concerning GBV, which ultimately raises questions concerning their ability to preside effectively over such issues.

Moreover, under the law, GBV offences are not considered to be cognisable offences which would entitle police officers and prosecutors to investigate, arrest, and prosecute without a warrant on the merit of the crime. Consequently, less than two-thirds of GBV perpetrators are convicted within courts, mainly on account of insufficient evidence and the deliberate tampering with evidence. The problem is greater in cases involving sexual offences, where 40 per cent of cases fail due to insufficient evidence, allowing many sex offenders to escape prosecution.

Other than gaps in the substantive law – gaps that are being tirelessly pinpointed by many activists led by the Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA) – procedural rules contribute to the inefficacy of the substantive law. The research established issues with jurisdiction, documentation, investigation and evidence. Moreover, functionaries do not have the capacity to competently handle GBV cases; almost all functionaries interviewed have never been trained in aspects of GBV law and its application.

I ask the minister, other public officials and legislators to ascertain their facts before spouting claims that border on incompetence and tactlessness. No one will think of them to demand expert guidance should they require it from people who have made the issue their vocation. Perhaps if they fussed less about hefty allowances under their misplaced sense of self-importance they would truly begin working for the population they represent.

The problems encountered today by lawyers, activists, victims and survivors of gender-based crimes are the shortcomings of the Ministry of Justice and Parliament responsible for drafting, discussing and passing the laws. To gain our confidence, it would be smarter and more productive if these institutions learn from their past mistakes and improve on their performance, rather than continuing to compromise our sense of well-being and security.

* Salma Maoulidi is an activist and the executive director of the Sahiba Sisters Foundation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Lessons from Ghana’s 2008 elections

Mawuli Dake

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54963

cc BBC World ServiceMany lessons can be drawn from the historic 2008 elections in Ghana, writes Mawuli Dake. Different campaign strategies yielded diverse results, and voters are now looking more at politicians’ character and conduct when choosing their preferences rather than mere appearances or the provision of gifts, Dake maintains. Ghana went through three contentious rounds of voting, which resulted in the opposition’s victory and the transfer of power from one government to another without a single loss of life. This is a positive not just for Ghana, Dake suggests, but for the whole of west Africa.

The recent Ghanaian presidential and parliamentary elections were historic in many ways. It was the most contested election in the country’s history, with record-breaking campaign expenditure. It took three rounds of voting for a victor to emerge; the first round was arguably the most peaceful and transparent election in our history, and the second round was characterised by a level of fraud and electoral malpractice never seen before in our history, a situation that tested the nerves of a people who are known to be peace-loving. Ultimately, peace and democracy prevailed. The election not only culminated in a peaceful transfer of power and the emergence of a minority as a new majority in parliament, but also left us with some intriguing lessons. These lessons are important because, through experience, we can make our democracy better. This article highlights some ‘common sense lessons’ from our last election that can make our leaders better, our voters smarter and our electoral institutions and voting processes stronger.

LESSONS FOR CANDIDATES AND POLITICAL PARTIES

Money can no longer buy votes for victory

One of the biggest lessons from both the primaries and the general election was that candidates can no longer substitute money for concrete ideas, substantive messages or genuine appeal to voters as they have in the past. In the New Patriotic Party (NPP) primary for instance, some of the biggest campaign spenders ended up with woefully low votes – as low as one vote. I am by no means downplaying the crucial role of money in electoral campaigns, but there are certain things that money simply can’t buy. A candidate can fund long political ads, but if they are not the right message he may not only be wasting his money but may actually be funding his own downfall. Gone are the days when a tot of ‘akpeteshie’ or a new t-shirt could earn a vote. Not even cloths, bicycles, TV sets or fresh Ghana cedi notes can guarantee anyone votes these days. Ghanaians have learnt to do the smart thing, to take the money offered and then vote according to conscience at the ballot box.

There is no such thing as inevitability

Presidential and parliamentary candidates who appeared to have presumptuously arrogated to themselves the right of inevitability as winners learnt a bitter lesson that must go out to all parties and politicians. No single factor affected the NPP’s chances of winning the 2008 elections more than the public perception that its candidate was arrogant and thought he must and would become the president of Ghana. The public may have their reasons for this opinion about the candidate, but as someone who knows Nana Akufo-Addo, I think his campaign did a terrible job of portraying the easy-going and affable Nana I know. In my assessment, one of the most effective campaign ads of the season was the NDC (National Democratic Congress) ad in which a young female university student directly imputed, in very strong words, characteristics of egotism and an ‘I know it all’ attitude against the NPP candidate. From a strategic point of view, it was a fatal mistake that the NPP did so little to push back on, and continued ads that projected flamboyancy and deployed surrogates whom supporters said ‘only speak big English’. All this was based on the faulty campaign assumption that their candidate would win inevitably.

Impact of ads over-estimated

One of the subtle but significant indirect battles in the 2008 election cycle was the one between the powers of traditional campaign advertising versus direct contact with voters. Either by choice or circumstance the NDC, which did not have anything close to the money and power of the NPP to compete in ads, took their case directly to voters in a door-to-door strategy. If TV ads were as influential as assumed by some parties, the NPP would have won the elections hands down. One of the most noticeable observations I made upon my arrival in Ghana a few weeks before the first round of elections was the dominance of one party over the airwaves, with ads that were several minutes long running simultaneously on various TV channels and radio stations. This is not to discount the power of political ads, but to point out that a good campaign strategy must combine ads with effective voter outreach. It is easier and fancier to run ads, but as a matter of common sense, voters respond far more positively to direct contact, as recent studies have shown.

Ideas and values matter, but election results are ultimately about votes

When it comes to choosing a president, Ghanaians seem to be putting more emphasis on ideas and values than in the past. Today, more and more voters look beyond tribe and qualifications in examining candidates’ personal and professional qualities and values. This explains why voters responded favourably to the exciting ideas of the Convention People’s Party’s (CPP) Paa Kwesi Ndoum and to the touted qualities of humility and integrity of the NDC’s John Atta Mills. This also explains why allegations of arrogance and drug use, even though unsubstantiated, nearly sunk the candidacy of NPP’s Nana Akuffo-Addo, one of the most formidable candidates of the season both in the primary and the general elections. Not too long ago, voters’ choices partly depended on fiddle-faddles such as the handsomeness of a candidate. This is no longer the case. Therefore, in today’s society, politicians need to watch their actions because they will need the character capital at ‘voting time’. Ultimately, the real test lies in deliberately and tactically transforming the excitement about a candidate’s personality and ideas into votes. You can campaign all you want and have the best ideas on earth, but until you have a strategy to translate all this into votes, ‘it all don’t matter’.

National elections require national outreach

In general elections, the winner ends up being the person who draws support from the greatest number of diverse elements of society. The Ghanaian electorate consists of 10 regions with diverse ethnic, religious and social groups. It should, therefore, be of great concern to the NPP that the party only continues to do well with one ethnic group and very poorly with the rest. The NPP won only two out of the 10 regions, with enough votes to be close to winning the presidential elections. Even if they had obtained enough votes to win, it is not good for the image of a national political party to seem interested in only a few segments of the country. It is true that the NPP is a democratic party open to all Ghanaians of all backgrounds, but this is also not enough. It has built-up a reputation – intentionally or unintentionally – as a party in which people from only certain places or with certain lineages matter. The leadership of the party must do more to reach out and include ‘others’. It is understandable and necessary for campaigns to pay extra attention to traditional and potential strongholds. It is disastrous, however, when such actions appear to completely ignore or alienate everybody else outside of that stronghold, including those who may never be strong supporters, but may provide the small margin of votes needed to win.

Polls don’t win elections, votes do

The assumption that making up phoney polls will make your candidate become president is not only naïve but stupid. There were a number of groups, from the Danquah Institute to the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), that constantly bombarded the public with ridiculous and false polls, even to the point of predicting a landslide victory for their preferred candidates. It is important to note that no one expects polls to be spot-on right; that is why even scientific polls have margins of error. The argument here is not that these groups should have been accurate, what matters is that these polls must have been fabricated or so poorly conducted that they were not even within any excusable margin of error. This kind of dishonest conduct not only undermines the ability of the guilty groups to conduct polls ever again, but also damages their credibility on other public causes they may undertake in the future. We must take due note of such fraudulent entities, and treat them with the contempt they deserve.

Days of rigging to win may be over

Many politicians would rather rig if they had the chance than actually work to earn victory. But with the level of vigilance and interest of ordinary citizens in the political process, combined with the growing culture of democracy, it is more and more difficult to win through rigging. No doubt both NDC and NPP attempted and did rig in this election, but I don’t believe anyone was able to rig enough votes to win. Of course, losers would always want us to believe that they lost because the winner rigged, and no wonder NPP attempted to manipulate or reject the results based on this excuse. But as a matter of common sense, it doesn’t make sense that a party that lost eight out of 10 regions and lost over 20 of its incumbent parliamentary seats can be crying wolf that they lost because there was rigging in one region. The lesson is that Ghanaians are determined to allow nothing but their votes to be the decider in who governs them. Political candidates must accordingly busy themselves with how they can work to earn those votes, not how to rig them.

LESSONS FOR THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN GENERAL

Citizens or groups of people who desire change, want to be heard, or seek representation must be willing to stand-up and fight for it. There is no better way to express this than the words of Frederick Douglas: ‘If there is no struggle there is no progress… Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.’ In political processes, this may require more than mere press statements and conferences. It may even require more than mere agitation. All these are important, but they need to be backed with tactical and positive action. And that is why it is disappointing that despite the desire and commitment of the women’s movement to increase women’s political representation in Ghana, there are fewer women in parliament today than in the previous one, dropping from 10.9 per cent to 8.7 per cent. Groups like the Women’s Manifesto Coalition deserve credit for their efforts in terms of raising public awareness and calling for action on the part of political parties. But the women’s movement as a whole certainly can and must do better with actionable efforts that demand and hold parties and institutions accountable to ensure women’s representation and meaningful participation.

LESSONS FOR THE NATION

We should never ever again, as a nation, take our peace for granted. A lesson that we should have learnt from Kenya even long before our election is that no society is immune from violence. Maintenance of the peace and stability that we enjoy can only be ensured through continuous and conscious effort, and not complacency. As a nation, we appeared to have slacked for a while with regard to peace and stability in the early stages of the campaign season. Consequent tensions over bloated registers, intimidations and tribal politics that were ignored for so long could have been catastrophic mistakes had it not been the last minute efforts by the Ghana Peace Council, Obrafour and many others.

As someone who has been involved in two US presidential campaigns and elections, I am the first to admit that no system is perfect. Nevertheless, we must not cease in our efforts to perfect our system. This is why every election cycle should be an improvement over the previous one, and that is why the level of malpractice in the second round of the presidential elections is unacceptable. Relevant institutions (the Electoral Commission especially) must investigate and document all the tactics used by parties and their agents to rig. More importantly, we must put in mechanisms to prevent them in subsequent elections.

LESSONS FOR WEST AFRICA

Yes, west Africans can have elections and the democratic change of governments without killing each other. Ghana went through three contentious rounds of voting, which resulted in opposition victory and power transferred from one government to another without a single loss of life. It may not be and does not have to be perfect, and there will definitely be tensions and challenges, but we can have elections that pass a reasonable threshold of fairness and represent the will of the people. And it is only through this that we can create the environment for realising the new ECOWAS vision of: ‘A borderless, prosperous and cohesive region where people have the capacity to access and harness its enormous resources through the creation of opportunities for sustainable development and environmental preservation.’ As the poorest region on the face of the planet, we cannot afford to waste any more time destroying what we have built or killing each other. If Ghana can hold free and fair elections, all other west African countries can.

* Mawuli Dake of the Africa Initiative is a leading African human rights advocate and social strategist. He was a key member of President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign team.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Corrupt leaders are mass murderers

Corruption more omnipresent than God

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/54971

Sometime ago I was a keynote speaker at an international conference jointly hosted by two leading policy thinktanks on the African continent, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). The former was set up by the UN for Africa while the latter was set up by Africans for Africans. The ECA remains a global institution focused on Africa, but its control by Africans and policy prescriptions sympathetic to the continent’s interests cannot always be taken for granted. It is dependent on the quality of the people who are controlling it, their ideological and political preferences and the hegemonic battles and politicking in UN and global institutions. There were times when the ECA was hostage to the World Bank and IMF’s neoliberalism, but it was also the place where Africa’s alternative to the structural adjustment was given global clout both intellectually and policy wise. As for CODESRIA, its radical credentials – some years of obscurantic experimenting with post-modernism, deconstruction and other made-in-the-US academic discourse notwithstanding – have been generally consistent. It has been revolutionised, re-legitimised and has regained its eminent voice as a centre of African intellectuals of relevance (reminiscent of its founding leadership) under Professor Adebayo Olukoshi’s meritorious leadership, a leadership that has now come to an end.

The conference was on corruption in Africa and was organised as part of the 50th anniversary of the ECA. Addressing such contemporary and controversial issues may be proof that the ECA is regaining its voice and not shying away from topics because of the sensitivity of governments, the famous ‘member states’ that make many UN institutions and UN officials impotent.

As to be expected there were all kinds of experts there from academia, UN agencies, governments and civil society. There are were many theories and prescriptions on offer, and the proceedings may be useful for future references and maybe new policy initiatives.

However, I am more than ever convinced that the battle against corruption cannot be won in conference halls or through the creation of more anti-corruption bodies and even more laws. There are enough laws in the statutes of many countries that if they are implemented many leaders; politicians, their families and cronies; business people; members of other professions; legislators; councillors; civil society and NGO leaders; police bosses; security officers; nurses; judges; imams; priests; bishops; student leaders; college principals; civil servants; journalists and many more will be in jail.

My recent trip across Nigeria may have unduly influenced this piece. However, while Nigeria may present the extremes of many absurdities about corruption, the truth is that in every country I visit I see and hear about similar things involving all social classes. It may just be a question of volume, but corruption permeates our private and public life. While attention is often rightly focused on the public sector, not enough is focused on the private, personal or even the communal level of the problem. Wherever you look corruption stares one in the face without blinking, and the tolerance level for it is so high that – wittingly or unwittingly – we have all become either active promoters and beneficiaries or complacent and cooperative victims.

Of course there is nothing particularly cultural or African about corruption. But we should not take cover under such blandishments. Corruption is destroying Africa more than any other region and it has greater impact on our lives than it does in most others. From drinking water to the dangerous ‘licensed’ aircrafts defying gravity that fly across our airspace, through hospitals and death traps on our roads, corruption is more omnipresent than God. Even in our temples, churches and mosques corruption reigns. We reserve high tables at religious, cultural, social, political and other public events for thieves and rogues who continue to rob us and wipe our noses in their acts. We elect them and complain afterwards.

It is not possible to root out corruption without every one of us willing to do our part. You may not be able to do something about it, but you can decide not to be part of it by refusing to give or take, and by refusing to respect or honour those who do. You can show your zero tolerance of corruption no matter how ‘small’ – whether it is what the police call ‘chai’ in east Africa or ‘handshake’ in west Africa – or the ‘bigger’ examples involving government contracts and other public procurements. As long as we are willing to partake in it or not mind being its beneficiaries through our kiths and kins then corruption will remain endemic.

It is about time we borrow from other parts of the world like China, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia where corruption is treated with the highest contempt and sternest sanctions including capital punishment. It does not mean that these countries are inhabited by angels, but the fact that severe sanctions are often applied has proven to be a deterrent in many ways. Not all thieves would be caught but those caught would not be allowed to go with impunity.

It is the regime of impunity in many African countries that has made institutionalised corruption. It is not enough to continue to blame the system without looking at human agency. Gone are the days when we could glibly dismiss corruption as the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’. We have to accept that after several decades of primitivism this class of exploiters is not capable of growing out of it or transforming their loot into anything but more looting. Indeed, we should regard public officials and their private sector collaborators as mass murderers killing millions of our peoples through inadequate public services compromised by corruption. Monies meant for drugs, roads, hospitals, schools and public security are siphoned away, making all of us vulnerable to premature death and our societies more unsafe and insecure for the masses.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem writes this syndicated column in his capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Walking through parliament in high heels

Prespone Matawira

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimnotes/54964

In an unprecedented move in Harare last week, women cabinet ministers, deputy ministers and MPs from across party lines gathered over lunch. They gathered to celebrate the women who contested the March 2008 elections and to continue the process of building and strengthening a cross-party women’s alliance in parliament in order to push forward a women-focused agenda.

First to arrive was Lucia Matabenga MP (MDC-T (Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai)); she was followed by Margret Zinyemba (MDC-T). Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga, minister of regional integration and international cooperation (MDC-M (Movement for Democratic Change – Mutambara)), and the new Minister of Labour and Social Welfare Paurine Mpariwa (MDC-T) were joined by Flora Bhuka, head of Zanu PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front) women’s league. Next came Deputy Minister of Justice and Legal Affairs Jessie Majome (MDC-T), Sekai Holland MP (MDC-T), Fay Chung and Rudo Gaidzanwa – who stood as independents (linked to Muvambo) – and Mai Dandajena (MDC-T), a long-time community activist and now a senator. Former Minister of Women’s Affairs Oppah Muchinguri (Zanu PF) called in an apology, along with Olivia Muchena (Zanu PF), current minister of women affairs, gender and community development, and former Minister Shuvai Mahofa (Zanu PF). Still they continued arriving.

Despite the creation of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol on Gender and Development, which stipulates that women should hold equal positions to men in both public and private sectors by 2015, there are no provisions for quotas as a way of advancing the representation of women in publicly elected bodies in the current Constitution of Zimbabwe (1980) or the electoral laws.

Political parties are left to their own devices on this score and the effective participation of women has been dramatically limited by the closed political environment and the ‘political competition and contestation’ that has characterised opposition politics in Zimbabwe in the last 12 years.

Women were caught and sacrificed in the party politics that characterised the last elections, both literally and figuratively. Consequently, there is a low representation of women politicians in the inclusive government, in fact the lowest in 15 years: only four women are part of the 35-member cabinet. Women make up 14 per cent of the House of Assembly and 33 per cent of the Senate.

But getting bogged down in the math is tiring.

Quotas are a step forward, but numbers are not enough. Quotas arose out of a feminist strategy to get women into parliament as a means of representing, fighting for and being accountable to the needs and issues of women as a constituency. It was ultimately one of a number of strategies to ensure transformation and subsequently true and meaningful freedom for women. But as we’ve discovered, just because you are in a women’s body doesn’t necessarily mean you embody a transformatory politics. As we’ve also discovered, a depoliticized uptake of quotas prevents the adoption of a political culture whereby women, however they may be positioned, are integrated into the political system. Quotas can circumvent meaningful structural change.

Listening to the conversations around the table that day, I realised that once in, women face different challenges. Quotas do not ensure real political participation or leadership by women, and women’s activities in parliament often remain marginal. ‘Women’s issues’, for their part, become ghettoised and reduced to the implementation of ‘gender policies’, often with a lack of financial resources to support their implementation.

The dominant model of political leadership remains competitive, masculine, territorial, violent and dehumanising. This limits not only women but men with ‘non-traditional’ approaches too. Now more than ever we need not only alternatives, but people who are willing to break rank in order to make them a reality.

The status quo is not going to do it for women in Zimbabwe, and the women sitting around the table know this. They know it for they have been in the patriarchal party political trenches.

There are no ‘women’s issues’. Every issue facing Zimbabwe right now involves and impacts on Zimbabwean women. Ask them, they will tell you.

So. Where does that leave us?

While I will always have a healthy scepticism about the extent of parliament as a radical site for change, my hope lies in the energetic and vital link that some of these women parliamentarians have with their constituencies through Constituency Consultative Forums, more commonly known as CCFs.

Facilitated by a cutting edge women’s political support organisation, these structures have since 2005 been systematically established in constituencies where women MPs committed to women have served a term of office and/or were contesting elections, on both a Zanu PF or MDC ticket.

The CCFs are comprised of a minimum of 70 women drawn from the various wards in the constituency. Members participate in political education programmes and exchange visits to other, rural or urban, constituency forums. The CCFs provide a support base for women MPs during elections, and their vibrancy and dynamism means that they also provide necessary checks and balances in terms of accountability after the elections.

As a key organiser within the facilitation team commented, ‘In areas with CCFs women contested elections and won. In the two areas where women lost, the tide of internal party politics was too strong. The CCFs are powerful structures and the women members know what they want.’

In the chain of public participation in governance, we move from the CCFs to another interesting women-only space, the women’s parliamentary caucus. Many of the women who broke bread together that day were members of this body. From here, women MPs share, learn, support and strategise. Women can and have caucused on issues, put forward positions and have even creatively blocked things detrimental to women at large from passing through parliament. It’s certainly ‘safer’ for women MPs to come together under the banner of the women’s parliamentary caucus in order challenge the status quo than for individual women to do so!

The party whip is never far away. It’s a fragile space.

In this period of ‘transition’, I guess my hope lies in the potential and possibilities of the space to contribute to a radical politics, a politics that centres on the needs and demands of ordinary Zimbabwean women wherever they may be found, and a politics committed to real and sustainable change, and not simply the transfer of power from one elite patriarchal group to the next. I hope for a politics that interrogates our current political culture and that refuses a paternalism that ‘allows’ women to have their quotas, thereby fulfilling regional and international obligations around governance, with very little else.

No, this is not enough.

In this period of transition, whether the women’s parliamentary caucus and the CCFs will haemorrhage from the wounds of partisan politics, be suffocated by the quest for individual power or be nurtured so that they can grow and form the beginnings of this new politics, remains to be seen.

I for one will be listening, following the click–click of those heels as they walk from the far-flung districts through to the corridors of parliament.

* Prespone Matawira is a Zimbabwean feminist and activist who contributes to the new Chii Chirikuita: What's up? blog.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Sad way to commemorate Kimaathi Wachiuri’s 52nd birthday

Francis Wambugu

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/54970

On the night of 18 February at around midnight and after Kenyans celebrated the 52nd anniversary of our hero Kimaathi Wachiuri, city council tractors embarked on demolishing all structures on Mwariro market in Kariokor. The land, measuring about 42 acres, has been supporting at least 3,000 poor Kenyans. By the next morning of 19 February all the structures had been brought down and the residents had lost all their wares. Several residents were shot at by administration policemen on that night, and were treated and discharged at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH). The land is said to have been allocated to a private developer of Somali nationality by the former MP Maina Kamanda and the current Councillor Muchiri. On contacting the area the MP seems to have failed to secure the land on behalf of the residents. Today, the residents are being hoodwinked to move to another piece of land in Ngara, which is not empty… It is now a month since this demolition occurred. Bunge La Mwananchi is calling for action to stop this continued harassment of poor citizens. We shall be mobilising locals in the area to stop the demolition and construction of any new property on this land. We are asking our friends of Bunge La Mwananchi to join us to restore the livelihoods of the Kariakor people. We will stop this by any means necessary!
For and on behalf of Bunge La Mwananchi – Kariakor network

* Francis Wambugu is with Bunge La Mwananchi – Kariakor network, the Kenyan people’s parliament.

We know the Kenya we want

Sophie Ngugi

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/54980

I agree with the author, we know the Kenya we want and we know that women can make a difference. We have know this for a long time, but somehow our organising has not been succesful. We can not wait to say the same in 2013, we need to fill the gap that has made women not access these positions, we need a woman president come 2012, but more so we need women who are leaders of integrity as being a 'woman' is not enough platform. There are many many qualified women, what we need is a strategy that is different from the past.

Commenting on Zimbabwe

Charles Sondergaard

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/54981

This article sure faces up to the position in Zimbabwe and makes it clear that the MDC needs the support of the world and particularly the neighbouring SADC Governments. South Africa has been the creator of this "mule" and should be the country now supporting the MDC and a proper legal system. Currently S Africa refuses aid to Zimbabwe because it knows ZANU PF corruption and power is still overwhelming and aid money will dissapear. If S Africa is unwilling to commit funds how can you expect the rest of the world to do so. Currently thousands of Zim refugees are treated like criminals in S Africa. (However), this article written by a bunch of left wing communistss blaming the world for the problems created by a dictator who has killed 20,000 of his Nkomo opposition on coming to power and who has destroyed is country and become wealthy at the same time. Mugabe's government now controls all the wealth in the country and the MDC is a financially poor bunch. The main reason Mugable and cronies will not step down is fear of the Haugue war crimes tribunal. Should we say forgive and forget and let this murderer continue in power? Sure - support Zimbabwe, but in the current situation just handing out money will not repair the economy - all the farming land is now owned by Mugabe's regime rather than the Zimbabwe people. This article provides no practical solution to the ongoing african problem of corruption by governments.

Discourses on Civil Society in Kenya

2009-03-20

http://www.arrforum.org/publications/publicationsDB.htm

The African Research and Resource Forum last year held a 3 part seminar series on Discourses for Strengthening the Civil Society in Kenya. As a result, a book ‘Discourses on Civil Society in Kenya’has been published. The book is currently on sale at the ARRF Offices, African Book Services alongKoinange Street and Simply Books at ABC Place.

Mobile Activism in African Elections

Review

Sokari Ekine

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/54969

The ubiquitous mobile phone in the hands of millions of Africans working as the primary tool for communication is fast becoming the core technology for supporting social change and the empowerment of citizens. Mobile phones are being used in innovative ways. In agriculture and fishing they are used to provide farmers and fishermen with up-to-date weather reports, prices for their products and transport costs. They are being used to send money, provide rural communities with up-to-date changes in government policy and legislation, enable women to report incidents of domestic violence, to report human rights abuses, send questions to radio phone-in programmes and citizen journalism, to name just a few. In 2007 mobile phones were also used as a monitoring tool during and after three country elections: Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya.
Rebekah Heacock’s report, ‘Mobile Activism in African Elections: A Comparative Study’, is part of DigiActive’s Research Series. It describes and evaluates the use of mobile phone SMS (short message service) technology during these three elections. In Nigeria SMS were used in the April 2007 elections which marked the first transfer of democratic power since independence in 1960. In Sierra Leone they were used by trained observers to report ‘critical issues’ around the first post-civil war elections. Finally, in Kenya SMS was used to report and document the post-election violence which broke out in within hours of the election results being broadcast.

The report concludes that although mobile phone monitoring is ‘far too informal to replace international monitoring missions’, it does have a role in providing timely and local election results which could go a long way to easing the tensions often surrounding countries’ elections. In the case of Kenya, SMS technology worked alongside radio and internet technology to provide up-to-date information on the violence taking place.

Although the report is rather short, it does provide a detailed overview and useful starting point for further research into the use of mobile phones for election monitoring and as a tool to aid citizen empowerment in governance. It is largely descriptive and as such there is considerable room for a more analytical, in-depth study examining the monitoring process and both the actual and potential impact on election monitoring and documentation.

* Sokari Ekine blogs at www.blacklooks.org.
* Rebekah Heacock’s ‘Mobile Activism in African Elections: A Comparative Study’ is available at DigiActive’s Research Series.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Crying for Darfur

Lemlem Tsegaw

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/54966

The Sudan

That unknown village
Repugnant stage
A child killed
A mother raped
A father tortured
The whole world
Witnessed
Yet did nothing
I
You
Through silence
We all are accomplices
* This poem is dedicated to Judge Birtukan Mideksa and the Darfur people. Crying for Darfur was inspired by a BBC story of 1 June 2006.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

The Liberator

Lemlem Tsegaw

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/54967

The Liberator at Markato
what is his motto?
The Liberator,
who wore camouflage
in lieu of Dr.'s gown
has put a red hat on.

That Liberator
rules at night
as Leninist.
The godless,
boorish but clever,
works day and night
sitting at the Addis Palace.
Effervescent and unflagging
he is finishing
the task
assigned by Isayas.
That Liberator,
who fought without
understanding liberty;
that dreamer
wanted the palace for eternity.

That Liberator
who is godless
knows how to govern,
massacre,
and silence
with the barrel
of a gun.
That Liberator
now like a mad dog
roams town,
his mouth foaming
with the blood of the young.
* This poem is dedicated to Judge Birtukan Mideksa and the ‘36 unarmed people killed’ by the Ethiopian Regime in Mercato on 8 June and 31 October 2005.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Pambazuka Blog Review – March 19, 2009

Dibussi Tande

2009-03-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/54948

Enie Cecile of the Social Forum blog comments on the disturbing “breast ironing” phenomenon in Cameroon which is supposed to prevent teenage pregnancy:

“The UN says that 3.8 million West and Central African girls are at risk of this painful form of body mutilation. In Cameroon where the practice is most widespread, 50% of adolescent girls in cities and a quarter of all girls nationwide have their breasts 'ironed,' often by their mothers. While some reports proclaim One-quarter of all Cameroonian women are said to have been victims of this painful "breast-ironing".

Ironically, the tradition was a mystery to many in the West African nation until a recent campaign to stop the potentially dangerous practice, aimed at delaying a young girl's natural development was launched.

Nevertheless breast ironing is widespread and interestingly, the high prevalence in cities attributed to the effects of urbanization.”


Agendia Aloysius outlines his expectations of Pope Benedict during the pontiff’s first visit to Africa:

“As a spiritual leader who represents hope, he] must not only tell us to just keep waiting and hoping. We expect him to be courageous enough to tell those thwarting the hope of…Africans to at least, have some feelings for human beings and or their fellow citizens.

We expect him to speak about and against neo-colonialism and its funded wars and its economic and political domination in Africa. We expect him not only to hinge on the murder of Jews by Nazis, but, also recognise that even before that, millions of Congolese were murdered under the auspices of the Belgian King Leopold… Thousands continue to die till date because of these economic-neo-colonial driven wars. It is not about going back to the past. But we must know the present was shaped by the past and struggling during and for the present, will determine the future.”


Nigerian Best Forum writes about the “text message insurgency” of Somali Islamist group al-Shabab:

“The radical militia is a fiercely secretive and ruthless organisation with alleged links to al-Qaeda. The leaders of the group - which has taken over swathes of central and southern Somalia - are unknown to their subordinates. The middle lieutenants get their orders through text messages, or phone calls from recognised voices, giving them proof the instructions are coming from the right person.

The leaders of al-Shabab are called “emirs” and they do not usually come from the region they administer. The emirs are said to use text messaging systems daily. The mid-ranking emirs and foot soldiers are given prepaid phone cards to carry out their day-to-day operations.

Text messages are also used to threaten those al-Shabab believes oppose them. Anyone who ignores these warnings is likely to receive a visit from the gunmen.


Gef’s Outlook publishes a podcast interview with Rosebell Kagumire, winner of the Waxal Award for Best English-Speaking African journalist's blog:

"This investigative journalist for ‘The Independent’ news magazine in Kampala - Uganda thinks if blogging is made close to everyone in Africa it could serve as a counterweight to the depiction of Africa by international media like the CNN and the BBC as a place of suffering, despair and poverty. She supposes it might even make these media view Africa differently.

My conversation with Rosebell also delved into the difference between blogging and journalism and how she copes with both caps...

Rosebell's Blog was described by the members of the jury of the Pan-African awards as ‘attractive blog, interesting and diverse content. Easy to read and navigate. The image makes it more interesting’.”


Tgoose's Blog condemns the army-backed regime change in the Republic of Madagascar in no uncertain terms:

“I am still reeling from all the events of yesterday, I can hardly believe that such a travesty of democracy could happen so quickly…. What this coup represents is a serious step backwards for Madagascar, or at least freedom in Madagascar and potentially some trouble for its future...

The methods used by the TGV to obtain power were illegal… There ABSOLUTELY has to be repercussions for what happened to the government of Madagascar, and hopefully the international community will start that. But this is just the tip of the iceberg…

Now you are going to see people come out of the woodwork, now that their puppet (or scapegoat) has taken control of the country… How can a 34 year old DJ with approximately 1 year of political experience being mayor bring down a government without major help from someone else?

So… what’s next? A fourth republic? Massive overhaul of the constitution? Didier Ratsiraka coming back to Tana for a visit? Who knows… but we will all be watching, hoping that someone will pay for what has been done to Madagascar.”


Scribbles from the Den publishes a rejoinder to an earlier blog on gerontocracy in Cameroon with a guest contribution by Emmanuel Konde of Albany State University, in Georgia (USA):

“Nowhere in Cameroon do we find a Fon, Lamido, Chief, or Village Headman removed from power through the ritual of election. All over the land every Fon, Lamido, Chief and Headman who ascends to power rules for life if some vicissitudes of history beyond human control do not intervene to force a displacement…

And so I ask: ‘why should the President of Cameroon be expected to relinquish power by election if his counterparts everywhere in the country, including those who preceded his rise to power in 1982 in the various ethnic polities, have not done the same in their fondoms, lamidats, chiefdoms, and villages?’
It is with the utmost humility that I question the hypocrites and parasites amongst us, people who would expect the whole to operate in contradiction to its aggregates. Why should the national government of Cameroon be anything but gerontocratic if the Fon and his cabal of old men called kwifon rule their Fondom, and the Chief and his Council of Elders consisting of old men rule their chiefdom?”

* 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/

'Economic downturn blessing to Tanzania'

2009-03-20

http://www.ippmedia.com/ipp/observer/2009/03/15/133383.html

Current global economic meltdown might be a blessing in disguise for Tanzania should long term strategies be employed to revamp its agricultural sector, Standard Chartered Bank` s Regional Head of Research, Africa Razia Khan has said.
Addressing a press conference in Dar es Salaam this week, Khan said the country stands to benefit immensely from adequate investment in agriculture, its traditional economic mainstay, owing to expected increase in demand for food and food products in countries currently grappling with the economic recession.

China advises Sudan not to let Darfur crisis worsen

2009-03-20

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aaYP5RjktTkM&refer=asia#

China has expressed “serious concern” to Sudan’s government about the expulsion of aid workers from Darfur, yet won’t back United Nations Security Council pressure to reverse the decision, China’s envoy said. “We have openly expressed our concern,” China’s ambassador to the UN, Zhang Yesui, said in an interview in New York. “We have advised the Sudanese government to be restrained. We told them we do not want the humanitarian situation to worsen.”

China lost billions in diversification drive

2009-03-20

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/11fa4136-119f-11de-87b1-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

China has lost tens of billions of dollars of its foreign exchange reserves through a poorly timed diversification into global equities just before world markets collapsed last year. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the opaque manager of nearly $2,000bn (€1,547bn, £1,429bn) of reserves, started making huge bets on global stocks early in 2007 and continued this strategy at least until the collapse of the US mortgage finance providers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in July 2008, according to analysts and people familiar with Safe’s operations.

China-Africa relations to deepen

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/cwtmp2

More opportunities for Chinese investment into Africa are to open up soon, with the announcement that China is to bolster its China-Africa Development Fund by an additional R19.8-billion ($2-billion). The state-run equity fund has already invested in 20 projects, totalling a massive R3.9-billion ($400-million), in Africa since it was established in June 2007. The latest development will give Chinese enterprises added impetus to sink their funds into the continent, particularly in light of the withdrawal of Western investors, many of whom find themselves under financial pressure because of the global recession.

China’s shot across the bows

Stephen Marks and Sanusha Naidu

2009-03-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/africa_china/55104

African leaders put their case as finance ministers from the world’s 20 richest countries met in London, ahead of next month’s G20 summit on the global economic downturn. British premier Gordon Brown took the opportunity to promote himself as Africa’s friend within the G20. But in a first-ever joint communique on the eve of the meeting, Brazil China Russia and India called for reform of the global financial institutions to give a greater voice to emerging economies and provide better regulation of the financial system in future.
Donald Kaberuka, head of the African Development Bank, called the impact of the crisis on Africa an ‘emergency’ and ‘deeper than anticipated at the beginning’. Ethiopian Prime Minister Melas Zenawi and South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel both called for greater flexibility from the IMF and World Bank to make finance for trade avaiulable once again.

Prime Minister Zenawi argued that investment in Africa was in the richer countries’ self-interest as ‘The global stimulus impact of every dollar spent in Africa is higher than if it is spent in the US or the UK’, and the cost of instability and breakdown would be greater - a point also made by Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

The African leaders were in London for a meeting hosted by Gordon Brown, who heard reports of the continent-wide impact of the crisis - 500,000 thrown out of work on the Zambian copper belt, farmers losing work and income as prices fall, and a slump in remittances from abroad.

But the four BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - made their own powerful plea for change in a first-ever joint statement calling for more access to finance. The four nations said that private investment is evaporating this year and next year and "it is imperative that multilateral financial institutions should expand their lending to offset the massive decline."

Existing resources for the International Monetrary Fund are "clearly inadequate and should be significantly increased" they said, asking the IMF to speed up efforts to raise up to $11 billion by selling 400 tons of gold.

They also warned the U.S. and the Euro-zone nations that they needed economic policies that were "more balanced, proactive, coordinated and countercyclical" to promote global economic recovery. And they called for a speeding up of the current review of representation on the governing bodies of the World Bank and IMF.

The G20 Finance Ministers were full of warm words for the poorer countries in their final communique, stressing that ‘We are committed to helping emerging and developing economies to cope with the reversal in international capital flows. We recognise the urgent need to pursue all options for mobilising International Financial Institution (IFI) resources and liquidity to finance countercyclical spending, bank recapitalisation, infrastructure, trade finance, rollover risk and social support. We agreed on the urgent need to increase IMF resources very substantially’.

But they will need to move fast to offset the trend for the crisis to hit hard at key investment in Africa’s infrastructure. A recent meeting of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa heard from its co-ordinator Alex Rugamba ‘We should not underestimate the impact of the financial and economic crisis on investment in Africa's infrastructure sector, particularly on the levels of private sector investment...there is a gap of 80 million dollars in new infrastructure building and maintenance’,

Meanwhile China was pushing ahead with its African investment and acquisition. The Financial Times reported that the China-African Development Fund is to receive a US$2 billion top-up earlier than planned as Beijing looks to snap up assets left by what the FT called ‘ the hasty retreat of western investors from the continent’

The fund, which was launched in late 2006 at the Beijing FOCAC summit , has so far invested US$400 million of the US$1 billion starting capital granted by China Development Bank. It is expected to use up the remainder by the end of 2009 - a full two years ahead of schedule, said Chi Jianxin, the fund's chief executive. Existing investments include agricultural projects in Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique; industrial zones in Egypt, Nigeria and Mauritius; and a share of a power station in Ghana.

The fund has now launched its South African branch with the signing of a memorandum with SA’s Department of Trade and Industry at a high-profile ceremony attended by powerful movers and shakers from the ruling ANC and from Chinese and South African business leaders.

To reinforce the trend, the Chinese government announced [url=http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90778/90857/90861/6615294.html]
new regulations to promote and regulate overseas investment[/url].The new regulations seek to simplify the procedures needed for Chinese companies to get permission to invest overseas. They also urge Chinese companies ‘to fully abide by laws and regulations of the host countries and fulfill social responsibilities when expanding their business on the international markets’

According to the report in Peoples Daily, China’s overseas investments in 2008 totalled US$52.1 billion - a massive 96.7% increase over 2007.

The Washington Post gave details of what it described as China’s ’shopping spree’ . ‘On Feb. 12, China's state-owned metals giant Chinalco signed a $19.5 billion deal with Australia's Rio Tinto that will eventually double its stake in the world's second-largest mining company.

‘In three other cases, China has used loans as a way of securing energy supplies. On Feb. 17 and 18, China National Petroleum signed separate agreements with Russia and Venezuela under which China would provide $25 billion and $4 billion in loans, respectively, in exchange for long-term commitments to supply oil. And on Feb. 19, the China Development Bank struck a similar deal with Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, agreeing to a loan of $10 billion in exchange for oil.

‘On Saturday, Iran announced that it had signed a $3.2 billion agreement with a Chinese consortium to develop an area beneath the Persian Gulf seabed that is believed to hold about 8 percent of the world's reserves of natural gas.’

Other reports of continuing Chinese activity included the offer of more than $1 billion in loans to Angola, to be spent on agricultural projects, housing and infrastructure, on top of the existing total of over $5 billion in loans extended since the end of the civil war in 2002.

In Nigeria talks were being held to hammer out the details of the planned Ogun Guangdong Free Trade Zone Project, a 7,000 hectare industrial enclave based on investment by Chinese enterprises from Guangdong in southern China.

And in Zambia, two Chinese companies [url= ,]http://www.lusakatimes.com/?p=9682], ‘Zhonghui Guohua Industry (Group) Limited and State Grid International Development made their intentions to invest in Mwinilunga during a meeting with Mines and Minerals Development Minister Maxwell Mwale and Minister for Trade, Commerce and Industry, Felix Mutati’[/url]. This follows the recent announcement by the Zambian government that it will soon advertise demarcated Oil and Gas blocks in three regions.

The New York Times reported that at the same time as announcing the new regulations on overeas investment, China’s Commerce Ministry was also leading its first-ever mergers and acquisitions delegation of corporate executives to Europe. ‘The executives are looking at companies in the automotive, textiles, food, energy, machinery, electronics and environmental protection sectors’.

Meanwhile, a former China expert at the IMF observed that recent amendments to China’s $600 billion economic stimulus package indicate a sharper focus on increasing China’s long-term economic competitiveness. “Higher expenditures on education and research and development, along with amounts already committed to infrastructure investment, will boost the economy’s productivity.”

This background gave additional significance to the understated warning by China’s Premier Wen Jiabao that he was ’a little bit worried’ about the safety of Chinese assets in the USA.

A few days after Premier Wen made his remarks, at a press conference following the annual session of China’s legislature, the official Xinhua News Agency made clear the background in its report on the recently-published US Treasury Department figures on international capital flows, showing that in January foreign purchases of US debt rose by $10.7 billion, ‘bringing slight relief to those who were concerned that U.S. debt had lost its appeal’ as Xinhua pointedly put it.

As the agency also reported, the figures show that in the same month China increased its holdings of US debt by $12.2 billion - more than the total net increase. In other words, President Obama’s recovery programme is in effect being financed by China, which now holds 60% of total US national debt.

Naturally, US officials were swift to repeat Hillary Clinton’s recent reassurance that ‘There’s no safer investment in the world than in the United States’ - also pointing out that confidence would have been hurt without the Administration’s recent package.

As the Washington Post observed;
‘That reality, experts say, has given China more leverage in its dealings with Washington, with some seeing Wen's comments yesterday as amounting to economic saber-rattling. The words came only days after a confrontation in international waters between a U.S. military ship and five Chinese vessels that sparked recriminations on both sides of the Pacific. Chinese officials have also signaled alarm over a growing "protectionist" sentiment in the U.S. Congress that could further endanger its exports, now in sharp decline as world demand spirals during the global economic crisis.

..."The power that China now has is that its actions are seen as a leading indicator of the confidence that foreign investors will have in the ability of the U.S. government to pay the debt," said Eswar Prasad, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "These comments are saber-rattling in the sense that they are using that leverage to tell the U.S. to back off on currency policy and trade policy."

All of which indicates that when the full G20 meets next month, the demand from China and the other BRIC partners for a greater say in global financial governance for the emerging powers of the global south will be hard for the established powers to resist. While tempting, the BRIC partners face a daunting task of ensuring that the diverse voices and diffuse issues of the Global South and Africa, in particular, is given fair representation in any reformed global financial architecture. But perhaps the more foreboding challenge facing these emerging powers is whether they can claim to be the voice of the Global South and Africa.

*Stephen Marks is Research Associate and Project Co-ordinator with Fahamu’s China in Africa Project
* Sanusha Naidu is Research Director with Fahamu’s China in Africa Project
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

How to look at Sino-African relations?

2009-03-20

http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90780/91343/6617755.html

Sino-African relations have aroused a lot of attention from around the world. Some are critical and some see more positive changes. Thus how to look at Sino-African relations depends on how one understands such relations. At a seminar in Stockholm last week, Dr. Henning Melber, Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskyöld Foundation in Uppsala in Sweden gave an overview on Sino-African relations and some changes in the current situation.

Libya may thwart China national’s takeover of Verenex

2009-03-20

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=aD1eoTXm7DbE&refer=canada#

Libya will exercise its right to buy Verenex Energy Inc., trumping a proposed C$499 million ($393 million) takeover of the Canadian explorer by China National Petroleum Corp. “We will exercise the right of preemption,” Shokri Ghanem, chairman of Libya’s state-run National Oil Corp., said today in an interview in Vienna. Libya wants to buy the Calgary-based explorer for “purely commercial reasons,” he said. Under the preemption clause, Libya has to match the offer from China’s biggest oil company.

Lifan to set up $10mln assembly plant in Ethiopia

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/dyhyce

Lifan Group, one of the biggest privately-owned enterprises in China, will set up a vehicle assembly plant, the first of its type, in Ethiopia with an initial investment outlay of $10 million, Pan Juequan, chief representative of the company and project manager of the future establishment in Ethiopia told The Reporter. Lifan Group is also the sole supplier of engines, motors and spare-parts for the locally assembled Holland Car which produces Abay and Awash antomobile for the local market and export.

Mahindra’s hike stake in South African vehicle venture

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/czg5rc

Indian vehicle manufacturer Mahindra and Mahindra has increased its stake in the joint venture with its South African partner to 90 percent from 51 percent, and invested a further 30 million rands ($3 million) in the country’s automotive business. Mahindra South Africa, which launched its new multipurpose vehicle Xylo here last week, also expressed confidence in the South African auto market, though other manufacturers reported record drops in sales in the wake of the global economic downturn.

Long way to go before sanctions are lifted

2009-03-20

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5425

Zimbabwe's power sharing government has "a long way to go" before the United States lifts sanctions, an official said Thursday despite an appeal for their removal. "We have not yet seen sufficient evidence from the government of Zimbabwe that they are firmly and irrevocably on a path to inclusive and effective governance, and as well as respect for human rights and the rule of law," State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.

Recovery plan calls for rule of law and an end to farm invasions

2009-03-20

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news190309/recovery190309.htm

The inclusive government’s new ‘Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme’ (STERP), was officially launched on Thursday. It commits the administration to upholding the rule of law, as well as stopping any further farm invasions. STERP is aimed at trying to rejuvenate the beleaguered economy, and the launch in Harare was in response to the severe economic challenges facing the country - at the centre of which is hyperinflation, deteriorating public service delivery and corruption.

Africa: AU suspends Madagascar over coup

2009-03-20

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE52J0LZ20090320

The African Union suspended Madagascar on Friday, the strongest condemnation yet by the international community after opposition leader Andry Rajoelina took power with the support of the army. The AU decision echoed criticism by southern African bloc SADC, the European Union and United States. Weeks of political unrest in Madagascar have killed at least 135 people, devastated the economy and worried foreign investors.

Global: Liberia stresses need for female peacemakers

2009-03-20

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3949/context/cover/

For three days and nights 28-year-old Comfort Wilson rode in the back of a pickup truck from her rural village in Liberia to the capital, Monrovia. She came with 30 women from her village sleeping in the truck bed, eating food they prepared at home. They came, along with women from Mozambique, Guatemala, Kosovo and 25 other countries, as a global show of support for the idea that more women must be involved in building and maintaining peace.

Global: Online learning tools on violence against women

2009-03-20

http://new.vawnet.org/category/index_pages.php?category_id=867

This collection provides a sampling of available Online Learning Tools with subject matter related to violence against women prevention and intervention. Materials included in this collection have four key components: they are 1) free, 2) available online, 3) interactive, and 4) self-guided. The resources listed here can be used for the purposes of staff development (by individuals), or as tools for trainers (in groups)

Lesotho: Women farmers get mobile know-how

2009-03-20

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83535

Access to mobiles phones has transformed the lives of rural women farmers boosting income and expanding knowledge, a pilot study in Lesotho has found. Three years ago, Evodia Matobo, then 62, a small-scale poultry farmer in Lesotho's rural lowlands, was stacking plastic containers to feed her chickens. Now she talks about "feeders, agricultural shows, workshops, experts."

DRC: Militias must go, but security forces need discipline, says UN envoy

2009-03-20

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30233

In order to end the sexual violence plaguing the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), it is necessary to stop the activity of armed groups but also to ensure security forces have strong discipline, the top United Nations envoy there has said. Responding to a group of women victims of such violence as he continued to assess the humanitarian situation in North Kivu province, Alan Doss, Special Representative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for the DRC, voiced the need to “put an end to the presence of armed groups, but also to put discipline into the heart of security forces.”

Gambia: ‘Witch hunt’ shows worsening human rights

2009-03-20

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83532

Arbitrary kidnappings and beatings of citizens in The Gambia, allegedly involving President Yaya Jammeh’s forces, signal a deterioration of human rights, says Amnesty International. Up to 1,000 people have been kidnapped by ‘witch doctors’ – from Guinea, rights activists say – since early February and taken to detention centres or to the President’s farm in Kanilai, accompanied by the President’s personal protection guards, the police and the army, according to an Amnesty International communiqué released on 18 March.

Chad: blazes rip through Sudanese refugee camps

2009-03-20

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30204

The United Nations refugee agency said today it was hastening to replace supplies and put preventive measures in place after five accidental fires swept through two camps for Sudanese refugees in remote eastern Chad in the past four weeks. A 9-year old boy died and some 1,455 people were left homeless in the Amer and Djabal camps, due to the fires, which were caused by poorly tended open fires fanned by heavy winds, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has said.

DRC: Attacks by Hutu rebels continue to cause displacement

2009-03-20

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/LSGZ-7QBEPU?OpenDocument

Attacks by the Hutu rebel group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, are still causing displacement over a wide area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's North Kivu province. On 20 January, Congolese and Rwandan forces launched an offensive to forcefully disarm the FDLR, considered by Rwanda as a major threat to its national security. FDLR has been retaliating against the civilian population and has launched sporadic attacks on villages in North Kivu.

DRC: Shelter programme needs fresh funding

2009-03-20

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/49c1278f4.html

Pressure to provide new housing in South Kivu is mounting as more and more people return to the relatively peaceful and stable province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). But the ability of agency's such as UNHCR to keep pace with demand will depend on the continuing generosity of donors. "The absence of adequate housing is one of the biggest challenges refugees face upon their return to South Kivu. After years of absence, most find their homes destroyed and have nowhere to stay," Sebastien Apatita, head of the UN refugee agency's office in Baraka, explained during a recent visit.

Uganda: Uprooted continue to return home in the North , UN reports

2009-03-20

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30211

Northern Ugandans uprooted during two decades of fighting between the Government and a notorious rebel group are continuing to return home, the United Nations humanitarian arm has announced. The clashes between the Government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) drove nearly two million people from their homes, devastating infrastructure and services.

Western Sahara: Aid partners to assess state of refugees on UN-led visits

2009-03-20

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30213

Concern over malnutrition among long-term refugees from Western Sahara have sparked two assessment missions to their camps in western Algeria by humanitarian partners, the first of which embarks tomorrow, the United Nations refugee agency has announced. Staff of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP) will accompany representatives of donor countries and their partners from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on a three-day mission to the camps of Sahrawi people, starting tomorrow.

Global: Barefoot guide to working with organisations and social change

2009-03-20

http://www.barefootguide.org/what-is-guide.php

This is a practical, do-it-yourself guide for leaders and facilitators wanting to help organisations to function and to develop in more healthy, human and effective ways as they strive to make their contributions to a more humane society. It has been developed by the Barefoot Collective.

Global: WSF 2009: converging of networks to face the global crisis

2009-03-20

http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/download/2009-03-12-newsletter_EN.htm#1

During six days at the end of January, citizens, movements and organizations from 142 countries gathered in the city of Belem for the IX World Social Forum. More than 2300 activities involved 113 thousands participants in panels, debates, seminars, cultural events, marches, demonstrations, and open spaces for direct interactions in this edition of the event in the heart of the Amazon region.

Kenya: What principals and Parliament must do to deal with current financial crisis

2009-03-20

http://blog.marsgroupkenya.org/?p=639

When we were told that Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga (Principals to the Kenya National Accord) had settled on a Kenya Cabinet size of 43, Mars Group told Kenyans to prepare themselves to pay through their noses, unless Kenyans managed to convince these two men to see what was obvious: That Kenya could not afford such a large Cabinet and that Kenya did not need such a large Cabinet. This very bad start for the Grand Coalition has bust the bank less than 12 months after the Grand Coalition Cabinet was appointed. And for what?

South Africa: Residents to attend Cape High Court on the 20th of March at 10h00

2009-03-20

http://antieviction.org.za/

We, the Delft Symphony Residents received an application of eviction from the City of Cape Town. We must appear in the High Court on the 20th of March of 2009 at 10h00. On the 9th of March of 2009 we went to advocates in town, Cliffe, Dekke, Hofmeyr, Number 11, Buitengracht Street, Cape Town, and to the Cape High Court to hand in our notice of intention to defend.

Algeria: Presidential campaign officially launched

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/cngeyo

The electoral campaign in Algeria started officially on Thursday (March 19th), giving candidates until April 6th to convince voters and collect enough support to win the race. From now through the end of the campaign, Algerians will see more of their presidential candidates. They will listen to their platforms; weigh their backgrounds and achievements and challenge their promises with everyday reality. Voters have until the polls open on April 9th to make up their minds

Gambia: Court releases opposition leader

2009-03-20

http://www.afrol.com/articles/32739

The Gambian court has freed opposition leader Halifa Sallah from jail with all the charges against him dropped. Mr Sallah who was arrested earlier this month, was charged with spying, sedition and holding illegal meetings. His release comes just a day after human rights organisation Amnesty International appealed for his release saying he was at risk of being tortured in jail also saying the country will not hold a fair trial for the man.

Global: Nations line up to slam big powers' UN veto rights

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/ddmyw9

African and other developing nations joined several European powers at the United Nations to denounce the veto rights of the five official nuclear powers on the U.N. Security Council, diplomats said. The chorus of criticism began on Monday and continued on Tuesday at a closed-door session of the General Assembly on reforming and expanding the most powerful U.N. body.

Guinea Bissau: Parliament approves government agenda

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/cuucu8

The programme drawn up by Guinea Bissau's Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior has been approved by the country's parliament. The approval, on Wednesday, paves the way for the government to implement the programme.

Madagascar: AU chairman calls for referendum

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/ca5kbx

The chairman of the African Union (AU), Libyan leader Mouammar Gaddafi, has called for a referendum in Madagascar as soon as possible under the auspices of the country's constitutional institutions and AU organs to find a solution to the political events presently prevailing in the country.

Kenya: Do Kenyans trust the Grand Coalition?

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/dchwgw

The Grand Coalition Government in Kenya seems to be losing the war against corruption. In the wake of widespread starvation and rising costs of living, TI-Kenya’s National Corruption Perceptions Survey shows that many Kenyans believe the government has the power, the ability but not the will to tackle corruption. Parliament stands especially indicted in the failure to uphold the common good.

Zimbabwe: TI-Zimbabwe castigates corruption at Harare City Council

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/chhywb

The Transparency International Zimbabwe is greatly disturbed by the reports of massive corruption rocking Harare City Council. Consequently, we urgently call for a forensic audit to determine the magnitude of the rot that has dogged the Town House to date. This includes the periods of the illegal and legal commissions. The issue of the cattle is just a tip of the iceberg and we believe that the forensic audit will lay the cards bare for public scrutiny.

Africa: Crisis 'will cost Africa $49bn'

2009-03-20

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7945843.stm

The financial crisis and global recession will see African economies lose up to to $49bn by the end of this year, research by ActionAid suggests. About $27bn of this was a fall in aid, export earnings and income from richer recession-hit nations said the charity. The lost income is equivalent to a 10% pay cut for the continent, it added.

Africa: Better food safety crucial for Africa

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/dymwe8

Africa must protect its food supplies from contamination by prioritising and investing in food production systems, says Ruth Oniang'o, editor-in-chief of the African Journal of Food Agriculture Nutrition and Development. January 2009 saw Kenya destroy US$8 million worth of maize — the country's staple food — after it was found to be contaminated with aflatoxin. But it seems the government agency concerned was more worried about recouping storage costs than righting its failures, says Oniang'o.

Africa: Downturn 'risks Africa conflict'

2009-03-20

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7947321.stm

African leaders have warned that parts of the continent could be plunged back into conflict if they are not helped to recover from the global downturn. The stark warning came as they gathered in London to put their case ahead of the G20 summit next month. The scale of the crisis faced by Africa because of the economic downturn is only now becoming apparent.

Africa: Finance ministers make promises to developing countries

2009-03-20

http://allafrica.com/stories/200903140016.html

Finance ministers from the G20 grouping of nations issued a communique after a meeting in Britain Saturday, saying they would help emerging and developing countries to cope with the reversal in capital flows and would mobilise international financial resources to help these countries. !n an apparent response to a meeting arranged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Tanzanian government in Dar es Salaam this week, the finance ministers said there was a need to boost IMF resources "very substantially."

Africa: Is East Africa ready for oil?

2009-03-20

http://blogs.reuters.com/africanews/2009/03/13/is-east-africa-ready-for-oil/

Buoyed by recent discoveries of commercial scale oil deposits in Uganda, east African policy makers, foreign oil explorers and their local partners trooped to a five-star hotel on the Kenyan coast this week to reflect on the progress and chart future strategies. Viewed as a frontier region for oil exploration, east Africa’s first major oil find was made by Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil companies in the Albertine Basin, which spans the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (whose improving relations are making the exploitation of the reserves look more likely).

Globl: Agri investments must help, not hurt: World Bank

2009-03-20

http://www.reuters.com/article/FoodandAgriculture09/idUSTRE52I82K20090319

Growing interest from Asia and Middle East countries to lease agricultural land in Africa "is not a bad thing" but must be handled properly and in a transparent way, a top World Bank official said on Thursday. Speaking at the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director at the World Bank, said it matters how those foreign investments are made.

Kenya: New partnership to unlock credit financing for small scale farmers launched

2009-03-20

http://www.awcfs.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=573&Itemid=1

Throughout her farming career, Jane Owino she has planted recycled seeds from the previous year’s harvest. However, for as long as she can remember, the 47 year old farmer in Western Kenya has never posted any profits from her labours. Year in and year out, she prepares her farm diligently and plants the seeds on time but she knows that she is at the mercy of increasingly unpredictable seasons and when the rains fail her harvest is in jeopardy.

Mozambique: Aid partners approve $816 million for budget

2009-03-20

http://af.reuters.com/article/investingNews/idAFJOE52H0MD20090318

A group of Mozambique's nineteen development partners on Wednesday approved a $816 million aid package to support the government's 2009 state budget and other development projects for the next five years. The group, known as the Programme Aid Partners (PAP), who provide support to the national budget, are the largest grouping of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Southern Africa: SA may be excluded from SADC EPA

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/cxspn2

A meeting held in Swakopmund, Namibia last week between the European Commission (EC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) group failed to break an impasse over concerns raised by South Africa over the economic partnership agreement (EPA), despite significant further concessions by the European Union (EU) to sweeten the deal.

East Africa: Kenya, Uganda VCTs turning in thousands of false HIV-positives

2009-03-20

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/-/2558/545696/-/rjm3osz/-/index.html

Hundreds — or even thousands — of Kenyans and Ugandans may have been told that they are infected with HIV when they are not, thanks to faulty rapid, 15-minute tests administered at VCT centres. Many others may have wrongly been declared negative, clearing them for unprotected sex, when they actually are HIV-positive. That is the worrying conclusion of a study involving 6,255 people carried out in Uganda and Kenya, which bluntly says that the misuse of rapid tests at most VCT centres makes them fraught with error and that they cannot by themselves alone determine whether one is HIV-positive or not.

Global: Half million deaths from cryptococcal meningitis a year in people with HIV

2009-03-20

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/CE8A5494-4408-467B-822C-58FC529CAB33.asp

Researchers have estimated that there were about one million infections and a half a million deaths from HIV-related cryptococcal meningitis worldwide in 2006. The findings published in the February 20th edition of the journal AIDS also show that sub-Saharan Africa had the highest global burden of cryptococcal meningitis among people living with HIV. The scientists (led by Benjamin J. Park of the US Centers for Disease Control) did the study because although although cryptococcal meningitis is one of the most widely reported HIV-related opportunistic infections, the global burden is

Kenya: Dancing with death

2009-03-20

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83531

The music blaring through Nyahera village in Kenya's southwestern Nyanza Province comes from two large speakers strategically placed at Mzee Dishon Onyango's home. Youths, some as young as 12, gyrate to the beats of their favourite music and consume a local illicit brew; others smoke bhang [marijuana] with abandon.

Nigeria: Seizure of drug shipment threatens ARV access

2009-03-20

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83459

Dutch customs officials have seized a consignment of generic antiretroviral (ARV) drugs bound for Nigeria, raising the health risk to HIV-positive people in need of the life-prolonging medication. Claiming that the drugs were counterfeit and violated patent rights, Dutch authorities seized the shipment at the end of February as it passed through Schipol Airport in Amsterdam en route to Nigeria, where the drugs were to be distributed by the Clinton Foundation, an implementing partner of the country's HIV/AIDS programme.

South Africa: Final chapter in the Rath saga?

2009-03-20

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83497

AIDS activists in South Africa appear to have won the final round of a protracted battle to prevent vitamin salesman Matthias Rath from promoting his unproven remedies to patients living with HIV and AIDS. Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS lobby group, reported on Monday that Rath had failed to file court papers in time to uphold his appeal against a High Court order issued in June 2008, banning him from publishing further advertisements claiming that VitaCell, his multivitamin product, cured AIDS, or from continuing clinical trials of the product in the treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Tanzania: New prevalence report has some surprises

2009-03-20

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83479

Tanzania's HIV prevalence has dropped to 5.7 percent from a high of seven percent in 2004, according to the recently released Tanzania HIV/AIDS and Malaria Indicator Survey 2007/08. The study was carried out among people aged between 15 and 49 in all 26 regions on the Tanzanian mainland and the semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar.

Global: Free education Week

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/education/55022

Constitutive on the "International Day of Action against the Commercialization of Education" on Nov.5th 2008, the International Students Movement is calling for a Global Week of Action in April 2009 (20/04 – 29/04). We are a loose network of various progressive (student) groups from close to 30 countries on 5 continents. What unites us is the struggle against the increasing commercialization of education and for emancipating public education accessible to all members of society.
Call for a Global Week of Action 2009

Constitutive on the "International Day of Action against the Commercialization of Education" on Nov.5th 2008, the International Students Movement is calling for a Global Week of Action in April 2009 (20/04 – 29/04).

We are a loose network of various progressive (student) groups from close to 30 countries on 5 continents. What unites us is the struggle against the increasing commercialization of education and for emancipating public education accessible to all members of society.

More and more groups realize that forces responsible for this development – the privatisation and commodification of education (like many other aspects of life) – function globally. And we can only effectively counter them, if we unite in our struggle.

Students, teachers, workers and parents around the world ask themselves: Is the public education system actually still serving the interests of the public, or is the focus shifting to implement education systems that primarily serve private and business interests? Tuition fees are – once introduced – sky-rocketing, universities and schools are turned into businesses, student debt keeps increasing and education budgets cut. Institutions of higher education become highly dependant on their ability to attract sponsorships (usually from economic actors).
Consequently only those institutions and departments are able to survive, that are deemed valuable by sponsors.

Public education systems, from kindergarten to university, must prioritize emancipating aspects, be free and accessible to all. A democracy only exists, if society consists of emancipated and self-determined individuals, that are able to critically reflect their (social) environment, developments and power structures. Any system, that doesn’t fulfill these criteria is not a
democracy.

The fact, that groups in more than 20 countries on 5 continents joined the international day of action in November show how international this struggle is.
During the week of April 20-29 active citizens around the word are uniting to reclaim education from the grip of commercialization and so-called "neoliberal policies".

It is up to each group how and for how many days they want to express their protest. It can be a smaller or bigger action. But it is important that we co-ordinate this together.

Therefore please get in touch with us, once you decided to arrange something for the Global Week of Action.

Let's get organized and unite in our struggle!


Please send your questions or enquiries to: united.for.education@gmail.com

Zimbabwe: Board appointed to reform education

2009-03-20

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5421

The Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, Senator David Coltart has announced and appointed a new National Education Advisory Board which will advise him on ways to improve Zimbabwe's primary and secondary education. The board's immediate task is a rapid assessment of the state of primary and secondary education, as the foundation for a long-term plan and funding for the Ministry, a statement from Coltart says.

Nigeria: Church backs anti-gay bill

2009-03-20

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=nigeria&id=2071

The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, Reverend Peter Akinola has lauded the Same Gender Marriage Prohibition Bill which aims to do away with homosexuality in Nigeria. In a paper, recently submitted to the Nigerian Parliamentary Committee, stating the Church’s position, Akinola demonstrated his support for this controversial bill which seeks to punish whoever enters into a same gender union in Nigeria.

Global: Obama under fire from black activists

United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Durban Review

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/cccop5

Black activists around the country will hold simultaneous press conferences on Saturday, March 21, 2009, also the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racism. The December 12th Movement International Secretariat will hold a Press Conference in New York City to protest President Barack Obama’s threat to boycott the United Nations World Conference against Racism - Durban Review being held in Geneva Switzerland next month.

Global: World forests rapidly disappearing

Biofuels a major driver, networks claim

2009-03-20

http://www.soyatech.com/news_story.php?id=12938

In a reaction to the alarming data released in the 2009 State of the World's Forests report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Friends of the Earth International and the Global Forest Coalition, two leading networks of environmental and Indigenous Peoples' Organisations, called on world governments to take immediate action to halt deforestation and forest degradation.

Kenya: Supporting the Kajiado Maasai to protect their land rights

Kituo Cha Sheria

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/d46o38

The Maasai of Kajiado, like many indigenous communities the world over, are continuously victims of historical and contemporary injustices arising from land and natural resources. This is occasioned by their unique and distinctively different livelihood system from the mainstream Kenyan society and their refusal to embrace the modern agricultural economic systems, despite much pressure to do so. Most recently, their lands in the Kajiado district are being threatened by the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Bill 2000 which will urbanise Kajiado as part of the Nairobi Metropolitan Area (NMA).

Mauritania: Journalist arrested for criticising Junta now released

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/djrx7o

Abou Al Abbass Ould Brahim, a Mauritanian journalist, ar rested and detained by Police 15 March for allegedly criticizing the military junta in the country, has been released without being charged to court, the sub-regional press freedom body, Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), said in a statement received by PANA Thursday.

Sierra Leone: Stations banned for inciting violence

2009-03-20

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/europe/article.aspx?id=7180

Sierra Leone's vice president, Samuel Sam-Sumana, on Mar. 13 ordered an indefinite ban on radio stations owned by the ruling All Peoples Congress (APC) and its main rival, the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP). This comes in the wake of a wave of politically-motivated clashes between rival party militants across the country these past two weeks. The situation has deteriorated so much so that by-elections in Gendema, a remote town bordering Liberia, had to be put on hold.

Somalia: Local newspaper editor sentenced to five months

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/55024

The Somali Coalition For freedom Expression (SOCFEX) condemns the arbitral detention of the editor of YOOL and the subsequent sentencing to five months by the regional court of Hargaisa in the self declared state of Somaliland after being accused of publishing newspaper without proper authorization. Mr. Mohamed Abdi Urad has been detained by the Somaliland police in late February 2009. He was held in the headquarters of Somaliland CID in Hargaisa. He appeared in court briefly once and was sent back to detention after prosecution failed to make credible charges.
SOCFEX Press Release: Local newspaper editor sentenced to five months

SOCFEX condemns the arbitral detention of the editor of YOOL and the subsequent sentencing to five months by the regional court of Hargaisa in the self declared state of Somaliland after being accused of publishing newspaper without proper authorization.

Mr. Mohamed Abdi Urad has been detained by the Somaliland police in late February 2009. He was held in the headquarters of Somaliland CID in Hargaisa. He appeared in court briefly once and was sent back to detention after prosecution failed to make credible charges.

It is still not clear the reasons for his detention but unconfirmed reports suggest that the editor of YOOL is being detained because of the wishes of a minister in the incumbent government. Observers in Hargaisa claimed that the minister thought to be behind the Mr. Urad’s detention is the minister of finance. It is believed that the minister visited the CID headquarter apparently to discuss possible charges against the editor.

When the court sentenced the editor for five months the relative of the editor bought the sentence and paid the money to an account operated by the ministry of finance and later the prosecution office complained and the court requested the money.

The SOCFEX is calling the Somali Land authority to take concrete and effective action to investigate the case of Mohamed Abdi Urad.

We strongly insist on the authorities to respect his rights under the law and ensure that he receives fair trial.

For further information please contact

Somali Coalition for Freedom of Expression
Maka al-Mukara Street, opp. of Tre Piano building, Hodan District
Tel: +252 1 850 040 / 236 012 Mogadishu, Somalia
E-mail: socfex@yahoo.com, socfex@socfex.org

Zimbabwe: Top lawyer nominated for freedom of expression award

2009-03-20

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5420

Harrison Nkomo, a top Zimbabwean human rights lawyer known over the past decade for defending journalists in Zimbabwe, has been nominated for the Bindmans Law and Campaigning Award by Index on Censorship. Nkomo has in the past few years been arrested, intimidated and assaulted by state agents in Zimbabwe while trying to do his job. In March last year he was arrested for allegedly insulting President Robert Mugabe.

Global: Conference will establish African Socialist International in N. America

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/diaspora/55023

On the weekend of May 22-24, African organizers from across the U.S. and Canada will converge on Washington, D.C. for a conference recognizing African Liberation Day (ALD) with the theme, “One Africa, One Nation: Separated by Colonial Slavery, Reunited by Revolutionary Resistance!” The event, organized by the African People’s Socialist Party, will serve to formally establish the North American Region of the African Socialist International (ASI), a worldwide party uniting African workers to liberate Africa and its people wherever they have been dispersed.
African Revolution builds in North America
with conference over African Liberation Day weekend
May 22-24 in Washington, DC

What: First North American Regional Conference of the African Socialist International
When: May 22nd-24th, 2009
Where: The Carlos Rosario Charter School NW, Washington, DC
Contact: Lisa Watson, 612.203.6621, media@alduhuru.org

On the weekend of May 22-24, African organizers from across the U.S. and Canada will converge on Washington, D.C. for a conference recognizing African Liberation Day (ALD) with the theme, “One Africa, One Nation: Separated by Colonial Slavery, Reunited by Revolutionary Resistance!” The event, organized by the African People’s Socialist Party, will serve to formally establish the North American Region of the African Socialist International (ASI), a worldwide party uniting African workers to liberate Africa and its people wherever they have been dispersed.

A simultaneous ASI conference will take place in Manchester, England to consolidate the organization’s presence in Europe. These conferences come on the heels of a well-attended West African ASI regional conference held in October 2008 characterized as the largest socialist gathering in the region since the 1930s and one in East Africa scheduled for April. They represent the growing popularity of African Internationalist political theory throughout the world.

From recent rebellions demanding an end to French colonialism in the Caribbean, to the ASI resolving that foreign mining companies in West Africa must leave, to African working class-led farming projects in Zimbabwe; African people are demanding an end to the oppressive relationship that has fueled the economic systems of the U.S. and Europe for so long.

“African people suffer the worst conditions of poverty and brutality, all because we have been separated from our freedom, our resources and our homeland, Africa,” says Chioma Oruh, Secretary of the ALD Organizing Committee in North America. “The African Socialist International will serve as one revolutionary party to unite the struggles African people face in Washington, D.C., and in other North American cities, with the worldwide African revolution. While we live in poverty and police terror in D.C., our brothers and sisters on the continent live on less than $1 a day. Only a revolutionary organization led by the African working class will save us from these brutal conditions. We must fight for Africa and all our resources if we are ever to know freedom and happiness again.”

The African Liberation Day / ASI North America Conference kicks off with a banquet on Friday, May 22nd and continues on May 23rd and 24th with a dynamic program including a keynote address given by African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela. Participants will also hear from the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project (AAPDEP), which is organizing food, energy and economic sustainability projects in anticipation of the deepening economic crisis. And as African people in the U.S. and Canada face massive imprisonment, rampant police murder and lack of quality education, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) and the African Internationalist Student Organization (AISO), both under the umbrella of the African People’s Socialist Party, have programs addressing democratic rights, self-determination and education. Conference attendees, coming to D.C. from campuses and black working class communities across North America, will take with them the tools to build these and other programs in their areas.

For more information or to schedule an interview with an African Liberation Day / African Socialist International organizer, contact Lisa Watson at 612.203.6621, media@alduhuru.org or visit http://www.alduhuru.org

Kenya: UN seeks $244 million to boost food aid to vulnerable Kenyans

2009-03-20

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30219

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed for $244 million to scale up its operation in Kenya, where high food prices and drought have left 3.5 million people in need of aid. The Kenyan Government declared a national disaster in January following the failure of rains in some parts of the country. Subsistence farmers in south-eastern and coastal areas were hardest hit and have experienced almost total crop loss.

Namibia: 200,000 affected by floods

2009-03-20

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/ASAZ-7QBFAT?OpenDocument

More than 200,000 people in Namibia have been affected by heavy flooding near the northern border with Angola since January, the United Nations said on Friday. Fields of crops have been soaked and the loss of agricultural produce could have an impact on the region's food security, said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Sudan: Dafur rebels cancel plans for talks with government

2009-03-20

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LK941761.htm

The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), a major rebel group in Darfur, has cancelled plans to hold more peace talks until the Sudanese government lets back aid groups it expelled from the troubled region. The announcement marks the latest escalation in the Darfur crisis since the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir this month over alleged war crimes in the region. Sudan, which does not recognise the ICC, rejects the charge.

Sudan: US seeking to reverse expulsion order

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/dkbddk

Sudan, by expelling foreign aid agencies, has created the conditions for "untold misery and suffering" among hundreds of thousands of victims of the six-year-old war in the Darfur region, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday. Also Tuesday, in a signal of the Obama administration's intention to step up U.S. involvement in the violence-wracked region, President Barack Obama settled on retired Air Force Gen. J. Scott Gration, a close personal friend with long experience on African issues, to be special envoy to Sudan, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.

Uganda: Activists want fresh dialogue to end Kony conflict

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/c55nsh

A forum of civil society organisations from the Great Lakes region have converged in Gulu town to craft fresh efforts towards a peaceful solution to the LRA conflict in northern Uganda. The call comes days after the Uganda People’s Defence Forces abruptly ended its three-month old military offensive against the LRA rebels in Garamba.

Africa: East and Southern Africa Telecommunications Report Q1 2009

2009-03-20

http://www.pr-inside.com/east-and-southern-africa-telecommunications-report-r1113382.htm

The latest update on the telecommunications markets of East and Southern Africa contains revised mobile market growth forecasts for all eight of the countries surveyed. In each case, the authors have also extended their forecasts to the end of 2013. The new forecasts are based on an assessment of Q308 subscriber data published by the region's telecoms regulators and by its various mobile operators.

Africa: Tata to bring IP services to East Africa via SEACOM undersea cable

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/ddlzdc

Tata Communications has earned the right to serve as anchor tenant on an undersea fiber-optic cable that’s 9,320 miles long and is poised to connect much of the east African coast. Partly funded by nations along the coast (the cable itself is about three-quarters African-owned), the Sea Cable System, or “SEACOM (News - Alert),” is worth about $650 million.

Mali: Export group uses GPS, cameras and computers to gather product data

2009-03-20

http://ictupdate.cta.int/en/Feature-Articles/Exporting-information

A Malian association uses ICT to gather data from farmers to meet international export standards and makes the same information on the web to help supply chain partners and inform consumers. When the Malian fruit and vegetable export organization, Fruit et Légumes du Mali (Fruiléma), decided to promote locally grown mangoes to markets overseas, it also wanted to give consumers the chance to find out more about the product and where it came from.

South Africa: Neotel scoops up cheaper bandwidth

2009-03-20

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A960621

Telecoms operator Neotel has become the anchor tenant on the Seacom cable, poised to deliver vast quantities of cheaper bandwidth to SA through a deal struck by its parent company, Tata Communications. Tata, which owns 56% of Neotel, has signed up as the undersea cable’s first big customer, and has struck another deal to actually manage the cable, its billing systems and customer relations on behalf of Seacom.

Zambia: Sending the right message

2009-03-20

http://ictupdate.cta.int/en/Feature-Articles/Sending-the-right-message

The Zambia National Farmers’ Union publishes up to date market information on the web and sends out trader and price details to farmers using a system of SMS messages. ‘I used to sell my crop for a very low price, just because I had no idea of how the market was moving’’ says James, a small-scale farmer from the Chongwe district in Zambia. ‘I often felt confused when I was dealing with traders’, he adds. ‘I thought that I had to take the first bid the retailer offered’.

Global: John Humphrey Freedom Award 2009

2009-03-20

http://www.dd-rd.ca/site/humphrey_award/index.php?lang=en

Rights & Democracy (International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development) presents the John Humphrey Award each year to an organization or individual from any region of the world, including Canada, for outstanding achievement in the promotion of human rights and democratic development. The Award consists of a grant of $30,000, and a speaking tour of Canadian cities to help increase awareness of the recipient’s human rights work. It is named in honour of the late John Peters Humphrey, the Canadian human rights law professor who prepared the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Global: Rethinking Finance launches new website

2009-03-20

http://www.rethinkingfinance.org/

The global financial and economic system is in crisis. Existing economic policies and institutions have overseen an economic system scarred by high levels of poverty and inequality, which is contributing to an environmental catastrophe. Blind faith in the virtues of markets, and inadequate public control, regulation and accountability of finance are at the heart of the financial crisis. Before the financial crisis, people across the world and in Britain were already suffering from the effects of rising food prices, inadequate essential services and the threat of climate chaos. There can be no return to business as usual. Fundamental change is needed.

4th WAAD Conference - Call for papers

Education, Gender & Sustainable Development in the Age of Globalization

2008-11-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/52089

The 4th WAAD interdisciplinary conference will provide opportunities for constituencies inside and outside the academy—researchers, academicians, practitioners, policy makers, professionals, and students from various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, pure and applied sciences, professional schools, etc.—to discuss the education of women and girls in Africa and the African Diaspora and explore its relationship to sustainable development in a rapidly globalizing, complex world.
4th Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (WAAD) International Conference on Education, Gender & Sustainable Development in the Age of Globalization

Abuja, Nigeria (August 3-8, 2009)

Professor Obioma Nnaemeka, Convener
E-mail: waadconf@iupui.edu; website: http://www.waadconf.org

CALL FOR PAPERS

BACKGROUND

For over a decade, the WAAD conferences have provided the space for researchers, students, policy makers, activists, women and men of different races, religious persuasions and ideological leanings to engage in vigorous and fruitful debates on issues relating to women in Africa and the African Diaspora. The first WAAD conference held in Nsukka, a small university town in rural Nigeria, gathered over 700 researchers, activists, policy makers, and students from five continents. The conference generated ten-volume proceedings of over 200 original papers and saw the beginning of the Association of African Women Scholars (AAWS). The second WAAD conference, held in Indianapolis (USA) in 1998, gathered hundreds of participants from 35 countries and 48 national and international organizations. The third conference in Madagascar was equally very well attended. The WAAD conference has succeeded in putting in place forward-looking strategies for continuing its work—it maintains a global network and has published three volumes of selected papers.

THEME (Education, Gender & Sustainable Development in the Age of Globalization)

The 4th WAAD interdisciplinary conference will provide opportunities for constituencies inside and outside the academy—researchers, academicians, practitioners, policy makers, professionals, and students from various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, pure and applied sciences, professional schools, etc.—to discuss the education of women and girls in Africa and the African Diaspora and explore its relationship to sustainable development in a rapidly globalizing, complex world. How can the acquisition of different forms of knowledge guarantee women’s participation in ensuring that today’s growth does not jeopardize the growth and possibilities of future generations and that “development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”? What role would indigenous knowledge play in women’s participation? In disciplinary terms, the conference will examine the central role the arts and humanities can and must play in the global knowledge economy and their relevance to development discourses and practice. How can humanistic studies dialogue with scientific studies in addressing global issues such as social and environmental justice, gender/social inequality and knowledge gap, and education for 21st century global citizenship?

SUBTHEMES

Autobiographies and Biographies
Capacity-building and Leadership
Civil Society, NGOs and Transnational Activism
Creativity (Oral & Written Traditions), Artistic Expressions and Development
Curricular Development and Reform
Democratization and Women’s Participation
Educating against War and Militarization
Volunteerism, Civil Engagement and Global Citizenship
Education Policy, Teacher Education, and National Development
Energy, Mineral Wealth and National Security
Engendering the Disciplines
Entrepreneurship and Small/Medium-size Businesses
Feminist/Womanist Interventions
Gendered Inequalities and Access to Education
Gendered Spaces and the Diaspora Question
Global Financial Institutions and Women in Developing Countries
Health, Medical Sciences and Health Education
Gendered Violence, Human Rights and Social Justice
Libraries and Archives
Mobilization and Transnational Social Movements
Peace and Conflict Resolution
Poverty Alleviation, Agriculture, and Food Security
Preserving the Environment, Saving Our Planet
Religion, Culture, and Indigenous Knowledge
Skills-Training and Economic Independence
Communications, Technology and the Digital Divide
The Economy and Global Capital
The Humanities, Development, and Globalization
Understanding Gender and Global Africa
Women in Higher Education: Research, Teaching and Administration
Youth Engaging Development Strategies

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION

Forms for paper, panel, roundtable and workshop proposals are available on the conference website: www.waadconf.org Send as e-mail attachments the completed proposal form, abstract and curriculum vitae (as Word documents) by FEBRUARY 15, 2009 to the Convener at waadconf@iupui.edu Selected papers will be published.

REGISTRATION

Registration form and fee schedule are available at the conference website: www.waadconf.org All presenters whose proposals have been accepted must pre-register by MARCH 15, 2009 for their names to appear on the conference program.

CONTACT

Professor Obioma Nnaemeka, Convener
2009 WAAD Conference
Department of World Languages & Cultures
Indiana University
425 University Boulevard
Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA
Phone: 317-278-2038; Fax: 317-278-7375
E-mail: waadconf@iupui.edu; Website: www.waadconf.org

Africa: 2009 African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/54986

The African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in partnership with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) are pleased to announce the second call of the African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowships (ADDRF). The 2009 ADDRF seeks to facilitate more rigorous engagement of doctoral students in research, strengthen their research skills, and provide the fellows an opportunity for timely completion of their doctoral training.
2009 African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship

The African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in partnership with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) are pleased to announce the second call of the African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowships (ADDRF). The 2009 ADDRF seeks to facilitate more rigorous engagement of doctoral students in research, strengthen their research skills, and provide the fellows an opportunity for timely completion of their doctoral training. The fellowship targets doctoral students with strong commitment to a career in training and/or research. ADDRF’s overall goal is to support the training and retention of highly-skilled, locally-trained scholars in research and academic positions across the region.

The ADDRF will award about 15 fellowships in 2009. These fellowships will be awarded to doctoral students who are within two years of completing their thesis at an African university. Dissertation topics showing great promise of making significant contributions to efforts to strengthen health systems (governance, equity, health or population related issues) in the region will be given priority. The deadline for submission of applications is the 30th of April.

More information:

http://www.aphrc.org/documents/2009%20ADDRF%20Call_English.pdf

http://www.aphrc.org/documents/2009%20Application_English.doc

Africa: Call for materials on African sexualities

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/54985

This is a call for materials for a contemporary Reader on African sexualities, which is being developed and edited by Prof. Sylvia Tamale-outgoing Dean of Law at Makerere University and Coordinator of the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Project at the Faculty of Law. This seminal work will be a compilation of diverse populist and academic pieces that either engage with or inform sexualities enacted all over the African continent.
Call for materials on African sexualities

This is a call for materials for a contemporary Reader on African sexualities, which is being developed and edited by Prof. Sylvia Tamale-outgoing Dean of Law at Makerere University and Coordinator of the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Project at the Faculty of Law.

This seminal work will be a compilation of diverse populist and academic pieces that either engage with or inform sexualities enacted all over the African continent. We are interested in collecting a range of materials including (but not limited to) essays, fiction, poetry, web blogs, art, crafts, photographs, film, documentaries, diaries, music, theoretical discussions, empirical papers, academic publications etc, that address and inform African sexualities. The editor will obtain copyright permission where necessary. Although the main language of the Reader will be English, relevant materials published in French, Portugese, Spanish, Arabic and any African tongue will be translated for inclusion. This Reader aims to be as inclusive of all of Africa as possible.

The deadline for submission is October 30, 2009. All received pieces will be acknowledged.

Please send material to:
Stella Nyanzi,
Research Assistant,
Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Project,
Faculty of Law,
Makerere University,
P. O. Box 7062, Kampala, Uganda.
Cel: +256-775-301-767
Tel: +256-414-543-946
Fax: +256-414-543-110
E-Mail: snyanzi@law.mak.ac.ug

Africa: HIV/AIDS and the discourse of the ‘outsider” in Africa - CODESRIA

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/55018

Health, Politics and Society constitutes one of CODESRIA’s research clusters for the period 2007-2011 as articulated in the latest Strategic Plan for the Council. The theme is pursued within the framework of the Council’s overarching objective of reviving and consolidating development thinking in Africa. Within the broad framework of the mandate defined for the Council in its Charter, various research and training programmes have been developed over the years for the purpose of both mobilizing the African scholarly community and responding to its needs.
CODESRIA Institute on Health, Politics and Society in Africa
Theme: HIV/AIDS and the discourse of the ‘outsider” in Africa
Date: 5th -30th October, 2009

Venue: Dakar, Senegal


Call for Applications for the 2009 Session


Health, Politics and Society constitutes one of CODESRIA’s research clusters for the period 2007-2011 as articulated in the latest Strategic Plan for the Council. The theme is pursued within the framework of the Council’s overarching objective of reviving and consolidating development thinking in Africa. Within the broad framework of the mandate defined for the Council in its Charter, various research and training programmes have been developed over the years for the purpose of both mobilizing the African scholarly community and responding to its needs. CODESRIA training programmes particularly targeted at younger, mid career scholars whose need for support in advancing their reflections on conceptual and methodological questions was at the origin of the initiation by the Council of a number of annual thematic Institutes. Beginning with the Governance Institute, the number of Institutes has increased and now include the Humanities, Child and Youth Studies, Institutes of Health Politics and Society and Gender Institute. In addition, plans are underway for the launching of a new Institute on Developing Economics in 2010.


Within the Institute of Health Politics and Society, The Social Sciences and HIV and AIDS comprise one of the main thematic thrusts. HIV and AIDS continue to be one of the most devastating pandemics affecting the African continent in the most recent years. In the field of social science, HIV and AIDS have also created a conceptual and methodological crisis which calls for a paradigm shift among practitioners and researchers. The search for solutions is becoming increasing urgent and requires multidimensional approaches to dealing with the pandemic. The 2009 Health Politics and Society Institute will focus on the theme “HIV and AIDS and the discourse of the outsider in Africa”.


Why is the discourse of the outsider important for HIV and AIDS?
At the level of knowledge production, Africa has been and continues to be the “outsider” excluded from the production of new knowledge required to address the pandemic effectively. From the onset, Africa has been perceived as the outside source of the epidemic, but also the outsider in the discourse of HIV and AIDS. In return, Africa has reproduced its own outsider discourse which is rooted and reflects Africa’s own vulnerability and search for solutions. It is for this reason that the issue of the “outsider” in the African HIV and AIDS discourse needs to be unpacked.
The Institute of Health Politics and Society, which aims to promote enhanced interest in multidisciplinary health research among African scholars plays a critical role in this respect. In addition, the HIV and AIDS pandemic came to the fore in the context of a generalized weakening of the health structures and processes of African countries as well as the decline in the average health and nutritional status of Africans which provides another platform for reviving both research and scholarly discussion on poverty within the broad framework of health.

Objectives
The main objectives of the Institutes on Health Politics and Society are to:
1. Encourage the emergence and sustenance of a networked community of younger African scholars in the field of health research.
2. Promote methodological and conceptual innovations in research on African health questions through the application of enhanced social science and humanistic approaches;
3. Encourage a structured dialogue between the Social Sciences and the Health/Biomedical Sciences as part of the quest for a holistic approach to understanding health, politics and society in Africa and;
4. Promote the sharing of experiences among researchers, activists and policy makers drawn from different disciplines, methodological/conceptual orientations and geographical experiences on a common theme over an extended period of time.

Organisation:
The activities of all CODESRIA Institutes centre on presentations made by resident researchers, visiting resource persons and the participants whose applications for admission as laureates are successful. The sessions are led by a scientific director who with the help of invited resource persons ensures that the laureates are exposed to a wide range of research and policy issues generated by or arising from the theme of the Institute for which they are responsible. Open discussions drawing on books and articles relevant to the theme of a particular institute or a specific topic within the theme are also encouraged. Each participant selected to participate in any of the Council’s institutes as a laureate is required to prepare a research paper to be presented during the course of the particular institute they attend. Laureates are expected to produce a revised version of their research papers for consideration for publication by CODESRIA. For each Institute, CODESRIA Documentation and Information Centre (CODICE) prepares a comprehensive bibliography on the theme of the year. Access is also facilitated to a number of documentation centers in and around Dakar.

The 2009 Session: HIV and AIDS and the discourse of the “outsider” in Africa

The central question to HIV and AIDS and identity addresses issues about the extent to which Africans and African governments have taken ownership and control of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. To take ownership of a problem means taking control of the various aspects of the pandemic, understanding the dynamics of transmission, putting in place measures to protect citizens from infection, providing care to the inflicted and affected, taking responsibility and providing realistic resources toward alleviating the problem. Ownership of the HIV and AIDS pandemic means that Africans and their governments will drive the process towards finding working and workable solutions for all populations.

Why have African governments taken so long to take leadership in the control of the pandemic? Perhaps one of the main reasons is that from its inception, the discourse surrounding HIV and AIDS has been one which focused on the outsider both as the cause and sometimes the perceived victim of the disease. This externalization of the problem has been critical in shaping both the global and local responses to the pandemic. Associated with this denial of ownership by African governments, has been the “distorted” claim of ownership of knowledge of the pandemic by self proclaimed experts in the field of health and social sciences who have been able to influence national and international responses to the pandemic because they have claimed ownership of expertise of the disease. This selective ownership has in most cases created North South networks of experts supported by “epidemic logic” who have mostly enriched themselves on research grants while making very little impact on alleviating the HIV and AIDS problem in Africa.
In the epidemiological discourse on the origin and causes of HIV and AIDS, the theme of the outsider began early with western notions of the disease as African (whether through African monkeys or sexual practices), or as a disease affecting mostly members of the gay community, prostitutes, and intravenous drug users. Most of those suffering from the disease were perceived as being foreign in one way or another either because of nationality or citizenship, sexual preference (homosexuality), spatial location, geography or race. The “otherness” identity provided the explanation why a person became the affected or infected. An examination of the evolution of the discourse as well as the history of the disease and the changing faces of this discourse provides an interesting starting point to this debate.

Within the African continent, the discourse of the outsider has emerged in studies that focus on migrants, prostitutes, mine workers, soldiers, foreigners and other perceived outsiders. This focused has allowed governments and policy makers to invest very little in dealing with the pandemic at national level and has lulled a lot of “citizens”, insiders into a false sense of security where they no longer perceive themselves as at risk. With new HIV infections still on the increase on a daily basis in many African countries, this approach to the pandemic is tantamount to a deliberate neglect by governments.
At both global and local contexts, immigrants, migrants, travellers, tourists, refugees, soldiers and many people experiencing spatial relocation and dislocation have been the focus of studies on HIV/AIDS. The underlying theme reflects that researchers and scholars still grapple with the idea of HIV/AIDS as a mainstream disease and are more comfortable treating it as a disease for those on the fringes of society. This externalization of the problem to the outsider has provided excuses for many African governments not to play their roles in the prevention, providing care and treatment and protection for all populations. It has created a fertile ground for all sorts of experts some of whom have neocolonial agendas while others simply use the pandemic to enrich themselves or to disempower poor Africans.
Why, in spite of all the knowledge gathered and the expertise housed in Africa and the ever increasing death toll of Africans from the pandemic, has no multi country powerful team of Africans dedicated to finding solutions to the HIV and AIDS pandemic been set up, housed in the African Union and funded by various African governments to spearhead the finding of a vaccine, challenge drug patents and provide sustained research on African AIDS medicines?

Why is Africa lagging behind in finding solutions to a pandemic which is devastating the continent?
While the focus on the outsider continues, the disease is killing mainstream Africans, many uninformed, or misinformed into believing themselves not to be at risk. With the disease externalized to a few pockets of deviant outsiders, African governments are finding justification not to put enough resources to face the problem, own it and find solutions for it.

The CODESRIA Health Politics and Society Institute invite scholarly papers to focus on some of the following issues below:
1. Globalization and HIV and AIDS in the 21st Century discourse
2. Paradigms, methodologies and models of intervention and research
3. Policy responses: the role of international organizations, bilateral agencies and funding agencies in the shaping of international and local responses
4. Studies of the global outsider due to spatial relocation and dislocation
HIV and AIDS and migration, refugees, and displaced populations
HIV and AIDS and non nationals, tourists and mobile populations
HIV and AIDS and security in Africa (armed forces, police, and armed conflict)

5. The local outsider: HIV and AIDS and exclusion of other

Poverty and social exclusion
Stigma and discrimination
Sexual minorities and identities
Commercial sex work
Violence and gender based violence

6. Challenging international and national responses

The Director
For every session of its various institutes, CODESRIA appoints an external scholar with a proven track-record of quality work to provide intellectual leadership. Directors are senior scholars known for their expertise on the topic of the institute and originality of their thinking on it. They are recruited on the basis of a proposal which they submit and which contains a detailed course outline covering methodological issues and approaches ; key concepts integral to an understanding of the object of a particular Institute and the specific theme that will be focused upon; a thorough review of the state of the literature designed to expose laureates to different theoretical and empirical currents; a presentation on various subthemes, case studies and comparative examples relevant to the theme of the particular Institute they are applying to lead; and possible policy questions that are worth keeping in mind during the entire research process. Candidates for the position of Director should also note that if their application is successful, they will be expected to:


• identify resource persons to help lead discussions and debates;
• participate in the selection of laureates;
• design the course for the session, including the specific sub-themes
• deliver a set of lectures and provide a critique of the papers presented by the resource persons or laureates;
• submit a written scientific report on the session.

The Director is also expected to (co)-edit the revised versions of the papers presented by the resource persons with a view of submitting them for publication in one of CODESRIA’s collections. The Director also assists CODESRIA in assessing the papers presented by laureates for publication by the Council.

Resource Persons
Lectures to be delivered at the Institute are intended to offer laureates an opportunity to advance their reflections on the theme of the programme and on their research topics. Resource persons are therefore senior scholars in their mid careers who have published extensively on the topic, and who have a significant contribution to make to the debates on it. They will be expected to produce lecture materials which serve as link pieces that stimulate laureates to engage in discussion and debate around the lectures and the general body of literature available on the theme.
Once selected, resource person must:
• submit a copy of their lectures for reproduction and distribution to participants not later than on week before the lecture begins;
• deliver their lectures, participate in debates and comment on the research proposals of laureates;
• Review and submit the revised version of their research papers for consideration for publication by CODESRIA not later than two months following their presentations.

Laureates
Applicants should be African researchers who have completed their university and /or professional training, with proven capacity to carry out research on the theme of the Institute. Intellectuals active in the policy process and/or social movements /civic organizations are also encouraged to apply. The number of places offered by CODESRIA at each session of its institutes is limited to fifteen (15) fellowships. Non-African scholars who are able to raise funds for their participation may also apply for a limited number of places.
Applications
Applicants for the position of Director should submit the following:
1. an application letter
2. a proposal, not more than 15 pages in length indicating the course outline and showing in what ways the course would be original and responsive to the needs of the prospective laureates, specifically focusing on the issues to be covered from the point of view of concepts and methodology, a critical review of the literature and the range of issues arising from the theme of the Institute;
3. a detailed and up to date curriculum vitae
4. Three writing samples.

Applications for the position of Resource Persons should include:
1. an application letter;
2. two writing samples;
3. a curriculum vitae;
4. a proposal of not more that five (5) pages in length, out lining the issues to be covered in their proposed lecture.

Applications for Laureates should include;
1. an application letter;
2. a letter indicating institutions or organizational affiliation;
3. a curriculum vitae;
4. a research proposal (two copies and not more than 10 pages) including a descriptive analysis of the work the applicant intends to undertake, an outline of the theoretical interest of the topic chosen by the applicant, the relationship of the topic to the problematic and concerns of the theme of the 2009 Institute and
5. two reference letters from scholars and/or researchers known for their competence and expertise in the candidate’s research area (geographic and disciplinary), including their names, addresses and telephone, email and fax numbers.

An independent committee composed of outstanding African social science researchers will select the candidates to be admitted to the Institute.
The deadline for the submission of applications is set for 10th July, 2009. The Institute will be held in Dakar, Senegal from the 5th -30th October, 2009.

All applications or requests for further information should be addressed to:
CODESRIA Institute on Health, Politics and Society
Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop x Canal IV
BP 3304, CP 18524,
Dakar, Senegal.
Tel: (221) 33 825 98 21/22/23
Fax : (221) 33 824 12 89.
Email: health.institute@codesria.sn
Website: http://www.codesria.org

Africa: Negotiating child and youth livelihoods in Africa’s urban spaces

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/55012

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce its 2009 Child and Youth Studies Institute and invites interested scholars to send applications for consideration for selection as laureates’ resource person and director in the session scheduled for September 2009. The Institute is an offshoot of the Child and Youth Studies programme and is designed to strengthen analytic capacity on all questions affecting children and youth in Africa and elsewhere in the world.
CODESRIA Child and Youth Studies Institute

Theme: Negotiating Child and Youth Livelihoods in Africa’s Urban Spaces

Date: 7th September to 2nd October, 2009

Venue: Dakar, Senegal
Call for applications for the 2009 Session

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce its 2009 Child and Youth Studies Institute and invites interested scholars to send applications for consideration for selection as laureates’ resource person and director in the session scheduled for September 2009. The Institute is an offshoot of the Child and Youth Studies programme and is designed to strengthen analytic capacity on all questions affecting children and youth in Africa and elsewhere in the world. The impetus for the introduction of the Institute was strengthened by the critique emanating from African researchers of the content and context of the developmental crises facing the continent. In addition, the link between these problems and what is designed as an annual interdisciplinary forum where participants can reflect together on a specific aspect of the conditions of children and the youth in Africa provided further support for this kind of Institute. It is hoped that this Institute will contribute to the advancement of the frontiers of knowledge and policy.

Each session of the Institute is held over a period of four weeks under the leadership of a designated director.

Objectives

The main objectives of the Child and Youth Institute are to:

1. encourage the sharing of experiences among researchers, activists and policy makers from different disciplines, methodological and conceptual orientations and geographical/linguistic zones over an extended period of time;

2. promote and enhance a culture of democratic values that allows to effectively identify and tackle Children and Youth issues confronting the African continent; and

3. foster the participation of scholars in discussions and debates about the processes of child and youth development taking place in Africa.

Organisation

The activities of all CODESRIA Institutes centre on presentations made by resident researchers, visiting resource persons and the participants whose applications for admission as laureates are successful. The sessions are led by a scientific director. With the help of invited resource persons he/she will ensure that the laureates are exposed to a wide range of research and policy issues. Open discussions drawing on books and articles relevant to the theme of a particular institute or a specific topic within the theme are also encouraged. Each selected participant is required to prepare a research paper to be presented during the course. Laureates are expected to produce a revised version of their research papers for consideration for publication by CODESRIA. For each Institute, CODESRIA Documentation and Information Centre (CODICE) prepares a comprehensive bibliography on the theme. Access to a number of documentation centers in and around Dakar is also facilitated.

The 2009 Session: Negotiating Child and Youth Livehoods in Africa’s Urban Spaces

African urban spaces are contested spaces in terms of character. The classical sociological concepts of “the rural” and “the urban” do not fit the current situation in most African cities. From a conventional point of view, the urban space in Africa is neither completely urban nor completely rural. Does this fact make it necessary to adapt the concepts to the African setting or to develop a genuine concept of African Urbanity? Is classification of the urban environment enough for understanding livelihood strategies of children and young people?

The situation in urban Africa is an outcome of high rates of urbanization (mainly due to internal migration) not being paralleled by economic growth nor the provision of adequate infrastructure for the new comers. The urbanization of poverty and the impacts of structural adjustment programmes have lead to a situation in which for many of Africa’s poor, urban spaces provide opportunities and hopes as well as fears and economic hardship in livelihood provision. The absorption capacity of the formal labour market is by no means sufficient to provide income opportunities for the majority of Africa’s urban poor. Informality is a main characteristic of the continent’s urban environment.

Because of the youthful demographic make-up of the African continent, more and more children and young people are caught up in this environment in search of viable livelihoods. Children represent the future of each society, but in urban Africa the youth is especially vulnerable and prone to livelihood insecurity and risks.

What are the chances and challenges? Does the urban environment create sufficient livelihood opportunities for children and young people? Or does the need to cope with their vulnerability push the children and young people to the margins of urban society - and at what future costs?

The HIV and AIDS pandemic, with its burden of morbidity and mortality, has clearly worsened the situation of Africa’s urban children and youth. Much research explains why children and young teenagers may end up in the role of providing livelihood. A large number of orphans who end up in the streets in search of livelihoods are without effective adult support. Increasing poverty and unemployment among adult people leads to households needing supplementary incomes, much of which has to be provided by children and young people.

In order to cope with their situation of livelihood vulnerability, children and young people are engaging in activities ranging from begging, petty trading, selling of cooked foods, selling flavoured water, theft, prostitution, and sometimes serious criminal activities. Some of these activities are with the support of the family, others are clandestine. Much research has also identified and explained the various work activities that children and young people engage in, in various African settings.

What is lacking, however, is an exploration and examination of urban Africa itself as the spatial and social environment for a large percentage of the continent’s most vulnerable groups: the children and the youth. The 2009 session of the Child and Youth Institute will focus on this and the way this environment facilitates or inhibits children and young people’s sustainable livelihood security. Among some of the questions that the Institute might address are the following:-

1 What are the unique social, economic and cultural characteristics of various African urban spaces? We need to consider different kinds of home, different kinds of formal and informal work-place, and different kinds of open environment. How do they compare with parallel institutions outside Africa?

2 What kinds of child and youth livelihood strategies are likely to be initiated and facilitated by these various kinds of urban spaces? How do urban facilities help in the short and long term?

3 What is it about African urban spaces that make children and youth livelihoods possible or vulnerable? - (exploration of social and economic networks)

4 Are children a “means for coping” for the urban households or do they cope themselves? What are the variables that hinder or help coping? How do concepts of childhood in relation to the family relate to access to, and utilization of, various urban spaces?

5 In what ways do African children and young persons use the various urban spaces? (Case studies)

6 Who gains from the different natures of the African urban spaces? In what ways do they gain, materially and socially? Who pays the price of these gains?

7 What are the roles and responsibilities of governments? What government responses contribute to meeting children and youth livelihoods needs and to what extent do government actions, at both local and national levels, make their situation worse?

8 What are the future prospects for child and youth livelihoods in Africa’s urban spaces?

9 Case studies - children and youth livelihood strategies linked to the “ruralization/villagisation” of the urban or the “urbanization” of the rural. (case studies)

10 Alternatives to the negatives - African urban spaces as places of opportunity for alleviating vulnerability (case studies)

The Director

For every session of its various institutes, CODESRIA appoints an external scholar with a proven track-record of quality work to provide intellectual leadership. Directors are senior scholars known for their expertise on the topic of the Institute and originality of their thinking on it. They are recruited on the basis of a proposal which they submit and which contains a detailed course outline covering methodological issues and approaches ; key concepts integral to an understanding of the object of a particular Institute and the specific theme that will be focused upon; a thorough review of the state of the literature designed to expose laureates to different theoretical and empirical currents; a presentation on various subthemes, case studies and comparative examples relevant to the theme of the particular Institute they are applying to lead; and possible policy questions that are worth keeping in mind during the entire research process. Candidates for the position of Director should also note that if their application is successful, they will be asked to:

- identify resource persons to help lead discussions and debates;

- participate in the selection of laureates;

- design the course for the session, including the specific sub-themes

- deliver a set of lectures and provide a critique of the papers presented by the resource persons or laureates;

- Submit a written scientific report on the session.

The Director is also expected to (co)-edit the revised versions of the papers presented by the resource persons with a view of submitting them for publication in one of CODESRIA’s collections. The Director also assists CODESRIA in assessing the papers presented by laureates for publication by the Council.

Resource Persons

Lectures to be delivered at the Institute are intended to offer laureates an opportunity to advance their reflections on the theme of the programme and on their research topics. Resource persons are therefore senior scholars in their mid careers who have published extensively on the topic, and who have a significant contribution to make to the debates on it. They will be expected to produce lecture materials which serve as link pieces that stimulate laureates to engage in discussion and debate around the lectures and the general body of literature available on the theme.

Once selected, resource person must:

- submit a copy of their lectures for reproduction and distribution to participants not later than on week before the lecture begins;

- deliver their lectures, participate in debates and comment on the research proposals of laureates;

- Review and submit the revised version of their research papers for consideration for publication by CODESRIA not later than two months following their presentations.

Laureates

Applicants should be African researchers who have completed their university and /or professional training, with proven capacity to carry out research on the theme of the Institute. Intellectuals active in the policy process and/or social movements /civic organizations are also encouraged to apply. The number of places offered by CODESRIA at each session of its institutes is limited to fifteen (15) fellowships. Non-African scholars who are able to raise funds for their participation may also apply for a limited number of places.

Applications

Applicants for the position of Director should submit the following:

1. an application letter

2. a proposal, not more than 15 pages in length indicating the course outline and showing in what ways the course would be original and responsive to the needs of the prospective laureates, specifically focusing on the issues to be covered from the point of view of concepts and methodology , a critical review of the literature and the range of issues arising from the theme of the Institute;

3. a detailed and up to date curriculum vitae

4. Three writing samples.

Applications for the position of Resource Persons should include:

1. an application letter;

2. two writing samples;

3. a curriculum vitae;

4. a proposal of not more that five (5) pages in length, out lining the issues to be covered in their proposed lecture.

Applications for Laureates should include;

1. an application letter;

2. a letter indicating institutions or organizational affiliation;

3. a curriculum vitae;

4. a research proposal (two copies and not more than 10 pages) including a descriptive analysis of the work the applicant intends to undertake, an outline of the theoretical interest of the topic chosen by the applicant, the relationship of the topic to the problematic and concerns of the theme of the 2009 Institute and

5. two reference letters from scholars and/or researchers known for their competence and expertise in the candidate’s research area (geographic and disciplinary), including their names, addresses and telephone, email and fax numbers.

An independent committee composed of outstanding African social science researchers will select the candidates to be admitted to the Institute.

The deadline for the submission of applications is set for 31st July, 2009. The Institute will be held in Dakar, Senegal from the 7th September to 2nd October, 2009.

All applications or requests for further information should be addressed to:

CODESRIA Child and Youth Institute
Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop x Canal IV
BP 3304, CP 18524,
Dakar, Senegal.
Tel: (221) 33 825 98 21/22/23
Fax : (221) 33 824 12 89.
Email: child.institute@codesria.sn
Website: http://www.codesria.org

Global: Development and Inequality in the Global South

Brown International Advanced Research Institutes - May 31st - June 13th 2009

2009-03-20

http://www.brown.edu/Administration/International_Affairs/initiative/globalsouth.html

The Brown Summer Institute on Development and Inequality will bring together a group of young scholars, mainly from the Global South, for a two-week workshop. The workshop will focus on sharing knowledge about cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on inequality in developing countries and about methodologies for studying inequality. Emphasis will be placed on the differences in the definitions of inequality (and therefore need for distinct methods and approaches) across regions of the Global South.

Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa

2009-03-20

http://tinyurl.com/ch45kx

The African continent has been central to the project of capitalist globalization, and the dominance of Western economic and geopolitical interests continues to profoundly shape Africa's internal dynamics in the postcolonial period. This collection of essays and interviews from leading activists and socialists offers critical insights into class struggle and social empowerment across the continent.

Global: Social Media Consultancy - UNHCR

2009-03-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/55044

UNHCR’s Division of External Relations (DER) in Geneva is looking for a consultant with expertise in the development and use of Social Media platforms. Reporting directly to the Head of the Electronic Publishing Unit (EPU), the consultant will bring with them at least 3 years experience in the field of Social Networking and Web 2.0 interactive platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Google Earth, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.
Social Media Consultancy: Terms of Reference

Overall purpose

UNHCR’s Division of External Relations (DER) in Geneva is looking for a consultant with expertise in the development and use of Social Media platforms. Reporting directly to the Head of the Electronic Publishing Unit (EPU), the consultant will bring with them at least 3 years experience in the field of Social Networking and Web 2.0 interactive platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Google Earth, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. A proven track record of creative and innovative thinking is required as is the ability to bring fresh ideas to new public awareness and fundraising initiatives planned by UNHCR during 2009/2010. We are looking to fill this consultancy position immediately and it will run until the end of 2009.

Background

Since the end of 2007, UNHCR has started and intensified its activities on social media platforms. Particular emphasis has been placed on Facebook, Facebook causes, Twitter, MySpace, Youtube and Flickr. 2008 was a year mostly concentrated on internal buy-in and was an experimental year to test community reactions to certain flows of information and to engaging the staff in contributing. Two major campaigns were launched on-line last year which have triggered an increase of viewers and members mostly in Youtube, Flickr and Facebook by 200%. 2009 will be a year to consolidate strategy and membership and mainstream information and contribution flow from UNHCR staff around the world.

Objectives
1. Utilize Social Media platforms to raise awareness of UNHCR and create emotional engagement and a willingness to help.
2. Reach out to a younger audience on the internet and convey a positive image of UNHCR and its people of concern.
3. Communicate Social Media (internally) as an essential and contemporary communication channel.

Responsibilities
1. Manage and develop UNHCR’s Social Media presence.
a. Coordinate with DER’s units (Communication Group, Public Affairs, Private Sector Fundraising etc.) to develop and maintain UNHCR’s Facebook and MySpace pages with content (particularly during campaigns).
i. Promote UNHCR campaigns on Facebook and MySpace – Social
Media drives traffic to campaign landing pages and to the UNHCR website: www.unhcr.org
ii. Enable user interaction on Facebook and MySpace – invite ‘fans’, ‘friends’ and cause supporters to support the agency by taking various types of actions.
b. Assist the Video Unit in managing UNHCR’s YouTube presence. Use the platform in the same way as for a.i’ and ‘a.ii’ above.
c. Coordinate and implement the uploading of UNHCR operations to Google Earth.
i. Collecting, selecting and editing material and transforming it into Google Earth style (photos, text, video);
ii. Coordinate with four different departments (fundraising, media, public relations and mapping unit) to develop pop-up windows on the Google Earth platform;
iii. Coordinate with graphic design unit and public relations unit on lay out;
iv. Objective: have all major operations of UNHCR uploaded in Google Earth by 2010 (10 to 12 operations. Currently 3 are uploaded).
d. Assist the Photo Unit in managing UNHCR’s Flickr presence. Use the platform in the same way as for ‘i’ and ‘ii’ above.
e. Monior trends in Social Media and respond to developments.
f. Explore ways to use Twitter as a swift external communication channel.

2. Build the capacity of offices and staff to utilize Social Media.
a. Create and distribute a primer for using Social Media as a campaign tool in general, and primers for using specific Social Media platforms (such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter) in particular.
b. Educate offices and staff as necessary.
c. Set up workshops and training sessions.

3. Establish and manage partnerships with central actors in Social Media.
a. Manage existing partnerships with major actors in Social Media.
i. Continue working with Social Media key players, such as Facebook, to promote and enhance UNHCR’s campaigns on Social Media.
b. Seek to partner with major actors in Social Media.

4. Set a long term strategy for Social Media.
a. Monitor UNHCR’s presence on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter and produce statistical reports on usage, demographics, visitor and campaign activites
b. In collaboration with the Head of Public Affairs and the Head of the Electronic Publishing Unit, plan Social Media activities for UNHCR campaigns
c. Set reasonable goals based on 4b. and benchmark with other organization operating on Social Media platforms.

Applicants should send their CV with a covering letter to: greer@unhcr.org

Fahamu