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Echoes from Tunisia and Egypt: Revolutions without self-proclaimed revolutionaries

Horace Campbell

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70670

cc MoghawemtWith decentralised organising structures and the absence of a leadership vanguard, events in Egypt and Tunisia point to an emergent mode of revolutionary organisation, argues Horace Campbell, one which provides new lessons for mobilisation around progressive change and non-violence.

‘It was a victory parade – without the victory. They came in their hundreds of thousands, joyful, singing, praying, a great packed mass of Egypt, suburb by suburb, village by village, waiting patiently to pass through the “people's security” checkpoints, draped in the Egyptian flag of red, white and black, its governess eagle a bright gold in the sunlight. Were there a million? Perhaps. Across the country there certainly were. It was, we all agreed, the largest political demonstration in the history of Egypt, the latest heave to rid this country of its least-loved dictator. Its only flaw was that by dusk – and who knew what the night would bring – Hosni Mubarak was still calling himself “President” of Egypt.’

This is how Robert Fisk of the Independent of UK captured the mood of optimism of the peoples in Tahrir Square (also called Liberation Square) in Cairo before the veiled fist of counter-revolution unleashed its whip to reverse the initiative of the popular uprising in Cairo. On Tuesday 1 February there were over 2 million people gathered on Liberation Square to demand the removal of Hosni Mubarak, and on Wednesday 2 February plain-clothes police and armed thugs mounted on camels and horses stormed the unarmed citizens, attempting to kill and brutalise those who want to be free. The people stood their ground and beat back the government thugs.

The peoples of Egypt had grabbed the attention of the world as oppressed peoples all over took courage from the new sense of purpose of the Egyptians. Their confidence and freedom from fear has inspired oppressed people in all parts of the world, and there are already popular uprisings and protests in Jordan, Yemen and Sudan. Not far behind are citizens in Algeria, Cameroon and Libya who are slowly stirring and demanding political and social change.

The peoples of Egypt and Tunisia have made their mark on the world stage and they have shifted the balance of power back to ordinary people. They have re-established the essence of popular democratic participation and elevated the issues of the politics of inclusion. This shift is bringing back the sense of power to the exploited all over the world. Oppressed peoples all over the world now take courage from the new sense of purpose of the demonstrators. Their confidence and freedom from fear have been so inspiring that there are already popular uprisings and protests in Jordan, Yemen and Sudan. Not far behind are citizens in Algeria, Cameroon and Libya, who are slowly stirring and demanding political and social change.

Indisputably, youths are rewriting the meaning of revolutionary organisation and at the same time exposing the hollowness and hypocrisy of the liberal ‘democratic’ posture of Western imperialists. It is this same Western liberal force that supported the regime in Egypt as a bulwark of ‘stability and counter-terrorism’ in North Africa and the Middle East. By unleashing thugs and state security personnel to attack the unarmed civilians, the Egyptian revolution now poses a challenge of the fourth stage of the revolution: how to harness the ideas of revolutionary non-violence to be able to stand firm and fight back against internal and external provocations. In this standoff, the army will be put to the test as the external supporters of the moribund Mubarak regime seek to crush the revolutionary spirit of the people. One of the important tasks of the peace and justice movements internationally is to oppose the militarists who will seek to exploit the moment of transition to foment war and military interventions.

MILLIONS IN LIBERATION SQUARE AND ACROSS EGYPT

As millions of people surge on to the streets of Alexandria, Aswan, Cairo, Port Said, Suez and other Egyptian cities, the anti-dictatorship protest in Egypt built on the third stage of the revolutionary process in Tunisia and brought an entirely new force, that of the power of numbers and the test of creative means of self defence. On Tuesday 1 February, there were reports that an estimated 2 million people plus were on the streets of Cairo demanding the removal of the dictatorial regime of Mubarak. Millions more amassed in every city and community in Egypt. In our last piece, we outlined three basic stages of the Tunisian revolution. In our analysis we identified the first stage as the self-immolation and sacrifice of Mohamed Bouzazi. The second stage involved the self-mobilisation of the popular forces of Tunis, leading to the removal of the Ben Ali government. The third stage involved the caravans of liberation, when people from even the most rural parts of Tunisia rode on their caravans to Tunis to hasten the dismantling of the remnants of the Ben Ali regime.

The massive outpouring of popular energy for social justice not only moved the ideas of liberation from town to town but across borders. This week, we seek to grasp how the Tunisian revolution intersects with the Egyptian uprising, and what this means for 21st century revolutions. In Egypt, the people have sounded it very clearly that theirs is a popular revolt of a revolutionary character. In both places, the potential revolutionary character could mature to the extent that winning the rank and file of the military and police to create a new society could be the foundation for a quantum leap in the changes away from dictatorship and brutal repression.

One thing that stands out in both revolutions is the search by ordinary people and people from all walks of life to end a system that represses their human dignity and generates fear and submission. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolts are also uprisings against neoliberal capitalism and the medicines of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and Bretton Woods institutions that pushed the trickle-down prescription for the economic health of society. Not only did implementing a neoliberal economic programme supported by the IMF and World Bank in 2004–05 directly foster the income inequality and conditions which the Tunisians and Egyptians are seeking to change, but during this period, these same institutions ‘applauded’ the governments for the success of these programmes because they achieved higher rates of GDP (gross domestic product) growth and increased foreign investment. Just as Ireland was applauded for its ‘successful’ economic model before imploding, it is evident that the ‘success’ being achieved occurred as impoverishment and unemployment for the majority of citizens were increasing.

Both Tunisians and Egyptians have witnessed massive unemployment, poor living conditions, a lack of decent housing, exploitation and low wages, state corruption, police repression and brutality, inflation and other forms of state terrorism. These conditions persisted in societies of billionaires, massive expenditure on state security apparatus and a general climate for providing the conditions for capitalists to accumulate vast amounts of wealth.

The dehumanisation of Egyptian youths has been consistent with the dehumanisation of the people of the region. This dehumanisation is most advanced in the Palestinian territory. And it was not by accident that the same Egyptian government that dehumanised these people assisted Israel in blockading Gaza in an effort to starve and subdue the Palestinians.

The massive gap between the rich and the poor in Egypt is now in the open, taking this rebellion beyond the narrative of the Western media about rage, anger, chaos and Islamic extremism. The transformation of the consciousness of the Egyptian and Tunisian peoples places the issues of social transformation at the centre of politics. Thus for the people of Egypt, it is not simply about the removal of Mubarak, it is also about the removal of the local and international apparatus that kept Mubarak in power for 30 years. This understanding is important because one narrative being told is that people are rebelling for greater political and economic freedom, as if poverty and unemployment were caused by the political dictators ‘controlling’ the economy. This is false. Under the neoliberal programmes in Tunisia and Egypt, the economies were ‘liberalised’ and state-owned enterprises were ‘privatised’ in the name of promoting economic freedom. In such environments, political and economic elites (foreign and local) were able to capture the majority of whatever gains the greater economic freedoms produced by neoliberal policies.

From the murder of Khaled Said in Alexandria last summer to the self-immolation of the Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi, there is a new generation of youths who were able to mobilise social-networking tools to light up the imagination of other youths that they had to take a stand against police brutality. We now know that the police beating of Khaled Said in June 2010 had ‘ignited protests in Cairo and Alexandria and demands for justice spread like wildfire on blogs and social networking sites’. With the deployment of new social media tools of organising by the youths and the collective security efforts of the people to defend their communities in Egypt, there is a pattern of self-organisation that contains the seeds of a new strategy for 21st century revolutions. How the seeds will germinate will depend on the extent to which the organisation for revolutionary non-violence and self-defence can take root to the point of beating back the organised state violence that has been unleashed to destabilise the popular revolt.

REVOLUTIONS WITHOUT SELF-PROCLAIMED REVOLUTIONARIES

Khaled Said had been killed because he dared to expose the depth of the corruption of the police and the operatives of the ruling political party, the National Democratic Party (NDP). Originally founded by Anwar Sadat to provide legitimacy for a military dictatorship, the NDP has dominated politics, pushing out other social forces from the centre of the legal political stage. Mubarak dominated this party and treated it as his personal fiefdom, promising to place his son as the heir, as if Egypt had become a monarchy. This example of a leader usurping the role of the party in society undermined the meaning and essence of political parties as vehicles of popular organisation.

A prominent feature of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt so far has been the absence of vanguard parties or personalities as leaders for the revolts. Throughout the 20th century, there was the conception that revolutions required vanguard party or groups comprised of the most advanced sections of the working class and intelligentsia in the society. This vanguard in the past had to be prepared to wage armed struggles to capture state power. The basic thesis on the need for advanced elements of the working class to lead revolution were spelt out by Lenin in two important documents, ‘What is to be done’ and ‘The state and revolution’. These documents provided a guide for revolutionaries, and there were successful revolutions in China, Cuba and Vietnam. These revolutions were different from the deformities of vanguardism that had developed in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and copied by Mubarak. The negative experiences of vanguardism were not confined to despots such as Mubarak and Stalin. Non-socialists and non-communists in societies such as Zaire under Mobutu and Iran practiced vanguardism. The case of Iran is of special importance because the Mullahs adopted some of the tactics of vanguardism with disastrous results for the people of Iran after the overthrow of the Shah, thus undermining the emancipatory goals of the revolutionary process. As though the experiences of vanguardism had been studied by the young people of Egypt and Tunisia, they were careful not to elevate any one individual or party that could hijack or personalise their struggle for freedom. These youths worked to build trust and cooperation among the networks of the social forces who were fighting for freedom.

As the momentum of the Egyptian revolution gathered strength, Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei left Vienna and joined the movement, offering himself up as a leader of the popular revolt. By the seventh day of the popular uprising, the coalescence of the opposition forces around ElBaradei was a defensive act because the Western media had been insistent on placing the stamp of Islamic extremism on this peaceful opposition to dictatorship.

These experiences make it essential to spell out the importance of revolutions carried out without self-proclaimed revolutionaries and leaders. In Egypt, youths and women from the April 6 movement emerged to organise and connect the networks of networks. It could be argued that they were aware of the positive and negative lessons of vanguardism, whether in the former Soviet Union or in Iran. It is for this reason that we hear the slogan in the streets of Egypt, ‘this is the revolution of all the people.’

We now know that this uprising in Egypt came after years of patient and consistent work by young men and women who have been organising in what is now called the April 6 Movement. This is a group of young persons who had used the social-networking instrument of Facebook to call on the youths of Egypt to support the workers in their struggles. From 6 April 2008 these youths have been meeting and organising to build a movement linking their work to communities all across Egypt and linking up with grassroots activists in other parts of the world. By establishing the principles of sharing and cooperation instead of competition, these youths of the April 6 worked to be more effective in building a new kind of campaign for political change.

In my book, ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics’, I offered the principles of Ubuntu – the philosophy of shared humanity – as a basic revolutionary ideal for the 21st century. At the core of this idea is the struggle to be human, and to rise above human hierarchies, divisions and xenophobia, and compartmentalisations. The echoes of Ubuntu reverberated from the actions of and words of the ordinary people at the forefront of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. At some points during the protests when Islamist sections of the protesters shouted ‘Allah Akbar!’, a louder chant came, echoing ‘Muslims, Christians, atheists, we are all Egyptians.’ Behind these chants laid concrete acts of Christians who offered to guard Muslims as they prayed during the demonstrations. These small acts of Ubuntu and recognition of each other’s humanity have to be celebrated, elevated and cascaded across Africa and the Middle East for transformation in the 21st century.

The youths had carried forth a long tradition of struggle that had come from the working people of Egypt. Egypt has one of the strongest social movements for peace and justice in Africa. Umm Kulthum is still revered in her nationalistic songs of self-determination and dignity. Leading African thinkers and activists from Egypt such as Samir Amin and Nawal El Saadawi are household names among progressives in all parts of the world. Eighty years old, Nawal El Saadawi, in particular, spoke for millions of women, narrating how she had been incarcerated twice – once in the cells of the regime and then in the prison that is Egyptian society. Her book, ‘Woman at Point Zero’ had a statement on the call for women in all parts of Africa and the Middle East ‘to mobilise against gender oppression.’

The youths and women who have been organising day and night are the inheritors of organising traditions that had been undertaken by trade unionists, writer, journalists, farmers, artists, progressive intellectuals, women, religious forces and patriotic business-persons. The strength of these social forces is so remarkable that the ruling elements resorted to violence. The closing-down of the internet and shutting down of cell phone services and non-government media were only the more modern manifestations of a long tradition of repression that had placed conservative militarists at the top of the political ladder in Egypt. Anwar Sadat had been explicit in his efforts to reverse the populist efforts of Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the foremost nationalists in the independence period in Africa. When Sadat was gunned down in cold blood by elements from within the military itself, Hosni Mubarak became president in 1981.

The Mubarak dictatorship was an alliance between local oppressors with US and Israel to beat back the legitimate demands of the peoples of Egypt. There was never a moment in the history of the peoples of Egypt in the past century when they were not organising and protesting for better conditions. With the entrenchment of militaristic rule, political parties were banned, leaders were arrested, killed or sent into exile and genuine political expression stifled. The youths were studying the positive and negative lessons of political organising in order to fashion new tools for political struggle.

REVOLUTIONARY SELF-ORGANISATION AND REVOLUTIONARY NON-VIOLENCE

All of the evidence of young men and women, rich and poor organising in communities point to the level of social and political consciousness that has motivated the people to mobilise themselves to defend their interests. These millions of Egyptians are not afraid to stand up for their rights. These people have provided crucial revolutionary leadership and developed tactics that have now won over the majority of the Egyptian people to the cause of revolution. In the process, they have broken the cohesion of the Egyptian political and economic ruling class that had been built up with the help of the military–industrial complex and the Wall Street elements of the USA. It is not by accident that as the revolution was unfolding, army chiefs from Egypt were in Washington DC consulting with the joint chiefs of staff of the US military. The billions of dollars that have gone from the US citizens to support the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak had supported divisions in the Egyptian military so that there was a class of officers whose interests were allied with those of the US and Israel against the interests of the Egyptian people. It is to this group that the sections of US and European leaders are turning in order to break the cohesion of the revolutionary forces in the streets. With the Western media presenting the popular revolt as scenes of chaos and anger, the Mubarak regime unleashed armed elements in the streets to fit into the template of the Western image while seeking to destroy the popular power that had occupied Tahrir Square. When the forces of the state stormed the people on Liberation Square the people stood their ground, defending themselves. Hundreds were wounded but this test brought out the fourth major stage of the revolution: the reconsolidation of the popular forces to sharpen the tools of revolutionary non-violence and self-defence.

These revolutionary forces in the streets have understood the social divisions in the military and have made direct appeals to the rank and file of the armed forces. These appeals have been consistent with not only the tools of organising, but the manner of organising. Having conceptualised the manner of self-organisation in advance, the revolutionaries have been ahead of the government so that even when the internet was shut down, the tactics of self-organisation gave way to sophisticated and creative means of communication. It is this sophisticated organisation that defeated the attempts of the government to crush the mass movement. This sophisticated organisation will also be needed if the counter-revolutionary forces consider war as the weapon of choice to reverse the revolution.

Indeed, the pattern of revolutionary organisation and revolutionary leadership in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions have so far neutralised the scheming of counter-revolutionary elements in Egypt and the USA, who were bent on using anti-Islamist and counter-terrorism propaganda to beat back the popular revolts. The centrality of the Egyptian military to regime legitimacy in Egypt has been consistent for the past 50 years. However, in the height of the Cold War, the US moved to support the most conservative fundamentalists in Egypt in order to bolster the US Cold War goals. Younger readers may not remember that it was in Egypt that the US recruited many of its Mujahideen fighters to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen fighters were also deployed against trade unionists, socialists, women and other social justice networks in Egypt. Sectarianism and fundamentalism served both the dictators and their imperial backers.

It is imperative to note that one of the positive lessons from both Egypt and Tunisia is the unity of the people across regional lines. In this process, the women of Tunisia and Egypt have emerged among the foremost and clearest section of the revolution. For decades, Egyptian women have been struggling against a government that suppresses Islamic fundamentalism, but mobilized the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism to dominate women. The images of forthright women outlining the goals of the mass movement sweeping Egypt and Tunisia remain an inspiration to women across Africa and the Middle East. We want to repeat that the struggles for reproductive rights, bodily integrity and opposition to sexual oppression elevated the democratic struggle beyond the rights to freedom of speech, to assemble and for workers to organise.

ITERATIONS OF 21ST CENTURY REVOLUTIONS IN AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

The Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions have now changed the political calculus and the discourse on politics and revolution. Not only have these revolutions transformed the consciousness of the people, they have also given rise to a new burst of creative energies and become a school for new revolutionary techniques for the 21st century. These energies could be translated into numerous actions geared toward revolutionary transformations across Africa and the Middle East. Clearly, the changes in economic conditions which the people are calling for will not be achieved by the types of reforms financed by foreign donors to promote ‘more’ economic freedom. They will only be achieved by the peoples electing new leaders and governments with the courage to implement alternative economic policies which focus on addressing the conditions of life as opposed to the interests of foreign investors and local elites.

The uprising in Egypt reached a tipping point where the counter-revolutionary forces are in disarray and cannot keep up with the pace of change. There is a pattern of popular outpouring which is cascading from Tunisia and Egypt to all societies under dictatorial rule in Africa and the Middle East. The task of the progressives is to celebrate the positive lessons of self-organization and the wind of self-emancipation blowing across Africa. Progressives cannot be on the sideline and have to find their own method of showing solidarity with the people who are now being mowed down in the streets.

We have spelt out what we are learning from some of the characteristics of these 21st revolutions. The important characteristics that we have highlighted so far are:

1) The revolutions are made by ordinary people independent of vanguard parties and self-proclaimed revolutionaries
2) The nature of independent networks of networks and the sophistication of the tools of the revolution
3) The leadership of ordinary people who displayed self-mobilisation for the revolution
4) The building of revolutionary non-violence for self-defence
5) The revolutionary ideas of the people whose ultimate goal is to be dignified human beings and not to be dictators’ robots or zealots.

It is now up to us progressives to embrace and support this pattern of revolution to initiate a quantum leap beyond neoliberalism, capitalism, militarism and dictatorship in Africa and the Middle East.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. Professor Campbell's website is www.horacecampbell.net. 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.

Egypt: A revolution reflected

Patrick Burnett

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70631

cc AzlsTwenty-four hour network coverage, activist videos, Twitter, Facebook and blogs have all mashed together to convey the Egyptian revolution to the world, writes Patrick Burnett.

Twenty-four hour network coverage, activist videos, Twitter, Facebook and blogs have all mashed together to convey the Egyptian revolution to the world.

‘I’m making this video to give you one simple message. We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honour and we want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25… Whoever says it’s not worth it because there will only be a handful of people, I want to tell him you are the reason behind this, and you are a traitor just like the president or any security cop who beats us in the streets. Your presence with us will make a difference, a big difference!’ This is an extract from a 18 January video featuring Asma Mahfouz. It’s one of many that have helped define the passion and intensity with which Egypt’s revolution has been depicted.

As dawn broke over Cairo on Thursday, 3 February, the euphoria of the 2 February million-strong march had been replaced by something else amongst the anti-Mubarak protesters holding on to Cairo’s Tahrir Square - defiance, but also fear and shock.

‘We have lost a lot of people,’ an emotional anti-Mubarak supporter told Al Jazeera Live in the early hours of the morning, ‘and we have lost them for a cause. We have many injured people and it is hard. We know that if we give in now we will be hunted one by one. The thugs with rifles on the bridge are shooting at us. One was shot right through the head. We are not leaving this place until Mubarak leaves.’

To watch only mainstream network coverage of events in Egypt is to miss the whole story. Twitter, Facebook, citizen videos and blogs have been crucial in getting the word out about what has transpired in Egypt. Watching the 28 January battle for Cairo's Qasr al-Nil Bridge is to grasp the epic nature of a people rising up and triumphing against armoured cars, and helmeted police with batons and guns. This video was first seen online before it was picked up on by Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera coverage of events has been exceptional considering the restrictions. This video , showing a visit to a morgue in Alexandria, has been given as one reason why the Al Jazeera bureau in Cairo was shut down and cameras seized. Indeed, the network has succeeded in mirroring the immediacy of the social networks in its coverage. In the early hours of Wednesday morning its live feed captured an explosive situation in Alexandria, possibly the first example of the regime’s game plan to unleash its thugs against anti-Mubarak protestors, when pro-Mubarak supporters clashed with demonstrators. Rocks were thrown, fist fights broke out, knives were drawn and the rattle of gunfire rang out. It was to see its most violent outlet the next day in Cairo.

Watching a single hashtag on Twitter, it’s been almost impossible to keep up with the speed of tweets. But at #follow Egypt you can watch multiple columns of different hashtags ticking over. ‘Mubarak must go now! The new Egypt will start today. The people of Egypt can't wait no longer for a better future. Protest must go on!!’, says one tweet. ‘And a lovely revolution to you too, sir. Live from Cairo - we are back and excited like we've never been before!’

Tweets were the first to point to the hidden hand behind the pro-Mubarak supporters. On Wednesday, this tweet: ‘A peaceful anti-goverment protest gets violent as soon as pro-goverment people get involved. Peculiar? You betcha!’ And this one: ‘Every thug we search, we find that his I.D. says police those r the only pro-Mubarak supporters in #Egypt’. See for pictures of ID cards collected from captured pro-Mubarak supporters. Pointing to the responsibility of Mubarak and his regime for the violence, @Gsquare86 tweeted at 3.54am on Thursday morning: ‘he is a murderer and he has to be prosecuted !!! he is gonna kill the people in tahrir square before morning’.

Even though Twitter was effectively shut down when the Egyptian government terminated the internet from 28 January until early on Wednesday morning, services such as @speak2tweet were designed to enable Egyptians to continue Tweeting. The speak-to-tweet service enables users to send tweets using a voice connection. Anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail on one of three international phone numbers: +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855.

Tweets sent using the service automatically include the hashtag #egypt. This one, sent at 10.55pm on Wednesday night said: ‘#Egypt translation: Being beaten, burned, and hit http://bit.ly/esCvDE @speak2tweet #Jan25’

A blog, Alive in Egypt , has been started to add further functionality. It aims to help bring the voice of Egyptians to even more people and posts all the audio files sent in together with the translations. There are also blogs that display the latest tweets and videos on a map of Egypt.

Wednesday night and Thursday morning saw pitched battles in and around Tahrir Square. @Gsquare86, a female anti-Mubarak protestor in Tahrir Square, tweeted at 9.35pm: ‘At Kasr El Nile bridge, we have taken complete control Gaza style with just rocks against gun fire' http://yfrog.com/h0yzsgj’

Twitter has been interesting to watch because of the vast array of material it has transmitted. From links to news and analysis, to live updates about protests, photos, messages of solidarity and even medical advice for the injured, the number of voices it is able to reflect does create an overall and immediate impression of what is happening.

Facebook seems to be almost outshone by the powers of Twitter, but has also been important. We are all Khaled Said has 38,876 likes and contains interesting updates and observations about events in Egypt. The same can be said for 3arabawy .

The revolution has also resulted in some iconic images, made available by Flickr and blogs such as Arabs 48 Magazine and 3arabawy . These blogs also contain numerous citizen videos. It’s noticeable through these pictures how prominent women have been in the movement.

Much has been made of the role of the army in not taking sides and allowing Egyptians to peacefully protest, up until 2 February. But increasingly questions are being asked as to why they have stood by and watched while armed Mubarak supporters attacked peaceful demonstrators in Tahrir Square. This picture says it all.

What’s missing in all of this immediacy is a deeper analysis of events. For that you’ll have to read this week’s Pambazuka News .

Suffice to say that none of the protesters tweeting, Facebooking and posting videos are blind to what the Mubarak regime has done or the broader implications of the revolution. Mubarak has been a crucial US pawn in the Middle East. Depending on who governs next, the possibility for a radical realignment of the entire region is clear. Rest assured that behind Barack Obama’s 1 February speech on justice and democracy, powers-that-be manipulation will already be taking place, jockeying for position to secure their vested interests.

If there’s a common theme running through this overwhelming stream of media, it’s almost as if those in Tahrir Square have come to symbolise something enduring about the human spirit which echoes far beyond Tahrir Square. Human beings, capitalism tells us, are inherently selfish, inherently violent, in need of top-down systems of control and happy to strive for over-accumulation at the expense of solidarity with their fellow human beings.

In the peaceful expression of love, compassion and solidarity on display in Tahrir Square on Tuesday, over a million people showed there is an alternative future. In their resistance, those that remain against the onslaught of Mubarak’s thugs are fighting for that future.

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* Patrick Burnett is editor of Links & Resources, Pambazuka News.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Movements in Egypt: The US realigns

Samir Amin

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70615

cc WikipediaWith Hosni Mubarak on a tentative footing, a US which once propped him up would now turn to a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) it regards as ‘moderate’, writes Samir Amin. But with the fundamental economic conditions which produced the social unrest in the first place unlikely to change much, and with the working-class and peasants’ movement yet to be fully involved, the same problems will remain, Amin concludes.

Egypt is a cornerstone in the US plan of control of the planet. Washington will not tolerate any attempt of Egypt to move out of its total submission, also required by Israel in order to pursue its colonisation of what remains from Palestine. This is the exclusive target of Washington in its ‘involvement’ in the organisation of a ‘soft transition’. In that respect the US may consider that Hosni Mubarak should resign. The newly appointed vice-president, Omar Soliman, head of army intelligence, would be in charge. The army was careful not to associate with the repression, thus protecting its image.

Mohamed ElBaradei comes in at that point. He is still more known outside than in Egypt, but could correct that quickly. He is a ‘liberal’, having no concept of the management of the economy other than the ongoing, and cannot understand that this is precisely at the origin of the social devastation. He is a democrat in the sense that he wants ‘true elections’ and the respect of law (stop arrests and torture), but nothing more.

It is not impossible that he would be a partner in the transition. Yet the army and the country’s intelligence will not abandon their dominant position in the ruling of the society. Will ElBaradei accept it?

In case of ‘success’ and ‘elections’, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) will become the major parliamentary force. The US welcomes this and has qualified the MB as ‘moderate’, that is, docile and accepting the submission to the US strategy, leaving Israel free to continue its occupation of Palestine. The MB is also fully in favour of the ongoing ‘market’ system, totally externally dependent. They are also, in fact, partners in the ‘compradore’ ruling class. They took a position against the working-class strikes and the peasants’ struggles to keep their ownership of land.

The US plan for Egypt is very similar to the Pakistani model, a combination of ‘political Islam’ and army intelligence. The MB could compensate their alignment on such a policy by precisely being ‘not moderate’ in their behaviour towards the Copts. Can such a system be delivered a certificate of ‘democracy’?

The movement is that of urban youth, particularly holders of diplomas with no jobs, and supported by segments of the educated middle classes and democrats. The new regime could perhaps make some concessions – enlarge the recruitment in the state apparatus, for example – but hardly more.

Of course things could change if the working-class and peasants’ movement moves in. But this does not seem to be on the agenda. Of course as long as the economic system is managed in accordance with the rules of the ‘globalisation game’, none of the problems which resulted in the protest movement can really be solved.

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* Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum and chair of the World Forum for Alternatives.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Military and intelligence at Egypt's democratic dawn

Mozn Hassan

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70669

cc M SIf Egypt’s military is ever to be a legitimate national force, it must side with the protesters against Mubarak’s thugs and the police, writes Mozn Hassan.

If the military is ever to be a legitimate national force, it must side with the protesters against Mubarak’s thugs and the police. These thugs have been ridiculously and mistakenly labeled by right-wing media as “pro-Mubarak demonstrators. This critical junction in the Egyptian Uprising when is the Egyptian Army’s moment of truth. As thousands of unarmed demonstrators are tortured, trampled, firebombed and molested by Mubarak’s thugs, will the military move to protect, or to crush the non-violent democratic movements that have occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo for the last ten days? Following on Paul Amar’s useful analysis (Jadaliyya, 1 Feb 2011) we need to know which faction of which of the Army's branches is ascendant, and where exactly, within these forces, we can energize possible allies.

The newly appointed Vice President is Omar Soleiman, whom everyone assumes is being groomed to be the next president. We Egyptians know him as the person who managed the negotiations between different Palestinian groups and generally works to assuage Israel’s security concerns. Soleiman is welcomed by the US as a trusted man who caters to international interests. Soleiman is from the Intelligence Services (mukhabarat) which is loosely associated with the Army. Intelligence is charged with international security and countering the external Islamist militant threat. Soleiman is not hated by the people, but his base of support is as much in Washington and Tel Aviv as it is in Cairo. He does not have a strong base of support at home. In contrast, Field Marshall Muhammad Hussein Tantawi, the General Chief of the Army (al-Geysh) does indeed have a domestic base of legitimacy and respect. So this plays out now as a very critical struggle between Mukhabarat and Geysh, that is, between Soleiman and Tantawi. Since the police and security forces have done most of the repressing and torturing, the Geysh has kept their hands clean. So Tantawi is the person who we Egyptian people respect. But we do not know him well enough to quash our concerns of whether he and the Geysh are indeed trustworthy.

Citizens have an image that the soldiers of the army are people who care and espouse a national duty to protect the people and the land. However, the Intelligence services are thought of as politicians whose role is to protect the US and Israel -- and to protect their own political power as dependent on external political forces. Egyptians generally do not have a clear opinion on Soleiman or the Mokhabarat but they suspect that Soleiman is drawing out the endless Israeli peace/security. Whereas under Nasser, the military served the nation; under Mubarak, the Intelligence Services serve the individual leader’s personal ambitions.

People in Egypt derive a sense of security from, and have a feeling of affinity towards, the army without dealing closely with them. Once and if they have to deal with them directly as repressors or direct rulers, the limitless hate they have now for the police may be transferred directly to the army. Citizens should create a clear position towards, and expectations of, the army and the army should respond to the peoples’ demands in order to maintain the nation’s respect.

During the next few days Tantawi’s armed forces will have their chance to either reaffirm the national fabric and legitimacy of the country, or to plunge into the mire of brutality and corruption – the place where Soliman’s Intelligence Services now wallow along with Mubarak’s thugs and the monstrous police forces.

Tantawi today must step up to protect the people, evict the Mubarak family from the country immediately, and subordinate the international mission of the mukhabarat to the national mission of the people. He could then facilitate the peaceful transition to what everyone wants: a new parliamentary and presidential election.

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* This article first appeared in Jadaliyya.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Egypt: ‘Al-yom ya Mesr, yela yela Mesr!’

Melakou Tegegn

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70660

cc MoghawemtFollowing developments in Tunisia and as Egypt’s extraordinary scenes continue, Melakou Tegegn stresses that the ruling classes across the region are shuddering at the power of the revolts.

A popular revolt, a revolt of the plebeian, the heretofore forgotten, suppressed and muzzled, is rocking North Africa. The impact of the revolt is threatening the ruling classes in the region of the Middle East and north-east Africa where the ruling classes are already shaking with fear as the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt are sending shudders down the spine of these dictators. ‘Embarih Tunis, al-yom Mesr’ (‘Yesterday Tunisia, today Egypt’) have become the beacons of this much feared popular revolt of the poor. Let the ruling classes of the region, including the EPRDF (Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front) clique, resort to a much stronger defence, but there is nothing that can stop the rising of a determined people. The heroic people of Tunisia just showed us the way yesterday. Today, it is the turn of Egypt. This beacon of human civilisation in the region can still become a beacon of revolution.

The Egyptian people rose to a determined struggle to end the rule of the monstrous regime that has repressed them for decades. Time and again, they have tried to voice their concerns and demands for a better life and for freedom. The answer they got from this arrogant regime was sheer repression. The demand to end poverty was met with police brutality; women’s demand for the protection of their rights was answered in a manner that was humiliating and dehumanising to them. Despite the odds, Egypt has produced great individuals; economists, social scientists, women activists, journalists, human rights activists and so on. At one time or another, they have all been silenced or beaten and thrown into jail. The Egyptian people have tried the peaceful way. It did not work. On the contrary, the response they got from Mubarak’s regime was brutal repression. They tried to vote for the candidates of their choice during the ‘elections’ that have been held for years now the last one just a few months back. Every time Egyptians were told that the ruling party, the National Democratic Party, had won the elections and their popular candidates were all ‘defeated’. As the contradiction and conflict, though latent, between the people and the ruling class got sharper, the arrogant regime even claimed that it has won more than 99 per cent of the votes in the last elections. This insult to the intelligence of the Egyptian people would not be taken any more. The people have finally said ‘enough!’ Just the other day, Tunisia, tired of such ruling-class deception, threw out its dictator. Egypt is doing precisely that now. Let’s hope that they will finally overthrow Hosni Mubarak’s regime and install a government that respects freedom and democracy.

Egypt made its first attempt towards a fundamental social change way back in 1952 when its first revolution overthrew the Farooq monarchy. But, that was quickly hijacked the Free Officers Movement, very much like the Derg of Ethiopia, and Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power. Nasser’s regime failed to take Egypt through social development and freedom, though he still addressed issues of poverty in a reformist way through what he called ‘Arab socialism’. Nasser’s ‘Arab socialism’ reverberated throughout the Arab world and Arab nationalism rose in the Middle East as a result. The Palestinian factor gave another dimension to his reign as Arabs united to fight Israel. Nasser led Egypt through the two Middle East wars of 1956 and 1967. By the late 1960s, Nasser’s Egypt started to go into crisis as a result of a stagnating economy on the one hand and the consequences of the1967 war on the other. That led to the emergence of Anwar Sadat, who introduced changes in the country’s policy and resorted to peace overtures to Israel despite the last Middle East war in 1973 that took place under his presidency. Egypt under Sadat emerged out of the Soviet orbit and became a staunch US ally in the Middle East next to Israel (for an excellent analysis of this period see Mohammed Hussein’s ‘Class Conflict in Egypt’.)

Egypt under Sadat went further down the road of poverty and a quasi-military dictatorship. Anger was built up throughout the Arab world against his regime as a result of the unilateral peace treaty that he entered with Israel in 1979. Islamic fundamentalists became more active than ever and infiltrated the Egyptian army, including the elite corps called the Presidential Guard. In 1981, Sadat was assassinated by fundamentalist elements from within the army and Mubarak succeeded him. Egypt has been ruled by him ever since. With neoliberal economic policy prevalent and dictatorship, the country descended into deeper poverty as the population grew to 72 million with an unemployment rate of 9.7 per cent in 2010 (9.4 per cent in 2009) and with 20 per cent of the population living under the poverty line. It is this grinding poverty coupled with an absolute dictatorship that finally threw the people of Egypt into the streets to bring their misery to an end.

Heroic Egyptians went to the streets in their hundreds of thousands in the four largest urban centres, namely Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and Port Said. On Friday, they torched the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building and the headquarters of the ruling party that were still burning as these lines are written. They fought with police tooth and nail in the streets of these cities. They paid in lives and blood. They are determined to overthrow the regime; there is no turning back. They openly and loudly said: ‘Al-yom ya Mesr, yela yela Mesr!’ (roughly ‘Egypt, it is today [or never]! Forward!’) In a historic gesture, probably the most significant, the demonstrators formed a human shield to protect the national museum from being looted. Perhaps this could be the most unique act of a people in revolt, destroying the symbols of the dictatorship but protecting the treasures of the nation, its history!

The ruling class did all what it could to defeat the insurrectionists. Like all ruling classes threatened by revolution, Mubarak’s regime responded with the usual police force brutality. It cut off telephone and internet connections in a vain attempt to quell the rebellion. But it was too late: the insurrectionists were already in the battlefield. Meles Zenawi did the same during the 2005 elections in Ethiopia. He abolished the SMS system from mobile telephony in a vain attempt to curb communication among the masses. But the Ethiopian people were determined to vote to Kinijit at the time. Then the option left to Meles was to resort to outright election stealing and violence. One thing that no ruling class, overthrown by revolutions from the days of Louis IX to today’s dictators such as Ben Ali, Mubarak, Meles and so on has ever understood is the fact that once the masses are determined to see change in their lives by changing the main obstacle to progress, the dictatorship, nothing will stop them. It might not happen in Ethiopia or elsewhere yet, but it is only a matter of time.

What is going to happen in Egypt in the coming days will be very interesting indeed. It is interesting to note the reactions of the ruling class to the ongoing revolution in Egypt. Indeed, Mubarak clearly showed that he still does not understand that the Egyptian people have said ‘enough!’ In the speech he just made, he announced that he has sacked his cabinet and will announce a new government tomorrow. It is amazing indeed that ruling classes never learn, even from the latest experience. Ben Ali’s last attempt to quell the people’s revolt was the announcement of the sacking of the old cabinet and appointment of a new one. This happened just last month in Tunisia and Mubarak has not learnt a bit. Like their Tunisian sisters and brothers, the Egyptian insurrectionists quickly responded with ‘Down with Mubarak!’ This is a clear indication that the events of Tunisia are being repeated in this historic country once again.

In reorganising itself and quelling the rebellion, the classical step that the ruling class will take is to remove the president and his government and replace it by people that are seemingly ‘popular’. We have learnt that the chief of staff of the Egyptian armed forces is in Washington. A coincidence? We don’t think so. In as much as the Tunisian military, with the consent and advice of Washington, hinted for Ben Ali to flee, the Egyptian army may also remove Mubarak with the support of Washington. At the moment, that is the only way to save the ruling class. Then the question will be: Will the insurrectionists go home with such military coup? There again, they need to learn from Tunisians who continued their fight till all members of the old regime completely leave the government. Will the heroic people of Egypt continue their struggle as the Tunisians did? The events in the coming days will tell.

What makes Egypt different from Tunisia is the fact that political Islam has quite a substantial following there. Political Islam has gone a long way since its guru, Hassan El Banna (a Palestinian who lived in Egypt), first constructed it in the late 1920s. It entered alliance with similar movements in the Middle East, particularly with the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Sudan led by Hassan El Turabi. It is not very clear as to what the role of the Muslim Brotherhood was in the current uprising, but it has denied involvement. Its top leader was nevertheless arrested, despite the denial. That might make the movement more popular and might influence the outcome of the current uprising. What Egypt needs is a negation of what has prevailed there so far: poverty and un-freedom. Freedom and democracy are the way out, after which undoing poverty is manageable.

The events in Egypt interest us Ethiopians a great deal indeed. Egypt has always supported any opposition in Ethiopia with its primitive ‘strategy’ of ‘containing Ethiopia in under-development’ so that it won’t develop the capacity to utilise the Blue Nile for its own purposes. Without pre-empting a discussion on the question of the equitable use of the Nile waters by the 10 riparian countries of the Nile basin, I would nevertheless state that the Egyptian strategy of ‘containing Ethiopia in poverty’ constitutes a parochial (vis-à-vis the reality of interdependence), harmful and primitive approach. Our thesis in objecting to Egypt’s strategy must be different from that of Meles Zenawi, who just accused Egypt of supporting the armed opposition in Ethiopia. We are not sure what his reaction to the ongoing Egyptian revolution might be, but one thing for sure is that the impact of the insurrection is too scary for him.

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

Ideology in a time of crisis: Egypt, Washington and the TV networks

Adrian Crewe

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70663

cc MoghawemtThe dubious coverage of events in Egypt reveal the extent to which Western media outlets remain mere neoliberal cheerleaders, incapable of conceiving that the Egyptian people have both the right and capacity to determine their own direction, writes Adrian Crewe.

Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of the (‘realist’) Washington/Western European position on the gathering wave of revolt in the Middle East than the paralysis that it has so spectacularly displayed in its response to the events unfolding in Egypt. Unwilling to ditch Mubarak when the political opportunity to do so was clearly available – and thus ‘buy into’ an emergent democratic Egypt – Washington and its allies now face the prospect of managing an even more volatile chain of events over which they will likely have even less control. In parallel, nothing has been less edifying over the last 10 days than the mainstream TV networks’ endlessly repetitive presentation of the Egyptian drama within the worn-out paradigm of the ‘clash of civilisations’. The blind amplifying the blind.

The reason why the ‘analysis’ offered by CNN, Sky and the BBC has been way ‘behind the curve’ of events throughout is not hard to find. It is not possible to grasp the dynamics of revolt and revolution if you remain mired in an ahistorical, depoliticising economism at the service of a casually brutal neoliberalism and a coldly cynical geopolitics of the Middle East. The reductionism that continuously undermines and exposes the networks’ faux ‘sympathy’ for the protestors continuously rises to the surface in the framing of Egypt’s possible futures via a single ‘organising’ question: consolidation of democracy or spread of the caliphate? Thus while a show is made of admitting the theoretical possibility of ‘deepening democracy’, combined with (a still entirely speculative) emergent ‘Islamist hegemony’, this outcome (and the many other possible outcomes) is implicitly invalidated in advance, on ideological principle. That is to say, the networks can offer no illumination of the generalised ‘unrest’ in the Middle East because they think the problem of revolt from the ideal standpoint of ‘homo economicus’: the rational, self-interested, passive consumer of goods and services. Such a figure can have no legitimate interest in revolt or revolution as long as the economy is ‘performing’ in line with neoliberal growth nostrums. There must therefore be manipulation at work. The talking heads that repeatedly stress Egypt’s ‘impressive recent reform and growth record’ are otherwise at a loss to explain the depth and intensity of the uprising, other than via a lame personalisation of the ‘problem’: Hosni Mubarak is ‘an octogenarian … increasingly out of touch with his people’s needs’. (This was not, of course, a ‘problem’ until a week or two ago. It had never even surfaced as an ‘issue’, either for commentators or for Washington – with Secretary of State Clinton warmly describing Mubarak as ‘family’).

But suddenly everything has changed. The network anchors’ cherished ‘reforms’ have clearly not registered with the overwhelming majority of enraged Egyptians, perhaps for the simple reason that the depth and scale of ‘reform’ now revealed as politically indispensable cannot be contained within the straitjacket of macro-economic tinkering and elite manipulation. A conceptual blockage has thus arisen: the discourse (and hard practice) of market liberalism can no longer cohabit unproblematically with the (soft) mantra of freedom and human rights. The repressed makes its return with a vengeance. And now too – thanks to the courage of the Egyptians (and a little help from Al Jazeera) – it is no longer possible to gloss over the proximate historic conditions that have given rise to the revolt: three decades of oppression by a narrow, corrupt elite; a dictatorial, semi-fascist party-state that has allowed no substantive freedom of expression and has routinely resorted to illegal imprisonment, torture and extra-judicial murder; and, finally, Egypt’s role as Washington’s Arab policeman and interlocutor of choice with Israel.

Given all this, the depth and breadth of the revolt are not hard to grasp – if, that is, one is able to grasp that for all this time the vast majority of Egyptians have been politically excluded, physically oppressed, culturally stifled and systematically blocked from meaningful democratic participation. This is one reason, no doubt, why the Egyptian ‘middle classes’ have been so actively involved in the uprising. (As Hamlet ironically put it: ‘Sir, I lack preferment!’)

But the broader reason why events in Egypt are taking what begins to look like a revolutionary turn is that middle-class rage is matched by an equal or greater fury on the part of the ‘popular strata’ – the working class, the chronically unemployed, the rural destitute, the socially and economically excluded – all those who ‘in normal times’ may only appear onstage as fly-blown recipients of aid. This now is the very combination of forces that is approaching critical mass, driving events toward the tipping point. But while poverty and unemployment are all too clearly crucial components of the uprising, the initial, overwhelmingly unifying demand echoing across Tahrir Square and the streets of Alexandria and Suez has been crystalline in its simplicity: ‘Mubarak must go – now!’ In other words, the core unifying aspect of the revolt that has emerged is extra-(or supra-) economic – an outpouring of cross-class solidarity manifested in the continuously reiterated cry for dignity. It is this condensation of the lived experience of social blockage, humiliation and degradation that is largely ‘unimaginable’ to the networks. And this in turn guarantees that whatever further analyses they develop down the road – as the inevitable fissures and latent antagonisms within the uprising begin to appear and the terrains of politics, governance and civil society are tumultuously reconfigured – those analyses will be dead in the water before they start.

Washington – and its European acolytes – talk human rights and freedom but think market freedom, mineral resources and geopolitical order. The spectre of the demos is as powerful a bogeyman to them as it was to their 19th century imperialist predecessors, as encapsulated (in an interview with Sky TV) by the fading satrap of the Washington consensus, Tony Blair: ‘What is inevitable is that there's going to be change and the question is; what change and how do you [sic] manage it? … So the change that people want to get to [sic] is a situation where the Egyptian government evolves and you have full, fair and free elections at a certain point in time… It must be managed in a way that means that they will have a proper democracy, but also means that the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is not adversely affected, but rather improved by what happens.’

The gritting of teeth is almost audible as the grudging admissions are forced out: ‘change’, ‘evolution of governance’ and full, free and fair elections ‘at a certain point in time’! Five years? Ten years? After the military has restored order and got business back up and running (though ‘deploring the bloodshed’)? Crucially, however: ‘We’ must manage the process; ‘they’ are incapable of doing so; indeed, have no fundamental right to decide on any process for themselves). Enter, stage left, the spectre of ‘Islamism’ – here in the guise of the Muslim Brotherhood – the ‘irrational’, the ‘pre-modern’ beguiler of the naïve oriental masses, the ‘foreign body’ that has to be excluded, or surgically removed – together with its mistaken adherents, at whatever cost – from the emerging polis. Crisis has a way of making the silences of neoliberal geopolitics speak. What is now on full display is not only what Slavoj iek has called ‘the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their (own) ideas of democracy and human rights’, but its underlying, constitutive aporia.

In summary, the issue of ‘Egypt itself’, as articulated by the leaders and commentator-cheerleaders of the stuttering global neoliberal order, has in fact very little to do with the condition or aspirations of the Egyptian people. It is not, indeed, – even in its own terms – ultimately about ‘Islamism’. The West has been able to cohabit just fine for the last decade with the ‘Islamist’ Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdoan, which has, in turn, been extraordinarily accommodating towards Israeli regional policy. The governing discourse is of course that which constructs the couplet Israel–Palestine, and legislates the maintenance of that order, that brutal ‘balance’, at any cost. It is about who will remain the regional hegemon in the oil-rich Middle East, which secondary regimes will buttress that form of hegemony – if, indeed a form of control that relies so little on consent can be termed ‘hegemonic’ – and how the present (dramatically weakening) regional regime of ‘stability’ will be maintained, even as it provokes ever more dangerous forms of instability and fresh possibilities of regional war. Forget ‘the people’ – if the stability of the regional system is at stake, anything goes.

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

Transformation in the Arab world

Mazin Qumsiyeh

2011-02-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70602

cc MonasoshSlogans won’t be enough to build a new Egypt. Mazin Qumsiyeh gives some tips on how Egyptians can recover from dictatorship.

‘Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he's been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with Israel…I would not refer to him as a dictator.’ - US Vice President Joe Biden

I first visited Egypt 30 years ago in 1981 to do research for my master's thesis, which was later published in my first book ‘The Bats of Egypt’. I have visited Egypt twice since then and I vividly recall police abuse of their own people. And yet the Egyptians I encountered mocked and joked about dictatorship. We tried at least from a distance to support our Egyptian brothers and sisters as they struggled for freedom. Arabs everywhere (yes, even here in occupied Palestine) are talking about a transformation and about revolution. But all such transformations carry pain. Over 200 Egyptians have been killed, thousands injured, and there is much destruction.

Yet in a nation of 85 million people this is still a relatively peaceful transformation. While dealing with the present is critical we must also, at this juncture, start to look at post dictatorship scenarios in the Arab world and plan for the future.

I vividly recall a talk by a self-described ‘liberal Zionist’ (an oxymoron) at Duke University on 1 March 198l; at 77 he had no inhibitions in saying, ‘Zionists do not want democracy in the Arab world.’ He explained that if Egypt was a democracy, it would not have signed a peace deal with Israel since the sentiments of Arab people would not accept this. On this point he was absolutely correct, but in the long run such a short-sighted perspective is self-destructive.[1]

As I watched Hosni Mubarak make his (hopefully last) speech, I was very much reminded of the last speeches of the Shah of Iran, Marcos of the Philippines and Bin Ali of Tunisia. They all claimed after so many years of torturing their own people that they now want to ‘reform’. The US funded and supported the brutal Mubarak regime for over 30 years even as human rights organisations documented police abuse of citizens.[2] This is the same police who, on the instruction of the Mubarak dictatorship, beat international activists trying to provide humanitarian relief to besieged Gaza.[3] It is now recognised that Mubarak’s reign is ending and a new era is beginning.

It is rather amusing that the brutal dictator of ‘Saudi’ Arabia (a country named after a ruling family) called to support Mubarak and stated that the demonstrators are hooligans and criminals. Anyone who knows anything about Egypt knows that this amazing, inspiring and mostly nonviolent revolution is a true expression of the will of the Egyptian people regardless of their political or religious persuasions.

In other news for those who don't keep up with internet news or those who watch mainly the (supine) western media:

- Large demonstrations have been held by Egyptians and human rights defenders at Egyptian embassies around the world, all demanding democracy.
- The Israeli embassy in Cairo is essentially emptied (an apartheid state embassy in the largest Arab country is an abomination).
- Israeli pundits are very worried about how Egypt might look after Mubarak.
- There are many signs that the Egyptian military (like the Tunisian military) may be critical in this struggle. Already there are instances where the demonstrators have been protected from the Egyptian police by the Egyptian military.[4]
- A number of human rights groups and Egyptian community representatives abroad have all called for an end to the Egyptian police brutality. By contrast EU and US government officials are making feeble statements to hedge their bets and at best call for ‘peaceful’ actions from ‘all sides’. Slowly they were
forced to modify their rhetoric to talk about ‘change’, but must finally call on their puppet Mubarak to leave power and insist that he and his sons and family return the billions stolen from the Egyptian people.
- A number of religious and civil organisations in Egypt have broken their silence to support the ouster of the ‘last Pharaoh’.
- The dictatorship cutting off web and mobile phone services and banning reporting by groups like Al-Jazeera did little to stem the tide of protest because people are living it daily in their homes and on the streets and are not being incited from outside.
- Protests have spread to Jordan and Yemen (two other Western supported governments). There are now plans for large protests in Syria and other countries.
- On the Palestinian Authority TV news, it was noted that Mahmoud Abbas called Mubarak and stated his support for the stability of Egypt. Other news outlets stated that he fully supported the Mubarak regime. Hamas then came in to say that they supported the Egyptian people.

Sadly, I think all rational human beings know which horse to bet on in this struggle between people and a western-supported dictator who accomplished nothing for his people and instead enriched his family (his sons are billionaires in a country in which tens of millions of people live on less than $1 a day).

I wrote seven months ago that: ‘The political leadership in the fragmented Arab countries and Palestinian authority have convinced themselves that they have no option but to endlessly try to talk to politicians from Tel Aviv and Washington (the latter also Israeli occupied territory) hoping for some “gestures”…I know most politicians like to feel 100% safe (mostly for their position of power) and are afraid of any change. But I wish they would realise that daring politicians make the history books and those who hang around trying to protect their seats will be forgotten. Cowardice is never a virtue.’ And then I concluded that: ‘In the demonstrations yesterday, a child in Gaza was carrying a sign that says “we demand freedom” and a child in Cairo that says “children in Egypt and in Gaza want the siege lifted”. That is our future - not elderly politicians meeting to do media damage control with empty words.’[5]

But make no mistake about it: no power transformation happens without a period of unrest, instability, and pain. I believe in these difficult periods; humans are tested. Some are weak and may even try to use the situation to make some quick personal profit. Others are of strong and decent character and this shows in their watching of their neighbours and their community. I have seen countless pictures and heard countless stories of acts that can only be described as heroic (people protecting the national museum in Cairo or their neighbours' houses). Intellectuals are stepping forward to articulate rational scenarios for the future. People are helping other people. So I think we will weather the transition. As to what the future holds: clearly, the era of ignoring the masses is gone. It will not be easy since we have a legacy of poor education (one that does not emphasise civic and individual responsibility). Getting rid of dictators is not enough. Building a civic participatory society is not easy (Europe's enlightenment did not come just from removing a few dictators).

People's expectations, raised for change, will dash against the reality that it will take decades to create systems of governance, accountability and economic justice to allow for the unleashing of the great potential in the Arab world.

It is critical that people begin to chart this future honestly and pragmatically. Slogans will not work. We the people must take responsibility for our own lives and for our communities. We need to take time to educate children in a very, very different way than we were educated. The beginnings may be simple. For example, in many Arab countries, people were thinking that as long as the country is not theirs (and ruled by dictators), they can only watch over their own personal space and literally dump trash in the public space. In the new era, they have to learn that public space is theirs too. Order and respect for fellow citizens and for the country will have to be taught very early to our children. This is but one example for laying a brick in the road to real freedom and real prosperity. The bricks though are many and they will have to be fashioned and laid by the people. It is very hard work but it is the only way forward.

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* Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He serves as chairman of the board of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Beit Sahour He is author of 'Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle' and the forthcoming book 'Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment. http://qumsiyeh.org
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
NOTES:

[1] I challenged him on this in the Q&A and then wrote a follow-up letter
that was published in the Duke Chronicle. See
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/zionistpositionfailstorecognizeotherside/

[2] Torture at Egyptian police stations. Here are three examples (disturbing content)
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhQRFz65M6s
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCHM6LYiBsY
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8KG5N_yq1s

[3] Egyptian police beat Free Gaza convoy activist on December 30, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT4tk2RiNIo

[4] See this Associated Press story about the role of the Egyptian military
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/29/ap/middleeast/main7296653.shtml
And this interesting footage of the military shielding demonstrators:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfqcEsDwgYQ
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQD-X9G9xfk

[5] Mazin Qumsiyeh, ‘Of Cowardice, Dignity and Solidarity’,
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/ofcowardicedignityandsolidarity/

Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
http://qumsiyeh.org

Unpacking revolution

Khadija Sharife

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70671

cc AzlsKhadija Sharife considers the role played by the WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables in the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

Wikileaks did not cause the ground-up revolution in Tunisia that resulted in the collapse of dictator-president Ben Ali's repressive hold. Nor for that matter did Facebook – counting 1.2 million Tunisians as users from a country of 10 million, despite the latter hosting the video of a peaceful protest that was later picked up by Al Jazeera. Instead, it was the mounting fury and despair of citizens, particularly the youth, catalysed by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a young 26 year old vendor who set himself alight to make his final statement. The difference between Bouazizi's death and that of other similarly brave and desperate youth, who chose to write the very same ending, was the determination of freedom fighters to take a stand that could not be ignored, smothered or cloaked behind the veneer of a forced peace as was usual in Tunisia.

The protest, led by Bouazizi's mother, would be described to Al Jazeera by his relative Rochdi Horchani, as an uprising of people who took to the streets with, “a rock in one hand, a cell phone in the other.” The use of technology by Tunisians resisting the regime's machinary was evidenced several years ago, when the country's primary labor organization, the General Union of Tunisian Workers, filmed demonstrations in the Gafsa province (after state promises to create jobs in reopened mines failed to materialise) evidenced the beatings and imprisonment of protestors as well journalists like Fahem Boukadous, sentenced to four years in prison. The labor movement posted the video on YouTube in an effort to take the message beyond the province. The state too, tried to take the brutal crackdown to a national level, presumably to send a warning.

What Wikileaks did, rather, was disclose confidential US cables revealing Tunisia's Ben Ali as 'an old friend', acknowledging also the country's living reality as a police state without freedom of expression, characterised by serious human rights violations problems. Dated 2009, the cables situate Tunisia as a country that 'should' be an ally, but has yet to realise its potential chiefly due to Ben Ali and his sclerotic regime though Tunisia's commercial and military assistance to the US was noted. But the US's position toward Ben Ali was clarified when the cable advised, “major change in Tunisia will have to wait for Ben Ali's departure.”

And so, the fall of Ben Ali could be perceived from the US perspective as a positive not a negative outcome. Citing the Tunisian youth's admiration for the US's way of life, in spite of anger leveled against the Iraq war, the cables stated that Ben Ali was not an ally, implying that he not vital to US foreign policy. In fact, the opposite is true.

But the danger of Tunisia's uprising, and perhaps the main reason for tolerating Ben Ali's regime, lies in the fact that it is located next door to Egypt, the US's most crucial geostrategic ally located astride both the Middle East and North Africa, conveniently containing the Gaza strip – a Hamas stronghold, using $1.2 billion annual military aid supplied by the US. Egypt is the US's second largest foreign aid recipient after Israel, a tradition that began some three decades ago, financing Mubarak's 28 year dictatorship. Even USAID, according to the US-based Carnegie Endowment Center, “adopted a policy of only funding those organizations officially registered and approved as NGOs by the Egyptian government." President Obama even selected Egypt as the scene for his 'message' to the Muslim world titled, 'A New Beginning'.

The US perception is that any regional move for democracy within Tunisia, whether or not such is connected to Islamic movements, would inspire the same in neighbouring Egypt, where the anti-Zionist Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition party with immense ground support, would easily win democratic elections, ousting in the process, Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP). But the Muslim Brotherhood is banned and members regularly tortured and detained by the secret police and the Mukhabarat – Egypt's intelligence service. Meanwhile the party itself is marginalised and vilified, justified by Mubarak's regime as an 'Islamic terrorist organization'.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley, repeated the US's official position, emphasizing that Egypt's uprising was unlike Tunisia's, and that only reform was needed in Egypt, describing Tunisia's revolution as 'indigenous'. He said the US urged restraint from 'both' sides and supported the right of Egyptian's to protest peacefully and access social media as a 'right'. No mention was made of Egypt's repressive regime engaging in torture through US-financed weaponry. Crowley was insistent in his claims that Egypt was relied on as an invaluable ally to the US, an anchor and 'stabilising' force in the region, helping the US pursue peace in the region. Most crucially, Crowley described it as a regime that “made its own peace with Israel, and is pursuing normal relations with Israel, we think that’s important.”

While a shake-up is in the process, already, the consequences are designed to remove the 'figure' of terror, as Mubarak has become known in Africa, to a quiet replication of policies under Mubarak's new Vice President, Omar Sulieman – previously the head of Egypt's secret police, perceived as a staunch US and Israeli ally.

Unlike Tunisia, even as Egyptians presently sentenced to life without freedom rise up from the catacombs, the battle for Egyptian democracy is not simply a matter of national revolution, but foreign policy sustaining circles of power and influence. These factors determine the rise and fall of empires. While Egypt's revolution may be televised, liberation will not come easily.

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* Khadija Sharife is the southern Africa correspondent for The Africa Report magazine and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa.
* This article first appeared in New Age.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Egypt: Log on to the revolution

Khadija Sharife

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70655

cc C 4 KWhile the Egyptian authorities have sought to disrupt the country's communications through turning off internet traffic, people in Egypt are able to post a 'voice tweet', writes Khadija Sharife.

Al Jazeera says: "With the internet blackout still hindering access for most people in Egypt, a new service could help circumvent those obstacles. Now, people inside Egypt can call a number to post a 'voice tweet'.

"Call +16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855 to leave a tweet and hear tweets."

From Twitter use Telecomix (referring to net connection mentioned below): "French ISP FDN told us the modem connections being tweeted around were used 1-2 times every 2-3 minutes."

Egypt stands on the brink of a revolution against the dictatorial regime of Hosni Mubarak, long since propped up by foreign military aid. The US, supplier of said foreign aid (about $1.3 billion plus annually) in exchange for backing Israel and geostrategically checking the Palestinians, calls Egypt a "stabilizing force," enabling aid, for the past three decades, to sustain Mubarak's regime.

For this reason, Omar Suleiman, Egypt's pro-Israeli intelligence chief, has been elevated to the position of vice president. Israel remains the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, not difficult to understand given that the GCC oil-producing states, allied to the US and Israel, depend on the latter to keep another regional power -- Iran -- marginalized (confirmed in recent leaked cables). Failure to do so would result in a large number of corrupt GCC royal families and political elites being kicked to the curb. Democracy in the MENA region begins with Egypt, straddling these realities. By killing democracy not only within Egypt, but also Palestine through undermining the democratically-elected party -- Hamas -- Egypt is able to "legitimately" quash (as an African-Arab power) the aspirations of the peoples inhabiting these regions. The issue is not whether those outside of Palestine support those elected by Palestinians but whether democracy is only relevant when the choice of the people supports the U.S.'s agenda. History tells us that democracy in Egypt, Palestine and others would be the "destabilizing" force upending the power of the U.S.'s military battleship -- Israel. Instead, the U.S. prefers "reform" within the established system to prevent any anti-Israeli movements from coming into power. Tunisia may been instrumental in waking the giant next door, but as leaked cables confirm, the U.S. government does not perceive Tunisia's dictator-president Ben Ali as an ally -- rather, even as an "old friend," he represented a problem.

More than ever, the internet remains a crucial vehicle of sustaining and transmitting resistance by allowing for Egyptians to "network the world" about the machinery of Mubarak's brutal regime. While it is not technology that has given life to the revolution but Egyptians themselves, catalyzed in part by their Tunisian neighbors, access is fundamental (hence, blackout). For those able to access, they can connect to the internet (I've heard) via traditional phone lines using the following instructions: French ISP FDN (free world dial-up) to access the Internet anonymously at the following number: 33172890150 with login: toto and password: toto.

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* Khadija Sharife is the southern Africa correspondent for The Africa Report magazine and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa.
* This article was first published by The Huffington Post.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The death of David Kato

LGBTI Ugandans mourn loss and fear for own lives

Sokari Ekine

2011-02-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70600

© WikipediaResponses to the brutal murder of Ugandan LGBTI activist David Kato and Egypt’s inspiring revolution are the key topics covered in this week’s round-up of the African blogosphere, compiled by Sokari Ekine.

Last Wednesday 26 January at approximately 2pm, David Kato was brutally murdered in his home outside Kampala. David was the advocacy and litigation officer for Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) who released the following statement on his murder:

‘David has been receiving death threats since his face was put on the front page of Rolling Stone Magazine, which called for his death and the death of all homosexuals. David’s death comes directly after the Supreme Court of Uganda ruled that people must stop inciting violence against homosexuals and must respect the right to privacy and human dignity’.

David’s death has been covered throughout the international mainstream media and blogs. Most of the coverage has been positive and welcome but it is painful to see a few organisations use his death as an opportunity to further their own agendas.

Much has been written about David’s work in challenging the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill but less is known of his plans to work with local communities in changing their perceptions of LGBTI people. Gay Uganda makes reference to this in one of his many posts on David:

‘The situation in Uganda, we can only change with what we have. That depends on us. Engaging the populace, making them see that we were no different...............That is something which David had achieved at his village. All seemed to know that he was gay. Few seemed to really mind. And, at the wake, they saw us, knew us, and didn't seem to be really bothered. Pity that he had to be buried at another place. We would have had less hostility shown to us.’

David’s colleague at SMUG, ValKalende, comments on the statements by Martin Ssempa (his death was a result of ‘gay on gay bashing’) and David Baharti (donors who send money “to promote homosexuality in Uganda”) on the death of David Kato:

‘But why should this concern Uganda's LGBT citizens? Ssempa is washing his hands clean of David's blood and literally saying "gays killed their own man." This language has everything to do with what Scott Lively said while speaking at the March 2009 conference in Kampala where he said that the Nazi holocaust was masterminded by homosexuals, including Adolf Hitler himself. I watched this video for the umpteenth time this morning. David's death warrant was signed at that conference. It also has everything to do with why Ugandan LGBT activists are condemning U.S. Christian evangelicals who are sponsoring homophobia in Uganda.’

‘In this UG Pulse interview, Baharti says police should use the occasion of David's killing to "dismantle the illegal networks, particularly financial, which are being used to facilitate gay activities in Uganda, especially in schools. Still wondering why David's murder is good news for Bahati?

‘What people like Ssempa and Bahati need to understand is the extent to which spreading misinformation about homosexuality puts LGBT Ugandans at risk of being attacked by robbers who will kill for it. On his TV appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, Bahati alleged that 50m dollars was sent to Uganda last year to promote homosexuality. I can bet my bottom dollar if Bahati has delivered on his promise to send evidence to Rachel's email address that there is "recruiting" of children into homosexuality.’

African Activist sees David’s death as also a possible moment of hope as Uganda’s Daily Monitor published an editorial asking ‘Can we talk honestly about homosexuality’ and thus opening up the space for serious debate and challenges the positions of people like Ssempa and Bahati:

‘Whatever the motive behind the killing, this incident reminds us of the homophobia that is widespread in our country and society – and the deadly consequences of not dealing with it.

‘Homosexuality is illegal under Ugandan law and the Anti Homosexuality Bill prescribes harsher punishments, including the death penalty for sodomy.

‘While such legislation might serve as a deterrent, it will not eliminate homosexuality and might cement the discrimination of sexual minorities.’

The homosexuality question in Uganda has two major flaws. First is that a lot of the debate is shouted down from extreme positions of moral self-righteousness; as a result there is little common understanding among those who oppose gay rights and those who advocate for them.

Sour Grapes: The fruit of ignorance comments on the lack of response by the ‘international community’ to speak out against the proposed Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill which they describe as the ‘genocide of the Pink community of Uganda’ and tells us why the work of David Kato, defender of human rights is so important:

“Why this article? Because after two years, South Africa is still trading with and providing economic and logistic support to the Uganda that sees people like me as trash, morally and socially inferior, and worthy of death by genocide - and because our government hasn't got the moral fiber, or quite frankly, the balls to stop licking Uganda's arse.

‘Why this article? Because David Kato, friend, colleague, teacher, family member, and human rights defender of the Pink Community in Uganda was brutally beaten to death inside his home on 26 January 2011. Across the entire country, straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Ugandans mourn the loss and fear for their own lives.

‘Why this article? Because David Kato’s death comes directly after the Supreme Court of Uganda ruled that people must stop inciting violence against homosexuals and must respect the right to privacy and human dignity - it was a small but significant victory - and yet he was nevertheless murdered brutally in his own home for being part of a persecuted and hated minority group.’

Gukira by Keguro Macharia has two articles on David, one on his blog and one published in the UK Sunday Observer. The one speaks of David’s vulnerability and the dangers of being ‘actively public’ in a hostile environment:

‘What we can say for sure is that David was vulnerable, that his activism made him public, a target in a way that others might not be. And I think it’s very important to underline that the kind of publicness I am discussing is distinct from the closet/non-closet paradigm–the choice was not between being “out and proud” and being “ashamed and silenced,” a binary that only works in certain geo-cultural contexts.

‘At this point, what is threatened is that publicness. And not simply in Uganda, but also in Kenya.

‘Over the past few years, Ugandan LGBTIQ activists have won significant legislative victories. Despite and given the vitriolic anti-queer rhetoric in the country, they have been more successful in grounding their claims within legal frames than have Kenyan activists. (A rights notwithstanding.) While it would be naive to presume that legal victories should provide safety, it is disheartening to imagine that they involve trading different kinds of safety–legal protection at the loss of personal safety, as strange as that sounds.

‘In his Guardian piece “Will David Kato’s murder mobilize protestors in Africa?” he questions whether like Bouazizi Mohammed whose self-immolation became “a rallying point for the Tunisian uprising, David Kato’s death could “similarly mobilize action in East Africa...

‘Doing so would require understanding sexual minority activism not as claims for special rights, but as fundamental to the cause of expanding social, cultural, and political freedoms in the region’.

THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION

Many of us have watched with growing amazement at the determination and consistency of the Egyptian protests calling for the removal of President Mubarak. For me what has been impressive and most inspiring about the Egyptian revolution is that it is everyone’s revolution, cutting across age, gender, religion and class. Those who participated and watched the battle of the Nile Bridge ‘Qash al-Nil’ won by the protestors, will live forever in our memories.

Twitter has paid a huge role in providing us with minute-by-minute reports along with Al Jazeera English and Arabic providing outstanding coverage. YouTube is also full of video footage taken by protestors.

Hossam of Arabaway posts a video of a talk he gave (in Arabic) on dissent and the spread of information:

‘In a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation.’

Egyptian Chronicles reports from Suez which is under siege for the second time in it’s history – the first was in 1973. Her last report was dated 27 January:

‘[N]ow in 2011 the Suez city is yet again under a brutal siege thanks to the Mubarak regime. There are food and medicine shortage in the city thanks to the security siege. There has not been a full list yet or a real count for the victims fallen among the civilians, officially 4 people have been killed in the past 24 hours and dozens were injured. The death toll in the city is now 7. More protesters are detained and actually what it increases the clashes is that the detainees’ families demand their release in front of the Governorate building.’

The Arabist comments on withdrawal of police and the resulting chaos which he believes was planned by the government:

‘There is a discourse of army vs. police that is emerging. I don't fully buy it — the police was pulled out to create this situation of chaos, and it's very probable that agent provocateurs are operating among the looters, although of course there is also real criminal gangs and neighborhoods toughs operating too.

‘For me, Omar Suleiman being appointed VP means that he's in charge. This means the old regime is trying to salvage the situation. Chafiq's appointment as PM also confirms a military in charge. These people are part of the way Egypt was run for decades and are responsible for the current situation. I suspect more and more people, especially among the activists, are realizing this.’

In ‘After Tunisia’, Moroccan blogger, Laila Lalami uses a quote by Tayeb Salih’s from ‘Season of Migration to the North’ to point the finger in the direction of the United States and their role in maintaining the repressive regime of Mubarak ‘an unnamed university graduate returns to his home country, Sudan, full of hope about the new era of independence in his country. But an old man from his ancestral village warns him: “Mark these words of mine, my son. Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do.”

‘As Salih predicted, the regimes that have followed European occupation of the Arab world have consolidated power in the hands of a small elite, which was often beholden to foreign countries and bent on repressing the civil and human rights of its people.’

The question is where next for the revolution. There are protests on the streets of Jordan and Yemen and now in Northern Sudan as reported in Enduring America EAWorld View students have been protesting. How far south will the movement reach – Zimbabwe, Kenya? Will it move westwards to Cote d’Ivoire? Nigeria? Maybe not this year, but in time if things don't change, world leaders are on notice that people will do it their way.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Following David Kato's death, Pambazuka News has had a number of expressions of condolences and solidarity. Please add yours as a comment on this article.
* Sokari Ekine blogs at BlackLooks.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Aslema ya Tunis, au revoir Ben Ali

Melakou Tegegn

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70657

cc A HIt’s crucial for the Ethiopian people to draw lessons from the Tunisian revolution in their struggle for freedom and democracy, writes Melakou Tegegn, as similar events could ‘take place in our country too sooner or later.’

Few dates enter the history books of a given country, dates that are to be remembered by the future generations, not just by their occurrence but by the significance they have in the future of the country, by bringing freedom and democracy. The latest date to enter the history books is 14 January 2011, the day the people of Tunisia overthrew the 23-year dictatorship of Ben Ali.

Dictators, who appear invincible and who think they can surmount any crisis with the use of brutal force and who still threaten to use the same brute force to quell an ongoing rebellion by the people who abhorred the conditions of their lives and finally said enough and went to the streets not only for their sake but also for the sake of their children, suddenly turn coward and flee. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the hangman and blood thirsty killer, fled Ethiopia when the going got tough. When the going got tough, the coward dictator wet his pants. The Tunisian dictator did the same.

Like in February 1974, Ethiopia’s most unforgettable days, Tunisia is still in a dilemma after a historic victory yesterday. In as much as Haile Selassie’s brutal dictatorship suppressed liberties that prevented an organised opposition, Ben Ali’s suppression of liberties also prevented the country from having an organised and viable opposition on the morrow of the historic victory. Now, the big question is whether or not the Tunisian political elite that were groomed by Ben Ali will be able to circumvent the people’s victory and impose its rule in a different way by preventing the people’s alternative to reign. Mengistu managed to do that for 17 years, but to be swept away in 1991. We hope nothing like that will take place in Tunisia. The revolution should be crowned with freedom and democracy and establish a democratic state that guarantees the people of Tunisia the freedom and democracy they have fought for. That was exactly what Mengistu prevented from happening in Ethiopia in the wake of the 1974 Revolution. Ethiopia was not lucky even after Mengistu; the EPRDF still prevented the people of Ethiopia from having the freedom and democracy that they demanded, fought and died for in 1974.

Tunisia is a country with rich history. A number of ‘civilisations’ had reigned in Tunisia starting with the Phoenicians, extending to the Greeks, Romans and the Ottoman empires. It is home to Carthage, the famous ‘civilisation’ in North Africa that gave way Arab ‘civilisation’ later on. Tunisia is the home of the indigenous Amazigh people, commonly known as the ‘Berbers’, like Algeria and Morocco. Historical relics of these various ‘civilisations’ are still found in the country. A Roman town is found intact in a place called Duga on the Mediterranean. Like Ethiopia, Tunisia is also rich in its history. But, its proximity to Europe had greatly influenced its late history with impact on its livelihood systems, social organisation and economy. Tunisia is the largest producer and exporter of olives, it has a dynamic economy and social organisation that can only be compared to Southern Europe. It has one of the largest middles classes in the world and is a middle-income country scoring very high in the Human Development Index.

Abject poverty like the one that prevails in Africa is not the problem in Tunisia despite a very high rate of unemployment among the educated. Tunisian poverty is like a European poverty. The biggest problem that throttled Tunisian society is/was the dictatorship. The state was a typical police state a la the dictatorships that reigned in Latin America in the 60s and 70s. The revolt of the people of Tunisia once more confirmed the natural dictum that humans are, unlike animals, cannot live without the freedom for their natural power to express what they think. That is why freedom to human beings is a natural construct. It is not a gift or something that drops from heaven, humans simply cannot live without freedom. Suppressing freedom is in the first place artificial that came with the emergence of the state. In traditional systems of governance that still prevail in pastoral and hunter- gatherer societies; there is no repression as far as the right to expression goes. The Tunisian revolution once more confirmed that freedom and democracy are essential ingredients of life for humans.

The events in Tunisia should interest us, Ethiopians, a great deal indeed. Sometime back, there was a report somewhere that Meles’ regime was studying the system in Tunisia as a successful case of a one-party state. Undoubtedly, Meles should be the most disappointed person by what happened in Tunisia yesterday. His idol, Ben Ali, the champion of one-party state who also claimed elections victory by more than 86 per cent (he seems to be a bit more modest than Meles who claimed a 99.6 per cent victory) has just been swept away by a revolution that was ignited less than a month ago. If Ben Ali with 86 per cent claims of election victory is swept away, what can happen to Meles who unashamedly claimed a 96 per cent victory? Under Ben Ali’s rule, expressions of opposition was extremely rare that the international community wrongly considered it as one of the most stable with a dynamic economy. The people of Ethiopia, on the other hand, have always expressed their disgust with Meles’ regime ever since it came to power. The 2005 elections confirmed that the overwhelming majority of our people wanted his regime out of office. It is a political irony of immense proportion that Meles Zenawi claimed that 99.6 per cent of the same population switched their votes to him in a matter of five years. The word shame does not seem to exist in his vocabulary. At the end of the day, Meles has to look elsewhere for a role model for a one-party rule. But where?

What is crucial for Ethiopians is to draw lessons from what had happened in Tunisia for the last one month culminating in the overthrow of the dictatorship there. We cannot rule out that a similar event can take place in our country too sooner or later. But better assume it can than it cannot as the historical dilemma that bedeviled us in 1974 will not be repeated.

In 1974, when the people of Ethiopia revolted, they did not have a political organisation that would lead them to freedom and democracy. Almost 40 years later, we still face the same dilemma. What will happen if Woyane is overthrown by a popular revolt? Just think of it, who will reign in power? Will the same military come to power in a different name than Derg? As the Amharic saying goes, ‘ayhonimin titesh, yihonalin yaszi’ (roughly translated as: ‘better think that something will happen than it won’t’). Certainly, any group that assumes power in the wake of the overthrow of Woyane will proclaim political amnesties and invite all refugees to come back, liberalise the political situation, organise elections, and so on – promises that they think will thrill the public.

It is important for Ethiopians to get better organised now than ever, patch up our differences, stop the squabble and embark on a serious political work of discussion and debate on issues that will unavoidably grapple with sooner or later. We need political courage and realism to cross the Rubicon and embark on such kind of political work. At stake are the lives of 80 million people and the future of our children. What will we bestow to the future generation? Rivalry or modesty? Personal grandeur or serving the people? We have to choose now. You never know what will happen tomorrow. Did we know last November that the heroic people of Tunisia would overthrow Ben Ali in January 2011?

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

Why land matters to Africans regardless of agriculture

Chambi Chachage

2011-02-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70601

cc SolAgriculture is back on the international agenda on Africa, but at the heart of the matter is the question of land use – and control, writes Chambi Chachage.

‘Nothing will compensate an African for the loss of his land’ – Sir Godfrey Lagden

Agriculture is back on the international agenda on Africa. A green-cum-agrarian revolution is thus being televised. At the heart of this quest, however, is the question of land use – and control.

It is within this context a number of diplomats, investors, researchers and scholars across the ideological divides recently convened at the Mumbai’s World Trade Centre and the University of Mumbai in India for an International Conference on ‘South- South Cooperation: India, Africa and Food Security: Between the Summits.’ Soon afterwards, some of them gathered at Rhodes University in South Africa for the third African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS) Summer School on the ‘Global Crisis, Scramble and Agrarian Reform in the South.’ In both cases the agrarian question in relation to agricultural productivity and ownership of land in Africa was brought to the fore not least because of the ‘new’ wave of ‘land grabbing’ across the continent.

The case of South Africa and Zimbabwe’s ongoing land reforms highlights this contentious relationship. On the one hand they jointly affirm the centrality of land ownership in Africa irrespective of whether Africans use it for agricultural production or not. Yet, on the other hand, they dialectically confirm the viability of agricultural productivity among the African peasantry.

Land dispossession, if one has to be reminded, has never augured well with Africans since time immemorial. In fact colonizers and settlers were very much aware of this. Note, for instance, the following interview between the then Resident Commissioner in Lesotho, Sir Godfrey Lagden, and the then Chairperson of the then South African Lands Settlement Commission, one Mr. Southey, on the suitability and availability of African farmland in the then Orange River Colony:

‘Sir Godfrey Lagden […]: Nothing will compensate an African for the loss of his land.
Mr. Southey […]: Not if he is transferred to other land?
Sir Godfrey Lagden […]: No, except he could see the other land first.
Mr. Southey […]: And if it were better land?
Sir Godfrey Lagden […]: Yes.’[1]

But even such a presumable better land would hardly compensate. After all they had a rationale for being where they were in the first place. It is those kind of rationales that one needs to unpack, even today, before jumping into the bandwagon of claiming such and such land in Africa is idle and hence the imperial imperative of displacing Africans to pave way for investors.

In the AIAS deliberations, the National Research Foundation (NRF) Professorial Chair in Land Reform and Democracy in South Africa, Lungisile Ntsebeza, reiterated the ‘enduring’ centrality of the land question in his country. To him this question remains an important marker of inequalities in South Africa. As such it still necessitates a “radical land redistribution program”.[2]

Elsewhere Ntsebeza thus captures the stance of AIAS’ Executive Director, Sam Moyo, on land:

‘Moyo takes a broader view of the land question in southern Africa. His departure point is that land remains a basic source of livelihood for the majority of southern Africans in areas such as the development of agriculture, tourism, mining, housing and industry. Thus, according to him, the land question is not only an agrarian issue, but also a critical social question.’[3]

This consistent position resonated well with at least two South African participants in the AIAS event, Nomboniso Gasa and A.M.S Majeke. To them land is intimately linked to identity. It is central to the production and reproduction of community. Land thus ensures cultural continuity.

Another participant, Elizabeth Kharono from the Centre for Land, Economy and Rights of Women (CLEAR) in Uganda, underscored this point strongly in her feminist critique of gendered land tenures. Although all forms of land tenure recognized by the Ugandan constitution are underpinned by patriarchy, she sharply noted, research from the ground indicates that the often demonized customary land tenure is relatively far beneficial to women when it comes to ensuring their access to land. At the risk of appearing a pro-patriarchy apologetic she aptly states:

‘Customary land tenure systems and production relations have in-built social insurance mechanisms … meant to ensure that the land needs of everybody in the community, including the needs of vulnerable members of society – aged, widowed, orphans, etc, are met. The possibility for catering for the land needs of all members of the community is important to women because it is linked to family and community ties and obligations that other land tenure systems lack. Customary tenure arrangements are also designed to support livelihood systems. This is not the case for other tenure systems which support highly individualized and commercialized lifestyles. As long as women’s membership to a production unit is intact under customary tenure systems, therefore, they can have access to land, social networks and mutual support systems as well as common property resources which supports their efforts to fulfill their obligations for household food production, whether they are married, widowed or unmarried.’[4]

Of course, as Kharono cautions, such systems should not be seen as static. They are flexible. The central point here in relation to the centrality of land irrespective of its agricultural use is that:

‘Because their basic motivation is to support a livelihood system, customary tenure arrangements permit access to land and other common property resources which are important for sustaining livelihoods. These include land for production, water sources, grazing land, firewood and medicinal plants. Such resources are communally owned and managed and no single individual can appropriate them.[5]

Yet the question is posed: Why reclaim/redistribute/repossess land that would not be farmed by Africans (productively)? Or as Ntsebeza rhetorically asks in the context of South African in relation to Zimbabwean land reforms: “How do we characterise South Africans living in rural areas? Are they interested in making a livelihood out of land, or are jobs their main pre-occupation?” To complete the rhetoric behind that query one may add: Even if they are not interested in making a livelihood out of land by farming is that enough to deny them their land?

Ntsebeza’s latest intervention at AIAS’ Summer School unpacks the sinister rationale for this deniability. “Ironically”, he observes, “the conversion of the indigenous people into workers of various sorts is, most recently, being used as a case to essentially argue against land and agrarian reform in South Africa.” “The argument”, he further observes, “goes that since land dispossession, the South African economy has undergone major transformations such that land is no longer the sole measure of wealth and inequalities.” It is such a thesis that renders Africans in South Africa no longer able to farm as if aftereffects of the then Land Ordinance of 1913 and the Bantustan policies of the then Apartheid regime have made them forget how to use their land to sustain life. At the heart of this thesis, as Ntsebeza notes, South Africa is embraced as “not an agrarian society any longer”[6] whereby the term agrarian is uncritically used to mean agriculture.

The main implication of this thesis is obvious to Ntsebeza: A potentially reactionary streams that suggest that Africans in South Africa should not reclaim their land since agriculture no longer matters to them. Such a thesis is even backed by Marxist-cum-Radical scholars who dare claim that South Africa does not have an agrarian question – only a land question. Such assertions fail to – or deliberately bypass the – link between these questions with the national question. By reducing “the land question to a question of livelihoods and agriculture only” they fail to grasp that in South Africa as in other African countries “there is more to the land question which has to do with fundamental claims of legitimacy over ownership and control of the country at large”.[7]

This blind spot, and the persistence denial of the failure of ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ and ‘use it or lose it’ land reform models in South Africa, needs an eye salve from Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). Unfortunately the debate on the merits and demerits of FTLRP has been coloured if not tainted by the preoccupation on the despotic regime of President Robert Mugabe. Yet when one scratches the surface on the ground it is easy to see how such selective engagement had been informed by a similar myopic discourse on land use for agriculture. AIAS’ recently released FTLRP Baseline Survey thus aptly captures this discourse:

‘Many claim that most, if not all, of the land allocated to new beneficiaries lies unused and idle, suggesting that there is hardly any farming taking place. The new beneficiaries are accused of being unable to adopt the production system and output levels established by the former [Large Scale Commercial Farm] LSCF producers, largely because it is presumed that most of the beneficiaries are unskilled in farming and their work or life experiences are not adaptable to high value farming, particularly of export crops. Farming techniques and agronomic practices are generally considered to be poor and land productivity low, reflecting deficient farming competence. It is generally claimed that hardly any useable farm machinery and equipment, infrastructure and irrigation facilities remain on the farms, or if they do, they are hardly being used effectively, hence the poor land utilisation levels. Moreover, most of the new farmers are deemed to be 'weekend', 'cell phone' or part time farmers, who are not committed to farming and also lack qualified farm managers, hence their pathologically low levels of land utilisation. In addition, it is argued that extension services (by the state, actors and farmers' organisations) have collapsed, such that there is no promotion of productive agronomic land use and natural resource use practices.’[8]

AIAS went to the field to test these assertions empirically. However, such was the lacunae among Africanists – and some African scholars[9] – such that even preliminary findings were bitterly dismissed when Mahmood Mamdani alluded to them in his ‘Lessons from Zimbabwe’.[10] In their defense of his use of these provisional results, Sam Moyo & Paris Yeros thus reiterated:

‘The land reform has been broad-based and largely egalitarian. It has benefited directly 140,000 families, mainly among the rural poor, but also among their urban counterparts, who on average have acquired 20 hectares of land, constituting 70% of the land acquired. The remaining land has benefited 18,000 new small- to medium-scale capitalists with an average of 100 hectares. A small segment of large-scale capitalists persists, including both black and white farmers, but their land sizes have been greatly downsized to an average of 700 hectares, much lower than the average of 2,000 hectares previously held by 4,500 landowners on the whole of this land.[11]

To them this was – and still is – nothing less than a deep structural change. As such it needs to be defended though doing so is not one and the same thing as condoning pro-regime human rights violations. “The new agrarian structure in Zimbabwe”, they then insisted, “now holds out the promise of obtaining food sovereignty (which it had never obtained before), creating new domestic inter-sectoral linkages, and formulating a new model of agro-industrial development with organized peasants in the forefront”. This promise was informed by various new dynamics that they observed as being “underway in the countryside in terms of labor mobilization, investment in infrastructure, new small industries, new commodity chains, and the formation of cooperatives” to the extent that “despite the adverse economic conditions, land utilization levels had already surpassed the 40% mark that prevailed on the so-called white farms after a whole century of state subsidies and racial privilege”. They thus chided their colleagues for missing it:

‘Needless to say, a number of scholars have never recognized this potential. On the contrary, they continue to speculate about “crony capitalism” (Patrick Bond) and the “destruction of the agriculture sector” (Horace Campbell), without having conducted any concrete research of their own, or properly interrogated the new research that has emerged.’[12]

Theirs is a call to go to the Zimbabwean countryside and see for ourselves. It is a clarion call to reconsider the empirical evidence on the ground rather than rely on hearsay. When one does so, he or she will be in a better position to reaffirm or refute AIAS promising findings such as these:

‘The FTLRP transformed the agrarian structure from a bi-modal structure in which 4,500 farmers (approximately 5,000 farm units) held over 11 million hectares mostly on the basis of export focused commercial agriculture, alongside one million communal area households on 16.4 million hectares mostly in the drier regions of the country. The FTLRP implemented by the Government of Zimbabwe redistributed about 80 percent of the former large scale commercial farms (LSCF) to a broad base of beneficiaries including, mostly peasants from across the political divide, as well as politicians, senior Government officials, private sector officials, employed and unemployed urbanites, farm workers, corporate and the former white farmers. This has altered the previous highly unequal bimodal agrarian structure and created relatively more broad based tri-modal agrarian structure comprising small, medium and large farms with an estimated 170,000 family farms created by the FTLRP… It is clear that the FTLRP has broadened access to land and related natural resources to a diverse set of beneficiaries dominated by landless and/or land short peasants from the Communal Areas. The beneficiaries of the FTLRP go beyond those formally allocated land by the state to include others who are labelled as “"squatters"” who co-exist with formal land beneficiaries under different land sharing arrangements. The position of women has vastly improved in newly redistributed areas in comparison to the communal areas as a sizeable proportion were allocated land in their own right, while some benefitted as joint owners through the marital institution.[13]

Ian Scoones from the UK’s Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and his associates at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) in Cape Town, South Africa had been in Zimbabwe researching the matter on the ground for about a decade. Incidentally, they arrived to more or less similar conclusions as Moyo & Paris and their AIAS research colleagues. The irony is that even the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), well known for being so quick to dismiss if not demonize any positive side of Zimbabwe’s radical land reforms, had to reluctantly swallow its pride and prejudice as it extensively quoted Scoones’ admission of being “genuinely surprised” by findings of their study on ‘Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myth and Reality’ that debunks these five myths perpetuated by “political and media stereotypes of abject failure” in Zimbabwe: (1) That land reform has been a total failure; (2)That most of the land has gone to political "cronies"; (3) That there is no investment on the resettled land; (4) That agriculture is in complete ruins, creating chronic food insecurity; (5)That the rural economy has collapsed.[14]

Rumor has it that even the World Bank and the IMF are also surprised by Zimbabwe’s recovery.

This discussion would not be complete without referring, at least in passing, to Abdul Raufu Mustapha’s exposé at the AIAS Summer School of the celebrated Zimbabwean farmers’ exploits in Nigeria. His research has revealed that it is only the case in which there is heavy financial among other supports from the Nigerian government(s) that these farmers have flourished. Of particular concern to the topic at hand is the fact that even such success have come at the expense of local farmers. Elsewhere Mustapha thus captures their land dispossession and its consequence:

There has been a torrent of journalistic accounts on the success of the Zimbabwean farmers in transplanting commercial agriculture to Nigeria. Under titles like ‘White Zimbabweans Bring Change to Nigeria’, ‘White Zimbabwean farmers highlight Nigeria's agricultural failures’ , and ‘White farmers from Zimbabwe bring prosperity to Nigeria’. The impression is created of a massive transformation based on the ingenuity of the Zimbabwean farmers and without any support from Nigerian governments. But is this really so? The terms of the [Memorandum of Understanding] MOU which the Kwara State government signed with the Zimbabwean farmers, and developments surrounding the establishment of the farms, paint a different picture. It committed the State government to the provision of a series of services crucial for the development of the commercial farms. Crucially, it committed the government to provide land. The government undertook to clear choice land of the indigenous users’ right next to the River Niger. 1289 local farmers in 28 communities were uprooted from their farms to make way for the Zimbabwean farmers. The state set aside a total of N77m (US$513,333) as compensation for the displaced local farmers. Each of the initial 13 Zimbabwean farmers received a 25-year lease of 1000 hectares. The state's instrumentalist use of compensation and 'agricultural packages' (bicycles – 720 were distributed – , fertilizers, seed etc.) and the provision of long sought after communal infrastructure like electricity and additional classrooms in local schools helped to defuse local protests. [15]

All this echoes the epigraph above – nothing can compensate Africans for the loss of their land.

What has been happening in and to Zimbabwe is a wake-up call, not only to South Africa, but to all African countries that wish away the land question under the guise of an agrarian question. As long as the national question remains unresolved these questions need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. This is particularly so now in the neo-liberal context of ongoing land grabs in Africa.

Land mattered to Africans. It still matters somehow. Anyhow it will always continue to matter.

* © Chambi Chachage
* This article first appeared on UDADISI: Rethinking in Action
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
NOTES

[1]Bethuel Setai (1998: 74).The Making of Poverty in South Africa. Harare, Zimbabwe: SAPES BOOKS.
[2] Lungisile Ntsebeza (2011: 1). Contemporary Agrarian Questions in South Africa. Opening address, Third Summer School on Land and Agrarian Questions in Southern Africa, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 17 – 21 January 2011(Used by Permission)
[3] Ntsebeza (2006:4-5). The Land and Agrarian Questions: What do they mean in South Africa today? Key note address presented on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Surplus People Project (SPP), Pinelands Bowling club, Pinelands, Cape Town, on 24 February 2006.
< http://www.spp.org.za/publications/Seminar%20Papers/agrarianquestion.pdf>
[4] Elizabeth Kharono (2011: 7). Gender and Land Relations in Uganda. Paper presented at the AIAS Summer School 17 – 21 January, 2011, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa (Used by Permission).
[5] Kharono (Ibid.:8)
[6] Ntsebeza (Ibid 2011.: 1-2)
[7] Ntsebeza (Ibid 2011.: 2)
[8] Sam Moyo, Walter Chambati, Tendai Murisa, Dumisani Siziba, Charity Dangwa, Kingstone Mujeyi & Ndabezinhle Nyoni (2009: 6-7). Fast Track Land Reform Baseline Survey in Zimbabwe: Trends and Tendencies, 2005/06. Harare, Zimbabwe: AIAS.
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wanazuoni/message/8255>
[9] Sean Jacobs & Jacob Mundy (eds.) ACAS (2009) Bulletin 82: Reflections on Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe.’
<http://concernedafricascholars.org/bulletin/82/>
[10] Mahmood Mamdani (2009). Lessons of Zimbabwe.
< http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n23/mahmood-mamdani/lessons-of-zimbabwe>
[11] Sam Moyo & Paris Yeros (2009). Zimbabwe Ten Years On: Results and Prospects.
<http://concernedafricascholars.org/bulletin/82/moyo-yeros/>
[12] Moyo & Yeros (Ibid.)
[13] Moyo, Chambati, Murisa, Siziba, Dangwa, Mujeyi & Nyoni (Ibid.:37)
[14] Joseph Winter (2010). Zimbabwe Land Reform ‘Not a Failure.’
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11764004>
[15] Abdul Raufu Mustapha (2011). Zimbabwean Farmers in Nigeria.
<http://www.westafricainsight.org/articles/view/77>

The hidden gold in intellectual property

Khadija Sharife

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70603

cc CIATPrivatised seed corporations are grabbing the market in basic food staples. Khadija Sharife explains how they pay nothing for the market dominance.

In a globalised world, there is nothing so invaluable as the knowledge economy, comprising intangible assets.

The most substantial asset class is intellectual property or ‘creations of the mind’, especially critical to the profit base of entertainment, pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations.

According to Forbes magazine, by 1999, three of the four richest people in the world made their fortune from intellectual property rights. They owed their fortune, said Michael Perelman, to ‘Microsoft, one of the major holders of intellectual property rights, befitting the so-called New Economy in which “DOS Capital” has supplanted Das Kapital’.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development described intangible assets as ‘one of the most important commercial developments in recent decades’. This is especially true as it concerns ‘saviour’ solutions such as patented, genetically modified (GM) seeds.

African countries like Kenya, with mass cases of reported famine, have been packaged as ideal candidates for GM seeds. The Gates Foundation - the philanthropic arm of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates - has partnered with biotechnology corporations to save Africa.

Yet Kenya’s famines are as much political as they are socio-ecological. In 2009, the year the country exported 450,000 tons of produce, the Kenyan government declared a famine-induced state of emergency.

Export-orientated structural adjustment policies, ordered by the World Bank and endorsed by the government, have evidenced not simply the allocation of the most fertile land for cash crops and game parks, but also destructive land privatisation policies benefiting Kenya’s corrupt elite. From 1998 to 2000, for instance, when food aid constituted 23 per cent of the country’s imports, just 10 per cent of fertile land was productive and used by export-orientated companies.

Unfortunately, the political elite controlling the state also tend to act as Kenya’s largest land-owners, determining the nature of land idleness, landlessness, under-utilisation of fertile land, and tenure insecurity, leading to famine.

Yet the deliberate manipulation of the root causes of Kenya’s famines has been justified by the solution: utilisation of patented seeds. In Kenya about 70 per cent of grants allocated by the Gates Foundation via Agra (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) are directly connected to Monsanto.

This time, patented seeds, that is, privatised seeds branded as the property right of Monsanto, one of the world’s leading agro-chemical and biotechnology companies, have not been deployed for cash crops, but to grab the market for inelastic basic staples: food that the world’s poor cannot live without.

While patented seeds are given at no cost, according to Monsanto, ‘We’re not here because of charity. When you help small farmers today they may not be good customers. But in 10 years time, they may be good customers.’

The anthem of Monsanto’s intellectual property is chiefly to ensure that the IP revolution - and GM solutions - will not be taxed. In 2007, for instance, Monsanto owned 23 per cent of the global ‘proprietary seed market’, controlling 87 per cent (through licensing) of the total world area devoted to genetically engineered seeds.

Monsanto as ‘licensor’, strives its utmost to pay nothing for the privilege of dominating the global agricultural IP market. In 2000 the company merged with Pharmacia corporation, a ‘Delaware’ corporation, based in the US.

A new entity was created for this purpose for Monsanto, from which it entered into an intellectual property transfer agreement with Pharmacia. The scene was Delaware, one of the world’s leading tax havens - better known as secrecy jurisdictions. The location of IP is generally geographically determined by zero taxation and corporate opacity. Delaware is ideal for such purposes.

Usually, on the advice of major accounting and law firms, parent companies would establish new entities in Delaware, converting what would be taxable income in South Africa or even a US state, to nontaxable passive income channelled to the tax haven.

The parent company would thereafter receive stock in the newly created Delaware entity - the latter employing nobody, creating and producing nothing, generally hosting just one shareholder - the parent company, paying a ‘fee’ for the use of IP.

Delaware’s services, particularly the infamous Passive Investment Companies (PIC) have been eagerly used by more than 200,000 multinationals since 2009, including more than 60 per cent of the Fortune 500 corporations. A limited liability company can be established within two working days. Beneficial or ultimate owners are not disclosed, banking secrecy is offered and there is no requirement to file any financial statements unless there exists economic activity within Delaware.

Certainly the Gates Foundation and others have greatly aided in drawing attention to the devastating impact of climate change in Africa. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change director RK Pachauri, ‘crop net revenues could fall by as much as 90% by 2100’. But in context, when it comes to the hidden gold that constitutes IP, the role of the Gates Foundation, allegedly to save Africa via drought-resistant seeds, is not all that hard to understand.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This column previously appeared in The New Age (18 January 2011).
* Khadija Sharife is the southern Africa correspondent for The Africa Report magazine and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Lumumba, Gbagbo and Ki-moon

Okello Oculi

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70651

cc UN PhotoUN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's failure to understand the workings of communal democracy in Africa put him in a weak position to negotiate for peace in Côte d’Ivoire, argues Okello Oculi.

The United Nations secretary general Mr Ban Ki-moon is a strange type of democrat. Speaking to the press at Addis Ababa outside the meeting of the African Union he spoke thus: ‘I am concerned that differences of opinion are now surfacing among the African Union. This is not desirable at this time in preserving the integrity and fundamental principle of democracy’. His notion of democracy does not value ‘differences of opinion’. It stands at variance to Mwalimu Nyerere’s view of the workings of communal democracy of Africa in which members of a community ‘talk and talk and talk until we agree or agree to disagree’. That Ban Ki-moon has not imbibed this fundamental law of African democracy is not surprising since he is from Korea, with deeply ingrained memories of brutal dictatorship against his people by Japanese colonial rulers when Japan conquered and occupied his country. As a top official of the United Nations, however, he has no excuse not to acquaint himself with a core cultural value in African civilisation.

Ban Ki-moon has shown a rare haste to see Alassane Ouattara in power and Laurent Gbagbo out. He has been party to a gang known as the ‘international community’ to oust the constitutional order in Cote d’Ivoire in rude deviation from the principle of the ‘rule of law’. The constitutional order spelt out steps that were not challenged before the election was conducted to the effect that the Electoral Commission conducts an election but the ultimate authority to affirm final and legitimate results is the Council of State. That Ivorian formula held a precaution against the possibility of election malpractices being the determinant of election results. In his haste to support Ouattara, Ban Ki-moon has sided with the high possibility of election results contaminated by malpractices. That a UN secretary general finds himself in this position indicates that his unwholesome position is not a measure for defending a ‘fundamental principle of democracy’, but rather a matter of real politicks to please powerful groups behind the UN Security Council.

Africa is deeply indebted to the heroes of the freedom revolution in Tunisia and Egypt. They took the winds or nuclear fuel off the sails or engine of Ban Ki-moon’s invasion of the electoral politics of Cote d’Ivoire by taking television cameras and salivating propagandists to the streets of Tunisian and Egyptian cities. What the threat of nuclear war between his native brothers in North Korea and South Korea could not achieve in pulling Ban Ki-moon to that region as a fire brigade chief, the angry youths of Tunisia and Egypt did with an enchanting if tragic drama in the deaths of those murdered by police and military guns. Under the glow of those political fire storms, the African Union could meet in Addis Ababa and bluntly rebuke the French President Sarkozy and Ki-moon by telling them that Cote d’Ivoire is and African problem. The first salvo was shot out by Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the AU official negotiator, who declared that instead of salivating for blood in Cote d’Ivoire, the African Union must tell Ouattara to sit down and talk with Gbagbo.

Odinga’s position was first hinted at in an earlier interview to a Kenyan journalist in his Karen residence in Nairobi when he said that Gbagbo and Ouattara are both seasoned politicians, not military generals. Political leaders work with words and not bullets and bombs as first tools of choice. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, threw at Ban Ki-moon a view whose roots go back to his 1987 speech to the UN General Assembly. In that speech he had argued that if even earthworms know what is food for them and crawl away from danger, why should the Cold War powers of the Capitalist West and the Communists, assume that African leaders have to be taught to realise that it is not acceptable that 96,000 children in Uganda die annually from preventable diseases. Ban Ki-moon should not have been too hasty to teach Africa’s leaders the call for democracy in Cote d’ Ivoire.

Ban Ki-moon is a puzzle to African observers. He heads an organisation that was created ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in out generation brought untold sorrow to mankind’. West Africa has suffered ‘ untold sorrow’ in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the last two decades. Somalia is in the grip of ‘ untold sorrow’. Over 1.5 million people in Northern Uganda lived in filthy poverty-stricken camps to be ‘ protected’ by their government from forced recruitment and death by LRA militias. For twenty years over 40,000 children in these camps trekked daily to sleep on cold pavements in urban centres to escape from being captured by LRA’s marauders’. Over 2 million peoples of Southern Sudan died from war, not to mention victims of Darfur. If Ban Ki-Moon finds that difficult to integrate into the historic mandate of the United Nations Organization, he should not expect African leaders to suffer from such racist amnesia. He should urgently abandon the hope of weeping crocodile tears over rivers of blood in Cote d’Ivoire in the name of a doubtful authenticity of an electoral ‘democracy’ in that country.

The freedom revolution currently ablaze in Tunisia and Egypt is anchored in the rejection of policies imposed on friends of the ‘ international community’ countries that Ban Ki-moon listens to. Those policies blocked internal industrialisation and industrial expansion – including moving into the realm of use of information technology for industrial productivity. It blocked the creation of jobs. The pains and humiliations of perpetual unemployment is the fuel that has exploded the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. Because China stood independent of this Euro-American tyranny of unemployment, poverty, and wrath, the streets of China have been saved from the spectre of hundreds of millions protesting and burning down buildings. Due to a strange historic deafness, Ban Ki-moon wants to put in power Alassane Ouattara as a puppet that will take Cote d’Ivoire down that same route to destruction.

Ban Ki-moon also seems to be anxious to outdo one of his predecessors – Dag Hammarskjöld. That UN secretary general holds the notorious record of virulently hating and participating in the murder of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba had wanted Belgian troops driven out of his newly independent country. He wanted the secession of Katanga province from Congo ended quickly before racist white mercenaries from South Africa, Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Belgium, France, and Britain helped it to become a fully separate country. He was ordered to assassinate Lumumba by President Dwight Eisenhower of the United States and by top officials of Belgium, Britain and France. Voices of African leaders, like Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Nasser, who wished to advise Lumumba and build negotiations and dialogue between Congo’s politicians, were ignored contemptuously. Africa must this time help Ki-moon to climb to a higher and historical legacy; one not soaked in African blood from Cote d’Ivoire and West Africa.

The freedom revolution in Tunisia and Egypt deserves a more glorifying form of honour by Ban Ki-moon. The African Union, however, needs to find a herbal cure for that obnoxious ideology of ‘ ivorite’ (or only people whose parents are also born of ethnic groups from southern part of the country can hold leadership posts), that has poisoned politics in that country. The African has creative example to borrow from. One of them is Nigeria’s ‘ federal character principle’ and Kagame’s civic education for youths against ‘ genocide ideology’.

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

Swazi Media Commentary: Telling the truth about Swaziland

Peter Kenworthy

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70617

cc HezaRichard Rooney’s online Swazi Media Commentary is a rare example of objective, progressive news and journalism in a country burdened with biased reporting and censorship, writes Peter Kenworthy.

To read accurate daily analyses of the situation in Swaziland, you must turn not to its self-censored official newspapers or a foreign media that has no daily presence in Swaziland, but to a blog written by Richard Rooney, a 54-year-old journalist and former associate professor at the University of Swaziland (UNISWA). ‘The Swazi media aren’t very good and there isn’t really a foreign press in Swaziland,’ Rooney says of the standard of reporting on Swaziland. Rooney’s blog, Swazi Media Commentary, in contrast, is both very outspoken, comprehensive and widely read. It usually carries articles every day on a wide range of subjects in relation to the Swazi media, democratisation and human rights which ‘help to build a loyal readership’, as Rooney puts it.

STARTING SWAZI MEDIA COMMENTARY

The site was started in 2007 as a way of informing his UNISWA students about Swazi media research, of which there was little to be found elsewhere. The website averages over 500 page views a day, although this doesn’t count readers of his articles that are reposted on other websites and debate forums, including his own mirror of the site, Swaziland Commentary. It is read in many countries in all the continents of the world, most of the readers coming from within Swaziland itself and many in South Africa, the US and the UK.

Initially, the site was to be primarily about the Swazi media, which is why it is called Swazi Media Commentary. ‘It was never intended as a “human rights” blog,’ says Rooney. ‘I taught journalism and mass communication at UNISWA and discovered that there was very little academic material on the media in Swaziland, so I set about researching and writing it myself. I thought to set up a website with short articles written by myself that would give examples from the Swazi media of topics that I and colleagues were teaching in class.’

Rooney had planned to discontinue the blog after he left UNISWA in 2008, but was asked to continue it by his many readers. ‘I continue to write it because people continue to read it. I get a lot of private feedback about posts and also emails with requests for information from all kinds of people, including journalists who are going to visit Swaziland; from professional people doing academic research on Swaziland; university students inside and outside Swaziland; school students inside and outside Swaziland and human rights activists.’

‘ROONEY IS PIVOTAL’

The people within the Swazi democratic movement whom I have contacted praised Rooney’s journalism. Swaziland Solidarity Network spokesperson Lucky Lukhele said that Swazi Media Commentary ‘has been very critical of the censorship in the news, both self-censorship and that which is imposed by the state. Swazi Media Commentary also tries its level best to search for and publish news that Swazi newspapers cannot publish due to censorship.’

Maxwell Dlamini, president of Swaziland National Union of Students, says that Swazi Media Commentary has ‘become the voice for the voiceless oppressed people of Swaziland,’ and that he is ‘so much grateful to have such a progressive and opening platform.’

Sikelela Dlamini, project coordinator of the Swaziland United Democratic Front, speaks of Rooney’s ‘insistence on objective journalism, achieved through systematic gathering of facts’. His concern is that Swazi journalists, on the other hand, ‘take shortcuts by gunning for quick stories which are not exhaustively investigated,’ and that ‘Rooney could yet play a pivotal role in the democratic movement's search for alternative media.’

A third source from within the movement, who asked not to be named, called Swazi Media Commentary ‘an invaluable source of independent and alternative information and a vital service in continuously keeping the largely hidden political problems of Swaziland on the international map,’ and said that Rooney had a ‘deep understanding of media ethics and press freedom that ordinary Swazi journalists do not normally feel able to practise.’

ROLE OF THE SWAZI MEDIA

One of the main reasons for the importance and relevance of Rooney’s Swazi Media Commentary is clearly the disposition of the Swazi mainstream media. The two widely read daily newspapers in Swaziland, the Swazi Observer, in effect owned by King Mswati, and the Times of Swaziland, exercise a large degree of self-censorship. The editor of the former has even vowed not to print anything unfavourable about the monarch. (The small magazine, The Nation, does live up to its self-proclaimed role as ‘watchdog’ by challenging the government, and the government has responded by taking the magazine editor to court in an attempt to close it down. The Nation, however, has nowhere near the readership of the mainstream papers).

Many of the articles in the Swazi newspapers also tend to have a sensationalist tinge, and when they do report on the democratic-, financial- and human rights-related crises that Swaziland is facing – as especially the Times does – they tend not to properly analyse why the country is in such a state. Maybe this is because they fear that the government, who in the case of the Times is a major source of advertisements and thus income, will remove this vital source of income, maybe because they have been threatened not to print stories unfavourable to the monarch or prime minister.

That this is the case flies in the face of general journalistic standards and the Swaziland National Association of Journalists’s code of conduct. Article 8 states that, ‘under no circumstances should news or a publication be suppressed unless it borders on issues of national security.’ Either ‘national security’ is defined very broadly in Swaziland, or its editors or journalists should try harder to observe these standards.

Rooney has himself commented on the lack of quality of the Swazi media on his blog, for example in 2007, where he wrote that he had ‘found during the three years I have lived in Swaziland that if I want to really know what’s going on in the kingdom, I should not bother with the Swazi media.’ This view of the media in Swaziland may not exactly have endeared him to Swazi newspaper editors or journalists, as I learnt when speaking to the editor of the Times of Swaziland in September. Nevertheless, Rooney says that they still sometimes use his material: ‘Both Swazi newspapers have followed up on my blogs in the past, without attribution mostly.’

The foreign press, for its part, doesn’t report very regularly on Swaziland, and most of its stories are written by freelancers, as there are no foreign bureaux in Swaziland. Rooney has therefore been approached, and has supplied information to, an array of foreign news outlets from around the world, including Africa Report, the BBC, France 24, PBS and ABC TV in the US, and Reuters.

HOW TO SOLVE SWAZILAND’S PROBLEMS?

So what should the media be reporting on and how should the international community react? A real problem is that the international community isn’t really interested in Swaziland, according to Rooney. ‘It has no real mineral wealth that industrialised nations need and it has no strategic ports or airstrips, so is of no military use.’ Foreign governments and the multilaterals do therefore not feel compelled to pressure the Swazi regime on its many wrongdoings or to demand democratisation – although strategic interest does not automatically result in political pressure, of course.

Swaziland’s democratic movement therefore seems to be in something of a catch 22 situation. It needs the international community to help it grow, but the international community will probably not help it before it gets its act together, so to speak. And for this it needs credible news and analysis about Swaziland. It is therefore perhaps a little sad that both the international community, and to a large degree people in Swaziland who have an internet connection (approximately 5 per cent of the population in 2008), must rely to a large degree on Rooney’s blog for in-depth, independent news and analysis on Swaziland. On the other hand, this should not take anything away from the importance and quality of Rooney’s efforts.

The action – or inaction – of the international community in regard to Swaziland matters however, says Rooney. ‘I think organisations like the IMF [International Monetary Fund], EU [European Union], African Development Bank, should insist on political reform as a prerequisite for bank loans and aid,’ he says. ‘And overseas political parties, trade unions etc could help to build the capacity of individual members of the Swazi opposition groups, for instance PUDEMO [People's United Democratic Movement], so they can develop leadership skills and also develop practical political policies that can be put forward in opposition to the present leadership.’

An increased professionalism and direction is an important prerequisite to getting both a larger segment of the people of Swaziland and the international community on board, says Rooney. ‘The democratic movement tends to mainly focus on activism to get “democracy”, but it is less clear what they will do once they get it. For example, as far as I know, none of the groups has a coherent policy on getting Swaziland out of its economic mess. How will they eradicate poverty? What’s the plan for creating jobs? If they had a manifesto, as opposition political parties have in democracies, they might increase their credibility with Swazi people and also with people/groups/nations in the free world who could perhaps assist them to meet their ambitions. I don’t mean this as a criticism of individual people, but at the moment these groups come across as political amateurs – maybe big on rhetoric, but small on actual policies.’

Certainly, without proper information and direction, the ever-increasing and understandable anger that many Swazis feel because of their growing economic predicament will not necessarily be vented at a Swazi regime that is to a large degree responsible for it. ‘People will get fearful and angry,’ says Rooney, ‘but might not know how to direct that fear and anger.’

BRINGING ABOUT CHANGE

Rooney is aware that the task of bringing about real democracy in Swaziland is enormous, however: ‘“Real” democracy took hundreds of years to come about in Western Europe, the US etc, so we shouldn’t expect much for Swaziland – but we can move towards these things. Unbanning political parties in Swaziland would be a big step forward.’

The present financial crisis in Swaziland might help bring about a change that could lead to democratisation by removing the system of clientelism that keeps the king in power, especially as this crisis is to a large degree self-inflicted as it started well before the international financial crisis in 2008. ‘Change will start to come about when those in Swaziland who presently have a stake in the status quo lose that stake. That could easily happen in Swaziland, especially when there is increasing evidence that the king doesn’t have real loyalty – people around him are in it for what they can get for themselves. They couldn’t give a damn about the king – as long as they are getting their graft. Once the opportunity for graft goes, their loyalty will go too.’

‘It was financial crises that brought down many ex-Soviet states,’ Rooney reminds us as an analogy to the situation in Swaziland. ‘The middle class turned against the leaders and the leaders were out on their ears. As soon as the middle class can’t afford their luxuries they will revolt. Also, if the economy becomes a siege economy and goods are not available, they will revolt.’

Up until now the Swazi regime has relied on a combination of traditionalism, nationalism and brutal police and armed forces to stay in power. According to Rooney, however, the strength of the police and armed forces is bound to their supposed loyalty – a loyalty that can easily crumble. ‘I doubt that King Mswati’s army commanders have any real loyalty to him or the monarchy – they too are corrupt. Also, the capacity of the army is weak – just think of the 500 recruits who supposedly went crazy at the end of 2010 because they were possessed by demons.’ As for the legitimacy of parliament and Swaziland’s ministers, this is also rapidly dissipating. ‘The recent scandals involving e.g. ministers are hugely affecting the “legitimacy” because they show that everyone is in it for themselves.’

Reflecting on the problems and potential of information dissemination, Rooney argues that perhaps Swazis should also learn from other conflicts such as the presently unfolding revolution in Tunisia. ‘I think social networking might be a better way forward by keeping democracy activists and progressives informed on what is going on. I’m presently trying to do research on how social networking was involved in the recent Tunisia business to see if there are lessons to be learned for Swaziland,’ he says.

However the struggle for Swazi democratisation is brought forward, access to proper information, analysis and reflection is important – and blogs such as Rooney’s are therefore vital in that they not only deliver this but also inspire and help mobilise others. But none of this will bring about change without a strong and purposeful democratic movement within Swaziland itself.

As Rooney reflects, ‘The more we keep talking about these things the better. In my blog I constantly refer to the PM [prime minister] as being illegally appointed and that King Mswati is the last absolute monarch in sub-Saharan Africa, i.e. himself illegitimate and undemocratic. I see my phrases used by other writers all over the web. All of this keeps telling people that they are not legitimate. The problem is that the knowledge that they are illegitimate is not enough. We need to mobilise activity around this and that is why political parties in Swaziland would be so important and equally why the rulers want to keep them banned.’

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Peter Kenworthy is Africa Contact’s communication and project officer.
* Richard Rooney is a journalist with a PhD in communication and former associate professor at the University of Swaziland (2005–08). He has published articles on a variety of subjects, including media freedom in Swaziland and media ideology.
* You can receive a weekly newsletter containing several of the most interesting weekly articles from Rooney’s Swazi Media Commentary news by mailing Africa Contact at SAK-Swazinewsletter-subscribe@yahoogroups.co.uk.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Black (or White?) History Month

Chika Enzeanya

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70629

cc D CBlack History Month ‘allows Africans to tell their “his-story” starting only from the period when they set foot on the enslaver’s soil and became subjected to his “civilising” efforts', argues Chika Ezeanya.

February is widely celebrated as Black History Month in the United States. As with most things American, the celebration transcends the domestic shores of its country of origin to gain widespread recognition and media coverage in other Western and non-Western hemispherical nations. Although termed Black History Month, the celebration in conceptual clarity always focuses on the achievements of the erstwhile enslaved people of black Africa in the United States. Dr Carter G. Woodson, the son of former slaves who went on to earn a doctorate degree from Harvard University, laid the foundation for the marking of Black History Month. After he noticed the absence of any form of history of black people in teaching and in academic discourse, Dr Carter made a case in 1926 for a Negro History Week, which later became the Black History Month.

The caption, Black History Month, is likely to confuse the historian out in search of authentic African history dating back millennia. However, it is commonly accepted in the United States that to utter the word ‘Black’ means strictly speaking, African-Americans. In essence, Black History Month celebrations are concerned with the exposition of the achievements of African-American former slaves within the ambit of their former colonial masters. Outside the coast of the United States this interpretation and celebration of Black History can therefore be adjudged a misnomer. This is because Black to most people around the world means African, and African history means the story of the people who lived in the continent in times past.

It is disconcerting and somewhat disturbing that the history of ‘Blackness’ in the world’s intellectual and media capital, the United States is associated with white domination, oppression, repression and slavery. It is a history, dictated by the West, one that late Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper of Oxford University would validate with his statement in 1965 that there is no African history, but only the history of Europeans in Africa, ‘the rest is darkness… and darkness is not a subject for history.’

The celebration of Black History Month without laying the major emphasis on pre-slavery, pre-colonial Africa, and on the myriad achievements of continental Africans/Blacks of that era indicates that most Black scholars and historians are still submerged in the Western historical point of view of history. His-story: The story of the white Caucasian male as told by him or from his point of view. His-story of enslavement of the Africans and dragging them to his territory. His-story of granting them freedom after only a certain number of years as slaves. His-story of the achievements he has so magnanimously allowed their most illustrious sons and daughters to accomplish, despite their lowly past. His-story of how the former slave has leveraged on the white man’s education to become the first ‘African-American’ to ride a car, a plane or train. In all, Black History Month allows Africans to tell their ‘his-story’ starting only from the period when they set foot on the enslaver’s soil and became subjected to his ‘civilising’ efforts.

Slavery was calculated to capture the memory of the enslaved, such that even after freedom has been granted, he is already inherently configured to think like a slave. The physical un-cuffing of chains did not in any way free the mind from the years of calculated and intense mental subjugation. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, alluding to colonialism, captures this so succinctly, when he writes: ‘but cultural subjugation is more dangerous, because it is more subtle and its effects, long lasting. Moreover, it can make a person who has lost his land, who feels the pangs of hunger, who carries flagellated flesh, to look at those experiences differently… he or she has been drained of historical memory of a different world.’ Rather than advancing the study of authentic Africa, Black History Month at the moment is bound by the myopia of African interaction with the West. Paulo Freire would argue that this form of history ‘is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.’

The same his-story is taught in African schools. Pupils in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are taught that Henry Morton Stanley was the first European to navigate the river’s length. Little is taught to the students about the powerful kingdom of the Kongo people, who lived, traded and travelled by the river for thousands of years before Henry Morton Stanley. DRC pupils know more about Belgium and King Leopold than the Manikongo and BaKongo. Such examples thrive all across formerly colonised black Africa.

Much more than fighting for the independence of India from the British, Mahatma Gandhi insisted on the mental decolonisation of the Indian. In his seminal work, ‘Towards New Education’, Gandhi asserts that ‘the curriculum and pedagogic ideas which form the fabric of modern education (in India) were imported from Oxford and Cambridge, Edinburgh and London. But they are essentially foreign, and till they are repudiated, there never can be national education.’ Education to be considered sound must be able to ensure continuity from one generation to another. No generation should, due to education, loose touch of the investments, knowledge bank and core values of its predecessors.

For Africa, decolonisation of the curriculum - with an emphasis on history – must be embarked upon. People of African descent, resident and in the diaspora must seek to know their age-old authentic history through conscientious research, archaeological excavations, cultural and linguistic analysis and a deconstruction of the his-story bequeathed by the racially motivated scholarship of the Victorian era.

As a matter of urgency, Black History Month, while duly acknowledging the innumerable contributions of people of African descent in the United States, must liberate itself from the territorial narrowness in which it is presently embedded. African history and contributions to ‘global civilisation’ – dating back as far as ancient Egypt – must be studied and disseminated to the rest of humanity.

Dreams, desires and innate expectations of men are founded on the memories they hold. The despicable political and economic situation of the black race – regardless of their place of abode – is founded on a lack of aspiration due to absence of positive consciousness. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o sums it up so brilliantly; ‘Black consciousness then becomes the right of black peoples to draw an image of themselves that negates and transcends the image of themselves that was drawn by those who would weaken them in their fight for and assertion of their humanity… It seeks to draw the image of a possible world, different and transcending the one drawn by the West by reconnecting itself to a different historical memory and dreams…’

For progress of any measure to be recorded among people of African descent within and outside the continent, they must begin to research, disseminate and identify with the past of Africa. Africa’s past is not darkness, it is only dark to those who do not see it. Creativity and innovation are products of a positive self-image, an attribute that the black man is inherently lacking. Positive self-image is an offshoot of knowledge. For Africans, knowledge of the positive, independent and unencumbered contributions of one’s forefathers to humanity, would definitely unleash the latent creative energies of the living protégés.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Chika Ezeanya is a PhD candidate in the Department of African Studies at Howard University in Washington DC. Her debut manuscript was shortlisted for the 2010 Penguin Publishers Prize for African Writing.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Pambazuka Samir Amin Award

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70604

Pambazuka News is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the first annual Pambazuka Samir Amin Award. This award, launched to mark Samir Amin’s 80th birthday in 2011, pays tribute to the extraordinary contribution Samir Amin has made to our understanding of the exploitation of the peoples of Africa and the global South.

Entrants are required to submit an essay showing original thinking and of no longer than 10,000 words on the subject of 'Accumulation by dispossession: the African experience'. Essays may be geographically focused on one or more countries, or about the continent as a whole; they may address the topic thematically (for example, focused on the mining sector, or agriculture, etc) or historically. Submissions are limited to one per person.

Submissions are open to citizens of African countries who on the closing date are under the age of 35 years.

A panel of leading African intellectuals from across the continent will select up to five contributors to receive this year's award. The chosen essays will be published as a book by Pambazuka Press, and summaries will appear in Pambazuka News.

The award-winners will be invited to a ceremony (to be held in either Dakar or Nairobi) where they will present their papers and meet Professor Amin and representatives of the award panel. The winners will receive a selection of Professor Amin’s publications personally signed by him; they will also be interviewed by the media. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Awardees may also be offered fellowships to enable them to spend periods at selected research or academic institutions in Africa; full details will be announced later.

Please submit your essay, written in clear English or French, using any common word-processing software, together with a summary of no longer than 500 words, and a copy of your CV. Please follow the author guidelines (.doc and .pdf) and the Pambazuka News style guide (.doc and .pdf) or write to awards@pambazuka.org to obtain copies.

Essays should be submitted by 6pm GMT on 30 April 2011 and sent to: awards@pambazuka.org. The results will be announced in September 2011.

6 Billion Ways

2011-02-07

http://6billionways.org.uk/

From the grassroots to the global, communities and movements are imagining and creating a world where people and planet come before profit, and democracy trumps corporate power. 6 Billion Ways is a day that explores this resistance through discussion, ideas, action and the arts. With speakers and practical workshops for all ages, debates, films, music and art, 6 Billion Ways is your chance to inspire and be inspired, and to make connections with others who want to challenge injustice and inequality, both in the UK and globally.

Fahamu events at 6 Billion Ways include:

- Africa: Empire and Resistance

Africa is still portrayed as a hopeless, famine-struck continent in need of rescue. In this session, leading thinkers will paint a more positive picture, and assess the hopes and prospects for African resistance in the twenty-first century.

Speakers

Samir Amin, Third World Forum, Senegal
Firoze Manji, Fahamu network for social justice
Patrick Bond, Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal

- Film: Tin Town

Promised housing by the South African government, more than a hundred Cape Town families found community through their struggle as squatters on a sandy road known as Symphony Way. Recently moved by court order to an indefinitely temporary relocation area dubbed ‘Tin Town’ or ‘Blikkiesdorp’ in Afrikaans, community members reflect on that road in their past and on the road ahead.

This is a short film followed by a discussion with Firoze Manji, executive director of Fahamu.

The book 'No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way' will also be launched at the screening.

Free sanitary pads won’t stop violence against women

Glenda Muzenda

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/70608

cc M NTough measures to tackle gender-based violence are more important to South African women than government distribution of free sanitary pads, argues Glenda Muzenda.

As we roll out 2011 and we ready ourselves again for new struggles, battles left unfinished in past and opportunities ahead, I am afraid that this is the same pattern as of last year and the many years past. In 2010 the announcing of the next 10 years as the decade of the women leaves a lot to be desired. The calls and numerous statements made to stop gender-based violence (GBV), the raping of women and children, the killing of lesbians and decriminalising same sex coupling and the decriminalising of sex work and HIV/AIDS have gone unheard, with no response from our leadership in Africa. And all we get are sanitary pads.

So I am not going to bore you with another World Cup story or adventure, seeing that I am not a football fan anyways. I am merely pointing out the facts of gender-based violence and the fact that as resolution for 2011, we are talking about these same issues. It bothers me deeply that we have not progressed much and I am not comparing. In 2010 many things happened that caused the hair on my neck to stand on end. I bet with South Africa’s president offering free sanitary pads to women who cannot afford them, perhaps he ought to have found out what happened during the World Cup when female condoms were scarce. I say to you, ‘President Zuma, I want to empower myself and others in this decade of the women. I need female condoms to be available so that I can protect myself from sexually transmitted disease and not have another baby. I’ll also be protected in case I get raped – maybe even by my spouse. By virtue of the condom I will not become a statistic of HIV/AIDS – and thanks, I do not use sunlight soap.’

When the two men in Malawi where convicted of homosexual acts which were against the country’s sodomy laws, President Zuma just about whispered that South Africa condemned these arrests in Malawi, in time for the UN Secretary General’s statement condemning the treatment of the two men in Malawi, which resulted in their release.

On 25 October, the African Commission for Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) rejected the observation o the rejection of the application for observer status made by the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL). The decision was devastating to the human rights communities and activists alike. In the following weeks on 16 , another blow was dealt. South Africa voted against the inclusion of sexual orientation on a resolution condemning extrajudicial killings during UN General Assembly in November of 2010.

As if that was not enough, with the rejection by ACHPR still very fresh in our minds, on 2 December, the Star newspaper published a story of yet another lesbian death in Bhambayi, Kwazulu Natal. Ncumisa Mzamelo was murdered and burnt to a crisp in a toilet and all that remained to confirm who she was, was her dental records. The stories of other victims of ‘corrective’ rape, like Millicent Gaika, whose pictures are posted on the Avaaz website, stir anger inside me and strengthen my efforts for gender justice. Gaika was bound, raped repeatedly and strangled just so she can be woman who desires men and not women. Perhaps women bleeding from wounds of torture can use pads – not!

My point is that there seems to be a pattern here. In 2009 for example the Anti-Gay Bill was hot in the news in Uganda, where MP David Bahati spent a lot of money pushing for the Bill. But what did South Africa say? Nothing! For a country that drives and takes on a constitution that the western world finds amazingly progressive on same-sex marriage, this is seemingly becoming false and the true prejudices of South Africa are showing through. It makes me sick to realise that the only thing that the President has thought of to empower women so far is to stop the bleeding on the seats of buses and home affairs office benches by providing sanitary pads. Where did that idea come from Mr President?

South Africa has damning crimes against women and lesbians and yet these take a long time for the National Prosecuting Authority to even find time to convict, unlike petty crimes during the World Cup. It feels as though men have been given the ticket to rape women in South Africa. With as little as 4 per cent of speeches that mentioned gender-based violence made by government personnel (according to research on gender-based indicators by Gender Links and the Medical Research Council), it is no surprise that there continues to be open grounds for sexual predators in South Africa. Most of these crimes that violate women and human rights just fade into the next year, when we start the ‘16 Days’ campaign and in time for elections. I imagine a scenario of a woman reporting sexual abuse at the police station. ‘I was raped and beaten last night and I want to open a case, but thankfully the pad stopped the bleeding on my head were my lover hit with a cooking stick. These pads are good for it thanks to President Zuma.’

So the UN Assembly vote by South Africa on the resolution condemning extrajudicial killings on the basis of national, racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic group status has passed and we wait by the abattoir. That goes for anyone else who thinks they do not tick this box – your turn is now, be aware.

With fatigue of funding HIV/AIDS in Africa, I feel that the announcement by the African Union (AU) on the next 10 years being for the African Women is just another jackpot for donors to pour in money to Africa. Why have we not questioned this statement made to include stopping violence against women? What does the African Women’s Decade, mean if most are beaten, raped, killed and murdered for the next 10 years?

The African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) rejected the application by Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL) for Human Rights status. It was demeaning and incomparable, yet it happened. All human rights issues by the way, and yet again we are already planning for the Commission on the Status Women (CSW55) this coming end of February and March 2011, and within that are plans for the 16 days of no violence. What does this mean really? Will we continue chasing our tails here and wait for the free pads whilst we bleed to death on violations that affect women in South Africa? I challenge you President Zuma to take a stand to end violence against women. In return, you can keep the pads for our freedom.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Glenda Muzenda lives in Johannesburg. She was the 2010 Human Rights Advocate at Columbia University NY, USA.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

People of Côte d'Ivoire: Keep lucidity

Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/70612

cc WikimediaThe people of Côte d’Ivoire must be supported in their efforts to bring the country’s political crisis to a peaceful conclusion, while all talk of military intervention must be resisted, writes Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua.

In the political crisis that Côte d'Ivoire goes through, the lucidity of the Ivorian people and African residents has been exemplary. We must support them by texts that focus on the conditions enabling it to continue. We must focus debates on the need for democracy and the obstacles to be overcome to make it an achievable goal and an irreversible process.

Political democratisation in Africa can only be defended by a people in the long term if it is associated with social progress, the development of natural resources of soil and subsoil for national economic development or sub-regional self-reliance, and anti-imperialist Pan-Africanism. Otherwise, the failure is certain. I draw attention to the techniques that Western imperialist powers are now implementing to block the convergence of these three requirements, and keep government at gunpoint by the presence of military bases or creating rebellions.

Why did the US precipitate Liberia, their only African colony, into chaos and London find it useful to extend the chaos in Sierra Leone? We say they were above all intended to force the Americo-Liberians and Anglo-Sierra Leoneans to share power with the natives to broaden the social base of the control over diamond mines and forest reserves. At first his belonging to both groups (native mother and Americo-Liberian father) and his temperament have played for George Taylor. But as during the war he gave the impression of being closer to Félix Houphouët-Boigny and then to France, they decided he would not remain head of state. Notwithstanding his election according to laws and under the supervision of the international community, he was forced to resign against the promise of finding asylum in Nigeria. He is now facing the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In Nigeria, the running imperialist project comes down to this: The country's oil should be exclusively devoted to serving the energy security of the US. In return the ruling classes can waste oil rents as they please and incite people to kill each other on behalf of different ways to worship the same god. A rebellion has been totally made up, keeping remote non-Western and sometimes non-Anglo-Saxon corporations. In this context they can even recognise Nigeria as the regional power, but a giant with feet of clay.

The Sahel, a region that symbolises famine, became an area of strategic natural resources and thus fostered an AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) base whose origin dates back to the Islamic brigades recruited by the US in their fight against a secular government in Afghanistan. Niger and Mali are seen as a testing ground or field simulation of the struggle against governments that attempt to nationalise the mining or oil companies or accept non-Western investment in the exploitation of strategic minerals. In Niger the pretext of a change of constitution was enough to justify a coup which allowed to call the Chinese claims to invest in uranium into question; after that, as part of Franco-American mini-rivalries, Niger has been accused of delivering the uranium ore to Iran.

In Sudan, John Garang, who was yet planning a confederal state and was an ally subordinate to the collective imperialism, was murdered in order to eliminate a ‘friend who knew too much’ and secondly to transform its proposed project into two sovereign states, to house NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) new military bases.

In these circumstances it is understandable that the people of West Africa oppose a military intervention by ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) in Côte d'Ivoire, because they know that the United States and the European Union are in line with the monopolisation of natural resources in West Africa using two complementary strategies, the installation or enhancement of military bases and the introduction of chaos to come as the saviours of people at risk. West Africa needs a regionalisation which supports the efforts of peoples to control their fate.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua is the Third World Forum research director.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Periscoping Nigeria’s NEITI Act 2007

Uche Igwe

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/70613

cc S S SWhile the passing of the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) Act in May 2007 ‘sent very positive signals about Nigeria’s desire to sustain its leadership in the global initiative to the world’, NEITI needs to be subject to a number of new amendments, writes Uche Igwe.

The passage of the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) Act in May 2007 sent very positive signals about Nigeria’s desire to sustain its leadership in the global initiative to the world. The Nigerian oil and gas industry, like in many resource-rich countries, has been largely seen as an avenue to fuel corruption and enrich a privileged, parasitic elite at the expense of ordinary citizens. The blessings that theorists predict will befall a natural resource-rich country have not managed to happen in Nigerian, even after more than 40 years of the flow of petrodollars. The decision of the Nigerian government to implement wide-ranging reforms and openness in payments and receipts, back in 2003, in line with the global multi-stakeholder Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), paved the way to enthrone a more open, transparent extractive (oil, gas and mining) industry and to hold governments accountable for public revenue. Indeed, the comprehensive financial, physical and process audits conducted by NEITI on the Nigerian oil and gas sector between 1999 and 2004 clearly exceeded the global focus of EITI and have been often referred to as EITI plus plus.

The NEITI Act was conceived therefore to insulate the implementation of EITI in Nigeria against the vagaries of policy reversal and political manipulation. This legislation became the first of its kind where EITI implementation was codified in law. Some EITI implementing countries in Africa have borrowed from the Nigerian experience in crafting their respective national laws.

The EITI secretariat, based in Oslo, initiated a quality-assurance mechanism known as validation to ensure that countries that are part of the initiative achieve implementation compliance in line with agreed multi-stakeholder guidelines. It is expected that the Nigerian EITI will soon achieve compliance alongside other African countries like Ghana and Liberia. While validation is an essential milestone, compliance cannot be seen to be the same as transparency or accountability. Beyond validation therefore, it is imperative to take a diagnostic review of the NEITI Act which could review objectives and suggest entry points for strengthening the clauses which may be standing between the Nigerian EITI and effectiveness.

One major concern is the fact that the objectives of the act may be too ambitious and open-ended. For instance, in Section 2(c), the act empowers NEITI to ‘eliminate all forms of corrupt practices in the determination, payments, receipts and postings of revenue accruing to the Federal government from extractive industry companies’. This particular clause gives a very broad range of responsibilities to NEITI. NEITI is designed as a lean bureaucracy and so will be unable to carry out these functions. Furthermore, some of these functions are already being carried out by statutory government agencies such as the Federal Inland Revenue Service, Central Bank of Nigeria and Office of the Accountant General of the Federation. This clause can however be modified to give NEITI a clear coordinating role and bridge-builder to ensure that there is no duplication in terms of the mandate of these agencies, yet NEITI will ensure that the numbers flowing add up.

The fourth objective of NEITI according to the act in Section 2(d) is ‘to ensure transparency and accountability by government in the application of resources from payments derived from the extractive industry companies’. Many complex issues can be deduced from this objective. The unbundling of the word government will mean federal, state and local governments. The federal constitution of Nigeria does not allow a federal government agency such as NEITI to operate beyond the federal level into the state and local government sphere. It is therefore almost impossible for NEITI to implement this objective as it is crafted by the act. There has been a renewed call for state governments to voluntarily adopt the EITI model in the area of expenditure transparency, as has been done by oil-rich Bayelsa State. This will provide entry points for NEITI and work with such states in an innovative manner.

Another interesting clause is Section 3(c), which prescribes a function for NEITI to ensure ‘transparency and accountability in the management of the investment of the Federal Government in all extractive industry companies’. Some experts have argued that this function clearly falls within the scope of the functions currently carried out by the National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS). Currently NAPIMS is a unit of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. It is believed that the functions of NAPIMS will be taken up by one of the regulatory agencies that will be established after the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB). This clause can be modified to specify the role of NEITI to that of ensuring compliance in terms of governance and ensuring that business models are competitive. One way to fast track this is to expedite the cost (value for money audits) that has been on the table of NEITI in the last five years.

Section 3(d) and (e) of the NEITI Act are crafted to accommodate the issue of confidentiality clauses. This is now an anachronism in the oil and gas industry, especially since the passage of Dodd Frank Act. Many extractive industry companies operating in developing countries insist on partial disclosures and argue that complete disclosures may harm proprietary interests. However, such confidentiality clauses no longer apply in line with industry best practice. The retention of these clauses in the NEITI Act is generally seen to make NEITI a toothless bulldog. Such confidentiality clauses should be exercised in line with global industry best practice.

Another obvious weakness in the act is contained in Section 7, which states that ‘a person appointed as a member of NSWG shall hold for four years and no more’. This means that there is a slim chance for transfer of knowledge. During the four-year tenure, it will be expected that board members of NEITI will learn more about EITI and the oil and gas industry. This institutional knowledge will be lost as there will be no chance of reappointing any of them. This will mean that every four to five years, NEITI will witness a change in leadership with may not be in the overall benefit of a new regulatory institution. It is my view that a possible reappointment of performing members of the NEITI board, as well as relevant professionals, reduces the loss of institutional memory and catalyses policy sustainability.

In Section 12, sub-section 1–3, the act outlines the qualifications of the executive secretary of NEITI. This ought to be a very important section, but sadly there is an obvious lack of clarity. The qualifications of the executive secretary of NEITI are outlined as ‘a graduate with relevant qualifications and at least ten years cognate experience’. This could be interpreted to mean many things and could be hijacked by mischief-makers to impose incompetent crones, as has been the case in the past. It is important for the act to clearly qualify the sort of disciplinary affiliation and cognate experience expected of such persons. My candid view is that an economist, accountant or engineer with 10 years’ verifiable experience in the oil and gas industry, integrity and pedigree as well as international exposure will be best suited for such a demanding position as that of the executive secretary of NEITI.

The sanction clause as contained in Section 16 stipulates a fine of 30 million naira for any company that does not comply with the act. For a multi-million dollar industry, this is seen by many as a slap on the wrist. Rather than leave it on a fixed amount, the law must be crafted to allow relating the office to the magnitude of sanction. Furthermore, this will be neutralised by such things as economic inflation as years go by.

As the new National Assembly comes on stream after the elections, the review of the NEITI Act 2007 and suggested amendments must be made to come on the agenda. All the reforms prescribed in the proposed Petroleum Industry Bill are anchored in compliance to the NEITI Act. This act is therefore too important to be left loose. A concrete demonstration of seriousness with extractive industry reforms in Nigeria will be to carry on the discussions on the PIB alongside the review of the NEITI Act to ensure congruence. The multi-stakeholder process of NEITI means that civil society groups have an important role to lead constructive advocacy in this direction. Our prosperity as a nation depends on it, at least for now.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Uche Igwe is a visiting scholar at the Africa Program, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

If African politics was this…

Sanya Osha

2011-02-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/70587

cc Z MAfrica has a wealth of leadership outside of state politics. Sanya Osha gives some examples.

In spite of the fact that many African communities suffer disappointment in the political field, the continent still boasts many inspiring political events and personalities that bring much hope. These achievements often occur away from the mainstream politics and political governance that dominates African lives.

Many African political theorists such as Peter Ekeh and Mahmood Mamdani have demonstrated that the African public sphere has a bifurcated structure as a result of the intrusions of colonialism and modernity on African territories. As a result, the state and modern forms of governance are usually perceived to be distant, abstract and unapproachable. Politics usually has meaning when political leaders are able to communicate with their constituencies on a direct basis.

It appears that Africans still view the modern structure of the state from an abstract perspective. It is common to hear people say, ‘the government did that, the government plans to do this, the government has withdrawn such and such a regulation or law’, as if they are not themselves part of the government.

In spite of the growing democratisation of the African continent, the common democratic adage, ‘rule of the people, by the people for the people’ immediately loses meaning and force once governance is associated with the state. Perhaps for a few more generations, this state of affairs will continue. Forms of formal governance will as a result continue to be distant.

Political leaders in Africa seem to be successful when people can touch and feel them. There are many examples to support this view. Thabo Mbeki is technically a better manager of the state than Jacob Zuma, but the latter is a more powerful leader because he is able to form a direct bond with the South African people.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was able to articulate a form of politics outside the confines of state structures by focusing on a set of important as well as impressive issues: environmental consciousness, resource allocation and control, advocacy of democracy, cultural and linguistic empowerment, equitable federalisation and so on. He was able to mobilise his Ogoni people around these issues and succeeded in staging a rally during the beginning of the Ogoni protest movement that ensured that 500,000 people were involved without a single violent incident. This proved that people believed in him. Everyone could see he was trying to improve social justice and it was also clear that he was fighting for democracy even if the Nigerian polity was held captive in the clutches of a dictator, General Sani Abacha. At the end of the day, he was hanged and the entire continent of Africa has been the poorer as a result of his death.

It isn’t always that a popular and just leader such as Ken Saro-Wiwa operates outside the ambit of the state. Nelson Mandela is one of the more obvious examples. Mandela spent 27 years in jail for his anti-apartheid stance, but was still able to make the difficult transition from a liberation struggle leader to the manager of a modern state. His late compatriot, Steve Biko, was equally popular as a leader of people until he was murdered by the apartheid state, thereby further impoverishing South African society.

Thomas Sankara, in spite of being a military officer, was able to galvanise the aspirations of the common people of Burkina Faso. He touched a chord within the populace that mobilised all and sundry along the path of collective unity.

My point ought to be clear by now: we should not always look within the structures of the state to identify who are true leaders, since we rarely find them there. They are everywhere within our numerous communities. They build schools and orphanages for our communities from private means, they provide spiritual succour at our churches and mosques, they fill up the potholes on our roads, they provide shelter out of their own resources to homeless people. They toil away daily with little reward and recognition and are not given their due because they do not wield the powers of the state. Yet they are often able to touch and transform lives in a powerful way.

Our leaders don’t always have to be associated with the state; they also don’t have to have the technologies of domination that come with state power. They could be humble fillers of the potholes on our streets who do this in their private time and with their own resources. They could be as famous as Nelson Mandela and Ken Saro-Wiwa. They may work for many causes or only a few. The causes we all need are self-evident: good governance, selflessness, public accountability, probity, sustainability of our ecosystems and so on. There are many faceless individuals and groups that toil away daily for these and other causes. Nonetheless, we know them when they appear because they transform our lives in deep and lasting ways. Therefore we should give such figures our full and undivided support. Governance shouldn’t always be associated with the state and perceived as an abstract activity. Indeed, governance is essentially about people and not structures and this may yet remain so in Africa for many generations.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Sanya Osha is the author of ‘Kwasi Wiredu and Beyond’ and ‘Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow’. His latest book is ‘Naked Light and the Blind Eye’.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

AU Chairman Obiang must uphold AU principles in Equatorial Guinea

Press Release

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70614

The African Union’s decision to appoint Teodoro Obiang, the long-serving president of Equatorial Guinea, as its next chairperson places pressure on his government to fulfill its obligations to the African Union and other multilateral organisations regarding democracy, human rights, social justice, and corruption, EG Justice has said.

‘By the end of Mr. Obiang’s one year Chairmanship, we expect to see marked improvement in the Equatoguinean government’s application of the fundamental principles of the African Union,’ said Tutu Alicante, executive director of EG Justice. ‘If governed with respect for human freedoms, Equatorial Guinea could become a beacon of hope and an engine of growth for the entire African continent. In this way, Mr. Obiang would demonstrate his commitment to the African Union’s vision of peace, prosperity, and stability.’

Five key African Union principles remain unmet in Equatorial Guinea: fostering democracy, rule of law, and basic freedoms, promoting human rights, increasing investment in health and education, combating corruption, and protecting women’s rights. As Mr. Obiang prepares to take over leadership at the African Union, his government must demonstrate its commitment to the African Union and its principles by devoting the political will and resources necessary to ensure their application in Equatorial Guinea.
To guarantee press freedom and democracy, civil society organisations must be allowed to operate without interference and the government must allow journalists to freely distribute information. The government should investigate and prosecute all cases of torture and allow international organisations to aid in these efforts as a concrete step forward in the promotion of human rights in Equatorial Guinea.

Further, by increasing the amount of government expenditures for health and education, the government could fulfill its international commitments to expanding the social and economic rights of its citizens.

Effectively combating corruption requires the government to open its books, publish information on revenues and budgets, and ratify the African Union’s convention that aims to unite African countries in their struggle to eliminate the scourge of corruption. The government should also ratify the African Union’s protocols that promote women’s rights, and provide scholarships that are targeted specifically at promoting women’s education.
Through these concrete steps, the Equatoguinean government can fulfill its obligations and commitments to the African Union and international law.

Fostering Democracy, Rule of Law, and Basic Freedoms

AU Principle:

The Constitutive Act of the African Union mandates that African nations must ‘consolidate democratic institutions and foster a culture of democracy and ensure good governance and the rule of law.’ Additionally, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights requires that governments grant each individual ‘the right to receive information’ and ‘the right to express and disseminate his opinions within the law’.

The Reality: Equatoguinean elections are routinely marred by widespread irregularities, with Mr. Obiang and his ruling party consistently winning more than 95 per cent of the vote. Freedom House gives Equatorial Guinea its lowest possible score for civil liberties and political rights, placing it alongside countries like Burma and North Korea. The only widely distributed local media outlets are owned by Mr. Obiang and his son Teodoro Nguema, and journalists are routinely censored and harassed.

Recommendations:

- Enact a Freedom of Information Law to grant access to and protect the dissemination of information.
- Eliminate restrictive press permit requirements that impede local and international journalists from reporting on news inside Equatorial Guinea.
- Eliminate all internal police roadblocks to protect the right of all Equatoguineans to travel freely within the country.
- Rescind all laws and cease police actions that restrict the abilities of Equatoguineans to form labour unions and civil society organisations and to hold meetings without government monitoring.

Promoting Human Rights

AU Principle:

The Constitutive Act of the African Union calls on all nations to ‘promote and protect human and peoples’ rights.’ The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights prohibits ‘torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment and treatment’, as well as arbitrary arrest and detention.

The Reality: The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment stated in January 2010 that torture, discrimination, and inhuman conditions are prevalent in Equatorial Guinea’s prisons. In 2010, the Equatoguinean government abducted, tortured, and executed four Equatoguinean refugees that had been living in Benin.

Recommendations:

- Cease the use of torture and fully investigate and prosecute any future cases of torture by agents of the government.
- Allow national and international human rights organisations unrestricted access to all detention facilities.
- Produce a comprehensive, publicly available registry of prisoners.

Investing in Health and Education

AU Principle:

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights stipulates that states must ‘take the necessary measures to protect the health of their people’. In addition, the Equatoguinean government agreed to implement several of the recommendations of the Universal Periodic Review pertaining to health and education, including increasing its investment in these two critical areas.

The Reality: Most citizens still lack access to affordable, quality health care. Similarly, more than half of Equatoguineans lack access to adequate sanitation facilities and potable drinking water. Education faces similar challenges: according to the government’s own studies, less than half of first and second grade students have access to the textbooks used in their classes and the primary school repetition rate more than doubled between 1999 and 2007.

Recommendations:

- Increase government spending as a percentage of total government expenditure to the average spending rates for all African countries (9.6 per cent and 17.5 per cent for health and education respectively).
- Allocate the resources necessary to ensure 100 per cent access to primary and secondary school for all Equatoguinean children.
- Allocate sufficient resources and take all necessary measures to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary schools.
- Ensure that quality health care is promptly available and affordable to all Equatoguineans.

Combating Corruption

AU Principle:

The African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption requires governments to establish ‘the necessary conditions to foster transparency and accountability in the management of public affairs’, and to create an enabling environment that will allow civil society and the media to hold the government to the ‘highest levels of transparency and accountability’.

The Reality: Equatorial Guinea has not yet ratified the Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption. Corruption remains a deeply institutionalised practice in Equatorial Guinea. Transparency International ranked Equatorial Guinea168 out of 178 countries in its 2010 Corruption Perception Index. President Obiang and persons closely affiliated with him have been the subjects of several recent or ongoing criminal and regulatory investigations in the United States, France, and Spain, as well as a case before the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, suggesting a pattern of suspected money-laundering and other apparent acts of corruption. Lastly, the Equatoguinean government failed to fulfill the validation requirements of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and was delisted in April 2010.

Recommendations:

- Conduct annual audits of government bank accounts, including identifying the sizes and locations of foreign accounts, and make the results public and accessible online.
- Publish national and local government budgets and make these documents available online as well as in hard copy at the Parliament and municipal buildings in order to improve transparency and accountability in the use of public funds.
- Take the necessary steps to rejoin the EITI, including reforming the legal framework, in order to guarantee greater civil society autonomy and participation.
- Ratify the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption.

Protecting Women’s Rights

AU Principle:

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights requires that all states ‘ensure the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and…ensure the protection of the rights of the woman… as stipulated in international declarations and conventions.’

The Reality: The Equatoguinean government has failed to ratify the Optional Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Additionally, Equatoguinean women continue to have less access to education, work, and political positions.

Recommendations:

- Ratify the Optional Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa.
- Ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
- Enact a law and allocate resources for compulsory primary and secondary education and to ensure access to reproductive healthcare for all Equatoguinean women.
- Enact laws - including gender quotas - and allocate resources to increase women’s economic and political participation.
- Enforce existing regulations that forbid domestic violence against women.

For more information, please contact: Tutu Alicante (English, French, Spanish): + 1 615 479 0207 (U.S. mobile), or tutu@egjustice.org

About EG Justice: EG Justice is the only international non-governmental organisation solely dedicated to promoting human rights, the rule of law, transparency, and civil society participation in Equatorial Guinea. We work with Equatoguineans inside and abroad to push for reform and to build a just and transparent Equatorial Guinea. By working with local and international partners to engage in rigorous research and analysis, conduct international advocacy, and convene roundtable discussions on the most salient issues affecting Equatorial Guinea, we help build a new Equatorial Guinea. To learn more, visit www.egjustice.org

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

How global allies should respond to the murder of David Kato

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70668

How global allies should respond to the murder of David Kato

29 January 2011

Our dear friend and colleague, David Kato, was brutally murdered on Wednesday, 26 January 2011. David was the advocacy officer of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) and a longtime leading activist for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights.



The condolences and offers of support from the global community have been tremendous. On behalf of David’s family, colleagues and friends, we thank all of you. We fully understand that many of you are full of sadness and anger and would like to take action on David’s behalf. However, we believe that first and foremost Ugandan civil society must be respected in leading and coordinating events and actions over the coming weeks and months. We also believe that it is crucial that we as Ugandans are able to document the national and international response to David’s brutal murder, which requires your regular communication with us. 



WHAT ACTION TO TAKE:



· Send letters urging the Government of Uganda (contact information below) to take the following steps:


- Publicly condemn David's murder.

- Carry out a full and fair investigation into David’s murder.
- Prosecute the perpetrator(s) to the fullest extent of the law. 

- Investigate David’s hacked email account in the days preceding his death.

- Assume that, until proven otherwise, David’s death was motivated by homophobia and not routine or arbitrary violence.

- Communicate frequently with LGBT leaders throughout the investigation into David’s murder.
- Ensure that members of Uganda’s LGBT community have adequate protection from violence.

- Take prompt action against all threats or hate speech likely to incite violence, discrimination or hostility toward LGBT Ugandans.

- Eliminate any possibility of consideration or passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.


· Contact your own governmental authorities and urge them to communicate these concerns to the Ugandan authorities in direct and private advocacy.


· Continue to expose and denounce US conservative evangelicals spreading homophobia in Uganda


· Organize respectful and non-violent vigils at the Ugandan embassy or consulate in your country.


HOW TO TAKE ACTION:



· Inform SMUG of all action you take around David’s murder, So that we can monitor all developments. Send copies of your press releases, statements, audio/video recordings of vigils, pictures, and action plans on this subject to SMUG email : justicefordavidkato@gmail.com




· Ensure that you do not spread misinformation. A highly political and delicate investigation is underway in a dangerous environment in Uganda, and therefore misinformation could be seriously damaging. We call for respectful responses towards David Kato’s murder and not to use this tragic incident for fund raising campaigns.

We thank and encourage everyone who has supported SMUG’s work to continue with us in the fight for LGBT rights.



CONTACT INFORMATION FOR THE UGANDAN GOVERNMENT:



President of The Republic of Uganda H.E Yoweri Museveni
Parliament Building
PO Box 7168
Kampala, Uganda

Email: info@govexecutive.net

Fax: + 256 414 346 102

Salutation: Your Excellency



Inspector General of Police
Major Kale Kayihura

Police Headquarters

PO Box 7055
Kampala, Uganda

Fax: + 256 414 255 630

Salutation: Dear Major



Minister of Justice Hon. Makubuya Kiddu
Parliament Building

PO Box 7183
Kampala, Uganda

Email: info@justice.go.ug

Fax: + 256 414 234 453
Salutation: Dear Minister




SMUG Contacts:



Frank Mugisha: +1 646 436 1858; fmugisha@sexualminoritiesuganda.org

Val Kalende: +1 857-247-1184; kalendenator@ gmail.com



Pepe Julian: +256 772 370 674; jpepe@sexualminoritiesuganda.org




International community must ensure rights of Egyptians are upheld

Urgent appeal from International Civil Society

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70662

1 February, 2011

We, civil society organizations from across the world, strongly urge all governments, as well as regional and international organizations, to clearly and unequivocally denounce the ongoing violent crackdown against the public protests and demands for democratic reform and government accountability that have been occurring across Egypt since the 25th of January.

The Egyptian government has responded to protests with excessive force. This has included wide-spread use of beatings, arbitrary detentions and the use of rubber bullets and allegedly live ammunition against unarmed civilians, resulting in over a hundred deaths. Moreover, a state imposed black-out on national cell phone services, the internet and independent media channels was put in place on the 28th of January, making it very difficult for Egyptians to report any abuses occurring. On that same day the Egyptian government began to deploy military forces in supplement of internal security forces.

With the strong risk that repression, violence and instability in Egypt could escalate to unprecedented levels in the coming days, it is critical that individual governments from all regions of the world urgently exert strong and concerted pressure on the Egyptian government to curb human rights abuses.

We call on the United Nations, its Member States and regional bodies to condemn the serious and widespread human rights violations carried out by the Egyptian authorities against civilians throughout the country. The international community must remind the Egyptian government of its international human rights obligations, urge it to fully respect the rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of movement and freedom of expression, and support the demands of the Egyptian people for the holding of free and fair elections and the ending of the decades long State of Emergency law which has been used to enforce authoritarian rule.

SIGNATORIES:
Action for People's Democracy (Thailand)
The African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (ACDHRS)
The Africa Democracy Forum (ADF)
Ain O Salish Kendra (Bangladesh)
Aitzaz Ahsan and Associates, Advocates and Attorneys(Pakistan)
Alkarama Foundation (Switzerland)
Angikar Bangladesh Foundation (Bangladesh)
Article 19
Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization
Asian Citizen’s Center for Environment and Health-South Korea (ACCEH)
Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD), the Philippines
Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)
The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC)
Asia Monitor Resource Centre- Hong Kong (AMRC)
Bangladesh Occupational Safety, Health and Environment Foundation (OSHE)
Bahrain Centre for Human Rights
The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS)
Cambodian Center for Human Rights
Centre for Independent Journalism (Malaysia)
Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales- CELS (Argentina)
Center for Health and Social Change- South Korea (CHSC)
Centre for Legal Awareness and Support (India)
Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR), the Philippines
CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation
The Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR)
Collectif des Familles des Desparus en Algerie
Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)
Committee to Support Imprisoned Workers (South Korea)
Community Legal Aid Institute, (Indonesia)
Community Resource Centre- Thailand (CRC)
Conectas Direitos Humanos (Brazil)
DAGA Center for JustPeace in Asia (Thailand)
Damascus Centre for Human Rights
Democracy Coalition Project (DCP)
Democratic Workers' Solidarity (South Korea)
The East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project (EHAHRP)
Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research, Inc.- Philippines (EILER)
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EURMED)
Federation of Independent Trade Union- Indonesia (GSBI)
Franciscans International (Switzerland)
Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT)
Friends of Women (Malaysia)
Human Rights Agenda (Nigeria)
Human Rights First (USA)
Human Rights Watch (HRW)
Imagination for International Solidarity- South Korea (IFIS)
Information & Culture Nuri for Disabled Koreans (South Korea)
International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF)
International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
Jagaran Media Center- Nepal (JMC)
Janasansadaya (Sri Lanka)
Japan Occupational Safety and Health Resource Center
JINBONET (South Korea)
Justice for Peace Foundation (Thailand)
Korea Center for United Nations Human Rights Policy- South Korea (KOCUN)
Korean Federation of Medical Groups for Health Rights- South Korea (KFHR)
Korean House for International Solidarity- South Korea (KHIS)
Lawyers for Liberty (Malaysia)
The Lebanese Center for Human Rights (CLDH)
Maldives Democracy Network (Maldives)
MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society (South Korea)
Muntada - Arab Forum for Sexuality Education and Health (Palestine)
Network of Accessible Environments for All (South Korea)
Open Society Foundations
The Other Media (India)
Palestine Peace Solidarity of South Korea (South Korea)
Partnership for Justice (Nigeria)
People's Health Movement (USA)
Peoples Training & Research Centre (India)
Persatuan Kesedaran Komuniti Selangor (Malaysia)
PILIPINA Legal Resources Center (Philippines)
RightOnCanada.ca
River, indigenous people and human rights watch Arunachal (India)
Sisters' Arab Forum for Human Rights (Yemen)
Sisters in Islam (Malaysia)
Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination- South Korea (SADD)
Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea (South Korea)
Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM)
Thai Labour Campaign
Triumph International Thailand Labour Union (TITLU)
Try Arm Underwear - Self-Managed Worker Cooperative (Thailand)
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
U.S. Campaign for Burma
Vikash (India)
VISION (Pakistan)
Western African Human Rights Defenders Network (WAHRDN)
Women's Aid Organization (Malaysia)
Women for Women’s Human Rights – New Ways (Turkey)
The World Organization Against Torture (OMCT)
World Student Christian Federation Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
The World Without War (South Korea)
Zi Teng (Hong Kong)

Solidarity with the people of Egypt! Equality for LGBTI people in Africa!

The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70658

The statement can also be found at www.equality.org.za

Solidarity with the people of Egypt! Democracy for all! Justice for David Kato! Equality for LGBTI people in Africa!

In a recent protest in Cairo, protestors chanted “Leave, leave, Mubarak. Tel Aviv is waiting for you. We've had enough. They've raised the price of sugar and oil. They've wrecked our homes. Raise your voice, people of Egypt.”

This Friday, COSATU, with people from organisations and groups around Gauteng will protest outside the Egyptian embassy in Tshwane to raise their voices in support of the demands of the Egyptian people: Bread, Jobs, Education, Dignity, Democracy, Freedom of Expression.

In the same week that the protests in Egypt began, in Uganda openly gay human rights activist David Kato was killed. The killing of Kato and persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people on our continent is an attack on democracy, equality and human rights for all. Struggles for justice and human rights are not complete without addressing state-sponsored homophobia and persecution of LGBTI people.


The speakers on the programme will give voice to and celebrate the plurality of South African society whilst simultaneously showing their support for the people of Egypt and send a clear message to the Egyptian despot, Mubarak, to get out! It is also essential that when raising our voices in support of justice at Friday’s protest that COSATU and all those present call for justice for David Kato. We must insist that state sponsored homophobia is challenged and that a full investigation be carried out into the death of Kato.

Furthermore the violence and oppression against all people in Egypt cannot and must not be separated from the ongoing homophobic stances taken by Egypt at the African Union (AU) and other multilateral fora. It is thus both symbolic and material that an end to the Mubarak regime and the oppression it promotes should also be a call for an end to Egyptian state homophobia.
We acknowledge that while Mubarak has become the central figure of people’s rage, that it is what he represents that is the core issue. Unemployment, police harassment, state-sponsored violence are all central to people’s anger. The United States’ unwavering support of the Mubarak regime (it receives the second greatest amount of aid after Israel) has maintained and promoted a situation of violence against people. Egypt as a crony to the United States and the resultant violent neo-liberalism and unquestioning support of Israel and its human rights abuses should not be left unchallenged.
The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project will be part of this protest and strongly believes that In the same way that millions of ordinary South Africans took to the streets to demand an end to racism, violence and sexism and who fought to restore the inalienable right to live with dignity, food, jobs, education and democracy for all citizens; so do the Egyptian people today.

We know that our struggles in South Africa persist but we also know that the struggles of people in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Jordan against hunger, unemployment, homophobia, corruption, police harassment are also our struggles today. We acknowledge that both oppression and resistance are interconnected and thus call for an end to all inequality including homophobia.

Join workers and people of Egypt and South Africa. Show your support.


Friday, February 4th, 14:30
Egyptian Embassy
270 Bourke Street, Muckleneuk, Pretoria
Call: 011 339 4911

South Africa: Demo in support of Egyptians

Cosatu

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70661

Where: Embassy of Egypt, 270 Bourke Street, Muckelneuk, Pretoria
When: 14:30, Friday, 4 February 2011

The heroic masses of Egypt have risen up against the decades-old corrupt dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Taking inspiration from the intifada in Tunisia, Egyptian protesters are demanding: Bread, Jobs and Dignity! They are calling for an end to corruption and unemployment. These demands resonate with us and we support them. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are on the streets defying a curfew. A general strike has been called and a million people are expected on the streets of Egypt tomorrow.

Dictators in their palaces and the capitalists in the boardrooms are trembling. They are afraid of this exemplary lesson of People's Power and the influence it will have throughout the world. This is not only an Arab revolution: This is a revolution for all of humanity.

The anger of the people is also directed at the support successive United States administrations have given to shore up dictators like Mubarak in the region and their collaboration with Israel and Israeli occupation. Mubarak's role as a vital strategic partner in the Israel-US-Egyptian axis also facilitates the illegal siege of Gaza by closing the borders between Egypt/Palestine and thus sealing the 1.5 million Gazans into the world's largest open air prison-denying essential access to medical treatment, education, food, water and the tools to rebuild a society completely broken down by Apartheid Israel's violent and racist ethnic cleansing campaign.

As South Africans watch the unfolding events in the north of our continent, it reminds us too of our own uprisings: Sharpeville, Soweto, Langa... and spurs us on to express our solidarity.

Legions of commentators and politicians have declared that mass democratic action is a relic of the past, but events unfolding in Tunisia and Egypt have proved them all wrong. Making shoddy unmandated compromises behind closed doors, as the recent ‘Palestine Papers’ have shown, has wholly discredited the US, Israel, their fixers like Tony Blair and puppets like Mubarak. Instead, mass democratic action is bringing about real change not foreign intervention nor Al-Quida. Mass democratic action can move mountains!

Over the next weeks, a number of activities will be held in solidarity with these struggles throughout South Africa. These activities will kick off with a demonstration outside the Egyptian embassy in Pretoria, with South Africans repeating the calls of our Egyptian comrades: “Bread! Jobs! Education! Dignity! Democracy! Freedom of Expression!

For more information, call:
Samantha Hargreaves – 083 384 0088
Steve Faulkner – 082 817 5455
Melissa Hoole – 084 574 2674
Salim Vally – 082 8025936

Map Link

Please pass on – send sms’, emails to everyone you know. Highlight the
situation and inform others of Friday’s demonstration. Please help us
raise funds for transport to the demonstration. Any and all donations
will be greatly appreciated.

Statement on developments in the Middle East

PEN International

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70652

31 January, 2011—In the wake of the welcome and peaceful move towards democracy in Tunisia , PEN International notes with great concern the violent response to antigovernment protests elsewhere in the region, notably Egypt , but also in Yemen and Syria .

“PEN International warmly welcomes the democratic developments in Tunisia ,” said John Ralston Saul, President of PEN International. “However, we are alarmed by the trampling on the rights of citizens to transparency, information, knowledge and freedom of assembly elsewhere, most recently in Egypt over the past several days.”

PEN welcomes in particular the release of all Tunisian journalists, bloggers and other political prisoners, following the protests which ended 23 years of President Ben Ali's rule. It also welcomes the lifting of many restrictions previously imposed on freedom of expression. PEN hopes for a full recognition of free speech and the right to assembly in Tunisia .

In Egypt , scores have been arrested in the crackdown on peaceful protesters calling for democratic reform since 25 January 2011, including several journalists. At least ten journalists covering the demonstrations have been attacked, tight restrictions have been imposed on freedom of assembly, and there has been widespread disruption to internet and mobile-phone connections. Egyptian authorities have also shut down the websites of two popular independent newspapers, Al-Dustour and El-Badil, and a number of social media sites. On 30 January 2011, Egypt shut down the Al Jazeera bureau in Cairo .

In Yemen , tens of thousands of peaceful opposition activists have also taken to the streets demanding democratic and social changes. In Syria , the authorities have blocked Facebook and other social network providers including mobile message facilities (SMS) in an attempt to suppress antigovernment protests. There are fears that opposition activists, writers and journalists in both these countries are at increased risk of arrest.

“The worldwide community of PEN reiterates our solidarity with our colleagues as they seek democracy and practice their fundamental rights to speak, write and join their fellow citizens in peaceful protest,” said Mr. Saul.

PEN International urges the authorities in Egypt , Tunisia and Yemen to refrain from using violence to respond to peaceful protests, and reminds these governments of their commitments to freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

* This statement was submitted by Khainga O'Okwemba of the Kenyan Chapter of International PEN.

Sudan: Protests spark 113 arrests and one death

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70649

(1 February 2011) Demonstrations organised by the “Youth of 30 January for Change Alliance”, a coalition of members of student movements such as Girifna, Nahoa Alshari, and Aid ala Aid and supported by the National Consensus Forces, a group of mainstream opposition groups, mobilised thousands of activists through social networking in Khartoum, El Obeid, Wad Medani and Kosti. The demonstrations called for President Omar al-Bashir to abdicate power, and for the National Congress Party (NCP) to rescind austerity measures imposed to combat the economic effects of Southern secession. The unrest that sparked Egypt and Tunisia’s popular uprisings was channeled into the protests in Sudan, where Facebook invitations through the group Youth for Change stated “it is the right time to rise against oppression and despair…if the Egyptians and Tunisians can break the fear barrier, so can we. What are we waiting for? Our history says we can!”

The demonstrations in Sudan’s North occurred at an extremely politically sensitive time. The Southern Sudan Referendum Commission announced their first official preliminary tabulation of votes on Sunday with a 98.85% vote for secession. Though the results were to be expected and were not an official declaration of independence, police and the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) were already on high alert. Since the referendum voting, sporadic protests on rising prices against commodities have been met with intense backlash, and organisation of the political opposition and calls for a constitutional conference have led to repressive tactics reminiscent of the NCP’s early days in power.

Despite the challenges, the demonstrations mark the first time that the opposition has publicly supported the youth movement in Sudan. It is also unusual for activists to so brazenly demand an end to NCP hegemony. More demonstrations have been organised, with the next scheduled for 3 February. In the face of hundreds of armed riot police, thousands of protestors chanted “revolution, revolution until victory”, and “we are ready to die for Sudan”. Below is a brief synopsis of the protests and names of those detained, injured, tortured, and currently being held incommunicado.

• In Omdurman at 10:30 AM, joint NISS and police forces attacked demonstrators at Omdurman Islamic University and Omdurman Al Ahlia University with black water pipes, sticks, and tear gas. Thirty eight students were arrested and referred to the Abo Said Police Station in Elfitihab area, where they were charged with rioting. The police released the group on bail after they provided their addresses.

• In Khartoum at 11 AM, youth gathered at meeting points at Midan Jackson, Sharia Algasr, and Al Meridan. They were attacked by joint NISS/police forces with water pipes and sticks. Journalists were targeted, and nine were arrested and referred to security offices near the Army High Commander in Khartoum. Photos from the demonstrations were deleted. The names of those arrested are:
o Hamza Albalul, Alahdath
o Rashid Abdulhab, Ajras Alhurria
o Ali Haj Alamin, Ajras Alhurria
o Sara Taj Alsir, Al Sahafa
o Ahmed Sir Alkhatim, Akhbar Alyoum
o Mohamed Marzouh, cameraman, Alakhbar
o Mohamed Aamir, cameraman, Alakhlas
o Fatima Alkhzali, Al Gerida
o Anas Abdurrahman, freelance journalist

Joint forces also arrested forty protestors, who were taken to the Al Shemali Police Station in Khartoum. Thirty of the detainees were released on bail, and ten remain in custody. Police officials have refused to release the names of the detainees. A full list of those released on bail is available from the African Centre. Those released reported that six female detainees were transferred to security offices near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Army High Commander in Khartoum. Some protestors were seriously injured in Khartoum by police wielding tear gas, water pipes, and sticks. They are:

1. Mahmoud Ali Alumdaa
2. Mustafa Mohamed Ali
3. Abdelrahman Ahmed Alhassan
4. Mohamed Abdelrahman
5. Ahmed Ali
6. Mustafa Mohamed Ali

• Mohamed Abdelrahman, a student at Omdurman Islamic University, was shot and killed by joint police and NISS forces when he joined demonstrations at Omdurman University. He died later that evening at Omdurman hospital. Messages on the Facebook wall for “Youth for Change” have proclaimed him as the first martyr of the revolution.
• At Khartoum University’s Student Shmbat complex, peaceful demonstrations were disrupted by the NISS, who attacked and arrested a number of students. Three of the names known are:

o Hadim Alzhari
o Mohamed Ahmed
o Albaid Abaquir

• At 4:30 PM, the NISS arrested Nasr Mahmoud Nasr, age 55, a member of the Umma Party and Trade Union organiser, from his home. Walid Alhidaia and Thuria Habib were also arrested from their homes in Khartoum.

For its part, the Police Media Office made a statement addressing the number of detainees, claiming that 70 people had been arrested, 40 of whom were students released on bail. Permits are requested for demonstrations, which are often denied. A spokesperson stated that the police did not use force excessive to what was “necessary”.

Initial monitoring by the African Centre indicates that the number of detainees is much higher than the number cited by police, and some of the demonstrators have been transferred to NISS custodies in Khartoum and Khartoum Bahri. Though not an exhaustive list, those known to still be detained are:

1. Yousef Mubark Alfadil
2. Slah Mubark Alfadil
3. Dr. Hussam Malik
4. Bshir Hussain
5. Louis Awil Weriak (a Southerner, he has reportedly been tortured and is currently being held incommunicado and separate from other members of the group. Mr. Weriak is a member of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Khartoum)
6. Zinab Badraldeen
7. Ahmed
8. Slah Almubark
9. Rshad Ahmed
10. Mohamed Banaga
11. Musab Zain Alabdeen
12. Mutaz Mohamed
13. Ashraf Aiz Aldeen
14. Ahmed Fuaad
15. Mohamed Alhider
16. Muntasir zain Alabdeen
17. Omar Abdlbagi
18. Smah Mohamed Adam
19. Sidig Abdlgbar
20. Rashid Mohamed Abdalla
21. Ruaa Ahmed Osman
22. Mohamed Awad
23. Ahmed Babikir
24. Dina
25. Smah Bushra
26. Sara Taj Alsir
27. Samir Hassan
28. Marwa Alfaki
29. Rawa Salah
30. Thruat Swar Aldahab (tortured in police custody)
31. Abdalla Alaidrous
32. Amina Alsid
33. Suhaib Abbas
34. Mrwa Alriah
35. Mahir Hussein Alfil
36. Mohamed Wada
37. Ahmed Batik Mohamed Ali
38. Abdlaziz Kabala
39. Nasir Aldeen Yousef
40. Mohamed Alasir
41. Nuhan Alnagar
42. Nafisa Alnour Hajar, lawyer
43. Mohamed Adil

Similar protests occurred on 30 January in El Obeid Market in El Obeid, North Kordofan. Many people joined the demonstrations before the NISS and NCP-affiliated militias arrested a number of protestors from Kordofan University, Quaran Al Karim University, and El Obeid technical faculty, including Abeer Ahmed.

The following day, 31 January, solidarity demonstrations were organised in Kosti, Central Sudan, at Al Imam Al Mahdi University. Students of the Engineering Faculty staged a sit in, and refused to attend classes. Police and NCP affiliated students broke into the building and attacked the students. Five students escaped and went to demonstrate in the market. Three police lorries followed them, and beat them in the middle of the market. Shoppers prevented police from arresting three members of the group, including Ahmed Salih. Two members of the group were arrested, and police refused to give information on their names and condition. Monitoring indicates that the names of those in police custody are:

o Mohsin Abdelgadir, teacher and frequent contributor to SudaneseOnline
o Basil Mohsim, student

• On 31 January at 4:15, the NISS arrested student members of the National Alliance on Al Morda Street in Omdurman. They were taken to the NISS Political Affairs office in Khartoum Bahri, where they were forced to stand against a wall and beaten with water pipes and sticks until 9 PM. They were denied access to food, water, and toilets. They remain in NISS custody in Khartoum Bahri. The names of the detainees are:

o Mohamed Abdelrahman (NISS officers beating him taunted him, saying “are you the one who died?”, as his name is the same as the student killed at Omdurman University)
o Abdulla Mathi
o Rashid Abo Hassan
o Ahmed El Tijani
o Gahmat Mohamed Osman

Severe censorship on news publications and internet media were also instilled in an effort by the NISS to prevent information on the demonstrations and subsequent crackdowns from being widely distributed.

On 31 January, the NISS prevented Ajras Alhurria and Al Sahafa from being published. Though the NISS had visited the printing house the evening of the 30 January and approved the Ajras Alhurria edition to be printed the following day, they were prevented from distributing copies in the morning. Al Sahafa’s offices were visited the morning of the 31 January. The website Sudaneseonline, a news and forum site where many of the announcements were posted, has been blocked since Sunday, as has the website tinyurl.com, used to shorten links for Twitter. Twitter is not as frequently used as Facebook, so it remains unclear if the blockage was due to the events in Egypt or directly related to Sudanese events.

Opposition groups have launched a scathing criticism of the arrests, blaming the NCP for Southern secession, and worsening economic conditions. A leading member of the National Consensus Forces, Mubarak al-Fadir al-Mahdi, demanded Bashir’s immediate resignation and that the NCP make arrangements for a transitional government to counter further disintegration. Nafie Ali Nafie, the presidential assistant, stated that the demonstrations were a failed attempt by the opposition, while the pro-government Sudan Vision wrote that “our message to those opposition dinosaurs is to unite their ideas and objectives for the benefit of the citizens if they are really looking for the welfare of the Sudanese people”. In fact, the opposition has only grown stronger and more unified in recent months. The National Consensus Forces have agreed to only negotiate multilaterally with the NCP.

The incidents of 30 and 31 January indicate the seriousness of Sudan’s youth and student movements to challenge the repressive nature of the ruling regime and their lack of access to fundamental civil and political freedoms such as the freedom of expression and assembly, as well as access to information and justice. The freedom of expression, assembly, and association is guaranteed under Article 39 of the Interim National Constitution. These same rights are also in alignment with international standards under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

All of these incidents indicate that the NCP plans to curtail the small space open for political freedoms during the interim period, and refuse to engage in a dialogue with the opposition for a new constitutional arrangement. President Bashir’s implicit referral on 19 December in El Gedarif to the NCP’s tactics of its early days in power of managing political unrest by repression appears to have come to pass. The African Centre is extremely worried that the little respect left towards human rights and democratic pluralism and cultural diversity will recede at the end of the interim period, threatening the very existence of the North of the country. In a memorandum issued on the eve of the protests, the National Consensus Forces promised that if the NCP continues to avoid calls for dialogue on the future of the North, the National Consensus Forces will “dedicate themselves to tried and tested methods of civil political action to mobilize popular support behind demands to bring about change in government structure and policy”.

Contact: Osman Hummaida, Executive Director
Phone: +44 7956 095738
E-mail: osman@acjps.org

Civil and political rights are critical to the interim period, which despite being in its last hours is a unique opportunity for the NCP and Northern opposition groups to define themselves. Yesterday’s events (and other incidents monitored by the Centre) illustrate that these ongoing rights violations are a pattern to silence dissident voices and limit access to information. The nature of crackdowns and the suppression undertaken by Sudanese authorities on peaceful efforts by civil undermines the NCP’s credibility further. The responses undertaken by police forces and the NISS exemplify the extent to which the NPC are unwilling to tolerate any other voices on the road to democratic transformation.

Urgent call from the Egyptian demonstrators

Defending their country and for their right to live a free respectable life

April 6 Youth Movement

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/70659

We appeal to all human rights organizations and to all the defenders of freedoms and human rights and all the free honourable media inside and outside Egypt to interfere immediately and support our peaceful demonstrations from the savage attack of the security against the demonstrators using all kinds of weapons, knives, gas bombs and molotov bombs electric sticks to spread fear among the demonstrators and this is illegalized in any place in the world and against all human rights concepts.

The victims till now today are 230 victims, killed and injured.. and the security is protecting those criminals.

It's worth mentioning that the government has closed the internet and the mobile phone networks and many headquarters of different channels to ensure that our voice won't reach the media and people...

We need the help and support of all human rights organizations and all defenders of freedom all over the world to stop this massacre.

What's happening in Egypt now is a crime against humanity

Please show your solidarity and Support....

April 6 Youth Movement
Egyptian Resistance Movement

A skimming flight over Mozambican memory

Review of ‘Memórias em Vôo Rasante’

Wilson Gomes de Almeida

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/70605

The two last editions of the autobiographical book by Jacinto Veloso were quickly sold out and it’s now on its third edition. The important missions he was involved in, the functions he executed and the positions he occupied before independence (1964–1974), during the Transition Government (1974–1975) and throughout most of the trajectory of post-colonial Mozambique, justify the curiosity he arouses and the great interest people have in what he has to say. Jacinto Veloso, a white man inside and out, is frankly identified with the Western and Christian world ideology in which he was raised, but a Mozambican by choice, he had, so to speak, the unique opportunity to participate in a libertarian epic, in a privileged position, reserved for few. That is what, among other things, the book ‘Memórias em Vôo Rasante’ (A Skimming Flight over Memories) is about, throughout its 290 pages.

‘Memórias em Vôo Rasante’ contains important moments of Jacinto’s personal trajectory and his social history. In it the following issues are widely explored: (a) his forced tour to some African capitals, in search of a contribution to the fight for the release of Mozambique from the Portuguese colonial yoke; (b) the tensions inside the Mozambique liberation movement in the exile that resulted in the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane, president of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo in Portuguese); (c) troubled transition, the national independence proclamation and the difficulties in the first years of governance by Frelimo Party under the siege of trilateral alliance formed by the racist Rhodesia, the apartheid regime of South Africa and with the assent of the western governments that gave them support and actively collaborated with them in an attempt to cripple the young Republic; (d) the backstage of the actions that resulted in the with them of peace agreements with racist South Africa and the estrangements caused by the Nkomati Accords of international scope, given that domestically there appeared to have prevailed some sort of quiet unanimity; (e) the experiences from what the author calls ‘Affair SOCIMO’ (Mozambican Commercial and Industrial Society, Ltd) a company created with the intention to combine business, ‘economic intelligence’ and security activities in the interests of the Mozambican state.

The diversity of subjects, situations and characters visited by the author at the same time makes the book rich in information, much of it unknown to the general public, but also requires the reader's redoubled attention because it is, above all, between the lines and traps woven in the text that much of the most revealing information is found. One cannot overlook the fact that Jacinto Veloso has a military background, he was the first holder of the state, security services, as the head of SNASP (National Services for the People’s Security) and, by imposition, before and after the independence of Mozambique, was often devoted to the tasks of intelligence and counter-intelligence. That is one of the reasons, if not the main one, why ‘Memórias em Vôo Rasante’ is arousing so much interest.

Without the pretension of analysing the book, which by the way is not the objective of a review, it seems interesting to put in evidence some aspects of Jacinto’s book. The first aspect relates to the self-centred nature of the piece, which, as in most post-modern texts, carries a strong mark of cult to the author’s own personality. Veloso is no exception to the rule. Repeating, by transverse roads, the same itinerary made by Dr Helder Martins, in his book of memories, ‘Why Sakrani?’, he difference lies fundamentally in the fact that Dr Helder Martins is more explicit and direct, demanding for himself, when he thinks it appropriate, the leading role in many of the events he writes about. However Jacinto Veloso transits between the implicit and the deceit. He exaggerates his position alongside Samora Machel, whom he served directly – at least that’s the idea given, regardless of his own merits and the personal qualities he is undeniably endowed with.

By convenience, and also because the subject is emergent memories from Mozambique, it’s fair to add: Also in the history of everyday life, in which history is constructed through personal experience, is inscribed the life journey of Janet Mondlane. ‘Meu coração está nas mãos de um homem negro’ (‘My Heart is in the Hands of a Black Man’), written by Nadja Manghezi, contains the memories of Janet and it was the way she found to recollect Eduardo Mondlane, so, she wrote in the preface of the book. Even though the book is based, predominantly, on the exposition of repressed resentment, it’s still a valuable contribution and a fundamental reference work on to the knowledge of recent Mozambique history.

Another aspect worth noting is the clear dichotomy between the narrator and the analyst of historical events and facts. In the role of the narrator, Veloso talks about a significant body of facts and events and at the same time discourses on an enviable number of episodes and characters, according to his own criteria with prior selection and consciously ranked, as stipulates traditional history. Particularly noteworthy are the success narratives that have the memoirist himself as the patron. This is the case of the so-called ‘Operation Zero’, when Mozambique replaced the old Portuguese Escudo by Metical, the currency in force in the country since 1980. Ten fat paragraphs explain the successful ‘Operation Zero’, while only two miserable and laconic paragraphs launch in the depth of the ill-fated Metical, currency that was supposed to replace the Portuguese Escudo before the implementation of the Metical, but whose operation was aborted by the authorities. It is worth a while to remember that much was said and speculated at the time about the stillborn Metical but till this day nothing of consequence was ventilated or clarified publicly about the matter. This is only an example, but there are many other that were muzzled!

Considering the time-frame covered by the ‘Memórias em Vôo Rasante’ and the numerous events and personalities involved, it seems something isn’t right in regards to the names mentioned or even by the omission of many of them. Fleeing from the rule are the allusions to the author himself, something perfectly predictable, and to Samora Machel, who is referenced about a hundred times in the book. In a distant place, but still in relief, emerge the names of João Ferreira (Samora’s friend and exile comrade), Eduardo Mondlane (first Frelimo president), Joaquim Chissano and Aquino de Bragança, all of them with an expressive presence, some being mentioned up to thirty times. In the third place, names such as Óscar Monteiro and Fernando Howana, Fernando Ganhão and Helder Martins, Sebastião Marcos Mabote e Prakash Ratilal, Armando Panguene, Jorge Rebelo and Alcântara Santos are referred to at least on three occasions. That’s not the case with figures of Mozambican revolution of the stature of Marcelino do Santos , a first-hour militant of Frelimo and long dubbed the ‘number two’ in the party and state hierarchy, as a member of the politburo, secretary for economic policy of the party, minister of planning, resident governor of Sofala and speaker of the parliament. He is only cited twice in the entire work, both cases are allusions to periods prior the blow-up of the revolution, while he was in transit by Egypt. One of the citations tells about the time when Marcelino dos Santos, in Cairo, battered Jacinto Veloso and João Ferreira for acting as useful innocents in the production and dissemination of pamphlets in the interest of enemies of the ripening Mozambican revolution. There is, actually, a third passage presented by the author almost casuistically, in which Marcelino directed a party meeting to decide the destinies of the all-mighty SOCIMO.

The feeling that stays is that Marcelino dos Santos is not a crucial part of Mozambican history in Veloso’s imagination, neither during the armed struggle nor in the transitional government, and even less during the republican course of the country. Sérgio Vieira, a respected name and historical figure of Frelimo, just like Veloso occupied the billet equivalent to chief of intelligence services beyond other important key-positions such as governor of the Bank of Mozambique and agriculture minister, but is mentioned in two moments altogether, one during the armed struggle and the other on occasion of the Nkomati Accords. Armando Gebuza, Mário Muchungo, Joaquim de Carvalho, Graça Machel, just to mention some the names that are arbitrarily put in the book are referred only once. There are however names from the party, the state and the governmental hierarchy front that were not cited, at least not directly, contrary to what happens on an endless list of notable personalities from neighbouring countries (including Kito Rodrigues, Frederik de Klerk) and western personalities (friends or foes) like Jean-Batiste Doumenge, Chief Fernandez, Frank Wisner, Pik Bhota, Van der Westhuizen, among other, who are spoken of restlessly. Under this perspective a loose loyalty is observed towards old comrades.

From this fact it is inferred that the history narrated in the first person induces the reading of the events and realities and the very interpretation of the national and world history to be merely from a personal perspective. This is consistent with what the author announces at the beginning of his book as ‘[…] several comrades, family members, youngsters and friends, compatriots as well as foreigners, have come to suggest that I write telling a little bit about my own life experience in the last forty or fifty years, in particular my involvement with FRELIMO’. Therefore one can conclude that the problem lies not in the narrative itself but in the method used by the author. In it, Veloso recovers his own image from the past through the reiteration of the Frelimo Party government emblem, its maximum leader, the president Samora Machel – the propeller and the only and universal point of national convergence. From that statement many memories have to be written in order to reach the composition in its entirety or almost all of the complex mosaic, which composes the Mozambican experience from the last 50 years.

Jacinto Veloso truly exceeds himself when he moves from the dissertation to the evaluative discourse, opening his heart and soul to the reader and making gush, through the veins and pores, his profession of public faith in the market’s ‘invisible hand’. Abdicating a more rigorous analysis of the facts and events, with a mea culpa tone he effects a vigorous self-criticism about what he considers to be unfortunate choices that for so long kept Mozambique excluded from the positive – in his view, IMF and World Bank’s prescriptions. In defence of the reasonableness of his thesis he argues: ‘I believe that Eduardo Mondlane would have defended Mozambique’s adhesion to the IMF and World Bank, while maintaining balanced contacts with the West, specifically the USA, which he knew well because he had studied and lived there for sundry years’. Staunch enemy of state planning, and ardent supporter of market economy, here and there pinpoints with aversion and malicious contempt, he even mocks ruthlessly and caustically the ephemeral Mozambican experience. And he does so with the authority of a former minister for economic affairs that had high responsibilities in the conducting of the economy through the capitalism route.

Nevertheless the most severe criticism to the planned economy are voiced through Veloso’s guru the French business man, Jean-Batiste Doumeng, the ‘red millionaire’, as he was known and owner of sentences such as the ones quoted in the book: ‘Brezhnev Tovarish I have found that the only scythes that exist in the USSR are those drawn on your flag’. ‘The truth is that no one recorded this item (a scythe) in the list of products of the National Plan Commission and what was not in the Central State Plan simply could not be produced or imported’. ‘[...] I know you follow the Russian model, this model will not take you very far. In a while, you’ll have to ask the IMF and the World Bank for help and will be forced to do on your knees what you still have time to do with your head held high, by choice [...]’.

Thus, he solemnly distances himself from the economic choices made by the party, state and government, to whom he had always served and, suggests to his old comrades that they should explain themselves for what he considers to be bad choices. Veloso snobs and deliciously amuses himself by confiding to the reader how he cheated the Mozambican state planning to make possible his project of opening schools for the training of airplane pilots. He did so by passing and approving an importation, in foreign currency, of school books and the like but instead he would buy flight simulators and training aircrafts. As to the East-West conflict, this is treated in the same manner; synthesised in the known allegory, actually an old Mozambican proverb: ‘In a fight between two elephants, the grass is the victim’, meaning that the real consequences to the bipolar conflict were felt by countries such as Mozambique and Angola.

The form in which this issue is addressed by the author, results in a sensation of what was the level of perception of the Frelimo Party, of its foremost directors and even of the scribe himself, which is made to transit between the romantic and the most candid naivety, in the matter of the international background, and the nature, amplitude and implications of the east-west conflict.

Veloso at no moment in his memories takes the risk of confronting which would have been the real gains for the Mozambican masses in the 24 years in which the country was part of both multilateral organisations, comparatively to the preceding nine years, abstracting the effects and consequences of the destabilisation war and natural calamities that made Mozambique go backwards 50 years in time, in terms of GDP! That’s no doubt an exercise that the Anglo-Saxon historian Robert William Fogel would certainly make, in search of ways of explaining the one and only past of independent Mozambique.

However, it’s in the chapter about the amending that preceded the proclamation of the independence of Zimbabwe, where the author explores issues with more acuity. It’s certainly the most exciting part of the book, where the facts are very well chained and the events comprehensibly characterised, even though it has to be admitted, after reading, that the true architecture of Zimbabwe’s independence was engendered from Maputo through a bridge direct to London. In it, Zimbabwean patriots were put in the second place because the matter concerned a ‘vital interest’ of the Mozambican state. Who does not recall the demand from the ‘Front Line’ countries, where Mozambique carried out a prominent role, supported little by little by others international influent players, the need for England to resume its position of colonial potency concerning the Rhodesian issue, as indispensable pre-requisite for the success of Lancaster House negotiations? It was, without a doubt, a historical deed, transcendental, to which the Mozambique contribution was crucial, and which Veloso’s disclosure much clarifies.

Another issue on which Veloso’s contribution is remarkable, pertains to the destabilisation war in independent Mozambican bred by the perverse alliance formed by the apartheid regime of South Africa, Ian Smith’ s Rhodesia, the Malawi of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Portugal and its allies from NATO. In this chapter Veloso does more than just an honest self-criticism about the mistakes made by underestimating the enemy for being part of the Frelimo leadership. He brings to light key elements that help better understand the nature of the 16 years war to which his country was submitted. Veloso has the care, as an expert in war theory and the real circumstances of the destabilisation, not to assess it as a ‘civil war’, contrary to what many do, driven by his particular motivations.

Behind the apparent graveness usually carried in public, Veloso, finds ways to share with the reader hilarious episodes lived at trying times in his political journey. One of them is the case of the Boer that tried to order different brands of whisky from the barman in a local hotel, always getting a negative response that there was none. Angry, the South African asks the barman, which brand he had to serve. ‘Black and White’, answered the barman, to what the Boer replied: ‘Okay! That’s fine! But serve it in two separate glasses’.

One can stay with an absolute feeling that in this first work the author preferred to be economical, saving ammunition for the next, which will certainly come. Therefore, going from levelling flight to deep diving, much of the debt to the reader would be liquidated. Of one thing nobody has doubts: Major-General Jacinto Veloso – as inferred, a Generalfeldmarschall for Samora Machel of some sort, but primarily for Frelimo after the fervour of the early years of the independence passed – is knowledgeable and has plenty of stories to tell.

However, it has to be recognised that the author makes a real effort to deliver what is promised, in the itinerary traced when he justifies the title of the book: ‘Memórias em Vôo Rasante’ (A Skimming Flight over Memories). Why? Because it is really skimming – skimming the earth, the trees, the poles, the bridges, skimming the truths and lies of recent history, to verify, see, recon and perhaps surprise.

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* Wilson Gomes de Almeida is an agronomist and graduate of the University of Sofia/Bulgaria. He worked as a lecturer in Mozambique.
* This article was translated from Portuguese by Susana Ribeiro Arthur Gomes de Almeida.
* ‘‘Memórias em Vôo Rasante’ is published by JVCI, Ltda, Maputo, 2007.

Dear Mr President

Nebila Abdulmelik

2011-02-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/70597

Dear Mr President,

Whether by bullets or ballots
You climb upon your thrones
Trampling on the backs of your people
Leaving a permanent marker of your presence
Your love for power is grander than your love for life
As we struggle for every breath,
You maintain the stranglehold
Dry as it is, you milk the system for every last drop
So much so that the pips have no more squeak left in them

You’ve built a system that fattens no-one but itself
You feed your own pockets before you would even think
of doing the same for the bellies of your people

Your palaces are built on mountains of gold & silver
You bathe in lakes of oil
Unable to wash away the blood stains
So you conceal them with diamonds & pearls

You entice us with democracy
But we find our democracies silenced
You entice us with equality
But we find our equalities segregated
You entice us with freedom
But we find our freedoms imprisoned
You entice us with justice
But we find our justices lawless & unjustified
You entice us with peace
But we find our peace constantly at war
You entice us with riches & prosperity
But we find our riches impoverished
You entice us with progress
But we find our progress stalled indefinitely

You promise us health care
But we find our health in desperate need of urgent care
You promise us scholars
But we find our students in desperate need of schooling
We’re still starving
After consuming all of your empty promises
We’re tired of being sick
We’re sick of being tired
We’re sick & tired of being sick & tired

I’ve heard it said that power corrupts
But it’s obvious that absolute power corrupts absolutely
Seeing as the house only stands
As long as the people continue to prop it up
This is to tell you we’ve decided to bring the house down
And you along with it

Sincerely,
Your disgruntled citizens

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I am not Duality

Amira Ali

2011-02-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/70598

Tears rain our world
crying for the moon
covering the ocean with bottomless tears,

humanness love a lucid confusion
unknown but by the few,
the jewel of reality
worn only but by the few,

greed's desperation shattering visions
pouring fire on the tepid soul,
in heights of deprivation
self-destructive behavior imposed,

nailed in a coffin
caged in with cold words
of duality
of race, religion,
ideology a reason in seasons,

depriving one of oneself,

Can't you see
you can't claim me
I can't claim me,
I belong everywhere and nowhere
birthed in a place of somewhere of nowhere

I am not this nor that,

dancing to the fire of love
I sing like the bird
not for he nor she,
I beat the drum of no words

I am not this nor that,

I am rather the love of life
dancing to the beat of the earth,
I and I.

Thinking inside the box

Khadija Sharife

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/70611

she said i'm not
altogether there
grasping at bits of myself
like playdoh
that just won't come together

think inside the box
she said
the universe will
get with the programme
and who can you believe
if not
the advertising?

direct-to-consumer marketing
she claimed, would give you the option
of becoming a whole new person

my sister, the graphic designer
tells me everything is photo-shopped,
nipped and tucked into shape
nothing is what you see
even with your own two eyes

because i'm of different colors
that just won't make sense
strange languages from ancient empires
built on blood and stone

it must have an impact, this
medley of realities

she observed, running her fingers through my hair

neither here nor there
when it comes to declarations
of new age-healthiness

how do you feel, she asked

(thirsty, like a billion people
don't have water?)

but there is no right answer
so i shake and nod
to cover both bases

progress she replied
fingering her theories

no legitimacy proven or identities created
like a quilt stitched together
from patches of everything not you

but none is desired here
my feet don't fit glass slippers that cannot be walked in

you may as well not be here
she responded

because you're alone and have nothing

the stuff of dreams is too far to reach, she says

no color in this black and white stream of consciousness

the doctor proclaims
with serious hand movements
borne of medical school
my looseness is chronic sleep deprivation

just

a good night sleep for the next few months
coupled with anti-unwell medicine for the next few years

unraveling up and down

it just

made me yawn in the middle of her sentence
about the beauty of prozac culture
when life gets too tough

get lost in chemicals

even if life is still the same
outside the bubble
even if
i become a cool-calm-cucumber inside the box
someone new

wrapped in plastic thoughts
isolated from everything
that matters

and nothing changes

and she shifted uncomfortably
suddenly aware that she had buttocks

attached to legs
clothed in itchy fabric

planted on a seat
made of dead animals
in a room filled with

refrigerated air
in front of her self-important plaque
that had no voice of its own and could not save her
just then

well, she said, turning into a patient inflicted with her own
special form of tuberculosis

cough cough cough

i guess so, but you know, she said

the drugs are there to help
in bad times,
it's just science,

and like a diver in too tight swimsuit, she

launches into the terminological inexactitude of

mishmashed facts

cloaking suicide
etc
etc
etc

as commercial secrets

and answers

shhhh

sure, sure,

but why not prescribe weed and cut wall street out of this equation unless
we have it wrong

and its not patents that rule the world?

and prozac is not a blockbuster drug

designed to build these boxes

human cages that we pay to live in?

and from TB she went swiftly down the path of tourettes syndrome

babbling fumbling stumbling

you see, statistics say

she said

lips moving, sentence drifting off

eyes fixed on the plaque, the idol that would not speak

like me, she would be up that night

thinking, fixing

the lie, for tomorrow's presentation

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Africa: From Davos to Dakar

2011-02-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Dakar2011/70717

Days after the global elite's jamboree at the Swiss resort of Davos, a week-long carnival of the oppressed and the marginalised, and those speaking for them, has begun in the capital of this western African nation, with thousands of left-leaning activists declaiming against globalisation and its discontents. The debates will revolve around resistance and struggles of the peoples of Africa for sustainable development as the continent zooms back into global focus, with some of African economies doing better than the developed world. 'The marginalisation of Africa is an important theme at the forum. Land grabs have put the focus back on issues of social justice,' Sanusha Naidu, a South African of Indian origin, who heads Emerging Powers in Africa programme at Fahamu, a global NGO, told IANS.

Senegal: Same old system can only produce new crisis

2011-02-07

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54368

The world is in financial crisis thanks to the reckless behaviour of bankers, say campaigners, yet ordinary people are picking up the tab. Debt activists fear the recession will provide cover for a fresh round of toxic debt to countries in the South. Nick Dearden, director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, an international coalition of about 200 organisations, says there has never been a more important time for activists to meet to discuss collaboration and strategies to bring about real change to the world's economy than now.

Senegal: ‘Signs of Change’ Says Bolivia’s Morales as World Social Forum Opens

2011-02-07

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/europe/index.asp

Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Dakar on Sunday to mark the start of the annual World Social Forum. Activists carried colorful banners denouncing land grabs, restrictive immigration laws, agricultural subsidies in Europe and the US and many other issues. Others sang freedom songs and played drums whilst marching peacefully through the streets along a route that began near the offices of Senegal's public broadcaster, RTS, and ended at the Cheikh Anta Diop University, the main venue for the weeklong gathering.

Pambazuka News 176 : Comment sortir la Somalie du chaos

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/summaryfr/70630

Assets seizures in Côte d'Ivoire and Zimbabwe

Gado

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/cartoons/70607

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Change in the Arab world

Gado

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/cartoons/70610

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Impunity grins

Gado

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/cartoons/70609

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Mubarak to leave office

Gado

2011-02-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/cartoons/70606

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Zimbabwe: Army will crush any Egyptian-style uprising

2011-02-07

http://www.rnw.nl/africa/article/zimbabwe-army-will-crush-any-egyptian-style-uprising

Zimbabwe's defence minister has said the army will crush any Egyptian-style uprising led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. The latter said last week that there is nothing wrong with people demanding their rights, including in Zimbabwe. 'We in Zanu PF (Mugabe’s party, ed.) are determined to make sure that there is peace,' defence minister Emmerson Mnangagwa said to military commanders in the weekend. 'Those who may want to emulate what happened in Tunisia or what is happening in Egypt will regret it because we will not allow any chaos in this country,' Mnangagwa said.

Zimbabwe: Foreign mining companies to be forced to sell majority shares

2011-02-03

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news020211/foreign020211.htm

The government has announced that laws requiring foreign mining companies to sell a majority of their shares to locals will be gazetted by the end of February. In a statement published in the state-run Herald newspaper on Wednesday, the Indigenisation and Empowerment Minister, Saviour Kasukuwere, said consultations were at an ‘advanced stage’ and new regulations would be gazetted no later than the end of February. A controversial Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act, requiring all businesses to give 51 per cent of their shares to locals was signed into law in 2008, but the government has not yet acted on it.

Zimbabwe: Parties condemn spate of political violence

2011-02-07

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE71409020110205

Zimbabwe's main rival political parties on Saturday condemned a spate of violent clashes among their supporters, which Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai blames on President Robert Mugabe's youth brigades. In the last two weeks, Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has traded accusations with Mugabe's ZANU-PF party over attacks on some MDC members in townships around the capital Harare, including the burning down of a satellite party office.

Egypt: AU calls for 'appropriate reforms' in Egypt

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/dNtgaL

The African Union (AU) Friday called for 'appropriate reforms' in Egypt, where protesters have been pushing for President Hosni Mubarak's exit from power. In a statement made available to PANA, AU Commission Chairperson Jean Ping expressed regret at the continuing violent protests, which entered its 11th day Friday. He said the Egyptian authorities must institute appropriate reforms and respond to the needs of the protesters, while expressing concern at the violent protests and loss of lives.

Kenya: Kenya wins AU support over ICC trials

2011-02-01

http://www.africareview.com/News/-/979180/1099394/-/i65pmnz/-/index.html

Kenya's diplomatic offensive against the International Criminal Court got a major boost after the African Union agreed to back its bid to defer Hague trials against six of its citizens. AU chief Jean Ping told reporters that the summit had approved Kenya's request for a suspension of the trials for one year as it seeks to overhaul its judicial system and try the suspects at home. Kenya had appealed for a suspension of the ICC process against prominent Kenyans which the court has accused of sponsoring the violence that saw 1,133 killed and close to 600,000 flee from their homes.

Africa: Building momentum for abandonment of FGM

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/gbIJzO

Female genital mutilation/cutting has been illegal in Senegal since 1999. But that didn’t stop Dialyma Cisse‘s paternal grandmother from having her cut, against the wishes of the young girl and her parents. Once a social norm is established, even if it is a harmful one, it can be hard for individuals to opt out. Parents fear their daughters may be socially marginalised or face reduced marriage prospects. But in Senegal, and in many countries across Africa and the Arab States, communities are questioning the traditional ways and taking collective action in response.

Africa: Sanitary padding and the political discourse

2011-02-07

http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/article854669.ece/Sanitary-padding-the-political-discourse

Without access to sanitary towels, a girl child in the SADC region may be excluded from her right to education. The Commonwealth Education Fund (CEF) and the Girl Child Network (GCN) have discovered that despite the provision of free schooling by the Kenyan government, more than 800,000 children (mostly girls) continue to forgo the opportunity of education. The CGE and the GCN found that during menstruation, some girls refused to go to school because they cannot access sanitary towels and the school toilets are unsafe or unusable. The high cost of sanitary towels also results in the use of unhygienic sponges, tissue paper and even foliage during menstruation.

Egypt: The feminine face of fury

2011-02-07

http://pulsemedia.org/2011/02/04/egyptian-riot-grrls-finding-the-feminine-face-of-fury/

Much has been aflutter on twitter about the very visible presence of women among the protests that have taken Egypt by storm over the last few weeks, but images of them have remained sparse amid the digital slideshows strung together by major media outlets, portraying mainly dense crowds of the manly. Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights activist Ghada Shahbandar claims the crowd in downtown Cairo is up to 20 per cent female. Others have put the number much higher, at 50 per cent.

Morocco: Female farm workers struggle in Spain

2011-02-03

http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2011/02/02/feature-07

A number of female Moroccan seasonal workers in Spain find themselves in a precarious legal and economic situation, a study revealed on 28 January. 'They do not speak Spanish, so they have no way of defending their rights,' said Rachid El Badouli, director of strategic studies at the Orient-Occident Foundation. According to the findings, around 90 per cent of the women are illiterate and come from large poor families. Over 23 per cent of them earn less than 35 euros per day.

Mozambique: Maternal initiative launched

2011-02-03

http://bit.ly/fFPwRS

As in many African countries, women in Mozambique often give birth outside of a health facility. Factors leading to this decision include having difficult access to health services, being scared of how they will be treated at a health facility, and feeling more comfortable delivering at home. But, when complications occur at home, women and babies are much less likely to receive the appropriate, life-saving care they need. Women Deliver reports that the Mozambique’s government and partners are working to change this trend by improving health care delivery through the Model Maternities Initiative (MMI). The goal of MMI is to improve maternal and newborn health care services while providing a supportive environment in which women give birth.

Zambia: Government launches gender responsive budget programme

2011-02-07

http://ukzambians.co.uk/home/?p=10270

Government has launched the Gender Responsive Budget Programme which seeks to ensure equality in the budgetary process. The project, which is in conjunction with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) will incorporate four main areas of activities. The activities are gender citizen report cards, budget tracking from the gender perspective, budget statements and gender-aware policy appraisals.

Algeria: Algeria to lift emergency powers

2011-02-07

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/02/20112315364175524.html

Algeria's 19-year state of emergency will be lifted in the 'very near future', state media has quoted Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president, as saying. During a meeting with ministers on Thursday, the president also said Algerian television and radio, which are controlled by the state, should give airtime to all political parties.

Botswana: Kalahari Bushmen win right to water in Botswana court decision

2011-02-03

http://www.canadians.org/campaignblog/?p=6122

Survival International has reported that: 'In a momentous decision, Botswana’s Court of Appeal today quashed a ruling that denied the Kalahari Bushmen access to water on their ancestral lands...Celebrating after the decision, a Bushman spokesman said, "We are very happy that our rights have finally been recognised. Like any human beings, we need water to live."' Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow says, 'This is a major win, it’s the first test case of our right to water resolution at the United Nations.'

Burundi: Lifting ban on activist group a positive step

2011-02-07

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/02/01/burundi-lifting-ban-activist-group-positive-step

Burundi's decision to restore legal status to a prominent activist group banned in 2009 is a positive step and should prompt further government actions to engage with civil society, Human Rights Watch has said. On 28 January, Interior Minister Edouard Nduwimana reversed a November 2009 order that had banned the Forum for the Strengthening of Civil Society (Forum pour le Renforcement de la Société Civile, FORSC). FORSC is an umbrella organisation that coordinates initiatives by Burundian civil society groups and has often criticised human rights violations by the government.

Egypt: Army arrests human rights defenders

Habitat International Coalition press release

2011-02-07

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/515/PR Husni Tyranny.pdf

The Habitat International Coalition (HIC) has learned that Egyptian military police yesterday have arrested or abducted some 30 human rights defenders in Cairo in yet-unclear circumstance and with unknown charges. The group of arrested human rights defenders includes three staff of the Egyptian Center for Housing Rights, a long-standing HIC Members organization. At the time of their arrest in Bulaq Abu al-„Ila, they were purchasing blankets that they reportedly intended to distribute to protesters camping out in Cairo's central Tahrir Square.

Egypt: Organisations call for rights to be respected

Article 19 Statement

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/i3EG1H

'We, the undersigned civil society organisations working to promote freedom of expression around the world, condemn the serious violations of human rights taking place at this critical moment in Egypt. Since pro-democracy activists first began popular protest across Egypt on 25 January, there have been at least three hundred deaths, incidents of physical attacks and brutality, often involving live fire, and
arbitrary arrests and detentions of protestors and journalists. The government has also restricted access to the internet, withdrawn mobile phone services and placed restrictions on independent media.'

Kenya: Kenya faces acid test in round two of shuttle diplomacy

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/g7PZk0

As the government prepares for round two of the shuttle diplomacy in its efforts to seek deferral of the ICC case, a debate is raging on the implications of the move, reports the Daily Nation. And in the raging debate, there is a view that the country is slowly reclaiming its sovereignty and a counter argument that the move is seriously hurting Kenya’s image in the international community.

Africa: The irregular movement of migrants to Southern Africa

2011-02-07

http://www.unhcr.org/4d395af89.html

This UNHCR paper examines the mixed movement of people that is currently taking place between the East and Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region to the southern part of the continent. Stretching all the way from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia to South Africa‟s Atlantic coast, growing numbers of people are travelling the whole or part of this complex 4,500 kilometre route, travelling overland, by sea and (much less commonly) by air.

Liberia: Strain of hosting Ivorian refugees in Liberia creates tension

2011-02-03

http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/strain-of-hosting-ivorian-refugees-in-liberia-creates-tension/

Like other Liberian communities along the border, the impoverished villagers in Beo-Garnaglaye welcomed Ivorian refugees with whom they share the same ethnicity, language and ties based on inter-marriage. But aid workers say there is simmering tension as food supplies have dwindled stretching the resilience of the hosts.

South Sudan: Uncertainty on future of returnees in Sudan

2011-02-03

http://www.africanews.com/site/Uncertainty_on_future_of_returnees_in_Sudan/list_messages/37238

Experts warn an influx [of returnees] is expected to cause dire shortages of food, water, health care and sanitation in Southern Sudan. The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, Mr. Georg Charpentier says even when the referendum results are announced, the number of returnees could keep increasing.

Sudan: 22,000 South Sudanese stranded in Khartoum

2011-02-07

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/MCOI-8DTG9T?OpenDocument

As the final results of South Sudan's referendum for independence are confirmed, 22,000 southerners are stranded on the side of the road in and around Khartoum still waiting for transportation to the South. After Sudan splits, they are afraid they will become refugees in a foreign land and that their rights will not be protected.

Zimbabwe: Zim ‘robbing’ citizens in SA

2011-02-07

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news040211/passop040211.htm

South African based refugee rights group, PASSOP, has accused the Zimbabwean government of robbing its citizens in South Africa, where more than a hundred thousand Zim nationals are still waiting for passports. Zimbabweans who have applied for permits to remain in South Africa legally are still waiting for their government to issue them passports so they can get the permits. But the Zim authorities have not made good on their promises to roll out the documents, even shunning meetings with civil society to explain the delay.

South Africa: Homes destroyed, activists arrested

Mandela Park Backyarders Press Release

2011-02-07

http://www.abahlali.org/node/7780

Around 09h30 yesterday (4 February), the MEC for Housing Bonginkosi Madikizela, came with police and the Anti-Land Invasions Unit. No one consulted with anyone in the community. They came without warning, without the necessary court documents, and destroyed brick houses and shacks in section 20-21 of Mandela Park. At around 18h00, the Mandela Park community gathered at Andile Nhose community hall to discuss the illegal demolition earlier in the day. Community members decided to take to the streets in a spontaneous demonstration protesting against the actions by Madikizela and the government.

Latest Edition: Emerging Powers News Roundup

2011-02-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/emplayersnews/70674

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers.
1. China in Africa

China eyes $10bn investment in Zimbabwe
China Development Bank could fund up to $10-billion in Chinese investment in Zimbabwe's mining and agriculture sector, a big boost for a country struggling to attract foreign investors, a government minister said on Monday.
Read More

Sasol to hold off on China CTL plant pending review
South African petrochemicals group Sasol said on Thursday it would delay any further work on a 94 000 barrels-per-day coal-to-liquids plant in China pending a review by the Chinese government. Sasol and its partner, the Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group (SNCG), submitted the project for review in December 2009 and are awaiting a decision on their application.
Read More

China eyes Kenya telecoms
China is looking to Africa again for business. This time it is the telecommunications industry in Kenya that has the Asian giant on the prowl. It hopes to increase its market share in mobile handsets and the infrastructure market, which has left European companies on the out. “We are witnessing China’s great push into the telecom industry across Africa and Kenya is just the latest to see China’s influence grow,” said IT consultant Mary Evans in London. Until five years ago, the Kenyan telecommunications sector heavily leaned towards European based firms such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia. However, China based firms such as Huawei and ZTE Technologies have been gaining steam in the infrastructure arena and are now establishing a foothold in the retail segment with low cost mobile phones and Internet modems.
Read More

Key African economist hails China's investment
China is winning more understanding and recognition in Africa, Chinese experts said after a key African economist said Chinese investment is "really largely positive" at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Such views will benefit both sides as positive opinions from Africa will encourage more Chinese companies to invest in the continent, they said. Late last week, the Voice of America (VOA) website quoted African Development Bank Chief Economist Mthuli Ncube as saying that Africa welcomes Chinese investment and that China has become a valuable partner of the continent in many ways.
Read More

Mandarin for the future as China takes off
Mandarin is fast "becoming a good contender" against European languages such as German and French as China becomes a major global force. And increased relations between South Africa and the Far East country - and more recently an invitation by China for South Africa to join the Bric (Brazil, Russia, India and China) group of countries - are also feeding the demand to learn the language and culture. So convinced is Pretoria mother Unathi Mguye that "China is the future", she removed her three daughters from one school and enrolled them at Pretoria Chinese School this year where they are doing Chinese as a compulsory subject. "China is leading the economy and I want to prepare them so that they are globally ready after school. They want to go and stay overseas and not be confined to South Africa," she said.
Read More

2. India in Africa

India, Ethiopia decide to enhance economic engagements
India and Ethiopia today decided to increase volume of their bilateral economic engagements by starting new ventures particularly in the field of agriculture. Decision to this effect was taken at a meeting between Food minister K V Thomas and Ethiopian Agriculture Minister Tafera Derbew here. India's investment in Ethiopia, a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa, at present stands at USD 4.4 billion which we wish to increase "substantially" by opening new ventures particularly in the farm sector, Thomas told reporters after the meeting.
Read More

3. In Other Emerging Powers News

South African health worse than BRIC countries
South Africa’s proportional health expenditure is the highest in comparison to the BRIC group of countries, but our health outcomes are generally worse, says the South African Institute of Race Relations. Spending is at 9% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), followed by Brazil’s 8% and Russia’s 5%. China and India both spend the lowest proportions at 4%. These figures appear in the latest South Africa Survey, published by the Institute in Johannesburg this week. With 49 million people, South Africa has the highest incidence of tuberculosis (TB) at 960 per 100 000 people. China’s population of 1.32 billion has an incidence of 97 while Brazil’s 192 million people have the lowest incidence at 46. Russia’s 142 million people have an incidence of 107 and India, with 1.14 billion people, is at 168.
Read More

Lending a Hand to Less Developed Countries
Mothers' milk banks that are helping reduce infant mortality in Guatemala and are starting to be set up in Africa as well form part of the numerous social technologies developed by Brazil that are driving the fast growth of its international development cooperation. The total funds dedicated annually to international organisations, technical and humanitarian assistance, and scholarships for foreign students grew 129 percent between 2005 and 2009, from 158 million dollars to 362 million dollars, according to the first official report on Brazilian Cooperation for International Development. That is still not much, a mere 0.02 percent of GDP, said Guilherme Schmitz, one of the authors of the study, carried out by Brazil's Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA). But South America's giant is just now gaining stature as a donor country. And as a developing nation, it does not have a target to live up to, he told IPS -- unlike industrialised countries, which have pledged to give 0.7 percent of GDP to official development aid.
Read More

4. Blogs, Opinions, Presentations and Publications

Commentary: Beijing's Response to Egypt's Upheaval
Beijing is taking no chances regarding the possible impact that the “color revolutions” raging in North Africa and Middle East may have on China. While news about the dramatic events in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan and surrounding regions can still be found in the state media, all Chinese editors have been told by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Propaganda Department that they can only use news dispatches by the official Xinhua News Agency. Moreover, Netizens and bloggers are not allowed to discuss Egypt in the Chinese equivalents of Facebook or Twitter. Egypt-related searches on various micro-blogs, such as Sina.com, Netease.com and Weibo have produced either no results or error messages. The Hu Jintao administration has attempted to divert public attention by focusing on the speed and efficiency with which Beijing dispatched chartered flights to send home hundreds of Chinese (including tourists from Hong Kong) stranded in various Egyptian cities.
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Questions About China’s “Win-Win” Relationship With Angola
In November last year, China’s vice president Xi Jinpeng (who is widely tipped to take over from Hu Jintao), visited Angola on a tour of Africa which also took him to Botswana and South Africa. In a joint statement at the conclusion of the visit, much was made about the development of a “strategic partnership” to “jointly seize opportunities and tackle on challenges facing the new international context”. Such “challenges” and “opportunities” were discussed on Jan 31 in Luanda at a high-level conference organised jointly by the University of Durham, the Centre for Scientific Studies and Investigation (CEIC) at the Catholic University of Angola and the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). Organiser Dr Marcus Power, from the University of Durham, told IPS: “Although there is a lot of academic research about the relationship between the two countries, there has been a real lack of dialogue among Angolans.
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China's Year of Africa?
As it ushers in the Year of the Rabbit, China has spoken of more plans to deepen its economic ties with Africa. And, its African friends are making a concerted effort to dispel notions that China is little more than a neo-colonialist intent on ensuring access to resources like oil. China's business sector this week has more-or-less ground to a halt as the New Year celebrations, China's equivalent to the festive season, gather momentum. February 2 marks the start of the week-long holiday, the most important period on the calendar to spend time eating and relaxing with family. But, amid the frenzy of buying gifts, food treats and rabbits - real and toy ones, lanterns embellished with rabbits, paper art cuts in the shape of bunnies, and so on - Africa has not been forgotten. Ahead of the Spring Festival festivities, China's leaders were talking about further strengthening the country's ties with nations across the African continent.
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S Africa: first trade surplus since 2003
So much for an uncompetitive exchange rate. South Africa recorded its first annual trade surplus in seven years in 2010, according to the South African Revenue Service, defying the much-maligned strengthening of the rand. Exports soared 14.1 per cent compared to 2009, while imports rose 8.2 per cent, giving South Africa a modest 5bn rand ($0.7bn) surplus for the year. The figures are a timely reminder that ? although important ? currencies are not the only factor determining global trade patterns. The surplus was much higher than consensus forecasts of 3.1bn rand ($0.4bn). This was largely due to a 15.9 per cent monthly fall in imports in December, which outweighed the 10.4 per cent fall in exports. The rapid growth in exports over the year is largely due to strong global demand for South African commodities. Exports of gold, precious stones, metals and minerals made up the bulk of the trade surplus.
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Top in trade and investment
Standing at US$114.8 billion in November 2010, China-Africa trade has bounced back faster than most of Africa’s other foreign trade since the 2008 global financial slowdown. China is now marking its second year as Africa’s biggest trading partner after overtaking the United States in January 2010. China-in-Africa fits into the wider picture of China’s rise: bailing out weakened European economies, the building of a muscular military infrastructure and the Beijing government’s available, but unused, leverage to resolve global conflicts from North Korea to Sudan. As China rises, it also wants to be seen as a responsible member of the international system, and as the world’s banker – as well as its workshop. Generally, China has more interest in stability than insurrection. In December, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi insisted Beijing is keen to meet its international responsibilities. The recent revelation, based on research from London’s Financial Times, that China’s capital flows to developing countries now exceed those of the World Bank put Yang’s statement in economic context.
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Tighten US-Africa links
American President Barack Obama is expected to focus more on Africa in 2011. This comes none too soon. Africa has become a competitive terrain as emerging powers accelerate their economic diplomacies on a continent considered the "last frontier" for trade and investment opportunities in the West-to-East shift in global economic momentum. The unfinished business of Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama's reaching out to the Muslim world and re-engaging with neglected vital interests in East Asia inevitably pushed Africa on to the back burner. The "Great Recession" reinforced his domestic focus and interrelated with his administration's initial Asia-Pacific emphasis. Yet, simultaneously, Obama's opening move saw Asia as Sinocentric and meant acknowledging the rise of emerging powers and regions. The orchestrated emergence of the G20 (including South Africa), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's opening foray into the continent and Obama's symbolic visit to Ghana, including his "tough love" remarks for Africa's leaders, seemed a harbinger of things to come.
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India could teach SA a thing or two
About a week ago I had the opportunity to visit India for the first time. The trip was an eye opener. When you get to New Delhi you soon realise that you have arrived at what must be one of the most fortified capitals in the world. Since the co-ordinated terrorist bombings of hotels in Mumbai in 2008, India has had to beef up security immensely. Visible policing is nearly everywhere there are checkpoints with heavily armed police on about every stretch of the road in New Delhi. Even when you check into a major hotel your luggage has to be X-rayed before you are let in. To an outsider all this might seem a bit of an inconvenience, but Indians say that the heightened security merely reflects a fact of their lives that they live in a dangerous neighbourhood. Security challenges to India are nothing new. Indian government officials say that the country has been a victim of terrorism for more than 30 years. In conversations with financial editors from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa government officials were quick to point to neighbouring Pakistan as one of the biggest security challenges.
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Interview with China’s FM
Ethiopia and China have long standing relations. The presence of China in Ethiopia’s market in particular and that of Ethiopia in general has been showing an upward trajectory. China’s relation with the Africa Union is rising from time to time. Walta Information Center has conducted an interview with H.E. Mr. Liu Zhenmin, Special Envoy of the Chinese Government and Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China on China-Africa cooperation
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CAR: Bozize is re-elected

2011-02-02

http://www.africareview.com/News/-/979180/1100062/-/hrs69dz/-/index.html

Francois Bozize has been re-elected president of the Central African Republic, according to provisional results released by the electoral commission last Tuesday. The commission said Bozize received 66.08 per cent of the vote in the January 23 poll, the outcome of which has already been rejected by three of the five candidates.

Egypt: Talks fail to end Egypt protests

2011-02-07

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/20112764216497806.html

Pro-democracy protesters are continuing their sit-in in Cairo's Tahrir (Liberation) Square for the fourteenth consecutive day, showing no signs of being appeased by talks held a day earlier between the government and opposition groups. People were still camped out in the square on Monday while life was slowly getting back to normal in other parts of the Egyptian capital. An Al Jazeera correspondent said traffic in the streets was increasing while businesses were beginning to reopen.

Kenya: PNU to consult on bid to pull out of coalition

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/geirGy

Party of National Unity affiliated parties will consult on how to pull out of the grand coalition its deputy secretary general Jeremiah Kioni said on Sunday, reports the Daily Nation. PNU, which is a key party in President Kibaki’s alliance of parties that brought him to power and which is in the coalition with ODM, had last week indicated that it would want its top decision-making organ to call a conference to discuss withdrawal from the grand coalition.

Libya: Signs of popular uprising show

2011-02-03

http://www.afrol.com/articles/37198

As most Libyans are still are too afraid of secret government agents to express their ample discontent, three of Muammar al-Ghaddafi's sons are preparing for a possible popular uprising. One is a reformist; two are hardliners. Tunisia is Libya's main western neighbour; Egypt its main eastern neighbour.

Malawi: Local politics meet gender politics

2011-02-03

http://www.jhr.ca/blog/2011/01/local-politics-meet-gender-politics-in-malawis-municipal-elections/

Beauty Pillow is a rare woman in Malawi - she can afford to run for office. 'I don’t have any donors but I use the little my husband sends from South Africa and from my own business—selling chitenjes (traditional garments), rice and sometimes beans,' Pillow says. Aspiring for local government is no easy task. Beyond campaigning costs and time spent, Pillow says a major challenge will still be to win her party’s favour and make it through the primaries next year.

Namibia: New law on regions irks opposition

2011-02-01

http://www.africareview.com/News/-/979180/1099408/-/i65p32z/-/index.html

Namibia’s opposition parties have taken issue with government once again, this time over what they termed as the ruling Swapo party’s unfair rubberstamping of laws without adequate deliberations in the country’s legislative chambers. Swapo used its two-thirds majority in the legislative chambers last December to rush through a bill that gave optimum power to the President to appoint regional governors, as opposed to the former system where governors were selected from among regional councillors.

Nigeria: Opposition fail to agree on joint candidate

2011-02-01

http://bit.ly/gfJpXP

Nigeria’s opposition parties failed to agree on a joint candidate to face President Goodluck Jonathan, the flag bearer of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, in April’s presidential election, the parties said. The inability to reach an accord comes ahead of the deadline for all parties to submit the nomination papers of their candidates to the Independent National Electoral Commission. 'Each party is at this time pursuing their fortunes separately,' Dapo Olorunyomi, chief of staff to Nuhu Ribadu, the candidate for the Action Congress of Nigeria, said in a telephone interview.

South Sudan: Vote result celebrated

2011-02-03

http://www.panos.org.uk/?lid=33774

In Southern Sudan, preliminary referendum results point to 99 per cent of those polled voting to split from the North. Panos has spoken to voters in the Warrap and West Bahr al Ghazal states about their hopes for the future. Ariac Kuot Akuei, 64, waited in line for nine hours to cast her vote for separation after walking four kilometres to her polling station at Kuajoc Secondary School, in Warrap state.

Africa: Africa pushes for bigger free trade area

2011-02-07

http://www.tralac.org/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&news_id=98576&cause_id=1694

The effort by three of Africa’s economic communities to form a combined free trade area from Cape to Cairo involving up to 700 million people will gather momentum next month when their representatives meet in South Africa for their second tripartite summit. The combined free trade area is envisaged to unlock large cross-border infrastructure for communications, roads, rail, marine ports and air development to facilitate trade, while citizens will be able to travel freely and their skills shared by member countries.

Africa: African LDCs won’t benefit much from BRICS arrival

2011-02-02

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54296

South Africa landed a coveted membership with the Brazil, Russia, India and China bloc (BRIC) by marketing itself as a gateway to Africa but analysts doubt whether this development holds real benefits for poor countries on the rest of the continent. Sanusha Naidu, research director of communication network Fahamu’s 'emerging powers in Africa' programme, says: 'What most people fail to realise is that by joining BRIC, South Africa offers a strategic partnership for investors from these countries. These investors do not necessarily have the savvy to do business on the continent, nor do they want to take all the risks associated with it. Linking up with South African capital can provide the commercial spin they are looking for.'

Africa: Commission targets Africa in EU drive for raw materials

2011-02-07

http://euobserver.com/?aid=31735

Europe's development policy and external lending practices should play a greater role in securing raw materials from key producer regions such as Africa, the European Commission is set to propose in a new policy paper on Wednesday (2 February). The communication will also look at measures to tackle growing fluctuations in global commodity markets, an issue that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made a cornerstone of France's G20 presidency.

Gobal: Doha round tariffs Cuts 'will still hit' poor countries

2011-02-02

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54314

To allow least developed countries (LDCs) to protect nascent industries, they are not required to cut tariffs for industrial goods and fisheries in the Doha Development Round. However, tariffs cuts will affect them if they are members of customs unions where some of their neighbours are larger developing countries without LDC status. For example, 'Nigeria is not an LDC but the nine LDCs in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) may also be bound by the commitments that their more powerful neighbour agrees to in the Doha Round,' explains Aileen Kwa in response to questions from IPS about what lies ahead for LDCs at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) during 2011.

Mozambique: Calls for renegotiating mega-projects

2011-02-03

http://www.trademarksa.org/node/3494

The Governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Ernesto Gove, has claimed that the economic and social conditions now exist in Mozambique for the government to renegotiate contracts signed with some of the mega-projects that have come to dominate the economy. Speaking on Friday at the closing session of a meeting of the Bank's Consultative Council in Mozambique, Gove said, 'In investment everybody has to win, otherwise social tensions are created.'

Africa: Economic development equals more cancer

2011-02-07

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20033076

Information released by the American Cancer Society (ACS) on the eve of World Cancer Day last Friday warns that lifestyle cancers of the lung, breast and colon – which are in turn related to economic development - will continue to rise in developing countries if preventative measures are not widely applied. The findings are contained in the ACS reports - Global Cancer Facts & Figures and Global Cancer Statistics - and include a special section on cancer in Africa, where according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) about 681,000 new cancer cases and 512,400 cancer deaths occurred in 2008.

Global: Fund Against Aids cracks down on fraud

2011-02-07

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12371723

The UN-backed Global Fund Against Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has announced it is strengthening financial safeguards following corruption claims. The fund, with a budget of almost $22bn (£13.6bn), said the new measures would include a panel of independent experts to review financial procedures.

Global: Health, medicines and recent negotiations

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/fuaefJ

The purpose of this research paper from the South Centre is to describe, above all, a negotiating process which many have described as historical. More than an analysis on the subject of public health and intellectual property, this is an analysis of a negotiating process which could change the course and the nature of an organisation such as the WHO. It is still too early to say whether this was achieved are not, but we are starting to write a chapter in the history of public health in the 21st century.

Kenya: Campaign launched on cheaper malaria drugs

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/e9Ihle

The Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation is in the process of popularising the highly subsidised malaria drugs now available in the country, reports the Daily Nation. Through the programme, the ministry and the private sector are offering treatments for less than Sh40, effectively bringing down the cost of malaria medicine from a high average of Sh500 per dose. Although these medicines have been around for several months now, many pharmacies have been selling them at prices far above those that have been recommended. This has prompted the current campaign to inform Kenyans that the medicines are available and that they need not buy them at the previous high prices.

Liberia: Measles campaign launched

2011-02-02

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37433&Cr=Ivoire&Cr1=

The Government of Liberia, with support from United Nations agencies, will launch a week-long measles vaccination campaign on Wednesday targeting all children in Nimba County, which hosts over 30,000 refugees who fled the political turmoil in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. As of the end of January, five Liberian children between one and five years old had died of measles, two cases had been confirmed by the UN World Health Organisation (WHO), and just over 100 suspected cases had been reported.

South Africa: Delayed drug registration could affect region

2011-02-03

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54330

Delays in drug registration by the country's Medicines Control Council (MCC), contribute to depriving South African HIV patients of important fixed dose combination antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. But there are indications that the effects of the delays are being felt even farther afield. In December 2010, South Africa announced a new, two-year tender for ARVs which halved drug costs for the national HIV treatment programme; The tender however failed to include many fixed dose ARV combinations, which although approved by bodies like the World Health Organisation are not yet registered by the MCC for use in South Africa.

Global: Promoting rights in schools - providing quality public education

2011-02-03

http://zunia.org/post/promoting-rights-in-schools-providing-quality-public-education-prs/

The Right to Education Project and ActionAid has launched the Promoting Rights in Schools: providing quality public education (PRS) resource pack. Aimed at actively engaging parents, children, teachers, unions, communities and local civil society organisations in collectively monitoring and improving the quality of public education, PRS offers a set of practical tools that can be used as a basis for mobilisation, advocacy and campaigning.

Kenya: Famine hurts school enrolment

2011-02-01

http://bit.ly/ecQBVx

School enrolment has drastically dropped in Turkana County due to famine and insufficient learning materials, reports the Daily Nation. Most children have been forced to drop out of school and migrate with their parents in search of food and water due to the ongoing drought. 'The acute food shortage is impacting negatively on learning in the area. Some children have moved with their parents to areas far away from school in search of food,' said Turkana South district commissioner Joseph Kanyiri.

Senegal: Eight NGOs work for Education for All in 2015

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/fOSQ9J

The regional agencies of eight non-governmental organisations under a platform Inter-Agency for Education on Friday decided to take advantage of the World Social Forum (FSM) to be hosted in Senegal from 6 to 11 February 2011 to join their forces to attain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the domain of education. The Inter-Agency for Education, which brings together ActionAid, Ancefa, Fawe, Oneworld UK, Oxfam, Plan, UNICEF and Word Vision, is a framework of synergy and knowledge sharing aimed at strengthening the voice of the civil society for quality and free public education.

Somalia: Fighting for an education

2011-02-02

http://irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91613

Sometimes the teachers make it to school but the children do not - when the fighting is too intense for them to venture outdoors. Sometimes teachers make it to school only to find it has been moved - to enable displaced children to continue learning. This is the nature of teaching in war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, considered one of the world's most dangerous cities. In the midst of the chaos and violence, teachers, students and their parents are confronted with a choice of obtaining a semblance of education or giving up altogether.

South Africa: DA calls for removal of Qwelane as ambassador to Uganda

2011-02-01

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-01-31-da-calls-for-removal-of-qwelane-as-ambassador-to-uganda/

The Democratic Alliance (DA) on Monday called on President Jacob Zuma to remove controversial former columnist Jon Qwelane as South Africa's ambassador to Uganda. Qwelane had in the past 'launched many verbal assaults on gay and lesbian people', stating publicly that he 'would have disowned his own children if they were gay'.

South Africa: Zuma called to speak out on gay murders

2011-02-03

http://www.mask.org.za/zuma-must-speak-out-on-gay-murders-in-africa/

The 'deafening' silence by the South African government on issues relating to homosexuality on international platforms has been highly condemned by gay rights groups at a rally spearheaded by the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP) outside offices of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) in Pretoria on 01 February 2011. Over 150 people attended the march which called for DIRCO and government as a whole to uphold and promote the South African Constitution and urge African Union member states to fight discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people.

Uganda: Promptly investigate killing of prominent LGBT activist

2011-02-02

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/01/27/uganda-promptly-investigate-killing-prominent-lgbt-activist

Police in Uganda should urgently and impartially investigate the killing of the prominent human rights activist David Kato, Human Rights Watch has said. Kato had dedicated his life to fighting for the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexual, and transgender persons (LGBT) in Uganda, facing threats and risks to his personal safety. The government should ensure that members of Uganda's LGBT community have adequate protection from violence and take prompt action against all threats or hate speech likely to incite violence, discrimination, or hostility toward them, Human Rights Watch said.

Global: The role of the World Bank in carbon markets

2011-02-07

http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-567401

This paper outlines the World Bank’s involvement in the carbon market and reviews concerns about its impacts on greenhouse gas emission reductions and development. First, it introduces the role and aims of the Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit and the various funds and facilities that it manages. The Bank has worked to shape the carbon market by reducing risk for other investors, setting social and environmental standards, and developing new types of projects. It is now focusing on promoting national programmes', reducing emissions from deforestation; and large-scale, long-term carbon finance.

Africa: Land deals - what is in the contracts?

2011-02-02

http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/18083

Over the past few years, agribusiness, investment funds and government agencies have been acquiring long-term rights over large areas of land in Africa. Together with applicable national and international law, contracts define the terms of an investment project, and the way risks, costs and benefits are distributed. Who has the authority to sign the contract and through what process greatly influences the extent to which people can have their voices heard. Yet very little is known about the exact terms of the land deals. Drawing on the legal analysis of twelve land deals from different parts of Africa, this report discusses the contractual issues for which public scrutiny is most needed, and aims to promote informed public debate about them.

Nigeria: Flourishing Niger Delta threatened by Libya water plan

2011-02-07

http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/18106

The inland Niger delta of Mali is a unique wetland ecosystem that supports a million farmers, fishermen, and herders and a rich diversity of wildlife. But now, the country’s president and Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi have begun a major agricultural project that will divert much of the river’s water and threaten the delta’s future.

Global: GM isn't the answer to hunger

2011-02-02

http://www.wdm.org.uk/news/gm-isnt-answer-hunger

The World Development Movement has criticised the findings of the Beddington report in the United Kingdom, which promotes the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops as a key solution to global hunger. The focus on GM in the chief scientist's report is a red herring and does not correctly identify the real causes of hunger. The World Development Movement's director, Deborah Doane said: 'The Beddington report does not accurately reflect the real cause of hunger in developing countries. The current record food prices are down to banks and hedge funds betting on food. The hot speculative inflows of money into commodity markets are dramatically pushing up the price of foods like bread, sugar and corn.'

Cote d’Ivoire: Two TV journalists detained

2011-02-03

http://www.mediafound.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=615&Itemid=1

Sanogo Aboubakar and Kangbe Yayoro Charles Lopez, of the pro-Ouattara Television Notre Patrie (TVN) in Bouake, the second largest city in Cote d’Ivoire, have been detained by security forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo since their arrest on 28 January 2011. The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s correspondent reported that the two journalists were picked up at the airbase of the Liaison Transport Air Group in Abidjan where they were to board a flight belonging to the United Nations Operations in Cote d’Ivoire (ONUCI) to cover a story at the Golf hotel.

Egypt: Mubarak's onslaught on free expression condemned

2011-02-03

http://www.ifex.org/egypt/2011/02/02/unprecedented_onslaught/

The Egyptian government's attacks on journalists and unprecedented blackout of the nation's Internet and mobile phone services have crushed the rights of free expression, assembly and association and should be reversed immediately, say the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) and a growing chorus of IFEX members.

Ghana: Police manhandle RTI protestors

2011-02-07

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_message/33172?data%5Bsource%5D=rss#m33172

Police personnel in Accra on 2 February 2011 scuttled a plan picketing by members of the Right to Information (RTI) Coalition at Ghana’s Parliament House to register their displeasure about undue delay of the law makers to pass the bill into law, which was laid in 2009. The RTI Bill went through the first reading on 5 February 2010, it is now before the Joint Communication and Legal Committee of parliament and the committee is expected to conduct a nationwide consultative meeting, but the coalition says the bill is not on the agenda of this session of the house which ends in June, 2011.

Rwanda: Journalists on Umurabyo newspaper sent to jail

2011-02-07

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12370738

Two Rwandan journalists with the Umurabyo newspaper have been sentenced to long jail terms after being found guilty of stirring up ethnic divisions. Editor Agnes Nkusi was sentenced to 17 years, while reporter Saidath Mukakibibi was imprisoned for seven.

South Africa: ICD to probe photographer attacks

2011-02-07

http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/icd-to-probe-photographer-attacks-1.1022345

Two violent attacks by police on news photographers in Pretoria and Bloemfontein are to be taken up by the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD). The investigation comes as editor and journalist groups condemned the attacks and demanded that the policemen responsible be criminally investigated and prosecuted.

South Africa: Idasa questions committee on info bill

2011-02-02

http://www.idasa.org.za/media/uploads/outputs/files/mr._burgess_-_26_jan_2011.pdf

In a letter to the Ad Hoc Committee for the Protection of Information Bill, Idasa, the African Democracy Centre has questioned the applicability of the controversial legislation to various organs of state. 'It appears that the ad hoc committee’s view is that it is in fact too time-consuming to do an audit of the organs of state which exist. We are of the view that it is crucial that every consideration be given to the scope/applicability of the proposed legislation. Given the extensive number of organs of state, we submit that Parliament needs to be mindful of legislating without fully considering the impact of the draft legislation.'

Global: UN official vows to focus on surging youth

2011-02-03

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37441&Cr=unfpa&Cr1=

With the world’s population slated to top the milestone seven billion mark by late 2011, the new head of the United Nations agency that helps countries use population data for policies to reduce poverty pledged today to focus on the largest global youth generation ever. 'Investing in youth, their reproductive health and gender equality can help put countries on a path to accelerated economic growth and equitable development,' UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin said in his first address to the UN Development Programme (UNDP)/UNFPA Executive Board.

South Africa: Welfare payments, a panacea for poverty?

2011-02-03

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91812

With nearly one in three South Africans expected to receive state assistance in the form of welfare benefits during the 2011/12 financial year, commentators are wondering how the country can afford to keep providing an ever expanding social safety net. According to the latest South Africa Survey, released on 1 February by independent think-tank the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), the number of social grant beneficiaries has increased by more than 300 percent in the past nine years, while the number of registered individual taxpayers has grown at a much slower rate.

Zimbabwe: Poverty line for Zimbabwe families rises

2011-02-01

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-01-31-poverty-line-for-zim-families-rises/

The poverty line for maintaining a family of five in economically ravaged Zimbabwe rose last year to $467 per month - but without increased earnings to cover the 8 per cent rise, Zimbabwe's state statistics agency said on Monday. The nation's 240,000 civil servants, teachers and government workers are planning to strike to protest average monthly incomes of about $200. With massive unemployment, most Zimbabweans survive on the equivalent of about $1 a day. Two million people are set to receive food aid in coming months, according to the United Nations.

Cuba: Cuban organisation fights for release of US prisoners

2011-02-07

http://bit.ly/gJfPZS

Enrique Roman, first vice-president of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), has underlined that the movement in solidarity with Cuba prioritises in 2011 the struggle for the release of the five Cuban antiterrorist heroes incarcerated in the United States. Roman also pointed out that, the more marked the failure of Washington’s policy of isolation against the island the greater the support and the number of actions against the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the White House on Cuba for almost half a century now, the Prensa Latina news agency reported.

Haiti: Government says Aristide can come home

2011-02-01

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-01-haiti-govt-says-aristide-can-come-home

Haiti's government has said it was ready to issue a new passport to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which would allow him to return after almost seven years in exile in South Africa. 'The government will give assurances that as soon as it receives such a request, it will be swiftly granted,' the information ministry said in a statement. Aristide, who fled the Caribbean country in 2004, formally requested earlier that Haitian authorities issue him a diplomatic passport, and provide guarantees for his safety.

Côte d’Ivoire: AU sends new mediation team

2011-02-07

http://www.africareview.com/News/-/979180/1102438/-/hrqojoz/-/index.html

The new African Union (AU) team of experts left Addis Ababa on Sunday for Abidjan in a fresh bid to resolve Côte d’Ivoire’s political crisis.The team consisting of security and diplomatic experts will be in the West African country from 6 - 10 February to meet the rival politicians and other stakeholders then prepare its recommendations to the AU high-level panel.

DRC: Trade in conflict minerals continues

2011-02-03

http://www.trademarksa.org/node/3489

The Congo government's ban on trade in conflict minerals has met with little success as trade in North Kivu remains dominated by a mafia network that connect the mines to international markets, a report by the Enough Project said on Tuesday. Many armed groups have benefited from Congo's protracted violence and don't like the possibility of a shrinking market for their minerals, Research Director David Sullivan said in a statement. 'So it should come as no surprise that some of the fastest-moving efforts to trace and audit mineral supply chains are actually being driven by many of the same commercial actors and regional governments that have been indiscriminately purchasing Congolese minerals for years, as documented by UN investigators,' he said.

Egypt: Diary of an Egyptian rebel

2011-02-07

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/04/egypt-rebel-diary-ahdaf-soueif?INTCMP=SRCH

'I shall leave now for Tahrir Square. My family is already there. My son phoned and said it's fine: the military are running checks and everything's orderly. The questions that are being settled on the streets of Egypt are of concern to everyone. The paramount one for us today is this: can a people's revolution that is determinedly democratic, grass-roots, inclusive and peaceable succeed?'

Egypt: New film explores Egypt's revolt

2011-02-07

http://pulsemedia.org/2011/02/06/egypt-burning/

This film tells the story of five days in January 2011 when the people of Egypt broke through a barrier of fear they had known for a generation and rose in revolt against their president. Egypt Burning captures those critical moments as history unfolded through interviews with Al Jazeera correspondents on the ground.

Egypt: Obama backs Mubarak’s bid to retain power

2011-02-02

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/feb2011/egyp-f02.shtml

Obama’s aim is all too clear: to keep Mubarak in office for as long as possible while fashioning a regime to prop up bourgeois rule and uphold US strategic and economic interests in the region, says this article from the World Socialist Web Site.

Nigeria: New wave of violence leaves 200 dead

2011-02-02

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/01/27/nigeria-new-wave-violence-leaves-200-dead

A deadly spate of sectarian violence in Nigeria's central Plateau State since 24 December 2010, has killed more than 200 people, Human Rights Watch has said. The victims, including children, have been hacked to death, burned alive, 'disappeared', or dragged off buses and murdered in tit-for-tat killings. The Nigerian government should act swiftly to protect civilians of all ethnicities at risk of further attacks or reprisal killings, and allow the United Nations secretary-general's special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Francis Deng, to visit the state, Human Rights Watch said.

Nigeria: Soldiers open fire in clash with students

2011-02-01

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-01-30-nigerian-soldiers-open-fire-in-clash-with-students/

Nigerian soldiers opened fire on students in central Nigeria in late January in a fresh round of violence that also saw churches and mosques set ablaze, officials and witnesses said. A hospital official said 24 people were admitted with bullet wounds and one person had died, but the commander of a military task force in the region said only four students were shot and injured when soldiers fired in self-defence.

Somalia: Rising number of child landmine victims in Somaliland

2011-02-03

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91805

Somalia's self-declared independent region of Somaliland has experienced an increase in landmine and unexploded ordnance (UXO) explosions in the recent past, with officials calling for mine awareness education in schools, as children have been the main victims. 'Child victims of land mines have increased in Somaliland in the past two months,' Ahmed Ali Maah, director of the Somaliland Mine Action Center (SMAC), told IRIN. 'Some 93 children have been killed by landmines in the past three years.'

Egypt: Speak-to-tweet service launched for protesters

2011-02-01

http://mashable.com/2011/01/31/google-twitter-egypt-call-service/

A group of engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow (which Google acquired last week) have built a speak-to-tweet service for protesters in Egypt. The service, which is already live, enables users to send tweets using a voice connection. Anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail on one of three international phone numbers: +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. Tweets sent using the service will automatically include the hashtag #egypt.

Kenya: Google launches mapping party in Nairobi

2011-02-03

http://google-africa.blogspot.com/2011/02/ladies-mapping-party-coming-to-nairobi.html

Do you want to change the world? Are you a woman working in tech, or working for a cause in which Google Maps could help tell your story? Or perhaps you’re just interested in Google Map Maker and mapping your world, as well as interacting with other like minded women? Then join us at iHub on 12 February 2011 for a Mapping Party using Google Map Maker.

Angola Monitor Issue 1/2011

2011-02-03

http://www.actsa.org/page-1499-Angola_Monitor.html

The Angola Monitor covers the politics, economics, development, democracy and human rights of Angola. It is published quarterly by Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA) and is available in both English and Portuguese. This issue covers President dos Santos’ state visit to South Africa, the meeting of the general secretaries of liberation movements in Luanda and the 2011 budget and increased investment in industry and health. It also covers calls for more transparency in the oil industry, cases of rape during the continued mass expulsions into DRC and growing concerns about violence against reporters.

The revolution in Egypt: analysis and resources

2011-02-07

http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/youth/2280-the-revolution-in-egypt-analysis-and-resources

Compiled on the Towards Freedom website is a collection of recommended reports and resources on current events unfolding in Egypt and across the region.

'Taking Stock of Transitional Justice': Podcasts available

2011-02-07

http://www.csls.ox.ac.uk/otjr.php?show=conference

On 26-28 June 2009, Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) hosted the international conference, 'Taking Stock of Transitional Justice'. 170 delegates from 36 countries took part in the event, which was held in the Social Sciences Building at the University of Oxford. Featuring 75 presentations by established experts and new thinkers who challenge accepted positions, the conference provided the basis for re-orienting the study and practice of transitional justice. Bringing together speakers and participants from a wide range of geographical areas, with a focus on transitional justice-affected countries, the conference provided a means to foster dialogue and establish long-term working relationships. The podcasts for this event, which include a series on Sudan, are now available from the website provided.

Call for entries to 2011 Africa-India Capacity Building Scholarship

2011-02-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/70675

The Commission of the African Union invites applications from University lecturers, who intend to undertake postgraduate studies at the PhD level in any reputable Indian University. The applicant must possess a Masters degree with at least 3 years post-graduation experience, and not above be 45 years of age.
Call for entries to 2011 Africa-India Capacity Building Scholarship

With support from the African Union-Government of India Cooperation, the Mwalimu Nyerere Programme of the African Union is calling for entries to the 2011 Africa-India Capacity Building Scholarship program.

The Special University Lecturers PhD fellowship Program is a capacity building program for PhD studies for teachers in African institutions of higher education and research, in any field of Agriculture, tenable in any Indian University. The Commission of the African Union invites applications from University lecturers, who intend to undertake postgraduate studies at the PhD level in any reputable Indian University. The applicant must possess a Masters degree with at least 3 years post-graduation experience, and not above be 45 years of age.

Under the African Union – Government of India cooperation programme, the African Union Commission has announced the special Capacity-Building Masters Degree Scholarship programme in any Agricultural discipline, tenable in any Indian University. Applicants should be in possession of at least a Second Class Upper Honours degree or equivalent, with at least two years post-graduation experience, and not be over 40 years of age. The master’s programme must not exceed two years duration. The Government of India support will cover tuition fees, and monthly allowance of 12,000 Indian Rupees for accommodation and subsistence, as well as medical and local travels throughout the duration of the programme.

Both The Special University Lecturers PhD Fellowship Program and the Capacity-Building Masters Degree Scholarship will be taught in English. Deadline for entries is Friday 11th February 2011. See www.au.int for more details or email mwalimunyerere@africa-union.org

Master's in International Human Rights Law (part-time)

University of Oxford

2011-02-01

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

Oxford University’s Master's programme in International Human Rights Law is offered jointly by the Department for Continuing Education and the Faculty of Law. It is conducted on a part-time basis over 22 months. It involves two periods of distance learning via the internet as well as two summer sessions held at New College, Oxford. The degree programme is designed in particular for lawyers and other human rights advocates who wish to pursue advanced studies in international human rights law but may need to do so alongside work or family responsibilities. The aim of the degree programme is to train and support future leaders in the field of international human rights law. A central objective of the course is to ensure that participants not only know but can also use human rights law. The curriculum places roughly equal emphasis on the substance of human rights law, its implementation, and the development of human rights advocacy skills.

Transforming Civil Conflict

The Network University, 7 March to 2 April 2011

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/70667

During the course the participants are familiarised with contemporary theories of conflict and conflict resolution, acquainted with a range of relevant information on conflict on the Internet and introduced to practical issues and debates within the field. They are brought together in a 'learning community' with people with a professional interest in conflict. The subjects for each of the course weeks are: Introduction to Conflict Resolution, Conflict Analysis and Conflict Prevention. The students participate through online debates, assignments and exercises and are coached intensively online. Information about the content, fees, planning and approach to the conflicts can be found in the demos course: www.netuni.nl/demos/tcc If you are interested in participating in the courses or if you have additional questions regarding course content and fees, please contact us at Claske@modop.org Information about the Network University or its partner Modus Operandi can be found on our respective websites www.netuni.nl and www.modop.org

New Issue of Refugee Survey Quarterly

2011-02-01

http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/4.toc

A new issue of Refugee Survey Quarterly (RSQ) (vol. 29, no. 4, 2011) is now available. The focus is on terrorism and refugee protection. Contents include:
- Terrorism, Torture, and Refugee Protection in the United States
- Anti-Terrorism Measures and Refugee Law Challenges in Canada
- The European Convention on Human Rights, Counter-Terrorism, and Refugee Protection
- Refugee Protection, Counter-Terrorism, and Exclusion in the European Union
- Counter-Terrorism Measures and Refugee Protection in North Africa
- Complicity and Culpability and the Exclusion of Terrorists From Convention Refugee Status Post-9/11.

Call for Applications: 2011 MILEAD Fellows Program

Deadline 30 March 2011

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/70665

The MILEAD Fellows Program is a one-year leadership development program designed to identify, develop and promote emerging young African women leaders to attain and succeed in leadership positions. It builds their knowledge skills and support network to be agents of change in their community and Africa as a whole.
Call for Applications: 2011 MILEAD Fellows Program- for young African women leaders.
Deadline 30 March 2011

Moremi Initiative for Women's Leadership in Africa (Moremi Initiative) is pleased to announce its call for applications for the 2011 Moremi Leadership Empowerment and Development (MILEAD) Fellows Program.

The MILEAD Fellows Program is a one-year leadership development program designed to identify, develop and promote emerging young African Women leaders to attain and succeed in leadership positions. It builds their knowledge skills and support network to be agents of change in their community and Africa as a whole. The program targets dynamic young women interested in developing transformational leadership skills that help them tackle issues affecting women in their communities and society as a whole. Applications are welcome from young African women living in Africa and the Diaspora.

MILEAD fellowship awards will be made to 25 young women with exceptional qualities who have exhibited leadership potential in their community, organization, and/or profession. To be eligible for the one-year program, an applicant must be African, living on the continent or in the Diaspora; agree to participate in all required activities related to MILEAD including a three-week residential Summer Institute in Ghana in August; and commit to a community leadership service project. Applicant must be between 19 - 25 years of age. Specific requirements of the program and related dates are outlined in the application package.

Please note that this is not a full-time fellowship. Selected candidates may remain full time students or work full time for the program duration, except during the 3-week summer institute. The 3-week summer institute is an intensive and full-time residential program and all fellows will be required to attend. The rest of the program involves community-based, online and other distance activities.

We invite you to forward the MILEAD application information to the most amazing young African Women leaders you know, who have the potential to help transform Africa.

How to Apply
Interested applicants should submit the following by the application deadline of March 30, 2011. (Application forms must be completed online).

1. Complete MILEAD Application Form online
2. Upload Resumé/Curriculum Vitae (C.V.).
3. Upload or email two letters of recommendation from professional or academic referees.

The deadline for completed applications to be submitted for review is March 30, 2011.
For application package or additional information, please visit: www.moremiinitiative.org or contact us at: info@moremiinitiative.org Tel: +1 404 826 2942

Ghana: Capacity building program officer

Revenue Watch Institute

2011-02-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/70566

The Revenue Watch Institute (RWI) is a non-profit policy institute and grant-making organization that promotes the transparent, accountable and effective management of oil, gas, and mineral resources for the public good. RWI provides expertise, capacity building and funding to help countries maximize the long-term economic benefit of their natural riches.
Position Available: Capacity Building Program Officer - Media
Revenue Watch Institute
Accra, Ghana
January 2011

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About Revenue Watch Institute

The Revenue Watch Institute (RWI) is a non-profit policy institute and grant-making organization that promotes the transparent, accountable and effective management of oil, gas, and mineral resources for the public good. RWI provides expertise, capacity building and funding to help countries maximize the long-term economic benefit of their natural riches.

Oil, gas and mining resources have the potential to fuel the growth and development of resource rich countries. But, often this wealth may be captured by elites, may distort and damage the broader economy, may reduce governments’ apparent need to respond to their citizens and may fuel conflict. Many developing countries lack the oversight mechanisms, both within government and civil society, to manage these challenges.

Revenue Watch is the only organization exclusively dedicated to helping oil, gas, and mineral-producing countries harness extractive revenues for development. We take a comprehensive approach to improving governance and development along the resource value chain—from the decision to extract, through the organization of production, revenue generation and management, to the expenditure processes in resource-rich countries. We believe that improved public oversight of these revenues, coupled with targeted assistance to governments on managing them, can help turn resource wealth from a hindrance into an asset.

Purpose and Context

The Capacity Building Program Officer for Media post will implement, monitor and promote our approaches to addressing the diverse and increasingly advanced needs of the media.
RWI believes that a vibrant, scrutinizing media is essential in giving public the information and voice it needs to demand the transparency and accountability necessary for good use of public resources and revenues, including those related to oil, gas and mining. RWI has undertaken some training and capacity building work with and for media actors, to improve the quantity and quality of reporting on extractive issues. But RWI now has a strong desire to develop more systematic, sustainable and impactful approaches and expand its coverage.

The Program Officer will focus on work to build the capacity of media as a key target group. At the end of 2009, RWI received funding to develop a significant new media capacity building program in Ghana and Uganda. The project is currently slated to run for 3 years, with the possibility of expanding in geographic scope in the following years. If the project is successful and further funding secured, there is the strong probability that the post will be extended and the remit expanded. The position will be based in Accra, Ghana, but will be managed from London.

Responsibilities

The Capacity Building Program Officer for Media will be responsible for the following:
• Ensure good on-going communication and coordination with other agencies involved in capacity building of media (especially related to economic media and the extractives) – nationally, regionally and internationally.
• Negotiate and manage all contracting and relationships with local partners and any others providing inputs to the program (including inputs from technical advisors within RWI).
• With local partners, ensure the smooth design and implementation of the:
• selection process to identify participants,
• needs assessments and trainings,
• mentoring program
• financial support mechanisms
• prizes for journalism
• Ensure an effective monitoring and evaluation approach is designed and implemented, including tracking and analysis of media coverage.
• Ensure project learning and impact is effectively documented and communicated to key audiences, using traditional and new media and tools.
• Maintain close and constructive relationships with editors, owners, leading journalists etc to ensure the smooth running of the program.
• Ensure effective financial management of the project and reporting to donors.
• Build contacts and lever the project to develop and sustain the RWI media programme in Africa and other regions.
• Represent RWI externally at meetings, conferences, with donors etc.
• Implement media related work as required by RWI’s capacity building portfolio, in agreement with the Director of Training and Capacity Building.
• Undertake other tasks as required by management.

Qualifications

Requirements
• At least 3-5 years experience running and managing capacity building projects in an international development and advocacy environment – including recruitment and management of staff, relationship management and capacity building of local partners, monitoring and evaluation, financial management.
• Demonstrable understanding of the media in Africa – key players, constraints, opportunities – and how it can be strengthened.
• Personal commitment to improving the use of, and accountability for, public resources.
• Skills in effective documentation and communication of project progress and learning.
• Ability to combine attention to detail whilst driving towards the overall goals of a program
• Ability to manage several simultaneous projects in a fast-paced environment.
• Ability to work in a self-motivated manner, with management support from a distance.
• Collegiate working style with superior interpersonal, writing, and organizational skills.
• Ability to use all key Microsoft office software.
• Willingness to travel – at least1 week per month.
• Ability to be based in Accra for the duration of the project.

Strongly preferred
• Experience in media capacity-building and network building in low income countries, especially in Ghana and Uganda.
• Post-graduate degree in a relevant field (media, political science, economics, international affairs).
• Experience in adult learning and teaching/teacher training.
• Experience in civil society capacity-building and network building in low income countries.
• Fluency in at least one additional language to English, especially French.

Location: The candidate will be based in Accra, Ghana, where RWI’s Africa regional office is located.

Duration: Initially until the end of the first project, slated for completion by October 2012.

Start Date: March - April 2011

Compensation: Commensurate with experience. Benefits include medical, dental, work travel insurance, life and disability insurance, private pension scheme, 20 annual leave days plus all public holidays.

To Apply: Please email resume, cover letter, references and salary requirements before February 13, 2011, to: hdempsey@revenuewatch.org
Include job code in subject line: PC/MEDIA/RWI

Once we have had an opportunity to consider all resumes received by February 13, 2011, we will only contact those applicants whose background and prior experience appear to be most suited to this particular position.

No phone calls, please. The Revenue Watch Institute is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Website Content Resource Person

GBV Prevention Network

2011-02-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/70666

Raising Voices is searching for a website resource person, with experience in the field of violence against women, and knowledge of organisations and individuals in this field within Africa and specifically the Horn, East and Southern Africa.
Call for Applications: Website Content Resource Person www.preventgbvafrica.org
Part time, off-site position with Raising Voices 2 days per month.

The GBV Prevention Network is a dynamic group of activists and practitioners committed to preventing gender- based violence in the Horn, East and Southern Africa. To date we have over 350 individuals and organizations from more than 18 counties in the region. The Network is a vibrant space for innovation, expertise, experience sharing and exchange on GBV prevention, and is currently coordinated by Raising Voices in Kampala, Uganda.

To encourage connection, sharing and learning among members the Network runs an interactive website www.preventgbvafrica.org this is a one stop shop for GBV prevention resources in the region. On the website we have publications, communication materials, researches, evaluations, activity reports and more from members, experts and organizations within the region and globally. Every month the website is updated with resources from members and non-members.

Raising Voices is searching for a website resource person, with experience in the field of violence against women, and knowledge of organizations and individuals in this field within Africa and specifically the Horn, East and Southern Africa. This person will be required to help the Network provide up to date regional and international resources on GBV to members each month, and have regular access to the internet with their own computer. They will be required to search for resources and valuable information to be updated on the website monthly and shared with members. Technical skills for programming and design of website are NOT required.

Scope of work

1. Source up to date regional and global GBV prevention/response information (resources, publications, communication materials, researches, evaluations, videos, events) from members and non-members.
2. Source for member news and events from organizations in the region working on GBV: discussions, action alerts, petitions, calls for funding, links, job postings and any other events of interest to our members.
3. Regularly scan through the website, highlighting problematic areas and make suggestions for changes that would benefit members e.g. use of the interactive features, identifying formatting/spelling/link errors, etc.
4. Actively promote website and the GBV Prevention Network activities in the region and beyond.

Deliverables
1. A minimum of 5 new member resources and 10 non-member resources prepared in provided format ready for upload (by web designer) on the website by the 20th of each month.
2. A least 5 items of relevant member news and events, and other information detailed in 2 above from the region per month.
3. At least 2 recommendations for improving the website every month.
4. Evidence of promotion of the GBV Prevention Network and website every month.

Time Frame and Payment
The Website Content Resource Person will be expected to work off site (i.e. not in Raising Voices offices) and they do not have to be based in Uganda. Access to a computer and internet connection is a must. Payment for 2 days work per month will be 300 USD per month for a one year contract that is renewable.

To apply, send a thoughtful cover letter and CV to Winnie@raisingvoices.org by February 16th 2011.

Ethiopia: African leaders in Ethiopia land grab

2011-02-02

http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/18069

Several African leaders have bought lands in Ethiopia to develop agricultural projects or tourism resorts. They are let to bypass a 2007 ban on export of cereals, still in place for other investors. It has earlier been known that former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasansjo and current Djiboutian President Ismael Omar Guelleh privately have bought up large properties in Ethiopia. Also the Egyptian Prime Minister managed to buy large agricultural land tracts in Ethiopia on behalf of his government. However, a US Embassy cable from February last year, released by Wikileaks, indicates that several of these underreported deals operate in the grey zone of Ethiopian legislation.

Liberia: Court admits Wikileaks documents in Taylor's trial

2011-02-01

http://bit.ly/gEdZu8

Judges at the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor have admitted into evidence two Wikileaks documents that appear to question the impartiality of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The decision comes just days before prosecutors and defense attorneys present their closing arguments in Mr. Taylor's war crimes trial.

Sudan: AU chief privately critical of Sudan’s inaction on Darfur justice

2011-02-07

http://www.sudantribune.com/Wikileaks-AU-chief-privately,37901

The African Union commission chairman Jean Ping has been unhappy about Sudan’s lack of progress on handing justice for victims of alleged war crimes committed in Darfur, according to a classified U.S. document obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. Ping’s views came at a meeting he held in January 2009 with representatives of the P-3 group (United States, United Kingdom and France) in London.

Fahamu