Current Issue

Pambazuka seeks a Technology Project Manager

2009-07-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/58039

Pambazuka News (http://www.pambazuka.org) is the award-winning pan African platform for social justice. We seek to establish Pan African social networking platform as the hub of social activism across the continent – an independent, self-financing, pan African social network and community of members comprising social justice activists, engaged intellectuals and institutions that have similar missions to those of Pambazuka News. It will become the central hub of opinion, organizing, advocacy and analysis of all progressive voices on Africa from within Africa and the African diaspora internationally, providing a unitary, safe space online reflecting and enabling cooperation for the cause of social justice in Africa. In addition, we seek to establish Pambazuka Press as the pre-eminent publisher internationally of non-fiction titles on Africa by Africans.

We propose to build an online, interactive, Web 2.0 driven, multilingual, scalable, and e-commerce-ready pan African networking platform for social justice movements in Africa. The site will enable academics, social activists, women's rights campaigners, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, commentators and policy makers, institutions and individuals to engage in advocacy and neworking.

We are seeking an experienced Web 2.0 technologist to project manage the implementation of the platform which is to be developed externally. We see this position as someone who can turn our overall vision of PZ2.0 into reality by providing us the optimum yet futuristic technological platform and functionalities. Consequently having a strong IT expertise is certainly a necessary attribute to interact with the vendors, manage platform-building tasks etc. Most importantly the person should be comfortable in a technological environment where the focus is on providing products and services to the people. The person should be able to work closely with the marketing and sales personnel too, so that products and services visualised by the marketing team can be reasonably built into the platform. Ideally, the person also needs to have some experience in mobile and 3G applications.

The person would have at least 5 years of experience working on IT projects within corporate or non-profit environment, and experience of working in small teams.

The person will be required to work in Oxford and should have the right to work in the UK.

Applications with a CV outlining both technical and managerial experience of similar projects should be sent to fahamujobs@googlemail.com Closing date for applications: August 15, 2009.

China–Africa Watch becomes Emerging powers in Africa Watch

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/57953

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

The contours of an aid alternative: An abrupt rupture?

Samir Amin

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57938

Samir Amin's 'The contours of an aid alternative' is a chapter from Pambazuka Press's new book Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Coloniser?, edited by Hakima Abbas and Yves Niyiragira. Featuring contributions from leading commentators like Patrick Bond, Demba Moussa Dembélé, Charles Mutasa and Khadija Sharife, Aid to Africa is available to Pambazuka News readers at 20% off the recommended retail price of £12.95 and comes with a free ebook copy – simply enter 95641284 as the discount code when ordering online. The Aid to Africa ebook is also available on its own for only £5.

An abrupt rupture from the current aid architecture is, alas, not desirable. It would signal a declaration of war, aiming to destabilise the powers that be and maybe even, beyond that, the destruction of the state. This strategy has in fact been, and is, used (the blockades on Cuba and Zimbabwe are good examples).

The choice is not between aid as it is or no aid at all. The battle must be waged for radical transformation of the concepts regarding the function of aid, as the South Centre argues. This is primarily an intellectual battle, which should not have boundaries. This struggle is relevant to all those that propose the construction of another world (better), another globalisation, an authentically polycentric world system, respectful of the free (and different) choice of states, nations and peoples on the planet. Let us leave the monopoly on the production of recipes for all to the World Bank and the arrogant technocrats of the ‘North’ to impose.

The moral arguments in favour of debt in the North with respect to the South, giving all its legitimacy to the principle of ‘aid’ (becoming therefore ‘solidarity’) are not without value. More convincing, and politically grounded, are arguments related to the solidarity of peoples faced with the challenges of the future. In particular, the consequences of climate change. The project to create a convention on climate change (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC) is an acceptable starting point to envision financing from opulent countries (responsible in the first instance for the deterioration of the global environment) for programmes that benefit all of the peoples of the planet, and in particular those that are most vulnerable. But precisely because this initiative began within the UN, Western diplomats seek, at the very least, to impede (if not sabotage) its development.

The elaboration of a global vision of aid cannot be delegated to the OECD, the World Bank or the European Union. This responsibility is that of the UN alone. That this organisation is, by its very nature, limited by the monopoly of states, supposedly representing their people, is what it is. Strengthening more direct presence of peoples alongside states deserves attention, but this presence must be conceived to reinforce the UN and is not replaceable by NGO participation (pulled out of a hat) at conferences conceived and managed by the North (and manipulated by Northern diplomats).

I would therefore give priority of support to initiatives taken by ECOSOC (the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations) in 2005 for the creation of a Development Cooperation Forum (DCF). This initiative began the construction of authentic partnerships within a polycentric global perspective. The initiative is, as one can imagine, very badly received by diplomats of the triad.

But we have to go further and dare to reach a ‘red line’. Not to ‘reforming’ the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF. Not to limiting ourselves to denouncing the dramatic consequences of their past and present politics. But to proposing alternative institutions, positively defining their tasks and drawing up their institutional framework.

The debate on alternative aid (united) must immediately eliminate some subjects retained by the DAC under the rubric of the ODA which, in reality, is not aid from North to South but, rather, the reverse.

At the top of the list must be concessional loans provided at below-market rates. This is merely aggressive trade policy implemented by triad states (somewhat like dumping from the East) from which Northern exporters are the main beneficiaries.

Debt reduction, decided upon almost charitably (as is evidenced by the diplomatic jargon that surrounds these decisions), should not figure under the rubric of ‘aid’. Instead and as a legitimate response, not only morally, to this issue, an audit should be conducted of the debt in question (private and public, from the side of the recipient and the donor). Debts that are recognised as immoral (for instance those that are associated with corrupt operations in one way or another), illegitimate (for instance those which thinly disguise political support, as was the case for the apartheid regime of South Africa), or usurious (by their interest rates, decided upon unilaterally by ‘markets’, by the full repayment of their capital and beyond it), should be cancelled, and their victims (debt-owing countries) compensated as a result for what has been paid beyond what was owed. A UN Commission should be created to elaborate the international right, worthy of the name. Of course, the triad diplomats do not want to hear any proposal to this effect.

ALTERNATIVE AID AND ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT

Alternative aid is inseparable from the conceptualisation of alternative development. Although this is not the subject of our thesis here, it is nevertheless useful and necessary to reflect on some important principles of development so as to give clarity to the proposals for alternative aid that follow. It is to these important principles that I will now turn.

A diversified system of production

Development demands a diversified system of production, which in the first instance engages on the road to industrialisation. The tenacious refusal to recognise this necessity in sub-tropical Africa is remarkable. How else can one comprehend the insane industrial drift that should be laughable (which country in Africa is currently ‘over-industrialised’?), unfortunately taken up by people in the alternative globalisation movement who are unaware of the real impact of the Bandung era? I suspect, actually, some racism for the peoples in question, within this proposal. On the contrary, is it not plain that it is precisely those countries engaged on the ‘insane’ path who are today ‘emerging’ countries (China, Korea, and others)?

The incontrovertible industrial perspective does not exclude the call to international capital. Complex and diverse partnership formulae between state and local private capital (when it exists) or foreign capital are certainly admissible, inevitable, probably. But, it only makes sense when liberalism is excluded, as it reduces the creation of ‘attractive conditions for transnational companies’ as the WTO and aid agencies recommend. Real partnership in strategic decision making, control of re-exported profits, must accompany industrialisation strategies.

Diversification (including industrialisation) incontrovertibly demands the construction of infrastructures that do not exist in these countries. This has become indispensable for the survival of these countries.

Social infrastructures

There is no development without quality education, from the base to the summit, and without a population in good health. Here there is potential for financial and technical aid that is indisputably positive, manifesting solidarity. The eradication of pandemics, of AIDS, are evident examples.

Regional cooperation

Diversification and industrialisation will demand the construction of forms of adequate regional cooperation. Continental countries can without a doubt do without it but those of ‘medium’ population size (from 50 million upwards) can initiate the process alone, knowing that they will rapidly reach terrain that they will only pass through with regional cooperation.

The form that regional cooperation takes must reinvent itself to be coherent with the objectives of the type of development spelt out here. Regional ‘common markets’, which dominate the institutions in place currently (when they exist and function) are not in line with this development, as they are conceived as blocs constitutive of liberal globalisation (Amin 2005).

Agriculture at the centre of alternative development

Rural and agricultural development must be at the centre of the definition of a strategy for another development, not just presently but even more strongly in a long succession of advanced phases of development.

It is not enough here to proclaim the priority of agriculture as many do. The type of agriculture must also be defined. Coherent alternative development with diversification as its objective imposes the translation of some grand principles into concrete policy, such as giving priority to food producers within food sovereignty (as defined by Vía Campesina) and not food security frameworks.

The food security approach, promoted by the World Bank and retained by the Paris and Accra Declarations, is the origin of the ongoing food crisis. This approach implies not only that farmers produce more to first feed themselves (the majority of under-nourished people are rural), but also to produce the excess necessary to satisfy the urban demand. This is obviously part of a ‘modernisation’ policy certainly different from the models of modernisation to which farmers of the developed world today were submitted.

Agricultural policy founded on the maintenance of rural populations

As equal access as possible to land and the correct means to exploit it, commands this conception of farmer agriculture. This implies agrarian reform, strengthening of cooperation, adequate macroeconomic policies (credit, provision of input location, commercialisation of products). These measures are different to those put in place historically by capitalism in Europe and North America, which was founded on the appropriation of land, its reduction into a merchandise, a rapid social differentiation of peasantry and the rapid expulsion of ‘useless’ rural surplus.

The option recommended by the dominant system, not put into question by the Paris and Accra Declarations, is situated at the antipodes of advanced principles. Founded on financial profitability, short-term productivity (rapidly increasing production at the cost of accelerated expulsion of farmers in surplus), it responds certainly well to trans-national interests of agribusiness and of an associated new class of farmers, but not to that of popular classes and the nation.

Questioning the globalisation of production

On these important questions, we can only refer to Jacques Berthelot’s remarkable work, which provides the best analysis of the catastrophes that liberalisation has produced, and continues to produce, the best arguments notably concerning the fundamental asymmetries that characterise the Cotonou Agreement, the so-called projects of economic partnership, the debates on the subvention of exports from the North and more generally the negotiations at the heart of the WTO. The rebirth of farmers’ movements in francophone West Africa, organised within the Network of Farmers’ and Agricultural Producers’ Organisations of West Africa, a stakeholder in our debates, bears witness that the option for the farmers’ path is necessarily in conflict with the dominant productivist options in the circuit organised by the OECD, the WTO and the EU. The alternative passes by national policy of construction/reconstruction of national stabilisation funds and support for the concerned products through the implementation of common international funds for base products, permitting an effective alternative reorganisation of international markets of agricultural products. I would also refer here to the propositions made by Jean Pierre Boris.

Understanding external relations

The alternative development framework provided here imposes a true mastering of economic relations with the exterior, amongst them the abandonment of the ‘free trade’ system claimed as ‘regulation of the market’, to the benefit of national and regional systems of control of rates of foreign exchange. Beyond the impossible reform of the IMF, the answers to the challenges invite one to imagine the putting in place of regional monetary funds, articulated in regards to a new system of global monetary regulation, which the current crisis makes more necessary than ever. ‘Reform’ of the IMF doesn’t respond to these necessities. In a more general sense, the understanding of external relations, which isn’t self-sufficient, defines the contours of what I have qualified as the ‘delinking’, to be a constitutive element, incontrovertibly of the emergence of a negotiated globalisation. This development equally demands control of national natural resources. Alternative development is founded on the principle of priority given to national and regional internal markets and in this framework to the markets that respond in the first instance to the expansion of the demands of the popular classes, not to the global market. This is what I call an auto-centred development.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Coloniser? is available to order from the Pambazuka Press website. Pambazuka News readers can get 20% off the recommended retail price of £12.95 – simply enter 95641284 as the discount code when ordering online.
* Samir Amin has been the director of IDEP (the United Nations African Institute for Planning), the director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and a co-founder of the World Forum for Alternatives.
* This article appears as 'Aid for development' in Aid to Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Capitalism's ecological footprint condemns South to poverty

Samir Amin

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57940

cc SprolThe expansion of capitalism is destroying the planet and placing the future of people in the South in jeopardy, writes Samir Amin in this week’s edition of Pambazuka News. Consumption levels in Europe, North America and Japan are four times higher than the per capita global average, a figure which already outstrips the earth’s ecological carrying capacity. If this pattern continues, says Amin, its logical conclusion is ‘either the actual genocide of the peoples of the South – as "over-population" – or at least keeping them in ever increasing poverty.’

1) The work of Wackernagel and Rees (first publication in English, 1996) instigated a major strand in radical social thinking about construction of the future.

The authors not only defined a new concept – that of an ‘ecological footprint’ – they also developed a metric for it. Its units are defined in terms of ‘global hectares’, comparing the biological capacity of societies/countries (their capacity to produce and reproduce the conditions for life on the planet) with their consumption of resources made available to them by this bio-capacity.

The authors’ conclusions are worrying. At the global level, the bio-capacity of our planet is 2.1 global hectares (gha) per capita (ie 13.2 billion gha per 6.3 billion inhabitants). In contrast, the global average for consumption of resources was already – in the mid-1990s – 2.7 gha. This ‘average’ masks a gigantic imbalance, the average for the Triad[1] (Europe, North America and Japan) having already reached a multiple of the order of four magnitudes of the global average. A good proportion of the bio-capacity of societies in the South is taken up by and to the advantage of these centres. In other words, the current expansion of capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity and this expansion’s logical conclusion is either the actual genocide of the peoples of the South – as ‘over-population’ – or at least keeping them in ever increasing poverty. An eco-fascist strand of thought is being developed which gives legitimacy to this type of solution to the problem.

2) The interest of this work goes beyond its conclusions. For it is a question of a calculation (I use the term ‘calculation’ deliberately, rather than ‘discourse’) put in terms of the use value of the planet’s resources, illustrated through their measurement in global hectares (gha), not in dollars.

The proof is therefore given that social use value can be the subject of perfectly rational calculation. This proof is decisive in its import, since socialism is defined in terms of a society founded on use value and not on exchange value. And defenders of capitalism have always held that socialism is an unreal utopia because – according to them – use value is not measurable, unless it is conflated with exchange value (defined in terms of ‘utility’ in vulgar economics).

Recognition of use value (of which the measurement of economic footprints is but one good example) implies that socialism should be ‘ecological’, indeed can only be ecological, as Altvater proclaims (‘Solar socialism’ or ‘no socialism’). But it also implies that this recognition is impossible in any capitalist system, even a ‘reformed’ one, as we shall see.

3) In his time, Marx not only suspected the existence of this problem. He had already expressed it through his rigorous distinction between use value and wealth, conflated in vulgar economics. Marx explicitly said that the accumulation of capital destroys the natural bases on which it is built: Man (the alienated, exploited, dominated and oppressed worker) and the earth (symbol of natural riches at the disposal of humanity). And whatever might be the limitations of this way of putting it, trapped within its own era, it nonetheless remains an illustration of a clear consciousness of the problem (beyond intuition) that deserves to be recognised.

It is regrettable, therefore, that the ecologists of our time, including Wackernagel and Rees, have not read Marx. This would have allowed them to take their own proposals further, to grasp their revolutionary import, and, of course, to go further than Marx himself on this topic.

4) This deficiency in modern ecology facilitates its capture by the ideology of vulgar economics from its dominant position in contemporary society. This capture is already under way and, indeed, considerably advanced.

Political ecology (such as that proposed by Alain Lipietz) was located from the beginning within the gamut of the ‘pro-socialist’, political Left. Subsequently, ‘green’ movements (and then political parties) located themselves in the Centre Left, through their expressed sympathy with social and international justice, their critique of ‘waste’, their concern with the fate of workers and ‘poor’ peoples. But, apart from the diversity of these movements, we should note that none of them had established a rigorous relationship between the authentic socialist dimension necessary to rise to the challenge and a recognition, no less necessary, of the ecological dimension. To achieve this, we should not ignore the wealth/value distinction originated by Marx.

Capture of ecology by vulgar ideology operates on two levels: On the one hand by reducing measurement of use value to an ‘improved’ measurement of exchange value, and on the other by integrating the ecological challenge with the ideology of ‘consensus’. Both these manoeuvres undermine the clear realisation that ecology and capitalism are, by their nature, in opposition.

5) This capture of ecological measurement by vulgar economics is making huge strides. Thousands of young researchers, in the United States, and, imitating them, in Europe, have been mobilised in this cause.

The ‘ecological costs’ are, in this way of thinking, assimilated to external economies. The vulgar method of measuring cost/benefit in terms of exchange value (itself conflated with market price) is then used to define a ‘fair price’ integrating external economies and diseconomies. And Bob’s your uncle.

It goes without saying that the work – reduced to mathematical formulas – done in this traditional area of vulgar economics does not say how the ‘fair price’ calculated could become that of the actual current market. It is presumed therefore that fiscal and other ‘incentives’ could be sufficiently effective to bring about this convergence. Any proof that this could really be the case is entirely absent.

In fact, as can already be seen, oligopolies have seized hold of ecology to justify the opening up of new fields to their destructive expansion. Francois Houtart provides a conclusive illustration of this in his work on biofuels. Since then, ‘green capitalism’ has been part of the obligatory discourse of men/women in positions of power, on both the Right and the Left, in the Triad (of Europe, North America and Japan), and of the executives of oligopolies. The ecology in question, of course, conforms to the vision known as ‘weak sustainability’ (in the usual jargon), in other words, marketisation of the ‘rights of access to the planet’s resources’. In the report of the United Nations commission which he chaired, presented to the United Nations General Assembly of 24-26 June 2009, Joseph Stiglitz openly embraced this position, proposing ‘an auction of the world’s resources (fishing rights, licences to pollute etc)’. This proposal quite simply comes down to sustaining the oligopolies in their ambition to mortgage further the future of the people of the South.

6) The capture of ecological discourse by the political culture of the consensus (a necessary expression of the conception of capitalism as the end of history) is equally well advanced.

This capture has an easy ride, as it is responding to the alienation and illusion that feed the dominant culture – that of capitalism. An easy ride because this culture is actual, and holds a dominant place in the minds of the majority of human beings, in the South as well as in the North.

In contrast, the expression of the demands of the socialist counter-culture is fraught with difficulty. Because socialist culture is not there in front of our eyes. It is part of a future to be invented, a project of civilisation, open to the creativity of the imagination. Slogans – such as ‘socialisation through democracy and not through the market’; ‘the transfer of the decisive level for decision making from the economic and political levels to that of culture’ – are not enough, despite their power to pave the way for the historical process of transformation. For what is at stake is a long ‘secular’ process of societal reconstruction based on principles other than those of capitalism, in both the North and the South, which cannot be supposed to take place ‘rapidly’. But construction of the future, however far away, begins today.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Samir Amin has been the director of IDEP (the United Nations African Institute for Planning), the director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and a co-founder of the World Forum for Alternatives.
* Samir Amin is a contributor to Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Coloniser?, available to order from the Pambazuka Press website. Pambazuka News readers can get 20% off the recommended retail price of £12.95 – simply enter 95641284 as the discount code when ordering online.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] Translator’s note: 'La Triade' (The Triad) is a term used in French for the three dominant economic areas in globalization, Europe, North America and Japan.

Food Rebellions! now only £12.95 plus a 20% discount for Pambazuka readers

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57939

Pambazuka Press's groundbreaking new book Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice by Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel is now available for only £12.95. What's more, Pambazuka readers can receive a 20% DISCOUNT when ordering from the Pambazuka Press website – simply enter 56784813 as the discount code when ordering online.

Haunted by history

Ken Olende

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57942

High CourtVeterans of Kenya’s Mau Mau independence struggle came to Britain in June demanding compensation for atrocities committed by the British. Ken Olende tells their story.

Five veterans from the Mau Mau war in Kenya arrived in Britain last month to sue the British government for their imprisonment and torture 60 years ago. In the 1950s, Britain was desperately trying to hold on to its colonial empire and it crushed a nationalist rebellion in Kenya in a shockingly brutal manner.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) is bringing the case. George Morara from their legal team told Socialist Worker, ‘After the horrors of the Nazi era, Britain was central to establishing an international legal system to defend human rights.

‘How could a country at the forefront of drafting these laws go on to commit torture on a horrendous scale in Kenya immediately afterwards?

‘The government at the time claimed that it did not know what was happening. We wouldn’t accept that as an excuse for Iraq or Guantanamo Bay.

‘There was no justification for taking measures that made some of the victims blind or led to limbs being amputated. British soldiers castrated men and sexually abused women. These are outrageous human rights violations and the British government must be held to account.’

Gitu wa Kahengeri is chair of the Mau Mau War Veterans’ Association. He told Socialist Worker, ‘In August 1950 the colonialists passed a law describing the Mau Mau as a dangerous organisation.

‘That law persisted in our law books after independence right through until 2003. It is only now that Mau Mau people can register organisations and meet legally.

‘Our country was occupied by the British for nearly 70 years before we rose up. They were newcomers to our country. They could have stayed here as business people but they had to control our land. In 1948 we started an underground movement. We recruited people all over the country to remove the colonial power.’

The authorities got wind of the emerging rebellion and launched a military sweep in October 1952. They detained all the African nationalist leadership, conservative and radical alike.

The leadership of the Mau Mau passed to new, less experienced activists. The organisation remained very disciplined and set about establishing guerrilla bases in the forests and supply lines from Nairobi.

Gitu continues, ‘I was a young man then, about 17 years old. I was at school. I had thought if I got an education I could get a good job. But the colonialists did not want that. Even with an education they wanted us to work as farm hands.

‘The struggle was about land. Land is not something to be given by the government. It is our birthright. Everyone has the right to access land. When they refused to give us our land we decided to take it from them.’

The settlers could not conceive that the Africans had legitimate demands. The all white East African Women’s League summed up the typical settler view, stating that ‘the basic fact was not that the African had been held back by racial discrimination, but that he had travelled too far too quickly’.


Operation AnvilThe response of the British to the growing insurgency in the capital was Operation Anvil – which rounded up all black people in Nairobi in early 1954. The city’s population at the time was about 10,000, almost all black. Anyone deemed ‘suspicious’ was held in a rapidly built network of concentration camps.

Like many secret organisations, the Mau Mau insisted members take an oath of loyalty. In the twisted racist thinking of the colonial powers, it was the oath that was driving otherwise passive Africans to rise up.

Oliver Lyttleton, secretary of state for the colonies at the time, said, ‘The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy and nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed.’

The camp system was supposed to force Mau Mau supporters to renounce their oaths and so abandon the rebellion. In practice any hope of ‘rehabilitation’ was replaced by forced labour, torture and revenge. Up to 160,000 Kenyans passed through the camps.

Gitu says, ‘I was arrested in 1952. I was detained in a series of concentration camps: Athi River, Lodwar and Takwa on Manda island off the coast. That camp was particularly for leaders of the Mau Mau movement. I was there with Ramogi Achieng Oneko and Pio Gama Pinto.’

The Mau Mau uprising is often portrayed as a tribal rebellion that only involved the Kikuyu people. However, the people Gitu mentions were from Luo and Asian backgrounds. The Mau Mau War Veterans have members from a wide range of Kenya’s ethnic groups.

Also, the popular British view of a depraved orgy of violence against peaceful settlers doesn’t sit well with even the official figures for deaths.

The British declared an official Emergency in 1952, which lasted until 1960. During that time 32 white and 26 Asian civilians were killed along with 63 white members of the military and 527 African who were ‘loyal’ to the British. Officials admit that 11,503 African rebels were killed – though the KHRC estimates the real figure is nearer 90,000 people.

John Nottingham was a colonial district officer in Kenya during the Emergency but is now very critical of what the British did. He travelled to Britain with the Mau Mau veterans.

Asked if British forces had committed any human rights abuses during the Emergency, he replied, ‘If throwing a phosphorous grenade into a thatched hut with a sleeping family inside isn’t a human rights abuse then I don’t know what is.’

Gitu remembers the forced labour that he was required to do. ‘We built roads. We built the international airport at Nairobi. We had no equipment,’ he said. ‘Many people died in the camps – some from diarrhoea because of the bad conditions, some were beaten to death. They wanted us to die there. Their aim was to suppress the movement.’

A civil war of sorts developed between the heavily armed ‘loyalist’ Home Guard and the Mau Mau and their supporters. There was a distinct class element to this. The chiefs and loyalists had grabbed the best land in the reserves.

There was an incentive for loyalists to accuse local enemies of Mau Mau membership since those convicted of rebellion could have their land confiscated.

The rounding up of the Mau Mau’s urban leaders moved the leadership to local cadres in the countryside. Groups of up to 4,000 rebels set up bases in the deep forests around Mount Kenya.

The British army and the RAF were unable to dislodge the forest fighters, particularly as the Mau Mau were given intelligence and supplies by the local population.

The army forcibly moved farmers from their traditional scattered farmsteads into villages surrounded by barbed wire. This process involved almost the entire rural Kikuyu population of 1.5 million.

The greatest forest leader was the audacious guerrilla Dedan Kimathi, who managed to stay one step ahead of the British for years. When the authorities complained that they couldn’t catch him as no one knew what he looked like, he sent them a photo.

He also sent a message to the British people on why they should support the rebellion. For all its naivety it is a call for solidarity that should be remembered:

‘Do you not remember what your grandfathers did during the reign of King Richard II, when sixty thousand slaves [serfs] went to [the King] and demanded their freedom?

‘These people tore down prison walls and the houses of the rich men they hated, and killed many who were their enemies. They burned the houses of the lawyers, tax collectors and the King’s Officers who had wronged them, and killed many men of that sort, cut off their heads and set them up on London bridge. [Because of their resistance] the King made them free forever.’


Dedan KimathiEventually Kimathi was captured and executed in 1956. This effectively ended the rebellion, though the Emergency and the camps remained until 1960.

One of the veterans’ demands is to be told the secret location of Kimathi’s grave, so that he can be given a proper funeral.

THE CASE: SEEKING JUSTICE AFTER 50 YEARS

The delegation of three men and two women veterans presented their case to the high court in London at the end of June.

These five test cases are the first of 40 that the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) is preparing. All the cases include details of torture. Some involve castration, sexual abuse and unlawful detention.

One of the women involved in the current cases was 15 when she was imprisoned in a detention camp for four years for supplying food to Mau Mau fighters. Two of the five say they were wrongfully imprisoned for years.

George Morara of the KHRC said, ‘It has taken a long time to find survivors and thread the links between the British government and the Kenyan colonial government.’


Lone VeteranThe British government has stated that the claim is invalid because so much time has elapsed. It added that any liability resulting from the colonial rule had passed on to the Kenyan government at independence in 1963.

The KHRC is looking to precedents such as the recent agreement by Italy to compensate Libyans for suffering under colonialism. The New Zealand government has also offered compensation to some 100,000 Maoris.

George says the British military took direct control of many operations in the Emergency: ‘They brought in the RAF with its bombers. That means that this was something that the British government took very seriously, so it cannot say it was not complicit.

‘We have spoken with people who were officials in the Kenyan government at the time who claim they were ordered to destroy many documents shortly before the colonial government departed.

‘But we feel that we have enough evidence to show that the killings went far beyond what is in the official records.’

Muthoni Wanyeki from KHRC said, ‘This is not a case about the individual perpetrators of torture.

‘Our veterans want something very small – an acknowledgement of what was done to them. They want compensation, often for small things – to get crutches that fit or medical attention.’

HISTORY: AN UGLY TALE OF COLONIALISM

The British arrived in East Africa in the 1890s and took what is now Kenya by savage military conquest. The invaders took the best farming land for themselves. This became known as the White Highlands where no African could own land. Much of the area had previously been home to the Kikuyu people.

Africans were banned from growing the most profitable crops.

Gitu wa Kahengeri, chair of the Mau Mau War Veteran’s Association, said, ‘African farmers were not permitted to grow crops like tea and coffee – they were the cash crops.’

Many Africans agreed to fight for the British in the Second World War. Gitu explains, ‘They were in the Far East, mainly in Burma. Some were in Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. But when they came back the government mistreated them. British soldiers were given land in Kenya, but the Kenyans didn’t get anything.’

The colonial government was attempting to entrench white rule. It offered good farming land not only to British ex-soldiers but also to Italian prisoners of war.

Demobbed Africans could find neither land nor work.

Black trade unions led some very effective strikes, notably in 1950, when Nairobi was declared a city. While the whites celebrated, African workers downed tools and went on strike. Strike breakers had their heads shaved and were made to clean public toilets.

From the late 1940s radicals expanded from their base in the unions and Nairobi’s street gangs into the main legal nationalist organisation, the Kenya African Union, which they attempted to radicalise.

They started taking oaths of resistance to colonialism. This was the movement that became known as Mau Mau.

The brutal colonial response won the war, but Britain would not again risk the costs of another insurgency in any other African colonies.

White settlers were forced to accept Kenyan independence in 1963.

Once the settlers needed direct British military support they were in no position to declare an independent racist state, as Rhodesia later would.

But independence did not solve the land issue that sparked the rebellion.

Gitu says, ‘The land question is still a great problem in Kenya. When we removed the British settlers it was the loyalists, Africans who supported colonialism, that got the land.

‘The freedom fighters did not receive what they fought for. The collaborators received everything.

‘They continued hating the freedom movement. That is what they have done to this day. The Kenyan government did not give us the land because those in high positions had not belonged to the freedom movement.

‘I was an MP from 1969 to 1983. I tried to help people who had fought. I’ve been a small farmer since then. I am 79 now. We need young people to take up the struggle or it will die with us.’

George Morara says there is a lot of interest in the case in Kenya, ‘Since independence the Kenyan government wanted to try and keep the status quo.

‘They tended to use the same instruments of oppression as the colonial power.

‘The people in power in Kenya from 1963 to 2000 were very keen to only show one side of what happened and to bury the atrocities because they were beneficiaries of the independence settlement.

‘From 2003 there was a lot of optimism that Kenya was setting out on a new trajectory. For once we had a chance to redefine our history. The issue of Mau Mau was a starting point, to anchor Kenyans in something to believe in.’

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* Ken Olende writes for the Socialist Worker.
* This story first appeared in Socialist Worker.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Memory and politics: Liberia's TRC report

Lansana Gberie

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57934

cc KippsterAs Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) moves to address the country's troubled past, Lansana Gberie is entirely confused by the commission's direction and intent. With some US$8 million plus spent on the TRC over a two-year period, considerably more would have been expected from the commission's report than mere woolly, dull assertions. The report's dismissal of the views informing its findings undermines its relevance, Gberie argues, and is only saved from complete insignificance by the sheer outrageousness of its recommendations.

James Joyce was right that history is a nightmare, the African-American writer James Baldwin wrote, reflecting in a somnolent Swiss village on the racial tensions in his country: 'But it is a nightmare from which there is no awakening. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.' The words were written about 40 years ago, and were issued out of a specific context. But they seem to have a particular resonance for post-war Liberia.

Over five years after its brutal insurgencies ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) in 2003 and the deployment of thousands of UN troops (at a cost of over US$600 million per year), Liberia is enmeshed in another conflict altogether, a contest over its past and soul. The outline of the story is jarringly seductive, and there were tantalising hints of it at the 15–20 June 2009 National Conference of Reconciliation organised by the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It was held at the Unity Conference Center in Virginia, just outside Monrovia; the centre was built for the jinxed Organisation of African Unity (OAU) – the precursor of the more robust Africa Union (AU) – in Liberia in 1979 by President William Tolbert, who would be murdered in his bedroom by his own soldiers less than a year later.

Part of the once-famous Hotel Africa, the hall's main structure – a massive high-rise building – is now a monstrous ruin, making the conference centre, still intact and even elegant, something of a minor wonder. On the walls of the annex, which the casual visitor is likely to miss, there is a very telling mural of a group of confident black people dressed in Western-style clothing getting off a boat to be greeted by apparently dissolute and benighted Africans in their 'native' attire. This is not an accurate historical representation, of course, but this is exactly the point. And that point is also captured in the flowering communiqué issued at the end of the conference, the delegates of which, 'representing citizens of Liberia from all 15 counties and from all walks of life, background, race, clan [sic] and tribe [sic]', were still able to recall, with no hint of irony, 'the spirit of all our great ancestors, who through love of unity, freedom, justice and liberty founded this great nation'. This is the standard, vainglorious narrative of Liberia's history, and here we are told that it is shared by 'perpetrators and victims of crimes of all forms and degrees against our fellow brothers and sisters' during the country's recent wars.

Surely the presence of perpetrators and victims imply contest – and so an unruly voice among the drafters asserts itself – calling for 'a historical review commission [to] be established to review Liberia's history and produce a version of it that reflects the lives of the people met here by the settlers in 1822'. It continues to point 24 of the communiqué, declaring that 'the motto in the seal of Liberia should be changed from its current form, 'The love of liberty brought us here', to instead read 'The love of liberty unites us here'. In this same revisionist mood, the communiqué also called for 'a national culture center [to] be established to promote Liberia's diverse culture[s]', as well as for 'a national consultation process [to] be set-up to determine a single indigenous dialect to be spoken throughout the country and taught in Liberian schools'.

You now get the basic idea. In its modern form, Liberia was established by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1827 as a colony for American freed slaves. The condition of freed blacks in the United States at the time was both pressing and complex for America's (racist) white masters like Thomas Jefferson, for they amounted to hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Jefferson and his revolutionary colleagues clearly did not envisage that their ideas of independence and liberty, which had led them to revolt against British colonial rule, should extend to their own black population. These leaders thought that the chief solution would be to repatriate the blacks to Africa, where they would live in liberty with themselves. This point has been much stressed by various writers – from the English novelist and travel writer Graham Greene to the Liberian (indigenous) nationalist and academic George Boley, who later emerged as a factional leader during Liberia's recent civil wars, but it surely had been settled over a century ago by that erudite pan-Africanist Edward Blyden. Noting the influential African voices in America who were yearning at the time for a return to Africa, Blyden wrote that while the whites clearly wanted to expel the freed slaves, the Liberian project 'was in harmony with the instincts and desires of the Africans in America'.

The only problem was that by a cruel sub-Freudian dynamic, the 'instincts and desires' of these Africans would come to reflect exactly the pathos and contradictions of the American revolutionaries. In Liberia they replicated the system of servitude they had known in the antebellum South, only this time with themselves as masters and the majority indigenous Africans as virtual slaves. This is hardly surprising: the classical writers of ancient Greece and Rome, the world's first organised slave societies, had thousands of years ago postulated something about the 'slave mentality', the idea that a slave remains a slave even when freed, because the mind remains shackled and conditioned by an experience which makes freedom meaningful only if it exists side-by-side with servitude. This is Liberia's foundational deformity, if you will, and it is why post-war Liberia today is burdened by a very special anxiety, the fear that it is relapsing into that condition against which the struggles of the late 1970s, the nihilistic coup of 1980, and the subsequent collapse into bloody anarchy was triggered.

That anxiety is most clearly expressed in the TRC report released early in July, the month that Liberia celebrated its 163th year as a republic, making it the oldest in Africa. The TRC had been established by the Act of the Legislature in 2005, and in the course of its ponderous work collected more than 20,000 statements from victims as well as alleged perpetrators during the country's nearly 15 years of brutal civil war over the period 1989–2003. The commission was mandated to inquire into Liberia's tragic past from as far back as January 1979 – the final year of Americo-Liberian rule, and 10 years before the war began – to 14 October 2003, the day of the inauguration of the transitional government which replaced Charles Taylor's rule. This time-span was a compromise reflecting a fundamental Liberian problem, the fact that the tiny-but-still-powerful Americo-Liberian elite tend to view the crisis of state collapse and violence as beginning with the coup of 1980, which overthrew William Tolbert, the last of Americo-Liberian oligarchs. On the other hand, the majority indigenous Liberians tend to think that the coup resulted from the disastrous nature of the Americo-Liberian True Whig rule, contending that the entire period from 1847 to 1980 was disenfranchising, laying the foundation for the war that began in 1989. In fact, Article IV of the TRC Act stated that the commission could look at 'any other period preceding 1979' in order to create an 'accurate historical record' of the past which would form the basis of reconciliation.

Thoughtful Liberians have long deplored the paucity or absence of such a historical record. In Wilton Sankawulo's vastly underrated novel 'Sundown at Dawn: A Liberian Odyssey' (2005), a very wise character (doubtless the author's alter-ego) vents his frustration about this fact, noting that Liberia will move forward in peace and stability 'Only if we know our history – history that highlights our strengths and other resources. But the true history of Liberia is yet to be written. All we have is a jumble of journals, reports, and memos which tell us when Liberian was founded, who have been its presidents – what parties have been in power – what nations aided us…we're thriving on chaos and mistrust because we don't know our true history.' The 370 pages of the TRC's Consolidated and Final Report attempts to fulfil such a task, but it is hard to imagine that Sankawulo, Liberia's foremost literary figure who died early this year, would have found it almost entirely disappointing.

Here I must state, by way of full disclosure, that from January 2008 to June 2009 (shortly before the report was submitted) I was head of International Center for Transitional Justice's (ICTJ) Liberia programme, and that the TRC was one of the core institutions we worked with rather closely. It was, however, a very difficult relationship, to put it no stronger, though it continued till the end of my tenure without open rancour.

Predictably, the report has a long list of 'causes' for Liberia's slide into civil war, including the 'over-centralisation and the oppressive dominance of the Americo-Liberian oligarchy' (who at no point have constituted more than five per cent of the population) over the indigenous Liberians, a weak judiciary, tribalism, disputes over land acquisition, distribution and accessibility, and a 'lack of clarity and understanding of Liberia's history including its history of conflicts'.

Few would have any problem with this, though one can certainly quibble. A large part of the report is taken up by interesting but somewhat extraneous discussions around concept, methodology and the personalities of those involved with the commission, and various other mundane details. The historical section, deemed the most important, is brief to the point of terseness, and it is rather problematic. It opens, bewilderingly, with a notorious quote from Hugh Trevor-Roper, a former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, dismissing the idea of African history ('it does not exist')! Perhaps the report writers should have pressed further with Trevor-Roper, who for much of his career had to fend off accusations of racism and anti-Semitism, for he elaborated his foolish thesis by arguing that before the European arrival in Africa, there was only 'the gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the world'. Would such a dubious authority aid the TRC's efforts in trying to include the contributions of indigenous Liberians to the development of the modern state of Liberia? Is the TRC saying that pre-settler Liberia is irrelevant?

There is truth in the following observation (appearing in the historical section): 'Central to understanding the socio-political conflict and its degeneration into armed conflict in the evolving history of Liberia is the choice made by the early leadership of Liberia from colony, to commonwealth and statehood. It was a choice of purpose or political direction for the new enterprise. One option was a Euro-American orientation with the idea of a civilizing and christianizing mission at its core. The other option was to attempt to build an African nationality that blended Western and African values, as Edward Wilmot Blyden and others have advocated. The choice of the former is at the root of Liberia's yet unresolved historical problem of political identity and legitimacy. The choice, in time, alienated, marginalized, degraded not only the majority of the inhabitants of the Liberia area, but implicitly the very westernized black leaders who bought into and adopted the views derived from American colonialist sentiments.'

Again, one can quibble. Blyden has recently emerged as the great intellectual and political hero of Liberia, the most important inclusive personality among the settler types (in Boima Fahnbulleh's remarkable historical novel 'Behind God's Back', published in 2005, the same point is made even more forcefully, with Blyden appearing in the novel as 'Dr. Caldwell'.) This is largely a myth, of course, and its appearance in the TRC report is telling. Blyden, as a highly cultured man, was certainly disdainful of the vulgarities of settler politics, and he had little time, himself a proud 'unadulterated Negro', for the Mulattos who dominated early Liberian politics: his quaint racial theory had them as degenerate and effeminate, an inferior breed. But far from being a consistent spokesman on behalf of indigenous Liberians, Blyden advocated the bringing in of more blacks from America and the Caribbean. Reflecting the views of some of his European friends, he looked upon indigenous Africans as degraded and benighted – the issue of equality with them did not arise in his mind.

Blyden himself was forced to flee Liberia by his political enemies, and he settled in Sierra Leone, where he died. Liberia remained in its state of inertia; at the end of the 19th century the settlers numbered only 25,000. When in 1874 the Liberian government decided that other groups adjacent to Monrovia would be allowed representation in the national legislature as 'referees and advisers', their advice was restricted to matters involving their own ethnic groups, and they were denied the vote. It is entirely moot given their background and demographic disadvantage whether the settlers could have afforded a more inclusive state; for political purposes, history does not make room for such nuances. Liberia, in fact, was probably too weak and indigent to have expanded its writ much; by the end of the 19th century, its entire budget, about £25,000 (sterling), was less than half what its neighbour Sierra Leone was spending on education.

Liberia's fortune changed radically when in 1926 President Charles Dunbar Burgess King (who was born in Sierra Leone of settler descent) signed an agreement with the American Firestone Company to invest US$20 million in rubber plantation; the company also gave a loan of US$5 million to the government, and then took the management of the country's customs to ensure the loan was paid back. Firestone fuelled both a measure of economic growth and an extreme form of patrimonial corruption, with receipts from its taxes and royalties being controlled directly by the presidency. This ensured that the Liberian government had enough resources to ignore the overall socio-economic development of the country, as well make the presidency a potent and overwhelming force. The relationship between the Monrovia government and the indigenous population was so skewed that a League of Nations investigation in 1931 actually recommended that Liberia be deprived of its independence and colonised. In the mid-1950s, William Tubman, the embodiment of this new patrimonialism, had made the presidency utterly personalised; maintaining his personal yacht – bought at crippling cost by the indigent state – cost more than the allocation for education for Liberia's 2 million people. He was succeeded, after 27 years in power, by Tolbert, who was overthrown by the nihilistic Samuel Doe, a former master-sergeant. Under his bloodthirsty reign, Liberia dissolved into anarchy.

However fair one wants to be about Liberia's settler elite, it is clear that they, out of ignorance, avarice or existential necessity, refused to adhere to Edmund Burke's vision of a state as a partnership with its citizens in all arts and sciences, in all virtues and vices, in all endeavours great and small. And they refused to see that disenfranchisement, the relegation of a large body of people to a position that Baldwin called that of 'disesteemed', leads to rage. That rage, as Baldwin saw clearly, may be 'personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood … is one of the things that make history.' Liberian history for the past quarter-century – from the Doe coup to the Taylor-inspired insurgencies – has been driven exactly by this rage of the disesteemed.

While the TRC report captures some of these undercurrents, the analysis often seem breezy and pat, as though what is being presented is self-evident; the writers do not even bother to make attributions like footnotes.

Attention is likely to focus on the recommendations around lustration and prosecution, but the manner in which these are made is rather irresponsible and foolish. The report notes that 'Prosecution in a court of competent jurisdiction and other forms of public sanctions are [sic] desirable and appropriate mechanisms to promote the ends of justice, peace and security, foster genuine national reconciliation and combat impunity.' And it asserts – without careful, deliberative evidence-based demonstration – that a number of groups, entities and individuals were 'involved in a joint criminal enterprise or conspiracy, which planned, instigated, ordered, commanded, aided or abetted in the planning, preparation or execution' of crimes against humanity during the Liberian wars. The phrase 'joint criminal enterprise' is the reductive, depoliticising and intellectually slovenly formulation of David Crane, former prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Its use in the TRC report that pretends to weigh the political, economical and social factors that led to the civil war in Liberia is unfortunate, and utterly inapt.

The following, deemed the 'Significant Violator Groups' in the category of culpability, are well-known and deserve little comment: Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), which is found to have been responsible for most of the violations, 41 per cent; Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD); George Boley's Liberian Peace Council (LPC); Militia [sic]; Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL); United Liberation Movement (ULIMO); Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL); Unknown [sic]; United Liberation Movement-K (ULIMO K); Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL); United Liberation Movement-J (ULIMO J); and Anti-Terrorist Unity (ATU). In all, 106 people, including leaders of all the warring factions, are recommended for prosecution by an extraordinary court for 'gross human rights violations and war crimes.' But 36 persons, except for Joe Wylie, are rather unknown characters and are exempted by the TRC from prosecution 'though found to be responsible [for violations] because they cooperated with the TRC process, admitted to the crimes committed and spoke truthfully before the Commission and expressed remorse for their prior actions during the war'.

Doubtless the most unexpected, and certainly the most outrageous, recommendation is the one dealing with lustration. The TRC recommended that 52 persons, who were 'political leaders and financiers of different warring factions', should be barred from holding public office for 30 years. This category includes – sigh! – the current President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It also includes the academic Byron Tarr, whose very useful analysis of the early stages of the war has been much cited by other academics. The list seems to come from nowhere; there is little in the entire report to suggest that most of the personalities were culpable in anything. In fact, few of the names on the list are mentioned in the actual report, making the recommendation seem rather glib and asinine. President Johnson Sirleaf appears a few times in the report, and her name is thrown about rather carelessly; we are told somewhere that 'Amongst Doe's staunchest and most active political opponents in the Diaspora were Dr Amos Sawyer and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, both victims of Doe's brutality', and that Sirleaf 'led the pro-Taylor elements while Dr Amos Sawyer led the opposition to any form of engagement or support to Charles Taylor'. Again, we read that as Taylor became 'increasingly unpopular, he lost the popular support of the Liberian people and his traditional political allies and financiers in Liberia, including Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.'

This is about all. Sirleaf was not in a leadership position at the time, and she has provided a convincing account of her dealings with Taylor, both to the TRC and in her memoirs, 'This Child will be Great' (2009). Her first meeting was when 'sometime in 1989' Taylor was presented to a group she belonged to in the US, the Association for Constitutional Democracy in Liberia (ACDL); the second was in a Paris hotel just before the war started in Liberia, at which Sirleaf suggests buying breakfast for Taylor and Tom Woewiyu, who had unexpectedly visited. Taylor said, 'The money you spend for breakfast you could give to us.' She gave them the money, adding with a touch of pathos, 'It was clear to me that whatever their plans, they were not going well at the moment if they needed the price of breakfast to keep on.' And finally when Sirleaf ventured into Taylor territory during the war to present him with US$10,000 her group had raised, to feed his troops and civilians trapped on his side of the frontlines. Sirleaf writes that she was appalled by Taylor's viciousness and his lack of a reforming vision for Liberia. She cut her ties with Taylor after that.

This account may well be abbreviated, incomplete, but the TRC does not present an alternative narrative, it simply makes assertions, perhaps convinced that by simply doing so they would be taken at face value. This really in a way defeats the purpose for which more than US$8 million was expended on the TRC – Sirleaf's government, as well as many other donors, was supportive throughout – over a period of two years. In fact this very dull, padded and somewhat shabby report is rescued from utter irrelevance by its being so outrageous and irresponsible in the recommendations section. Can any sensible person who has seen the immense accomplishment of the Sirleaf government since it came to power in 2006 suggest with a straight face that she is unfit for public office?

More useful and interesting is the statistical data, analysed for the TRC by the US-based charity Benetech. We learn that forced displacement accounted for the most violations, 36 per cent (or 58,849 cases), to be followed by killing at 17.1 per cent (or 28,042 direct war-related killings). This should cause some reflections on some of the casualty figures usually bandied about for the war. The TRC accepts these figures, but curiously rejects another set of statistics produced for them by Benetech, which had determined that about 60 per cent of Liberians would rather 'forgive and forget' the crimes of the past; in other words, the overwhelming majority of Liberians rejected prosecution for the offences committed during the war. I have myself recommended some kind of prosecution for the egregious crimes committed with impunity in Liberia during the war, but I found this statement by the TRC totally confusing: 'The catalogue of violations enumerated [in the report] evidences the distinct nature of violations of human rights that characterized the conflict in Liberia. Rightly so, the TRC has determined that gross violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws, egregious domestic violations and other forms of violations were very much pervasive in Liberia's several wars and armed conflict during the TRC mandated period of review.' The TRC 'determines'; so what was the point of the public hearings, the very elaborate effort to collect statements and views from across the board all over Liberia? Are these to be dismissed so glibly? This cavalier approach seriously undermines the relevance of the report itself.

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* Lansana Gberie is a Sierra Leonean academic and journalist.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Deferring democracy: Dining with a delinquent

It takes more than three people to design a country's constitution

Tapera Kapuya

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57943

cc WikimediaIt’s no wonder President Robert Mugabe is keen to use the Kariba Draft as the basis for Zimbabwe’s new constitution, writes Tapera Kapuya in this week’s Pambazuka News. Negotiated in secret in 2007 by a representative from each of the three ruling parties, the document would give him ‘unchecked and exclusive authority, placing him above all citizens and the law’. Pessimistic about the MDC’s ability to gather ‘enough strength and conviction to fight off the possible imposition’ of the draft, Kapuya highlights the need for an independent body to lead the process of making a people-driven constitution, based on the views of all citizens.

Speaking at the burial of veteran nationalist Akim Ndlovu, Zanu PF leader Robert Mugabe quipped that the writing of Zimbabwe’s new constitution will not be a ‘mass party’. The aged leader has not hidden his liking for the Kariba Draft, negotiated in secrecy by the ruling political parties’ representatives: Welshman Ncube, Tendai Biti and Patrick Chinamasa. The draft was agreed on in 2007 – a year before the September 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) that led to the formation of the unity government.

Reasons for his preference are easy to read, and should provide enough cause for the pro-democracy movement to remain vigilant. The Kariba Draft retains a system of executive fundamentalism that has so undermined good governance, nurtured corruption and stifled democracy. The draft carves for the president unchecked and exclusive authority, placing him above all citizens and the law. He has unfettered powers to make all key appointments with the only requirement being that he consults bodies which he would have appointed himself – a classic treatise on how to consult oneself. These appointments range from ministers, permanent secretaries, judges, Reserve Bank governor, attorney general and ambassadors, to chairpersons of various commissions set out in the draft – including the Electoral Commission.

As if not having learnt anything from our immediate history, the draft gives the president exclusive powers over the military, including the power to declare war. No cabinet or parliamentary approval is required, until after sometime – by which the country would already be at war. Using existing provisions in the Lancaster House constitution, Mugabe sacrificed the lives of many of our soldiers in the DRC. This adventure in 1997 depleted over a billion dollars in unbudgeted resources – setting in motion the collapse of the economy.

The president also has powers to declare a State of Emergency and martial law without cabinet and parliament approval. We have had an experience of a State of Emergency and martial law before: 1964 until 1990. During this time, a number of atrocities were committed under the banner of preserving state security. Mugabe’s admitted ‘moment of madness’ saw an estimated 20 000 people being butchered in Matebeleland, and several hundreds disappeared across the country. Civil liberties were suspended – and political freedoms entertained to the extent to which they were either state sanctioned or aided the state.

In normal democracies, parliament is meant to provide checks on the executive in addition to its duty of ‘law making’. A president who violates the constitution or deliberately fails to defend it can be impeached. Yet in Zimbabwe, the drafters of Kariba sought a constitution that removes any parliamentary sanction against him. Instead, the president is handed a sledgehammer to smash parliament: Powers to dissolve parliament. This power can be exercised as he wishes – without need to consult or show reason.

Such powers are as enticing to politicians seeking to retain political power as they are to those seeking to acquire it. The same can’t be said for the country – the less power politicians have, the healthier the nation. The draft is a perfect tool for dictators and a monumental retard of democracy. This is the draft that in all likelihood will be presented to the people.

The other parties to the GPA have been trying to convince Zimbabweans and the world that this will not be case. But experience militates against their assurance. For a start, few Zimbabweans would have believed that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) would sign such a scandal as the ill-named Global Political Agreement (GPA). Any reading of the document proves that Zanu PF had an upper hand. Even after losing the 2008 elections, Mugabe walked away being both head of state and head of government. He chairs cabinet. Morgan Tsvangirai, the winner of the elections has had to live with being reminded by some ministers and security chiefs that they take order ‘only from the president’.

Issues remain unresolved. Mugabe refuses to swear in the MDC nominee for deputy in the agriculture ministry, Roy Bennet; Gideon Gono and Johannes Tomana remain in office; Mugabe’s appointees remain as permanent secretaries, giving Mugabe control of the administration of all ministries, and Mugabe refuses to convene the National Security Council. In the past months, we have witnessed the use of the courts to decimate the MDC lead in the House of Assembly. Seven MDC members of parliament have been conveniently convicted or are facing trial on charges that carry custodial sentences that disqualify them to from parliament.

In all these situations, the MDC has done little apart from releasing statements and ‘referring matters to SADC’. As the party waits for a response from SADC, Mugabe’s onslaught remains. It is not difficult to see where power lies in this government: The MDC look like the guests of a delinquent.

The GPA sets a number of areas of focus and deliverables. Most of these require nothing but goodwill to achieve. These include the unlocking of civil and political liberties; allowing the free movement of humanitarian aid; freeing the media and stopping political violence. Five months into the life of this transitional regime, we are yet to see any signs of these matters being addressed.

Considering that the MDC is failing to win on these issues, it is difficult to imagine the party gathering enough strength and conviction to fight off the possible imposition of the Kariba Draft. Mugabe has since reminded everyone that they agreed to the Kariba Draft. On its part, the MDC has developed the narrative of ‘incremental change’. It reads naive.

Some elements in the party are of the thinking that the ‘constitution making process’ currently going on must not be challenged no matter how bad it is or how bad the content will be. The idea is that this unity regime concludes at the delivery of a constitution, with elections being held and a popular government being elected. This line of thought feeds on the hope that the MDC would win the election – and then as a new government, will create space and resources for a thoroughly people driven democratic constitution.

MDC MP for Nyanga Douglas Mwonzora, one of the chairpersons of parliament’s Select Committee has even gone further to suggest that opposing the process is tantamount to supporting Mugabe. Already many within the broader democracy movement have heeded to this scaremongering and are slavishly following the road to the butcher’s house.

Without the constitution hurdle being passed, there will be no elections we are told. So in theory we must all support the parliamentary process chicanery and the Kariba Draft it seeks to legitimise. This builds on the same defeatist theory that saw the people’s party being pushed into an unfair and anti-democratic deal with Zanu PF. Then, people’s hunger and suffering was used to capitulate and compromise democratic principles instead of being seen as the objective factors upon which the struggle for democracy would be fought and achieved.

This school of thought has been opposed by our democracy movement since its inception. The 2000 Chidyausiku Draft Constitution could have been accepted if it were for Mwonzora and his kind. The same reasons they raise now applied then. Even better. At least the Chidyausiku Commission managed to project a façade of popular consultation whilst masking Mugabe’s imposing hand. The same can not be said of the Select Committee cronies. In voting 'no' against Chidyausiku’s draft in the 2000 Constitutional Referendum, Zimbabweans were making it clear that undemocratic processes can never give birth to sustainable democratic outcomes. They won.

Worse, it is even hard to believe an MP touting the ‘elections after constitution’ carrot when members of parliament are scrambling for five year US$30 000 vehicle loans. Aside a few, parliament is the only source of livelihood for our MPs.

In opposing this, the democracy movement has long argued that constitution making is about qualifying our democracy, putting in place a template that will give it meaning. It is about defining the relations between citizens, managing their competing interests whilst promoting common interests. It is about establishing their relations with the state and apportioning the degrees of power to those privileged to run their public affairs. The latter part clearly calls for careful thought and the need for thorough restraining. To give those who have this power a free reign to decide the nature of power and how it should be used is a disaster. Our experiences with a constitution made for the moment has taught us the hard way. Being so, people have to be at the centre of this struggle. They have to write the constitution themselves – as citizens, not serfs.

The National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) and many in the MDC executive council have given guard to this truth. They have asked parliament to back off from leading the constitution making exercise and called for the establishment of an Independent Constitutional Commission. The commission should be established through an open and transparent process. Such a commission should not only be independent but also be seen to be independent. No group – whether political parties, the executive, parliament, NGOs etc should have more privileges than others in this process. All citizens irrespective of social, economic or political status should be equalised, and their opinions and views must be held with the same weight. This is the principle upon which a people driven constitution is made.

Parliament’s role should be to safeguard the independence of such a commission from the ‘obvious hand’ of the executive. The executive has a significant role in ensuring that the necessary resources are allocated, through parliament, to the commission. In participating in the processes of the commission, members of parliament and the executive would do so as any other citizen would.

The struggle for a new constitution should not be seen as an aside battle. It is the soul of the last decade’s fight for democracy and change. The moment we are in provides ample space to re-engage the masses of our people and reaffirm that the tragedies of 1979 at Lancaster will not be repeated. Such a call requires us to look at the transitional arrangement not as a seat of compromise, but a platform to advance the frontiers of the fight for freedom and the end of tyranny. So the next time Mugabe’s kind tell us that there will be no ‘mass party’, we should be able to shout back for generations to hear that writing a constitution is not dinner for three.

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* Tapera Kapuya writes in his personal capacity.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Reform not re-invention: South Africa's provincial government

William Gumede

2009-07-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57904

cc LebeccioIn light of the sustained problems of mismanagement and corruption burdening South Africa's provincial authorities, many have called for these institutions to be scrapped entirely. This, argues William Gumede in this week's Pambazuka News, would be a step too far and likely to make matters worse. Far more important, Gumede contends, is the need to dismantle a culture of cronyism and political impunity. The provinces in fact need greater power, the author argues, but this must be under the authority of figures genuinely motivated by tackling poverty and creating jobs.

Given the pervasive corruption, mismanagement and lack of service delivery in most South African provinces, many have, not surprisingly, called for this sphere of government to be scrapped.

But is scrapping the provinces really the best solution? Firstly, we must not now again fall prey to the perennial South African policy-making weakness, whereby we, whenever an institution appears not to be working, scrap it, and create a new one, with, inevitably, new problems, problems which are sometimes even worse.

We must calculate whether it would not be easier, cheaper and more effective if we actually seriously try to make provincial governments, public services and leaders more accountable, versus creating a new giant central structure with the same deficiencies and blindingly hoping that it would by magic produce better results.

Furthermore, does the current national public service have the capacity to take on the additional burden of administrating the provinces? Are we not creating a new mountain of problems that will dwarf the current provincial shortcomings? Then there are the practicalities of creating a new central structure, establishing new reporting lines, procedures and offices, which alone may take years to complete. Service delivery may grind to a halt as energy, focus and priorities are concentrated on creating a new national structure.

Meanwhile, ordinary communities are restless across the country, demanding immediate improvements in service delivery. Furthermore, it is likely that the incorporation may be fiercely resisted across the provinces. This will in turn increase paralysis, which again will distract from focusing on service delivery. Is the proposal to close down the provinces – perhaps another attempt at taking the easy option – rather than confronting head-on the real problem of lack of delivery in the provinces, which surely must be the lack of accountability and capacity in provincial governments?

The perception is that very few of those in provincial government are actually going to be fired for mismanagement, corruption or incompetence – especially if they are politically connected – and that employment in many provinces is reserved for either those with the right ethnic background, right faction or right colour, rather than right level of competence. The reality is that the provinces have become patronage machines, rewarding friends and allies through government tenders, contracts and appointments.

This means that competent professionals of all colours with the skills won’t even apply for jobs, because they know they are not ‘connected’. Yet we appear to lack the courage to do not only the right and cheaper thing, to fire those who are responsible for mismanagement and corruption, even if they are our allies and friends, and to appoint those who we may disagree with politically and who come from a different background, but who have the skills that will help pull our people out of grinding poverty.

The problem also is that provinces do not have enough power. They are conveyer belts for policies from the centre. They have limited say over their budgets. They cannot even raise their own revenues, except through liquor licenses, casinos and traffic fines – one of the reasons for the proliferation of these. The provinces have little say in setting development priorities. In the Eastern Cape, there are massive retrenchments, but the province lacks innovative leadership, fresh ideas and the courage to come up, together with local business, civil society and communities, with an emergency provincial strategy to ease retrenchments, rescue closing plants and think of new kinds of job-creating opportunities.

The challenge is to bring fresh talent, skilled personnel and innovative minds into provincial government. The provincial civil services must be depoliticised and detribalised; political cronies or those from the same ethnic group of the provincial or national bosses without skills should not be appointed to critical jobs, and those already in these positions who fail must not protected simply because of their political or factional allegiances. These are hard political decisions to be made which need courage, because those that make them will become politically unpopular, but on balance they are cheaper and will bring better results.

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* This article first appeared in the Sowetan.
* William Gumede is author of Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Kenya's Talai: The end of a dynasty

Bill Rutto

2009-07-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57905

Tracing the Talais' history and experiences under British colonialism, Bill Rutto discusses the plight of a Kenyan group still suffering under the weight of a colonial-era expulsion order. The ruling clan of the Kipsigi people, the Talai were the victims of a wholesale round-up once it became apparent to the British authorities that they could not be simply controlled, Rutto writes. Following their expulsion the group came to squat on the outskirts of Kericho town, where they remain over half a century later, the Kenyan and British governments oblivious to their cause. But with their compatriots the Mau Mau bringing legal action against the British government, will the Talai be able to pursue justice themselves, Rutto asks in this week's Pambazuka News.

In one of his ballads, American country singer Charlie Pride laments incredulously, 'How can anything so real become a dream…?' Indeed, how can that possibly be? Dreams, conventionally, come true and not the other way round! But if the world around you suddenly crumbled like a pack of cards, as seems to have happened to poor Pride, then the irony of his grousing becomes less perplexing. The Talai of Kenya will concur with Charlie Pride every time they reflect on what befell them on 22 October 1934, the fateful day when the British colonial authorities in Kenya deported them from their ancestral land.

Historians agree that the deportation of the Talai was unprecedented in Kenya of the 1930s. In complete disregard for human rights and in violation of its own laws, including even the incipient international law under the League of Nations Charter, the British cold-bloodedly expelled an entire community from their land simply because colonial officers were not creative enough to cope with a tenacious African leadership. The Talai, the ruling clan of the Kipsigi people, wielded both temporal and spiritual authority over the Kipsigis when the British colonial juggernaut reached Kericho district in 1903. At first, the British and the Talai leadership seemed to get on fine together, with the Talai potentate, Laibon Kipchomber arap Koilegen, even accepting a colonial appointment of paramount chief of the Kipsigis (or the Lumbwa as the British called the Kipsigis then). This arrangement fitted quite well with the British concept of indirect rule, where existing local leadership was often used to impose pax Britannica.

It was not until about 1911, however, that the Talai began to feel a little uncomfortable. They felt something was seriously amiss; the white strangers at their new Kericho station were increasingly becoming assertive and bothersome. In a single month, for example, several messages would reach the Laibon (the Talai were descended from the Maasai Oloiboni clan of diviners, hence the title), summoning him to appear before the district commissioner at Kericho for one thing or another. And it soon dawned on the Laibon that the white men at Kericho were up to no good. They seemed bent on weakening his leadership, for how else would anyone explain the peremptory attitude of a bunch of strangers in the manner they summoned the Kipsigi monarch at will? Laibon Koilegen (the elder brother of the legendary Nandi leader, Koitalel Samoei, who had led the Nandi in a bloody decade-long resistance to British rule until 1905 when he was killed) began to ignore the district commissioner’s summons.[1]

Of course, Laibon Koilegen, and for that matter the Talai and the Kipsigis, had no idea that the white men they were defying at Kericho station represented a colonising power on whose empire, it was said, the sun never set. This is why the Laibon, for starters, abandoned his 600-rupee per year appointment as paramount chief and began to lead the Kipsigis in circumventing every rule imposed by the white man at Kericho. But the British officers, aware of Laibon Koilegen’s Nandi connection, were not about to allow a repeat of the Nandi debacle and moved swiftly to stop Koilegen in his tracks. They arrested the offending monarch, along with his two influential brothers, Kiptonui arap Boisio and Kibuigut, and deported them in 1913 to distant lands in the Kikuyu country. By removing the Laibon, the officers reckoned that the Kipsigis' country would be a lot easier to control. But they were wrong.

The British did not understand the Kipsigis' social and political institutions sufficiently; they did not realise that the influence of the Talai clan and the role they played in Kipsigi society was not based on a single individual. The institution of the Laibon was hereditary and therefore a new Talai Laibon emerged upon the removal of Laibon Koilegen to carry on his work. This was soon evident enough to the offices as resistance, albeit from the underground, continued. But what frustrated the local British officers the most in all this was not so much the charisma or pragmatism of the Laibon leadership but rather the spiritual aspect of it, which an exasperated assistant district commissioner named G. Beresford Stooke described in a memo as the 'the intangible power' of the Talai. With such 'power' in their disposal, the Talai leadership did not need a physical presence anywhere to lead the people in defying the British. An edict from the underground was enough.

Matters came to a head by 1930 when lawlessness had reached unbearable levels, thanks to this remote-control phenomenon. European farms were targeted by Kipsigi warriors. Livestock and firearms were looted and physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges were sabotaged. In 1934, the attorney-general placed a bill before the Legislative Council to debate the creation of a specific law to expel the entire Talai clan from the Kipsigis' country if, as Stooke put it, 'the government wants to rule this part of the colony'. The enactment of a new law was necessary as the Natives Removal Ordinance already in existence was considered too inadequate to deal with the Talai question.

This brings us to 22 October 1934, the day the Talai lost everything. For several months, even before the actual enactment of the Laibons (Talai) Removal Ordinance into law in August 1934, Kericho District Commissioner Douglas Brumage had rounded up all the Talai and held them captive in a transit camp in the location of Kiptere. Save for a few possessions, namely livestock, the entire Talai clan of 700 souls were dispatched into exile in Gwassi, a disease-infested place on the shores of Lake Victoria, empty-handed.

The Sondu River Bridge was the staging point of the long trek into Gwassi by bewildered Talai men, women and children and is today a monument of great emotion for every Talai survivor. Says David Tuei, a son of Gwassi survivor Chemiron arap Ng’asura: 'My father, although he was quite young, has never forgotten the Sondu Bridge; I think for him and all the victims, crossing the bridge was like for the Jews getting onto trains to the concentration camps during the Nazi outrage.'

The Talai remained in Gwassi until 1962 when the departing British government saw no reason to continue banishing them and allowed them to return to their old district of Kericho. But it was a changed district: the Kipsigis had taken over the Talai land. No Kipsigis seemed to have expected the Talai return. And not only that, the British had reckoned the Talai would be assimilated by the dominant Luo community in the vicinity of Gwassi where they had been exiled to. But everyone was wrong, the resilient Talai returned intact having maintained their identity and the Kipsigis' cultural disposition.

The reluctant but nonchalant British authorities allowed the Talai to settle down on the outskirts of Kericho town pending possible resettlement. But close to half a century down the line, the Talai are still squatting on the sliver of land on the edge of town, completely forgotten. Post-colonial governments of Kenya have turned a blind eye to the plight of the Talai even as their population continues to rise and challenges multiply.

Says prominent Nairobi lawyer and scholar Kimutai Bosek: 'The Talai are an aggrieved party and it behoves the British and Kenya governments to provide the Talai with adequate resettlement and compensation for their losses and suffering arising from these injustices.' The lawyer also points out the fact that the British as a colonising power violated international law of the time when they deported the Talai. 'It was incumbent upon the British, the colonising power, to observe the provision of the Article 23 (b) of the League of Nations Charter, which proclaimed that every member country of the League would undertake to secure just treatment of the native inhabitants of territories under their control.' Of course, the lawyer does not agree that the British government needed deport the Talai in the first place, simply because its officers did not have the ingenuity to deal with the Talais' 'intangible power'.

Finally, the deportation of the Talai brings to mind the case of the Illois of the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean archipelago of Chagos. The British government, driven by its usual obsession to support the US, expelled the Illois people to Mauritius in 1971 to pave the way for the establishment of a naval base on Diego Garcia. But a spirited character called Oliver Bancoult sued the British in London for acts of violence against his community and won the case in 2000. Lord Justice Laws, the presiding judge, lived up to his name by finding the British guilty. He described the deportation of the Illois as an 'abject legal failure' and added that 'I cannot see how the wholesale removal of a people from the land where they belong can be said to conduce to the territory's peace, order and good government.'

Can the Talai, like their compatriots, the Mau Mau – who have already brought a case against the British – succeed in getting justice?

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

NOTES

[1] The Nandi and the Kipsigis are closely related members of the Kalenjin-speaking peoples of East Africa.

UK border policy decreases migrant civil liberties

Tendai Marima

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57947

cc M SchinkelAlthough the UK government’s new e-Borders policy will apply to all travellers leaving the country, Tendai Marima argues that its biggest impact will be on people who have been ‘historically targeted as public enemy number one by race, nationality or class’. As a non-British citizen with a temporary residence permit, Marima fears the policy is yet another manifestation of a growing ‘unwelcomeness’ towards immigrants, and a portent that the state will place further limitations on ‘the right of the stranger’.

As of September 2009, the UK Border Agency will begin to institute its e-Borders policy. This policy states that everyone leaving the country will be required to submit 53 pieces of personal information relating to their travels. It is argued that it does not contravene UK data and information legislation and is seen by UK as a protective rather than invasive measure. In terms of state resources, it translates to £400 million that the traveller will pay for through ticket taxes. It is deeply ironic and troubling that gainfully employed people work to pay taxes to prop up a system that violates the individual's right to privacy and freedom of movement. Such is the peculiarly contradictory and oppressive nature of state politics; which is by no means a UK phenomenon but a universal condition that operates in ways as multiplicitous as they are complex.

Policing the movements of individuals through e-Borders questions the importance of the values of democracy and freedom in the eyes of the state. If the phenomenological relation between subject and state is one of accountability, responsibility and reciprocity, then UK state policy is sorely lacking in this regard.

These 53 questions, in my view, represent a new method of citizen control in the name of policing terrorism. It’s already being done in the US, Spain, Canada and Australia, so arguing that this is a global trend and a necessity, UKBA has been able to pass this as policy. In an age of hyper-fear and increasing surveillance stemming from 9/11, this is one of the many control features symbolising the panopticon state where everyone's every move is watched. While I am aware that all people will be subject to this system of tracking, the impact of this policy on a particular group of people is of concern to me. Those who have been historically targeted as public enemy number one by race, nationality or class, will as travellers top the list as those whose movements are to be tracked. If anyone naively believes otherwise, then the full framework of this policy, in the context of this article, needs to be pieced together. The revised UK visa system of November 2008 requires foreigners to carry bio-metric identity cards, and those coming in are subject to a similar bio-metric regulation that requires their details to be stored.

Adding to this the government mantra 'British jobs for British workers'; the UK is becoming increasingly inhospitable towards immigrants. More perverse manifestations of unwelcomeness will continue as the recession leaves many unemployed. As a non-British citizen who requires a permit to be here and to travel to other parts of Europe, I am worried about how much more 'the right of the stranger', as the late Jacques Derrida terms it, will be limited as time goes on. Marked out as 'the Other' in the construction of the Fortress of Europe, the Schengen visa system means I am subject to visa restrictions, arbitrary refusals of entry and its information system already tracks my movements.

Come September I and others of non-EU citizenship, will be subject to even more scrutiny and in the full glare of the panopticon British state and the European Union. For me, as an African whose native country has a strained relationship with the UK, this interprets into a new kind of containment that works in unison with the crackdown on asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

The UK has among the highest records of deportations in Europe and statistics from the Border Agency show that 2008 the rate of removals was one person every eight minutes – even to countries like Algeria, Congo and Pakistan where conditions for safe returns are not always guaranteed, despite the UK's firm assurances.

From an immigrant's perspective, the relationship between deportation, biometric ID cards and the proposed 53 questions shows the true colours of the government, beneath the facade of a multi-cultural, tolerant Britain. Supposedly as progressive and democratic as it is cosmopolitan and diverse, in truth this is an economically unequal society, whose blue-collar immigrant labourers live on the margins of society. Government policy towards the broader group of immigrants in the form of travel surveillance checks such as e-borders is, in my view, indicative of the harsh curtailment of immigrants' civil liberties.

The laws of hospitality, as Jacques Derrida argues, are paradoxically bound with questions of state sovereignty and unconditional hospitality where the stranger is not subject to unwarranted interrogation when in the host country. Unfortunately, we live in a world where Derrida's ideal hospitality is becoming increasingly impossible to achieve. The balance between 'the right of the stranger' and that of the state is a precarious one, that raises tensions on nationalist, racist or political grounds and in its most extreme forms it has violently divided societies between 'us' and 'them', as evidenced by the electoral seat won by the neo-fascist British National Party (BNP) and the upsurge in Islamophobia.

In this regard, the 53 questions will feed this fear and mark out Muslims and Arabs as trackable individuals rather than as ones offered hospitality – in the form of more culturally-sensitive integration policies. For Arabs and those whom the juridical distinction between European and non-European is discriminatory, the e-borders policy gives the state more power to keep arbitrary 'non-suspect' tabs on travel. Public attention needs to be brought to the serious implications of e-borders and to mobilise a challenge to the legality of this autocratic surveillance policy.

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* Tendai Marima is a Zimbabwean currently undertaking a PhD in Zimbabwean women's writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Madonna, Mercy and neocolonialism

Ama Biney

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57933

cc EvaMadonna's ability to adopt a Malawian child in spite of an original court verdict against her is deeply worrying, writes Ama Biney. Madonna's action belongs in an established neocolonial tradition, Biney argues, one in which Malawi's Supreme Court judges have played a role not dissimilar to that of slavery-era African chiefs as the facilitators of human transfer. Recalling the forewarnings of Kwame Nkrumah around the shadow of neocolonialism, Biney contends that retaining Africans' self-respect will depend on challenging dehumanisation and putting such subjugation to an end.

In 19th century England it was fashionable for the middle-class and aristocratic English gentlemen and ladies to return from the West Indies with a black male or female domestic servant to serve in their lavish homes; such Africans were at times painted with this genteel class sitting by their feet like pet dogs or accessories. It exemplified that they were well-to-do, had travelled and had money. It set a trend among the English elite. Today, the vogue among Western celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie has reconfigured this practice.

Madonna’s recent adoption of Mercy James Chifundo, and the adoption by Angelina Jolie of an Ethiopian child, are not devoid of the usual patronising and unconscious Western stereotypes that have historically characterised how Europeans see Africans and have related to the African continent. In the 21st century new forms of colonial subjugation have engulfed Africa, racism has reshaped itself and Africans have continued to be co-opted as collaborators in their own subjugation, such as when Malawi’s Supreme Court lawyers recently permitted the 50-year-old singer to adopt the 4-year-old Mercy along with David Banda, who was adopted in 2006 at the age of 13 months. How many wealthy Africans do we see going to the Romanian orphanages to adopt orphans there? And if they did, would it have the historical baggage that resides in the relationship between Africans and Europeans? Would it be morally or ethically correct if they did so?

A recent documentary entitled ‘Madonna and Mercy: What really happened’ broadcast in the United Kingdom on 29 June 2009 was presented by the British investigative journalist Jacques Perreti. Its force was that it unearthed two dangerous and important facts: first, the involvement of the Kabbalah sect, related to Judaism, in the social and economic fabric of Malawian society; second, the collusion of the Malawian government in Madonna’s charity Raising Malawi that builds orphanages in the country.

In the 19th century the Scottish missionary David Livingstone came to Malawi to save African heathens. Unknown to many individuals in the West and in Africa is the fact that Madonna belongs to the religious organisation Kabbalah that has allegedly provided childcare centres to 160,000 children in Malawi.

Fundamentally, neocolonialism is thriving on the African continent in different permutations from its 19th century predecessors of formal colonialism and slavery that engendered direct colonial rule. During the Slave Trade, African people were taken to slave markets and auctions in the Americas and the Caribbean. They were inspected like cattle. In the documentary, we learn that Madonna’s first adoption of David Banda in 2006 was prearranged by her then husband, Guy Ritchie, who saw David. It seems David was not among the 12 children lined up for inspection by Ritchie, who somehow saw David in the orphanage and sent pictures of him to Madonna before she came to Malawi to see him for herself.

Her arrival is similar to those few European slave-owning women in the Caribbean, who were a minority but no less brutal in their treatment and attitudes to African slaves, as documented in the scholarly work by female historian, Verene Shepherd. Unlike those European slave-owning women, Madonna contends that her motives are benevolent and altruistic. Her charity Raising Malawi is run by Michael Birch, head of Kabbalah in the US, of which Madonna is a prominent member. Other celebrities donate to the Kabbalah organisation; they wear a special wristband that David Banda can now be seen sporting and they promote 'spirituality for kids'. Children are flown to the US for training and taught that they can expect miracles and returned to Malawi.

How different is this from the young Kikukyu boys British colonial officials rounded up to train to become tax collectors for the British colonial administration? Is it not disturbing that all orphanages are paid for in Malawi by foreign donors? The implications of this are that an entire generation of children are being 'raised' in the Kabbalah mindset. Is Madonna really doing good for Africa and the Mercys and Davids of Africa? To what extent is she different from the 19th century Europeans who arrived in Africa to engage in ivory hunting? Perhaps she is merely hunting in order to save babies, is she not? Some would argue that such children would otherwise lead a life of poverty, if not death.

The role of the Malawian government and the three Supreme Court judges who made the ruling on 12 June in favour of Madonna are fundamentally complicit in this neocolonial partnership. We need to ask the question: Why did Malawi’s Supreme Court judges allow Mercy to be adopted by overturning the decision of the lower court in April 2009? The provincial justice, Esimie Chombo, stated in April that special exemptions for celebrity adoptions risked opening the door to child-trafficking in the future. She blocked the adoption on the grounds that the American star was not a Malawian resident, but this argument was dismissed by the higher court on 12 June 2009. Even prior to Mercy’s case, going back to the period when David Banda was adopted by the singer, her adoption spree had been attacked both by local and international aid agencies and rights groups who believe it violates international child welfare and adoption rights. The Supreme Court waived the normal requirement of 18 months residency for any foreign national looking to adopt a Malawian child.

It appears Malawi’s three Supreme Court judges performed a not dissimilar role to the African chiefs during slavery. Such traditional leaders sold African people into slavery to Europeans, giving rise to African-Americans, Afro-Latinos and African-Caribbeans.

Those chiefs did not know the lands that lay beyond the Atlantic Ocean. The African judges who legalised Mercy’s adoption cannot plead such ignorance of life in the West. The Malawian government Spokesperson for Adoption Silas Chege appeared like a bumbling, disingenuous, buffoon character; like that of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson. When asked in an interview whether he was concerned that Madonna and the Kabbalah organisation may be attempting to create a Kabbalah state, he laughed and said: 'My mandate is to speak on behalf of children and women. My area is not spiritual.' The minister was asked if he was aware that Madonna’s organisation was in the process of buying land for the building of a girls school and the fact that local villagers were not only concerned about being pushed off their land but that they had yet to receive the promised US$4,000 for the land, despite the fact that the government had marked up the land for Madonna’s contractors to begin building. He responded: 'I wouldn’t comment on that. I guess they are following procedures.'

What can be inferred from the minister’s evasive response is his sheer indifference because the government considers Madonna an important donor who has donated US$12 million to Malawi since the establishment of her foundation. The climax of the interview with Mr Chege was when the journalist put the following to the minister: 'Mr Chege, doesn’t it confirm to you the rich white missionary coming into an African country and preaching a new religion and saying "take this and you’ll be saved"?' The minister responded: 'No, because I think the missionaries when they were coming they clearly declared themselves as missionaries. Dr David Livingstone was moving with the bible.' To this Jacques Peretti replied: 'I think you’ve given the best answer I’ve heard since I’ve been in Malawi which is that the first missionaries came and they declared themselves. And that’s the difference between the missionaries of 150 years ago and the missionaries of now. The missionaries now are not declaring themselves.' To this, the minister could only respond with laughter!

Equally disturbing is the fact that little attention is paid – if any – to the reality that Mercy will be deprived of growing up in her own cultural environment by living in the West. The cultural alienation and covert racism that continue to be ingrained in British society are some of the issues that fail to be addressed in the complexities of the arguments. How will Mercy and David Banda (and others that are likely to follow this trend) deal with the issue of racial identity as they grow up in Madonna’s white English world? What identity will they be brought up with? Will it be Malawian, African, black, English, white, American? Will they seek to straighten their broad African noses like the late Michael Jackson? Or will they bleach their skin in a Western society still bound to historical notions of a 'pigment-ocracy' based on the notion that 'the lighter your skin complexion, the more attractive you are'?

Mercy and David will certainly, like Michael Jackson, have the financial means to alter their physical appearance via cosmetic surgery in the materialist world they will be immersed in. They will want for nothing in Madonna’s 'material world'. Yet, who will their role models be in such a world? What version of history will they learn at school? What cultural and moral values will they be exposed to and taught? Across Africa, there exists the philosophy that 'it takes a village to raise a child.' In the Western world different family values exist and are pervaded by individualism; each parent has individual possession over their children and children can report their parents to the state. Such a culture does not exist in Africa. In the UK the charitable organisation ChildLine exists, whereby children can report on anything from being bullied at school to their parents beating and abusing them, whereas in Africa every child has a line to many adults surrounding them in their extended family, for not only support and guidance, but for chastisement and advice!

What could Madonna do to help the thousands of Davids and Mercys? In the specific case of David and Mercy, they were never strictly orphans. They both had one living parent. David’s father Yohane gave up his son believing that he was breaking the cycle of poverty by allowing his child the opportunity to go to the West to get an education in order to return and help his people. This is a view that many Africans, even outside of Malawi, continue to uphold and revere. That Yohane loved his son is unquestionable, as he would borrow a bicycle to make the 50-mile trip to the orphanage where David was staying to visit his son. Similarly, Mercy’s 18-year-old father, who went into hiding when his then 14-year-old girlfriend became pregnant with Mercy, wanted his daughter but could not provide for her, as did Mercy’s grandmother, Lucy. Yet poverty was the decisive factor in prompting the decision to hand over the child to the pop star. The grandmother seemed to be powerless against the consensus of patriarchal opinion in favour of the young Mercy being adopted for similar reasons to that of David Banda.

The bottom line is, can a better standard of living, healthcare, education and loving adoptive parents ever make up for what is lost when an African child is removed from their country and culture? Could other solutions to this issue not be found? What are those solutions?

Firstly, more Africans at home and abroad have to take responsibility by positively doing something about the issue of Africa’s orphans by sponsoring such African children to go to school. In Malawi alone, it is reported that there are approximately 4,000 children orphaned by Aids.

Secondly, we need a new type of principled and progressive leadership across Africa that will put people – namely, women and children – at the centre of development and provide for their basic needs. The type of leadership and position demonstrated by Minister Chege must be exposed.

Thirdly, if the Madonnas and Angelina Jolies of this world really want to do something positive for Africa and African people, it could be argued that they could simply have paid a monthly allowance to the remaining parents of David and Mercy to have looked after their own children, with no strings attached. Yet such an arrangement continues the subservience of Africans to Westerners. Alternatively, with all their wealth and access to it, such Western celebrities could be involved in schemes to create jobs in Africa that would employ the skills of David and Mercy’s fathers so they could have the dignity to work in order to look after their own children, rather than relying on monthly handouts from a famous Western celebrity.

But ultimately, as long as the African state cannot provide for its own citizens' basic welfare and has to rely on the handouts of former colonial powers, foreign donors or Western NGOs – many of whom perform roles as the missionaries of the 21st century – African states will never be politically and economically independent. As far back as April 1958, Kwame Nkrumah had the prescience to warn Africans at the Conference of Independent States, hosted by Ghana, of the spectre of neocolonialism. He later advanced his ideas on what he described at the time as the 'new forms of colonialism which are now appearing in the world, with their potential threat to our precious independence' in his book ‘Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’, published in 1965. Since Nkrumah, neocolonialism has advanced its operations and manifestations on the African continent. Yet the dignity of African people on the continent and in the diaspora will continue to be damaged by the arrogant paternalism, dependency and obsequious attitude that exists among some African ministers who collude with Westerners in our continued subjugation and dehumanisation. It is necessary to expose this pernicious and odious neocolonial relationship. More importantly, as Africans, we have to end it in order to regain our self-respect.

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

Weep not, child

Cultural nationalism and the Madonna adoption case

Tee Ngugi

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/57941

cc KhymTee Ngugi shares with Pambazuka News why he believes the Malawi Supreme Court has made the right decision in allowing Madonna to proceed with her adoption of orphan Mercy Chifundo, despite vehement opposition from the continent’s beard-stroking 'cultural nationalists'.

There are two paradigms – in and out of court – that are being used to debate the Mercy Chifundo adoption case. One is a legal paradigm in which the arguments being advanced attempt to determine to what degree Madonna fulfilled or failed to fulfill the requirements of the Malawian adoption law. The other, led by our intellectuals, is a cultural nationalist paradigm which analyses the case in terms of the opposition between Western cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism. In this latter instance, 4-year-old Mercy Chifundo, who is just an orphan in need of a loving family and the best chance at success in life, is reduced to cultural nationalism’s latest exhibit in its body of evidence against Western imperialism.

Cultural nationalism’s core argument is that Africa has a unique cultural history and, therefore, universal theories and practices of social and economic development cannot be applied to Africa. Abdullahi an-Naim, a rights scholar, best captures this view:

'International standards on universal human rights have been primarily conceived, developed and established by the West. They cannot be accepted and implemented globally by peoples of other parts of the world.' Cultural nationalism’s goal is to define an African model of socio-economic development based on the notion of an authentic African experience. Sedar Senghor, for example, argued that the West’s rationality was cold and dehumanising, and instead advocated for a society informed by emotion which, he claimed, was a humanising aspect of the African personality. Other expressions of cultural nationalism – Mobutu’s authenticism, Kaunda’s humanism, Nkrumah’s conciencism, and even today’s afrocentric intellectual expressions – are based on an assumed existence of an African worldview and sense of ‘being’ provided by the African traditional society.

As the dominant post-colonial thought, cultural nationalism not only informed our body politic, but has also exerted a dominating influence on our artistic and other expression. In much of African literature, for instance, the motive is to validate the precolonial traditional society. This effect is achieved by juxtaposing characters morally corrupted by western influence to the moral uprightness of characters who remain true to their traditional values ( Okot P’ Bitek’s Song of Lawino best exemplifies this tendency). Even young African writers and artists who have never experienced traditional life, feel constrained to reproduce the philosophy and imagery of an idyllic traditionalism and the Babylon of Western influence. This idea of the self-evident morality of traditional culture and the corrupting influences of the West is all pervasive, finding expression in discussions on topics ranging from women’s rights to democracy on our call-in radio chat shows and TV debates. For the few who decide to write about the experiences of a modern African who is responsible for his/her situation and conditions of life, the rebuke from the cultural nationalist orthodoxy is swift and ruthless. In an article in the BBC Africa magazine, Kenyan filmmaker Judy Kibinge recalls the opposition to her film on the basis that 'Africans do not kiss', this particular lapse in morality being caused, I suspect, by the corrupting influences of the West.

Thus the cultural nationalists’ vehement opposition to Mercy Chifundo’s adoption by Madonna. Never mind the merits of the legal and moral arguments in favour of the adoption, or the fact that, by all accounts, Madonna is a good mother. Never mind that the adoption gives little Mercy a means of escape from her grim circumstance and the best chance to become a successful African woman. Never mind all that. In the view of cultural nationalism, this is Western imperialism in the person of Madonna seeking to corrupt African culture and African sense of ‘being’ in the person of Mercy. So the newly-found biological father of the child, even though he had never even seen her, pronounces his opposition to the adoption and proudly declares that he wants her to 'grow as a Malawian…with our culture.' No shame for having shirked his responsibilities, no criticism of himself, or even of the politicians that have made Malawi such a poor country. But that’s just the problem with cultural nationalism – you need not own up to your responsibilities and failures. All one needs to do is claim African culture and castigate the sinister intentions of western imperialism, and one is free of any responsibility. That is why so very often, criticism of shortcomings in our governance and politics, or even artistic products, is met with a cultural nationalist defence or – as made famous by Robert Mugabe – offence.

The Malawi Supreme Court has decided to act in the strict interests of the child in accordance with the statute governing adoption, overturning an earlier ruling. Had the judges of the Supreme Court succumbed to the ideological arguments and ruled against the adoption, the proponents of cultural nationalism – no doubt stroking their professorial beards and patting their flowing Kente robes – would have celebrated the ‘victory’ over this latest of assaults by western imperialism. In a Malawian orphanage, a little child would have continued to play, innocent of the life she had just been condemned to live, and unaware of the cruel irony that cultural nationalism, which has informed – explicitly or implicitly – the ruinous post-independence socio-economic policies which created the conditions that produce thousands of children like her in Africa, had acted again to block her escape from those conditions.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Tee Ngugi is a former columnist for The Namibian newspaper and the Southern Times, and now works for a non-governmental organisation.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Africa’s children haunt the US prison system

Dan Moshenberg

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/57945

cc F FIn the wake of studies that suggest that by age 14, a quarter of black American children born in 1990 had a father in jail, Dan Moshenberg calls for the US to take action to prevent the incarceration of primary caregivers. New research suggests that having a parent in prison ‘doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behaviour, social isolation, depression and problems in school’, underscoring the need, argues Moshenberg, for ‘a distinctly human – and African – solution to a distinctly American risk for the children descended from Africa.'

The New York Times has yet again 'discovered' a crisis among African American youth. Africa’s children haunt the United States, home of 'the incarceration generation': 'The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behaviour, social isolation, depression and problems in school – all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.'

‘Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,’ said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the ‘incarceration generation’. Incarceration rates in the United States have multiplied over the last three decades, in part because of stiffer sentencing rules. At any given moment, more than 1.5 million children have a parent, usually their father, in prison, according to federal data. But many more are affected over the course of childhood, especially if they are black, new studies show. Among those born in 1990, one in four black children, compared with one in 25 white children, had a father in prison by age 14. Risk is concentrated among black children whose parents are high-school dropouts; half of those children had a father in prison, compared with one in 14 white children with dropout parents, according to a report by Dr Wildeman recently published in the journal Demography. For both blacks and whites, the chances of parental incarceration were far higher than they were for children born just 12 years earlier, in 1978.’

None of this is new news or surprising. Cage the fathers, super-exploit the mothers, forget the children. It’s a simple program. Put a nation of mothers behind bars, where too often there are no fathers or other guardians around and there is no public support, and you imprison the children. Where’s the surprise? Shackle pregnant women prisoners in labour and delivery, in the name of security. Are you surprised? This has all been said before. It’s common knowledge.

Albie Sachs is a South African judge who also haunts the US prison system. Why? Because he is a decent human being, that’s why. He decided to listen to a woman colleague, who argued that a woman, Mrs M, could be a good mother who had made some mistakes – many mistakes in fact – but a good mother who was not a monster. His female colleague argued as well that Mrs M’s children had rights, constitutionally protected rights. In effect, she argued that the constitution codifies responsibility, state as well as individual. Albie Sachs did not shrug; instead, he listened and heard. In the S versus M case, Sachs decided that primary caregivers of children should not be sent to jail. That decision haunts US prisons as it haunts The New York Times story.

Sachs later discovered that he was not alone in his finding. In Scotland, Kathleen Marshall’s report, Not seen. Not heard. Not guilty, argued that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ‘are systematically ignored by the court system. The report found that almost two-thirds of prisoners in the Cornton Vale women's prison in Stirling had children under 18, but there was no provision to take their rights into account during sentencing.’ Kathleen Marshall’s report haunts the prisons and the accounts of prisons in the United States.

In South Africa, Albie Sachs took responsibility and acted. In Scotland, so did Kathleen Marshall. In the US, it’s time, it’s way past time, for similar action. Perhaps South Africa could send some judges whose judicial expertise is founded in human decency and a sense of social justice, to bring a distinctly human – and African – solution to a distinctly American risk for the children descended from Africa.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Dan Moshenberg is co-convener of Women In and Beyond the Global, and director of the Women’s Studies programme, George Washington University. A different version of this article appears at Women In and Beyond the Global.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

An open letter to Barack Obama and Ban Ki-moon

Vincent Nuwagaba

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/57936

cc WikimediaVincent Nuwagaba tells Pambazuka readers of his inhumane treatment at the hands of staff at Uganda's Butabika Hospital and criticises the extent to which state institutions have been reduced to the whims of President Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM).

RE: ASSAULT BY BUTABIKA HOSPITAL GUARDS CITING ORDERS FROM ABOVE AND INHUMANE AND DEGRADING TREATMENT OF GAUDENCE TUSHABOMWE

I wish to bring to your attention that I was badly beaten by Butabika Hospital guards citing orders from above. This is not the first time I have been assaulted at the same hospital since my ordeal there when their medical staff, Dr Nakku, Mr Jjuko and later Dr Tom Onen, whom I sued as the second defendant together with the attorney general who connived with the police to help torture me with the intention of ultimately having me dead, an intention they nearly attained as I stopped at the verge of my grave. Although the first time the assault was not physical yesterday I was physically assaulted and I feel a lot of pain in my ribs and in my eyes where the security guard hit me in the presence of the police and one of the hospital administrators, who refused to disclose his name to me. I will not comprehensively document what I went through for I feel the details can be an issue for the human rights report, or a defender article or a newspaper article. But all in all what happened is a pointer that our institutions are not weak but both dysfunctional and dead.

I had gone to investigate a case concerning one Gaudence Tushabomwe, 34, a university student doing BCOM external year 3 from Kirema, Kinkizi, Kanungu District. Her area MP is the Honourable Dr Chris Baryomunsi. Tushabomwe reportedly had 25m and 14,000 Uganda shillings which she deposited with COWE which had come disguised as a charity for caring for orphans and women. Tushabomwe alleges that COWE belongs to the first family and therefore she was fleeced of her money by the first family, a family which ironically should be responsible for protecting her and other Ugandans. She told me what pains her so much is to take it as a political threat. Tushabomwe can be reached on +256 782 343 580.

Apparently, she used all available channels to have redress and failed. She showed me messages on her phone sent to Amelia Kyambadde from her cell phone: +256 753 000 277. She reportedly used the Honourable Fred Ruhindi, Simon Mayende and Chris Baryomunsi all in vain.

Surprisingly, even the media workers that we take to be human rights defenders didn’t run her story. She told me of John Njoroge of The Independent, Dreck of Vumbula on WBS and CBS. She told me even Jasper Tumuhimbise of ACCU failed to handle the matter. The story is too long and I am ready to compile a full report if I am given the opportunity to get more details from her.

As a human rights defender I found that quite interesting. Interesting in a sense that the goons who stressed I had a mental illness that must at all costs be treated by forcefully injecting me with their poison and making me swallow their toxic tablets, now fear me to the extent of declaring me a persona non grata. I will insist and keep going there to establish whether the people detained there genuinely have a mental illness.

It perturbs me to consider the NRM (National Resistance Movement) government that sold our parastatals and never gave accountability of the proceeds thereof, a government that shamelessly pilfers taxpayers’ money to bribe the myopic MPs to lift the ban on term limits for a man who has only turned a populist and exploited the masses' ignorance to retain power, and who is accused, along with his family, of stealing money from indigent Ugandans. I have come to learn that all Yoweri Museveni wants is to make all Ugandans poor so that they will forever remain subservient. He knows pretty well that poverty leads to voicelessness and powerlessness, attributes he wants to forever remain in power.

What Mr Museveni doesn’t know is that the same poverty leads to normlessness, frustration, hopelessness and alienation, which are not good for any society. Accordingly, we are not about to see the reduction in crimes. The police itself, an institution whose mandate is to combat crime, is full of criminals. I say this one without any fear of contradiction, for I have a practical experience with them. General Kayihura was named among the people that orchestrated my arrest and whose mission was to have me killed. I say this because I was detained incommunicado; a celebrated professor of law Dr John-Jean Barya was blocked from seeing me after he was informed that I had been in the cells for the past two days; I was told they would poison me, which was reason enough for me not to eat their despicable food; they stole my money, my computer and my clothes, something which I reported at the police and which they chose to ignore.

Shamelessly, after doing all those horrible, horrendous, horrid and nasty things, they connived with Butabika and took me as a mental patient. Now they regret why they ever did that and rather than swallow their pride as say we are sorry, they have declared me persona non grata at Butabika Hospital.

Whoever has been thinking that Vincent Nuwagaba is looking for a job from Museveni, please keep reading this. I have put my position in black and white so that in future should I be seen serving this notorious dictatorship that disguises itself as a democracy, then know that nobody can be trusted. As I send this letter to you, all the media houses are being given copies and the president himself has been given one. This will prove whether Museveni has indeed spurred development in this country or whether his government is just demonic. I would at least expect such things to be done by normal people. Accordingly, whoever is behind the ordeal of the innocent Gaudence Tushabomwe and myself is suffering from schizophrenia, which is the highest form of mental illness. But also, the so-called consultants in Butabika who keep people brought by the police are not only insane but mad. They ought to be removed from society. They are a danger to society and a potential danger to themselves.

HARASSMENT DOESN’T THREATEN ME

I would wish to remind whoever is behind my harassment that I am intrepid. I have refused to be incarcerated by fear. In fact, when I am tortured, dehumanised and humiliated I count that to be a milestone. How would you genuinely call yourself a human rights defender if you have not faced any threat and if you say should you be threatened you capitulate. Yesterday when I was beaten from Butabika Hospital, my colleague in the research division of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative sent me a text message that read, 'please leave that place immediately, they can easily kill you'. But I never capitulated. I called my brother who works with Amnesty Commission and I entered the hospital premises. The hospital staff are engulfed in paranoia because of the criminality they have been orchestrating over the years. What all of us need to know is that there is an end to everything. My ordeal may have been designed by God to put a stop to this autocratic regime. I have come to believe that any dictatorship fears the battle of the brain and this tells us that the saying that 'the pen is mightier than the sword' holds true.

As I was writing this article my foster-father Henry Rukundo called me and I told him that I was beaten from Butabika. He sounded annoyed with me. He said in Runyankole 'beitu shi iwe tobireka. Okazayo bakukoma bakuha emibazi ngu oshazire mbwenu nogaruka nozayo. Ahamuheru nibaza nokukutererayo amasaasi. This literally translated means, 'why don’t you do away with that place? You went there and were detained and sedated as though you were a mental patient. Surprisingly you go back. Next time they will fire you with live bullets.' When I told him whether I should stop working he told me, 'okore ahandi kandi omu department orimu wenka?' I complied because I never wanted to keep him worried, for I know how much he loves me. But I think I am better placed to research on mental health rights and am better placed to speak out for people in Gaudance Tushabomwe’s case because I have been in a similar situation.

What is paradoxical is that my dad, Rukundo, works with the Presidential Initiative on Banana Plantation but typical of this corrupt and heartless regime, he rarely gets his salary. Meanwhile Reverand Florence Muranga, who heads the project, enjoys herself too much. Robert Rotberg argues that in a failed state there are a few cliques of people who have too much money alongside too many people experiencing poverty, exploitation, dehumanisation and injustices of all sorts. I am giving my views as a political scientist and I expect whoever disagrees with me is free to give his or her account. I expect a civilised debate. If the president feels he is an achiever he will win the debate in which case I will look for any other place to live in. But, I am not ready to leave Uganda before 2011. If the 2011 election is botched then I will seek asylum because it seems things are only getting worse. As we await 2011, the president and his team are enjoined that I am not harmed.

RECOMMENDATION TO THE MEDIA

Please, do us a favour. The Western democracies have a soft spot for Museveni even when they know he has no scintilla of democratic credentials. Should he stay all the critical voices will be silenced and muzzled. Never rely on the Ugandan press, for it reports only symptoms. I state this without any fear of contradiction that the Ugandan press is hopeless and almost useless. Useless in a sense that the underdogs do not matter to them. I used to send stories to The Independent magazine started by Andrew Mwenda. Even when I was sanctioned by the Managing Director Mwenda himself, my stories could be blocked by one of the editors. When I asked him, he told me, 'Vincent, look, if you submit an article and Professor Oloka Onyango submits one, no matter whether your article is better than Oloka’s we shall not run your article.' When I asked him why they don’t promote ideas he told me if my ideas are to be promoted I should also first become a professor. I informed his boss who encouraged me to keep writing, promising that some will be run and others will not.

On 11 April 2008, a day I was arrested, I called my very good friend who works with the Daily Monitor, telling him my life was in danger. He never appeared anywhere and I am sure even his appearance alone as a journalist would have saved me.

On 17 June 2009 I received threats from the police and Dr Tom Onen, from none other than the police commissioner in charge of legal affairs Mr Sam Kyomukama. He told me, 'Nuwagaba, you will be secure only when you have the goodwill of the people.' I told him, that is yet another threat against my life. I said I cannot have the goodwill of the criminals in the state institutions on whose toes I have been stepping. In that very meeting Kyomukama asked me whether I had sent a text message to Dr Onen. I said indeed I have. I read for him the message I had last sent to him which read, 'Dr Onen, you declared me a person of unsound mind, do you know it is you the public knows you are insane? I want you to read my literature on the net. I will use the brain you said I don’t have to annihilate you. You are a murderer and you don’t deserve the job you hold. But you will pay for your sins.'

Kyomukama then asked me, 'What does annihilate mean?' I told him it has two meanings: 1) to destroy somebody or something completely or; 2) to defeat somebody or something completely. I told him I had no regret whatsoever for such a text message and I was ready to defend myself in court. I unequivocally told him, after defeating the attorney general and Dr Tom Onen in court, that I will make sure that Onen pays heavily for defaming me but also will ensure that he loses his job. If that is not annihilation, what is it? Actually it is on the basis of that that the commissioner of police told me that I will be safe only if I have the goodwill of the people.

Apparently a young man by the name of Ronald Magezi had tormented me before and taken me to be nothing. Yet he is a lawyer by training. I asked him whether we should respect him as a lawyer, yet he comports himself in an unlawful and inhumane manner. He told me, I forget they went to the same university that I went to. I told him unfortunately you don’t behave like you went to university because your conduct is unexpected of a graduate. Because I maintained my stand he later apologised, assuring me how he is a good man and that I should ask Alex Kibandama about him.

INSTITUTIONAL DYSFUNCTIONS

It is clear that state institutions have been personalised and the state reduced to a family property. This we have both a moral and legal obligation to reject. This reminds me about the French Revolution when the revolutionaries said, 'We are here by the will of the people and we shall not leave until the point of the bayonet.' As long as I personally am fighting for a just cause, if you harass me you only help to water and irrigate the revolution.

ON GOODWILL

I clearly don’t have the goodwill of monsters in our society. Paradoxically, I don’t support the death penalty, otherwise they would be candidates for that punishment. Thus I firmly believe that they need to be taken to Luzira maximum security prison. I don’t have the goodwill of the dysfunctional institutions, state-supported terrorists and greedy, corrupt and Machiavellian visionless politicians. I also do not need it. I would never touch the National Resistance Movement, even with the longest stick. My only prayer is that they should forthwith refrain from interfering with my God-given rights. And I am henceforth stressing that the NRM has no moral, legal, political or otherwise authority to meddle with my rights. The NRM does not own the state institutions and thus they have no right whatsoever to block me from visiting these institutions. I am a researcher and I am now researching on mental health. In fact, I have an assignment with Mental Health Uganda. How does anyone expect me to get data if I am blocked from accessing the mental patients and those deemed to be mental patients? Do they want to render me jobless like they did when I lost my jobs with Uganda Christian University and Poverty Eradication Think Tank Uganda (PETTU), where I had been appointed a national coordinator? Incidentally, after my ordeal PETTU collapsed in its infancy for there was nobody else that could steer it.

DEDUCTION

I am now convinced that every bad thing that happens does so for a cause. The case of Gaudence Tushabomwe is surely going to lead to the collapse of this regime, if at all that she alleges is true. And I want to firmly believe that all she said is true, for there is no way one can accuse the people who control the instruments of coercion.

Finally, the higher the monkey climbs the more it exposes her private parts. Museveni was right when he observed that the problem with Africa are leaders who overstay. Two decades later, the man seems to have forgotten all about what he said and wrote.

TO MUSEVENI

Please, Mr Museveni, do us a favour and look for where you belong. You cannot preside over dysfunctional state institutions, you cannot breastfeed, fuel and lubricate corruption (and you say you are suited to fighting corruption). Your people (the police and medics) wanted me dead, but by the grace of God I survived. This time, if I am to die in unclear circumstances all the accusing fingers will point at you. And I say you because all people that were killed by Idi Amin’s soldiers we say were killed by Amin. Please repent. You can join the catholic church if you are to be on a morally upright path, in which case you confess your sins and beg to be forgiven. If you indeed help heal the lives of many Ugandans who would otherwise perish in your presence as president, we are ready to forgive, although some of us cannot forget.

Together we can make a difference!

BROUGHT TO BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Vincent Nuwagaba can be contacted at vnuwagaba@gmail.com or on +256 772 843 553.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Deconstructing Obama’s speech in Ghana

Ama Biney

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/57935

cc Monde PersoReflecting on the US president's Accra speech in this week's Pambazuka News, Ama Biney finds Obama's dismissal of neocolonial explanations for Africa's difficulties worrying. Though apologetic towards his Arab audience for past US meddling while in Cairo earlier this year, Obama showed no inclination to acknowledge his country's support of African dictators such as the former Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Kenya's Daniel arap Moi. If Obama is not simply to be the new George W. Bush, albeit under a more humanitarian guise, he will need to advance a foreign policy genuinely grounded in economic and political equality, Biney writes. Echoing the words of the late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Biney stresses however that Africans should in reality prioritise pan-African solutions to their continent's challenges, rather than merely competing to be the US's 'brown-eyed ally'.

As a son of Africa, the first African-American president of the empire of the United States delivered a speech to Africans from a European would easily have been described as imperialist lecturing. But the on grounds of blood solidarity, Africans have lauded his 33-minute address at the Accra Conference Center on 11 July. The world, and Africans in particular, continue to be infatuated with what William Blum pertinently calls Obama’s 'toothpaste advertisement smile'. However, it is necessary for us to deconstruct Obama’s Ghana speech and charming smile. Did his speech indicate a new determination to engage with Africa in a different way from his predecessors? Were there sagacious insights in the understanding of the complexities and history of the African reality? To what extent did our African brother change the discourse beyond listing the faults of Africa against the yardstick of America? Should we have expected Obama to have thought differently about Africa simply because he is partly of African origin? How will his speech inform future US–Africa relations?

Firstly, the tone, contents and vision of Obama’s lecture would have been different if someone had given him, even if a day before, Walter Rodney’s classic ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, with Kwame Nkrumah’s ‘Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’ thrown in for good measure. Such texts would have given him the ideological and historical lens with which to have viewed Africa’s present economic and political predicament. Instead, the commander in chief of the empire 'deployed his impressive oratorical skills to frame a false historical and current reality about Africa', as Solomon Comissiong pointed out.[1]

But even before the president of the United States set foot on the African continent, his interview with AllAfrica.com at the White House in advance of his meeting featured disturbing views. He bemoaned the decline of Kenya’s GDP (gross domestic product) in the early 1960s, equivalent at the time to that of South Korea’s, and the 'steady application of some of these models over time in Africa', but when asked if that was the failure of US policy or a failure of governance in Africa, Obama replied: 'I think part of what’s hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we’ve made excuses about corruption or poor governance; that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism. I’m not a believer in excuses.' It appears Obama articulated what many Westerners have thought and continue to think, that racism, oppression and new forms of subjugating Africa are false explanations for the problems that confront the African continent and are no longer justifiable. This was a fundamental error in his analysis that he continued to advance when he arrived in Ghana’s capital, Accra.

Early in his speech, Obama said, 'the 21st century will be shaped by what happens not just in Rome or Moscow or Washington, but by what happens in Accra as well. This is the simple truth of a time when the boundaries between people are overwhelmed by our connections. Your prosperity can expand America’s. Your health and security can contribute to the world’s.' The president of America suffers from historical amnesia in the colossal wealth that has been extracted from Africa (leaving aside the millions of African slaves from whom his wife Michelle is descended). This wealth accumulation has not only continued in the post-independence phase, that is, the era of his father, but Africa’s 'prosperity' continues to expand America in an unequal relationship that is symptomatic of a global economic system currently in crisis.

Obama then went on to say, 'I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world – as partners with America on behalf of the future that we want for all our children. That partnership must be grounded in mutual responsibility…' Any genuine partnership must be grounded in honest truths and understandings of historical realities because history informs the present and the future. And then came another one of Obama’s fundamental analytical errors of the diagnosis of the problems of Africa. He said, 'It is easy to point fingers, and to pin the blame for these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense bred conflict, and the West has often approached Africa as a patron, rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.' This is where Obama’s ideological spectacles distorts the analysis of Africa’s past, because the West, including its leader, the US, has not only approached Africa as a patron but exploited her economically and politically for America’s own national and imperial interests, particularly during the period of the Cold War, indeed, throughout the 50 years of Africa’s post-independence history. The Cold War disfigured Africa and those impacts remain on the continent today. In short, as Commissiong explains, 'Obama spoke as if America and Europe had nothing to do with much of the "bad" governance that Mama Africa has seen since European invaders began their rape, murder and plunder.'[2]

However, it can be argued that the West has indirectly contributed to the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy in failing to honour the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, while Western multinational companies continue to aid and abet the proliferation of small arms that have ended up in the small hands of young boys as combatants in the wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda (with the Lord’s Resistance Army) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Following on that, Obama said to Ghanaians, ‘[W]e must recognise a fundamental truth that you have given life to in Ghana: development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That is the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is the responsibility that can only be met by Africans.' Furthermore, 'we must support strong and sustainable democratic governments… Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.'

Yet whilst in Cairo in early June this year, Obama appeared apologetic for America’s arrogance before his Arab audience. In Ghana, with the gaze of the whole of Africa and the world upon him, Obama did not acknowledge that his country had supported African dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko in the DRC and Daniel arap Moi in the land of his father, to name but two African countries where American meddling, whether it be economic or political, has impacted negatively on development. Neither did he mention that his presidential predecessors carried out regime change against the governments of Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba and for decades armed the opposition movements such as UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) led by Jonas Savimbi in Angola. The antipersonnel landmines that remain in Angola and require elimination are largely Western and supplied by top-secret private American companies. Just as Africa has no need for the 'caudillos' (strongmen) that have also characterised Latin American politics, Africa does not need Obama’s duplicity and imperial arrogance. In any partnership there must be political honesty wedded to a principled stand and analysis of past relationships that must inform future relations and actions. Otherwise deception continues and Obama will be nothing but Reaganism and Bushism in a humanitarian guise, albeit with an African face. Therefore, when Obama pronounces, 'America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation – the essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny', it is not surprising, if we look to historical experience as our guide and teacher, that seeds of scepticism inform our outlook. If Obama’s words were true, the embargo on Cuba would not remain and Cuba and America’s relationship would enter a new chapter in the making of history – but that is another story!

When Obama uttered that 'development depends upon governance' he should have elaborated further on these rather overused terms. Past American administrations, including that of Obama’s, equate 'democracy' and 'good governance' (with its heavily laden-value judgement) to mean a free market economy that defends American interests. The corollary is that any government that undermines American interests is undemocratic. However, Obama’s duplicitous stand can be seen in his visit to Egypt in June. Egypt is run by an 81-year-old octogenarian president who has been in power for over 28 years. What criteria influenced Obama’s team of advisors in selecting Egypt for his address to the Arab world? Was a blind eye turned to Egypt’s autocratic rule in favour of the fact that the American administration considers Egypt its number two best Arab ally, after Saudi Arabia, and therefore the fact that ordinary Egyptians do not have democracy (like the Saudis) is something Obama’s administration can trade off in the pursuit of their foreign policy interests?

Similarly, when the dictator Omar Bongo died earlier this month, a man who had ruled his oil-rich nation with an iron fist for 41 years, Obama noted 'President Bongo played a key role in developing and shaping the strong bilateral relationship between Gabon and the US today.' Yet Bongo was head of one of the most authoritarian one-party states in Africa and a man who killed and jailed members of the opposition. America has installed and funded many tyrannical African dictatorships, yet the commander in chief of the US empire, as Firoze Manji observed, should have acknowledged that the history of America’s 'relationship with Africa has not always been positive'.[3]

Fundamentally, Obama’s concept of democracy reflects the neoliberal agenda or Washington Consensus, which can be defined as the security of property rights, deregulation, a unified exchange rate, trade liberalisation, privatisation, fiscal discipline, a minimal role for the state in the economy to ensure the market runs unfettered for the maximisation of profit, low tax rates and financial sector liberalisation. However, the ongoing global economic meltdown, which began in the United States, raises important questions as to what kind of economic system is desirable to provide the maximum benefit to the majority of people, not just in Africa, but globally. What confidence can African people have in the neoliberal economic agenda that is in crisis in the West and which has been vociferously rejected in Latin America? To paraphrase the communist Joe Slovo, the Soviet Union may have failed with communism but neoliberal capitalism has failed humankind.

Obama said, 'The essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny. What we will do is increase assistance for responsible individuals and institutions, with a focus on supporting good governance – on parliaments, which check abuses of power and ensure that opposition voices are heard, on the rule of law, which ensures the equal administration of justice; on civic participation, so that young people get involved; and on concrete solutions to corruptions like forensic accounting, automating services, strengthening hotlines, and protecting whistleblowers to advance transparency and accountability.' The subtext is that if Africans behave and adhere to the rules of the game, often determined by others, they will be rewarded by what Obama refers to as 'assistance'. His criteria of 'good governance', which is tied to aid and imposed by the international financial institutions and the donor community, has become a political conditionality alongside the former economic conditionalities of the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs – otherwise known as Suffering African People). It appears this political conditionality has now been reconfigured in the terminology as 'good governance' which has come in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 along with the rise of the 'multipartyism'. It is the prevailing dominant discourse and purports to be a liberal one, even if the terms are coercive.

As the scholar Issa G. Shivji correctly identifies, 'The contemporary neoliberal discourse has one fundamental blind spot. It treats the present as if the present has had no history. The discourse on democracy in Africa suffers from the same blindness.'[4] As Shivji reminds us, 'the independence and liberation struggles for self-determination, beginning in the post-world war period, were eminently a struggle for democracy.' These were bottom-up struggles that engaged ordinary people in reclaiming 'the right to think for themselves and to chart their destiny'. The reality is that the trajectory of economic and political liberalism of 'good governance' – to use Obama-speak – does not represent mere reform but rather Africa’s further integration into the liberal and imperial global order. Obama likes to present himself as a man-of-change but his ahistorical perspective and language suggest no new grand vision or change for Africa.

Whilst America’s leader points to the corruption and bribery in Africa that is undoubtedly a problem borne of poverty and underdevelopment – as African people on the continent and abroad – we must hold him accountable to checking American and other Western companies that aid this corruption by paying facilitation fees – bribes – to ensure they obtain contracts favourable to them. Corruption is a two-way street, not only involving corruption between Africans but between Western companies and Africans too. According to Obama’s moral compass, is this not also reprehensible? Secondly, we must also ensure that such companies do not consider Africa a place of tax evasion, which means increasing profits for US companies and increasing poverty, unemployment and deskilling for Africans. Obama’s administration must prosecute American companies and individuals who bribe and avoid taxes, as such funds will positively assist Africa’s economic development. Thirdly, if Obama is genuine about tackling corruption, which not only has a moral dimension, but is rooted in economic and political realities, we must address the continuing looting of African dictators (like Mobutu, Bongo and others) sitting in Western and American banks. Their loot – money which belongs to ordinary African people – should be returned directly to civil society organisations to circumvent corrupt African governments using it for their own ends. For example, in 1999 the American Senate investigated Citibank and discovered that Bongo alone had US$130 million in his personal account with the bank. Yet, it is corrupt for this money to continue to reside in Citibank whilst poverty prevails among Gabon’s 2 million poor.

Ultimately, when we apportion historical blame for Africa’s current problems let us do so fairly whilst owning up to our own contribution to the problems. It is indisputable that African leadership of the worst kind – whether civilian or military – has contributed to the neocolonial mess that Africa is in. By neocolonial, I refer to local reactionary classes in Africa who align themselves with foreign imperial interests for economic and political gain; they are subservient and junior partners in the unequal global set-up.

However, another fundamental aspect of Africa’s continued poverty and underdevelopment lies in the fact that Africa has tried all the economic medicines and models since independence. Many of these prescriptions have perpetuated Africa’s subservience, technological and economic stagnation in the imperial world market. SAPs failed to bring about economic growth in many African countries. Yet Obama told us: 'Wealthy nations must open our doors to goods and services from Africa in a meaningful way. And where there is good governance, we can broaden prosperity through public–private partnerships that invest in better roads and electricity.' The premise of Obama’s thinking is that there is 'a direct correlation between governance and prosperity'. If we look to the world’s largest democracy, India, we can see this is not necessarily the case. The vast majority of Indians continue to confront economic poverty like many Africans. Therefore, democracy without justice is 'demon crazy' as one Kashmiri protester splashed on a placard. Economic justice for Africa may begin with a levelled playing field if African farmers received the same agricultural subsidies American and European farmers receive when their crops enter the world market. However, we all know that African governments cannot afford this. If Obama is genuine about a new beginning for Africa, he could have announced the ending of tariffs on African exports to the American market and an end to the dumping of subsidised American agricultural products like American long-grain rice.

The headline ‘Obama’s speech sparks calls for reform across Africa’ captures Obama’s intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, given little attention or simply silence. AFRICOM (AFRIcan COMmand) merited more attention but received a passing mention in Obama’s speech. He very briefly explained that the creation of AFRICOM was the consequence of a commonsense (whose commonsense?) restructuring of the US approach to promoting stability in Africa, and that there were no current plans to relocate its headquarters from Germany to African soil.

In summary, the four pillars of future Africa–US relations rest on, firstly, what Obama calls American 'support [for] strong and sustainable governments'; secondly, 'supporting development that provides opportunity for more people'; thirdly, 'strengthening public health'; and finally, 'the peaceful resolution of conflict'. We shall wait to see how his administration deals with the conflicts in Africa – in the DRC and Darfur – on which he remained silent.

Overall, as Africans we must disabuse ourselves of the belief that Obama is our messiah. As the late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem wrote, ‘Obama is not our saviour. Our capacity to leverage anything from Washington beyond good intentions will depend on how clear we are in terms of our own interests. We should deal on a Pan-African multilateral level instead of lining up as Obama’s "bestest" country or ally.’ Presently, Ghana has been anointed the brown-eyed darling of the American administration, just as it was the 'model colony' during British colonial rule. Fundamentally, pan-African solutions are – to use Obama’s words – the 'ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long … that is the change that can unlock Africa’s potential.'

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

NOTES

[1] Solomon Comissiong, ‘Take a Look in the Mirror, America’ in Black Agenda Report.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Firoze Manji ‘Obama in Ghana: The Speech he might have made’ Pambazuka News 2009-07-16, Issue 442.
[4] Issa Shivji ‘The Struggle for Democracy’ 2003.

Is there hope for Kenya?

Lucy Simiyu

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/57944

cc Tom MarukoLucy Simiyu worries about where Kenya is headed as a nation, as she discovers that it is ‘not just the local mama by the roadside’ that is caught up in the ‘falsehoods and stereotypes’ that feed the enmity between the country’s ethnic groups, ‘but also highly educated professionals’ who should be ‘the voice of reason’. Critical of politicians who increase this polarisation between people for their own ends, Simiyu calls for Kenyans to take a stand against intolerance and recognise that ‘no one ethnic group can take this nation to its great heights without the support of the others’.

This morning I went to buy a loaf of bread from the mama across the street and she greeted me in my mother-tongue. I replied in Swahili – I often do this. As she counted the change due to me, she made a scathing attack on members of a particular ethnic group and how in her opinion, they think that her ethnic group does not matter. I did not comment. I simply took the cash and wished her a good day.

On another occasion this week, we were caught up in Nairobi's traffic and a young man came by selling sweets and groundnuts and when he had left, my companion in the car made a remark about the young man’s ethnic group. According to my companion, this particular group of people had infiltrated the country and was now merchandising everything they could to the detriment of others in society. Since the handing over of the famous envelope to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, I have heard numerous theories about the list, but the most laughable one was one where my friend stated that he was sure members of a particular community would find their way to The Hague and influence any decisions to be made. He spoke with such authority that I almost believed him!

These three incidences have stirred me to the reality of Kenya’s polarised state. It is not just the local mama by the roadside that is caught up in falsehoods and stereotypes that have resulted in enmity amongst us as a people, but also highly educated professionals who should in essence be the voice of reason. This seems like a 'tired' topic but I am deeply worried as to where we are headed as a nation. In all my years I never side-lined anyone because of his or her tribe, especially considering my profession that calls for equal treatment of everyone. However, in the past six months or so, I am getting scared as I listen to comments from family and friends alike. We who never believed in polarisation are now standing on the threshold of being narrow-minded and judging others on the basis of their ethnicity.

The politicians are at it again: Stating that any form of justice meted out to the perpetrators of post-election violence will stir up fresh violence. These statements are being made in the politicians’ constituencies and I am wondering how much more do they say that is not reported in the press? Some have been known to utter statements in their local dialects and God knows what they tell their constituents! The common man has picked up this argument and one does not need to be a prophet to gauge where all this talk is headed to. Since when did one man’s sins become a community’s sins? I marvel at us, the common man. While we were busy hacking one another to death and taking cover in fear, our politicians’ families were well-secured, with some out of the country away from the danger of machetes and bullets. As we continue to side-line others because of their ethnic backgrounds, our politicians embrace and laugh together, enjoy the perks of being high and mighty together, their children go to the best private schools here and abroad, with most enjoying the benefits of wining and dining together. In fact, Kenya’s parliament is 'tribeless'; ethnicity issues only arise when the members of parliament visit their constituents or when one of their own is perceived to be at risk of losing the glamour that comes with the position of honourable MP.

Is there any hope for Kenya? Can we get out of this dungeon in which we now find ourselves? How can we begin to empower the common man and woman to use reason and not listen to his or her politician? What can we do to teach Kenyans that if politician A paid some fifty boys Kshs. 5000 each to hack members of a certain community to death, then the politician should carry his own cross? Civil society is as polarised as the society it is supposed to reach out to. So who then is our hope? It begins with you and me as responsible members of society. Can we be bold enough to silence the little snide remarks made in our presence? I think we can; firmly and patiently until we begin to see the beauty that each individual contributes to the diversity that is Kenya and Africa and the world at large. Imagine if we were all one tribe in the world – how boring! We need one another and it begins with appreciating that each one of us has a role to play in making this nation a beautiful nation. No one ethnic group can take this nation to its great heights without the support of the others. The sooner we realise this, the better for us and the generations to come.

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* Lucy Simiyu is a counselling psychologist by profession. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Organisational Development at the United States International University – Africa in Nairobi, Kenya.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Obama in Ghana: A sub-Saharan sermon

Ihechukwu Njoku

2009-07-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/57906

www.scoan.comFollowing Barack Obama's recent visit to Ghana, Ihechukwu Njoku tells Pambazuka News of his hope that the choice of destination will be seen as a celebration of a laudable government rather than a political snub.

The world, particularly Africa, was agog with the news of Barack Obama’s triumphant arrival in Ghana; Obama-mania erupted across the continent. Whilst some African nations are busy licking their wounds, making various excuses for why the most powerful and popular man in the world chose Ghana ahead of them, most are simply relishing another proud moment of African history.

As a Nigerian, I appreciate Obama’s choice of Ghana for his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, a nation which has managed to maintain a clean image in a continent so smeared in electoral fraud and political conflict. I applaud and agree with Professor Wole Soyinka’s bold assertion: 'If Obama decides to grace Nigeria with his presence, I will stone him. The message he is sending by going to Ghana is so obvious, is so brilliant that he must not render it flawed by coming to Nigeria anytime soon.' Why would Obama choose to associate with a nation so embroiled in corruption and lust for control at all costs, a nation in the hands of power-hungry tyrants parading themselves as politicians, a nation touted to be the most religious and yet the most reckless?

I reflect in sadness on the state of our ‘religious’ nation. Rather than stand up against the obvious abuse of responsibility by those in power, many religious leaders in Nigeria openly frolic with political champions for the sake of cheap publicity, political influence and their share in taxpayers’ money. As such, they are publicly condoning this greed and power-mongering by their very attitude, abandoning the role of torch-bearers in society. As Ebenezer Obadare wrote of such dubious relationships, '…in a dynamic that works quite well for the state and serves the ends of holders of political power, religious leaders attend their [officeholders’] birthday ceremonies, bless their respective families, and, at the end of each year, unfailingly prophesy positive things for the country they so spectacularly misgovern.'

I am reminded of how Pastor Enoch Adeboye of the RCCG (Redeemed Christian Church of God), recently voted as ‘Nigeria’s greatest living legend’, regularly fraternised with former President Olusegun Obasanjo, now generally considered as one of Africa’s most corrupt and crooked rulers. As Adeboye played host to him in his Redeemed headquarters, received his endorsement for evangelical crusades, posed with him in pictures for the papers, Obasanjo in return waived RCCG’s tax imports and gave them various political privileges. Yet in the course of their closeness, it was not reported that Adeboye ever publicly denounced OBJ’s corrupt practices and immoral activities.

In a similar vein, Adeboye hailed Otunba Gbenga Daniel’s (ODG) tenure in Ogun, endorsed his campaigns and often visited the state on invitation for prayer sessions. However, with the current crises engulfing Ogun State, calling into question the integrity of OGD and his political rivals in the gateway state and further reiterating the catastrophic level of double-mindedness and vulgarity that has ensnared our nation, one wonders whether such a level of intimacy will remain between the two. Success is everybody’s child, while failure has no father.

Well did Martin Luther King say, 'We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.' It is clear our religious leaders have a part to play in the gross mismanagement of resources and talents that Nigeria has come to be known for, not merely for what they have done, but rather for the truth, however unpalatable, that they have failed to stand up for and compromised for the sake of personal gain and political appeasement. Many turn a blind eye to the words of Jesus Christ: 'What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.' (Luke 16:15)

However, when the Ghanaian President Professor John Evans Atta Mills came to power this January in a peaceful election applauded internationally, his first point of call following his inauguration was The Synagogue, Church Of All Nations in Lagos, Nigeria, to give thanks to God for his historic and unexpected victory. There he shocked the continent with his declaration that Pastor TB Joshua had accurately predicted specific details of his three-round election victory, even calling Pastor Joshua ‘his mentor’, testifying that his humility and generosity had greatly impacted and inspired him. Joshua, in his turn, called on Atta Mills to help the less privileged in Ghana, and support charitable organisations who ‘spend more on others and less on themselves’. The difference is evident. I am aware also of Atta Mills's ailing sight and hearing when he initially visited Joshua – problems set to ruin his political ambitions, and his remarkable recovery following prayers.

It appears strange that the Nigerian churches are still busy arguing among themselves about the authenticity of Pastor TB Joshua, the very man Atta Mills has publicly hailed and honoured. I think the results of these relationships speak louder than any pontificating on the qualifications of a true man-of-God.

In any case, we thank God that Ghana is moving from strength to strength, the present visit from Obama solidifying its reputation of democratic commitment, and the discovery of oil in its territory pointing to a bright future ahead. Africa should be proud of Ghana’s achievements and learn the necessary lessons from Obama’s visit rather than ruminating on why he didn’t choose another nation. As Bono recently said: 'Quietly, modestly – but also heroically – Ghana's going about the business of re-branding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa.'

I pray this visit will usher in a new wave of loyalty to the principles of democracy, in tandem with the timeless African values of being your brother’s keeper, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you and considering the good of your nation of greater moment than your own personal ambitions.

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

What the economic crisis means for Africa

Moreblessings Chidaushe

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/57948

cc Wayan VotaThe global financial crisis is taking its toll on Africa, writes Moreblessings Chidaushe, despite initial attempts to downplay the continent’s interdependence with the world economy. As commodity prices tumble and cuts in resources delay and stall major development projects, Chidaushe calls for African leaders to engage their citizens in building internal solutions to the challenges they face, rather than looking to a diminishing pool of external sources of aid.

Like any other concerned citizen, I have, to the extent possible, tried to follow, closely, the voluminous information being generated by the on-going global economic crisis. Forget the sometimes contradictory facts, the reality is that although the severity of the impacts varies at global, regional and various national levels, the crisis is here and alive.

Some have tried to downplay the impacts initially, claiming that because Africa is not in the mainstream global economy there would therefore be minimal impact. Classical is the case of the South African government, which only publicly admitted the crisis after the national elections, then acknowledged that some of the promises made during the campaign may not be fulfilled because of the ‘recently discovered’ crunch.

Yet by the third quarter of 2008, the vehicle manufacturing industry was already showing heavy signs of the toll, with thousands of employees either being laid off or working less time and taking pay cuts. Other industries like textiles were not spared either. In Zambia, the fall in international demand for copper has led to a severe fall in the product’s price, in one year alone falling from US$8,000 to US$3,900 leaving more than ten thousand mine workers in the cold.

In a number of countries in the region, major development projects have either delayed or stalled due to cuts in resources. For example in Mozambique mega economic development programmes running into tens of billions of dollars have been affected, like the Nacala-Velha oil refinery, Chibuto Sands and the Nkanda Nkua dam (electricity generation).

The International Financial institutions (IFIs) estimate that the African economy will shrink significantly and have revised the economic growth projections from 6 per cent to 3.25 per cent for 2009.The International Labor Organization (ILO) has also revised – downwards – its unemployment figures to estimates between 210 to 239 million (globally) in the current year. In a recent press release, the organisation also highlighted that at least 73 per cent of the workforce in Sub-Saharan Africa is in ‘vulnerable employment’.

This leaves nearly all of us Africans vulnerable, bearing in mind that an employed African can have an average of 5 to 10 dependents. Socio-economic impacts are heaviest on the African citizens because of either weak or non-existent social security welfare systems in place to cushion them against the harsh impacts.

Clearly the impact has direct and severe impacts to whatever efforts have so far been made to reduce poverty and bring about sustainable development, thus we will witness ever growing poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy and vulnerability in the coming years as a direct impact of the current crisis. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) although minimal in their nature face fresh and more serious challenges, derailing hopes of achieving them.

African leadership responses to the global economic crisis have been inconsistent, ranging from denial, ignoring the debate, opportunity and threat. African citizenry, although most affected by the crisis, have barely been involved in the economic crunch discourse which remains topical mostly at international level. A few civil society meetings have been held, international media has been way ahead of the African media in churning out information and updates. The African Development Bank earlier in the year convened a meeting and in early June, African Finance Ministers met in Egypt to discuss particularly the issue of resource pressure and domestic resource mobilisation. Beyond this, the discourse has not been taken down to the man in the street, and the solutions, other than begging and pleading for more aid, are not clear.

Africa’s income earning capacity through trade, remittances and development aid (major income sources for the continent) will continue to decrease as the economic crisis impacts escalate. So to will demand for the continent’s mineral resources, including gold, copper, platinum, uranium and diamonds, leading to mine shut downs and job losses. Due to high unemployment overseas, the bulk of African labour, most of which is unskilled and illegally living overseas suffers heavy layoffs as employers cushion their own citizens, resulting in significant reduction in remittances which have previously brought billions annually to the continent. In 2007 alone, sub-Saharan Africa received about $US12 billion dollars through official remittance channels. In the same year, globally more than US$300 billion was remitted while a net total ODA of $US103 billion was received in the continent. Remittances, a huge source of income for the poor globally, are expected to fall by between 5-8 per cent as migrant workers experience layoffs and some return to their original countries, as has already been witnessed in places like Dubai, US, Australia and Spain amongst others.

Most sub-Saharan African countries depend on development aid for, on average, up to 40-50 per cent of their annual budgets. The traditional donors have mainly been the OECD member countries, who give aid in form of humanitarian/emergency grants and loans. Despite increasing concerns that aid has not delivered as expected, it continues to form a significant part of African economies and solutions, and a key criticism has been the recipient dependency it creates on the donor. In the North, aid is generated from taxpayers and the Gross National Product (GNP) resources. It also comes from individual or organisational donations from well-wishers.

Criticism for the motivations for aid as mainly for buying strategic favor from the developing countries has become crystal clear especially in the advent of the financial crisis. Despite multiple pledges and so-called commitments from the developed world over the years, Africa has consistently operated with an aid deficit with its annual requirements of a minimal US$50 billion hardly being met. Both aid quality and quantity have remained far below expectation. Political will by donors to see Africa progress to an independent and sustainable level has remained low, thus the little aid that has filtered into the continent can be viewed as a public relations exercise to buy strategic favour, while the real poverty needs of the continent have been sidelined.

The double standards of the rich to the poor have been exposed as evidenced by how quickly the massive stimulus packages to rescue western corporate were put in place. It has become clearer that the issue of aid is not about the availability of resources but about sheer lack of political will by western leaders to see Africa out of its quagmire. According to the United Nations Millennium Campaign, 50 years of development aid brought in only US$2 trillion while overnight US$18 trillion has been mobilised for bailouts. And now with the pressure to resuscitate their own economies, it will be a miracle if the third world agenda and development aid remained a genuine priority for the rich.

Thus clearly the situation is gloomy for our dear continent – which currently is not doing much on its own to address the crisis, largely hoping that the western solutions will trickle down for Africa to benefit from. Gloomy as the picture maybe, African citizenry is thus challenged to start taking an aggressive stance in finding its own solutions. Civil society organisations have long called on African governments to adopt development frameworks that will depend less on aid in the long run, they have also long called for domestic resource mobilisation and prudent use of these – an issue the international community has recently highlighted, a subtle message to lower the expectations of aid and also a survival strategy as each man fights for themselves to fight the economic crunch. In his first official visit to Africa, United States president Barack Obama emphasised in a speech to the Ghanaian parliament that Africa needs to forge its own future and solve its own problems, and most importantly that Africa’s future is up to the Africans. The western message to the continent has been clear – if this time around Africa does not heed and learn and take care of its destiny, it may never learn and thus remain poor and dependent.

This article intends to challenge the African leadership and citizenry to extract and learn positive lessons from the crisis and shine the light in this gloom. I for one am optimistic and would like, despite the current challenges, to see the continent re-emerging stronger, less dependent and better off after the crisis. This however is largely dependent upon the lessons that the continent chooses to learn from the crisis. Unfortunately, so far the continent seems to take a victim stance and wait for others to come up with a solution for us.

Possible solutions have revolved around more begging and urging major donors not to cut their allocations. But under the circumstances, the question is whether that is a practical and a worthy option to pursue. Instead of going round with the begging bowl, it is time Africans came up with internal solutions to Africa’s problems. And yet the leadership needs to be reminded that a sustainable solution cannot be achieved without the involvement of the citizenry who are the worst affected.

Some possible solutions to cope under the crisis include:
- Using aid resources better: Ensuring that the little aid coming in is reaching the poor for whom it is intended
- Investing in basic services and socio-economic infrastructure to ensure safety nets for its citizens especially during crunch times
- Domestic resource mobilisation and prudent use of the resources
- Promote sub-regional, regional and continental integration
- Living within our means and minimising borrowing
- Have more confidence in its citizenry as an uncompromised resource that will develop its continent.

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* Moreblessings Chidaushe is the programme advisor, Accountable Governance & Economic Justice, Norwegian Church Aid. He writes here in a personal capacity.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Natural capital, sustainable economics

Khadija Sharife

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/57946

From the deforestation that caused the collapse of the Mayan civilisation to the fatal breaches in the mega-dam of Marib, the capital of Sheba, man-made environmental catastrophes have often set the precedent for the fall of empires. Rarely has the planet concurrently experienced such peril. Policy profiteering from Tibet to Angola has ensured the co-modification of every inch of 'discovered' land. We’re skating on thin ice: Though GDP has more than doubled during the past 25 years, over 60 per cent of the environment is critically exploited, from fisheries to farmland.

Monetised industrial economics, formulated on the basis of financial and intellectual capital, is delinked from mechanisms functioning relative to the value of natural resources; instead, our wealth is purely speculative and does not reflect the environment’s ability to carry or sustain us at the current rate of exploitation.

Whereas GDP measures brute quantity, the quality of growth is discluded from assessment. Trade distorting subsidies, deregulation and privatisation artificially depress the value of resources, guaranteeing a raw deal for developing nations and ecologies. The politics of pollution has yet to become an 'election issue'.

Economists do not take into account the impact and value of the loss of natural habitats (wetlands, forests, savannahs, etc), wildlife, arable land or non-renewable/finite resources. Nor do they account for the cost of air, water or soil pollution, affecting both the environment and human health. In terms of a commodified society, GDP does not indicate access, equity and quality of life i.e gender politics, percentage with access to education, medical care, housing, water and waste sanitation.

PRIMARY INDICATORS

Yet GDP is used as one of a few primary indicators measuring the economic pulse of a nation, legitimising ecological plunder as the necessary precedent bolstering growth. Lending institutions like the World Bank facilitate destruction, mandating that forests be razed to push GDP up by 10 per cent as is currently happening in West African countries – supplying wood, oil, water and crops to denuded 'first worlds'.

Equatorial Guinea’s rising GDP – the ninth highest in the world, is shooting through the roof like Wonka’s glass elevator. But the nation is mired in pollution, deforestation and poverty, with the gaps between rich and poor growing steadily wider. Obiang, the lapdog dictator, was welcomed by Condi Rice as 'a friend'.

The global financial machinery, hooked on the buy-now pay-later trajectory, is heading toward a global crisis of immense proportions via monetised paradigms that have marginalised the identity of the ecology, reifying deteriorating living ecosystems for short-term gain.

Sustainable economics, an interdisciplinary approach integrating financial, human, intellectual and ecological capital, is the obvious solution. But this approach requires a value system extending beyond financial capital and into formal ecological investments, guaranteeing the recognition of natural identity politics.

There is no legislation that grants legal standing to the ecology. Instead, Africa has continued to endorse inherited predatory colonial policies, systematically plundering 'commodified' environments. Likewise, monetising natural capital, devoid of legal rights, substitutes deficiencies by commercialising exploited ecosystems for purely financial value, externalising cost, and actively preventing realisation of the legally enforceable rights of nature.

UNHINDERED ACCESS

Lest we forget, colonialism was never about subjugating indigenous peoples for the purpose of slavery. The primary aim was to gain unhindered access to exploit natural resources, using people as complementary aids to mine, extract and farm.

This same mentality formerly framed the enclosures (privatisation) and enslavement of European peasants prior to the degradation of Europe’s ecology. It is the histories of resources, from timber to tobacco, that articulate the motives behind the 'civilising' force of imperialism, justifying rapacious appropriation through racial ideologies hinged on technological superiority.

And the ice is breaking. Take water: In West Africa, Lake Chad, straddling four countries, has experienced a rapidly diminishing surface area from 22 772 square kilometres in 1966, to 1 000 square kilometres in 1998.

The UNEP states that 50 per cent of the loss of surface area is directly linked to irrigation. In Africa, cash crops consume over 73 per cent of water.

The Niger basin drains from an area of two million square kilometres, or 33 per cent of the sub-region surface area, while the Volta basin is shared by five countries. Water in Africa is a trans-boundary affair. One missing link and the whole chain collapses.

'There is enough rain falling on Africa to supply, in theory, water for nine billion people or one and a half times the world population currently. But little is harvested,' says Achim Steiner, UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) director.

Meanwhile, the UNDP alleges that countries interlocked with the Niger and Volta basin will soon be mired in water wars. The UN puts the human figure at 200 million, by 2020.

One reason is embedded or hidden water: It takes over 2 000 litres of water to produce just 300 grams of cotton. Africa is a major producer of cotton, among other monocultures for export.

WATER PRIVATISATION

Each year Coca-Cola uses over 300 billion litres of 'third-world' water, from Nigeria to India. About three litres of fresh water is required to produce a litre of Coke. Meanwhile, a good portion of Nigerians have to purchase water from hawkers, coughing up hundreds of nairas each month. Water is privatised as part of structural adjustment reforms, the derivation of loans or alternately, HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) completion points. Fresh water is not a right for commodified societies, nor does it possess rights; it is viewed instead as property under the law.

In his 'I am an African speech', former president Thabo Mbeki spoke of an inclusive identity rooted in the rights-based system, valorising the experiences and lives of those generally set apart from Africanness.

Mbeki described the sands, mountains and rivers of the Kgalagadi, the Drakensberg and the Lekoathe, as the 'panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day'.

'At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.

'South Africa is one of a handful of countries to legitimise the concept of sustainability. Our Bill of Rights upholds the essential human right, 'to have the environment protected… and to secure ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources while promoting justifiable economic and social development'.

IS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT POSSIBLE WITH SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS?

During an interview, Steiner stated, 'Recently economists have been focusing their work on capturing the true economic value of the world’s natural or nature-based assets. The millennium ecosystem assessment or MA, published in 2005 with support from UNEP, is one such inspiring example. The MA started putting figures on the value of intact ecosystems versus their value when modified, degraded or lost.'

He continued, 'Take an example, the Mau Complex forest in Kenya. The Mau is the largest closed-canopy forest in Kenya, generating goods and services worth in excess of Ksh20 billion [or over US$320 million] annually for the country’s tea, tourism and hydro-power sectors. It is located on the western side of the Rift Valley.

'The ecosystems not only provide essential water to rivers and lakes in Kenya but also feed Lake Victoria, which is shared with Uganda and Tanzania and is part of the River Nile Basin, and Lake Natron, shared with Tanzania.

'Water provided by the Mau feeds rivers that nourish major tourist destinations including the Maasai Mara National Reserve and Lake Nakuru National Park – part of a sector that employs a million people in the formal and informal sectors.

'In total over 100 000 hectares or close to a quarter of the Mau Complex has been destroyed in the past decade, putting at risk livelihoods, businesses and existing and planned hydropower schemes.'

Though justifications in support of racial supremacy have been interrogated, colonial impressions of the environment – now endorsed by African leaders –continue to evade analysis and necessary corrective action.

HOW THEN DO WE IMPLEMENT?

'One option is an intergovernmental panel on biodiversity and ecosystems,' says Steiner, 'An issue debated by governments including many from Africa last month (Nov) in Malaysia.

'Armed with validated, unequivocal economic cost benefit analysis, governments will be able to make genuine decisions about the costs of, say, building a road through a nature reserve, versus whether to clear a forest for agriculture, or conserve it for international payments for carbon.'

IDEOLOGIES

Ideologies informing economic policies are heavily influenced by ideas of reality, including enlightenment philosophies such as Lockean empiricism – the progenitor of the modern political self. The philosophy, interpreted by Taylor as the 'punctual self' – describes a being distinct from the [unconscious] natural world, mandated with the right of dominion.

Such philosophies provided platforms, legitimising the conquest of those outside of the assumed white normative experience. The components of this colonial identity, no longer specified by skin color but mindset, has served to repress other commodified, unclaimed or marginalised (and narrativised) experiences, perceived as the mirror of uncultivated wilderness.

This may be of the natural world – from the trees and oceans to mountains and wildlife or mankind, marked by diversity in gender and ethnicity.

Is Africa’s essential identity composed solely of skin colour, and beyond that, of humanness? Or does it also rest in the biomes that Mbeki spoke of?

The question of determining African identity must be inclusive, for life remains within the context of environmental integration, protection and sustainability. The alternative, 'self-regulated' casino capitalism, is free of environmental and economic restraints, logic – and sustainability.

There is more to life than GDPs and speculative orgies, where even the winners are not winners but greedy and delusional losers. Until ecology possesses the innate and legal right to exist, we cannot progress. This truth is self-evident.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared in the Mail & Guardian online.
* Khadija Sharife is a journalist and visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS). She is based in South Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The other side of the Madiba magic

Mphutlane wa Bofelo

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/57949

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is undeniably one of the most charismatic, suave and diplomatic statesmen that South Africa and the world ever had. His humility and down-to-earth temperament was once again expressed by his insistence on his 91st birthday that post-apartheid South Africa is the product of the collective struggle of all South Africans, rather than the work of one man or one political party.

This is in contrast to rigorous efforts to romanticise and deify Madiba, even at the expense of falsification of history. This misrepresentation of history and events often is by omission and obfuscation. A clear example of this is attempts by the current leadership of the tripartite alliance and many in the media and academia to attribute all the failures of the ANC-led government to Thabo Mbeki, without acknowledging that the so-called class of 96 project was actually a consolidation of the project initiated by Mandela in 1994 and even long before that. Very often the name of Nelson Mandela is evoked whenever former president Thabo Mbeki is projected as the guy who steered the ANC-led government away from whatever egalitarian precepts contained in the Freedom Charter, and who took South Africa down the path of unbridled capitalism.

The fact of the matter is that it is Nelson Mandela who first publicly recanted the Freedom Charter’s stance on the nationalisation of the mines and mineral resources of the land. People without selective memory will recall that shortly after his release, Nelson Mandela made a pro-nationalisation statement, which elicited an outburst of anger and criticism from the captains of industry. The following day Mandela withdrew his statement and avowedly assured Big Business that nationalisation was never and will never be part of ANC policy. It is under Nelson Mandela’s leadership that the ANC consented to the sunset clause, the repayment of the apartheid debts and the guarantee of property rights. The sunset clause effectively slowed the process of initiating demographic representativeness within the army, civil service and other state/public institutions. The property clause effectively stood as a safety valve against the nationalisation and socialisation of strategic areas of the economy, and also ensured that the land redistribution project becomes locked to the failed willing-buyer, willing seller arrangement.

As Mandela himself made a public confession, the huge amounts of money that goes to servicing the apartheid debt constitutes one the major barriers to the capacity of the government to deliver services and address the inequities and imbalances of that exist in South Africa. It was under the reign of the same Mandela that the government vigorously pursued the structural adjustment programme of privatisation and deregulation of state assets and public enterprises, relaxation of taxation on Big Capital, and relaxation of trade and tariff rates.

Trying to please big capital with lower tax resulted in the poor having to fit the bill in the form of increased pay as you earn (PAYE) and increased value added tax (VAT). Trade and tariff liberalisation caused tremendous harm to the local industry and the workforce that become retrenched and unemployed as a result of companies being forced to downsize or wind up. The textile, clothing and manufacturing companies are particularly squeezed by cheep proliferation of foreign material that are products of child labour and slavery wages and exploitative conditions in the sweatshops of Eastern countries. In the face of all this, Mandela asked the labourers to tighten the belt to help kick-start the skorokoro capitalist economy, with promises that the benefits of enhanced growth will slowly trickle down to the poor.

When it became clear that the trickle-down effect is just a mirage, civil society organisations and the labour movement increased protests against the Growth and Redistribution strategy. Instead of heeding to popular opinion, Mandela used his charm and the veneration and respect that the people have for him to dismiss protestations against GEAR (Growth, employment and redistribution). Again, people without a short memory or deliberate amnesia will remember how Mandela went to a COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) congress and tongue-in-cheek, rebuffed the concerns and demands of the people against his government’s neoliberal trajectory and told all and sundry that GEAR was the lock and key of ANC economic policy and was going nowhere. So, while Mbeki had to resort to bureaucratic centralism and intellectual chauvinism to repulse popular opinion and popular demands, Mandela had the luxury of the Madiba charm – an exaggerated sense of awe and reverence towards him which almost render him beyond reproach.

How many of us are willing to concede that the political deployment of party faithfuls to managerial positions in public enterprises and executive positions in the public sector, and the cronyism and nepotism that dogged the Thabo Mbeki government started in 1994, under the watchful eye of our beloved Madiba? How many of us are willing to recall that some of the incidents of police brutality against popular dissent as well as acts of intolerance towards dissenting views happened while Mandela was the leader of both the ANC and the government? How many of us would be brave enough to put the name of Mandela in the mix when speaking about ANC leaders who owe the public an account of the arms deal fiasco?

I listened with interest at a COSATU rally in Durban last year when Zwelinzima Vavi, Dr Blade Nzimande and others said that although Mandela was the president when the government ignored the alarm raised by Eskom that there was a need for another electricity station, the blame for the electricity crisis should be put squarely on the shoulders of Thabo Mbeki who was the deputy president then. Vavi and his colleagues argued that at that time Thabo Mbeki was the de facto final voice within the presidency. Strange when it comes to the account of miracles that happened between 1994 and 1996, all the glory goes to the Madiba, and when it comes to the bad decisions and anti-poor policies we are told that the real man at helm was TM. Our love for leaders, including Mandela – who really deserves the reverence we have for him – should not seduce us into jazzing up history.

Yes, Mandela is a great man of peace and tolerance, but he is also the architect of neoliberal, neo-capitalist dispensation. The effable, amiable and peaceable Mandela who said the government was open to negotiation on the ‘boere staat’ idea is the same person who annoyingly pointed a menacing finger at journalist who questioned his visit to hailing of Verwoed’s widow as ‘a wife of a hero’ on his visit to racist Orania, accusing these journalists of undermining his government’s reconciliation endeavours, which many of us found to be one-sided. When TM started throwing the ultra-leftist and racist label on whoever differed with the ANC policies, he was only following in the footsteps of his predecessor.

How many of our independent analysts and academics or revolutionary poets and underground emcees will utter these unpalatable truths about dear Madiba? Does Madiba approve of this selective memory over his life and history? I want to believe that Madiba – who, despite my beef with him ideologically, I have come to appreciate and love as a great human being and a statesman par excellence – would love to be remembered not as a god and perfect person, but as an ordinary individual, with excellent personality and outstanding charisma and statesmanship – but human still, prone to error, capable of misjudgement on issues, and open to questioning. I therefore want to submit that the deification of Mandela is not the best way to pay homage to him, and selective memory on any of our leaders, Stephen Bantu Biko, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Oliver Tambo, Winnie Madikizela Mandela, etc is not doing a service to their legacy and to the heritage of this great nation.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Mphutlane wa Bofelo is a writer-activist with a passion for using creative education, literature and theatre as tools for transformation and development.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Kenya: Release 27 Civil Society Activists Now!

Solidarity Network Kenya

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/57931

Dear Mr President: Mr Kibaki

Dear Mr Prime Minister Mr. Raila Odinga,

Once again the heavy-handedness of the Kenyan police has resulted in the arrest of 27 young members of Bunge La Wananchi in Limuru. They have been locked up for simply voicing their concern as citizens of Kenya for the accountable use of CDF funds in Kenya. This is an area which you yourselves in government have been concerned about and towards which you have taken appropriate steps just last week. So it is disturbing the administration in your government acts to the contrary.

I urge you to act immediately to release the 27 civil society activists, arrested illegally in Limuru. The constitution guarantees freedom of assembly and it is disturbing that these illegal and arbitrary arrests go on notwithstanding the physical abuse on the arrested persons. Kenya must enter the realm of a Human Rights State that guarantees peaceful and non-violent action by citizens of a country struggling for their basic right to be heard.

Hoping for your immediate action.

Zahid Rajan
Solidarity Network Kenya
P O Box 32843 - 00600
Nairobi, Kenya
Email: solidaritynetkenya@gmail.com

Appeal for help with Kiswahili translation

Aleem Walji

Google.org

2009-07-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/57903

We at Google.org (the philantrhopic arm of Google) are working with our Google colleagues to try and improve our machine translation abilities in a variety of African languages (where we're currently under-represented). To start, we're hoping to improve our ability to translate English text to Swahili and visa-versa. We currently support a host of European languages and Asian language, link available here.

Our corpus of identical text in English and Swahili is pretty limited. We typically like to have at least a million words of high quality translated text for our machine learning tools to get going in earnest. It could be academic papers, books, laws, stories, dictionaries, etc, that are available in both language. Happy to give attribution where it makes sense but this is not a revenue driving priority for us. It's part of what we do to try and provide a valuable service to users. Thanks in advance for your help and advice.

Bringing dignity to a banal speech

Toyin Agbetu

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/57950

Thank you Firoze for reimagining what could and should have been said during the recent visit by President Obama to Ghana.
Few writers in the media make comment of the point that Egypt was his first visit to Africa as President, Ghana was second.

If there was a supposed snub to Nigeria by his choice of Ghana, then there was simultaneously a snub to so called ‘sub-Saharan’ Africa by his choice of Egypt.

Obama had a historic opportunity to address many of the ills of the nation he now heads and deliberately chose not to do so. Instead he delivered a speech full of banality using language designed to chastise Africa in the eyes of the western media, perhaps to reinforce the fact that he has no loyalty to Mama Africa.

I hope I am wrong, maybe he is playing a clever double game where we will see his intent towards restoring African sovereignty through covert foreign policy.

Sadly even if this is the case I am of the belief that leaders should act with integrity in the open and not behind malevolent secretive institutions such as the CIA, which continue to play a major role in the destabilisation of the Continent in favour of US and western interests.

Firoze, your text exuded a dignity lacking in the most eloquent of speeches ever made during the seven month political life of the US President, it revealed a holistic understanding of world politics that no longer places Africa at the boundary as a raw mineral source to be exploited, but at the centre as a force of people and natural resources to be nurtured and respected.

I wish Obama had your vision, your humanity. Sadly his actions to date and most importantly his inactions, reveal that he does not. Thankfully Pambazuka News exists to promote another way forward. Until then the struggle continues.

Parody of a well thought out speech

Horace Awi

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/57951

I certainly do not agree with the parody of a speech you have written as something Obama should have given. Obama's speech in Ghana was well thought out and very apt. After 40 years plus of independence in most African countries we cannot continue to blame the west and western corporations for our failures.
I certainly do not agree with the parody of a speech you have written as something Obama should have given. Obama's speech in Ghana was well thought out and very apt. After 40 years plus of independence in most African countries we cannot continue to blame the west and western corporations for our failures. This is a lie that MUST end. We must take responsibility for our nations and our future and stop looking for scapegoats outside Africa.

Monstrous leaders like Idi Amin Dada, Mobutu Sese Seko, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Omar Bongo, and Mugabe are Africans who abused their countries, robbed their nations and destroyed any vestige of dignity, and there are many more all over Africa. This cannot be blamed on the west. America has the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) to dissuade its corporations and persons from partaking in bribery and corruption. This is a good step, but when Africans are involved in corruption, there is no punishment for those involved by the home government, whereas the parties in America are punished. A good example is the Halliburton bribery scandal in Nigeria. Halliburton personnel and the corporation have been punished in America, but not a single Nigerian who got the $180m bribe has been punished.

The administration of the aid sent to Africa is done largely by Africans who connive with others to steal aid money in order to buy properties in these developed countries and send their kids to school there. It is not the west that prevents African leaders from developing their nations. Billions of dollars of national budget are stolen by these leaders. With the current mass larceny going on in most African countries even if $18 trillion was poured into Africa it will not change the situation.

A case in point is Gabon with a small population and massive oil revenues for over 40 years and yet the country is still under-developed. Omar Bongo and family and his cohorts are billionaires with properties all over the world. A similar case is developing in Equatorial Guinea which has over 2 billion barrels of oil reserve and is raking in billions of dollars every year, with a population of half a million people. The country is still largely underdeveloped despite a decade of oil production. Contrast this with what is happening in the middle east, in countries like United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait etc.

We must stop this LIE of deceiving ourselves that everybody else is to blame but Africans. We need to be ashamed as black people for not being able to get our acts right in a world where must races are fast tracking their developing. In Africa we are still rocked by wars and instability due to the greed of the leadership, corruption and graft. We, as black Africans have to rise up to say enough is enough and fix our problems.

A review of 'After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond'

Gerald Caplan

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/57932

Since I'm going to strongly recommend this book, I'd better disclose off the top that I know both of the co-editors as well as four of the contributors. Phil Clark and I had dinner together in Kigali on my last night in Rwanda in April, finding an okay Ethiopian restaurant just off the road between Hotel Chez Lando and Amohoro Stadium. Linda Melvern is a very dear friend, I have great regard for Bill Schabas and I meet with Tom Ndahiro to discuss genocide denial each time I'm in Rwanda. Rene Lemarchand is a great pioneer of Rwandan and Burundian studies, though I think his deep antipathy towards the Kagame government sometimes takes him off the deep end.

This familiarity can be potentially awkward, to be sure, especially if I happened not to have admired their work here. But if you're labouring in any relatively small field the chances of you not knowing many of the players are pretty small. Criticising a colleague or friend can't be easy and tests one's own integrity. I fear there's no solution to these potential conflicts of interest except to refuse to review the work of anyone you know, or instead to be aware of them and to commit full disclosure. I have obviously chosen the second course.

This is an extremely ambitious book, as the sub-title indicates, dealing with an enormously complex and controversial series of more or less interrelated subjects. Students of any aspect of Rwanda, of genocide and of any post-conflict effort are bound to be enriched by at least some and perhaps many of the 20 chapters. I should also report that of 24 different writers, there are three essays by Rwandan survivors as well as chapters by a Congolese and a Tanzanian. Five Africans and 19 Westerners might not seem an appropriate ratio for a book like this. But since so much writing on both Rwanda and genocide is exclusively by Westerners, having a quarter of the writers from Africa is a welcome step forward.

As a bonus, Clark and Kaufman give us introductory background chapters to set the context for post-genocide issues. Linda Melvern, one of the truly indispensable authorities on the genocide, reminds us of the careful planning that went into the genocidaires' conspiracy. J.B. Kayigamba provides an invaluable and harrowing first-hand account of how someone actually survived the 100 days. And Paul Williams describes how dysfunctional the UN peacekeeping system was in 1994 and how indifferent to the genocide most of the Security Council were; Rwanda's Tutsi paid the ultimate price for both UN institutional incapacity and Security Council callousness.

I do have one criticism of the book. It grew out of a series of conferences the editors organised at Oxford in 2004–05, and the papers (plus some others) have been included here mostly without being updated for publication. Essay after essay depends on interviews or materials that are now already five years old and often older. In a society where events move as quickly as they do in Rwanda, basing present judgments on such evidence could be dicey. Happily, in this case it doesn't effect the overall quality of the volume. But the latest sources are always the most valuable.

Very surprising for a serious academic tome, the volume begins with an essay by President Kagame, or whoever writes in his name. Typical of Kagame (whatever one thinks of him), this preface is not the usual platitudinous hot air we've come to expect from most VIPs on formal occasions. This is the real Kagame, putting his case as forcefully as possible, pulling no diplomatic punches when he attacks the UN for being cowardly or Rene Lemarchand for his fierce criticisms of Kagame's government.

As it happens, the editors are by and large sympathetic to Kagame and on the many controversial issues their book raises – gacaca and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), to name two obvious examples – they tend to lean towards the government's position. What makes their book even more impressive is that a good number of the contributors don't share this view and are strongly critical of Kagame and his initiatives. This happens to be a nice reflection of the world's view of Rwanda under the Kagame government, with its bevy of admiring and influential Western fans facing off against its parade of hostile and influential foes. It's intellectually quite exciting to see these contradictory arguments being hashed out within a single volume, and it allows readers enough information to decide for themselves.

But we can be certain that the present Rwandan establishment are not going to be happy with the well-presented arguments of Helen Hintjens and Suzanne Buckley-Zistel, which assert that certain key government policies are really further polarising Hutu and Tutsi while supposedly reconciling them. For this year's 15th anniversary of the genocide, for example, the official slogan for all signs and speeches and documents was '15th anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsi'. This may have been an understandable response at a moment when genocide denial is rife, but what message does it send to the Hutu majority about the Hutu moderates who were murdered for refusing to support anti-Tutsi activities, or the Hutu righteous, or those Hutu who themselves lost family in the tumult of 1994 and beyond?

Perhaps the most enduring contribution of these essays is to underline precisely how complex, misunderstood and difficult to achieve are all the words in the sub-title: transitional justice, post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Mahmood Mamdani made this insightful point soon after the genocide when he observed (not cited in this book) that the future was fraught thanks to the mutually incompatible goals of the two 'races': the victorious minority Tutsi wanted justice; the defeated majority Hutu wanted democracy. The Tutsi feared an election in which the majority would defeat them and the Hutu feared the victor's justice that would be aimed at them as the perpetrators of genocide. Yet for most liberals, indeed for most Westerners of all stripes, justice and democracy are inextricable. Free elections, an independent judiciary and the rule of law all are critical to a just and equitable society.

Even the pursuit of justice is far from simple. Justice for whom? For the Kagame government and for many outsiders such as me, trying the genocidaires is the priority. This task alone more than consumes all the available resources of the Rwandan justice system as well as the ICTR. Yet to the fury of Kagame, as his preface angrily points out, foreign human rights groups insist that RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) soldiers who are accused of committing atrocities must be tried with equal zeal. This is like demanding, in the few years after the Second World War, that the fire-bombers of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo and those responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been in the dock at the Nuremburg and Tokyo war crimes trials. As Clark and Kaufman insist, 'While it is true that both 'sides' committed crimes in 1994, it is being increasingly forgotten that only one 'side' committed genocide.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International even condemned the gacaca process for failing to live up to the most meticulous international legal practices, a wildly impractical possibility that is properly repudiated in the overview chapter by the two editors. Far more vexing is the question of who slaughtered whom in the DR Congo from 1996 to 1998 – it appears that hundreds of thousands died – and how either truth or justice will be brought to address this question. Although Rene Lemarchand's passionate anti-RPF bias leads him to some foolish assertions – not least the unproved charge that Kagame's RPF army shot down President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane – his section on the RPF in the DR Congo is powerful and disturbing.

And while we're at it, we might wonder when the ICC (International Criminal Court) will issue arrest warrants for those many officials in Western governments, the UN and the Catholic church to be tried for crimes of commission or omission during the genocide. I vote to begin with France.

All post-conflict societies face a mountain of urgent needs, not all of them compatible, as Mamdani understands. Look only at the many different forms of reconciliation that exist, as the much studied Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa soon learned. I still recall those African mothers attending the commission's meetings who were relieved to learn, at long last, the awful truth of how and where their children had died. But they are never going to be reconciled with their confessed killers. Neither would I. There are countless examples of amazing Rwandans who have learned to forgive the murderers of their families, but I'm with the majority of victims who can never do so.

So post-conflict goals are in fact not always universally shared, which we often forget, and many are in conflict or tension with each other. Besides justice, democracy, truth and reconciliation, there are the equally daunting goals of peace, ending impunity, healing, forgiveness, national unity, harmony, short-term relief, longer-term reconstruction and development. And all of these are to be acted on by a new government that does not enjoy universal support and that depends on human and financial resources that are minuscule and infrastructure that barely exists.

It's a testimony to the strength of this volume that it's not possible to do justice in this review to many of the individual essays. Beyond the ones already referred to, let me particularly recommend the following:

- Tom Ndahiro's exposé of outrageous genocide denial by Hutu Power thugs still free and active in the diaspora, who actually assert that the real genocide was perpetrated by the RPF against the Hutu. When will they get the justice they deserve?
- Phil Clark's chapter clearly explaining the complexities of transitional justice and his other solo essay on gacaca, where he sharply criticises Human Rights Watch and Amnesty for their dogmatic lack of realism.
- William Schabas's largely positive overview of the ICTR and gacaca systems, supplemented by H.B. Jallow's succinct chapter making a persuasive case for the ICTR, as one would expect its prosecutor to do.
- In the 'lessons learned' category, Jennifer Welsh's helpful overview of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine – or should we call it mere rhetoric? Does it make humanitarian interventions more likely? Her sad conclusion: Even with R2P, the world is 'not yet in a position to promise "no more Rwandas".'

A final note. Even though some of these papers are distinctly critical of the present Rwanda government, who will often not be amused, Phil Clark and Zachary Kaufman are in truth good friends of a country trying to put its singular nightmare behind it. Both know that the genocide against the Tutsi was real and both are more sympathetic than hostile to the various efforts of the present government, even if they are far from blind cheerleaders. Kaufman has for years been among those promoting a public library in Kigali, Rwanda's first, and as passers-by can attest, real progress has been made. The building is actually under construction. 'Wanting to make their own concrete contribution to the development of post-genocide Rwanda', the editors are donating whatever profits they make from this book to the Kigali public library. A good deed to complement a good book.

* Gerald Caplan is the author of 'Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide', and 'The Betrayal of Africa'.
* 'After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond', edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman (London, 2008, pp. 396) is published by Hurst Publishers.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Sudan. Sudan.

Chuma Nwokolo

2009-07-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/57907

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Chuma Nwokolo is a publisher with www.african-writing.com, a literary paper committed to the literature of continental and diasporic Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The state, prostitutes and teachers: Reading Okello Oculi’s 'Prostitute'

John Otim

2009-07-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/57908

There was no stealth, no shame. The affair took place in full view of assembled villagers. The village leadership assisted in the crime. The village chief and his wife made the arrangements. They carefully crafted and choreographed the scene. The setting was the chief’s large compound in the centre of the village where the ceremony honouring the visiting minister of state took place. There amidst the dancing, singing and merrymaking the minister abducted the unsuspecting girl. Rosa was one of the young girls brought in by the chief’s wife to serve refreshments to assembled local and visiting dignitaries. But even a fool could see now that Rosa was brought in to serve the big man’s pleasure.

Yet at that moment of her abduction, except for the girl’s mother there is not a voice of protest raised from among the assembled villagers. It was as if they did not see, bowing as they did before the incarnation of power. Yes your honour. Was it true what a campus drunk once said? Ee hardo not to be a tyrant in Africa. The get away was drama in itself.

‘… the car roared into the ears of the silence of the village and its torch lights drove out of the village into the darkness in front.’ (Okello Oculi, 1968, p.21)

At the back of the speeding black Mercedes in her bare feet the youth sat defiantly. Contempt, such as came only from the truly innocent, was written large in her eyes. She watched the grotesque bundle of fat sitting next to her, only yesterday one amongst the villagers. She wished she could murder him. Thoughts of her mother, of her friends, and of life in the village now fast receding in the distance, raced through her mind. Ice cold water ran along her spine. Rosa suspended existence.

In the capital where the car was headed, where she had never been before, she would be sexually assaulted, raped and cast to the wide, open city to face the life of prostitution. Now instinctively she shut her mind against the world. The song of Christendom now returning to her from Sunday school, in bits and pieces, seemed to mock her. Then am I dead to all the world and all the world is dead to me. She felt like a prisoner before the scaffold. But a new spirit rose within her and gave her courage.

'Prostitute' is the work we are discussing, a fast-moving early post-colonial piece of writing published by a young Makerere University student back in 1968. The novel’s novelty and singularity at the time was its thoroughly local setting and easily recognisable set of characters. People could identify, if not themselves then their circumstances, in the work. It was a thoroughly contemporary piece of writing. Students at Makerere University could not get over the fact that their robust and colourful lifestyles were celebrated in the work. Their enthusiasm pushed the work to the top of the bestseller list in East Africa.

When a group of young city barmaids heard about the novel and began reading it, they found their own stories there. It became an impassioned group reading. The smug lobby of the Gardenia became a seminar room. Every turn of the page was exhilarating. They cheered, and coursed. Every misfortune suffered by the young heroine was theirs. Every victory she won, no matter how little, was theirs. The state rose before their eyes and appeared as what it really was, a monster.
When state power intruded in the village and plucked Rosa and flung her into the dungeons of the city, the reading became a riot. The girls were a football team whose side was cheated out of victory. Rosa’s life in the village had been idyllic. In Rosa’s story they read their own stories. They saw their own ruined lives. Prostitutes! Every Tom, Dick and Harry called them. Can’t a girl earn a living without harassment?

As the story progressed the girls were appalled, but they were also delighted. They did not know that their life could become a book. They had no idea there were in the city some gentle spirits. All they encountered was abuse and insults. But here on the pages of this novel they found a friend. It was as if Michael Jackson was calling to them. You are not alone, we will bring salvation back, where there is love there is hope, just call my name and I will be there. The poet Okot ‘p Bitek was yet to write the 'Song of Malaya', the work in which prostitutes find their own voice, in which prostitutes challenge and defy the state and heap scorn on the hypocrisy of society:

‘Let parliamentarians
Debate and pass laws
Against us
Let the police arrest us
And lock us up
In their cells
Let the magistrates
Sentence us to jails
But
Who can command?
The sun
Not to rise in the morning’

In the novel 'Prostitute' the minister of state is full of scorn about teachers. On the same night in which he abducted and violated Rosa he told teachers, 'The government will soon leave the business of governing to you people if you think you can do better.' But first he would arrest them all. 'Where were you,' he sneered, hitting his chest, 'when I and His Excellency and our comrades in power were fighting the white man? Where were the teachers?'

Thus began the dismantling of the education system in post-colonial Africa. Something the soldiers, under military rule, would greatly accelerate. The soldiers came to view teachers, especially the universities, as competitors, for scarce resources, who must be beaten down to size. In the eyes of the soldiers scare resources included women. Thus education was downsized. Many now believe here lies the cause and the curse of the backwardness in Africa of the last 50 years. Where Korea, Singapore and Malaysia were shooting ahead Africa was headed in the opposite direction, because its leaders scorned education and embraced corruption. To depart from education is to be corrupt.

Yet the post-colonial state was in reality a teacher’s state, or it ought to have been. The nationalist movement that brought independence to the vast majority of African countries was inspired by teachers, or at any rate by the products of the school system such as they were under colonial rule. In the post-colonial state teachers were in government, they were in parliament, and often they headed the state itself. Yet the conditions of teachers left in the classrooms and the enormous prestige they enjoyed under colonialism began to wane with independence.

'Why say they could leave the teachers to [govern] and yet threaten to imprison them if they continued to talk against the [government]'?

'Should the teachers fight too, like the way he [the minister] says they fought against the white people?'

Rosa’s sharp mind churned through the hypocrisy and the cynicism of the minister of state. She became convinced struggle was the only way forward. The group reading the story in the lobby of the Gardenia in downtown Kampala agreed. Away with sham independence, here was the beginning of the struggle throughout Africa that became known as the second liberation, the struggle that would itself in the end run aground with a new set of leaders even more corrupt. What was Africa to do?

The story of Tichuona Nyamubaya of Zimbabwe, on the radio in 2008 on the BBC World Service, illustrated this predicament perfectly. In many ways the Zimbabwean’s story ran parallel to that of Okello Oculi’s Rosa. At the age of 15 when just out of high school Tichuona enrolled in the rebel army then fighting white minority rule in Rhodesia.

At the training camp for new recruits she is repeatedly raped by the camp commandant. The experience makes her bitter and disheartened. It does not help that she found that other girls at camp were similarly abused. They complain to higher authorities but are ignored and the abuse continues. Tichuona survived and still rose to become an officer in the liberation army.

Liberation fighters returned home in triumph to form the new Zimbabwe. But Tichuona had seen enough. She knew the new leadership would run the country as they ran the camp. They would be corrupt, they would be brutal and merciless. She warns of the dangers ahead. In the euphoria that attended independence she is dismissed as a spoiler. Why are you saying these things? Let us celebrate.

Tichuona could have swallowed her pains and hurts. She could have become a minister of state, hurting and humiliating others in return. Instead Tichuona turned to poetry and music. Today Tichuona’s artistic voice forms part of the efforts seeking a new way forward for the beleaguered county.

A dozen years separate real-life Tichuona from Oculi’s fictional Rosa, but the two girls have much in common. Both were underage kids, both were violated and abused by men of the new post-colonial state. Both are disheartened and feel terribly let down. But both chose to continue in the struggle for a better tomorrow. It is interesting how women fictionally and in real life are at the forefront of the struggle for the future in Africa.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* John Otim is a Ugandan teaching at Nigeria's Ahmadu Bello University.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Pambazuka Blog Review – July 23, 2009: Corruption in Patrimonicide

Dibussi Tande

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/57930

The CHRDA blog publishes the complete text of a paper by Prof. Kofele Kale of Southern Methodist University in Dallas in which he calls for the elevation of corruption to the Status of a crime in positive International Law. Prof. Kale describes this new crime as “Patrimonicide”:
“I submit that what has been taking place in the last five decades or so is a coordinated plan whose effect, if not objective, is the destruction of the essential foundations of the economic life of a society. It is the systematic looting and stashing in foreign banks of the financial resources of a State; the arbitrary and systematic deprivation of the economic rights of the citizens of a nation by its leaders, elected and appointed, in military regimes as well as civilian governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, on a scale so vast and never before seen in history. As the man who coined the word “genocide” sixty years ago argued, a new crime deserves a new name…
I have somewhat immodestly taken the liberty of inventing the word ‘patrimonicide’ as the name for this new international economic crime. The word comes from combining the Latin words ‘patrimonium’ meaning “[t]he estate or property belonging by ancient right to an institution, corporation, or class; especially the ancient estate or endowment of a church or religious body” and, of course, ‘cide’ meaning killing. It is submitted that indigenous spoliation is the very essence of the destruction (or killing, if you please) of the sum total of a nation's endowment; the laying waste of the wealth and resources belonging by right to her citizens; the denial of their heritage.”

Inside Somalia has excerpts of a recent report by the House of Lords EU Committee on Money Laundering and Terrorist Finance which criticizes the UK for being complacent in dealing with pirates off the coast of Somalia:
"Any study of terrorist financing has to take account of the proceeds of piracy. The Government say that they have not found a link between the two. We believe that they would find one if they looked for it, making the same effort as they have, with other states, in naval operations.
We regard this as an extraordinarily passive and complacent attitude. The Government, together with other states, are far better placed than individual ship-owners to decide whether ransoms are likely to be used to finance terrorism but they seem unwilling to shoulder this responsibility. We think that they should.
In our view the likely reason no link has been found between piracy and terrorism is that no link has been sought."

27 Months reviews an innovative Thin Client Computing platform called Ndiyo and says it has the potential to resolve issues of computer access and use in Africa:
“The conventional PC-based networking model is so intrinsically wasteful and expensive in terms of energy, resource and time inputs that it has effectively blocked access to ICT in poorer nations... Instead of making PCs cheaper, Ndiyo makes them easier to share...
The Ndiyo model and the philosophy behind it are very compelling, for several reasons.
On a practical level, the environmental benefits and energy cost savings of an Ndiyo-type system are obvious. A client which consumes 5 watts verses 300 or more is clearly advantageous. I imagine it would be possible to provide backup power to an entire Ndiyo cluster with a single UPS device, or even to supply constant power using a renewable energy source. This is a big consideration for developing countries where power infrastructure is often less than reliable or nonexistent.
Ndiyo also provides an alternative to traditional Western notions of how technologies should be deployed, used and paid for in developing countries. Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and refurbished PCs are two different approaches that spring to mind. Refurbished PCs are potentially transformative, but have a lot of hidden costs including power consumption, spare parts, support and maintenance. Perhaps instead of unloading tons of obsolete PCs on developing countries, a market-oriented solution with new or refurbished flat panel monitors could be tried instead, used with Nivo clients to build robust clusters.
The Ndiyo cluster also leverages ideas from mobile phone sharing—a concept which needs no introduction to Africans, and takes greater account of conditions on the ground where these systems will be used.”

Zambian Economist comments on reports that some members of the ruling MMD party are backing attempts by the Zambian opposition to impeach President Banda:
“The possibility of MMDMPs rallying behind the impeachment is something that I had not anticipated… The reason is simple: weak incentives. In the event of an impeachment, Parliament has to be dissolved with a new general election held. There's a reason why previous presidents have kept that provision - precisely because it raises the cost of reneging within the ruling party. Basically, it makes it difficult for those within the ruling party to remove a sitting President, because doing so would automatically send the whole party to a general election. No serious MMD MP wants to go and face an electoral vote with an uncertain outcome. So by ensuring that impeachment triggers general elections, the sitting President is immune from pressure from his party, thereby providing further opportunity for centralising his authority…
Is there a deal between the Opposition and the MMD parliamentarians that has somehow strengthened the very weak incentives ensured by the existing constitutions?”

The latest issue of Palapala, the online literary magazine carries a response by Dibussi Tande to novelist Patrice Nganang’s argument that the use of the term “Anglophone Cameroon literature” to describe literature from the English speaking region of Cameroon marginalizes that literature:
“Anglophone Cameroon Literature” is not an aberration, and like other “minority” literatures in world, it is intricately tied to the unique experiences of the Anglophones within the Bilingual Cameroon Republic. It is a literature which does not only have to deal with issues of literary quality and quantity, but, unlike its Francophone counterpart, also has to engage in a relentless political fight for recognition as the other major component of mainstream Cameroonian literature.
The literature from the former British Southern Cameroons is not merely “Cameroon literature in English” as some would like us to believe. If that were the case, then English translations of Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (“Houseboy”), Mongo Beti’s Mission terminée (Mission to Kala”) or even Nganang’s Temps de chien (“Dog Days”) would be classified as “Anglophone Cameroon literature”. But that is not the case. Anglophone literature goes beyond a colonial language to embrace a specific territory, a specific socio-cultural space, and a specific historical reality…
Anglophone literature will develop and take its rightful place on the Cameroonian literary pantheon, not by submerging its identity into a vast Cameroonian “national literature” that is synonymous with Francophone Cameroon literature, but by creating a distinct literary space and trajectory which reflects its own historical, political and socio-cultural realities.”

* 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/

Rio case could signal shift of gear

Stephen Marks

2009-07-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/africa_china/57937

When China detained four Shanghai-based executives of the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto on spying charges earlier this month, Western governments and business leaders feared the possible implications for Western firms doing business in China. But the real meaning of the incident could lie elsewhere, and be part of a major shift of gear in China’s economic strategy.

One reason the arrests rang alarm bells was that a month earlier, Rio had pulled out of a major buy-in by China’s state-owned aluminium firm Chinalco. More immediately, Stern Hu, the senior executive arrested and an Australian citizen, was Rio Tinto’s leading negotiator in fraught negotiations over the ‘benchmark’ price for iron ore.

Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and the Brazilian company Vale are said between them to control 75% of the world’s iron ore supplies. The Chinese Iron and Steel Association had been holding out in talks for cuts of some 40 to 50% in the ‘benchmark’ price to reflect falling world demand, as against the 33% said to have been offered by the ‘big three’, and accepted by the Japanese and South Korean steelmakers.

According to the Financial Times on 15 July ‘The state-owned China Daily quoted an unnamed “industry insider” claiming Rio bribed each of the 16 Chinese steel companies involved in this year’s negotiations to set the benchmark iron ore price, a process that brings together steelmakers and suppliers of iron ore, steel’s key ingredient...Rio computers seized in Shanghai this week, Chinese media reported, revealed data about Chinese steel companies so detailed, one unnamed source in the China Daily claimed, that even the presidents of those companies might not have known them. Such information could be used to boost Rio’s negotiating position in the iron ore pricing round with Chinese steelmakers.’

Whatever the facts of this case, such methods of industrial espionage are of course not unknown on all sides. Earlier this month AP reported that ‘A Chinese-born engineer was convicted Thursday of stealing trade secrets critical to the U.S. space program in the nation's first economic espionage trial. A federal judge found former Boeing Co. engineer Dongfan "Greg" Chung guilty of six counts of economic espionage and other charges for hoarding 300,000 pages of sensitive documents in his home, including information about the U.S. space shuttle and a booster rocket’.

Of course the Chinese Government, like Rio, has vigorously denied the charges.

Chinese sources have stressed that the inquiry was under way before Rio pulled the plug on Chinalco’s attempted U$19.5 billion buy-in. But the background to the case shows up the multiplicity of motives for China’s ‘going out’ policy of encouraging leading Chinese companies to increase their overseas investments, especially in natural and energy resources.

As well as the widely credited motive of securing access to key raw materials, a stake in major players would also give China a say in influencing global market conditions - a point reinforced by the fact that the breakdown of the ‘benchmark’ price negotiations followed soon after Rio ditched the Chinalco deal for an alternative arrangement with BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company. In effect, this was a deal between two of the industry’s big three, to which China has responded by threatening action under its new anti-trust laws.

Chinese concern on the issue is all the more understandable when we bear in mind that these developments happened to coincide with the IMF’s attempt to obstruct China’s US$9 billion ‘infrastructure for copper’ deal with the DRC.

China’s policymakers would have to be only slightly paranoid to see a connection between a frustrated attempt to get direct access to the raw material, a frustrated attempt at a partnership with one of the three monopoly suppliers of that material; and undermining of their negotiations over its price.

But China’s response has been to reinforce its ‘going out’ drive, explicitly stating that its record foreign exchange reserves will be used for the purpose. The Financial Times of 21 July quoted Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as telling diplomats ‘“We should hasten the implementation of our ‘going out’ strategy and combine the utilisation of foreign exchange reserves with the ‘going out’ of our enterprises,”

According to the FT, ‘Qu Hongbin, chief China economist at HSBC, said: “This is the first time we have heard an official articulation of this policy ... to directly support corporations to buy offshore assets.” China’s outbound non-financial direct investment rose to $40.7bn last year from just $143m in 2002. ... Mr Qu said this was part of a strategy to reduce its reliance on the US dollar as a reserve currency.

“This is reserve diversification in a broader sense. Instead of accumulating foreign exchange reserves and short-term financial assets, the government wants the nation to accumulate more long-term corporate real assets.”

The same report quotes Chen Yuan, chair of China Development Bank, as forecasting that ‘Chinese outbound investment would accelerate but should focus on resource-rich developing economies’.

Thus continued overseas corporate acquisitions serve a triple purpose for China ; helping secure access to key raw materials and to the firms that help shape markets in them; enlarging the global role of major Chinese State-owned corporations; and providing a way of diversifying China’s foreign exchange reserves away from the dollar without risking undermining its value, and hence that of China’s dollar-denominated assets.

However, the implications of the ‘Rio affair’ extend beyond the direct issue of China’s raw material interests, crucial though these are.

Press reports have claimed that the charges ‘could reflect a structural shake-up of China's economic management in the wake of the global financial crisis, as the Communist Party's nine-member standing committee, led by President Hu Jintao, exerts more control over economic decisions at the expense of the State Council, led by Premier Wen Jiabao’.

This could be the more significant implication, not only of the Rio arrests and those of Chinese steel bosses also implicated in the scandal, but also of other less-publicised crackdowns

As well as Chinese steel industry executives accused of accepting bribes from Rio, two senior executives of Guangdong Development Bank have been arrested on suspicion of ‘economic crimes’, and a former chairman of Sinopec, the country’s second-biggest oil company, was given a suspended death sentence for bribery.

This follows a death sentence passed last December on Yu Weiping, vice-chairman of Yunnan Copper Group, China’s third-largest copper producer, for accepting bribes and embezzling about $10.3m.

How far is this part of a trend? The German news magazine Spiegel claims that President and Party Chairman Hu Jintao is using these and other corruption scandals to ‘clean up’ the party ahead of the impending 60th anniversary celebrations of the Peoples Republic, but also as an opportunity to fundamentally restructure the world's manufacturing powerhouse in response to the global economic crisis.

‘The most recent wave of scandals has given a boost to modernizers in the party. Chief among them is Guangdong party leader Wang Yang, who promotes "new thinking" and is a close associate of President Hu. He wants to liberate the province from its dependence on the production of cheap goods, while at the same time preserving low-wage jobs for migrant workers’.

Another area in which sections of central government may be making use of the conjuncture to boost restructuring is environmental regulation. On 25 June Reuters reported that China's environmental ministry has won its latest battle with influential state-owned power firms after forcing two of them to stop hydropower projects in the southwest province of Yunnan.

In itself this could be just another battle in the never-ending war between the Ministry of Environmental Protection and local regional and industrial bosses - battles most of which are lost, especially when central priority is being given to countering the economic downturn through the Chinese government’s massive economic boost.

But the independent Chinese journal Economic Observer sees a wider significance in the move;

‘The re-emergence of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) as a regulatory body with teeth, is an indicator that there has been a shift in the Chinese government's macroeconomic focus’ it argued on 10 July.

‘After remaining conspicuously silent while investment surged into various high-polluting and energy intensive projects during the past 7 months, the MEP has recently stepped back into the fray by suspending construction of the Jinsha River hydroelectric dam.

‘The Ministry also undertook other disciplinary action, placing limits on other construction projects being carried out by the dam's investors, the China Huaneng Group and China Huadian Corporation and declaring a moratorium on the approval of any iron and steel construction projects in Shandong Province.

‘This is being interpreted as a clear sign that the government is starting to shift its macroecomic focus’.

The shift, according to the journal’s correspondents, is away from the emphasis on stimulating demand in the first phase of the economic recovery package, to a new emphasis on a fundamental economic restructuring. This means a shift away from the loose regulation that characterised the first phase of the package, when the emphasis was on growth above all. It also means an attempt to avoid the problem of over-capacity , which was seen in the stimulus package introduced to counter the Asian financial crisis of ten years ago.

The emphasis in the first round of the package was on investment in infrastructure, which took up 50% of the total spend. But critics pointed to the danger that once the boost from the initial spend had passed, there would be little lasting benefit to the rest of the economy.

But now, according to Economic Observer’s analysis, ‘Although the stimulus package will continue to be carried out as originally planned, it will now be combined with a new emphasis on economic restructuring. Investment will be encouraged in areas that benefit the livelihood of ordinary people and a focus will be placed on upgrading technology in key sectors of China's economy.

‘Many ministries and departments view this focus on technical upgrading as an additional round of investment, but unlike the government backed stimulus package of the past seven months, they hope this investment program will be backed by enterprises.’

In this context, the increase in activity by the Ministry of Environmental Protection [MEP] is seen as a sign of central government’s intention to take restructuring seriously. If so, the emphasis is certainly needed, as it seems that between January and May this year projects begun without official approval from the MEP outnumber those with official approval by some 340 to one - or a staggering 590 times if projects already under way are included.

According to experts at the National Development and Reform Commission, this growth in unvetted projects was due to local officials getting as many projects under way as quickly as possible. But figures show that this boost in new investment is not being followed through in terms of value added or sales of industrial goods.

Hence the new emphasis on restructuring - and enforcement of environmental regulations is seen as part of this.

According to EO ‘In detail, the MEP will strengthen the environmental approval process that all industrial investment projects are required to pass through and the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) will restructure the rules in relation to credit institutions.
‘Aside from strengthening the environment impact assessment process, the reforms also seek to speed up the process of upgrading industrial technology and ensure the outdated capacity is eliminated.
‘Furthermore, the State Council has made it clear that a detailed development plan concerning how to restructure ten key sectors must be released before the end of July,
‘According to sources familiar with the situation, as excess capacity is a shared problem for each of these ten sectors, the new program will not only focus on expanding domestic demand, but will also involve more fundamental economic restructuring’.

It is significant that the analysis in EO substantially coincides with a recent study on the Carter Centre’s China Elections and Governance website. Sam Verran argues that;

‘This momentum has the potential to go beyond simple increases in government investment, and alter specific policy areas and sectors of the economy as the government uses this momentum to make necessary reforms. Reform in the healthcare system is one such example of the central government using the current downturn to tackle long needed reforms....’

Indeed, on the environment Verran predicts - as we can now see, accurately - that ‘Beijing had considered the idea of linking promotion for officials with the degree to which they had engaged in environmental protection. Now again with the stimulus package, internal politics may once again prove to be a potent deterrent for any true change to be accomplished. ..., it is entirely conceivable that local officials will seek to bypass the EPM's approval process and use the stimulus money to immediately begin construction, under the pretext of improving the standard of living in their respective areas.

Nonetheless he insists that ’It is undeniable, however, that China is making a definitive and concerted effort to improve environmental conditions domestically and to become a global environmental leader’. Indeed he points to a review of China’s emerging ‘green industries’ in the US magazine Business Week which concludes that China’s lead in this sector is already such that ‘The rock-bottom prices for made-in-China green technology could make it impossible for cleantech ventures in the U.S., Europe, or Japan to compete’.

In common with most Western observers, Verran is sceptical about the feasibility of economic restructuring within the existing political framework of central control of SOEs. But the Chinese authorities evidently feel that the Rio iron ore scandal resulted from too little central control over China’s 16 major state-owned steel mills, which entered into a cosy relationship with Rio and other suppliers. Officials at all 16 are now said to be under investigation. The major Chinese importers had little interest in getting a low price, as they could pass on any increase to the rest of the industry. They did have an interest in maximising the amount of ore they were able to import, and in selling on the surplus to smaller mills.

When the China Iron and Steel Association [CISA] took over the negotiations this year and tried to leverage China’s market power as the world’s biggest iron importer, the cosy relationship was disrupted. As one anonymous source at Baosteel put it "the Rio Tinto affair is really a struggle between the market power of China's steel companies and the political power of China's government planners."

* Stephen Marks is research associate and project coordinator with Fahamu's China in Africa Project.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Angola: Angola: Sinopec, CNOOC to buy marathon stake in Angola block

2009-07-24

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=az8tMzNGuT5o

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., the country’s largest refiner, and CNOOC Ltd. agreed to buy a 20 percent stake in Angola’s offshore deepwater Block 32 for $1.3 billion from Marathon Oil Corp. Marathon, the fourth-largest U.S. oil company, will keep a 10 percent interest in the block, site of 12 announced petroleum discoveries, after the sale, which is expected to close by year- end, the companies said today in separate statements.

China: A rare protest by foreigners in China

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/mw8x43

China has seen its fair share of anti-foreigner protests, from the Boxer Rebellion to the May Fourth movement, and, in more recent decades, more generically termed demonstrations against Americans, Africans, Japanese and the French. Yet for all the expat grumbling about living in China, public protests by foreign residents are virtually unknown, perhaps tempered by the awareness that we are here by choice, live in relative comfort, and would likely achieve little more than a swift deportation.

Mugabe urges end to violence, Tsvangirai seeks justice

2009-07-24

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE56N0G720090724

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has called for an end to political violence and committed his party to campaigning peacefully as the country marked the start of a national reconciliation process. The southern African country was plunged into violence last year as Mugabe fought to reclaim power in a run-off vote after being defeated by Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai, now prime minister in a new unity government.

Africa: One-dollar campaign against teenage pregnancy

2009-07-24

http://www.africanpswu.org/9.html

In response to the high rate of teenage pregnancy in Africa, the African Professional Sex Work Union® APSWU has initiated a permanent project called “Campaign Against Teenage Pregnancy in Africa, CATPA” and calls on all those who care about the well being of the African Child to support this campaign with at least one dollar. The caption "one dollar" is borrowed from the famous “less-than-a-dollar-a-day” classification of vulnerable members of society.

Global: Drastic shortfall in resources threatens women's safety

2009-07-24

http://www.choike.org/2009/eng/informes/7595.html

The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women is a global source of support for country and local-level action to end violence against women and girls established by the General Assembly. Due to the global economic and financial crisis, the Fund is facing a dramatic shortfall in donor contributions.

Global: Landmark meeting on discrimination against women held

2009-07-24

http://www.unhcr.org/4a69bde09.html

A landmark meeting in New York, co-organized by the UN refugee agency, has given important impetus to efforts to eradicate discrimination against forcibly displaced and stateless females, including rape, domestic violence and other abuses.

Mauritania: First steps for women's cooperatives

2009-07-24

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=47618

In December 2008, a group of young women staged a protest against the common practice of fattening women before marriage, intended to make them more attractive in the eyes of men. The protest did not immediately result in the end of the practice, but it was a landmark event showing a new assertiveness among Mauritanian women in a society where men use tradition and sharia law to maintain their dominance.

Swaziland: Stiff penalties approved for gender violence

2009-07-24

http://www.afrol.com/articles/33844

The Swaziland cabinet has endorsed a harsh law imposing fine of E50, 000 ($6, 500) for persons convicted of perpetrating domestic violence. The proposed legislation, Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Bill of 2009 which is yet to be tabled in parliament, further says should the convict fail to pay the fine, they should faces up to 10 years in jail.

Uganda: No safe haven for Ugandan girls

2009-07-24

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=47619

A year ago, a mother in Kashari County took the law into her own hands and castrated a man she caught raping her seven-year-old daughter. Malita Kyomugisha returned from her farm and found her neighbor Tito Mugarura sexually assaulting her youngest daughter behind her house in Rugyerera village.

Egypt: Selling kidneys to pay the bills

2009-07-24

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47738

Karim borrowed money to expand his bakery. When the money ran out, and facing the prospect of imprisonment if unable to repay his debts, the 36-year- old Egyptian baker sold his kidney. His case, among hundreds documented by the Coalition for Organ-Failure Solutions (COFS), a Washington-based NGO working to end organ trafficking, reveals an alarming trend: poverty is driving Egyptians to sell their organs.

Ethiopia: FEars over new anti-terror law

2009-07-24

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/europe/article.aspx?id=7615

A little over 18 years ago, when the ruling Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power, people were so eager to exercise democracy that even children started to challenge their parents saying "this is my democratic right". Perhaps it was too good to last. Earlier this month a new anti-terror law was passed, granting sweeping powers to the state to detain people it deems threatening. It follows closely on the heels of legislation that severely restricted the operations of NGOs working human rights issues.

Kenya: The bitter and better options for Kenya in the fight for justice

Kenya Human Rights Commission

2009-07-24

http://www.khrc.or.ke/documents/Bitter_Better_Options4Kenya_in_Fight4Justice.pdf

The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) would like to comment on the ongoing debate about prosecution of perpetrators and financiers responsible for the post-election violence versus the role of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) in handling the question of justice. To begin with, KHRC wishes to remind Kenyans that the post-election violence as result of the disputed presidential elections in December 2007 led to massive deaths, displacement, injuries and destruction of property.

Nigeria: Investigate killings by security forces

2009-07-24

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/07/20/nigeria-investigate-killings-security-forces

The Plateau State Judicial Commission of Inquiry in Nigeria should investigate and call for the prosecution of members of the security forces responsible for the alleged killing of more than 130 people in November 2008, Human Rights Watch has said.

Uganda: Charge or release those secretly detained

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/l2a3kh

The Ugandan government should urgently charge or release five detainees held by military intelligence, one of them for 16 months, Human Rights Watch has said. Lawyers for the detainees' families and friends filed petitions for habeas corpus with the High Court in Kampala on July 17, 2009 seeking to compel the government to justify the legal basis for continuing detention.

Chad: UN appeals to donors over displaced

2009-07-24

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=31570

The United Nations has called for an additional $200 million to provide aid to more than half a million people uprooted by violence in Chad and the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR) and Darfur region of western Sudan, as demand mounts for humanitarian assistance. “People in eastern and southern Chad still require considerable help from the international community as they attempt to cope with the effects of displacement and in some cases to rebuild their lives,” said Eliane Duthoit, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Chad.

DRC: Thousands flee new fighting in South Kivu

2009-07-24

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/LSGZ-7U9GCX?OpenDocument

Thousands of Congolese have been uprooted by the latest escalation of fighting in the South Kivu province of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Our initial estimates show that at least 35,000 people have been displaced in the Ruzizi River plain where the DRC borders neighbouring Rwanda and Burundi. These people have reportedly fled in the wake of the latest government military campaign code-named Kimia II, which began on 12 July in the Uvira territory of South Kivu.

Sudan: Crackdown on Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees

2009-07-24

http://www.voanews.com/horn/2009-07-17-voa1.cfm

Police in Khartoum began a crackdown on Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees in the past few days. The Amharic service's Tizita Belachew interviewed leaders of the refugee community in Khartoum on Thursday and Friday who said the raids began on July 5 and each day since then truckloads of police and other Sudanese government security have raided the homes and business of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees, confiscating the contents of their restaurants and homes and beating and raping women and children.

Kenya: There is no obligation to support Kenya’s Unity Government

2009-07-24

http://blog.marsgroupkenya.org/?p=1018

The Partnership for Change is of the considered view that over the last 17 months the citizens of Kenya have exhausted the mechanisms available to us under the national Accord Agreement to cause the Grand Coalition Government to implement the National Accord. This government acting together with Parliament has no vision, no morals and no desire or intent to uphold the constitution of the Republic of Kenya.

South Africa: City accused of politicising food aid

Abahlali baseMjondolo

2009-07-24

http://www.abahlali.org/node/5485

More than ten Cape Flats informal settlements hardest hit by floods did not receive any emergency assistance at all from the City of Cape Town or the Provincial Government. These include Tambo Square, Barcelona, New Rest and Gxa Gxa Square in the Gugulethu area. In addition to this, the city continues to ignore the plight of vulnerable backyard dwellers whose homes have been flooded.

Congo: Opposition parties appeal results

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/kvo3bc

Four candidates of the Front of Congolese Opposition Parties (FPOC) and an independent candidate, who ran for the 12 July polls in Congo, have appealed for the annulment of the election results.

Kenya: Debate-The politics of violence and accountability

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/mptzrc

The handover of the names of the suspects behind Kenya’s post-elections violence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an uncertain chapter in the country’s history of political violence. This development has generated a vibrant debate among Kenyans: What should accountable politics look like? Oxford Transitional Justice Research is working in partnership with Moi University and Pambazuka News to offer a space in which concerned Kenyans can come together with a range of experts, scholars, practitioners, and commentators to discuss fundamental questions about how we got here, and the strategies necessary to move the country forward.

Kenya: Truth commmission established

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/lkt4wr

Renowned diplomat and peace maker, Ambassador Bethuel Ki plagat, has been selected to chair Kenya's Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission. Nairobi lawyer Betty Murungi was named vice-chairperson of the nine-member commission in the appointments made by President Mwai Kibaki.

Mauritania: Election results challenged

2009-07-24

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=47748

Coup leader-turned-politician General Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz has been declared winner of Saturday's presidential elections by Mauritania’s Interior Ministry. His main rivals, former parliamentary speaker Messaoud Ould Boulkheir and veteran opposition figure Ahmed Ould Daddah have rejected the results as "prefabricated, meant to legitimise the coup that brought General Aziz to power."

Mauritania: Electoral Commission President resigns

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/lbrpyg

The president of Mauritania's Independent National Electoral Committee (INEC), Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Dey, has resigned his position. Dey is a member of the opposition Rally of Democratic Forces (RFD). No reason has been given for the resignation which comes 5 days after the holding of the presidential poll won in the first round by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of the Union for the Republic (UPR), Several opposition figures have criticised the result saying there was "fraud a nd manipulation" of the voters' register.

Niger: Leader defiant on vote plan

2009-07-24

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8164629.stm

Niger's president has said he will not bow to foreign pressure to abandon his attempt to hold a referendum on whether he can serve a third term in office. Mamadou Tandja told state TV the threat of sanctions would not deter him from doing what was right for the people.

South Africa: Govenrment vows to stop riots

2009-07-24

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8164956.stm

South Africa's government has vowed to crack down on riots in townships where residents are demanding better basic services, such as water and housing. "We are not going to allow anybody to use illegal means to achieve their objective," a local government minister said on South African radio.

Kenya: Using puppets to battle corruption

2009-07-24

http://www.fordfound.org/newsroom/inthenews/295

At a recent prayer breakfast in Kenya, religious matters were pushed aside and instead gluttony was the order of the day. President Mwai Kibaki struggled to eat a whole chapatti in one go, Prime Minister Raila Odinga spilt tea down his suit and Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka struggled after getting a sausage stuck in his mouth. Luckily, these were just puppets being filmed in the cramped dining room of a Nairobi home for the latest of 13 episodes of the XYZ show.

Namibia: Graft body wants to interview son of Hu

2009-07-24

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE56N0FF20090724

Namibia's Anti-Corruption Commission has requested an interview with the son of Chinese leader Hu Jintao to glean information about a deal involving a Chinese scanner company, the head of the anti-graft body has said.

Africa: The new scramble for Africa

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/nqdkfo

Two scarcely noticed events occurred in Nigeria and Botswana at the end of last week that signal the growing speed and strength of a new "scramble for Africa" among the world's big powers, who are tapping into the continent for its oil, iron ore, timber, gold, diamonds and other natural resources. At Nigeria's Defence Intelligence School in Karu, near the capital Abuja, 30 military officers from seven African countries graduated from a training course designed to meet the "rapidly changing security complexities" of their nations "and the continent at large".

Angola: Government pledges $1.2 bln to farming, food security

2009-07-24

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE56F05M20090716

Angola will invest an estimated $1.2 billion in agricultural development over the next four years as part of a food security initiative, according to a government statement. The investment will be financed by a line of credit from the China Development Bank, private investment and other loans, said the statement in the state-owned newspaper Jornal de Angola.

Congo: US$20-million for health and education

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/nhmv26

The World Bank has given Congo a US$20-million loan to finance two projects in the health and education sectors. The Minister of Economy, Finance and Budget, Pacifique Issoibeka, and the World Bank operations director Marie Françoise Marie-Nelly signed two agreements - US$15 million to support basic education (PRAE BASE) and US$5 million for the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Global: Improving budget transparency and accountability in aid dependent countries

2009-07-24

http://www.internationalbudget.org/resources/briefs/brief7.htm

Only 20 percent of the world’s governments are providing adequate information for their citizens to begin to hold them accountable for managing the public’s money. This finding comes from the Open Budget Survey 2008, an extensive new survey of government budget transparency in 85 countries issued on February 1, 2009, by the International Budget Partnership (IBP). The Survey also found that nearly 50 percent of the 85 countries evaluated provide such minimal information that they are able to hide unpopular, wasteful, and corrupt spending.

Kenya: Social audits in Kenya: Budget transparency and accountability

2009-07-24

http://openbudgetindex.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2465

The activities of Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI), a civil society organization (CSO) based in Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrate the significant role budget transparency plays in improving accountability. MUHURI’s work also shows how public engagement in the budget process can strengthen oversight and lead to improved public service delivery. At the same time, MUHURI’s impact has been restricted by the lack of a Freedom of Information (FOI) law in Kenya, along with other broad transparency challenges in the country.

Africa: Delays in starting treatment common in ART programmes

2009-07-24

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/BF56E295-3842-4E99-8D40-B0D10F8AA45C.asp

Late initiation of antiretroviral treatment following diagnosis is contributing to the continuing high death rate among people who present with low CD4 counts in eight sub-Saharan African countries.

Africa: Going into debt for health

2009-07-24

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=85284

One in four families living in the world’s poorest countries borrows money or sells assets in order to afford health care, according to the most recent issue of the US medical journal "Health Affairs". he authors calculated almost 26 percent of households representing 3.6 billion people – most often the poorest with little or no health insurance – used "hardship financing" from 2002 to 2004 to cover health costs.

Global: 'Bureaucratic envy' puts AIDS lobby on defensive

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/mzassr

Any other group of activists might be in a mood to celebrate. The HIV-AIDS lobby has been among the most successful in the world, winning an impressive $10-billion in new annual funds and tripling the level of global support for AIDS programs since 2003. But instead, the AIDS advocacy groups are in a state of anxiety. Their future is looking increasingly difficult, despite all their recent gains.

South Africa: ART for mothers leads to decline in infant deaths - study

2009-07-24

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/C99C0F65-15A4-494C-920F-90C5429C45D0.asp

A major decrease in the childhood mortality rate in children under the age of two (U2CMR), observed between 2001 and 2006 in northern rural KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, was associated with the rollout of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in that region, according to a presentation made at IAS 2009 in Cape Town this week. Although some of the benefit may have been due to the introduction of programmes to prevent vertical (mother to child) transmission in 2001, researchers found that it was most strongly associated with maternal access to ART.

Uganda: End in sight to Aids drug treks?

2009-07-24

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8161354.stm

A week after giving birth to her sixth child, Christine Achan walked 60 km (37 miles) from her village in northern Uganda to get life-saving anti-retroviral drugs to stop her and her baby becoming sick with Aids. Doctors say it is villagers like her that the results of Africa's largest and longest running clinical test, the Dart trial, should help.

Uganda: HIV circumcision study ends early

2009-07-24

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8154134.stm

Circumcising men who already have HIV does not protect their female partners from the virus, a study in Uganda has found. Circumcision is known to protect men from acquiring HIV. But the research, from the Lancet, showed no benefit in those who already had the virus and was stopped early because of the continued risk to women.

Zimbabwe: Crisis 'driving HIV decline'

2009-07-24

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5841

Fewer Zimbabweans are getting infected with AIDS, and researchers speculate it's due in part to a battered economy that's leaving men short of money to be sugar daddies and keep mistresses. Presenting a study of the infection rate among pregnant women at a major international AIDS conference in South Africa this week, Dr. Michael Silverman said the prevalence of the virus that causes AIDS fell from 23 percent in 2001 to 11 percent at the end of 2008.

Zimbabwe: Male circumcision rollout a long way off

2009-07-24

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=85432

Providing male circumcision as an HIV prevention measure in Zimbabwe's state hospitals is off to a very slow start, and experts cite the country's crippled health sector as the main reason for the delay. Although about 140 circumcisions were successfully performed at four hospitals as part of a training exercise, health officials told IRIN/PlusNews the government was not yet ready to roll out the programme.

Uganda: School building fund provides lessons on community mobilization

2009-07-24

http://openbudgetindex.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2446

Nearly ten years ago, the government of Uganda established the Universal Primary Education Program, designed to boost classroom attendance and increase literacy and education rates throughout the country. In less than a decade, the policy generated dramatic results, more than doubling the number of students enrolled in primary schools from 2.9 million to 6.3 million children.

Africa: Alarm as lesbian women shut out from services

2009-07-24

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=Health&id=2215

As health institutions are stepping up to fight HIV prevalence among the gay community Women who have Sex with Women (WSW) seem to be shut out. This is a group which, according to Nomvuyo Dlamini of Durban Lesbian and Gay Community and Health Care Centre, is less researched but also faces sexual health problems. Dlamini says the WSW are generally not regarded as being at a high risk of HIV “but they are.”

Africa: Alarming male gay HIV rate

2009-07-24

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8158469.stm

HIV rates among gay men in some African countries are 10 times higher than among the general male population, says research in medical journal the Lancet. The report said prejudice towards gay people was leading to isolation and harassment, which in turn led to risky sexual practices among gay communities.

Global: A transgender person's murder is reported every third day - study

2009-07-24

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=phealth&id=2217

In April 2009 the international NGO Transgender Europe (TGEU) in cooperation with the multilingual Online-Magazine “Liminalis - A Journal for Sex/Gender Emancipation and Resistance” started a new project, the Trans Murder Monitoring Project, which focuses on systematically reporting murdered trans people on a worldwide scale.

South Africa: Lesbian murder accused to face court

2009-07-24

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=southafrica&id=2218

Trial to the murder of Eudy Simelane is resuming at Delmas Circuit Court on 29 – 31 July 2009. This time only three of the four accused, who pleaded not guilty, will appear in court as one of the accused who pleaded guilty is already serving a 31 years sentence. The remaining co-accused Khumbulani Magagula, Johannes Mahlangu and Themba Mvubu are facing charges of robbery with aggravating circumstances, rape and murder.

South Africa: Racism is the twin evil of poverty

2009-07-24

http://blog.choike.org/eng/news/597

South Africa, as a member of the G20 group, is playing an increasingly important role in world affairs, but the xenophobic riots of May 2008 offered a reminder of how explosive the social situation can be. Khulile Nkushubana, general secretary of CONSAWU (1), examines the recent developments in the fight against racism and outlines the strategies for a more harmonious future.

Africa: Fund promotes African adaptation to climate change

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/mcbc93

Africa's most marginalised communities will be able to share their experiences of adapting to climate change thanks to a new fund that seeks to promote knowledge sharing across the continent. AfricaAdapt, a network set up in May to aid the flow of information between stakeholders, launched a Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund last month (16 June), offering grants of up to US$10,000 to projects testing new ways of sharing knowledge, such as theatre performances and radio broadcasts.

Global: Are rights-based approaches the way forward for conservation?

2009-07-24

http://www.eldis.org/go/topics/resource-guides/environment&id=44126&type=Document

The links between the realisation of human rights and the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity are receiving increasing attention worldwide. Experience has demonstrated that exclusionary approaches to conservation can undermine those same rights of affected communities and can undermine conservation objectives. The ‘rights-based approaches’ (RBAs) to conservation presented in this document offer a number of positive ways forward, but they also raise a range of new challenges and questions.

Lesotho: One dollar per square metre, now move

2009-07-24

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47756

The construction of a two billion dollar dam in Metolong, some 35 kilometres outside of Lesotho’s capital Maseru, is being welcomed by people in and around the city who will gain access to clean and safe drinking water when construction is completed in 2013. But for 250 rural families who will lose access to land and natural resources - some will be forced to relocate to make way for roads, power lines and other infrastructural development during construction - the dam is bad news.

Zimbabwe: Thousands faces mass eviction

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/nz5bpj

Up to 200 people from an informal settlement in the Harare suburb of Gunhill in Zimbabwe face being forcibly evicted without being given adequate notice or any consultation or due process. Thousands of vendors across Harare also face forcible removal from their market stalls. The majority of those to be affected are poor women whose principal source of livelihood is selling fruits, vegetables and other wares at market stalls like Mbare Musika and Mupedzanhamo in Harare.

Burkina Faso: Moving towards food security

2009-07-24

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47717

Burkina Faso was one of several countries that where a rapid rise in food prices led to rioting in the streets in 2008. Policy-makers had sensed a crisis developing, but the country was not able to build up sufficient reserves of imported commodities such as rice, wheat and oil to avoid it. There is now an emphasis on achieving food security. Bonou tells IPS that Burkina Faso is one of the handful of countries respecting the Maputo commitment to spending at least ten percent of its budget on agriculture.

South Africa: More unknowns than knowns with GM crops

2009-07-24

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/321.1

Genetically modified (GMO) crops have more unknowns than knowns. Yet the South African government whole-heartily embraces this technology in the production of food crops, particularly maize, a staple food in South Africa. The South African pro-GMO lobby is very proud of the fact that South Africa is the eighth biggest GMO producer in the world among the 13 largest biotechnology-producing countries. They also make claims that this technology is accepted worldwide, however many African countries have put a ban on GMO foods and in Europe, countries like Switzerland have put moratorium on GMOs.

Niger: Media go on strike over press freedom restrictions

2009-07-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/57984

President Mamadou Tandja of Niger, operating under his emergency powers on July 8, 2009 gave sweeping powers to Daouda Diallo, chairman of the Conseil Supérieur de la Communication (CSC), the media regulatory body, to unilaterally deal decisively with the country's media.
President Mamadou Tandja of Niger, operating under his emergency powers on July 8, 2009 gave sweeping powers to Daouda Diallo, chairman of the Conseil Supérieur de la Communication (CSC), the media regulatory body, to unilaterally deal decisively with the country's media.

According to a presidential decree Diallo has the exclusive power to take all measures including closure, against any media which allegedly "undermines public order or state's security" without seeking the approval of the other members of the CSC.

Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)'s correspondent reported that this latest act of highhandedness comes in the wake of deep division among members of the media regulatory body over the closure of Dounia Media Group on June 29.

The closure of the Dounia Group followed the broadcast of a statement by civil society groups calling for the resignation of President Tandja. Majority of the members of the CSC have distanced themselves from the CSC's directive saying the decision was not a collective one but solely that of the commission's president. The Dounia group has reopened after a Niamey court ruled that the closure was illegal.

Meanwhile, independent media houses in Niger have vowed to presurise President Tandja to rescind this decision. To show their determination, the print media have stopped publication for the week which ends on July 27. Radio and TV stations will not broadcast for a day on July 21.

Following unsuccessful attempts to extend his stay in power, President Tandja on June 29 declared a state of emergency in the country. Prof. Kwame Karikari

Executive Director
MFWA
Accra, Ghana
Tel 233-21 242470
Fax 233 -21 221084

Senegal: PM advocates nationwide talks with the media

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/ns6ta5

The Senegalese Prime minister, Souleymane Ndéné Ndiaye, said on Thursday that he would soon hold nationwide talks with the local media, urging actors in the sector to have a daily dialogue with the government. Speaking in Dakar he expressed regret about recent misunderstandings in the relations between the government and some privately-owned media.

Sudan: Journalist prosecuted for article

2009-07-24

http://www.ifex.org/sudan/2009/07/23/habbani_prosecuted/

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) condemns the Sudanese authorities for continuing to persecute reporters and oppress all voices defending freedom of expression. ANHRI requests that the Sudanese government abolish or change the public discipline law, one of the most oppressive and discriminating laws against women, as it violates basic individual freedoms.

Zambia: Tabling of FOI bill delayed

2009-07-24

http://www.ifex.org/zambia/2009/07/22/foi_bill_delayed/

The minister of information and broadcasting services, Lieutenant General Ronnie Shikapwasha, confirmed on 16 July 2009 that the freedom of information (FOI) bill will not be tabled before the current parliamentary session. He instead stated that the bill would possibly be introduced in the next parliamentary session. Responding to queries from journalists in Lusaka, Shikapwasha noted that the government is still making consultations on the bill in different countries, such as the United Kingdom.

Zimbabwe: Journalist sues state over illegal detention

2009-07-24

http://www.ifex.org/zimbabwe/2009/07/23/manyere_files_lawsuit/

On 14 July 2009, freelance photojournalist Andrisson Manyere and 15 members of the Movement for Democratic Change-T (MDC-T) filed a lawsuit with the High Court demanding compensation in the amount of US$19.2 million from the Co-Ministers of Home Affairs and State Security agents, following their alleged abduction, unlawful detention and deprivation of liberty.

Honduras: Implications of coup for Afro-descendants

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/mcsbws

Currently, the country of Honduras in Central America is experiencing its worst political crisis in decades. In the aftermath of the military coup that forcibly removed President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, there have been various developments that have raised our concern about the security of citizens’ rights and the impact of the situation on people of African descent.

Somalia: Clashes kill 46

2009-07-24

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE56N01Y20090724

Clashes in central Somalia and the capital have killed at least 46 people, officials and peace groups have said, while a newly-appointed security minister pledged to build strong national security forces. Meanwhile, the African Union (AU) said it was investigating a mystery illness that had killed three Burundian peacekeepers based in Somalia. Eighteen more were in a Kenyan hospital with the same symptoms, an AU official said.

Somalia: growing insecurity hampers aid access

2009-07-24

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=31534

Aid workers are finding it increasingly difficult to gain access and provide assistance to residents of the Somali capital because of the worsening conflict there, the United Nations refugee agency has reported. This week’s scheduled distribution of 4,000 aid kits in Mogadishu and surrounding areas had to be postponed because of security concerns, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Ron Redmond told journalists in Geneva.

Ghana: Programme to train students in computer repairs launched

2009-07-24

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

A programme to train students in technical institutions to repair and service computers has been launched by the Ghana Education Service in Accra. The Computer System Support Programme (CSSP) is a two-year pilot programme which will commence in September this year and initially run as a technical institute for senior high school students who offer science programmes.

Kenya: Fibre optic goes 'live'

2009-07-24

http://tinyurl.com/ll7ajn

Kenya's private sector-backed SEACOM fibre optic cable has gone ‘live’ in five of the 11 countries that it is to connect. The 17,000-kilometre cable, linking South and East Africa to global networks through India and Europe, was commissioned in Kenya, South Africa, India, Tanzania and Mozambique simultaneously. It went live in the port city of Mombasa.

Uganda: Schools to lose computers due to importation ban

2009-07-24

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

Bushenyi district might lose a donation of over 500 computers if the Government goes ahead to implement a ban on the importation of used computers. While presenting this year's budget recently, Syda Bbumba, the finance minister, announced a total ban on the importation of used computers, freezers and refrigerators, citing environmental concerns.

Zambia: UNICEF uses text messgaing to spread information about polio

2009-07-24

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=31517

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) will be sending text messages to millions of Zambian parents this week as part of a new initiative to harness modern technology in the fight to prevent polio. UNICEF has joined forces with the Zambian Health Ministry and two mobile phone companies, ZAIN and MTN, to encourage parents to bring their children under the age of five to the nearest health-care centre for free polio vaccinations.

Global: International Budget Partnership

2009-07-24

http://www.internationalbudget.org/

The International Budget Partnership (IBP) was formed in 1997 to collaborate with civil society organizations in developing and transition countries to analyze, monitor, and influence government budget processes, institutions, and outcomes. The aim of the Partnership is to make budget systems more responsive to the needs of poor and low-income people in society and, accordingly, to make these systems more transparent and accountable to the public.

Ghana: 2nd International Conference on African Culture and Development 2009

Call for papers

2009-07-24

http://www.icacdafrica.org/CallForPapers.htm

The Secretariat for the International Conference on African Culture and Development (ICACD) invites you to submit abstracts / presentation ideas for ICACD 2009 – www.icacdafrica.org . Academics, artists, cultural and development workers, Government agencies and policy makers and all people committed to working to see Culture included on all development agendas are encouraged to submit their abstracts or ideas. ICACD 2009 will be held in Accra, Ghana November 15th to 18th 2009.

Pambazuka seeks a Technology Project Manager

2009-07-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/58038

Pambazuka News (http://www.pambazuka.org) is the award-winning pan African platform for social justice. We seek to establish Pan African social networking platform as the hub of social activism across the continent – an independent, self-financing, pan African social network and community of members comprising social justice activists, engaged intellectuals and institutions that have similar missions to those of Pambazuka News. It will become the central hub of opinion, organizing, advocacy and analysis of all progressive voices on Africa from within Africa and the African diaspora internationally, providing a unitary, safe space online reflecting and enabling cooperation for the cause of social justice in Africa. In addition, we seek to establish Pambazuka Press as the pre-eminent publisher internationally of non-fiction titles on Africa by Africans.

We propose to build an online, interactive, Web 2.0 driven, multilingual, scalable, and e-commerce-ready pan African networking platform for social justice movements in Africa. The site will enable academics, social activists, women's rights campaigners, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, commentators and policy makers, institutions and individuals to engage in advocacy and neworking.

We are seeking an experienced Web 2.0 technologist to project manage the implementation of the platform which is to be developed externally. We see this position as someone who can turn our overall vision of PZ2.0 into reality by providing us the optimum yet futuristic technological platform and functionalities. Consequently having a strong IT expertise is certainly a necessary attribute to interact with the vendors, manage platform-building tasks etc. Most importantly the person should be comfortable in a technological environment where the focus is on providing products and services to the people. The person should be able to work closely with the marketing and sales personnel too, so that products and services visualised by the marketing team can be reasonably built into the platform. Ideally, the person also needs to have some experience in mobile and 3G applications.

The person would have at least 5 years of experience working on IT projects within corporate or non-profit environment, and experience of working in small teams.

The person will be required to work in Oxford and should have the right to work in the UK.

Applications with a CV outlining both technical and managerial experience of similar projects should be sent to fahamujobs@googlemail.com Closing date for applications: August 15, 2009.

Zimbabwe: Receptionist/ Secretary - Zimbabwe Women Resource Centre and Network

2009-07-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/57981

The Zimbabwe Women Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN) is seeking a competent, experienced and self motivated individual for the position of Receptionist/Secretary. ZWRCN is an information-based organization with a focus on research, collection, analysis, processing and dissemination of information on gender and development. The organization’s strategic interventions aim to empower women, strengthen inter-organizational networking of gender and development agencies and promote the women’s movement in Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwe Women Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN) is seeking a competent, experienced and self motivated individual for the position of Receptionist/Secretary.

ZWRCN is an information-based organization with a focus on research, collection, analysis, processing and dissemination of information on gender and development. The organization’s strategic interventions aim to empower women, strengthen inter-organizational networking of gender and development agencies and promote the women’s movement in Zimbabwe. ZWRCN’s programmes are aimed at reducing gender inequalities and promote gender sensitive national policies and programmes for the improvement of the welfare of women and girls in Zimbabwe.

The following are the Key Performance Areas for Receptionist/Secretary:-

- Organising and professionally managing the front desk;
- Effective managing telephonic communication, including the switchboard system as assigned;
- Provision of secretarial services to the Executive Director and to programs as and when necessary;
- Managing incoming and outgoing mail;
- Undertaking specific administration duties as assigned including; assisting the Executive Director with filing and also assisting the Admin Officer with filing for the central filing system.

Education & Work Experience
- 5 “O” Levels including English Maths/Accounts
- Diploma in Secretarial Studies, a receptionist course is an added advantage
- High word processing speed and knowledge of common office software packages including spreadsheets
- At least three years experience in a similar position

ZWRCN is offering a competitive package for the candidate with the right qualifications and experience. Applications with certified copies of certificates, CV and other relevant documents must clearly state the position applied for and should be submitted no later than 26th July 2009 to:

The Caretaker Director, ZWRCN, 288 Herbert Chitepo, Harare, Zimbabwe or via email to vacancy@zwrcn.org.zw Please note that only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

Fahamu