Current Issue

Pambazuka Press titles in Namibia and South Africa

2010-08-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/66467

Fahamu seeks consultants

Expression of interest to develop curriculum for social justice courses

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/66477

Background
Fahamu focuses on working with grassroots social movements and organizations that address the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized in society. We do so because we believe that the potential impact of these organizations to create change will enhance participatory democracy and human rights in Africa.

Based on our long term needs to support social movements and grassroots organizations, we intend to deliver cutting edge human rights education using a diversity of tools and platforms to strengthen these movements and assist them in creating the change that they seek.

This has been necessitated by the fact that grassroots social movements and organizations in Africa face a dearth of access to knowledge, information and learning tailored to their needs.
Within this framework Fahamu has planned to develop courses and training packs that promote competencies in the following themes,informed by a needs assessment with our constituents, trainings alumni and beneficiaries;
• Movement building and grassroots organizing in Africa
• Africa-centred advocacy
• New tactics in human and peoples' rights
• Sexuality and reproductive health rights

Objective of the assignment
Fahamu is looking for consultants to coordinate the curriculum development process for these courses using participatory approaches.

Scope of work
Each course curriculum development consultant will be expected to meet the following specific tasks:
• Plan and conduct a learning needs assessment with Fahamu’s alumni, constituents and partners
• Analyse and share results of the LNA
• Analyse and evaluate existing tools and training materials on the course themes by organisations or institutions
• Draft and share with Fahamu a curriculum development process
• Manage discussion/planning sessions of the curriculum development committees /partners
• Coordinate review of the first and second curriculum drafts and incorporate feedback.
• Facilitate curriculum pre-testing and validation process

Expected outcomes
• Curriculum development guide /summary
• Course curriculum
• Curriculum development process report

Consultancy duration
The assignment is to expected to take 90 days .

Skills required
• Advanced university degree in education,social studies, international law and/or human rights;
• Proven experience in curriculum development; use of adult education methodologies; developing training manuals and engagement in activities of social justice
• Experience working with and in community based organizations and social movement in Africa.
• Experience in conducting qualitative research using various methods
• Excellent oral and written skills in English
• Strong analytical skills
• Excellent facilitation skills
• Be creative and take own initiative
• Able to work to tight deadline

Application Procedures

Interested candidates are expected to send an abstract not exceeding 600 words on how they will manage the curriculum development process and the topics they intend to cover in the specific course.
The abstract should be sent together with a copy of the C.V to winnie@fahamu.org

The deadline of application is 4th August 2010. Only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Witchcraft allegations, refugee protection and human rights

A course for lawyers and legal advisers

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/66499

Kenyan constitution: History in the making

The challenges of implementation

Yash Ghai and Jill Cottrell Ghai

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66501

© S 1Provisional results of the referendum in Kenya indicates a landslide victory for the new constitution - at last a home grown one. Yash Ghai and Jill Cottrell Ghai discuss the challenges of implementation and the importance of Kenya’s people ‘proclaiming their sovereignty’ through a constitution ‘made by the people, for the people’.

As Kenyans prepare for the implementation of a new constitution, in the expectation of a Yes vote, attention will turn to technical questions of implementation. The Proposed Constitution (PC) sets out in some detail how the old order will give way to the new, and how that new order will be made a reality. On the ‘effective date’, at most 14 days after a positive referendum result, the new constitution will come into force, repealing the old. While most provisions, including the expansive bill of rights, will come into effect immediately, some, particularly about the executive and the legislature, and devolution, will not do so until the next general elections. Meanwhile a programme of extensive legislative and administrative changes will begin. A new commission on implementation will have a major responsibility to ensure that the new constitutional order is fully established in about five years.

It is not the intention of this article to explore the scheme for the transition to, and the implementation of, the new constitution, however critical. Even more critical are the social and political processes, the interplay of economic, social and ideological interests, which influence, and often determine, the impact of constitutions. A great deal of effort has gone into crafting the PC so that its values and structures will impose themselves on state and society, with much attention to enforcement and remedies. However, the internal logic and dynamics of the constitution will have to compete with the larger social forces, the most powerful of which may have little commitment to its values.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

It is one thing to make a constitution. It is quite another to breathe life into it, making it a living, vibrant document which affects, and hopefully improves, the reality of people’s life, which they use in their daily existence, which governs and controls the exercise of state power, and which promotes the values and aspirations expressed in it. The fortunes of a constitution are shaped by many factors: personalities and elites, political parties and other organisations, social structures, economic changes, traditions of constitutionalism – and by the rules and institutions in the constitution itself.

Older constitutions were instruments of rule: by one community, class or region. The constitution recognised the dominance of that group and provided the legal basis for its rule, but did not create that rule, which was founded on its dominance in social and economic spheres. In these circumstances, the constitution was effective as an instrument of governance.

Many recent constitutions have resulted from a stalemate when no competing group is able to win an outright victory. This imbalance is often reflected in the constitution. Some constitutions are truces; the fundamental problems are not solved. Instead a framework for competing parties to work together is established (as with our Grand Coalition). Some constitutions have been made under considerable external pressure, often in tandem with key elements in civil society. The fluid political situation, which allows a highly participatory process of constitution making, results in a curious phenomenon: the imposition of the constitution by relatively weak and unorganised groups on the ruling class. But the absence of a dominant group committed to the constitution makes its implementation problematic.

Older constitutions dealt mainly with the system of government, establishing principal state institutions, distributing functions and powers among them, and providing some basic rules for relationships among them. They did not explicitly aim to change society. Today’s constitutions seek to solve social and political problems: of accountability, corruption, environment, poverty, equitable distribution of property and other resources, recognition of new and multiple forms of identity, and the democratisation of the party-political organisations and processes. In multi-ethnic societies, constitutions have also to deal with relations among ethnic, linguistic and religious communities and between them and the state.

A major obstacle to the implementation of such a constitution is that the state in a country like Kenya is the primary source of power and wealth in society. Corruption is the principal vehicle for accumulation. Since a major preoccupation of the Proposed Constitution is to safeguard public resources from plunder, the only way the ruling class would achieve its objectives is by systematic violation of the constitution, benefiting from impunities that our legal system has bestowed on them. Since the state is so dominant locally – the lasting legacy of colonialism – the question is whether those who are committed to reform of the state will be able to impose the discipline of the constitution on the ruling class, the principal and direct beneficiaries of the state. For though politicians and bureaucrats seem to fight each other, as in the referendum campaign, they are bonded by common interests as a class and will collectively resist reforms. The resilience of social traditions, ideologies, and institutions is a major obstacle to progressive social reform and change. Economic entrepreneurs, who might be expected to favour constitutionalism as the framework for the market, still seek the favours of the state and acquiesce in, if not to promote, the acquisitive state.

The viability and success of a constitution presupposes constitutionalism, a belief in the value of restrictions on power, and the practice of the rule of law, with the emphasis on rules and their enforcement. Paradoxically, countries like Kenya which try to use the constitution for social transformation lack the traditions from which these ideologies spring. This situation is aggravated by a lack of knowledge of the role and content of the constitution among those who would benefit from respect and enforcement of the constitution.

PREREQUISITES OF IMPLEMENTATION

The Kenyan state was born in violence, and has been sustained by violence. Its function has been the plunder of the people and their resources. The ambition of the Proposed Draft is to turn the state towards the service of the people and the moulding of a common identity and loyalties, transcending both corruption and ethnicity. It is to be sustained by its legitimacy, not coercion.

One urgent prerequisite for achieving this objective is the end of impunity, for which an independent, committed and competent judiciary is essential. Another is the implementation of reforms of political parties, which, as in legislation now, current leaders and their followers have steadfastly violated. Most of all, we need to move away from politics as the preserve of millionaires to the birthright of all wananchi.

The new constitution is made by the people, for the people. It is people-centred, the very first article proclaiming their sovereignty, unlike the current one which proclaims the sovereignty of the president. The most essential prerequisite for success of the constitution is that the people act as the custodian of this, their constitution. They should remain engaged in the politics of constitution, with renewed vigour after the referendum. They must use the many opportunities of participation opened by the constitution, at different levels of the state, to advance the fight against corruption and against pervasive poverty. They must transcend the politics of ethnicity, manufactured by politicians to obscure the mechanics and immorality of plunder. They must hold onto the vision of a Kenya that they helped to shape, in numerous meetings and submissions over the years – of a democratic and caring society, based on inclusion and social justice, fundamental human rights, respect for cultural differences but united in our search for harmony and unity, and the common commitment to the worth and dignity of us all.

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

Democratic dreams and nightmares in Africa

Dibussi Tande

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66535

This week, Kenyans went to the polls to vote for a new constitution which is supposed to usher in a new era of democracy, rule of law, human rights and equality in the country. With the results in favour of the ‘Yes’ camp, the delight – and pride – in the Kenyan blogosphere has been overwhelming.

Rafiki Kenya

Rafiki Kenya sees the victory of the Yes camp as a new dawn for Kenya:

‘Thank you, fellow Kenyans! And welcome to Kenya 2.0! This new constitution - which is probably one of the best in Africa, if not the best - is redefining Kenya and is indeed a very historic moment signalling a new dawn for East Africa's most vibrant economy. The wind of change has blown through our country, and we should all be ready to contribute to the building of a great nation, creating an example for Africa, and becoming an important and respected player in the world. This time for Africa, our time for change has come. We have been hungry for change for decades and now we are ready to believe again. I have traveled across Kenya and have made many trips abroad, and I have seen what Kenya is and I strongly believe in what this country can be. That is the Kenya I see and the Kenya I hope all of us can see. It is up to all of us to realize this vision of development and prosperity for this great nation, with respect for peace, for our environment, for justice and for human rights. Today is probably the most crucial turning point in Kenyan history since independence in 1963, so let's all be proud that we have the privilege of being part of it...

‘Kenya 2.0 is our new Kenya. Kenya 2.0 is a Kenya that embraces new technologies for a fairer society and for better lives; it is a nation where all Kenyans are enabled to contribute to development on an equal basis. Kenya 2.0 is a Kenya that is free from dictators, corruption, fraud, tribalism and violence. It is a Kenya where innovations can thrive, where ideas are nourished. It is a Kenya which is attractive to investors from within Africa and from overseas.’

Blogithinji

While excited about what awaits a new Kenya, Blogithinji nonetheless points out some of the challenges that lie ahead:

‘The majority of Kenyans have chosen to go green. The mood is great. Most people are lit with hope as this move by Kenyans affirms the theme of change in this country... The excitement will be immense, but Kenyans must remember and never forget 2008. Peace and Unity were preached before the polls and must remain after. We must accept these results even as they get confirmed. PEACE is key for change.

‘Let us also realise that this is also just the beginning of a long journey to the Kenya we have dreamt for. There are tonnes of legislation to take place and so much reform to be undertaken. There are so many promises made to the No camp, especially the church of abortion, to be carried out. I think the next couple of years may be harder than Kenyans may think, but a brighter and more prosperous Kenya will ease the pain.

‘This has been a long painful struggle for many veterans and I, as a young Kenyan bound to enjoy the fruit of their labor, am grateful to them; for all the cold nights in detention, the painful days in Nyayo House torture chambers and the lonely years they spent away from their families in exile. THANK YOU ALL.

‘The IIEC has also carried out the most independent electoral process in Kenya since independence, and for that HONGERA.’

The Abantu View

Abantu is grateful to all those Kenyans who fought for decades for a new Kenya which the majority of Kenyans’ identify with:

‘The winners weren't really the YES and NO proponents led by powerful forces that included sitting President Mwai Kibaki and his erstwhile Prime Minister Raila Odinga and the entire Kenyan Government machinery in the YES corner and former President Daniel Arap Moi, equally powerful and vocal Minister William Ruto and the Church backing in the NO Corner! The real winners were the Kenyans who lost their lives over four decades and whose blood has redeemed our New Nation! The winners were the living Kenyans who peacefully trooped to the various polling stations in all the 210 constituencies straddles across Kenya and exercised their God given democratic right at the ballot box. The winners were the peace loving Kenyans who knelt and prayed for their Nation and held their shoulder high and refused to be coerced into violence!

‘I woke up this morning feeling more proud of my country Kenya and that feeling will never ever go away! We truly showed the World, as it waited for an apparent repeat of bloodshed, that truly Kenya is ready to step into that place in history and deliver a constitution that even America and Britain and first world state will be truly envious of! I was equally impressed by the new Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC), led by an under 40 year old Chairman who basically out did, out classed and outshone the management of the entire process! That’s what you get from trusting young people with sensitive national duty that needs resolute handling! 2012 here we come! Excellent stuff!

‘We have shown that Africans can do it on their own peacefully, and I can safely bet that this New Kenya is headed for some serious serious change! Viva Kenya, Viva Africa, Viva Democracy!’

Ghana Pundit

As Kenyans enthuse over what they see as the birth of a new democratic polity, Ghana Pundit warns that any democratic system that is mired in poverty and underdevelopment is merely a mirage:

‘The status of Ghana as an emerging democracy has been acknowledged worldwide. This democracy has come with peace and stability that has made Ghana the darling of her neighbours and the international community. The recent outstanding performance of the Black Stars in the 2010 Fifa world cup in South Africa has added to the worldwide view that Ghana is on the path of greatness. However, the stability and peace that the democracy has brought the nation has not translated into economic and social development.

‘The essence of democracy is to elect leaders who will manage the country to provide security, energy, housing, education, health and telecommunication infrastructures that the citizens can take advantage of to improve their living conditions. Many who have engaged in the democratic process have done so with the hope that democracy will usher in not only liberty, freedom of speech and assembly but also economic prosperity. But the people who have been running Ghana since the day the Fourth Republican Constitution came into operation seem to have forgotten this simple meaning of democracy...

‘Slowly we are missing the opportunity to develop and to add quality and value to the lives of our people. Since 1992 the various governments that have governed Ghana have not been able to take advantage of the peace and stability provided by our democracy to formulate and implement the necessary policies to transform Ghana’s economy to enable Ghanaians to benefit directly…

‘This is very dangerous for the continuous existence of democracy itself. People cannot continue to cast their votes every four years and continue to live in the same pre-colonial conditions without jobs, proper housing, electricity, roads, farming equipments and access to water and sanitation. People cannot vote every four years while they continue to live on two dollars a day. That is not democracy. Democracy must come with liberty, economic empowerment, social development and improvement in the overall quality of life of the people. This has not happened in Ghana more than sixteen years of democratic governance and over fifty years of independence.’

Daniso’s Warped Thinking

In many parts of Africa, there is widespread disillusionment with the multiparty systems that that have still left the vast majority of citizens on the margins of national life. In a satirical open letter to the president of Malawi, Daniso wades into the controversy over complaints that the government violated basic democratic principles by unilaterally imposing a new flag on the country:

‘Mr. President... what these imbeciles don't understand is that a national flag is like a mileage marker on a road. It records a country's progress in history, the same way that a mileage marker records how far along you've progressed on the road to your destination. So, needless to say, after 46 years of plastering a few roads with thin layers of tarmac (and patching and repatching them, time without number), we've to celebrate with a new flag. A few years down the line we'll toast the delivery of the port City of Nsanje with another flag; one with a different colour of the sun perhaps. We can again randomly shuffle the background colours.

‘Once the five new universities are all up and running, it'll be time to bring out the bubbly again as we unveil another flag to reflect the big stride we'll have made on the education front. And when your brother takes over from you as president, we'll mark the historic moment with yet another flag. In fact, this would be the opportune time to add blue to the flag. After all, it's the nation's favourite colour. Yes, you misguided cynics; blue is the colour of our most favourite natural resource, the lake. The fact that blue also happens to be the ruling party's colour will be a very welcome but coincidental bonus.

‘Understandably, we'll reserve the biggest celebration of new flags for the year after Malawi makes it out of the group of the world's 10 poorest countries. Since this will be the mother of all achievements, we'll celebrate with a new flag per month. In place of a glaring sun, we'll have a full moon followed by others depicting various stars such the Southern Cross. Yes, stars for a star nation!’

Mzati Kolokosa

Still on Malawi, Mzati Kolokosa, breaks from the mould to adopt a long-term optimistic view about Malawi’s future:

‘We must not allow our travels to frustrate us into believing that we are a backward country; rather, we should strive to move on and be like or surpass the capitals we admire.
‘True, we have not overcome the grinding poverty but we have moved a step away from grinding poverty. As our common wisdom says, every journey, even the longest one, starts with the first step; and walking is putting one foot ahead of the other.

‘As a country, we have started a long journey towards prosperity. We have been in poverty, extreme poverty to say the truth, for decades…

‘I am writing from Kampala, Uganda, where Malawi is being praised for its effort to reduce deaths of mothers and children. It is, in fact, number three in Africa on health spending.

‘But mothers and children are still dying. Should we dismiss this good news and be frustrated and surrender to fate that we shall be poor forever?

‘No. We need to build hope from our moderate achievements.’

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* Dibussi Tande blogs at Scribbles from the Den.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The ANC turns on the press (again)

Richard Pithouse

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66489

cc Z I G TSouth Africa’s media could soon be working under tighter restrictions if a new ANC bill restricting press freedom is approved, writes Richard Pithouse. The bill proposes to give government bodies the right to withhold information from the media, the creation of media tribunals and the publication of a new pro-ANC newspaper, removing the right of any media to critique government policies and leaders. ‘If the ANC was committed to the democratisation of society it would be working to democratise the media by legislating for real diversity, generous subsidies for autonomous community media and serious state support for genuinely public broadcasting. What they are doing, instead, is trying to bully the media into submission to an increasingly authoritarian and conservative regime,’ says Pithouse.

The African National Congress (ANC), perhaps buoyed by a renewed sense of public confidence in the wake of the World Cup, is again moving against one of our fundamental democratic freedoms.


Amidst a new flurry of indignation, paranoid and hysterical in equal measure, various representatives of the ANC have made it quite clear that they consider some of the criticisms of the party and its leaders that have appeared in the media to be unacceptable. This is not the first outbreak of this sort of hostility to press freedom within the ANC, but it needs to be taken seriously because it is backed up with real intent.

The most solid aspect of that intent is the Protection of Public Information Bill, which would allow more than 140 different bodies, from municipal managers up the minister of State Security, to withhold information. It would also criminalise whistle blowing and effectively give the state the power to stop uncomfortable media investigations. By all accounts the Act would be unconstitutional and would go the same way as the Slums Act if confronted with a challenge in the Constitutional Court.

To compound the situation the ruling party has returned to its proposal for a media tribunal that could, on its own account, result in journalists being imprisoned, fined and fired. This proposal wasfirst put forward in 2007, then later abandoned following a huge outcry. As in 2007 statements from the ANC, many of which are patently anti-democratic, are quite clear that their central concern is how the party and its leaders are represented.

The South African Communist Party (SACP) has supported the call, arguing that the Press Ombudsman is inadequate and that the alternative opportunity to redress the legal system is not affordable to most South Africans. At least one newspaper editor takes the view that the ombudsman is indeed understaffed and underfunded, but if this is the case it hardly justifies an inquisition aimed at stemming critique of the ruling party. On the contrary the solution would be to give the ombudsman’s office the support it needs or to propose a better alternative. The SACP’s second point is certainly fair, but to point to the class bias of our legal system to justify a call for an inquisition by a ruling party that is actively entrenching inequality is to misuse left wing critique of our society to try and legitimate right wing agendas, as the Communist Party often does.

Blade Nzimande, himself a recent target of media criticism, has argued that the confession by the former Cape Argus journalist Ashley Smith that he had taken money and privileged access to tenders to report favourably on Ebrahim Rasool indicates the necessity for a media tribunal. But Nzimande says nothing at all about the fact that the ANC has seen fit to give Rasool a prestigious and important diplomatic posting. To its credit the SACP is, raising the issue of corruption both within party structures and in a grassroots campaign that has had impressive moments. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is fundamentally dubious for Nzimande to call for the ANC to arrange for an inquisition into the media on the basis of a case that reveals corruption in both the party and the newsroom of the Cape Argus. Why not a tribunal to look at corruption in the party? To use one case of corruption to besmirch the reputation of the whole of the fourth estate, and to do so in a manner that aligns with the out and out political authoritarianism of someone like Jackson Mthembu and his clear desire to subordinate the media to the party, puts the SACP firmly in the camp of the authoritarian nationalists.

The third component of the ANC’s new strategy towards the media seems to be The New Age, the new newspaper to be published by the Gupta brothers. The paper will be ‘broadly supportive of the ANC’. There’s nothing wrong with a newspaper that aims to be supportive of a particular political party or idea but there is something very wrong when there’s a strong suspicion that the owners of that newspaper are involved in questionable business relations with the president and his family. Is this not potentially something very much like a supersized version of the Ashley Smith and Ebrahim Rasool nexus? Nzimande’s silence on this score is telling.

There is no question that the media is imperfect. Anyone who has been part of a project or event that makes the news will attest to the fact that most reports carry some errors. This is not at all a unique failing of the South African media or even of the media in general. A large proportion of the academic articles that deal with current events are also riddled with errors of fact. Governments, human rights organisations and businesses all get it wrong fairly often.

The tendency to error doesn’t have to be explained through the language of conspiracy. While there are better and worse ways of doing things, and while we certainly need to strive for the former, the fact is that some degree of error is inevitable. Error is part of the messiness of the world and a democratic view needs to understand that and to respond to it by preserving as much openness as is possible =to respond to error.

Journalists, like all of us, make mistakes and carry prejudices. Unlike most of us, journalists have to negotiate their fallibility under tight deadlines and in the public gaze. Around the world the pressures that journalists are under have been greatly exacerbated by newspaper owners that want to wring as much profit as they can out of their businesses with the result that newsrooms are often chronically underfunded. In South Africa journalists also work in a society structured in all kinds of systemic unfairness and in which all kinds of power relations are fundamentally unequal.

But no media tribunal will change any of this. On the contrary if it follows the logic of Jackson Mthembu all it will do is to send a clear message that the state does not consider certain forms of critique to be acceptable.

The ANC is as engaged as any other powerful constituency in society in trying to win the media to its point of view. There are times when it is successful and times when it is not. But it is certainly not just the ANC that gets the short end of the stick from time to time. Some of the poor people’s movements that are at the coalface of building real resistance to the ANC have, on occasion, been subject to entirely scurrilous treatment in the media. In fact popular protest is routinely treated through a prejudicial lens in which poor people are assumed to be irrational, violent, criminal and a threat to bourgeoisie society.

Among the many political clichés that deserve their regular repetition is the truism that being elected into power doesn’t make one a democrat. It is equally important, given the legalistic nature of some of the responses to the ANC’s return to outright hostility to a free press, to repeat the point that a narrow and legalistic adherence to the letter of democratic obligations is hardly a meaningful fidelity to their spirit.

On the contrary a real fidelity to the spirit of democracy requires a genuine commitment to diffuse power and to engender multiple sites of power. If the ANC was committed to the democratisation of society it would be working to democratise the media by legislating for real diversity, generous subsidies for autonomous community media and serious state support for genuinely public broadcasting. What they are doing, instead, is trying to bully the media into submission to an increasingly authoritarian and conservative regime.

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* This article first appeared on SACSIS, The South African Civil Society Information Service.
* Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] South African Civil Society Information Service

The Gambia: A dictator’s anti-media war

Alagi Yorro Jallow

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66490

cc N BSince the 1994 coup d’état that saw President Yahya Jammeh rise to power, the Gambian media has been forced to work under repressive and restrictive conditions. The disappearance of editors and journalists, destruction of property and threat of imprisonment and harm by Jammeh’s National Intelligence Agency officers mean Gambian media outlets must either praise the ruling party or close their doors. Alagi Yorro Jallow, once an editor of a now closed private Gambian publication, discusses the Gambian government crackdown on the media and regulations under which a Gambian journalist must work.

This month marks the sixteenth anniversary of the military takeover in The Gambia, in which President Yahya Jammeh ascended to power via coup d’état. A former wrestler and soldier, Jammeh has proven himself a tough man to deal with, as the Gambian media has discovered.

Before the military takeover, The Gambia was known as the ‘smiling coast,’ a place of sunshine, hospitality and generosity. It was home to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, as well as the African Center for Democracy and Human Rights. It represented one of the oldest multi-party democracies in a continent beset by military take-overs and despotic regimes.

All of this changed in July 1994, when a group of junior army officers overthrew the thirty-year government of Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara. The officers first installed themselves as military overlords, and in 1996 rigged the constitution and fixed the presidential elections in favor of their contender. At that time, Jammeh purported to transform himself into a civilian candidate, campaigning on a platform of anticorruption, transparency and decency in all manner of governance.

Western reaction to the coup was swift, and foreign aid dwindled. In search of new allies, Jammeh and the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council made overtures to Libya, Taiwan, Cuba, Nigeria, Iran, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania and Kuwait. These overtures came to form the basis of the country’s foreign relations under Jammeh.

Jammeh assured Gambians that he welcomed their ideas, challenging the press to ‘criticise us where we are wrong and contribute where you can contribute.’ In practice, however, the regime targeted private media and freedom of expression from the outset. On August 4, 1994, Jammeh promulgated Decree Number 4, which denied Gambians the right to discuss political views and express themselves collectively as members of political parties. The government also conducted regular raids on the independent press, subjecting journalists to harassment and deportation.

In the years that have followed, the scale of such attacks has only increased. Government actors regularly wage violence against private media outlets and journalists that publish articles deemed inaccurate or unfavorable to the junta. Such violence can take the form of harassment, detention at the hands of National Intelligence Agency officers, arson and destruction of property, arbitrary arrest, torture and even murder. As a result, Gambian journalists have little choice but to practice self-censorship in their daily work.

Despite national and international concern over the climate of fear and repression in The Gambia, not a single police investigation has culminated in the successful prosecution of anyone responsible for crimes against the media or opponents of the regime. Ebrima Chief Manneh, a reporter with the pro-government Daily Observer, has been missing since July 7, 2007 and is said to be held by the National Intelligence Agency. The agency has repeatedly denied holding him, but reports from local media confirm that Manneh has been held incommunicado in different locations, including the Mile 2 Central Prison and, most recently, Fatoto Police Station.

Newspapers have been transformed into mouthpieces for the ruling party, the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC), or otherwise subjected to heavy censorship. Reports on Gambia Radio and Television Services focus on Jammeh’s ‘achievements,’ including his farming skills and his so-called treatment of HIV/AIDS, while ignoring the most newsworthy national events. The president has virtually succeeded in breaking the backbone of the independent media, either by illegally closing down media houses critical of the regime or by reducing them to mere singers of praise.

President Jammeh himself has not held a press conference since 1994. He normally talks only to handpicked representatives of pro-government media houses, and most members of the independent press are routinely left out of state functions and other newsworthy events.

After sixteen years of rule under the leadership of Jammeh and the APRC, The Gambia has descended into chaos. Its citizens live in a fear of reprisals and harassment by government lackeys, its economy is in tatters, its media have been muzzled, and the social fabric of this once peaceful land is in danger of disintegration. A free press is unlikely to emerge in The Gambia unless and until the country adopts and sustains a solid democratic culture, an independent judiciary, and a respectable, apolitical military that is eager and willing to serve under a democratic commander-in-chief.

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* Alagi Yorro Jallow is founder and former managing editor of the Independent, The Gambia’s only private newspaper before it was banned by the government in 2005. He is currently in residence as a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The Angolan presidency: The epicentre of corruption

Rafael Marques de Morais

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66476

cc N CResponding to Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos's call for a zero-tolerance policy on corruption on 21 November 2009, Rafael Marques de Morais reports on the business dealings of three figures representing a 'triumvirate that today dominates Angola’s political economy': General Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Júnior “Kopelipa”, General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento “Dino” and Manuel Vicente. Though government figures, these individuals make no distinction between public and private affairs and represent the apex of a state-business empire based on 'illegal self-enrichment for the top state officials', Marques de Morais writes.

This report shows how the Presidency of the Republic of Angola has become the site of shady business deals, a fact that has consequences for citizens’ freedom and development, as well as for the country’s political and economic stability. The text responds President José Eduardo dos Santos’s call, on 21 November 2009, for a zero tolerance policy against corruption.

For the sake of clarity, this investigation limits itself to a small demonstration of the business practices employed by the minister of State and head of the Military Bureau (Casa Militar) in the Presidency, General Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Júnior “Kopelipa”. This is the man responsible for co-ordinating the defence and security sectors of the state. General Kopelipa is one of the triumvirate that today dominates Angola’s political economy, along with General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento “Dino”, the presidency’s head of telecommunications, and Manuel Vicente, the chairman and CEO of the national oil company, Sonangol. Their dealings acknowledge no distinction between public and private affairs. Manuel Vicente is the link that connects the considerable powers accumulated by the generals, to Sonangol and to his own position as one of the most powerful members of the MPLA Political Bureau, for being the president’s protégé, and in charge of overseeing the private business dealings of the ruling party.

Sonangol is the biggest company in the country and the state’s major source of revenue. Several analysts have viewed Sonangol as the most important factor in ensuring the survival of President Dos Santos’s regime – in the worlds of finance, politics and diplomacy as well as the main source of illegal self-enrichment for the top state officials.

In some instances the report refers to the relationships of mutual interest and complicity with other members of the government and public officials in carrying out business, that involves the looting of state assets, and other acts that go against the law of the land.

Key sectors such as petroleum, telecommunications, banking, media and diamonds form part of the business empire built by these figures. The firms involved include Movicel, Biocom, Banco Espírito Santo Angola, Nazaki Oil & Gás, Media Nova, World Wide Capital and Lumanhe.[1]

The report frequently refers to the Law on Public Probity, even in cases that date from before it was signed into law in March 2010 and consolidated various anti-corruption provisions that had been in force since 1989.[2] All of the articles contained within the Law on Public Probity can be found among this earlier body of law. In the interests of greater clarity, this text therefore refers to the Law on Public Probity as an overarching reference to the laws in force since 1989. For instance, the Law on the Crimes Committed by Public Office Bearers (Law 21/90) prohibits public office bearers from entering into business deals over which they would have influence or decision-making powers in the course of their official duties (art. 10, 2).

MOVICEL

There are currently only two mobile phone operators in the country, Unitel and Movicel. As a private operator, Unitel started its services in 2001, as a joint-venture between Sonangol, Portugal Telecom and two Angolan private companies GENI and Vidatel, each one with 25% of the shares.

Last year, through Resolution 67/09 of 26 August, the Council of Ministers ordered, without a public tender process, that Movicel be privatised and sold off to a consortium of Angolan businessmen at a cost of US$200 million. The Council of Ministers tried to justify the decision by referring to the difficulty in finding investors for the privatisation of the company, and to the urgency to raise funds for the government coffers “in the face of the global financial crisis”. This decision, according to the government, had been made possible by the identification of “national private investors who can guarantee the essential financial resources for the immediate implementation of Movicel’s investment plan, and to boost the financial reserves hoped for by the national treasury”.

In the meantime, 59% of Movicel’s capital was transferred to two companies formally belonging to high-ranking officers subordinate to General Kopelipa: Portmill and Modus Comunicare. On 10 June 2009, General Kopelipa, General Dino and Manuel Vicente, formally left Portmill Investimentos e Telecomunicações, of which they had been the owners with 99,96% of the capital, split evenly among themselves. They gave up their shares, through Portuguese business manager Ismênio Coelho Macedo, to a group of high-ranking officers in the Presidential Guard. This is a unit which falls under the Military Bureau. Regarding Portmill, Lieutenant-Colonel Leonardo Lidinikeni, officer of the president’s security detail, holds 99,96% of the shares in the company. Lieutenant-Colonel Tadeu Agostinho dos Santos Hikatala, officer of the presidential security detail, holds 99.92% of the shares in Modus Comunicare.

Ismênio Coelho Macedo also had the task of buying and restructuring a small communications, advertising and marketing company Modus Comunicare – Comunicação e Imagem Ltd, whose shares were never sold publicly, but rather divided out among top officers in the Presidential Guard. On 14 August 2009 the company was transformed into a limited company dedicated to telecommunications. This date shows that the legal process to change the company’s status was concluded only two weeks after Dos Santos’s government had granted it 19% of Movicel’s capital.

On 29 July 2009, the Council of Ministers approved the privatisation of 80% of Movicel’s capital by the Angolan companies Portmill Investimentos e Telecomunicações (40%), Modus Comunicare (19%), Ipang – Indústria de Papel e Derivados (10%), Lambda (6%) and Novatel (5%). The remainder of Movicel’s capital is held by the state enterprises Angola Telecom and Empresa Nacional de Correios e Telégrafos de Angola, with 18% and 2% respectively.

These tables show the companies that benefited, and their shareholders.

PORTMILL, INVESTIMENTOS E TELECOMUNICAÇÕES (40%)



MODUS COMUNICARE – TELECOMUNICAÇÕES (19%)



IPANG – INDÚSTRIA DE PAPEL E DERIVADOS, LIMITADA (10%)



LAMBDA (6%)



While serving as National Director of Telecommunications, Aristides Cardoso Frederico Safeca took part in Movicel’s Privatisation Board, in accordance with Despatch 67/07 by Finance Minster José Pedro de Morais, dated 19 January 2007. This commission was headed by the then economic advisor to President dos Santos, Archer Mangueira.

Since October 2006, Aristides Safeca has also been chairman and chief executive of a Belgian company Parisa. Aristides Safeca and his brothers Alcides Safeca, who is secretary of State for the Budget in the Finance Ministry, and Amílcar Safeca, the director of the mobile phone operator Unitel, hold a majority share in Trans Omnia, where they are in partnership with General Fernando Vasquez Araújo, head of the Chief Directorate for Weapons and Technology of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA). Trans Omnia has benefited from multimillion-dollar contracts for supplying foodstuffs to the FAA, a topic that will be dealt with on another occasion.

In spite of the new Law on Probity, Aristides Safeca still enjoys impunity as he muddles up his public duties with his private affairs. While deputy minister of Telecommunications he is also chairman and administrator of Parisa, a foreign enterprise, and continues to do numerous business deals with the state to his own self-enrichment and that of his family and associates.

NOVATEL (5%)



The transfer of 5% shares of Movicel to Novatel is yet another example of the misappropriation of state property. Novatel was created on 29 April 2009 after the report from Movicel’s Privatisation Board and three months before the Council of Ministers announced the beneficiaries of the privatisation process.

At the time Movicel was formally privatised, the shareholders of Novatel had no private or collective assets which could have qualified them as entrepreneurs. One person involved with Novatel denied being the real beneficiary. However, even though there are legal loopholes to conceal the names of beneficiaries, the names stated above are of the registered shareholders who, in accordance to the statutes of Novatel (art. 5, 1) are the real owners. Thus, by all means, these individuals are formally responsible for the legal rights and obligations entitled to the registered shareholders.
Notes on Movicel


The names among the shareholders in the businesses that were granted shares as a result of the privatisation of Movicel clearly illustrate the government’s dishonesty. Contrary to the official explanation, this was not a deal that involved a group of national private investors, and certainly not one with the kind of financial resources that the treasury so needed in the light of “the global financial crisis”. There has been no public or official confirmation that the sum of US$200 million has been paid to the state. Moreover, several economists have estimated that Movicel is worth a few times more than that sum. The deal was simply a case of handing out state assets to individuals, in which General Kopelipa, with the connivance other influential bodies close to the presidency, and the Telecommunications and Information Technology Ministry are the main beneficiaries.

In terms of the Law on Public Probity, members of the government and high officials in the presidency are breaking the law in various ways. The principle of public probity prohibits any public servant from accepting loans, favours or gifts that might affect “the independence of his or her judgement and the credibility and authority of the public administration and its institutions and services”.

The privatisation of Movicel can be seen as an unscrupulous act by the head of government, President Dos Santos, in granting favours to his subordinates. One lawyer, who preferred to write anonymously, describes the privatisation of Movicel as “an administrative act suffering from the vice of abusing power for the sake of private interest”. According to the lawyer, this abuse of power occurs “when the administration does not pursue the ends of public interest but rather of private interest, for reasons of family relationships, friendship… corruption, or any other motives of a private nature”. [3]

Movicel under public ownership was one of the most profitable and well organised of the state businesses, with more than 2.5 million customers. The privatisation of Movicel did not make it more efficient, or bring in more money for the state. At the same time the privatisation undermined market competitiveness and further weakened the standing of the private sector, by strengthening the grip that government officials, doubling as businessmen, have over the private sector as a result of the plundering of state assets.

The same lawyer discusses the legal invalidity of the privatisation of Movicel. “The absence of public tender, as required by the law, renders null the procedure and subsequent contracts, owing to the omission of an essential element” (Articles 76(2) line f and 127 of Legal Decree 16A/95 of 15 December).

According to the lawyer’s arguments:

Article 77 of the same law establishes that: 1. A null act has no judicial effect, independent of the declaration of nullity. 2. Nullity may be invoked at any time by any interested party, and can be declared at any time by any administrative body or by any court.

Likewise, the public servants who benefited from the privatisation of Movicel are committing an act conducive to illegal enrichment in terms of the Law on Public Probity (article 25, a), by receiving percentages in a private business deal with the state. The same public servants are committing deeds harmful to public patrimony, in terms of the Law on Public Probity (article 26, 2, a) by incorporating a public business into their private portfolios.

Another serious question with respect to the privatisation of Movicel has to do with the nature of the regime that is highly dependent on the security services, contrary to the precepts of the rule of law. Telecommunications are a very sensitive area for the intelligence services and are fundamental to the process of keeping watch on relationships between citizens. Through its private control of both the mobile phone operators in the country, the presidential inner circle is in a position to arbitrarily spy on citizens and limit their freedom of expression for private ends. General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento, the head of the president’s telecommunications, is a shareholder of Geni, which controls 25% of shares in Unitel.

BANCO ESPÍRITO SANTO ANGOLA

On 10 December 2009, the company Portmill, Investimentos e Telecomunicações, headed by high-ranking officials of the Military Bureau of the Presidency and the Presidential Guard bought 24% of the shares in Banco Espírito Santo Angola (BESA) for US$375 million.[4] Banco Espírito Santo (BES Portugal), the seller, retains the majority shareholder, with 51.94% of the shares.

The Portuguese bank has so far avoided commenting on its relationship with Portmill’s shareholders, and it has not replied to questions submitted by the Portuguese daily newspaper Público on the subject.[5] On July 19, after a brief phone call the author emailed the following questions to BES media department: “How could BES accept a business deal worth 375 million dollars tabled by military officers on duty? Did it question the source of the funds involved and the legality of the act?” BES media office replied that the questions should be directed to BES Angola, as it is an autonomous institution. However, the author insisted with BES, without success, because the holder of the shares sold to Portmill was BES, as reported in the statement the latter sent to the Portuguese regulation authority (CMVM) and public statements by BES CEO, Ricardo Espírito Santo Salgado.[6]

This deal raises two pressing questions about the origin of the funds that serving soldiers, as the legitimate owners of the business, paid as part of the transaction. Second, it means the Portuguese bank, headed by Ricardo Salgado, is effectively laundering money acquired illegally through the plunder of Angolan state assets.

The officials of the Military Bureau and the Presidential Guard have two ways of raising capital: through holding private assets, or through a bank loan. From the legal point of view these two options call attention to the limitations prescribed in law. Public servants are prohibited from soliciting or accepting loans “that might call into question their liberty of action, the independence of their judgement and the credibility and authority of the public administration and its institutions and services” (Law on Public Probity, article 5).

It is not publicly known whether the new partners in the Banco Espírito Santo are the heirs to family fortunes or whether they have got rich through private careers. Assuming they do not have assets of hundreds of millions of dollars, the other possibility is a loan. According to the legal provisions mentioned above, the granting of a bank loan to high officials of the Angolan army, whose task is the physical protection of the President of the Republic and of the Presidency in general, raises serious questions about national security and the physical security of the nation’s highest official. This question deserves further consideration in this article’s conclusions.

The Law on Public Probity (article 25 g) defines illegal enrichment as “acquiring for oneself or for another, in the exercise of one’s duties, responsibilities, employment or public function, goods of any nature whose value is disproportionate to the capital gains or income of the public servant.”

Neither Banco Espírito Santo, an institution of international repute, nor the Military Bureau of the Presidency are in a position to explain the proportionality between the earnings of the military officers in question, and the size of the deal that was signed.

Nevertheless, General Kopelipa, General Dino and Manuel Vicente must respond publicly to the question of the transfer of the Portmill shares. For what reason did they, as the owners, transfer title in Portmill to members of the Presidential Guard? Also worth noting in this operation is the executive role of Ismênio Coelho Macedo, who is also chief executive of Banco Privado Atlântico (BPA), a private institution in which Sonangol has a 19.5% shareholding. Until the year 2000, Macedo was the director in Angola of Banco Português do Atlântico (BPA).

At the same time it should be noted that the Presidency and the presidential family have perfected the practice of promiscuity between public duty and private interests. For example, in 2004 President dos Santos allowed the setting up of the business management company Luzy, involving his daughter Tchizé dos Santos, the head of the Presidential Guard, general Alfredo Tyaunda, and the then presidential advisor, general Clemente Cunjuca. The latter is currently deputy minister for War Veterans.

Similarly, on 30 May 2001, Generals Kopelipa, Alfredo Tyaunda, and Clemente Cunjuca, set up a company called Lunha Imobiliária, with José Leitão who at the time was the chief of staff of President Dos Santos. This group of high officials brought in other shareholders in the persons of the president’s uncle (godfather) and nephew, José Pereira dos Santos Van-Dúnem and Catarino Avelino dos Santos. In 2002, Lunha partnered with four offshore companies, namely Valuta Investimentos, Landon Holdings, Oakleigh Holdings e Osmond Investimentos, in the creation of Lunha Investimentos. The latter recently built a condominium with 58 luxury residences, priced at up to four million dollars per unit, on a site linked to the Military Bureau in the Morro Bento neighbourhood of Luanda.

BIOCOM – THE ANGOLAN BIO-ENERGY COMPANY

On 24 July 2009 the Council of Ministers approved the Unidade Agro-Industrial de Cacuso project in Malanje province, to grow and process sugar cane. Valued at US$272.3 million, the project aims to produce sugar, alcohol and biofuel.

Companhia de Bionergia de Angola (Biocom) had already been set up on 25 October 2007, by the Brazilian multinational Odebrecht, the Angolan private company Damer Indústria S.A., (each with a 40% share) and Sonangol Holdings (with 20%).

Odebrecht Angola offered to respond to questions about its dealings in Biocom, but could not do it on time as its director in charge of the project was on holiday.

As has become normal with the investments approved by the Council of Ministers that involve partnerships between foreign multinationals and Angolan private companies, a considerable amount of the shareholding was allocated to political leaders. Damer Indústria, created on 26 July 2010, is owned jointly by General Kopelipa and General Dino in partnership with Manuel Vincente of Sonangol. In the document that officially approved the project, Resolution 63/09 of 18 August, the Council of Ministers once again spoke of the desire to promote Angolan private business initiatives. Damer was created three months before Biocom, and its owners are not entrepreneurs but public servants. The Law on Public Probity defines a public servant as “a person who exercises duty, responsibility, employment or function in a public entity, by virtue of election, nomination or contract (…)”. The law explicitly applies to members of central government (article 2 d), those who control the public assets of the armed forces (article 2,h) and the managers of public enterprises (article 2,i) as public servants.

So, the Biocom project involves various acts of corruption. First, Odebrecht is involved in influence peddling and the corruption of Angolan officials. The bribery and corruption of public officials are defined and criminalised in articles 318 to 323 of the Angolan Penal Code, with penalties laid down in the Law on Economic Crimes (Law 13/03).

The Conventions against Corruption of the African Union (article 4, 1, f) and the United Nations (article 18, a, b) as well as the SADC Protocol against Corruption (article 3, 1, f) all clearly define influence peddling as an act of corruption. These international agreements were incorporated into Angolan law and transgression of their provisions was made punishable by article 321 of the Angolan Penal Code.

Secondly, Sonangol’s chairman, Manuel Vicente, is using its subsidiary Sonangol Holdings and public funds in establishment of Biocom, in which he is a private shareholder: an act contrary to the law. Moreover, according to the weekly newspaper O País,[7] the Banco Africano de Investimentos (BAI) is at the head of a syndicate that is to finance the project to the tune of US$168 million. BAI is a private bank whose main shareholder is Sonangol, a public entity, and which has Manuel Vincente as its vice-chairman. Manuel Vicente is also a private shareholder in BAI, holding 5% of its share through his offshore company ABL.[8] By using his position in Sonangol to gain control of 5% of BAI’s shareholding for his own personal enrichment, Manuel Vicente is involved in an act of corruption as defined in article 321 of the Angolan Penal Code.

Thirdly, the deal involves President dos Santos himself. During his visit to Brazil from 22 to 25 June 2010, Dos Santos met the chairman of Odebrecht, Marcelo Odebrecht. They discussed Biocom and Odebrecht’s desire to expand its investments in Angola. In his official speech during his meeting with President Lula da Silva, Dos Santos asked for Brazil’s support for “projects that seek to create alternative sources of energy, both solar and from biofuels, for which Brazil’s already significant experience in these areas may be of great help”. His concern for a deal that was made possible by the corruption of the two generals closest to him and on whom the security of his continued rule depends, puts Dos Santos in the dubious position as either the patron of these acts or a hostage of his generals.

NAZAKI OIL

Through Legal Decrees 14/09 and 15/09 of 11 June 2009, the Council of Ministers granted to Sonangol, as national concession holder, “the mining rights for prospecting, research, development and production of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons” in the deepwater blocks 21 and 9, respectively. This decision was taken in accordance with Law 10/04 (article 44, 2) according to which all such rights shall be granted by the State to Sonangol.

To this end, the government ratified the consortium set up between Sonangol, the Angolan private company Nazaki Oil & Gas and the American company Cobalt International Energy, the latter being designated as the operator of blocks 9 and 21.

Cobalt International Energy’s founders and main shareholders are Goldman Sachs, and a partnership between the Carlyle Group and Riverstone Holdings, with an initial investment of US$500 million in 2005.[9] To a certain extent, these latter two shareholders are investing Angolan public money in the business, since Sonangol has invested about US$500 million in the Carlyle Group and Riverstone Holdings energy fund.[10]

According to Global Witness, Cobalt has refused to name the owners of Alper Oil – which became involved in the deal at a later stage – and Nazaki, arguing that this would “involve selective disclosure of non-public company information and, in some cases, to do so would also be a breach of the confidentiality provisions of agreements by which [Cobalt] are bound”.[11] This argument is fallacious since Angolan law does not provide for corrupt acts to be protected by confidentiality or by any other juridical mechanism, since corruption is clearly defined as an illegal and criminal act.

Cobalt has gone ahead with the deal, which was executed at the end of February, even though it warned in its own U.S. regulatory filings: “We have not worked with either of these companies in the past, and, therefore, our familiarity with these companies is limited. Violations of the FCPA [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] may result in severe criminal or civil sanctions, and we may be subject to other liabilities, which could negatively affect our business, operating results and financial condition.”[12]

In fact, Cobalt’s top executives, including its director general Joseph Bryant, have plenty of experience of working in Angola as managers for BP in the country, and their argument appears like an attempt to justify themselves in terms of American laws, and demonstrates arrogance in relation to Angolan laws.

The ownership of Nazaki Oil & Gas is shared equally among the same three men whose names have occurred repeatedly in this investigation: General Kopelipa, General Dino, the head of telecommunications at the presidency, and Manuel Vicente, the chairman and CEO of Sonangol. Four subordinates of General Kopelipa, who front the company, hold each 0,01% of the shares. They are namely Colonel José Manuel Domingos “Tunecas”, his chief of staff, Colonel João Manuel Inglês, his logistics officer, Colonel Belchior Inocêncio Chilembo, his advisor, and Domingos Manuel Inglês, his private business assistant.

The company has three subsidiaries, created on 23 July 2008: Nazaki Distribuição – Sociedade de Distribuição de Combustível e Lubrificantes SA (distribution), Nazaki Refinaria – Sociedade de Refinação e Petróleo SA (refineries), and Nazaki Petroquímica – Sociedade Petroquímica SA (petrochemical).

On 24 February 2010, Cobalt International Energy signed the Risk Services Agreements for exploration, research and production in offshore blocks 9 and 21. The agreements were signed by Sonangol, Sonangol Pesquisa e Produção (research and production), Nazaki, and a further Angolan company, Alper Oil, which initially had not been expected to receive government authorisation. The shareholding structure is identical for blocks 9 and 21: Cobalt (40%), Nazaki (30%), Sonangol Pesquisa & Produção (20%) and Alper Oil (10%).

According to Cobalt, it “obtained a written approval from Sonangol dated March 3, 2010 for expenditures incurred for technical work on Blocks 9 and 21 offshore Angola as pre-RSA expenditures for future tax deductibility. As a result, Nazaki will reimburse the Company for its share of the leasehold bonus and related pre-RSA seismic expenditures incurred on these Blocks”.[13] Cobalt paid the US$3.7 million signature bonuses owed by Nazaki (article 21, 1 of the contract for Block 21) plus 1.5 million (article 21, 1 of the contract for Block 9) to Sonangol.[14] How can a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and which employs the services of two reputable legal firms justify making payments on behalf of a private company (Nazaki) that is owned by the inner circle of the Angolan presidency?

The allocation of Blocks 9 and 12 to the consortium led by Colbalt, without public tender, was ratified by the then Prime Minister and current Speaker of the National Assembly, Paulo Kassoma, and promulgated by President dos Santos. Both these men were therefore fully aware of who the beneficiaries of the deal were. From the legal point of view, these figures at the very top of government gave their assent to an act of corruption. Angolan law, as this article has already demonstrated, forbids political leaders and public officials from carrying out business with the state for their own personal benefit and enrichment.

Cobalt is also involved in criminal acts. What it has done can be described as influence peddling in terms of the Conventions Against Corruption of the African Union (article 4, 1, f) and the United Nations (article 18, a, b) as well as the SADC Protocol Against Corruption (article 3, 1, f), all of which define influence peddling as an act of corruption. These international agreements were incorporated into Angolan law and transgression of their provisions was made punishable by article 321 of the Angolan Penal Code. As an illustration, Cobalt was involved in a business deal with Manuel Vicente, who as the chairman CEO of Sonangol, is a representative of the state. Nazaki’s partnership with Manuel Vicente and Generals Dino and Kopelipa – the latter extremely close to the president – amounts not only to influence peddling but also to active corruption of officials, according to the Angolan Penal Code (article 321).

The lack of transparency in Angola, particularly in the petroleum sector, has been brought to international attention by western governments and NGOs. The Soros Foundation and the Open Society Institute, founded by the American billionaire philanthropist, George Soros, have been particularly bold in persuading the government to promise better scrutiny in the sector. After months of negotiations, on 13 November 2003 Soros was expecting to sign an agreement with Sonangol and the Angolan government to guarantee transparency in government and in particular in the petroleum sector. However, at the last moment the government pulled out of the agreement.

Seven years later, Soros has emerged as a notable shareholder in Cobalt through Soros Fund Management, which holds 5.9 million Cobalt shares, valued at US$81.1 million. Soros’s proposed transparency agreement would have offered technical and financial assistance to the Angolan authorities and to Sonangol in exchange for the implementation of reforms. It would also have included measures to improve the government’s and Sonangol’s international image, to allow benefits that would have included greater access to international capital markets. In the last seven years, members of the government and the managers of Sonangol have become more transparent only in their continued corruption and the pillage of state assets, causing ever greater poverty and disillusionment among most Angolans.

The Soros example alongside many others, shows how the global powers are in thrall to the spells of petroleum and corruption in Angola. Soros is also one of the driving forces behind international initiatives such as Publish What you Pay, Revenue Watch Institute and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which oblige the corrupt governments of the weakest developing countries to be more transparent. His office did not reply to calls for comment.

MEDIA NOVA

On 14 December 2008, TV Zimbo began broadcasting amid great publicity as the first private television channel in Angola, despite the fact that the necessary legal framework has never been set up. According to the Press Law (article 59), television broadcasting requires a licence that should be granted only after a process of public tender. The same law (article 60, 3) states that television broadcasting is subject to a “special law regulating the licensing mechanisms and other conditions.” This “special law” has never been passed, which leaves TV Zimbo’s activities on the margins of the law.

The lack of public information about the ownership of TV Zimbo has deepened the public’s suspicion and led people to speculate, correctly, that only the presidential circle could get away with flouting the law in such a way. Created on 27 December 2007, TV Zimbo has as its shareholders Manuel Vicente, General Kopelipa and General Dino, who between them hold 99,96% of the TV station’s shares. Kopelipa made a symbolic gift of the remaining 0,04% to his most loyal officers, namely Colonel José Manuel Domingos “Tunecas”, his chief of staff, Colonel João Manuel Inglês, his logistics officer, Colonel Belchior Inocêncio Chilembo, his advisor, and Domingos Manuel Inglês, his private business assistant.

TV Zimbo is part of the Media Nova holding. Also, Rádio Mais, which broadcasts in three provinces, namely Luanda, Huambo e Benguela is also part of the Media Nova group. The expansion of this radio has happened at the time when the government has blocked, for years, the Catholic-run Rádio Ecclésia to extend its signal to beyond Luanda, through FM repeaters installed in 10 provinces. Media Nova in turn plays a crucial role in the editorial control strategy for the private media sector in Angola, including in its ownership the weekly papers O País and Semanário Económico, the magazines Revista Exame and Chocolate, Media Nova Distribuidora (distribution) and Media Nova Marketing.

The journalist João Van-Dúnem, formerly editor of the BBC Portuguese for Africa Service, is chairman of the board of Media Nova.

As owners of Damer Indústrias the triumvirate of Kopelipa, Dino and Manuel Vicente, apportioned a public investment of up to 30 million dollars for the setting up of a state of the art printing press in the country, which is now part of their private portfolio as Gráfica Damer. This is the largest printing press in the country, and started operating in November 13 2008.

The Media Nova group began with an investment of over US$70 million, and has the same shareholding structure as its subsidiaries. Once again, Manuel Vicente and Generals Kopelipa and Dino are equal shareholders. Kopelipa’s four underlings, colonels José Manuel Domingos, João Manuel Inglês e Belchior Inocêncio Chilembo, and private assistant Manuel Domingos Inglês each have a token shareholding of between 0,01% or 0,02% as in the case of Nova Media Marketing, the company designed to control the advertisement market.

WORLD WIDE CAPITAL

General Kopelipa also holds a range of major investments outside the country, especially in Portugal, with funds of obscure origin. It is worth mentioning one of these investments for it shows the president’s henchman also holding private office abroad.

To date, general Kopelipa is a member of the board of directors of World Wide Capital, S.A, a holding that shares the same address with the residence of his main business partner in Portugal, Filipe Vilaça Barreiros Cardoso, in Avenida da Liberdade, Lisbon. This company, in which the general is the main shareholder, is the fourth largest shareholder of Portuguese bank BIG, with 7,9% of shares. The chairman and CEO of Sonangol, Manuel Vicente, until recently personally held 4,9% of the shares of the same bank, having transferred them now to his stepson Mirco Martins, according to the Portuguese daily Público, on May 20 2010. BIG holds, in custody, the 469 million shares Sonangol has in the largest Portuguese bank Millenium BCP, which corresponds to 9,6% of bank’s total shares.[15]

The laws of the land do no allow for Angolan leaders to accumulate public duties with private ones for personal profit, lest in business ventures abroad.

LUMANHE

General Kopelipa has made his mark on the diamond trade as well. On February 13 2004 group of six generals had to cede shares that they held in the mining company Lumanhe, in favour of General Kopelipa. This happened at a time when Kopelipa’s power and greater personal control over the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) was on the rise, and currently each of the seven generals holds 14.28% of the shares in the company.

Three of the generals concerned, Armando da Cruz Neto, Carlos Hendrick Vaal da Silva and Adriano Makevela Mackenzie, remain on official duty respectively as governor of Benguela, chief inspector of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA), and head of the Directorate for Troops’ Training and Instruction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other three generals are currently in business only, and they are the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of FAA, the chief of staff of the Army, and the head of commandos, namely João de Matos, and the brothers Luís and António Faceira.

On February 18 2004, five days later after General’s Kopelipa admission as a shareholder, General Carlos Hendrick Vaal da Silva, signed, on behalf of Lumanhe, a joint-venture agreement with state company Endiama and ITM Mining for the establishment of Sociedade Mineira do Chitotolo, a profitable alluvial mining concession in the north-eastern province of Lunda-Norte. As an officer on active duty and inspector at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Vaal da Silva doubled his public duty with that of being Lumanhe’s manager. Thus, the state through Endiama transferred 15% of the Chitotolo shareholding to the band of generals. Lumanhe also holds 21% shares in Sociedade Mineira do Cuango (SMC), in a joint venture with Endiama (41%) and ITM Mining (38%). SMC is responsible for systematic human rights abuses in the town of Cafunfo, in the Cuango Valley, where it holds a major alluvial concession. Killings, torture, destruction of farms, and arbitrary policing are part of the company’s routine against the villagers and artisanal miners. SMC enjoys the same degree of impunity as the generals who profit from it, and a new report on these events is due soon.

The Portuguese government also finds itself entangled in the shady business procurements of the generals. On June 30 2009, the consortium formed between ITM Mining and Lumanhe, ended its contract for operating the diamond concession of Sociedade Mineira do Calonda, where it held 50% of the shares. As a concession-holder Sociedade Mineira do Lucapa (SML), held the other half of the shares. The Portuguese state, through Parpública SGPS, is the minority shareholder of SML, with 49% while the Endiama controls 51% of the stakes.[16]

CONCLUSIONS

The consequences of the private control of the presidency reflects, to a certain extent, the manner in which President Eduardo dos Santos has systematically weakened the state and its institutions to concentrate more power around himself. To assure his grip on power, President Dos Santos only gives real power to figures of his choosing, regardless of the post, and has encouraged a cult of personality that overwhelms the functionality of state institutions. An apt example of this is the excessive powers that have been granted to General Kopelipa.

The status of the the Military Bureau of the Presidency (art. 21, 1, d) confers on General Kopelipa the right to be able to represent the President of the Republic. Constitutionally, these are rights that belong to the vice president and the president of the National Assembly.

For years, General Kopelipa, through the Office of National Reconstruction, has been the chief negotiator for the Chinese oil-backed loans and contracts with its companies, which have been estimated to be around ten billion dollars.[17] General Kopelipa has been working closely with the chairman and CEO of Sonangol Manuel Vicente, whose responsibility is to ensure payments in oil. Both, as the cases above demonstrate, are business partners in several enterprises.

Until he was relieved of his duty, last April, as head of the Office of National Reconstruction, there is no public information about how this institution he was managing funds from the Chinese and other operations, either in the country or abroad, which also engage Sonangol.

The highly significant role of the Portuguese national Ismênio Coelho Macedo, in facilitating the illegal operations of General Kopelipa enables him to have much influence on the presidential decisions regarding Angola’s political economy. Macedo also heads the Banco Privado Atlântico, in which Sonangol has 19,5% shares.

In reality, the zero tolerance policy against corruption that was trumpeted by President Dos Santos is nothing more than a mask covering up the plunder of the country by his inner circle. The official discourse against corruption has served as a window dressing for business to remain as usual while garnering more international legitimacy for the status quo. Thus the looting of the country by the ruling elite has international support.

This state of affairs stems from the lack of moral and political authority by the President José Eduardo dos Santos to restrain his closest aides, who have vulgarised the office of the president, and give it an image similar to that of a den of thieves.

The levels of corruption in the presidency are unsustainable, and the overwhelming involvement of the presidential security apparatus in the process poses a major threat to the sovereignty of the country and to the president himself. The state and the president, in this case, have become hostages to what the Cameroonian academic, Achille Mbembe, has described as private indirect government. In other words, the state apparatus and the civil service are all used for the benefit of private interests by private operators. [18]

Furthermore, the private control of telecommunications and media by the president’s henchmen represents a serious blow to the possibility of democracy in the country, beyond the rubber stamping of elections.

The dealings of General Kopelipa, General Dino and Manuel Vicente can only thrive in a society where the public are fighting for basic survival, thus paying little or no attention to the functionality of the state. However, the distraction of society to the consequences of corruption and the privatisation of the Presidency of the Republic also has the potential to create a vacuum for institutional power.

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* This article was first published on Maka – Anti-Corruption Watchdog.
* Rafael Marques de Morais is an Angolan journalist and writer with a special interest in Angola's political economy and human rights. In 2000 he won the distinguished Percy Qoboza Award for Outstanding Courage from the National Association of Black Journalists (US). In 2006, he received the Civil Courage Prize, from the Train Foundation (US) for his human rights activities.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] The cases disclosed in this paper are based on official records in my possession. Otherwise, the secondary sources used are identified in the footnotes.

[2] The Decree 23/90 (On the Patrimonial Benefits of Public Office Bearers), the Decree 24/90 (On the Rules for Gifts to Public Office Bearers), the Law 22/90 (Law on the State Discipline), the 13/96 (Statutory Law for Members of Government and their Salaries) constitute the body of legislation harmonised in the Law on Public Probity, and thus by the latter revoked.

[3] See Semanário Angolense, “A (i)legalidade do processo de privatização da Movicel”, http://semanario-angolense.com/home/semanario_angolense_333.pdf, Number 333, 12-19 September 2010, page 29.

[4] See statement by Banco Espírito Santo: http://web3.cmvm.pt/sdi2004/emitentes/docs/FR26301.pdf

[5] The article Chefe da Casa Militar de Eduardo dos Santos é o novo accionista do BES Angola, printed by the daily Público, Issue 7197, pp. 23, refers to BES’ unresponsiveness to comment on the deal.

[6] See Ricardo Espírito Santo Salgado’s editorial at http://www.bes.pt/sitebes/cms.aspx?plg=46f992b2-8aa2-48ba-9469-d9495957dc95

[7] http://www.opais.net/pt/opais/?det=4818

[8] See Angola Case Study: Exploiting Poor PEP Controls, page 310, section inserted into the report of the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, titled Keeping Foreign Corruption out of the United States: Four Case Histories – Angola Case Study, published 3 February 2010.

[9] See The Carlyle Group (2005) “Carlyle/Riverstone and Goldman Sachs to invest $500 million in Cobalt International Energy, a New Oil & Gas Exploration and Production Company” http://www.carlyle.com/media%20room/news%20archive/2005/item7059.html

[10] See the column referring to other active financers in Sonangol’s Financial Statements (Demonstrações Financeiras da Sonangol) mentioned in the Ernst and Young Auditor’s Report, 2008. http://www.sonangol.co.ao/wps/wcm/connect/
a996d180424f8abe883c9ad909a3036f/SEPFinancialStatements08.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

[11] See Global Witness press statement on the risks of corruption in the negotiations around blocks 9 and 21 http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/970/en/
goldman_sachs_backs_angolan_oil_deal_despite_corruption_risks

[12] Cobalt International Energy. 10-K filing for 2009. Page 51.

[13] See Risk Services Agreement between Sonangol, Cobalt, Sonangol Pesquisa & Produção, Nazaki and Alper Oil for block 21 (pp. 33) at http://sec.edgar-online.com/cobalt-international-energy-inc/s-1a-securities-registration-statement/2009/10/30/section63.aspx and for block 9 (pp. 27) at http://www.secinfo.com/dVut2.r2t6.b.htm

[14] Ibid.

[15] See Sonangol’s Financial Statements (Demonstrações Financeiras da Sonangol) mentioned in the Ernst and Young Auditor’s Report, 2008. http://www.sonangol.co.ao/wps/wcm/connect/
a996d180424f8abe883c9ad909a3036f/SEPFinancialStatements08.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

[16] See the 2009 Report and Financial Statements of Sociedade Portuguesa de Empreendimentos (SPE) available at http://www.parpublicasgps.com/file/RC2009.pdf

[17] See Campos, Indira and Alex Vines (2007) Angola and China: A Paradigmatic Relationship. Working Paper Presented at a CSIS Conference,“Prospects for Improving U.S.-China-Africa Cooperation”, December 5, Washington D.C. http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/080306_angolachina.pdf

[18] See Mbembe, Achille (2001:80) On the Postcolony. University of California Berkeley.

Petroleum: Blessing or curse for Ghana?

Cameron Duodu

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66472

cc R N WAs Ghana gears up to develop its petroleum industry, Cameron Duodu strongly laments the absence of greater public sharing of information around the sector. Duodu stresses that Nigeria’s tumultuous history with petroleum ‘is a rehearsal of what could be waiting for us’ and that Ghana should pay particular attention to its neighbour’s experience if it is to avoid ‘so much cheating and thievery’.

A deluge of 'flak' is already falling over Ghana’s infant petroleum industry. People are fighting over it – in very deadly mode – even before a drop of the stuff has reached the surface from down below.

Perhaps, this is as it should be. Petroleum is a national asset that can transform our country’s coffers from being nearly empty to being almost full. And because the asset belongs to all of us, we are all interested in how the income from the asset will be distributed.

Frankly, it is an indication of the manner in which this country has gradually descended into financial fascism that we know so little about those who are going to exploit or who are going to benefit from our petroleum and gas deposits, what our government’s share will eventually be – in fact, as against supposition – and how that proportion was arrived at – when, why and on whose advice, as per 'due diligence'.

Isn’t it amazing that it took a series of obviously political insinuations to ferret out a couple of Ghanaian names associated with Kosmos, the company which brightened our faces by announcing a find called ‘Jubilee’? And what about the only-now-publicised Tsatsu Tsikata connection?

And isn’t it shameful that it was only when Kosmos announced it was going to sell some of its holdings in assets – which belong to all of us – that we began to learn that it had apparently had access, for some time, to information collected by our own national oil corporation? Why was the corporation sitting on the info?

Such a cynical approach to an industry as politically sensitive as petroleum is self-defeating, as everyone can now see, as they put their publicity machines into overdrive, in the service of damage limitation. For in the current atmosphere, the public does not believe anyone at all. Even as prestigious an institution as Forbes magazine, whose estimates of what rich people and companies are supposed to own are accorded near-biblical authority, has been found wanting whilst commenting on the Ghana economy, just because it has been made to appear to be linked with a campaign to twist the arm of the Ghana government to make it change its position regarding a petroleum transaction. Forbes engaged in special pleading? What is the world coming to, huh?

It is to be hoped that the unpleasantness that has surrounded the oil industry in Ghana – to the extent that even the integrity of the US Department of State, or its visa-issuing arm – will persuade our government to torpedo the long-held tradition by which Ghanaian administrations have regarded information on national economic matters as a state secret to be doled out only to a favourite few, so that they can benefit privately from public largesse, albeit, in a private-enterprise guise. I repeat: we are running economic fascism, pure and simple.

If there happens to be an oil spill (God forbid), it isn’t only people who have access to international finance-capital who will pay a dear price, but poor fishermen, the dependants of poor fishermen, and those who earn a meagre living by servicing the tourist industry (such as it is) who will be unable to lift their hands to their mouths any longer.

The stupidity of the idea that any group of people, or even individuals, can be so 'powerful' in our society that they corner a national asset with as high a profile as petroleum and gas is beyond belief. Yet an attempt has undoubtedly been made to do just that, as if interest versus counter-interest were invented yesterday or that its operational mechanism could be banned from Ghana.

I saw some of these intrigues in the early 1970s, when we witnessed the modus operandi of a company called Agri-Petco. It made a lot of noise about finding oil around Saltpond. But up till today, I don’t know who brought Agri-Petco to Ghana (Ghanaians that is.) I don’t know when Agri-Petco left Ghana either, and exactly why they left. We all assumed that they hadn’t been able to realise the amount of oil from their wells that they had announced they would be able to bring up. Were they right? Were they wrong? We didn’t know. We didn’t even know whether our government had the capability to cross check the information they made available to it. They did what they liked and left when they didn't like what they were finding in Ghana – no information given publicly and no questions asked either. Why ask questions which no one would bother to answer?

When I talk about ‘economic fascism’, some people might think I am using too strong a term. But I am not: I remember that during 1979, when we were in the incredibly hazardous position of having to ration petrol in Ghana, Agri-Petco was still carrying on exporting its crude oil abroad, in precisely the way it had done before we ran out of petrol. Many of us assumed that they were doing that because the agreement the Ghana government had signed with the company gave them the right to export their crude, irrespective of what was happening in Ghana, even if what was happening in Ghana amounted to an ‘insurrection’ that could legally be regarded as ‘force majeure’.

But apparently the true explanation must have been that the crude they were getting from their wells in Ghanaian waters wasn’t suitable for our refinery at Tema. Or so I was told recently by someone, who added that Tema uses heavy crude, whereas the Agri-Petco stuff was 'light'.

I accepted that explanation because I thought the person who offered it ought to know. On the face of it, one should, however, have pointed out that we do buy crude oil from Nigeria, and that most of the Nigerian crude is also light! It is called ‘bonny light’. Admittedly, Nigeria also produces Brass River, Qua Iboe and Escravos blend, among others. But what exactly was Agri-Petco getting from Ghana? Why don't we know the answer?

Even today, do we, as members of the public, actually know the type of crude we get from Nigeria? I don’t think so. Shouldn’t we have been told, at the time Agri-Petco was around, why we weren’t getting any of its crude? Apparently our government didn’t think it necessary. What if we worried our heads about why we were exporting oil when our refineries’ tanks were empty? It is the government’s business, not ours. Or more precisely, it is Tema Oil Refinery’s business. What if Tema Oil Refinery belongs to all of us?

The same cavalier attitude was taken by the Nigerian government towards the petroleum industry, which is its biggest foreign-exchange earner and also the greatest contributor to national income. Until recently, the new Minister of Petroleum Resources Diezani Alison-Madueke says she is trying to get a ‘petroleum industry bill’ passed by the National Assembly, which will ‘unify’ all the many laws (at least 16 at the last count) governing the industry in Nigeria and bring as much transparency to the industry as possible.

The ‘objectives’ of the bill are to bring: ’transparency, accountability and good governance’ into the petroleum industry of Nigeria. It will create an open framework, by eliminating confidentiality of:

- All texts of licences, leases, contracts and amendments
- Amounts of revenue payments to government by individual companies
- All geological, geophysical, technical and well data
- Production, lifting/quantities and values lifted.

According to the minister, the bill also contains ‘stringent guidelines’ that will ‘protect the environment from oil spills and other forms of degradation’.

In an interview with CNN in London, Alison-Madueke acknowledged that about 9 million barrels of oil may have been spilled in the Niger Delta, dating back ‘to 1938 when oil exploration and production started’. The spills were due mainly to ‘piracy and misapplication of the country's laws,’ she said. ‘We have seen so many pirates. The militancy in the Niger Delta obviously created problems. There was piracy in terms of bunkering but there may have been some misapplication of laws over the years.’

‘As we see it now,’ she continued, these things have become ‘a thing of the past, because we are implementing extremely stringent laws, processes and procedures … to ensure that environmental degradation is addressed in time and is effectively remedied.’

The minister expressed the hope that the Petroleum Industry Bill would be passed ‘in the next four to five weeks’, adding that the government was trying to persuade the National Assembly to sacrifice its August recess and pass the bill. The government wanted to address ‘not only the issue of environmental degradation but also [to] ensure greater equity and participation of the Niger Delta communities in the oil and gas sector’.

On the face of it, this should bring progress in an industry that has long been synonymous with opaqueness and the corruption it engenders. The Ghana National Assembly ought to send a delegation, accompanied by oil industry officials, to Nigeria to listen to the Nigerian National Assembly debates on the issue. For it is the fool who says ‘it only concerns my neighbour but not me.’ It took Nigeria over 30 years of unconcern to come to the realisation that even an apparently supine populace could tolerate only so much cheating and thievery and that after a while it would react – as the Delta communities are now doing.

If Ghana does not know, it ought to realise – sooner rather than later – that the current Nigerian situation is a rehearsal of what could be waiting for us. Yet the other day, on Canadian television, a businessman in Takoradi was seen boasting that ‘oh, the type of situation in Nigeria cannot happen in Ghana.’ How does he know? Hmmm … let him rest in his fools’ paradise. For the rest of us, our guiding principle should be that to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

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* Cameron Duodu is a journalist, writer and commentator.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

What is so African about anti-homosexuality and anti-terrorism?

Chambi Chachage

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66485

cc R W P‘Any attempt to strictly define Africa and Africans in terms of one race or culture without acknowledging its diversity is discriminatory,’ writes Chambi Chachage. ‘What we now know as Africa is such a complexity. A cursory look at its history shows that it has always contained a variety of practices and peoples. Its dynamic nature – for every cultural and geographical entity is not static as the theory of relativity shows us – has allowed it to give and take from other continents.’

I felt my African fingers itch when I read Ayub Rioba and Peter Muthamia’s recent articles. Yes, ‘African fingers’, for that is how far one can go in defining things African! Well, let me explain.

Rioba’s article carried these phrases: ‘Whichever way anyone may choose to look at things, Africans enjoy life’; ‘No wonder Africans have a louder laughter than probably any other human race on earth’; ‘In Africa, again, the word suicide is not foreign. But when Africans choose to use it they take a rope and head into a jungle; not bomb crowds’ (‘Africans love their miserable life on earth - nothing else’, The Citizen, 28/07/2010).

In Muthamia’s article the phrases are more categorical: ‘Being African with 100 per cent melanin in my skin I see homosexuality as dirty, disgusting and terribly not African’; ‘In the recent times, African countries are increasingly being dragged into all follies and moral decadence born and nurtured in the West’; ‘No matter how one looks at it, homosexuality does not augur well with African culture though the habit is picking up’ (‘Of gays and activism gone bad as human rights are violated’, Sunday Citizen, 01/08 2010).

Here we are talking of men who carry what can be regarded as African – Rioba and Muthamia – and Judeo-Christian – Ayub and Peter – names respectively. Of course one may argue that they could not protest when their parents or teachers gave them names associated with (Western) Civilisation and Christianity. My friend Ayub would even say he was born one Ikwabe Itembe.

This name-calling, if you may call it so, has nothing to do with ad hominem. Rather, it gives us a glimpse into the ambiguity of trying too much to isolate things we associate with Africa. More significantly, it highlights the dangers inherent in putting these things into fixed ‘pure’ boxes.

What we now know as Africa is such a complexity. A cursory look at its history shows that it has always contained a variety of practices and peoples. Its dynamic nature – for every cultural and geographical entity is not static as the theory of relativity shows us – has allowed it to give and take from other continents. Of course the story has not been that rosy, as we all know from the history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism that has skewed its relation with Euro-America.

So, what we have now is even more than what Ali Mazrui called ‘A Triple Heritage’ in reference to influences from primarily (Christian) Europe, (Islamic) Asia and (‘Animistic’) Africa. We have people of various colours and creeds. As such, any attempt to strictly define Africa and Africans in terms of one race or culture without acknowledging its diversity is discriminatory.

And we all know by now, through what we have experienced as a continent and a people, of what discrimination can lead to. It did not only lead to apartheid, but also to xenophobia, in South Africa. And we should always remember that at least one in three people who were killed during the xenophobic attacks were also South Africans. Why? Because it was thought they were not South Africans! How? By associating South Africanness with stereotypical physical features!

By the way, even those who killed Lucky Dube – the reggae maestro who sung ‘Different Colours, One People’ – claimed that they thought he was Nigerian! How can one tell who a Nigerian is simply by looking? By the colour of his/her skin – is it darker than other Africans?

When a sperm bank in South Africa advertised that it was desperately looking for ‘black, coloured and Indian sperms’ at the dawn of this decade what was it telling the world – that biologically an ‘African sperm’ is black in colour? This is the level of absurdity the politics of pigmentation can lead us to when defining who an African is or not. We can end having ‘Black/African fingers’!

In ‘What makes you more Tanzanian?’ I referred to an advert that appeared on one of the television stations in South Africa. It flashes a question, ‘what makes you African?’ Then it shows an African albino and asks, ‘is it the colour of your skin?’ It goes on to show Africans with blond hair, blue eyes and other stereotypical European features. Such are the limits of the absurd politics of pigmentation – the same politics that have led to genocide and albino killings!

As we were recently debating bitterly about whether Pan-Africanism ought to still be a ‘black’ racial project in the 21st Century, a colleague reminded me of an interesting quote that highlights the limit of colour politicisation: ’I used to define black nationalism as the idea that the black man should control the economy of his community, and so forth’, Malcolm X said back in 1965, but, ’when I was in Africa in May, in Ghana, I was speaking with the Algerian ambassador who is extremely militant and is a revolutionary in the true sense of the word (and has credentials as such for having carried on a successful revolution against oppression in his country in 1962)’.

Malcolm X then concludes: ‘When I told him that my political, social and economic philosophy was black nationalism, he asked me very frankly, well, where did that leave him? Because he was white. He was an African, but he was Algerian and to all appearances he was a white man. And he said if I define my objective as the victory of black nationalism, where does that leave him? Where does it leave revolutionaries in Morocco, Egypt…So he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries, dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.’ Frantz Fanon would have agreed.

So, what does all this rumbling about Africanity has to do with anti-homosexuality and anti-terrorism? It is just a caution to our analysts to tread careful in the way they attach a meaning to what Africa is and Africans are? Attaching a meaning is always a political act. It can lead to things with serious negative political implications to those who are excluded from the meaning.

But should a meaning be ahistorical? Should a political act of naming, by way of propaganda, deny a historical reality for the sake of pushing an agenda benign as it may be? In the case of Ayub, the agenda seems to be that of warning African leaders – and awakening African citizens – to the possibilities of using ‘terrorism’ broadly defined to make an end to the misery in Africa.

Read as a satire, Ayub’s article can be absolved of creating a mythical Africa in which ‘anti-terrorism’ is not alien. But history shows that many Africans have been regarded as ‘terrorists’ simply because they were fighting for their freedom from foreign occupation. To the British, Dedan Kimathi and his band that stormed their garrison were terrorists. Lest we forget, by 2008 the name of Nelson Mandela was still on the United States of America’s official list of terrorists!

In Muthamia’s article the agenda is to arrest ‘bad activism’ which ‘engender issues that are petty and unnatural’. To him, activism ‘should envisage better lifestyles for all Tanzanians and not catapult them to crass decadence.’ It should not be ‘radicalism, militancy, extremism and all approaches that have been imposed by Western countries.’ As such activism ‘should adopt positive non-confrontational approach that must have respect for the government and society.’

Analysed as a discourse, Muthamia’s article draws its inspiration from the very canon it questions. Its call is based on the tenets of what is regarded as ‘Western’ liberal democracy in regard to the relation between the state and civil society. His interpretation of what is natural – as in normal – and respected – as in accepted – in society is highly informed by what is referred to as ‘Western’ Puritanism’. It would be truthful to admit this rather than misconstrue Africa’s history.

Ancient and contemporary history, whether that of Africa or the world, does not confirm this conclusion of his: ‘Homosexuality is one of the greatest paradoxes of our time, a pervasion that is gradually being imposed on Africa.’ This is an ancient practice – even if it was not performed in public in certain places – here and elsewhere. Somehow the practice has persisted to our times.

Even the script from which Muthamia gets his first name talks about such a practice in ancient times. Of course it condemns it. That is what Peter should be telling us, that homosexuality is bad because God, through the Bible, says so. Depending on our belief in the Bible as the Word of God, we can pick from there. If the text that informs him doesn’t deny history, why should he?

Our two columnists only have to (re)read the history of how they became named Ayub and Peter to know that they are in as much a (by)product of the West they query as they are of Africa they protect. That way they, and we, won’t deny the extent to which this seemingly contradictory legacy continues to lock us in stereotypes that do not serve our continent and its people well.

A dynamic people do not deny reality. They bring social change. Let us, Africans, make history.

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* Chambi Chachage is a co-editor of 'Africa's Liberation: the Legacy of Nyerere', published by Pambazuka Press. He blogs at Udadisi.
* © Chambi Chachage
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Malawi has an app for that: Charting the nation’s IT future

Steve Sharra

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66473

cc D ZReflecting on discussions at a Malawian ‘unconference’ on information technology, Steve Sharra considers IT’s future role in the lives of Malawians. With ‘billions of kwacha’ leaving the country in the form of software licences to northern companies, considerable Malawian taxpayer money ends up being spent on proprietary software, despite governmental indifference. As Sharra emphasises, Malawian ingenuity around application development and the use of open source software should be much better supported in the struggle to improve the country’s education system.

The dominant discourse in the study of development is about how much aid developed countries give to developing countries, and very little discussion of how much wealth goes the other way, from developing countries to developed countries. To their credit, African scholars and activists, a handful of politicians and a few global justice activists make this point, albeit infrequently, with the consequence that considerable sections of African societies, including Malawi, have come to view their entire world from the perspective of a people forever destined to be objects of Western pity. What is perhaps not emphasised enough are the nitty-gritty details of how much wealth the global South transfers to the developed global North. A recent conference, Barcamp Malawi 2010, gave this issue a Malawian face, when Malawian information technology (IT) experts and their counterparts from the US, Europe and elsewhere met over the weekend of 17–18 July at the Sunbird Capital Hotel in Lilongwe.

In this article I discuss this revelation about how much wealth Malawi as a country transfers to developed countries in the form of software licence fees. However, much of the article is taken up by descriptions of the issues that came up at the ‘unconference’, where participants suggested topics to present on, share and discuss with others as a way of offering IT solutions to problems that ordinary Malawians grapple with. The term ‘unconference’ suggests a format in which the topics for presentation and discussion come from the participants, rather than the organisers.

I left the conference on the night of Sunday 18 July feeling much better-educated about the role that the IT community plays in Malawi, the paralysing indifference they encounter from government bureaucracy, and their vision for the future of IT and its applications to Malawian contexts. I develop these points in the larger framing of this article, stressing the crucial role that Malawian IT visionaries play despite the odds they face. I also make suggestions as to how the locally grown solutions that the Malawian IT community envisions need to be taken up, especially by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MOEST). There are two reasons for zeroing in on MOEST. First, they are entrusted with the responsibility of developing educational, scientific and technological systems in the country, as their full portfolio intimates. Second, Malawi would be taking to a higher level its aspirations for a home-grown development paradigm if Malawian schools were to embrace the innovative, can-do spirit that many Malawian IT experts have espoused.

STARVING AMIDST PLENTY: FREE OPEN SOFTWARE AND LICENCE FEES

During one of the breakout sessions on the last day of the meeting, one participant explained how as a nation Malawi pays billions of kwacha in annual software licence fees. In one example mentioned, a key government agency (name withheld) is said to spend GB£43 million a year in software licence fees. That amount translates into approximately MK10 billion every year. Worse still, there are several other Malawian government and corporate entities that are spending hard-earned taxpayer money and scarce foreign exchange paying for these software licence fees. To illustrate this, much of the costs for running the telecentres the government is constructing across the country are going toward software licences for proprietary software. The most recent telecentre has been opened in Mwanza, costing MK77 million, according to a 4 July article posted on The Nation newspaper’s website. The telecommunications industry itself sends out billions of kwacha every year paying these kinds of fees to developed countries.

A number of IT specialists reported how they had on separate occasions contacted relevant authorities in government and demonstrated to them free open source software that didn’t require any licence fees. In each case, the government representative approached expressed scepticism and a reluctance to even consider the idea. Yet, only two years ago Malawi hosted an international conference on open source software development. Organised by the ICT Association of Malawi (ICTAM), the sixth International Wide Open Access ICT conference was held in Lilongwe on 12–14 November 2008. The conference, bringing to Malawi IT experts from around the world, was supposed to be officially opened by the erstwhile cabinet minister responsible for ICT development in Malawi. The delegates sat and waited for the minister, until one of the organisers picked up the phone and called to find out where the minister was. The minister was nowhere near the conference site. In an even more striking piece of evidence of government’s apathy for things IT, a few years ago a speaker of the Malawi parliament (name withheld) once threw out a member of parliament for using a laptop in the house.

MALAWIANISING COMPUTERS AND INTERNET CONTENT

Soyapi Mumba, one of the organisers and a leading Malawian software engineer, was of the opinion that there was a lot of Malawian content around, it just wasn’t easy to access. He gave the example of the numerous radio stations that broadcast in Malawi, whose content does not appear on the internet. He said the challenge for Malawian IT experts was to make that content accessible, on the internet. Even if Mumba’s observation is correct, it is still the case that the majority of the content that dominates Malawian airwaves from the more than 20 radio stations and a handful TV channels in the country is never archived on the internet. Only a handful of Malawian newspapers and magazines put their content on the internet, a situation that does render credence to the observation that Malawi is much underrepresented on the World Wide Web.

Edmond Kachale, a software developer at Baobab Health, made a presentation on natural language technologies, in which he demonstrated a Chichewa spellchecking plugin for Firefox. Kachale has given the plugin a technical name, ‘ChicPOS’, which stands for ‘Chichewa Part of Speech Tagger’. The plugin does what one sees when one misspells an English word on their computer, redlining the word to alert the user of the spelling mistake. Kachale’s plugin gives the computer a function that recognises Chichewa words and their parts of speech. Kachale has also created a Chichewa spellchecking plugin for openoffice.org, a free open source program that works much like Microsoft word processing and graphics applications. Kachale is part of the team that created the Chichewa Google page, available at www.google.mw. He said the page serves not only Chichewa-speaking people from Malawi, but also Chinyanja speakers in Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. He provided an email address, chichewalocaliser@gmail.com which people can write to for more information on the project.

More examples of localisation of content came from a topic on game design. Steven Chanza demonstrated a Malawian computer game he had developed, which he said was called ‘Thela’ or ‘Odi’. In his demonstration he played against an imaginary opponent whom he named ‘Malume’. Chanza’s game has varying levels of difficulty, and tabulates summaries of scores and other data at the end of a session. In light of Chanza’s and Kachale’s work on Malawian computer content, the issue of content localisation is an interesting one given the contradictions that characterise language policy and practice. Malawian education policy, drawn from cognitive research and expert opinion, requires Malawian children to be taught in a language they speak at home. Yet the majority of private schools, where most Malawian elites – and non-elites who can afford it – send their children, do not allow any Malawian languages, with very few exceptions. A recent UNESCO report points out how Africa is the only continent on the planet where the majority of children start school in a foreign language. The consequences of these policy and practice contradictions manifest themselves in the low literacy rates, political disempowerment and reduced rates of democratic participation seen across Africa (‘Why and how Africa should invest in African languages and multilingual education’, UNESCO, 2010).

MALAWIAN GENIUS ON DISPLAY

A discussion which came up at various points in the course of the two days was on how to provide ICT solutions to rural parts of Malawi. That discussion revealed some quite exciting developments that are already occurring on that front. Alex Gondwe, deputy country director for Baobab Health, described how the organisation has been adapting computers and converting them into low-energy consuming gadgets, from 240 volts to 12 volts. These computers are being used in clinics and health centres in rural areas, where they are powered by solar and wind energy. Max Phiri’s company, ITS Enterprises, recently donated a 15-terminal computer lab to a primary school in Mchinji. The computers all use 12 volts only, making it possible for schools not connected to the ESCOM grid to still be able to use computers.

The innovation to adapt computers and make them usable in such low-energy conditions is where the concept of localisation squarely meets the desire to make technology locally relevant. These are computers that are transforming the medical informatics landscape in Malawi, and as has been shown by ITS Enterprises, the same IT innovations are also applicable in Malawi’s education context. For me this was the most exciting part of Barcamp Malawi, in which Malawian genius was at full display. William Kamkwamba had been expected to attend and give a talk, but he had other commitments that prevented him. I later learned on MBC TV the following Monday that Kamkwamba had just been honoured by the Malawi Institute of Engineers for his pioneering work in locally sourced windmill energy technology.

Kamkwamba will soon be attending the Ivy League school Dartmouth College in the United States. Kamkwamba’s memoir of how he created a windmill from junk materials in his village, co-authored with Bryan Mealer, became a bestseller in the United States of America. In the book Kamkwamba and Mealer narrate the story of how William dropped out of form one at Kachokolo Day Secondary School in Kasungu in January of 2002. This was at the height of the 2002 famine, and his parents had failed to raise MK1,200 (US$80) for his school fees. Kamkwamba, aged 14 at the time, started visiting a library at a nearby teacher development centre (TDC), where he started reading a book on how to make electricity at home. It is a beautifully written, fascinating story that raises the question of the limits of the school curriculum, and the power of a determined mind. It rises to the level of a complete introduction to physics and homemade electricity. Entitled ‘The Boy who Harnessed the Wind’, the book – despite its ambivalences, which all books have – should be made required reading in Malawi’s teacher training colleges, secondary schools, technical and vocational colleges and universities.

Toward the end of the two-day event more Malawian genius was on display when five teams competed in using Google App Engine to create software applications, or apps as they have become widely known. The criteria asked for apps that were creatively designed and whose solutions targeted an important problem in Malawi. The prize was the latest Google phone, HTC Legend. That prize went to two young Malawians, Steven Chanza, aged 24, and Kondwani Hara, aged 27. Chanza and Hara created an application that they named ‘shareajob’. The utility for the application, they explained, is that most job postings are available only to those who can afford to buy a newspaper, or to read one in a library or view a copy bought by somebody else. Their application is meant to bring job announcements to anybody who has an Internet-enabled mobile phone.

Each one of the apps demonstrated for the contest was quite unique and exciting. Some were even funny and light-hearted. Boster Sibande, co-lead organiser of the barcamp and a top software engineer in his own right, won second prize for an app that would make it possible for Big Brother housemates to cast anonymous votes on a computer to eject other housemates. Another app developed by Sibande offers a solution to the problem of reformatting phone numbers in a mobile handset. Sibande explained that recently Malawi switched from a system of 8-digit mobile phone numbers to 11, adding 0999 or 0888 and their variations. He said for people who had hundreds of contacts in the phones, it would be a tedious process to go through each contact and reformat it to the new system. His application, known as PIM API, solves that problem by simultaneously changing all the phone numbers automatically.

Third prize went to Austin Madinga and Lengani Kaunda, who developed an app they named ‘Pano’, Chichewa for ‘here’. Madinga’s and Kaunda’s idea is for the application to serve the social networking purpose of announcing one’s location, and also identifying particular places such as banks, petrol stations, restaurants and hospitals within in a 20-kilometre radius.

CHARTING THE FUTURE OF IT IN MALAWI THROUGH EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

As Barcamp Malawi 2010 drew to a close, participants paid particular attention to what they need to do as IT experts, promoting collaboration among themselves and making their voice heard. They also talked of the need to involve other stakeholders and consult widely in their discussions. In the course of the day, several examples came up that highlighted issues of schooling and where IT solutions fit in. Many participants seemed eager to apply their expertise to educational issues in Malawi.

Two aspects of the localised solutions being experimented with seemed pertinent to the one problem recent policy-making the Malawi Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MOEST) appears to be giving a lot of attention to lately. Educational thought leaders here in Malawi appear unanimous in their agreement that Malawi is not going to improve the quality of education with the current class sizes that the average Malawian teacher has to contend with. Thousands of classrooms are extremely overcrowded, and learning conditions are quite challenging. One researcher told an educational symposium recently that he could not think of another country in the world that had the class sizes and teacher pupil ratios that Malawi does. Educational researchers and policy-makers point out what a miracle it is that Malawian children persist and survive the early years of schooling at all.

Given the numbers of teachers needed to make a real difference in the problem of quality education and equitable access in Malawi, technological solutions will be indispensable. An important first step might be the consideration of establishing a MOEST directorate solely devoted to educational technology in Malawian schools and teacher-training colleges. We don’t seem to have one at the moment for that specific purpose.

The Malawi government needs to be assisted in appreciating the significance of adopting free open source software. The huge amounts of money the country spends on unnecessary software licence fees could promote IT investment within Malawi, rather than enriching already rich countries. There is a lot of awareness work to be done. As Madalo Khoza poignantly explained, Malawian IT experts need to talk about ICT not as a technical matter, but rather as ‘enabling tools.’

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

Congo-Kinshasa: New evidence shows US role in Lumumba’s death

Stephen R. Weissman

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66484

cc WikimediaFollowing an extensive parliamentary inquiry in 2002, the Belgian government assumed a portion of responsibility for the murder of Patrice Lumumba, writes Stephen R. Weissman. But ‘controversy has continued to swirl over allegations of US government responsibility’, despite a 1975 investigation concluding that it was not ‘in anyway involved in the killing’. ‘It is now clear,’ writes Weissman, ‘that conclusion was wrong.’

Fifty years ago, the former Belgian Congo received its independence under the democratically elected government of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Less than seven months later, Lumumba and two colleagues were, in the contemporary idiom, ‘rendered’ to their Belgian-backed secessionist enemies, who tortured them before putting them before a firing squad. The Congo would not hold another democratic election for 46 years. In 2002, following an extensive parliamentary inquiry, the Belgian government assumed a portion of responsibility for Lumumba's murder.

But controversy has continued to swirl over allegations of US government responsibility, as the reception for Raoul Peck's acclaimed film, ‘Lumumba’, demonstrated. After all, the US had at least as much, if not more, influence in the Congolese capital as Belgium. It was the major financier and political supporter of the UN peacekeeping force that controlled most of the country. According to still classified documents that I first revealed eight years ago, members of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) ‘Project Wizard’ covert action program dominated the post-Lumumba Congolese regime. However, a 1975 US Senate investigation of alleged CIA assassinations concluded that while the CIA had earlier plotted to murder Lumumba, he was eventually killed ‘by Congolese rivals. It does not appear from the evidence that the United States was in any way involved in the killing.’

It is now clear that conclusion was wrong. A new analysis of the declassified files of the Senate ‘Church’ Committee (chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church), CIA and State Department, along with memoirs and interviews of US and Belgian covert operators, establishes that CIA station chief Larry Devlin was consulted by his Congolese government ‘co-operators’ about the transfer of Lumumba to sworn enemies, had no objection to it and withheld knowledge from Washington of the impending move, forestalling the strong possibility that the State Department would have intervened to try to save Lumumba. I detail this evidence in a new article in the academic journal, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 25, no. 2 (The full article is available from the publisher.)

Here, briefly, are the most important new findings:

- Former US officials who knew Lumumba now acknowledge that the administration of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower mistakenly cast him as a dangerous vehicle of Soviet influence.

- Covert CIA actions against the Lumumba government, often dovetailing with Belgian ones, culminated in Colonel Joseph Mobutu's military coup, which was ‘arranged and supported and indeed managed’ by the CIA alone, according to Devlin's private interview with the Church Committee staff.

- The CIA station and US embassy provided their inexperienced and politically weak Congolese protégés with a steady stream of political and military recommendations. The advice arrived both before Congolese government decisions and shortly afterwards when foreign advisers were invited in to offer feedback. Devlin's counsel was largely heeded on critical matters, especially when it came to Lumumba. Thus Mobutu and former president Joseph Kasavubu were persuaded to resist political pressures to reconcile with Lumumba, and Mobutu reluctantly acceded to Devlin's request to arrest him. After both Devlin and the American ambassador intervened, the government dropped its plan to attack UN troops guarding Lumumba. And after Lumumba was publicly brutalised by Mobutu's troops, the US embassy – under pressure from the State Department, which was concerned about African governments' threats to pull out of the UN force – pushed Kasavubu into promising Lumumba ‘humane treatment’ and a ‘fair trial’.

- In this context of US adviser-Congolese leader interactions, Devlin's decision not to intervene after he was informed by a ‘government leader’ of a plan to send Lumumba to his ‘sworn enemy’ signalled that he had no objection to the government's course. It was also seen that way by Devlin's Belgian counterpart, Colonel Louis Marliere, who later wrote, ‘There was a “consensus” and …no adviser, whether he be Belgian or American, thought to dissuade them.’ Considering Congolese leaders' previous responsiveness to CIA and US embassy views, Devlin's permissive attitude was undoubtedly a major factor in the government’s final action. (Its last-minute switch of sending Lumumba to murderous secessionists in Katanga instead of murderous secessionists in South Kasai does not change the crucial fact that Devlin gave a green light to delivering Lumumba to men who had publicly vowed to kill him.)

- Furthermore, shortly before the transfer, Mobutu indicated to Devlin that Lumumba ‘might be executed’, according to a Church Committee interview. Devlin did not suggest that he offered any objection or caution.

- Cables show that Devlin did not report to Washington the impending rendition for three days (i.e. until it was already underway), forestalling the strong possibility that the State Department would have intervened to try and protect Lumumba as it had done several weeks earlier. When news came that Lumumba had been flown to Belgian-supported Katanga (but before it became known that he was already dead), a top State Department official called in the Belgian ambassador to complain about Belgian advisers' possible contribution to the Congolese government's ‘gaffe’ and to insist upon the need for ‘humane treatment.’

- The Church Committee failed to uncover the full truth about the US role because of its inattention to the covert relationship between the CIA and Congolese decision makers, CIA delays in providing key cables, and political pressure to water down its original draft conclusions.

Devlin died in 2008 after consistently denying any knowledge of his Congolese associates' ‘true plans’ for Lumumba, and maintaining that he had ‘stalled’ the earlier CIA assassination plot. Yet declassified CIA cables disprove his claims.

One horrible crime cannot, by itself, change history. But the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the most dynamic political leader the Congo has ever produced, was a critical step in the consolidation of an oppressive regime. At the same time, it crystallised an eventual 35-year US commitment to the perpetuation of that regime, not just against Lumumba's followers but against all comers. In the end, Mobutu's kleptocracy would tear civil society apart, destroy the state and help pave the way for a regional war that would kill millions of people.

There can no longer be any doubt that the US, Belgian and Congolese governments shared major responsibility for the assassination of Lumumba in Katanga. The young prime minister was an imperfect leader during an unprecedented and overwhelming international crisis. But he continues to be honoured around the world because he incarnated – if only for a moment – the nationalist and democratic struggle of the entire African continent against a recalcitrant West.

If the US government at last publicly acknowledged – and apologised for – its role in this momentous assassination, it would also be communicating its support for the universal principles Lumumba embodied. What better person to take this step than the American president, himself a son of Africa?

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* This article first appeared on AllAfrica.com.
* Stephen R. Weissman is author of ‘An Extraordinary Rendition’, in Intelligence and National Security, v.25, no.2 (April 2010) and ‘American Foreign Policy in the Congo 1960-1964’. He is a former staff director of the US House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Human rights in Ethiopia: Can Obama deliver?

Steel vices, clenched fists and closing walls (Part III)

Alemayehu G. Mariam

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66469

cc A HThe Obama administration must hold Meles Zenawi to account for gross human rights abuses against his people in Ethiopia, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam. Mariam argues that although the US has instilled a hope for a better future in the vision of the oppressed, without a realignment of US foreign policy and subsequent pressure against the regime in Ethiopia, belief will deteriorate into despair and anti-Americanism in the country. ‘It is time for the US to fish or cut bait in Ethiopia’, writes Mariam.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS LEDGER OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

President Obama has been sharply criticised for his ‘inability’ to deliver on his human rights ‘promises’. Some say his support for the cause of human rights and those struggling against oppression has been rhetorical, and lukewarm at that. He has been unable to translate lofty words into concrete actions that prevent human rights abuses. They say his basic approach is flawed because he is trying to reform and rehabilitate nasty dictators into wholesome democrats. A few have suggested that in the post-9/11 world, President Obama has made it his mission ‘to atone for America’s sins’ instead of reasserting a strong leadership role for the US, particularly in the area of human rights. He has been charged with ‘hypocrisy’ for not speaking out against China, Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule of Egypt under a state of emergency, the fizzling of human rights activism in Iran following the elections last year and the military coup in Honduras. His critics say that he has gone out of his way to accommodate the bloodthirsty Burmese military dictators despite the fact that the democratically elected leader of that country, Aung San Suu Kyi, has remained in detention for two decades. The vast majority of Ethiopians are disappointed in President Obama’s silence over the unjust imprisonment of Birtukan Midekssa, the first woman political party leader in Ethiopian history and arguably the most important political prisoner on the African continent today.

Although President Obama and his administration could have done a lot more in the field of global human rights, I am not inclined to join the ranks of his critics and blame him for everything that has gone wrong in the struggle for human rights worldwide during his eighteen months as president for two reasons. First, his administration has been weighed down by a domestic agenda of epic proportions and distracted by a variety of policy crises of unprecedented severity. Moreover, he had to manage two major ground wars and the global war on terror. Second, I do not expect decades of official neglect of human rights to be addressed in the span of eighteen months. Rather, I am inclined to telescope his overall involvement in the human rights field and make some inferences on his potential to make a great ‘human rights president’ in his first term. I find some encouraging evidence that he has the potential to play an extraordinary role in the upholding of human rights worldwide.

Few would argue the fact that over the past eighteen months, President Obama has restored considerable credibility to US global human rights leadership following gross human rights abuses in Iraq. He banned the use of torture (or ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’) immediately after taking office. His speeches and public statements in Ghana, Egypt and Turkey, amongst other places, promoting human rights and accountability have given hope to millions. His administration has fully supported the work and activities of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and even Kenya where the prosecutor – acting on his own initiative for the first time – is investigating that country’s 2007 and early 2008 post-election violence. (A similar ICC investigation into the massacres of hundreds of people in Ethiopia after the 2005 elections is overdue and fully warranted.) In a symbolic but unprecedented act, President Obama, in a special White House ceremony, honoured female human rights activists from Zimbabwe by awarding them the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for their struggle against the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. He has thrust human rights into the centre of the debate on US foreign policy around the world. These facts, in my view, are significant in light of his predecessor’s ritualistic obsession with elections regardless of whether they were rigged or stolen. As Secretary Clinton’s recent human rights speeches demonstrate, the Obama administration is emphatic on the issues of free expression, free press, clean elections and civil society. Overall, the evidence from diverse opinion surveys worldwide suggests that, in numerous countries, opinions about the US are about as positive today as they were before 9/11, principally because of a heightened emphasis on human rights.

I am also mindful of Senator Obama’s successful sponsorship of the Democratic Republic of Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act in 2006. That act aims to help promote and reinvigorate the political process in the DRC and meet the basic needs of Congolese citizens, and targets the elimination of sexual violence against women and children. I recall the fact that Senator Obama would have fully supported the Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act had it been brought for a vote on the senate floor following its passage in the US House of Representatives in 2007. On a personal level, I have confidence in Mr Obama that he will stand up for human rights not because he is president but because he is first and foremost a constitutional lawyer. Challenging those who abuse power, flout the rule of law, sneer at justice and thumb their noses at due process is encoded in the DNA of every genuine American constitutional lawyer. None of the foregoing should be viewed as an apology for any failures on the part of President Obama, or his administration. I will not hesitate to challenge the administration’s human rights policy in Ethiopia (or elsewhere) as I have done in these series of commentaries.

THE INSANITY OF DOING NOTHING

It was Albert Einstein who said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ This could be said of US human rights policy in Ethiopia over the past decade: doing nothing over and over again and expecting results – insanity, sheer madness. The fact of the matter is that the US, for all of the billions it has given to the dictatorship of Meles Zenawi over the past two decades, has been unable to curb his gross human rights violations. Indeed, the US has shied away from strong and sustained criticism of Zenawi’s dismal human rights record. The Obama Administration must realise, if it has not already, that the current status quo – rigged and stolen elections, warehousing of large numbers of political prisoners, intimidation of opposition parties and leaders, decimation of the independent press, the climate of fear and loathing for the citizenry, denial of expressive freedoms, enactment of repressive anti-civil society laws, jamming of Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts and provocative accusations against the US Government of being the soul mates of the genocidal thugs of Rwanda’s Interhamwe – cannot and must not go on so long as American tax dollars are being used to bankroll Zenawi’s dictatorship. It should also be crystal clear to the Obama Administration that quiet diplomacy, soft-pedalling on human rights and attaching human rights as an afterthought to negotiations on counterterrorism, security, etc, will not work. The status quo will be damaging both to US strategic interests in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa and undermine the democratic development of Ethiopia.

The dilemma that President Obama is facing today over human rights in Africa is the same one that his predecessors have faced over the decades. The US has never really developed an African policy that tethered human rights, security, trade and governance issues. Historically, US policy in Africa in general, and Ethiopia in particular, has been haphazard and episodic; dominated by a concern with the role of colonial powers, the containment of communism and now defeating global terrorism. Realpolitik has always trumped Wilsonianism. It was President Woodrow Wilson who during and after WWI undertook the mission ‘to make the world safe for democracy’. He believed international peace and America’s preeminent role in the world could be secured by promoting democracy and human rights and spreading the virtues of individual freedom, limited government and popular sovereignty.

The Cold War threw cold water on Wilsonianism after WWII, as the struggle to contain totalitarian communism became the core ideology in US foreign policy. It was the Carter Administration that gave human rights a real boost by emphasising democracy and human rights as practical objectives of US foreign policy. Not unlike President Obama, President Carter raised the hopes of millions around the world. President Carter followed up with action imposing export and import restrictions on South Africa, Ethiopia and Uganda and by linking economic and military aid to human rights violations. But realpolitik caught up with him quickly and the specter of communist insurrections forced him to negotiate for military bases in Kenya, Somalia and Sudan, despite the poor human rights records of the ruling regimes. The Reagan Administration showed interest in human rights at the cusp of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was the administration of the senior George H. Bush that elevated the human rights rhetoric to new heights by unapologetically declaring that the world was not divided along an east-west axis but ‘between those committed to democracy and liberty and those against’. President Bill Clinton dubbed Africa’s dictators a ‘new breed’ of African leaders and built his ‘strategic initiative in Africa’ so that Africans could serve as US military proxies while using development aid and the international lending institutions to promote democratisation.

President Obama is facing the same dilemma his predecessors have faced. His challenge now is to develop an effective strategy to convert his moral advocacy of human rights to a practical application of human rights principles in US foreign policy. If he fails to make the transition, he will be criticised for dashing the hopes of millions around the world and judged harshly by history for perpetuating American ‘hypocrisy’ and spreading cynicism and despair.

WALKING THE HUMAN RIGHTS TALK: ACCOUNTABILITY

It is high time for the US to begin walking its human rights talk in Ethiopia. No doubt, striking the right balance between human rights concerns and pragmatic, strategic interests will be no easy task. For the past decade, the US has thrown human rights in Ethiopia under the bus in its pursuit of the global war on terror. Despite gruesome revelations of gross human rights abuses in Ethiopia by an official US global human rights watchdog, the US has consistently dismissed, ignored, disingenuously deferred or promised action which never came to pass. It is time for the US to fish or cut bait in Ethiopia.

Secretary Clinton in her recent speech in Poland said there are four elements to the Obama Administration’s approach to ‘putting our principles into action’ in American global human rights policy. The first pillar is accountability, which means ‘governments [must] take responsibility by putting human rights into law and embedding them in government institutions; by building strong, independent courts, competent and disciplined police and law enforcement’. Over the past decade, the US has shown an almost pathological and reflexive aversion to the very idea of holding dictator Zenawi accountable. When Zenawi came out and declared that he had won the May 2010 election by 99.6 per cent, the White House put out a statement bleating, ‘We are concerned that international observers found that the elections fell short of international commitments [and] U.S. Embassy officials were denied accreditation and the opportunity to travel outside of the capital on Election Day to observe the voting.’ Over the past five years, the US has soft-pedalled gross violations of human rights. When Zenawi slaughtered hundreds of protesters following the 2005 elections, the US Government made the mind-numbing statement: ‘The deaths as a result of the actions surrounding these protests are senseless. The United States calls upon both side to engage in a peaceful dialogue.’ When Zenawi jailed tens of thousands of people that same year, the US Government said: ‘We urge the government to respect the rule of law, international principles of human rights, and due process with regard to those arrested or detained.’ This is not accountability; it is pusillanimity.

Accountability means holding someone responsible for their acts. Someone must be held accountable for the deaths and severe injuries of hundreds of peaceful protesters in 2005, the massacre of hundreds of Anuak people in Gambella in 2004 and the untold deaths and destruction in the Ogaden. The Obama administration must show the same moral leadership in Ethiopia as it has shown in Kenya by supporting the ICC investigations for the deaths that occurred in the post-election period of late 2007 and early 2008, and the genocide in Darfur. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If ICC action is good enough for Kenya and the Sudan, I say it is good enough for Ethiopia.

By Secretary Clinton’s own words, accountability applies not only to the tin pot dictators of the world but also to the US. That is why Ethiopians in the US must hold the Obama Administration itself accountable under Section 116.75 (a) of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act. That provision plainly states:

‘No assistance may be provided under this part to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or de-grading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons… or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country.’

Similarly, Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1976 mandates:

‘[E]xcept under extraordinary circumstances no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons or other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person.’

Is there a country that cries out more for the rigorous application of these provisions than Ethiopia?

WALK THE HUMAN RIGHTS TALK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK

President Obama has raised the hopes and democratic aspirations of millions around the world. He will have to give human rights the importance it deserves in US foreign policy. Whether in Ethiopia or elsewhere, the issue of human rights should not be left to some embassy functionary who juggles other duties. Human rights should be given the same attention and importance as is given to counterterrorism, security, development and policy towards trade with African dictatorships. It must not be a side issue or an afterthought to other policies. In his speeches, President Obama has awakened the world’s oppressed masses; they fully expect that he will stand up with them and not those who oppress them. In Africa, he has a clear choice: Africa’s tin pot dictators bound for the dustbin of history or Africa’s youth. In his own words, ‘it will not be giants like Nkrumah and Kenyatta who will determine Africa's future. Above all, it will be the young people - brimming with talent and energy and hope’. I am hopeful that the Obama Administration will use creative approaches to put American human rights principles into action in the foreseeable future.

FREE BIRTUKAN MIDEKSSA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS IN ETHIOPIA.

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* This article was originally published by The Huffington Post.
* Alemayehu G. Mariam is professor of political science at California State University (CSU) San Bernardino.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

South Africa loses its ‘War on Poverty’

Patrick Bond

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66498

© abahlali.orgNow two years in the making, the South African state's War on Poverty (WoP) is ‘one of the most clandestine operations in South African history’, writes Patrick Bond.

Shortly before Pretoria’s presidential power change from Thabo Mbeki to Jacob Zuma two years ago, the South African state announced its War on Poverty (WoP). What news from the front, in the immediate wake of World Cup host duties that showed observers how very pleasant life is for the rich and middle class here?

We don’t know, because the WoP is one of the most clandestine operations in South African history, with status reports kept confidential by a floundering army in rapid retreat from the poor, who are estimated at half the society.

Initially the WoP appeared as a major national project. Early hubris characterised the war, as happens in most, with victory claimed even before Mbeki officially launched it in his February 2008 State of the Nation speech.

Five months earlier, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel bragged to Parliament that people in poverty ‘dropped steadily from 52.1% in 1999 to 47% in 2004 and to 43.2% by March this year’. (Such claims would wither under scrutiny, e.g., from a University of Cape Town research team showing virtually no change from 1993–2008.)

In August 2008, a national ‘war room on poverty’ was established in the office of Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Akin to Pretoria’s ‘Total Strategy’, to borrow a 1970s phrase, the WoP was meant to include both low-intensity warfare techniques – such as welfare grants (old-age pensions and disability grants of around $100 per month and child grants of $30) and temporary Extended Public Works Program jobs (usually no more than six months in duration) – as well as high-profile shock-and-awe tactics, like water-piping extension to black schools.

By late 2009, the new Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe unveiled a special weapon: self-help. Instead of soldier-bureaucrats doing the fighting, winning the WoP would be outsourced to the masses. Government’s BuaNews reported that Motlanthe ‘is of the opinion that such an approach will force people to help themselves out of poverty’.

But would the people ‘help themselves’ (and the state) in the WoP, or instead continue to harbour the enemy in their houses? Would the masses fight dependency, or instead continue nurturing a psychological thug deep within their hearts, minds and homesteads?

Frankly, not enough is known about the WoP to answer these questions.

Why so little reliable information? After all, contemporary wars feature extraordinary public-relations offensives. But those in Pretoria leading the WoP established a secret society, as is obvious when checking the empty website or requesting research information directly from the webmaster.

British management consultant Ian Houvet, a WoP mercenary who runs the site when not working for Barclays and Vodafone UK, replied to me: ‘I am afraid the WoP web site is for government officials associated with the WoP only and therefore access cannot be granted.’

The problem goes deeper than a secrecy fetish. Unlike the apartheid-era ‘winning hearts and minds’ (WHAM) strategy, when Pretoria maintained a lasting commitment to ‘oil spots’ and other pacification strategies during the War on Black People, there really isn’t enough action in the current WoP to merit journalistic interest.

WoP reporting ceased nearly entirely by 2010, aside from unreliable SA Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and BuaNews journalists who are hopelessly embedded among bureaucrats and politicians. So with WoP off the media radar screen, the only information we have about the state’s infiltration of enemy ranks with the new self-help artillery are filtered dispatches by civil servants.

Although genuine battles by the poor against the state were raging across the country daily, the next official WoP siting was only in April 2010, when General Motlanthe returned to rally troops and inspect weaponry at Ground Zero, the Eastern Cape’s wretchedly poor Lubala village, where the WoP’s first shots were fired in 2008.

There, confessed Eastern Cape Premier Noxolo Kiviet, ‘lack of coordination and integration of government services’ meant that ‘only 30 percent of the households surveyed received all the services needed.’

Those services were bravely aimed to hit the enemy hard, but were obviously too few to defeat poverty on home turf: seedlings and fencing ‘in more than 19 households’, water and sanitation for Lubala Primary School and water tanks for 15 households; and ‘about 15 young people have been trained in areas such as First Aid, chain saw operator, health and safety, personal finance and accounting’.

Useful as these incursions might be in the tiny Protected Village of Lubala, and notwithstanding SABC’s enthusiastic broadcast of such meaningless skirmishes, the rest of the country was in flames. Poverty was clearly winning the WoP.

Of course in any such war, troops will be lost to friendly fire, such as seemingly ubiquitous ‘service delivery protests’ that turn the state’s attention from attacking poverty, to attacking the poor themselves.

The poor in turn reacted by blocking roads, burning down state buildings and evicting councillors in townships ranging from small Mpumalanga dorpies in the mountainous east, to the big-city ghettoes and highways on the plains of the Western Cape.

Poverty was by now bunkered in and heavily fortified. From time to time the enemy would emerge in the form of marches by toyi-toying youth, who manoeuvred with ease around desperately outnumbered local police.

Amidst thousands of such battles recorded by the police annually, one this year was illustrative. A large, heavily-armed vehicle – a ‘Caspir’ identical to those used by the SA Defense Force during apartheid – entered the township of Ogies in Mpumalanga Province, on the auspicious date of 21 March, Human Rights Day (memorialising apartheid’s fatal shooting of 69 people in their backs at Sharpeville in 1960).

The Caspir’s driver was soon surrounded on all sides by extreme poverty. According to police spokesperson Leonard Hlathi, the vehicle was ‘irreparably damaged’ after being ‘outrageously attacked’ in an ambush. A wire service reporter explained the tank trap: ‘an improvised spike strip to puncture its tyres. Three of the heavy vehicles’ puncture-proof tyres were blown out when it drove over the spikes, that were camouflaged with branches.’

Molotov cocktails followed. ‘Nothing working remained in the vehicle,’ said Hlathi. ‘Only the steel hull remained.’

Police personnel escaped without casualty on this occasion, but did wound the enemy (with live ammunition) as they shot their way out of the trenches.

The proximate cause of this incident was familiar enough: desertion. Apparently, according to that rare media dispatch, ‘The Ogies protest started on Thursday, when a march was held to hand over a memorandum to representatives of the provincial government. It is alleged the authorities did not turn up as requested. The people went on rampage, barricading the roads with burning tyres and burning down property.’

Back in the War Room that weekend, the WoP must have appeared as a full-fledged class war, unwinnable under the country’s prevailing economic conditions given the motley coalition of power brokers in the African National Congress (ANC) and the continuing vice grip of uncompromising, neoliberal Treasury and Reserve Bank officials.

At the same time, one of Zuma’s four wives refused to pay her long-suffering domestic servant even a pittance salary, suggesting how far up the hierarchy practical sabotage had emerged against the WoP.

Meanwhile, structural forces continued pounding Pretoria’s WoP. A million formal-sector jobs were lost over the prior year, and macroeconomic ‘recovery’ was accompanied by further job-shedding. The poor were advancing relentlessly, and the WoP looked as bogged down as US troops in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pretoria’s forces were obviously confused and confounded, their anti-poverty strategies like Maginot lines, easily broken through by a clever enemy. On this shaky new terrain, trickle-down grants were simply not good enough to stem the broken dikes. Poverty – and especially the poor themselves – flooded through tirelessly, with sticks, stones and petrol bombs, retreating into the shack settlements and township alleyways before sallying forth for yet more outrageous attacks.

Finally, state strategy took a new turn. Three days after the Ogies debacle, Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform Gugile Nkwinti dropped a bombshell: the WoP was relocating to his department.

Apparently the generals had decided that one of their fronts, South Africa’s towns and cities, was now too dangerous. After all, a January report of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development prepared by Cape Town academics declared that in recent years, ‘poverty incidence barely changed in rural areas, while it increased in urban areas.’

Thus a crucial component of the new plan is, apparently, retreat.

But a tough question must be asked: is the War on Rural Poverty’s new leader fighting fit for a counterinsurgency against peasant guerrillas? Nkwinti’s most recent audit reveals resource abuse comparable to the US Pentagon and Halliburton in Iraq: ‘A total of 5.9 million hectares had been redistributed since the end of apartheid but 90% of that land was not productive.’

According to Nkwinti, there is a clear reason his money is going to waste: the beneficiaries’ own inability to ‘continue producing effectively and optimally on the land’. The poor obviously wanted to remain poor.

As a result, the counteroffensive would require a new tactic: financial starvation of the desperate landless. According to a recent WoP dispatch, Nkwinti’s department ‘failed to pay $480 million in post-settlement grants to beneficiaries of land reform with potentially damning consequences’.

Then suddenly last month, in the wake of the silent surrender on the urban front and the rural fiscal squeeze, another disaster emerged in the countryside: the colonel directing the troops apparently walked off the job. Nkwinti’s director-general, Thozi Gwanya, resigned. But in secret, like the WoP itself.

Aside from WoP saboteurs in an opposition party whose press release hinted about a mysterious, allegedly damning auditor general’s report on Gwanya, no one else breathed a word about this traitorous act. Days later, the alleged departure was denied, described as a ‘malicious’ report by Nkwinti’s spokesperson. Yet within four days, Gwanya was finally acknowledged as a genuine casualty.

The battlefield carnage was now too close to home. Just as Pretoria lost its previous war, against Cubans on the outskirts of the Angolan city of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, it was impossible to disguise the body bags of high-profile WoP warriors (then it was younger white men, now older black politicians).

Two of South Africa’s supreme WoP leaders, respectively, were fired and went absent with out leave (AWOL): Mbeki and Mlambo-Ngcuka. Motlanthe may yet get more SABC coverage, but where a fighting spirit is required – amongst generals like Nkwinti, colonels like Gwanya and especially ordinary bureaucrat-grunts – it has obviously fizzled.

Pretoria’s last-gasp strategy, even if dangerously short-term and lacking the bread that comes with the old Roman circus (and we know what happened to that empire), was to deploy 31 squads of imported soccer players across the country last month and simultaneously introduce millions of Chinese-made plastic trumpets (‘home-grown vuvuzelas’), as a quaint and at least briefly effective distraction.

However, actually winning the WoP does seem utterly impossible, given the balance of forces, the leadership, the chosen weaponry and the economic terrain upon which the battle rages. So it’s probably best for Pretoria to not even talk about this struggle anymore. The War Room is best isolated within the state’s least effective ministry, and the secret dispatches can continue being left off the web. If Pretoria is lucky, no one will notice.

Then, if one scenario plays out – a quiet state surrender in the WoP – history can finally begin. Initiatives that might genuinely move SA to a post-class-apartheid society can get underway.

Service protests can shift from chaotic self-destructive and sometimes xenophobic ruptures, to a national movement of poor and working-class residents. Trade unionists, community activists, immigrants, environmentalists, feminists, gays/lesbians and all the other oppressed can finally unite.

That would mean, however, that the poor would be victorious in the WoP, a scenario too ghastly for Pretoria to contemplate, but surely a better outcome than the present quagmire.

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* Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban. With co-editors Brij Maharaj and Ashwin Desai, he next month releases ‘Zuma’s Own Goal: Losing South Africa’s War on Poverty’ (Africa World Press).
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Kenya: Avoiding trouble during referendum voting

SOS by SMS

IRIN News

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/66481

© IRINKenya is once again at a crucial stage in its pursuit of a democratic constitution capable of bringing stability and unity to the country. Energy and resources are being focused towards ensuring the constitution referendum process is not plagued with violence in a repeat of the tragic events following the 2007 election. One innovative initiative is to allow the citizens themselves to provide up-to-date reports of potential trouble through the use of mobile phones and the internet.

In a nondescript room on the 14th floor of a Nairobi office block, the words ‘hate speech’ appear on a computer screen next to the name of a prominent politician, with location, a telephone number and buttons marked ‘Not verified’ and ‘Follow-up’.

Another message reads: ‘If you think peace is expensive, try violence!’

Yet another says: ‘Plz help us. A certain community is threatening other communities to vacate the area in case YES wins.’

Over the past three weeks, Kenyans have used their mobile phones to send more than 5,000 such messages to a dedicated number: 6397.

The free, short message service is part of an initiative, the Uwiano Platform for Peace, set up with help from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to ensure the 4 August referendum on a new constitution is not marred by the kind of violence that claimed more than 1,000 lives and saw over half a million people take flight after the presidential election in 2007.

When incoming messages are received at the office of the national steering committee on peace building and conflict management – part of the Ministry of State for Provincial Administration and Internal Security – or by a separate team at PeaceNet Kenya, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) partner in the Uwiano programme, they are triaged into one of six categories: informative, threat, positive message, hate speech, coded message and incitement to violence.

In order to verify claims of hate speech or violence or anything that might require action by the authorities, team members call the sender of the message, as well as other officials in the area.

‘We can mobilise security agencies very quickly’, said Dickson Magotsi, a programme officer in the peace-building secretariat.

As an example, Magotsi said that during the previous weekend a message had come in from Chebarus, in the Rift Valley, which bore the brunt of the violence after the last election.

‘We received a message from someone saying he was being threatened by three people in his house. We spoke to him and he said he feared for his life, he had been told to leave. We then spoke to the district [police] commissioner who sent security immediately. Two people were arrested.’

Uwiano – ‘connection’ or ‘correlation’ in Swahili – has also deployed a pool of volunteer monitors to hotspots across the country and has established peace committees that work to improve relations between rival communities.

BE PREPARED

‘In 2007 we were not prepared’, conceded Magotsi. ‘We assumed too much and didn’t think we could have conflict across the country. This time around there is more preparedness and coordination at the national and local level,’ he said.

Another crowd-sourcing initiative monitoring security around the referendum is Uchaguzi – Swahili for ‘choice’ or ‘election’.

Citizens and civil society groups are encouraged to send reports of intimidation, hate speech, vote buying, bias amongst polling clerks and voting misinformation, and any other complaints, via SMS to 3018, via Twitter (using the hashtag ‘#uchaguzi’), by email (to reports@uchaguzi.co.ke) or by filling in a form online.

The Uchaguzi website displays these reports, a Twitter feed, a map displaying the location of incidents and a selection of mainstream news related to the referendum. Some of this information is forwarded to election officials and security services. The project was developed by crowd-sourcing software pioneer Ushahidi with several civil society umbrella groups.

EXPANDING SOURCES

The value of crowd sourcing is recognised by the international humanitarian community, which was caught off guard when violence erupted in Kenya in early 2008.

‘We’ve learned that limiting our information sources to just a few officials or agency heads is… well, limiting,’ Jeanine Cooper, who heads the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Kenya, wrote in an article published on Facebook.

‘Getting information on what is happening from the wananchi [general public] who are experiencing it, passing it to the various authorities who can respond, well that is at the core of coordination… A system of SMS and web-based alerts and updates will reduce the need and frequency of [humanitarian agency] meetings while allowing for effective and swift response,’ she wrote.

The 12 million or so Kenyans who own a mobile phone will be able to receive the results of the referendum by constituency or polling station simply by sending a request to 3007. Designated mobile phones will be used by returning officers across Kenya to send results directly to a national tallying centre.

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

Angolan Church speaks out on diamonds

Sylvia Croese

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/66487

cc PaparutziGovernment and civil society need to ensure that exploration in Angola’s diamond provinces brings greater benefit to the lives of the local populations, according to a new report about the country’s diamond sector, writes Sylvia Croese. Prepared by the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace, the report focuses on the growth of the sector from 2002 to 2009 and analyses the effects of the economic crisis, diamond legislation and the development of the diamond provinces of the country.

On Friday 30 July, the Economic Justice Sector of the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace (CEJP) of the Bishops’ conference of Angola and São Tomé (CEAST) presented a report on the diamond sector in Angola, 'O sector diamantífero e a transparência em Angola' ('The diamond sector and transparency in Angola').

Through the report, the Church aims to open space for constructive dialogue between the entities of the diamond sector and civil society. In this regard, the launch of the report was successful as those present included a representative of the Catoca project, the world’s fourth biggest diamond mine in Lunda Sul province, as well as a representative from the government of Lunda Norte.

The report focuses on the growth of the sector from 2002 to 2009 and analyses the effects of the economic crisis, diamond legislation and the development of the diamond provinces of the country. Central to the report is the importance of transparency, which according to the Social Doctrine of the Church is fundamental for all to benefit from the natural resources of the country.

The report concludes that although the new constitution of the country, adopted in February this year, includes the right to information (art. 40), this right is not yet regulated by ordinary law. Moreover, contracts closed between the state diamond company and other companies include a clause on confidentiality, and access to other information regarding the diamond sector is not easily granted by public institutions or diamond projects.

With regard to the law that regulates the diamond reserves of the country, the report states that this law conditions the freedom of people, since it limits their entry, stay and circulation in these areas, which have to be authorised by the provincial governor. The law that regulates artisanal mining is also seen as imposing many limitations, as the requirements established to obtain a license to engage in artisanal mining are difficult to meet. A new mining law is currently being drafted by a technical commission which will include an obligation to hold a public tender in order to render mining rights. Under the current legislation, a tender is only optional.

The last chapter of the report points to the need for the government to implement programmes and policies in the diamond provinces of the country that promote development as public investments are often directed at the same limited number of provinces along the coast and in the central highlands of the country. The report refers to the words of the Bishop of Dundo, Dom Manuel Imbamba, who has stated publicly that exploration in the diamond provinces doesn’t have any impact on the lives of the local populations that are very poor, often illiterate and don’t have access to the most basic services. The diamond provinces also have one of the highest unemployment rates of the country and many youngsters are involved in illegal mining. Another concern raised in the report is the degradation of the environment in these provinces as a result of diamond exploration. This in turn affects the agricultural activities on which many small-scale farmers depend for their survival.

Angola currently is the largest oil producer of the African continent, together with Nigeria, and the third largest producer of diamonds after Botswana and South Africa. Worldwide, Angola is the fifth-largest producer of diamonds by value.

The first diamonds in Angola were found in 1590 with the discovery of the first reserves. However, it was only in the twentieth century that diamond mining took off with the foundation of the Mining Research Company of Angola in 1917. In 1981, the Angolan government created the National Diamond Company of Angola (ENDIAMA), which is the exclusive concessionary of mining rights in the country. Any company that seeks to explore diamonds in Angola needs to enter into a partnership with ENDIAMA, which by law needs to be approved by the Council of Ministers.

Most of the diamonds reserves in Angola can be found in the north east of the country, stretching towards the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the provinces of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul. After the end of the war in 2002, production of the diamond sector grew, leading to rising export, gross revenues and fiscal contributions. New diamond concession areas were opened or expanded which led to an increase in the output of the sector of about 6 million carats in 2003 to about 9.7 million carats in 2007. However, as a result of the global economic and financial crisis the price of diamonds came down by 40 per cent, and output between 2008 and 2009 fell by 21 per cent. This resulted in the closing of some mining projects and the reduction in the production of others, which led to the unemployment of many workers.

Angola is a participant to the Kimberley Process, which is an initiative between state, industry and civil society. However, civil society participation in the process is still weak in Angola. The launch of the diamond report of the Commission for Justice and Peace also mentioned the approval of new legislation in the USA, which will require energy and mining companies registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose how much they pay to foreign countries and the US government for oil, gas and minerals. This measure may give citizens, also in Angola, the information necessary to combat corruption in the extractive industries sector, demanding more accountability for responsible resource use.

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* Sylvia Croese is an independent Dutch-Angolan researcher and consultant, based in Luanda, and a part-time accompanier to the Economic Justice Sector of the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace.
* The report is currently only available in Portuguese. Contact us if you wish to be notified when copies of the translation into English are available.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Call to action: Help stop Terminator’s return!

La Via Campesina

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/66483

cc E FAlthough a moratorium on ‘Terminator’ technology was reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity four years ago, proposals to develop and commercialise ‘genetic-use restriction technologies’ are ‘back on the agenda for policymakers and the biotechnology industry’, writes Via Campesina. Ending the moratorium on ‘Terminator’ crops, modified to produce sterile seeds, poses threats to both food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity, Via Campesina warns.

Four years after the moratorium on Terminator technology was reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), proposals to develop and commercialise ‘genetic-use restriction technologies’ (GURTs) are back on the agenda for policymakers and the biotechnology industry. Terminator is a threat to food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity: Ending the moratorium on Terminator will increase control of seed by transnational corporations (TNCs) and restrictions on farmers’ rights to save and plant harvested seed. Additionally, pollen from genetically-modified (GM) crops with Terminator will contaminate non-GM and organic crops, and native plant species.

GURTs (herein referred to as ‘Terminator’) are genetic engineering technologies that seek to control plant fertility. First-generation Terminator (also called ‘suicide seed’) was developed jointly by the US Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land Company in the 1990s to protect the intellectual property of US agricultural biotechnology TNCs. GM crops produce sterile seeds to prevent farmers from replanting harvested seed with patented DNA. Due to international public outcry from farmers and civil society worldwide, Terminator has never been commercialised anywhere, and Brazil and India have national moratoriums prohibiting it. In 2000, the CBD recommended a de facto moratorium on field-testing and commercial sale of Terminator seeds. In 2006, pressure from La Via Campesina and its allies helped to strengthen this moratorium in Curitiba, Brazil.

That year, US-based TNC Monsanto Company, the largest seed company in the world, acquired Delta and Pine Land, along with the intellectual property rights to Terminator. Since then industry, the US and European governments and ultra-rich philanthro-capitalists have ramped up rhetoric on the need for Terminator and other biotechnologies to adapt to the climate, energy and food crises. Various false solutions are being proposed to sell the lie that techno-fixes allow rich countries to continue consuming resources and emitting carbon dioxide, unabated: GM crops for cellulosic and second-generation agrofuels; geoengineering ‘climate ready’ GM crops and trees with increased albedo (reflectivity) and resistance to drought, heat and salt; monoculture plantation forests of GM trees to industrially produce biochar for carbon sequestration; and GM algae and marine microbes for carbon dioxide sequestration. Monsanto is proposing that monoculture plantations of its Roundup Ready soybeans qualify for carbon credits under so-called ‘no-till’ agriculture. All of these false solutions create new markets for agricultural biotechnology and ‘extreme genetic engineering’.

With financing by the US government and British Petroleum (BP), in May, Synthetic Genomics, the company founded J. Craig Venter (which helped to sequence the human genome) announced that it had created the first-ever synthetic, self-reproducing microbe with synthetic biology. Venter’s team claims that the microbe can be used to produce clean, green algal biofuels; however, what will happen if this microbe escapes into the wild and contaminates non-synthetic algae with its DNA? Similarly, what will happen when a GM maize variety engineered to have a high amount of stover (the stalks, husks, etc. of maize) for cellulosic agrofuels contaminates food maize varieties? The implications are frightening. Industry is now claiming that Terminator is needed to contain genetic contamination (transgene flow) of food crops and other natural life forms from genetically-engineered DNA in non-food crops; in essence, as a precautionary, environmental necessity. Venter recently told the New York Times that Terminator should be employed to contain transgenic contamination.

Genetic contamination of non-GM and organic food crops from GM crops, which occurs through the spread of GM pollen by wind and bees, is gaining recognition as a growing ecological and economic problem. On 21 June the US Supreme Court ruled on Monsanto Co vs. Geertson Seed Farms, and recognised that transgenic contamination is ‘harmful and onerous to organic and conventional farmers,’ and grounds for litigation against biotechnology TNCs. Thus a new generation of Terminator research is focused on biological containment to prevent engineered genetic traits (transgenes) from spreading to non-GM food plants and wild relatives. It is highly unlikely that the industry that created the problem of genetic pollution will solve it with more biotechnology. Given BP’s difficulty to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, why would the US government entrust it to contain trangene flow from the world’s first synthetic life form? Yet that is what is taking place. Europe has funded the Transcontainer Project with billions of euros, and there are proposals from right-wing Brazilian politicians to overturn the country’s national ban on Terminator.

While application and commercialisation of Terminator technologies can’t promise fail-safe containment of transgenes, they can function to control farmers’ access to seeds and germplasm. Under the guise of environmental security for GM crops, industry will use the new generation of Terminator technologies to tighten its grasp on proprietary germplasm, and restrict the rights of farmers to re-plant harvested seeds. Further, the likely prospect of contamination of food crops by GM crops engineered with Terminator places the entire global food supply at imminent risk, and it therefore poses unacceptable threats to food and seed sovereignty and agro-biodiversity. TNCs are expanding and consolidating control over the world’s croplands, rangelands, peat bogs and last remaining forests, while simultaneously consolidating control of the genetic commons at cellular and molecular levels. Terminator technologies for synthetic biology, GM crops for agrofuels, geoengineering and all of the other false solutions to the energy, climate and food crises enclose vast genetic resources and agrobiodiversity, taking them out of the public realm and into the control of TNCs, especially the US Big Biotech giants Monsanto, Dupont and Arborgen.

ORGANISING AGAINST TERMINATOR IN 2010 – WHAT YOU CAN DO

It is critical that La Via Campesina, small farmers, NGOs and consumers throughout the world organise to stop Terminator’s return. Pressure by civil society at the CBD meeting in May resulted in two draft moratoriums against synthetic biology and geoengineering, giving a boost to mobilisation against Terminator at the next CBD meeting in Nagoya, Japan, 18-29 October 2010, where industry will likely try and overturn the moratorium. Because industry’s rhetoric for Terminator is based on false solutions to climate change, organising against it will also be critical at the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, November 29 to December 10, 2010. The international coordination of La Via Campesina is asking its members, allies and all consumers to:

Write letters, request meetings, launch cyber-campaigns, etc. to pressure with your government representatives who will be representing your country in the CBD and UNFCCC negotiations to uphold the moratorium on Terminator in Japan and Cancun. It is vital that organisations and individuals in India and Brazil pressure their governments to maintain national their moratoriums. For your convenience, use and adapt the attached standard letter.

Send as many people as possible to the CBD and UNFCCC meetings in Japan and Cancun.

RESOURCES

‘The race to make fuel out of algae poses risks as well as benefits’. Dina Fine Maron, Environment and Energy Publishing. July 22, 2010
‘Exploring Algae as Fuel’, Andrew Pollack, The New York Times. July 26 2010.
ETC Group Hands off Mother Earth campaign:
‘Retooling the Planet: Climate Chaos in the Geoengineering Age’, ETC Group, December 2009.
’Terminator: the Sequel’, ETC Group, May/June 2007.
‘Peasants victory in defending seeds from Terminator Technology’, La Via Campesina, March 2006.

Contacts:

Tejo Pramono (Indonesia)
Isabella Kenfield (US)

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* La Via Campesina is the international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

AU: The state of the Union

Reflections on progress

Lucy Bamforth

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/66475

cc S WThe 2010 State of the Union Continental Report ranks 10 African countries in order of most to least progressive based on a number of areas of focus, including the promotion of human rights amongst the citizenry and the level of democratic governance. The African Union comes under scrutiny in this report in a bid to effectively promote development. Lucy Bamforth takes a look at the report’s findings and implications for the countries investigated, and the continent at large.

Ranked in order from most to least progressive, ten African countries are vying to be among the most progressive nations on the continent in accordance with the 2010 State of the Union Continental Report. Constructed and researched by both international and continental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations (CSOs), this newly launched report aims to deliver a powerful message to the African Union (AU): By delaying protocol ratifications, you are denying millions of Africans their political, educational and medical wellbeing.

The State of the Union Continental Report marks a departure from focusing on single governments, instead shifting attention the entire AU body, whose agreements and instruments are supposed to safeguard the fourteen areas of African society that were used to measure progress in the report.

The 10 countries reviewed by the report committee: Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa, were drawn from each of the five regions of Africa. This continental report was born out of the need to analyse the progress being made by African governments since the AU agreed in February 2009 to ratify all outstanding agreements by July 2010. At the time there were 1,800 agreements to ratify; in the 18 months since the meeting only 800 have been ratified, leaving 1,000 ratifications to be made by the end of July to reach the targeted deadline. Unfortunately, this is virtually impossible.

Irungu Houghton, Oxfam’s Pan-Africa Policy Advisor, called the results of the report the ‘stark reality of non-implementation’, as he presented the findings, which unveiled the effects that non-ratification have had on countries such as Nigeria, whose democratic governance earned it last place among the ten ranked countries, and Cameroon, whose women were the least equitable.

‘It just shows you that while sitting in your country you think you’re doing everything good but compared to other people you have to do a lot more work,’ said Ghanaian Hannah Opoku Gyamfi, a programme administration officer at the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG). As IDEG was one of the members of the report’s research team, Opoku Gyamfi was able to foresee the impact of the report while it was still being pulled together.

‘As part of the [research] process we had the validation workshop and some of the government officials were there. They could attest to the fact that this is the truth being put on paper and it helps you in advocating for good governance reforms,’ she said.

Opoku Gyamfi’s fellow researcher Alexis Nkurunziza, of the Rwandan Collective of Leagues and Associations for the Defense of Human Rights (CLADHO), agrees that the report will likely have an impact on policy makers and the AU:

‘It was a bit difficult when we were doing research because people are not accustomed in this kind of research, but there is really good interest. People want to know about what everyone is doing at the AU. Citizens want to hold governments accountable for what they are signing at Addis Ababa. They want to know why they are not consulted.’

Wole Olaleye of Fair Play for Africa, however, wasn’t quite ready to whole heartedly herald the report’s success:

‘I think it’s a very important initiative and I think it’s a very welcome one, but I think we need to go beyond a very descriptive report around which countries signed, which countries didn’t sign to begin to really go behind some of the reasons why countries are failing to sign.’

His critique is one that is echoed by the report’s architects, who make several recommendations for supervisory bodies and review boards, and call on governments to uphold their commitments and CSOs to hold governments accountable.

But Olaleye makes another point about the focus of the report, commenting on the way it breaks down the issues facing the AU into different areas of study:

‘An African person is a whole person. An African person is not just an electorate. An African person is not just a person that is suffering from food. This is a whole person that is experiencing all those things all at once. Questions around food, questions about education, questions around health, questions around good governance, everything has to be in it. I think collectively we have to find a mechanism by which we begin to address these issues simultaneously.’

The report pares the agreements down into fourteen key areas, which are further reduced into seven score cards on which the ten reviewed African nations are listed in rank order from most to least progressive. The findings of eight summary areas: human rights, status of ratification on AU protocols, democratic governance, food security and environment, healthcare, rights of women, rights of the child and rights of the youth, were used to make the report’s final recommendations for the progress of the AU.

In the area of inequality, human rights and fundamental freedoms the report found that Africa is experiencing more transparency and democracy today than it has done in the past thirty years, which is evidently a point to be celebrated. To further that good news, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that despite the global economic downturn, many of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies in 2010 will be African, and improvements in basic education, agriculture and commitment to fighting fatal diseases are beginning to reverse the decades of damage caused by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). Where the ten reviewed countries are concerned, seven had less than 50 per cent of their populations living in extreme poverty, whereas Nigeria, Rwanda and Mozambique had over 50 per cent of their populations living in extreme poverty. Egypt was marked as the most progressive country in this respect, along with Senegal and Kenya, though the income gaps in Kenya (ranked third) and South Africa (ranked seventh) are growing.

The second score card – the current status of the AU – is based on four policy frameworks adopted by the AU, two of which deal with health, the third with sexual health and the fourth with agricultural development. While every African country had ratified the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, only nineteen had ratified the African Youth Charter, and a disappointing three had ratified the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governments. The report cites the greatest issue facing the universal ratification of the protocols as the lack of communication across ministries and between offices when it comes to ratifying AU charters and agreements. Department turnovers and changes in office with little conferring between staff means the follow-up to protocol ratification rarely occurs, leaving potential protocol ratifications to start again from scratch when they may have been previously nearing ratification. Out of the ten member states Rwanda led the group with nine out of ten key protocols ratified by January of this year. Mozambique ranked second and Ghana third, while the final three were Algeria, Egypt and Cameroon – the two former having ratified five, the latter four. None of the ten countries had ratified the Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, though five had signed the protocol. The report recommends that supervision of protocol ratification be left to a body of the AU itself, rather than to the NGOs and CSOs who monitor the actions of African governments.

The third area covered in the report is that of democracy and human rights, where Africa has simultaneously made leaps and bounds whilst falling behind its own progress. In 1990 only five African countries were being run by democratic, multi-party governments, while the remaining 48 were administrated by governments established through military coups, armed struggled, de facto one party states or colonisers. By 2008 the number of democratically elected, multi-party governments was up to 18, though a quarter of those democracies – Togo, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Kenya – have been marred by pre- and post-election violence in the past four years. Freedom of the press, a crucial indicator of democracy, is still a pressing issue in a number of African countries, while governmental corruption runs high in Kenya, Nigeria and Mozambique, leading to a general mistrust of politicians and government offices. The nature of democracy and elections made it difficult for the report composers to rank the ten reviewed countries in terms of progress towards democracy, though they noted that elections in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt have been marked by disappearances, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings, particularly among the rural and urban poor communities. Press freedom remains restricted in Rwanda and Mozambique, but progress has been made in the establishment of human rights commissions in five of the ten reviewed countries.

The fourth area reported, the right to food security and conservation of nature, is of particular importance at the moment as West Africa faces one of the most serious food shortages in recent memory caused by crop failures and irregular rainfalls. The report details an unfortunate regression in food security in Africa. Whereas fifty years ago Africa was self-sufficient and a net exporter of food to the rest of the world, currently the continent exports one-third of its gain and the number of food emergencies has tripled since the 1980s because of soil infertility, land degradation and HIV/AIDS. Faced with these food insecurities, the AU designed the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture in 2003, whereby ratifying countries must allocate 10 per cent of their budget to investment in agriculture. Only seven African countries have met this target, only two of which – Ghana and Senegal – were in the ten countries reviewed by the report committee. By contrast, Kenya, Cameroon and Rwanda spend less than five per cent on their agricultural sectors, though Rwanda’s agricultural output has increased by 30 per cent despite not meeting the declaration’s standards. In terms of malnourishment, Mozambique, Rwanda and Cameroon have the greatest rates of malnourishment (at 47, 37 and 35 per cent of the population, respectively), while Algeria, Egypt and South Africa currently hold the best records for low rates of malnourishment out of the ten reviewed countries (at 5, 3 and 0 per cent of the population, respectively). Pollution, deforestation, water shortages and the availability of pastureland are predicted to pose serious threats to human security in several African countries in 2010. Africa’s oil-bearing nations will likewise continue to grapple with industrial waste pollution.

The right to health is the fifth score card area examined by the report, which concludes that Africa has made strides through frameworks to meet the child and maternal health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but that there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure those goals are met by their 2015 deadline. Only six African countries have met the target of 15 per cent national budget expenditure on healthcare, and most African countries spend only US$54 per person on essential health services. Countries such as Tanzania have chosen to spend less on healthcare than they were a few years ago, despite the fact that one in 24 mothers will die from pregnancy or other complications related to childbirth. Unsafe abortions account for 14 per cent of all maternal deaths in Africa. Many African countries have outlawed the procedure. Of the six countries responsible for 50 per cent of the maternal deaths in the world, three of them are African. The numbers for maternal mortality have been dropping, however, from 160 per 1,000 to 145 per 1,000 between 2006 and 2007. Incidences of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria have are stabilising, and drugs to fight these diseases are becoming more available. In terms of the ten country rankings, Rwanda was the only country to meet the 15 per cent target mark for national budget expenditure on healthcare, while Nigeria and Ghana both spend less than five per cent of their national budget on healthcare. Algeria and Egypt have the lowest mortality rates of the ranked countries, at 1 in 220 and 1 in 110, respectively.

The rights of women on the African continent were also evaluated by the State of the Union Continental Report, which unfortunately showed an enormous disparity gap between males and females in Africa. For example, 80 per cent of the farmers in Africa are women, yet they control less than one per cent of the land. More than 40 per cent of women in Africa do not have an education, despite the enormous health and economic gains that will be made later in life if a girl receives just six years of education. Of the ten reviewed countries, Rwanda again came out on top with the most equitable society between the genders, followed by South Africa and Kenya. Algeria, Nigeria and Cameroon were rated as having the least equitable societies of those reported. In places where gains are being made, those gains may not be spreading into the rural communities where more traditional lifestyles are still the norm and where women are still subject to harmful cultural practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM). Ghana and South Africa, who were both making gains in equity in the past decade, have begun slowing in the progress made.

The seventh area of the report’s investigation deals with the rights of children. Of the 53 African nations that make up the African continent, only two countries, Algeria and Egypt, are set to meet the MDG target of reducing the mortality rate of children under five by two-thirds. Rwanda has been making rapid gains in reducing its child mortality rate, but Kenya and Mozambique have disappointingly experienced an increase in child mortality, and there has been little progress made in ensuring children stay in school rather than seek employment at a young age. Primary education parity is growing in most African countries and Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda and Nigeria are well on their way to meeting the MDG to close the disparity gap between girls and boys receiving primary education. The report doesn’t rank the ten reviewed countries in order of least to most progressive for this area of investigation, but instead names the difficulties facing each country on their way to meeting the MDGs concerning child mortality and primary education. In Mozambique and Ghana, for example, child marriages and sexual harassment of girls have had regressive effects on the progress of parity. Discrimination still affects children born out of wedlock and of varied ability in Nigeria and Kenya, little is being done in most countries to provide children with an alternative to entering the labour force and child trafficking remains an untraceable issue in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria and Cameroon.

The final area analysed by the review board was that of the rights of youth in Africa. With 70 per cent of its population under the age of thirty, Africa is the world’s youngest continent, but three out of five youth are unemployed and three quarters of African youth live on less than one dollar a day. With poor labour markets currently affecting most African countries and a global recession in effect around the world, this trend is likely to grow. However, the ten reviewed countries are enjoying some progress in the area of youth rights. During the report’s review period, Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria all passed national youth policies aimed at getting youth educated and employed, though education about HIV/AIDS was lower than the targeted 2010 levels and HIV/AIDS testing was irregular across all ten reviewed countries.

The report, as well as the recommendations made by the review committee can be viewed in full on line at the State of the Union website. This report does have its shortcomings; it only focuses on ten countries and only on 14 areas of the AU, but it is a thorough and independent report about the progress of the AU and its member states. With over a year and a half of research to back up its findings, and with these findings likely to be used by a number of CSOs and NGOs in Africa, this is evidently a document that African leaders are not going to be able to dispute. It might be too late to meet the July 2010 ratification deadline, but armed with this report the AU might be encouraged to ratify the remaining 1,200 protocols by this time next year.

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* Lucy Bamforth is a recent journalism and history graduate from Carleton University.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Tragedies of the African diaspora

Roland Bankole Marke

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/66474

cc B & CRecent tragedies of domestic violence from within the African community in the United States leave Roland Bankole Marke posing the question: ‘Are Africans losing out on their community-based cultural and spiritual values in pursuit of the American dream that is fast becoming a myth and nightmare rather than a reality for many?’ Marke raises fears that a separation from Africa has weakened the resonation of African culture in the lives of those who have chosen to live outside the continent. Marke warns that the deterioration of African culture is resulting in such societal devastation and must be stopped in its tracks.

On 19 July 2010, shockwave news of the horrible tragedy of a Sierra Leonean couple spread like wild bush fire during a severe harmattan season, especially among the Sierra Leonean community in the United States. 52 year-old Godfrey Manley-Spaine, aka Lord Bongo Johnson, a popular comedian and member of The Professionals (a drama group born in Freetown, Sierra Leone) and his 46 year-old girlfriend Claudia Johnson, a nurse, have been living together for 17 years in Mesquite, Dallas, Texas. The police and coroner’s report confirmed that Godfrey killed his girlfriend, inflicting trauma on her by strangulation. He eventually committed suicide by hanging himself.

A domestic violence case was earlier filed against him resulting in a restraining order banning him from visiting or living in the same house with Claudia, his heart-throb. Sparks of a love-hate triangle cannot be completely divorced as one of the root causes of the tragedy. Finally, Claudia made up her mind to terminate the toxic relationship by moving on with her life with someone else more compatible, who would eventually lead her to the altar. But her estranged partner thought otherwise.

Manley-Spaine, who was unemployed, was selfishly unwilling to accept his fate. Losing his job and drowning in the dead sea of economic limbo, and the stress of having to secure his own place of abode were gigantic challenges he couldn’t grapple with headlong. He said, ‘No one else will get her if I couldn’t.’ He would later settle down for the point of no return. His blurred thinking became the risk factor. People in a mind like his could become dangerous and would probably end up killing their victims, and that’s exactly what he did. It was a 911 call from a concerned compatriot, who had not seen the emotionally drained couple the whole day of Sunday 19 July, that forced police to break into the house, discovering the bodies of the estranged couple with blood spattered around the house – a bloody theatre – where a fight took place leading to their dramatic and violent deaths.

The mighty Dallas economy is sputtering, with the city at risk of economic crisis. It’s losing its position as the region’s economic core, ranking closer to distressed Detroit and Philadelphia than its bustling peers to the south-west. The current economic downturn and the scenario of a prolonged economic malaise are taking a devastating toll on many minority families. In a situation where there’s destitution and hopelessness, doom and gloom often win a free ride.

Godfrey and Claudia were nursing deep emotional wounds – probably chronically bleeding emotionally and psychologically. Some thought they were a sweet happy couple from a distance. But the truth is their relationship had dangerously hit rock bottom. Verbal abuse reigned in an atmosphere of domestic violence taking centre stage. They had two adorable children, Godfrey Jr, 15, and 7 year-old Elizabeth. The well-mannered and disciplined kids were luckily away visiting family when the tragedy occurred.
The enigma of domestic violence that invariably results in tragedy is going viral, infecting the African community both at home and abroad. Just a few weeks ago, a Nigerian pharmacist battered his middle-aged wife in cold blood with a baseball bat in Tampa, Florida. After he killed her he asked neighbours to call 911, telling them that she was having a heart attack when in reality that was simply a deceptive ploy for him to escape police scrutiny and arrest. But he was later arrested and he is now in police custody. Part of their problem started over an argument on finance and the high cost of living in America.

Also in rapid and dramatic succession, a Ghanaian fatally stabbed his 28 year-old fiancée in Boston, Massachusetts. He then went on to dismember her dead body, hiding the severed body parts in garbage bags down in his basement in an attempt to destroy core evidence.

Concerned Africans are deeply worried that all is not well within the African community. Are Africans losing out on their community-based cultural and spiritual values in pursuit of the American dream that is fast becoming a myth and nightmare rather than a reality for many? Trying to cope with Western challenges and values on a daily basis could be an uphill climb for most African immigrants, especially the new arrivals. Africans are a tenacious people who need to form a working support group to help address these invasive cancers. Are we not entrusted to be our brother’s keeper? Connected, integrated and responsive to the needs of our brothers and sisters living in a global community? But charity begins at home. What is wrong with our African brothers, who claim to love and cherish their African sisters until death? But as soon as some are abroad it becomes very easy for them to abandon the African culture. This love-hate relationship must be arrested before it runs amok and insanely out of control. Tapping brain power is smarter than resorting to the use of brawn to assault physically indefensible women. The million dollar question on the front burner is: ‘You… and me, and me… and you, and me… and you, have we all changed our lives yet?’ Time is ticking as fast as a time bomb. Taking action now is better than waiting until it is too late.

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* Roland Bankole Marke © 2010
* The Professionals, of which the deceased comedian was a respectable member, gave an official statement on Lord Bongo Johnson’s death on 21 July in Washington, DC: ‘The members of The Professionals are in utter disbelief and deeply saddened by the turn of events as it relates to our brother Godfrey Manley-Spaine (aka Lord Bongo). The details of this tragedy in no way align with the childhood friend and brother that we knew for over twenty years. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Haggerty and Anthony Families and the children.’
* The Professionals have established a Trust Fund for the children. For more information on making donations to the trust fund and/or burial please contact Donald Nat-George (Dandogo) on (214) 606-1056 or by email: dandogo@tx.rr.com or contact Joseph Betts (Pa Bangura) on (240) 508-2820 or by email: bettsjoseph@gmail.com.
* Roland Bankole Marke is a Sierra Leonean poet, author of 3 books and freelance writer based in Jacksonville, Florida. Marke’s short stories and poetry have been anthologised online.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Nigeria and imperialism: A race to the abyss

Ayo Ademiluyi

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/66488

cc A J LFollowing a century of colonialism, contemporary neoliberal imperialism is the cause of many of the crises ravaging Africa, writes Ayo Ademiluyi, with particularly harsh consequences for Nigeria’s working class. With oil accounting for over 90 per cent of government revenue, local industry has collapsed, leading to widespread unemployment and increasing poverty. As child and maternal mortality rates continue to increase and life expectancy decreases despite the wealth oil exports have brought the government, Ademiluyi calls for the workers’ movement to galvanise itself to transform society.

With over a century-long period of criminal colonialism, present-day vicious neoliberal imperialism is the factor behind the fratricidal crises ravaging Africa, and the vampire drawing blood from the working class in Nigeria in particular. The quest of the imperialist US, working through the local capitalist elite in Nigeria, is to draw barrels of oil in commercial quantity with a total abandonment of critical infrastructure. This is with the terrible consequences on the fate of working masses in a neocolonial backward country like Nigeria.

Currently, Nigeria earns 83 per cent of its foreign earnings from oil exports, of which the imperialist states (US, UK, China etc) are the major beneficiaries. Over 90 per cent of government revenue is from oil. By contrast, manufacturing's share of export revenues is estimated at 1 per cent. With high oil prices at US$147 per barrel, the Naira could be kept relatively stable and high economic growth could be maintained. Also as a result of this, in 2007 Nigeria posted a US$23 billion trade surplus, importing about US$39 billion of goods and exporting about US$62 billion of goods, thereby saving US$60 billion in external reserves. On this basis, Nigeria settled almost all its external debt of US$37.5 billion to the Bretton-Woods institutions (the IMF and World Bank).

Yet, the widespread majority of the working people continue to suffer as child and maternal mortality increases and life expectancy continues to shrink. UN investigators recently published a document which disclosed that as a result of corruption, over 80 per cent of the oil wealth went into the private purses of less than one per cent of the population. While over 800 industries have collapsed, widespread unemployment, unbearable living conditions, worse levels of education and healthcare continue to spring ethno-religious conflicts across the board. This is with the lack of a broad mass revolutionary alternative that will galvanise the anger of working people and capture power to begin the transformation of society.

IMPERIALISM IN CRISIS

Capitalism and its advanced form – imperialism – is beset with crises everywhere. US imperialism has been enmeshed in the unwinnable war in Afghanistan now for 10 years, longer than its intervention in Vietnam. In Iraq, there is an uneasy ’peace’ and sectarian civil war could reignite, leading to the division of the country.

Similarly, the inevitable despoliation of planet will occur if capitalism is left in control. The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest demonstration of complete irresponsibility and lust for profit. We have already had the ‘war for oil’; now water disputes are numerous, including in Central Asia and Latin America. The United Nations says one in three people will live in countries affected by water shortages. There are already 450 million people, in 29 countries, where tensions over water rights are likely to grow. The Copenhagen Summit on climate change was an absolute failure.

Only a matter of months ago the capitalists internationally defended their fiscal stimulus plans. But in a dizzying switch at the Toronto G20 summit, a majority of the capitalist leaders swung over to ‘austerity’! Obama was isolated, which is a sign of weakness in that he could not impose US capitalism’s will, despite the country still having the biggest economy in the world.

Keynesianism cannot solve the problems of capitalism in the long term, because eventually either the working class pays through increased taxes and inflation, or the capitalists go on an investment ’strike’, if they are made to pay. One writer in the Guardian newspaper (London) claimed that Keynesianism was ‘dead’ following the G20 summit. But further stimulus packages may be necessary to rescue the system, particularly if there is a tsunami of mass protests.

Neither will the private sector solve the problem. In Britain, 750,000 public sector jobs are to go and as a consequence 600,000 private sector jobs will also disappear, yet the private sector is supposedly to create two million ’new’ jobs! The weakness of Britain’s industrial base will shatter the illusion that it can export its way out of the crisis. Germany has had some increase in exports but the rest of the de-industrialised world, particularly the rest of Europe, will not be as lucky.

And China is now facing a slowdown due to overheating and a property collapse. There has been over-investment and massive surplus capacity. China’s decision to revalue its currency, the renminbi, has seen a miserly rise (0.77 per cent) so far and is not having the desired effect of cutting China’s trade surplus with the US. Even if there is some economic revival in Germany, it will not be noticed by the masses because of the increase in unemployment, accumulated losses in income and the fall in living standards. Millions of workers in Europe now are on worse conditions than existed before crisis, with the general enforcement of neo-liberal policies. The capitalists will push more workers into the less formal and insecure sector, so they are easier to sack.

INTERESTS OF IMPERIALISM

The effect of the wide scale imperialists’ crises on the neocolonial world is terrible. US imperialism has an arms expenditure of over US$800 billion – which could cater for billions of malnourished children, provide sound maternal care, build millions of schools and feed the famine-ridden parts of the world – is equal almost to the total spending of the world put together.

A recently released report states that child mortality increased in six sub-Saharan countries despite the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Even though several countries have reported increased wealth, the number of those living in extreme poverty has risen in some of the countries such as Nigeria, which has a life expectancy of only 48, and Zimbabwe, which has been specifically targeted by the imperialist sanctions.

According to the report, the only part of the world registering an increase in mortality rates among children under the age of five is sub-Saharan Africa. This rate has increased in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Kenya and Zambia. Most of the 36 countries with child mortality rates above 100 per 1,000 births are in sub-Saharan Africa. Only Afghanistan, which is occupied by imperialists, and Myanmar are not in sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, in the United States, child mortality has gone down from 30 per 1,000 in 1960 to 7.8 per 1,000 in 2008. The child mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa is higher than that of the United States 50 years ago. This is just one of the ways, invisible to many in the First World, that imperialism kills millions upon millions every year in the Third World. The deaths from the structural violence of imperialism far outnumber those killed by American drones in Pakistan and Zionist bullets in Gaza, and so on. There is no reason that such high mortality rates have to exist in the world today. Many tens of millions die each year from preventable poverty-related causes, lack of health care, from preventable illness, etc.

The most glaring fact about our global society is the tremendous gap between the wealthy countries and the poor countries.

All of the countries with high child mortality rates, with great poverty, have a history of colonialism, most especially countries on the continent of Africa. This is no accident. Capitalism-imperialism is a world system where a minority of countries gains tremendous wealth and social peace at the expense of the vast majority. Imperialism contributes to child mortality, poverty, and lowered quality of life for the vast majority in the Third World. The First World exists at the expense of the Third World. If imperialism is inequality between countries and peoples, socialism is equality. Under socialism, the First World, including its so-called working class, will no longer be allowed to live high on the backs of Third World peoples. Under socialism, such gaps in quality of life will not be tolerated. Socialism will turn the tables.

In further defence of their imperial interests, US and UK (with China-the new competing imperialist force) continue to watch the development of socio-political crises in Nigeria, given its position in the sub-continent. They continue to monitor the socio-economic explosions brewing up, before the coming 2011 polls and the explosion during or after. What imperialism really understands is that it would really have a huge refugee crisis to resolve if the staggering domino falls. With over 350 tribes lumped in a disparate manner and the national question left undemocratically unresolved, the present preoccupation of imperialism is the protection of its material interests and a suitable ‘candidate’ that can match its fundamental interests.

* Goodluck Jonathan’s pro-rich regime cannot guarantee the needs of working people: Imperialism working hand in hand with its tested neocolonial agents like Obasanjo has found such suitable candidate in a Goodluck Jonathan. Backed with the force of local military supremacists and building on lesser evils, imperialism believes that a Jonathan candidacy may pause the militant activities going on in the Niger Delta and restore the flow of oil as prior to the last period. Running on the support of the major bourgeoisie party, it would sail into power on an election that will record the worst turnout. While a tiny number can be bought with the momentary populist appeal, a large number will abstain in the absence of an alternative.

* Jega’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) without fighting working people’s political alternative will not stop rigging: A largely discredited ruling class will not expect its mandate to flow from the electorate it has defrauded and disenfranchised, therefore no level or ‘electoral reforms’ will halt rigging or the radical personality of an Attahiru Jega. If labour is ready to defend the interests of working people in the electoral context, it must throw its energy into building the already registered Labour Party as a fighting mass-based working people’s political alternative, standing genuine working class candidates with vigilant backers in the party to secure votes. Without this, all talk of ‘free and fair elections’ is all ruse.

* January election time-table: Labour’s opposition must be backed with a fighting mass based Labour Party: The ruling class will want to bury its ghost quickly-and it has decided in an undemocratic manner to fix elections for January. This has correctly been opposed by labour. However, labour can place mass representation on the agenda by demanding for a REFERENDUM to decide this question-in that way the future of the country. This demand will place decision in the hands of the working class. Labour must go beyond sanitising a warped electoral system or continue to appeal to a totally bankrupt ‘political class’ without getting political.

INDEPENDENT WORKING PEOPLE’S POLITICAL ALTERNATIVE: LABOUR’S BEST RESPONSE TO THE 2011 ELECTIONS

In the whole game of the imperialists and local ruling class, in order to secure a soft landing, a pseudo-opposition is also orchestrated in order to deceive the working masses momentarily. Any bold means of working class representation is being castrated as reflected in the organised erosion of the political attraction of the Labour Party.

To defeat the local ruling elite and their imperialist’s backers, labour must build a fighting mass-based working class Labour Party as a genuine and independent working people’s political alternative that will not only stand genuine working class candidates in electoral contests but also be the political organ in the struggle for power. By participating in all working class struggles-against VAT hike, exorbitant electricity tariffs and denial of living wage-and combining revolutionary tactics, it will lead the working class in the historical task of coming to power to begin the socialist transformation of Nigeria.

However, as the objective conditions continue to deepen, the subjective factor-crystallisation of a broad socialist layer – is yet to be achieved, with an undeveloped mass consciousness, unaided by the lack of a revolutionary mass political platform and a far-sighted labour leadership. This is drawn on the present capture of the state of the working class in relation to its historical tasks.

INORGANIC CLASS STRUGGLE: The last period has witnessed a litany of workplace strikes, community protests, peasants’ action and students’ struggles. However, these struggles diffuse because of the absence of the organic working class political platform drawing these streams of resistance into a “single gigantic torrent” that will galvanize the anger into a force that will bring a workers’ and peasants government to power.

BUREAUCRATIC WORKERS MOVEMENT: In spite of the willingness of workers to fight, bureaucratic trade union structures deny workers the defence of their interests in the workplaces. Fighting, democratic trade union leadership, subject to recall is necessary to build the struggles of workers and sustain it to win genuine concessions. A fortified workers’ movement will be the springboard for any genuine working people’s political alternative that will emerge to vie for power.

REFORMIST LABOUR LEADERSHIP: At the top layer of the labour movement is a leadership that is at best reformist and at worst docile. It continues to open up the anger of working people, at a time or the other, with mass protests and no genuine willingness to take the struggle of the working class forward-in taking power. It continues to limit its political intervention to reformist attempts at making a bankrupt ‘political class’ play according to the rules created by itself. Despite perpetual appeals, it has not yet thrown its weight into building a fighting mass based Labour party as a genuine working people’s political alternative.

ERODING LABOUR PARTY: Worse still, the hawkish and reactionary leadership of the labour-created Labour party continue to fashion out grand strategies to make merchandise of the party platform through the exorbitant candidature fees presently put in place. While they want ordinary working class elements to be members, they make the candidature a ‘privilege’ the moneybag politicians can afford. This continues to erode the party of the political attraction and appeal it should have for working people. However, it still affords immediate opportunity for debate, agitation and propaganda.

BROAD SOCIALIST LAYER: Within this milieu, it is necessary to maintain a nucleus of the consistent and combative left trade unionist and socialist cadres, within and outside the labour party that will strive to achieve the political tasks of the workers’ movement with a combination of revolutionary tactics. In achieving this, it would strive to put in place socialist structures in galvanising the revolutionary socialist movement that will draw the support of the rank-and-file of the police and soldiers to bring a workers and peasants government into power.

Such a working class government will ensure:
- Nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy under the democratic socialist control of workers, peasants and youth
- Repudiation of the fictitious foreign debt and maximisation for total infrastructural development
- Public ownership of all public enterprises and companies under the direct democratic control of workers, peasants and youth
- Free education at all levels up to tertiary level
- Massive public works programme to build every necessary school, hospital and homes and generate jobs for everyone
- Democratic planning of production with centrally controlled economy to safeguard available means for everyone
- Convocation of a Sovereign National Conference made up democratically elected representatives of the constituents of workers, peasants, artisans, ethnic nationalities and the rank-and-file of the army and the police to determine corporate existence of Nigeria with right to self-determination.

A voluntary socialist federation of Nigeria will be a beacon to masses in war-torn West Africa, the entire continent, fighting workers in advanced countries of Europe and the entire world.

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* Ayo Ademiluyi is based in Surulere, Lagos.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The new media face of the peace movement

Horace Campbell

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/66500

‘Technology is a double edged sword.’ – General George Casey

When army chief of staff General Casey was making his speech about the future of US National Security to the Brookings Institute in 2007, the US military was being retooled for the era of information warfare. General Casey was quite aware of the deep divisions in the US armed forces and that the world was changing before his eyes. In the same period, there was a book about the Fiasco in Iraq. The peace movement had seized the moral high ground and the rhetoric about war on terrorism was exposed as a front for military aggression against innocent civilians in all parts of the world. With the hollowness of the rhetoric unveiled, the US rulers needed to reformulate the psychological warfare and mind control over the US citizens.

But decline followed decline as the horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison, Faluja and other graphic and disturbing images were beamed by information platforms to billions around the world. Hackers joined the peace and justice forces and discredited the US intelligence/military and information systems. Citizens were now opposed to military spending when there was the most severe capitalist crisis since 1929. The US intelligence/military information apparatus have been known to have the most sophisticated networks of hackers in the world. Hackers, including those trained by the US intelligence service, cannot be considered good for our freedom and security. The irony about the belief that the US intelligence/military apparatus, including the CIA, has a monopoly of sophisticated hackers has been exposed by Wikileaks, which have beaten the US intelligence in their own game. I do not support hackers, but want to highlight the game-changing effects of WikiLeaks.

In previous depressions, nationalism, jingoism, militarism and military aggression were the favourite techniques to mobilise poor people against their own interests. The intelligence, drugs and financial services industry worked together to regain their footing and moved to reshape the Obama administration in their image, with full time warriors in strategic positions around new government in January 2009.

With this new strategy, the forces of war and death hoped to continue, but they were unaware that the election of Obama only served to heighten the understanding of the need for the democratisation of information. Information warfare had inspired its opposite, the appearance of hackers for peace who were in the business of exposing warfare. The peace and justice forces were forced to acquire new tactics and strategies in light of the limits of representative politics and elections.

One of the faces was the online service called WikiLeaks. This was a platform that exposed the video of the July 2007 attack in Baghdad where US forces, firing from helicopter gunships, wounded two children and killed more than a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters employees. This revelation exposed the brutality of the new kind of terror that was carried using the tax dollars of the poor.

The existence of WikiLeaks exposed the fact that it was not only the US government that could gather information and circulate information. The premises of the Patriot Act and the legislations around Homeland Security in the aftermath of the September 2001 events required total control over information. WikiLeaks and the networks of hackers and computer wonks weakened the power of the militarists and strengthened one of the arms of the peace movement.

PEACE MOVEMENT AS THE GLOBAL SUPER POWER

When the peace movement brought out millions in the streets of the world before the Iraq war in February 2003, the New York Times called this massive organisation one of the new super powers. This is how the paper captured the mobilisation for peace:

‘[T]he huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.’

Faced with this power of public opinion, the US war-makers moved aggressively to disperse and disorganise the traditional forms of the protests, demonstrations and petitions of peace movement. Militarist fronts such as the US Institute for Peace went into full time operation to turn centres of peace into areas for the study of counter-terrorism.

The fabrication of terrorism frightened many in the traditional peace movement so that it was only the most tenacious groups such as Grannies for Peace, Mothers for Peace, Pastors for Peace, Code Pink and local Peace and Justice groups at the local levels (groups with a long term view) that kept opposing the military industrial complex. One of the institutions that suffered the most from this counter penetration was the university system. Unlike in Israel or parts of Europe and Africa where there was a vibrant peace movement within the academy, in the USA, the universities became complicit in covering up war crimes as the corporatisation of the intellectual life was corrupted by the billions handed out by the Pentagon.

This counter-penetration and confusion in the ranks of the peace movement reached its highest point in the Save Darfur Campaign. This was supposed to be a peace movement that was calling for the deployment of US troops in Africa. Mahmood Mamdani has recorded in his book ‘Saviors and Survivors’ how the so-called forces of peace were calling for the deployment of US troops in the Sudan. After the election of Barack Obama in November 2008, this psychological warfare against lovers of peace continued with the war on terror being changed to the 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' The Obama administration had faced pressures from the peace movement and from the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Those who had recognised the criminal activities of the US military machine urged the Obama administration to drop the phrase ‘war on terror’. The ICJ had communicated to the Obama administration that the formulation ‘war on terror’ had given the Bush administration ‘spurious justification to a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations,’ including detention practices and interrogation methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as torture.

While dropping the name war on terror, the Obama administration did nothing to dismantle the booming business of military and intelligence contracting that consumed billons in the midst of a depression. Despite the mildness of the formulation, ‘humanitarian law violations’ term, the rebuke by the International Commission of Jurists was a manifestation that the peace front was widening.

While those who were looking for messiahs were bemoaning the fact that there were no longer huge demonstrations similar to the February 2003 manifestations, they were not fully appreciative of the new silent but effective face of peace as it appeared in numerous forms within the social media platforms. Peace could not be separated from health nor from environmental justice so those looking for big demonstrations were unaware of the new networks of networks for reparative justice and peace.

One of the places where the peace movement was growing was inside the armed forces. From time to time there were flashes of what was going on from peace forces called Iraq Veterans Against the War. In July 2010 the new reach of this international peace movement was exposed o the world when the WikiLeaks website posted over 76,000 American military documents on the US-led war against the peoples of Afghanistan. The documents covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009 did not bring out anything new, but highlighted the role of death squads and completely discredited any basis for the continuation of this war against innocent human beings.

As a new global platform, the head of this WikiLeaks hails from Australia and the network of workers stretch all across the world. The international nature of these new faces of peace was underlined when the release was timed to coincide with articles on these revelations in the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel. These news outlets had been traditional supporters of the War on Terror but the chilling details of the killing of innocent civilians (numbered over 20,000 by Julian Assange, spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks) had deepened. Inside the United States, the principal TV and Media outlets, connected as they were to the military industrial complex, blamed WikiLeaks for endangering the lives of soldiers. There was not a hint of irony from those in the conservative and liberal media who were making these claims about innocent lives.

So while the old forms of mass protests and demonstrations are not seen, new and emerging forces of peace expose how the US death squads operate at will under a media blackout. Popular blogs and other forms of new media reproduced the information on the war crimes, especially the various special forces that at one time were called Task Force 373.

Africans from the peace and justice sections will immediately recognise the activities of these special forces, since these forms of murder had been practiced in Africa and other parts of the oppressed world since the murder of Partrice Lumumba in the Congo. Today, these forms of kidnapping and murder are being carried out by elite groups of the US military and the private contractors who are basically paid assassination groups. We now know that what is being called war in Afghanistan consist of organised groups for murder.

One website Counterpunch summarised the documents in this way:

- The methodical use of a death squad made up of US Special Forces, known as Task Force 373
- Willful, casual slaughter of civilians by Coalition personnel, with ensuing cover-ups
- The utter failure of ‘counter-insurgency’ and ‘nation building’
- The venality and corruption of the Coalition’s Afghan allies
- The complicity of Pakistan’s Intelligence Services with the Taliban.

ADDICTS OF WAR AND HACKERS FOR PEACE

These details of the clearly criminal actions of the US armed forces were not the first to show how the values of the US Constitution had been undermined by the capitalist class and the military industrial complex. During the wars against the peoples of IndoChina, the Bertrand Russell war crimes tribunal had charged the US military with a long history of racial genocide. In the absence of a new and strong force of international peace activists, WikiLeaks emerged as a game changer on the scene.

Since the dawn of the information age, the US military had been entering the video game business and using this medium as a recruiting tool. Youths in the USA are then ensnared into the military in a context where death does not seem real. The Pentagon had joined forces with the information technology behemoths while the intelligence services tapped into the business model of Google to establish firms such as In-Q-Tel. But the surreal nature of the video game wars caught up with the US military as hundreds of real soldiers were committing suicide because of the crimes they were witnessing and millions more were suffering from mental disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.

With the wave of sickness from the criminal acts increasing, there were young citizens in the armed forces who were opposed to the wars. Hundreds of thousands of these youths had been brought up on video games and were linked to the world of social media and a world of computer wizards known as hackers. These youths were connected to networks of computer programmers who had access to the security clearances that had exploded with the multibillion-dollar intelligence contracting business after the wars escalated.

The world of hackers and the world of soldiers for peace met with the emergence of new actors for peace, and one such person was Bradley Manning.

The reality was that the era of information technology had sharpened the digital divide with the strengthening of those who used the power of information to dominate others. So while the democratic content of information technology is counteracted by the technology divide on a global scale, the US could not contain the explosion of computer knowledge. This was especially because the US wanted to remain a super power without spending on education and health. If in 2003, the NY Times was referring to two superpowers, by the time of the capitalist depression of 2008, the global peace movement was slowly emerging as the potential force in world politics. Casey was beginning to see the reality that information warfare and technology was a double-edged sword because there were others whip could control the technology outside the big capitalists.

The contradictions of the massive investments in the Cold War military industrial complex were coming to haunt the rulers and they were faced with a world where there was the declining power and influence of the USA. This decline was exponential in the information technology branches of industry because the US did not sufficiently invest in the education of the youths and in the expansion of broadband technology. By 2010, the US ranked No. 20 on the scale of countries where the citizens had access to broadband. Thus, the world of hackers was being internationalised with hackers having their own platforms such as the Hackers Quarterly, hoping to make up for the democratic deficit in the information era in a context where the military and intelligence services were in a losing battle to escape accountability and transparency.

The New York Times lists three groups of hackers:

‘“Black hats” break into corporate computer systems for fun and profit, taking credit card numbers and e-mail addresses to sell and trade with other hackers, while the “white hats” help companies stop their disruptive counterparts. But it is the third group, the “gray hats,” that are the most vexing for companies. These hackers play it any number of ways, which can leave a company vulnerable to lost assets as well as a tarnished reputation as security breaches are exposed.’

One group that was not mentioned was the hackers for peace who are wielding the double-edged sword in the era of information warfare.

WIKILEAKS AND THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

WikiLeaks operates within this world of computer technology where there are black hats, white hats and gray hats. The hackers have their own mouthpiece and do not make the same distinctions as the mainstream media. Our interest is in the fact that the interpenetration between hackers for peace and hackers for war are temporarily blurred in the era of disinformation and it is the task of other sections of the reparations, peace and justice movements to bring out the positive aspects of the hackers for peace. This point should be made because peace activists should not be purists. One look at Julian Assange will tell that he has not been fully exposed to the world of reparative justice in Australia. However, the role of WikiLeaks in this new information warfare is pushing the work to new spaces so that the peace movement as a whole is enriched by the operations of hackers for peace that are in the networks of information sharing and sifting that is eventually seen on web sites such as WikiLeaks.

One can see the value of these platforms in the fact that in this era of YouTube graphic images are worth millions of words as pictures are streamed of war crimes. This was certainly the case of the video that is now being called ‘Collateral Murder’.

‘Collateral Murder’ is the name given to the now famous graphic video from Baghdad that had shown the US killing innocent civilians in July 2007. These graphic details fully explain why the US military and their supporters have been the most opposed to the United States signing the Rome Statutes to becoming a member of the International Criminal Court.

But the addicts of war could not hide, despite the absence from any international body that could bring the perpetrators of the crimes to justice. Hackers for peace within the military itself had constituted a new face for peace and exposed to the world that there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary soldiers in the US military who wanted to bring the US military before the court of international public opinion. Bradley Manning epitomised one of the hundreds of soldiers who are now the new faces of the peace movement. These are sailors on ships, soldiers in faraway places, marines and some sections of the air force who are quietly compiling information. These new faces of the peace and justice forces within the traditional military are making distinctions between the addicts of war and the psychopaths of the military contract ring business on one side and poor youths of the working classes who have been forced into the military because of the depression.

The double-edged sword is cutting both ways. The corporate media and those sections of the information technology industry that are now collaborating with the intelligence services are most afraid of the hackers for peace. These hackers respect no borders visible and invisible and have now created panic in the ranks of the top military brass of the USA. The vitriolic responses of Defense Secretary Gates of the USA and the Chairperson of the Joint Chief of Staff reflect the realisation that the information communicated by WikiLeaks represented the tip of the iceberg. The shrill and panic reached the point where the Secretary of Defense used the word ‘moral’ to describe the transgression of WikiLeaks.

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED

The arrest of Bradley Manning and the fallout of the entrapment of this young soldier exposed a new layer of warfare in the United States. As the full story of the relationship between Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and the differing layers of the US intelligence/corporate structures are revealed, there will be further education on the ways in which the Central Intelligence Agency is fully integrated into Wall Street.

More significantly, the case of Adrian Lamo as reported on the website of Glen Greenwald, the strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks serves to remind the uninitiated of the world that was inhabited by James Jesus Angleton. Readers should get the book, ‘JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters’ to understand the double and triple dealings that were orchestrated to kill a president and to send the USA into war.

There is a similar move afoot in the USA to pitch the USA into war. The leaked documents are part of the information and disinformation process.

The war in Afghanistan was already unpopular. The US rulers wanted a drawdown and a new front for war in Iran. In the middle of this planned transition to a new round of destruction and diversion in order to save capitalism, the released documents unleashed a cascading release of information that exposed the full integration of Wall Street, the Intelligence Agencies, Google and the army of private contractors.

For the first time citizens heard of In-Q-Tel comprising of billionaires, venture capitalists, academics, intelligence wonks and militarists. The information on Bradley Manning only served to expand the base for mobilising the active duty soldiers and sailors who represent the new faces of the peace movement. Every attempt to press charges against Manning by the Obama administration will intensify the networks of new hackers linked to the military who will intensify their efforts to develop a project beyond capitalism so that the mainstream media will have to reformulate their black, white and gray hats.

Names such as Project Vigilant and the nested loop of investors, financiers and militarists who wanted war strengthened the peace and justice forces as the military sought to threaten Julian Assange. Even with the threats, the full exposure of the death squads and special forces meant that the faces of peace were spreading and that a new stage had been reached. The challenge was for the international faces of the peace movement to become such a force that will bring down the death squads and military contractors along with the investment firms and banks that want capitalism to continue regardless of the costs for humans everywhere.

The capitalist classes in the USA are desperate. The mind control of the war against terror has failed. Millions are unemployed. At a time when the conditions of the working people all over the world have deteriorated, the profits of the capitalist classes are at an all time high. New wars are necessary to confuse the ordinary citizens. But these wars will only serve to intensify the contradictions to strengthen the forces of peace and justice. A military strike against Iran in the midst of this tussle at the international level could unleash untold consequences for the USA and for the world. Barack Obama should heed the warnings of the veteran Intelligence professionals on the consequences of an attack on Iran.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. His latest book is 'Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA', published by Pluto Press
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Beware, they're waiting to subvert the constitution

Muthoni Wanyeki

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/66491

This is it! By the end of next week, we shall know whether or not we finally (finally!) have a new constitution. Frenetic work has been done by the Committee of Experts, the media and a host of civil society organisations as well as citizens in their individual capacities to educate people on the contents of the draft.

As the outcome seems clear (a Yes vote and with a clear majority, according to the opinion polls) attention is shifting to the no less onerous tasks that lies ahead: Coming back together again regardless of how we vote, and the implementation of the outcome.

The Society of International Development has provided us all with sobering scenarios to consider as we move into the post-referendum phase. Its report, Searching for a More Perfect Union: Scenarios for Kenya’s constitutional referendum, was released last week.

The report sketches the history of the constitutional reform project and identifies those who stand to benefit and those who stand to lose should the Proposed Constitution of Kenya be adopted.

The report then outlines three possible scenarios for us: Hatutaki, Ndoto, and Kula Vumbi.

In the Hatutaki (‘We don’t want it’) scenario, the No vote prevails and the story then goes into the consequences.

It is not a good story, being about the divisions and rifts caused by the unquestionable blow to the authority of the two Principals and the Grand Coalition Government should the constitution fail to pass.

The Ndoto (‘Dream’) scenario has the Yes vote succeeding, but the story then continues to spell out the consequences of reality setting in when it comes to managing expectations and the mammoth costs of implementation.

The worst scenario (to me) is Kula Vumbi (‘Bite the dust’), in which vested interests, sensing defeat and eventual accountability, use their old tricks to ensure that the polling and tallying are marred by or followed by maximum violence. It is a horrible story — the outcome is essentially a No vote.

At this point, it seems clear that the Ndoto scenario will probably succeed (knock on wood). And, naturally, the impulse now of those who have worked so hard for this through several generations will be to celebrate, if only for a moment. To realise the potential of a Yes vote, we are all going to have to take a deep breath and dive in yet again to work against the political and economic interests that have always co-opted, perverted or otherwise thwarted change.

And don’t imagine those interests are sleeping on the job. On the contrary they are always (always!) ahead of us all.

The first battles will no doubt be over the membership of the implementation commission and the parliamentary select committee on implementation.

There will be a huge mass of legislation to be drafted and passed when our parliament’s rate of passage of legislation is six to eight pieces a year.

Fundamental institutional changes will need to be effected in the security services, the judiciary, the entire public service. It will be confusing.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Hundreds saved from the death penalty in Kenya

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/66480

In a landmark decision delivered on August 1 2010, the Court of Appeal of Kenya declared the mandatory death penalty for murder to be unconstitutional. This decision will benefit all prisoners presently under sentence of death. The ruling follows the recent decisions from Uganda and Malawi restricting the use of the death penalty in accordance with contemporary human rights standards.
In a landmark judgment, the Court of Appeal of Kenya today declared unconstitutional the application of a mandatory death sentence on all prisoners convicted of murder.

In their unanimous judgment, the Court of Appeal ruled that the automatic nature of the death penalty in Kenya for murder violates the right to life and amounts to inhuman punishment, as it does not provide the individuals concerned with an opportunity to mitigate their death sentences. As a result, hundreds of prisoners currently on death row in Kenya, including the Appellant, Godfrey Mutiso, will fall to be re-sentenced in accordance with the new law. The Court of Appeal said that the same reasoning given in the judgment would apply to other offences having a mandatory death sentence, such as treason and robbery with violence (section 296/2 Penal Code).

A new set of procedures will now have to be adopted to ensure that sentence hearings takes place and a judge will now have the discretion to consider what sentence to impose after hearing evidence in mitigation. The death penalty is now to be the maximum sentence, but not the only sentence.
The Court of Appeal also came out strongly against the death row phenomenon, stating that holding a person on death row for more than 3 years would be unconstitutional.

Timothy Bryant and William Wameyo, both Kenyan Advocates represented Mr Mutiso on a pro bono basis in the Court of Appeal. They were assisted by the staff of CLEAR Trust. They have been assisted by a team of UK lawyers comprising of Saul Lehrfreund MBE and Parvais Jabbar (Executive Directors of the Death Penalty Project) and Joseph Middleton of Doughty Street Chambers. They travelled to Kenya on a number of occasions before the hearing to co-ordinate the case and assisted with the drafting of legal arguments. In addition, they attended the hearings in the Court of Appeal.

Saul Lehrfreund MBE and Parvais Jabbar, human rights lawyers and Executive Directors of the Death Penalty Project state:-
“The cases of many prisoners on death row in Kenya will now have to be reviewed. The implications for future murder trials will be the introduction of a completely new set of procedures restricting the imposition of the death penalty in the first instance. We are delighted that the jurisprudence from Uganda, Malawi and other regions in the world has now been accepted in Kenya. It also reflects an emerging trend seeking to restrict the application and scope of the death penalty/

We hope this decision will be adopted in other countries in East and West Africa where the mandatory death penalty is still in operation.”
————-
The Death Penalty Project is an international human rights organization housed in the offices of Soho legal firm Simons Muirhead & Burton, providing free legal representation to many individuals still facing the death penalty in the Commonwealth. The organisation receives generous support from the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Oak Foundation, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture and by a grant from the Foundation of the Open Society Institute.

Information for Change 2010: Digital Publishing in Africa: The Next Steps

21 September 2010: 09.00 - 16.30

2010-08-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/493/ifc2010_flyer.jpg

Information for Change 2010: a free workshop in Nairobi linked to the Nairobi Book Fair

Title: Digital Publishing in Africa: The Next Steps

Date: 21 September 2010: 09.00 - 16.30

Location: Jacaranda Conference Centre, Jacaranda Hotel, Westlands, Nairobi

In July 2009 the first undersea cable to bring high-speed internet access to East Africa went live, opening up new opportunities for digital publishing in the region.

Information for Change 2010 will examine emerging digital publishing models in East Africa. Speakers will present first-hand experience of the realities of working in the region, and will showcase and share innovative approaches to the creation and delivery of information. The programme will include a keynote address, a speaker-led panel session, two World Café sharing sessions, case studies presentations, a venue for participants to display materials, and a moderated interactive session that will involve all participants.

A buffet lunch is included in the programme.

To register, go to www.informationforchange.org, click on Registration on the left hand navigation, and complete the form.

Leaked World Bank report on land grabs contradicts its own advice

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/66479

Recently leaked draft report from the World Bank, The Global Land Rush: Can it Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits, challenges the publicly held position of the World Bank on investments in agricultural lands in poor nations - a trend that has come to be popularly known as land grabbing. Although such investments have been hailed by the World Bank as a way to generate jobs and infrastructure, the report states, "investors are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap, and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments," and in some cases inflict serious damage on the local resource base.
Recently leaked draft report from the World Bank, The Global Land Rush: Can it Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits, challenges the publicly held position of the World Bank on investments in agricultural lands in poor nations - a trend that has come to be popularly known as land grabbing. Although such investments have been hailed by the World Bank as a way to generate jobs and infrastructure, the report states, "investors are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap, and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments," and in some cases inflict serious damage on the local resource base.

"Conclusions of the leaked report confirm those of(Mis)Investment in Agriculture: The Role of the International Finance Corporation in the Global Land Grab, a report released by the Oakland Institute in April this year. They pose a challenge to the World Bank whose policy prescriptions, up to now, have contented that the land deals reflect a potential win-win situation for both investors and developing countries," said Anuradha Mittal, director of the Oakland Institute. "This calls for heightened scrutiny of the Bank's activities in promoting investor-friendly policies that spur foreign direct investment in agriculture in poor countries, and holding it accountable instead of allowing it to sweep the damning findings under the rug," she continued.

In April, as the World Bank and UN agencies released a discussion note entitled "Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that respects rights, livelihoods and resources," the Oakland Institute released (Mis)Investment in Agriculture, exposing the role of the Bank's private sector branch, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), in fueling land grabs, especially in Africa.
"The Bank's report is certainly a surprising turn of events given that the International Finance Corporation (IFC) has not only legitimized the land grab trend but effectively facilitated and promoted it," said Shepard Daniel, Fellow at the Oakland Institute and co-author of the (Mis)Investment report. "The report's conclusions that land deals are dangerous, lack transparency, and rarely seek to incorporate the host countries' overall investment strategies reflect our findings. The key question is how this acknowledgment will be integrated into the work of the Bank's agencies like the IFC, which have increased the ability of foreign investors to acquire land in developing country markets," she continued.

Following the publication of its reports, The Great Land Grab: Rush for World's Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor (2009) and (Mis)Investment in Agriculture: The Role of the International Finance Corporation in the Global Land Grab (2010), the Oakland Institute is continuing to examine and document land deals in an effort to expose their impact and how this trend impedes the urgent and critical task of improving food security for the world's most vulnerable.
Click Here to download a copy of (Mis)Investment in Agriculture.
Click Here to download a copy of The Great Land Grab.

For more information please contact amittal@oaklandinstitute.org; info@oaklandinstitute.org;www.oaklandinstitute.org.

South Africa: Organizations condemn arrest of journalist

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/66530

We are organisations that campaign for social justice. The success of our work is dependent on respect for the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. The right to free expression and freedom of the press and other media are essential components of democracy. That is why they are contained in the Bill of Rights. They are one of the essential means by which all people in South Africa, especially the vulnerable, exploited and poor, can hold government and the powerful private business sector to account.
We are organisations that campaign for social justice. The success of our work is dependent on respect for the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. The right to free expression and freedom of the press and other media are essential components of democracy. That is why they are contained in the Bill of Rights. They are one of the essential means by which all people in South Africa, especially the vulnerable, exploited and poor, can hold government and the powerful private business sector to account.

This week Mzilikazi wa Afrika, a Sunday Times journalist, was arrested in Rosebank Johannesburg. The circumstances, manner and cause of his arrest all seem to point to intimidation by the state and attempts to suppress freedom of expression.

The arrest follows the exposure by the Sunday Times of questionable dealings by the National Police Commissioner, Bheki Cele. It comes during a national debate over proposed legislation to curtail press freedom, i.e. proposals for a new Protection of Information Act, changes to the Criminal Procedure Act and the ANC's proposals to establish a media tribunal.

We therefore unequivocally condemn the arrest of wa Afrika.

The media in South Africa, as anywhere else in the world, is very powerful and influential. We are not blind to its many shortcomings. The quality of journalism in South Africa is often mediocre. Newspapers, magazines and television sometimes make serious errors, permit unethical advertising and sometimes make false or charges against individuals.

We are concerned that the main media houses are overly concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations and consequently primarily represent the interests of a relatively small affluent portion of the population, thereby paying insufficient attention to the interests of poor and working class people.

There is undoubtedly a need for a better, more equal and more socially responsible media. There is a need for an informed public debate about the media, which the media should listen to. There is a need to democratise the media. There is a need for civil society oversight of the SABC to ensure that it is truly a public and politically independent broadcaster. There is a need to re-examine the institutions that are meant to govern the media and protect people from it abusing its power. There is a need to strengthen and enforce media ethics and to examine how this can be done.

But having said all this we restate that the non-negotiable starting point for this discussion is agreement that a free press plays a critical role in holding government, the private sector and their media competitors to account. Draconian anti-media legislation will make this impossible.

Over recent years there have been many occasions when serious media investigation and publication has helped to root out corruption and, expose wrongdoing and unethical conduct. This is vital to the reconstruction of SA. Thus the exposure and ultimate conviction of corrupt former Police Commissioner,

Jackie Selebi, was a direct result of investigative work by the Mail & Guardian and others. Thabo Mbeki's deadly AIDS denialism was justifiably the source of media condemnation. The media's role in highlighting campaigns for social justice is also critical, for example the shortage of school libraries, the rollout of an unsafe circumcision device in Kwazulu-Natal, the failure to provide private toilets in parts of Khayelitsha, the harassment faced by sex workers and hate crimes against foreigners, womenand gays and lesbians.

Unfortunately, we believe the crackdown on the media being encouraged by parts of government, some in the ANC and probably influential ‘tenderpreneurs’ and predatory elites is not aimed at improving the quality and responsibility of the media, or making it more equal. Instead it is aimed at hiding corruption, frustrating accountability and covering up service delivery failure. These are problems that now permeate every level of government; at national level, in all nine provinces and in most districts.

The Constitution was won by the sweat and blood of people who opposed and defeated apartheid censorship and repression. A brave, even if unfree, media played a part in this. We therefore wish to issue a warning to
the Cabinet and all those groups and individuals that we will campaign against all attempts to undermine press freedom and the Constitution. We are committed to equality, social justice and honest government. We will
defend the Bill of Rights. We will not be intimidated and we will not stand by and let the erosion of our fundamental freedoms happen.

Released by (in alphabetical order):
AIDC, Anti Privatisation Forum, Equal Education, Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP), Social Justice Coalition, SECTION27, Students for Law and Social Justice, SWEAT, Treatment Action Campaign

Sometimes strong words are necessary

Responses to ‘Transgender people, myths and gender politics’

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/66497

I couldn't agree more – we (as human beings) shouldn't be sidelining anyone because of their gender. Gender being something that is far more dynamic and variable than most understand. There is a reason many grassroots and student organisations have renamed themselves to include sexual and gender minorities, and those coming to terms with who they really are (eg LGBTQ and intersex as well).

I'm sorry that the press often see all these issues as 'gay' issues – we may have common aims but we are not all the same. Show respect to your fellow humans, don't just label and dismiss those you think as somehow less human. 3rd genders are often present in pre-Christian/pagan societies – we so easily forget our past, and at our peril.

No one is less human – if we treat other as such we lead very quickly to inhuman treatment and genocide – on every continent. Not just Rwanda but anywhere where racial tensions are killing people every day. Don't just be ignorant or quiet about these things – they will continue to happen again and again.
- KEN ROHDE

[url=I love this. She says a lot that needs to be said. But I have an issue. NOT all who are (because of their nature) transgender women/men identify as transgender women/men. I for example, identify as a woman. Period. What's between my legs is not an issue.

While I agree that society needs to wake up to reality that the binary gender ‘boxes’ are obsolete, we need to also respect each other for what we identify with.

Nice work Audrey, keep on telling them the hardcore truth. Sometimes such 'strong' words are necessary to jolt some sense into people's minds.
- LINDSAY

A feast of knowledge and wisdom

Response to 'Pambazuka News 492: Links & Resources'

Gerry German

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/66493

With this Africa will go somewhere

Antonett Hamandishe

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/66495

Peace for the Mzee

Response to ‘Basil Davidson, Africa thanks you’

Okello Oculi

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/66494

I have just immensely enjoyed reading Cameron Doudu's tribute to Basil Davidson. Like him, I wish the Mzee – who is now in what Ali Mazrui has called ‘AFTER AFRICA’ – peace and pride in his contribution to intellectual freedom and the enjoyment of profound dignity for post-colonial Africans.

I wish to suggest that Mr Doudu goes on a safari of editing a 'wake-keeping' book for Basil Davidson. In Nigeria when an old man dies – especially one who had served his family and community well – there is no shedding of tears but a beating of drums and celebration with throwing an owambe party. For a start, he should rope in all the persons he mentioned whose minds were liberated by Basil Davidson's recasting of history in the service of African humanity. Pambazuka should publish this work.

This safari should be done to yield a series; to go with a book on Professor Cheik Anta Diop.

Brother, keep on spreading the gospel

Response to ‘Political awareness in Nigeria: We do not beg your pardon’

Olu Mikel

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/66496

‘Mbira Man’

Dedicated to Moses Bikshoni and Nhamburo Ziyenge

Natty Mark Samuels

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/66482

When you think of Zimbabwe, think not just of Mugabe. Think also of Thomas Mapfumo, the Mbira Man. Beautiful mbira. Metal, wood and calabash. Ancient instrument of Zimbabwe - channel to the ancestors. Missionary tried to
destroy it; Ian Smith too. But they couldn't. Mbira
dzaradzimu(“voice of the ancestors”).

In a time called Chimurenga
The tired freedom fighter
Soothed by his ancestor.
Beautiful mbira
Ancient Song of the Shona.

'Tween Zambezi and Limpopo
Came Thomas Mapfumo
Lion of Zimbabwe.
He came with Mbira
Ancient Song of the Shona.

Rebel: Once, only you had the gun. Now we have it too.
Colonial: But we had empire.
Rebel: So did we. Do you not know of Mwenemutapa?
Empires come and go.
Colonial: We will often have empire; under whatever name or
guise.
Rebel: But what is more powerful – empire today or ancestor
forever? There will always be mbira.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Natty Mark Samuels © 2009
* Natty Mark Samuels is a poet based in Oxford.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Future in-law and order

Verbal

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/66471

you might say, i'm still waiting to get back to my right state of mind
meaning yours,
price-tagged, civilised and ready for export, give or take
a little force, whether I like it or not
and i do
love the extras on dvds,
mochas, piping hot in a styrofoam cup,
paperbacks from every corner of the world, shipped to me as i please
for a couple of dollars,
this chew and swallow eyes-wide-shut bit; i can do it
with the best of them,
or not; but i could try impress you, to pretend,
there is no thought involved in transgressions against this life branded as no-name brands stocked at the dollar warehouse everything has become,
a false ebb and flow,
around the intelligence constipation that has shocked and awed us into admiration
courtesy of respectable architects like you, kicking up stardust in your wake
or is it toxic waste?

and no, we don't all agree
that life is what you invested in the making of, even though i see, from the mass produced buy-one-get-one-free philosophies lining your shelf, temporary relief
even you hide from yourself, the modern way
not jarring enough to affect will,
it hangs just right on the hand-me-down legacy you hope to hand down
to him,
so far away, and so close to the
the patented truths of pat roberston and osama bin laden remaking god in their own image
men of war, they say, pray
to the biggest gods on the horizon..
skyscrapers
falling to rubble in the name of liberation
it all looks like paper trash to me,
advertisement packaged as news fucked by the murdochs of the world
businessmen building empires of hard mistruths won by
big guns packaged as prestigious news, junkies to the ambition embedded in confidential words churned out by war ministries,
yes, hindsight always looks higher when you're on the decline, religiously guiding bullets
in the name of peace, and a bigger slice for a few

but this forced peace has never sounded so terrible to me
especially coming from you

maybe i am
playing russian roulette with myself, my moral decay evident in my ignorance
of timer-scheduled godliness, in my failure
to mimick the architypal timidity of what should be girls like me,
would i make it better if i said
i was not lured to the other side, not a broken soul desperate to shake off the angst of a life mislead, nor a mind disbelieving of its innate purpose
i've not slipped backward,
but somewhere along the line i fell off the straight long narrowed, turned my head to the left from chalky signs pointing to the right,
fell, only to find myself, one more body outline
on the street, casual, collateral, to the war on numbers,
you're not savvy to some great wisdom, you just don't want to know to see, the cost
hiding in your shadow

no, change isn't easy to live
and there is nothing peaceful about a revolution that start with millions pushing,
i have watched as my toothless mother blends life into a smoothie
so easy to swallow, but i cannot be your oliver twist,

you lose that subtlety when you fall with nothing to land on
only to find the last signs of life, still twitching after being smashed into the kind of submission that can only accompany dark nights lit up by deadly flares of despair and something worse
but like superman and reality television, real life melting into delusions of granduer, have fooled both you and i, into believng that we can live without the waking the dead, that someone else will do it for us,
while we live like the dead and pretend,
that we didn't know anything, get anything, more than duct-tape to seal the deal,
but at the edge of this, surely you see there isn't - will never be, enough tape to keep this shit together?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Pambazuka News 156 : Les raisons de l'émergence d'Al Shabab

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/summaryfr/66492

Civil society demands action from SADC leaders

2010-08-06

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news060810/civilsoc060810.htm

Civil society have demanded that leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) take action to prevent state-sponsored violence during the next elections in Zimbabwe. The call by the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition comes ahead of the SADC Summit in Namibia from August 15 – 17, where Zimbabwe’s current political stalemate is set to be debated. The situation fell off the agenda at last month’s African Union (AU) summit in Uganda, despite the stalemate that has blocked any real change in the country.

MDC sustain broken limbs after attacks in Chipinge

2010-08-06

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news050810/mdcsustail050810.htm

Assaults on MDC officials and supporters intensified in the Chipinge area of Manicaland on Wednesday and Thursday, as ZANU PF continued its campaign of violence linked to the Constitutional outreach program. Provincial spokesperson and Makoni South MP, Pishayi Muchauraya, told SW Radio Africa that two MDC officials sustained broken limbs and MDC vehicles were attacked and vandalized by youth militia and CIO agents in separate attacks.

Zimbabwe Constitution: Take the survey!

2010-08-06

http://www.sokwanele.com/zimbabweconstitution/survey

Sokwanele is launching an online Constitution survey that aims to gather views from Zimbabweans everywhere, including the millions of Zimbabweans who live in the Diaspora and who have been largely excluded from the constitution-making process. he constitution survey features a mix of questions. Some questions directly address content usually included in a constitution, while others seek to survey opinions on issues of concern to Zimbabweans. These issues, and Zimbabwean opinions on them, should guide those who are tasked to draft the new document and our views should be honoured in the detail making up a new constitution.

Africa: African Women’s Leadership Institute

3rd – 16th October, 2010

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/66526

AMwA will be holding a Sierra Leone National African Women’s Leadership Institute (AWLI) on the theme, “Reclaiming Our bodies: Women’s Leadership and Movement Building on Gender Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Conflict and Post Conflict Africa”, that is scheduled to take place from 3rd – 16th October, 2010 in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
AMwA will be holding a Sierra Leone National African Women’s Leadership Institute (AWLI) on the theme, “Reclaiming Our bodies: Women’s Leadership and Movement Building on Gender Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Conflict and Post Conflict Africa”, that is scheduled to take place from 3rd – 16th October, 2010 in Freetown, Sierra Leone.


The AWLI aims to strengthen the personal and organisational capacities of young African women influence policy and decision-making through training and networking. It serves as a networking, training and information dissemination forum for young women aged between 25-40 working on gender issues. Since it was established in 1997, the AWLI and its related programmes, has a network of over 3000 alumni from all over Africa, UK and Europe.

Trainees for this Sierra Leone AWLI will include young women professionals in government, civil society, feminist organizations and multilateral agencies with a strong professional background on gender, women’s rights, leadership, movement building, development work, etc in order to allow for push for these issues further. This being a Sierra Leone AWLI, all participants should be Sierra Leone Nationals.

The deadline for the receipt of applications for this unique and exciting training programme is 25th August, 2010.

The application form and brochure are available for download.

Egypt: Woman alleges rape by police on TV

2010-08-06

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10882670

Human rights activists in Egypt have expressed concern following allegations that a woman was raped by two police officers. She took the unusual step of appearing on television to give an interview about her ordeal. The woman claims that the rape took place on a deserted rural road in the Nile Delta, north of Cairo.

Global: Musawah - Toolkit for equality in the family

2010-08-06

http://www.musawah.org/resource_kit.asp

The Resource Kit provides ideas and arguments that can be used to advocate for equality and justice in Muslim family laws and practices. The local context and people’s needs will determine which argument works best in that environment. The Kit examines various aspects of family laws and practices. For each aspect, the Kit provides support for the idea of equality and justice from the four different approaches. The Kit also shares examples of different countries that have addressed these areas of family life in more equitable and just ways.

Global: Stopping violence against women worldwide

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9l7lG7

Violence against women is a worldwide crisis, and a bill scheduled to come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, the International Violence against Women Act, would improve the way US foreign assistance is provided to address such violence. The US Violence against Women Act and several reauthorizations created critical funding, strategies, and structures to prevent violence against women and girls and to support survivors.

South Africa: Change is a process, not an event or holiday

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/dgfhgH

We are now in August, that special month set aside to celebrate the achievements of women in South Africa. But I'm not so sure we should be pouring champagne just yet. It is also during this month that we commemorate the day on which 20,000 women marched on the Pretoria Union Buildings 54 years ago to protest the extension of passes restricting freedom of movement during the apartheid government.

South Africa: Photo Essay: Women speak out

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9Txz7h

As we commemorate South Africa National Women's Day, Gender Links spoke to ordinary women about the challenges they face every day. In an accompanying story, Doreen Gaura writes that the link between many women's organisations and the realities of women's every day lived experience has become tenous. She spoke to women from informal settlements about the issues that matter to them. This photo essay documents their conversation.

South Africa: Rape survivors still feel marginalised

2010-08-06

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032881

Every 17 seconds a woman is raped in South Africa. According to the South African Police Services’ 2006 rape statistics, close to 55 000 women reported being raped that year. But how many more rapes go unreported, and why? Put yourself in a rape survivor’s shoes just for a minute. After experiencing an extremely traumatic ordeal, what would you do? Would you go to the police station, seek medical attention or do nothing and hope to forget about it? Often, these are some of the questions that linger in the mind of a rape survivor. Every 17 seconds a woman is raped in South Africa. It is also estimated that 1 in 9 adult women report being raped.

South Africa: Sexual violence rife at South African borders

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/ajg0XF

Unlike schools and offices in South Africa, the criminal gangs along the border between the World Cup hosts and Zimbabwe did not take a break because of a sports tournament. As thousands of foreign fans flocked to the football stadiums and hundreds of journalists arrived to cover the first African World Cup, along the border another influx of foreigners received a different sort of welcome. They were not met with bright green and yellow flags and vuvuzelas, instead, these foreigners faced armed attacks and a pattern of sexual violence employed systematically to traumatise already vulnerable people.

Africa: Renaissance fund given to "rogue states"

2010-08-06

http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=117260

International Relations and co-operation department director of Nepad, Harvey Short, says more than R770 million of South African state funds have been used to prop up states with human rights abuse records. These include Zimbabwe and Guinea, and no attempt was made to monitor the use of funds, nor evaluate what the effect of the cash windfalls were.

Angola: Quash convictions of Cabinda activists

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/ad8H6Z

The Angolan government should annul the convictions of three prominent rights advocates and a former policeman after a politically motivated trial in the oil-rich Cabinda province, Human Rights Watch has said. The government should revoke the overbroad and vague provisions of the state security law brought against the four men, Human Rights Watch said.

Botswana: Former UN water advisor condemns treatment of Bushmen

2010-08-06

http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/6307

Maude Barlow, former UN advisor on water, ‘Alternative Nobel’ prize winner and founder of the Blue Planet Project, has condemned the Botswana government’s failure to allow Bushmen to access water. Barlow’s remarks come a week after the United Nations declared water a fundamental human right, and two weeks after a Botswana High Court judge ruled that the Kalahari Bushmen cannot access a water borehole on their lands.

DRC: New evidence of US role in Lumumba death

2010-08-06

http://allafrica.com/stories/201008010004.html

Fifty years ago, the former Belgian Congo received its independence under the democratically elected government of former prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Less than seven months later, Lumumba and two colleagues were, in the contemporary idiom, "rendered" to their Belgian-backed secessionist enemies, who tortured them before putting them before a firing squad. The Congo would not hold another democratic election for 46 years. In 2002, following an extensive parliamentary inquiry, the Belgian government assumed a portion of responsibility for Lumumba's murder.

Gambia: Court rejects jailed opposition leader's appeal

2010-08-06

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE6750CM20100806

A court in Gambia has rejected the appeal of an opposition politician who was jailed for using a megaphone at a rally without permission, a case that has drawn harsh criticism from foreign donors. The jailing of Femi Peters, campaign manager of the main opposition UDP party, led to the United States and former colonial power Britain speaking out over concerns about human rights in Gambia, moves which drew an angry rebuke from President Yahya Jammeh who accused them of backing the opposition.

Global: Access to water and sanitation a human right - UN

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/d3NaRZ

The U.N. General Assembly has declared access to safe, clean drinking water and sanitation to be a "'human right' in a resolution that more than 40 countries including the United States didn't support. South Africa did support it. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution last Wednesday that access to water and sanitation is a human right. The resolution passed with 122 votes in favor, none against, and 41 abstentions.

Global: US charges 14 over links to Somalia's al-Shabab

2010-08-06

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10883870

US officials have charged 14 people with providing money, personnel and services to the Somali militant group al-Shabab. The charges stem from four separate indictments in the US states of Minnesota, Alabama and California. Concerns about al-Shabab have grown after the group carried out a bomb attack in Uganda.

Kenya: Kids in the city: new films

2010-08-06

http://www.irinnews.org/film/?id=4304

IRIN is pleased to announce the launch of three more chapters in our ongoing series of short films, Kids in the City. The Dump Site tells the story of children who scavenge from the Dandora rubbish tip in Nairobi to survive. Home Alone features a family of four children in the Ugandan capital Kampala who were orphaned by AIDS, while The Weigh Scale introduces 14-year-old Cambodian Chan Sori, who never knew his fathe

Nigeria: Government sued over 'inhuman treatment of pensioners'

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/br9tUG

The Non-Governmental Organisation Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has sued Nigeria's federal government for allegedly maltreating pensioners in the country. In the suit, filed at the Federal High Court in Lagos, SERAP said 'owing to the government’s failure to faithfully implement the Pensions Reform Act, several pensioners continue to have their internationally recognized human rights to life, to an adequate standard of living, to equality and non-discrimination, and to humane treatment violated, with impunity.”

Rwanda: Silencing dissent

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/c95Ung

Rwanda's presidential elections will take place on August 9, 2010, in a context marked by increasing political repression and a crackdown on free speech. Over the last six months, Human Rights Watch has documented a worrying pattern of intimidation, harassment and other abuses - ranging from killings and arrests to restrictive administrative measures - against opposition parties, journalists, members of civil society and other critics.

South Human rights award for Salman Khan

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/66510

On the 23rd July 2010 in an auspicious gala dinner in Johannesburg Salman Khan, founder and chairman of SAKAG (South African Kashmiri Action Group) was awarded in recognition of is work for the Kashmir cause in South Africa by the Human Rights Foundation of South Africa. Salman Khan founded SAKAG in South Africa in 1999 and have relentlessly worked on the raising of issue of Kashmir on all level in South Africa for last 11 years, he has since delivered hundreds of speeches, over 200 radio interviews, 50 TV interviews, several presentations in universities and schools, and had written many articles on Kashmir human rights issues in national news papers.
On the 23rd July 2010 in an auspicious gala dinner in Johannesburg Salman Khan, founder and chairman of SAKAG (South African Kashmiri Action Group) was awarded in recognition of is work for the Kashmir cause in South Africa by the Human Rights Foundation of South Africa.

The award Citation read as follows,

Award for Mr Salman Khan for "His Outstanding Contributions toward Human Rights" by Human Rights Foundation of South Africa:

Citation.
1. For his contributions to Liberation of People of Kashmir.
2. For his contribution to the exposure of the violation of the human rights of Kashmiri's
3. For his contribution to the search for the Truth and Justice for the People of Kashmir.

The occasion was attended by the diplomatic immunity, Government officials Scholars, politician, Journalists, civil and human rights NGO.
Salman Khan had found SAKAG in South Africa in 1999 and have relentlessly worked on the raising of issue of Kashmir on all level in South Africa for last 11 years, he has since delivered hundreds of speeches, over 200 radio interviews, 50 TV interviews, several presentations in universities and schools, and had written many articles on Kashmir human rights issues in national news papers.
He also had organised two major Kashmir Peace conferences in Johannesburg which was attended by Diplomats, scholars, Trade Unionists, Human Right watch and various notable organisations.
Since 1999, he also had led 12 marches and rallies to Indian Embassy in Pretoria and Johannesburg, and also carried out a protest at Union Building during the State visit of President Manmohan Singh’s to South Africa in 2007. His famous march and protest was at the Gallagher estate during the Bollywood Star Salman Khan Show “ Sensation 2007”, where mainstream newspaper published a frontline heading “Salman Khan Vs Salman Khan”.
On 23rd May 2008, he had assassination attempt on him meant he was shot at point blank range eight times, miraculously he survived but unfortunately injuries on his faces and eyes resulted in the loss of sight in his right eye.
The incident has not deter him from his human right activism for Kashmiris, he maintained that this incidents give him strength to continue is struggle for liberation of innocent people of Kashmir and these obstructions make his resolve even stronger to help the hopeless people of Kashmir.

Mr. Khan maintained that no amount of danger or demoralisation by any quarter would weak his intrinsic resolves toward the Kashmir cause and its liberation.


SAKAG News desk.

Global: Asylum seeker takes his own life after losing legal aid

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/cYxRFM

For two hours Osman Rasul perched on railings surrounding the seventh floor balcony of a Nottingham tower block. He blanked out police officers attempting to talk him down and at 7pm last Sunday, placing his hand on his heart, he looked up to the sky and leapt. The 27-year-old Iraqi Kurd, classified by the local refugee centre as a "destitute asylum-seeker" and in a fraying relationship with the mother of his two children, had lost the legal aid he needed to pursue his application to remain in the UK. A trip south to confront Home Office immigration officers in Croydon saw him being turned away and told to find a solicitor.

Global: Campsfield detainees continue refusing meals

2010-08-06

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-10865358

Some inmates at Campsfield House immigration removal centre in Oxfordshire are continuing to refuse meals. Detainees said the demonstration, which began on Monday, was due to people being detained for long periods. About 80 detainees decided not to take food on Tuesday evening, the UK Border Agency said.

Global: Israel to deport 400 children

2010-08-06

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?Reportid=90039

Of the 1,200 children of migrant workers slated for deportation in 2009, the Israeli Cabinet on 1 August granted legal status to 800 and said 400 would be deported with their families to their parents’ country of origin within 21 days. To win legal status, the children had to have enrolled in the Israeli school system, resided in Israel at least five years, entered Israel before the age of 13 or be born there, and speak fluent Hebrew.

Namibia: Rekindled persecution fear plagues Caprivi village

2010-08-06

http://www.nshr.org.na/index.php?module=News&func=display&sid=1390

Sifwe-speaking villagers in Namibia’s Caprivi Region live in fear of renewed persecution by members of the Namibian Police (NamPol) assigned to the marathon Caprivi High Treason Trial (CHTT) saga. Most of the said NamPol officers have been accused of systematically committing acts of torture and or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (TCIDT) or punishment against the alleged Caprivi secessionist rebels.

Sudan: Rebel chief issues warning to UNAMID

2010-08-06

http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article35830

The leader of a major rebel group in Sudan’s Western region of Darfur warned the embattled African Union-United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) that it will bear the consequences if they allow Sudanese authorities to enter the IDP camps in the wake of deadly clashes that took place this week.

Sudan: Uneasy calm reported in tense camp for displaced in Darfur

2010-08-06

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=35511

An uneasy calm has returned to a displaced persons’ camp in the restive region of Darfur in western Sudan where clashes broke out last week over tensions related to the current state of the peace process, the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission (UNAMID) there reported. Mohammed Yonis, UNAMID’s Deputy Joint Special Representative and acting chief of mission, visited South Darfur, where the troubled Kalma camp is situated, and discussed the security situation with the state governor and camp leaders.

Tanzania: Possible deportation of refugees

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/66505

The Refugees Self Reliance Initiative a branch of Ezra Ministries of Tanzania has received credible reports that there are a lot of refugees from DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi etc who are forced to return home against their will. We have spoken directly to the team of those refugees and register some mistreatment in the new camp of Nyarugusu.
The Refugees Self Reliance Initiative a branch of Ezra Ministries of Tanzania has received credible reports that there are a lot of refugees from DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi etc who are forced to return home against their will. We have spoken directly to the team of those refugees and register some mistreatment in the new camp of Nyarugusu.

It is hard for them to resist expulsion; some of them were forced to go back home countries from the former camp of Lugufu recently closed by Tanzania’s Government. Without taking action internationally to stop that kind of repatriation forced there is fears that those refugees will be forcibly returned to their home countries by Tanzania’s Government, they will be exposed to the danger of imprisonment, mistreatment, and possibly even death.

On our side we are trying to mobilize the international community to act by taking a kind of interventions on behalf of these refugees, also talking directly to Tanzania’s Government.

The following list is some of the refugees contacted by our organization in Nyarugusu camp:
1. Mbele Jacque
2. Saidi Mwenebatu
3. Ali Kibamba
4. Jerome Ebuela
5. Mwira Asumani
6. Ndwali Jafari
7. Shongole Muronda
8. Clau M’monga
9. Omari Kitungamo
10. Kasore Ruvumira
11. Ange Issa
12. Yvone Zabihu
13. Joli Joseph
14. Roza John
15. Sofia Kipo
16. Babwire John
17. Beatrice Chala
18. Sifa Ayeba
19. Shabani Diedonne
20. Mbale Alphonso
21. Sumahili Etabu
22. M’bekalu Abwe
23. Mukendi Isaibasu
24. Bakari Watambila
25. Matendo Mto
26. Kaskile Mzaliwa
27. Agostini Oleani
28. Odila Kibasomba
29. Alinoti Kitandala
30. Mnena Amisi
31. Lola Jowari
32. Abajo Selemani
33. Philip Chanja
34. Yela Salumu
Etc

Please help us to stop repatriation forced and fight for the refugee’s right in this country.
Rev. Tshiye

South Africa: Workers set strike deadline

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/8ZPjvt

About 1.3 million South African public sector workers have penned down August 10 to stage a nationwide strike. The government raised its pay offer to civil servants on Thursday to try to avert the strike, but it was quickly rejected by the unions. "More than 1.3 million public servants will on Tuesday take part in marches and demonstrations right through the country leading to a total shutdown of the public service," the largest umbrella labour group, COSATU, said in a statement.

Emerging Powers in Africa News Round-up

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/emplayersnews/66524

General
New Silk Road Built by China Connects Asia to Latin America
The high-speed rail link China Railway Construction Corp. is building in Saudi Arabia doesn’t just connect the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It shows how Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America are holding the world economy together.
Read More

World Bank Probe of Eskom's Loan
The World Bank has started an investigation into its $3,75bn loan to Eskom after a complaint by two local environmental groups on behalf of the Lephalale community, where the Medupi power station is to be built.
Read More

US asks India, China, Brazil to open farm markets
The United State is pushing emerging markets like India, China and Brazil to open up their agriculture markets for a successful Doha round of World trade talks. The US was 'taking the lead in pursuing new trade opportunities, with a special focus on the world's fastest-growing markets,' US trade representative (USTR) Ron Kirk told the Senate Committee on Agriculture Wednesday. 'In the Asia-Pacific, USTR is leading negotiations of a new, high- standard, 21st century Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement that will ensure American farmers and ranchers access to the region's dynamic and growing markets for decades to come,' he said.
Read More

More SA businesses want a piece of BRIC
South African big businesses are positioning themselves to take advantage of the growth in the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India and China] bloc through intensifying efforts to get partnerships and investment opportunities in those countries. Yet another high level business delegation, which includes Standard Bank Group chief executive Jacko Maree, Industrial Development Corporation CEO Geoffrey Qhena, BHP Billiton chair Xolani Mkhwanazi and Eskom chair Mpho Makwana among others, is accompanying President Jacob Zuma on his two-day bilateral official visit to Russia.
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Ma to visit Africa next year: official
A ranking official at the Presidential Office said on condition of anonymity that Ma would visit the country’s African allies at the beginning of next year and preparatory work would begin as early as November. If things go smoothly, Ma will visit all four allies on the continent, the official added. Taiwan’s four African allies are Burkina Faso, Sao Tome and Principe, Swaziland and Gambia.
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China in Africa
Ethiopians to hold protest rally against China’s policy on Ethiopia
A coalition of several Ethiopian groups are coming together to organizing a protest rally against China’s political, financial and technical assistance to the genocidal regime in Ethiopia. The first protest rally will be held in Washington DC on August 5, 2010 at the Embassy of China.
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SA signs police agreement with China
As part of efforts to strengthen bilateral relations between South Africa and China, Police Deputy Minister Fikile Mbalula on Friday signed a police co-operation agreement with his Chinese counterpart, Chen Zhimin. In a statement the ministries outlined various ways of consolidating and exchanging intelligence information on drug trafficking, illegal immigration, money laundering, arms smuggling and trafficking of women and children.
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Wesizwe's China Deal Stuck on BEE
WESIZWE Platinum CEO Mike Solomon will step down as the company negotiates with a Chinese consortium on a R6,6bn deal that may be delayed because of its empowerment stake.
Wesizwe has to address its empowerment level to win government approval for the transaction, which will give the Chinese consortium a 51% stake in Wesizwe, dilute existing shareholdings and provide full funding for development of a R6bn platinum mine.
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Zuma to charm China
South Africa will push for expansion of both trade and direct investment when President Jacob Zuma visits China later this month in one of the legs of a worldwide tour to expand ties with the world's biggest economies.
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Dti to lead business delegation to China
Trade and Industry Deputy Minister Maria Ntuli is to lead a 35-member business delegation to the World Expo 2010 in China. The six-day expo, which kicks off on Saturday, is themed "Better City, Better Life", highlighting the concern of the international community for future policy making and sustainable development.The South African delegation will consist of business people in defence, security, arts and crafts, textile sectors and officials from three provincial economic development agencies.
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Ecobank Signs Pact With Bank Of China
Ecobank Ghana, on Friday, signed a partnership agreement with the Bank of China (BOC), to facilitate international trade, projects, and investments between Africa and Asia.With the agreement, Ecobank Ghana becomes the first affiliate of the Ecobank Group to have a dedicated desk of the Bank of China.
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China, Africa promote agricultural co-op through party-to-party channels
Senior officials from Chinese and African political parties will gather in Beijing next week to discuss ways to promote agricultural cooperation. The International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (IDCPC) made the announcement Tuesday at a press conference.
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China’s centre for agricultural research in Mozambique ready in October
China’s Centre for Agricultural Research and Technology Transfer in Mozambique, located in the district of Boane, Maputo province is expected to be finished in October, the Mozambican minister for Science and Technology, Venâncio Massingue, said in Maputo Thursday.
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Opportunities for African Firms in China
At a business event held in Sandton, South Africa, on July 26, 2010 by the Global Business Roundtable, Tianjin, one of China’s key municipalities under the Central Government, showcased its huge infrastructure investments over the past few years, positioning the area to be a leading economic hub. They were seeking African investors into its economy, as well as opportunities for business people from the Tianjin to invest in Africa.
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Kumba shrugs off China's ore import restrictions
The China Iron & Steel Association announced new rules yesterday restricting the number of licensed iron ore importers, a move intended to reduce smaller traders blamed for inflating prices. China consumes about half the world's output of iron ore, used as a steel-making ingredient. Its domestic iron ore production has risen as imports drop off.
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Cocaine: NDLEA won’t extradite arrested Chinese, says Giade
The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, yesterday ruled out the possibility of extraditing the Chinese nationals arrested in connection with the recent seizure of 450.400kg of cocaine valued at N4 billion. NDLEA Chairman, Alhaji Ahmadu Giade, who disclosed this in Lagos, said the two Chinese nationals, Richard Wang and Chiusen Fong, would be tried in the country as soon as investigations into the matter was concluded.
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Opportunity China's pharmaceutical enterprises in Africa: the market attractive policy concessions – medicine, Africa – the pharmaceutical
It is because of the huge African market in the pharmaceutical supply capacity needs and their own poor, in recent years, Africa has become China’s pharmaceutical enterprises “going out” one of the first choice.
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China's Investments in Southern Africa Shifting from Mining to High-tech
Dorcus Makgato-Malesu, Minister of Trade and Industry of the Republic of Botswana, said on July 26th that China's investments in southern Africa are shifting from infrastructure, mineral resources such as copper and nickel to high-tech fields such as information.
The Minister said on the China-Botswana Business Promotion Seminar that most southern African countries boast abundant mineral resources, including Botswana. Her country will take an active part in talking with Chinese enterprises about cooperation in mining, manufacturing (including glass processing and diamond processing), agro-products processing etc.
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Chalco, Rio Tinto formalise Guinea iron ore venture
Aluminum Corp of China Ltd (Chalco) has agreed to invest $1.35 billion in a Guinea joint venture that partner Rio Tinto claims is the world's largest undeveloped iron ore deposit.
The agreement to develop the Simandou project follows a non-binding deal signed in March by Chalco's parent, Chinalco, and is the Chinese group's first non-aluminium investment overseas.
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India in Africa
India's Export-Import Bank Lends Congo $42 Million to Build Bandundu Dam
India’s Export-Import Bank lent Democratic Republic of Congo $42 million to build a dam in west- central Bandundu province. The Kakobola dam will provide power for almost 2 million people around the city of Kikwit, the office of Congo’s Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito said in an e-mailed statement.
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Are the Guptas the new Shaiks?
President Jacob Zuma seems to have replaced the well-known Shaik brothers as his close allies with another influential and wealthy family: the Guptas from India
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Indian demand fuels African cashew trade
West Africa is developing into an increasingly significant producer and processor of cashew nuts, feeding into lucrative markets in India. The cashew nut rarely figures high on most investors’ lists of West Africa’s principal exports. The nut is more closely associated with India, where it is processed and exported worldwide or ground into shahi korma sauces. However, India has built up such a significant cashew industry that in order to satisfy increasing demand, it now imports as much of the nut as it grows.
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India to assist Seychelles in anti-piracy operations
In an effort to increase its presence in the Indian Ocean, India has agreed to and provide aircraft to Seychelles and bolster its security forces. Responding to the request during an interaction with the leadership of Seychelles, Defence Minister A.K. Antony agreed to extend help to carry out maritime and Exclusive Economic Zone surveillance operations.
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Durban to host Africa diaspora conference
Come October and the Indian diaspora in Africa will converge for the Mini Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) in Durban, marking the city's historic links with India and aiming to 'build bridges' between them and their country of origin. The event, titled 'PBD-Africa', is to be held in the South African city Oct 1-2 on the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. The year also marks the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured sugarcane labourers from India whose descendants have today risen to become flourishing entrepreneurs.
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Indians seek 'safety net'
South Africans who spoke to the Sunday Times Extra said they had applied for Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) and People of Indian Origin (PIO) cards as a "back-up plan if things worsen in the country". PIO and OCI cards were made accessible to South Africans of Indian origin by the government of India in 2002 and 2006, respectively. Both cards allow holders to buy property, do business, visit and live in the country without a visa while giving the card holder the rights of an Indian citizen, with the exception of the right to vote.
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In Other Emerging Powers News
Zambia miners campaign against $400 million copper investment by Vale
Zambia's largest mine workers' union said on Wednesday it aimed to block Brazilian firm Vale's planned development of a $400 million copper mine because of concerns about its bad labour relations record. Mine Workers' Union of Zambia (MUZ) President Rayford Mbulu said Vale, which plans to develop the Konkola North copper project, had been involved in a standoff with steel workers in Canada for almost a year and should not be allowed in Zambia. Mbulu said the 20 million-member International Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers' Union (ICEM) resolved to oppose Vale's investments worldwide until the company proved that it would respect workers' rights.
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Russia inks new uranium deal with South Africa
Russia agreed on Friday to supply more low-enriched uranium to South Africa's only nuclear power station, a contract that will give Russia's uranium trader nearly half of Africa's biggest market for enrichment services. The deal, which extends an earlier agreement from the 1990s, was signed after Kremlin talks between South African President Jacob Zuma and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. Under the deal Russia's state uranium trader Techsnabexport will supply uranium enrichment services to companies such as Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp, for delivery to the Koeberg nuclear power plant.
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SA, Russia sign trade protocol
International Relations Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane has signed a trade deal with her Russian counterpart, her department said on Tuesday. "The ministers reaffirmed their determination to intensify and deepen mutually beneficial bilateral social, economic and technical co-operation," it said in a statement.
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Russia ready to discuss South Africa joining BRIC – Medvedev
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev indicated on Thursday Moscow's readiness to discuss bringing South Africa into BRIC, the informal grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
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S.Africa's Zuma steps up BRICs charm offensive
South African President Jacob Zuma goes to Russia and China this month, part of a push to open new trade and investment routes to the fast-growing emerging economies to replace traditional markets in Europe.The trips come on the heels of a state visit to South Africa by Brazilian President Luis Inazio Lula da Silva during last month's soccer World Cup that underscored the importance emerging countries are placing on boosting mutual trade.They also mean Zuma will have visited all four of the BRICs countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- in a little over a year after taking office.
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There's a New Silk Road, and It Doesn't Lead to the U.S.
As the U.S. emerges from the recession, American investors often wonder where the growth is going to come from. Perhaps they should talk to Ruben Bisi, international operations director for Marcopolo, Brazil's biggest bus maker. It's having a banner year, with revenue up 47 percent so far. You won't see Marcopolo buses in the U.S., though. They're cruising the highways and city streets of Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Egypt, India, China, and South Africa.
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Adani to put $30 bn in coal, power, shipping
The Adani Group, after acquiring Australian firm Linc Energy Ltd’s Galilee coal tenement, plans to invest $25-30 billion (Rs1.2-1.4 trillion) in its businesses over the next seven years, said chairman Gautam Adani. These investments will be made in a slew of projects involving coal mine acquisitions, cement manufacturing, shipping, port construction, overseas farming and power generation among others.
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Cementing Vietnam-Africa ties of friendship and solidarity
In recent years, the Communist Party of Vietnam has gradually made Vietnam’s relationship with African countries an important part of its foreign policy. So far, Vietnam has established diplomatic relations with 51 out of 54 African countries. The country is also promoting the establishment of diplomatic ties with the remaining three African countries – Comoros, Malawi, and Liberia.
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The rising power of the Chinese worker
CHEAP labour has built China’s economic miracle. Its manufacturing workers toil for a small fraction of the cost of their American or German competitors. At the bottom of the heap, a “floating population” of about 130m migrants work in China’s boomtowns, taking home 1,348 yuan a month on average last year. That is a mere $197, little more than one-twentieth of the average monthly wage in America. But it is 17% more than the year before.
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Not entirely free, your honour
The legal profession, like the clients it serves, is well on the way to going global—but especially in India, obstacles to its spread remain.
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Blogs, Opinions, Presentations and Publications

Home is SA
It's complicated being a South African Indian visiting India. You return as a tourist 150 years after your ancestors left as glorified slaves; with home never far from your thoughts. South Africa, five generations later, is unequivocally home.
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The Pros and Cons of Mining in West Africa
Western Africa seems like the place to be for large mining and steel businesses, such as: Vale, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, ArcelorMittal, Aluminum Corp of China or Chinalco, Severstal. These six companies plan to spend billions of dollars in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – where some of the world’s richest deposits of iron ore and bauxite have been found.Yet despite the promises of profits the area holds, those companies need to tread carefully. Because they could strike it rich… or step on much more dangerous mines while they search.
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Nothing is for Nothing - Influence and China's Rising Quick-Impact Infrastructure
China's ambassador here, Zhou Yuxiao, in begging another multi-million dollar project- the construction of the country's Health Ministry--has made it clear that his country has no vested interest in Liberia. From Cold War perspectives, when China and other powers sought ideological partners across Africa and Asia, that could be true. But his declaration is an understatement. China has embarked upon expanding its influence, cultural and economic, and there is nothing wrong with that on today's global political landscape, indicating that there is nothing for nothing.
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Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa, land of a billion customers
Multi-billion dollar resource and infrastructure deals between China and African countries make the business headlines ever more regularly, but there are very few reports on the growing numbers of Chinese entrepreneurs and small private companies seeking opportunities in Africa that they cannot find in China. Tessa Thorniley looks at how they are faring.
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Brics in Africa: adding it up
It’s become a hoary cliché that the Bric economies are leading a modern day “scramble for Africa” - and it’s a scramble that’s often frustratingly difficult to quantify. But Standard Bank has waded through the mish-mash of data and emerged with a prediction: that over the next decade emerging economies will contribute 30 per cent of the new foreign investment coming into Africa. While the bulk of African FDI is still from the old economies, the momentum is all with the Brics.
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BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Compiled by Hayley Herman, programme officer based with the Emerging Powers in Africa programme.

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

Africa: South Africa recalls ambassador to Rwanda

2010-08-06

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10889039

South Africa has recalled its ambassador to Rwanda following a diplomatic row over the shooting of an exiled Rwandan general in Johannesburg. Gen Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, a critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, was shot and wounded in June. South Africa said it had not broken diplomatic ties and no connection was being made between the ambassador's withdrawal and the shooting.

Cote d'Ivoire: New poll date set

2010-08-06

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10884545

The date for long-delayed presidential elections in Ivory Coast has been set for 31 October, Prime Minister Guillaume Soro has said. A rebellion lead by Mr Soro split the country in half in 2002 and polls are seen as a vital step to end the crisis. Mr Soro joined a unity government in 2007, but the peace process has been dogged by delays.

Kenya: New constitution gets overwhelming vote approval

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/bEVN0P

Kenyans have overwhelmingly voted in a new constitution, which would redefine the political landscape and make it easy to send a sitting President to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face trial for crimes, including genocide, as part of the East African nation's range of law reforms. Kenya's draft constitution easily sailed through during the 4 August vote, with the provisional poll results Thursday showing at least 67.9 percent of the voters had given it their approval, against 33 percent of the voters who opposed the draft law.

Nigeria: Former VP to contest 2011 elections

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9Cg7n7

Indications emerged that erstwhile number two man in Nigeria, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, would on Sunday formally declare his presidential ambition for the 2011 presidential elections in the country. An invitation supposedly signed Atiku's spokesperson, Shehu Garba states that the former vice president under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo administration would make public, his plans to return to the government house, but this time around, as the President.

Rwanda: Kagame ‘almost sure’ of victory

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/cDWvJO

President Paul Kagame, who has ruled post-genocide “new Rwanda” with an iron fist for 16 years, is almost guaranteed of victory on August 9 after a campaign that saw increased repression of the opposition. The lanky 52-year-old, who has presided over the destiny of the small central African nation since he ended the 1994 genocide against his Tutsi minority, will seek the endorsement of a five-million-strong electorate.

South Africa: Selebi gets 15 years

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/97R2fI

South Africa's stop-start war on corruption claimed its biggest success yesterday as the country's former leading policeman was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Jackie Selebi was told by a judge that he was "an embarrassment to all right-thinking citizens" as he was sent down on corruption charges.

Africa: Secretary Clinton addresses 9th African Growth Forum

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9qrDKY

Africa is a continent on the rise and its story needs to be told: "Africa is open for business and ready to grow," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told the ninth annual U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Forum -- also known as the AGOA Forum.

East Africa: Japan sponsors rice research hub

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9OplV9

Uganda hopes to become the region's leader in rice research with the opening later this year of a US$6 million centre at its crop research institute. The National Crop Resources Research Institute (NACRRI) received the money from Japan in September last year for the construction of a training and research centre for rice farmers and scientists, which is now nearing completion.

Ghana: France gives 200m euros

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/dbr5x9

The French government through the French Development Agency is sponsoring the execution of development projects totalling 200 million Euros throughout the West African Nation of Ghana. The projects, which are mainly on the provision of potable water, electricity and sanitation, are currently being executed in the Brong Ahafo, Ashanti, Northern and Volta Regions.

Global: Anti-poverty policies 'failing the poorest'

2010-08-06

http://uk.oneworld.net/article/view/165721/1/

More than 10 years on, global poverty reduction strategies introduced by multilateral organisations including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), have failed to remove many of the poorest communities, especially minority and indigenous communities, out of poverty, Minority Rights Group International says. Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) were initiated in 1999 by the IMF and World Bank to help low income and highly indebted countries to reduce their poverty levels. At the time, the move was widely supported by the UN and big donor countries. Currently, about 140 countries around the world are at some stage of a PRSP process, including implementing development projects based on the papers.

West Africa: Conditionality in World Bank crisis-lending to Ghana

2010-08-06

http://www.eurodad.org/whatsnew/reports.aspx?id=4211

The World Bank continues to influence developing country economic policies through placing conditions on loan agreements, despite concrete commitments by the Bank to significantly reduce the economic policy reforms required for the receipt of Bank funds in order to ensure an increase in recipient country policy space. What is new, however, are the more discreet channels of influence. This briefing finds that the conditions for the receipt of loans are increasingly being pushed in through the side door, for example by being stipulated outside of the loan agreement itself in side documents and letters, contravening responsible financing principles.

Angola: UNICEF, WHO appeal for joint efforts to stop polio

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/cX4bQh

UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have appealed for the participation of all sectors of the Angolan society to ensure the vaccination of about 5.6 million children under five years against polio 6-8 August and 10-12 September. A joint statement by the two UN agencies said the exercise was aimed at protecting children in the country against the crippling disease, and a forerunner to Angola's plans to carry out a national vaccination campaign in 2011.

Cameroon: Biggest cholera outbreak in 10 years

2010-08-06

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=90056

Cholera has killed at least 94 people in northern Cameroon and is spreading, in what health officials say is the most severe outbreak in years. "We are used to seeing cholera here during the rainy season, but we don't understand what's happening this year," Kuété Fotié Yves, health director in the district of Moloko, told IRIN. "We have not seen an outbreak of this magnitude in at least 10 years."

Global: Study finds PrEP safe for gay, bi men

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9Er5pK

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with tenofovir (found in Viread, Truvada and Atripla) is safe for men who have sex with men (MSM), according to a U.S. study presented Friday, July 23, at the XVIII International AIDS Conference (IAC) in Vienna. PrEP is one of the most promising prevention tools on the immediate horizon. With PrEP, HIV-negative individuals take antiretroviral drugs to prevent becoming infected with the virus.

Global: What happened in Vienna 2010

2010-08-06

http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/my6NIpy1Hf

The AIDS 2010 conference theme emphasizes the central importance of protecting and promoting human rights as a prerequisite to a successful response to HIV. The right to dignity and self-determination for key affected populations, to equal access to health care and life-saving prevention and treatment programmes, and the right to evidence-based interventions based on evidence rather than ideology are all incorporated in this urgent demand for action. Rights Here, Rights Now emphasizes that concrete human rights measures need to be in place to protect those most vulnerable to and affected by HIV, especially women and girls, people who use drugs, migrants, prisoners, sex workers, men who have sex with men and transgender persons.

Liberia: Government strategy lauded

2010-08-06

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=35549

United Nations officials in Liberia have welcomed the launch of a new national strategy to combat HIV/AIDS, stressing the importance of tackling the disease before infection rates become high in the West African country. Liberia’s National AIDS Commission yesterday launched a strategic framework for 2010 to 2014 in the capital, Monrovia, with the target of containing the spread of HIV at its current rate of 1.5 per cent among the general population.

South Africa: Unpaid VCT counsellors threaten to walk out

2010-08-06

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=90089

After months of non-payment, lay counsellors vital to government's ambitious target of testing 15 million South Africans for HIV by April 2011, are threatening to walk out of voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) clinics. Lay counsellors in at least two of South Africa's nine provinces - Eastern Cape and Gauteng - said they had gone for as long as five months without receiving their government stipends for providing pre- and post-test counselling as part of the national testing drive.

Uganda: PEPFAR makes u-turn

2010-08-06

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032883

Advocacy organisations in the US and Uganda have welcomed the announcement that the U.S. global AIDS program, PEPFAR, has reversed severe restrictions that capped enrollment of new HIV patients on life saving treatment in Uganda. Following Pressure, White House Announces it is Lifting AIDS Treatment Caps in Uganda. Similar Treatment Access Crises Loom Unless the Obama Administration Keeps its AIDS Funding Promises.

Cameroon: Guarded lives

2010-08-06

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/08/04/guarded-lives-cameroon

A recent decision by the UK Supreme Court found that a gay man would "face a well-founded fear of persecution" if he returned to Cameroon. The Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeal's decision that this Cameroonian man could return and conceal his identity to avoid persecution. News outlets quoted Cameroon's communications minister, Issa Tchiroma, as saying, "No homosexual is persecuted in Cameroon." The cases below prove that the UK Supreme Court got it right and that the minister might be unaware of what is happening in his country.

Zimbabwe: Schoolgirls arrested over homosexuality

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/aZ9mMh

Police in Bulawayo have arrested 15 girls from Evelyn High, a girls only public school here for engaging in homosexual activities. Homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe, and some individuals have been prosecuted and convicted for their sexual orientation, including former president Canaan Sodindo Banana.

South Africa: Coming together to end xenophobic violence

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9EbNFv

Following the incredible feeling of African unity experienced during the World Cup, most of us were alarmed by rumours of the targeting of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers in some pockets of our communities post the final. It stood in stark contrast to the Pan-African spirit we demonstrated when we collectively switched our loyalty to Ghana after Bafana-Bafana was eliminated from the tournament.

Ethiopia: European Investment Bank abandons mega dam

2010-08-06

http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/6318

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has announced it is no longer considering funding Africa’s tallest dam, in Ethiopia. The hydroelectric dam, called Gibe III, has drawn international criticism because of the devastating effect it is likely to have on the food security of at least eight Ethiopian tribes.

Global: South should also be paid for eco-disasters

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9R4OBq

The new South has a cover story on why developing countries should also be eligible for compensation by transnational companies responsible for environmental disasters. The recent $20 bil fund set up by BP for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico should be a model for companies to compensate for disasters such as in Bhopal, the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Niger Delta.

South Africa: Climate policy to go before Cabinet

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/aatzrn

South Africa's draft climate change policy, known as the green paper, would be submitted to Cabinet by the end of August, after which it would be gazetted for public comment, the Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA). DEA communications chief director Albi Modise further explained that following engagement on the comments received, a widely-consulted white paper would be submitted into the Parliamentary process by the end of the year, for promulgation which was expected in the first quarter of 201

Zimbabwe: Ministers and journalists face arrest for ‘leaking’ information

2010-08-06

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news060810/ministers060810.htm

The Minister of Media, Information and Publicity, Webster Shamu, on Wednesday threatened to arrest any government ministers who disclose information on cabinet meetings and proceedings to the media, plus the journalists who use such information. Minister Shamu reportedly said ministers were using confidential information from cabinet proceedings to “further their political agendas” and that some even “distort or misinterpret” the information in order to “promote their narrow party political interests”.

Kenya: Foreigners form dummy firms to keep land

2010-08-06

http://farmlandgrab.org/14716

Foreign land barons are using millions of shillings to hire elite law firms for advice on how to protect their property should Kenyans pass the proposed Constitution — that bars them from owning land — in Wednesday’s vote. Commercial lawyers said the number of clients seeking land ownership advice under a new constitution has risen steadily in the past three months to peak at the end of July as the referendum drew closer.

Kenya: Thrown out of the forest into a camp

2010-08-06

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=90040

Since March 2008, Beatrice Tamaska Kae has lived under a tarpaulin with her seven children in a camp after their eviction from a government forest in Trans Nzoia West district in western Kenya. "It is hard to get used to life in a camp when you had a lot of space before; during the dry season life is slightly better because it is not cold but now with the heavy rains and the cold, it is pure misery, however closely we sit or sleep, we cannot get warm in this weather," Kae said on 29 July at Teldet primary school, in Kissawai location of Saboti Division.

Global: FAO cuts wheat production forecast

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9dOfxp

The impact of unfavourable weather on crops in recent weeks has led the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to cut its global wheat production forecast for 2010 to 651 million tonnes, from 676 million tonnes reported in June. However, despite production problems in some leading exporting countries, the world wheat market remains far more balanced than at the time of the world food crisis in 2007/08 and fears of a new global food crisis are not justified at this point, FAO said.

Global: Banned, censored, harassed, and jailed

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/b0y7D1

Human Rights Watch announced Hellman/Hammett grants for 42 writers from 20 countries in recognition of their commitment to free expression and courage in the face of political persecution. All are writers whose work and activism have been suppressed by their governments. Beyond their own experiences, they represent numerous other writers and journalists whose personal and professional lives have been disrupted as a result of repressive government policies that aim to control speech and publications.

Southern Africa: MTN warned of all-Africa boycott over Swazi shame

2010-08-06

http://news.za.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=154319419

South African telcommunications company MTN has been warned by the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN), an opposition group close to the South African trade union federation Cosatu, that it could face a mass boycott from Africans concerned about its bowing to demands from the Swazi royal family to investigate phone calls to South African journalists from inside the country.

CAR: Documenting the human impact of violence

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/cmsPjq

Researchers from the University of California Berkeley’s Human Rights Center canvassed nearly 2,000 households in the Central African Republic to document the impact of violence in the country and gather opinions about the best way forward. The results present a stark picture of a population traumatized by decades of political strife, military coups and poverty; leading the researchers to conclude the country is one of the worst cases of a humanitarian crisis in the world.

DRC: Nearly 90,000 people uprooted by clashes in eastern DRC

2010-08-06

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=35484

Local authorities in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are reporting that almost 90,000 people have been uprooted from their homes following recent military operations in the region, the United Nations humanitarian arm said. At least six civilians have died and dozens of others have been injured in the fighting between the national army, or FARDC, and fighters associated with the Ugandan rebel group known as the Allied Democratic Forces-National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (ADF-NALU) in the Beni territory in North Kivu province

Somalia: Unarmed and under fire in Mogadishu

2010-08-06

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/ACIO-883BSL?OpenDocument

Civilians, especially women, tend to bear the brunt of armed conflicts across the world, particularly in Somalia, where Islamist insurgents are fighting a weak government propped up by African Union forces. Several women in Mogadishu told IRIN about the day-to-day reality of living in a warzone.

Sudan: Relations with UNAMID reach low point

2010-08-06

http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article35843

The United Nations spokesperson has said that the restrictions recently announced by the Sudanese government on the movement of personnel from the African Union-United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) violates previous accords signed between both sides. Last week, a senior Sudanese official told Reuters that UNAMID travel would be monitored going forward and that their bags will be searched. They will have to inform the government before moving on roads even within South Darfur’s capital Nyala, he said.

Africa: ICT ministerial confab opens in Nigeria

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/b4N3un

The third Africa Union Communications and Information Technologies Ministerial Conference got underway in Abuja, the Nigerian capital city, Tuesday, with a communications expert stressing the n eed for countries to invest more in the sector so as to generate employment for their peoples.

Africa: Should Africa continue to invest in ICT?

2010-08-06

http://www.elearning-africa.com/newsportal/english/news255.php

Africa is witnessing a gradual shift towards massive investment in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), thanks to the role of policymakers who are pushing for full regulatory reform for ICTs. Many African leaders have realised that, for any meaningful economic development to occur, technology has to play its part. But the free flow of investment in the sector was slowed down last year, owing to the global economic downturn, which forced many African countries to cut spending in some sectors and prioritise the most urgent areas.

Kenya: SOS by SMS

2010-08-06

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?Reportid=90050

In a nondescript room on the 14th floor of a Nairobi office block, the words “hate speech” appear on a computer screen next to the name of a prominent politician, with location, a telephone number and buttons marked “Not verified” and “Follow-up”. Another message reads: “If you think peace is expensive, try violence!” Yet another says: “Plz help us. A certain community is threatening other communities to vacate the area in case YES wins.”

Africa: Migrant rights updates

AfricaFocus Bulletin Aug 6, 2010 (100806)

2010-08-06

http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/migr1008.php

"An astounding 100 deportees a month come to ARACEM [in Mali] for shelter, food and clothing. They are expelled from Libya, Morocco and Algeria as they make the way from Central and West Africa in an attempt to find work. These three North African countries have signed agreements with European countries to act as external border control agents to prevent migrants from reaching Europe."

South Africa: Xenophobia & Civil Society

AfricaFocus Bulletin Aug 6, 2010 (100806)

2010-08-06

http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/xeno1008.php

"Virtually every author concludes that violence against African migrants will continue and increase unless some profound socio-economic and attitudinal changes occur. This text thus sounds a loud warning bell to South Africa about our future. And it does so not merely based on the opinions of the authors, but because of the views of ordinary South African citizens that informed the research. ... survey after survey, focus group after focus group, have shown deeply xenophobic attitudes rising steadily over time." - David Everatt in introduction to report on South African Civil Society and Xenophobia, July 2010

2nd AfricaAdapt Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund

Call for submissions 9-20 August 2010

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/fundraising/66504

AfricaAdapt is launching its second Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund. The Fund offers support to African researchers, local and civil society organisations, cooperatives and community networks that create new ways of sharing knowledge between African communities. These poor and vulnerable communities rarely get the opportunity to share their valuable experience and learn from others in formal exchanges of knowledge on climate change adaptation.
AfricaAdapt is launching its second Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund. The Fund offers support to African researchers, local and civil society organisations, cooperatives and community networks that create new ways of sharing knowledge between African communities. These poor and vulnerable communities rarely get the opportunity to share their valuable experience and learn from others in formal exchanges of knowledge on climate change adaptation.

Do you have an idea? Apply now!
African researchers, local and civil society organisations, cooperatives and community networks are encouraged to submit their ideas.

Important dates:
First round of submissions open 9 - 20 August, 2010.
Shortlisted applicants will be notified by 6 September, 2010.

How does the AfricaAdapt Innovation Fund work?
In 2009, the AfricaAdapt Innovation Fund helped nine African projects supporting climate change adaptation. These ranged from a community centre using multimedia in Lukwanga, Uganda, to the ‘Radio Citizen’ Club in Senegal.

This year the AfricaAdapt Innovation Fund is offering grants of up to US$6,000 to projects that seek to overcome barriers to share knowledge with ’hard-to-reach’ or marginalised African communities. These barriers may be related to language, access to information and marginalisation due to gender or disability. Theatre performances, songs, radio broadcasts, visual arts, videos and comics are just a few ideas about how they could be overcome. The key is to ensure these groups can learn and share.

Why reach out to marginalised communities?
Ensuring that vulnerable communities are active in the exchange of African knowledge, best practices and know-how on climate change adaptation is a high priority for AfricaAdapt. These communities are the most directly threatened by climactic impacts, However they also have a wealth of experience in adapting to past changes that could benefit other communities.

What is the AfricaAdapt Network?
AfricaAdapt is a network that facilitates knowledge sharing between different stakeholders groups. The network built an online African adaptation community of interest, with a website that has 600 members across stakeholder groups from all corners of Africa.

AfricaAdapt is a hub for stimulating innovation in both offline and online knowledge sharing practices, through the impact of the Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund. For more info on Innovation Fund projects that were selected in 2009, please visit our website: http://tinyurl.com/374ebpz

Wellcome Trust’s International Engagement

Grants of up to £30,000 available

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/bOetse

Wellcome Trust is accepting applications for the International Engagement Awards for global health research. A wide range of people including media professionals, educators, science communicators, health professionals and researchers in bioscience, health, bioethics and history can apply for these awards, which offer grants of up to £30,000 for a period of maximum three years.

2nd World Conference on Humanitarian Studies

Changing realities of conflict and crisis

2010-08-06

http://www.humanitarianstudies2011.org/

The Second World Conference of Humanitarian Studies (WCHS), organized by the International Humanitarian Studies Associational (IHSA) and hosted by Tufts University, Medford, USA (in collaboration with Harvard University, Columbia University and the Social Science Research Council) will take place 2 - 5 June 2011. The conference marks a major step in ratcheting up the quality of our understanding of the dynamics of societies in crisis, the resultant greater use of evidence based humanitarian programming and an increased professional approach to humanitarian work. As with other professional fields, having a forum where cutting edge research can be presented and critiqued is a vital tool in moving the profession forward.

Information for Change 2010: Digital Publishing in Africa: The Next Steps

21 September 2010: 09.00 - 16.30

2010-08-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/493/ifc2010_flyer.jpg

Information for Change 2010: a free workshop in Nairobi linked to the Nairobi Book Fair

Title: Digital Publishing in Africa: The Next Steps

Date: 21 September 2010: 09.00 - 16.30

Location: Jacaranda Conference Centre, Jacaranda Hotel, Westlands, Nairobi

In July 2009 the first undersea cable to bring high-speed internet access to East Africa went live, opening up new opportunities for digital publishing in the region.

Information for Change 2010 will examine emerging digital publishing models in East Africa. Speakers will present first-hand experience of the realities of working in the region, and will showcase and share innovative approaches to the creation and delivery of information. The programme will include a keynote address, a speaker-led panel session, two World Café sharing sessions, case studies presentations, a venue for participants to display materials, and a moderated interactive session that will involve all participants.

A buffet lunch is included in the programme.

To register, go to www.informationforchange.org, click on Registration on the left hand navigation, and complete the form.

Uganda: Short course on African Transitional Justice

2010-08-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/493/IATJ.pdf

The Refugee Law Project (RLP), Faculty of Law, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, in collaboration with the African Transitional Justice Research Network (ATJRN) has established an Institute for African Transitional Justice (IATJ). The institute is pleased to announce its first short course on African Transitional Justice. The course will take place in Kampala, Uganda from 21 – 27 November 2010. This week-long residential course will consist of a series of interactive lectures, workshops, and round table discussions focusing the theme “Addressing Transitional Justice in the Context of African Challenges”.

Africa Peace & Conflict Journal

Call for papers

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/publications/66513

The Africa Peace & Conflict Journal, published by the UN Mandated University for Peace, is now accepting abstracts and full length articles for its upcoming December 2010 publication. Submissions on all topics related to African peace and conflict studies are welcome. The deadline for receipt of full-articles is September 1st 2010. The Africa Peace & Conflict Journal is a biannual publication.
The Africa Peace & Conflict Journal, published by the UN Mandated University for Peace, is now accepting abstracts and full length articles for its upcoming December 2010 publication. Submissions on all topics related to African peace and conflict studies are welcome. The deadline for receipt of full-articles is September 1st 2010. The Africa Peace & Conflict Journal is a biannual publication. If you are interested to submit on a future theme, please take note:

Upcoming Publications
June 2011: Forced migration, Refugees, Conflict and Peacebuilding
December 2011: Open

Guide for Contributors
The APCJ is a refereed journal with a panel of international editorial advisors and readers. All articles are anonymously peer reviewed by at least two referees. We welcome the following types of contributions year round and will periodically issue calls for papers on specific topics:

* Articles and case analysis-critical case studies or thematic discussion and analysis of topical peace and conflict themes (7,000 words maximum, including endnotes; abstract, 150 words or less).
* Briefings/practice-training or intervention strategies, outcomes and impacts, policy review and analysis, country situational updates, and so on (2,000 words maximum).
* Book reviews-critical assessments of new books that integrate peace and conflict concerns (1,500 words maximum).
* Resources-reports, upcoming conferences and workshops, notices of new books and videos, e-communications, and Web sites that link peace and conflict studies (150 words maximum); documents, declarations, communiqués, and other relevant nongovernmental or multilateral organizational statements (1,000 words maximum).

The editors will consider only material that meets the following requirements:
* The submission must be original and not under consideration for publication by another journal or organization or have been published previously.
* For notes and references, use the short-title system (not the author-date system) as per Butcher's Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Copy-editors and Proofreaders, 4th edition (2006).

Submit to editor@apcj.upeace.org and assted@apcj.upeace.org

Culture is our Weapon

2010-08-06

http://www.cultureisyourweapon.com/about/

In this book, Patrick Beate and Daminan Platt write about AfroReggae, a movement that uses music and culture to provide hope and opportunity to young people, and is taking Brazil's favelas back - one song at a time. Powerful and moving, this is an unforgettable look at Rio, its people and this extraordinary group. What emerges is a colourful portrait of resistance, ethnic diversity, social inequality, and the timeless power of music in a society of fascinating, often heartrending extremes

Child Rights Lawyer - Refugee Law Project

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9u4q5P

The Refugee Law Project seeks a Child Rights Lawyer to coordinate the Child Rights and Protection Programme. S/he should be an advocate of the High court of Uganda and must be conversant with the international, regional and national mechanism for the protection of children. Masters Degree in Human Rights is desirable.

Child Rights Officer - Refugee Law Project

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9u4q5P

The Refugee Law Project seeks a Child Rights Officer to be responsible for the psychosocial component of the Child Rights and Protection Programme. S/he must be a trained social worker or counsellor with considerable experience working with Children.

Deputy Director - FAWE

2010-08-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/66517

The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) is a pan-African non-governmental organisation headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya with a network of 33 National Chapters throughout Africa. FAWE is the pioneer and leading NGO on the promotion of girls’ and women’s education in Africa. FAWE is seeking to recruit a bilingual, results-oriented individual to join its dynamic, professional team as Deputy Director.
The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) is a pan-African non-governmental organisation headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya with a network of 33 National Chapters throughout Africa. FAWE is the pioneer and leading NGO on the promotion of girls’ and women’s education in Africa. FAWE is seeking to recruit a bilingual, results-oriented individual to join its dynamic, professional team as Deputy Director.

Job Title: Deputy Director Department: Executive Director’s Office
Reports To: Executive Director Position within organisation: Cross-cutting

Position Summary
The Deputy Director will be a member of the FAWE Regional Secretariat’s management team and will report to the Executive Director (ED). She will be responsible for managing the overall operations of the Regional Secretariat (RS), including oversight of programme management, human resource, and administrative functions. She will support the ED in the areas of strategy, planning and budgeting, and will be responsible for monitoring progress against plans and budgets, in collaboration with section heads. She will assist the ED in handling network-related issues such as relationships with the National Chapters (NCs), organisational development, and internal governance issues. She will work closely with the Senior Finance and Administration Officer and the Senior Programme Coordination Officer. She will oversee the coordination of statutory and periodic events such as the Executive Committee, Donors’ Consortium and General Assembly meetings. She will supervise reporting to donor partners and will perform other tasks as delegated by the Executive Director.

Job Purpose
To assist the Executive Director in the development and implementation of FAWE’s Strategic Plan by overseeing the operations of the Regional Secretariat, handling relationships with the National Chapters, contributing to the enhancement of donor relations and partnerships as well as to the organisational development of the FAWE Network.

Expected Results to support the achievement of the 2008-2012 Strategic Plan Objectives
- National education systems are influenced to formulate gender responsive policies and promote girls’ education
- Leadership and coordination is provided to FAWE RS and NCs to ensure that FAWE’s strategic objectives are achieved
- Sufficient funding is mobilised to fulfil FAWE’s mandate and execute FAWE’s programmes
- Communities are mobilized to promote girls’ education
- Organizational development is ensured in order to better deliver programmes
- M&E is institutionalized to better satisfy the information needs of FAWE management, donors and stakeholders
- Strategic partnerships are forged or strengthened to complement the work of the organisation
- Good governance and organisational policies are upheld throughout the network.

Key Responsibilities
• Planning, Budgeting and Implementation
- Assist the Executive Director in the development of strategies and execution of decisions
- Work with the Executive Director to prepare and submit work programs and respective budgets to the Executive Committee for deliberations and approval
- Oversee the monitoring of overall progress on FAWE’s Strategic Plan and Annual Work Programs
- Coordinate the preparation of periodic implementation reports for review, approval and dissemination
• Human Resource Management and Administration
- Support the Executive Director in managing human resource issues such as recruitment of staff and consultants, performance reviews, and remuneration
- Oversee the maintenance and updating of HR-related policies and procedures
- Support the ED in creating a conducive environment for attracting, retaining, developing and motivating professional staff
- Coordinate the operation of various sections and handle escalations from section heads
- Ensure that administrative policies and controls are up-to-date and enforced.
• Leadership and Governance
- Work with the Executive Director to uphold the integrity, reputation, visibility and sustainability of the organization
- Assist the ED in providing leadership & direction to RS staff and National Chapters
- Assist in the handling of RS/NC and ensure compliance to the FAWE Charter and other governance- related policies and procedures
- Coordinate statutory and periodic meetings
• Communication and External Relations
- Oversee the preparation and submission of financial and technical reports to FAWE donor partners on a timely basis in accordance with grant agreements
- Occasionally represent FAWE at various fora and functions for purposes of advocating for girls’ education and networking with various partners
- Contribute to the drafting of proposals, minutes, reports and other correspondence as required
- Perform other duties and tasks as directed by the ED.

Job Requirements
Education and Training
- A Masters’ degree in Nonprofit Management, Public Administration or Educational Administration with a focus on Gender and/or Development Studies (Ph.D. preferred).
- Expertise in gender and education, particularly in the context of sub-Saharan Africa
- Proficiency in both French and English Experience
- 7 to 10 years of management experience in non-governmental organizations or in an international development organization, with a focus on education and/or gender.
- Demonstrated experience in administration and operations management, financial management and people management
- Knowledge and experience in programme planning & implementation, resource mobilization, advocacy and communication.
- Proven experience in successfully managing diverse stakeholder expectations

Skills and Competencies
- Strong management and strategic thinking abilities
- Ability to execute efficiently and produce expected results
- Self-driven, with exceptional skills in innovation and problem solving
- Excellent interpersonal, networking and negotiation skills
- Ability to interact and communicate effectively with high-level officials in government & donor agencies
- Strong leadership and advocacy skills, with the ability to influence policy at high levels of government
- Demonstrated track record of honesty, integrity and adherence to good governance principles
- Passionate about girls’ and women’s education
- Excellent writing skills in English and French
- Ability to learn new things quickly and to adapt to changing situations
- Proficient in the use of standard business software applications such as Microsoft Office

Terms and conditions
FAWE offers an attractive remuneration and benefits package including an employer-funded pension plan, medical insurance and a generous leave provision. The initial contract will be for a period of two years, subject to a probationary period of 6 months.

To Apply
Please send your CV and cover letter to recruitment@fawe.org no later than Friday 13th August 2010.

Fahamu seeks consultants

Expression of interest to develop curriculum for social justice courses

2010-08-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/66478

ackground
Fahamu focuses on working with grassroots social movements and organizations that address the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized in society. We do so because we believe that the potential impact of these organizations to create change will enhance participatory democracy and human rights in the Africa.

Based on our long term needs to support social movements and grassroots organizations, we intend to deliver cutting edge human rights education using a diversity of tools and platforms to strengthen these movements and assist them in creating the change that they seek.

This has been necessitated by the fact that grassroots social movements and organizations in Africa face a dearth of access to knowledge, information and learning tailored to their needs.
Within this framework Fahamu has planned to develop courses and training packs that promote competencies in the following themes,informed by a needs assessment with our constituents, trainings alumni and beneficiaries;
• Movement building and grassroots organizing in Africa
• Africa-centred advocacy
• New tactics in human and peoples' rights
• Sexuality and reproductive health rights

Objective of the assignment
Fahamu is looking for consultants to coordinate the curriculum development process for these courses using participatory approaches.

Scope of work
Each course curriculum development consultant will be expected to meet the following specific tasks:
• Plan and conduct a learning needs assessment with Fahamu’s alumni, constituents and partners
• Analyse and share results of the LNA
• Analyse and evaluate existing tools and training materials on the course themes by organisations or institutions
• Draft and share with Fahamu a curriculum development process
• Manage discussion/planning sessions of the curriculum development committees /partners
• Coordinate review of the first and second curriculum drafts and incorporate feedback.
• Facilitate curriculum pre-testing and validation process

Expected outcomes
• Curriculum development guide /summary
• Course curriculum
• Curriculum development process report

Consultancy duration
The assignment is to expected to take 90 days .

Skills required
• Advanced university degree in education,social studies, international law and/or human rights;
• Proven experience in curriculum development; use of adult education methodologies; developing training manuals and engagement in activities of social justice
• Experience working with and in community based organizations and social movement in Africa.
• Experience in conducting qualitative research using various methods
• Excellent oral and written skills in English
• Strong analytical skills
• Excellent facilitation skills
• Be creative and take own initiative
• Able to work to tight deadline

Application Procedures

Interested candidates are expected to send an abstract not exceeding 600 words on how they will manage the curriculum development process and the topics they intend to cover in the specific course.
The abstract should be sent together with a copy of the C.V to winnie@fahamu.org

The deadline of application is 4th August 2010. Only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Gender Researcher - Refugee Law Project

2010-08-06

http://bit.ly/9u4q5P

The Refugee Law Project seeks a Gender Researcher to lead in Gender Research component of the Beyond Juba Project. S/he should be able to demonstrate field research experience as well as group facilitation skills, and be conversant with concepts of gender, masculinities, sexual & gender based violence. A Masters degree in a related field is desirable.

Fahamu