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Bahati’s bill: A convenient distraction for Uganda's government

Solome Nakaweesi-Kimbugwe and Frank Mugisha

2009-10-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59556

cc GBMNewsAs Ugandan MP David Bahati spearheads a campaign around the adoption of the homophobic 'Bahati's bill', Solome Nakaweesi-Kimbugwe and Frank Mugisha call for an unwavering rejection of a piece of legislation entirely against the interests of wider Ugandan society. With strong suspicions of Bahati's financial backing by extreme-right Christian groups in the US, the bill seeks not only to establish draconian punishments for homosexual acts but also to actively encourage Ugandans to snoop on one another indefinitely for the supposed good of the nation. If homophobes like Bahati were really worried about 'protect[ing] the traditional family', Nakaweesi-Kimbugwe and Mugisha argue, they'd concern themselves with tackling the conditions keeping so many Ugandans in poverty, rather than making scapegoats of homosexual people. The authors conclude that with an election approaching in 2011, the momentum behind the bill smacks of a none-too-subtle attempt to divert attention away from Uganda's true issues.

BAHATI’S 'ANTI-HOMOSEXUALITY BILL'

On 14 October 2009 the Hon. David Bahati (MP, Ndorwa County West, Kabale) tabled a private-members bill before the Ugandan parliament titled the 'Anti-Homosexuality Bill'. When it was tabled, the Minister for Ethics and Integrity Dr James Nsaba Butoro made a strong statement in support of the bill and for the greater sanction of individuals and organisations supporting homosexuality. The bill is aimed at increasing and expanding penalties for 'homosexual acts' and for all institutions (including NGOs, donors and private companies) who defend the rights of people who engage in sexual relations with people of the same gender. The bill also calls for Uganda to withdraw from all international treaties and conventions which support the rights of lesbians, gays and bisexuals, introduces extradition arrangements for Ugandan citizens who perform 'homosexual acts' abroad, and includes legal penalties for people who fail to report alleged homosexual acts or individuals and institutions that promote homosexuality or same-sex marriage to the authorities. The death penalty is mandated for HIV-positive people who engage in sex with people of the same gender. The tabling of the bill has been accompanied by threats against any Ugandan media organisation that allows LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) Ugandans to air their views or publish press statements.

Bahati’s bill is an alarmingly retrogressive piece of legislation, aimed at legalising hatred against a section of the Ugandan citizenry, but also importantly at controlling and censoring dissent and open public debate. In legal terms, the bill would set a precedent for state authorities to control rights to freedom of expression, freedom of thought and freedom of association for state and non-state actors. It would also set a precedent for government censorship of internal workplace and other policies of national and international institutions operating in Uganda.

The bill is clearly a diversion from the serious issues facing Uganda’s policy-makers today in the lead-up to the 2011 elections especially around livelihoods; poverty and the lack of jobs; electoral reforms; lasting solutions to the northern Uganda peace process; political conflict; ethnic tensions and the unresolved land question; high rates of violence against children and against women (perpetrated largely by heterosexual men); and the ongoing impact of HIV/AIDS. It also poses a serious threat to press and academic freedom, human rights activism overall, and indeed to Uganda’s commitment to the values of human rights and democracy upheld by its own constitution and by the regional and international systems to which it belongs.

WESTERN-BACKED HOMOPHOBIA

A common claim put forward by homophobes in Uganda is that Western donors and human rights organisations are encouraging the spread of homosexuality in Uganda. Interestingly, what they never admit to is that fact that their own campaigning and mobilisation against lesbians and gay people is itself funded and supported by actors in the West, more specifically the Christian rightwing in the USA. There is evidence to suggest that support for Bahati’s bill has come from extreme-right Christians in the United States of America who are working through allied churches and parliamentarians in Uganda. In March 2009 the Family Life Network, led by Ugandan Pastor Stephen Langa (affiliated to the Kampala Pentecostal Church), hosted a workshop entitled 'Exposing the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda'. The workshop trainers included members of three American organisations well-known in US Christian rightwing circles:

- Scott Lively, co-founder of the hate group Watchmen on the Walls and author of The Pink Swastika, a pseudo-history book claiming that militant male homosexuals helped mastermind the Nazi holocaust
- Caleb Lee Brundidge, a 'sexual reorientation' coach for the International Healing Foundation, a Christian organisation that aims to 'free' people from 'unwanted same-sex attraction'
- Don Schmierer, a board member for Exodus International, an umbrella body for Christian groups that seek to 'reform' homosexuals using Christian teachings.

Alongside the workshop, the Americans also met with MPs and influential religious actors. The Family Life Network has mobilised through churches across the country to deliver a petition to parliament calling for the introduction of stronger legislation against homosexuality. Bahati’s bill is the result.

It's worth noting that it costs a considerable amount of money, time and processes to table a private-member’s bill, which begs the question of how the MP from Kabale District is financing this process? It has also been common practice for the mushrooming pastors and churches to use homophobic attacks on opponents as a way to discredit each other and sway faithfuls.

CONTENT AND IMPLICATIONS OF BAHATI’S BILL

The tabled bill aims at increasing the scope of laws established in the British colonial era prohibiting 'carnal knowledge against the order of nature' and acts of gross indecency. These articles of the penal code and are already being used to arrest, detain and prosecute Ugandans allegedly engaging in 'homosexual acts'.

Bahati’s bill would establish legal definitions for homosexuality and homosexual acts, include explicit prohibitions for sex between men and between women, reinforce legislation against same-sex marriage, and establish a wider range of penalties for both the performance of homosexual acts and for the support of sexual rights broadly and the rights of homosexuals in particular.

Criminalising the practice of homosexuality

The bill criminalises homosexual acts, with penalties ranging from up to 10 years imprisonment for single acts of homosexual sex to life imprisonment and the death penalty for a category of crime labelled 'aggravated homosexuality'. The latter includes an HIV-positive person having sex with a person of the same gender, and same-gender sexual relations with people with disabilities and with legal minors. The offence of homosexuality includes any person who 'touches another person with the intention of committing homosexuality' (Article 2.c.), an alarmingly broad provision which is open for wide interpretation and malicious use given that the burden of proof is vague.

In criminalising sexual acts between consenting adults, the bill’s provisions directly violate the right to privacy, to equality and concepts of bodily integrity and autonomy.

Bahati’s proposed bill also supports stigma and discrimination against HIV-positive people, and would undermine years of efforts to tackle the epidemic. Uganda has been considered as a 'best practice' leader in the fight against HIV and AIDS, and has received significant amounts of international support for its HIV and AIDS programming from donors such as the Global Fund for HIV and Malaria. If passed, this leadership status would be put in serious question and has potential to down-roll the stewardship and achievements achieved thus far.

The social implications of the bill are equally problematic. The active persecution of LGBT people would lead to tremendous suffering and violence against people who are, after all, our own family members, colleagues, business partners, political and religious representatives, and friends.

Criminalising the 'promotion' of LGBT rights

Article 13 of the bill calls for up to seven years imprisonment or a monetary fine for any person or institution believed to be promoting homosexuality. Business and NGOs convicted of promoting homosexuality are liable to be de-registered. Article 14 also penalises anyone who fails to report an offence under the act, with up to three years imprisonment or a monetary fine.

The term 'promotion' includes providing office space, broadcasting and otherwise disseminating information and funding any activities deemed to support 'homosexuality and related activities'. Such a broad definition could well be used to close down institutions that the government wants to silence, especially in the run-up to the 2011 elections. For many networks, alliances and coalitions, this bill poses a threat to organising and engaging in general given that it would allow the de-registration of an entire network even if only one member has been found at fault. This is of critical concern as it would enable the censorship of national lobby groups and networks such as the national NGO forums and women's national forums, who as of now are still battling with the repressive NGO Amendment Act. This bill in essence tightens the areas of engagement that were left within the NGO act.

Under the rubric of 'promotion', the bill would legalise the censorship of broadcast and print media and the shutting-down of media houses that support discussion on the issue of homosexuality and equal rights. It would criminalise organisations providing health information for men who have sex with men. It would also require employees and managers in institutions who are aware of the sexual practices of their colleagues to report them to the authorities. Promotion could also be interpreted to include the presence of equality policies that cover LGBT staff. This has implications for any bilateral and multilateral agency in Uganda, as well as the many multinational corporations who have a legal duty to support equal opportunities for all staff. Put simply, if the bill is passed, there is a legal precedent to shut down the operations of Uganda’s bilateral donors, and of foreign corporations from Europe, North America, Brazil and other countries whose own national laws require that they support equality.

By penalising citizens for the failing to report 'suspected homosexuals' to the authorities, the bill calls for the creation of a fascist-style society where family members, service providers and colleagues are made to spy on each other. This is not the kind of Ugandan society that we want.

Jurisdiction

Articles 16 and 17 of the bill provide for the prosecution of Ugandan citizens who commit homosexual acts, as defined by the bill, in other countries. It even goes so far as to include extradition arrangements, which would require its African neighbours and other countries to send Ugandans home to face prison or even execution for voicing support for LGBT people, or for engaging in consensual sexual acts with another adult. Such extradition powers are aimed at silencing and threatening the bulk of political opponents and dissidents that have hitherto provided alternative voices and engaged on the state of governance in Uganda.

Withdrawing from international legal and policy instruments

In addition to changing national legislation, Article 18 of the bill would oblige Uganda to withdraw from any international legal or policy instrument that contradicts with 'the spirit and provisions enshrined in the Act' (Article 18.1). This would mean withdrawing from any international or African Union instrument that supports equality (which is, of course, at the foundation of all human rights law and most contemporary policy on development). This had major implications for Uganda’s membership in and commitment to international and Africa regional governance and human rights systems. It would also call into question Uganda’s eligibility for funding support for initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals which advance the 'spirit' of equality. Also, by withdrawing, the bill’s provisions would push Uganda into the category of a pariah state, with implications on the human rights of all Ugandans regardless of sexual orientation.

MYTHS AND LIES

The justification for Bahati’s bill is built on unscientific, unverified arguments around the fact the homosexuals in Uganda 'recruit' people, including children, into changing their sexual orientation. There is no factual basis for the claim about recruiting, which has itself led to scare mongering, hate speech and arrests in Uganda.

The recruitment claims also misrepresent the situation. Homosexuals are not predators. However, homophobic members of society and the state have themselves certainly been systematically marginalising and harassing people named or identifying as 'homosexual'.

The bill states that its primary target is to 'protect the traditional family' (Article 1.1). Here again, the focus of concern is curiously placed on homosexuals and supporters of their rights, rather than on the actual threats faced by Ugandan families day to day, such as the inability of many parents to feed their children and to provide resources for them through all stages of their education. It makes no steps forward in affirming women’s rights in marriage, including comprehensive protections against domestic violence.

The bill states that its primary target is to 'protect the traditional family' (Article 1.1). Here again, the focus of concern is curiously placed on homosexuals and supporters of their rights, rather than on the actual threats faced by Ugandan families day to day, including the unacceptably high rates of domestic violence, child abuse, sexual violence, land and resource-based tensions, breakdown of traditional support and safety nets, the inability of many parents to feed their children and to resource them through all stages of education. It makes no steps forward in affirming women’s rights in marriage including comprehensive protections against domestic violence. Also, the bill in essence can't justifiably claim to strengthen families given that since the 1995 constitution, women and marginalised groups have continued to demand the implementation of existing laws and the expansion of protections against gender-based violence (including domestic violence and female genital mutilation (FGM)). The greatest irony is that for 49 years now the Ugandan Parliament has failed to enact the infamous Domestic Relations Bill (family code) that would protect families!

The bill is, its supporters claim, tabled in the interests of the health and security of Uganda’s children, adults and people with disabilities who apparently are at the mercy of predatory homosexuals. Interestingly, neither Bahati nor one of its most ardent supporters, Minister James Nsaba Butoro, have taken major steps to ensure that the many girl children and adult women sexually abused and raped in educational establishments, at home and in the streets – almost exclusively by heterosexual men – have either access to justice or health and other services to support them. If sexual abuse is their concern, why are they not lobbying for increased funding of women’s crisis centres and legal aid for victims of sexual violence? Why is the Sexual Offences Law still not in place, or indeed a national sexual harassment policy? If the protection of people with disabilities is their concern, why have they not been pushing for the Ugandan government to tackle the broad range of challenges faced by people living with disabilities? How far has Uganda gone beyond enactment of the Disability Act and affirmative action in politics for people with disabilities?

DIVERTING ATTENTION FROM THE REAL ISSUES

All of these questions point to the fact that Bahati’s bill serves as a diversionary tactic. In the run-up to the 2011 elections, many Ugandans are pushing for electoral reforms, the creation of greater space for multiparty political engagement and alternative voices. Part of the diversion tactics are thus to engage the parliament and citizenry in highly emotive 'moral debates', rather than on the real governance issues facing Uganda. The bill is one of a range of such moral debates, all targeting gender and sexuality (including issues such as homosexuality and sex-work) which will predominate parliamentary discussions and leave little or no space for the discussion of electoral law reforms. This bill, if passed, would also be an easy tool to use in the run-up to the 2011 elections to fight political opponents even within Bahati's own ruling political party as a way to 'weed' out dissent in the face of a failure of political parties to regulate their elected members in parliament. The likely targets for this are the young politicians and those who are unmarried or divorced and thus do not fall into the limited, moralistic 'approval list' of Bahati, Butoro and their allies.

WE NEED AN AFRICAN RESPONSE

Supporters of Bahati’s bill are trying to draw on the notion that calling for the imprisonment and death of people who engage in consensual sexual acts with people of the same gender is supported by 'African traditional values'. As Africans we are clear in saying that hatred is not, and has never been, a traditional African value. Our African cultures, in all their diversity, have always embraced people who are different. Our African cultures are also not relics from the past, but are changing and adapting with time. We reject the use of our African identity to support and legislate the persecution of LGBT Ugandans, their allies and anyone willing to consider the right to equality for all. Bahati’s bill is giving Africans a bad name.

As Ugandans we urge our elected representatives to vote against Bahati’s bill as a piece of legislation that would lead to the persecution, suffering and even death of our fellow Ugandans, and a move that could threaten possibilities for continued foreign investment and aid to help develop our nation. As Africans we call on our sisters and brothers to join us in voicing their support for the full equality of all Africans, and for our own national representatives to vote against a bill that supports hatred, social control and violence. This is not just a Ugandan concern. It is an African concern. Join us in calling for a vote against Bahati’s bill.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Solome Nakaweesi-Kimbugwe is a human rights defender and the executive director of the pan-African women’s rights organisation Akina Mama wa Afrika, headquartered in Uganda. Frank Mugisha is a human rights defender and the co-chairperson of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Closing political space: Abahlali and South Africa's authorities

Stuart Wilson

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59524

© Ahahlali.orgThis week’s Pambazuka News brings you a contribution by Stuart Wilson on the attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road. Wilson has worked closely with and represented Abahlali in court. He reflects on the recent attacks on the movement in Kennedy Road and the horrific reaction these attacks have received from the authorities. It is all too clear that the attacks signify the closing of political space in South Africa and the fact that constitutionally protected citizens are by no means practically protected if their actions go against the powers that be, Wilson concludes.

I would like to talk, in the time allotted to me, about Abahlali baseMjondolo, a movement of informal settlers in KwaZulu-Natal I represented while I worked at CALS [Centre for Applied Legal Studies], which has recently been violently repressed by the state under the guise of a police operation to tackle vigilantism. John Dugard was the first to sign a statement condemning the repression for what it was – a remorseless attack on a peaceful and democratic community-based organisation.

Abahlali is the shackdwellers’ movement of South Africa. It is run by people who live in shacks, for people who live in shacks. It is committed to improving conditions for people living in the settlements affiliated to it, and to campaigning for the better integration of the poor into the urban fabric. Abahlali’s core message is that shackdwellers should not sit back and wait for what is often blithely called ‘service delivery’, but rather take responsibility for actively campaigning for better housing, sanitation, healthcare and education, to be provided on terms favourable to its members. In simple terms, as its president Sbu Zikode often says, Abahlali’s message is ‘nothing for us without us’.

Its central campaign is concerned with housing. Instead of mass relocations to matchbox housing settlements on the urban periphery – which tend to deepen poverty, destroy social networks and increase unemployment – it seeks the upgrading of informal settlements in situ, in line with national government policy and international best practice. At a time when many poor and understandably frustrated communities across South Africa are blockading roads, setting fire to cars and destroying government property, Abahlali is mobilising informal settlers to find solutions to their problems through coming to grips with the nature of their exclusion, rejecting the stigma which is often attached to them and forming progressive alliances with housing technicians, lawyers and other civil society organisations to campaign for their objectives. Abahlali fosters a dialogical, iterative and reflective relationship with and between its members, as well as with those outside its membership who support its objectives.

During the xenophobic violence which rocked South Africa in 2008, it was observed that few attacks took place in settlements in which Abahlali had a presence. This is because Abahlali’s membership comprises of citizens and non-citizens, and the movement responded to the violence by bringing them together in forums where the grievances of both could be discussed openly. The result was that most people were able to reflect and realise that the causes of the frustrations leading to the violence were rooted in poverty and inequality that made little meaningful distinction of nationality – at least in informal settlements.

Abahlali was first met with violent repression (its marches and meetings were illegally broken up, its leaders were arrested and beaten and its members or people living in settlements in which it had a presence were evicted at gunpoint without a court order by the city’s land invasions unit). However, Abahlali’s patient engagements with the Durban municipality have led to limited undertakings on behalf of the state to consider the viability of upgrading settlements in which Abahlali has a presence and the beginnings of a meaningful dialogue with the movement. Abahlali has also successfully campaigned for the installation of more water points and better sanitation in its members’ settlements.

Abahlali’s turn to the law has facilitated some of this. Abahlali began, with the aid of public interest lawyers at CALS, the Legal Resources Centre and private attorneys acting pro bono, to challenge and successfully resist some of the unlawful evictions to which its members were subjected. Abahlali’s members were defended on and successfully resisted spurious charges of public violence brought against them. Faced with a movement over which it could not simply ride roughshod with police harassment and unlawful eviction, the state began to talk.

Most recently, Abahlali, with CALS’s assistance, has taken a case to the Constitutional Court. That case challenges the constitutionality of the Slums Act, a piece of provincial legislation which equates the elimination of slums with the eviction of people living in them and is intended to make that a much more frequent and easily facilitated occurrence. Judgment in that case is pending.

Abahlali’s message and its modest, incremental successes in improving the lives of its members have been popular. Abahlali now has a presence in well over 30 settlements in Durban and many more in Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. However, although Abahlali has never sought political office, or power for its own sake, its success has been interpreted as a threat by some local politicians and property owners. This is because much of the land on which Abahlali’s settlements stand is valuable suburban property. It is worth far more to some if it were developed commercially, rather than upgraded for low-cost housing. A powerful, assertive organisation of shackdwellers who know their rights represents a real threat to the commercial agenda.

Last Saturday and Sunday nights, a gang of thugs entered the Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban. Kennedy Road is the founding settlement of Abahlali, where its office is based and in which its membership is strongest. The gang sought out and destroyed the shacks of around 30 leading members of the movement and stole their possessions. The police were present and did nothing to stop the pillage. They only intervened to arrest members of Abahlali who resisted the gang. Many other families associated with the movement fled in fear of their lives. On Monday morning, the local ANC [African National Congress] Councillor Yacoob Baig and the MEC [Member of the Executive Council] for community safety, Willas Mchunu, arrived at the settlement, congratulated the community on having removed what they called a criminal element and declared that the community could now live in peace and harmony. Abahlali’s office was ransacked.

At first, the state painted the violence either as xenophobia or vigilantism. Later on, it released a statement claiming that the violence was directed by a shady community-based organisation, which it referred to as ‘The Forum’ (which it said had links with Abahlali) and that the police had intervened to ‘free’ the Kennedy Road informal settlement from its clutches. In later statements, representatives of the state and members of the ANC have simply stated that the police operation was directed at Abahlali, which is a criminal organisation.

The criminalisation of the poor is nothing new. I have often seen crime-prevention operations in the inner city of Johannesburg which quickly and seamlessly metamorphose into unlawful evictions. The residents of the Olivia Road properties had to resist three such crime-prevention operations on their way to the Constitutional Court hearing, which ultimately resulted in their voluntary relocation to state-funded housing in the inner city. But these incidents have mostly been the result of fairly low-level corruption – a property owner who can’t be bothered to get an eviction order, or wait for the state to do it for him, will slip a middle-ranking police officer a few hundred rand to arrest some unlawful occupiers for trespass, or to stand by and ensure that there is no resistance while a security company carries out an eviction at 3am.

What is happening to Abahlali represents something more profound. It is a closing down of political space; it is a warning that the poor should not be too organised, critical or demanding – at least not outside the spaces in which the state can control and marginalise dissent. One of the most chilling aspects of the MEC’s statement in the aftermath of the violence at Kennedy Road was that after Abahlali is disbanded ‘challenges community shall be addressed through dialogue within properly constituted community structures’. One is left to wonder, uneasily, what that means. When an ANC councillor declared the next day that Abahlali’s office, by then ransacked, would become a new branch office of the ANC itself, the answer seemed menacingly clear.

CALS has been one of the spaces in which the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court on socio-economic rights has been the most used, praised and criticised. Whatever the contours of that debate, the court is indisputably correct about one thing: At their most fundamental, socio-economic rights prohibit exclusion, and guarantee the space to engage with and shape the terms on which the benefits they guarantee are provided to the poor. One such space has been violently wrested from Abahlali’s members this week.

When John set CALS up, he might have been forgiven for thinking that in 30 years’ time we’d be dealing with a different kind of law in a different kind of society. And, in many ways, we are. We have a government legitimated by truly free and fair elections. We have a much less hostile judiciary. Most importantly, we have a constitution which, at least formally, guarantees the inclusion of all in the political community. But democracy must also fill the spaces between elections. The freedoms guaranteed by the constitution must be practiced – and permitted to be practiced – by the citizenry. The attack on Abahlali is an attempt to stamp out that vital practice of democracy. Abahlali, fighting on behalf of an excluded underclass in the teeth of a paranoid state, an aggressive propertied class and a corrupt police force, is now becoming painfully aware of the lessons John learnt and taught 30 years ago.



BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Stuart Wilson is a visiting senior research fellow at Wits Law School.
* This article was originally part of a 'Contribution to a panel discussion on John Dugard’s legacy to human rights activism and litigation'.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Strategies for stopping SA’s runaway crime

William Gumede

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59525

cc D BlackadderA police strategy of shoot-to-kill won’t stop South Africa’s runaway crime, William Gumede writes in this week’s Pambazuka News, when the real issues are corruption, inefficiency and a lack of skills and resources in the police service and criminal justice system. What the country needs, argues Gumede, is ‘a comprehensive anti-crime, poverty and job creation strategy.’

The new muscular police strategy of shoot-to-kill to stop runaway crime is not the solution. The real danger of the policy is that it will encourage trigger-happy police, as likely has been the case in the tragic shooting of Olga Kekana in Pretoria, who was mistaken by the police for a car hijacker last Sunday.

Firstly, the argument that criminals have used South Africa's model constitution and legislation to evade the law is just foolish. Surely, the woeful performance of the police and the poor state of the criminal justice system cannot be blamed on South Africa’s model constitution and its laws.

For another, the Criminal Procedure Act as it stands, which the Police Commissioner Bheki Cele blames for police inadequacy and wants to amend – with the support of President Jacob Zuma, already gives the police sufficient power to use force if they or the public are in danger. Better policing and an effective criminal justice system must be at the heart of any turnaround strategy to curb out-of-control crime.

The real issues are corruption, inefficiency and lack of adequate skills and resources in the police service and the criminal justice system. We need a comprehensive turnaround strategy.

We must start by dealing with the perceptions that some dodgy political figures are above prosecution, if they have the right political connections or are aligned with the right political faction within the ANC; and that in some cases people are prosecuted to settle political scores.

We must also take the politics out of policing, as we must also take business out of policing, asking those with business connections to get rid of it.

The police force has a credibility problem, which must be dealt with. There is a perception in the public image that some bad apple policemen are in cahoots with, if not criminals themselves. Often almost everybody in a township knows who the criminals are, where the drugs and stolen goods come from, where the gangsters hang-out.

Yet, the police in many cases often appear not to know this or ignore this. If the police leadership strategy is to score big wins early on in the fight against crime, the first thing the police must do is to round up the most known (by communities) big wig criminal bosses across the country. Furthermore, there is a perception that in some instances the police are picking on soft targets, rather than taking head on the big criminal masterminds.

For example, the metro police often sit comfortably on the side of highways and stop easier targets in cars, while the most effective action crime prevention action should be to police communities, where the murders, housebreaking, hijackings and serious crimes are happening. The police must get elementary police work right, take proper notes, be able to the right things at a crime scene, not to lose firearms and dockets. The vacancies in the police force must be filled, even if it means recruiting all those who took voluntary retrenchment packages before.

Cele must go on a drive to attract specialist skills to the police service, and expand the recruitment pool, especially to the leadership, to bring the best possible talent on board. He must reinstate the specialised police units, such as the narcotics bureau, the family violence, child protection and the sexual offences units. Build more forensic science laboratories, and recruit more scientists, even if means importing from abroad en-masse in the interim.

A police station should be built in every township. This should be done through public works programs, with the local unemployed in the area building it. Recruit at least 100 000 more police officers, for detective work. Furthermore, recruit another 150 000 matriculants who are unemployed, who have impeccable characters, and employ them as police assistants in the community.

The police must release crime statistics regularly and transparently, so that we can clearly measure progress, and so that civil society, the media and the public can hold the police accountable.

As part of a comprehensive anti-crime, poverty and job creation strategy, the government must introduce a basic income grant to help people affected by poverty and the impact of the global financial crisis. This will with one stroke deal with those who are forced to commit crime just to survive, and help focus police resources elsewhere, where it matters most.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Mother Ethiopia and its healthcare

Alemayehu G. Mariam

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59523

cc GigiAlemayehu G. Mariam calls our attention to the dire state of the healthcare sector in Ethiopia. His account is based on and inspired by an article from Hanna Ingber Win, the world editor of the Huffington Post who has reported on the Ethiopian malaise. This well-informed article also draws on data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and comes to shocking conclusions about the healthcare situation in the country. Mariam calls us to action on this issue and argues that there is hope for ending child malnutrition and poor maternal and child health in Ethiopia, provided we ‘work together in unity – with malice towards none and charity for all’.

It is not only Mother Ethiopia that is in deep trouble today but also the millions of mothers in Ethiopia. Hanna Ingber Win, the world editor of the Huffington Post was ‘invited by the UN Population Fund to visit its maternal health programs in Ethiopia, which has one of the world’s worst health care systems’. Her investigative findings are shocking to the conscience, her analysis is compelling and convincing, and her conclusions are profoundly distressing but not lacking in cautious optimism. In a five-part series entitled Mothers of Ethiopia, Win paints a portrait of a country that is the epicentre – the ground zero – of Africa’s maternal and child health crises.[1]

EXCERPTS FROM HUFFINGTON POST

'Zemzem and her husband, a poor farmer, collected 50 birr (US$4) from their neighbours for the trip to a hospital … and travelled 20 hours, while in labour, from her rural village to get to the hospital in the closest big town. By the time she arrived at the hospital, her uterus had partially ruptured. A resident and health officer were able to save her life and that of her baby… If she [had been delayed] two or three hours more, the baby – and even the mother – would have lost her life… No one else in the ‘Septic Room’ can empathise with Zemzem's joy. The other three patients all had fully ruptured uteri and lost their babies… When I enter the maternity ward at Jimma Hospital, the stench practically smacks me in the face. The smell, a combination of urine and faeces and other bodily fluids, overpowers all my other senses…

'Ethiopia ranks among the top 10 countries for child marriage, according to the International Centre for Research on Women’s Analysis… Early marriage can cause higher rates of maternal and infant mortality, vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, abuse, isolation and long-term psychological trauma from forced sex, according to UNFPA… Two centres in Addis serve about 600 girls between the ages of 10 and 19, says Habtamu Demele, the project coordinator of the centre. Most of them have escaped early marriage. Even though the legal age to marry in Ethiopia is 18, more than 30 percent of girls living in rural parts of the country are married by age 15, according to the Population Council…

'The white tile floors in the Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekelle, a large city in northern Ethiopia, look so clean they practically sparkle. Unlike the maternity ward in Jimma that reeks of human waste and sickness, this hospital smells sterile and clean. Nurses gather at their station writing down their patients' information in orderly files, and a small handful of visitors wait patiently in the corridors. The multi-storey hospital with a manicured garden and televisions in the hallways looks so modern and fancy it could easily belong in New York. There's just one problem: many of its new beds go empty. The hospital, which opened in September 2008, does not have enough doctors or medical equipment for the facility to be fully used. Of the 450 beds in the hospital, only about 65 per cent can be filled…

'In Ethiopia, the maternal health statistics suggest that the nation's health care system needs an overhaul. Less than six percent of women have access to a health professional while giving birth, according to Ethiopia's 2005 Demographic and Health Survey. The maternal mortality rate is one of the worst in the world. For every 100,000 live births, 673 women die giving birth, according to the survey.

'In the United States, eight women die during childbirth for every 100,000 live births, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). In Ethiopia, 673 women die, making the maternal mortality rate 84 times higher. UNFPA considers every single maternal death preventable. In the U.S., a woman has a 1 in 4,800 chance of dying from complications due to pregnancy or childbirth in her lifetime.

‘This government has failed at the very important task of training the professionals,’ says Dr. Beyene Petros, chairman of the opposition United Ethiopian Democratic Forces party and a member of the Ethiopian House of People's Representatives. ‘You can put up huge buildings, but if you don't have a program to properly train and maintain the manpower, what's the value?’

WIN’S ANECDOTAL DATA IS CONSISTENT WITH THE MACRO LEVEL HEALTH DATA

One may be tempted to critique Win’s report as anecdotal based on episodic observations of a few isolated cases. This, however, would be erroneous because the general statistics on the country’s health system are more frightening than the reports of individual cases. According to World Health Organisation (WHO) 2006 data,[2] Ethiopia’s population was estimated to be 77 million. To serve this population there were 1,936 physicians (1 doctor for every 39,772 persons); 93 dentists (1 for every 828,000 persons); 15,544 nurses and midwives (1 for every 4,985 persons); 1,343 pharmacists (1 for every 57,334 persons); and 18,652 community health workers (1 for every 4,128 persons). The total expenditure on healthcare as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) was 5.9 per cent. General government expenditure on healthcare as a percentage of total expenditure on healthcare was 58.4 per cent, and private expenditures covered the balance of 41.6 per cent. There are less then 25 hospital beds available per 10,000 people. Per capita expenditure on healthcare was US$3 at an average exchange rate. The WHO’s minimum standard is 20 physicians per 100,000 people, and 100 nurses per 100,000 people. What more can be said? The numbers speak for themselves.

HEALTH AND THE EMPTY RHETORIC OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

If empty political rhetoric and grandiose claims of double-digit development were concerned with medicine, Ethiopia would be the healthiest country in the world. Addressing the opening session of Ethiopia's ‘parliament’ recently, Girma Wolde Giorgis, the putative president, repeated the cockamamie fabrication of runaway economic development over the past half-dozen years: ‘The fact that our economy has been able continuously to register growth rates of more than 10 per cent annually for the last six consecutive years in such difficult global and domestic circumstances is an attestation of the success of our policies and strategies designed to speed up our development.’ But Girma and his confederates seem to be clueless about the singular importance of heath in economic growth and development. In fact, health is considered so important that five of the eight targets of the Millennium Development Goals (adopted by 189 nations and signed by 147 heads of state in September 2000) to be achieved by 2015 are directly related to improvements in healthcare services and nutrition: eradication of extreme hunger and poverty; reduction in child mortality; improvements in maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; the achievement of universal primary education; the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women; and the development of a global partnership for development.

It is a cruel joke to talk about runaway economic development in ‘one of the world’s worst healthcare systems’. There can be no economic development in a society that is ravaged by pandemics, suffers from a high incidence of child and maternal mortality, which is devastated by preventable and vector-borne diseases and abysmally lacks basic maternal and prenatal services and rational public health policies. To believe in the fantastic blather about ‘10 per cent plus annual economic development for the last six consecutive years’ is to believe in the purple cow that no one has ever seen and the pink elephant that some see too often in the land of living lies.

The empirical data overwhelmingly shows that heath is a fundamental determinant of economic development and poverty reduction. The health status of a population affects economic growth directly through labour productivity and the negative effects of morbidity (i.e., fewer worker-related illnesses, lower absenteeism rates and the diversion of scarce resources for treatment of ill health from other activities). There is vast scientific evidence to show that improvements in healthcare services lead to significant increases in per capita income directly as each individual is able to produce more per unit of labour input. Beyond the immediate effects of poor healthcare services on productivity, the impact of child malnutrition and poor maternal and child health services will have a devastating impact on the Ethiopia’s future. It is well-established that malnutrition-related health problems of children have lifetime effects. Simply stated, sick children perform poorly in school and poor performance negatively impacts on future individual income and overall labour productivity of citizens in society. Without massive investments in healthcare services, training of healthcare providers, improved child nutrition and maternal care and the establishment of clinics, health centres, hospitals and dispensaries, Ethiopia’s future economic growth, labour productivity and most importantly, its precious youth, are doomed.

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?

So, we must ask some obvious questions: Why does Ethiopia have ‘one of the world’s worst healthcare systems’? What is the value of an ‘economic development’ that completely ignores the healthcare needs of the vast majority of its citizens? What is the value of an alleged 10 per cent plus economic growth if 85 per cent of the population has little or no healthcare services? What is the value of exporting flowers but not importing basic pharmaceutical drugs and essential medical equipment? What is the value of putting up shiny new buildings that offer little healthcare services but stand as magnificent political showpieces? Is there anything that has more value than ensuring the good health of a nation’s citizens? Is there even a slight chance that Ethiopia will meet its Millennium Development Goals?

WHAT IS HANNA INGBER WIN REALLY SAYING?

Win’s manifest purpose was to investigate certain projects supported by the UN Population Fund and report her findings. Her report sheds considerable light on the fact that the country’s healthcare system is terminally under-staffed, under-resourced, underdeveloped, mismanaged, over-bureaucratised and over-politicised, and its few health professionals under-qualified. But her findings also focus a beam of scrutiny on some stark policy questions: Why are scarce resources being wasted on shiny buildings and not in the recruitment, training and retention of physicians and other healthcare providers in Ethiopia? Why isn’t there a comprehensive programme of retention of Ethiopian doctors and other health professionals fleeing the country? Why is healthcare dominated and controlled by centralised planning in a country that is allegedly ‘federal’? Why isn’t healthcare planning decentralised to empower local communities? Why is there little investment in health education, prevention and disease control? What happens to all of the aid money that is earmarked for health?

There are major policy prescriptions that follow Win’s findings. First, it is clear that something must be done to stave off the exodus of Ethiopian doctors and other health professionals. It is a national tragedy that there should be a pervasive belief among health professionals in Ethiopia that there ‘are more Ethiopian doctors practicing medicine in Chicago than in Ethiopia’, as Win reported. But Ethiopian doctors are leaving the country for many compelling reasons: They do not want to practice medicine in unsafe and wretched conditions; they are frustrated by their inability to meet even the most basic needs of their patients; they do not want to work in a health system that lacks basic medical equipment, medications and trained providers; they object to being overworked, underpaid and underappreciated; and they would like to earn fair compensation for their services.

In March 2007, Meles Zenawi, responding to a question on the Ethiopian ‘doctor drain’, shocked health officials and physicians attending the conference. He declared, ‘We don’t need doctors in Ethiopia … let the doctors leave for wherever they want. They should get no special treatment.’ When the life and wellbeing of 80 million people hangs in the scales, such a callow reaction and arrogant attitude must condemned. No effort must be spared to retain Ethiopian doctors in order for them to serve in the country, particularly in the rural areas. It is also an obvious fact that the flight of Ethiopian doctors necessarily means the importation of expensive foreign ones or the vast majority of Ethiopians will continue to die from preventable diseases and lack of basic health services.

It would be misleading and unfair to leave the impression that Ethiopian doctors who have left the country have been totally disengaged from it. There indeed are some Ethiopian diaspora physicians and other health professionals who have done their share to help out. These unsung heroes have organised periodic medical mission trips to Ethiopia with colleagues from other countries. Some have even gone to extraordinary lengths to establish foundations for the principal purpose of acquiring much needed medical equipment and supplies to meet critical medical needs. They are refreshing points of light on the dark sky of ‘one of the world’s worst healthcare systems’.

The second area of policy concern underscored in Win’s report is the need to undertake a broader initiative to establish a more equitable health system between the urban and the vast rural areas where health services are virtually nonexistent. Something has to be done to provide incentives to healthcare professionals to work in underserved rural areas. Instead of wasting scarce resources on state-of-the-art half-empty hospitals that have few doctors and other health professionals, it makes more sense to use those resources to build rural clinics, train health officers and community health workers. Furthermore, these resources should be used to attract students from rural areas who are likely to remain in their communities to be engaged in public heath services as well as supplementing the salaries and benefits of other healthcare providers to go into the rural areas. Donors may be in the best position to help bridge the urban–rural gap and improve the overall quality of rural medicine. What is also implicit in the interview responses of Ethiopian health workers is the need to reassess the roles of nurses, mid-level health workers and community health workers and explore ways of diversifying their responsibilities through training.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO THE DICTATORSHIP

Win deserves our gratitude and appreciation for calling attention to the massive healthcare problems plaguing the mothers of Ethiopia. She told the story as she saw it. Her findings may prove embarrassing to a dictatorship that seeks to paint a portrait of a country panting for air from the galloping economic development it is undergoing. The fact of the matter is that when the lives of millions of mothers and their children are at risk, there is only one way to tell the story: The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That is what Win has done in her anecdotal report based on her visits to facilities supported by the UN Population Fund. Her report will ultimately serve to empower Ethiopian women by forcing the dictatorship to face up to the fact that it needs to provide resources to protect Ethiopian women's basic right to maternal and reproductive health – one of the cornerstones of the Millennium Development Goals.

There is another fact that we cannot afford to gloss over. Win’s report showed an apparent gap in the location and sophistication of healthcare infrastructures. For instance, the stark contrast she draws between the state-of-the-art hospital in Mekelle and the deplorable conditions in Jimma could potentially leave a bitter aftertaste in the mouth of a reader who had digested all of the other facts about ‘one of the world’s worst healthcare systems’. It would be an egregious mistake to dwell on such distinctions without focusing on the real outcomes of the healthcare system. It is therefore necessary to belabour the obvious: The residents of Jimma and Mekelle are in the same boat. Neither one is getting basic medical care. Even with a state-of-the-art modern hospital (with 450 beds – of which 157 cannot be used due to staffing shortages – and 14 doctors consisting of 1 surgeon, 1 paediatrician, 1 gynaecologist, 2 internists and 9 general practitioners) people still do not have access to the most basic clinical procedures.

SAVE MOTHER ETHIOPIA!

It is simply preposterous and irrational to talk about economic growth or development when a country has ‘one of the world’s worst healthcare systems’. The ultimate question is whether a regime described by the Economist as ‘one of the most economically illiterate in the modern world’ is capable of meeting the dire health challenges facing the Ethiopian people. No need to hold our breaths waiting for an affirmative response to that question. But there is no question on what we need to do. We must work together in unity – with malice towards none and charity for all – to save Mother Ethiopia and the mothers of Ethiopia!

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

REFERENCES
[1] Hanna I. Win’s five-part series on Huffington Post.
[2] http://www.afro.who.int/home/countries/fact_sheets/ethiopia.pdf

Kennedy Road olive branch a sham

Niren Tolsi

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/59519

© Ahahlali.orgThe tragic events at Durban's Kennedy Road have gained much-desired media attention, with the KwaZulu-Natal government likely ushering in a ‘healing process’ as a result of this attention. However, Niren Tolsi calls this so-called healing process a 'sham'. He writes that Abahlali baseMjondolo (ABM) members have refused to attend 'stakeholder' meetings out of principle and out of fear for their personal security. Indeed, Tolsi stresses that most of the participants were in fact not even from Kennedy Road, but were African National Congress (ANC) members from other areas brought in an attempt to give legitimacy to the meetings. In response, the ABM calls for a return to democracy in Kennedy Road and a guarantee of safety for them and their families.

The hatchet job on Durban's Kennedy Road informal settlement continued this week with an alleged ‘healing process’ by the KwaZulu-Natal government.

Its stated purpose was to effect reconciliation in Kennedy Road, home to about 7,000 people, after last week's violence that left two confirmed deaths, displaced several hundred and destroyed the homes of Abahlali baseMjondolo (ABM). The President Sbu Zikode of ABM and other members were forced into hiding.

On Sunday the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Safety and Security held successive meetings for stakeholders, the community and religious leaders. Most of the church community, such as Rubin Phillip, Anglican bishop of KwaZulu-Natal and chairperson of the province's Christian Council, refused to attend in solidarity with ABM, which boycotted the event.

Fearing for their lives, and that the African National Congress (ANC) would stage-manage the public meeting, Zikode and other ABM leaders kept well away from the venue, where a week earlier, an armed mob threatened members of their youth league.

The ABM also protested that, as elected community leaders and victims of a purge, they could not be expected to sit side by side with attackers driven by hatred, lawlessness and political intolerance.

The Mail & Guardian conducted a survey of the 88 people who signed the attendance register at the ‘stakeholders’ meeting. Nineteen were provincial government representatives, 12 from the municipality and eight from the police. After subtracting media and representatives of other community policing forums and clusters, the register reflected 14 ANC members, seven South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) members and seven people claiming to be ‘residents’ of Kennedy Road.

Telephone calls confirmed most of those claiming to be ordinary Kennedy Road residents or inhabitants with ANC affiliations were in fact from other areas, such as the Puntan's Hill, Sydenham Heights and the Foreman Road settlement. Many of the outsiders were given prime time at the community meeting.

One alleged that an award-winning Mfene (Pondo dance) group from Kennedy Road had instigated the attacks. Isabel Mbuyisa, a ‘resident leader’ according to the register, but in reality an ANC member from Sydenham Heights, alleged that the dance group was a front for political mobilisation.

Mbuyisa also railed against alleged corruption in the ABM, whereas ordinary residents talked of unemployment, health concerns and crime.

The meeting was an exercise in speaking with forked tongues, with government leaders talking left and others using anti-democratic-tipped boots to kick heads in.

Provincial Safety and Security Minister Willies Mchunu emphasised the need to ‘resolve the matter through non-violent means. As government we are not against any person or organisation in the settlement. If they want to participate in any activity critical of government, we accept that.’ Freedom of association, movement and thought were guaranteed at Kennedy Road because ‘that is what we fought for’.

eThekwini councillor and chairperson of the municipality's housing committee Nigel Gumede said that Kennedy Road ‘should have been developed a long time ago’ and blamed ABM for that fact that inhabitants still live in squalor. He said the social movement had opposed government's housing efforts and was anti-development, as continued deprivation guaranteed funding from academics and NGOs.

Gumede said ‘one of the many obstacles’ that had stopped government delivering houses to residents was ABM’s Constitutional Court case against the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act. He added a dash of tribal hatred, saying that ‘in our [presumably Zulu] culture, this [Mfene] dance is associated with muthi (witchcraft)’ and needed to be investigated.

It was obvious that local and provincial government officials, many in ANC colours, were there to extend the party's influence in the settlement.

Contrary to the municipality’s policy – since 2002 – not to provide electricity to shack settlements, Gumede promised electricity to Kennedy Road residents ‘within three weeks’. New houses, especially in the long-mooted Cornubia development, have also been promised to residents, and the provincial department of social development will be consulted about delivering food parcels to the area.

Meanwhile, ABM leaders remain in hiding under growing threats to themselves and their families. Their office at Kennedy Road was evacuated after warnings last week that it would be ransacked. The movement now holds meetings in secret.

ABM has called for the ‘immediate restoration of democracy in Kennedy Road’, ‘a genuinely independent and credible investigation’ into the attacks and ‘genuine and safe negotiation on the way forward between the ANC and ABM’. It has also urged President Jacob Zuma to visit the area and address the crisis.



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* Niren Tolsi is a journalist in South Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
* This article was first published in The Mail & Guardian Online.

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize: For what?

Ama Biney

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/59520

cc US ArmyThe news that Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize last week has created much discussion around the world as he has only been in office for nine months. In this week’s Pambazuka News, Ama Biney finds Obama unworthy of the prize as he still presides over one of the biggest nuclear arsenals in the world, as well as just having pushed one of the largest military budgets through Congress. The main question for Biney is, has a man whose country is at war received the prize for peace or has he received the prize simply for prizing peace?

Incredulity was my response to President Barack Obama’s recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize on 9 October 2009. I know that what I am going to write and the questions I pose may cause levels of disgruntlement among some of my Obamaist friends who have nothing but unswerving (yet uncritical) loyalty towards Obama. However, the issue is that we must sober up to the reality of the kind of politics and interests Obama and his administration stand for and rid ourselves of the euphoria of his election, despite its important historic and symbolic dimensions. We need to ask why did the Nobel committee decide on the basis of 205 candidates to award the peace prize to Obama, who is only nine months into his presidency? Was it not premature to have awarded him this prize? And on what basis was it awarded?

According to the Nobel committee of five people who made the decision, President Obama was selected ‘for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’. The chair of the committee said they appreciated the ‘special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons’. Furthermore, the committee declared: ‘Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.’

However, the reality is that Obama has yet to deliver on any of the major foreign policy initiatives upon which he has embarked. For example, his push for peace in the Middle East has been threatened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims that the Israelis will continue to build more Jewish homes on Arab lands, claims that are likely to stall the efforts towards any peaceful settlement. In short, there has been no significant change in the Middle East – Israel can do what it wants with the slightest, if any, rebuke from Washington. On climate change, Obama has yet to convince Congress to pass legislation reducing carbon emissions. Ostensibly the prize was awarded to encourage Obama’s initiatives to reduce nuclear arms and to ease tensions with the Muslim world that were partially relaxed through his visit to Cairo in June this year. Obama has also abandoned America’s embrace of the gun-wielding diplomacy of George W. Bush for multilateral diplomacy and international cooperation. Essentially the committee awarded Obama for his promises to maintain world peace rather than for any concrete accomplishments. To put it differently, some think the award is a repudiation of Obama’s predecessor, a kind of ‘thank you for not being Mr Bush’.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, ‘It is an award that speaks to the promise of President Obama’s message of hope’, while Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, described the award as an ‘unexpected, but inspired choice’. The Nobel committee proclaimed that Obama had ‘created a new climate in international politics’. It believes that the US under Obama’s leadership is pursuing a more constructive role in meeting ‘the great climatic challenges’ facing the planet. Certainly it can be argued that the award places more pressure on Obama to now live up to such ideals and hopes. Obama, like many people, was surprised by the award and showed humility in his response. He said, ‘I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honoured by this prize.’ He said he would accept it as recognition of the struggles of others for peace – ‘as a call to action, a call to all nations, to confront the challenges of the 21st century’. He will donate the cash award of $1.4 million (£880,000) to charity.

Meanwhile, the stark fact is that the award comes as Obama contemplates pouring tens of thousands more troops into Afghanistan while his national security advisors insist on a shift of the conflict from Afghanistan to pursuing al-Qaida in Pakistan. Meanwhile, American troops are still in Iraq. Another reality is that Russia possesses 15,000 nuclear weapons, Israel holds between 100–200 and the US has 9,600. Can Obama really be working towards a world free of nuclear arms whilst possessing such a stockpile? Similarly, on what grounds can Obama or anyone deny Iran the right to a uranium enrichment facility or even the right to possess nuclear arms when the US owns such weapons? Surely a nuclear-free world means that all countries should rid themselves of all weapons of mass destruction? In short, why should anyone be given a peace prize whilst their country owns one of the largest nuclear arsenals on earth and has over 500 military bases scattered around the world? Moreover, how can the prize be reconciled with the fact that Obama pushed of one of the biggest defence budgets in US history through Congress? Can a peace prize-winner now go forward and deploy 20,000 more US troops in Afghanistan?

In 1895, Alfred Nobel stated in his will that the peace prize should be granted ‘to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses’. In justifying their decision, the Nobel committee said, ‘We trust that this award will strengthen [Obama’s] commitment, as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, to continue promoting peace and the eradication of poverty.’

Let us have the ‘audacity of hope’ that the award will put enormous pressure on Obama to fulfil the expectations granted by the prize-givers and all those within America and across the globe who genuinely desire peace and an end to both covert and overt war. It is only in the future that history and historians will have better grounds to evaluate Obama’s performance based on his concrete accomplishments and performance, rather than solely soaring words.

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* Dr Ama Biney is a pan-Africanist and scholar–activist who lives in the United Kingdom.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Incitement or raising the red flag?

L. Muthoni Wanyeki

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/59522

Last week, the BBC broke a story pointing to the possibility that both the Kalenjin and the Gikuyu communities in the Rift Valley are arming themselves with conventional weapons. The story was picked up the next day by local media houses and the key quotations to back up the BBC's claims were given by Ken Wafula, who works with a human rights organisation in Eldoret. The government predictably came out to deny the possibility, arguing that its intelligence did not indicate the story to be true. By Friday, Wafula had been called in for questioning by the District Commission’s intelligence officer, and is now facing possible charges relating to the circulation of false and alarming information and incitement, should he be unable to substantiate the quotations attributed to him by local media houses.

The government’s immediate denial of the arming efforts is, of course, belied by the speed at which Wafula was picked up for interrogation. On the one hand, it is somewhat reassuring to know that the government did take the claims seriously enough to investigate them. On the other hand however, the initial denial – and worse, the charges against Wafula – can only contribute to the hesitancy of Kenyan citizens to come forward with more information on the same issue.

It is not that the possibility has not been discussed before in both the public and the private domains. The May 2009 report of the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Monitoring Project commissioned by Kofi Annan from South Consulting expressly mentions the same concern. Under the section ‘trends in disarmament’, the report notes the discovery of five arms caches in Nandi district in February 2009, pointing to the possibility of weapon flows into Kenya from neighbouring countries still faced with armed conflict. The report also notes that discussions on violence from those surveyed made frequent references to guns.

So much for the public domain. In the private domain it is not just those of us that work on human rights who have been receiving information on the weapons build-up within the Rift Valley from contacts and network members on the ground. Talk of weapons has apparently become common in certain business and professional circles as well. Within the last two weeks alone in otherwise social encounters (during which political matters are inevitably also discussed), I personally have received (admittedly anecdotal information and hearsay) about the same.

A medical professional who works in the Rift Valley told me of her shock at hearing claims, at a social gathering of her mostly Kalenjin peers, that almost everyone present had apparently armed themselves, supposedly ‘in preparation’. She could obviously not ascertain the truth of the claims. Neither could she clarify what the ‘preparation’ was for, beyond the obvious tensions that persist in the region.

Another colleague, meeting socially with a Gikuyu who owns a trucking company, professed to me his shock at hearing that this person not only easily and readily admitted to still making financial contributions to ‘the cause’, but that he also claimed to use his trucks, when requested, to move arms into the Gikuyu areas of the Rift Valley. Again, he could not ascertain the truth of the claims, or what 'the cause’ was, beyond the sense that the Gikuyu are determined not to be easy targets ever again.

Like I said, these are anecdotes and hearsay. The people sharing them with me had no means of ascertaining their truth and neither do I. Just as my organisation has had no means of ascertaining the truth of what is being said on these matters from contacts and network members in the field. We are not criminal investigators and have no powers to investigate the contents of people’s homes, trucks or property.

However, we do take the claims seriously, which is why we also take seriously the need for security sector reform, and a restoration of confidence, by all ethnic communities, in the security services' ability to act effectively, impartially and strategically (not to mention within the boundaries of the constitution and the law) to guarantee our protection. In addition, the security sector must be checked and reined in when that ability is clearly seen to be waning.

The government and only the government must hold the monopoly on the use of force (particularly armed force) within the country. Citizens must have faith in the government’s use of this monopoly to assure them of basic safety and security. The fact that these anecdotes even exist point to three alarming conclusions. Firstly, there is the clear possibility that the erosion of the government monopoly on the use of force is accelerating rather than decelerating. Secondly, the possibility that the erosion of citizens’ faith in the government to protect them within the boundaries of the constitution and the law is equally accelerating, rather than decelerating. Thirdly, there is the need to act with urgency and to at least acknowledge, if not address, what may underlie the persistent tensions in the Rift Valley, namely the legitimate grievances of so-called ‘host communities’ and the equally legitimate fears of so-called ‘settler communities’. Nobody can ever be safe in the Rift Valley unless and until that is done – until in fact, peace and reconciliation are approached far more deeply and fundamentally than current exhortations to basically ‘love your neighbour’ regardless.

Owning conventional arms is a crime unless owners are duly authorised and registered. Trading in conventional arms is equally a crime unless the traders are also duly authorised and registered. Using conventional arms offensively is a crime as well. That should be evident – but apparently it is not.

The first two conclusions are, or should be, of grave concern to us all. If with essentially makeshift and traditional weapons (farming implements as well as bows and arrows) over 1,000 Kenyans were killed in such a short space of time in 2008, imagine the numbers of deaths we would register if conventional small arms and assault weapons were to be used. The government should with haste investigate the BBC’s and the follow-up stories. In doing so, it should be careful not to penalise and punish those essentially trying to blow the whistle – especially when, as should be obvious, those most concerned about blowing the whistle have the least capacity to verify the evidence. There is a balance between trying to raise the red flag and unnecessary alarm. What weighs the balance is the public interest – and in this case, evidently, the broader public interest prevails.

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* 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.
* This article was first published in The East African.

The dreaded time in Kenya’s culture of impunity

Okello Oculi

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/59521

With the 30 September 2009 deadline breached for Kenya’s squabbling politicians to set up a local tribunal to try ‘those who bear the greatest responsibility for the violence which claimed more than 1,500 lives’ following the December 2007 elections, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was back in Kenya to ensure that the deadline he had established remained a priority for the country. Annan had arrived in February 2008 to mediate between leaders of the ruling Party of National Union (PNU) and the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) over who should rule Kenya and on what terms of engagement. In the context of a blazing countrywide conflict that caused violent deaths of over 1,300 people and uprooted over 650,000 from homes and means of livelihoods, the challenge of achieving peace and acceptable governance was enormous.

The diplomatic team consisting of Kofi Annan, Gracia Machel (wife of slain Mozambican leader Samora Machel and now wife of Nelson Mandela) and former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa had put forth four laws to guide the road to Kenya’s salvation. These consisted of: Urgent land reform (to remove a major economic source of inter-ethnic conflict); vigorous fights against corruption by indicting corrupt officials; achieving drastic electoral reform and ending a culture of impunity in Kenya’s electoral politics through not punishing wielders of violence. Following relentless protests by civil society groups and parliament’s refusal to endorse his reappointment by President Mwai Kibaki as Kenya’s anti-corruption boss, Aaron Ringera voluntarily resigned, thereby opening the way for the creation of an agency that would not only investigate corruption but which would also have powers to prosecute offenders. In a swift move, a meeting between Kofi Annan, President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga resulted in an announcement that major offenders would stand for trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Two issues must be noted with this turn of events. The troika of Kibaki, Annan and Odinga met after their staff aides had been sent out of the room. Pressures from intransigent lobbyists were thereby eliminated and the leaders could talk without fear of being quoted for political capital. The lesson here is that too often the media, civil society and the general public focus only on political figureheads and shield powerful officials or ‘special assistants’ from the heat of visible public accountability. In Kenya’s history the notorious trio of Mbiyu Koinange, Bruce Mackenzie and Charles Njonjo were blamed by Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Joe Garba for the collapse of the East African Community (EAC). By 1976 the trio had succeeded in keeping President Jomo Kenyatta, who was by this time crippled by old age, usefully uninformed about their actions and real events in the rush to break up the EAC. In the current crisis there are pressures from top security officials and politicians with loyalties to the PNU and the ODM who have good reason to be afraid of losing the cover of protests and support by their local communities once they are carried away to The Hague. The media, civil society, academia and the general public must vigorously take accountability to the doorsteps of ‘advisers’, aides and lobbyists.

The second issue is to review what is to be gained from the departure of Aaron Ringera. As a parting gift he revealed that his commission had ‘recommended the prosecution of’ as many as 65 chief executives of public institutions, 11 permanent secretaries, four members of parliament and eight government ministers. That is a commendable record. He however lacked the legal mandate to act against them. This is information that Ringera should have given the public as soon as clamour against the seeming invincibility of corrupt officials began to build up and poison the country’s political culture. That he did not do so shielded Kibaki, Raila and parliament from the need to amend the mandate of the commission to include prosecution. Corrupt officials benefited from that lack of action.

It also served as a diversion of attention away from the more deadly issue of a mindset which says that Kenya’s presidency will never leave the hands of the Kikuyu or the House of Mumbi. In the run up to the 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections, several taxi drivers told me in Nairobi that for the next one thousand years Raila would never rule Kenya. Similar sentiments had fuelled the most horrendous crimes of apartheid in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, white settler dictatorships in Algeria and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), black settler rule in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the genocide that traumatised Rwanda and Burundi. Islamists in Somalia wear the same attitudinal garments of political death. Similar attitudes by Tutsi or Banyamulenge groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were reported to have contributed to the over four million deaths (since 1998) that echo the reign of terror of King Leopold II of Belgium in the unfortunate land. With the end of the Cold War, merchants of conflict in Africa have only been too glad to ignite flames out of this attitude and to gain fortunes from it by selling arms and ammunition to combatants. In Sierra Leone, Liberia and the DRC international and local mafias have had rich harvests of gold, diamonds, tantalite, timber and other natural resources. The media, intellectuals, politicians and civil society groups in Kenya must accordingly force this matter onto the agenda of political discourse. The African Union’s pre-emptive diplomacy must be urgently set in motion.

As the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo looms in Kenya, there is also talk of some politicians and security officials giving out arms to internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kenya. With a huge mass of over 650,000 victims, the post-election violence became a potential recruiting point of those who saw armed revenge as an option. European and American entrepreneurs in the political economy of violence in Africa can be assumed to be eyeing Kenya with much appetite. Civil society groups in Kenya must, with utmost urgency, bring this matter into public discourse across Kenya as well as eastern and central African regions.

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, L. Muthoni Wanyeki, Irungu Houghton and Brian Kagoro were a most active quartet in the diplomatic drama that not only yielded intervention by the African Union team led by Kofi Annan, but also shaped their perception of Kenya’s electoral history since 1988 that had formed the backdrop to the violence. Their most important impact was to drum up focus on the legacy of Kenya’s politicians directing periodic macabre orchestras of ‘hacking down husbands with machetes, rungus, poisonous arrows, spears and bullets’ and arson in the elections of 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2002. The politicians had also begun to assume that they would return to ‘business as usual’ in their politics without anybody calling them to account for their responsibility for violence. Tajudeen would today call for active intervention from all over Africa in mending Kenya’s affairs instead of returning to a slumber until the next television pictures of rivers of blood and flames that wreck lives and homes in that country.

This is a time of dread for those nurtured in impunity in Kenya’s politics. It remains one of dread for those who lost their land and means of employment since the British colonial invasion and administration robbed them of their ancestral lands. Kofi Annan’s reform vision must bring that dread to those who inherited ownership of vast tracts of lands combined with a tradition of using political power to deny millions of people access to land and employment. His success would be a new dimension in pan-African nation-building and the invention of good economic and political governance. It would be a most appealing confluence between the political dreams of Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, two young African intellectuals who met in Manchester in 1945 to reinvent Africa.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* 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.

Keith Goddard

Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/59590

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum is sad to announce the tragic death of our colleague, Keith Goddard, a champion of human and LGBT rights in Zimbabwe and on the world stage. Sadly, after a short illness, Keith died last night, Friday 9^th October at St Anne's Hospital in Harare. Keith sat on our Board of Directors and was the Director of our member organisation, Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ).

cc PNTGMKeith joined GALZ as a member in 1992 and was appointed as the Programmes Manager in 1996. In 2006 he was appointed as the Director, a position that he held till the time of his death. During his life and time with GALZ, Keith was instrumental in highlighting the challenges experienced by LGBT people. Although of small stature he had a voice that commanded authority and silenced any room he was in. Keith dedicated his life to the advancement of LGBT rights, human rights and his passion for music. The struggle for LGBT rights is a difficult struggle and in many instances in the history of GALZ Keith stood gallantly in the frontline. He dared where most men would not go. At the time of his death, Keith was serving as a board member for the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, The Centre and the Zimbabwe College of Music.

May your soul Rest In Peace dear friend and comrade.

Keith Goddard (1960-2009): Champion of LGBT rights

GALZ

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/59526

It is with deep regret and sorrow that Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) informs all our friends and partners of the passing away of our director - Keith Goddard, one of the champions for the struggle for lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people's rights in Zimbabwe.

Keith joined GALZ as a member in 1992 and was appointed as the Programmes Manager in 1996. In 2006 he was appointed as the Director, a position that he held till the time of his death. During his life and time with GALZ, Keith was instrumental in highlighting the challenges experienced by LGBT people. Although of small stature he had a voice that commanded authority and silenced any room he was in. Keith dedicated his life to the advancement of LGBT rights, human rights and his passion for music. The struggle for LGBT rights is a difficult struggle and in many instances in the history of GALZ Keith stood gallantly in the frontline.

He dared where most men would not go. At the time of his death, Keith was serving as a board member for the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, The Centre and the Zimbabwe College of Music. May your soul Rest In Peace dear friend and comrade.

Ramanbhai Khandubhai Naik

2009-10-17

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/oct/13/rk-naik-obituary

RK Naik, who has died aged 81, was the only Indian to have served as a member of the central committee of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu), the resistance movement started in the then Southern Rhodesia in 1961. Ramanbhai Khandubhai Naik was born in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia; his parents had migrated there from Gujarat, India. When RK was three, his father died during one of his visits to India. The family stayed on and RK completed his matriculation in India before returning to Southern Rhodesia at the age of 16.

Discriminating against the Baka of Central Africa and protest in the townships

Dibussi Tande

2009-10-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/59518

Bombastic Element

Bunmi Oloruntoba posts a video on, and comments about discriminatory practices against the Baka of the Republic of Central Africa:
“Unrelated to the Baka of Cameroon, but foragers and hunters like them, the Baka populations of the CAR still suffer from a racial ideology shaped during the colonial era by the colonizers who labelled them pygmies, and that ideology which constructs their difference into inferiority, like a baton, was picked up by their farming and herding neighbors, the Bantu, who have continued to stereotype the Baka as ‘physically and socially inferior, as unclean, untrustworthy, immoral, lazy and stupid, even as not fully human’…
Hence, the Baka are exposed to high levels of violence, have very unequal access to justice, and have had to endure racial prejudice in every aspect of their lives…
The racialization of the Baka illustrates why race often isn't about skin color or any discernible features; rather race has to do with human beings in a world of limited resources; we create race or racialize others as a means to exploit them, preserve what is ours or expropriate what is theirs. Therefore the weapon is difference -- any system of recognizing or appropriating difference can be put into play when it comes to racializing others.”


Beautiful Mind


cc Charles King
Charles King writes about the harrowing experience of being caught in the middle of the ongoing service delivery protests in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province:
“Emthonjeni township, Machadodorp: ‘We are fucking tired of poor service delivery,’ is what the few hundred community members protesting outside Emthonjeni were chanting in my face as I barely stood my ground - despite, quite honestly, my insides turning to water. This was on the barricaded and burning R36 (between Machadodorp and Carolina) earlier today.
I had driven slowly around barricades as the police quickly retreated back to Machadodorp for reinforcements; I had to know what - in the community's eyes - this was all about. But what I felt right then was pent up anger spat into my face; I was, suddenly, the enemy. (My thoughts included - 'Just how many journalists have died in identical situations...and was it worth it?')
A pen, a spiral-bound notebook, my camera, and an earnest face prepared to listen might have helped me this time. Also my back was against the wall, this time an impenetrable and writhing circle of chanting human beings. Then, thank God, one woman in the crowd screeched out my name – ‘Charleseee...!’ - and ran me into her arms. This was always-smiling Gloria from Seattle Coffee at Millys on the N4, who had served me great Cafe Mocha's on countless occasions. "He's a journalist, he's a friend," she screamed back at the crowd. That was the turning point... in my favour.”

Project Diaspora writes about a recent decision by 14 Somali villages to publicly renounce Female Genital Mutilation:
“In Puntland, Somalia where an estimated 98% of the population practices FGC, this declaration provides new way forward. 14 villages in this Northeast Zone of Somalia, made history on Monday as they became the first group of communities in the region to collectively pledge to abandon the practice of female genital cutting (FGC).
These communities participated in an empowering three-year education program implemented by the NGO Tostan in collaboration with UNICEF and the Government of Puntland…
Approximately 2,000 people attended the declaration held in a soccer stadium in the city of Garowe…
The particular circumstances in Somalia – namely, the near universal practice of FGC – makes this declaration of abandonment particularly significant. The villagers from Puntland join a growing movement in which over 4,000 communities have followed a similar process of education and community outreach, followed by a public declaration for the abandonment of this harmful traditional practice. It is anticipated that similar public declarations will be made by neighboring communities in Somaliland in the coming months.”

Idea Lab

Guy Berger of Rhodes University blogs on attempts the Namibian and Botswana governments to muzzle criticism via new media, namely mobile phones and blogs:
“Comments and text messages in particular, are causing umbrage in Namibian government circles. Their unhappiness highlights the historic shift of media away from unidirectional, univocal information.
This case underlines the politics entailed when the media becomes a platform for broader communication, which is exactly what's happening with mobile phones in some African countries.
Things came to a head in Namibia in early October at a political rally… A torrent of abuse and threats were issued at the event, and they emanated from the Namibian minister of justice who… launched a racist attack on the editor of The Namibian, Gwen Lister, and accused this celebrated journalist of personally writing the critical SMS messages that have been published in the paper…
What's scary is that in next door Botswana, a draconian law was passed which requires the registration of all media, including bloggers. The system of course could allow for their de-registration and criminalization.
Despite these heavy-handed approaches, the genie of user-generated content is out of the bottle. A totalitarian regime would be required to stop all SMS messaging in order to prevent political criticism, and both Namibia and Botswana count themselves as democracies.



cc EduTech
On the World Bank Blog, Michael Trucano ponders on what improving internet connectivity in Africa will mean to education:
“What does, or might, all of this improved connectivity mean for students and teachers in Africa? How can we keep track of all of the related changes happening throughout the continent?...
Many people see great potential for advances in information and communication technologies to help provide new tools and approaches to educational practices going forward, and indeed the 'potential' is undeniable. Moving beyond the rhetoric, however, it is a challenge to keep track of what is actually happening…
Where all this will lead, no one knows, but there is no denying that we are witnessing encouraging developments. For those interested in the potentially transformative value of the use of technology in education, there will be much to learn from the experiences of African educators and students in the coming years.”



Scribbles from the Den


cc Dibussi Tande

Dibussi Tande investigates how British business interests in West Africa tried to use elected officials to influence the outcome of the decolonization of the British Southern Cameroons:
“Practically all books and articles on the decolonization of the British Southern Cameroons focus primarily on the internal and external political factors that ultimately led to the February 11, 1961 UN-sponsored plebiscite. There are very few studies that focus primarily or exclusively on how British businesses tried to influence the outcome of the decolonization process. This is quite intriguing, considering, as S. E. Stockwell has pointed out in the case of the Gold Coast, that ‘British companies were much more than by-standers in the transition from colony to independence’…
This point was driven home recently when I came across Conservative MP Sir John Tilney’s robust pre- and post-plebiscite defense of the independence option for Southern Cameroons – the (in)famous “Third Option” which was not included in the 1961 plebiscite questions…
Without doubt, the strident support for full Southern Cameroons independence in the British parliament and elsewhere (rather than independence by joining either the Federal Republic of Nigeria or the French Cameroons) was not always driven by altruistic motives, and in some cases had little to do with the actual interests of the people of Southern Cameroons. “

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

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

Russian outward FDI and its policy context

Andrei Panibratov and Kalman Kalotay

2009-10-17

http://www.vcc.columbia.edu/documents/FDIProfile-Russia.pdf

Outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from Russia often surprises outside observers by its landmark deals. One of them was the purchase in September 2009 of a 55% stake in General Motors’ German affiliate Opel by a consortium of the Canadian car maker Magna and the Russian state-owned bank Sberbank. The latter is the largest creditor of the Russian car maker GAZ, and may represent its commercial interests in the contract. With this deal, Russia has bought into the industrial heartland of the world economy and could potentially access more advanced technology. This acquisition hints at the growth of Russian OFDI in general, which has prospered despite fears in many host countries that the investors are subject to Russian political interference, a fear that recently announced Russian policy intentions may allay.

Cabinet to meet without MDC

2009-10-18

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE59H06920091018

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will chair a weekly cabinet meeting on Tuesday without members from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's party, which boycotted the unity government last week, state media reported on Sunday. Tsvangirai announced on Friday that his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party would disengage from Mugabe's "dishonest and unreliable" ZANU-PF party in the country's coalition cabinet set up in February.

MDC boycotts unity government

2009-10-18

http://tinyurl.com/yhkx963

Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has said his Movement of Democratic Congress (MDC) party has "disengaged" from the unity government over the treatment of his senior aide. He said all outstanding issues of a power-sharing deal had to be dealt with before the MDC would work with Zanu-PF.

Africa: Open letter to Security Council members regarding the situation in Guinea

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/59586

Dear Ambassador,
As you are aware, the last two weeks have seen dramatic levels of violence in Guinea. A large part of this violence has been specifically aimed at women, particularly sexual violence. Reports tell of women being raped in public, being gang-raped, and being sexually assaulted with guns and knives, by members of the Guinean armed forces.
Dear Ambassador,
As you are aware, the last two weeks have seen dramatic levels of violence in Guinea. A large part of this violence has been specifically aimed at women, particularly sexual violence.

Reports tell of women being raped in public, being gang-raped, and being sexually assaulted with guns and knives, by members of the Guinean armed forces.
We appreciate the statement to the press that Ambassador Rice, on behalf of the Security Council in her role as President, delivered on 30th September, 2009 on the situation in Guinea. The urgent call to authorities to end the violence was particularly important, as was the support that the Council expressed for an international investigation, echoing a similar call made by ECOWAS. We applaud these initiatives, and hope that a thorough investigation and appropriate measures will be promptly forthcoming. We ask you to support special attention to acts of violence against women in this investigation, and in any measures subsequently taken by both ECOWAS and the African Union. Given the nature of these crimes in Guinea, advisable measures could include a cessation of military and police weapons transfers.

As a member of the Security Council, which recently voted unanimously pass SCR 1888, reiterating the cessation of the use of sexual violence in conflict; and which voted last week to unanimously pass SCR 1889, pressing for the participation of women in the resolution of conflict and rebuilding; we ask you to continue your support of the current ECOWAS and AU efforts to resolve this situation in line with the principles these resolutions embody.

Namely, these resolutions reassert and reaffirm the need for both UN and regional actors to ensure that “all reports of sexual violence committed by civilians or by military personnel are thoroughly investigated and the alleged perpetrators brought to justice” (1888 OP 7; also 1889 OP 3), and to include women in efforts to prevent and end conflict (1888 OP 16; 1889 OP 1).
With the current efforts of President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, particularly in light of Burkina Faso’s support of the important role women can play in conflict resolution processes, we look forward to the meaningful inclusion of women in any negotiations that take place, and the inclusion of women’s rights and interests on the agenda of any efforts to resolve this situation.
As the Security Council recently affirmed, the use of sexual violence can “significantly exacerbate situations of armed conflict and may impede the restoration of international security.” (SCR 1888 OP 1) We hope that you will use the full weight of your position on the Security Council to ensure that the survivors of these acts of sexual violence receive true justice, and do all in your power to ensure that the situation is speedily resolved in line with the Security Council’s statement to the press of 30 September 2009.
We urge the Security Council to remain true to its words and “continue to follow this grave situation closely,” including by taking decisive action to redress the situation as appropriate and in line with all Security Council resolutions that address the rights of women in conflict situations.
Sincerely,
Sarah Taylor
COORDINATOR
NGO WORKING GROUP ON WOMEN PEACE AND SECURITY
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
CONSORTIUM ON GENDER, SECURITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
FEMMES AFRICA SOLIDARITÉ
GLOBAL ACTION TO PREVENT WAR
GLOBAL JUSTICE CENTER
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
INTERNATIONAL ACTION NETWORK ON SMALL ARMS
INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S PROGRAM AT THE OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S TRIBUNE CENTRE
WOMEN’S REFUGEE COMMISSION
WOMEN’S ACTION FOR NEW DIRECTIONS
WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM

Global: Empower women to stem global hunger, say experts

2009-10-18

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86602

Countries where women's literacy rates and access to education are significantly worse than men's tend to have higher levels of hunger, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). "Wherever women are not empowered you see high levels of hunger," Suresh Babu, a senior research fellow with IFPRI, said. The institute’s 2009 Global Hunger Index (GHI) calls for policy action on gender empowerment, social protection and governance to improve food security.

Global: Gender and Soccer World Cup 2010

Call for personal accounts and opinions

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/59581

Gender Links is commissioning commentary and opinion pieces and personal accounts or ‘I’ stories around different thematic areas on the impact of the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 on the advancement of gender equality and women’s economic empowerment throughout the SADC region. The aim of the contributions are to highlight the gender dimensions of the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 through people’s lived experiences and relevant opinion pieces.
Gender Links is commissioning commentary and opinion pieces and personal accounts or ‘I’ stories around different thematic areas on the impact of the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 on the advancement of gender equality and women’s economic empowerment throughout the SADC region. The aim of the contributions are to highlight the gender dimensions of the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 through people’s lived experiences and relevant opinion pieces.

Background
The FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 is one of the most important economic events for South Africa and the Southern Africa region over the next two years and has the potential to offer women in the region opportunities to participate in and access a range of economic opportunities as well as to ensure a social legacy from 2010. A concerted effort is required to consult women regarding how they can access economic and other strategic sectors of this event. Delivery of the FIFA Soccer World Cup will happen at the regional and local level and local government, as the sphere closest to the people, is critical to the economic empowerment of communities in general and of women in particular.

The recently signed and adopted SADC Protocol on Gender and Development, foregrounds the need for SADC countries to address and advance the economic empowerment of women in light of the economic realities faced by women of the region and their often dire economic conditions. Articles 15 to 19 in the SADC Gender and Development Protocol seek to provide “for the equal participation of women in economic policy formulation and implementation.” These articles have provisions and targets on entrepreneurship, access to credit and public procurement contracts, as well as stipulations on trade policies, access to property, resources and employment.

Contributions are invited under the following themes:
1. The current and potential role of the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 in advancing gender equality

* The active participation and creation of space for women in decision-making structures in all sectors of the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010, particularly those relating to economic opportunities in the form of procurement and employment and the creation of new and additional economic opportunities particularly at the local level, and any other relevant issues.
* Is there evidence of deliberate mechanisms that have developed by local government to ensure the inclusion of women in local economic development initiatives surrounding 2010? What mechanisms have been used to enable a greater participation of women?

2. Localising Soccer 2010

* How can local government use 2010 as a flagship project for benefitting women’s economic needs?
* What is the role of local government in ensuring that women have access to and participate in all sectors that relate to the Soccer World Cup 2010?
* What will the potential impact of the Soccer World Cup 2010, positive or negative, be for women in the SADC region?

3. Economic opportunities (procurement, employment, trade and entrepreneurship) for women in the planning and delivery of the FIFA Soccer World Cup

* What is the quantity and monetary value of contracts going out to women’s businesses?
* Are there specific sectors where women dominate in regards to 2010? Which ones and what are the reasons for the dominance of women in some sectors?
* Does gender disaggregated data on employment for the delivery of the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 exist? Where are women most located in terms of employment sectors and employment levels?
* Do targets exist in terms of access to employment, procurement and trade opportunities for women in the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010?
* How could the gendered division of labour impact on women’s ability to access economic opportunities offered by the World Cup?

4. Human trafficking and/or sex work
· What migration patterns might develop as a result of World Cup 2010?
· Vulnerabilities of women and children to sexual exploitation across borders
· How is the advent of the regional visa for the World Cup likely affect women?
· In what ways could the long-distance transport sector enable the sexual exploitation of women during the World Cup? Which other sectors could perpetuate the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women?

5. Gender Based Violence

* In what ways can the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 exacerbate the occurrence of gender based violence?
* Which specific types of gender based violence are likely to be most prevalent? Why?
* In what ways could a major international event of this nature be used to galvanise support for ending gender violence?
* How are governments and civil society prioritising and responding to this issue?
* What should governments’ and civil society’s response be to this?

Submissions may be made in following categories:
1) Personal accounts or “I” stories
· The “I” Stories are a series of first hand accounts of how people have been impacted by Soccer 2010.
· The “I” stories can be published under a pseudonym if required.
· The stories must be around 800 words.
· Final stories must be received by the 30 October 2009.
· Please submit your “I” story to Naomi Blight on justiceintern@genderlinks.org.za by the 30 October to receive full details of requirements. If you would like to discuss your story before writing please contact Naomi.

2) Opinion and commentary pieces
· Analytical perspectives of the problems and possibilities of Gender and Soccer 2010.
· Successful stories will be published in Gender and Soccer 2010 book and in the mainstream media.
· The pieces must be around 800 words long.
· They must tie into the themes as outlined above.
· Pieces must be received by 30 October.
· Please submit your “I” story to Naomi Blight on justiceintern@genderlinks.org.za by the 30 October to receive full details of requirements. If you would like to discuss your story before writing please contact Naomi.

All submissions and enquires should be directed to:
Naomi Blight
Justice Intern
Email: justiceintern@genderlinks.org.za
Tel.: +27 11 622 2877
Fax: +27 11 622 3742

Senegal: Women in peace-building

2009-10-17

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCnnQUImK7Y

This is a video featuring a presentation on the role of women in peace-building efforts in the Casamance by Mme. Seynabou Male Cissé, coordinator of USOFORAL. She was invited to present on this topic by Leadership Africa USA that is running a leadership training program for young women in Casamance. The presentation is in French.

Somalia: Women take on men's jobs to feed their families

2009-10-18

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86584

Khadijo Mahamud, a mother of five, goes to Bakara market every day to look for work, despite the constant shelling. Her youngest child is 10 months old but Mahamud knows she has no choice but to leave him with her 10-year-old and venture out to find food for the family. “I have to leave the children and try and find something for them to eat; I will do almost any job," she told IRIN on 14 October. "Some days I get to wash clothes, but other days I work as a porter or clean stores.”

Africa: Arrest Bashir - ICC

2009-10-18

http://www.afrol.com/articles/34435

The international court has urged the Ugandan authorities to arrest the indicted Sudanese President, Omar Al-Bashir if he comes to Kampala next week for the African Union meeting. The International Criminal Court statement comes a day after President Yoweri Museveni said Uganda will not execute the international arrest warrant on President Al Bashir at the summit.

Guinea: ICC Prosecutor confirms situation is under examination

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yl6ujml

In the wake of recent events in Guinea and in light of information related to the alleged commission of crimes under ICC jurisdiction, ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has confirmed that the situation in Guinea is under preliminary examination by his Office.

Malawi: Police force HIV tests for sex workers

2009-10-18

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48800

It was, Malawian police say, a routine sweep for criminals at one of the country’s busiest border posts. They were looking for criminals. But when police arrested 14 prostitutes as part of their search, and then allegedly forcefully tested them for HIV and charged them for "deliberately trading in sex while having a sexually transmitted disease", human rights organisations had to step in.

Morocco: Government urged to respect rights of arrested Sahrawi lawyers

2009-10-18

http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/12049.html

On 8 October, seven Sahrawi advocates from Western Sahara were arrested by Moroccan police at the Mohamed V Airport in Casablanca, Morocco and remain in an undisclosed location. The advocates were returning from a trip to Algeria where they visited Sahrawi refugee camps in the southwest of the country.

Africa : The AU IDPs Convention

More protection for the internally displaced in Africa

2009-10-18

http://www.fidh.org/The-African-Union-IDPs-Convention-a-unique

The African Union IDPs Convention would be the first international instrument of its kind and would send a signal to the rest of the world about the seriousness with which Africa, home to around half of the global total of internally displaced persons (IDPs), considers the issue.

Africa: Hundreds of Sudanese refugees deported from Lebanon

2009-10-17

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=107311

Some 260 Sudanese refugees jailed for entering Lebanon illegally have been deproted, according to a Sudanese Embassy official. The refugees were sent back on a Sudan Airways flight, the official said. In a statement to the Sudan News Agency, head of Sudan’s Expatriates Affairs Amin Taha al-Girain said 2,871 Sudanese nationals had also been voluntarily returned from Libya.

Africa: Shining the spotlight on the displaced

2009-10-17

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86585

Forty years after the rights of Africa’s refugees were enshrined in a landmark convention, the continent’s leaders are due to make legal history again by adopting a new instrument to assist people displaced within the borders of their own country. The African Convention on the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa is the main agenda for the heads of state summit on refugees, returnees and IDPs in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, from 19-23 October.

Angola: Retaliatory expulsions reach a new peak

2009-10-17

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86567

The tit-for-tat expulsion of thousands of Angolan refugees living in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the repatriation of thousands of undocumented Congolese migrants working in Angola, is raising fears of a "humanitarian catastrophe" in the making. According to ANGOP, the Angolan state-run media outlet, the number of Angolans forcefully removed from the DRC since a large-scale repatriation operation kicked off in August 2009 had topped 23,000 by 13 October.

Burundi: Review Rwandans’ asylum claims

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yk9m25d

The Government of Burundi should immediately evaluate the claims of up to 400 Rwandan asylum seekers and stop all efforts to coerce them to leave the country, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch also called on Rwandan authorities to stop pressuring Burundi to force the asylum seekers to return to Rwanda.

DRC: Do not forget the displaced in eastern Congo

2009-10-18

http://www.unhcr.org/4ad88d336.html

Comparing the hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres on Friday urged the international community not to forget the Congolese in their hour of need.

Uganda: Camp closures worry HIV-positive IDPs

2009-10-18

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86573

The imminent closure of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in northern Uganda is causing concern among HIV-positive residents, who fear they may not have access to vital health services when they return to their villages. The decommissioning of the IDP camps started in the region on 1 October, with six closed in Gulu district.

South Africa: Abahlali baseMjondolo and shackdwellers everywhere win at the ConCourt

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/59583

Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement of South Africa, an organisation representing thousands of people who live in informal settlements, and its President, Mr Sibusiso Zikode, approached the KwaZulu-Natal High Court, Durban, challenging the constitutionality of the KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act. The High Court dismissed the challenge.
Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement of South Africa, an organisation representing thousands of people who live in informal settlements, and its President, Mr Sibusiso Zikode, approached the KwaZulu-Natal High Court, Durban, challenging the constitutionality of the KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act. The High Court dismissed the challenge.

The applicants made two contentions before this Court. They claimed first that the whole provincial Act was invalid because the KwaZulu-Natal legislature had no provincial power to make the law because it trespassed into land tenure a legislative competence reserved for the national legislature.

They also contended that section 16 of the Act was inconsistent with the Constitution and invalid. Section 16 gives the Member of the Executive Council of the province power to publish a notice in the provincial gazette determining a period within which an owner or person in charge of land or a building that is occupied by unlawful occupiers must institute proceedings to evict the occupiers under the PIE Act. If the owner or person fails to comply, the municipality must bring proceedings to evict the occupiers.

Yacoob J, writing for a unanimous Court on the legislative competence issue, found that the Act was within the power of the province to pass laws on housing. He pointed out that the Act is not concerned with evictions alone but with the elimination of slum conditions by upgrading and relocation. He also pointed out that the Act placed detailed responsibilities on municipalities as well as the Member of the Executive Council responsible for housing in the province. A slum is a home in which people live. An Act concerned mainly with improving the circumstances in which people lived is concerned with housing. The Court therefore rejected the first contention and held that the provincial legislature had the power to pass the provincial Act.

On the constitutional validity of section 16 of the Act, Moseneke DCJ, writing for the majority (with Langa CJ, Cameron J, Mokgoro J, Ngcobo J, Nkabinde J, O’Regan J, Sachs J, Skweyiya J and Van der Westhuizen J concurring), held that section 16 of the Act is inconsistent with the Constitution and invalid.

Moseneke DCJ found that section 16 compels an owner of a building or land or the municipality within whose jurisdiction the building or land is located to institute eviction proceedings against unlawful occupiers even in circumstances where the requirements of the PIE Act, which protects unlawful occupiers against arbitrary evictions, may not be met.

Moseneke DCJ noted that section 16 of the Act will make residents of informal settlements, who are invariably unlawful occupiers, more vulnerable to evictions should an MEC decide to issue a notice under section 16.

Moseneke DCJ also concluded that the power given to the MEC to issue a notice is overbroad and irrational because it applies to any unlawful occupier on any land or in any building even if it is not a slum and is not properly related to the purpose of the Act, which is to eliminate or to prevent the re-emergence of slums.

Accordingly, the majority judgment granted an order declaring that section 16 of the Act is inconsistent with section 26 of the Constitution and invalid.

Yacoob J dissented on this second issue. He found that the contested provision could be read subject to all the safeguards provided by the Constitution and the PIE Act. He held that, on a proper construction of the Act, an owner or municipality had to comply with the PIE Act and all other relevant legislation before an eviction could be ordered. Neither the municipality nor the owner could evict unless the evidence at their disposal satisfied these requirements. The section was therefore consistent with the Constitution.

Emerging Powers news roundup

Stephen Marks

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/emplayersnews/59597

In this week's emerging powers news, focus shifts to China's dealings with various African countries, notably Guinea, which has been under the spotlight for the brutal suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations. Elsewhere, a GreenPeace report accuses Chinese and under multinationals of breaching environmental regulations.http://admin.pambazuka.org/newsletter/a_admin.php?action=new-form
Guinea, Ghana And Other Deals
Guinea’s military government, facing international sanctions and heavy strictures over a mass killing of unarmed demonstrators, was highlighting a recent agreement with a Chinese company that could provide it with billions of dollars. More

But while human rights groups slammed the $7bn mining deal, China kept a low profile, not confirming the announcement by Capt. Moussa "Dadis" Camara who seized power in a coup in December.

David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso and an expert on Chinese-African relations, said the timing of the announcement was strategic on Guinea's part.

"The fact that the announcement came from Guinea and not Hong Kong or China is important," he said. "I can't imagine that China would want to use this timing to announce it." More

As Daniel Howden pointed out in the Independent; ‘There are now some 800 Chinese companies operating in Africa and the investors in talks in Conakry are not from Beijing but from the Hong Kong-based China Investment Fund. Yet only two months ago officials in Beijing said that China would not be investing in Guinea’.

"It's not clear if the CIF has the support of Beijing," said Dr Chris Alden, author of China in Africa. "Just like ordinary Western actors in Africa, China has independent actors who take decisions without reference to central government."More

Later Guinea confirmed that it was ‘in talks with China Investment Fund’ on the $7 billion deal.. More

The Ghanaian government was reported to be ‘divided’ over whether to cut a deal with a leading Chinese oil company or with Exxon Mobil Corp. to develop a giant offshore oil field. More

Nairobi and Beijing are mulling a huge project to develop a port on the Kenyan coast and a corridor creating a new export route for China's oil in Sudan's secessionist south, the Financial Times.

China's involvement would come as an alternative to a project floated last year in which Qatar would have invested 3.5 billion dollars in the port in exchange for a lease on a huge tract of land to grow crops.
The newspaper said the ambitious project would be a key issue during a trip to China by Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga. More

At the same time, more than 40 Kenyan businesspeople left the country for a two-week trip to China where they will explore various investments opportunities. More

South Africa and Kenya plan to launch a joint trade commission by the end of the year to guide investors on opportunities.. Once the Commission is launched the team will be expected to facilitate the launch of a joint chamber of commerce to be in the hands of the private sector. More

Singapore has sent its largest ever delegation of local companies to Sub-Saharan Africa to seek business opportunities. More

China Railway Engineering Corp. and Sinohydro Corp. signed an amendment to a $9 billion agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Wu Zexian, China’s ambassador to the central African country, announced.

Congo needed the Chinese parastatals to sign the changes in order to move closer to debt relief from the Paris Club and to have a $600-million International Monetary Fund loan program approved. The Washington-based lender previously said the deal could add to Congo’s $11 billion foreign debt. More


Bric Powers And Others
Economists at a prominent South African bank are excited about burgeoning investment by Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) in Africa. But they are vague on the question of how far it will benefit the majority of Africans. Ensuring this, they believe, is the responsibility of African states themselves. More

In particular Simon Freemantle, a Standard Bank economist, advised African governments to make the most of their relationships with these emerging economies. "There needs to be more proactivity from the African side" he argued More

South American and African leaders will meet in Kenya in December this
year to forge stronger cooperation between the two regions and discuss
their positions with regard to a number of pressing international
concerns.

A statement from Kenya's foreign ministry said on Monday the
South-South Cooperation Summit which will be held between Dec. 1-3 in
Nairobi will bring together delegates from Africa and South America. More

After President Putin’s China visit resulted in outline agreement on massive oil and gas deals, Time Magazine argued that Russia and China’s old alliance now hinges on energy. More

The financing of a joint Africa-EU development initiative could be headed for an operational shift as leaders press for an independent Pan-African kitty to bankroll projects launched under it. More

India and China
New Delhi is objecting to Chinese projects in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir after Beijing protested a visit by India's premier to Arunachal Pradesh state, portions of which China claims.
[url= More]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-india-china-tiff15-2009oct15,0,6646753.story/]More[/url][/url]

The India-China border dispute could escalate into a broader conflict. China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory. And most of those claims are tangled up with Tibet. More

Environment
Eighteen top multinational and Chinese corporations, including Shell and Sinopec, violated a new Chinese environmental regulation in its first year of enforcement, a Greenpeace report has shown.

“It is shocking that these companies that are leaders in their respective industries did not even manage to obey the most basic environmental regulation in China,” said Tianjie Ma, Senior Campaigner for Greenpeace China.

“The public has a right to know about what these corporations are discharging in the rivers and lakes around their communities and what risks they face.” More

Developing countries have dropped long-standing demands for access to rich countries’ technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions, removing a big obstacle to an international deal on climate change, European officials said on Thursday.
In part, the shift reflects the reality of the world economy. The rush of western companies to set up factories building wind turbines and other low-carbon technology has made China one of the biggest exporters of environmental goods. More

Us/Global
The United States is going out of its way to build a warmer economic relationship with China and the strategy seems to be paying early dividends. In the past two weeks, China has endorsed a U.S.-backed commitment to rebalance the global economy, and impressed some European officials by backing up the pledge with specific steps it planned to take to reconfigure its own economy. More

The Obama administration said on Thursday that it had “serious concerns” about the value of the renminbi. But in keeping with the new climate, it once again stopped short of accusing China of manipulating its currency in a closely watched report to Congress. More

China's second-ranking military officer will travel to Washington later this month on a week-long visit designed to promote trust and avoid "misunderstandings," the Pentagon said. More

FOCAC
A new website for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was launched at a ceremony in Beijing. More

Great potential still needs to be explored in the cooperation and communication between Chinese and African non-governmental organizations (NGOs), heads of NGOs from the two sides said Wednesday here at a China-Africa NGO seminar.

The seminar, which invited 20 persons in charge of NGOs and ambassadors from eight African countries and more than ten Chinese NGOs, is the first high-level one linked to the Ministerial Conference of the forum.
More

China And The Media
The future of one of China's best-selling investigative magazines is at stake in an increasingly public battle for control that pits its envelope-pushing editor against her financial backers. More

The Chinese government’s effort to prevent dissident authors from taking part in the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair, an international showcase for freedom of expression, has raised the broader question of China’s attitude to the media. 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.

West Africa: Guinea boasts of deal with Chinese company

2009-10-17

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/world/africa/14guinea.html?_r=2&hp

Guinea’s military government, facing international sanctions and heavy strictures over a mass killing of unarmed demonstrators, is highlighting a recent agreement with a Chinese company that could provide it with billions of dollars.

Botswana: Ruling party claims election victory

2009-10-17

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-/1066/673578/-/135po8yz/-/index.html

Botswana’s ruling party claimed victory in the country’s general election on Saturday extending President Ian Khama’s rule over the world’s largest diamond producer for another five years. Khama’s Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), in power since independence from Britain in 1966, said it had secured a majority of the parliamentary constituencies. “We have reached the 29 out of the 57,” Langston Motsete, a member of the BDP’s election committee, told Reuters.

Burkina Faso: Sankarists denounce international support for Compaore regime

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yhxyyfl

Supporters of the slain military leader of Burkina Faso, Captain Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara, have denounced international support for the regime of President Blaise Compaore saying it was doing all it can for him "to rule for ever". Commemorating the 22nd anniversary of the assassination of Captain Sankara in the Burkinabe capital, Ouagadougou, they gathered at the Daghnoen cemetery, a district in Ouagadougou, around the tombs of their idol and his companions who were assassinated on 15 October, 1987 during a coup.

Côte d'Ivoire: Steps taken to resolve issue of unlisted voters

2009-10-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32593

The United Nations top envoy to the Côte d’Ivoire is slated to hold a series of meetings next week in a bid to jump-start a critical step threatening to disrupt the nation’s much-delayed presidential elections, scheduled for late next month. The initiative aims to give new impetus to efforts which would lead to the posting of the final voter list for the Côte d’Ivoire’s long-awaited polls, which were to have been held as far back as 2005 and are now scheduled for 29 November.

Guinea: AU sanctions Camara

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/ylmohs7

African Union's top security organ, the Peace and Security Council (PSC), said targeted sanctions against Guinean junta leader, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, and other senior leaders of his regime would take effect on 17 October, 2009. At its 206th session at which it discussed the situation in Guinea and Niger, the PSC said targeted sanctions against the Guinean junta leader would take effect on Saturday and the list of those to be targeted would be known after a regional Summit on the same issue.

Mozambique: Elections schedule tight

Mozambique political process bulletin

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/59575

Ballot papers and other electoral material will be given to provincial elections commissions on 18 October, which leaves just 9 days to distribute to polling stations before the vote. Two Mozambican companies are involved – Sotux is supplying voting booths and lamps and Académica is supplying the clear plastic ballot boxes. The rest of the material is coming from South African companies, Lithotech and Uniprint.
Even with helicopters,

The schedule is very tight

Ballot papers and other electoral material will be given to provincial elections commissions on 18 October, which leaves just 9 days to distribute to polling stations before the vote.

Two Mozambican companies are involved – Sotux is supplying voting booths and lamps and Académica is supplying the clear plastic ballot boxes. The rest of the material is coming from South African companies, Lithotech and Uniprint.

Printing ballot papers is complex. The presidential ballot papers are the same for the entire country, but the national parliament ballot papers are different for each province and the provincial assembly ballots are different for each district, because different parties are standing in different constituencies.

Materials will be packed by province and sent by lorry to the provincial capitals. In the province, the materials are split up by district, and the electoral registers – provided provincially – are added. Districts are responsible for sending materials out to individual polling stations, in the form of “kits” which fit in a single metal trunk for each polling station.

At the same time, the electoral administration secretariat, STAE, will be doing the final training of polling station staff. This will finish on 24 October, four days before the election, leaving little time for bureaucratic procedures including signing contracts.

Each polling station has its own team of 7 people, headed by a president. In 1999 and 2004, after training, the polling station team were given their kit to check at district level, and then were transported by lorry with their kits to the polling station. This process means that distribution of teams and kits to 12,694 polling stations can only begin on 25 October.

This is very tight, and although this is technically before the rainy season, there are often already showers by late October, which makes roads muddy. “Even with a normal situation, there are places which are far away and with difficult access, such as the islands in Cabo Delgado and places in Niassa that can only be reached by canoe. So we have opened a tender to hire four helicopters which will be positioned in the north, but could also provide support in the centre,” STAE head Felisberto Naife said in an interview in Domingo.



The count

Early results from districts,

but second national count

The outcome of the elections should be known on Sunday 1 November. But the National Elections Commission will do its own count, and will also reconsider the invalid votes (nulos), and must announce an official result by Friday 14 November.

The CNE approved its directive on the count on 27 September. It is not yet on the CNE website, but the key parts are now on ours: www.eleicoes2009.cip.org.mz

Ballot papers are counted within the polling station immediately after the close of voting. A summary results sheet (edital) and a more detailed report (acta) are compiled by each polling station. A copy of the edital is posted on the door of the polling station, and given to parties and observers. Copies of the edital and acta and all electoral material are then taken immediately to the city or district election commission. (CEC, CDE).

There will be two different tabulations. A national count (apuramento nacional) done by the various election commissions, and a separate computerised “provisional count” (contagem provisória) done by the CNE in Maputo.

At all levels, much of the actual work is to be done by STAE, supervised by the election commission.

Apuramento nacional

At district level, STAE and the CEC/CDE simply add up the totals on the polling station editais, referring to the more detailed actas only as needed. Results must be announced within three days of the close of voting, that is, Saturday 31 October, and posted at the election commission. Thus results will be clear by Sunday 1 November.

All materials are then passed up to provincial level, where the district and city results are simply added up and published within five days of the end of voting. The provincial election commission also calculates the allocation of seats in the provincial and national assemblies. At district and provincial level, the election commissions cannot delay if material is missing; the results must be based on the editais that are available. But the provincial election commissions are allowed to take “necessary measures” to resolve problems. Where editias are missing, the law allows election commissions to use signed copies which have been given to parties and others, and this seems an opening to allow election commissions to replace missing editais with party copies.

Provincial editais and actas are then sent to Maputo (on CD rom) where the CNE adds them up. However, the CNE also must reconsider all invalid votes (nulos), and those which are accepted as valid are then added to the sum of the provincial results. That is the national result, which must be announced within 15 days of the close of voting – Friday 14 November.

Nulos

Many voters, particularly those who are illiterate, mark the ballot paper improperly, for example voting for more than one candidate. These invalid ballots, known as nulos, are then rejected at the polling station and not included in the count. The law says that if the intent of the voter is clear, then the vote should be counted, but polling station staff are often quite strict. In the past, all invalid ballot papers have been sent to the CNE in Maputo for reconsideration.

The table below is for the nulos in 2004. At polling stations nearly 4% of presidential ballots and nearly 5% of legislative ballots were ruled invalid. In 2004, the CNE looked at nearly 300,000 individual ballot paper – sacks and sacks of them – and concluded that for one third the intent of the voter was clear and that the vote should be counted.

The law this year seemed to suggest that nulos might be reconsidered at district level. But the directive of the CNE says that, as in the past, all invalid ballot papers (plus the very few which are challenged by party representatives in polling stations) are to be sent directly to Maputo. With three elections instead of two, and a higher turnout likely, it seems possible that the CNE will received 500,000 ballot papers to check.

These numbers are so large that they could have an effect on the distribution of parliamentary seats between parties. In 2004, for example, in the legislative election Renamo received 21,510 requalified votes, compared to 16,123 for Frelimo.

Contagem provisória

At district and city level, as soon as information is received poling stations, copies of the data from the edital are then sent to the provincial election commission and then on to the CNE. The regulations are designed to encourage electronic transmission of the data (although a copy of each edital must eventually be sent to national level). CNE will then input the results from individual polling stations into a central computer system. There will be public computer terminals in the press centre where observers, party delegates and journalists can actually look up the data which has been input, and, for example, compare the input data to that from the independent parallel count.

The contagem provisória is intended to give the CNE an independent check on the process, but the agreed directive says that “in general” the apuramento nacional, based on district and provincial counts plus requalified nulos, takes precedence.

Invalid votes in 2004
Nulos at polling stations Accepted by CNE as valid Total votes in ballot boxes
Number % total votes Number % of nulos
Presidential 130,997 3.9% 42,682 33% 3,329,167
Legislative 158,875 4.8% 48,813 31% 3,322,051
TOTAL 289,872 4.4% 91,495 32% 6,651,218



Observer regulations

An English translation of the observer regulation (Deliberation n.° 108/CNE/2008 of 8 October) was posted on the CNE website on 17 September. It is on http://www.stae.org.mz/media/deliberacoes/Regul.Obs.rtf



Renamo official jailed in Ilha de Moçambique

José Carmona, Renamo party agent in Ilha de Moçambique, was jailed for six months by the district court on 8 October. He was convicted of four charges: vandalism, by invading the house of a Frelimo member; physical aggression against a man wearing a Frelimo shirt and a woman wearing a Frelimo capulana; and making death threats against Caetano Mutita Júnior, a former president of the municipal assembly who left Renamo and joined Frelimo.

Market traders block Dhlakama

Traders in Lichinga central market prevented Renamo head Alfonso Dhlakama from campaigning in the market on 8 October. Passing through markets shaking hands with stall-holders and buyers has become a conventional part of Mozambican campaigns. But when the small Dhlakama parade – one car with sound system plus cyclists and people on foot – arrived at the market square on 8 October, the traders left their stalls to meet the procession, yelling “keep moving, Renamo”.

Anyone who wanted to hear what Renamo had to say were threatened. “Anyone who goes to the Renamo meeting will never sell in this market again. This market was built by Frelimo, not Renamo,” the stall holders said.

23 state cars for candidate Guebuza

23 state cars used during the campaign visit of President Armando Guebuza on 10 October to Chibuto, Gaza. In Bairro Cimundo, 9 vehicles of the provincial government, 7 of the district government, and 7 of the municipal government were seen in use, with their registration numbers covered by red Frelimo banners.

Electoral violence

Maua, Niassa. Frelimo sympathisers disrupted the MDM campaign; one MDM injury and campaign material destroyed.

Cahora Bassa, Tete: 3 Renamo members, including the local delegate, Chico Sebastião, were injured by a Frelimo shock group (grupo de choque) in Bairro de Unidade 8 October, allegedly for destroying Frelimo campaign material.

Maxixe, Inhambane: 6 October, Frelimo shock group (grupo de choque) erected barricades to prevent an MDM group led by its president Daviz Simango from campaigning in the market.

Massinga, Inhambane. Frelimo members disrupted the MDM campaign led by Daviz Simango on 6 October. Skirmishes led to the injury of one Frelimo woman.

Balama, Cabo Delgado: 7 October, Frelimo supporters hit by Renamo members who claimed they were trying to infiltrate a Renamo parade.

Namuno, Cabo Delgado: 3 October, Frelimo supporters hit by Renamo members when they tried to put up posters near where Renamo was to have a rally.

Ilha de Moçambique, Nampula: 7 October, ex-mayor Gulamo Mamudo injured in a scuffle when Renamo and Frelimo parades met.

Meconta, Nampula: Homes of Renamo members Cantilo Ali and Inácio Parede burned on 4 October. Renamo party agent in Namialo, Bernardo Muti, accuses “Frelimo brigade number 4” headed by Mualintho Lichinga. Muti claims that on 3 October the Frelimo brigade said that if residents did not come out of their houses to a Frelimo rally, there would be consequences. Linchinga denies the charge.

Dondo, Sofala: 5 October, MDM member José Manuel Fernando arrested when he was caught climbing a post, allegedly to pull down a Frelimo poster.

Mabalane, Gaza: 6 October, young men wearing Frelimo shirts in Combumune neighbourhood allegedly attacked José dos Santos for having posters for an opposition candidate in his window.

Namarroi, Zambézia: Renamo supporters invated the Frelimo office in Lipal, tearing up posters and phamplets.

Frelimo use of state cars

Chibabava, Soafala: in a campaign parade, district health service motorcycles MMC 87-57, MMC 82-4, MMC 81-81 and a department of agriculture car MMC 97-51.

Milange, Zambézia: 8 October, Toyota Hilux, white double cabin, of the district government, with registration plates covered with Frelimo pamphlets.

Quelimane, Zambézia: Seen at the airport: double cabin vehicle of TDM (state telecommunication company) full of young people in Frelimo shirt singing Frelimo songs.



Matutuine, Maputo provínce: white Nissan, MMJ 77-23, belonging to the Education, Youth and Technology service, and a white Toyota Hilux belonging to the district government.

South Africa: Rubber bullets clear protests

2009-10-17

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8304602.stm

South African police have fired rubber bullets and tear gas at crowds of protesters angry at a lack of services and proper housing in their townships. Thousands of residents in two communities east of Johannesburg had barricaded roads and marched on public offices, setting one building alight.

Africa: Uneven progress on development goals

2009-10-17

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48869

The Millennium Goals cannot be achieved at the United Nations. The U.N. can create a platform for governments to make commitments but cannot force compliance by member states. Only citizens and their elected representatives – at the national level – can hold governments to account for the promises to reduce poverty made in 2000 at the UN General Assembly in New York.

Global: Africans 'losing out' in North–South collaborations

2009-10-18

http://tinyurl.com/ylctsja

African researchers are missing out on publications and career advancement because they are failing to negotiate joint ownership of data generated by international research collaborations, a meeting has heard. Elly Katabira, associate professor of medicine at Uganda's Makerere University College of Health Sciences, said that African researchers are often indifferent to data ownership.

Kenya: Drilling for oil begins in two weeks

2009-10-17

http://www.nation.co.ke/business/news/-/1006/671428/-/ifb9nsz/-/

Kenya’s search for oil will intensify with the drilling of oil at Boghal near Isiolo in the next two weeks. Energy minister Kiraitu Murungi said the government had signed 18 oil production sharing contracts in the last 18 months noting that they were at various stages of exploration. Speaking during the opening of the second South-South meeting on gas and oil management at Windsor Golf and Country Club in Nairobi, the minister said exploration had been stepped up in recent years. He said there were high hopes that the country could strike oil soon.

Cameroon: At least 51 cholera deaths in the north

2009-10-18

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86608

Cholera has killed at least 51 people in the past few weeks in northern Cameroon, where health experts say safe water and proper sanitation are sorely lacking. “[The fight against cholera] here will be difficult because the hygiene conditions are awful,” said a health official who was not authorized to be quoted. He noted that most people defecate in open areas.

Global: Engaging men and boys in HIV prevention

2009-10-18

http://tinyurl.com/ygjxo4o

Nearly 35 participants from UNFPA country offices in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Arab States, Asia and Europe, along with partners from governments and the civil society, met here this week to reflect on the most appropriate and efficient strategies to fully engage men and boys in the promotion of gender equality and in the prevention of HIV. This consultation will inform UNFPA strategy for engaging men and boys in gender equality and HIV.

Kenya: Court case holds up national ARV supply

2009-10-18

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/5A075B6C-0F42-426F-9653-F548722EEB16.asp

Kenya is facing a nationwide shortage of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs as a court case continues to hold up the purchase of the life-prolonging medication. The High Court in the capital, Nairobi, barred the Ministry of Health from procuring ARVs after a consortium of drug suppliers challenged the tender process.

South Africa: Screening tool for HIV in children being used ineffectively

2009-10-18

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/FDA57DDE-E75D-4AFC-BFAC-201F094EB11C.asp

Incorrect use in routine practice of a World Health Organization (WHO)/UNICEF HIV screening tool for children at primary health care clinics in Limpopo and KwaZulu Natal provinces, South Africa leads to the failure of life saving interventions, Christiane Horwood and colleagues reported in a study in the September 22 2009 edition of BMC Pediatrics.

South Africa: South Africa needs an HIV/AIDS truth commission

Salim S. Abdool Karim

2009-10-18

http://tinyurl.com/yg7fe7s

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is one of the greatest challenges facing post-democracy South Africa. In 2007, the country, which is home to less than one per cent of the world's population, carried 17 per cent of the global burden of HIV infection — and the virus continues to spread relentlessly. The government's response to the epidemic during the last decade has contributed to this disproportionate burden. It not only questioned the reliability of HIV testing, the safety and efficacy of antiretroviral drugs and the accuracy of statistics on AIDS-related morbidity and mortality, but also the very premise that HIV causes AIDS.

Zambia: Women’s suicide reminder of HIV stigma

Zarina Geloo

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/59576

The newspaper headline signaled the tragedy. This story gave an elaborate and compassionate account of how 41-year-old Linda Kabengele committed suicide after her community continually stigmatised her due to her HIV-status. Her charred body was found still smoldering, as she lay dead near a tavern. Next to her was a photograph of her child, her handbag and some anti-retrovirals. There were tut tuts followed by sympathetic noises from the public.
The newspaper headline signaled the tragedy. The story below gave an elaborate and compassionate account of how 41-year-old Linda Kabengele committed suicide after her community continually stigmatised her due to her HIV-status. Her charred body was found still smoldering, as she lay dead near a tavern. Next to her was a photograph of her child, her handbag and some anti-retrovirals.

There were tut tuts followed by sympathetic noises from the public. The most striking reaction however, came from the National AIDS Council spokesperson Justine Mwiinga. Responding to a reporter from the Zambia Daily Mail on the suicide, he said stigma was not as bad as before and implied that Kabengele was an isolated incident.

Mwiinga added that the negative attitudes towards people with HIV were generally going away. More strikingly he said, “Whatever the case, stigma is not among the six main drivers; it is not a serious threat to the extent it used to be.” Perhaps Mwiinga spoke generally, but the reality tells quite a different story.

It is an uncomfortable fact for many people who work in and around HIV and AIDS to accept that over 20 years after the start of the pandemic, despite billions of dollars thrown into campaigns and projects, and thousands of AIDS service organisations set up, stigma is still alive and well. Moreover, it affects women particularly.

The haunting words of Winston Zulu, the first Zambian to disclose his status, sums up what stigma feels like. “I fight HIV, but then I also fight the stigma, because HIV itself can attack your gut, it can attack your brain sometimes, it attacks your immune system, but the biggest attack comes from people outside,” he said. “People think that because you are HIV-positive, you must have been a sex-worker or a gay man, or you must have been loose with your life. And that, sometimes, is even more difficult to deal with than dealing with the virus itself.”

A research by CARE in Zambia shows that stigma against women with HIV range from subtle actions to the most extreme degradation, rejection and abandonment. Kabelenge had become the object of taunts, mockery and laughter and had to be given a room at a school in her community where she slept alone, fuelling her feeling of isolation and rejection.

The study further notes that women with HIV, and pregnant women assumed to be HIV positive, repeatedly suffer extensive forms of stigma, particularly once they become sick or if their child dies. Studies in Zambia show that women not only are more heavily stigmatised than men, they are also blamed for bringing HIV into the family or marriage.

It reminds me of a colleague, journalist Mildred Mpundu, who before she died disclosed her HIV status. She talked of how she left her employment at a newspaper because she felt stigmatised by her colleagues. Ironically, Mpundu worked for the first media house in Zambia to formulate an HIV work place policy and offer counseling and free anti-retroviral treatment.

"It’s not that I was the only one with HIV, there were others, men mostly, but they were not talked about the way I was. I was button-holed, labeled and increasingly isolated," she said in one of the flurry interviews she gave before she died.

Mpundu’s knowledge and long association with HIV strengthened her emotionally and she withstood stigma, but this is not to say that there were not times when she thought about taking her life.

Interestingly, when another male journalist Christopher Mulenga went public about his status, the reporting was succinct and dealt with the issue in a perfunctory manner. When Mpundu came out, she became the HIV poster girl of the media. A newspaper produced a special supplement, most of it dedicated to her past choices of partners that culminated in her contracting HIV and the usual “before” and “after”pictures. Why was Mpundu’s story more interesting than Mulenga’s?

Juliet Maundi from the Network of People Living with HIV and AIDS offers a reason. Mpundu was a woman and a single parent. “It’s worse when a woman is unmarried because then the assumption is that she was sleeping around and infecting numerous partners. It’s about heaping blame on women for the relationships in which they get infected.”

Mpundu and Kabelenge were not rural women, they lived in urban towns surfeit with HIV and AIDS messaging, information and programmes. Their communities were well aware of the dangers of stigma, but still they suffered.

So how else can things be done? Well for starters, no matter what the statistics say, we should put stigma back on the list of drivers of HIV, or at the very least, acknowledge that stigma is still a very big factor in HIV infection. Messages and information should target particularly the stigmatisation of women with HIV.

Maundi says it irritates her to see AIDS messages literally cover the walls of ante-natal clinics and health centres where women usually congregate. “They don’t have the same posters covering the walls of bars or places where men are found,” she points out. “It gives the impression that HIV is about women and yet both need the information, men more so because they are usually the first to blame women for HIV infection and are in the forefront in stigmatising women.”

Information and messages on stigma should also be prominent and stand alone, not as a side bar to HIV messages. There should be very strong clear messages that stigma is as bad as knowingly infecting someone with HIV.

People who stigmatise should be subject to the same legal process and punishment as human rights violators. AIDS organisations need to step up their watchdog role and apportion adequate time and resources to curbing stigma.

In the case of Kabelenge when it became apparent that she was being stigmatised, local authorities and AIDS activists should have used the opportunity to advocate for the protection and care of people infected with HIV and also forced the community to face up to its bad behaviour.

Kabelenge’s suicide is a chilling reminder that we should not be complacent about stigma, we should not take comfort in general statistics indicating that it is not one of the six drivers of HIV infection. More importantly, it should not be overlooked that it is the women that are bearing the brunt of stigma.

* Zarina Geloo writes from Zambia. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.

Uganda: Homosexuals face death penalty

2009-10-17

http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/12/697859

Aggravated homosexuality will be punished by death, according to a new bill tabled in Uganda's Parliament. The private member's bill was tabled by Ndorwa West MP David Bahati (NRM). A person commits aggravated homosexuality when the victim is a person with disability or below the age of 18, or when the offender is HIV-positive.

Benin: Farmers unite against effects of climate change

2009-10-18

http://tinyurl.com/yfua7dc

Farmers in Benin are implementing their own research findings to boost the soil fertility and moisture retention of their plots. The experiment is part of the project Strengthening the Capacity to Adapt to Climate Change in Rural Benin (PARBCC) — established in late 2007 — which aims to create a three-way conversation between farmers, meteorologists and the government, and help farmers make informed choices about when to sow and harvest crops.

Chad: Shrinking lake could trigger disaster

2009-10-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32555

Lake Chad, once one of the world’s largest water bodies, could disappear in 20 years due to climate change and population pressures, resulting in a humanitarian disaster in central Africa, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned. The lake – surrounded by Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria – has shrunk by 90 per cent, going from 25,000 square kilometers in 1963 to less than 1,500 square kilometers in 2001.

Kenya: Proposed law to rid country of rampant public land-grabbing

2009-10-17

http://farmlandgrab.org/8287

All public land will be identified, registered and handed over to a National Land Commission after the proposed National Land Policy becomes law. This will make it difficult for public land to be grabbed, a practice rampant in Kenya. There is no system for registration of public land and it is left to the Finance ministry permanent secretary, in whose name it is registered, to safeguard it.

Nigeria: Report Bundu Waterfront genocide

2009-10-17

http://eng.habitants.org/news/inhabitants_of_africa/report_bundu_waterfront_genocide

This Report is on the recent Genocide at Bundu Waterfront in the Township axis of Port Harcourt in the Rivers State of Nigeria. The Report is presented by the National Union of Tenants of Nigeria and based, not only on newspaper publications, but more on the personal experiences by officials of the union who visited the scene and equally had interviews with leaders of the affected community who confirmed the incident and gave useful information to the union.

Global: Global hunger worsening, warns UN

2009-10-17

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8306556.stm

Targets to cut the number of hungry people in the world will not be met without greater international effort, UN food agencies have warned. The UN's annual report on global food security confirms that more than one billion people - a sixth of the world's population - are undernourished. It says the number of hungry people was growing before the economic crisis, which has made the situation worse.

Global: Right to Food and Nutrition WATCH 2009

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yhvnfuj

FIAN is pleased to announce the release of the new issue of the Right to Food and Nutrition WATCH. This year's edition focuses on the question of "Who controls the governance of the world food system?" - a burning issue in light of the current World Food Crisis. The WATCH, available in three languages, is a common endeavor of a Consortium of human rights organizations, social movements and development agencies.

Zimbabwe: No collateral, no inputs, then no food

2009-10-18

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86618

The planting season in Zimbabwe is fast approaching, but farmers are struggling to access crucial agricultural inputs, bringing fears of yet another poor harvest. "Before the government of national unity came into being [in February 2009] ... new farmers would receive fuel, fertilizer, seed and implements at almost giveaway prices, and sometimes for free," said Thomas Chirandu, a large-scale farmer in Mashonaland West Province who had prepared his land but could not afford to buy maize seed and fertilizer.

Tunisia: Assault on union activist condemned

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yhe5ntv

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned attacks and harassment of Tunisian journalists after a series of incidents which suggest deliberate targeting of activists for independent journalism. In particular, the IFJ condemned the beating up of Zied El Heni, journalist for the daily Assahafa, that took place yesterday in Tunis. His blog, Tunisian journalist, was also shutdown for the 22nd time by the authorities.

Zimbabwe: Journalist arrested for visiting Chiadzwa diamond fields

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yknkpp6

The Chiadzwa diamond fields in Marange, Manicaland province are still off-limits for journalists working in the country. This was demonstrated by Friday's incident where freelance journalist Annie Mtalume was arrested on allegations of entering the ' protected' area without a pass. She was detained overnight in Chiadzwa and was only transferred to Mutare on Saturday.

South Africa: Poor citizens could see increase of free electricity

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yjdqf95

Poor South Africans could receive 70 kilowatts worth of free electricity if Eskom is granted a 45 percent "smoothed" tariff increase, says it's Chief Executive Jacob Maroga. "We recommend that it be increased to 70 kilowatts and that the cost be carried by industry," Maroga told reporters as the parastatal unveiled details of its Multi-Year Price Determination 2 (MYPD 2) for the three-year period, beginning in 2010 to 2013.

DR Congo: Civilian cost of military operation is unacceptable

2009-10-17

http://tinyurl.com/yhhv4r7

The Congolese government's military operation in eastern Congo, Kimia II, backed by United Nations peacekeepers and aimed at neutralizing the threat from a Rwandan Hutu militia group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), has resulted in an unacceptable cost for the civilian population, said 84 humanitarian and human rights groups in the Congo Advocacy Coalition.

Guinea: Military rule must end

2009-10-17

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=6349&l=1

This latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group, focuses on the events of 28 September – when security forces killed at least 160 people in a crackdown on opposition to the military regime – and their implications for the stability of the country and the sub-region. It discusses dangerous fractures within the military and signs that various members are raising ethnic militias, warns that Guineans will not accept an attempt by the army to remain in power and calls for the end of military rule and a re-opening of the democratic transition process.

Horn of Africa: Nearly five million risk starvation

2009-10-17

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32539

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) sounded the alarm on the worsening humanitarian situation in the Horn of Africa today, noting that nearly five million children under the age of five in the region are now hungry. This marks an increase of 1 million since May, while the number of people in need of emergency assistance in the region has also risen, climbing from 20 million earlier this year to 24 million, the agency said.

Nigeria: Rebels end ceasefire

2009-10-18

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/10/200910161579772408.html

Nigeria's main rebel group has ended its 90-day ceasefire with the government and threatened to resume attacks in the oil-producing southern region. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) said in an emailed statement that it would resume "hostilities against the Nigerian oil industry, the Nigerian armed forces and its collaborators" on Friday.

Somalia: Rival clans "re-arming" over Somaliland farm

2009-10-18

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86595

Officials are warning renewed fighting is likely between two rival clans in breakaway Somaliland, where they are reported to have amassed a large number of weapons and positioned hundreds of militiamen near disputed farmland in Gabiley region. "We are afraid new conflict could break out any time," a police officer, who requested anonymity, told IRIN, adding that the clans had at least 1,000 militiamen, armed with automatic rifles such as AK47 rifles and BKM handguns, in or near the Elberdale farmland area.

Sudan: UN-AU peacekeepers attacked in Darfur

2009-10-18

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32595

Unidentified gunmen shot and wounded three peacekeepers, two critically, from the joint African Union-United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) in an attack on Saturday in the war-ravaged region on the western flank of the Sudan. The police unit came under fire near Zalingei, West Darfur, while escorting a UNAMID garbage truck. The armed men stole the police vehicle and escaped.

Africa: African universities to buy 60 Gb bandwidth and set up continental network

2009-10-18

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

Almost unnoticed African universities have come together to sort out their bandwidth problems in the new era of fibre. In April 2010, European NREN Dante will start to implement with eastern Africa’s UbuntuNet Alliance, a continental network to link up African universities with plentiful bandwidth to their colleagues across the globe. On 1 November West and Central Africa will set up its own network organisation to join the process. African universities currently spend an estimated US$1.4 million and are destined to become important players in network development.

Africa: The East African Internet Governance Forum

Advancing the internet governance debate for meaningful participation

2009-10-18

http://tinyurl.com/yzoowot

The East Africa Internet Governance Forum (EA-IGF), which first convened in 2008, aims at creating a community of practice that will, in the long term, become a sustaining foundation for meaningful participation of East African stakeholders in internet public policy debates at the national, regional and international level. This year’s EA-IGF was held in Nairobi Kenya, with over 200 participants from varying sectors, from fifteen different countries. This year’s forum focused on cyber-crime, policy regulatory needs consumer issues, critical internet resources, and access to broadband.

Africa: World Bank to invest $215 million to boost Internet in Central Africa

2009-10-18

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

The World Bank has announced a 10-year US$215 million fund to support the countries of the Central African region in developing their high-speed telecommunications backbone infrastructure to increase the availability of high-speed Internet and reduce end-user prices. Three countries - Cameroon, Chad and Central African Republic (CAR) - are participating in the initial US$26.2 million phase of the Program. A further eight countries are also eligible to participate in the Program - Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Niger, Nigeria, São Tomé and Principe, and Sudan.

South Africa: Opportunities spring from e-waste

2009-10-18

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48743

There was an audible gasp when Kirsten McIntyre told the audience that e-waste is the third fastest growing waste stream in the world, with between 40 and 50 million tons of computers, TVs and washing machines being "thrown away" each year. The event was the Life Cycle Management Conference, which took place last month in Cape Town. McIntyre is the environmental compliance manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa at the multinational technology company Hewlett Packard.

Tanzania: It’s not enough to have a pushy broadband policy

2009-10-18

http://tinyurl.com/yzsmfhj

Like its East African neighbours, Tanzania shares an unwavering faith in high-speed broadband. Broadband, the story goes, will be the panacea to myriad societal woes – including poverty, poor education and health services, and a lack of government services. Optical fibre running through the heart of the country has the potential to change the country’s social and economic fabric for good.

Sudan: Between peace and war

AfricaFocus Bulletin Oct 11, 2009

2009-10-18

http://www.africafocus.org/docs09/sud0910b.php

The pace of diplomacy on Sudan is increasing, with talks set to resume on Darfur and active engagement by the African Union, the United Nations, and the United States in efforts to move Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement forward as it approaches the last year of a projected 6-year interim period. But, says veteran Sudan analyst John Ashworth, in fact the agreement "is not Comprehensive, nor Peace, nor an Agreement. Its failure could ignite a new war even more deadly than the two previous conflicts in Southern Sudan.

Africa: Internship program - Africa in Democracy and Good Governance (ADG)

2009-10-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/fundraising/59582

Africa in Democracy and Good Governance (ADG) gladly accepts interns interested in broadening their knowledge on a range of topics. Internship assignments vary in length according to the availability and academic requirements of the intern, as well as the needs of ADG and are available on a part-time and full-time basis throughout the year. Internship assignments also vary greatly in terms of content.
Africa in Democracy and Good Governance (ADG) gladly accepts interns interested in broadening their knowledge on the following topics:

* Women’s Rights
* HIV/Aids
* Child’s Right
* Governance (Economics, Human Rights, Elections)
* Reforms in Government
* Media (Research and edit articles for ADG biannual magazine, Websites updating, training of local journalists)
* Project Proposal Drafting
* The Responsibility to Protect Mechanism
* Youths and Migration

Internship assignments vary in length according to the availability and academic requirements of the intern, as well as the needs of ADG and are available on a part-time and full-time basis throughout the year. Internship assignments also vary greatly in terms of content. They may involve working on, and traveling to rural areas, — including responding to e-mails, taking minutes at executive meetings, assisting in coordination events and writing reports on various issues.

ADG Internship program operates on a non-remunerative basis. The costs connected with an intern's participation in the program must be borne by the nominating institution, related institution or government, which may provide the required financial assistance to its students; or by the individual, who will have to obtain financing for subsistence and make his or her own arrangements for travel, accommodation etc.

If you are interested in an internship opportunity please submit a cover letter and resume to adg_gam@yahoo.com or info@adg-africa.org

Global: 2010 STARS Impact Award

Applications open

2009-10-17

http://www.starsfoundation.org.uk/impact-awards/

Applications are now open for the 2010 STARS Impact Award. The STARS Impact Awards recognise outstanding organisations working in the areas of children's health, education and protection. Eligible Organisations working with children in Africa, the Middle East, Asia or Pacific are invited to apply.

Global: Oslo Peace Scholarship

2009-10-17

http://cambodiajobs.blogspot.com/2008/07/oslo-peace-scholarship.html

The Graduate Studies in International Affairs (GSIA) program in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, in partnership with the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) and Bjørknes College, offers one scholarship each year for full-time study in the Master of International Affairs specialising in Peace and Conflict Studies degree program. Tuition fees will be covered by The Australian National University and Bjørknes College; and students will receive some funding towards living costs as a stipend. Oslo Peace Scholarship Applicants Deadlines is April 30, 2010.

Global: The Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program 2010

2009-10-17

http://www.ifpsa.org/about.asp

Applications are now open: The Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program2010- 2011. The Program is especially designed to support candidates from groups that have historically lacked access to higher education. Eligible candidates who belong to marginalized and excluded groups and communities such as scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backward classes, religious minorities, women, physically challenged and those with other kinds of socio-economic deprivation are encouraged to apply.

Fahamu