Back Issues

Reconsider Symphony Way's eviction to Blikkiesdorp

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/59312

On 7 October 2009 at 10:00 am, the Symphony Way pavement dwellers will appear in the Western Cape High Court.

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) has sent a letter to Mayor Dan Plato calling on the city to reconsider the eviction of the Symphony Way community to Blikkiesdorp.

We all face evictions from the city of Cape Town – for a second time. The first time was when we were evicted from the N2 Gateway houses without being given any suitable alternative place to stay. This is why we have been occupying Symphony way for 1 year and 8 months.

The city wants to put us in Blikkiesdorp, but we refuse to move there. In Blikkiesdorp our children will not be safe. There are too many crimes happening and children in that relocation camp are being raped all the time. Different kinds of gangs and drug-houses operate in Blikkiesdorp.

We agree with COHRE that the structures are inadequate in size for large families. Because they are constructed with thin tin and zinc sheets, the structures fail to provide adequate protection against the extreme weather conditions of the Cape Flats. As reported on national TV, you can cut open the shacks with a scissor, so it's risky to leave your blikkie to go to work or go shopping for food. Last week, a national newspaper even compared Blikkiesdorp to the concentration camps holding aliens featured in the new hit movie 'District 9'.

We refuse to be treated like aliens in our own country! This is why we say Asiyi eBlikkiesdorp! We will not go to tin-cans!

We will get together for our march at Keizergracht Square at 8:00 am and start marching to the High Court at 9:00 am. The march will be as follows: from Keizergracht down Darling Street, left onto Adderley Street, right into Wale Street and then left into Keerom Street where the court is situated.

For more information, contact Kareemah on (+27) 078-492-0943, Aunty Badru on (+27) 072-822-8109 and Evelyn on (+27) 072-748-6864.

To download the letter to Plato, click here. To download COHRE's report on the N2 Gateway, click here.

* 'Voices from Symphony Way' is a forthcoming publication from Pambazuka Press.

Kenyatta university student leader hospitalised after attack

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/59297

Following the students unrest on early march in Kenyatta University, four students and a lecturer were arrested after getting their suspension and expulsion letters charged with incitement and obstructing police from doing its duties.

Yesterday we received a phone call from a Kenyatta University student about the severe stabbing and strangulation of Moses Nandwale, the secretary general of University Students Leader Association. He is hospitalised; we are trying to locate the hospital he is admitted in since his phone line is not operational. Up to now there is a student still remanded in Industrial Remand Prison waiting for a 20,000 Ksh Bond. The last time we talked with Moses Nandwale was last Friday while we were in court for the mention of the five who were arrested while taking tea in Githurai 45 Hotel. Over the days Shalmat Kasim Naumi has been living in fear; even in court she was scared. Yesterday the stabbing of their fellow comrade leader shows the magnitude of the problem and the threats the students from Kenyatta University are facing.

In the meanwhile Professor Mugenda Olive – whose removal from managing Kenyatta University the students have been fighting for – yesterday heard a case brought against her by two lecturers to the industrial court over their reinstation to the institution after they lost their jobs illegally in 2006. She refused to heed the court order for the reinstatement and that’s why the judge committed her for a two-month jail term for contempt of court.

We are thankful to all the people who have shown a willingness to assist through the R.P.P secretariat. Among the students wishes is to challenge their illegal expulsion and the threats towards them.

Patrick Kamotho Githinji

Democracy’s everyday death: South Africa's quiet coup

Nigel Gibson and Raj Patel

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59322

© Abahlali.orgThe assault and killings suffered by Abahlali baseMjondolo members at Kennedy Road represent a quiet 'coup' and an attack on democracy, write Nigel Gibson and Raj Patel in this week's Pambazuka News. At once a reflection of the ANC's (African National Congress) encouragement of thuggery and the disturbing entrance of an ethnic politics 'unthinkable even in apartheid’s darkest days', the incident was the result of a deliberate attack on an autonomous, grassroots movement. With S'bu Zikode – Abahlali's elected chair – now forced into hiding, the intolerance of poor people's desire for representation and the emergence of 'demons of ethnic hatred' threaten the nation's very stability, the authors conclude.

You don’t need presidential palaces, or generals riding in tanks, or even the CIA to make a coup happen. Democracy can be overthrown with far less pomp, fewer props and smaller bursts of state violence. But these quieter coups are no less deadly for democracy.

At the end of September, just such a coup took place in South Africa. It wasn’t the kind involving parliament or the inept and corrupt head of the ANC (African National Congress), Jacob Zuma. Quite the opposite. It involved a genuinely democratic and respected social movement, the freely elected governing committee of the shack settlement at Kennedy Road in Durban. And this peaceful democracy was overthrown by the South African government.

First, some background. As South Africa prepares to host the 2010 World Cup, the poorest South Africans are still waiting for the end of apartheid’s predations. The country is spending US$1.1 billion just to build new stadiums, while those who fought apartheid wait in shack settlements for running water and electricity. Levels of human development are now lower than in 1994, and South Africa has overtaken Brazil as the country with the widest gap between rich and poor.

But not everyone is waiting patiently, hands outstretched, for the government to drop something into their palms. Some people, particularly those living in shack communities, have organised to bring the dividends of housing, water, education, healthcare, employment and food to their communities. When some communities organised to protest against their government, using the freedoms enshrined in one of the most open and supportive constitutions to be found in any modern democracy, the government responded by initiating its bloody coup.

In the middle of the night on Saturday 26 September, men armed with guns, knives and even a sword, descended on Kennedy Road, and into a shack settlement housing about 7,000 people. These men chanted slogans of ethnic cleansing, pitting Zulu against Pondo. With these words, they summoned an ethnic politics that was unthinkable even in apartheid’s darkest days. Even the 1980s battles between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC were political rather than ethnic clashes. But under Jacob Zuma’s South Africa, the Zulu nationalism that was once anathema to the ANC has now become its standard operating procedure.

Four people were killed. The violence continued under the eyes of the police and local ANC officials. Once it was over, the democratic leaders of the Kennedy Road Development Committee were arrested (even though many weren’t in the settlement at the time of the attacks). Thousands of shack dwellers have now fled the settlement and many shacks have been destroyed.

It has now become clear that the thugs were backed by the local branch of the ANC and their leaders. Jackson Gumede, the chairperson of the Branch Executive Committee of the ANC in the electoral ward containing Kennedy Road, has now taken over the settlement where those remaining live in a state of fear. The ANC provincial government has also become a willing partner.

It has also become clear that the target of the attacks is the autonomous and grassroots democratic shackdweller organisation – Abahlali baseMjondolo – which has grown over the past four years into the largest poor people’s movement in South Africa. Abahlali has become a significant thorn in the side of the ANC provincial government in KwaZulu-Natal.

What particularly irks the ANC is Abahlali’s refusal to let the shackdwellers continue to be a vote bank for the ANC at election time. Rather than supporting any political party, Abahlali has promoted a 'No house, no land, no vote' policy. As well as rejecting the legitimacy of the local ANC councillor, Yacoob Baig, Abahlali has taken the provincial government to court over the constitutionality of the government’s Elimination of Slums Act and spoken out against the forced relocation of shackdwellers to transit or temporary camps outside the urban areas.

Abahlali have also had successes, which have annoyed local politicians. Through their activism, they forced the Durban municipality to agree to upgrade some of their settlements. Controls over the settlement means control over the disbursement of funds. This is the prize that Yakoob Baig and Jackson Gumede covet.

The ANC’s decision to destroy a grassroots poor people’s movement has been condemned around the world. The South Africa Council of Churches (SACC) has called the incident 'an attack on democracy' and has issued a statement of alarm at how community leaders are being criminalised. Bishop Rubin Phillip, the chairperson of the KwaZulu-Natal Christian Council and Anglican Bishop of Natal, who had visited Kennedy road, was 'torn with anguish' by the attack and spoke of the real social hope that Abahlali was creating. Around the world and in South Africa statements of solidarity and outrage continue to pour in and while these pressures may give the ANC pause in their actions against Abahlali, it is also clear that the ANC are not in control of the violence that they have unleashed.

At the settlement anyone associated with Abahlali has been threatened with violence and forced to leave. Already 2000 people have been left homeless. S’bu Zikode, the elected chair of Abahlali, is now in hiding after receiving a number of death threats. Writing on 29 September, Zikode understood that the attack was an attack on the voice of ordinary poor people: 'This attack is an attempt to terrorise that voice back into the dark corners. It is an attempt to turn the frustration and anger of the poor onto the poor so that we will miss the real enemy.' He ends by not only calling for solidarity but asking 'for close and careful scrutiny into the nature of democracy in South Africa'.

Zikode is right, of course. This is why he has been targeted by the militia, and why his safety must be guaranteed. And the attack augurs ill for South Africa’s future. The demons of ethnic hatred had no harbour in South Africa. But once unleashed, they could very well tear the Rainbow Nation apart. Without swift and transparent justice to right this grave wrong, the future looks grim. History makes one thing very clear: small coups beget bigger ones.



BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Nigel Gibson is a visiting research fellow at the School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the author of the forthcoming book 'Fanonian Practices in South Africa'.
* Raj Patel is an honorary research fellow at the School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the author of the forthcoming book 'The Value of Nothing'.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Guinea: Dadis Camara is Charles Taylor at best, Pol Pot at worst

Tierno Monenembo

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59313

cc WikimediaTierno Monenembo cries out in anguish at the killing of 157 people by Guinean soldiers on 28 September. Amidst shock at the bloody brutality, the anguish at the loss of sons and daughters, and the apparent treachery of the gods, there is a resurgence of hope. The death of 157 innocent citizens on 28 September also signals a new beginning. For their sake, the popular uprising must push on towards its ultimate goal: the departure of Dadis Camara. An old Soussou proverb serves a warning to the supporters of Camara: 'The snake you feed will be the one that bites you.'

The bastards actually did it! Like their evil mentor Lansana Conté, they fired on their own people with barbarous cowardice! January 2007 was not enough for them – they had to do it again, and spill innocent blood. The peaceful people of Guinea once again martyred and dehumanised.

Since 1958, the people of Guinea have suffered oppression. It neither ended with the death of Sekou Touré nor Lansana Conté. The system lives on, with its torture chambers, its gallows, the brutality of the 'the supreme leader', the avarice of 'Général Fory Coco', the archaism of 'Pivi-les-gris-gris' and the proud ignorance of 'Captain Dadis'! It remains the same, only the faces change… After Sekou Touré, Lansana Conté and Dadis Camara.

'... the womb from which the vile beast emerged is still fertile', said Brecht, writing about Nazi Germany. O Lord, master of the universe and all creation, what next after Dadis Camara? Shall we know nothing but misery and the whip? Would you cast your divine light upon us, and illuminate our paths and our spirits? Of all the leaders you create on earth, must we always suffer the most foolish, arrogant, blind and destructive? Poor Guinea, so far from God and yet so close to Dadis Camara, to Sekou Touré, to Lansana Conté and his ilk! Each time we take off, we seem to plunge back to the ground, every new era seems worse than the last. The Algerian comedian Fellag surely speaks of Guinea when he says, '… at the bottom of the abyss, they do not climb out, they dig deeper.' Guinea and tyranny are like Sisyphus and his boulder, only that Sisyphus seems more fortunate that Guinea!

For Guinea, the moments of greatest promise always seemed to end in interminable nightmares and regret.

1958
- In the beginning: the radiant smile of Sekou Touré, a shining symbol of liberation from the shackles of slavery … the black man is finally free from the colonial bonds of colonialism, free from the curse of the white man.
- In the brutal end: misery, exile, Russian snowploughs, the speeches, the public hangings, Camp Boiro, the Peul plot, Coco Lala, green mango porridge, Labe Tamba shoes…

1984
- In the beginning: the end of the dictatorship, the dream of freedom, justice, reconciliation, brotherhood, the return of exiles, social and economic restitution. Lansana Conté and Diarra Traoré were going to undo the catastrophic legacy of Sekou Touré.
- In the end: 'Wo Fatara', the assassination of Diarra Traoré, misery, corruption, the murders of January 2007, the narco-state.

2008
– In the beginning: end of the Conté regime, economic progress, democracy, and transparency
- In the end: Dadis Camara and his accursed National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), laxity, cruelty, corruption, megalomania and juvenile delinquency.

In some ways, misfortune can be helpful. The events of 28 September gave us a clear view of this evil person. We now know Dadis Camara’s true nature. When he came to power, he had the reassuring silhouette of Amadou Toumani Touré, and the messianic tone of Thomas Sankara. The cruel salvo of 28 September tore off the mask and there was no disguising the man. He was neither a new Amadou Toumani Touré, nor a new Sankara. He is Pol Pot, if not worse! Now we know Charles Taylor. Camara is not a saviour, just a gang member from another faction, here to collect his portion of blood and his share of the cake.

What about the alleged war against drug trafficking, the audits? All a ploy! It’s the old story of a wolf crying wolf to create a diversion. Accusing others of a crime that you are committing yourself is an old trick that was commonly used in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Sekou Touré’s PDG (Parti Démocratique de Guinée) and others. Unfortunately, this trick still works in countries such as ours that have been dehumanised by the trauma of tyranny and secrecy. Monday 28 September marks a major turning point for us as a nation. Things will never be the same.

From this moment on, for all of us, the CNDD (Conseil National pour la Démocratie et le Développement) has neither the competence nor the legitimacy to legislate, to make decrees, investigate or judge anyone in Guinea. These men are illegal from head to toe. The Guinean people did not elect them, and neither does the international community recognise them. They do not deserve to be in power! Guineans must refuse to submit to their control. Rather, the people must audit them! What have they done with public money? It is time to set up a commission of inquiry, to identify and prosecute those responsible for the killings. The international community must cease all contact or dialogue with this criminal junta in Conakry until this inquiry is concluded.

Most importantly we must not make the same mistake made by the unions in 2007, which continued dialogue with Conté, in spite of the tragedy of 27 January. One on side we have the people of Guinea, united as never before. And on the other side, we have the CNDD assassins. In the between the two flows the blood of our martyrs. To those who defend Dadis and his criminal clique, I remind you of the Soussou proverb: 'The snake you feed will be the one that bites you'. They owe nothing to those who helped them come to power. The horrors of the infamous Camp Boiro teach a lesson that, tragically, nobody wants to learn.

Brethren, let us forget our quarrels and misunderstandings of the past – let us move forward as one before the bodies of our fallen. Let us dedicate ourselves fully to building a free and democratic Guinea – prosperous and united, as has always been our dream.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Tierno Monenembo is a Guinean writer and the recipient of the 2008 Prix Renaudot.
* Translated from the French by Josh Ogada.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Abahlali baseMjondolo supported all over the world

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59304

© Abahlali.orgIn the wake of the armed African National Congress (ANC) takeover of Kennedy Road, Abahlali baseMjondolo has received support from all over the world.

The armed ANC (African National Congress) takeover of Kennedy Road (including the death of at least four people and the exiling of 1,000 residents) has now been condemned all over South Africa and all over the world. This is a new era in South Africa. No longer can we pretend to be a 'rainbow nation' when political parties are actively supporting armed militia in attacks against independent social movements. But we do have an advantage: In the long run, we are doing what is right and therefore we will win.

Below you will find a huge list of statements, articles and blogs. The most important are the following:

1) 'The ANC Has Invaded Kennedy Road' by S'bu Zikode
2) Abahlali baseMjondolo being featured on DemocracyNow! in the United States
3) The Statement of Support from the Archbishop of Cape Town and from Bishop Rubin Phillip
4) The new Mail & Guardian Article: Ethnic Tension Boils Over
5) Eyewitness Video Testimony on the attacks

Full statements of support have also been published in multiple languages and in at least 15 countries, and a petition to Jacob Zuma has been going around which has garnered 1,000 signatures from concerned people in South Africa and all over the powers. There was also a solidarity protest in the UK on the 30th and one in Grahamstown on Monday 5 October.

(Key statements and articles are marked with a *)

ABAHLALI BASEMJONDOLO PRESS STATEMENTS

2009-09-27 at 12h40 (Sunday) - Kennedy Road Development Committee Attacked – People Have Been Killed
2009-09-27 at 22h40 (Sunday) - The Attacks Continue in the Presence of the Police and Senior ANC Leaders
2009-09-29 at 13h53 (Tuesday) - 'The ANC Has Invaded Kennedy Road' by S'bu Zikode*
2009-10-01 at 16h53 (Thursday) - Update from Kennedy Road
2009-10-01 at 16h55 (Thursday) - Rushed (and Rough) Transcript of an Interview (anonymous of course) with Two Young Women Still Living in Kennedy Road

VIDEO FOOTAGE AND PHOTOGRAPHS

2009-09-28 at 21h35 (Monday) – Photos: S'bu Zikode's House after the attack*
2009-10-01 17h08 (Tuesday) – Photos: Abahlali at Court to defend the 'Kennedy 8' (from 29 September 2009)
2009-09-30 at 16:10 (Wednesday) – Eyewitness Video Testimony (Footage taken on Sunday and Monday)*
2009-10-01 at 16:54 (Thursday) - Moving Video Interview with S'bu Zikode
2009-10-01 (Thursday) - DemocracyNow! Video interview with Abahlali baseMjondolo (DN! Is the largest progressive media radio station in the United States) *

SOLIDARITY PETITION: AN OPEN LETTER TO JACOB ZUMA (NOW WITH OVER 950 SIGNATURES)

STATEMENTS OF SOLIDARITY WITH ABAHLALI BASEKENNEDY ROAD

2009-09-28 - Joint Statement on the attacks on the Kennedy Road Informal Settlement in Durban (27 signatures from academia) *
2009-09-29 - Testimony from Brother Filippo Mondini
2009-09-29 - Democracy Under Attack in Kennedy Road – A Statement by Bishop Rubin Phillip *
2009-09-29 - Letter to the International Media from Nigel Gibson & Raj Patel
2009-09-29 - Kennedy Road Murders Recall Terror of the 1980s (ZACF Statement)
2009-09-30 - Durban Action Against Xenophobia Statement
2009-09-30 - Statement from The Children of South Africa (CHOSA)
2009-09-30 - War on Want Writes to the South African High Commissioner (UK)
2009-10-01 - Statement from the International Forum in Denmark
2009-10-01 - Statement on Kennedy Road Informal Settlement by AFRA
2009-10-01 - War on Want (UK) calls for an end to violence against South African shack dwellers
2009-10-01 - The Poverty Initiative (USA) Supports the Shackdwellers Movement
2009-10-01 - Development Action Groups statement on the violent attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road
2009-10-01 - The KZN Monitor asks tough questions of the South African Police Service
2009-10-01 - Letter from the Editors of the Academic Journal "Interface"
2009-10-01 - Slum Dwellers International Statement on the Attacks on Kennedy Road Settlement, Durban, South Africa
2009-10-01 - Statement by Global Peace & Justice in Auckland, New Zealand
2009-10-01 - Statement of Support from KwaZulu-Natal Christian Council (KZNCC) in response to the Kennedy Road Killings
2009-10-01 - US Center for Constitutional Rights: Solidarity Statement
2009-10-01 – Statement of Support to the AbM from Movement for Justice in el Barrio in New York City *
2009-10-02 – Statement of Support from the Democratic Socialist Movement
2009-10-02 – Statement of Support from the Archbishop of Cape Town *
2009-10-02 – Statement of Support from the Treatment Action Campaign
2009-10-02 - Statement by the National Association of Democratic Lawyers

OPINION PIECES ON THE ATTACKS

2009-09-30 - Abahlali baseMjondolo Is Not A Criminal Movement (The Mercury) *
2009-10-01 - Pogrom murders in the Durban area (Politicsweb)
2009-10-02 - Ethnic cleansing (Business Day)

MAINSTREAM MEDIA

2009-09-28 - SAPA: Attackers Associated with ANC (News24)
2009-09-29 - Academics condemn attack on settlement (Business Day)
2009-09-29 - SAPA: Fund Set Up for Victims (News24)
2009-09-29 - Xhosa attack ‘far more sinister’ (The Witness)
2009-09-30 - Kennedy Road attack: ANC and police in the spotlight (The Natal Witness)
2009-09-30 - Police 'behind shack attack’ (The Mercury)
2009-09-30 - Fund set up after Durban attack (Business Day)
2009-10-01 - Call on Zuma to probe attacks (The Sowetan)
2009-10-01 - Call for solidarity among shack dwellers (The Mercury)
2009-10-03 – Ethnic Tension Boils Over (The Mail & Guardian)

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA ARTICLES

2009-09-30 - Shack dwellers' struggle by Sokari Ekine
2009-10-01 - DemocracyNow! Video and radio interview and transcript
2009-10-02 - Column: Abroad view By Alex Kadis
2009-10-02 - Violent Attacks on Social Movement Abahlali baseMjondolo Misrepresented (SACSIS)
2009-10-02 – Provincial Government & Police Endorse Attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo (Pambazuka)

RELATED EVENTS

2009-09-30 - Protest at the South African Embassy in London on Wednesday (on 30 September)
2009-10-03 - Solidarity Protest in Grahamstown - Monday 5 October 2009

OTHER LANGUAGES

2009-09-28 - Nye etniske opptoyer i Sor-Afrika (Norwegian)
2009-09-30 - Los hechos de los ataques en AbM (Spanish)
2009-09-30 - Attacco Alla Democrazia Nelle Baraccopli del Sudafrica (Italian)
2009-09-30 - Sud Africa. La protesta del movimento dei baraccati Abahlali arriva a Londra (Italian)
2009-09-30 - Νoτιοc Αφρικn: Τρομακτικn επiθεση παρακρατικwν και μπaτσων στουc Abahlali, υπaρχουν νεκροi (Greek)
2009-10-01 - Θυμiζουν τον τρcμο τηc δεκαετiαc του 1980 (Greek)
2009-10-01 - ANC acusado de atacar y asesinar a los que viven en chabolas (Espanol)
2009-10-01 - Operation coup de poing a Durban par Philippe Riviere (French)
2009-10-02 – Sudafrika: Unser Verbrechen ist ganz einfach: Wir sind selbstorganisierte Arme...(German)
2009-10-02 – Declaracion de apoyo a nuestr@s hermanas y hermanos de Sudafrica del Movimiento de los de Casas de Carton (Abahlali baseMjondolo) de parte de Movimeinto por Justicia del Barrio en Nueva York, EU (Spanish)

SACC appalled by violent attacks against democracy

South African Council of Churches

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59287

© Abahlali.orgFollowing the attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo members at Kennedy Road, Durban, the South African Council of Churches condemns the violence perpetrated against a defenceless group.

The SACC is appalled by the violent attacks against defenceless and poor members of the community of Kennedy Road, Durban, known as Abahlali baseMjondolo. We are shocked at the savage attacks on their leadership. The sin of members of this community is resisting relocation and fighting for a place to call home. In May 2009 they took their plight to the Constitutional Court. Such actions amplify the commitment of this destitute community to seek redress through democratic and constitutional means.

On Saturday night (27 September 2009) armed bandits – apparently masquerading as a registered security company – launched savage attacks against the leadership of the Abahlali baseMjondolo and wider community of Kennedy Road. Police were alerted to the attacks and called to intervene, but inexplicably failed to provide protection and to quell the violence and destruction that lasted for 24 hours. Several people were killed and scores of people were left homeless and had to flee with only the clothes on their backs.

One victim claimed that 'the only sin we committed was to engage in peaceful and democratic actions to secure a place for our children and loved ones.'

Bishop Rubin Phillip, who is the chairperson of the SACC's provincial structure, the KwaZulu-Natal Christian Council, and the Anglican Bishop of Natal, stated that 'I was torn with anguish when I first heard of the unspeakable brutality that has raged down on the Kennedy Road shack settlement.' He has in recent years spent many hours in the settlement and continues to provide pastoral support to this community. The Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, endorses the condemnation of the Kennedy Road attacks.

'This horrific attack can only be construed as an attack on democracy', Eddie Makue of the SACC asserts. 'We are alarmed by the way in which legitimate community struggles are being criminalised. Community members who are asserting their rights can not be treated as criminals. The Abahlali baseMjondolo has been seeking redress in a responsible and democratic manner.'

Those who launched the attacks on the Kennedy Road community have not been apprehended. Instead, community leaders have been imprisoned. Therefore, the SACC supports Bishop Rubin in calling for 'a credible and independent force to be deployed as a matter of urgency'. The Sydenham Police failed to provide the security that the people of Kennedy Road deserve.

Professor Maluleke, the SACC president, expressed his condolences with those who lost their relatives during these attacks. 'It is unjust enough to be poor and destitute, but to be attacked and killed for struggling against poverty and destitution is worse. We shall approach political authorities to ensure that the people’s hopes in democracy are not destroyed. We appeal on the provincial government to do everything within their power to put an end to the senseless violence', said Maluleke. 'We call on all who believe in and support democracy to demonstrate support for the people of Kennedy Road by contributing towards the relief fund started by Bishop Rubin.'

Donations to the relief fund can be made to:
Diocese of Natal Trust Account
First National Bank
Account number: 509 3118 7386
Midlands Mall Branch
Pietermaritzburg
South Africa

For more information, contact Mr Eddie Makue, general secretary, on (+27) 082 853 8781.

* This article appears as a statement on the South African Council of Churches website.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

'A living politics': Resisting gentrification

Abahlali baseMjondolo

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59290

© Abahlali.orgThe members of Abahlali baseMjondolo describe their movement as 'made for us and by us' or, as their elected president S'bu Zikode describes, 'a living politics'. Pointing out the essential irrelevance of the Northern-produced term 'gentrification' to describe their conditions, Abahlali stresss that their situation is markedly different and results from the authorities' 'dehumanising hatred'.

DEFINING OURSELVES

We are here as elected delegates of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shackdwellers' movement. We approach each challenge and opportunity from within our own 'living politics' which the president of our movement, S'bu Zikode, has described as a politics that:

'starts from the places we have taken. We call it a living politics because it comes from the people and stays with the people. It is ours and it is part of our lives… It is the politics of our lives. It is made at home with what we have and it is made for us and by us.' (S'bu Zikode, 2008)

Throughout our struggles, we have found that others want to define us and they want to understand our struggle according their own definitions and projects. It is always necessary to resist this and to insist that we think and speak for ourselves. Without this discipline, our living politics would die.[1]

CLARIFYING OUR THOUGHT AND STRUGGLE IN RELATION TO 'GENTRIFICATION'

We have discussed the issue that this conference will confront in a number of meetings and, last Saturday, in a camp (an all-night meeting). We have concluded that the idea of 'gentrification' is not one that can really be said to be part of the living politics of Abahlali baseMjondolo. It is not a word that you will hear shackdwellers in South Africa using a lot (or at all really!) to describe their lives or to analyse their situation. This is not surprising since the term was developed in the 1960s by Northern analysts trying to explain certain patterns in the historical development of mostly Northern cities. We know that the word continues to be used, and that it is used quite widely by now. We know that the patterns and issues it deals with are definitely important for all of us who are thinking about cities and who are committed to people's struggles for justice in cities all over the world. We are very clear that we fully support the struggle of the poor against the rich everywhere in the world – in Zimbabwe, in Haiti and also in England. But, from the perspective of the living politics of the shackdwellers of South Africa, we want to suggest that it might be more important to clarify some of the ways in which our struggle is not about gentrification – rather than trying to fit our story to match the theories and ideas developed elsewhere by others who do not know our story. This is why we can really get to know each other and our struggles that are different in some ways and the same in other ways.

POINTING OUT THE DIFFERENCES

Although there are lots of debates about it, 'gentrification' usually describes the process where richer people move into neighbourhoods that had been settled by poorer people but which, for various reasons, have become attractive neighbourhoods for these new groups of richer people. On the surface, the results of this can look quite good – if you prefer the aesthetics of wealthy people and their neighbourhoods to those of poor people! Buildings get done up and repaired, new businesses spring up to service these interesting new elites with money to spend lounging about in coffee shops, art galleries or whatever. But below the surface, the results are usually disastrous for the poor. They may have lived in, and helped shape, the 'edgy' atmosphere so attractive to some of these new elites, and their inner-city housing may have quaint and historical appeal too – but the rising land, housing and rental costs invariably squeeze them out. So people are evicted by the market.

What we must be clear on is that this is not the pattern that affects shackdwellers in South Africa. Our shack settlements, our homes and neighbourhoods, are under active threat of being demolished and destroyed by the state, and we are being forcibly removed. We are violently evicted by the police, anti-land invasion units and private security – including Group 4 Securicor from England. Rich people do not move in and renovate and refurbish our settlements! On the contrary, they want to eradicate rather than upgrade our places. They want to make it look as though our settlements were never there. So it is perfectly clear that elites in our part of the world do not view our settlements as places that are somehow quaint, if a little run-down. Their view is one of utter contempt, and that contempt extends beyond the way they talk about the places we live in – which they repeatedly describe as 'slums' and 'hotbeds of criminality' – to a hateful contempt for the people themselves. This is the dehumanising hatred and contempt we fight against. What we have demanded again and again is to be treated as human beings and citizens who can work with government to make improvements to our settlements on our own terms, so that we can remain in the places we live and make a decent life for the people who are there now.

Often we face resistance to our struggle as shackdwellers from more middle-class people living near to shack settlements. These groups, often sharing the broad elite attitude to shacks and shackdwellers of fear and loathing, can mobilise elite and political opinion against what we can perhaps call the 'de-gentrification' that takes place when we as poor people have occupied land and moved into areas reserved for the rich. It seems to be that the armed wing of the state, especially the police, as well as the party-political classes, are often very sympathetic to these middle-class voices and can join in this struggle to remove us.

Of course, as the movement of shackdwellers, we do not claim to represent all of the struggles of all the poor. We are aware of the struggles that have had to be fought by people living in blocks of flats in the inner city of Johannesburg[2] who face violent and frankly illegal evictions in a process that might be closer to 'gentrification'. But even there, what is happening cannot be seen as some sort of 'natural' process arising from the movement and changes in different social groups of Johannesburg – it is a malicious and aggressive project of the local state, backed by big business, private security and the thinking of the World Bank.

SUGGESTING POSSIBLE COMMONALITIES

It does not surprise us to learn that, although the poor of other cities experience different patterns to ours, many of the results look more or less similar. It comes as no surprise that other cities also experience the process of elite projects trumping democratic ones, of rich and powerful people benefiting, and of the poor being pushed aside and right outside the cities. We, as Abahlali, have seen very clearly how our world is made to extract land and labour and life from the poor to benefit a small group of the rich and powerful. We have seen how, in practice, this has turned the idea of 'development' into a war against the poor; it has fertilised the elite fantasy idea of the 'world-class city' where the poor have no place, no voice. We reject this in Durban and we reject this everywhere.

We are therefore sure that we can find strength and solidarity with all other genuine and grassroots movements of poor people in cities all over the world, including those who organise and fight to resist gentrification's pernicious effects on them. Where resistance and contestation of these processes by the poor becomes a common, popular and political project forged in the minds and hands of poor people themselves, there we know we will find true comrades in a living politics that asserts the right of everyone to the city. We will support this politics full force.

We know too that gentrification is not only a threat against the long-established neighbourhoods of the poor. It is also a threat against spaces in the city that have been taken and appropriated by those who are not counted in the official order of things. Many young people in cities of the North who are called 'squatters' have already understood the importance of our own struggles in South Africa, and they have, like the Camberwell Social Centre, found important ways of being in solidarity with us as Abahlali. From their own experiences, they know a lot about evictions and the violence of the state that is unleashed against both them and us. Some of them have come to live and struggle with us for a while. They have been there when the police come to evict us, or when the fires race through our settlements. They are our comrades. We are talking about people like Antonios Vradis and Matt Birkinshaw.

Our movement is a scandal for the rich and the state. Perhaps the biggest scandal of a movement like Abahlali baseMjondolo is our refusal to accept this place of having no place and our insistence that everyone counts – and that refusal is made every time and everywhere that people resist being pushed away and aside by the rich and powerful. We like this idea of the ‘right to stay put’. We like it a lot.

RESISTING GENTRIFICATION OF OUR STRUGGLE

So there are differences and commonalities but we also can't help wondering whether what we might call a 'resistance against the gentrification of our struggle' isn't one of the most interesting conversations to have. What we mean is something like this:

- though our struggle/s, we create new political spaces for contesting power

- this inevitably creates speculative interest from professional vanguardist 'activists' and 'civil society' looking for constituencies to populate their imagined fantasies of resistance and revolution

- they try by all means to invade and take over (often with offers of money) the space our struggle opened up and unless we sustain a living politics militantly resisting against this onslaught, the result looks very much like what the academics describe as the result of 'gentrification', namely, the poor get moved out once again, but the quaint and edgy appeal of the spaces they created has a residual value for the professional activist class who occupy it through their superior access to various international currencies – sometimes quite literally, greater resources and money, but also other currencies of organisational and patronage networks, media and communication technology that can 'represent' people's issues and struggles with no accountability to or insertion in the actual movements themselves that are the currency of 'civil society's' claims to legitimacy and relevance.

This is why we said at the beginning:

'We have found that others want to define us and they want to understand our struggle according their own definitions and projects. It is always necessary to resist this and to insist that we think and speak for ourselves. Without this discipline, our living politics would die.'



BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article comprises material from a conference in Manchester, UK, in August 2009.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] See the website of Abahlali baseMjondolo for more information at www.abahlali.org.
[2] The Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) issued a full report on the Jo'burg situation in 2005. It can be accessed at http://www.cohre.org/store/attachments/Any_Room_for_the_Poor_8Mar05.pdf

Land-grabbing in Africa: The why and the how

Nikolaj Nielsen

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59291

cc C A MinicSpecific home and host-country policies, cheap land, the lack of a legal infrastructure, investment opportunities and the promise of quick profit returns are the driving factors behind land acquisitions throughout Africa, argues Nikolaj Nielsen in this week's Pambazuka News.

Two years ago singer–songwriter and activist Bob Geldof was so excited about biofuels he even became the special advisor to biomass company Helius. At the time, Geldof visited jatropha curcas plantations in Swaziland run by UK biodiesel producer D1 Oils. Geldof was quoted as saying that these plantations had 'life changing potential'. Since then, D1 Oils dropped out and Mr Geldof silenced. HIV/AIDS victims in Swaziland were 'targeted to plant jatropha and promised easy money', said Adrian Bebb at Friends of the Earth International (FoE) in a telephone interview with Pambazuka News. But jatropha was a cause supported by rhetoric and a science that neglected the socio-cultural impact. The perennial plant would produce inedible oil and any financial gain would depend entirely on the biodiesel plant operator, which pulled out. The crops planted in marginal lands were also unable to produce any sufficient yields. Those who worked the land were left empty-handed and considerably worse off.

Biofuels were then and continue to be in many respects hyped as an environmentally friendly alternative to oil-based transport fuels. The United States, the EU and other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries initiated legislation to encourage its production. They also set mandatory targets. The EU set a binding target to replace 20 per cent of fossil fuels with biomass, hydro, wind and solar by 2020. Each member state is also required to replace 10 per cent of its transport fuel as well. It is this 10 per cent target that is a cause for concern and is partly conditioned on the commercial viability of second-generation biofuels. Second-generation biofuels are mainly made from lignocellulosic materials like wood and straw. First-generation biofuels are mainly ethanol from grains, sugar crops and biodiesel from oil seeds or from recycled cooking oil.[1]

Sweden, for instance, has set a 40 per cent target for 2020 and a new government bill requires its transport sector to be fossil-free by 2030. While such initiatives may be applauded, Sweden is as a result investing heavily in research and influencing EU-wide policy that provides financial incentives for companies to buy up land in Africa for biofuel production. Two Swedish biofuel companies, SweTree Technologies and SEKAB, currently sit on the industry-dominated board of the European Biofuels Technology Platform (EBTP). The EBTP have privileged access to European Commission decision-making and help shape research direction and spending of public money.[2] SweTree Technologies, for instance, is researching second-generation biofuels by genetically modifying trees for fuel conversion. SweTree’s director, Björn Hägglun, also happens to be the chief director of WWF (World Wildlife Fund) Sweden, only one of only two NGOs that has openly admitted its involvement with the EBTP. Second-generation biofuels are now mandated to produce twice as much energy compared to first-generation biofuels in meeting the 10 per cent EU-wide transport target.

Exporting biofuels or feedstocks from developing countries to the EU will push up food prices and hurt poor consumers. Studies and countless media reports link biofuel plantations with a number of destructive conditions that directly undermine their potential, not to mention ethics. For instance, the EU has a contractual obligation to import sugar from ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific) states entering into an EPA (economic partnership agreement). But there are no clear legal mandates to determine the difference between 'environmentally sound' and 'environmentally damaging' imports.[3]

As such, European companies are scrambling for a slice of African soil. The financial incentives along with home policies drive the business fury and yet, according to a report by the European Parliament, only a tiny percentage of biofuel is imported from Africa because of high tariffs. The United Nations FAO (Food and Agricultural Organisation) along with the IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development) and the IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) conducted a study that looks at the impact of land acquisition in Mali, Ghana, Sudan, Ethiopia and Madagascar. Since 2004, close to 2.5 million (ha) hectares of land – excluding land allocations below 1,000 ha – have been appropriated by foreign acquisition in these countries. Two-thirds of 3 billion people survive on around 500 million parcels of land less than two hectares in size. Most of the land claimed by foreign acquisition was already in use by local people. Women, who are the main food producers, were more easily driven out due to discrimination. In Tanzania, a sugarcane plantation for biofuel in the Wami basin displaced 1,000 farmers. The results are disheartening as people end up in over-populated urban centres and their outlying slums.

The promise of easy money in an environment without strong regulation and cheap land is a motivating factor for companies and the hosting government. Weak legislation means mechanisms that are supposed to protect local rights, interest, and welfare is disregarded.[4] Rich arable land used for commercial biofuel production has serious implications for a people who already spend 70 per cent of their incomes on food. Food and energy security concerns are supposed to be key drivers behind government-backed investments. However, the key driver behind these deals is investment opportunities. This is compounded by a global demand for non-food agricultural commodities and biofuels, which promise high rates of return. The buy-outs and speculation of African land is also driving up its value while policy measures in home and host countries encourage the scramble.[5] The incentives stemming from EU legislation on biofuels, for example, mean the acquisition of land for biofuel production will continue.

'A lot of little start-up companies with financing are going to Africa. It’s like the conventional oil industry. It starts off small and if it works, they will be bought out by the large companies,' Mr Bebb told Pambazuka News. Mr Bebb suspects most of these start-ups will fail within in two years.

In Ethiopia, arable land and wooded areas are being cleared without taking into consideration the loss to biodiversity. Environmental impact assessments are not required or are performed in an ad hoc manner. Access to rural land by investors is guaranteed by Article 4 of Ethiopia’s Rural Land Administration and Land Use Proclamation (456/2005) so long as priority is supposedly given to peasant farmers and pastoralists. Biomass fuels account for almost 94 per cent of total energy consumption while the remaining percentage comes from imported petroleum fuels. As a net importer of petroleum fuels, the country is particularly vulnerable to price hikes and the government is seeking to offset the risks by investing in alternative fuel sources.[6] Energy security is the official line. But at what cost? Two years ago there were around 50 registered developers for biodiesel and another six for bioethanol production in Ethiopia. Four of the bioethanol producers are government operated and sugar is their source crop.

The Ethiopian Biofuels Development and Utilization Strategy is encouraging large scale production of biofuels without conducting proper land inventories. For instance, Flora Eco Power Ethiopia, operated by a German private company, purchased 200,000 ha to plant castor seeds for biodiesel production. By 2008, they had cultivated 15,000 ha in several Woredas in East and West Hareghe Zones. They cleared 10,000 ha of virgin forestland. One hectare of trees can offset up to 200 tonnes of carbon a year, according to a 40-year study by the University of Leeds on African forests. The company also bought communal grazing land that runs into the Babile Elephant Sanctuary. Flora Eco Power then conducted a disingenuous Environmental Assessment Impact and proposed to leave behind at least 10 trees on every hectare of felled virgin forests.[7] For Ethiopia to replace its consumption of 29,000 barrels of oil a day by renewable energies it will need to cultivate 24 per cent of its entire surface. The highest yields are invariably located on arable lands or forests where rainfall is abundant. Indeed, over 80 per cent of all land allocated for biofuel production is located in arable lands, forest lands and woodlands. As such, the price and demand for any remaining arable land increases.

'Land acquisition is a political issue', Alexander Muller, the assistant director at FAO, told a special committee at the European Parliament. 'Deals seek access to resources, not to the market. Most of the investors are private but the government is also involved', he said. Mr Muller then explained that it was in the interest of everyone to support small farmers and that local communities must be involved to defend vulnerable groups. These individuals are asked to produce legal documents to protect them from foreign acquisition. Traditional land rights are not considered binding so people are forced off the land.

Thousands of kilometres away in the capitals of Europe, ministers are slapping taxes on locally produced first-generation biofuels. In Germany, for instance, biofuels were entirely tax-free until 2006. A year later German biodiesel production capacity peaked and then bottomed out in 2008. Nearly 70 per cent of Germany-based biofuel companies went bankrupt. But the knock-on effect is that Germany is now importing more biofuel from abroad. As an added bonus, second-generation fuels will continue to enjoy complete tax exoneration until 2015.[8]

Over the weekend in New York, the EU Commissioner for Development Karl de Gucht delivered a speech and proposed a monitoring mechanism under the conjoined efforts of the Global Partnership for Agriculture and Food Security and a reformed Food Security Committee hosted by the FAO. But it’s also back home in Europe where policies influenced by corporate interests should be fully disclosed. The backroom dealings and the lobbyists that roam the corridors of the European Parliament and the European Commission do their best to stay out of the public eye.

It is indeed a tragic enterprise where worthy conservation and sustainable energy initiatives become high-jacked by political and corporate interests. Strong regulation of EU companies seeking their fortunes in Africa is missing and as a result, reckless investments and the promise of quick returns are felling virgin forests and driving indigenous peoples off their land. When and if these companies fail, they will pull out and leave behind them a wasteland where elephants in the Babile Elephant Sanctuary once roamed, where entire families surviving on less than 2 hectares attempt to carve out a desperate living in an overcrowded slum, where carbon absorbing trees lie smouldering. In the meantime, Europe will meet its 10 per cent target and some, like Sweden, will even excel. Then the highbrow discourse will follow along with the press releases that praise Europe’s commitments to meeting its objectives. But in the far-flung places of the world’s least developed countries, the machinery will grind out the devastation if serious attempts at oversight, at regulation, at responsible government and sincere sustainable efforts are not met.

The right to an adequate standard of living, including food and housing, is inscribed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This includes the right to property and indeed land. The acquisition of land and other natural resources must not be a free-for-all. International laws are there to ensure that these conditions are met. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development affirms that the right to development must respect the developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations. States on both sides of the divide must promote responsible governance to protect the rights of individuals and the precious natural resources of water and land. So long as priority is given to investors, then sincere human and environmental development policies will fall by the wayside.



BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Nikolaj Nielsen is a freelance journalist based in Brussels. His work has appeared in openDemocracy, Reuters AlertNet and other media. He writes the human rights blog at the Foreign Policy Association.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] UNCTD (UN Conference on Trade and Development) (2007) Report of the Ad hoc expert group meeting on biofuels: trade and development implications of present and emerging technologies. Available at: http://r0.unctad.org/ghg/events/biofuels/UNCTAD_DITC_MISC_2007_8.pdf
[2] Corporate Europe Observatory. 'Agrofuels and the EU Research Budget: Public Funding for Private Interests.' May 27, 2009.
[3] European Parliament. Directorate-General for External Policies. 'Production and use of biofuels in developing countries.' May, 2009.
[4] 'Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investment and international land deals in Africa.' Lorenzo Cotula, Sonja Vermeulen, Rebeca Leonard and James Keeley. Iied, FAO, IFAD. 2009.
[5] ibid
[6] 'Rapid Assessment of Biofuels Development Status in Ethiopia And Proceedings of the National Workshop on Environmental Impact Assessment and Biofuels.' Editors Teresa Anderson and Million Belay. MELCA Mahiber, September 2008
[7] 'Rapid Assessment of Biofuels Development Status in Ethiopia And Proceedings of the National Workshop on Environmental Impact Assessment and Biofuels.' Editors Teresa Anderson and Million Belay. MELCA Mahiber, September 2008
[8] 'Update on implementation agendas 2009. A review of key biofuel producing countries.' A report to IEA Bioenergy Task 39. Editors: Mabee, W., Neeft, J. Van Keulen, B. March 2009.

Yar’Adua’s war or Yar’Adua’s peace?

Sabella Ogbobode Abidde

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59292

cc WikimediaWhile the Niger Delta represents the epicentre of an ongoing crisis in Nigeria, it is but a microcosm of a nationwide problem, writes Sabella Ogbobode Abidde in this week's Pambazuka News. The country must face up to its difficulties, Abidde contends, and not simply marginalise voices of dissent. Common sense must prevail and President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua must use the instrument of the state to pursue peace.

Steve John G. Stoessinger, in 'Why Nations Go To War', reminded us that, 'The emperors and generals who sent their men to war in August 1914 thought in terms of weeks, not months, let alone years.' President George W. Bush was also under the impression that Iraq would be a surgical operation. All assumptions on all fronts were erroneous. We all now know what happened. Military quests are unpredictable. What’s more, wars, as Steve Yetiv tells us, 'are tragic events. They not only produce devastating human and economic costs but also often reflect the failure of reason to control events and emotions.' And in the estimation of Kenneth Waltz, 'in wars there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat.' We shall revisit this theme in later essays.

The epicentre of the ongoing crisis may be in the Niger Delta, but really, what we have is a Nigerian problem: problems of environmental degradation; uneven development; weak institutions and poor governance; untenable federalism; institutionalised corruption; how to fairly distribute profits from the sale of resources; the unhealthy and uneven relationships between ethnic groups; an insidious culture that robs people of their sense of belonging and their sense of identity. Essentially, the 'Nigerian question' has not been resolved. There was hope for a resolution, or at least addressing this thorny question, during the Obasanjo regime, but he reneged even though he promised a group of select Nigerians in several consultation sessions in Washington, D.C., New York, London and elsewhere.

Most Nigerians from all walks of life know that the Yoruba, the Ogoni, as well as the Igbo and many other ethnic nationalities have issues with the country’s composition, and with how political goods and services are being shared. Scholars and political commentators even speak of the mistake of 1914. We need not dwell on the mistakes of yesteryears, but we must find acceptable and long-lasting solution to these mistakes. We can’t continue to ignore them. To pretend all is well with the country or to asphyxiate those with dissenting opinion is not only unreasonable, it is self-immolating. Problems are to be solved, not to be swept aside.

Nigeria has problems, problems we must collectively confront through a sovereign national conference or through other constitutional mechanisms. But somehow, we have never been good at peaceful and meaningful dialogue. We dismiss or ignore the aggrieved, or we impose our will, telling them what to do, how to do it and when to do it. As a collective, we have never been good at finding common ground and we certainly have never been good at allowing the minorities, or those with a minority opinion, to have their ways. Once a group of people assume a position of power, they hold onto it, protecting their holdings as if to let it go will mean the demise of their provincial civilisation.

Perhaps because of primordial sentiments and suspicious, and perhaps because of the events of 1967–70, the Nigerian oligarchy has never been good at sharing power. What’s more, ethnic identification and allegiance – and in recent times, religion – colours most of the decisions that are made at the national level. Whenever the Hausa–Fulani and their historic cousins are in power, their goal, for the most part, is to weed out all others save for some decorative, less powerful or near-inconsequential positions. When they are not weeding, they fill vacancies with their own. And of course, the Yoruba do the same in a less injurious manner. The Igbo, in spite of their intellectualism, resourcefulness, patriotism and contribution to the nation, usually find themselves bargaining and/or begging to be heard, begging to be seen and to be taken seriously. It is as if they are afraid to assert themselves.

The first official report detailing the grievances of the Niger Delta community was the 1957–58 Willink Minority Report. In the intervening years, there have been a dozen or so other reports, including the Niger Delta Technical Committee Report of 2009. Whether under military or civilian administration, every commission’s report and recommendations have either been watered-down or the recommendations completely ignored. It is as if the Nigerian government does not think much of the pain and anguish of the Niger Delta communities. After all these years, the aggrieved – especially the Ijaw – have simply had enough. Fifty years after Willink’s report the predator and the prey collided and are about to cross the Rubicon.

Sensibly, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) – the major justice-seeking group in the region – has taken the high road and called for dialogue. The group wants to negotiate with the Nigerian government on how best to prevent the further escalation of the ongoing low intensity conflict. The group has not imposed preconditions, but has instead signalled its intension to come to the negotiating table with open and clean hands. But Defence Minister General Godwin Abbe, speaking on behalf of the Nigerian government, scoffed at MEND, saying his government would not enter into any negotiation because it does not recognise the existence and/or the legitimacy of MEND.

In spite of General Godwin Abbe’s public utterances, we hope and expect the Yar’Adua administration to take a step back from the line in the sand. We expect common sense to prevail. We are advising President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua to plan for peace and to plan for the construction and reconstruction of the Niger Delta, especially of the riverine areas. We also implore him to speak to the flawed constitution and to convene a sovereign national conference. He should not plan for war, an outcome which he cannot guarantee. This could be his war or his peace. He has the instrument of state at his command. How he chooses to use it is his and his alone (as enshrined in the constitution).

A section of the Nigerian military cadre may be urging the president to embark on a military adventure. A section of the Arewa Consultative Forum may be nudging the president towards military intervention. The hawks in his administration may be beating the war drums in his ears and to his liking. This president must ignore them all. This president must choose negotiation and diplomacy over war and destruction. He has nothing to gain by going to war. Lives will be lost. Properties will be destroyed. Bodies will be maimed. His place in history will be certain: as the president who ordered the killing of his countrymen and women and the president who ordered the destruction of homes and hope and the maiming of women and children.

But the cost to the Nigerian state, especially to the treasury, will be heavy too. Beyond that, Yar’Adua must know that we now live in a world where tyrants, murderers and maniacs are no longer safe and free from the tentacles of international law and convention. Also, can a country with such diminishing prestige within the international system afford to shoulder the worldwide outcry its actions will elicit? And who is to say that Yar’Adua’s military escapade will not trigger violent ethnic conflicts, military coups d’état or the secession of the Ijaw ethnic group from an already weak and collapsing Nigeria?

It is precisely because of these that I hate wars and the pain, anguish and misery they bring. And then there are the costs and recriminations and mental pain and social dislocation and tensions. War is horrible. It is why I favour negotiations; it is why I favour dialogue. And now that the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has also called for a negotiated settlement, Yar’Adua and Godwin Abbe want none of it. Why is the government balking at such a noble and brave idea?

What is Yar’Adua afraid of? In any case, what can a lion do when flies hovers around and peck at a gaping wound by its ass? Remain calm and ask for help, of course. In this instance the Nigerian government should come to the table, to dialogue with MEND under the auspices of the United States and one or two other non-governmental organisations. To negotiate is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of maturity and coherent thinking.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Sabella Ogbobode Abbide is a public intellectual who has written and commented extensively on African affairs. He is currently based in Washington, D.C.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Grace Ushang’s death and the Indecent Dressing Bill

Asma’u Joda and Iheoma Obibi

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59320

cc J BrackenFollowing the tragic rape and death of Grace Ushang in Cross River State, Nigeria, Asma’u Joda and Iheoma Obibi deplore the absence of any meaningful protection for the country's women and the Senate's apparent move to exacerbate matters further through the adoption of the Indecent Dressing Bill. If Ushang had merely been wearing khaki trousers – the official uniform of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) organisation with which she worked – then how will Nigeria guarantee the safety of each and every women in the uniformed services at large?

Grace Ushang was a young Nigerian woman who had every right to expect a bright future. Now she is dead merely because she was female. On the day that Nigeria celebrated its 49th independence anniversary on 1 October 2009, NEXT newspaper reported that Ms Ushang from Obudu in Cross River State, a member of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) serving in Maiduguri, Borno State, was raped to death by some men still at large, who, according to the story, 'took offence because she was wearing her Khaki trousers – the official uniform of the youth corpers.'

The cavalier brutality of this morbid tale of criminal vigilante action is compounded by the official response to it. The director-general of the NYSC reportedly travelled to Maiduguri ostensibly to discuss this crime with the state’s law enforcement authorities. Rather than denounce this for the crime that it is and reassure our young graduates on national service that their wellbeing preoccupies the highest levels of decision-making, the director-general merely advised youth corpers to 'take their personal security seriously because whatever we provided is not enough. They must learn to be security-conscious.' Pray, how?

The compounded crimes that killed Grace Ushang painfully return our attention to the pervasiveness of violence against women in Nigeria and the growing resort to vigilante action to police vague notions of feminine propriety and decency.

In 2008, the chairperson of the Nigerian Senate’s Committee on Women, Senator Ufot Ekaette, introduced a bill in the Senate to prohibit so-called 'indecent dressing'. At the public hearing on the bill in July 2008, there was a consensus that its provisions portended great danger for the safety and security of Nigerian women. The bill proposes to grant intolerably dangerous powers of arrest and invasion of the most intimate privacies of the woman’s body imaginable to both police officers and ordinary citizens to undertake vigilante action against women they merely perceive to be 'indecently dressed'.

Senator Ekaette’s bill covers any female above 14 years wearing a dress that exposes 'her breast, laps, belly and waist … and any part of her body from two inches below her shoulders downwards to the knee' (such as the much-admired Fulani milk maid). Also liable to become a criminal if this bill were to become law is any person dressed in 'transparent' fabric (such as lace) as well as men who expose any part of their bodies between the waist and the knee (such as men relieving themselves by the roadside). All these people and more would presumably attract arrest from zealous policemen. If this bill becomes law, there will not be enough prisons or mortuaries in Nigeria for its victims. It will licence vigilante violence against women, leading to fatalities like the fate that befell Grace Ushang.

Grace Ushang’s story demonstrates the fallacy of the justifications for laws like the Senator Ekaette’s Indecent Dressing Bill. Those who wish to commit crimes of sexual violence need no excuse. They must be treated like the predators they are. If a woman like Grace Ushang, dressed in regulation clothing prescribed by the Federal Republic of Nigeria is considered to be so indecently dressed as to be put to death by the most vile acts of violence imaginable, how do we guarantee the safety and security of Nigerian women in the uniformed services, such as the armed forces, police, prisons service, and immigration?

The killing of Grace Ushang is part of a pattern of violence against women that deserves urgent attention across borders in this year of the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In some countries of the Sahel, East Africa and the Middle East, women who survive rape get put to death for allegedly bringing dishonour to their families. Or they are charged with zina (adultery) as they 'have made love', as any form of sexual intercourse – consensual or non-consensual – can be translated to mean 'love making'.

Only recently in Sudan, Lubna Hussein, a former employee of the United Nations, along with 12 other Sudanese women, was charged with the offence of dressing indecently for wearing trousers. Sudanese law prohibits ‘dressing indecently’ in public. Absurd? Yes, certainly, by Nigerian standards, where no person bats an eyelid at the sight of women in jeans, or in offices, clad in trouser suits – or so we thought until Grace Ushang was raped to death. Sudan’s laws, however, criminalise a woman’s dressing, prescribing lashing and an unlimited fine for any woman ‘in public’ dressed like a ‘man’.

Lubna resigned her employment at the UN, which would have granted her immunity from trial, to compel the courts to take a stand on an issue she feels (quite rightly) should be a matter of public concern, because they impact directly on her human dignity, freedom of choice and privacy. By her action, Lubna placed Sudanese ‘justice’ in the global spotlight and should, hopefully, trigger change in policy and law in that country.

We may not yet have a law that determines what a woman (or man) can wear, but there can be no tolerance of the growing tendency towards vigilante enforcement of notions of indecency. Sudan and Nigeria have similar lawmakers it seems. Surely someone sat down and determined for Sudan, in his opinion, what is permissible as a woman’s choice of dress, and garnered parliamentary support for his personal belief that wearing trousers was an abomination that should be penalised. In the same manner, some persons in the Nigerian Senate are unilaterally and arbitrarily attempting to decide for Nigerians what should be the acceptable form or mode of ‘dressing’ for women. No account has been taken of the diversity and the culture in both countries, or even of the fact that in African rural settings, women routinely expose much more, without giving a thought to it being ‘indecent’. Nor has there been any reckoning of the effect that this will have on the safety of women.

As Sudan struggles with the implications of its indecent dressing laws, and its courts struggle to find ways around it, Nigeria’s own lawmakers appear bent on imposing these retrograde and potentially explosive laws over here. While they are looking for ways to move forward, our legislators seem determined to throw us back into the past.

Our lawmakers should focus on passing measures that promote human dignity, preclude discrimination and guarantee human wellbeing. Instead of a law on indecent dressing, they can accord priority to enacting a law to protect all Nigerian women from wanton violence and ensure that all perpetrators of such violence are brought to justice. As a first step, the Senate should vote down the Indecent Dressing Bill and firmly close any further arguments on it. In its place, and in memory of Grace Ushang, we need a federal law on violence against women. That would be an appropriate way to commemorate the tragedy of her senseless killing.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Asma’u Joda and Iheoma Obibi are on the steering committee of the Nigerian Feminist Forum (NFF).
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The first Babu Memorial Lecture on 22 September 1997

Samir Amin

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59324

cc WikimediaThis week’s Pambazuka News brings you a lecture given by Samir Amin on the 22 September 1997 in memory of Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu. Amin recounts the struggles of independence and post-independence in Africa, struggles that Babu played a major role in. In this eye-opening historical analysis, Amin not only pays tribute to Babu but encourages us to look beyond the populism of the Bandung years and the following comprador societies and instead build on the independence struggles to create genuinely democratic societies in Africa.

Thank you dear friends, sisters and brothers, it is with much emotion that I respond to the honour of being invited to speak at this first Babu Memorial Lecture. For me, speaking about Babu is speaking, not only of a comrade and an elder but of a personal friend whom I knew right from the post-war period – the whole of our generation in Africa. Babu (Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu) was someone with whom I shared most political views for something like 40 years. For me Babu's main characteristic was that he was always critical to systems and his criticisms were always from the left. He never shifted to the right and he was always critical even of regimes which he considered, and I think rightly, represented a step ahead in the long liberation struggle.

I think the political life of Babu can be divided into three periods – firstly, before 1955, before Bandung – the glorious project for the liberation of Africa and Asia crystallized as the non-aligned movement – then the Bandung years – then the period of recolonisation of Africa.

It was in London, in 1952, that we first met. Babu was then, like me, a young student, he was my elder by a few years which at that point of time seemed a considerable difference – later of course the difference lost most of its meaning.



We were both very active among African students in Britain and France trying to start a unified movement, or unifying various movements, of students from various African and Asian countries. Babu was connected to the East African anti-colonialist committee, but there was also the West African Student's Union (WASU) which was very active, particularly the Ghanaians. They were thinking of establishing a magazine, and it was Babu and some others, in 1954, as far as I remember, who started the first African magazine in London. I was involved on the other side of the channel with a union called Etudiants Anticolonialistes (Anticolonial Students' Union) which brought together students from Asia (Vietnam), the Middle East, and Africa. We also had a newspaper, and in working together we discovered that we had the same views. These views could be summed up in the questions – who is going to lead the struggle for national liberation and to do what? Is it purely and simply national liberation to get independence and be part of the capitalist system? National liberation cannot have any meaning if it is not led by a communist party, by Marxism and socialist forces associated with it.

We were among the first readers of Mao Tse Tung's New Democratic Revolution, which was published, in French and English in 1950 or 1952. There were clearly two lines: There was the Indian line presented by (Jawaharlal) Nehru and the Congress Party (which was similar to and came from the same tradition as the Egyptian position) – national liberation or the struggle for independence with a view to participating on a more equal footing in the same global capitalist system; and there was the Chinese line which was followed by the Vietnamese and other countries of South East Asia. There was of course a sharp difference between the two lines. Most of the organisations we belonged to – particularly the Africans and the people from the Middle East – were rather of the Nehru line. We were a minority but we had a strong impact and Babu played a major role in that. Our position was that national liberation cannot be separated from socialism because no other social forces than those with an objective interest in going beyond capitalism into socialism could achieve national liberation. Perhaps we were exaggerating (as history has proven) because the role of the bourgeoisie had not completely ended, but I think looking back after 40 years that we were not fundamentally wrong. I had the opportunity of discussing this with Babu comparatively recently and we agreed that view was not wrong, even if history was a little different.

In the second period – the Bandung period, called after the conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955, at which Nehru, Sukarno, (Gamal Abdel) Nasser and Zhou Enlai met and established an enormous societal project for the liberation of Asia and Africa.

The African liberation project, particularly the tendency represented by Kwame Nkrumah, was also a major force in that conference, along with many other organisations and forces – I'll come to Zanzibar in a moment.

The point was as follows: National liberation under the leadership of the Communist Party had achieved its goals in China in 1949, was achieving its goals with a compromise (division of the country) in Vietnam in 1954, but elsewhere the communist guerrillas had been defeated – in Thailand, earlier in Indonesia, and in Malaysia. The bourgeois line of India, Egypt and a number of other countries of Asia and the Middle East had achieved national independence but curiously, instead of being supported by the imperialist system had found themselves in conflict with it on major issues such as the Cold War or with respect to internal problems related to multinational companies' property, mining, trade etc. And the bourgeoisie, contrary to what we had thought before, was able to achieve something, at least with respect to national liberation, and could be anti-imperialist. Babu and I (and many others like ourselves) thought that the Bandung line should be supported and that we should reflect on our previous analysis, not that it was wrong but that perhaps the objective conditions had changed and that there was a bourgeois national societal project, a nationalist project, with (different) shades of course, which could be qualified differently from one country to another. There was gradually a radical line which developed which Babu and I came to qualify later as nationalist populist (populist not socialist). It represents not only the bourgeoisie but it operates in alliance or with the support of popular classes. But where does it lead? Where can it lead?

At that point (the 1960s) there came the independence of a number of African countries south of the Sahara and the radicalisation of the struggle in North Africa, in Algeria in 1954 with the war which was to end in 1962. As a result, independent Africa was divided into two camps – the Monrovia group which appeared to us to follow a neocolonial line, and the Casablanca group which was very small (neither Tanganyika nor Zanzibar belonged to it at that point). The contradictions between the two groups were suddenly reduced at the end of the war in Congo and they merged into the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. Since that moment there have been two approaches on the left to the question of national populism, those who believed that not only should it be supported but that it would lead to national liberation and even to social transformation, and those who were critical. The first group supported the idea that the contradictions between national liberation and imperialism can lead to socialism. There was a whole ideology and political analysis which was produced as a non-capitalist road to socialism. Again there was a minority among the left – and not a small one – in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Asia which did not look at that nationalist populist experience in that way but regarded it as so full of contradictions and historical limitations that it would not be able to go very far; that the contradictions would radicalise the popular classes and would lead to new revolutions among African and Asian people; or if the power system is able to maintain itself and strengthen its position, it is going to reintegrate itself further into the global system, (reintegrate further because of course it had never de-linked) and keep well away from the idea, the possibility, the potential for de-linking with more radical internal changes into socialism.

That was a debate which started very early, almost immediately after Bandung in 1955. It was reflected in the Chinese-Soviet debate which started two years later. Among other things there was the question of the so-called non-capitalist road, or was it a capitalist road with its own specificities, its own contradictions with other capitalist roads and interests but belonging to the family of capitalist roads? When I met with Babu to discuss precisely these problems – what position should we have? What analysis should we think of? We found ourselves (with others) to be of the same type of view – critical, and critical from the left – that is, even if those contradictions create the conditions in which we can consider the regimes anti-imperialist and therefore support them in their struggle we should not forget that they are very strongly aware of the danger that is represented by an autonomous organisation of the popular classes. And this is what forms their approach vis-à-vis the trade union movement, vis-à-vis the Communist party, vis-à-vis independent social movements – trying to control the movement and limit its capacity to go beyond. The Soviet Union was supporting them and the Soviet Union was right from an overall perspective of a major struggle – East – West, the Cold War but also capitalism vs. socialism in general; but you need to qualify them as nationalist bourgeois, nationalist populist, nothing more, with all the internal contradictions implicit in this. I was at that point very critical of Nasserism and it created some problems for me for quite a long period. Babu did better than I because he was able, at that point to participate in the creation of objective forces in his country (Zanzibar) which led to a revolution in January 1964, which potentially at least could go beyond nationalist populism.

I knew of course what Babu thought of all this. We had been on the board of a magazine, Revolution, which was published in 1962-63 i.e. just before the Zanzibar revolution and at a crucial point in history at least from the Egyptian point of view, after the radicalisation of 1956 but before the defeat of 1967, a time of close Soviet-Egyptian relations. It was also the glorious time of Ghana with Nkrumah, of Guinea with Ahmed Sékou Touré, there was the victory of Algeria. In other words, there were a number of points on the map of Africa where there seemed a potential for radicalisation going beyond nationalist populism. We worked, both of us, with others on that magazine, to look at precisely this question. Is it possible and if so under what conditions for nationalist populism to move to the left? Not because the leaders move to the left by themselves, not because they develop a socialist rhetoric from time to time, not because the Soviets gave them a certificate of socialism, but provided the popular classes organised independently go into conflict with the system and go ahead. Babu tried to do this in Zanzibar with some success, Amrit wrote a book (Amrit Wilson : US Foreign Policy and Revolution – The Creation of Tanzania, Pluto Press, London, 1989) some time later which has established that the imperialists were afraid of that small country and thought that the best way to limit the danger was to merge Zanzibar with Tanganyika to form Tanzania. And if we look at what happened later as a result partly of that (partly of course it was for reasons internal to Tanzania and Zanzibar), we have societies which were not allowed to move much beyond national populism. Soon after the merger, in 1967, came the Arusha Declaration.

We see some countries of Africa moving from a very neocolonial pattern chosen by another set of countries into a more radical national populism with a socialist rhetoric and in some cases social transformations – whether as in North Africa and Egypt this took the form of land reform or in other countries nationalisation even where there was very little to nationalise, or attempting to modernise through industrialisation with a view to catching up – in conflict with the logic of the global capitalist system of that time. So there appeared to be a potential and most people were very happy with the Arusha Declaration and considered that by itself, it was almost a guarantee that Tanzania was moving towards socialism. Babu was critical, critical from the left. He said that there are a lot of conditions which are not provided by the very logic of that system, by the patterns of ruling the country which reduce the chances of its moving beyond nationalist populism – and he was right, history has proven that he was right. And he was not alone, we were right, fortunately there were many of us, but we were still a minority. A minority moreover which had no very strong capacity to convince the popular classes through organisations of autonomous political forces.

In my opinion it was because he was critical that Babu was arrested, for no other reason. And he was critical again, he said it again after six years of prison from 1972 to 1978. In 1972 we had organised a big meeting together in Dar es Salaam – liberation movements of South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe but also from independent Africa – North, West, Central and East Africa, whether from the radical nationalist populist regimes – parties speaking in their name, or from other political forces within those countries. We debated exactly this point – that accepting that we are on a capitalist road – under what conditions may we move from that road to another line. The meeting did not please everybody and he was regarded, while he was still a minister as a potential danger to the system.

Now things started moving faster than we ever imagined to the sad conclusion that we had more or less forecasted. In the mid 1970s, there was the so-called proposal of (Houari) Boumediène of a New International Economic Order after the oil shock of 1973, it was totally rejected by the West and it was the start of the erosion of nationalist populism. The rates of growth and industrialisation which were not so bad a relatively short time before moved towards growing difficulty and the power system was confronted with a challenge. To move beyond would require more power for the popular classes, and if this did not happen then the conditions would be created for an imperialist counter offensive – a successful imperialist offensive – and the dismantling of the broad alliances that were led, if not by a bourgeoisie, at least by a potential bourgeoisie (a ruling class) which would aspire to becoming a neo-comprador bourgeoisie and would shift to the right. It happened in Tanzania, in Egypt, in Ghana, everywhere in Africa at that point in time.

I could not meet Babu because he was in jail. But with other brothers, sisters, comrades, we started thinking of a new set of discussions – now that nationalist populism has gone to its limits, has started to erode, what else? How to analyse the next phase of the struggle? We established the Third World Forum in 1975, Babu was in prison but he was a member from the very start. And when he came out in 1978, he was very active in promoting the idea.

Then we entered into the third period of re-compradorisation of Africa. From the 1970s till now it has been continuously been going on along with the same erosion of the attempts to build socialism elsewhere. I have in mind the Soviet Union but also China. As I said earlier, in the debate of the early 1960s about the non-capitalist road – our criticism, from the South – of the Soviet Union probably started in 1957 and continued till the early 1960s. It was over the labelling of certain regimes as 'socialist' by the Soviets, purely for diplomatic and political reasons. We did not relate it at that point to a critique of the Soviet system itself, but that came very quickly when Maoism addressed this in a critique of the Soviet Union and Soviet socialism, analysing it not as a socialist road but a capitalist road – what I have described as a way of building capitalism without capitalists, with the same ruling class (which was a non-capitalist ruling class) becoming a capitalist class in the last chapter of that evolution.

When we think of the historical limitations of nationalist populism and Soviet socialism we realise that in the two cases where we have a vision of capitalism without capitalists, the target is to reproduce a society which is very close to the reality of a capitalist society with a view to 'catching up' or reducing the historical gap which is a result of imperialism and unequal development. Until it (this gap) is reduced to the point of the countries becoming equal partners; and a qualitative change in the power structure and the economic system to having normal capitalism with capitalists. And if it is normal capitalism, we in Africa are bound to be more mediocre, because for historical reasons, the West and particularly Europe has maintained us in the old role of the periphery. We are still producing raw materials, agricultural and mineral, and not moving into industrialisation at the very time when parts of Asia, either through communist leadership or through bourgeois leadership (India and South East Asia), and with different historical reasons Latin America – are moving into industrialisation more or less successfully – in terms of the capacity to be competitive.

The re-compradorisation proposed for Africa is the road to marginalisation in the global system. I remember discussing this with Babu more than once. One occasion I remember was when we were invited by the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Group in the 1980s for a series of meetings and discussions with a number of comrades.

This latest chapter in the history of Africa has come to such a disastrous point that it has led to the crystallization of such things as ethnicity, civil war, religious illusions etc. I did not have the opportunity to discuss this with Babu but it would have been useful to have his contribution to the analysis of what has been changing in Southern Africa in the last few years. There have been a series of important changes; I call them victories in the long liberation struggle. Firstly, in South Africa the end of Apartheid, which of course is the beginning of 50 years more of struggle to move from that society which is perhaps the ugliest in the world into something acceptable from a human or a socialist point of view. Changing that microcosm of a world system in which you have the maximum inequalities which you can find anywhere in the globe within the boundaries of the country, into something else. But the first victory and a major victory was the end of the political system of Apartheid. Now, in the meantime even before there have been changes and continuing struggles, there have been the first changes in the same direction in Zimbabwe, the continuation of armed struggle in Angola and Mozambique, the change in Uganda with (Idi) Amin and (Milton) Obote replaced by Museveni, and then last but not least the fall of Mobutu (Sese Seko) in Congo .

These changes are not the end and in my understanding they have not moved out of the pattern of compradorisation of Africa. But they have mobilised political forces which for sure have objective interests and a feeling that the system is not delivering what they expect. And for the first time in this current period we see those forces, whether organised or not, reappearing on the stage. We have to regret very strongly that someone of the calibre of Babu is not with us to contribute to those changes – not only analysing those changes but also defining an alternative strategy. Some of us, mainly academics, try to analyse those events and some speak of a renaissance of Africa and a new world. I think Babu would have analysed not only where we stand today but on what conditions national liberation can move ahead – re-compradorisation can be destroyed and replaced by a popular democratic alliance of forces. Babu had started during the multi-party elections in Tanzania to play that role. I think in addition to the friendship we all have for him, for his enormous personal qualities, we all regret deeply that he is not with us to continue the debate.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

QUESTION: Given the current political and economic situation in Africa today, what do we have to do to move the situation forward?


SAMIR AMIN: I think all the questions are related, and the first one really sums it up: What strategy should we put forward from where we are. That is the most important and relevant issue. I do not have a blue print for that and shall not try to offer one but – assuming that the overall analysis of the global capitalist system at this point in time is correct – then what can we do?
Firstly, one must never resuscitate the past. Things have changed. It is not that the experiences before have failed, I do not think that failure or success is a correct way of analysing things, rather that it has provided changes and reached historical limitations and entered a new phase. The system is changing and the challenges are changing. One can never respond to new challenges by trying to reproduce the responses which had their efficacy in a previous period. If we look at what I think are the challenges, we ought to develop the struggle at all levels: national – meaning the boundaries of the state (a political reality); regional and sub-regional; the South – with all the internal limitations and contradictions; and at the global level.

At the national level I would stress fundamental principles which have always been true, even if it is under different conditions; the autonomy of organisation of the people, of popular classes, as far as is possible. That is the meaning of democracy. Democracy should not be reduced, as the West wants it to be to a formula with multi-party elections or pseudo-elections, not necessarily absolutely fabricated but without much meaning – and in some cases meaningless! Low intensity democracy and nothing more. Long live democracy provided it changes nothing! The market changes by itself so if you move this way or that way the result is the same if you are powerless. Therefore the question is how to re-link democratic demand to social progressive change. It is a very complex problem with cultural dimensions – how to democratise the society, not only the higher strata of political management of society. That is crucial, more than ever before, because at earlier stages, national populism could indeed achieve something – not now. In the struggle for independence and in achieving independence it created upward social mobility through education – which has been the way of creating non-democracies or pseudo- or caricature-democracies. Now we need to link democratic change to social progressive change. That is the challenge. There is no blueprint as I said; we have to take into consideration the concrete conditions which are different from one country to another and from one period to another.

QUESTION: My question is about the balkanisation of Africa, if we become petty nations, do these nations have the capacity to advance the cause of Africa?

SAMIR AMIN: But although we all have a responsibility, even the smallest and weakest countries, we have also to take into account that this has to be reinforced by action at a regional level. That is why the ideology of Pan-Africanism or Pan-Arabism, while not negative, are not enough by themselves. It is not useful to repeat general wishful thinking rhetoric of Pan-Africanism or Pan-Arabism. Here we have to look at the challenge of regionalism in another way: That the bourgeoisie – at the global level or the compradors at various levels in Africa and elsewhere – look at the problem of regionalisation in terms of common markets and we should be very critical of this view. It is presented as follows: That if even the Europeans with strong national economies need to unite by building a common market, we should do the same. In fact they have different problems and I think they have to go beyond a common market even from the European Left point of view. I think that the European problem will find its limitation very soon and dangerously. I think that what we had in the past, since the industrial revolution – classical imperialism – was a polarisation on a global level. This was more or less synonymous with industrialised countries (America, countries of western Europe, central Europe, Japan) and non-industrialised areas (the rest). The vision of catching up was logically modernisation, and therefore regionalisation (whether de facto, with a large country – multinational like the Soviet Union – or with a number of countries medium and small like we have in Africa and South East Asia) would mean supporting further industrialisation through more integration and common markets with a certain degree of protection. I think now we are moving towards polarisation no longer based on industrialisation vs. non-industrialisation, but on the five monopolies of the centre: the monopoly of science and technology; the monopoly of controlling finance systems at the global level; the monopoly of access to (not ownership of) the resources of the globe; of communication, and through communications interfering in politics, culture etc; and the monopoly of armaments. In that framework a number of countries of East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, Latin America – and in this way you get more than half the population of the globe – are moving and quite successfully into industrialisation and towards the capacity to be competitive in the global market. But they will face polarisation, they will continue to be a periphery to the advantage of the centres of the five monopolies. Therefore we should look to regionalisation as a means of fighting bourgeois policy and reducing its impact – this is nothing to do with a common market. In the political dimension of regional security the question of armaments is very important, the cultural dimension – the monopoly of communications is very important. But there are also other dimensions.

That is the pattern of regionalisation around which we should organise. Not that I have disrespect for the rhetoric of Pan-Africanism or Pan-Arabism but it is not enough by itself. It may turn into a pure rhetoric with little effect if it is not accompanied by a vision of the region very different from the dominant vision – which includes the vision of intellectuals on the left, nationalists, progressive people of Africa – people like ourselves.

We also need to fight on a global level (this is not an answer but a comment on the collapse of the Soviet Union). We have tasks and responsibilities and there are not only reactionary but also progressive forces everywhere, including at the centre, who also have their responsibilities. We have to be internationalist and look at how to link progressive struggles in the North and South. I don't think it is surprising that with the internationalisation of capital, people should respond with more local nationalism – whether it is national chauvinism, ethnicism, or culturalism of one sort or another. Therefore there is a struggle we have to develop at a global level; we have to take up the challenge to open serious and continuous debate between progressive forces of North and South. So, we should be active at these three levels and the alternatives will crystallize.

QUESTION: Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future in Congo?

SAMIR AMIN: The last question was about being pessimistic or optimistic, I don't want to be either. But put the question another way, not whether (Joseph) Kabila is bad, but what conditions can bring a step ahead towards crystallisation of an alternative – i.e. the problem is the strengthening of democratic forces within the Congo. The future will depend not on who is Kabila but on how Congolese people organise, develop, and potentially impose democratisation and not the low intensity democracy which the West is asking. They are asking Kabila to organise elections which they never asked Mobutu to do. But it does not mean we do not need democracy in Congo. If we put the question in that way, we get out of the issue of whether the reality leads us to be pessimistic or not, we should ask ourselves what are the conditions and what is our responsibility in that.

QUESTION: Congratulations for capturing so succinctly what Babu stood for. A few years ago when I spoke to him, he was very suspicious about what was going to happen in South Africa. There was a distinction between fighting to overthrowing a system and working towards an alternative. His feeling was that in South Africa we have not clearly demonstrated what the alternative would be. I would like to link that with another issue you have raised about an African 'renaissance'. For example in the Orange Free State, the grassroots people decided who should be the Prime Minister but the powers that be decided who actually became the Prime Minister. The question then is – how viable is this African 'renaissance' and what is your reading of South Africa?

SAMIR AMIN: Now, what has happened in South Africa? Contrary to the opinion currently developed, particularly in Britain, that Apartheid was conflicting with the logic of capitalism as though capitalism was synonymous with democracy and anti-racist at least in principle. No, capitalism is much more complex than that. Apartheid has been very useful for capital accumulation and so on but it has reached its limits because of the struggle of the African people of South Africa. The project of capital accumulation in South Africa, in the language of the World Bank has failed (in the sense that it has been unable to build a competitive export industry). It is as bad as the Soviet Union, as bad as Egypt etc. Of course the Apartheid regimes were not socialist, nor were they Blacks or Arabs. They were good whites, capitalists. They failed because the slave labour – almost slave labour – resisted. The result was a microcosm of the global system. You have everything that exists anywhere and usually the worst of everything! You have strata with the level of consumption of developed capitalist countries, but not the average productivity of those countries. Elsewhere there is an industrial third world, hardworking people with high productivity but low wages, and a fourth world too – the poorest people of Africa in the erstwhile Bantustans. All that is in one country. Now the target from any progressive, not even socialist but progressive, perspective should be reducing inequalities and within 50 years creating a normal capitalist society with classes. This means land reform, redistribution of the population – enormous changes. Between 1990 and 1992, I had feared that a pseudo-federal constitution would be adopted which would reinforce the capacity for unequal development. Fortunately the constitution is not too bad on that point, but the main problem now is overall strategy. What the World Bank is suggesting (and all governments of the West support this and the government of South Africa at present accepts it) is the vision of becoming competitive on the global market. It is suggesting capitalising on the so-called advantages of South Africa compared to other African countries, industrialisation etc. to become more competitive. This choice maintains the unacceptable inequalities. Even if there is a Black bourgeoisie and already there is one, it could be part of what could be called a 'semi-imperialist' role of South Africa within Africa. I think the other countries and peoples of Africa will not accept it and it will not go very far even from the point of view of that capitalist vision. The alternative would be to focus more in the short term, i.e. the next 50 years on dramatic internal social changes and to bring the question of external relations (what to export, what to import) to the service of changing the social pattern of society inside the country. What the World Bank has said is adjust your internal development for global constraints/forces, I am saying try as much as you can to adjust your external relations to internal perspectives. I am relatively optimistic; South Africa had proved that it will change in the long run.

Q. What can Africa do to deal with International Financial Institutions?

Samir Amin: International Financial Institutions should not be looked at as the major forces we are up against. They are just institutions at the service of dominant capital – the G7 if you like. Their vision of globalisation is in my opinion a utopian vision, the capitalist utopia – that you can run the world not as a market but as a supermarket and very little more. It is a utopia, it is stupid but it is the natural utopia of capitalism. Capitalists adjust when they have an enemy who compels them to adjust. But when they feel they can run unilaterally, it can produce the maximum chaos in the shortest possible time. It does not solve the problem or even move the system out of the crisis but it moves into a spiral going down with relative stagnation, low growth, relative excess of capital which does not find a way of expansion and deepening of the productive system and for which financial outlets have to be created continuously. It is not that the technocrats of the IMF or World Bank have thought of the system, they do not think of anything, they just implement. That is why we must create social and political forces which compel the system to adjust.

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.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
* This lecture has been edited from the original transcript.

Patriots and trying times in Ethiopia

Alemayehu G. Mariam

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/59285

cc ODISaluting the contribution of Ethiopia's 'patriot-soldiers', Alemayehu G. Mariam commends the courage, patriotism and resilience displayed by the country's defenders in this week's Pambazuka News.

'These are the times that try men’s souls' said Thomas Paine, one of the founders of the American republic, at the onset of the American Revolution. It could be said equally that these are times that try a nation’s soul.

Ethiopia today is stranded in a sea of political, economic and social troubles. It continues to be strafed by the slings and arrows of wicked villains, thugs and scoundrels, to paraphrase Shakespeare. But before Ethiopia became the playground of outlaws, she was the land of patriot-soldiers who protected her boundaries from foreign invaders, defended her honour and dignity against the insolent and cowardly hordes, and guaranteed her independence and freedom from enemies who sought to slice and dice her.

Those patriots were the members of her armed forces of yesteryears who marched the arid lowland deserts in the blistering heat, endured the biting cold of the craggy highland mountains and defended against the aggressor in the bushes, the swamps, the valleys and the once-dense forests. They were underpaid and overworked, under-funded and overburdened. They were under-appreciated. They faced unimaginable hardship in their decades of selfless service. Many suffered hunger, thirst, disease and isolation in their remote outposts. But they marched on, sailed the sea and flew over the glorious skies to make sure Ethiopia kept her independence for another 3,000 years.

A couple of weeks ago, an event was held in Washington, D.C., to honour former members of Ethiopia’s armed forces. The event, dubbed the 'Evening of Ethiopian Heroes' (Ye Jegnotch Mishet), was organised by the Committee to Honor Ethiopian Heroes. The purpose of the event was to pay homage to the brave patriot-soldiers, to show them the high respect and appreciation they have earned for their sacrifices, and to express to them profound gratitude for their long service. The sample list of named soldiers was drawn to represent all ranks of the hundreds of thousands of veterans, fallen soldiers and those missing in action. For the occasion two legendary retired generals, Tesfaye Habte Mariam and Kassaye Chemeda, were honoured for their exemplary and extraordinary service to their country. Ali Berke, a militia fighter known for his heroism in various theatres of conflict, was honoured in absentia. Last year General Legesse Tefera and others were honoured by the committee. Truth be told, these generals and many of their officer colleagues proved to be extraordinary military leaders because the troops they commanded made them so, and the honour goes to their loyal troops as well.

TRUE COURAGE AND TRUE COLOURS

Ethiopian history offers accounts of mercenaries who took up arms against their country and people dreaming of riches and political power. There were those who betrayed the honour and dignity of their uniforms to advance their political ambitions and to grab power, along the way abusing and misusing professional military institutions as tools of repression of the civilian population. But there were also the true soldiers, the soldiers’ soldiers, like the ones honoured in Washington who performed their duties with skill, professionalism, integrity and honour. These were a special breed of soldiers who had mastered not only the art of war and the ways of peace, but who also lived the values of country, duty and honour everyday of their lives.

Military skills can be taught and learned, but courage, integrity and humility are the specialty of the patriot-soldier. These honoured soldiers took up their profession for one purpose only: to defend their people and their homeland. In peace-time or at war, in good times or bad, these patriot-soldiers never wore their ethnic stripes, and never displayed their tribal marks. Under fire, they showed only two things: the true courage they inherited from their forefathers and their true colours of green, yellow and red. They put their flag and country above all things, including their own safety and their families’ wellbeing, and they did it all with unquestioning devotion and unconditional love.

NEVER WAS SO MUCH OWED BY SO MANY TO SO FEW

History will tell of the great sacrifices and courage of these patriot-soldiers when freedom rings in Ethiopia. But we know a lot from reading the autobiographies and battlefield accounts of the generals honoured at this event. We are moved to tears by the horrible toll war exacts on the mind, the soul and body of the soldier, and the unfortunate civilians caught in the tragedy of conflict. We know these patriot-soldiers carry with them the emotional and spiritual burdens and scars of their battlefield experiences, and we can only imagine their great sacrifices from the injuries and disabilities they suffered defending their country.

We are familiar with the efforts that have been made to slander, defame and shame these patriot-soldiers. We know these soldiers were put in jail by criminals who sought to cover up their own crimes. The criminals tried every treacherous means to demoralise, discredit and dishonour them. But the patriot-soldiers marched on; they harbour no grudges or ill will to those who have mistreated and abused them. They stand tall above all as patriot-soldiers, and we can say to them from the depths of our hearts: 'Never have so many owed so much to so few.'

WHAT GOES ON IN THE MINDS OF OLD PATRIOT-SOLDIERS?

Old patriot-soldiers are good at hiding their pain, heartache and suffering. It is a professional virtue they have developed from experiencing years of hardships few of us can imagine, let alone endure. Those of us who have not walked a mile in their boots – never tasted life in the windswept deserts, never held sentry in desolate mountain outposts, never set eyes on the horrors of war, never heard the 'crash of guns, the rattle of musketry and the strange and mournful mutter of the battlefield' – often wonder: 'What goes on in the minds of old patriot-soldiers?' What do they think of their legacy of decades of dedicated service and sacrifice to their country? What do they say to each other when they see the land they defended with their blood, sweat and tears cut up like a slab of meat and handed away to the enemy? What do they think when thy see their people forced into ethnic corrals like cattle; and their lifelong sacrifices for the unity, harmony and territorial integrity of their country turn into a faint memory. What do they see in their dreams about the country they loved so much and the people they served so selflessly?

HOW DO OLD PATRIOT-SOLDIERS SURVIVE IN THESE TRYING TIMES?

Those of us who never answered the call to service, we have learned some very hard lessons. These old patriot-soldiers have taught us that the unity, security and integrity of Ethiopia can never be taken for granted. Our burden is to deliver the lesson we have learned to the new generation: 'There is a price to be paid to have a country united under the rule of law. That price is eternal vigilance against enemies foreign and domestic.'

OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE, THEY LIVE IN OUR HEARTS FOREVER

It has been said that 'men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own.' These patriot-soldiers love Ethiopia even though she is very poor and down on her luck, and her skin is covered with ticks that suck her lifeblood away. They love her because she is all they have got.

Most of us spend our lives asking whether we could have done this thing or that for our motherland; we question ourselves in the deep of the night if we could have made this contribution or that sacrifice. These patriot-soldiers do not have to ask themselves any questions. Unlike us, they have answered the call.

It has been said that 'old soldiers never die, they just fade away.' Not our patriot-soldiers. They never die, and they never fade away. They just live in our hearts forever. I have no doubts that when these old patriot-soldiers rest their heads for the last time, just before they close their eyes for eternity, in their last breaths will be the words: 'God bless Ethiopia, my home, sweet home!'

We owe them an eternal debt of gratitude (Ye Mairesa Wulleta). May God bless them all.

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* This article was originally published by Ethiomedia.
* Alemayehu G. Mariam is a professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and an attorney based in Los Angeles. For comments, he can be reached at almariam@gmail.com.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Xenophobia déjà vu and human rights in South Africa

Tafadzwa Thelma Madondo

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/59294

cc JaysenIn this week's Pambazuka News, Tafadzwa Thelma Madondo writes about last year's xenophobic attacks in South Africa and their dramatic consequences for foreign women and children. Madondo argues that the government did not do enough to protect the most vulnerable to violence and that more has to be done to guarantee everyone’s safety in South Africa in the future.

South African citizens in township areas recently demonstrated for the government to improve their living conditions in relation to water, sanitation and housing. Once again, these demonstrations led to a resurgence of xenophobia in South Africa. Reports from the Sowetan newspaper show that threats were being made to foreign nationals living in the Western Cape and evidence suggests that there might be a reoccurrence of xenophobia.

Last year a similar demonstration triggered serious xenophobic attacks, which left 62 people dead and about 100,000 displaced from their homes. At the time, former President Thabo Mbeki apologised to the world for the xenophobic attacks. However, did this really have an impact on the angry and impatient South Africans seeking the government’s attention?

Numerous human rights violations arose from these attacks, such as an infringement on the right to safety for foreign nationals, refugees and South African citizens living in the township areas, where they are exposed to violence and crime. Innocent women and children living in these areas are more vulnerable to abuse and rape. During last year's attacks dozens of women were raped and more than 6,000 women and children were displaced from their homes.

During the xenophobic attacks women and children were unable to protect themselves, being denied their human rights as their lives were being stolen through the threat of violence. This traumatic experience was a clear example of domestic violence as defined by Section 1 (viii) of the 1998 Domestic Violence Act. The definition is broad and encompasses acts that include physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional and verbal abuse, intimidation, harassment, damage to property and entry into one’s residence without consent. All of the above were a reality during the attacks and the people who were responsible for such violations were never charged for their crimes.

The children who were victims suffered both psychologically and physically by being traumatically displaced from their homes, witnessing other humans burnt alive or being beaten up severely and as a result of the police shooting rubber bullets and tear gas everywhere. Not only does this affect their psychological and physical health but it also infringes on children’s rights to safety. International conventions advocate the protection of children’s rights. Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states that:

‘1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.
2. The child has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’

Interpreting Article 16 and looking at the previous xenophobic experience, the children’s rights to privacy were violated as most of them and their families were unlawfully attacked and made to flee their homes. They had to go through the pain of losing their belongings and not being able to locate their family members during the rampage. After reading Article 16 one would say that, the government had the duty to protect these children from this devastating déjà vu before its occurrence. They had to make sure that the children were placed in safer locations before the attacks became severe in order to protect them from the violence.

According to Article 22 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, government and state parties have the duty to protect the rights of children seeking refugee status. It states that:

‘State parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure that a child who is seeking refugee status or who is considered a refugee according to law receives appropriate protection and humanitarian assistance in the enjoyment of applicable rights…’

One could say that the government of South Africa responded to this duty by providing camps for the displaced children and their parents, although this was not adequate to cater for their basic needs and protection. The government camps were later closed and the families had to find alternative solutions. For the foreign citizens (including children) the choice was either to go back to their home countries or live in the streets as they had lost all their belongings. The South Africa in which they had sought refuge was not a safe haven anymore.

If this xenophobic tragedy is to re-occur in South Africa, protection measures have to be set in advance to protect the innocent women and children who are victimised through such situations. The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) conducted a study which focused on the gendered nature of xenophobia in South Africa and the impact of such xenophobia on migrant women. Their findings showed that women are more vulnerable to xenophobic abuse due to issues of identification documents and the resulting difficulties in accessing the criminal justice system as they are not accorded the rights to report such incidences to the police. Recommendations were set forth in the study, including foreign and migrant representatives in community structures enabling access to decision-making bodies, informing migrant women on how to access public services, educating society about different cultures and acceptance of foreigners and creating a transparent complaint process for the Department of Home Affairs and public hospitals. It is important for state parties and the government to consider these recommendations in order to achieve a free and fair South Africa where everyone is protected from violence.

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

REFERENCES

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8163187.stm
Beeby N, Double Jeopardy: Female and Foreign in South Africa 3 June 2009 http://www.refugeeministriescentre.org.za/double_jeopardy.htm
Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) Report shows women migrants continue to live in fear 5 June 2009 http://www.csvr.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1109&Itemid=21
Convention on the Rights of the Child 2 September 1990
Domestic Violence Act , 1998
Majavu A, Traders threatened Sowetan News 29 May 2009 http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=1008791
Plus News, South Africa: Act II of xenophobia waiting in the wings 14 August 2009 http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83444
UNICEF, Domestic Violence against women and girls, Innocenti Digest No. 6 June 2000

Captain Camara: Butcher of Conakry?

Okello Oculi

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/59286

On 28 September 2009, ‘Chaka the Zulu’ in the fight against corruption in Nigeria, Mrs Farida Waziri, (officially tagged as the 'Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)), beat a familiar but still startling drumbeat when she uttered the following daredevil words: 'I am inclined to suggest that public officers should be subjected to some form of psychiatric evaluation to determine their suitability for public office.' Her concern was in consonance with her current mission to protect public wealth and was expressed as follows: 'The extent of aggrandizement and gluttonous accumulation of wealth that I have observed suggests to me that some people are mentally and psychologically unsuitable for public office.' Between 11 August 2009 and 1 October 2009, Farida Waziri has recovered 103 billion Naira (of a total 774 billion Naira), either owed, or stolen from, Nigeria’s banks.

Professor O. Lambo, the former head of psychiatry at Lagos University Teaching Hospital and the former boss of the World Health Organisation (WHO), was so disgusted by the criminal lootery evidenced by African leaders – who would buy old castles and villas in Europe while people starved in the rural and urban slums of their home countries – that he called for psychiatric tests for not only Nigeria’s leaders but leaders of all African countries. The call had not won any significant backing, not even from the Nigerian Medical Association, a politically vocal civil society organisation in the mid-1980s. Yet another celebrated Nigerian voice had beaten both Lambo and Farida Waziri in making this angry call. The great writer Chinua Achebe had, in 1972, made an assertion worth quoting at length. Said he in an interview: 'It seems to me that the basic problem that I hinted at in "A Man of the People" is that this generation which is not used to good things … that is fascinated by wearing lace or by wearing gold that reaches to the floor … is not ever likely to produce the kind of leadership that you and I want.' This link between mental disorder and the misuse of political power requires our concern and, as Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem would insist, demands action to combat it.

The latest manifestation of a lethal psychotic disorder was that by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, the new captain of terror in Guinea. Camara seized power a few hours after the official confirmation of the death of Guinea’s former military dictator, President Lansana Conté. Conté had died with his hands sticky with clots of the blood of trade union demonstrators, joined in their protests by those demanding democratic politics as the basis for governance in the country. Lacking mourners, it was easy for the people to be fooled by promises for better rule by another military coupist. Under pressure from the African Union (AU), ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) and the European Union, Camara pledged to conduct elections in January 2010. He swore not to use the election to serve his own ambitions. He would not be by running as a candidate. As the clock has done its tiks and toks, Camara has made unusual gestures of putting to shame formerly untouchable people associated with power. An example was getting the son of Lansana Conté to confess to television viewers to linkages with drug barons. Soldiers were also shown on television begging for pardon (while on their knees) for an offence of beating up a serving general in the army.

Camara’s antics recall those of Idi Amin in Uganda. Amin was once shown at a funeral sitting on the bare ground in front of a mud-and-thatch-roofed hut in a village from which a foot soldier came. Once while walking out of an interactive session with academic staff at Makerere University, Amin had stopped and handed over to a surprised Professor Ali Mazrui a piece of paper fished out of a shirt pocket. These gestures of a 'common touch' with members of the public, however, hid a deadly side of the bulky former rugby player and heavyweight boxer. A previous give-away was his record of fighting against Mau Mau revolutionaries in colonised Kenya. Official records attributed to Sergeant Idi Amin the sadistic practice of cutting off the genital organs of his captives. Milton Obote, as prime minister of independent Uganda, ignored a warning by the departing British colonial governor about having such a person at the head of Uganda’s armed forces. When he came to power following the military coup of 1971, Idi Amin would add to his armoury of sadistic terror the practice, invented by an Irish officer, of getting arrested Mau Mau suspects to beat each other to death for a promise of being set free. Over 600,000 Ugandans were murdered by Amin’s regime.

Captain Moussa Dadis Camara made a swift turning away from the 'common touch' to that of open butchery. Once he was shown evidence of resolute mass demands for democracy – and that people had seen through his gimmicks and signs of his intent to betray his earlier pledges – he saw it as yet another denial of love for him. Their rejection reminded him of a background of poverty and humiliation when he crawled around the alleys of Conakry as the poor boy from the 'back-lands' of southeast Guinea. It provoked in him a mad fury. He apparently impulsively ordered the use of live bullets against the crowd’s angry chants and placards.

This matter of armed groups from parts of the country that have experienced being treated with contempt by groups that see themselves as 'superior' or 'more civilised' has brought enormous harm to Africa. In Nigeria, a legacy of Igbo traders and officials – working in colonial post offices, railway services, health clinics, mines, etc. – treating 'Hausa–Fulani’ or 'Northerners' with contempt is repeatedly offered by some commentators as the fuel that drove the anti-Igbo pogroms of 1966 and 1967 in Nigeria. In Uganda, the brutalities committed by both Idi Amin’s Nubians and Kakwa soldiers, as well as Yoweri Museveni’s Banyankole and Banyarwanda soldiers, have also been blamed on past contempt suffered by them when British colonial officials brought their ancestors to work as cheap labour on sugar, coffee and cotton plantations in central Uganda. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, creole communities suffered wanton brutalities by peoples who claimed that creoles had always regarded and humiliated them as 'bush barbarians'.

This matter demands urgent and serious attention by African scholars at home and in the diaspora. Wole Soyinka once made the fatal error of caricaturing Idi Amin as a buffoon who climbed onto a platform to address rallies with his head empty. Faced with hundreds of expectant eyes in a crowd staring at him, jumbles of thought would rush into Amin’s head and he would utter any gibberish that would reach his mouth. This was an underestimation of Amin’s psychotic cunning that Soyinka shared with Uganda’s Asian community and Uganda's political elite, to the peril of the latter two groups.

It has been suggested that power groups in North America and western Europe revisited their colonial archives and the notes of their anthropologists for clues of what to use for mapping out a pandemic of violence and civil wars across Africa as a strategy for containing African nationalism once the fear of Soviet communism had ended. If that claim is valid, it is an enterprise in social engineering that Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem would have called us out to use as we organise to move away from the mere mending of wounds of civil wars to the creativity of nation-building. Accordingly, civil society groups must demand that the African Union dole out funds for researchers – academic research scholars, investigative journalists, writers of travel-based commentaries on African affairs and literary writers among them – to focus on the matter of psychological disorders and its destructive effects on governance in African countries.

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem was always preoccupied with this problem, often giving graphic reports about specific leaders and officials he had seen in action either in their offices or at conferences. His staccato laughter that accompanied these reports was also his cry about Africa’s predicament, while his 'Thursday Postcard' was his call to Africans everywhere to assume their right to comment on, and seek a cure for, each African country as part of their common heritage and collective sovereignty.

With specific action to deal with Captain Moussa Camara and his military gang, ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) should invoke its record of terminating Charles Taylor’s military capacity while the African Union invokes its record of ending Taylor’s criminality through the use of direct, high-powered diplomatic intervention by current and former chairs of the African Union. The facilitated migration by intransigent members of Camara’s military leadership should be conducted, along with the domestication of trials at The Hague for crimes against humanity, with the African Union trying Captain Camara and his gang at Arusha in Tanzania (where those accused of acts of genocide in Rwanda have been on trial) and using the much-acclaimed election commissioners of South Africa, Ghana and Sierra Leone to conduct the elections in Guinea under the protection of ECOMOG.

As diverse Christian groups are saying in their prayers across Africa, let us also use the struggle against terrorism by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara 'as a point of contact' for naming, shaming and seeking remedies for psychological disorders of those seeking and occupying offices in Africa’s governance. As one who was never tired of recalling his early education in schools runs by Baptists, Tajudeen would have said 'amen' to all that.

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* Okello Oculi is the executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The heart of impunity

L. Muthoni Wanyeki

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/59289

He finally did it. Justice Aaron Ringera finally resigned last week, ending a shameful and unnecessary stand-off between the Kenyan president and parliament, shameful and unnecessary for many reasons. The president could easily have retained authority and face by gracefully admitting to a process problem as soon as the matter was first raised. The head of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) could have retained the same by gracefully declining re-appointment until due process was followed, instead of allowing the president to spare himself ignominy at the KACC head’s expense.

Grace is in short supply in the public domain. Hackles and temperatures apparently had to be raised. Precious parliamentary time had to be wasted, at the expense of pending decisions on the annual budget as well as important legislative initiatives, such as the private members bill to establish the Special Tribunal. The KACC’s advisory board had to have its lack of oversight powers exposed. Civil society had to put itself on the line with another shameful and unnecessary stand-off with the Kenya police force on the right to freedom of assembly – in this case, around the desire to peacefully and publicly protest the KACC re-appointments. And the public had to be upset. Energy and time diverted from proactive movement forward to reactive attempts to simply hold the line.

With all of that in mind, rather than celebrate the supposed victory of the ‘popular will’ over the whims of the imperial presidency, we should actually question the opportunity costs of this kind of shameful and unnecessary stand-off. And, more importantly, we should interrogate and address the real issues raised by this stand-off about the KACC as an institution.

For what is clear is this. The initial problem was one of process, not of performance. But the impetus and momentum that the stand-off generated was based solely on perceived performance. On the scorecard of ‘public opinion’, the KACC was judged and found wanting with respect to delivering on its purpose – that of preventing and addressing corruption.

It was thus on addressing grand corruption, in particular, that the head of the KACC fell. Nobody seemed willing to listen to his adamant and spirited defence, centred on the fact that the KACC has only investigative not prosecutorial powers. Nobody cared.

But care we must, because encapsulated in that defence is, in fact, the core problem with our entire criminal justice system: the role of the offices of the attorney general and the director of public prosecutions. There is an institutional design problem that offers an easy out to avoid spirited follow-through with respect to the accountability and bringing-to-justice of suspected criminals. And that easy out is almost invariably taken when the suspected criminals are those in high public office.

What is the easy out? The powers of the office of the attorney general and the director of public prosecutions to simply refuse to prosecute files forwarded to them. The powers to return files to the Criminal Investigations Department of the Kenya police force, citing inadequate investigations for the purposes of successful prosecution. The powers to return files to the KACC for that matter, citing the same. The powers to delay and delay and delay, simply by sitting on files, trusting in the inevitable short-term focus of the Kenyan public to eventually enable the matters in the files to simply be of no supposed consequence anymore. The powers to intervene and end proceedings when private citizens, fed up, try to initiate private prosecutions. The powers to reply to any public questioning of progress by pointing fingers in an endless blame game; the evidence was insufficient, the witnesses are absent…

This easy out must be addressed. The suggestion that seems to be gaining currency is that the KACC should be given prosecutorial powers. But, as Maina Kiai, the former head of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission (KNCHR), has warned, that might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Obviously granting the KACC prosecutorial powers would not address the design problem that relates to the utter inadequacies of the offices of the attorney general and the director of public prosecutions. But, more importantly, granting the KACC prosecutorial powers risks creating a potentially extortionist monster of the KACC. There are reasons for checks and balances and the separation of powers, but checks and balances and the separation of powers in this instance will only work if all elements of the criminal justice chain work with the same intentions (including and particularly the offices of the attorney general and the director of public prosecutions).

In short, we cannot fall prey to the temptation to create ever more dense and impenetrable layers to the criminal justice system and yet avoid addressing the rot at its core. Back to basics and simplicity should be the driving principle. Are the evident number of potential criminal cases, including those to do with grand corruption, being successfully prosecuted? If not, why not? And what must be done to correct that?

The head of the KACC may be gone. But replacing him through due process will do nothing to satisfy the evident public anger at continued impunity for grant corruption without asking – and answering – those critical questions. Let us all now sober up and do so.

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* This article first appeared in The East African.
* L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC).
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Declaration on the rights and citizenship of Guinea's women

CONAG-DCF (National Coalition of Guinea for the Rights and Citizenship of Women)

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/59319

CONAG-DCF has followed with great interest the evolving political situation in our country Guinea. We refer to the breakdown of talks between the National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD) and the nation’s civil society, which led to the tragic events of 28 September 2009.

CONAG-DCF deplores and condemns the bloody repression of the 28 September march by the armed forces. CONAG-DCF offers its condolences to the families of the victims and to the people of Guinea as a whole. In our view, there is no possible justification for the massacre of the nation’s sons and daughters who sought nothing more than the reconstruction of their country.

In addition to the assassinating citizens, the armed forces committed unprecedented atrocities against the women and girls who were at the stadium on the day. Witness accounts tell of blows and injuries, public and mass rapes, and even the insertion of pieces of wood, rifle butts, and even bayonets into genitals.

The republic of Guinea has thus witnessed some of the most atrocious forms of violence against women. This violence was deeply felt by the women of Guinea, of Africa, and the whole world. CONAG-DCF strongly condemns these inhuman acts.

At the same time we note with regret that power intrigues have predominated our social cultural and religious values.

Throughout its history, our country has accorded special protection to the rights of women, even in cases of illegal activity. We recall the events of 27 August 1977 when the nation’s women demonstrated against the government’s economic policies, forcing the late Ahmed Sekou Touré to back down. The atrocities of 28 September constitute a grave violation of our traditions, and show us clearly that in spite of its lofty pronouncements, the new regime has no regard for the welfare and status of women.

In light of these gross violations committed by the very forces charged with safeguarding the rights of all, the most vulnerable being women and girls, CONAG-DCF protests in the strongest terms, and reminds the CNDD that:

- Guinea is a signatory to the key international, regional and sub-regional documents that safeguard the rights of women, such as: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa; United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security; and Security Council Resolution 1820 on Sexual Violence as a Tactic of Warfare.

CONAG-DCF, considering the atrocities committed against women during the events of 28 September 2009 and cognisant that no nation can claim progress while at the same time degrading those who give life:

- Demand an international inquest to identify those responsible and to hold them to account, in conformance with UN Resolution 1325, which states:
'It is the responsibility of all States to put an end to impunity and to prosecute those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes including those relating to sexual violence against women and girls…'

- CONAG-DCF makes a solemn plea to our African sisters, and to the women of the world, to support the women of Guinea in their struggle against all forms of violence against women. May all women of the world unite in ensuring that those responsible for these atrocities are identified and brought to justice!

- CONAG-DCF condemns the use of rape as a tool of repression and humiliation of women who did nothing more that exercise their democratic rights.

The current situation is a major setback for democracy on the African continent as a whole, but especially for Guinea. It has eroded the rights and basic freedoms of individuals.

Consequently, CONAG-DCF:

- Seeks national and international support for the women victims of 28 September 2009
- Urges all stakeholders to resume dialogue as the sole solution to the crisis engulfing the country
- Appeals for women’s solidarity and commitment to ensure that such atrocities never happen again, in Guinea or anywhere else.

'Never again in the Republic of Guinea'

Signed this 2nd day of October 2009 at Conakry

Member organisations of CONAG-DCF:
La COFEG, l’AME, l’ADDEF-G, l’AGUIFEL, l’AGACFEM, l’ADIC, le SLECG, la CPTAFE.

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

One year old refugee child dies inside an Egyptian Prison

Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/59321

Galila was a one year old child of Ethiopian nationality. She was born in harsh conditions in Ethiopia and fled that country as an infant with her mother, Mrs. Medhine - both were seeking a safer place, asylum and a better life. Instead, she suffered prolonged detention and ultimately death in an Egyptian prison.

Her problems began more than six months ago when her mother was arrested and detained for illegal entry into Egypt. This arrest occurred despite Egypt's obligations under Article 31(1) of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees not to punish refugees for illegally entering the country. In violation of Egypt's obligations she was detained with her mother in El Quanater Prison with her daughter (one year old). Ironically, as refugees, they were detained in conditions even more severe than those they had fled in Ethiopia.

After suffering from days of diarrhea and vomiting, Galila died last week inside El Quanater Prison. She died in custody and without access to medical care as there is no medical care inside the prison for the prisoners and her mother's pleas to be allowed out of prison to seek medical care for her sick daughter were denied. Galila's mother remains detained and distraught over the loss of her daughter. She lost her daughter, who died in front of her eyes, without being able to do any thing for her.

For months,the Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights (EFRR) has been demanding access to Galila and her mother. We have been demanding her release and her resettlement in Australia (where they both have family); an application for resettlement has been pending for some time. She has also been denied access to UNHCR.

Since the death of Galila, EFRR has submitted a complaint to the High General Prosecutor asking for an investigation into the wrong-doing that led to Galila's death. EFRR appeals to the Egyptian Authorities to release Mrs. Medhine immediately from El Quanater Prison. EFRR also demands that steps be taken to improve the access of refugees to counsel, to UNHCR and to medical care while in detention. In our view, the death of Galila was a tragedy that is directly attributable to the severe neglect of her health by Egyptian authorities.

Galila died on 27 September 2009 in El Quanater Prison in Egypt. She had been detained in contravention to international law for more than 6 months. Galila died before her 2nd birthday, missing the great dream of her mother for refuge. Galila and her mother sought asylum in Egypt. In return, as an infant, she was arrested, detained and, ultimately, killed by the indifference of Egyptian authorities to her well-being.

We join the extended family of Galila, her mother Mrs. Medhine and those individuals who helped seek her freedom and her care before her death in mourning her loss. We now seek justice for her mother and all other refugees in detention.


94 Mohamed Fared St, Second Floor, Downtown.
Tell/ Fax: 02 23910491
Email: efrr_eg@yahoo.com
www.efrr-eg.com

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

Sanctions are not the problem, bad governance is

Mutsa Murenje

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/59295

Robert Mugabe is a liability to the nation and is no doubt also a traitor to the cause of freedom. He does not care at all about what he says. I am in particular making reference to his responses in an interview with a CNN journalist, Christiane Amanpour, on 24 September 2009 ahead of his speech at the UN General Assembly. The suggestion by the tyrannical despot that sanctions have had adverse effects on Zimbabwe is, in my opinion, a fundamental attribution error. It is not sanctions that have hurt Zimbabweans but bad governance. We will have to ask ourselves about what preceded the other, bad governance or sanctions? The truth is that the targeted sanctions were a response to bad governance in Zimbabwe. In other words, we cannot look beyond Mugabe himself, for he is wholly responsible for this. Mugabe is the problem. Ndosaka tiri for regime change. Ko yanga yakaipei?

To say the land-grabbing process was the best thing to have happened to an African country is an irresponsible statement to say the least. Mugabe and his hoodlums purport that the so-called land reform programme was an effort to redress the historical imbalances that existed. Land reform per se is a noble idea, but the way in which it was carried out in Zimbabwe was nothing but a political gimmick by a ruling clique whose political fortunes were waning and which needed to consolidate its dominance. The evil and illegal land reform however brought with it a multiplicity of problems. Mugabe’s new farmers embarked on the indiscriminate cutting down of trees and burning of grass, resulting in serious negative implications on environmental stability. The operation also attracted widespread condemnation by the international community, resulting in subsequent isolation of the country. But who caused all this? Mugabe did!

In the year 2003 the United Nations estimated the population of Zimbabwe to be 12,891,000 people.[1] Suggesting that sanctions targeted at about 220 people have affected the whole population of Zimbabwe is being economical with the truth. This view is not only philosophically unsound but is equally practically unthinkable. The sanctions are the only scapegoat at the disposal of the octogenarian tyrant, who is struggling to maintain his unwanted grip on those who rejected him a long time ago, the suffering and oppressed people of Zimbabwe. Mugabe is a political reject and nothing will be gained by assuming or even wishing the contrary. What makes Mugabe an illegitimate ruler is that after having been rejected by the populace he refused to accept defeat. He instead rejected the rejection with the obvious assistance of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and the Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, who quickly inaugurated him following the one-man stand-up comedy show of 27 June 2008.

What we want is but one thing, good governance, especially when taking into consideration the fact that good governance gives meaning to life and the world. It is indeed the greatest incentive for a good life. From this standpoint, I humbly but authoritatively proffer that only good governance gives us the assurance that all that is noble and valuable will be conserved. This assurance resulting from good governance I find to be in its greatest virtues, and certainly any sane man cannot ignore them. The prolonged absence of good governance in Zimbabwe has made our life miserable, dull and meaningless.

In a nutshell, ‘The next step calls for leaders endowed with the gift of statesmanship to listen to people’s grievances, heal the wounds and pacify the nation’ (Henry E. Muradzikwa). I put it to you and rest my case.

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* Mutsa Murenje is a Zimbabwean human rights defender and an intern with World Youth Alliance Africa. He writes here in a personal capacity.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

REFRENCES

[1] www.nationsencyclopedia.com

Saving African print and online media

Roland Bankole Marke

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/59316

I’ve been toiling over the idea of making a strong case on why we need to support and protect black owned news media. Call them infant industries that might eventually blossom into powerful and profitable business entities, with a formidable voice that represents our goals, visions, and the life blood of the African heritage and psyche. These are perilous times for the global economy. It takes more than mere passion to keep black owned news outlets afloat. The days of freebies are quickly fizzling away before our eyes. It takes financial support to keep these publications alive and healthy.

I know first hand because I operate a website and subscribe to an internet server that does not offer free service. On average one pays about $50-$60 monthly for these services. If one is not computer savvy, there is the additional cost of the webmaster and antivirus protection. Hiring local and foreign reporters and editors has not even factored into the equation to keep the website operational and running smoothly. A printed paper means additional costs that must be evaluated on their merits. Being a publisher gives me the gravitas and authority to speak first hand. A publication that is worth the salt needs an adequate investment: sufficient working capital keeps it efficient and effective. The Krio adage: ‘Soup sweet, soup sweet, nar money kill am’ – what you pay for is what you get.

The recent decision of the Patriotic Vanguard management to start charging readers a monthly fee of $10 for both the print and online edition of its journal is a pittance, compared to the 5 year credible record of free, un-interrupted service and the timely manner in which it dispensed news to voracious readers. We have to take pride in supporting our own interests and communities that identify with us as a people, still struggling for freedom, identity and emancipation while seeking our destiny. Let’s think about our poor folk back home, who cannot afford to pay for the service. Information is power. The services of African news media have helped our folk with immigration and other issues in the West.

Our communities should offer sponsorship to black owned media in the West, making the services available to the less fortunate, free of cost. Most of those who cry foul or request better services are the ones who are chronically dependent on freebies. Nothing is free these days. Even aid packages require compliance with certain criteria. We must change our self-centered mindset, if as a people we want move from dependency to self-sufficiency, harnessing the seeds of dignity and pride. How about rewarding African entrepreneurs for their skill, sacrifice and hard work: Is it not what free enterprise advocates? Reward inspires motivation and the propensity to produce scarce goods and services.

Let’s become aware that even well established newspapers in the United States are at the brink of collapse or cutting back to arrest the nightmare of closing down? Here’s the reality check. The Wall Street Journal has created a list of 10 major newspapers that are most likely to reduce or shutt down their print edition and only publish online. This will change the whole dynamics of news reporting and consumption in the US. It is not going to be free. The endangered newspapers include: Philadelphia Daily News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Detroit News, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Daily News, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Who wants African news papers to become extinct in our lifetime? I believe other publications too are thinking of taking similar draconian measures to save themselfs from extinction. Survival and success are dependent on moral and most importantly financial support we give them. Advertisement helps to defray the cost of production of newspapers. But when the demand for advertisement space slows down drastically, or drys up, trouble lurks at the publishers’ doorsteps.

Are we willing to forgo the services of a formidable news portal by trying to swim ashore to save ourselves from drowning? The truth hurts but it uplifts the soul to search for redemption. Many of our folk would never have seen their work published or their voices heard without these media outlets. Do we want our voices to be silenced because we are too selfish to support our community initiated media? The choice is in our own hands, whether we want to dream of failure or propagate change that would elevate African publications to a new level of success, professionalism, integrity and prosperity.

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* Roland Bankole Marke is a Sierra Leonean writer, poet and author of three books. He is an activist for the poor, disadvantaged children and women and gives voice to the voiceless. www.rolandmarke.com
* Roland Bankole Marke © 2009.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Review: 'Spots of a Leopard: on being a man in Africa'

by Aernout Zevenbergen

Patricia Daley

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/59284

The high incidence of rape and domestic violence in Africa suggests that African men need to have a conversation about masculinities – on what it means to be a man in contemporary Africa and how they define their relationship with women. Recently, there has been a proliferation of reports on the emerging significance of a violent form of masculinity in Africa, manifested in a high incidence of men using physical might or brute force to harm and dominate women. Though outcry has come from African women’s organisations and international NGOs, since the majority of African men do not participate in such violence, the lack of contribution of progressive African men to the discussion is of concern.

So here we have, Aernout Zevenbergen, a journalist and a Dutch national, who was born in Africa, who has started this conversation about what it means to be a man in contemporary Africa. He sets out initially to understand the reasons for the men’s lack of sexual restraint or caution in the face of the high incidence of HIV/AIDS on the continent. Not satisfied with either ‘rightwing’ cultural relativism or ‘leftwing’ structural determinism, or even the ‘power dynamics’ of gender studies, he embarks on a continental journey to find his own explanations as to ‘what fuels the man who feel this urge to want to plant his seeds in as many flowerpots as possible?’

The book is based on research between 1996 and 2006 conducted in several countries across the continent. From Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), to Niger and Liberia, the author criss-crosses the continent gathering narratives from men and women on African attitudes to sex, homosexuality, rape, domestic violence, masculinity and changing gender relations.

The strength of this book is the narratives of these men and women adhering to hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity that do not seem to make sense in the contemporary world. Using an impressive array of vignettes, some extremely poignant, Zevenbergen exposes some of the insecurities affecting men in contemporary Africa, where economic collapse, unemployment, war and new constitutions have seemingly undermined what it means to be a man. These narratives of ordinary men and women put voices and circumstances to the statistics. As Zevenbergen rightly claims, he ‘encountered confusion, aversion, frustration, despair and nihilism, balanced by times of ingenuity, resoluteness, laughter and lightness’ (p. 244). There is a strong argument by the male voices for the need for procreation to carry on the family line and to have the freedom to plant their seed, as well as for children and women to provide labour. Yet these are not justifications for maintaining inequalities or for sexual abuse.

Zevenbergen's narratives debunk the myths about rape in Africa: that virgin rape is a cure for illness – the man who raped baby Tsepang did it out of vengeance – a way of hurting the mother; that it is about lust – most seem to be about the desperate need for respect, coupled with low self-esteem. However, Zevenbergen book reveals more than wounded male pride. In Kenya, the desperation of the HIV-infected widow to be cleansed is not just about her being tradition-bound, but about her dependency on family and clan for her and her children’s economic and spiritual survival. Furthermore, the lack of sound leadership in the face of crisis is exemplified by the young King Mswati of Swaziland with over 12 wives and several concubines, and the unspoken cause of the frequent deaths of the males in the royal family.

Zevenbergen provides explanations throughout the text but draws no conclusion. Despite his early rejection of explanations that focus on the vagaries and inequalities of capitalism, the narratives lead him to address the crisis of patriarchy and masculinity in Africa in the context of societies undergoing capitalist modernisation. Researchers such as Ifi Amadiume have already shown that in some pre-colonial societies gender relations were more equitable, and the introduction of an aggressive Victorian-era masculinity infused with capitalism and Christianity transformed some matriarchal societies into patriarchal ones, and redefined men’s and women’s roles in society; if those changes were possible then, transforming the destructive aspects of gender relations today is not impossible.

However, Zevenbergen’s narratives do not give us much hope. The Ugandan ministers who demonise homosexuality as Western are shown to be so blinkered that they cannot read critically into their own history. The Ugandan reverends’ virulent attacks against homosexuality are contrasted with their more subdued approach to the rape of adult women. These narratives throw up a confusing dynamic in contemporary Africa, where men can adopt Western practices yet criticise any that are independently adopted by women, and where the 20th century European fashion of virginal white wedding gowns are deemed appropriate, while mini-skirts are derided as Western and un-African.

However, it is clear from the vignettes that the social basis of the form of patriarchy that emerged under colonialism had disappeared by the late 1990s. Women’s empowerment, however limited, linked to economic crises have left men insecure and unable to fulfil their expected roles in the domestic and public spheres. Many African men, in their defence, blame women for the problems they face – ‘they are too materialistic’, and even Zevenbergen bewails materialism ‘as the new bar by which people measure each other’. The vulnerability of gender relations to economic crises is not peculiar to Africa. The feminist geographer Linda McDowell in her book 'Redundant Masculinities' reveals how the closure of the mines in northern England in the 1980s created a crisis of masculinity among miners whose raison d’être was determined by the toughness of mine work. Miners and their wives, and their sons and daughters, had to negotiate new ways of living together and that process was not always non-violent.

The book is also a personal quest for Zevenbergen and perhaps that is where it loses direction. His spiritual quest is woven throughout, so that the reader is sometimes unsure as to whether he is discussing himself or the men he encounters. The focus of the book gets somewhat lost toward in the third part of the text. Does his single, childless status, seen as problematic by the Africans he encounters, suppose to make him empathetic? The moving account of his family’s reaction to the death of his nephew serves to immortalise the boy, but what conclusion does he want us to draw from this personal revelation?

Apart from the structural weakness of the text, a key element missing is more narratives with men who perform non-violent forms of masculinity. These men appear essentially – young as Ronald in Botswana and Thando in KwaZulu-Natal, homosexual in Uganda, or old as Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia. Given that only a small proportion of the men in Africa carry out these violent acts, understanding what it means to be a man in Africa should involve exploring the range of masculinities on the continent. Zevenbergen refers frequently to the destructive effects of materialism and individualism in contexts where community and the spiritual once bound societies together, where different generations and gender are playing by different rules, with different gods and different heroes. Is modern man doomed, because of ‘a misdirected arrogance and belief that reason alone defines where it is we go and how we should live our lives’, as Zevenbergen seems to argue? Though this book does not present a way forward, it does provide the basis for conversations about the destructive effects of redundant traditionalism and unbridled modernity, despite the underlying pessimism in Zevenbergen’s text.

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* Aernout Zevenbergen, 'Spots of a Leopard: on being a man in Africa', (2009, Cape Town: Laughing Leopard Productions), ISBN: 978-0-620-43311-2, pp 280.
* Dr Patricia Daley is a lecturer at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

REFERENCE
McDowell, L. (2003) Redundant Masculinities?: Employment Change and White Working Class Youth, Wiley-Blackwell.

Review: 'Global Unions, Global Business'

By Richard Croucher and Elizabeth Cotton

Salma Soliman

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/59282

This new book makes important reading for all those interested in social justice in Africa and indeed the world. Brief, concentrated, clearly written, authoritative and well-documented, it is the first book for a generation to look in detail at the workings of a little-known and therefore widely misunderstood level of trade union activity, the Global Union Federations (GUFs), and their relations with activists on the one hand and the corporate world on the other. It is all the more valuable for building on the authors’ practical experience of working with them for many years.

The authors engage directly with vital questions by discussing a wide range of relevant labour issues such as the massive growth of ‘informal’ work and its meaning for trade unionism. As Anibel Ferus-Comelo recently argued in her review for the Journal of Economic Geography, the book ‘makes a valuable contribution to the vast body of literature on globalisation and labour by engaging insightfully with subjects rarely touched upon by proponents of labour internationalism’. The authors suggest relevant ways in which trade unionism can be developed within an international framework that are potentially very positive for currently weak and embattled African unions. More widely, they suggest ways that international organisations may work to maximise involvement from constituent organisations from the developing world.

The book is structured and argued as follows. There are three sections: ‘contexts’; ‘the work of the internationals’ and a one-chapter conclusion. The first section consists of Chapters Two and Three. In Chapter Two, the context in which unions and the internationals operate is outlined, showing why national unions are increasingly turning to the GUFs for assistance and illustrating the considerable extent of the demands on them. In Chapter Three, the GUFs’ history is explored, showing the distinctive legacy they draw on to sustain themselves, and the significant new opportunities created by the end of political divisions, symbolised by the recent creation of the global union coordinating body, the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation). These divisions previously played a major role in dividing the African trade union movement.

The second section comprises the bulk of the book, has five chapters and is about the current position of the internationals both internally and in relation to companies. In Chapter Four, the internationals’ resources and governance are analysed, explaining the twin problems of an internal balance of forces weighed towards developed country unions, and major current financial issues. Chapter Five examines their role in international collective bargaining. This shows that the International Framework Agreements that currently play such a large role in their strategy are useful, but are generated by processes that reflect the power relationships described in the previous chapter and hamper their effectiveness. Chapter Six examines the company and regional industrial networks established through the GUFs and suggestions are made for how they may best be built.

Chapter Seven is concerned with trade union education and is central to the book’s argument. It proposes that the specific forms of trade union education form an important, polyvalent area of work that supports all of the other activities outlined previously. Importantly, it has a democratising effect by raising levels of participation in union affairs and could usefully be expanded. The argument therefore rejects the common suggestion within the internationals that the GUFs’ main task should be international collective bargaining. Chapter Eight is intended both to illustrate and integrate the argument. An extended case study, it shows how one GUF (the International of Chemical Energy Mineworkers and General Unions) succeeded in building dialogue with a major multinational company, combining GUF discussion with senior management with organisation from below, strongly facilitated by educational work in both Africa and Latin America. This chapter will be of particular interest to those concerned with fighting the HIV-AIDS scourge in Africa. It demonstrates how the Ghana Mineworkers’ Union linked with its well-known counterpart in South Africa to work with the company and greatly improve the take-up by miners of company-based diagnosis and treatment. At the same time, it shows how the unions pushed, with the help of the Global Union Federation, for improvements in company treatment of miners. The chapter is a selling point of the book, drawing on the authors’ experience to build an unusual and graphic illustration of their themes.

The third section consists simply of the conclusion. It accepts that developments in the global political economy offer prospects for the internationals in building more multifaceted forms of unionism. It argues that this is best done using the educational approach, which should be developed, partly funded by devolving fundraising to regions. This educational work can most effectively be carried out by small groups of countries operating together on a ‘minilateral’ basis within the internationals’ wider multilateral framework. It shows how the necessary resources may be obtained from external sources. The conclusion is also presented as an internal challenge to the internationals’ membership: to raise their material contribution to the internationals, despite the current trend in the opposite direction. The key players are the unions of the developed world, and the issue is whether they are able to make the political case to their own membership to intensify their commitment to internationalism.

Central to the work is a detailed explanation of how carefully constructed and maintained alliances between unions in the developing world and the Global Union Federations can operate to the benefit of workers. Indeed, it opens an exciting new window on the ways of dealing with the crucial yet resilient problem of how to redress the balance between multinationals and employees everywhere. The subject will need careful monitoring in the future if social justice is to be served both in Africa and more widely.

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* Richard Croucher and Elizabeth Cotton, 'Global Unions, Global Business', 2009, pp. 146, ISBN: 978-1-904750-62-8. Available from Middlesex University Press at £19.95.
* Salma Soliman is a research executive at Open Cities and a PhD candidate at Middlesex University Business School.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Book release: 'The End of White World Supremacy' by Roderick Bush

'Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line'

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/59288

'The End of White World Supremacy' explores a complex issue – the integration of blacks into white America – from multiple perspectives: within the United States; globally and in the context of movements for social justice. Roderick Bush locates himself within a tradition of African-American activism that goes back at least to W.E.B. Du Bois. In so doing, he communicates between two literatures – world systems analysis and radical black social movement history – and sustains the dialogue throughout the book.

Bush explains how racial troubles in the US are symptomatic of the troubled relationship between the white and dark worlds globally. Beginning with an account of white European dominance leading to capitalist dominance by white America, 'The End of White World Supremacy' ultimately wonders whether, as Gunnar Myrdal argued in the 1940s, the American creed can provide a pathway to break this historical conundrum and give birth to international social justice.

PRAISE FOR 'THE END OF WHITE WORLD SUPREMACY'

'Roderick Bush has produced an outstanding and original work that will allow scholars to effectively reframe many central issues pertaining to the history of race-based social movements and black political thought specifically and radical social movements of the past 40 years more generally.'
—David Baronov, associate professor of sociology, St. John Fisher College

'In "The End of White World Supremacy", Roderick Bush has established his status as a pre-eminent scholar of the black intellectual tradition. I firmly believe that this work will become a classic which will assume an important place in the canon of African-American studies and world systems theory.'
—William W. Sales, Jr., associate professor, Africana studies department, Seton Hall University, and the author of 'From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the OAAU'

'Roderick Bush leads us on a sophisticated tour through the long and complicated history of the relations between black radicals (intellectuals and movements) and the world Left. He comes down squarely on the need to find politically effective common ground that does not sacrifice what both have had and still have to offer in their efforts to transform the world into something far different and much better.'
—Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

'"The End of White World Supremacy" is a riveting, bold and important analysis of black radicalism's evolution during the long 20th century. Theoretically ambitious and conceptually sophisticated, Roderick Bush has produced an invigorating and indispensable work whose wide-ranging scope will appeal to a broad range of interdisciplinary scholars and students.'
—Peniel E. Joseph, Tufts University and the author of 'Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America'

CONTENTS

Introduction: 'The Handwriting on the Wall'

PART I: Theory

1. The Peculiar Internationalism of Black Nationalism
2. The Sociology of the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois and the End of White World Supremacy
3. The Class- First, Race- First Debate: The Contradictions of Nationalism and Internationalism and the Stratification of the World- System
4. Black Feminism, Intersectionality, and the Critique of Masculinist Models of Liberation

PART II: Radical Social Movements

5. The Civil Rights Movement and the Continuing Struggle for the Redemption of America
6. Black Power, the American Dream, and the Spirit of Bandung: Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Age of World Revolution

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* The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line, Roderick Bush, paper EAN: 978-1-59213-573-8 (ISBN: 1-59213-573-0), $28.95, July 2009, available; cloth EAN: 978-1-59213-572-1 (ISBN: 1-59213-572-2), $79.50, Jul 2009, available, 264 pp 6x9.
* Roderick Bush is an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at St. John’s University in New York City. Long an activist in the Black Power and radical movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, Bush returned to the academy in 1988 to obtain a PhD. He is the author of 'We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century' and the editor of 'The New Black Vote: Politics and Power in Four American Cities'.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The hungry wo/man's ode to World Tourism Day

Wangui Kamari

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/59317

I have not sat in many Kenyan embassies around the world. In fact, I would rather not. But a few months ago I went to one such embassy in the northern hemisphere awaiting some unavoidable assistance. After tolerating all the financial and investment magazines I could, my eyes began to wander around the room. I had noticed the posters on my arrival, supposed depictions of the country of my birth, nonetheless, until this willful observing, I had not recognised the extent to which they pervaded this location.

Taking them all in, shocked and ashamed, it affirmed what I have been feeling for a long time: that it is better to be a mammal in Kenya than a mwananchi (citizen), struggling day to day. I believe that if the ‘big five’ could vote, Kenya would be a very different place.

The majority of the posters depicted only animals or landscapes and were devoid of any humans save, from time to time, the guest appearance by a perfunctory jumping Maasai or African ‘servant’. Beneath the purportedly accurate portrayals of our country were words that evoked memories of colonial travel literature. My own personal favourite, emblazoned in large font underneath a picture of Meru National Park (yet indisputably alluding to Kenya as a whole) was the following phrase: 'complete wilderness: theater of the wild'. The phrase that came a close second talked about Nairobi as ‘the world’s only wildlife capital’.

What happened to the Kenyans? Were they effaced by ‘the great wildebeest migration'?

My contentions are not the depictions of animals in posters about Kenya, but rather that it is only animals that are used to talk about Kenya. This illustrates our government’s commitment to the seduction of others rather than its mandate to provide the most basic requirements of its people. The preferred discussion within parliament's walls just may be what ‘savage’ animal should be used in the serenading of Europe, America and Japan this tourist season. Such dialogues and discourses consciously wipe out living, breathing people and their industry and valid contentions from the portrayal of Kenya. By continuing in this pursuit the 10th parliament does more to validate (and allow for the proliferation of) the fancies of the tourist than dedicating itself to making sure its people live in dignity.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I offer you this poem:

Dear President (or in our case presidents),
I have a question about our life
You practically pay tourists to come to this country, when we are here
living in strife.
I thought about it, actually it wasn’t so hard to decide,
Maybe tomorrow I will try and be a cheetah or an elephant in flight
you see, being a poor human doesn’t help me at all.

Caress them, squeeze them, love them
Smile large and reveal your untruths
Say that you’re an ‘African for development’, kneel on your
ne - pad, avoid being uncouth
Maybe tomorrow I will be a bird or beast of pray
A spotted beetle? A giraffe for the day?
Being a poor Kenyan doesn’t help me at all.

Give them safaris of luxury galore
Invite them home to your manor
Make a TV show about how you really need them more and more
Give foreign business men ‘traditional titles of honour’.
Don’t worry, pay me no mind.
I will be too busy being Kenya’s only Kangaroo
Because you see, being a poor African doesn’t help me at all

What I really need to be is some ecotourism mammal
Or a gender sensitive panther of some sort
Maybe then after a few random exhibitions and humiliating posing,
I can get more than I’ve got

Don’t call on the United Nonsense
The IMF, the World’s Prank
Or even some other country's (maybe Canada’s?) foreign bank.
Forget it, honestly don’t inconvenience your self too much.
I’ll just go on and be a peacock,
For I know being a poor mother doesn’t help me at all.

Bill Gates will want to help me I’m almost sure
But then he will have to speak for me, and you know
this one time, I would rather my hunger than his words
Please don’t even suggest Tony Blair or Bono,
Listen, dont worry; I’m scheduled to become a crocodile tomorrow.

I heard someone mention, that there was talk of some block buster movie,
a live concert in Hyde park?
An Amnesty International petition that is circulating through cyberspace
in the dark,

Don’t worry, we know the reality for We
Just let me continue chewing on these Jacaranda leaves

My sister says,
she is not so sure
how long her baby will be alive
and i looked her straight and i told her
dada,
don’t worry we shall conspire
tomorrow you can be the lion,
and I’ll be another of the big five

better be that endangered specie, that almost extinct whale
than the hungry child with not enough energy to exhale

don’t worry, i’m telling you
don’t worry at all
I already know its better to be that animal.

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* Wangui Kimari is an anthropology student and researcher based in Nairobi.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The right to stay put: Resisting evictions and deportation

Sokari Ekine

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/59314

The 5 October marked the UN World Habitat Day idea to reflect on our towns and cities and the right of all to adequate shelter. The fact that 2009 has seen an increase in the number of informal settlements, street traders and beggars removed from the city makes a mockery of this day, which no state appears to take seriously.

'New, violent actions on a massive scale, which amplify the disastrous effects of neoliberal responses to the global crisis, have characterized the past twelve months: tens of millions evicted for no guilt and with nowhere to go, unable to face the costs of rising rents; victims of neoliberal competition favouring profitable cities, of megaprojects, of wars which shred the fabric of society and ruin the environment, of racial or sexist prejudices, of real estate corruption and speculation, of natural disasters.'

In Nigeria beggars have been deported from Lagos to their home states and in Kaduna beggars were deported from the city to their villages. In South Africa the Abahlali baseMjondolo shackdwellers movement has been under attack by thugs for the past week, with thousands having to flee the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban. Both the elected president and vice-president remain in hiding – criminalised and displaced in their own home town, state and country for being poor.

InternAfrica points to a 'critical communique' by the International Alliance of Inhabitants launching the World Zero Eviction Days to support the resistance of those facing evictions from across the world.

'At its heart: the demand for a world-wide moratorium to evictions; and funding for housing and habitat in a "New Green Deal" for at least a billion people. This funding would be based, among others, on the investment of an important part of developmental aid as well as on the annulment of external debt, transformed into a Popular Fund for land and housing. This is the concrete enactment of the agreements made by all international networks for housing and city rights at the WSF [World Social Forum] 2009, the next step in the unifying process of building the World Assembly of Inhabitants on 2011.'

Following the attack on the Kennedy Road settlement on 26 September, Abahlali baseMjondolo have issued a statement – 'We are under attack' – in which they name the local ANC (African National Congress) as being responsible for the attacks with the compliance of the police, who failed to respond to their calls for help until the following morning. In the statement they assert their right to exist and to live in the city.

'Our movement was formed to struggle for development. We struggle for development everyday. But development is not a neutral thing. Some kinds of development are in the interests of the rich and against the interests of the poor. Therefore our movement is specifically committed to struggling for development that is in the interests of the poor. This means that we will oppose a forced removal from a well located shack close to schools, work, health care and so on to a "transit camp" (which is really just a government shack) in the middle of nowhere. This does not make us unique. Poor people’s organisations across South Africa, like the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town and the Landless People’s Movement in Johannesburg take exactly the same position. Poor people’s movements around the world take the same position. Academics and NGOs around the world take the same position. Our achievements in the struggle for pro poor development are a matter of record.'

Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign publish an article by Andile Mngxitama in the Sowetan in which he describes the attacks against Abahlali as an attack against democracy in South Africa.

'Clearly, the AbM has become a nuisance. It questions, it exposes and it’s cheeky. In the last elections they even had the gall to say: "No land, no houses, no water – no vote!"

'The politicians are not going to rest until they have destroyed the voices of the poor who speak up and speak back.

'Real democracy is under attack and we seem to be sleeping through it all. We can already see the heavy-handed responses of the police against service delivery protests.

'It’s as if our beloved Msholozi is giving his children rubber bullets instead of the promised land of milk and honey.'

In neighbouring Zimbabwe activists have begun a campaign against Nestlé’s purchasing of milk from farms belonging to Robert Mugabe. This is Zimbabwe reports that the multinational has now decided to stop purchasing Mugabe’s milk but will purchase from the 'Dairy Board of Zimbabwe'. Sokwanele ask, 'Is it ever ethical to do something very unethical for ostensibly ethical reasons? - Nestlé seem to think so.' As one of the commentators points out, this does not mean Nestlé will no longer purchase Mugabe’s milk, rather, they will continue to buy it indirectly:

'I think that what it means is that Dairy Board will resume buying from Grace Mugabe (previously they weren’t), and Nestle will buy from Dairy Board again instead of directly from the farms. In other words, Nestle are not buying from Grace Mugabe and the press release is factual. ( meaningless because they are still indirectly supporting the woman by buying from Dairy Board). If this is the case then Grace Mugabe is not being ‘punished’ for stealing the farms.

'But what do you do…? Ask all Zimbabweans to stop drinking milk to boycott Dairy Board? The horrible woman has a monopoly and she knows it.'

Finally, a couple of stories from Nigeria. The first refers to the deal made by Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi with Italy to patrol the Mediterranean Sea for African immigrants trying to cross to Europe. All those caught are sent to prisons in the Libyan desert. Gaddafi, who likes to see himself as some sort of father of the continent fighting the evils of the West, has on the contrary made deals with them to the detriment of the very Africans he purports to be 'saving'. In this report, Nigeria, World View comments on the executions of Nigerians held on death row in Libya. Various reports claim there are hundreds of Nigerians held in prisons in the country, with some 200 awaiting the death sentence for offences such as murder, drugs, robbery and immigration (how immigration becomes an illegal offence, let alone one that carries the death sentence, is unbelievable – immigrants are trying to get to Europe not Libya, and even if they were, how can they be killed for it?) whilst the Nigerian government appears to have abandoned them.

'It is now time for the Nigerian government to show responsibility by immediately ensuring the safety and well-being of the Nigerians on death row in Libya, and facilitating their safe return back home. The continuing silence and inaction of the Nigerian government on this matter is a failure of leadership and simply unacceptable,' Falana said.

The feisty lawyer asked President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua to rise up to the occasion in defending the rights of Nigerians across the world. According to him, the Libya case is proof that the rights of Nigerians outside the country could be protected when and if their government takes action.

It is important for the government to discharge its 'constitutional and international responsibility' towards Nigerians he added. Falana commended the chairman of the House Committee on Diaspora, Hon. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, and SERAP (Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project) for fighting for the rights of the condemned persons.

The last post is from Akin's blog, which I have followed over the years, along more recently with his humorous comments on Twitter. Akin is diarising his encounter with cancer. In this recent posts he talks about his first chemotherapy treatment, which he describes as 'A life of cytostatic ostracism':

'The needle for the intravenous feeding of the drug was inserted in my left arm near the wrist and close to wear [sic] I was once irritated and a bag of saline solution attached.

'HIGHLY PROTECTED

'My drug could be passed through in 45 minutes but the nurse set it for an hour, it was wrapped in aluminium foil a clear reddish fluid that I saw drip down through the tubes into me for nigh on 60 minutes till it all became clear and colour in the tubes.

'They had even arranged for my afternoon snack to be placed at my new place, talk about efficiency.

'PEOPLE IN PROTECTIVE SUITS

'I was not prepared however for the welcome I received when I returned, I notice was placed above my bed with extra precautions about handling me.

'Now, I had been given all information about the medical consequences of my chemotherapy but no one bothered to offer something about the psychological effects of being handled with the utmost care and treated like a contagion.

'So, I was confused, as nurses are supposed to wear protective clothing to now when even changing my bedding, this is understandable because my medication breaks down cell structure, affects the immune system amongst other things – my beef is that I should have been told about the life beyond chemotherapy.'

I think it is brave he has chosen to speak openly about this cancer and the humiliations of the treatment. So often we are silent on issues of health and our bodies as if illness is somehow a shameful process in which we should hide ourselves in the narrow confines of the hospital bed or some corner of our homes. I wish him all the best and thankful he maintains his humour!

As for Black Looks, I have been silent this week for the most part. However, I started a guest spot at FlipFlopping Joy which is authored by a chicana American sister friend, BrownFemiPower, from way back. You can read my post there. Also, I have been blogging at New Internationalist for the past 6 months.



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* Sokari Ekine blogs at Black Looks.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Concepts in Integrated Resource Recovery

Global Environmental Institute

2009-10-08

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/451/IRR.pdf

This report on Integrated Resource Recovery (IRR), written by Justin Carter for the Global Environmental Institute (GEI), outlines various components of a conceptual design that attempts to integrate community and industrial processes with ecological design. It is intended that by extracting the relevant parts of this approach, IRR-specific guidelines can be created that will serve the IPP program’s overall objectives. Much of what is described here is done with one of the Global Environmental Institute’s (GEI’s) core mandates in mind.

Financial crisis delaying African development goals

Zikipediq

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/africa_china/59315

Many development analysts assumed in relation to the last G20 summit in Pittsburgh that it might not forget about Africa in its talks on the financial crisis. Developing nations on the continent are being especially hard hit at a time when things were starting to look up.


cc ZikipediqAfrica’s developing countries are suffering even more from the financial crisis: not only are they having to make do with less development aid funding, but the amount of money that emigrants are able to send back to support their families at home is much smaller.

The crisis is threatening the hard-won progress made in Africa’s developing countries at a time when the situation was starting to improve. African national economies were showing an average growth of 5 to 6 per cent in recent years. Kenya, for example, has seen the development of a middle class that invests in its own economy. Outside money, including from newly industrialised countries such as China, Brazil and India, had considerably upped the level of foreign investment. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that foreign investment and credit for Africa increased to US$53 billion (40 billion euros) – five times the amount in 2000. But Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank, warns that the crisis could unravel this progress:
cc Zikipediq

'We have to distinguish between the financial crisis and the economic crisis,' Kaberuka said. 'Until now, [the financial crisis] has not hit a single African bank, but it has affected national economies. For 2009, we’re expecting an average maximum economic growth rate of 4 to 4.5 per cent, no more. And it could well turn out to be smaller. We have to mobilise inner-African capital. We have very rich and very poor countries in Africa. On the regional level, the African Development Bank has already managed to mobilise capital, but not for the continent as a whole.'

FEARS OF A SETBACK

Ad Melkert is a UN under secretary-general and an associate administrator of the UN Development Program (UNDP). He also fears that Africa will suffer a setback:

'This is all happening after a considerable number of African countries have, over the past few years, experienced significant economic growth and an increase in jobs and investment,' Melkert said. 'Now, there’s a reversal. That means when the international community – the G20 – meets in April in London for its financial summit, they have to work out an international agenda there. They have to ensure that they factor in Africa, because this is an international financial crisis that is having effects worldwide.'


cc ZikipediqInternational institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are calling for multilateral risk management for the financial markets. In Davos, some major actors called for the creation of a global economic council. The inclusion of developing countries in such bodies will be decisive, Melkert comments. The UNDP representative is hoping for a clear statement from the G20, as otherwise, the UN’s development goals will be in danger of failure.

'The crisis has created a totally new starting position,' he said. 'It really does mean a setback, even for really successful countries like China, for example. We’ll have to really go the extra mile now if we’re to reach our development goals.'

Despite the crisis, some industrialised countries as Spain and Germany have committed themselves to raising development aid bit by bit to reach 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product. Melkert advises other wealthy nations to also maintain their development aid goals.

'There’s no alternative to investing in development goals,' he said. 'I hope that the G20 summit will help, I hope that the new American administration under Obama will support the millennium goals even more. I hope that the Europeans keep their promises and invest more in development policies each year. And I hope that the growing middle classes in Africa, Brazil or in India pay their taxes and use this tax money to fight poverty.'

POVERTY REMAINS A MAJOR CHALLENGE

Although the global fight against poverty has made progress, the percentage of poor people in Africa hasn’t gone down at all, due to the continent’s fast-growing population. With a poverty rate of around 50 per cent, the share of extreme poverty in the total population hasn’t changed, and Melkert fears it could even get worse.

'We have to be really ambitious here and take the problem of poverty really seriously,' he said. 'With this financial crisis, more people will be forced into poverty than in years past.'

The IMF has revised its growth projection downwards and has forecast an economic growth rate of just 3.4 per cent for sub-Saharan Africa. But all African governments have to take political responsibility, Melkert says. He points to examples from Latin America, saying Africa should learn to also create effective social security systems and incentives for development.
cc Zikipediq

'Good systems have been established in Latin America,' he says. 'There, families get money if they send their children to school or get them vaccinated. Africa should follow this example. The World Bank, the UN or bilateral donors could financially support such a system. That would help the poorest people to have a minimal income to buy food, send their children to school or care for their health.'

He advises the international community to be patient and take a long-term view when it comes to supporting development goals – despite the global financial crisis.

'You don’t make development progress from one year to the next – it’s a question of 10 or 20 years,' Melkert said.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article was first published by Zikipediq.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Pambazuka News 117 : Sanglantes dérives en Guinée : 157 morts

2009-10-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/summaryfr/59293

Mugabe calls for fresh start with West

2009-10-09

http://tinyurl.com/yzzxv57

President Robert Mugabe has called for a new start to relations with those Western countries he has spent years insulting for their criticism of his leadership. "Our country remains in a positive stance to enter into fresh, friendly and co-operative relations with all those countries that have been hostile to us in the past," he said yesterday at the first sitting of parliament since a unity government was formed with the former opposition in February.

Soldiers involved in rape and other sexual violence on farms

2009-10-09

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news081009/soldiers081009.htm

Cases of serious sexual violence, including the recent rape of at least one woman by soldiers on an invaded farm, are being investigated, as members of the armed forces continue their illegal seizure of the land. The woman, part of a group of more than ninety farm worker families from Karori farm in the Headlands district, was reportedly raped more than a week ago when soldiers evicted them from the farm.

Global: International Day of Rural Women

2009-10-08

http://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/idrw/index.html#contribution

The International Day of Rural Women directs attention to both the contribution that women make in rural areas, and the many challenges that they face. Women play a critical role in the rural economies of both developed and developing countries. In most parts of the developing world they participate in crop production and livestock care, provide food, water and fuel for their families, and engage in off-farm activities to diversify the family income.

Global: Silent deaths

2009-10-09

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032524

More than one-million babies are stillborn during labour every year – 98% in low- and middle-income countries - yet global policy discussions around these largely silent deaths are mostly nonexistent. On top of this another 904 000 babies die soon after birth due to birth complications, closely linked to almost half of the world’s 536 000 maternal deaths.

Global: UN hosts photos, videos attesting to ongoing violence against women

2009-10-09

http://tinyurl.com/ylkkbpe

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, will sponsor a special event on 12 October to open a major exhibition on violence against women around the world. The show, to be attended by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, other senior United Nations officials and representative of the diplomatic community, is also intended to observe the 15th anniversary of the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and will follow a full-day session of the General Assembly commemorating the anniversary.

Global: UN Security Council adopts 3rd Resolution 1888 on women, peace & security

2009-10-08

http://www.iwtc.org/gnets/363.html

On September 30, 2009, the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution that addresses the need to end sexual violence against women in conflict-affected countries. Introduced by the US government, at a session chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the resolution builds on SCRs 1325 and 1820, both of which were instrumental in raising the issue of sexual violence on the Security Council’s agenda.

Guinea: African women condemn use of force on unarmed civilians

African Women's Development and Communications Network (FEMNET)

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/59336

African Women Condemn Use of Force on Unarmed Civilian in Guinea African Women leaders meeting in Lome, Togo at a Women’s Leadership Conference convened by the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) in collaboration with ROFAF condemns in the strongest terms the use of excessive force on unarmed and peaceful demonstrators in Conakry, the capital of Guinea that has resulted in the death of at least 157 persons and injuring over 1,200 people since Monday 28th September 2009.
African Women Condemn Use of Force on Unarmed Civilian in Guinea African Women leaders meeting in Lome, Togo at a Women’s Leadership Conference convened by the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) in collaboration with ROFAF condemns in the strongest terms the use of excessive force on unarmed and peaceful demonstrators in Conakry, the capital of Guinea that has resulted in the death of at least 157 persons and injuring over 1,200 people since Monday 28th September 2009.

The women leaders including Members of Parliament from Burkina Faso and Togo, a Presidential Candidate from Cote d’Ivoire, a judge of the Constitutional Court of Togo and leaders from Civil society organizations and trade unionists from Guinea, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Sao Tome & Principe are saddened by Guinea’s security forces’ barbaric conduct and irresponsible behaviour that has led to the death and injury of many people and the indiscriminate abuse and raping of women that were peacefully voicing their displeasure about the governance challenges in their country. The women leaders say, “Enough is enough. We must rid Africa of bad leadership and all its effects which slow down development in our continent.” The women of Africa call upon the leaders in Guinea to stop the security forces from abusing the rights of the citizens of Guinea and the denial of their right to freely express themselves. Immediate action is demanded to ensure that all those involved in perpetrating these heinous acts are made to account and are duly punished. It is the right of every person to participate in the governance of their country and that right cannot be derogated as it is clearly articulated in the Africa Charter on Human and People’s Rights which Guinea has acceded to.

We further appeal to Captain Dadis Camara to ensure the release of the opposition leaders that were arrested during the demonstrations. In any democracy the opposition has a role to provide alternatives for leadership and this role must be respected. The women also urge the government of Guinea to ensure that the atmosphere is conducive in the country to enable the people of Guinea to freely and fairly prepare for their involvement and participation in the forthcoming elections. We further call upon Captain Dadis Camara to uphold his decision and pledge not to contest in the Presidential elections scheduled in January 2010.

We are aware that currently a military junta without a legislative body runs the government in Guinea. We therefore appeal to authorities in Guinea to quickly restore a constitutional republic, which the country previously enjoyed before the December 23, 2008 coup d’état and put in place a legislative framework which ensures that all citizen enjoy their rights and women and children in particular are protected from all forms of abuse of their bodily integrity and dignity.

The Women leaders call upon the Economic Commission for West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union and the international community to act expeditiously to avert further strife in Guinea because unstable states are a big challenge to democracy building in Africa and derail the development agenda on our Continent. The time for Action is Now!!!

For Further Information Contact:
Carlyn Hambuba Communication Officer:
Tel: + (254)20.2712971/2 or + (254)20.2341516/7 (Wireless)
Cell: + (254)725.766932
communication@femnet.or.ke

Côte d’Ivoire: UN legal team assesses prisons and judiciary

2009-10-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/59364

United Nations legal experts are on a 10-day visit to Côte d'Ivoire to study the West African country’s implementation of national laws and its prison administration as well as the judiciary’s interaction with other sectors of society. Two experts from the UN Department Operations Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), Agneta Johnson and Gwendolyn Chellam, went to the western region to discuss the redeployment of judicial and prison authorities across the country following years of tensions in the wake of a political and military crisis.

Gambia: Yahya Jammeh- A threat to human rights in Africa

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/59328

The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) notes with concern the escalation of unbridled attacks in the on human rights in the Gambia. Since the 2004 murder of Deyda Hydera and several other alleged extra judicial killings, disappearance in detention, the wanton abuse of human rights especially the right of the freedom of expression and media freedoms have increased.
The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) notes with concern the escalation of unbridled attacks in the on human rights in the Gambia. Since the 2004 murder of Deyda Hydera and several other alleged extra judicial killings, disappearance in detention, the wanton abuse of human rights especially the right of the freedom of expression and media freedoms have increased. In his speech last week, President Yahya Jammeh specifically:
 
· Re-affirmed his outright disbelief in the value of human rights and the need to protect and advance them.
· Swore a sacred oath to [personally?] kill all human right activists in the Gambia.
· Assured the world that the death penalty provided in the Gambian constitution is not for decoration but will be implemented regularly.

This is the first time a President anywhere is the world would publicly announce his intention to kill human rights activists. Ironically, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the continental human rights body is based in Banjul, the Gambia.
 
In a related but separate development, the Gambian government has submitted a draft amendment to the ECOWAS Commission of the Supplementary Protocol which instituted the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice. The amendment intends to limit the ECOWAS Court’s jurisdiction until after the exhaustion of domestic remedies; the ECOWAS Committee of Experts is scheduled to meet on September 28, 2009 to consider the Gambian proposal.
 
This proposal is Gambia’s only engagement with the Community Court of Justice since it decided previously that the Gambian government should produce the journalist Ebrima Manneh who disappeared without trace while in detention. The Gambian government also refused to allow the security agents responsible for Manneh’s abduction to appear before the Community Court. The clear purpose of these amendments is to weaken the capacity of the Court to deal effectively with tyrannical governments trampling on citizens’ rights.  
 
The Gambia has also proposed that "with respect to human rights cases, the Court should only have jurisdiction in respect of international instruments ratified by the respondent country"; this is clearly in an attempt to avoid the ECOWAS Community Court’s ruling against it in the case brought against the Gambia by its citizen who was tortured while in detention (Musa Saidykhan vs. The Gambia). The Gambia is one of the rare African countries which have not ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading treatments.
 
The amendments proposed by the Gambia are part of a grand design to limit and frustrate the good work that ECOWAS and its Community Court have been doing on strengthening of democracy and human rights. The intention is to make the Gambia a safe haven for the abuse of human rights in the region. In view of these developments, CDD specifically calls on:
 
ECOWAS:
· The ECOWAS Commission to promptly discard the Gambian proposal for non conformity with ECOWAS democratic principles.
· The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice to note President Jammeh’s threats to human right activists and to hold him accountable should any human right activist working in the Gambia come to any harm.
· The Chair of the ECOWAS, H.E. President Umaru Musa Yar Adua and other Heads of State to intervene urgently in this matter by calling Yahya Jammeh to order and demand that he tenders an apology to human right activists and puts in place a mechanism that will ensure the safety of all human right activists working in The Gambia.

The African Union
· To immediately relocate the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, whose headquarters is in Banjul, the Gambia to another country. The location of such a prestigious institution in the Gambia can no longer be justified nor is the safety of human right activists who have to engage with this continental human right body guaranteed.

To the Human Rights Community
· The CDD appreciates the extent of danger President Jammeh’s recent statement poses to our work, we therefore agree that until the above demands are met, human right activists should not participate in any activity organized by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in the Gambia. Signed

Global: Concention on the rights of the chid turns 20

2009-10-09

http://www.hrea.org/index.php?base_id=2&language_id=1&headline_id=10065

Taking practical measures to realize the rights of the child is the greatest gift that we can give to our future generations, said High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay as the Convention on the Rights of the Child turns 20 years old. A two-day commemoration is taking place in Geneva on 8 and 9 October to kick off some five weeks of activities world-wide ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Convention on 20 November.

Guinea: Free or charge detainees

2009-10-09

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/10/03/guinea-free-or-charge-detainees

Guinean authorities should immediately free all those detained without charge following the bloody crackdown on an opposition rally on September 28, 2009, or charge them with a specific criminal offense followed by a fair trial, Human Rights Watch has said. The group also supported the call by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to establish an international commission of inquiry into the violence, in which an estimated 150 or more demonstrators were killed.

Rwanda: Genocide court nets second fugitive in two months

2009-10-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32440

A former senior Rwandan military officer indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal for his role in the 1994 genocide in the tiny Central African country was handed over to the court today after being on the run for nearly nine years – the second fugitive to be delivered up in two months. Idelphonse Nizeyimana, former second in command for intelligence and military operations at an officers’ school, was arrested in Kampala by the National Central Bureau of Interpol in collaboration with the tracking team of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and transferred to the court’s detention facility in Arusha, Tanzania.

Sudan: End rights abuses, repression

2009-10-09

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/10/06/sudan-end-rights-abuses-repression

The Sudanese government should end attacks by its armed forces on civilians in Darfur and make the major human rights reforms envisioned in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), Human Rights Watch has said in a new report. The 25-page report, "The Way Forward: Ending Human Rights Abuses and Repression across Sudan" documents human rights violations and repression in Khartoum and northern states, ongoing violence in Darfur, and the fighting that threatens civilians in Southern Sudan.

DRC: Congolese "brutally deported" from Angola

2009-10-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86465

Thousands of Congolese citizens are being deported from Angola to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) under alarming circumstances, say humanitarian workers. "The deportees have nothing with them, everything was taken; there are cases of violence, rape and sexual abuse," said Severine Flores, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Kenya: IDPs not ready to leave camps

2009-10-09

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8298373.stm

Two weeks ago President Mwai Kibaki ordered the closure of the camps, which at the peak of the violence were home to around 500,000 people. But more than a year-and-a-half later there are Kenyans still living in tents some of whom are reluctant to leave.

Kenya: Moves to stem H1N1 emergency

2009-10-09

http://tinyurl.com/yaox4fq

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has activated its emergency preparedness plan for Influenza A H1N1/A virus viral outbreak after 21 cases were confirmed in two large refugee camps in Kenya – collectively home to more than 320,000 people. There have now been 5 confirmed cases in Kakuma camp, northwestern Kenya, as well as 16 cases in Hagadera, Dadaab – one of the world’s largest refugee camps, where overcrowding and lack of resources are already putting a strain on healthcare systems.

Uganda: Thousands return to their farms after 20 years in displaced camps

2009-10-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32403

More than a million Ugandans driven from their homes by decades of violent conflict are gradually moving back to their homeland in the north of the country thanks to an innovative United Nations-backed farming project, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has said. A new rice-based farming system aimed at improving food security and reducing poverty in Uganda has enabled the incremental return of around 1.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) after living in makeshift camps for more than 20 years.

South Africa: City to reconsider Symphony Way's eviction to Blikkiesdorp

Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

2009-10-08

http://tinyurl.com/yhljncj

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) has sent a letter to Cape Town Mayor Dan Plato calling on the City to reconsider the eviction of the Symphony Way community to Blikkiesdorp. We all face evictions from the City of Cape Town – for a second time. The first time was when we were evicted from the N2 Gateway houses without being given any suitable alternative place to stay. This is why we have been occupying Symphony way for 1 year and 8 months.

Africa: Africa labour news roundup, 7 October 2009

2009-10-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/labour/59359

Tunisia: Teachers' strike shows solidarity with Gafsa protesters

2009-10-09

http://tinyurl.com/yjghbsk

Elementary school teachers in Tunisia organised a one-day strike on Monday (October 5th) to show solidarity with the dozens of trade union activists and educators imprisoned for their involvement in protests in Gafsa last June. Four of the 34 people imprisoned for the strike in the southern mining region are members of the Elementary Education General Syndicate of Redeyef-Gafsa

Emerging powers news roundup

Stephen Marks

2009-10-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/emplayersnews/59347

In this week's emerging powers news, Stephen Marks look t claims by Robert Fisk that Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading, a new report from the IMF suggesting that emerging and developing countries are leading the recovery from the global financial crisis, and demands by Africa's poorest nations for representation in the G20
NEW CURRENCY
Robert Fisk caused a storm by his claim in the Independent that;
‘In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading...Gulf Arabs are planning - along with China, Russia, Japan and France - to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar’.

He claimed to have reliable information that ‘Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars’.More.

Fisk explained his story at greater length in an interview on [url=ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBDPGkW6SCU&feature=player_embedded#/]al Jazeera TV[/url].


As he predicted, his report was officially denied.


But as if to underline the growing global power-shift, China and Japan were reported to be planning an EU-style Asian grouping.


CHINA AND GLOBAL RECOVERY
A new report from the IMF suggests that emerging and developing countries are leading the recovery from the global financial crisis. According to the recent International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook, these countries will grow 1.5 per cent in 2009 and 4.7 per cent in 2010.
.
Based on the IMF estimates, China's growth for 2009 will be 7.5 per cent and 8.5 per cent in 2010. The numbers for India are 5.4 per cent for 2009 and 6.5 per cent for 2010.More

The trend is also being recognised by the private sector. The global private equity firm Actis announced that it has raised $750 million for investment in infrastructure across emerging markets, including India. "Actis' presence on the ground across Africa, China, India, Latin America and South East Asia gives the fund an unrivalled presence in its targets markets," it added. More

China’s progress over the last 60 years is summed up in telling graphics in [url=ttp://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/139/redden-chinas-60th-anniversary.html
en: China's 60th Anniversary/]Fast Magazine[/url]


Is China, 30 years after its opening to the West, becoming a consumer society? What policies might drive that transformation, and what are the consequences for other nations? More

Meanwhile, just 10 years after establishing diplomatic and trade relations, China has overtaken the US, Japan, Germany and the UK to become South Africa's biggest trading partner, according to the latest figures from the SA Department of Trade and Industry. More.

AFRICA AND THE WORLD ECONOMY
Africa's poorest nations are demanding representation
within the Group of 20 (G20) developed and emerging economies, which
was turned into the world's main economic policy forum last week.
More

This year African Union heads of state adopted a plan of action for Africa's industrialisation. It was another attempt to shift the continent away from a dependency on primary commodity exports and towards local manufacturing and beneficiation.
More

CHINA AND THE USA
US opinion is having to come to terms with the implications of Chia’s economic rise - including Chinese firms in takeovers which save US jobs. More

The Obama administration's relations with Beijing have been better than feared. But the first cracks are emerging.


One possible point of friction is the renewed pressure from U.S. labor and manufacturing groups urging President Obama to formally label China a currency manipulator in a Treasury Department report due out next week. But policy watchers doubt the President will agree. More

Obama’s decision to delay a meeting with the Dalai Lama was seen as a straw in the wind.More

CHINA AND INDIA
Low-level friction between China and India continued to rumble over Chinese claims to the Indian region of Arunachal Pradesh. More

There was a similar stand-off over China’s latest move to issue “separate” visas to Indian passport holders from Jammu and Kashmir, More

ENVIRONMENT
Tension rose at climate change talks as China accused the developed nations of ‘trying to change the rules of the game’
More

The vexed issue of the role of developing countries in cutting emissions even led China to a rare public clash with the US and Europe as key talks continued in Bangkok. More

But all was not gloom, as a new study claimed that wind power could provide all of China's electricity, if the country raises its subsidy and improves its grid.
More

There was also good news for Africa as a World Bank official claimed that using Africa's vast agricultural resources to help tackle climate change could earn the continent $1.5 billion a year. Africa could tap its underexploited renewable resources, particularly hydropower, to meet increasing energy demand and boost both growth and development. More


INVESTMENTS AND BUSINESS
A southern African bank will provide a $60-million loan to Zambia, and China will give a further $420-million loan to fund a power project meant to plug a power deficit, according to the state-run power utility Zesco. More

Botswana may soon become a strategic hub for telecommunication and scientific technology development for southern Africa - if the country’s efforts to woo Chinese companies to set up telecommunications business there succeed.
More

The Nigerian government is planning to sell large stakes of its oil slabs, especially the ones currently unused by western energy firms, and China is ready to buy. But will the Chinese oil firm operate differently?
More

Dow Jones is reporting that China's top offshore oil producer, CNOOC Ltd., is in talks with Ugandan officials to invest between 5 and 6 billion dollars into Uganda's nascent oil sector. The investment could cover the refinery, the oil pipeline through Kenya and other infrastructure needs.
More

South Africa’s International Relations and Cooperation Minister Maite Nkoana Mashabane will later today jet off to Brazil for a state visit. The minister, who is travelling to the country ahead of the arrival of President Jacob Zuma on Thursday and Friday, is hoping to strengthen existing ties. More

South Africa’s decision to block a $23 billion merger between MTN Group Ltd. and India’s Bharti Airtel Ltd. may indicate President Jacob Zuma favors more state involvement in the economy to protect jobs and local industries.
Bharti and MTN abandoned talks after the deadline for an agreement expired on Sept. 30. Bharti said the structure of the deal failed to get approval from the South African government.
More

LAND GRABBING
South Korea will develop large-scale farmland and a food processing complex in Tanzania that could help local companies make inroads into African and European markets, a state-run rural development corporation said Thursday. More

The Chinese government intends to implement in Angola, as from next year, new farming projects in order to reduce the country’s dependency and decrease food import costs, ANGOP has learnt.
More

South Africa’s largest farmers’ union expects to conclude a multimillion hectare farmland deal with the Republic of Congo and agree a smaller land lease with Libya next month, its deputy president said. More

‘China’s growing appetite for African resources over the last decade is well documented. Indeed, China’s massive industrial machine relies on oil from Angola, Sudan, and Nigeria, and minerals from South Africa, Zambia, and Liberia. While China maintains that its trade relationship with Africa is benign, some commentators see China’s investment as a resource grab’argues US analyst Carl Rubinstein. More

South Africa’s minister for trade and industry Rob Davies feels that it is important to conclude the Doha negotiations of WTO as a development round even if it takes some more time. ‘I think here we have the legitimate demand of the poor farmers in the developing world against commercial ambition from commercial agriculture. For us, the balance has to be tilted in favour of the needs and interest of poor farmers’. More

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* 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.

Congo: Post-election clamp-down on opposition

2009-10-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86516

Authorities in the Republic of Congo have restricted the movements of several opposition politicians, who claim President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s July re-election was won through fraud. Electoral disputes in Congo have triggered violence in the past, most notably when a two-year civil war broke out in 1997 after a row between Sassou-Nguesso and former president Pascal Lissouba.

Kenya: Annan backs riot tribunals

2009-10-09

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8296005.stm

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says the leaders of Kenya's post-election violence should face trial. The key perpetrators are to be tried at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, but Mr Annan said it was vital that others were tried in Kenya. Mr Annan helped mediate a peace deal after the 2008 violence in which 1,300 were killed and 300,000 displaced.

Madagascar: Ravalomanana threatens power-share deal

2009-10-09

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-/1066/669596/-/136826jz/-/index.html

A deal on who should hold the top posts in Madagascar's power-sharing government faced collapse on Thursday after ousted leader Marc Ravalomanana refused to endorse his rival as president. Ravalomanana had agreed in principle to an agreement struck on Tuesday by the Indian Ocean island's feuding political parties which saw Andry Rajoelina, 35, retain the presidency on the condition he does not contest the next presidential ballot.

Mozambique: Election update

Mozambique Political Process Bulletin

2009-10-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/59346

In past elections, Frelimo in Tete took a hard line against any opposition, with violence and intimidation, and also obstructed observers. There is a danger that this might happen again, and our journalists are reporting higher levels of violence in Tete than elsewhere. In both 1999 and 2004, Frelimo drove all Renamo activists out of Changara district, there were no Renamo party delegates in the polling stations, and there was extensive ballot box stuffing. In 1999, Renamo houses were burned and the Renamo representative on STAE was driven out of the district.
Will Tete be a focus of tension again?

In past elections, Frelimo in Tete took a hard line against any opposition, with violence and intimidation, and also obstructed observers. There is a danger that this might happen again, and our journalists are reporting higher levels of violence in Tete than elsewhere.

In both 1999 and 2004, Frelimo drove all Renamo activists out of Changara district, there were no Renamo party delegates in the polling stations, and there was extensive ballot box stuffing. In 1999, Renamo houses were burned and the Renamo representative on STAE was driven out of the district. Frelimo leader and former security minister Mariano Matsinhe told a 6 December 1999 press conference with a smile that Renamo had brought in campaigners from outside, but these had been “expelled by the people” of Changara.

In 2004 there were also problems in Tsangano district, where Renamo party delegates had serious trouble obtaining credentials and there was ballot box stuffing.

In several places, Renamo delegates were excluded during the counting process. Tete election officials harassed national and international observers in 2004, delaying credentials and imposing a totally illegal ban on international observers speaking to polling station officials. Three domestic observers were held for several days by police during the 2004 election.

Renamo won a majority of Tete parliamentary seats in 1994 and 1999, and Frelimo had a large majority in 2004. But fraud was sufficiently serious in Tete in 2004 that Renamo probably improperly lost two parliamentary seats.

Despite substantial misconduct, those who ran the Frelimo campaigns in 1999 and 2004 were praised and promoted. This sent an unfortunate message, that in Tete fraud and intimidation are rewarded.

It is worrying that the same trouble spots are appearing again in reports from our journalists in Tete. Joseph Hanlon

STAE in race against time

When the Constitutional Council published its decisions on protests from the political parties on 28 September, the electoral administration secretariat STAE had just 30 days to print and distribute ballot papers – and STAE’s own calendar says this should take 35 days. STAE was able to order the printing of presidential ballot papers, but could not move on national and provincial assemblies because of the protests. Other polling station material had already been ordered and is now arriving, the director-geral of STAE, Felisberto Naife, told the Bulletin.

So far, STAE does not have dates on which the South African printers will deliver the ballot papers, and thus when they will be distributed down the chain – provinces, districts, administrative posts, localities and, finally, polling stations. In 2004 even 35 days was not enough, and despite the use of aircraft, many people could not vote because materials arrived late. A similar problem happened with the update of the electoral register, where lack of materials and late arrival of materials meant some people could not register.

With a schedule this tight, any problems are passed down the chain from national level to local level. STAE will start distribution of materials in the north of Mozambique, but there could be problems in the two largest provinces, Nampula and Zambézia.

Preparation and printing of registration books has been decentralised to the provinces this year, which should make it easier to correct errors locally. In the past, problems with registers sometimes meant people could not vote. Because the register is now computerised, the registration campaign this year could deal more easily with people coming for replacement cards, and just issue a new card and not have to do an entirely new registration, as in the past. Nevertheless, there are still potential problems because a large number of new people registered and there were many people moving from one place to another. And, in general, there is no way to take off the register people who have died.

Some register books have as few as 100 voters. In the registration campaign this year, mobile teams travelled out into more remote areas with relatively few people. Polling stations will be near the place people registered, both because it is required by law and because the distances between polling stations can be quite large.

After 2004 and 2008 elections, observers and civil society recommended to electoral officials that registration books, which have 1000 voters, should be split in half, and a law was passed this year to allow that. But STAE decided to stick with 1000 voters and a full book for each polling station. Naife explained that splitting books doubles the number of polling stations, and it would simply be too expensive.

But the number of polling station staff has been increased from 5 to 7. One of the extra people will stand outside the polling station and help voters find the right polling station – typically , which classroom within a school. The other will have a list of voters and identify the voter’s number, which voters will be able to give when they arrive at the official table in the polling station, and it is hoped that this will speed up the process within the polling station.

No register book numbers

When STAE published the list of polling stations (Bulletin 11), the list was borken down by locality and then the location of the polling station. But the law (artigo 41 (2) da lei 7/2007) also requires the list to contain the polling station number, which is linked to the register book number, and that number was not on the list. (Normally, each polling station has a single book.) This information is important for monitoring and for the parallel count.

STAE has it was the National Election Commission (CNE) which took the decision not to publish the numbers. But the CNE spokesman Juvenal Bucuane said “this is a purely technical question and thus is the exclusive responsibility of STAE.”

Integrity reminder for polling station staff

For the first time, the manual for polling station staff includes a code of conduct for people working in polling stations. In particular, it is noted that spoiling a ballot paper is an electoral crime. This is in response to reports by the media in the second round in Nacala local elections that polling station staff were spoiling ballot papers for the opposition by putting an extra ink mark on them.

Officials are also reminded that ballot box stuffing and removing ballot papers are crimes. There was significant ballot box stuffing in 2004, notably in Changara in Tete.

Violence in Tsangano, Tete

Tsangano was a hot spot in 2004 and again this year Renamo is coming under improper pressure. On 23 September a Frelimo group, allegedly headed by a local chief (régulo) stopped, interrogated and then beat three Renamo supporters returning from Chimvano where they had been putting up posters. Renamo made a formal complaint to the police on 30 September.
But that night a Frelimo group went to the Renamo delegate in Chimvano, who took him to the house of régulo Kwabzachina where he was detailed overnight, and the next day taken to the administrative post of Utengo Mbalane, where he was detained in the house of the administrator. Three Renamo officials, Jonas Albino Tanque (mandatário), José Xavier Kalumanba (candide for national parliament) and Pedro Uquine (candide for provincial assembly) went to the administor’s house to see what had happened to their party delegate. Seeing them there, Frelimo members attacked the house. The three Renamo members were then saved by fronteir guards.

Other electoral violence

Changara, Tete: A group of youths wearing Frelimo shirts attacked Renamo member Pedro João in bairro 25 de Junho as he rode past on a bicycle with Renamo symbols. He also reports they stole 3000 meticais ($100) and his moblle telephone. Another Renamo member was attached on 1 October in bairro 25 de Setembro.
Moatize, Tete: Daviz Simango was forced to abandon a rally. It was scheduled for 1 October on the football ground of bairro 25 de Setembo, but the locale was occupied by a Frelimo shock group. The rally was moved to Liberdade.
Mutarara, Tete: Renamo member Mwadeionanji White arrested by the police 29 September, accused of destroying Frelimo campaign material in Doa.
Cahora-Bassa, Tete: Renampo-nominated member of the district election commission, Paulo Extremo, was attacked on 28 September by individuals wearing Frelimo shirts, as he arrived home, having left his day’s work and passed by the Renamo headquarters. Renamo protested to the police, who said the attackers were not members of Frelimo.

Meconta, Nampula: People with Renamo shirts and banners attacked Frelimo member Rachide Fahamo and vandalised his motorcycle. He was giving out Frelimo pamphlets on 2 October.
Nacaroa, Nampula: People with Renamo shirts attacked the Frelimo campaign on 1 October, accusing it of occupying a Renamo campaign space. Two people were injured, including a 5-year-old child, and a Frelimo sound system was damaged.
Nacala-Porto, Nampula: Renamo has threatened to disrupt the Frelimo final rally on 25 October because it wants to hold its rally in the same place, Heroes Square. The municipality says Frelimo applied first.

Murrumbala, Zambézia: Renamo and Frelimo members involved in a punch-up Megaza administrative post, when Renamo parade of three cars and a motorcycle passed in front of the Frelio headquarters.

Machaze, Manica: Frelimo-MDM confrontation 4 October in bairro Sete de Abril. MDM was distributing leaflets and t-shirts and Frelimo members joined the queue and were recognised.

Montepuez, Cabo Delgado: The receptionist at Pensão Gepex, Bonifácio Xavier, was attacked and badly beaten by the personal security of a Renamo candidate, requiring hospitalisation, on 4 October when he told Renamo the hotel was full.

Frelimo use of state cars

Mabalane, Gaza: 5 October, Administrative Post Combomene, a white Toyota Land Cruiser of Limpopo National Park MMQ 55-80, and a white Ford Ranger of the District Education, Youth, and Technology department with the registration number covered by Frelimo pamphlets.

Magoé, Tete: 3 and 4 October white Land Cruiser of agriculture department and green Land Cruiser of the administration, registration numbers covered by Frelimo leaflets.
Macanga, Tete: 1 October Honda motorcycle XL MMV 07-18 of provincial health directorate.
Songo, Tete: The Tete election brigade headed by parliament speaker Eduardo Mulembwé used the secondary school for a meeting with civil servants.
Chiúta, Tete: 1 October visit of first lady Maria da Luz Guebuza, Toyota MMR 05-85 of National Social Security Institute.

Machanga, Sofala: Since the start of the campaign, Frelimo has been using seven Cidra motorcycles, four belonging to the local administration and three to the department of education, with registration numbers covered by posters.

Nacala Porto, Nampula: 2 October, red Toyota with part of registration 21-93, of the provincial public works directorate, driven by the director, Bento Mualoja.

Homoíne, Inhambane: 27 and 28 September, four Nissan “Hard Body”, MMR 48-91, MMH 77-47, MMR 91-87 and MMY 85-54, belonging to the provincial labour directorate, in Pende locality.

Nigeria: Former rebel denounces injustice in the Niger Delta

2009-10-08

http://www.afronline.org/?p=1987/

Founder of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, one of the most prominent armed groups operating in the Niger Delta region, today Mujahid Dokubo Asari is a member of the main opposition party of Nigeria. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to win elections with the aim to fight the unbalanced oil management in the country, in 2004 he and his armed group stopped oil production but did not damage oil lots.

Nigeria: Opposition decries lawmakers move to grant selves immunity

2009-10-08

http://tinyurl.com/yk54r3k

Nigeria's most vocal opposition party, the Action Congress (AC), has condemned the plan by federal legislators to surreptitiously grant themselves and their state counterparts the kind of immunity from arrest and prosecution now being enjoyed by the President, Vice President and the governors of the 36 states. In a statement, issued in Abuja by its National Publicity Secretary,Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said the bill, which, according to media reports, had scaled second reading in the House, could create a new set of 'untouchables' if passed into law.

Nigeria: U.S. Government urged to reject arms, promote talks in the Delta

City of Oakland, CA

2009-10-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/59348

The Oakland City Council unanimously voted in favor of a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to facilitate peace in the Niger Delta through independently monitored peace negotiations. The City’s call contrasts with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pledge in August to explore further U.S. military assistance to the government of Nigeria. The resolution marks a new level of support to pressure the United States to adopt a foreign policy that promotes constructive change through dialog in alignment with the American values of democratic civic engagement, and freedom of speech and the press.
Oakland, CA – On Tuesday October 6, 2009, The Oakland City Council unanimously voted in favor of a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to facilitate peace in the Niger Delta through independently monitored peace negotiations. The City’s call contrasts with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pledge in August to explore further U.S. military assistance to the government of Nigeria. The resolution marks a new level of support to pressure the United States to adopt a foreign policy that promotes constructive change through dialog in alignment with the American values of democratic civic engagement, and freedom of speech and the press.

In Resolution Number 09-0812 The City of Oakland unequivocally declares that quelling an insurgent force is not an acceptable reason for a government to unleash military might indiscriminately upon its own civilian population. The resolution states: “WHEREAS, Secretary Hillary Clinton, during her mid-August 2009 visit to Nigeria stated support for the government's approach to security in the country, pledged to explore U.S. military support for Nigeria, and referred to the President Yar'Adua's offer of amnesty for militants in the Delta as a "comprehensive political framework;"

Be it therefore “RESOLVED, that the Oakland City Council does hereby request that the Obama administration and the California Congressional delegation support independently monitored third party diplomatic talks in the Niger Delta with all stakeholders to bring about a peaceful solution” in the Niger Delta.

The Oakland City Council also supported the efforts of U.S. Senators who recently introduced a bill into the Senate that will require oil companies to disclose payments to foreign governments as part of a greater effort toward corporate accountability.

“I was tortured and imprisoned by the Nigerian military for my peaceful protests against Shell Oil's destruction of our land. As a resident of Oakland, I believe the City's support sends a strong message that communities in the U.S are concerned about the human rights abuses and environmental damage associated with oil extraction. I do not want to see my people continue to go through what I went through," stated Suanu Kingston Bere who spoke at the City Council meeting.

Fifty years of oil exploitation in the Niger Delta has produced over $700 billion in oil revenues shared between the Nigerian government and oil giants like Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Shell. Nigeria is a key supplier of oil to the United States, to which it exports over 40% of its supply. Despite the immense wealth gained from oil in the Niger Delta, the quality of life for local residents has deteriorated. Oil companies have destroyed the drinking water supplies and decimated the fish population that serves as a primary source of protein. Very little oil wealth is re-invested in communities from which it is extracted, most lack electricity, and access to education or healthcare facilities. These circumstances combined with an environment of rampant corruption, fraudulent elections and violent suppression of peaceful protests resulted in the rise of an armed political militancy with stated political demands regarding the development of the Delta. In response to the armed militancy the Nigerian government unleashed indiscriminate military might upon unarmed civilians, destroyed villages and caused thousands to be internally displaced in May 2009.

On a hopeful note, the resolution states that Nigeria is confronting a moment of serious crisis that can be turned into a moment of opportunity. Moreover, that the United States can help provide the leadership and influence to ensure that a creative and constructive solution to the root causes of the crisis in the Delta is undertaken.
Similar resolutions are pending in Berkeley, CA and Richmond CA.

(NOTE: The reintroduced bill into congress has since taken place and is now called the Energy Security Through Transparency Act (ESTT) Act [S.1700] and was introduced by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) on September)

South Africa: Arrested Development: The rise of infantilism in South African society

Dale T. Mckinley

2009-10-09

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/366.1

Since the birth of a democratic South Africa in 1994, there are a range of ‘isms that have had, and continue to have, varying degrees of currency and impact on our society. The favourite of the privileged classes and political-economic elites has, of course, always been capitalism while for a sizeable portion of the poor, alongside a few intellectuals and political activists (even within the South African Communist Party) socialism remains the preferred alternative. Some in our midst clearly still hanker for the repressive certainties of fascism and/or monarchism, while others endorse a more traditional communitarianism.

Africa: NGOs Welcome EU’s vow not to push Africa into EPAs

2009-10-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48792

Non-governmental organisations have expressed their satisfaction at the European Commission’s declaration that it would not put "undue pressure" on African and other countries to conclude the controversial trade deals called economic partnership agreements (EPAs)

Global: Nations cast plan for expanded IMF

2009-10-09

http://tinyurl.com/y9jw2wh

The push to reinvent the International Monetary Fund took a significant step forward this week, with nations agreeing to a rough timetable to come up with plans to reform its governance and expand its role in the global economy. The agreements, reached during the IMF's semiannual meeting in Istanbul that ends Wednesday, come as the mission of the 65-year-old Washington-based institution is re-examined in the wake of the global financial crisis

GlobaL: Second Africa-South America Summit declaration

2009-10-09

http://www.sardc.net/Editorial/Newsfeature/communique4_2009.htm

This is the declaration issued by the Heads of State and Government of Africa and South America, meeting in the Second Africa-South America Summit (II ASA) in Nueva Esparta State, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela on 26 and 27 September of 2009.

West Africa: States threaten Doha veto over cotton

2009-10-09

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE5980C220091009

Four African states threatened late on Thursday to veto any accord in the Doha trade round that did not address their demands for a reduction of Western subsidies for cotton. The negotiations on the product, a mainstay of several African economies, are seen as a touchstone of efforts to create a fairer global trading system in the Doha round, where agreement is sought in 2010.

Cameroon: Cholera outbreak sparks panic

2009-10-09

http://www.africanews.com/site/Cameroon_Cholera_outbreak_sparks_panic/list_messages/27360

Panic has gripped the Far North Region of Cameroon after five people died of what has been reported to be cholera. A cholera epidemic was recently reported in Mayo Tsanaga division in the Far North Region of the country. The outbreak first reported on 2 September 2009 has now spread to Mayor Sawa Division still in the Far North region.

Kenya: Cholera kills 29 as water shortage bites

2009-10-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86514

At least 29 people have died of cholera and hundreds more are being treated for cholera-related symptoms such as acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) in the larger Turkana District in the northwest and in the eastern regions of Garbatulla and Laisamis, say health officials. "Two people have died in Garbatulla, five in Laisamis, three in Turkana North, one in Turkana South and 18 in Turkana Central," said an official in Kenya's Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation.

Namibia: Illegal abortions common despite risks

2009-10-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48759

Ten years ago, a move to legalise abortion in Namibia failed. The number of unwanted pregnancies remains high, with many people unwilling or unable to use contraception. Despite the risks, illegal abortions remain common. Misoprostol - a drug used to control ulcers, more usually known by the brand name Cytotec - has become a favoured method for inducing abortion.

South Africa: HIV rate among pregnant women stays high

2009-10-09

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/BA337235-832A-4E84-B96B-53ED297B59BF.asp

The rate of HIV infection among pregnant women in South Africa has remained stubbornly high at around 29 percent for the third year running, according to government figures released on 5 October. The 2008 National Antenatal HIV and Syphilis Prevalence Survey - based on blood samples from 34,000 pregnant women who attended antenatal clinics in 52 health districts - measured HIV prevalence at 29.3 percent, compared to 29.4 percent in 2007 and 29.0 percent in 2006.

South Africa: Turning the tide against XDR-TB

2009-10-09

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86520

Three years ago, the Church of Scotland Hospital at Tugela Ferry, in the rural Umsinga area of South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal Province, was the focus of international media attention as the epicentre of a deadly outbreak of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). It was reported that 52 of the 53 patients initially diagnosed died within a month of contracting this strain of TB, which is resistant to both of the first-line antibiotics used to treat the disease, as well as two classes of second-line drugs.

Southern Africa: Lack of clean groundwater a health threat

2009-10-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48788

As the rainy season approaches, and sewage from pit latrines seep further into the Zimbabwe's groundwater, Irene Ngubeni will be at risk as the country faces another possible cholera outbreak. Even now, just before the rains have started falling Ngubeni is ill. She has travelled the 170 kilometres from her village in Matebeleland North to Bulawayo for treatment after drinking contaminated groundwater.

Malawi: Pre-school education a luxury

2009-10-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48617

Less than a third of Malawi's children attend pre-school; the others will lag behind their peers for their entire school careers. For most Malawian children, school only starts at the age of six - or sometimes even later - when they enter primary school. Pre-schools are mainly privately-owned and regarded as a luxury since most families cannot afford to pay the fees.

Senegal: Struggling to keep up with Education for All

2009-10-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48701

In Diohine, a village of some 3,000 inhabitants in the Fatick region of central Senegal, real progress has been made towards educating all children, in spite of a lack of infrastructure. Diohine has two public primary schools, each serving different neighbourhoods, and a third, privately-run Catholic school that was the first to be established, in 1948.

DRC: Country still hostile to homosexuality

2009-10-09

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=drc&id=2328

Despite its six million inhabitants, Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is far from a city where one can live openly and express their sexual orientation. On this day everywhere in Africa, homosexuality is considered an abomination and a way of relating imported ideas from the West. Just walk the streets of this vast city to understand how difficult it is to receive a same-sex partner. Moreover, within the family, the pressure is often so strong that the paper of a homosexual is like an ordeal.

Global: New UN assembly president on LGBT rights

2009-10-09

http://www.ilga.org/news_results.asp?LanguageID=1&FileID=1296

ILGA is deeply worried and outraged by UN Assembly new President Ali Abdussalam Treki's failure to consider the protection of the life and safety of lesbians, gay men, trans, intersex and bisexual people all over the world a matter of human rights. In an interview prior to his first address to the UN Assembly in his new role, Mr Treki declared himself to be “not in favour at all” with reference to the Statement in favour of the decriminalisation of homosexuality signed by 66 Countries and read by the Argentinian representative last December at the General Assembly in New York.

Souith Africa: Activists condemn homophobic attacks on judge

2009-10-09

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=southafrica&id=2332

LGBTI activists and human rights defenders have spoken against homophobic attacks by Zehir Omar, amongst others, aimed at High Court Judge Kathy Satchwell doubting her competence to be a Constitutional Court Judge because of her sexual orientation.

Africa: Uganda commits to reforestation

2009-10-09

http://www.afrol.com/articles/34357

Uganda has become the first country in Africa to undertake a reforestation project that will help reduce global warming emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The Nile Basin Reforestation Project in Uganda is a ground-breaking project being implemented by Uganda's National Forestry Authority (NFA) in association with local community organisations. The growing trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in exchange for revenues from the World Bank BioCarbon Fund paid to NFA and the communities.

Global: Finance key to successful outcome in Copenhagen

2009-10-09

http://tinyurl.com/yf3vzko

A United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) top official has said the Copenhagen climate change agreement which is expected to be clinched in December needs to come up with a financial architecture that puts governments and parties to the convention in control, as well as decide what will be financed and how. UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said it was also critical that the Copenh agen conference in Denmark also comes away with an architecture that clearly responds to nationally-defined needs and priorities, as opposed to priorities at national institutions.

Mozambique: Planned damming of the Zambezi condemned

2009-10-09

http://www.afrol.com/articles/34371

The International Rivers Network has released a new report damning the Mozambican project to dam the Zambezi river and build a huge hydro-power station at Mphanda Nkuwa. The network has said while the choice is to create more power, the region would be without water in the future. "That's a choice Southern Africa could face in a few years if current plans to build more large dams on the Zambezi proceed," the network criticised.

Tanzania: Report reveals North Mara gold mine pollution

2009-10-08

http://tinyurl.com/yz9mxty

People and the environment in the vicinity of the North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania are being exposed to heavy metals and cyanide pollution, according to a report published in June for the Christian Council of Tanzania (CCT). The study collected and analysed samples of water, sediments/soil for four heavy metals Nickel, Cadmium, Lead and Chromium. Concentrations of almost all of these were found to exceed the standards of the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Tanzanian and US Environmental Protection agencies.

Africa: South Africa receives land offers

2009-10-09

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE59808T20091009

South Africa said on Friday it had been offered 48 square miles of land for farming in Angola and Uganda but that it would not take up land offers without security of tenure. Agriculture Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said at a conference Zambia had also offered South Africa, the continent's largest economy, a 48-year lease agreement for land.

Chad: Pipeline threatens villages

2009-10-09

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8298525.stm

Human rights activists in Chad say they fear a new Chinese-backed oil project will displace hundreds of people and will destroy at least 10 villages. Work has begun to build a 300km (185 mile) pipeline from the Koudalwa oilfields in the south of the country, to a new refinery north of the capital. But activists say an environmental impact assessment was inadequate and residents were not properly consulted.

Global: Call for the struggle against multi-nationals

16th of October 2009, first day of international action

2009-10-08

http://tinyurl.com/y953veh

The transnational corporations are our common enemy; they constitute the present form of capital which exercises control over our economies. In the rural areas we are witnessing a savage offensive by capital and by the transnational corporations on agriculture and natural resources. It is a privatisation war of plunder directed against peasants and indigenous people, a privatisation robbery of the land, biodiversity, water, seeds, production, and agribusiness trade.

Global: International Financial Institutions Promote Land Grabs - report

2009-10-08

http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/526

As experts on food and agriculture come together in Rome on October 12, 2009 to discuss the challenge of feeding the world by 2050, a new report from the Oakland Institute, The Great Land Grab: Rush for World's Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor, sounds the alarm on the threat that land grabbing poses to food security and livelihoods.

South Africa: Government considers land seizures

2009-10-09

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-/1066/669904/-/1367y9qz/-/index.html

South Africa’s Government plans to resubmit a Bill to parliament that would allow it to seize land from farmers if negotiations to buy the land from them failed, a government official has said.The expropriation Bill was submitted to parliament last year as part of efforts to speed up the process of handing over 30 per cent of agricultural land to landless blacks by 2014.

South Africa: Land rights, but no water rights

2009-10-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48726

Thandi Sihadi stands next to a dry tap. As a maize and dairy farmer in one of South Africa’s driest districts, the lack of running water is nothing new to her. In fact, she says, she is one of many new black farmers who may now be fortunate enough to have land, but who still have problems accessing water for farming. Sihadi, a beneficiary of the Hereford land reform project – a project aimed at assisting small-scale black farmers, is from Sekhukhune in Limpopo.

Sudan: Government ‘about to lose investment’

2009-10-08

http://farmlandgrab.org/8117

The Sudanese government will take back a plot of land allocated for a Jordanian agricultural megaproject if the government does not implement the project within two weeks, Agriculture Minister Saeed Masri has said. The project was supposed to be implemented by a private company with government support, but last week, Masri announced that the private sector partner had withdrawn from the plan, noting that their decision was made unilaterally without prior notification.

Mauritania: UN scheme to reduce dependence on food imports

2009-10-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32423

Farmers in Mauritania will receive financial help to turn milk into butter and cheese, to clean and package the vegetables they grow and to add value to other raw products under a $12 million programme unveiled by the United Nations agency tasked with eradicating rural poverty. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) announced that it will provide a grant of $6 million and a loan of $6 million as part of the scheme, which aims to boost food production and to lower the West African country’s dependence on food imports.

Guinea: IFJ condemns threats and violence against journalists

2009-10-09

http://tinyurl.com/yzlsqe4

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has firmly condemned the violence and death threats by the military junta against journalists in Guinea. Mouctar Bah, the Conakry correspondent of Agence France-Presse and Radio France Internationale, Amadou Diallo, the BBC’s correspondent and Mamadou Ba journalist of the satirical newspaper Le Lynx are roughed up by soldiers covering the violent dispersal of an opposition meeting in which more than hundred persons died in September, 28 2009.

Sierra Leone: Journalists at war with highest court

2009-10-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48787

Umaru Fofana looks dishevelled. His hair is overgrown and people who do not know him could be mistaken for thinking he just joined an Afro band. And his hanging beard will surely solicit suspicious glances. But Fofana is not some musician or an unkempt hobo. He is the president of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) and his appearance is all for the cause of media freedom. The association petitioned the court for an interpretation and repeal of the criminal and seditious libel law contained in the Public Order Act of 1965.

Zimbabwe: Mugabe attacks ‘pirate’ radio stations... again

2009-10-09

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news081009/mugsattackspirates081009.htm

Mugabe used an appearance at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ‘World 2009’ meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday to attack the West for what he called the continued violation of Zimbabwe’s airwaves by foreign based radio stations. In a speech that aptly summed up his regime’s attitude towards media freedom, Mugabe told a Council of Ministers meeting that ‘certain western countries had ‘radio broadcasting systems’ that were targeting ‘his’ country to further their ‘obnoxious regime change agendas’.

Nigeria: Over 8,000 militants embrace amnesty

2009-10-08

http://tinyurl.com/yl45ruo

Some 8,299 militants embraced the Nigerian government's amnesty programme for oil militants, which ended 4 October, according to officials of the Coordinating Committee on the Amnesty. Chief Coordinator Lucky Ararile, an Air Vice Marshall, told journalists that the militants also surrendered 287,445 ammunition, 2,760 assorted weapons, 18 gunboats, 763 dynamites, 1,090 dynamite caps and 3,155 magazines.

Somalia: Government recruiting Kenyans for war - residents

2009-10-09

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE5980CW20091009

Somalia's U.N.-backed government has recruited more than 170 young Kenyans and former servicemen to help it fight rebels in the failed Horn of Africa state, local leaders in eastern Kenya said. Mohamed Gabow, the mayor of Garissa, told Reuters the enrolment of ethnic Somali Kenyans was being conducted at a home in Bulla Iftin village, on the outskirts of his town.

Sudan: 42 people killed in Mundari – Bor clashes

2009-10-08

http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php

At least 42 people are killed, 70 others injured following nearly a week-long fighting between Mundari and Bor youth, officials figures indicate. While 8,000 internal displaced persons (IDPs) are at the augury of starvation in Terekeke and Pariak in Terekeke and Bor Counties respectively and in dire need for humanitarian assistance.

Sudan: Renewed military activity in Darfur

Darfur Relief and Documentation Centre

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/59326

Darfur Relief and Documentation Centre (DRDC) is gravely concerned about the renewed military operations and displacement of civilians in Darfur. Violence is reported in Korma, Meliet, Jebal Moo, Jebal Mediob and eastern Jebal Marra in North Darfur State. Heavy military equipments including fighter planes and artillery are being used intensively during the last 4 weeks causing indiscriminate damage on civilian targets.
Darfur Relief and Documentation Centre (DRDC) is gravely concerned about the renewed military operations and displacement of civilians in Darfur. Violence is reported in Korma, Meliet, Jebal Moo, Jebal Mediob and eastern Jebal Marra in North Darfur State. Heavy military equipments including fighter planes and artillery are being used intensively during the last 4 weeks causing indiscriminate damage on civilian targets. Wide spread burning of dwellings and destruction of social facilities followed by organised looting of goods and livestock from the villagers were reported in many places. This new round of military action puts an end to a period of about 6 months of relative calm in the region.

In the first week of September 2009 the government army and the Janjaweed militia started military offensive in Ain Siro area in North Darfur. In the following days fighting broke out between the army and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) led by Abdelwahid Al-Nur in Korma area (70 km northwest of El-Fashir). Two SLM soldiers and 5 civilians including Mr. Ibrahim Adam Mohamed a long time primary school teacher died in this attack. Displacement of civilians is currently taking place in the area where about 12,000 IDPs were forced to abandon their villages. The security forces blocked the main access routes to the operation areas thus preventing many civilians from reaching more secure zones in major towns like Tawila and El Fasher. For several days the army and the SLM refused to allow UNAMID access to the affected areas. On 28th and 29th September 2009, the government launched a new offensive in the Meilit area in North Darfur. In Jebal Moo, northwest of Meilit, at least 20 civilians including children were killed and dozen others injured.

DRDC received reports that the Government continues building-up troops and military assets in different parts of Darfur. Thousands of soldiers and light military vehicles are being deployed in North Darfur in the environs of Kuttum and Kabkabiya. It is also reported that hundreds of armed Chadian rebels are currently stationed in Argi, Umdersai, Korri, Fono and Korti areas in North Darfur in their way to settle in Ain Siro. The locals expressed fears that Ain Siro could witness fighting in the coming weeks. It is significant that the renewed military offensives are taking place at a crucial time at the end of the rainy season and while villagers prepare to harvest their stable food. In another incident on 28th September 2009 armed men killed a Nigerian peacekeeper and injured two other soldiers during an attack on a UNAMID convoy near El Geneina (West Darfur). The assailants stole one of the convey vehicles.

DRDC condemns the renewed fighting and the targeting of civilians in Darfur. This serious development belies the recent statements made by top UNAMID officials that “the war in Darfur is over.” It also indicates the necessity of a more robust intervention from the international community to put an end to the ongoing military action, violence and atrocious acts against civilians in the region. Ends.

West Africa: Guinea stares at mayhem as junta members wrangle

2009-10-09

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-/1066/669930/-/1367y77z/-/index.html

A dispute broke out at the head of Guinea’s military government late on Wednesday after a junta leader sought to arrest a military officer for his part in the mass killings of anti-government protesters last month. The incident at junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara’s headquarters in the capital Conakry is the latest sign of rifts within the leadership and came just hours after France for the first time suggested Camara could be implicated in the deaths.

Kenya: Uproar over Internet costs

2009-10-09

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

The Kenyan Government has accused TEAMS shareholders of colluding to fix internet connectivity prices. Information and Communication PS Bitange Ndemo said the shareholders are making a massive 2,000 per cent from selling their capacity before the cable officially goes live. The shareholders have said that they will first have to recoup their investment before lowering the Internet connectivity prices.

Malawi: William Kamkwamba - a young inventor

2009-10-09

http://www.ted.com/speakers/william_kamkwamba.html

William Kamkwamba, from Malawi, is a born inventor. When he was 14, he built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap, working from rough plans he found in a library book called Using Energy and modifying them to fit his needs. The windmill he built powers four lights and two radios in his family home.

Uganda: E-Governance project in Western Uganda kicks off

2009-10-09

http://www.iicd.org/articles/e-governance-project-in-western-uganda-kicks-off

Local government, NGOs, church and IT leaders from the Kasese district in Uganda have launched a project to help give civil society organisations more influence over government planning and development. IICD will help manage the ICT component of this major project funded by the EU.

Africa: Wind Power in Global Context

AfricaFocus Bulletin Oct 4 2009

2009-10-09

http://www.africafocus.org/docs09/pb0909.php

This web-only AfricaFocus Bulletin contains brief excerpts on the role of wind in the world energy economy from the chapter on renewable energy in the new book Plan B 4.0 by Lester Brown.

Africa: Fellowship in poverty analysis and the MDGs for young African professionals

2009-10-08

http://www.uneca.org/recruit/current/Fellowships-Poverty-Analysis.htm

This fellowship is located in the African Centre for Gender and Social Development Division (ACGSD) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is the regional arm of the United Nations in Africa. Its mandate is to promote the social and economic development of Africa. As part of its program of support to member States, ECA is inviting applications from qualified young African Professionals to the “ECA Fellowships for Young African Professionals” programme.

East Africa: Training Programme on the Equal Status and Human Rights of Women

2009-10-08

http://www.africayouthtrust.org/eahuwo/#callforapps

The Equal Status and Human Rights of Women in East Africa (EAHUWO) is an East African based program that seeks to improve the knowledge of international human rights standards, in particular those related to equality and non-discrimination among professionals working with the human rights of women in order to contribute to the enhancement of gender equality throughout the East African Region.

Global: Master's in International Human Rights Law

The University of Oxford, Department of Continuing Education

2009-10-09

http://humanrightslaw.conted.ox.ac.uk/MStIHRL/index.php

The University of Oxford, Department of Continuing Education is now accepting applications for the Master's in International Human Rights Law 2010-11 entryThe aim of the degree programme is to train and support future leaders in the field of international human rights law. A central objective of the course is to ensure that participants not only know but can also use human rights law. The curriculum places roughly equal emphasis on the substance of human rights law, its implementation, and the development of human rights advocacy skills. Application deadlines: 20 November 2009, 22 January 2010, 12 March 2010.

Global: The Human Rights Advocates Program at Columbia University

2010 Applications

2009-10-08

http://tinyurl.com/yh2s52p

The application for the 2010 session of the annual Human Rights Advocates Program (HRAP) at Columbia University is now available. HRAP is designed to prepare proven human rights leaders from the Global South and marginalized communities in the U.S. to participate in national and international policy debates on globalization by building their skills, knowledge, and contacts. The Program features a four-month residency at Columbia University in New York City with a structured curriculum of advocacy, networking, skills-building, and academic coursework.

Global: UFAHAMU A Journal of African Studies

Call for papers

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/publications/59343

Ufahamu* has been an important forum for the publication of materials addressing Africa and the African Diaspora for more than 30 years. Named after the Swahili word for comprehension, understanding or being, UFAHAMU is committed views about social issues, addressing both the general reader and the scholar. Since its establishment in 1970, UFAHAMU continues to challenge and correct misconceptions about Africa, thereby creating relevant criteria for African Studies.
Ufahamu has been an important forum for the publication of materials addressing Africa and the African Diaspora for more than 30 years. Named after the Swahili word for comprehension, understanding or being, UFAHAMU is committed views about social issues, addressing both the general reader and the scholar.

Since its establishment in 1970, UFAHAMU continues to challenge and correct misconceptions about Africa, thereby creating relevant criteria for African Studies. It publishes material supportive of the African revolution and socially significant works of African history, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, law, planning and development, literature and other topics about the continent and the African Diaspora.

We encourage our readers to submit poetry, fiction, scholarly articles, commentaries, political or economic analyses, review articles and artwork to the Editors-in-Chief. You may submit your work to Ufahamu at www.ufahamu.org or http://repositories.cdlib.org/international/asc/ufahamu/

New users will need to create an account. Ufahamu is no longer accepting submissions via post or mail.

Our online submission process now requires that manuscripts be submitted in separate stages in order to ensure the anonymity of the review process and to enable appropriate formatting. The main text must be submitted as a stand-alone file (in Microsoft Word) without a title page, abstract, page numbers, or other headers or footers. The title, abstract, and author information should be input according to the directions on the site. Abstracts (400 words or less) should be submitted in plain text and should not include information identifying the author(s) or their institutional affiliations. All submissions except for book reviews must include an abstract before they will be considered for review.
Since we publish two issues per year, we continuously accept submissions. Though we occasionally publish special, thematic issues, most issues treat a broad range of topics. So, please, feel free to submit all of your African-related work.

If you have any further questions, you may contact the editors at ufahamu@gmail.com or access our website at: http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/ufahamu/


* Readers should note that Ufahamu, a Journal of African Studies, and has no association with Fahamu, the publishers of Pambazuka News

Africa Director, Africa Outreach Managers (2)

One International

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/59318

AFRICA DIRECTOR
AFRICA OUTREACH MANAGERS X 2

ONE is a campaign and advocacy organization backed by two million people from around the world and every walk of life who are committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa. We aim to hold world leaders to account for the promises made and we press them to support better policies and more effective aid and trade reform. We also work with African leaders to support greater democracy, accountability and transparency.

ONE is seeking an Africa Director and two Africa Outreach Managers to enhance our advocacy work with civil society, government, NGOs and media organisations on the continent. 2010 will be a very important year for Africa – it will mark years after Live Aid, 5 years on from Live 8 and Make Poverty History, 5 years before the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals and with the first football World Cup to be hosted in Africa, 2010 will be an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of recent years and demand that progress accelerates. It is therefore a crucial time for ONE as we ensure that our work accurately reflects the priorities of Africa at this time.

The Africa Director will lead our campaigning and advocacy work across the continent, supporting our wider work influencing G8/20 governments to maintain their commitments to the Millennium Development Goals and manage a strategy for maintaining our engagement and dialogue with key leaders in sub-Saharan African government, civil society, the private sector and the media.

The Africa Outreach Managers will support our advocacy and policy development work with government agencies, civil society and private sector organisations based in sub-Saharan Africa ensuring that ONE’s priorities are closely aligned with those of our African partners.

The ideal candidates will be great team players who can also operate well independently with substantial advocacy experience and a strong knowledge of the international policy architecture and environment. These roles will be based in Africa (exact location TBD) with some international travel.

For more information: please contact Tina Ajuonuma, European Operations Manager on +44 (0)207 434 7569 or tina.ajuonuma@one.org

Kenya: Programme Officer-Legal Affairs,

The Kenya Human Rights Commission

2009-10-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/59329

The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) is a national non-governmental organisation with the mission to promote, protect and enhance the enjoyment of all human rights by all men and women. The vision of the KHRC is a Kenya without human rights violations. The KHRC wishes to recruit a suitably qualified person to fill the position of Programme Officer-Legal Affairs.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) is a national non-governmental organisation with the mission to promote, protect and enhance the enjoyment of all human rights by all men and women. The vision of the KHRC is a Kenya without human rights violations.

The KHRC wishes to recruit a suitably qualified person to fill the position of Programme Officer-Legal Affairs.

Purpose of the Job

Reporting to the Senior Programme Officer, Research and Advocacy, the Programme Officer-Legal Affairs will be expected to provide leadership with respect to advocacy in programme/project areas related to legal, policy and institutional reforms.

Primary Tasks

The incumbent will be expected to:
* Conceptualise and implement relevant projects/interventions and prepare periodic reports/publications on the same;
* Provide legal opinions to the KHRC, including on regional and international interventions;
* Analyse human rights conditions, including emerging patterns of human rights violations, economic, social, cultural, civil, political and other trends by policy analysis and participate in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process;
* Oversee specific Public Interest Litigation cases;
* Provide legal guidance/support for rapid response initiatives and fact finding missions when the need arises;
* Supervise and manage weekly legal aid clinics including providing legal advice to individual clients and community groups on complaints of human rights violations and providing relevant interventions including institution of legal action when necessary.

Competencies Required

* A Bachelor’s degree in law or equivalent qualification. Must also be an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya with a current practicing certificate;
* A post-graduate Diploma in project management would be an added advantage;
* A minimum four years experience in legal and policy advocacy in the human rights/social justice sector;
* Demonstrable understanding and sound knowledge of human rights principles and work, including of the regional and international human rights protection system.

Attributes required for all Positions

* Excellent research and advocacy skills;
* Being self-motivated, committed to human rights, organised, collegial and able to function well under pressure. Must be willing to take the initiative and work independently with minimal supervision;
* Ability to appreciate, respect and promote gender and women’s human rights both at the work place and in programme/project work;
* Impeccable field and Internet-based research abilities;
* Experience in writing project proposals, reports and policy briefs;
* Ability to work in a diverse team and offer leadership;
* Excellent oral and written communication skills, as well as IT competency.

The successful candidates will be offered attractive remuneration packages and other benefits.

Applicants should send a cover letter attaching a detailed CV, photocopies of certificates and testimonials and the names, addresses and current telephone/mobile numbers of three referees and a statement of present and expected gross salary before the end of day, October 19, 2009 to:

The Selection Committee
The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC)
Valley Arcade, Gitanga Road
P O Box 41079 00100 (GPO)
Nairobi
E-mail: admin@khrc.or.ke

All applications should BE POSTED OR HAND DELIVERED in a sealed envelope.

The KHRC is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants for employment without regard to ethnicity, race, gender, age, colour, religion, national origin, marital status, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other ground for discrimination.

Canvassing will automatically lead to disqualification.

KHRC will not provide relocation allowances to overseas applicants.

Only successful candidates will be contacted.

Fahamu