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South Africa’s 2009 national election: Waiting to exhale

Sanusha Naidu

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/55643

cc WikipediaIn this special edition of Pambazuka News, Sanusha Naidu sets out the background to the upcoming South African election and introduces the wide array of perspectives informing this week's articles. While some commentators have chosen to emphasise the changing nature of the ANC's (African National Congress) political dominance and the party's current difficulties, others have focused on the ultimate absence of genuine liberation for South Africa's poor majority some 15 years after the historic 1994 election. With some calling for the 2009 election to be boycotted entirely, the contributors to this issue share a common desire to offer piercing analysis and powerful insights into South Africa's political landscape as the country approaches voting day on 22 April.

In less than a week South Africa will be holding its fourth democratic election. The voting has already begun, with approximately 7,000 South Africans living abroad casting their votes on 15 April 2009. With expectations running high and election fever gripping the country, most commentators and political parties would agree with Roger Southall’s assessment that the 2009 election is ‘the most fluid and unpredictable in South Africa since 1994’.

While debates rage around whether the ANC will retain its two-thirds majority, an ANC is victory is most surely guaranteed. Yet in the run-up to the 22 April election, the South African political landscape has become the scene of one of Shakespeare’s polemic interpretations of power, greed and gerrymandering, which some would even call a Greek tragedy.

The dramatic shifts of internal dissent and hostilities between the Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma camps started with Zuma being relieved of his position as deputy president in 2005. This resulted from an allegedly corrupt relationship with his financial advisor, Schabir Shaik, around the multimillion rand arms deal, a deal which the former National Prosecuting Authority boss, Bulelani Ngcuka, termed as having ‘prima facie evidence’ for but was unwilling to go court. This then spiralled into President Mbeki losing his popular appeal and being challenged by his detractors in the party and its alliance partners, COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and SACP (South African Communist Party), before finally culminating in Mbeki being recalled by the party as president of South Africa following a ruling which inferred that Zuma’s corruption charges were politically motivated (because according to some rationale he was deployed by the party and therefore accountable to the party).

But perhaps the final triumph for the Zuma camp was the dropping of the corruption charges by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) last week after hearing ‘compelling’ evidence that the former Scorpions boss, Leonard McCarthy, was being unduly influenced by the Mbeki administration. And so what started in 2005 as Mbeki’s moment of truth in fighting corruption and perhaps marking his legacy as president has come full circle, with Jacob Zuma being characterised as the sacrificial lamb who chose to challenge a president out of touch with his people and party and bent on acquiring more power through any means. Conceivably then, the fact that Zuma feels vindicated by the NPA decision is not altogether amiss. Although one should bear in mind that Zuma has not defended his innocence in a court of law or had the merits of the evidence that his legal team presented to the NPA tested by the judicial system. And so his vindication remains controversial to say the least.

As the majority of South Africans make their way to the polls next week, this is the crossroads in which South Africa finds itself. It's hard to tell what effect this will have or how it will influence the voting behaviour of ordinary South Africans next week. And most commentators are betting that it will not.

In this special edition of Pambazuka News on the upcoming 2009 South African election, we delve into some of the critical issues that voters will be considering as they go to the polls next week. As the lead analysis, Adam Habib’s commentary on substantive uncertainty captures some of the salient issues that underscore South Africa’s political landscape. None is so important as the issue of a viable parliamentary opposition and whether the Congress of the People, formed from the rib of the ANC following Mbeki’s resignation, will actually provide a substantive alternative to the ANC. Roger Southall complements the latter by arguing that the internal factionalism within the ANC has created signs that the ANC’s hegemony at the polls is crumbling, something which could be interpreted as a good indicator of democratic competition and pluralism.

This is followed by two significant articles focusing on gender mainstreaming among political party manifestoes. With more than half of the electorate being women, Liepollo Lebohang Pheko raises a vital question of whether the South African election advances women’s citizenship and agency. She proceeds to answer the question by examining the election manifestoes of the main political parties and concludes by asking ‘Could 22 April be the opportunity to claim back both the substance of women’s citizenship and the ballot box?'

On the other hand, Lisa Vetten and Sally Shackleton highlight that political parties have failed to develop concrete strategies that mitigate violence against women. Their argument is based on what they argue is an increase in the level of violent attacks against women, despite initiatives to promote public awareness.

Finally, two additional articles by Andile Mngxitama and Dale McKinley draw on the crucial issues facing South Africa’s poor, dispossessed and economically marginalised, asking whether the negotiated political settlement has led to fundamental economic emancipation. While Mngxitama makes a compelling argument that South Africa’s 15 years of freedom have not achieved real liberation, contending that the nature of transformation has not significantly transformed power relations within the state or afforded the true redistribution of wealth, McKinley offers a sobering analysis of the state’s neoliberal economic policy and the anti-privatisation and daily social justice struggles. He concludes with a bold call to boycott the 2009 election.

We hope that the wide array of articles in this special edition will offer readers insight into the political, social and economic issues currently facing ordinary South Africans. As we make our way to vote on 22 April, those among South Africa’s economically indigent participating in the vote will hope that their cross will lead to effective governance and a better life for all.

* Sanusha Naidu is the research director of Fahamu's China in Africa programme. She is also an independent political analyst who is part of the SABC’s (South African Broadcasting Corporation) 2009 election analyst panel.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Substantive uncertainty: South Africa’s democracy becomes dynamic

Adam Habib

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/55638

cc WikipediaAmid fears that Polokwane and the split in the ANC, and the uncertainty that these have generated, will unravel South Africa’s national potential for a rosier future, Adam Habib writes that ‘Economic development, service delivery, and poverty alleviation are dependent on a legitimated and capacitated state’. As the country’s national elections approach, Habib cautions that behaviour that ‘undermines the legitimacy and capacity of state institutions will compromise the new political elite’s own long-term goals’. Exploring the reasons behind former ANC leader Thabo Mbeki’s loss of support and what a Zuma presidency might mean for South Africa, Habib argues that the ‘substantive uncertainty’ introduced into South African politics by COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the SACP’s (South African Communist Party) mobilisation against Mbeki has opened up political space and created debate on a range of policy issues, that would otherwise not have taken place. But for this ‘substantive uncertainty’ to be sustainable, it must be institutionalised within the political system as a whole.

Thabo Mbeki’s political reign has now come to an end. His departure has provoked concern, especially among South Africa’s business community and its urbanised upper classes.

In December 2007 he was unceremoniously rejected for the ANC’s (African National Congress) presidency at Polokwane. Nine months later, the new leadership in the party forced his resignation as state president seven months prior to the end of his tenure. The resultant political instability including the resignations of a number of the cabinet ministers most closely identified with Mbeki has raised concerns. Is democracy imperilled? Will the prudent economic policy of the Mbeki years be jettisoned? How did Jacob Zuma win the presidency of the ANC and what can we expect in his political tenure?

All are important questions but let us begin by addressing what Polokwane was all about. Most people would recognise that Polokwane represented a rebellion by ANC delegates against Thabo Mbeki’s rule. And it was motivated by two factors. First, which almost everyone seems to agree with, is that Mbeki is seen to have centralised power, not consulted enough, aggravated tensions in the party, and was seen as aloof and divorced from the membership. Second, which many in the ANC leadership seem to reject, is that delegates felt that the transition under Mbeki had disproportionately benefited the rich and worked to the disadvantage of the poor. They were concerned about the inequalities that have defined the first 13 years of our transition, and the enrichment of the narrow politically-connected elite that has become the hallmark of our black economic empowerment agenda.

How do we explain this? How do we explain this centralised managerial style and this exclusivist economic agenda? Most explanations are what are called agentially focused. They explain the management style or the economic agenda as a product of Mbeki and his personality. Xolela Mangcu’s recent book,To the Brink, and Mark Gevisser’s biography of Mbeki, The Dream Deferred, are examples of this. For Gevisser, who provides the most sophisticated of these explanations, the centralised style of management is a product of a personality that grew up in no-man’s land – in between the rural and urban, in between modernism and traditionalism, in between father and comrade, and in between the international and the national. This profoundly affected Mbeki, generated the aloof personality that we have come to know, and defined both his technocratic orientation and the centralised management style of his presidency.

But this is not a comprehensive explanation. It does not recognise the issue of institutional constraints, and that individuals, however powerful their personalities, are constrained by the positions they occupy and the pressures they are subjected to. In the celebrated words of that much maligned philosopher Karl Marx who writes in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.’ A more coherent explanation has to look at the systemic rationale for both macro-economic policy choices and the centralisation of power under Mbeki. When the ANC came into power in 1994, it confronted a number of pressures.

It inherited a nearly bankrupt state, was confronted with an ambitious set of expectations from the previously disenfranchised, and an investment strike by the business community. To get investment and growth going, the ANC leadership felt that they had to make a series of economic concessions, most of which was captured in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR). As soon as they made this decision, they confronted another dilemma: How to get the programme passed, for they feared that their own comrades in the national legislature would defeat it?

So they bypassed the very structures of democracy that they had inaugurated. They endorsed GEAR in cabinet and implemented it. This established a centralising dynamic in the South African political system. From there it was a short step to appointing premiers and mayors and marginalising COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), the SACP (South African Communist Party) and others who disagreed with Mbeki from the decision-making structures of the party and state.

Yet while this explains Mbeki’s policy architecture and managerial style, and the enmity directed at him by COSATU, the SACP and many ANC branches, it does not tell us why suddenly in 2007 he was unable to defeat Jacob Zuma, his deputy in the ruling party and the man he fired as the state’s deputy president in 2005 for being implicated in the corruption trial of Shabir Shaik. Even if Polokwane represented a rebellion within the ranks of the ANC, the scale of the defeat suggests that a significant proportion of Mbeki’s support base abandoned him. How did this come to be?

THE UNRAVELLING OF THE PHILOSOPHER KING

Perhaps the answer lies in the nature of his support base. Despite what the spin-doctors actually say, Mbeki’s support base (as distinct from the ANC’s) has never been the poor and marginalised. That has been the preserve of the Zuma camp. As Mark Gevisser convincingly argues, Mbeki’s support base has always been the intelligentsia, and the urban middle and upper middle classes, both black and white. And they, especially the black component, constitute a significant proportion of the activist and leadership base of the ANC.

It is this group that abandoned Mbeki, not only in the ANC, but also more broadly in society. Go to any of the parties frequented by young black professionals in our urban centres, and the same message is heard: ‘Mbeki has betrayed everything we stood for’. This is also the message reflected in the data of opinion polls, which record a downward spiral in the ex-president’s popular support base.


What happened in this constituency? For years they were the support base of the Mbeki administration. Even when they disagreed with one or other policy of Mbeki, he was still their philosopher president. They were proud of the fact that he could walk in London and New York and hold his own with foreign politicians. He represented African modernity; proud of his roots, but cosmopolitan in orientation, a national politician and a global statesman, pursuing a liberal economic agenda, with a socially responsive progressive political rhetoric. He represented an African version of the global middle class dream. Why, then, did they abandon him?

The simplest answer is that in recent years his practice and behaviour betrayed their hopes and vision. For them, South Africa was to be a caring, modern, cosmopolitan social democracy. Of course this vision was a shallow one for the only people who could afford to even harbour it were the middle and upper middle classes of our society. For the vast majority of the poor there was nothing caring or social about our democracy. Nevertheless, despite the shallowness of this dream, it did galvanise the imagination of the privileged or at least the relatively privileged who became the mainstay of Mbeki’s support base. Yet it is they who have now abandoned him, feeling that their vision has been seriously betrayed in recent years.

Three developments punctured this vision. First, in the last two to three years, there was a growing perception in society that Mbeki was incapable of empathising with ordinary citizens. The two most dramatic examples of this were the crises in health and crime. In the former case, when scandals broke about the quality of care in Mount Frere Hospital and the deaths of babies in Prince Mashini, the Mbeki administration’s immediate response was a cover-up. People who broke the story and leaders who rose to the challenge were reprimanded, harassed and even fired. Witch-hunts became the order of the day, and the political leadership led by the President and the then Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, went into denial.

The then Deputy Minister of Health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who rose to the challenge, was first reprimanded and subsequently fired. Instead of empathising with the victims of health service delivery failure, and the mothers who lost their children, Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang buried their heads in the sand, denying anything was wrong in the public health system.

Similarly when confronted with a question on crime in an interview on SABC a couple of months later, his remarks were that the problem is being seriously over-played. Indeed in the very same interview, he argued that one could walk in Auckland Park without the fear of being mugged and attacked.

Not only did this betray ignorance about the conditions in Auckland Park and much of the rest of the country, but it also downplayed the seriousness of the problem of violent crime. Instead of rising to the challenge and sympathising with the victims of murder, rape and robbery, Mbeki refused to understand the fears of his citizenry, instead accusing them of being active or unwitting agents in the pursuance of an agenda of racial bigotry. Again, not only was there no empathy for victims, but the immediate response was to deny the social reality. This behaviour signalled a leader incapable of empathy and seriously out of touch with his citizenry.

Second, there is a growing perception that state institutions were being manipulated for personal political gain. Of course this has been the charge that Zuma has levelled against Mbeki for some time now. COSATU, the Communist Party, and Jacob Zuma have argued that the National Prosecuting Authority and other state institutions have been deployed against Mbeki’s political opponents. Initially, this was treated, at least in the public domain, with a degree of popular scepticism. But Mbeki’s behaviour, and of those around him, increasingly suggested that this charge may not be completely unfounded. The processes involved in the appointment of the SABC board, for instance, violated legitimate democratic protocols when it was revealed that MPs were instructed to appoint a set of individuals decided by Luthuli House. Similarly, the dismissal of Vusi Pikoli created political waves for it was seen as a means to protect Jackie Selebi. Both decisions were seen as examples where the president manipulates decision-making in state institutions to service his own political ends.

Finally, and related to the above, there was a widespread perception that Mbeki’s Machiavellian behaviour, reflected in his defence of those close to him, while dealing severely with opponents, was increasingly out of step with democratic norms. Again there was dramatic evidence of this in the last few years of Mbeki’s reign. Mbeki dismissed Jacob Zuma, while refusing to do so in the case of Jackie Selebi, even though the allegation against the latter was as serious as that levelled against the former. Similarly, he went out of his way to defend an incompetent health minister that brought the party and country into disrepute, while firing a popular deputy minister who defended the interests of HIV/AIDS victims and the poor and marginalised. These incidents provide credence to COSATU’s, the SACP’s and even many in the ANC’s charge that the president was inconsistent in his application of the rules, and really used his position to undermine the political contestation that should have been the everyday stuff of democratic politics.

Ultimately these developments exposed the fallacy of the vision of ‘the caring and socially responsive democratic society’ that the middle and upper middle classes harboured in this transition.

Feeling betrayed they turned against Mbeki. He was now seen as an autocrat, not the democrat they supported. He was seen as a manipulator, not the politically astute entrepreneur they endorsed. He was seen as one who turns against those closest to him, not the resolute politician who stands up against the forces of populism. Indeed, the popular image of Mbeki at the end of
2007 was one of a vindictive politician.

He was seen as the cause of his own misfortunes. And as these social strata turned against him, so they left him vulnerable to the growing list of political victims that Mbeki accumulated in his rise to power. This then is the great success of Jacob Zuma: the unravelling of the support for Thabo Mbeki among the middle and upper middle classes of South African society.

POLICY AND MANAGEMENT UNDER JACOB ZUMA

But what will Zuma’s political tenure look like? If systemic dynamics led to the centralisation of power and South Africa’s economic policy choices, is the ANC under Zuma, or the country under Zuma or his appointee, likely to be different? On the economic policy front, there is likely to be very little change. It is worthwhile bearing in mind that economic policy has gradually been shifting to the left under Thabo Mbeki in the last few years. Privatisation is no longer a national priority as it was in the late 1990s. There has been a significant increase in social support grants since 2001 so that 12 million people, a quarter of the population, receive such aid. In addition the health and education budgets have been on a steep rise for a number of years.

Moreover, South Africa has a major state-led infrastructural investment program to the tune of R400 billion. This is likely to be supplemented by another public investment of another R1.3 trillion in the energy sector in the next two decades.

The official rhetoric now speaks of the developmental state and not the untrampled market that was lauded only a few years ago. Of course this shift is not uncontested. Indeed, South Africa’s existing policy architecture is currently very contradictory.

There are significant sections of it that have a developmental, Keynesian, and social democratic flavour, especially when it comes to welfare and infrastructure spending. Yet, it also has strong continuities with the GEAR (Growth Employment and Redistribution) framework, particularly reflected in the Reserve Bank and Treasury’s rigid commitments to deficit and inflation targeting.

This contradiction in South Africa’s policy ensemble has to be resolved. The dispute between DTI (department of trade and industry) and Treasury has to be resolved in favour of the former. The Reserve Bank has to be reigned in, and made more economically secular and pragmatic by broadening its mandate to also look after employment.

Most of all, South Africa’s collective focus should shift to addressing the employment crisis. This in essence means an industrialisation strategy capable of absorbing large amounts of unskilled and semi-skilled labour. It would be worth recognising that no amount of training is going to transform citizens deprived of schooling and make of them skilled entrepreneurs successfully competing in the global economy. Given this, our economic strategy must be multi-faceted and sequenced. Some of our policies must be directed at the employment of new graduates of the productive sectors of post-apartheid schooling and education. But a significant amount of it should be directed at establishing industrial sectors capable of absorbing the unskilled and semi-skilled unemployed who were laid off in the first decade of our transition. Gradually, then, once the employment situation is stabilised, businesses and entrepreneurs should be prompted to progress up the value chain.

ARE ALL KINDS OF UNCERTAINTY BAD?

What of South Africa’s future? A number of domestic stakeholders, including business, have for some time expressed their disquiet about the climate of uncertainty that has prevailed since Polokwane. Now they are even more concerned given the formal split within the ANC and the decision by former leading lights of the Mbeki camp – Mosiuoa Lekota, Sam Shilowa, and Mluleki George – to launch a rival political party. People worry whether domestic and foreign business will be put off from investment, whether the constitution will be changed, whether corruption is likely to continue to thrive, and in some extreme cases, whether we are heading for civil war. Obviously some of these fears emanate from racialised perceptions of South Africa’s political system and its elites. But most of it emanates from decent folk who have the best interests of the country and their families at heart. And what they want to know is whether Polokwane and the split in the ANC, and the uncertainty these have generated, will unravel South Africa’s national potential for a rosier future.

At the outset it must be asked whether all forms of uncertainty need always be bad for the country. A couple of years ago, the academic journal Democratisation published an article by a political scientist, Andreas Schedler, who drew a distinction between institutional uncertainty and substantive uncertainty.

Institutional uncertainty – the uncertainty about the rules of the game – speaks to issues of the legitimacy of state institutions, and implies the vulnerability of the democratic system to anti-democratic forces. Substantive uncertainty – the uncertainty of the outcomes of the game – is about the perceptions of ruling political elites in a democratic system on whether they will be returned to office. It also speaks to economic elites and their fears about whether they can simply reproduce themselves along old patterns.

The former – institutional uncertainty – is bad for democracy as it raises the prospect of those defeated in the normal contest of elections not accepting the result and trying to overthrow the system. The latter – substantive uncertainty – is good for democracy for it keeps politicians on their toes and makes them responsive to their citizenry. The fundamental purpose of a democracy is to make state elites accountable to the citizenry. This is the only way to effect not only public participation, but also to guarantee a development trajectory in the interests of all the citizenry, including its most marginalised and dispossessed.
Such accountability is thus founded on the emergence of substantive uncertainty in the political system. In this sense, substantive uncertainty is the essence of democracy.

For much of South Africa’s transition, such a substantive uncertainty has been missing from its political system. The opposition parties, located as they were in minority electoral pools, had no hope of threatening the ANC at the polls and the political elite in the ANC could take their occupation of political office for granted. This underlay the arrogance that was sometimes displayed by them on matters like the arms deal, corruption and crime. It allowed Mbeki to marginalise critics like COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP) from the corridors of decision-making and power.

It also enabled his government to adopt the conservative macroeconomic policy agenda that was the hallmark of the early years of his administration. The subsequent opposition of COSATU and the SACP, their mobilisation against Mbeki, and later for Jacob Zuma, and the institutional revolution they fostered with others in Polokwane must be credited for introducing a substantive uncertainty into the political system.

It opened up the political space and created a debate on a range of policy issues, from AIDS to economy policymaking. Had this substantive uncertainty not been introduced into the political system, South Africa would never have had an overhaul of its AIDS policy.

Neither would it have had a shift in its economic polices. South Africa would never have had so many millions of people receiving grants, and it would never have seen the shift to more developmental economics. As a result South Africa would never have made some of the progress in poverty alleviation that it did in the last few years.

But as I argued in a panel debate with Aubrey Matshiqi and Steven Friedman at the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) in September 2006, this openness is vulnerable and unlikely to be sustainable so long as it is premised on a contest between two leaders in the ruling party. For it to be truly sustainable, the substantive uncertainty must be institutionalised within the political system as a whole. Now for the first time the real prospects of this happening have emerged. As has been often argued, the potential for a viable parliamentary political opposition has never lain in the rump of opposition parties. It was only realistically feasible if the ANC split. While most analysts before Polokwane, including myself, believed that this would have emerged with COSATU and the SACP splitting from the ANC, it now seems to be underway by the right of political centre, some of the defeated Mbekites who have decided that their political future lies in an independent parliamentary opposition.

Yet the emergence of a viable parliamentary opposition cannot be taken for granted even if it arises from within the ruling party. There have been similar splits before and they all have petered out. But none has arisen from such deep and serious fissures within the ANC, and none have had such a formidable collective of national political figures.

Nevertheless if this political initiative is to be a significant and sustainable one, then it would have to overcome four serious challenges. First, it is going to require seriously deep financial pockets. Shilowa has indicated that this is not a problem, and South Africa’s political rumour-mill suggests that a number of BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) giants, Saki Macozoma, Mzi Khumalo, and Khaya Ngqula included, are also supporting this initiative. Even if this were true, however, the question that has to be asked is whether these BEE entrepreneurs will be in for the long haul as would be required if this initiative is to be successful.

Second, the successful launch of this political alternative is going to require a national organisational infrastructure. To date, Lekota, Shilowa, and others have tried to work off the ANC’s institutional base, which accounts for why the leadership moved so quickly to isolate them. But now that they are on their own, the success of the initiative does depend on how many of the branches and provinces will throw in their lot with them. At present it does seem as if they will have some footprint in the Eastern, Northern and Western Cape.

In addition, however, they will need at least a significant presence in the Free State, Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West, and a small existence in KwaZulu-Natal if they are to be perceived as serious national political actors.

Third, the political initiative would need to be supported by a wider array of national political figures. Lekota and Shilowa are formidable political actors in their own right. But the initiative would get a great boost if Mbeki were to publicly give it his blessing, which is unlikely to happen at least in the short term. Given this, a wider array of figures in the Mbeki camp need to be seen to be supportive of this initiative, not only for it not to be seen as an attempt by disgruntled political leaders to hang onto power, but also if it is to carry the liberation pedigree that would be necessary if it is to have legitimacy among older members of South Africa’s black population.

Finally, the political alternative has to go beyond personalities and root itself in a distinct policy agenda. To date, it has been presented as a separation forced on by personality differences or unhappiness with the leadership of the ANC, because they have not shared equitably the spoils of office.

Obviously this comes off as a rupture among political elites to advance their own interests and lays the initiative open to the charge that it is being driven by ambitious politicians who cannot come to terms with the outcome of internal party democratic processes. If it is to go beyond this, then, the political alternative has to root itself in a policy program and a track record distinct from that claimed by the Zuma leadership within the ANC.

Perhaps, however, the greatest prospect for this initiative lies in the hands of the current leadership of the ANC. This might seem an odd conclusion to arrive at but it is worth noting that the political challenge only became a reality because the existing leadership underestimated the consequences of driving Mbeki from office. If a triumphalist attitude continues to prevail within the post-Polokwane leadership of the ANC, and if sufficient bridges are not built between the two camps within the organisation, then the political alternative is likely to grow if only because ‘dissidents’ have no other option.

It does seem as if leaders like Kgalema Motlanthe and even Jacob Zuma are aware of the threat, but there is also a strong strand within the leadership that responds to challenge and contestation with disciplinary hearings and expulsions. Obviously a balance has to be struck between maintaining internal political plurality and not enabling individuals to use the structures of the organisation against itself. But if an appropriate balance is not achieved, as seems to be the case currently, then the leadership may be precipitating the conditions for it to be seriously challenged at the polls.

Such a challenge will also be facilitated by the political behaviour of the current leadership of the ANC. These same political actors, who played such a useful role just a year ago, by introducing a political plurality and thereby a substantive uncertainty, have now begun to make decisions and behave in ways that introduce institutional uncertainty into the political system. They have attacked the NPA, the courts, and even individual judges. As a result they have begun to delegitimise the institutions of justice and other state structures. Some of their inflammatory statements about killing if the court does not find in their favour not only entrenches a culture of violence, but also undermine the rule of law. Also the new political elite’s decision to continue treating state positions as the spoils of war, to be used by the victors of Polokwane, blurs the divide between party and state and undermines the very foundation of democracy.

While some of these decisions and behaviour may serve their short-term political and personal goals, it will come to haunt them in the future when they occupy political office.

It needs to be borne in mind that economic development, service delivery, and poverty alleviation are dependent on a legitimated and capacitated state. Behaviour that now undermines the legitimacy and capacity of state institutions will compromise the new political elite’s own long-term goals.

Moreover, it may even alienate potential voters from the ANC. While previously this leadership could afford to remain complacent, this no longer will be the case if Lekota and Shilowa get their political alternative off the ground. Perhaps this will be the greatest contribution that Lekota and Shilowa will bequeath South Africa. By creating a viable political alternative, one rooted in all of South Africa’s population, political elites will no longer be able to take the country’s citizenry for granted. And therein lies the potential for the strengthening of democratic accountability in South Africa.

* Adam Habib is a professor of political science and deputy vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

South Africa’s election: A tainted victory

Roger Southall

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55642

cc Terje S. SkjerdalWith South Africa's election fast approaching, Roger Southall predicts a triumphant yet problematic victory for Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress (ANC). Southall examines the shifting electoral terrain within South Africa, indicating that younger voters are changing the political demographic. Despite the ANC’s respected economic record, increasing concern surrounds government policy, with injustice and inequality still prevalent across the country some 15 years after 1994's 'liberation' election. The author argues that regardless of the ANC’s predictable success in the April 2009 election, the party’s sanctity has been shattered as a result of its corruption and role in worsening the livelihoods of ordinary South Africans. The ANC’s dominance in the electoral arena is subsiding, Southall contends, a reality which will prove key in shaping the future development of South Africa's democracy.

The triumph of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa's fourth democratic general election on 22 April 2009 is assured. Yet this will be the ruling party's most shoddy and problematic victory.

The ingredients of success seem to be falling into place. The acting chief prosecutor's decision on 6 April not to continue pressing corruption and tax-evasion charges against the ANC leader Jacob Zuma – which opens the way for him to succeed Kgalema Motlanthe as the country's president – is a timely boost for the party, even if Helen Zille of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) promises to appeal to the high court against the ruling.

The ANC is intent on presenting a confident face to the voters; it announced a two-thirds majority in the national assembly as its goal. But this is bravado. In private, the ANC worries that its showing will be considerably worse – perhaps even below 60 per cent. This may sound impressive, though it would be a considerable decline from the near 70 per cent of the vote in the last (April 2004) election; even more worryingly for the party, worse than its 63 per cent in the ‘liberation’ election of 1994.

This could be the signal that, after some 15 years in power, the ANC is on a downward slope and could face the real possibility of defeat at the next election in 2014. Indeed, this is the agenda that the two highest profile opposition parties – the established DA and the new Congress of the People (COPE) – are working towards.

The inexorable shifting of South Africa's electoral terrain in a way that renders appeals by the ANC to the electorate more problematic helps explain why a party on the brink of electoral victory can also appear to be in decline. Three aspects of this process stand out.

A NEW LANDSCAPE

The first is demographic. South African voters are getting younger, the result both of a high birth-rate and (owing to the impact of HIV/Aids) declining average life-spans. The ANC may claim the loyalties of first-time (18-year-old and above) voters, but the political leanings of the ‘cell phone’ generation – which has little direct memory of apartheid – are likely to be more diffuse and less rooted than those of its parents.

The second is policy-related. The ANC's economic record since 1994 has been respectable, but a fundamental reality remains unchanged: South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The government's own 15-year-review acknowledged that in 2005, half the population – 22 million out of 44 million – lived in abject poverty. The government has done much to address the needs of the poor via a massive extension of social assistance, and a reasonable record in the supply of new housing, electricity connections and water. Nonetheless, these measures do not automatically translate into votes. These initiatives also foster dependencies and disappointed expectations, as well as a widespread sense of relative deprivation. In addition, there is growing resentment against perceived corruption and cronyism, especially at the local level.

The third aspect that limits the appeal of the ANC is social. South Africa's social cohesion is being undermined by at least four factors: massive rural-to-urban migration; inward and largely uncontrolled foreign immigration (notably from Zimbabwe); a perennially high level of unemployment (around 25 per cent, currently compounded by job losses caused by the global recession); and the growing casualisation of work. A Markinor poll published in February 2009 indicated that for the first time more South Africans felt the country was going in the wrong (42 per cent) than in the right (38 per cent) direction.

A PARTY CORRODED

The ANC might with some justification claim that these are precisely the sort of problems that any government is likely to face after 15 years in power. Yet so many of the troubles it faces are of its own invention.

The most notorious is the period of internal turmoil which culminated with the replacement of Thabo Mbeki as party leader by Jacob Zuma at the ANC's national conference in Polokwane in December 2007. This in turn was followed by Mbeki's ‘recall’ from South Africa's presidency in September 2008 and replacement by the interim figure of Kgalema Motlanthe. The official version is that there has been an internal healing of rifts, but in truth many scars remain and the wounds could easily be re-opened.

It's true that Jacob Zuma has emerged as his own man during the course of the campaign as opposed to a creature of the coalition of trade unions, the Communist Party (CP), and the ANC Youth League which propelled him to the leadership at Polokwane. But his appeal is divisive, and his ascendancy to the presidency will be of someone tainted by suspicion who, but for the ANC's politicisation of supposedly neutral state institutions, might otherwise be in jail.

At a deeper level, the reason why the ANC's forthcoming victory will be so qualified is the widespread sense that the party has lost its sense of decency. It arrived in power in 1994 as the champion of human rights; the government it formed was invested in the hopes of most South Africans for a fairer, more equal and more caring society. There is little of such idealism today. Instead of the iconic Nelson Mandela, the ANC is led by a man whom the majority (even of black Africans, who form the main body of the ANC's support), believe is guilty of corruption.

Indeed, there has been a series of scandals. Many have revolved around the ANC's misuse of state power to fund its party budget, while others have exposed dodgy deals with shady businessmen. The saddest aspect is that the expectation and even acceptance of corruption at all national, provincial and local levels has become the norm.

The ANC's money obsession means that it is awash with money from un-stated sources, much of it appearing to come from fellow ruling parties in countries such as China, Equatorial Guinea, Libya and Angola. But there is a cost: the party machinery, even at a time of electoral mobilisation, is creaking. Kgalema Motlanthe, when he was still secretary general of the ANC in 2007, admitted that the rot was ‘across the board’, meaning every project was considered in terms of its opportunities for people to make money.

The saga of Carl Niehaus – whom the leadership employed as ANC spokesman for the electoral campaign despite privately knowing of his background of extensive fraud, and subsequently dismissed when the media revealed his deceit and indebtedness – is symptomatic of the party's disarray. Few South Africans believe that a party headed by Jacob Zuma will prove able to recover its compass. The refusal of a visa to the Dalai Lama to attend a peace conference in South Africa, which would contribute to the maintenance of comradely relations with China (admittedly to the anguish of significant elements within the party), confirms that mammon has trumped morality.

AN EMPTY VICTORY

The ANC's predicament could well have been worse if COPE – launched in late 2008 by ANC dissidents, especially those opposed to Jacob Zuma and inclined to Thabo Mbeki – had managed to get its act together. It now looks as if COPE will no longer present a strong challenge to the ANC. Its own early life has been marked by a series of setbacks including limited funding, a lack of patronage, a failure to secure backing from enough high-profile ANC figures, all of which have been reinforced by internal divisions and its own incompetence.

COPE had initially hoped to win as many as 20 per cent of the vote. Now 5 per cent is more likely, though most of this should come from the ANC rather than from other parties of opposition. COPE and the DA could also benefit from a squeezing of the smaller opposition parties as voters determined to make their votes count turn to them. For its part, the DA may find it difficult to move much above its respectable 12.37 per cent share of the vote, but could emerge as the largest party in the Western Cape (weathering a challenge from COPE in the process) and be able to lead a governing coalition in the province after ejecting the ANC from power.

The current election is the most fluid and unpredictable in South Africa since 1994. Jacob Zuma's ANC will win, and could yet win big. But even if it manages to again defeat the opposition threat with apparent ease, the perception of its inviolability has been broken. The signs are prevalent that the ANC's dominance of the electoral arena is crumbling. Some believe, and even more hope, that this could be good for South African democracy.

* Roger Southall is honorary research professor in the sociology of work programme, University of the Witwatersrand.
* This article originally appeared in openDemocracy on 7 April 2009.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Towards women’s political calvary

Liepollo Lebohang Pheko

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55641

cc Michiel van BalenSurveying the range of manifestoes and political stances offered by South Africa's political parties, Liepollo Lebohang Pheko exposes a common paternalistic thread underpinning parties' approaches to women's representation and rights. With many women legitimately concerned about politics being a 'dirty' game in the country – as elsewhere across the world – Pheko writes that those championing women's greater involvement face considerable obstacles, not least of which is the lack of space for critical thinking around how a dominant, masculined state fails to provide for women's citizenship. Female political candidates are at once excluded from their parties' strong backing through prejudice and the persistence of a self-serving 'old boys' club' behind the selection of candidates, the author notes. Attaining true liberation for women, Pheko argues, requires tackling injustice at each and every level it is encountered, a strategy that will ultimately necessitate an effective challenge to the state's ghettoisation of women's issues.

‘We must pay the closest attention to women's situation because it pushes the most conscious of them into waging a sex war when what we need is a war of classes or parties, waged together, side by side. We have to say frankly that it is the attitude of men that makes such confusion possible. It is men's attitude that spawns the bold assertions made by feminism, certain of which have not been without value in the war which men and women are waging against oppression. This war is one we can and will win – if we understand that we need one another and are complementary, that we share the same fate, and in fact, that we are condemned to interdependence.’ Thomas Sankara

DO THE SOUTH AFRICAN ELECTIONS ADVANCE WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP AND AGENCY?

The practise and theory of elections are often dissonant, especially as an adequate expression of women’s aspirations and tangible transformation of their circumstances. Sikhula Sonke Women from Cape Town recently marched to parliament stating that they would withdraw their vote in protest at the government’s slow land redistribution programme. This ultimatum seems to be predicated on the assumption that the government is obliged to enable women’s substantive citizenship. Further, this implies that withdrawing suffrage is a valuable instrument for women to demonstrate the government’s lack of efficacy in providing a space that realises women’s hopes for full citizenship.

The practise of elections across the world is theoretically intended to shift power from one political party to the next. Conventional wisdom suggests that elections are intended to vest power in citizens by giving them the power to give or withdraw their mandate. However, it is slightly more complex than this. Recent elections across the region illustrate that elections are not necessarily the best or only marker of popular sentiment. It has been suggested that elections are in fact part of bolstering public confidence and donor perceptions about governance in Africa. This model makes it unclear whether women’s rights are collateral benefits of ‘performing elections’ or a central concern – one would suspect the former. In Africa and elsewhere in the world, elections and election observation became a growing industry in the last 20 years. There have been two potentially critical international protocols during this period. The first is the Beijing Platform of Action and the second are the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Beijing platform articulates 12 priority areas and resulted from a herculean process of compromise as a broad spectrum of women’s organisations and stakeholders tried to find consensus. The platform broadly attempts to create a normative approach to women’s rights and a universally accepted culture of what these rights are and how they are best enabled.

The Millennium Development Goals have eight goals, two of which make explicit reference to gender-related goals (and within those provide more gender targets). Notwithstanding the incongruence between goals, targets and indicators and the inadequacy of the gender-related aspects of the MDGs, the goals attempt to lift women’s political representation beyond the level of static national processes. This is in keeping with the era of supra-nationalism that has been particularly acute with the demise of bi-polarism. In common with the debate on elections, the MDGs attempt to co-opt feminist struggles and women’s voices into a manageable package of tick-box indicators.

What is interesting about the MDs and the Beijing Platform – apart from the fact that South Africa has ratified both – is that they attempt to locate women’s rights beyond the ballot box. Although both instruments contain the neoliberal interests that come with the state-sponsored citizenship of women, for South Africa they potentially represent the opportunity to claim back the ballot box beyond the party-political realm and create political engagement that resonates with Sikhula Sonke. A critical question is how the critical mass of these struggles – including access to land, access to education, to health, to economic agency and other ideals which mark equity and equality – coalesce with the election process. Is it actually worth women’s while to vote?

ELECTION MANIFESTOES AND WOMEN

Multiparty elections are part of routine political practice across the world and after 15 years South Africa has entrenched this as a focal part of political culture. Some observers criticise, quite rightly, the reductionist view that multiparty elections are the primary and sufficient condition for democracy. Even more worrying is the assumption that women’s agency is adequately encompassed by the practise of power exchanging hands between the same narrow class interests, interests which are typically masculine. The scenario is more intricate than this, and the narrow objective of gaining power in order to govern needs to speak to the complexity of various social actors and their concerns.

The 2009 elections present several political players with the opportunity to harness new ideas and create a new imagination. The extent to which this imagination is visible is disappointing. A glance at the various manifestoes presents us with the coded language of victimhood, rhetoric or the objectification of women and their unique social, economic and cultural circumstances.

The ACDP (African Christian Democratic Party) refers to the reduction of infant mortality, the provision of ARVs (antiretrovirals) to expectant mothers and poverty reduction. However, the manifesto does not refer at all to the manner in which women’s access to economic activity is mediated by differentiated entry points, nor does it make any attempt to deconstruct the feminisation of poverty.

The Independent Democrats have a broad manifesto which details investment policy, housing policy and a clear environmental platform. The discourse on social cohesion is a wasted opportunity to illustrate that women’s citizenship is more than a peripheral concern, but this is subverted to a critique of BEE (black economic empowerment) programme. While it is true that African people in this county are still excluded from critical processes, many of them are women and it is simplistic and erroneous to de-link class, race and gender struggles.

COPE’s (Congress of the People) manifesto opens with a list of priorities, including women’s empowerment and equality. Although making mention of women as recipients of BEE, COPE frames this in classically paternalistic tones by speaking the rhetoric of respecting the dignity of women and only mentions a 50–50 parity target in the service public as a tangible deliverable.

Among 16 succinctly stated key challenges, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) does not mention women’s empowerment or gender rights. Instead they also use the typically masculine model of clustering women and youth as one broad entity. This is problematic for a host of reasons which can be summarised by saying that the reduction of women’s agency to that of youth and children yet again negates their agency and is absolutely condescending and deeply disturbing across the party-political landscape.

The same can be said of the Inkhatha Freedom Party (IFP), which also delivers nine punchy but gender-blind action priorities. A section on redressing inequality misses the opportunity to remind voters that women and men have different access to resources, the economy and opportunities. While highlighting racism as an obstacle to growth, sexism is ignored.

AZAPO (Azanian People's Organisation) offers an interesting analysis of class inequality and youth development but offers only two lines of rhetoric about eradicating inequalities between women and men. Any tangible methodology is absent and an opportunity to link class with gender struggles is missed.

The ANC (African National Congress), who have had 15 years to develop a clear methodology on how to ‘do gender’, use very much the same nebulous language of creating a non-sexist society, and also locate women’s struggles within a broad church of the youth, the workers, the disabled and the rural masses. These struggles are not necessarily mutually exclusive and many women are disabled, rural, workers and young. Again the masculinised discourse objectifies women and places them at the mercy of state largesse with other implicitly ‘vulnerable’ groups. This is particularly worrying from the ruling government, which has had the opportunity to use the imperfect instruments of Beijing and the MDGs, for example, as bench marks. The ANC has a strong record on women’s representation. Whether this has influenced a clear or sufficient agenda for transformative women’s rights is unlikely.

Any semblance of dynamic African feminism has yet to be manifested in the run-up to the elections. In an era of supremely competent women leaders, this situation is astounding.

WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION IN PARLIAMENT

‘Quotas are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they oblige men to think about including women in decision-making, since men must create spaces for women. On the other hand, since it is men who are opening up these spaces, they will seek out women who they will be able to manage – women who will more easily accept the hegemony of men.’ Anna Balletbo MP, Spain

In general, quotas for women represent a shift from one concept of equality to another. The classic liberal notion of equality was a notion of 'equal opportunity' or 'competitive equality'. Removing formal barriers, for example, and giving women voting rights, was considered sufficient. The rest was up to individual women.

Following strong feminist pressure in the last few decades, a second concept of equality is gaining increasing relevance and support: the notion of 'equality of result'. The argument is that real equal opportunity does not exist just because formal barriers are removed. Direct discrimination and a complex pattern of hidden barriers prevent women from getting their share of political influence. Quotas and other forms of positive measures are thus a means towards equality of result. The argument is based on the experience that equality as a goal cannot be reached by formal equal treatment as a means. If barriers exist, it is argued, compensatory measures must be introduced as a means to reach equality of result.

Like many countries, some women perceive politics in South Africa as a ‘dirty’ game. This has dented their confidence in their ability to participate in political processes. This perception is prevalent worldwide. Regrettably, this perception reflects the reality in many countries. Although the reasons for this differ, there are some common trends. The basis of passive corruption can be explained by an exchange between the advantages and benefits of the public market (e.g., legislation and budget bills) and of the economic market (e.g., funds, votes and employment), which seek financial gains by fostering monopolistic conditions. In addition to this, a significant increase in the cost of election campaigning has become obvious, and this in turn increases the temptation to use any source of money that becomes available. Corruption can have many faces. Bribery and extortion in the public sector, as well as the procurement of goods and services, are key manifestations of it. Although new democracies need time to establish themselves and to develop roots, corruption has spread further in countries where the process of political and economic transformation is taking shape in the absence of civil society, and where new institutions are emerging.

However, in many places where changes in the political and economic system have already taken place, the market economy has become enmeshed in the ‘law of the jungle’, the mafia and corruption.

The high cost of bribery and extortion for a society has been recognised. Many governments and business leaders have expressed their desire to curb and eliminate corruption. But this is not an easy task; corruption is rooted in the system by some parties who continue to pay bribes. Corruption inevitably results in the creation of favourable conditions and opportunities for the existence of the most negative manifestation of organised crime. These factors combine to potentially scare women and provoke their fear of losing members of their families, all of which militate against their political involvement or their standing for elected bodies.

WHERE ARE WOMEN LOCATED IN THE MASCULINISED STATE AND ELECTION PROCESS?

African feminism is a complex and often maligned construct. Amina Mama posits that that feminism indicates a refusal of oppression, and a commitment to struggling for women's liberation from all forms of oppression – psychological, emotional, socio-economic, political, philosophical, internal and external. In addition, African feminism is a transformative and radical expression of women’s essence. It is far beyond the politics of mere survival – it anchors us when our national ideologies appear fragmented, our class discourse is contradictory and when the state itself threatens to overwhelm its citizens with its aloof self-importance once election sloganeering has subsided.

Accordingly one looks to certain constructs to connect the mammoth task of resisting and transforming exclusionary structures and patriarchal agendas. Feminism is a vehicle to address and countenance social disequilibrium manifested through gender-blind budgets, securo-crats who increasingly militarise our daily life, violence against women and regressive cultural practises.

Women have typically allowed themselves to be vote fodder across the world. The power of women’s structures located in the masculine party machinery discourse should be in their ability to consolidate women’s struggles with capitalist and imperialist oppression. Instead we fill stadiums with bussed in euphoria without asking how any policy frameworks and implementation strategies proffered by these men advances women’s citizenship. In the increasingly masculanised state, the woman is infantilised and is increasingly the recipient of benevolence at the whim of her father – the president, the ministry, the desk or whoever else will be her benefactor. As we sing at stadiums while our father leaders compare our pain and humanity to rocks that that cannot be struck – ‘wa thinta bafazi...’ – women must consider cogent reasons to continue allowing our core to be compromised by institutions, individuals and processes that do not always have our best interests at heart.

The African experience encompasses a dizzying array of women's mobilisation, not all of our own design or choosing. Modern history has illustrated that in Africa even the most autocratic regimes do not hesitate to involve women. Many of them make extravagant efforts to mobilise women on their behalf.

None of the current crop of political parties have given any reason to believe that they have a progressive feminist discourse and there are no utterances to suggest that they will move women’s relationship with the state to a more equitable one. Jacob Zuma, for example, used women as fodder during his court case as they ‘mothered’ him through his trial. None of the political parties have spoken to a woman’s reality and regrettable this includes those led by strong women such as Patricia de Lille and Helen Zille. This illustrates the politics of femocracy. Women who do not articulate a vision for women and men but a vision for citizens at large. This is a critical conceptual difference. This speaks to the heart of the de-politicisation of women’s issues and the marginalisation of women’s struggles in right-wing exclusionary policies and political constructs. This must not be obfuscated by nationalistic, liberation and electoral rhetoric and cultural nationalism.

Women play important roles in campaigning and mobilising support for their parties, yet they rarely occupy decision-making positions in these structures. In fact, fewer than 11 per cent of party leaders worldwide are women.

Although political parties possess resources for conducting election campaigns, women rarely benefit from these resources. For example, many parties do not provide sufficient financial support for women candidates. Research indicates that a large pool of women candidates, combined with sufficient financial resources, can significantly increase the number of women elected. The selection and nomination process within political parties is also biased against women in that ‘male characteristics’ are emphasised and often become the criteria in selecting candidates. An ‘old boys’ club’ can inhibit and prevent women from integrating themselves into their party’s work. This in turn impacts on the perception of women as viable candidates on the part of those who provide money for election campaigns. In addition, women are often not placed in winnable positions on party lists.

CONCLUSION

Women's liberation requires addressing gender injustice all the way from the micro- to the macro-political level, and not shying away from any level of struggle. This includes the struggle of self-belief. These elections and the party-political manifestoes have clearly reminded us yet again that a woman is not a feminist just because she is a woman nor is every activist male or female able to understand the inter-sectionality of struggle. Across the world and across this country women are asking if elections serve any purpose if they add not a single day to their lives or present them with new spaces to create a different reality?

The value of elections for women is questionable if they cannot even enshrine state sovereignty. As citizens we must challenge the role of the state as protector, provider, enabler and defender, especially when this role is all but vacated. The greatest danger is in outsourcing these struggles to state-led organs and processes where they become masculinised and often completely thwarted. Various gender desks, the Commission on Gender Equality and the Office on the Status of Women have unevenly attempted to create an alternative paradigm but their success rate evokes Audrey Lourdes words: 'We cannot indeed use the Master’s tools to tear down his house.' These institutions have unwittingly been effective in ghettoising women’s issues, rendering them tokenistic vanity projects of a paternalistic agenda. Could 22 April be the opportunity to claim back both the substance of women’s citizenship and the ballot box?

* Liepollo Lebohang Pheko is the policy and advocacy director of The Trade Collective, a gender activist and a social entrepreneur.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

SA political parties sidestep issues around violence against women

Lisa Vetten and Sally Shackleton

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55637

cc Circo de InviernoDespite studies which suggest that as many as one in two women in some parts of South Africa are affected by domestic violence, political parties in South Africa lack concrete, practical strategies to address violence against women, a debate organised by Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, Women’sNet and the department of political studies at Wits University has revealed. Party manifestos failed to adopt a multi-dimensional response to violence against women that go beyond the parameters of the criminal justice system, responses to the societal, economic and material dimensions are almost entirely absent, and no party recognises the unique circumstances and needs of marginalised groups of women who experience violence, write Lisa Vetten and Sally Shackleton.

Political parties in South Africa lack concrete strategies to address violence against women, a problem faced by a huge number of their constituents and that poses a significant challenge to the country's development. This was the message to political party representatives at a debate organised by Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, Women'sNet and the Political Studies department of Wits University earlier this month in Johannesburg. The debate challenged political parties to explain to voters ahead of the 22 April elections concrete measures with which they plan to combat rape and domestic violence.

Community-based prevalence studies suggest that domestic violence affects as many as one in two women in some parts of South Africa. The South African Police Service report for 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008, reports that 182,588 violent crimes were committed against women. Yet, statistics tell half the story. One study found that only one in nine women rape survivors report to the police.

While each party representative flourished much of the right rhetoric, the insubstantial and largely simplistic nature of their party positions was apparent once the floor opened for questions. For example, asked how they would address the economic and material deprivation that pushes some women into sex work, the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) proposed the introduction of sewing groups.

The African National Congress (ANC) sidestepped questions of why they dismantled the specialist Family violence, child protection and sexual offences (FCS) unit, while simultaneously pronouncing such crimes a priority. Both the Freedom Front Plus and the ACDP favoured reintroducing the death penalty for certain types of rape, which drew a mixed response from the audience.

Other proposals included establishing women's courts staffed only by women, and ensuring that abusive men, rather than women and children, leave the home. There are critiques for every one of these positions, but lets look at the last one, since it exemplifies the lack of forethought in many party responses.

Obviously, ideally the courts would evict the abuser from the home, but in reality, they are reluctant, particularly when the couple co-habits in a house registered in his name. For this proposal to become reality, parties would need to prioritise the finalisation of legislation around domestic partnerships. Not one party manifesto proposes such legislative reforms.

Further, in some instances, it is too dangerous for women to remain at known addresses; for safety, they must disappear. An audience member resident at the shelter hosting the debate challenged parties to ensure women fleeing their homes have access to shelters

Only the Congress of the People’s (COPE) manifesto recognised the need to increase the number of ‘special care’ facilities for women in abusive relationships. However, during the debate, the United Democratic Movement (UDM) committed itself to examining laws around property rights that currently prevent the eviction of abusive men, while the Independent Democrats (ID) committed to examining funding service organisations and shelters.

Political parties need to recognise the current failure of the justice system to cope with violence against women. A random, representative study of 2,068 rape cases reported in Gauteng in 2003 found that half of reports led to arrests (50.5 per cent) but only 42.8 per cent of suspects appeared in court. Trials commenced in less than one in five cases (17.3 per cent) and a conviction resulted in just over 1 in 20 (6.2 per cent) cases. Some convictions were for lesser charges, so overall only 4.1 per cent of cases reported resulted in convictions for rape.

First-time women voters met party promises with some scepticism. A 20-year-old who identified herself as Maninas observed, ‘They only talked about how they could change things if we vote for them. Why don't they start now with those changes?’

Sarah, another young first-time voter, was very clear about her expectations. ‘All I can say to the parties is that if they want our political system to be strong, then they should at least start by drafting down properly all the stuff that they are going to address in public. Because the promises they make will determine the future of their party.’

With the exception of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the ANC, party representatives were largely unfamiliar with the issues and out of their depth. No party manifesto adopted a multi-dimensional response to violence against women that went beyond the parameters of the criminal justice system alone.

While almost all parties responded to the legal dimensions of violence in a more or less inadequate fashion, responses to the societal, economic and material dimensions were almost entirely absent from their manifestos. Not one party recognised the unique circumstances and needs of marginalised groups of women who experience violence, including sex workers, undocumented female migrants and refugees, women with disabilities or lesbians to name a few.

Considering that Southern African Development Community (SADC) heads of state committed themselves to halving gender violence by 2015 when they signed the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development last August, the lack of planning at the national level on the issue is concerning.

Gender activists are also concerned about what a Jacob Zuma presidency would mean for women and issues of gender violence. Even putting aside previous rape charges brought against him and questions of whether polygamy and gender equality can co-exist, activists argue that the way in which the rape trial was conducted and the stigmatising treatment of the woman involved undoubtedly further reduced women’s confidence in coming forward.

Similiarly, bystanders will recall a group of taunting men singing Umshini Wami (also sung repeatedly during the rape trial) during a protest organised by the Progressive Women’s Association following the stripping and sexual violation in February 2008 of Nwabisa Ngcukana at Noord Taxi Rank. The song, clearly associated with Zuma, refers literally to a machine gun but carries a double implied threat of both shooting and rape, making a starling connection between the hostilities evoked in 2006 by the rape trial and the attack.

Encouragingly, party representatives invited the audience to challenge and hold them accountable on gender violence. They proposed regular debates, not only at election time, where they could engage with civil society on the issues.

Whether this is anything more than a promise made in the heat of electioneering remains to be seen. Such engagement is crucial on at least two counts: It is a test of parties' commitment to the creation of substantive policy to prevent and combat violence against women, as well as an indication of whether women are more than mere voting fodder at election time.

Parties represented at the debate included:
African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), Thembela Papu; African National Congress (ANC), Premier Edna Molewa; Congress of the People (COPE), Constance Mantai; Democratic Alliance (DA), Janet Semple; Freedom Front Plus, Louwretta Jacobs; Independent Democrats (ID), Rose Gudlhuza; Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), Sibongile Khomo; United Democratic Movement (UDM), Thandi Nontenja; Women Forward (WF) and Nana Ngobesi-Nxumalo.

To obtain a copy of the review of party manifestos, please visit Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre.

* Lisa Vetten is a researcher and policy analyst at Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre to End Violence Against Women. Sally Shackleton is executive director of Women'sNet.
* This article was originally published by the Gender links opinion and commentary service.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Movement-building, the capitalist crisis and the South African elections

John Appolis & Dale T. McKinley, for the APF

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55635

cc WikimediaDespite a sense of euphoria among significant sections of South Africa’s poor and working class that a Jacob Zuma presidency will usher in the long awaited better life for all, write John Appolis and Dale McKinley, socialists know that Zuma will not dismantle the alignment of class forces consolidated by the ANC since the early 1990s, but rather further entrench them. Since social movements are not in a position to present an alternative parliamentary option to the masses, the Anti-Privatisation Forum is calling on communities, workers, the unemployed, youth and students not to vote in the national elections on 22 April 2009, rather than ‘wasting their vote and time on parties that have no intention of bringing about real fundamental changes’ and that do not ‘represent the aspirations and interests of the poor and working class communities’.

THE CAPITALIST CRISIS AND THE POOR/WORKING CLASS

We are now in a world radically different from what it was a mere four months ago. The world economy is collapsing, torn apart by an economic recession. Thousands of workers are being thrown out of work; millions find themselves hungry in the midst of plenty of food; millions are homeless in the midst of houses being repossessed and standing empty. Cement and brick factories are standing idle when millions require shelter. Neoliberal capitalism has over the past thirty years inflicted untold misery onto the world's poor whilst simultaneously making a very small minority filthy rich.

Capitalism has no right to rule society and organise production. It has no more legitimacy as a workable economic system. We have been told that humanity and capitalism is inseparable, without capitalism society cannot move forward. The apologists for the system said there was no alternative, that socialism is dead. But today we find that capitalism is at its own deathbed. However, when capitalism is faced with its own death, it somehow finds a new lease on life. Capitalism faced death during the 1920/30s during the Great Depression. The working class with its strong left or communist parties and trade unions resisted the attempts of the various ruling classes to get them to carry the burden of the depression. It took the capitalist class over two decades through the use of fascism and a Second World War to break the back of the working classes in order to set the system back on the track of recovery. But it had to offer the working class something in return and that was social democracy. Only with this class compromise could the capitalist class embark upon a 25-year period of economic growth. This economic growth broke down in the 1970s. Thirty years of neoliberalism have not solved the crisis of the 1970s. Now in 2009, capitalism is faced with another world crisis more severe than the Great Depression and the crisis of the 1970s.

One of the things the various nationalist ruling classes are going to try to do is convince us to take joint responsibility for the crisis. They are going to sell the idea that we are all in this together and that we are all responsible for the mess, and that we must all try to find solutions for it. But in reality, the way out for them is to try and get the working class and the poor to carry the cost of this crisis. We must accept greater impoverishment, greater unemployment, and greater inequalities. And in the end the gap between the poor and rich will grow ever wider. We must tell them this economic crisis is their mess. We are not going to take responsibility for it. Rather we must expose to everyone, that to take responsibility for this crisis is to accept starvation. We are faced with a choice: Organise or starve.

Over the past eight years our movements here in South Africa have been digging local trenches of resistance to the neoliberal onslaught. We have resisted evictions, water and electricity cut-offs, prepaid meters, lack of service delivery and have fought hard for decent housing, education and healthcare for all. However, this crisis is also breaking out at a time when our movements remain organisationally weak. Whilst having a lot in common we are still not united around a common platform of struggle and demand. Faced with the coming tsunami of destruction of the capitalist class we have to intensify our local struggles, build our movements and unite. As separate and isolated movements, the capitalist class will defeat us, will push us aside. But as a united force it will find in us a formidable opponent. Our local struggles and demands must be linked to the question of institutional power, real participatory democracy and core macro-economic and social policy. We must confront head-on issues such as how wealth is produced/ owned, how it is distributed and consumed. For instance, we must demand that the delivery of houses must take place through the nationalisation of the big cement and bricks factories and placed under working class control. As a defense against starvation, we must also demand that the government legislate a national unemployment living benefit for all the unemployed irrespective of work experience.

The political space is there for us to intervene. Not only can the capitalists no longer tell us there is no alternative – that neoliberalism is the answer to everything – but the ruling party is also finding itself in the midst of a crisis. It is being torn apart by internal contestation over who is entitled to the spoils of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Those who have been excluded under the regime of Thabo Mbeki want to be first in line to BEE under the Zuma ANC and they are prepared to leave no stone unturned in their quest. Only by uniting around a common platform of demands and action can we build a movement with a national presence, one that presents to the masses an alternative pole of explanation and resistance. Our movements have a lot in common: In essence, we are anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberalism and united in our opposition to the ANC government’s core policies and rule.

THE PRESENT POLITICAL SITUATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

The capitalist class in South Africa is clearly not certain about the credentials of the Zuma elite-in-waiting. What is also not helping matters for them, despite re-assurances from Zuma, is the insistence from the ANC’s Alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), that things are going to have to change. And since the ANC’s Polokwane conference in 2007, the capitalists have been confronted with contradictory signals emanating from the elite-in-waiting. No ruling class can afford to have a government in place of which it is not certain that it will do everything necessary for the creation of the conditions for continued capital accumulation, especially in the midst of a systemic crisis. We can thus expect that they are going to do everything possible to ensure that the policies of the previous ANC government under Thabo Mbeki are not going to be sacrificed on the alter of the accumulation frenzy of the petty bourgeoisie marching under the banner of the Zuma elite. Enormous pressure is going to be brought to bear on the Zuma elite to maintain the course of the Mbeki ship. Any serious deviation is going to be met with outright hysteria.

On the other side, amongst significant sections of the poor and working class, there is a certain amount of euphoria that a Zuma presidency is going to usher in the long awaited better life for all. There is renewed hope that changes can come through the ANC and the institutions of bourgeois rule. This hope was ushered in with the developments at the ANC’s Polokwane Conference. Polokwane has been seen (and sold) as the culmination of years of struggle against the neoliberal project of the Mbeki administration. Sections of the poor and working class, under the auspices of organisations allied to the ANC, like COSATU and the SACP, view Polokwane as their victory, as the wrestling back of the ANC from the clutches of the ‘capitalist’ Mbeki faction.

Underscoring this renewed hope in the ruling party and the parliamentary process was the removal of Thabo Mbeki as president of the country in 2008, and the subsequent appointment of an interim ANC President, Kgalema Motlanthe. Also giving credence to this feeling is the apparent re-assertion of parliament as a body of authority insisting now on its oversight role of certain aspects of financial matters – like budgets and money bills. Critically also is the impression, marketed by the ANC, that it is now a more caring, people-orientated party – a good example being the recent ‘coming together’ of the ANC with the community and organisations of Khutsong. All of this gives the impression that things can be radically changed or are already in the process of changing.

Socialists and militants within the social movements, on the other hand, however, know that a Zuma presidency is not going to dismantle the alignment of capitalist class forces consolidated by the ANC since the early 1990s but rather further entrench them. No social movement militant should have any illusion about a Zuma presidency and his coterie of followers. We must understand that the Zuma faction does not represent an alternative class project to that of Thabo Mbeki. This is not only confirmed by the recently installed president Motlanthe who categorically stated that he is going to continue where Mbeki left off, but also borne out by eight years of struggle against the ANC government and its neoliberal policies.Complicating matters, however, is that there exists not only hope in a Zuma presidency within the ranks of the ANC’s ‘left’ allies and sections of the broader working class/poor, but also amongst the constituencies of the social movements, including the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF).

Not making things easier is the new kid on the political party block, the Congress of the People (COPE) and its key leader, Terror Lekota, the former chairperson of the ANC. COPE has introduced a new dimension into the political equation. They are projecting the image of people who respect the constitution and the rule of law. Whether this claiming of public space by former ANC members to voice political opposition to the current leadership of the ANC is going to lead to any kind of mass-based electoral support is still not clear, although it is certain that COPE will gain a degree of support, especially from the emergent black capitalist and middle classes. What we do know though is the track record of Lekota and his lieutenants as part of all the anti-working class policies of the ANC government. They were the co-drivers and implementers of GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution), privatisation, trade liberalisation and so on. Their loyalty has been firmly on the side of the capitalist class.

We are faced with a significantly changed situation as compared to that prevailing at the time of the 2004 national elections. On the one hand, the social movement militants are under no illusion as to what the new ruling elite in waiting represent. But, on the other hand, broad sections of the masses, including significant constituencies of the movements, are moving in tow with the elite-in-waiting. Thrown into the mix is the fact that social movements, as in the case of 2004, are not in a position to present an alternative parliamentary option to the masses. A realistic appraisal of the state of the movements will show that they have suffered further setbacks in their strategic capacity and implantation within communities where many organisations are in a state of survival. The significant support for a Zuma presidency amongst poor communities, is but one indicator of this process.

THE 2009 NATIONAL ELECTIONS – A CALL FOR A BOYCOTT

With the 2009 national elections around the corner we are confronted with the task of developing a parliamentary tactic that corresponds best to the present conjuncture. The term parliamentary tactic is employed on the assumption that it is common cause amongst socialists that participation in bourgeois parliaments is viewed as a tactical question and not one of principle. Over the decades the international working class has built up a vast arsenal of such tactics ranging from boycott, the fielding of candidates, protest vote in the form of a spoilt ballot to a conditional vote for a party/movement.

The bottom line is that none of the political parties that are contesting these elections are worth voting for. None of the main capitalist parties contesting, like the ANC, COPE and DA (Democratic Alliance), represent the aspirations and interests of the poor and working class communities. In the 1994, 1999 and 2004 national elections, the ANC and others also released with much fanfare their electoral manifestos promising a better life for all. Instead working class communities have seen increased poverty, homelessness, dismal lack of service delivery and joblessness. In fact, over the past 14 years the ANC government has shown it has no political will to address, in a fundamental way, the interests and aspirations of the poor.

Again in 2009, the ANC and other capitalist parties are making many claims and promises. The ANC is boasting that it has created on average, half a million jobs since 2004, reducing unemployment from 31 per cent in 2003 to 23 per cent in 2007. This is sheer dishonesty. The ANC is deliberately not including the millions who have simply stopped looking for a job. Independent figures show that unemployment is around 40 per cent and that the jobs that were created are the highly exploitative, casual, lowly paid and outsourced ones and of a very short-term nature. The so-called ‘answers’ to the mass poverty and inequality in South Africa that are provided in the ANC electoral manifesto of the ruling party, are not ‘answers’ at all, precisely because there is no political commitment and/or practical will to mobilise/organise the majority of the poor and working class to confront capital (i.e. to wage class struggle) and thus radically alter both the political and socio-economic status quo.

Instead of wasting their vote and time on parties that have no intention of bringing about real fundamental changes, we are calling on communities, workers, the unemployed, youth and students not to vote on 22nd April 2009. Voting in these national elections is not the sole, or even main, act of real democratic participation. We must not be fooled by empty appeals to ‘civic duty’ and ‘responsibility’ when we know that a vote for any of the participating political parties is a vote for a continuation of what has come before.

Social and political power does not lie in voting every five years for party representatives who claim to represent the people. It lies in building strong, mass poor/working class movements and strengthening our common anti-capitalist struggles on the ground, which can make a difference both in ordinary people’s lives and in the way they relate to those with institutional and party representational power. It is such choices and actions that can be the source of real, popular and grassroots-oriented political power that is not confined/limited by the narrow, institutional boundaries of stale bourgeois democracy and that can have the potential to enforce real accountability and meaningful democratic participation.

* John Appolis is Deputy Chair of the Anti-Privatisation Forum. Dale T. McKinley is an independent writer, lecturer and researcher. He is an activist within the Anti-Privatisation Forum as well as the Social Movements Indaba.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Why Steve Biko wouldn’t vote

Continuity in the post-1994 era

Andile Mngxitama

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55639

cc April LynnAs South Africa nears its fourth election since 1994, Andile Mngxitama laments the country's overall lack of progress toward genuine black liberation in the post-1994 era. Highlighting Steve Biko's emphasis on 'conscientisation' to counter the normalisation of black people's material and mental subjugation to the entrenched white power structure, Mngxitama decries the continued suffering of the poor black majority in post-1994 South Africa, arguing that the race-based understanding of impoverishment once used to describe marginalisation has now been effectively eradicated under the anti-racialist hegemony dominant in national discourse. With the state still essentially rooted in its apartheid-era model of white capitalist accumulation and exploitation – albeit with a new black leadership at the helm – Mngxitama contends that the country has simply moved into a neo-apartheid phase of little discernible distinction from its past, stating that to vote within such a system would merely be to grant it legitimacy.

South Africa is on the verge of going to its fourth national election since 1994.[1] The socio-political changes which have occurred in the country for past 15 years point to a dramatic failure to realise the dream of liberation as developed by Steve Biko. Here I develop an argument for why Biko, like so many, would not be voting.

BIKO’S CONCEPTION OF LIBERATION

Biko’s idea of liberation is fundamentally anti-racist and anti-capitalist, as opposed to being anti-racialist, non-racialist and intergrationist – these latter conceptions of change naturally lead to the de-racialisation of capitalism and thereby the legitimation of the white supremacist political, economic and social existence created over the last 350 years in South Africa. Biko’s framing of the fundamental contradiction in South Africa as one of white racism emanates from his conception of capitalism as it emerged in the country as an inherently racist project. In his words then:

'[T]he color question in South African politics was originally introduced for economic reasons. The leaders of the white community had to create some kind of barrier between black and whites so that the whites could enjoy privileges at the expense of blacks and still feel free to give moral justification for the obvious exploitation that pricked even hardest of white consciences.'

For Biko this initial subjugation of black people for economic reason has over time created the 'white power structure'. This is to mean white racism, while based on the historical dispossession and oppression of blacks, has come to assume a position of relative autonomy, where whiteness normalises itself as a power dynamic based on a superiority complex linked to skin colour on the one hand and the supposed inferiority of blacks on the other. The actual existing circumstances of blacks (historically and systematically created) actually reinforce the reality of this white superiority and black denigration. These propositions are not merely mental states, they are material, and determine life chances and privileges. To be white is to be human as to be black is to be subhuman. Biko sharply makes the point that '[t]he racism we meet doesn’t only exist on an individual basis; it is institutionalized to make it look like the South African way of life.'

It must be said that in fact the normalisation of racism is ingrained in the psyches of both whites (the beneficiaries) and blacks (the victims). It was on the recognition of this reality that Biko and his comrades argued for the 'conscientisation' of the blacks, because black people at the time 'often looked like they have given up the struggle'. Key to the conscietisation process was always the totality of black awareness and pride for the purpose of struggle. For Biko, 'Liberation is of paramount importance in the concept of Black Consciousness, for we cannot be conscious of ourselves and yet remain in bondage'.[2]

BIKO THE BLACK SOCIALIST

Throughout I write what I like we get snippets of Biko’s attitude to capitalism and his attitude towards a brand of socialism. It remains a mystery why the Eurocentric neo-Marxist and other such 'Leftist' thinkers continue to cast Black Consciousness (BC) as somehow agreeable to capitalism. If we take seriously Biko’s conception of apartheid South Africa as a country inflicted by a white racism founded on the development of its own brand of capitalism, it is hard to see how Biko could have been pro-capitalist. Let's let Biko speak for himself:

'[T]he poor shall always be black people. It's not surprising, therefore, that the blacks should wish to rid themselves of a system that locks up the wealth of the country in the hands of a few. No doubt Rick Turner was thinking about this when he declared that "any black government is likely to be socialist".'

Barney Pityana's echoing of the obviously erroneous view that Biko was not a socialist – or rather that he was an underdeveloped socialist – posits Biko’s vision as at best one nationalist with a commitment to justice. Pityana says Biko 'had no language of socialism and as such never critiqued to any substantive extent the socialist ideology, save that he harboured intellectual suspicions about socialist ideologies and practice'.

It is my contention that even in his earlier writing Biko shows a favourable attitude towards socialism, rejecting Stalinism, social imperialism, white arrogance and liberalism. It's possible it is Pityana who is misreading Biko’s position. Anyway, when Biko was asked, 'You speak of an egalitarian society. Do you mean a socialist one?', he answered:

'Yes, I think there is no running away from the fact that now in South Africa there is such an ill distribution of wealth that any form of political freedom which doesn’t touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless. If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday [emphasis mine].'

In a 1972 interview Biko elaborates on his criticism of Moscow’s social imperialism and the South African Communist Party's servile position to Moscow.[3] Biko furthermore demonstrates a deep appreciation of the competing Marxian tendencies, including the South African Trotskyite formations:

'[A] lot of young people see Moscow as revisionist in a sense, even in the communist context. You see what I mean?… [T]heir policies are revisionist. They tend to demonstrate a hell of a lot of the same things that one finds among imperialists at this moment. So in a sense they are not the kind of socialist direction that people would like to follow.'

I want to argue that throughout this conversation, Biko is developing a brand of socialism which I would like to call 'black socialism', for a lack of a better word. It’s contextual and focused on the black experience as a whole. It’s the kind of socialism which is anti-racist in nature, it takes into account that whiteness is pervasive and benefits whites irrespective of their political standing.

In the 1972 interview Biko summarises his mode of socialism:

'There are some leftist whites who have [an] attachment to say[ing] the same rough principles of post-revolutionary society, but a lot of them are still terribly cynical about, for instance, the importance of value systems which we enunciate so often, from the black consciousness angle. That it is not only capitalism that is involved; it is also the whole gamut of white value systems which has been adopted as standard by South Africa, both whites and blacks so far. And that will need attention, even in a post-revolutionary society. Values relating to all the fields—education, religion, culture and so on. So your problems are not solved completely when you alter the economic pattern, to a socialist pattern. You still don't become what you ought to be. There's still a lot of dust to be swept off, you know, from the kind of slate we got from white society.'

ANTI-RACISM VS ANTI-RACIALISM

At the beginning we argued that Biko’s vision of liberation was fundamentally anti-racist as opposed to anti-racialist. We also alluded to the fact that anti-racialism or non- racialism inevitably leads to accommodation with white supremacy, whilst anti-racism seeks to end the world as we know it. We find David Goldberg's formulation and articulation of these categories, and what political and strategic implications they hold, useful for our discussion.

The 1994 watershed inaugurated the realisation in a formal sense of anti-racialism in South Africa. A moment best described as the birth of 'born again racism', to borrow from Goldberg. This is achieved at the point of abandoning the promises of liberation as a matter of structural transformation into a matter inclusion. Accordingly, this is realised through legal formalism, and dare I add the fetish of constitutionalism, which promises equality in the abstract as it provides the historically advantaged more avenues to protect their ill-gained privileges in the name of the rule of law. In the South African context this meant the sedimentation of reconciliation without justice into the DNA of our law and constitution. From this perspective, blacks can't claim reparations, can't ask for justice for past transgressions; blacks cant even simply speak the specificity of their black suffering. The black grammar of being, which is in essence a grammar of suffering, is actually not only socially frowned upon, it's outlawed.

Goldberg argues that '[B]orn again racism is racism without race, racism gone private, racism without categories of naming it as such.' It is indeed 'raceless racism', which chimes well with the colourlessness demand of non-racialism based on a proclaimed equality before the law. Anti-racialism, or in our case non-racialism, erases the category of race but not racism. It disables those marked out for racism by the colour of their skin to claim redress or the name the crime. Racism is not a criminal offence in South Africa.

The tragic consequences of anti-racialism in South Africa are felt everyday in the denial of recognising black exclusion, suffering and death. We can't even say that the people dying from wanton neglect in Baragwanath hospital are black. Nor can we say that the more than 100 children who died without a scandal in the Eastern Cape and Mount Frere hospitals are black, or that the life expectancy between black and white is so wide you would think they live in different continents. Nor can we say that the South African state continues differential treatment of people based on skin colour, or point out that the groans of blacks under the weight of racism – both individualised and, most importantly, institutionalised – has no resonance in the state's dominant discourse of democracy, freedom, nation building and economic fundamentals.

Anti-racialism has found fertile ground in South Africa Leftist politics, which has always refused to accept race as a legitimate category of analysis, existence and resistance. In the post-1994 era we have seen the development of at least three tragic consequences (for excluded blacks) as a result of this commitment to anti-racialism. Firstly, the retreat of radical scholarship from theorising the state; if the apartheid state was a racist, neo-Nazi, settler colonial state in the service of racial capitalism, then what is the post-1994 state? Have there been any fundamental ruptures? My own take is that the post-1994 state remains racist in character and serves white racism in the context of promoting accumulation and the reproduction of capitalism. Note I don’t use the favourable 'post-apartheid'.

The second consequence has been that black leadership has taken over the levers of white supremacist institutions. This mirrors the sort of comedy we see in the functioning and symbolism of our parliamentary processes and courts. The annual opening of parliament is significant in its dramatisation of the neo-apartheid nature of our body politic, a red carpet against colonial iconography and statues. The whole scene is dominated by colourful African dress, basically dressing up the colonial and apartheid power structures in African colours. The essence remains white racist. The same ethic plays itself out more visibly in the university environment. You have black heads of white and often racist universities. The faculty is doted with blacks, but the curriculum, the culture and ethos remain white. Claims of racism from students and black faculty are mediated by blacks on top, thereby enacting a situation of black-on-black violence in preserving the whiteness of these institutions. Basically post-1994 inaugurates a neo-colony.

The third and sad consequence of the triumph of anti-racialism is the 'recruitment of people of colour to act as public spokespersons'. There is a curious development in this area, because some 'committed' black African public intellectuals have in essence become ironic spokespersons of anti-racialism in the name of either defending democracy, promoting 'cosmopolitanism' or nation-building, or as the defenders of a new sense of progressive identity.

My take is that Biko’s conception of BC is fundamentally anti-racist and stands inimically to anti-racialism and the terms of the post-1994 constitutional dispensation. To reiterate, Biko’s conception of black liberation is predicated on the obliteration of white racism –itself a product of capitalist accumulation present since the white and black violent encounter in 1652 – which continues to reproduce the same prejudice (as both individual and institutionalised racism), 1994's changes notwithstanding. In a sense there is no possibility of obliterating white racism, without fundamentally changing how things are around here.

CONTESTING BIKO

In our book, Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko (2008), we identify at least three ways in which Biko is contested today. The first is the black business class, second the state-linked political and bureaucratic classes (the 'bureaucratic bourgeoisie'),[4] and finally the excluded majority (for whom 1994 miracle remains a rumour).

I have alluded to the fact that the post-1994 political terrain is punctuated more by continuity that rupture. I tried to further show that the post-1994 moment has inaugurated a born-again racism which finds expression in constitutional precepts, laws, and opportunities in general within South African society. This reality stands opposed and in deep, sharp contrast to what Biko stood for. I want to argue that the racist state formation inherited by the post-1994 political managers should be a central consideration for staying away from the electoral process. If you arrive at this position, then whoever participates in the elections must explain how their participation does not provide legitimacy to the post-1994 racist state form.

Biko’s non-participation echoes what for now appears to be a position of the margins, a doing politics differently, but still a minority position from the 'public eye'. This minority is part of the millions who abstain from the electoral process for various reasons, which range from disillusionment to deep cynicism. Then there are the vocal, conscious and principled boycotters, such as the myriad social movements (Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), the Landless People's Movement (LPM) and the Anti-Eviction Campaign), with their cries of 'No land, no vote! No housing, no vote! No electricity and water, no vote!'

This cry started in the last election, and has been growing; it's part of the 20,000 or so protests recorded in the past few years. These are principled boycotters whom I think Biko would be marching with, burning tires with, blocking roads with, and swearing at the pompous and over-fed politicians with. There are groups like the counterculture group Blackwash, which is part of the loose collective of groups under the 'Nope' initiative.

These groups collectively frown upon the whole electoral circus, and respond with messages such as 'Fuck voting!' and 'Our dreams don’t fit in your ballots'. As a loose collective they have come to accept that our post-1994 liberal democratic process is a decoy for the elaboration of power. The Nope initiative for instance counters the sterility of political parties' empty rhetoric with their own 'manifestering', a form of counter-manifesto. Those refusing in this way operate decidedly outside of the mainstream; they don’t even hear the threatening rebuke of the IEC (Independent Electoral Commission), 'Don’t vote, don’t complain'. They place their hope in manifestering over manifestoes, which are about the mediation of desires and the permanent postponement of promises. The Nope manifestering cautions against pinning our hopes on manifestoes that cannot:

'…escape their framing by capitalism’s own manifesto. A manifesto that is felt everywhere by everyone. A manifesto that has taken hold in our everyday lives. That tries to get under our skins, and make us live in ways alien to our desires, the fulfilment of these always a matter of hope'.

Against the empty promise of hope we can't cope:

'But as a sore festers, the wounds inflicted on the poor, the homeless, women, children, the unemployed, those of us excluded from learning.'

This is a vindication of the implausibility of doing politics with a racist polity. The state form itself must be obliterated for new possibilities to emerge; it's not about defending the constitution but about defending life and the liberty of the those who haven’t tasted any as yet.

Frowning upon the politics of manifestoes and ballot box democracies, Nope laughs at these ugly, demented rituals:

'The mandatory manifesto. Every party has one. Every organisation. Every campaign. Lists of demands to be delivered, visions to be attained in some future always on the horizon. A ritual. A routine whose rhythms refuse the possibility for any ways of being political other than the vesting of hope in a vote. And that lock us in an endless cycle of reading our desires off the possibilities imagined by others for us all.'

We hear clearly the call for responsibility, discipline, hard work, respect for the dead and yesterday's heroic sacrifices, all reduced to 'people died for the vote'. I’m not convinced, neither do I think Steve died so that we could have the vote. We had bigger hopes and bigger dreams than 4x4s, arms deals, Johnny Walker blue edition, the vulgarity of buying islands and the everyday violence of existence. On the other hand, the millions who in election after election draw an X in the cubicle of hope, sight an ultimately deflated hope and can't cope with their basic desires, walking back to misery and exclusion.

The Nope manifestering process locates itself in the Armageddon predicted by Strini Moodley, 'the coming implosion':

'Today the system struggles, itself nursing injuries from our fights, our individual and collective refusals against the mantras of commodity, payment, fiscal discipline, conservation, restraint, indigent management… The burns stretch from the eyelid to the ankle of the globe. They cannot grow any bigger. But they can still deepen.'

I'm saying that Biko’s politics at the time of his death ran fundamentally in a different direction to what is being offered by the electoral process today, a process predicated on the preservation of our racist state, itself an outcome of the 1994 miracle. So quite apart from the fact that of all political parties playing the game right now, none is for Moodley or Biko’s Armageddon, there is the fundamental question of the legitimation of a state which is fundamentally against black people, even as it gives them an RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) house, a grant here, a pension payout there, inferior education and a health system which is dangerous to the health of the many. No, to say '‘94 changed fokol', as Blackwash proclaims, is not to deny that some things have been done, it's rather to protest at just how low the threshold has been placed. I mean, not even an apartheid government’s matchbox house?

To be outside right now gives you a fighting chance to be part of the solution. In or out is the question; it's not difficult to see where Biko would stand, if we pay attention to what he stood for.

* Andile Mngxitama is a Johannesburg-based rights activist with the Landless People’s Movement.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

NOTES
[1] This contribution is an abridged version of a lecture, which is now a booklet, and was first delivered at the University of Johannesburg, then Rhodes University. It will be subject to discussion at the South African Human Rights Commission this Friday.
[2] The 1976 uprising can be said to be a philosophical uprising, that is to mean resistance which is conscious of itself – black power! The uprising’s war cry is unmistakably black consciousness. The 1980s, rendering South Africa ungovernable, were in some way an uprising which didn’t think for itself save for the brilliance of resistance itself. The consequences were big; when Lusaka and Robben Island said 'stop', that resistance fizzled out and deferred all its disruptive capacity to the disciplining powers of the 'leadership', meaning a deal could be cut between two elite camps.
[3] This interview was discovered a few years ago at the William Cullen Library at Wits, it was done conducted by Professor Gail M. Gerhard, on 24 October 1972 in Durban. It is published for the first time in Biko Lives!
[4] To my knowledge this conception was coined by Issa G. Shivji.

China will block attempts to make Bashir stop the war

Kuel Jok

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55647

Recently I was in Darfur for fieldwork research. The situation of violence is complex. However, for a sociologist, it would be impossible to resist the reality that the state authority organises an intent discrimination of specific ethnic groups in the region of Darfur to be killed inclusively at their villages. For instance, Tingo, a small village in the Southern Darfur State of Nyala was attacked on Friday by an armed force, which the victim called Janjaweed. The owners of the village are Fur from African origin and even though they were in a public prayer in the mosque of the village, the attackers whom they believe to be of the same faith – Islam – could not spare them in the mosque. In that particular assault, more than 263 people were killed in the mosque and the market.

In conclusion, when a killing is racialised to the extent of searching for the particular group, then that is genocide. But who says this? The UN Security Council is incompetent to act at least to stop the killing, even if it refuses to categorise it as a genocide. China, as a giant state with a moral obligation to respect of humanity, is badly enslaved by economic interest hence, it blocks all possible attempts to force President Bashir to stop the war.

Enlightened on Guinea

Gustaf Redemo

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55648

Thank you for a very interesting article. I've been following what is going on in Guinea for some time now, but as often is the case with Africa and its countries, there are so many hidden pages, and this article enlightened me a bit more on Guinea.

Memories of Nkrumah

Helmi Sharawy

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55640

I congratulate your efforts in Pambazuka News to celebrate and promote the Pan-African symbols like Nyerere and Nkrumah.

You may not know that I listened to Kwame Nkrumah's speech in 1960, as member of Egypt's Nasser delegation, at that time headed by his assistant on African Affairs.

We really felt the revival of Pan-Africanism after the independence of Ghana 1957.

I remember all that now, when reading on your innovated celebration of these spiritual events. Best wishes for all.

Thoughts about the Pfizer settlement

Hajia Halima Ibrahim

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55645

I stumbled into your site while searching for something else. I was interested in your comments about the Pfizer settlement. Obviously your position is based on 'patriotism', i.e. we must support our people even in the face of obvious fabrications. As a Nigerian, I know that it is not possible to do the kind of thing Pfizer came to do without our government's permission. How was the equipment for the trials imported? I work for an NGO and our investigations revealed that Pfizer was permitted to carry out the trials by the federal government, NAFDAC and the Kano State government. We have been in the forefront of those clamouring for an out-of-court settlement because we have seen that the case against Pfizer is not as tight as we had thought.

You seem to be convinced that because a company is rich, it should be blackmailed to part with a large slice of its profit. I can't really confirm the total amount involved in the settlement aside from the figures carried in the newspapers. US$75 million is a lot of money. That is about 13 billion Nigerian Naira – almost three times the health budget of Kano state for the whole year. Who do we blame for the meningitis epidemic killing people in the northern parts of the country this year?

As a mother and a social activist, I have seen the misery our people are exposed to every year. Our governments should wake up. The World Health Organisation came to our rescue this year but their assistance fell short of our requirements. I don't want potential helpers to have the impression that we are just a bunch of blackmailers. If there hadn't been court cases over the Trovan trials who knows, maybe we would have called on Pfizer again this year to come to our aid. I am all for the settlement. I get your point about the litigation against Shell. But there is no parallel between that and the Pfizer case.

Where are the East Africans?

Juma Mwapachu

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55646

Yash Tandon's reflections are well articulated and sober. However, he makes a sweeping criticism about the absence of East Africans and the EAC at the Geneva Conference. In fairness, he should ask the conference organisers why, as he aptly puts it himself, ‘were there so many people from Europe and so few from East Africa apart from Kenyans themselves’?

An interview with Ivor W. Hartmann

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/55636

Conversations with Writers: What is StoryTime (ST) all about?

Ivor W. Hartmann: To quote the StoryTime About page mission statement if I may, since I put the effort into re-writing it recently:

The StoryTime African New Fiction FreEzine is all about new African fiction reading and writing. For our readers we provide a free weekly ezine showcasing the works of some of the hottest new African fiction writers. For our writers we endeavour to find them, and then encourage free online fiction publication at ST, as a multi-purpose means to improve writing ability and their exposure.

For the ST readers, my aim is to publish at least one great fiction story every week from an African writer, usually early morning Sunday (+2GMT).

I also do the occasional special edition on days like Valentine’s, or like the last one on President Robert Mugabe's Birthday. ST featured a cutting edge farcical story written for the occasion by Zimbabwean author Masimba Musodza (Robin Hood & The President's Birthday Bash).

Also in the works is an annual ST Book Anthology called African Roar, which is set to be published by The Lion Press in early August 2009. It will then be launched at a new Zimbabwean Writers Festival in that same month being organised by The Lion Press.

For the writers, I actively look for new and established talented fiction writers to showcase at ST, and welcome all fiction submissions within the ST guidelines. Once the authors are accepted into ST, I then provide an interactive online home for them and their stories. Firstly, we showcase their stories by publishing them in the ST ezine.

In addition to that, for each ST author, I create a special author bio page that show cases them specifically. This includes an autobiography with their picture, all their stories at ST, and many related links (I updated them monthly) to good content about the authors and/or their works. It includes, extra to the main ST feed, a specific feed only about them from ST.

The author page also gives them a space and the freedom to communicate with their readers in personal posts at their page, and in comments on the story itself. Taken all together, ST hopes to serve as a promotional interactive conglomerate of their online authorial presence and work.

Conversations with Writers: How did StoryTime come about?

Ivor W. Hartmann: Like most ideas, this one grew out of necessity, or the dearth of good fiction-only magazines, coming out of South Africa and, understandably, Zimbabwe. Not that there aren’t any, but they are fewer and far between in comparison to the rest of the world.

Frustrated as a new fiction writer madly writing with so few local outlets for my work, I started thinking about how I could remedy this dire situation.

Being strapped for cash back then (as a new-ish dedicated full-time writer and living in a new country), basically made me realise that a proper print magazine was out of the question to start with. So I took a look at online publishing, which led me to Google's Blogger framework, and so the first incarnation of StoryTime was born.

Right from the outset my intention was to use the Blogger framework to publish a real ezine. I also definitely wanted to avoid personal blogging in the ezine and feature only fiction works, even if they were only mine to start with.

Conversations with Writers: How long have you been working on the project?

Ivor W. Hartmann: I published the first ST ezine in June 2007.

Initially, I wanted to create a fiction ezine that would consist of an eclectic collection of world fiction, run directly by its authors for their readers, and to create an online home for all the authors involved.

Over time and after gaining a bit of experience in this new field of online publishing, I came to realise what I wanted ST to be. An ezine that focuses primarily on the poorly represented and yet amazingly rich and diverse, fictional literature coming out of Africa and from the far flung African diaspora. So I changed the ST emphasis to African writers only and the rest was history.

Conversations with Writers: How do you find contributors?

Ivor W. Hartmann: I actively seek out talented writers and invite them to ST, and constantly look for free ways to promote ST and all our authors by all means at my disposal, on and offline. Then there's the relatively new development of the ST book anthology, African Roar, something I have wanted to do since the very beginning. In this regard I have just put out the call for ST fiction submissions to be published first in the ezine, and thereby gain entry into the selection process for the printed anthology. This came about thanks in no small way to Sarudzayi Barnes at The Lion Press, who secured us the funding to print publish with LP, from the UK Arts Council. Though in the long run I'd like the anthology to not only pay for itself, but also to offer a decent percentage return for all the authors published in it.

Conversations with Writers: Which writers are you currently working with?

Ivor W. Hartmann: This is a great question and maybe I can also explain something of how ST works. Firstly let me do the honour roll for everyone ST is actively working with:

Igoni Barrett, Adesola Orimalade, Ayesha Attah, Ayodele Morocco-Clarke,Beaven Tapureta,Chris Mlalazi, Colin Meier, Esi Cleland,Emmanuel Sigauke, Masimba Musodza, Nigel Jack and Sarudzayi Barnes.

It is these authors who have made ST what it is by joining, contributing and working with ST. Two members of prime contribution are Emmanuel, who is co-editing the upcoming ST anthology with me, and Sarudzayi, whom I mentioned earlier.

Now when I say our authors work with ST, what I mean is that unlike traditional publishing, ST runs under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence (Attribution, Non-derivative, and Non-commercial). This means that in effect, the author joins ST and then together we showcase their work in the ezine, directly under their own names and copyrights. The authors then, forever, have complete access to all their works at ST and can edit them or remove them entirely if they so choose. This I feel is an important part of the capabilities of online publishing, giving the authors direct control over their work.

Hindsight can also be very illuminating, especially as one improves as a writer with each new work. At ST as the author you may make changes, normally reserved for a second revised edition in the print world. So the ST authors are their own editors, and I approve their works for publishing in the ezine as editor-in-chief of ST.

Conversations with Writers: What challenges do you meet and how do you deal with them?

Ivor W. Hartmann: ST always presents many daily challenges, which I try and deal with as swiftly as humanly possible. But I suppose the prime challenge from the beginning, has been my choice of the Blogger framework to publish ST for free. In doing so I have had to constantly search for ways to present ST as an ezine and not a generic blog. Luckily though, I am also a visual artist and have tried to make ST on the whole look as un-blog-like as possible. Not to mention the utter helplessness when faced with problems beyond my control, because it’s a free service. However, that's also the good thing about ST in its current form, apart from my own time and that of the authors; it's totally free for us and therefore our readers. This might change in the future, if we can ever afford a dedicated .com domain name and full website etc., which will bring its own set of new challenges no doubt. Though, unless we start printing a magazine solely, I'd like to keep the ST ezine free for the authors and all our readers.

There is also an inherent challenge in letting your authors have complete access to their works. One only has to view MySpace to see how out of hand this can get if left unsupervised. So behind each story I work a bit of hard-learned but simple HTML magic to make sure it complies with the ST layout standards, and doesn't jam the feed readers.

In general though, I have found the ST authors more than willing to help solve any problems that may arise, which makes life a lot easier.

Conversations with Writers: How would you describe the standard of writing at ST?

Ivor W. Hartmann: So far, I think we have maintained a fairly good standard of writing at ST, but I can only believe that this will become even better as ST grows. It is also my intention with the first anthology to raise the bar significantly, by only print publishing the 'eclectic' or very best, of all the works published in the ezine since our beginnings. Subsequent to the first anthology, it will be the best of that year.

Conversations with Writers: Who is your target audience?

Ivor W. Hartmann: On the whole I'd say we already have enough variety to satisfy nearly every fiction genre taste, and so this would put us squarely in the fairly broad realm of all those who read fiction/literature magazines and ezines.

Furthermore, with our solid presence on Facebook and by using the Blogger framework, we are introducing ST and our authors to whole new generations of online fiction readers.

Conversations with Writers: Which aspects of the work do you enjoy most?

Ivor W. Hartmann: There are quite a few reasons why I was motivated to start ST, but one of the big ones was to start communicating with my fellow Zimbabwean writing peers in Zimbabwe and those spread throughout the world. I had the idea that together we could do what artists are at least in meant to do, and that is being a voice for the voiceless; to bring to the world light the very real catastrophe of our Zimbabwean situation through our arts – in this case, writing. Therefore, I have slowly but surely opened the lines of communication between several Zimbabwean writers and myself, and together we have achieved some measure of real progress. This is surely what I enjoy most, seeing and being a part of something greater than myself, which actually does cause positive change.

Ultimately, like most Zimbabweans, I have a great desire to return home permanently from what is effectively an economic exile.

Conversations with Writers: What sets ST apart from the other ezines and literary magazines?

Ivor W. Hartmann: It would have to be the complete control the authors have over their work, and the strong sense of close community that ST engenders in both its authors and readers. We like to help each other out where we can, and most of us bring an existing entourage of readers to ST when we join. I believe it is this spirit of openness and community, tempered with real authorial control, which draws readers and serious writers to ST. This, therefore, raises the bar with the addition of each new talented writer, and our growing experience in online and print publishing.

* Ivor W. Hartmann is an author and editor-in-chief of StoryTime
* This article first appeared in Conversations with Writers.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Review of African Blogs, 15 April, 2009

Dibussi Tande

2009-04-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/55644

Spartakus writes about Makerere University’s very first election that were conducted using the university’s E-Voting System:

“The online system that has the aspirants and their pictures entered into the system was built at the Makerere University faculty of Computing and IT (CIT) as part of the National Software Incubation Center’s first batch of projects to be incubated...

The system boasts of several advantages over the traditional ballot process. For one, it relies on the voter’s student number and because this is verified at the entrance by polling agents, it makes it nearly impossible for one person to vote twice unless they have two identity cards. The system then uses the student’s number on your identity card to generate n code, which then gives you access from any networked terminal in the voting area to the ballot paper. You tick the candidates of your choice and click VOTE and go. The whole process takes about 2-3 minutes.”

The Spear in Arabia explains the low expat turnout in the first South African elections open to the country’s expatriate community:

“The ANC didn’t make it easy for us to vote. If you wish to vote overseas you must be registered in SA as a voter and you had to fill out a special request form to vote overseas. The special request form you could fill out in the foreign country and fax or email it back…

Unfortunately first time voters, a lot of those between the ages of 18 – 23, had to be registered in SA on the voters roll to be able to vote overseas. Unfortunately this first time registration can only be done in SA, so immediately we have thousands of our young people… excluded from voting… because they can’t get to SA to register.

The older expats, whom can vote is asked to drive or fly hundreds and in some case thousands of kilometers to vote…

Mark my words, next election, they will say, but the voter turn out was low and the cost is too much to justify it.”

Marvin Tumbo laments about ethnic realignments taking place in Kenya today beyond the glare of the spotlight:

“My parents bought a piece of land a while back and were planning to develop it when all the kids were through with their education...

On the surface, it seems that all is well in the country, but once you look beyond the façade, you will realize that tribal realignments are taking a physical, more concrete shape. My parents have decided not to settle on that piece of land that was once a prime investment, because they know they will be the victims when the second wave of tribal violence comes along. So as they search for a more serene place to settle after they retire, it is almost obvious that they will choose to live among people from their own tribe, or remain in the town where there are no “tribes”…

One gets the feeling that physical demarcations between tribes are being drawn in readiness for the epic battles, reminiscent of the old wars from which movies like the Troy and The Last Samurai were conceptualized. Tribal wounds have not healed, and people are no brighter than they were last year when they picked up machetes to kill their neighbours…

Startups Nigeria comments on recent enhancements to “legwork”, the budding Nigerian social networking site:

"Legwork.com.ng is Nigeria’s premier meeting place on the Internet for information, business, career and social networking. The social networking site has recently redesigned their site and added more interesting features such as mobile blogging, mobile clubs, Twitter updates and lots more...

The site which claims to have membership of over 500,000 Nigerians (with over 150 000 members living in Nigeria) has features including Twitter, SMS Channels, Mobile Meetup, Mobile Clubs, 150 Blogging that allows members to network socially, research opportunities, find businesses and receive informative, interesting and entertaining content via their mobile phone...

Legwork has taken me by surprise with these new and interesting features. This shows that the social networking scene in Nigeria has yet more and more places to explore. With this rebrand, my guess is that Legwork will be able to compete with social networking rival, Naijapals."

Scribbles from the Den carries excerpts of a rare interview of former Captain Guerandi Mbara, the sole survivor of the group of young Cameroonian officers who led the failed coup attempt against president Paul Biya 25 years ago on April 6, 1984:

“We were motivated by a number of factors, some dating back to the colonial period and others to events of the 1980s… Cameroon was already suffering from a sclerosis caused by an organic, hegemonic and even legitimacy crisis. The state was sliding towards what the Anglo-Saxons refer to as a “failed state.” The collapse of the state was already very very visible back then, from the race to plunder state resources to an increase in tribalism and nepotism, etc. Who does not remember the statement “It is now our turn?” Or “the goat eats where it is tethered”? ...Who does not remember the squandering of financial resources under the guise of creating a new ethno-regional bourgeois? Who does not remember the arbitrary arrests? Or, the desire to wipe out certain regions that were targeted by the ethnofacists in power?

Our primary objective was to prevent the chaos that we are witnessing today, and to anticipate solutions to the sociopolitical and economic disorders which were emerging from within the new administration.”

* 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/

A Realistic Prognosis for Medical Reform

2009-04-17

http://english.caijing.com.cn/2009-04-14/110143737.html

China’s long-awaited medical reform plan arrived as spring flowers bloomed around Beijing. It consists of two documents: an “opinion on deepening health care reform” from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the State Council; and “key points for implementing medical and health reform (2009-’11).”

An army marching to escape medieval China

2009-04-17

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5628fe4c-29f0-11de-9d01-00144feabdc0.html

This was supposed to be a spring of soup kitchens and breadlines in China’s manufacturing heartlands, the potential precursor to a long, hot summer of industrial unrest threatening the government’s vision of a “harmonious society”. Times are hard in China’s export sector, the hardest in memory. Exports from southern Guangdong province, which account for a third of the country’s total, fell 21 per cent in January and February as western retailers ran down their inventories.

China encourages domestic firms to invest overseas

2009-04-17

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/10/content_11165682.htm

China has unveiled an investment guide book to help domestic firms make foreign investments. The first batch of the guide book released Friday by the Ministry of Commerce covers 20 countries, such as Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan. The guide book includes investment laws and regulations of the 20 countries and statistics about individual countries among other useful information such as advice on problems that firms may encounter.

China juggles its future in Africa

2009-04-17

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KD16Ad01.html

China isn't in Africa merely to snap up raw materials, exploit African labor, or build geopolitical influence. Rather, its goals blend a combination of all the above with a need to beta-test future global brands, open new markets, enhance its soft power through international organizations such as the International Standards Organization - where African votes carry more than a third of the weight - nurture a new diaspora and build a resilient microeconomic bridge by exporting entrepreneurs

Chinese take Guinea-Bissau route to top med school

2009-04-17

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE5381VF20090409

Dozens of Chinese students who saw little prospect of getting into a top medical school have secured admission by becoming nationals of the tiny west African country of Guinea-Bissau, a newspaper said on Thursday. Among the 112 international students that entered Peking University Health Science Center in 2007 and 2008 were 48 from Guinea-Bissau -- all ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, the Shanghai Morning Post said.

Chinese tourists explore Ghana, other African countries

2009-04-17

http://news.myjoyonline.com/news/200904/28604.asp

A group of Chinese tourists have announced a travelling expedition from Ghana across the Sahara desert to help them learn more about Africa and also promote Ghana and the continent as a good tourist destination for other Chinese. The tourists will also serve as goodwill ambassadors for China by creating awareness among Chinese people about tourism opportunities and investment potentials on the continent.

Despite G-20 Promises, IMF Issues Linger

2009-04-17

http://english.caijing.com.cn/2009-04-16/110146118.html

The biggest winner at the G-20 summit in London on April 2 was the International Monetary Fund, which received pledges for US$ 1.1 trillion, including US$ 500 billion from member countries and US$ 250 billion through the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) currency. But rounding up the cash and overcoming political obstacles within IMF-member countries will be difficult. Despite the summit’s grand promises, some funding details are fuzzy.

Establishing NGOs in China

2009-04-17

http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2009/04/11/establishing-ngos-in-china.html

The establishment of not-for-profit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China is becoming increasingly popular as the necessity of providing private alternatives to social, economic, political, and cultural issues becomes apparent. Indeed, if China is to continue to flourish and expand, NGOs will play a critical role in making sure that it is done in a socially healthy and constructive manner that will be beneficial to all.

Furore over ANC T-shirts

2009-04-17

http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=307707

The ANC’s T-shirt suppliers are all South African, the ruling party protested yesterday after reports that its election campaign T-shirts, totalling millions of rands, are from China. “We needed two million T-shirts, that was the order. We used the services of a group of people who buy and print them. The suppliers bought the T-shirts, not the ANC,” said ANC spokesperson Jessie Duarte. “All our suppliers are South African. I don’t know anything about the Chinese.”

India and Mauritius a winning combination!

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/cfzuld

When corporates venture into other countries, the success of their businesses ventures, to a great extent, depends on the quality of services offered by banks and financial intermediaries in those countries. Hence, having a banking partner whose services are reliable is of utmost importance. HSBC, which has been in the forefront of helping Indian businesses find their feet in foreign lands, is of the view that Indian businesses, including SMEs, can look at Mauritius as an investment destination as well as a gateway to other African nations.

Quotas on imports pointless – reports

2009-04-17

http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=561&fArticleId=4934812

As job losses mount in the clothing and textile sector, two reports have criticised quotas imposed on 31 lines of Chinese imports as pointless and probably counterproductive. The quotas ran for two years from January 2007. A request to China to allow the quotas to continue was recently rejected.

Returning home to life in the countryside

2009-04-17

http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100435

At least 20 million rural migrants have lost their jobs and returned to their home villages over the last year. Many have subsequently returned to the cities to look for new employment, but for many of those who remain behind, readjusting to life in the countryside can be a real challenge.

Rules for Chinese overseas investment relaxed, guidelines issued

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/c9ghe9

The Ministry of Commerce released its first guidelines for overseas investment by Chinese companies on Friday. The document, encompassing some twenty countries approved by the central government to receive Chinese investment, are part of the ministry’s strategy to assist Chinese companies abroad and come on the heels of last month’s relaxing of government requirements to invest abroad.

Should the ROC navy fight African pirates?

2009-04-17

http://taiwanjournal.nat.gov.tw/ct.asp?CtNode=122&xItem=49597&mp=2

On April 6, “Win Far 161,” which is a deep sea fishing vessel home-ported in Kaohsiung, was hijacked by Somali pirates at gunpoint near an island in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Maj. Gen. Lee Yueh-chang, who is deputy assistant chief of staff for operations at the Ministry of National Defense, responded by saying that the ROC’s navy was “carefully considering” whether to escort and protect the island’s fishing vessels in the Indian Ocean.

Sino-Eritrean Relationship: The tip of an iceberg

2009-04-17

http://www.shaebia.org/artman/publish/article_5779.shtml

What I have put here as the title is what President Isaias Afwerki said in an interview with China Business Weekly Magazine in 2007, talking about Chinese and Eritrean relations and with particular reference to what Chinese investors see when they look at Eritrea. Indeed, Sino-Eritrean relationship goes far beyond what appears on the surface. Eritrea and China's friendly relationship dates back to 1993. China was in fact the first country to establish diplomatic relations with sovereign Eritrea in May 1993, and it has been contributing a great deal to various aspects of the Eritrean endeavors for economic rehabilitation and national reconstruction.

Sino-Eritrean Relationship: The tip of an iceberg

2009-04-17

http://www.shaebia.org/artman/publish/article_5779.shtml

What I have put here as the title is what President Isaias Afwerki said in an interview with China Business Weekly Magazine in 2007, talking about Chinese and Eritrean relations and with particular reference to what Chinese investors see when they look at Eritrea. Indeed, Sino-Eritrean relationship goes far beyond what appears on the surface. Eritrea and China's friendly relationship dates back to 1993. China was in fact the first country to establish diplomatic relations with sovereign Eritrea in May 1993, and it has been contributing a great deal to various aspects of the Eritrean endeavors for economic rehabilitation and national reconstruction.

South Africa Vs Dalai Lama - Matters Arising

2009-04-17

http://allafrica.com/stories/200904150472.html

South Africa, the self-acclaimed rainbow nation, is in the news again and for all the wrong reasons. The authorities of that country recently barred the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibet from participating in a peace conference slated for South Africa. No cogent reason was given for their action which has drawn an outcry from the rest of the world.

South Africa: Lame DTI can’t deal with textile realities

2009-04-17

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A980609

Seardel’s decision to close Frame Textiles, with the loss of up to 1400 jobs, illustrates both the deep flaws in SA’s industrial strategy and the futility of trying to insulate the country from the global economic crisis by means of protectionist policies. Frame, the biggest textile operation in southern Africa, has been struggling for years to compete with cheap imports, soaring input costs and — for the past six months in particular — the collapse of export markets globally.

South Africa: Sasol Weighs Giant Indian Plant

2009-04-17

http://allafrica.com/stories/200904140256.html

Petrochemicla group Sasol and India's Tata are considering investing in a multibillion-dollar coal-to-liquid (CTL) plant in India that could produce up to 80 000 barrels of liquid fuel a day. The companies are launching a prefeasibility study on the viability of the project, which a securities company analyst said last week could cost $5bn-$7bn, about the same as the estimated value of the proposed CTL plant in China, which would also produce 80 000 barrels a day.

Supporting Africa's paper to the G-20

2009-04-17

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/98656

The G20 world economic group has being treating Africa with a leper-like caution, reason Africa is yet to qualify to be invited to her fold. In her November 2008 leaders meeting in Washington DC, no African country was invited, even African Union (AU) an organization body of Africa, was not invited, in exception of South Africa who on its own is a full member in the G20 economic group.

The G20 Meetings: Financial Salvation for Emerging Markets?

2009-04-17

http://english.caijing.com.cn/2009-04-16/110146357.html

At the G20 meetings in London, finance ministers agreed on an unprecedented package of financial support for emerging countries: US$250 billion in new direct G20 financing commitments to the IMF, with a commitment to come up with another US$250 billion; around US$100 billion in new Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) for emerging market (EM) countries as a part of a US$250 billion global allocation (at the risk of oversimplifying, the IMF is essentially “printing money” and handing it out in proportion to member quotas.

Too big to fail

2009-04-17

http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13496903

The Democratic Republic of Congo was born into crisis and, for its nearly 50 years of existence, it has more or less stayed there. From a civil war that nearly destroyed the newborn nation in the wake of independence, it descended into decades of parasitic rule at the hands of a strongman, Mobutu Sese Seko. As he raided the coffers of state mining companies, the desperate and starving masses occasionally looted what was left of the country’s rotting infrastructure. In 1994 inflation hit nearly 10,000%: small by today’s standard in Zimbabwe, but enough to help end Mr Mobutu’s rule three years later.

War Is Boring: U.S. struggles to adapt to China's economic strategy

2009-04-17

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=3614

The tiny desert town of Abeche, in eastern Chad, offers a curious sight: Sandwiched between the mud huts that most people call home and the compounds belonging to international aid workers is a humble Chinese restaurant catering to Chad's growing population of Chinese engineers and managers. Significantly, no equivalent American-style restaurant is to be found.

Coalition Executive hold inaugural meeting

2009-04-17

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news160409/coalition160409.htm

Since the formation of the coalition government the MDC has been running around trying to put out fires created by ZANU PF, but Robert Mugabe has been consistent from the very beginning in making unilateral decisions such as the appointment of permanent secretaries and governors. He has also refused to budge on the issue of the appointments of the Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono and Attorney General Johannes Tomana, despite the two MDC formations insisting that the appointments were irregular.

Mugabe grabs an MDC ministry

2009-04-17

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83951

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's seizure of a ministry controlled by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is casting more doubt on his commitment to the fledgling power-sharing deal. The birth of the unity government on 11 February 2009 was designed to dilute the powers accumulated during Mugabe's nearly 29-year rule, which has reduced the once prosperous nation to penury.

Chad: Fighting violence against women – but how?

2009-04-17

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83790

Awa was killed by her husband last November in Guelendeng, 150km south of the Chad capital N’djamena. Her death was the tipping point for the town’s women, who, appalled by the rampant violence they face, have decided to fight for their rights. In December dozens of women took part in a protest march, the first of its kind in Guelendeng, to condemn the violation of their rights and to call the government to account over the impunity that prevails.

North Africa: Maghreb activists propose new marriage contract to protect women

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/cduxvn

In an ambitious plan to educate women in the Maghreb about married life, activists from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia drafted a new marriage contract that, if certified, will provide better protection for women's rights. The idea was presented April 11th in Tunis at a meeting organised by the Global Rights Maghreb organisation and attended by human rights activists, members of women's organisations and legal experts.

Sierra Leone: Chiefs ban genital cutting for girls under 18

2009-04-17

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83947

Sierra Leone village chiefs, community members and women who perform female genital cutting have signed an agreement stating that girls in northern Kambia district will not undergo genital mutilation – or ‘cutting’ – before age 18. The number of girls being cut during the December 2008-January 2009 initiation season in Kambia dropped drastically, according to Finda Fraser, advocacy coordinator at local non-profit Advocacy Movement Network (AMNet), which runs a ‘Say No to Child Bondo’ campaign in the district.

Africa: Africa's new human rights court: Whistling in the wind?

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/dd6chp

Human rights abuses on a massive scale continue to afflict the lives of millions of people across the continent of Africa. As in other parts of the world, the obstacles in pursuing justice are currently insurmountable for most victims. Against this troubling backdrop, the African Union (AU) has decided to add a human rights section to its new court which has been agreed upon but not yet set up. This court is called the African Court of Justice and Human Rights.

Africa: Eritrea becoming 'a giant prison'

2009-04-17

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8002178.stm

The Eritrean government is turning its country into a giant prison, according to Human Rights Watch. The Horn of Africa nation is widely using military conscription without end, as well as arbitrary detention of its citizens, says HRW. Hundreds of Eritrean refugees forcibly repatriated from countries like Libya, Egypt and Malta face arrest and torture upon their return, says the group.

DRC: UN envoy to push for children’s rights in peace process

2009-04-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30458

The United Nations human rights envoy tasked with protecting the rights of children in armed conflict is set to arrive in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for talks to ensure greater protection for children amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis engulfing the country’s east.

Eritrea: Repression creating human rights crisis

2009-04-17

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/16/eritrea-repression-creating-human-rights-crisis

Eritrea's extensive detention and torture of its citizens and its policy of prolonged military conscription are creating a human rights crisis and prompting increasing numbers of Eritreans to flee the country, Human Rights Watch said in a report.

Ethiopia: Dam threatens livelihoods

2009-04-17

http://internationalrivers.org/node/3773

Ethiopia's plans to build Gibe 3 Dam now threaten the food security and local economies that support more than half a million people in southwest Ethiopia and along the shores of Lake Turkana. Construction began in 2006 with flagrant violations of Ethiopia’s own laws on environmental protection and procurement practices, and the national constitution.

Ethiopia: Ethiopians rally in rare protest

2009-04-17

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8001962.stm

The main opposition parties in Ethiopia have held a march in Addis Ababa to call for the release of their imprisoned leader, Birtukan Medeksa. The demonstrators handed in a petition to the authorities about Ms Birtukan. She is serving a life sentence, after officials revoked a pardon which had previously seen her set free.

Kenya: Who is next in the dirty killings?

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/co7yna

The killing of Oscar Foundation Director Kamau King'ara and his deputy, Paul Oulu, brings nearer the surface a war on Mungiki that has gone on in the underground for many months and now opens a new, dangerous front with the targeting of civil society leadership. Kamau and Oulu were gunned down by unknown people near the University of Nairobi hostels in broad daylight on March 6, 2009. On that day, Kamau had led a demonstration against extra-judicial executions.

Sudan: Activists in arbitrary detention

2009-04-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/55754

The Arab Program for Human Rights Activists (APHRA) pursues with great concern the case of Mrs. Nahla Bashir Adam, works in Youth Association for Child Rights in Kurdufan. Nahla had been detained by the Sudanese Security Forces in south Darfur in December 12, 2008. However, since that time, Nahla hadn't subjected to a trail or accused of any charges. Moreover, no one knows where she exists even their lawyers or colleagues in human rights domain.
Urgent - Sudan
Activists on arbitrary detention


The Arab Program for Human Rights Activists (APHRA) pursues with great concern the case of Mrs. Nahla Bashir Adam, works in Youth Association for Child Rights in Kurdufan. Nahla had been detained by the Sudanese Security Forces in south Darfur in December 12, 2008. However, since that time, Nahla hadn't subjected to a trail or accused of any charges. Moreover, no one knows where she exists even their lawyers or colleagues in human rights domain.

It's worthy to be noted, Nahla is suffering from chronic diseases that required continued and lasting medical care and thus her health condition is very critical.

In consequence of that, The Arab Program for Human Rights Activists (APHRA) expresses its great condemnation over the activist's unjustified detention that violates the article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, the Arab Program denounces the purse of human rights activists as a result of the current complicated situation in Sudan.

Meantime, The Arab Program for Human Rights Activists (APHRA) lays complete responsibility of Nahla's critical health condition on the Sudanese Authorities over arresting her for four months without being subjected to trail or medications, the thing which would leads her to death.

Furthermore, the Program claims the Sudanese Authorities for an imminent and unconditional release of Nahla. In addition to perform an imminent investigation over the reasons behind her detention and to hold officials the complete responsibility over this violence.

Burundi: Asylum system established

2009-04-17

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/49e733de2.html

Burundi, an important host country for refugees over the past four decades, has just established a specialized office for asylum with help from the UN refugee agency. The development comes a year after the country passed its first asylum law. "The refugee agency welcomes these important steps towards improving refugee protection in Africa's Great Lakes region," said Bo Schack, the UNHCR representative in Burundi. "The government will now be clearly in the driver's seat," he added.

Kenya: Instruct officials to protect Somali refugees

2009-04-17

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/11/kenya-instruct-officials-protect-somali-refugees

Kenyan authorities should clearly instruct all officials to protect refugees and asylum seekers in accordance with international law, Human Rights Watch has said. A senior Kenyan refugee official recently admitted that security forces might cause problems for asylum seekers arriving from Somalia because those forces “do not understand the implications of such actions.”

Somalia: 60,000 return to unstable conditions in capital

2009-04-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30471

The United Nations refugee agency has voiced concern that some 60,000 people uprooted by violence in Somalia have returned to its volatile capital since the beginning of the year. The High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is not encouraging the return of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) to Mogadishu due to an unstable security situation and a lack of basic services.

Global: Another world is possible

Reflections and criticisms at the World Social Forum, 2009

2009-04-16

http://www.khayelitshastruggles.com/2009/04/another-world-is-posible.html

My long trip started on the 20th January 2009 when I traveled from Cape Town to Durban by bus. I spent 26 hours on a City to City bus, moving from Cape Town via PE, East London and Umtata and then to Durban. As much as it was a long journey I must say it I really enjoyed it. I think it was nice touring my own country, getting the opportunity to be exposed to different corners of South Africa from Cities and Townships to Rural areas where the poorest of the poor are located as a result of the past.

Morocco: Transport unions intensify protests against proposed regulations

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/dny6u4

Transport unions in Morocco are stepping up their protests over provisions of traffic laws currently under discussion in the Chamber of Councillors. Workers held a strike on Monday (April 6th), disrupting everyday life for the third time in recent weeks, after a stoppage on March 12th and a sit-in on March 16th outside the parliament building.

Nigeria: Shell: corporate impunity goes on trial

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/cn8wwu

Multinationals accused of human rights abuses can no longer feel safe now that the oil giant is facing allegations of complicity in the execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Could this be the beginning of the end of the age of impunity? Fourteen years after the judicial murder of the Nigerian novelist, environmentalist and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Shell is about to go on trial in New York, accused of complicity in his execution.

South Africa: US court allows apartheid claims

2009-04-17

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7991134.stm

A United States judge has ruled that lawsuits can go ahead against several companies accused of helping South Africa's apartheid-era government. IBM, Ford and General Motors are among those corporations now expected to face demands for damages from thousands of apartheid's victims.

Africa: Comoros holds referendum on constitution revision

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/cn9bou

A referendum on the revision of Comoros' constitution will be held on 17 May, President Ahmed Abdallah Sambi announced in a message broadcast on national radio and television stations, stressing that the referendum campaign would be held from 26 April to 15 May. “Those who do not want the revision of the constitution are free to campaign against it but they do not have the right to prevent the referendum from being held; a constitutional prerogative devolved on the head of state is a right of the people to exercise its sovereignty,” Sambi declared.

Algeria: Bouteflika elected for a third term

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/c29k3v

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika won 90.24% of the vote to secure his third mandate on Thursday (April 9th). The participation rate is 74.54%, Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni announced Friday morning. Although voting was held under tight security and Zerhouni affirmed that the poll was conducted in "good conditions", several attacks were reported. A bomb exploded at a polling station in Imeghenine, near (Boumerdes) and a police officer was killed by a roadside bomb in Tebessa.

Guinea-Bissau: Upcoming polls welcomed

2009-04-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30445

The Security Council has welcomed the convening of presidential polls in Guinea-Bissau this June, following last month’s assassination of the West African nation’s leader, calling for continued international support for the election process. In a presidential statement read out by Ambassador Claude Heller of Mexico, which holds the rotating Council presidency for the month, the 15-member body also welcomed the swearing-in of M. Raimundo Pereira, the Interim President, and the commitment of the new authorities to uphold the country’s constitutional order.

Guinea: Coup head could fight poll

2009-04-17

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8001659.stm

Guinea's military leader has said he has the right to contest elections promised this year, despite previously pledging to stand down. Captain Moussa Dadis Camara angrily accused politicians of thwarting his government's efforts and of failing to respect its authority. He also accused businesses of sabotaging his government and ordered them to reverse recent price hikes.

Kenya: Cabinet fresh crisis talks

2009-04-17

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8001676.stm

Kenya's coalition government has held fresh crisis talks a day after the premier said he would boycott cabinet meetings in a letter to the president. Prime Minister Raila Odinga still feels his Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is being sidelined by President Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU).

Kenya: Creation of new districts cause for alarm

2009-04-17

http://www.cdfproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=271

Since coming to power in 2002, President Kibaki has gazetted the creation of 124 new districts and there are rumours of a possible 15 more being created. Experts speculate the objective is to pre-empt the intended constitutional boundaries review. The ad hoc creation of new districts is a continuation of the government’s political manipulation of local development which in turn undermines the impact of the extensive resources channelled to through the districts and decentralised structures.

Kenya: Why Kenya should go fresh elections now!

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/dllhjz

The most potent question in public debate right now is whether or not to send “moribund President and ineffective Prime Minister” et al packing through fresh elections. The coalition government stands accused of failed leadership - their accuser, the discontented 70% of Kenyans per recent opinion polls and now the clerics. The prayers before the public court are that an urgent decision be reached on whether or not fresh elections should be held right away.

Madagascar: Ravalomanana to return home

2009-04-17

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83954

Deposed Madagascan President Marc Ravalomanana will return to the island state under the protection of the 13-member regional body, the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Ravalomanana told a media briefing on 15 April in the capital of Swaziland, Mbabane, that his return would kick-start a national dialogue with his successor, President Andry Rajoelina, in the hope of holding presidential elections by the end of 2009. He did not divulge the date of his return.

Mauritania: FNDD sets agenda for political dialogue

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/c274z2

Any initiative to resolve the crisis in Mauritan ia must ensure that the coup of 6 August 2008 fails by stopping the execution of the electoral agenda of the junta, the National Front for the Defence of Democracy (FNDD) said on Thursday. Reacting to a proposal by Senegal to organise, in Dakar, a round table to find solutions to the Mauritanian political crisis, FNDD demanded an end to the electoral process that would lead to the presidential polls planned for 6 June and the r elease of former Prime Minister Yahya Ould Ahmed Waghef.

Burundi: Find killers of anti-corruption activist

2009-04-17

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/16/burundi-find-killers-anti-corruption-activist

The Burundian authorities should ensure a speedy, independent, and thorough investigation into the killing on April 9 of prominent anti-corruption activist Ernest Manirumva, Human Rights Watch has said. The investigation should lead to the prosecution of those suspected of responsibility for the murder.

Africa: EPAs Will prevent African states from achieving MDGs

2009-04-17

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=46464

The economic partnerships agreements (EPAs) will push African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries ''deeper'' into poverty and negatively affect the livelihoods of people living in ACP countries. These trade deals ''will prevent'' African countries from achieving the United Nations’ millennium development goals (MDGs). Several speakers at a two-day workshop on EPAs in Johannesburg, South Africa, were in agreement that the EPAs will do more harm than good to ACP countries.

Africa: Funding for farming in conflict-hit communities

2009-04-17

http://www.afrol.com/articles/32975

Poor African farmers and especially victims of conflicts will benefit from a UN managed fund aimed at boosting recovery for households and formerly displaced communities. The project follows Belgium's agreement to a $6.6 million programme for FAO to provide emergency assistance to poor farmers in Africa as part of an ongoing partnership that has totalled more than $80 million over the past twelve years.

West Africa: "Senegal self-sufficient on rice by 2012"

2009-04-17

http://www.afrol.com/articles/32973

The Senegalese Minister of Agriculture, Amath Sall, has announced that "by 2012, Senegal will not import a single grain of rice." Record harvests in the River Senegal valley indicate the country is on the right course. The Dakar government has intensified its programmes to raise food production in the Sahelian country, with a special focus on rice as a staple food. Especially along the large valley of River Senegal, marking its border with Mauritania, results are now beginning to become visible.

West Africa: Liberia completes old debt buy back deal

2009-04-17

http://www.afrol.com/articles/32976

Liberia has significantly reduced its foreign debt by buying back $1.2 billion in outstanding government debt at a discount of nearly 97 percent of face value, the steepest ever negotiated on developing country commercial debt, the country has announced. The deal, according to the World Bank report, was concluded with the payment of $38 million to retire 25 outstanding commercial claims. The World Bank contributed half of the money through the International Development Association (IDA) Debt Reduction Facility, and Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States are said to have contributed the other half.

Zimbabwe: Botswana extends credit facility

2009-04-17

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5517

Botswana has offered a US$70 million credit line to help revive struggling Zimbabwean industries, a senior Zimbabwean official said on Thursday. “Botswana is proposing to provide US$70 million in credit support for some industries, all that is left is to tie up the agreement,” the official said.

Zimbabwe: World Bank willing to help

2009-04-17

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5516

The World Bank is willing to help Zimbabwe recover from a devastating economic crisis, but it is critical for the country's institutions to restore democracy and human rights, the bank has said. World Bank President Robert Zoellick told reporters Zimbabwe's new finance minister, Tendai Biti, would attend the the Spring meetings of the bank and the International Monetary Fund next week.

Congo: Taking testing to the people

2009-04-17

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83921

Seated at his cluttered desk in the offices of Congo's National AIDS Council (CNLS), Franck Fortuné Mboussou is a very happy man. In a country where barely 10 percent of the female population has ever been tested for HIV, the organisation finally has enough money to buy a mobile testing unit.

South Africa: ART for children feasible in small rural clinics - study

2009-04-17

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/3854FD58-A0A5-4943-A74C-DA5040687A05.asp

Paediatric antiretroviral therapy is feasible in decentralised, nurse- and counsellor-led programmes in public health clinics in rural areas in South Africa, according to research presented at the Fourth South African AIDS Conference in Durban earlier this month.

South Africa: Task-shifting key to achieving treatment goal

2009-04-17

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/0A5FEF7C-C715-4260-AD3F-D12438F03C95.asp

Task-shifting is the key to helping to reach South Africa’s goal of treating at least 80% of those in need of antiretroviral therapy (ART) by 2011, according to a joint statement by Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), Reproductive Health and Research Unit (RHRU) of University of the Witwatersrand, the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, and Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), released at the Fourth South African AIDS Conference in Durban earlier this month.

Southern Africa: Lack of implementation hinders HIV and human rights efforts

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/d69872

While SADC countries have made progress in addressing some aspects of HIV/AIDS and human rights laws, most countries are selectively applying international guidelines on HIV/AIDS and human rights. This is according to a report published recently by AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA). The report, which was unveiled at the SA AIDS conference, describes the extent to which SADC countries have implemented the International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights

Swaziland: A culture that encourages HIV/AIDS

2009-04-17

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83937

Anecdotal evidence that entrenched cultural beliefs among Swazis actively encourage the spread of HIV/AIDS has been confirmed by a joint government and UN report. The study by UN the Population Fund (UNFPA) and Swaziland's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare - The State of the Swaziland Population - echoes warnings by local NGOs that "AIDS cannot be stopped unless there is a change in people's sexual behaviour."

Uganda: Drug shortages raise resistance risk

2009-04-17

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83956

People living with HIV in Uganda's northern region are facing critical shortages of essential medicines. Dr Paul Onek, director of health services in Gulu District, said supplies of malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and antiretroviral (ARV) drugs had all run out. "We last received TB drugs in January for only 400 TB patients."

Sudan: Darfur: UN-AU mission gives green light to school project funding

2009-04-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30495

Schoolchildren in the war-torn western flank of the Sudan are set to benefit from a cash injection aimed at breathing new life into their educational system, the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) has announced. The UNAMID office in the West Darfur town of Zalingie has approved funds for some 19 projects that will attempt to rapidly rehabilitate and construct schools in and around camps where people uprooted by violent conflict in the area are seeking safety.

Ethiopia: Gays vow to have their voices heard

2009-04-17

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=ethiopia&id=2091

For the first time in Ethiopia, gay people are meeting and making concrete connections despite religious leaders in that country calling on government to, in addition to the penal code, ban homosexuality on the constitution as well. Members of Ethioglbt are meeting and working to effect positive change, something that they admit, will take time.

Morocco: Government "will not tolerate homosexuality"

2009-04-17

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=morocco&id=2092

Moroccan government has vowed to clamp down on homosexuals in a statement released by the Interior Ministry last month, citing that any practice that is a degradation of moral and religious values upheld in that region will not be tolerated. The latest attack has been sparked by the media in that country who have put pressure on government to allow homosexual voices to be heard.

Uganda: MPs propose tougher laws against homosexuality

2009-04-17

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=uganda&id=2095

The Parliament of Uganda strongly condemned homosexuality during its session on Wednesday 15 April where Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo presented a hard-hitting statement that the country should not compromise on the values it stands for. Following Buturo’s statement, several MPs also condemned homosexuality and called for stern action.

South Africa: Migrants don't vote

2009-04-17

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46536

In May 2008, South Africa was rocked by the worst xenophobic attacks that the country has ever seen. Less than a year later, the issue is almost invisible from the national election campaign. South Africa has long been troubled by xenophobia, but the 2008 attacks were the a significant escalation. Sixty-two foreigners were killed and tens of thousands of others fled their homes. The attacks which started in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra spread like fire throughout the country.

Global: Countries funded to plan forest protection

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/c37q9k

Five developing countries have received US$18 million in funding to plan how to implement a proposed scheme to reward countries that protect forests and reduce deforestation. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania and Vietnam will share the funds, which will enable them to prepare national action plans to take part in the proposed Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) mechanism — likely to be agreed upon at climate talks in Copenhagen in December this year.

Global: 17 April, International Day of Peasant's Struggle

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/ddcgwn

Farmers' and peasants' organisations, landless workers, rural women and youth are mobilising on April 17th for the International Day of Peasant's Struggle. This year, more than 100 actions including demonstrations, street theater, video screenings, direct action, conferences, art shows, local food markets, publications and exchanges... are being organised *by the international farmers' movement Via Campesina, its friends and allies.

South Africa: R93m land claim succeeds

2009-04-16

http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=307887

A Libode community rejoiced when land, from a settlement claim worth R93 million, was handed over to it by South Africa's minister of Land Affairs. The claimant community is made up of five villages – Magcakini, Tyarha, Mamfengwini, Mdlankomo and Moyeni – which, when the claim was made, had a total of 907 households, the members of which are the direct descendants of the originally dispossessed individuals.

Tanzania: Minister defends land nationalization

2009-04-17

http://www.dailynews.co.tz/home/?n=1086

Zanzibar Chief Minister, Mr Shamsi Vuai Nahodha, has said that the 1964 declaration that Zanzibar land is government property has enabled the Isles to preserve land for future generations.He made the remark yesterday in the Zanzibar House of Representatives during questions and answer period, following an opinion from Mr Salim Abdallah Hamad, that it was wrong for the government to prevent Zanzibaris from owning land.

Ghana: Journalist assaulted by ruling party supporters

2009-04-17

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/102378/

On 11 April 2009, William Jalulah, the Upper East regional correspondent of the Accra-based "The Chronicle" newspaper, was violently assaulted by supporters of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) for photographing a violent attack. The party supporters also destroyed his digital camera.

Niger: Government asked to to stop arrests and intimidation of journalists

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/dky86t

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on the Government of Niger to put an end to the intimidation and harassment of journalists allegedly accused of broadcasting “false reports” since April 1, 2009. “This is more nor less a deliberate attempt of harassing and intimidating the Dounia media group and Le Courier newspaper whose only wrong is to have organized a debate about the visit of French President, Nicholas Sarkozy and published articles considered to be defamatory”, declared Gabriel Baglo, Director of IFJ Africa Office.

West Africa: Calls to enforce court ruling in missing journalist case

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/cygncd

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Gambian authorities to enforce the ruling of the Community Court on the disappearance of the journalist Chief Ebrima Manneh more than three years ago after the Attorney General and Minister of Justice declared before the parliament last Monday that “Chief Ebrima Manneh is not in State custody”.

Burundi: Rebels sign agreement to reintegrate ex-rebels

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/cstu28

The Burindi Minister of National Defence Forces (FDN), Lieutenant General Germain Niyoyankana, announced on Thursday a new agreement aimed at demobilizing, disarming and reintegrating 8,500 ex-combatants of the National Forces of Liberation (FNL). The agreement was signed in Pretoria under the South African mediation and aims at reintegrating 3,500 ex-rebels into the different defence and security departments -- 60 per cent in the regular army and 40 per cent in the national police for mula, Niyoyankana said.

Chad: Instability threatens demobilisation of child soldiers

2009-04-17

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/VDUX-7R6QB8?OpenDocument

On paper rebels and the military in Chad are in agreement: a child should not be part of any armed forces. But renewed insecurity over the last few months has triggered an increase in child recruitment, humanitarian workers say. In May 2007, during a return to calm following a peace accord between the government of Chad and various rebel groups, the government signed an agreement with the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) to remove children working from armed forces and rebel groups and assist them.

Nigeria: Oil rebels warn of more violence in the delta

2009-04-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/55749

Nigeria’s main militant group gave warning yesterday of further clashes with the military in the oil-producing Niger Delta and said it had moved two British hostages “out of harm’s way” in anticipation of unrest. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said it would “join the fray” between the military joint task force and youths who it said were protesting against oil giant Royal Dutch Shell in the southern state of Bayelsa.
Nigeria’s main militant group gave warning yesterday of further clashes with the military in the oil-producing Niger Delta and said it had moved two British hostages “out of harm’s way” in anticipation of unrest.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said it would “join the fray” between the military joint task force and youths who it said were protesting against oil giant Royal Dutch Shell in the southern state of Bayelsa.
Gunmen attacked navy personnel guarding a Shell facility at Nembe in Bayelsa on Monday, killing one sailor and stealing four speedboats belonging to the company, in what the military said was revenge for the sinking of several militant vessels.
The militants put the death toll higher, saying three sailors were killed, four abducted and two navy gunboats seized. It said it could not guarantee the safety of Shell staff and equipment. “We wish to warn that should any MEND camps be attacked, the entire Niger Delta region will become a theatre of another civil war,” the group said.
“The same position will be taken if the military carries out any punitive invasion on the impoverished communities that protested against Shell.”
The militants, who have made such threats in the past, is the latest in a line of militant groups to press demands for what it says is a fairer share of the wealth in the delta home to Africa’s biggest oil industry.
Many villages remain mired in poverty after five decades of oil extraction and local communities blame foreign oil firms, although the corruption of local politicians means oil revenues and royalties paid by those companies have been squandered.
Attacks on industry facilities by militants or saboteurs seeking to steal crude oil are frequent in the delta’s creeks, but confrontation with the military has been relatively rare recently.
Insecurity in the area has cut Nigeria’s oil output, forced foreign oil giants to remove all but essential expatriate staff and eaten into the Opec member’s foreign earnings, exacerbating the impact of the global slowdown.
Finance Minister Mansur Muhtar said last month oil production so far this year had been averaging around 1.6m barrels a day, almost half the country’s installed capacity of 3m barrels a day, partly due to the insecurity.
The militants have been holding two British oil workers hostage for
seven months and has said it will not release them until one of its
leaders, Henry Okah, is freed from jail. - Reuters

Sudan: Darfur: Relative calm continues as UN-African force begins rotation

2009-04-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30480

The joint United Nations-African Union (AU) peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region has reported that the security situation remains calm as scheduled troop rotations begin among some units. The hybrid operation, which is known as UNAMID and is tasked with quelling violence and protecting civilians, had reported over the past month a rise in attacks on peacekeeping staff, armed banditry, the burning of shelters in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and harassment of civilians

Sudn: Government to allow some restoration of foreign aid

2009-04-17

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LG649073.htm

U.S. Senator John Kerry said after talks with senior Sudanese officials on Thursday Khartoum would allow some foreign aid to be restored in its western Darfur region but that it was not sufficient. "Time is of the essence to avert a humanitarian catastrophe," said Kerry, who heads the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee and is leading a congressional delegation to Sudan.

Africa: Less rosy future for satellite providers

2009-04-17

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

Satcom is the African satellite industry’s annual get-together and this year’s was held this week. On the second day of the conference the West African Cable System announced the signing of an over-subscribed fundraising. And this is only one of half a dozen international fibre projects that will be built. At the conference itself, new satellite entrants announced services that were both innovative and cheaper.

Ghana: Rural medics to get mobile advice 'hotline'

2009-04-17

http://tinyurl.com/c5u8xm

A pilot initiative to provide rural community health workers, nurses and doctors with advice on diagnosis and treatment via mobile phones is to launch in Ghana later this year. The project will enable rural health workers to call specially-trained doctors at a call centre, providing the daily support that health workers in richer countries take for granted.

Global: Fighting poverty from telecentres

2009-04-17

http://www.apc.org/en/news/fighting-poverty-telecentres-mali-and-colombia

“Training in ICT skills gets the community to start thinking differently and to consider the sources of income available to them more clearly. From a commercial standpoint, they become aware of the fact that their products have to meet certain standards of quality in order to be sold at higher prices,” says Aura Elena Plaza from Villa Paz, an Afro-Colombian community in the Cali region. Dafne Plou reports for APCNews on her first-hand experience of the impact access to information has had on the lives of people in remote villages in Mali, Africa and Cali, Colombia.

Southern Africa: Zimbabwe ranked low in ICT

2009-04-17

http://www.misazim.co.zw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=498

The Global Information Technology report of 2008-2009 has ranked Zimbabwe’s Information and Communication Technology sector at 132 out of 134 countries on the network readiness index list, ahead of East Timor and Chad. The Network Readiness Index (NRI) measures the capacity of countries to exploit the opportunities offered by the ever-changing Information and Communications Technology sector. The NRI comprise of three components: the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community, the readiness of the community’s key stakeholders to use ICT’ s, and the usage of the ICT amongst these stakeholders.

Africa: LLM in Human Rights & Democratisation in Africa

2009-04-17

http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/llm1.html

The LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa is a unique programme to which 30 individuals from African countries with a good law degree and preferably experience in the field of human rights are admitted. During an intensive one-year course, they are taught by eminent lecturers in the field of human rights and gain invaluable practical exposure. It is the only course of its kind in Africa.

Egypt: New graduate diploma

Specialization in Psychosocial Intervention for Forced Migrants and Refugees

2009-04-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/55751

The American University in Cairo (AUC) Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) is pleased to announce its plans for an additional Graduate Diploma with a Specialization in Psychosocial Intervention for forced migrants and refugees beginning in September 2009.
NEW GRADUATE DIPLOMA
Specialization in Psychosocial Intervention for Forced Migrants and Refugees
The American University in Cairo (AUC) Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) is pleased to announce its plans for an additional Graduate Diploma with a Specialization in Psychosocial Intervention for forced migrants and refugees beginning in September 2009.

This graduate diploma which is a collaboration between the CMRS and the new International Counseling and Community Psychology graduate program in the Psychology Unit is unique to Egypt, the region and globally.
Graduates will acquire core competencies for thinking critically and analytically about migration and refugee issues and planning and implementing culturally sensitive interventions in alliance with the most up-to-date guidelines and best practices for assisting forced migrants and refugees with psychosocial issues at individual, family, group, community and societal levels.
Students will have the option to finish this Diploma in one year of full time study or two years of part time study.
The 21 credits include:
5 required core courses (15 credits):
Introduction to Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Psychosocial Issues in Forced Migration Systems Approaches: Frameworks for Research and Practice (Psychology Unit) Applied Psychosocial Interventions for Forced Migration and Refugee Issues Practicum in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies (80 hours) 2 elective courses (6 credits) with at least one to be chosen from Psychology.
The knowledge and skills acquired by graduates can lead to careers globally within institutions such as governmental, non-governmental and international organizations, universities and training centers, the United Nations organizations, research organisations and private corporations dealing with issues that have psychosocial consequences for forced migrants and refugees.
Students must complete an application found through the American University in Cairo website www.aucegypt.edu

For further information please contact Dr. Nancy Baron / Director of Psychosocial Programs /Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (nbaron@aucegypt.edu).
Pending final university approval for September 2009 admissions.

Fahamu