Current Issue

African unity: revisiting the popular uprisings of the North

Awino Okech

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82400

cc N NThe most important question post-uprising is how to entrench a Pan-African agenda led by citizens that addresses the fundamental challenges hampering African unity.

Three years ago when Tajudeen Abdul Raheem died in Nairobi, I met one of his many Nairobi-based friends a week later. In jest, he said to me: “Awino, before you die be sure to leave a list of your friends’ names so that we call on them after you die”. It was a tongue in cheek statement but one that epitomized the reality of Taju’s life. He ‘belonged’ to many and even though most of us did not know him very well, his larger than life personality, a connection to his own struggles and an interest in his contributions to the Pan African movement made it seem as though you were comrades from another life time. He had a way of making you feel like you were old friends. You could not but take ownership of him.

I am reminded of this conversation today because of the metaphorical similarities it bears with the events that occurred in Egypt and Tunisia specifically. At the height of the ‘Arab Spring’ many African and Pan African commentators were quick to counter the overwhelmingly western media narrative that positioned the uprisings as part of an Arab – Middle Eastern process, disconnected from the histories of democratisation in the rest of Africa. Some needed to take ‘ownership’ of the popular uprisings as Pan African in nature, as inspired by the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1990s in particular and shaped by the some of our liberation giants – Nkrumah, Cabral, Senghor, Sankara and Lumumba to name a few. In fact, the uprisings presented an opportunity to dismantle the North Africa – Sub Saharan Africa divide. Re-asserting the Pan African slant and situating the ideologies of the Fanons of this world offered an incredible opportunity – we hoped – to transform the uprising discourses and in turn those claimed by the youth in these countries.

This train of thought was re-echoed at a meeting convened by the African Union (AU) in 2011 on the democratization process in Africa in the wake of Libya. The importance of not losing the Pan African thrust to these shifts was underscored largely due to the NATO led intervention in Libya. For a post-post Uhuru child, I was hard pressed to understand how NATO happened on Libya given the seemingly strong and progressive political positions echoed by former and current leaders in the room, most of who were at the centre of UN led negotiations at the Security Council. The Monrovia and Casablanca divisions were re-echoed, the need to recognise that democratisation was a process not an event and was inherently linked to the liberation struggles that gave birth to independent African states was re-asserted powerfully. The importance of African leaders taking responsibility for creating space for external intervention was underscored. Having said that, I am also aware that politics and foreign policy decisions are often not simply informed by our ideological positions and therefore one can understand why NATO happened on Libya.

Perhaps, one of the most critical pieces of work to come from ‘Arab Spring’ wave of discourses was the African Awakening compilation by Pambazuka Press. The analysis in this publication underscored that what we were in fact witnessing was part of a broader canvas of a people-led third liberation that was also happening in other parts of the continent. The need to upset and un-seat demagogues and dictators was not unique to Tunisia and Egypt. Despite symbols of democracy such as a seemingly valid constitution, regular cosmetic elections in other parts of the continent, the democratic process was a journey which had effectively been reclaimed by the masses and not left to the political elite.

Whilst in Tunis in 2012 as part of the AU seminar series, the narrative shifted ever so slightly but powerfully in my view. You see most of the debates I draw attention to above have been shaped by those in sub-Saharan Africa, by ‘North Africans’ in the diaspora or with Pan African histories. However, when in conversations with our Tunisian and Egyptian comrades at home, it was evident to me that this historical narrative rooted not only in the history of the OAU/AU as an institution but also as part of an intellectual political framework did not resonate here. I argue that it did not appear to resonate with the few who were present, primarily because of the way in which the revolution discourse was framed. It was rooted in connections with other moderate Islamic movements in the Arab world. The Ennahda movement in Tunisia is a case in point. The April 6th youth movement in Egypt for instance drew inspiration from American frameworks on non-violence for their own processes in addition to the most immediate inspiration - Tunisia. Admittedly, the constructions of Islam post 9/11 make it impossible for any conversation to occur without a feeling of the need to defend Islam as a religion, as a civilization and as well as its construction as antithetical to any democratic norms - a feature that has also been linked to the idea of Africa. In conversation, it was clear to me that their eyes and ears still look North (and here I literally mean the geographical North and not the Global North) for inspiration, to Africa for some belonging and to South Africa for lessons.

ON OWNERSHIP AND BELONGING

I must underscore that what I speak about here is not the instrumental debate of whether Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans consider themselves African. By virtue of geography and history they are African without a doubt. In fact, one of the most popular refrains today is the fact that Tunisia gave Africa its name. The more important question for me is whether being African is simply a process of naming or whether it is connected to belonging? If becoming African entails a much a more complex process that is not simply limited to a shared history of colonial oppression, then what do we need to do to differently as those interested in a Pan African agenda beyond invoking semantics?

Semantics are of course critical given that years of exclusion and disconnection of any form have a psychological effect that damages the possibilities of imagining alternatives. Three years ago when I lived in South Africa, I was initially amused and then increasingly irritated when I engaged with Capetonians who lived in the infamous “matchbox houses” [1] who would say to me “ things are so terrible up there in Africa, no wonder you are here”. DRC, Nigeria and Kenya were all one big country in their eyes, all war-torn and refugee producing. In fact, all Africans were Nigerians. Unlike the American or European students who arrived in droves every year at the University of Cape Town and were perceived as being able to offer ‘something’, I was constructed as unable to offer anything but would instead benefit from the new South Africa.

I recognise the gallant efforts that have been made by various civil society formations to engage ‘North Africa’. In fact, holding the next World Social Forum in Tunisia offers an incredible opportunity to open it to Africa. However, the process of belonging and ownership requires much more than our civil society jamborees. It demands a concerted engagement around some of the central issues that limit real connections. On Africa’s Liberation Day it is to the question of how as citizens we re-assert a new Pan African agenda that we must focus. There are a number of practical realities that we must deal with head on.

“Africans moving around Africa with African passports [this distinction is important] are still treated as others. Neither abroad nor at home do we receive first class treatment” (Tajudeen Abdul Raheem)

The limitation of mobility in Africa is a critical starting point. Holding an African passport in Africa buys you no favours. In 2009, when the African Union summit was held in Sirte, most African citizens despite Brother leader Gaddafi’s calls for a united Africa could not get into the country easily because of the securitisation of travel. Your passport had to be submitted to a specified local mosque for translation; you had to have an invitation from a sanctioned Libyan NGO: all of this before you actually got to the embassy where appointments had to be secured through the ministry of foreign affairs or through the African Union. The fact that our State systems are anti-people and citizenship and immigration systems are constructed to exclude must be at the forefront of our engagements today. African people especially their women move daily with or without passports but it is the implications of illegality linked to this movement that makes it insecure and subject to micro-economies on the borders that are often hinged on bodily integrity. Of course, progress has been made on this score through the Regional Economic Communities but this has instead resulted in regional balkanization, which was interestingly affirmed in the election debacle of the AU Commission’s chairperson. As citizens our seeming disinterest in playing a central role in determining who heads the AU’s commission is worrying to say the least.

The second reality is the question of language. My fellow Kenyan and a prolific author Ngugi wa Thiong’o has always insisted on the importance of reclaiming indigenous languages as part of the process of decolonizing the mind. Wa Thiong’o has ensured that his novels are first written in his mother tongue Gikuyu and then translated into English. This is a powerful political statement but one which means that even in his own country only give or take 6 million people are able to read his publications in their original form despite their global appeal. This is one layer of the problem, which a country like South Africa ‘resolved’ by making all languages national, including sign language.

The second layer involves our ‘inherited’ languages. Those of us colonized by the British walk around the world with an air of superiority (at least I do) and are appalled when we reached African ports of entry where immigration staff speak to us in what they have espoused as a national language. Their blank stare when you ask ‘can you speak English’ is less disconcerting than their refusal to engage after your continued attempts to get through the border by insisting on speaking English. Nkrumah’s calls to unity make little meaning when you cannot communicate. My attempts to interview Ahmed Maher, one of the leaders of Egypt’s April 6th movement, failed because between us we could not find one language that we could communicate in fully. He spoke some English, I spoke a lot of English, he spoke a lot of Arabic, I spoke no Arabic, he spoke no French, I spoke some French. Of course my mother tongue and Kiswahili would not have been useful here. Given that language is perceived as a key repository of one’s identity, this creates a challenge, but it is one that we must devise strategies for.

The third issue is rooted in how we need to organize. If there is one powerful lesson to be claimed and owned from Tunisia and Egypt despite the reversals has been the place and pressure of masses pushing for change. The lack of a state owned security apparatus no doubt played an important role in ensuring that citizen’s voices were not quashed a la Libya. The inability to transform those institutions or at least place that as a critical agenda post the uprisings means that security apparatus designed to secure elite interests are maintained: the turn of events in Egypt are instructive here. In addition, the subversion of various interests groups and their voices is also critical here. The construction of youth voices as limited to the streets and not re-constructed in political players driving demands is an effect of the uprisings that must be monitored. That said, these struggles have been disconnected from organized civil society, largely independent of proposal writing and grant reports and removed press statements. The democracy debates and resultant discourses are produced on the squares and on the streets and are not predicated on a network secretariat or per diem for travel. This is not to argue that these movements have not been confronted with what is constructed as the inevitable need to organize, create a structure and name leadership because we need a hero.

In my view, the important question post-uprising is not about where the initial influence was derived from: that is a battle that has been lost. Instead focus must be placed on how we influence each other today. Herein lies the importance of a renewed source: a renewed Pan African agenda led by citizens that addresses the fundamental challenges hampering African unity. If we must own anything, let us claim and own the legitimacy and opportunities created by mobilization that is not shackled by funding deadlines and let us remember that liberation is not an event.

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* Awino Okech is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

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Time to recall the land grabbers

An extract from ‘The Great Food Robbery’: Right Livelihood Award 2011 GRAIN’s acceptance speech, 5 December 2011

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82378

cc VredeseilandenPeople who just want to grow food and make a living from the land are being expelled, criminalised, and sometimes killed, to make way for land grabbers. It is nothing less than an assault on peasants.

INTRODUCTION

On 5 December 2011, GRAIN received the 2011 Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’, at the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. GRAIN was awarded “for its worldwide work to protect the livelihoods and rights of farming communities and to expose the massive purchases of farmland in developing countries by foreign financial interests”. GRAIN seized on the opportunity to demand an immediate end to land grabbing and a restitution of lands to local communities. The following speech was delivered to the Swedish Parliament by GRAIN during the Awards Ceremony.

THE SPEECH

Three weeks ago, on the 16th of November, Cristian Ferreyra was shot dead by two masked men in front of his house and his family. Cristian lived in San Antonio, a village north of Santiago del Estero in Argentina. He was part of an indigenous community and a member of one of our partners, the indigenous peasant organisation MOCASE Via Campesina. His “crime”? To refuse to leave his homeland in order to make way for a massive soybean plantation, one of so many that have been encroaching on rural communities throughout Argen- tina in the last decade. So the plantation owners had him assassinated. Cristian was only 25 years old.

Six weeks ago, on the 26th of October, one farmer died and 21 others were injured, ten of them critically, in the village of Fanaye in northern Senegal. They, too, were trying to stop the takeover of their lands. Government officials had handed over 20,000 hectares surrounding their area to an Italian businessman who wanted to grow sweet potatoes and sunflowers to produce biofuels for European cars. The project would displace whole villages, destroy grazing areas for cattle and desecrate the local cemeteries and mosques. Fanaye is not an isolated case. Over the past few years, nearly half a million hectares in Senegal have been signed away to foreign agribusiness companies.

Gambela is a region in Ethiopia that borders South Sudan. It is home to one of the most extreme cases of land grabbing in the world. Over half of the arable land in the region has been signed away to Indian, Saudi and other investors who are now busy moving the tractors in and the people out. Ethiopia is in the midst of a severe food crisis and is heavily dependent on food aid to feed its people. Yet, the government has already signed away about 10% of the country’s entire agricultural area to foreign investors to produce commodities for the international market. Earlier this year, we were involved in the production of a video on the situation of the indigenous Anuak peoples in Gambela, who now face losing their farms, their villages and their ancestral territories. We wanted to help raise their voices to the international level, but in the video we had to distort their voices and hide their faces – to pro- tect them from backlash by the Ethiopian government.

One could continue with many more examples of how people who just want to grow food and make a living from the land are being expelled, criminalised, and sometimes killed, to make room for the production of commodities and someone else’s wealth. Today, we are witnessing nothing less than a frontal assault on the world’s peasantry. This is not only happening in the global South. Here in the European Union, we have lost three million farms since 2003. This amounts to a loss of one fifth of our farms in just eight years. Living from the land is becoming more difficult and, in many parts of the world, more danger- ous by the day. Peasants who have been feeding the world for thousands of years – and still are – are now increasingly being cast as backwards, inefficient and obstacles to development. The not-so- subtle message is: they should cease to exist.

GRAIN was established two decades ago to help stem the loss of the world’s agricultural biodiversity, and the traditional knowledge associated with it. We learned, however, that the problem was not so much the loss of indigenous seeds and breeds but the loss of the people who create, nurture and sustain that diversity. “Genetic erosion”, as we called it 20 years ago, is really just a consequence of a larger development that is promoting industrial farming and leading to the annihilation of the world’s rural peoples.

But these people, all over the world, are fighting back. In all corners of the globe there are dynamic movements of resistance and rebuilding, where people are struggling to hold on to their territories and keep control over their resilient food systems.

FARMERS COOL AND FEED THE WORLD

Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, has called today, the 5th of December, the “International food sovereignty day to cool down the earth”. Right now, Via Campesina members and allies are out in the streets of Durban, South Africa, protesting the negotiations over false solutions to climate change, and insisting that small farmers can not only cool the world but can feed it too. They are right.

The basic idea of food sovereignty is that the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food, rather than the demands of trans- national corporations, should be at the heart of our food systems. It prioritises local food production, based on agro- ecology and family farming, and local markets. It keeps seeds and biodiversity in the hands of farming communities, and GMO free. It nurtures and builds on indigenous knowledge of soils, seeds and farming systems. It recognises the crucial and central role of women.

The world desperately needs food sovereignty. It is our best hope to solve the planet’s most pressing crises. Today, over a billion people on the planet do not have enough to eat. Around 80% of these people are food producers living in the countryside. This intolerable situation is not due to a lack of food or technol- ogy. It is due to government policies that deliberately replace peasant agriculture with an industrial model driven by the needs of transnational corporations. This model produces commodities for the global market. It does not and can- not feed people.

We are all acutely aware of the climate crisis. But how many people realise that the current industrial food system con- tributes around half of all global green- house gas emissions? You get this figure if you add up the emissions from agriculture itself, plus the change in land use when forests are turned into plantations, plus the enormous distances that food and feed are transported around the globe, plus the energy that goes into processing, cooling and freezing, plus the waste of energy and food in the increasingly centralised supermarket chains. Food sovereignty, which prioritises agro-ecological farming and local markets, can massively reduce these emissions. GRAIN has calculated that just by focusing on soil fertility restoration in agricultural lands, we could off- set between one-quarter and one-third of all current global annual greenhouse gas emissions! Small farmers can indeed cool the world.

They can also feed the world. Earlier this year, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food presented a report showing that agroecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty. Others have shown that policies oriented towards promoting local markets, short food- transport circuits and peasant farming, all help to do the same. The issue is as simple as keeping food in the hands of people, rather than corporations.
Still, peasants, fishers and other food producers have never been more in danger of extinction.

STOP LAND GRABBING

Never before has so much money gone into the industrial food system. The last decade has witnessed a spectacular increase in speculation on food commodity markets, increasing food prices everywhere. With today’s global financial and economic crises, speculative capital is searching for safe places to multiply. Food and farmland are such places. “Everyone has to eat” is the new mantra preached in boardrooms. The race is on to take control of the world’s food-producing resources – seeds, water and land – and the global distribution of food. Today, much of those resources and food systems are still in the hands of the poor. For example, 90% of India’s milk market, the largest in the world, is in the hands of millions of small dairy farmers and vendors who collect milk and bring it fresh to consumers. These are the kind of markets that corporations, banks and investors now want to take over.

Money is also flowing directly into farming and land acquisition. Banks, investment houses and pension funds are actively buying up farmland all over the world. The data and the contracts are very hard to acquire, but current estimates are that 60-80 million hectares of land have fallen under the control of foreign investors for the production of food in the last few years only. This is equal to half the farmland of the EU! Most of this is happening in Africa, where people’s customary rights to land are being grossly ignored.

This latest trend in global land grabbing – that for outsourced food production – is only one part of a larger attack on land, territories and resources. Land grabs for mining, tourism, biofuels, dam construction, infrastructure projects, timber and now carbon trading are all part of the same process, turning farm- ers into refugees on their own land.

There is much to be done. But GRAIN would like to use this opportunity, here in the Swedish Parliament, to call for one specific action. We want an immediate end to the global farmland grab – an urgent and massive “recall” of land grabbers, analogous to what food safety authorities do when recalling contaminated food. We call on everyone to do whatever is possible to stop the inter- national flow of money for the global acquisition of farmland and to return lands to all affected rural communities. Stopping land grabbing is not just about what is legal. It is about what is just.

Here in Sweden, people can start by taking on companies, like Black Earth Farming, that have bought or leased farmland overseas. They are not allowed to do this here in Sweden and should not be permitted to do so abroad. Campaigns can be launched to pressure Swed-fund, which is using taxpayers’ money to finance the land grabber Addax in Sierra Leone. The Swedish pension fund AP2 is also going into global farmland acquisitions as a new strategy, supposedly to protect the retirement savings of working Swedes. Swedish development aid projects ought to be scrutinised, as there are already indications that some are promoting land grabbing activities in Mozambique and elsewhere. Such actions and campaigns are already brewing in other parts of Europe and in the US. These should be strengthened and supported, in order to stop land grabbing at the source.

Rural communities have fed the world for millennia. Today, the massive expansion of large scale industrial farming is destroying our capacity to move on. At GRAIN, together with peasant organisations and others social movements, we will continue exposing what is going wrong, while fighting for an equitable, just and sustainable food system. This award gives this struggle a tremendous boost. We see it not only as an acknowledgement of our work but also as a powerful recognition of the contributions of countless people and organisations engaged in the fight for genuine community-based food sovereignty. Together, we will continue this struggle. We have no other option if we are to survive on this planet with some dignity.

Thank you very much for this award, and for your attention.

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The great food robbery targets Africa

Interview with Devlin Kuyek by Molly Kane

Devlin Kuyek

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82375

© Pambazuka Press‘Who gets to eat and who doesn’t is decided in a few rooms by boards of directors composed mainly of rich men. A handful of people in Northern countries deciding whether Africa is going to eat or not is insane.’

INTRODUCTION

GRAIN supports small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. A small, decentralized organization, GRAIN has a staff team of nine people from eight different nationalities. In 2011, GRAIN was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (the Alternative Nobel Peace prize) for ‘its worldwide work to protect the livelihoods and rights of farming communities and to expose the massive purchases of farmland in developing countries by foreign financial interests’. This week Pambazuka News interviews GRAIN’s researcher, Devlin Kuyek, about their acclaimed new book, ‘The Great Food Robbery: How corporations control food, grab land and destroy the climate. (Pambazuka Press, 2012)

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Why is GRAIN focusing its work on the corporate food system?

DEVLIN KUYEK: GRAIN has spent the last twenty years trying to help people defend biodiversity. That’s meant that we’ve been trying to work on issues that threaten people’s control over their own biodiversity. Lately we see the major force that’s threatening that control as the corporate food system.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: How is the corporate food system the biggest threat to biodiversity?

DEVLIN KUYEK: Biodiversity can only exist through the small farmers, indigenous people, and pastoralists who maintain that biodiversity. So what threatens them threatens biodiversity. The corporate food system is about taking food production out of their hands. With the structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s Africa was pushed to move towards export agriculture and “Green Revolution” style projects. Some moved ahead, many of them failed. Now, because of the rise in prices of agricultural commodities, corporations are trying to restructure food systems around the world to move commodities around more, and take more profit. Africa is increasingly being targeted as a centre of production for global markets. The talk now is that Africa is one of the last frontiers because much of Africa is not under the model of export production. Land and water are still in the hands of local communities. So there’s a big push to industrialize agriculture for export. Unfortunately, African governments are colluding with corporations who want to pursue agribusiness in their countries, with the help of the World Bank and bilateral and multilateral donors.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: How is this fueling the land grabs we are hearing about?

DEVLIN KUYEK: There are many different kinds of land grabs; some for biofuels, others for mining or tourism. But there is a particular trend that we have pointed to since 2008 where you have foreign interests, governments, corporations working together at a scale like nothing we’ve ever seen before to take over massive areas of land to produce food for export.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Are local people included in these projects as agricultural workers?

DEVLIN KUYEK: Local workers can be hired, but foreign ones are also brought in, especially for the skilled jobs. These things are not stipulated in the contracts, so it’s at the discretion of the company. But what kind of jobs are they creating anyway? If you are talking about plantation agriculture it’s notorious for being the worst paid and most dangerous work in the world. Those protesting the deals say that they want to be farmers and pastoralists, not farm workers.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: But plantation agriculture is not new. What makes this different?

DEVLIN KUYEK: In the past you would have had plantations for oil palm, pineapples and a few other crops. But now you’re seeing this model being applied to staple crops such as wheat and rice, and on a scale that is unheard of.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Where do you see the resistance to these trends in Africa?

DEVLIN KUYEK: Throughout Africa there is a lot of resistance. At the local level, communities are mobilising. There are some land occupations and protests. Groups are organizing - regional meetings, national meetings to pressure the governments, working with the media, doing what they can, even in the face of arrests and military repression. And there is a great international outpouring of solidarity, being expressed in campaigns to get pension funds to divest from land grab investments or in strong declarations against land grabs, such as the Dakar Appeal of a couple of years ago.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Isn’t a lot of this dispossession happening in the name of “development”?

DEVLIN KUYEK: You hear a lot about helping small farmers. But, more and more, governments and business, and even programmes like AGRA [Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa], are openly talking about small scale farmers as obstacles to development that need to be replaced by a new generation of commercial, modern farmers. This is code language for big farms, often owned by foreign capital, that use the machines, seeds, pesticides and others inputs sold by multinational corporations like AGCO and Monsanto, and that supply the global trade networks of corporations like Cargill and Olam. .

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: But one of the critiques of the people who criticize that corporate model is that they romanticize the lives of small peasant farmers.

DEVLIN KUYEK: One of the chapters in ‘The Great Food Robbery’ is about the dairy industry. Many people will probably be shocked by these numbers, but about 10-15 percent of the global population is involved in dairy production. And in the South, 80 percent of the milk that is marketed is in the informal sector, or what we call the people's milk sector. So in countries like Kenya, which is a large dairy consumer, milk is provided by small farmers with one or two cows and is collected and carried on bicycle to consumers at a price that is about half of what is produced in the corporate sector. There’s no need to romanticize that. It's a system that is providing a critical source of food to millions of Kenyans, a dignified livelihood to hundreds of thousands of vendors and a regular source of income to huge numbers of Kenyan farmers who use it to pay school fees, etc. All that happens when the corporate food system moves into countries like Kenya is that you take away percentages of the market that is in the hands of the people. When Nestle comes in with milk (made mainly of imported powdered milk), it’s not giving healthier or cheaper milk, it’s not giving more money or jobs to the workforce, its not generating more wealth and markets for farmers.

In cotton production, small farmers in Africa are amazingly efficient. They do it way more efficiently than any industrialized country but they get a lower price. That’s frustrating and infuriating, and has nothing to do with the production system. With pastoralists I don’t think you would find many people who would be willing to give up their culture and their livelihoods for mechanization. And why should they? Pastoral systems are more efficient and sustainable than the industrial model. So it’s not romantic – peoples’ livelihoods and access to food are at stake.

In Ethiopia, you have a government that has stated its policy is to go from 80 percent rural population to 20 percent rural population. Who can imagine what all those people are going to do? What’s the plan there? What jobs are they going to have? You can't say that this is about people in Africa choosing to move to cities. People are being forced out of their lands through mining projects, land acquisitions, and overall bad policies.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Another argument made to justify the land-grabbing is that corporate agriculture is better suited to deal with the impact of climate change because corporations have the seeds and production methods that can adapt to climate change. What do you make of that?

DEVLIN KUYEK: Let's start from the basis that industrial agriculture and the corporate food systems are the main contributors to global greenhouse gas production. There's a chapter in the book that explains these numbers in detail. The loss of organic matter in the soils through chemical fertilizers and unsustainable agriculture practices is destroying one of the most important carbon sinks that we have. Ecological practices, which can really only be implemented through small farmers, can rebuild that soil and capture very important amounts of carbon. So dealing with climate change requires that we shift away from industrial production.

And, with climate change, we also have to change the way food is distributed. More drought, dry weather, and water crises are going to mean a substantial loss of food production. You have to question the global system of food distribution; it’s set up around profit right now. Who gets to eat and who doesn’t is decided in a few rooms by boards of directors composed mainly of rich men. A handful of people in Northern countries deciding whether Africa is going to eat or not is insane. When the food crisis happened there was nothing done about some of the most flagrant practices, like speculation on agricultural commodities. The international system seems completely incapable of dealing with this, which means that people promoting food sovereignty have the right strategy because you cannot rely on the international system to meet your food needs. It has to happen at the local level.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: So that’s why you put the book together? Who is it for?

DEVLIN KUYEK: The book pulls together our work on many different issues. All of them in one way or another deal with aspects of the corporate food system. The book is meant to pass through channels where the Internet cannot reach, and to give people something more durable that they can use as a resource.

I hope anybody interested in these issues will read the book. But the real target audience is those involved in social struggles directly or indirectly related to food issues, who might be able to use the book to understand how corporations are working, what they are after, and in what ways resistance can happen. Pambazuka Press has published the English version and it is also being translated into Spanish and French.

So much is at stake in Africa. Whole territories are being targeted and affected by land grabbing. And this time the governments are major conduits for it. How are people going to react? In Ethiopia, where the whole southern part of the country is being handed over, earlier this month you had gunmen attack a farm of Saudi Arabian operations and five people died. It’s heating up. It's very explosive. Africa is under greater pressure than it’s ever been, at least since colonial times.

Some governments have tried to get better deals. But it’s hard to point to any government that is successfully resisting. Madagascar's new government said they were going to cancel the contracts but now they’re negotiating others. People have been pressuring their governments and people pressure is definitely being felt and governments are reacting to that. It’s going to explode; you can’t keep people in those conditions.

In the book there are a lot of positive things; and people can find hope. I find the stories about people’s struggles in the dairy sector very inspiring. In Colombia, business and government tried to shut down the people's milk sector, and this amazing alliance of vendors and farmers and consumers came together to defend their food system and they won. The government had to pull back from a law that would have made their milk system illegal. And now this alliance is working with other social sectors in the country to face off against free trade agreements with the EU and US that will also undermine their livelihoods and people's health. What they have done is to form a strong social mobilization linked to other movements. That’s the basis for real change.

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Groups reject foreign investment in African farming

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82382

cc CIMMYTThis letter from African civil society critical of foreign investment in African Agriculture at G8 Summit was presented by Mamadou Cissokho,
Honorary President of ROPPA, 
President Steering Committee CDP/CSO, on behalf of farmers who are members of the organizations listed below.

15 May 2012

Mr. President (of the African Union),

Please allow a West African peasant to share with you his preoccupations in the run-up to the G8 Symposium on food security to be held in Washington on 18-19 May 2012 and the G8 on 20 May 2012 at Camp David. Two events at which the food security of our continent will be discussed, following Aquila in 2008 and Paris in 2011.

International debates on financing African agriculture seem to be taking a direction which is not likely to lead to the necessary renewal of approaches. Yet this issue is a fundamental one. The choices that are made today in Sub-Saharan Africa regarding the modalities of agricultural financing and where it is directed will shape the form of agricultural development and the nature of the African food system of tomorrow.

It appears that appropriate financial approaches to address our major challenges have not yet been found. Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is confronted today with three essential problems, which have been identified with the consensus of all of the actors :
Increasing production in a sustainable and equitable fashion and improving the functioning of markets ;
Improving productivity and the economic viability of farms and value chains in order to create a sustainable basis for food security and sovereignty;
Balancing low prices for consumers with decent revenues for producers.

These challenges place us before a complex equation which includes the following questions: What investments to make? What production systems should be privileged? Which products to support? Which markets to target (local, national, regional, international)? And who should benefit from the support?

It is clear that the replies to these questions will not be univocal: no technical or institutional innovation can suffice on its own to respond to these challenges.

Today we are faced with two contrasting aspirations in Sub-Saharan Africa: the desire to regain control of our development and, on the other hand, the temptation of an excessive reliance on external resources.

During the 2000s, 25 years after its creation, ECOWAS opted for the establishment of regional sectoral agricultural policies in coherence with the original intentions of the founding countries, that is promoting the well-being of the peoples of the region through economic development and peace.

The PAU of UEMOA followed by the ECOWAP of ECOWAS were formulated in 2001 and 2005 in a spirit of dialogue with the networks of peasant and agricultural producers’ organizations, breaking away from the “project approach” whose limitations have become clear to all. These policies have been validated and signed into law by the African Heads of State.

At the same time, the African states committed themselves at Maputo to dedicate more public resources to agriculture. To complement these initiatives NEPAD gave birth in 2006 to a new partnership for agriculture. All of these commitments, put together, testify to a real commitment to agriculture on the part of the African authorities, to a new desire to assume control of African development in dialogue with local populations. They generated significant hopes and expectations on the part of the social movements and the networks of peasants and producers, who saw agriculture regaining its position at the heart of the political agenda. They saw that the African authorities were at last shouldering their responsibilities with resolution and determining to define, validate and fund a good proportion of the expenses in the key sector of their economies: agriculture, pastoralism, forests, fisheries, known as the "agriculture sector".

Unfortunately the methodology adopted for the formulation of CAADP rapidly degenerated. The National Agricultural Development Programmes, promoted from above with insufficient dialogue with the concerned actors, appeared to be above all occasions for negotiating new aid. In many cases the content of these national programmes hardly differs from the traditional standard lists of projects, overlapping or even contradictory, the same from one country to another. Yet it seems that we have suffered considerably from this type of programme in the past and that it would be in our interests to devote our attention to effectively applying our agricultural policies, along the lines of the CAP in Europe, the Farm Bill in the US, or the policies put in place by Brazil and India.

The paradox between an African consensus regarding the need to increase investments in agriculture and the lack of clarity concerning the destination of these investments (which products, which markets?) constitutes in my view a cause for serious preoccupation: how to conceive of the implementation of such unclear policies? In my view the ECOWAP should accord the major advantages to the principle investors in agriculture, those who take the risks within the family enterprises, that is the peasants, and not to urban or foreign sources of capital.

Three events have accentuated these doubts. First of all the misunderstandings around the principle of the green revolution proposed by AGRA. Then the World Economic Forum where “Grow Africa” was launched. And finally USAID’s approval of the “new alliance” for food security which should become a reality in June 2012. All three are signals, in my view, which risk seriously compromising the realization of the original missions of ECOWAP, the PAU and other similar policies in Africa.

At the moment in which the president of the United States, acting in good faith I am sure, has decided to organize a symposium on food security on 18-19 May 2012 in Washington on the eve of the G8 meeting in Camp David, I address myself to you, as President of the African Union, and through you to all of the African Heads of State. I ask you to explain how you could possibly justify thinking that the food security and sovereignty of Africa could be secured through international cooperation outside of the policy frameworks formulated in an inclusive fashion with the peasants and the producers of the continent.

A look at the history of agricultural development in the various regions of the world makes it clear that agriculture has never developed in this way. We know that the progress that has been accomplished in agriculture, the important successes of the agricultural policies obtained in Europe, in the United States and in emerging countries like Brazil and India, have always been the product of sovereign will and of a partnership between the states and the economic actors, that is the producers, the processors, the traders.

In my humble view, the justification whereby states do not dispose of sufficient resources to fund these policies is not acceptable. The management of mining resources exploited by others, in which the African states are generally the losers, should make it possible to generate resources for such investments.

Priority setting in public expenditure is also an issue. The contribution of activities in agriculture, pastoralism, forestry, fisheries to the creation of wealth in our agricultural countries, to job creation and to social stability justifies a clear choice in favor of this sector on the part of the African states. This is in no way in contradiction with our appreciation of international cooperation, in the context of which we expect an ever greater respect of the Paris Declaration, of the right to food in accordance with the UN Charter of human rights, and a determined fight against international financial speculation and corruption.

I would simply like to recall that food security and sovereignty are the basis of our general development, as all of the African governments underline. It is a strategic challenge. This is why we must build our food policy on our own resources as is done in the other regions of the world. The G8 and the G20 can in no way be considered the appropriate fora for decisions of this nature.

In asking you to transmit this message to your fellow Presidents I beg you to forgive this heartfelt appeal, however awkward it may seem, of an African peasant convinced that we have the means, the knowledge, the resources to build our own future.
Please accept, Mr. President, the expression of my highest and most sincere consideration.

LIST OF THE SIGNATORY ORGANIZATIONS

1. Network of Farmers and Agricultural Producers Organizations (ROPPA)

2. West African Platform of Civil society organizations on the Cotonou Agreement (POSCAO-AC)

3. West and Central Africa Network of National NGO Platforms (REPAOC)


4. West African Civil Society Organizations Forum (WASCOF)

5. Coalition of African Organizations on Food Security and Sustainable Development (COASAD)

6. Francophone Africa Civil Society Organizations (OSCAF)

7. West Africa Network of Economics Journalists (WANEJ)

8. Network of West African Women Association (AFAO)


9. Research Network for Pour l'Appui au Développement en Afrique (REPAD)

10. West African Institute for Trade and Development (WAITAD),

11. West African Bar Association (WABA)

12. Network of African Chambers of Commerce (RECAO)

13. National Association of Nigerian Traders (NANTS)
14. Plate forme des Acteurs de la Société Civile au Bénin (PASCiB),
15. SYTO (Réseau ouest africain de la jeunesse)

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Africa must unite: But behind whom?

Kofi Ali Abdul Yekin

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82406

cc F C O
cc W E FWith the 54 leaders of the African Union due to try again to elect a new Chairperson of the AU Commission in July, isn’t it time the African had a say in the election, rather than the outcome being influenced by outside interests?

This July is again time for another African-wide election to be held during the 19th Africa Union Summit in Lilongwe, Malawi, between 15 -16 July 2012 that will be deciding who shall be manning the AUC (Africa Union Commission) for another four years. Interestingly, with barely a month to go, the Ad hoc Committee of eight set up to present the 54 AU Assembly members with potential candidates have met first on the 17 March, 2012 and again on the 14 May, 2012 in Cotonou, Benin without a final outcome. It is even more interesting to know that the Ad hoc committee is planning for a final meeting on the eve of the AU election to decide who the AUC Chairperson candidates shall be, thereby giving the delegated electorates barely less than 12 hours to make a choice on who shall be the AUC Chairperson.

The four-year term of Jean Ping popularly referred to as ‘AU Era of Diplomacy’ came to an end in January 2012 and in his effort to seek another four years mandate to lead the AU, he contested the position with Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in a fierce election battle that ended with no clear winner. After repeating the contest for the third time, Jean Ping ended up standing alone as the rivals stepped down and despite this, all that the incumbent AUC Chairperson was able to muster was 32 votes, 4 votes less than the required 36 votes to qualify for another four years term. The initial reaction of the AU Assembly to the election outcome was to appoint the Vice AUC Chairman Erastus Mwencha to serve as an interim Chairman of the AUC for six months until another election, but this was later reversed for the incumbent to serve the interim period.

Unlike any election ever held at the AUC level this inconclusive AUC Chairmanship election of 31 January, 2012 between the incumbent Ping and contender Nkosozana, exposed the significance of the office under contention in the business of the AU. In fact, the AUC Chairmanship as an office conferred on a single person confirmed itself as the most important and the highest single institution of all the AU institutions. This is different from whatever we have seen in the past 49 years of the Union’s history.

This recent election proved that if some slight modifications are employed in broadening the participation and the procedure of arriving at who occupies the highest single office, the AUC Chairmanship will easily assume equal status to the President of America or China or at the least, India. This then will be saving us all the humiliation of having the AU divided by member states leaders, as is currently the case with Professor Atta Mills of Ghana, Boni Yayi of Benin and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia running to the USA at the bidding of Barak Obama to seemingly be attending the G8 Summit. Of course this tradition used to be the privileges of Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria and Jacob Zuma of South Africa until they lost favour. But what does anyone expect from a people who are not controlled by anyone as none of us is united behind a particular person at the continental level despite our despair at the leadership vacuum across Africa? Have we at all empowered anyone among us to discipline those who defy our set African Union standards?

Now with this sudden surge of interest in who assumes the AUC Chairmanship, why are these interests reflecting themselves in this fierce battle for Africa? Why at this time, and why the AUC Chairmanship in particular? Could this be said to be purely the normal type of disagreement that has traditionally characterised the decision making among the 54 members of the AU Assembly, or is there more to this than that? Could this be a resurrection of the Cold War between the Euro-American interests against the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) on the continent of Africa?

Now that outside powers are viciously contesting for their interests to be reflected in the AUC Chairmanship, to what extent then is the interest of the ordinary citizens of the 54 AU member states represented on the continent of Africa? Does this election indeed make room for the interest of the ordinary man and woman on the streets of the Africa Union’s 54 member states?

The January election and now, the coming July’s election are now challenging the minds of the ordinary people on the continent of Africa and the world at large, on who runs the Africa Union? These two elections to decide who runs the Union for a period of four years poses lots of questions, and worse still, at a time when the continent is being pressured by the realities around her. This exposes our common consensus on a leadership vacuum as the problem of Africa.

In today’s world the Euro-American interest does not only exist on the continent of Africa but is openly felt by anyone on the continent, regardless of creed or race. The last AUC election - as has been the case all this while with less of our attention being drawn to it - openly exposed the European and American activities to promote who they believe will best sustain their interests in the AU. One even read in the reports from Addis Ababa of the presence of individuals with specific reference to the French taking commands from Nicholas Sarkozy and the EU Commission in Brussels, shuttling among electorates to ensure their favoured candidate gets the Africa highest position. So with 25 AU member states being former French colonies and considering the strong influence of the French on their former colonies, one can only marvel at the outcome in which Jean Ping could not make the simple 36 majority requirement to win the position.

The anomaly in the January election of the AUC Chairmanship indeed affirmed the presence, power and influence of the BRICS on the continental body. It must be recalled that within the same period the Chinese doled out a magnificent present of a $200 million AU Complex to the Union. It is also important to bear in mind that South Africa is a member of BRICS and Nkosazana leading the AUC automatically translates into a citizen of a BRICS member state also being the one in charge of the AUC, and so a better way of advancing the interest of BRICS in Africa. But who blames BRICS for advancing their interest through South Africa and Nkosazana, when no one sees anything wrong with Jean Ping’s tendency to sustain French-EU interest as a citizen of Gabon?

We were all born with the slogan ‘Africa Must Unite’ that gave birth to the formation of the OAU (Organization of the Africa Unity) in 1963. Most of us are also aware of the sole purpose for the formation of the continental body and now the AU (Africa Union), as a united and a stronger front in place of the relatively weaker member states, to advance the best interests of her people. So the consensus prior to 1963 by all the founding fathers is that of a decimated Africa with a sad past that needs a new future for her people behind one person under the banner of a Union. In short, the purpose of the AU is to address the naturally inherent competitive environment that set the AU states against one another to the advantage of external interest.

The best way of expressing the African interest is by the Union’s own vision of ‘An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena’. The vision of the AU in a simpler term clearly seeks to create an industrialised Africa by her own citizens as the solution to her underdevelopment, insecurity, faming, wars, unemployment and basically an exporter of crude output with little or no value added. In other words the establishment of industries by Africans on the continent of Africa to produce every imaginable machine employable in the provision of security to her people is our common dream. Production of armoured cars, cars, trains, hydro-electric dams, tractors, oil drilling machines for both on shore and off shore exploration, pharmaceuticals, agro-chemicals, aeroplanes, space and sea ships, and nuclear adventures forms the AU dreams. In short, the limitation to the Africa in the AU shall be his/her won imagination.

Great and laudable as our vision is, little did most of us know that our interests are naturally in conflict with the interests of others who are non-Africans and who sustain their own interests at our expense.

The big question then is who should be in charge of the AU common interest if such interest conflicts with that of the African? If this person is the AUC Chairperson, then what is the purpose of the AUC Chairperson if the people of the member states of the Union are not going to be behind him/her to actualize the AU vision? How can the AU member states citizens, 986 million people, stand behind who ever emerges as the AUC Chairperson when barely two months until this election, neither the member states heads nor the citizens of these states know who will be standing to actualize the common vision? How indeed can the great vision of the AU expressed above be achieved for the people of the Union if the people of the Union are not united behind the administrative head of the Union?

The very obvious reality today in the lives of the citizens of all the 54 AU member states and their respective leaders is that of a hopeless people incapable of solving their developmental problems on their own. The lives of the citizens are just as good as they were under the colonial masters, with the leaders still under coercion from colonial influence on how the citizens and their economies are managed. The fact is ‘yes’, there is a change in the guards of who run the colonies, but they still sustain the domineering interest of the colonial masters with the collaboration of US power under the guise of the ‘international community’.

So given that the call for the ‘Unity of Africa’ is an appeal to all of the member states citizens and not just the leaders of these states, common sense then appeals to the mind that the African is being called to unite behind somebody which in this case, is the Chairperson of the AUC to advance the common interest of the African as expressed in the AU vision for Africa.

In advancing the US industrialised interest against the African interest, the president of the 50 states that forms their Union emerged as a person who has sold his/her vision regarding the common interest to the people of all the 50 states for which the individual is then elected. This person then working with the developed European 27 states currently struggling to establish themselves as a single market in advancing their interest on the citizens of the AU through the Chairperson who attains his/her position by the favour of the Euro-Americans. Since the Russians, Brazilians, Chinese and the Indians are also doing this through our South African brothers who are just as vulnerable as any of the 54 AU member states, the call to allow for direct participation of the majority of our people in who emerges as the AUC Chairperson behind who we are expected to unite becomes very important.

What we are all doing in the AU is a journey into the unknown and in this journey, the person to lead us all must not be a questionable and ambiguous character if the journey should not end up in a more complicated manner than is supposed to be. For every one of us to know where we are all going and why we must all go there, democracy demands that every one of us must be part and parcel in their consciousness of who is leading us all there.

This election has given us the opportunity of knowing what is being hidden from the majority of our people who are the vital resources and energy necessary for the actualisation of this journey of 49 years. The sheep are herded without a choice of whoever they follow as their shepherd. On the continent of Africa are human beings, and if they must follow anyone as a united people under the banner of the Africa Union, this Africa Union Day, Friday 25 May 2012, must be used to make it very clear to whoever we deem responsible, that there are more than just 54 people in the AU that must also participate in the AUC Chairmanship election.

Sure Africa Must Unite so that we can advance our collective and continental interest in a more organised way, but how can we achieve this noble task if we do not know behind who are we uniting our common energy? ‘If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, then the mountain must come to Mohammed’. A lot of our so called Pan African brothers and sisters enjoy raising their hands in despair saying, ‘The AU has to come down to the people and inform them of their rights in the Union’. Our plight in the AU however, is that of a people that will never be allowed to participate in the AUC Chairmanship election without putting up a fight. We have been denied the right of voting for the AUC Chairperson of our choice as a people to lead us all to the Promised Land. Some writers have even described this as the work of the invisible hands of the external interests. The option therefore for us as the people is to make the AUC Chairmanship election our right.


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* Kofi Ali Abdul Yekin is the Chair/Coordinator of Action Group of Africa (AGA), www.aga4fed.com Skype as kofialiabdul1

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The DA/Cosatu fracas: Appreciating the moral high ground

Steven Friedman

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82413

cc D AThere is a sustained ideological assault on trade unionism in South Africa. But why should millions of unemployed people be expected to see trade unions as the cause of their problems when there are more obvious targets?

Even in a “class war”, taking the moral high ground is not a luxury – it is a vital weapon that can be the difference between winning and losing.

It is not hard to see why the DA march on Cosatu House angered the union federation’s activists enough to get them out on to the streets. Their claim that “class war” was being waged against them might be a little overstated, but there is more than a grain of truth in it.

The DA’s campaign against Cosatu, of which the march was part, is one example of a wider trend in this society – a sustained assault on trade unionism from a variety of sources.

“Labour consultants” feed a constant stream of “research” to the media, which is thinly disguised propaganda: somehow it always shows that unions are a problem and that we would be better off without them.

They are joined by pro-business economists who conduct “research studies” which always show, conveniently, that unions and their members are selfish and grasping. Neither ever find anything critical to say about business – only workers and unions are greedy, not chief executives, even when, as some do, they earn more than R50m a year.

The DA has been an enthusiastic part of this campaign. For some time, it has targeted unions as the cause of unemployment, poverty, low growth, indeed just about everything that is wrong with this economy. It now hopes to win votes by persuading the unemployed that their problem is not business or the suburban middle class but the trade union movement.

This attempt to turn the DA into a right-of-centre party with a significant base of black voters seems unlikely to succeed. There are several reasons but the most obvious is that it is not clear why millions of unemployed people should see trade unions as the cause of their problems when there are more obvious targets.

But Cosatu is right to see it as an assault on organised workers. You don’t have to endorse many of the stands that unions take to realise that to blame them for unemployment is to let some much better heeled sections of our society off the hook.

But the fact the unions are targets of an assault is not a good reason to stop those who attack them from marching. In fact, it is an excellent reason not to do that.

The DA march presented Cosatu with a golden opportunity to make the point that it was being singled out for an ideological attack.

Had it simply let the march go ahead, it could have turned the moral spotlight on to the DA. It could have asked why, of all the possible targets of outrage, the DA singles out unions.

It could have pointed out that the effect was not to give voice to the poor and the jobless but to those right-wing business people and politicians who have never got used to the idea that working people should be entitled to get together to challenge the decisions that are made about them.

It could have asked why the DA, which seldom chooses protest marches to express itself, made a rare foray into the streets not to target government or big business but the organised voice of workers. It could have asked whether that did not say something important about the DA’s priorities and whose interests it thinks are worth protecting.

But much of that was lost by the fact that its response was not a well-argued reply but a confrontation in the streets, which its leadership seems unwilling to condemn. In effect, the DA provoked Cosatu and the union federation took the bait. Instead of allowing the DA to be seen as the aggressor, it allowed itself to seem as confrontational and intolerant as the official opposition.

The effect was to portray unions not as a social movement, which was being selected for attack by the well off, but as a thin-skinned group willing to mix it with its opponents in the streets. Instead of being seen widely as the victim of intolerance, Cosatu has managed to portray itself as just another interest keen to protect its turf.

So why should this matter? Surely, many unionists would reply, unions are under attack because they threaten the power of businesses? And surely that means they will be able to defend their members only if they show that they too are powerful? Surely you don’t win a “class war” by showing how nice you are?

This sounds realistic but is actually entirely unrealistic. Organised workers are an important group but they are not the majority in any society. And so they can look after their interests only by linking up with others and persuading them to see the world as unions do.

Even if union members were in the majority, they would still have to work with others to achieve their goals because those others would have skills and abilities to make things happen, which unions need. And unions are far more likely to persuade others to work with them if they are seen as more moral than those who oppose them.

We also live in a democracy, a society in which public opinion matters because it affects what governments and interest groups do. Obviously, citizens are far more likely to support unions if worker organisations have the moral high ground.

Over the past few days, some citizens, who normally support the unions, have been put off by Cosatu’s response to the march and it will need to win them back.

The assault on unions is a moral attack, an attempt to make worker organisations seem greedy, selfish and uncaring. The only way to fight that is to convince most citizens that unions are more moral than their detractors.

But unions clearly cannot do that unless they appreciate how powerful a weapon the moral high ground is.

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* Prof Steven Friedman is the director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg

* This article was first published by [utl=http://www.thenewage.co.za/blogdetail.aspx?mid=186&blog_id=2352]The New Age[/url].

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The president's penis

Gillian Schutte

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82381

cc A PThe piece of art reinforces the Eurocentric notion that it is okay to infer that the Black president is a rampantly savage sex fiend and publicly shame him in what is probably the most insulting manner a man in his culture can be affronted.

Over the past eighteen months there have been enough “Kaffir” slips of the tongue, from different echelons of White society to prove that racism is alive and well and living on the tips of the tongues of most White South Africans. In many cases all it takes is a bit too much wine, a bump in the Spar or a little bit of fame and Eros from the rightwing, to let it slip. And the recent hanging of ‘The Spear’ in the Goodman Art Gallery is not really much different. It may be a more erudite slip of the tongue but the painting is no more than a euphemism for the word “Kaffir”.

Using the term Kaffir translates into letting the receiver know that they are inferior, not civilized and even if in a suit they have no chance of reaching the same high rung of rational humanity that White people occupy.

It seems that the racial and cultural lines have been drawn over the matter of art vs. disrespect in Brett Murray’s parody of Zuma, which is part of a larger body of work called ‘Hail to the thief II’. It is blatantly noticeable that it is largely Black folk against the rest of South Africa on this issue, as many minority views generally side with the Eurocentric notion that it is okay to infer that the Black president is a rampantly savage sex fiend and publicly shame him in what is probably the most insulting manner a man in his culture can be affronted.

The president stands guilty as charged for his transgressions against womankind, homophobia and dubious leadership style, which many point to as the inspiration for the artwork.

But for me it is the racism in the work, that goes beyond a critique of the president’s misdemeanours, which also begs deconstruction – because while we are all wailing and gnashing our teeth about the waywardness of Zuma’s dick there is another insidious racist phenomenon worming its way through our society, which strengthens the White phallocentric supremacist stranglehold over all of our discourse – and it seems they are using the construction of the big black dick to do just this.

Let us unpack the ‘The Spear’ from a racialised and colonial perspective, something that the art fraternity seems to be deliberately circumventing in their cry for freedom of expression over all else. I too believe in freedom of expression wholeheartedly, but this does not make all artistic expression exempt from critique just as critique does not infer censorship.

The point, people, is this is not the president’s penis. It is the grotesquely huge Black male ‘dick-ness’ that resides somewhere in the deep collective consciousness of the White psyche – a primal and savage ‘dick-ness’ that was entrenched about 500 years ago as a White supremacist plot to control the world of women and racism. A dick-ness that liberals are fond of saying they are over – that they no longer associate the ‘humungous animalistic dick theory’ to Black men.

Except that they do and if ‘avant-garde’ art is the messenger of the intellectual unconscious then it is clear to me that the dick-ness of the Black male is still in the forefront of the White phantasmal.

Turn the clock back a few hundred years, when colonial discourse created this hype around a Black primal and uncontrollable sexuality. Indigenous people were perceived by the European colonisers as wild and rampantly sexual and the enslaved Black man was constructed as a cultural savage, a religious heathen, and socially inferior. The inferiority of the Black male was, of course, constructed as a way to justify the brutality of the slave system, while the notion that the Black man had an insatiable craving to conquer pristine White womanhood was concocted to ease the guilty consciences of White slave masters who characteristically forced themselves on their female slaves. In their minds, the Black man, out of retribution, would do the same thing to White women if given half a chance, thus they had to be brutalized to keep this threat at bay.

So the myth of ‘big dick-ness’ was invented to control the sexuality of the Black male by casting him as a sexual terrorist, a sexual monster in alliance with Satan himself.

The same ‘colonial fantasy’ is witnessed in Murray's obsessive focus on Zuma’s genitals. It is evident that an assured racial fetishism is the important element in both the pleasures and displeasures, which the painting plays upon. Such racial fetishism not only eroticizes the most visible aspect of racial difference as seen through the White male’s filter – dick size/colour – but also pushes the ideological reproduction of a primal and irrational Black sexuality.

The White male subject is thus positioned at the centre of representation by a desire for mastery, power, and control over the racialised and substandard Black ‘other’.

While many in the arts fraternity have made use of the shaky codes of the fine-art nude in support of this painting, I say that Murray has done no more than use the controlled function of the colonial racist stereotype – the Black man as promiscuous or savage – as a way to 'fix' the Black subject in its place and thereby stabilize the invisible and all-seeing White subject at the centre of the gaze. And this fixing is not simply as the ‘other’ but as the ‘thing’ in the field of vision that reflects both the fears and fantasies of the purportedly omnipotent White male subject.

Fanon said it best when diagnosing the horrifying figure of 'the Negro' in the fantasies of his White psychiatric patients, “One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis: the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis”.

By use of the mechanism of scale, Murray orders up one of the deepest mythological fears in the supremacist and neoliberal imagination: namely, the belief that all Black men have monstrously large cocks coupled with an animalistic sex drive. In the phantasmic space of the White male imaginary, the big Black phallus is perceived as a threat not only to hegemonic White masculinity but to White civilization itself, since the 'monstrous object' represents a danger to White wealth and social order and therefore presents the threat of an unstable world because it is no longer in control of the White man.

Within the picture, the binary makeup of everyday racial discourse is underlined by the nudge/wink irony of the contrast between the Black man's exposed private parts and the display of respectability signified by the suit. This creates a binary in the oppositional play of the hidden and exposed, exposed and clothed, which play upon the Western dualism of inferior and superior, savage and civilized, body and mind, nature and culture. These are the very binaries that inform the logic of dominant racial discourse.

In this way, the construction of racial difference in the image suggests that bestial sexuality, and nothing but this, is the essential 'nature' of the Black man, because, although in a suit, the unzipped dick confirms his failure to gain access to 'culture'. This suggests that the suit is nothing but a camouflage of middleclass respectability, but that it fails to conceal the fact that the Black man, as the White man's racial other, derives, like his dick, from somewhere outside of civilization.

Dig a bit deeper and there is yet another layer to the White male neurosis that plays out in ‘The Spear’. As Sander Gilman states in his seminal text Black bodies/White Bodies:

“Whites do not project a sexuality on the Black man which they themselves would like to have, but rather project onto others the faults they fear in themselves and thereby purge themselves of those evils.

Fears of an excessive and uncontrolled sexuality are stilled by ascribing this unmanaged, and possibly unmanageable sexuality to Black men and to other groups that are in disfavour, (as seen in the historical repression of womankind.) Thus White men can be rest assured that they are good, because the evil which they secretly fear in their own nature is manifest in other groups who are for reasons scapegoated.”

Perhaps this representation of the unruly sexuality of Zuma/Black men is an oblique way of giving expression to the anxiety of living adjacent to a hostile ‘other’ population that has the massive potential to revolt against them at any given moment. It is also the fear of an ‘other’ that remains, to the White South African, ambiguous and unfamiliar. The constant threat felt by White men can only be mentioned obliquely by expressing their view of the Black man as over-sexualised and primal and therefore incapable of running a country.

‘The Spear’ is most certainly an exposition not only on the White view of Zuma and his inability to measure up to leadership tenets as well as they would – it is also an indictment on how Black men in general, in South Africa, are perceived through the White filter to not measure up when it comes to political, economic, and cultural power in a White discourse dominated society. And there are elements of both fear and envy in this comparison. The big black dick, though a fabrication of White men – is now used to deride and disparage Black men for not measuring up in other ways.

But we also know that men across the race divide measure their self-worth by the size of their dicks too. Hence the White man will, rather than admit to his fears about an undersized dick, ridicule a Black man using his oversized and well-hung dick as the joke, in a way to overcome his own insecurities. In this way, by making the Black man’s penis central to his identity, he in effect, un-hangs him by inferring that his agency is more about his penis than anything else.

This is exactly the psychology Murray relies on as he sets about un-hanging Zuma by taking it upon himself to expose the President’s privates. The underlying invitation is for the audience to participate in a public lynching and this is exactly what has played out in the media. At the same time though, we get the sinister sense that Zuma becomes a symbolic catchall for White male feelings of superiority over all Black men.

And this is where the gratification contained within this work, from a White male perspective, plays itself out in a palpable sense of the pleasurable fantasy of their superiority over the Black subject – a phenomenon, which translates into a kind of sexualised fantasy. This fantasy inversely centres on the enormous penis and boundless sexual primal energy of the Black man.

Zuma is the perfect purveyor of this White male fantasy, which is encased both in fear and awe, disgust and envy, as he exhibits a sexuality not inhibited by guilt or even remotely concealed, even with the weighty title of a President. These fantasies are a source of delight that ‘civilised’ White men can fully relish because they can then feel that they are safely and morally in control of their own sexual urges and thus have the hold over rationality, lucid thinking and self-control which are imperative traits that the European has always attributed to himself. In this way he feels exclusively civilised.

There is something both savage and fairly pathetic about a group of intellectuals shuddering deliciously as they sip their champagne and congratulate themselves on their cerebral hold over the avant-garde. This is the shudder of pleasure – the pleasure that the messaging in ‘The Spear’ purveys. It is the collective self-congratulatory pat on the back that somehow they are entitled to expose the ‘savage and socially inferior Black man’ no matter what affect it has on the psyche of a Black population.

The myth of Black sexuality propagated in Murray’s ‘The Spear’ does nothing more than provide yet another White phallocratic avenue for bragging about European civilization and reassure White men that their fleshy White ‘members’ are still relevant.

In my view there are many other ways to critique the president’s leadership weaknesses as well as his transgressions against women. By choosing to use an insensitive and cruel colonial construct to do this Murray has, by default, exposed the insidious and sinister racist and phallic patriarchy of the White liberal echelon he reflects. Perhaps this is a good thing.

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* Schutte is an award winning independent filmmaker, writer and social justice activist. She is a founding member of Media for Justice and co-producer at Handheld Films.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Another missionary in Africa: the Bill Gates myth

Clairmont Chung

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82410

cc G FAfrica needs equality in trade and the exchange of technology, not myth-making charity. This scathing indictment tracks the predatory career of Bill Gates and paints his high-profile philanthropy as capitalist adventurism that further impoverishes the continent.

WHO IS THE MAN?

Bill Gates is a walking talking Bill Gates commercial. It matters not that he retired from Microsoft. The Bill Gates image is still very serious business. Arguably his most famous quote is “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.” He dresses the part: very casual with the preppy uniform of khakis and blue. His prepiness and nerdiness follow from his prep school background. But not too many nerds drop out of college, as Gates did. College is the place to find nerds; that’s where nerds get their revenge. Gates constructed the Microsoft company environment like a college campus. It’s part of the myth of that gentle, coed, carefree, nurturing, professorial and now the giving, philanthropist Bill Gates. It’s all very disarming.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) leads the push to bring nutrition and health to Africa. But this move requires some scrutiny and a determination as to whether this is another image builder or worse: an attack by a modern day missionary on another unsuspecting indigenous population. Yes, some Africans are an indigenous population too.

Gates’ retirement [1] from Microsoft allows him time to focus more intently on his image, his sales pitch and Africa. By contrast, the ‘Red’ campaign of Gap, Apple and a few other retailers, requires you buy the product to contribute to fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa. The emphasis is always on buying and selling, not on the disease. So, if you buy a pair of Gap jeans with the red label, a portion of that money goes to the fund. The project, founded by U2’s Bono, is intended to capitalize on what we do anyway - buy stuff. Generally, no one argues against helping Africa, right? But with all the riches these corporations and individuals earn, why do we still have to buy something before they give something? Much of these earnings were as a result of raw materials sourced in Africa: even its music. Unlike Red, Gates requires no purchase from Microsoft, at least not directly. But we can’t separate Gates from Microsoft and its products. Moreover, Microsoft’s operating system is still the most popular, and for good reason, so we don’t have as much choice as we think. We are locked into buying MS DOS. It’s like English in the business world: the official language. Bill Gates knows this. He ‘engineered’ it.

In Africa, there is no need to buy raw material. You simply dig it up, add value, and sell it. This was once done to its indigenous inhabitants. As Arundhati Roy assessed foundations,

“Their enthralling history, which has faded from contemporary memory, began in the US in the early 20th century when, kitted out legally in the form of endowed foundations, corporate philanthropy began to replace missionary activity as Capitalism’s (and Imperialism’s) road opening and systems maintenance patrol.” [2]

Of note, Gap, like Apple, has been under scrutiny for its use of sweatshop labour. However, it has been reported that the clothing used in Gap’s Red promotion is now made in Lesotho (Africa) and not the cheaper China. Gates seems to want to distance his image from the carnage of capital greed by insightfully focusing on software. Perhaps his reasoning was that he would not be responsible for the slave-like exploitation of mostly women and sometimes children, who build hardware for Apple and others in China, or those children digging for gold and coltan in central Africa. The latter two are essential metals used in circuit boards for hardware. This is misguided. Neither a focus on software nor resignation from his baby, Microsoft, could cover the trail. Like banks and insurance companies that financed the flow of human cargo from Africa and claim they did nothing wrong, the builder of operating system software that drives the machines that use our exploited resources and now track our movements and speeches of dissent should not be allowed to claim innocence.

Bill Gates should not be allowed to say he only builds operating systems. In a racist criminal justice system, the legislators who passed the laws, the police who make the arrest, the prosecutors who make the charges stick and even the defense attorneys who seem not to care, need to acknowledge culpability in a system out of control. All actors mentioned purport to do good, as Bill Gates now promises. They all claim to fight evil: crime on one hand, starvation and disease on the other.

Africa does not need this kind of charity. It needs equality in trade and the exchange of leading technology. Instead, Gates, the world's foremost technologist, brings experts on seeds and vaccines.
Contrary to popular belief, Bill Gates never invented anything. The real invention is the public belief in Bill Gates as the self-made mogul. He started with a ‘gift’ from IBM of the DOS platform. For that platform he adapted the MS-DOS system that operates all personal computers (PCs). Even the term personal computer really means operated by Microsoft DOS. This is so even if your ‘personal’ computer happens to be an Apple or using another operating system like Linux. Unless it’s Microsoft, it is not personal. To be a personal computer, a PC, it has to have a Microsoft DOS operating system. It’s not only the most widely used system, its personal.

It’s important to understand how these systems work before we look at what he is doing in Africa. Of course, Bill Gates is not alone. It’s a scorched earth policy, from the business culture that dominates the US landscape. It’s like the use of napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam, when the intent was mass defoliation of all flora, including food crops, Microsoft used all kinds of tactics, some unlawful, to grab its market share at the expense of any other competitor irrespective of any benefit to the consumer. In Vietnam, Agent Orange led to deforestation; the loss of crops led to losses in wildlife and livestock and an environmental disaster. Eventually, a literally scorched earth would result and starvation, death; victory would follow. Naturally, if you destroyed everything, survivors would need you to rebuild. This is the plan of an empire.

COMING TO A COURTROOM NEAR YOU, THE WAR FOR THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION

Gates’ victories were not a war of nerds but one of lawyers. Gates in a 1994 Playboy [3] interview explained,

“Our restricting IBM's ability to compete with us in licensing MS-DOS to other computer makers was the key point of the negotiation. We wanted to make sure only we could license it. We did the deal with them at a fairly low price, hoping that would help popularize it. Then we could make our move because we insisted that all other business stay with us. We knew that good IBM products are usually cloned, so it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that eventually we could license DOS to others. We knew that if we were ever going to make a lot of money on DOS it was going to come from the compatible guys, not from IBM. They paid us a fixed fee for DOS. We didn't get a royalty, even though we did make some money on the deal. Other people paid a royalty. So it was always advantageous to us, the market grew and other hardware guys were able to sell units.”

Part of this revelation is the importance of hardware ‘guys’ to the operation. It is not a separate exercise. What he neglected to explain was the enormous amount of litigation that accompanied and solidified this position and the almost continuous war that has followed this policy.

The Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft’s antitrust violations, only to seemingly lose steam and give up. Antitrust claims are simply claims that one company is attempting to kill off the competition. The Department of Justice, no less, then took up the fight and eventually settled for several hundred million dollars in fines. All during this time there were numerous lawsuits from wronged developers to burned competitors and even employees. This was some potent napalm. In Vizcaino v. Microsoft, 97 F.3d 1187 (9th Cir.1996), the court ruled against Microsoft and ordered it to pay benefits to workers who were denied benefits on account of their incorrect classification as independent contractors as opposed to employees. Welcome to our world.

i4i, of all the names, a software developer, filed a patent infringement suit and won against Microsoft. Microsoft refused to pay. Meanwhile, based on the stolen patents, Microsoft developed a replacement. Microsoft appealed to the highest court in the land. The United States Supreme Court ruled against Microsoft and ordered it pay the developer. Uniloc, Alcatel, and The Commonwealth of Massachusetts are just some of winners against Microsoft and its intent on domination. But they are still too few. Meanwhile, numerous claims have been buried under the costs of litigation and never came to light. I could go one forever listing claims against Microsoft for patent and business infringement, but you can use its search engine to find more. Of note the European Union (EU) fined Microsoft $1.4 billion for its anti-competitive practices. But these fines amounted to slaps on the wrist, as Microsoft continues in its scorched earth policy and more suits are being filed as well as patents being bought as we write.

In a practice known as defensive patenting [4], large companies like Microsoft are buying-up existing patents and seeking new ones to use as a basis to defend or attack in the event of war against their competitors. These patents serve no other useful purpose. The design is rarely manufactured. These patents, some ancient, are bought or brought with the idea that something in their intended use might resemble that of a new patent or one in the future and therefore form a basis to make a claim that it is stolen from Microsoft. If you develop a computer related patent, it is very likely that Microsoft owns one just like it, or partially like it, and can mount an attack against you based on that patent.

COMING TO AFRICA IN A TEST TUBE

It is with this background to his rise in wealth that Bill Gates launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with its focus on Africa. Like a good missionary, he does not come empty-handed. He has brought experts and seeds. It’s worth noting that the man Gates hired to help oversee his Africa sojourn is former Monsanto Vice President, Robert Horsch. Gates has invested heavily in Monsanto [5]. It would be an irony, except it is so serious that Monsanto was the company that developed Agent Orange. The effect of that deadly chemical is still affecting Vietnamese people and American soldiers forty years later. It is the progeny of that science that led to Roundup [6], Monsanto’s world-renowned weed killer and killer of several other things. Horsch was a leading figure in developing Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds that were resistant to its own herbicide and pesticides and are now earning Monsanto billions in royalties. They have patented these seeds, which can cross pollinate and colonize existing seed and farms. In America’s Midwest, farmers find their fields filled with a corn they did not plant. Without their original seed to replant, they now have to buy fresh seed to plant. Monsanto sells the seed that has now colonized unsuspecting farmers’ fields. In time, all seed would belong to Monsanto and they would have the patent to prove it. Their seed will become like English in the business world: the official language of worldwide farming. That is the plan.

We know what happened in Vietnam. The people resisted imperialism and drove the French, first, and then the full might of the US military out of their country. So it is in this context that you must view Gates’ approach to spreading his software and now his seed money in Africa. Like Monsanto’s plan to use genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and pesticides to become the dominant if not the sole producer of seed and food, Gates routinely violated antitrust and patent and other laws to achieve the goal of destroying all weeds (all rival software). His new hire, Horsch, will serve as senior program officer and will apply the GMO technology toward improving crop yields in regions including sub-Saharan Africa, where the foundation recently launched a major drive in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation.

Equally misguided is the Foundation’s approach to disease. Malaria and HIV appear to be its focus in the development of vaccines. A cursory look at the history of vaccines will reveal its inherent volatility and high rates of failure. Many of these health issues are really wealth issues. By wealth I mean the means to eat a balanced diet. I maintain that Africa’s problem is one of poverty: its inability to provide regular balanced meals to all of its people. Its greatest epidemic is poverty. Find a vaccine for that. How is it that the near richest man, and the smartest nerd, on the planet cannot see the need for an infrastructure that would lead to adequate supplies of food and water? Instead, he focuses on experimenting with dangerous chemicals and more dangerous genes, purportedly to increase yield.

Out of the other side of his mouth he’s decreasing population. F. William Engdahl quotes Gates’ 2010 TED speech where Gates declares, "First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent” [7]. Engdahl asserts that studies show that the chemicals used in the plan reflect reduction birth rates and that the Rockefeller Foundation has been involved with eugenics for some time. Its partnership with Gates and AGRA [8] is precisely for that stated purpose.

Gates sees the need, but the way he wants to fill it is in the mistaken belief that GMOs will provide the high yields to feed Africa and in the meantime he would vaccinate against diseases. Simultaneously, corporations like Monsanto and investors like Gates would reap billions in royalties from the use of its seed. The same GMOs banned by the European Union are acceptable in Africa. The result would be a monoculture that would eliminate centuries of farm practices and seed diversity that date back before the Bible and was partially disrupted by that other foreign intervention: the slave trade. Moreover, the colonialism that followed wanted cocoa, coffee, and cotton. These are not products that find their ways onto the plates of Africans. Stolen human resources along with forced agriculture for the European market set the stage for the shortages we find today.

Jonas Salk, credited with developing the Polio vaccine, when asked who owned the patent, is said to have responded, "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" [9] Gates and Monsanto have succeeded where others have failed. If you agree that the seed requires light to grow, preferably sunlight, likewise GMO seed, requires Monsanto’s permission and conditions for use; therefore, they control seed. They are the sun. They may not have patented the sun, but they patented the next best thing: control of the rights to whom, and in what conditions, their seed will access the energy of sun in order to grow. Vandana Shiva [10] refers to Monsanto’s actions as the colonization of seed.

I am no defender of patents and copyright. It’s just another tool to consolidate creativity in the hands of a few. But that is another blog. These empires, like Microsoft and Monsanto, are built on patents: on ownership, including ownership of the means of production. They no longer need to own factories. They only need to own the rights to what the factories produce. Observers like F. William Engdahl have noted that vaccinated children who drink water contaminated by feces are no healthier than they were before the vaccine. Providing that these untested vaccines are safe. Instead of cleaning up the water and sewage systems, they seek to compromise them even more by the use of pesticides and fertilizer needed for their push in agriculture.

“Life is not fair; get used to it.” Bill gates

As if Gates and Monsanto are not sufficient adversaries, President Obama recently appointed a former Monsanto CEO as senior advisor to the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Michael Taylor’s addition is in the context of the US governments plan Via AGRA (two words) to push its policies in Africa. Of course the FDA has refused to ban GMOs in the US and has refused to require foods be labeled, if containing GMOs. Gates is indeed visionary. He has singlehandedly determined the importance of food. It matters not that he could have asked any African child.

But this is a warning to the rest of us. The only other land and space available for full colonization is the Amazon rainforest. It won’t be around for long. But that is another blog. There is the Canadian Tundra and Mars, but first things first. Given the bad press and attention directed at the Amazon, Africa seemed the place with the most land lying seemingly unused. Governments have launched a campaign of terror to remove residents from lands they have occupied since before Columbus was conceived, let alone Microsoft. Though I do not hold Gates responsible for every peasant chased off land farmed for countless moons, I do blame him for adding to the hysteria of the land grab. His mere presence forces up the price of land. What one once farmed for free, soon one will not be able to farm for any money. But if you desire, there will be jobs on the new farm.

AN ALTERNATE CHEMICAL SOLUTION

Guyanese author Harry Narain wrote about high yield imported paddy rice in his collection of short stories, “Grass Roots People” [11], set in 1970s Guyana. The yield was so high that it bent the stalks lower to the ground than normal and ripened faster. The paddy was too heavy. Any rain would mean the end. It ripened so fast that there was not enough time to wait for the government loaned combines to get to his farm. Without money to hire a private combine, the rice crop would die in the field along with the farmer’s dreams of a pair of track shoes for his boy to play sports, earrings his little girl begged for, and a fridge for his wife. The yield was never so high again.

Despite and in spite of all the history and facts on Gates, there are still people who are going to say that Africa is in need and if Gates wants to contribute he should be allowed to do so. They will add that its people like this writer who have no money to contribute who are always trying to stop well-meaning people; and finally, Africa is on the rise as a result and here comes another no gooder, a crab, to pull the beneficiaries back down. It’s always the same arguments, on both sides. But facts are difficult to controvert. Denial is a sweet space to reside. No one comes to kick you out of there.

Under the cover of the foundation, Gates moved from paying little tax to paying no tax. That notwithstanding, there are a few things he can do for me. He must relinquish all his shares in Microsoft and donate half to Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement. He must remove his two executives from AGRA’s board. He must distribute the rest of the shares among those families in China whose children jumped to their deaths from the Foxconn [12] factory dorm while employed in making things for us that included his friend Steve Jobs’, ‘I’ stuff. He must denounce child labour. He must lobby Microsoft to withhold software from companies who use slave-like and sweatshop labor for their products. He must divest from Monsanto. Oh! And endorse the Buffet Plan to pay more taxes for himself and Microsoft before he divests his shares and Buffet transfers all his shares to the BMGF. Even Buffet has said that 30 percent is not enough. I’ll stop there for now. I shouldn’t have to tell him everything. He should be thinking for his damn self.

On Buffet, the New York Times [13] recently reported Buffet’s increased stake in Wal-Mart and that it came just before the same paper published detailed allegations that Wal-Mart executives bribed retailers in Mexico to facilitate its expansion there. Was this mission Wal-Mart’s or Buffett’s or Berkshire Hathaway’s? In 2011, he gave $1.5 billion of his BerkshireHathaway [14] stock to the BMGF as part of a plan to transfer the majority his wealth to the foundation. This means little or no taxes.

Oh, Bill! When you talk to Buffet tell him that giving his wealth to your Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will not absolve him, either. Tell him he would not be able to hide behind Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., the hedge fund he presides over. Smaller investors pool resources in a hedge fund for larger and more lucrative investments. However, as its name suggest, the Hedge fund is simply a hedge, a fence, between the money and the exploitation. Capitalism has not yet found a way to increase earnings without exploiting free or near free labour [15]. Wal-Mart’s record on wages and union busting is notorious. [16] It does not matter how prestigious sounding the name of the high and growing hedge between money and poverty. What Africa needs, finally, Brother Bill, is for you to get us some agent orange from your friends at Monsanto. So we can take care of the hedges ourselves.

* BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Please do not take Pambazuka for granted! Become a Friend of Pambazuka and make a donation NOW to help keep Pambazuka FREE and INDEPENDENT!
* Clairmont Chung is a lawyer, consultant, filmmaker and arts critic. His latest film is a documentary, ‘W.A.R. Stories: Walter Anthony Rodney’. He edited a book of the interviews done in making the film, which is due out in October 2012 from Monthly Review Press entitled, ‘Walter Rodney: A Promise of Revolution’. Chung tours with his film and maintains a small practice in New York and New Jersey. He is writing a book on the legal history of Africans in the 'New' World up until the Wars on Drugs and Terror.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

END NOTES

[1] Gates retired as CEO in 2008. He has not sold his shares in the company and until that happens he has more than a nominal interest in Microsoft. The continued association with him and the brand is as strong as ever. When you see him, you don’t think foundation. You think Microsoft. His transition from Microsoft to the Foundation may seem as a sudden change to some. But if you understand Gates, and the really wealthy, nothing is sudden and rarely anything changes except the increase in wealth. It’s always about the sales plan which is to get it for free, or close, and sell high.

[2] Arundhati Roy, “Capitalism: A Ghost Story: (Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare.... How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?)” Outlook India, March 26, 2012

[3] The Bill Gates Interview, 1994, Playboy reprinted on About.com

[4] Defensive patenting is not a practice limited to Microsoft. But they have been one of the most ardent collectors. The Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Jacob in a 2006, UK Court of Appeal, case, Aerotel v. Telco, likened defensive patenting to an arms race that has spread worldwide.

[5] Maureen O'Hagan and Kristi Heim of The Seattle Times, Gates Foundation ties with Monsanto Under Fire from Activists, lists the investment as $US27.6 million.Though a small fraction of the BMGF’s $33 Billion endowment, it’s part of a plan to eventually transfer close to $US40 billion to the BMGF.

[6] Roundup is a widely distributed weedicide and herbicide against which Monsanto has developed GMO seeds that would resist Roundup and grow while weeds and non-Monsanto seed die. They went further and developed seed that would not grow unless sprayed with roundup. No one knows to what extent these seeds are distributed but Africa is being primed.

[7] F. William Engdahl ‘Bill Gates talks about ‘vaccines to reduce population” March 4,2010 Geopolitics and Geonomics

[8] Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) describes itself as working on “integrated programs in seeds, soils, market access, policy and partnerships and innovative finance work to trigger comprehensive changes across the agricultural system” its Board includes two executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and two from the Rockefeller Foundation as well as an assortment of dignitaries from the continent. It has a reputed budget of over US$400 million and has been operational since 2009.

[9] Johnson, George (November 25, 1990). "Once Again, A Man With A Mission". The New York Times. Retrieved August 5, 2011

[10] Vandana Shiva has equated the colonization of the seed with the colonization of the future. She does not mean future colonization. She means your future is being colonized now.

[11] Narain, Harry, Grass Roots People, “A letter to the Prime Minister” (Casa de las Américas, Cuba 1981)

[12] The UK Guardian reported employees jumping from their dorm windows to their deaths rather than continue under the conditions in the Foxconn factories. Foxconn assembled goods for Apple and other prominent US companies. The owners placed nets around the building and had employees sign no-suicide clauses that absolved the company from suits filed by family members if anyone managed to succeed in killing themselves.

[13] David Barstow, The New York Times, April 12, 2012, Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle

[14] The Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 2011, Warren Buffett gives $1.5B in stock to Gates Foundation. The report described the gift as a plan to transfer the majority of his wealth to the BMGF. Buffet serves as trustee on the Board of the BMGF. Gates serves on the Board of Berkshire Hathaway. A real love affair has developed betweenthe two.

[15] To be fair, neither has socialism found a way around cheap labor. Socialist governments have been as confrontational with unions as have capitalist, corporate, dominant governments. However, The basic needs of citizens appear best met through a socialist approach, while a market approach drives-up the cost of everything after forcing consolidation.

[16] See Huffington Post-Chicago Wal-Mart's Union-Busting, 'Preference For Poverty' Described In Reader Interview, Updated May 25, 2011.

The Caine Prize and literary tensions

Sokari Ekine

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82401

cc E BAccusations are flying about African writers and intellectuals telling lies about the continent to their Western audiences, thus confirming age-old racist stereotypes. There are claims of plagiarism as well.

Towards the end of last year, Nigerian writer Ikhide R. Ikheloa published a series of essays in which he accused the Nigerian author Chris Abani of “Graceland” fame of telling lies and engaging in exaggerations http://bit.ly/LI9dsh relating to his admitted imprisonment in Nigeria’s most notorious hell hole prison, KiriKiri in 19xx.

“It is one thing for Abani to tell a lie and then move on with his life. It is another thing for him to continue to perpetuate the same lie at the expense of Africa. It is obnoxious and offensive, and if he was white, it would be considered racist. Since the confrontation/intervention in 2003, Abani has gone on to conduct moving interviews and given speeches expanding in graphic detail his alleged experiences. As I said earlier, the details get more fantastic in the re-telling and details and dates change each time. It is comic really.”

In a follow up blog post he repeats his allegations against Abani and further accuses, but does not name [I would like names please - if Abani is to be outed as a liar why not the rest?] “a tiny cabal of African writers” who “seem willing to wheedle, lie and steal their way into stardom on the tortured back of Africa.”

Ikheloa’s anger at Abani’s goes well beyond the alleged lies to the consequences both at home and internationally which once again raises important questions on who should write about Africa, how and what we should be writing [see Ikheola’s essay “[url=Email from America: The Caine Prize and Unintended Consequences[/url]”.

‘As a result, Africa and Africans are being doubly victimized. In the decaying classrooms of Nigeria, children born into a war schemed by thieving politicians and lying intellectuals are being taught that dead white men discovered places like River Niger. And abroad their sons and daughters are assuring their white counterparts that in Nigeria 14-year olds are routinely executed by means so brutal and primitive, they reinforce the truth that Africa is a land of darkness. That is what Chris Abani http://bit.ly/Jq1YU4 and his roaming band of Diaspora literature pimps are telling young impressionable Westerners every day in classrooms. We should be outraged. If you do not believe me, http://bit.ly/MK9ZEB is the official website of Professor Chris Abaniwho now teaches this kind of false odium every day at the University of California, Riverside.”

Taking the time to read through Ikheloa’s blog http://bit.ly/LtSk1C helps put some context to his Abani ramblings. He is repeatedly critical of what he considers is the narrow way Africa is being viewed through the work of a small group of African writers who have “unfettered access to Western publishers and arts patrons” and the general stereotyping of Africa as a place so burdensome to it’s citizens as to drive white folks either to pity us to the point of adopting [in this case] writers as literary pets or create NGOs with the aim of saving us from our misery - ourselves. His essay, “Email from America.....” addresses these tendencies as they are performed through the Caine Prize for Literature. Emmanuel Iduma http://bit.ly/KC2edj takes up the challenge of unpacking Ikheloa’s criticisms by complicating our understanding of the word stereotype.

“The dilemma we face is the challenge of distinguishing between writing a “story” and writing “stereotypes.” It is clear that the divide, and the constructs, exist. It is also clear that both merge and are almost inseparable. For instance, I might decide to write a story about incest and child witch-hunt in Esit Eket, thereby writing an African “stereotype” or I might decide to tell a story of a deaf man who hears a single song, thereby writing a “story.” This is a fashionable divide, sometimes bedeviling, other times accommodating. But I consider this divide more intricate than superficial.

Let me make assumptions for what it takes to write stereotypes, and write a story. To write a stereotype, one mixes fact with fiction – narrating, on the one hand, a considerable navigation of the known world and on the other creatively repeating that known world. This is perhaps an art in itself, and essentially accommodating, I think. Or perhaps stereotypes get their essentials from “political correctness” – which suggests that “stereotypes” can fall within the category that encompasses the media, Westernization, Neo-colonialism, and whatnot. The other realm, of stories, demands extended imagination – we find ourselves making our special known worlds, giving no quarter to political correctness, living in a (re)imagined state. This second realm, unlike the first, becomes celebrated only because those who read us find in it an escape from “reality.”

Iduma concludes by asking whether the way of avoidance of stereotypes, writing “the story that is pleasing and acceptable”, will itself not be in danger of becoming a cliché. Nonetheless the daily media onslaught of stereotypes and clichés around ‘Africa’ is head banging stuff without having to read stories by African writers which act as reinforcements of a largely uninformed western news media.


Fast-forward to the 2012 Caine Prize and another controversy. One Nigerian writer, Ahmed Maiwada http://on.fb.me/KWYipP accuses another Nigerian writer, Rotimi Babatunde [shortlisted for “Bombay’s Republic”] of plagerising another Nigerian writer’s work, http://bit.ly/KC4yRN, “Burma Boy”. From my reading of the argument on Facebook I am confident in saying the lines are unevenly drawn, balanced in favour of Babatunde. I have read Bombay’s Republic but not Burma Boy so I cannot comment on the specific. Nonetheless I have complete confidence in those that strongly disagree with his accusation, which is as follows:

“The storyline of Babatunde Rotimi's Bombay's Republic is too close to that of Biyi Bandele's Burma Boy; it is too close for comfort, too close to pass as an original! So, how did it manage to make it through to the final stage of the Caine Prize? It is either the judges are not critical readers, or they are no wide readers at all, or they cannot tell between an original story and the plagiarised. Whatever the shortcoming, this is most unfortunate for African writing!” [Facebook 20 May, 2012]

The accusation is deep and one cannot avoid the tone of vindictiveness as it also implies intent and in Maiwada’s words “lifting of text” as opposed to being inspired.

Both Dami Ajayi http://bit.ly/KGLEex and Emmanuel Iduma, editors of Saraba Magazine, came swiftly to Babatunde’s defense stating they have convincing email evidence dating from 2005, which predates Bandele’s novel. Ajayi admits there are ‘thematic’ similarities which is a long way from outright theft of idea and text. Comments on Maiwada’s Facebook page are full of similar examples between novels and Ajayi himself cites his own experience noting the universality of human experience.

“I once read a story by E.C Osondu which was pretty similar to a story I had published on the Internet. Why did I not scream foul play? The answer is simple and not far-fetched. Fiction is escapism into reality and human experiences are universal. Puberty, childbirth, culture shock are not personalized phenomena, they are experiences that belong to everyone. Mr Maiwada, in substantiating his claims, must do better than poach similarities between a story and a novel. He must raise evidence beyond reasonable doubt, beyond the delusional grandiosity that can compare a full length novel with a short story.”

Maiwada remains steadfast in his accusation and “thirst for blood’ [plagerised from a FB comment by one Deji Toye] ending invoking God http://on.fb.me/JzYXCe in his vow to cleanse Nigerian literature - spare me, can people not speak without God’s name?

“This desperation to win at all cost! God shall have mercy. But Ahmed Maiwada will never back out of this fight; it is his vow to sanitise the contents of Nigerian literature until all works put out there represent the honest and genuine efforts of the writers putting them out”

Babatunde has responded to the accusations stating he has not read Bandele’s novel; Bandele’s novel was published after his story was written. He goes on to provide a timeline of his work and ends with a promise to seek legal redress on the matter.

“I will speak with my lawyer. They say Maiwada is also a lawyer so, if he is any competent, he can't turn round to claim ignorance of the gravity of the allegations he has been making. In case he has previously gotten away with levelling these sort of claims against others, let him be aware that I will leave no stone unturned to bring him to book for his malicious statements. Please let anyone who is friends with him bring this to his attention."

Publicly challenging Babatunde’s integrity with accusations of plagiarism with intent is a destructive and mischievous act particularly as there is no evidence that Maiwada bothered to discuss his concerns with the author before going public. One hopes that these accusations will not prejudice the Caine Prize panel in their choice of a winner. I hope Babatunde does follow through by taking the matter to court although this could take years given the snail speed of Nigeria’s legal system!

All the shortlisted stories for the Caine Prize can be downloaded from their website. The following bloggers have reviewed Bombay’s Republic: http://bit.ly/JV5d7g, http://bit.ly/KSmLvZ, Olumide Abimbola http://bit.ly/JV68Vn
and Loomnie http://bit.ly/KipKiD

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Plotting for a share of the oil in Obiang’s Guinea

Agustin Velloso

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82379

cc E E GFollow super-secret agent 86 Maxwell Smart in Mission Equatorial Guinea

1. BUSINESSMEN, AMBASSADORS, LOBBYISTS AND OTHER ANIMALS

February 23, 2012. The telephone rings in the office of the super-secret agent 86:

“Hello. I am Katie Fish, researcher of Diligence, Global Business Intelligence; you know: investigations, due diligence, forensics, security, business intelligence.” (1)

“Delighted, please tell me…” (Smart wonders whether this is a poetry contest or, more probably, just a teaser).

“We are carrying out a routine investigation on Mr Francisco Nsue Masié and we would like to talk to people who know his whereabouts…”

Smart recalls in silence that Francisco Macías, that is to say, Masié, was Equatorial Guinea’s (EG) first president after the end of the Spanish colony in 1968. In 1979 he was executed after a summary trial ordered by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, then vice minister of Defense. He is still president since the third of August of that year, after a coup d’état against his uncle.

In the year 2000 Francisco Nsue was imprisoned, charged with conspiracy and seriously tortured during several days by the director of the national security Antonio Mbá Nguema, Obiang’s brother.

“Well, very interesting…” (He wonders: if this is a routine work, how will they deal with the extraordinary ones? A second later he thinks that the imprisonment and torture of Nsue –or another person – by order of any of the Obiangs is a routine matter in EG).

“My clients want to get in touch with him because they are planning to set up some business in EG and think that Mr Nsue can help them in this regard.”

Smart knows that since the second half of the 1990s of last century EG has experienced an economic growth unseen in other countries, chiefly due to oil exploitation. According to information provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), "The discovery and exploitation of large oil and gas reserves have contributed to dramatic economic growth”. The CIA adds that “gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2011 is 7,1%, while in the remainder of the world is of -0.8% for 2010, and GDP per capita in 2011 is 19,300 dollars, while in the remainder of the world is18,600 for 2010." (2)

“Mrs Fish, I never met Mr Nsue, although I really doubt he can be of any help for your clients, unless their businesses are of a kind that I dare not to name.”

Smart does not tell her that that growth has given rise to corporations, businessmen, mediators, consultants and adventurers looking for all types of business opportunities in EG, legal and illegal. Naturally, he knows that Diligence is aware that large foreign investments, especially those related to oil and gas, are inevitably linked to international politics. At the same time, due to the fact that the government and the remainder of the state powers are in the hands of Obiang’s extended family, who do and undo as they see fit according to their private interests, all the businesses are controlled or participated by its members. (3)

“I am sorry. I do not understand you.”

“Let me tell you that all I know about EG is useless to answer your question, since I mainly focus on human rights and social matters in general, but I am not interested in the business sector. I am not involved in any, and I do discourage people from participating in businesses in EG because these are detrimental to its inhabitants.”

“Yes, of course, I just called to find out if you are able to give us some information on Mr Nsue whereabouts…”

“I am sorry to disappoint you. I do not know Mr Nsue; in fact I admit that I hardly had heard of him before your call. I can only tell you that EG political situation does not allow for business initiatives which are beneficial for the majority of its population.”

According to the report on embezzlement, presented October 25, 2011 before the Court of Justice of the District of Columbia, "President Obiang exercises plenary control over the Government of E.G. Nearly all positions of political and economic power in E.G. are held by the Inner Circle. One member of the Inner Circle is Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, President Obiang's eldest son, who has been appointed by his father to various ministerial positions. Nguema is the beneficial owner of the defendant assets. During President Obiang's more than 30-year rule, members of the Inner Circle have amassed extraordinary wealth through a variety of corrupt schemes.” (4)

“Understood, many thanks. If you know of someone who can know Mr Nsue, please send me his contact details.”

“Sure, bye, bye…” (He thinks that Mrs Fish is perhaps a crack in the intelligence community, but as far as her knowledge of men is concerned, she does not even get that when one says no, this only means no, but nothing close to ‘perhaps', and much less 'I will do it if you insist').

After the phone conversation Mrs Fish was still unsure about the good disposition of Smart toward her. Some hours later she decided to encourage him through an e-mail:

“Thank you very much for speaking to me this morning. As mentioned, we are currently undertaking a routine background review of Mr Francisco Nsue Masie and are keen to speak to individuals that may have heard of him. As this individual is not known to you, it would be very helpful if you could send me the contact details of the other people you think might have knowledge of him. Many thanks in advance for your assistance. Kind regards, Katie”.

Mrs Fish is an employee who speaks on behalf of a firm “that helps its clients confront difficult business challenges. In this role, we provide companies with both the intelligence and analysis to enable them to identify, manage and mitigate risks stemming either from the normal flow of business or from unanticipated contingencies".

Her quite unromantic email made Smart recall a previous – and kinder- email from Mr Julian Fisher (Aegis General Director for Africa, obviously a fatter fish):

"Please excuse this unsolicited email, but I am hoping you can help me to avert a potential wrong. My job is to advise companies on planned investments in Africa. We were approached recently by an international bank and asked to provide them with a report on Equatorial Guinea as a potential bank costumer. As you might expect, I drafted a strongly worded report recommending that they did not take on the government as a costumer. In the report, I highlighted the ongoing abuses of democracy and human rights and the evidence of corruption including the Riggs Bank investigation, as well as the closeness of links between Obiang and the Zimbabwean President Mugabe.

“Subsequently, I was disturbed to learn that certain executives at the bank had dismissed my report. They had approached the US Ambassador in Malabo, who said the material in my report was out of date, Obiang headed a ‘people’s government’ and was ‘the ideal partner’ for the US in fighting money laundering! (…) I suspect, of course, that they are allowing the oil millions to blind them to the truth, but it is very sad that they have the support of the US ambassador."

At that time Smart did not even think of dismissing the request. On the contrary, he sent the report for free – obviously two times a fool -, but at least he took pains to discourage any investment in EG:

"Dear Mr. Fisher,

“It is not surprising at all that your advice has been dismissed. Simply for the reason you mention: money makes people blind to truth.

“It does not matter how much information on Obiang’s corrupt and criminal practices you provide them with, they will always find a way to see a ‘brighter’ side of the story, and they will also count on the convenient think tank or the lobby to balance that information with another brighter one supplied by governmental or private sources.”

Obiang knows what people all over the world think about him and he thinks that money can help him to improve that. Enter the lobbies, public relations firms, lawyers and high-ranking civil servants. Their influence is well known, as their number and profits are. Some 17,000 people work for the lobbies inWashington and some 15,000 in Brussels. (5)

Smart’s only comfort – after his collaboration with Aegis - was Fisher’s answer:

"Thanks, a powerful report. You will be pleased to learn that our client finally decided not to proceed with its proposed transaction with Obiang’s government. Thank you for helping us to guide them to this decision."

Had Smart been smart, he would have realised that “Aegis is a leading private security and risk management company with offices in the UK, USA, Iraq, Afghanistan and Bahrain (…) that enable our clients - multi-nationals, governments, international agencies and many others - to minimise risk and maximise opportunity.” http://www.aegisworld.com/

Despite his doubtful talent to help the very people who help their fellow men, at least he learnt that people working for business, intelligence and security firms, notwithstanding their bad reputation, are familiar with human emotions. Here is Fisher: "It is sometimes disheartening to watch international investors’ behaviour in parts of Africa, but all we can do is tell them how it is".

He also recalled another email of August 28, 2009. This was sent by Sandra J. Francis, Senior Special Agent in Charge, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 11226 NW 20th Street, Miami, Florida 33172, Office: 305.597.6187, Fax: 305.597.2727.

“Dear Mr Smart, I have read with interest your most recent article, ‘Equatorial Guinea: Thirty Years With Obiang’. I am a Senior Special Agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and I specialize in Foreign Corruption Investigations. I would appreciate the opportunity to speak or correspond with you relative to Equatorial Guinea and the Obiang family. I am hoping that one of these two email addresses I found for you are still current. I look forward to your reply.”

“Dear Mrs Francis, thank you for your email and your interest in my work. I will be away from my office for a couple of weeks (starting tomorrow). Although I will not be able to get phone calls, I will be using Internet for email correspondence. Please, feel free to send me your questions by email if this is convenient for you.”

“Dear Mr Smart, thank you for your reply. I am in no rush - and I would prefer to speak with you personally whenever you return. I'll look forward to speaking with at your convenience.”

Smart was not in a hurry to talk to her and finally he forgot the email and did not get any new call from Francis anyway.

2. WHATEVER DIFFERENCES EXIST AMONGST THE AFOREMENTIONED, THEIR AIM IS THE SAME: MEDDLING TO THEIR OWN ADVANTAGE IN WEAK COUNTRIES

Smart knew nothing about these people so interested in EG. Apart from Fisher, who can easily be found through Aegis web page, and another correspondent, Nicolas Cook, expert in African affairs, Katie and Sandra are more slippery.

There are several Sandra J. Francis, of course. If the ones that have passed away are ruled out, still there is at least a Sandra J. Francis really working in Florida, although not for the government but in the private sector. Perhaps she was fired after failing to obtain valuable information from Smart. However, she could have two jobs. Of course, hers could be just a convenient name for a secret agent.

Katie Fish is even a more suspicious case. There must be dozens of bars, restaurants and shanty towns with that name at the door. The problem is that some do not serve fish at all, but Mexican tacos. This is clearly a perfect name to confuse other secret agents and taxmen.

In Diligence web pages neither Katie nor Fish, let alone both together, can be found. A pair of ambassadors and a lord make up for that. Their CVs are extraordinary, although all are surpassed by the CV of Diligence Committee Advisor president, the judge William Webster, CIA’s and FBI’s former director.

Nicolas Cook looks like a good guy at first sight. Nevertheless, his obsession with concluding his statements with the tag: “comments are my own and do not represent the views of the CRS” (that is to say, his employer: US Congressional Research Services), or the tag: "the above thoughts are my own entirely, and are merely considerations that are a part of analysis and an exchange of views”, makes him a perfect suspect.

It does not help at all that those thoughts are not about the beauty of EG forests and beaches, but about “Africa's great strategic importance to the United States. Roughly 25 percent of the United States' oil imports come from Africa, almost all of which is the desirable, sweet and light crude. The African import market is expanding rapidly with other nations tripling exports in the last few years.”

While Fisher exaggerates his own kind nature in order to disguise the fact that at the end of the day what he does is to advise big international investment sharks, Cook objectively observes EG reality. In spite of this he ends up distancing himself personally as well: “African oil exporters do present some problems for the United States, however, and Cook pointed to the political elites' control over oil revenue as one of the main stumbling blocks to sustainable growth. Several governments have suffered from the ‘national resources curse’ phenomenon, where corruption and rebellion follow the discovery of valuable natural goods.”

Cook knows very well what is going on behind the scenes: "While President Obama has supported the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), aimed at reducing the pitfalls of natural resource curses, the administration has given limited aid to countries looking to put EITI into place”. (6)

Allen Jackson is one of a kind in the select group of those Westerners devoted to help lesser peoples.

"Dear Mr Smart: Thank you so much for your mail. I have tried to contact the law firm but the attorneys there (Malabo, EG’s capital) have not been very helpful with my offer to work for the poor in the country. My goal is to go there, to work with the poor and understand the place then comeback and educate folks in the US about it. Before coming to law school, I worked for 5 years as an adviser to the Democratic Party in the US and also for some senators. My goal is to bring some light to these folks on Guinea. I also assisted the US senate as a staff in investigating the Obiang governments Riggs Bank Account." (7)

Riggs Bank was a commercial bank in Washington DC and with branch offices abroad. Established in the 19th century, it stopped its operations in 2005, just after Teodoro Obiang and Augusto Pinochet accounts affair.

The US Senate opened an investigation on the matter. The investigation concluded that the bank had not followed the norms on money laundering prevention and also that government officials in charge of controlling the bank compliance with these norms failed to carry out their obligations.

Jackson was so kind as to send more details of his plans for EG, the US senate, the US government and Smart himself:

"I had a great meeting with the senators and a few congressmen today on EG. I am positive that there will be a new money laundering investigation launched against the (EG) government. I do not know if you will be willing to speak at Harvard University in the fall about your experience in EG. Please contact me if you can make it. I want to set up an EG accountability project at Harvard to expose this dictatorship.”

Harvard, generally considered one of the world’s finest universities, therefore well known before Jackson’s offer to Smart, recently made it to the news because a group of students walked out of a class in November of 2011.

“Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.”

NPR’s Morning Edition covered the kerfuffle, suggesting that the students objected to the class partly because of (professor) Mankiw’s résumé. He served as an adviser to President George W. Bush and is now advising the campaign of Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney. He has also criticized the Occupy Wall Street protests and warned against the ‘politics of envy’.” (8)

Early in 2012 a member of the Spanish Public Television Team of Investigation met Smart in a bar in downtown Madrid for a chat about Teodoro Obiang Nguema and his eldest son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang, otherwise known as Teodorín. By that time an international arrest warrant against him for ill-gotten goods had been issued by two French judges.

3. THE ARAB SPRING IS MOVING TOWARDS GUINEA EQUATORIAL

Some time later, Nicolas Cook, analyst working for the US Congressional Research Service (9), sent Smart an email on April 9, 2012:

“¿Puedes por favor proporcione informaciones sobre la Guinea Ecuatorial Coalicion Electoral / Oposicion Democratica (CE/OD). ¿Cuales son sus partidos constituyentes? Cuando se formo (en que ano)? ¿Hay mas detalles en cuanto a su formacion como una coalicion?

La mayoría de las fuentes no explican su pertenencia u origen, sino que sólo la lista como la "coalición electoral." Por ejemplo:
http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/2101_E.htm
http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/arc/2101_04.htm
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ek.html
.. y otras fuentes de impresión.

Muchas gracias, atentamente,
Nicolas Cook
African Affairs
Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division
Congressional Research Service
Washington DC
Tel. (202) 707-0429 FAX (202) 707-3415 ncook@crs.loc.gov” (10)

Smart was about to suggest to Cook to firstly change his automatic translator for an improved version and start again, but finally chose to answer his question right away and pay him back with a couple of questions of his own:

“First of all let me tell you that there is only one real opposition political party inside the country, Convergencia para la Democracia Social (CPDS), which is barely allowed to function. The rest of the groups are either in exile or banned and its members are in real danger (as many more people in the country, even those with no political activity whatsoever).

In other words, simply have a look at the electoral results (general, local and presidential) of the last years: The Partido Democrático de Guinea Ecuatorial (PDGE), Mr. Obiang Nguema's party, always wins (percentage of votes between 95 percent and 98 percent) and that is why he has been in power for the last 30 years. Let me put it this way: Equatorial Guinea house has 100 seats: 99 are occupied by the PDGE and one by CPDS.

Therefore, the question is not about democracy amongst any coalition of parties opposed to the dictatorship, disguised as “nominally multi-party Republic with strong domination by the executive branch”, according to US Department of State Country Reports, but about lack of democracy and respect for human rights under Equatorial Guinea’s government.

This question begs another one: why, also according to old US Department of State’s reports, “the people have no means of peacefully changing its government”?

I look forward to receiving your answer to my question.”

It seems that Cook is fast, efficient and understanding. Above all, unlike the others, he cares not only about just helping destitute Africans, but he strives to help them better. In his last email exchange with Smart, he was still ruminating about doing this softly or perforce.

Two ideas stand out amongst his long disquisitions on the US real political stand on EG authorities and their future.

The first is an appraisal: “I personally think that Obiang is (…) a personalist authoritarian, with all that entails on the human rights and (non-democratic fronts), no doubt. And his elder son is a corrupt buffoon, but if I understand things right, is culturally preferred as a successor (from Obiang's family's point of view), even if Lima (who ranks lower on that front due to his maternal lineage) is the smarter. (There are many other siblings, but none seem to pop up as possible successors.)”

The second is a plan of action: “That all being a given, how does one influence change, and what change is one trying to accomplish?”

Both ideas are taking hold amongst the international community. This is something that Teodoro and Teodorín could not help noticing through the controversial UNESCO-Obiang International Prize for Life Sciences and the aforementioned French warrant. (11)

Perhaps today it is already too late for the Obiangs to make a decision on their future, but at least they can try and negotiate about one of three US suggestions. These would correspond with the ones quite probably conveyed to the family head by two high-ranking French officials during a recent trip to Malabo. (12)

“The main choices seem to be engagement and slow reform over a long period; harsh criticism and isolation; combinations thereof; or overthrow. And one can take a legalistic and idealistic view or a realist view or play multiple hands (as in the case of the USA and France, i.e., do business on one hand, but prosecute for corruption on the other).”
In other –Cook- words:

“One option is to encourage them and try to hold the regime's feet to the fire on the basis of their own promises, treaty obligations, and pledges and potentially obtain a tiny bit of reform over time (get police training, allow some NGOs to grow, publish your oil receipts). Another is to continue to lambaste and criticize them harshly and relentlessly, possibly eventually forcing certain reforms but equally possible retrenchment, regression, self-isolation, or a turning to the east (and in all instances re the latter case, a reduction in influence). Another option, as some have done, is to try to overthrow the regime, which risks failure and any number of nasty repercussions, including succession by an equally ugly set of characters--and is of course not legal or democratic (even if its target is not either).

None of these options are ideal, some are not pretty, and all have big pluses and minuses attached. And the performance of the U.S. (and Spanish and British and French) governments vis-a-vis the courses that they take can certainly be criticized. But in the end, what to do? What should be the goals vis-a-vis the regime and, once chosen, how are they best pursued? These are very hard questions.”

Before answering Cook, Smart paused and thought that if US taxpayers knew they are financing the 80,000 million dollars annual budget of the diverse intelligence agencies and their 854,000 employees, so that some of these end up asking him (by means of a crap online translator) whether he knows Francisco Nsue and if he knows something about EG Electoral Coalition internal democracy, a coup d'état should not take place in Malabo but in Washington.

Eventually he sent Cook the following considerations:

“Dear Nick, Thank you for sharing your thoughts and considerations with me.

“ I see I can hardly give you more information on the Coalition or any other political issue about EG, since you are more than acquainted with the situation and know the sources. However, I would like to reply to your email:

“You write that you are an analyst and not a policy-maker. So I am sure you know that the variety of choices you mention are not so important as their real goal and implementation. In light of the US behaviour all over the world you cannot expect EG people to believe that the US is going to bring them real democracy and respect for human rights, disregarding at the same time US oil companies and US national strategic interests.

“Of course Spain would not do better. The only difference is that the most powerful country is able to inflict maximum damage, as we are witnessing in Afghanistan, Iraq..., a behaviour also shamefully seconded by Spain.

“So, my favourite choice - one you have not included in your selection - would be a complete turn of the tables in EG, that is to say, taking all government members who have violated human rights and become rich to a popular court, seizing their riches and giving these back to their lawful owners, EG people.

“Closing the US and other foreign embassies which have helped Obiang to stay in power for more than 30 years, and nationalising the oil and other basic industries, would be the next natural step to be taken.

“Not a million US Congress analysts could convince EG people (apart from a handful of corrupt or fainthearted local politicians) that the US can bring them democracy and human rights through three –or three million- US planned options.”

Cook stopped sending mails to Smart and thus fears that political leaders –both in Washington and in Malabo - consider that his option does not quite fit with their plans.

However, Smart has proved to be a man of resources and he can try his luck sending his proposal to the Department of the Presidency, Spanish Government, Moncloa Compound, 28071 Madrid, Spain.

Barely a few months ago he received an email from the Compound, inviting him to talk:

"We have had access to some of your publications on the African continent that we consider very interesting and timely. We congratulate you. African current affairs are closely followed over here at the Presidency, it would be very interesting to share with you some ideas about Africa."

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* Maxwell Smart, super-secret agent of the US government, is the protagonist of an US humorous TV series based on espionage films that were broadcasted in the second half of the last century. Smart is just the opposite of what can be expected of his surname and of course of a secret agent.
*Agustin Velloso is a lecturer at the Spanish Open University (www.uned.es), where he carries out research and teaches on education in ‘troubled’ countries.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

END NOTES

1. http://www.diligence.com/index.html

2. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ek.html

3. On the role of the foreign opportunists in EG: “Fly Airbus A330-300 to Malabo: Why Everyone is Heading to The Heart of Darkness”, http://www.zcommunications.org/fly-airbus-a330-300-to-malabo-why-everyone-is-heading-to-the-heart-of-darkness-by-agustin-velloso

4. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_documents/111025_DDC_1.pdf

(5) http://archive.corporateeurope.org/docs/lobbycracy/lobbyplanet.pdf

Cassidy and Associates earned more than 23 million dollars with its Obiang portfolio in 2008, according to Department of Justice reports.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cassidy_%26_Associates

"A few years ago, at least U.S. officials wouldn't talk about the relationship with Equatorial Guinea, or they would admit all the problems and horrible human rights abuses," says Frank Ruddy, the former U.S.ambassador to Equatorial Guinea. Now, he adds, "you would have thought this is Mother Teresa's brother running Equatorial Guinea."

http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/05/putting-lipstick-dictator

(6) http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/oil-africa-blessing-or-curse-0

(7) http://prmia.org/pdf/Case_Studies/Riggs_Bank_Short_version_April_2009.pdf

(8)http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/11/07/occupy_harvard_students_walk_out_on_greg_mankiw_economics_class_.html

(9) “CRS approaches complex topics from a variety of perspectives and examines all sides of an issue. Staff members analyze current policies and present the impact of proposed policy alternatives.”

“Congress relies on CRS to marshal interdisciplinary resources, encourage critical thinking and create innovative frameworks to help legislators form sound policies and reach decisions on a host of difficult issues. These decisions will guide and shape the nation today and for generations to come.” http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/about/

“The Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division's work includes analyses of political and economic developments in every region of the world. Experts examine international organizations; economic, political and security relations between the United States and other nations; and transnational issues such as terrorism and refugees. National security analysis includes a focus on military strategy, the U.S.defense budget, weapons systems, military compensation, and bases. Trade analysts assess economic issues, including trade agreements, exports, imports and tariffs.”http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/research/rsrch-foreign.html

(10) Original in – terrible- Spanish. Same text in English: “Can you please provide some information on the Equatorial Guinea Electoral Coalition/Democratic Opposition (EC)? What are its constituent parties? When was it formed? Are there any details regarding its formation as a coalition?

Most sources do not explain its membership or origin; they just list it as the "Electoral Coalition." For instance:
http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/2101_E.htm
http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/arc/2101_04.htm
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ek.html
..and other print sources.”
EG political situation can be summarized as follows: More than 30 years of corrupt practices by Obiang’s extended family and government high officials, which is the cause of their enrichment. Their preferred activity: appropriation of the abundant natural riches of the country; harsh repression against the population, which prevents a popular change of the status quo; and the role of the mafia that is known as the international community, which supports Teodoro Obiang, although there are currently some movements to change this, and specially to get rid of his enervating eldest son because his behaviour discredits the (hypocritical) international community’s line on democracy and human rights in Africa.

For more analysis and information on this situation see

a) On the recent political history of EG: “Equatorial Guinea 2009: 30 Years with Obiang and 20 with the Opposition” http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/equatorial-guinea-2009-30-years-with-obiang-and-20-with-the-opposition/

b) On Obiang’s current attempts to improve his bad image: “Equatorial Guinea: The good, the bad and the ugly” http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/62205

c) On Spanish foreign policy in EG: “So Close to the West, So Far From Democracy. Recent Developments in Equatorial Guinea”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/30/so-close-to-the-west-so-far-from-democracy/

d) On a solution to the stagnant situation of EG: “The Importance Of Being Leader Of The Opposition To Obiang Nguema”
http://www.countercurrents.org/velloso020212.htm

(11) “First protests came from press freedom groups, reminding UNESCO that there existed no independent press in Equatorial Guinea. These were followed by a global alliance of almost 200 human rights group. By creating a UNESCO-Obiang award, UNESCO is effectively endorsing his regime and undermining its own support for human rights, the organisations wrote in a letter to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon last week.

But also the global scientific community, which was to benefit from the new award, strongly protested the UNESCO-Obiang connection. Even a large number of previous recipients of other UNESCO prizes have called the credibility of the UN agency into question. On Monday, even Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu urged UNESCO to reconsider.

I have heard the voices of the many intellectuals, scientists, journalists and of course governments and parliamentarians who have appealed to me to protect and preserve the prestige of the organisation, (UNESCO Director-General Irina) Bokova told board member at today's meeting. I have come to you with a strong message of alarm and anxiety, she added.” http://www.afrol.com/articles/36333

“A French prosecutor has approved an international arrest warrant for President Obiang’s son Teodoro “Teodorín” Nguema Obiang as part of a probe into the “ill-gotten gains” of President Obiang and two other African Heads-of-State. Teodorín is the target of ongoing government corruption investigations in the United States and France. (…) The judges believe there is evidence to suggest that Teodorín purchasedproperties in France by fraud.

In October, the U.S. Department of Justice’s anti-kleptocracy division filed forfeiture complaints in the District of Columbia District Court and Central California District Court against goods purchased by Teodorín. The complaints seek to seize more than $70m worth of Teodorín’s assets purchased in the U.S., including his $30m mansion in Malibu, a $38.5m Gulfstream jet, a half-million dollar Ferrari, and more than $1m worth of Michael Jackson memorabilia, including “one white crystal-covered ‘Bad Tour’ glove.” The complaints allege that Teodorín and other government officials enriched themselves through a variety of illegal schemes, including embezzlement, extortion, and misappropriation of government funds.” http://www.egjustice.org/es/node/1793

(12) André Parant (Diplomatic Élysée Adviser) and Pascal Collange (Technical Adviser) were sent on March 2012 to EG by Nicolas Sarkozy, where they conferred with Obiang. http://www.africaintelligence.fr/LC-/

Roaring flames on the bight of Biafra

Nnimmo Bassey

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82377

cc C HOffshore oil and gas exploitation is accident-prone. Yet the response mechanisms of the oil companies as well as the government's regulatory agencies remain dismal in Nigeria.

Since the demise of Biafra after the civil war in Nigeria, efforts have been made to obliterate the bane from the map and the preferred name of that part of the Atlantic Ocean is the Gulf of Guinea. However, another war has been raging here and continues unabated.

It is an ecological war. International oil companies are the protagonists.

On 20 December 2011, a massive oil spill occurred at Shell's Bonga Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) platform. But for the vigilance of fishermen in the area the spill may have gone unreported and the ultimate impact on the coastal shores would have been classed as being of mysterious origins. Satellite images helped watchers gauge the size of the spill which Shell had pegged at 40,000 barrels. While fishermen and locals insisted that the Bonga spill indeed hit Delta, Bayelsa and Akwa Ibom states' coastal communities, Shell and the government's sectoral watchdog agencies either contradicted the people or kept mum. The Nigerian maritime agency, Nimasa, was the sole government agency that affirmed that the spill impacted a wide swath of coastal areas.

Shell's Bonga FSPO sits about 100 kilometres offshore. The company blamed the crude oil that reached coastal areas on other unnamed and perhaps unknown sources. They offered to clean the spillage, nevertheless. Has this act of 'charity' been effected by Shell? Simmering tensions in the area over the impact of the spill does not suggest that this is the case.

Almost a month after the Shell spill, an explosion occurred on a gas well drilling rig at Chevron's Apoi North field on 16 January 2012. That explosion killed two workers. Chevron, like Shell, offered initial information and updates on the incident, assuring that steps were being taken to contain and mitigate the disaster. Like Shell, also this clearly was a half-hearted public relations gesture and tapered out even while the inferno raged.

Located a mere 10 kilometres off the Bayelsa Coast, and in fairly shallow waters, the glow and roars of hell competed with the numerous gas flares onshore. The impact on the Koluama 1 and 2 communities, Ikebiri 1, 2 and 3 communities among others, cannot be dismissed or denied. The evidence floated and still floats on the waters. Dead fish, including dolphins, and at least a whale, indicate that what has occurred was not a minor incident but a catastrophe.

Must we continue to have the negative impacts from Chevron's operation in our environment, without corresponding benefits?

As Chief Christian Munghanbofa-Akpele, chairman of the Council of Chiefs, Koluama 1, told Environmental Rights Action monitors, this accident has raised serious concerns. He said: 'We suffered a similar thing in 1980 when there was another major oil spill from Funiwa 5; just about 300 metres from the site that is on fire now; the Apoi North.' He asked: 'Must we continue to have the negative impacts from Chevron's operation in our environment, without corresponding benefits? 'One full month went by before Chevron started drilling a relief well in order to plug the damaged one. Soon after they commenced drilling, the raging inferno ceased. Community people reported that they could not see the usual 'orange glow' of the fire from the night of 2 March. The fact that the fire went off ought to be a cause for celebration. Yes. But no, not by the way this happened and the surrounding uncertainties.

Chevron does not know and cannot explain why and how the fire got extinguished. They hazard a guess that rocks may have fallen into the damaged well and plugged it. They dangers associated with this murky state of affairs is that since the fire has not been stopped in a controlled and efficient way, we cannot be sure there is no further leakage or that there would be no further eruption or explosion. While Chevron claims that there is no further leakage of gas, community monitors report that there are bubbles on the waters and noxious odour from the area.

What are the lessons that we can learn from these incidents? Many. First of all we learn that offshore oil and gas activities are accident prone. A catalogue of these has been logged from around the world. We learn also that even in shallow waters the oil companies lack the readiness and capacity to handle these accidents expeditiously and effectively. The response mechanisms by the oil companies as well as government's regulatory agencies are dismal and the government agencies appear to be tied to the apron-strings of the companies and lack independent capacity to act. This replicates around the world because of the revolving chair relationship between the two.

We learn also that there is an embarrassing lack of seriousness on the part of our public officials. The minister of petroleum resources visited the Chevron accident scene and impacted communities one full month after the explosion. President Goodluck Jonathan went even later.

The neglect of communities is legendary. When the Chevron fire affected the communities, a protest of Koluama community women at the company's offices in Warri, Delta State, only resulted in the sending of token relief material to some of the communities.

Meanwhile, fundamental issues of environmental remediation and restoration are not on the cards. With regard to the Bonga spill, one journalist said 40,000 barrels of crude oil in the ocean is comparable to a drop of spit in a bucket of water. This sort of thinking that allows criminal exploitation and environmental despoliations to goes unchallenged.

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* Nnimmo Bassey is an activist, poet/writer and architect. His is Executive Director of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth in Nigeria and Chair of Friends of the Earth International. He also coordinates Oilwatch International. His book, ‘To Cook a Continent’ (Pambazuka Press, 2012) deals with destructive extractive activities and the climate crisis in Africa.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Roadmap for ending Somalia transition: An obvious fool’s errand

Ahmed Ali M Khayre

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82403

cc B-KSomalia’s Roadmap, including the proposed constitution, is anti-democratic and should be abandoned. It will probably produce another illegitimate, unworkable transitional entity and lead to further violence.

“These regimes based on the family unit seem to repeat the age-old laws of endogamy and faced with this stupidity, this imposture and this intellectual and spiritual poverty, we are left with a feeling of shame rather than anger. These heads of governments are true traitors of Africa, for they sell their continent to the worst of its enemies: stupidity.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.126

There is a broad political consensus that the term of the current Transitional Federal Institutions should not be extended after August 2012. It is also apparent that, the best way to end the transition is not to put the current discredited politicians in charge of the management of the process aimed at finding their replacement. As the International Crisis Group rightly observes, “The TFG should not be allowed to highjack the agenda or dictate terms in negotiations about Somalia’s future. It should be treated as one party among many in the development of the constitution and creation of the post-August 2012 government.”

The current process to end the transition is micro-managed by the Transitional Federal Government, and other few haphazardly selected regional entities, under the auspices of the United Nations Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS) and IGAD, while the vast minority of Somalis stay outside the process. This is glaringly reminiscent of Mbagathi process where Ethiopian sponsored warlords and their supporters were given the ultimate authority to select the members of the delegates and parliament members. That process palpably produced an ineffectual, illegitimate government and consequently exacerbated the political and humanitarian crisis in the country.

While the Mbagathi reconciliation conference was dominated by the same faction leaders, who failed to implement their countless previous pledges and agreements, the United Nations and other members of the international community continued to lend their support to the conference, and quixotically expected the faction leaders to find a solution to the protracted political crisis in Somalia.

Ironically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, after the conclusion of the Mbagathi conference that produced the Transitional Federal Institutions, the Secretary General of the United Nations candidly stated that “it cannot be said that either peace or reconciliation has been achieved or that fighting inside Somalia has ceased.” This is a hugely significant confession given the energy and resources dedicated to the conference. At the same time, the United Nations realised that the success or failure of the government is not only dependent on the support it receives from the international community, but also “on the contribution of the Somali population at large, including civil society.”

It seems that no lesson has been learned from the previous failures and another ill-considered roadmap is being presented. Surely, the outcome would not be different from the previous failed ventures and may produce a replica of the current ineffective TFIs at best.

In actuality, the opposition to the current externally driven Roadmap for ending the transition in Somalia and the ill-conceived constitution-making process is increasing. For instance, members of religious groups, clan elders, and former politicians voiced their strong opposition to this fraudulent project. Additionally, a joint statement released in Mogadishu by seven organisations comprising political parties and other organised civic forces added their voice to the opposition to the Roadmap. In a statement, those organisations correctly warned that, if the Draft Constitution is adopted “it will recharge old antagonism and trigger new, multiple and combustible divisiveness.”

The difference between those who invent games and those who play them is said to be, players can win or lose but inventors always end up winning. The sad irony is that, the current unsuspecting Somali politicians, intentionally or inadvertently, seem to be playing a dangerous game concocted by others. Ironically, some of them are even genuinely trying to finish the work on time, in the words of the Somali nationalist poet Mohamed Cibaar, “ignorant and unwary to the laid traps and the pits concealed.”

It is imperative to state, though, that the inventors of the current Roadmap for ending the transition in Somalia will not be the ones who will bear the brunt of the catastrophic consequences of their ill-advised policies. As is often the case, the ordinary Somalis will suffer the consequences of the misguided project. Apparently, the inventors of the current Roadmap started to issue the familiar threats and intimidations, in an attempt to force Somali people into accepting this ill-conceived scheme.

To that end, in a joint statement, the representatives of AU, UNPOS and AMISOM, stated “we remain greatly concerned that the Roadmap continues to be jeopardized by the actions of individuals and groups in and out of Somalia working to undermine the fragile progress we have collectively made in recent months.” In an Orwellian twist, the statement continues to declare “We have come too far, and too much is at stake for us to allow the progress to backslide at the exact moment Somalia has its best opportunity for peace in decades.” This grossly misleading statement is at variance with the political reality on the ground in Somalia.

It seems that, these representatives are attempting to railroad Somali people into supporting the current fraudulent protect intended for creating yet another unworkable, illegitimate transitional entity. In the face of unyielding opposition, the aforementioned organisations warned “non-compliance with, or active obstruction of the Roadmap for Ending the Transition in Somalia will be referred to the IGAD Council of Ministers with our recommendations for the immediate imposition of specific measures and restrictions.”

It is vital to note, nonetheless, that no amount of threat and intimidation will force the Somali people into accepting this fraudulent protect. In that respect, it is necessary to point out that Somali people have the right to participate freely in the political process of their country, and no one can deny them that hard-won right.

THE ADOPTION OF THE DRAFT CONSTITUTION

Early last week, Hiiraan Online reported that the President of the Transitional Federal Government, Sharif Sheik Ahmed, made a statement implying that the approval of the constitution is a foregone conclusion, and stated that “the rejection of the constitution is unacceptable, but individual provisions of the Draft Constitution can be discussed and any amendments suggested.” The statement of the president is problematic and demonstrates that the whole process is perchance nothing but political skulduggery. For a start, while there has never been any meaningful discussion of the system and the shape of governance that suits Somalia, this Draft Constitution provides for a federal system of government. In that regard, it is pointless to discuss individual articles of the Draft Constitution, while there is no political consensus on the shape of governance that Somali people want.

After the collapse of the central government in 1991, the only time Somali people had come close to a meaningful discussion of the shape of the system of governance suitable for Somalia was in 2000 when the Djibouti Government organised a Technical Consultative Symposium where Somali intellectuals, civil society members, representatives of various religious groups, clan elders and women representatives from inside and outside the country came together. On the future shape of the Somali government, the symposium proposed a decentralised unitary arrangement.

It is crucial to state that constitution-making is an immensely significant part of any peace-building and reconciliation, but experience elsewhere amply demonstrates that hurriedly, externally imposed constitutions only exacerbate the situation, and fuel further violence. As Lakhdar Brahimi, former special advisor to the UN Secretary General, pertinently notes, “a constitution cannot be rammed through too early in the process: people coming out of a conflict are hardly capable of building the national consensus required for the successful drafting of a constitution.”

My point is not to advocate a particular system of governance for Somalia, but to highlight the inherent right of the Somali people to participate in decisions of choosing a suitable political system of governance. Nevertheless, in my opinion, a decentralised unitary system of governance suits Somalia best. I believe that in the final analysis, a clan-based federal system will unnecessarily fragment the country and create new, unending violent conflicts in different corners of the country.

Moreover, and more importantly, the proposed constituent assembly, tasked to approve the Draft Constitution, will be far from representative. On the surface, it may seem representative and inclusive in terms of clan representation but inclusion entails more than balancing clan membership quota. As it stands, the assembly members will be handpicked by the current politicians and will probably choose people beholden to them- this is an obvious continuation of the disastrous zero-sum game of the past. In fact, there is credible evidence that some politicians are personally selecting the new members. More worryingly still, widespread irregularities and fraud is reported with respect to the selection of clan elders.

The argument that the assembly members will be representative because they are selected by clan elders is problematic. First, the clan elders who are expected to select the assembly members are going to be approved by the current politicians. Evidently, who approves clan elders matters because almost all Somali clans/ sub-clans have multiple leaders. Second, and more disturbingly, a committee comprising the current politicians, who declared their candidacy for top leadership positions, will have the final authority to approve of the selected members. In that respect there is an obvious conflict of interest.

THE SECURITY SITUATION

The leaders of the transitional federal government argue ad nauseum that the security situation of the country is improving and that they are winning the war against their opponents. To be fair, the security of Mogadishu has improved after the withdrawal of Al Shabaab militia from the city. The reason is that the daily heavy fighting and indiscriminate shelling of populated areas stopped. However, the security of the city is dependent on the presence of AMISOM troops because the Transitional Federal Government failed to create a credible national security force without which any security in any part of the country will be tenuous at best. The presence of the UN mandated troops will only work when a credible, legitimate government is in place – which is regrettably lacking at present.

The claim of the government that its troops are in control of territories outside the capital turns out to be a canard. In fact, troops from Ethiopia and Kenya control all the towns and villages captured from Al Shaabab. It is also crucial to point out that clan-based warlord militias accompany those foreign troops. Furthermore, credible reports suggest that both Ethiopian and Kenyan troops refuse to cooperate with the TFG, and bring in their own warlords in order to make them in charge of the areas under their control. This is an obvious attempt by those countries to empower the warlords and keep the status quo that clearly benefits them in more ways than one.

In that respect for Somalia to merge from the current political stalemate, the role of the neighbouring countries should be curtailed. The history between Somalia and its neighbours, particularly Ethiopia and Kenya, is riddled with mistrust and animosity. Additionally, their involvements in the Somali politics have been negative for the last decades. To enhance the trust of the Somali people in the next political dispensation, the role of the neighbouring countries should be limited. When Somalia stands on its feet again, close neighbourly relations between Somalia and its neighbours, based on mutual interest, can be encouraged and facilitated. However, such a relationship cannot be nurtured at the present moment when Ethiopian and Kenyan troops are in Somalia, and are empowering clan militias and unscrupulous warlords.

Additionally, in the face of precarious security situation and an escalating humanitarian calamity, it is difficult for many Somalis to comprehend the disproportionate attention and resources directed at the problems effecting foreign interests like piracy and “terrorism.” In stark contrast, the issues posing the greatest threat to the lives of the ordinary Somalis are practically ignored. As the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, candidly recognised, “ultimately, only security and stability in Somalia will resolve the root causes of the current piracy problem.”

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Edward De Bono wrote in his book New Think: “Logic is the tool that is used to dig holes deeper and bigger, to make them altogether better holes. But if the hole is in the wrong place, then no amount of improvement is going to put it in the right place. No matter how obvious this may seem to every digger, it is still easier to go on digging in the same place than to start all over again in a new place.” It is obvious that Somali politicians, the United Nations and other members of the international community have been using the same method to end the political stalemate in Somalia for the last two decades, digging a hole in the wrong place as it were. Sadly, the outcome will probably remain the same – more political turmoil and unrelenting bloodletting.

It seems, as the former special representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mohamed Sahnoun, poignantly observed early in the Somali conflict, “people in New York [and many other capitals] who knew nothing of the realities in the field make hasty and uncalled for decisions and persist in having them implemented, despite evidence of mismanagement and strong objection of the people in the field.” Sadly, the United Nations and other international actors are making the same old and costly mistake by gratuitously legitimising several regional administrations and current corrupt politicians, while ignoring the opinions of the vast majority of Somalis, the effect of which will be disastrous for all the parties concerned.

On the basis of the facts and evidence available, it can be reasonably concluded that the current Roadmap will probably exacerbate the already combustible situation in Somalia, and will, in all probability, produce another illegitimate, unworkable transitional entity. Unfortunately, and contrary to the claims of the actors involved in the implementation of the Roadmap, this current process will most likely be another fool’s errand. If the international community facilitates and finances such process, it would have to take moral responsibility for any violence and political turmoil it generates.

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* Ahmed Ali M Khayre is a PhD candidate in Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. He can be reached at: Ahmedakhayre@gmail.com

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

‘Closing the doors of learning’ (to Israel) opens the doors of freedom

Patrick Bond and Muhammed Desai

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82374

cc M I S YThe academic activists who have raised the stakes by educating South Africa about solidarity ethics will hopefully continue to 'terrorise' the Israeli apartheid regime.

One of South Africa’s largest tertiary institutions, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, is a site of multiple controversy but a near-disaster on Monday deserves more reflection because it points us in a positive direction: away from allying with the Israeli state and its apartheid policies during a time of heightened racism. A representative of Israel had been invited to speak but was then disinvited, after the university was called on by staff and students to respect the “academic boycott” of Israel.

From South Africa, the African continent and everywhere else, it is a critical time to step up pressure against the rogue regime in Tel Aviv. Israel’s hard-right leader, Benyamin Netanyahu, is in a dangerous career phase, preparing to bomb Iran; illegitimately holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners in worsening conditions; expanding settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank; terrorizing Gaza; and tightening his militaristic hold over the region.

Netanyahu’s approach to protecting his core constituency was unveiled at a recent cabinet meeting, in his paranoid description of African refugee immigration (mainly from Eritrea, Ethiopia and South Sudan) last week: “if we don't stop the problem (sic), 60,000 infiltrators (sic) are liable to become 600,000, and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic (sic) state.”

Interior Minister Eli Yishai picked up the same theme: “They [African immigrants] should be put into holding cells or jails… and then given a grant and sent back.” In spite of police data confirming that Israelis commit more than twice as many crimes per person as African immigrants, Yishai claimed, “most African infiltrators are involved in crime.”

According to the Hotline for Migrant Workers, “In the last month, the number of hate crimes carried out by Israelis against Africans has risen tremendously. Multiple Molotov cocktails were thrown into houses of Africans in southern Tel Aviv on two separate occasions, a week apart.”

Then on Wednesday night, the logic of Netanyahu/Yishai unfolded at street level when hundreds of their followers attacked Africans in what was widely described as a race riot, leaving many injured, with a dozen Israelis arrested for violence.

In this context, the Israeli embassy had suggested an input to a UKZN audience about Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. The Wall is the topic of current controversy since Gush Shalom, a Tel Aviv-based human rights group opposed to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, has just demanded that last Saturday’s ‘Jerusalem Day’ in future be removed from Israel’s calendar of holidays.

As a celebration of the 1967 War and Occupation of Palestine, it involves a provocative march to the Wall through East Jerusalem. Political scientist, Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism, remarked last week, “I am disturbed that Yom Yerushalayim [Jerusalem Day] has become a nationalistic holiday, observed most publicly by the religious right. Too often, Yom Yerushalayim celebrations turn violent… most celebrations glorify the violent abuse of power by cruel extremists.”

As Lia Tarachansky of the Real News Network reported from Jerusalem on the weekend, “The celebrators marched through Damascus Gate and the Muslim Quarter chanting ‘Muhammed is Dead’ and celebrating a 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron. Across the road roughly 600 Palestinians protested the celebration and the occupation of East Jerusalem. They were joined by Israeli peace activists.”

Pretoria-based Israeli official Yaa’kov Finkelstein had informed UKZN’s Social Sciences Dean Nwabufo Okeke-Uzodike that he “would like to give a lecture to staff and students on the Western Wall in Jerusalem” two days after this incident, but with less than 24 hours to go, UKZN Deputy Vice Chancellor Joseph Ayee emailed staff: “I have re-considered the sensitivities that the visit of the Israeli Deputy Ambassador has generated. Given the negative publicity that the visit will give UKZN, I hereby cancel the visit and the lecture.”

That the talk would “be held under a cloud with likely reputational damage for the institution is not in the interests of all of us,” observed Ayee. This resulted from a flurry of letters by senior academics including Lubna Nadvi, Rozeena Maart and Jerry Coovadia, as well as a vibrant protest planned by hip-hop artist, Iain ‘Ewok’ Robinson, who generated similar opposition to Finkelstein’s co-sponsorship of the Hilton Arts Festival near Durban last year. Said Robinson, “Hosting the ambassador under the auspices of creating some kind of neutral space for dialogue is another blatant legitimization of Israel’s policies of oppression.”

A time for dialogue with Israel’s official representatives should wait until nonviolent public pressure against the regime mounts and the extreme power imbalance is lessened. As the Palestinian solidarity movement argues, this time will come – just as three-decade long sanctions were lifted against South Africa when in the early 1990s there was irreversible progress towards one-person one-vote democracy (implemented in April 1994) – only when Israel recognises the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self determination and:

1. ends its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. guarantees the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinians citizens of Israel to full equity; and
3. respects, protects and promotes the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

Accepting these three conditions as comparable to the demand for democracy in South Africa, our local movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel got a boost in 2010 when South African Artists Against Apartheid formed with the announcement, “Collaborating with institutions linked to the state of Israel cannot be regarded as a neutral act in the name of cultural exchange.”

In this context, severe reputational damage for UKZN would have surely followed had the event gone ahead. Upon hearing of Finkelstein’s talk, Ramallah-based BDS strategist Omar Barghouti exclaimed, “Why would they invite an Israeli diplomat to UKZN at a time when even the SA government is advising its own ministers not to visit Israel, unless for absolute necessity? This is what complicity looks like!”

Barghouti continued, “Imagine in the 1980s if a Cuban or Palestinian university had invited a South African official to give a lecture? Wouldn’t the ANC and the great majority of South Africans have felt betrayed by their best friends in the world? Well, this is how Palestinians feel now if a South African institution is complicit with Israel.”

Universities should be at the forefront of the BDS movement – and thanks to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel this has been the case since 2004 – because by making Israeli officials unwelcome, these opportunities actually open wide the door for learning political ethics, as at UKZN. Three years the same controversy arose at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, whose officials mandated a leading lawyer, Advocate Geoff Budlender, to investigate. Budlender concluded in favour of the BDS activists, saying that Wits University “could legitimately decide to make its facilities available to outside organisations only for certain purposes, and not to make them available for other purposes... [if] a speaker or activity might be so offensive.”

Likewise, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) was requested by over 450 leading South African academics – including nine vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors – to end its institutional relationship with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University (BGU) last year. UJ did terminate the relationship and, in effect, became the world’s first university to impose an academic boycott on Israel. Then, according to Nina Butler of the Rhodes University Palestinian Solidarity Forum, writing for the Mail&Guardian Thoughtleader last week, another local university “was approached by BGU with a large amount of funding for water research, only to be told explicitly that their association and money was not desirable.”

At BGU itself, this week also an important moment for the academic boycott when a conference on Monday promoting ‘African Entrepreneurs’ was the subject of criticism, given the university’s ongoing collaboration with the Israeli military and the occupation of Palestine. Laudably, Zimbabwean historian Musiwaro Ndakaripa withdrew as a result of BDS commitments, but some Africans went ahead to violate the Palestinians’ boycott call, including the Angolan ambassador.

But elsewhere on the Israel-boycott front, matters are slowly improving. Last week, Pretoria’s Ambassador in Tel Aviv was summoned by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a formal reprimand because the SA Department of Trade and Industry ruled against ‘Made in Israel’ label in the marketing of Ahava Cosmetics, Soda Stream and other products from the illegal West Bank settlements. This extends existing labeling requirements of the European Union and Britain in a way that will facilitate the boycott of Israeli Settlement products, so Israel’s Foreign Ministry complained that it is “negatively tagging a state through a special marking, according to national-political criteria. Accordingly, this is a racist (sic) measure.” In reply: was it racist to oppose SA apartheid by boycotting the state institutions and the companies which made it tick, thus hastening the end of official racism?

Likewise, Israel’s Pretoria embassy spokesperson Hila Stern ratcheted up the rhetoric upon learning of UKZN’s about-face, describing it as a “campaign of intellectual terror.”

Quite right. When in 2010 US Vice President Joe Biden labeled WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a terrorist for revealing imperialism’s horrid secrets, and when the US State Department kept Nelson Mandela on its books as a terrorist from the early 1960s right through 2008 (when Congress forced a change), there was much these two men could be proud of. The UKZN academic activists who raised the stakes by further educating South Africa about solidarity ethics will hopefully continue to ‘terrorise’ the Israeli apartheid regime, just as did BDS ‘terrorise’ those on the side of South African apartheid decades ago.


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* Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and Muhammed Desai coordinates BDS South Africa (www.bdssouthafrica.com).

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Some odd responses to Obama’s statement on same-sex marriage

Bill Fletcher Jr.

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82380

cc The White HouseThe American president has opened up a discussion not just about same-sex marriage but about democracy and tolerance unlike anything we have had in years.

Soon after Obama’s historic statement in favour of gay marriage, I watched the traffic on Facebook. Overall, the responses were very positive, even where people had questions as to the relative strength of the statement. But then I started seeing comments that questioned the sincerity of the statement. My immediate response was simple: who cares about his sincerity?

Ever since the 2008 campaign, the focus of too many Left and progressive individuals has been on the level of sincerity that Obama has on any number of issues. Such concerns miss the point. The question should be who stands to gain by different overtures, statutes, policies, etc.?

Consider this for a moment. The President has opened up a discussion not just about same-sex marriage but about democracy and tolerance unlike anything we have had in years. The right-wing is gearing up for a major campaign against Obama with the focal point being his stand on same-sex marriage. So, regardless of what Obama did or why, we now have a moment to speak with millions of people about the rights of LGBTQ folks and also about the sort of country that the political Right seems intent on constructing. We also have an opportunity to speak about broader issues of equality. With regard to this latter point, this is why we should not focus on whether there are allegedly more important issues facing the LGBTQ community. We should not expect Obama to do our work for us.

How many times do we have to be reminded that Obama is not a leftist and is not a representative of the progressive movement? He was not elected as part of a progressive slate. He was elected to lead the United States and he has been a corporate liberal throughout. Yes, many people invested expectations in him, but therein lies the problem; expectations without the requisite political pressure.

So, now, in the face of Obama’s announced position on same-sex marriage, the wrong thing to do would be to sit back and see what more he does. The thing to do is to make use of this statement and that of other members of his administration to push and to push hard for more. This is the time to push hard for legislation, beginning at the state level, against any and all forms of discrimination against the LGBTQ population. It is also the time to take on the Right. My favorite way is to remind them of Deuteronomy Chapter 22 every time they start talking about God,The Bible and marriage. Haven’t read Deuteronomy Chapter 22 recently? Take a look and then let’s talk about marriage and family values.


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* BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president ofTransAfricaForum and co-author of ‘Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor’ and ‘New Path Toward Social Justice’(University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.

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My perspective on the on-going preparations for a National Land Audit

A discussion paper in the Zimbabwe Land Series by Sokwanele

Mandivamba Rukuni

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82411

cc UN PhotoThe land issue is still very much politically sensitive. But now there is greater pressure to rehabilitate the land for productivity, investment and economic recovery than just fulfil a political process.

INTRODUCTION

In this article I discuss how the land issue has been handled by the GNU as from its formation in 2009. Although progress towards a National Land Audit (NLA) has been very slow, a significant amount of technical and preparatory work has been completed and continues to happen. I will start by taking a historical approach relating what I know has happened so far. That will include an update on 'preparatory' activities for the land audit and my views on the technicalities of such an audit if this has to all add up to the rehabilitation of the land sectors. The need to undertake a National Land Audit (NLA) in Zimbabwe is provided for in the Global Political Agreement (GPA) of 2008 calling for a comprehensive, transparent and non-partisan land audit, for accountability and eliminating multiple farm ownership. Other objectives include fairness in land allocation; ensuring security of tenure; and crafting ways of financing land compensation, as well as other interventions towards greater productivity of land.

AUDITING LAND IN ZIMBABWE

While the Fast Track Land Reform Programme was underway, the government commissioned three audits - the Utete Commission and the Buka Audit in 2003 and the SIRDC and Ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement (MLRR) audit in 2006. The SIRDC/MLRR audit covered all eight of the country's provinces and also benefited from the findings of the earlier audits. The audits unearthed a wide range of issues such as the level of farm take up, vacant plots, double allocation of farms, multiple farm ownership, details of beneficiaries, land utilization, farm structures and equipment, improvements made by the new beneficiaries, land disputes, and illegal consolidation of subdivisions. But many issues remained contentious and unclear. The GPA's National Land Audit is meant to clarify the situation 'once and for all' by verifying and authenticating land records in the country. The NLA will therefore review existing records to verify land categories and ownership. It would provide a comprehensive and accurate assessment of the situation on the ground, allowing for proper land administration moving forward.

SUMMARY OF PROGRESS TO DATE

There is no doubt that the mood and the dialogue on the NLA has changed significantly since 2009. In 2009 the land issue was burning a lot hotter than is the case in 2012. The land issue is still very much politically sensitive, especially given that it is a key component of the GPA. But the nation continues to move on. There is greater pressure to rehabilitate the land for productivity, investment and economic recovery than just fulfil a political process. A significant proportion of dispossessed white farmers are placing greater emphasis on receiving their compensation than on restitution.

Back in 2009 there was hardly an aspect of the land issue that the GNU partners agreed on. Today there is evidence of convergence (not necessarily agreement) on issues such as the need for secure land rights, compensation (at least for improvements), and the need for more intensive land use planning. There is also an opening up of public dialogue on the land issue with, for instance, the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Land and Agriculture engaging both the public and the civil service. This was not feasible in 2009 when the only major dialogue was an in-house Ministry of Lands policy and strategy session held in Kariba. The donors interested in supporting the GNU on land organised themselves under the auspices of the Multi-Donor Trust Fund administered by the World Bank. The Donor Land Audit Working Group was quite active in 2009 meeting regularly and commissioning a number of studies. But there was no direct engagement with the Government then.

Things started happening a little faster in 2010 when the European Union (EU) Delegation to Zimbabwe offered the MLRR support through the UNDP for a 'pilot land audit' covering the sugar growing sector in the south eastern lowveld. The MLRR reviewed the idea and made a counter proposal that instead of a 'pilot' focussing on one sector, UNDP draft a methodology for a NLA. This eventually led to the NLA 'start-up activities' programme discussed below. But meanwhile the MLRR in 2010 submitted its own proposal to the GNU Cabinet on a NLA framework. That document is unlikely to go public until Cabinet resolves on a way forward. In 2011, however, Cabinet also requested the MLRR to submit proposals for a Land Audit Commission and the Cabinet has now seen both the NLA framework and a proposal for a Commission. A final decision and the way forward, however, is still to come.

THE START-UP PROGRAMME FOR THE NATIONAL LAND AUDIT

The MLRR implemented the Start-up activities under the financing agreement between the Ministry of Finance, UNDP and the EU. A total of €423,000 EU-STABEX funds were expended for the activities. The agreement provided for a division of labour between the UNDP and the World Bank (WB) in the implementation of the activities. Activities commenced in June 2010 up to the end of March 2011. An additional USD500,000 of donor support towards technical and expert reviews of land reform issues was also provided for in the agreed work plan of the Analytical Multi-Donor Trust Fund (A-MDTF). The start-up had five outputs and progress to date is as follows:

a) Land category verification: The land registry has been updated after reconciling the land transactions that have occurred since the land reform on all types of land. This was the single most important output of the start-up given that the entire A1 land resettlement data was not centrally captured. Data and information was available only at district and provincial levels were the committees responsible for land distribution had transacted. Teams from the MLRR with technical support form UNDP have taken about 18 months to collect and update the land register. A land audit would have been meaningless without this step.

b) Development of NLA methodology: A set of data collection instruments were developed and these will need stakeholder input and validation, as well as ground testing before their use (either by the Commssion or the MLRR) when the audit is finally given a go-ahead by Cabinet.

c) Stakeholder consultations: This aspect is budgeted for in the programme to allow discussion and input by stakeholdes on the methodology and audit strategy. This is now expected to happen under further preparatory activities.

d) Regional and international best practices on land reform and land audits: Visits to Brazil and Kenya were undertaken by the MLRR with technical guidance from UNDP and it is expected that this has improved understanding of issues around security of tenure and bankability, as well as addressing land reform issues and land administration.

e) Review of land policies was planned for but has not yet happened. The idea is to prepare status and option papers for review by policy makers and stakeholders specifically to cover: security of tenure, compensation to farmers, and land administration.

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A LAND AUDIT AND COMPREHENSIVE AGRARIAN REFORM?

The most significant issue on land that Zimbabwe faces is how to proceed with a comprehensive agrarian restructuring. I am generally an optimist myself and believe that this is feasible in the medium to long term. I, however, differ with most on how to characterise the challenge. It is human nature to wish for past pleasures and scenarios such as rebuilding the agrarian sector to more-or-less what it was before 2000, but this, in my opinion is highly unlikely. At the other extreme are those who see the challenge as simply supplying the new farmers with inputs and finance and then the past glory of being a bread-basket re-emerges. My position is not exactly a middle position, but informed by the very radical transformation of the agrarian sector that took place - from one dominated by large farmers to one where the small to medium-scale farms are predominant. It is not good enough to revive the research, extension, agri-finance, and marketing institutions. These have to und ergo a corresponding transformation in line with the new agrarian structure. Providing credit to 200,000 or so new small farmers, as an example, is radically different to providing the same service to 4,000 farmers who had a whole era behind them for integrated support by government and the business sector. Research, extension, marketing and other services need to learn how to service new and more numerous farmers with a limited business and banking track record.

I know that in the long run systems will adapt, but it is more strategic to recognise these transformational challenges and design them into recovery programmes.

So how will the land audit assist in all this? My opinion is that more progress will be made with the land audit by anticipating the key strategic issues that either need prior thought and positioning before the audit, or that need answers from the audit. It is common knowledge that part of the resistance to the land audit is because some land beneficiaries fear losing their land if, for instance, they are found to be under-utilising it. If there was sufficient dialogue ahead of the audit providing some policy guidance on the issue, this may reduce the perceived risk. Such policy positions are best arrived at by consulting with the affected groups, providing such clarity as a definition of 'under-utilisation' and its various manifestations and therefore the implications for each. The issue of multiple farm ownership, the various forms it takes and implications for each is another example. There are several other more strategic issues which need similar engagement ahead of the audit and these include land tenure, land compensation, and land administration structures and systems.

Zimbabwe has historically had a well defined system of land administration, including cadastral survey records, land registries and surveyors. Due to a lack of investment, these systems have decayed and land records are being lost. The nation urgently needs a state of the art land information system as part of Government's drive for e-Government and e-Citizenry.

CONCLUSIONS

It is unlikely that a NLA will happen ahead of the Constitution and elections. It is still important for the MLRR, professional and technical actors to continue preparing for the audit, especially given the need for rehabilitation and upgrading production and productivity levels. In the next article I turn to the issue of compensation as part of the rehabilitation process and discuss how these two are closely related in the current legislation. I will explain developments to date and offer options moving forward. The land sectors - agriculture, forestry, wildlife, and the tree and plantation sectors - will all have greater prospects for growth and development if the compensation issue is fast tracked and practical solutions put on the table, debated and agreed upon.

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REFERENCES

1. Rukuni M, Nyoni J, and Sithole E (2009) Policy Options For Optimization of the Use of Land for Agricultural Productivity and Production in Zimbabwe. A Report prepared for the ASTRG, MDTF. World Bank.

2. GoZ, 2006. National A2 Land Audit Report, Ministry of Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, Harare.

3. MLRR, 2009. Land Policy Review and Land Audit: Options and Strategy, A Synthesis of the Ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement Planning Retreat held Carribbea Bay Hotel, Kariba, 11th - 13th June.

4. Utete C, 2003. “Report of the Presidential Land Review Committee on the implementation of the fast-track land reform programme 2000- 2002″, Harare. Government Printers.

5. Buka Report, 2003. A Preliminary Audit Report of Land Reform Programme

6. Ministry of Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement (MLLRR) and Scientific Industrial Research Centre (SIRDC), 2008. Consolidated National A2 Audit Report, Harare.

7. Scoones, I., Marongwe, N., Mavedzenge. B., Mahenehene,J., Murimbarimba. andSukume, C. (2010) Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities, Weaver Press, Harare

Papers published so far in this series:

All papers in the Zimbabwe Land Series are available in PDF format from our document library (http://www.sokwanele.com/biblio). Download today's paper by clicking on this link. Comments may be left on this and previous papers by visiting our blog, This is Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe Land Series: Introduction (Sokwanele, 5 April 2012)
Why the land issue continues to define Zimbabwe's past present and future (Rukuni, 5 April 2012)
Land policy in Zimbabwe: a framework for discussion papers (Doré, 10 April 2012)
Land as a 'racial' issue and the lost opportunities to resolve the matter (Rukuni, 12 April 2012)
The Nationalist Narrative and Land Policy in Zimbabwe (Doré, 4 May 2012)
My perspective on the on-going preparations for a National Land Audit (Rukuni, 21 May 2012)
Rights reserved: Please credit the author of this paper, and Sokwanele, as the original source for all material republished on other websites unless otherwise specified. Please provide a link back to http://www.sokwanele.com

This article can be cited in other publications as follows: Rukuni M. (2012) 'My perspective on the on-going preparations for a National Land Audit', 21 May, Zimbabwe Land Series, Sokwanele: http://www.sokwanele.com/Zimbabwe_National_Land_Audit

‘The real enemy is humanity itself’

Ben Pile

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82402

cc S SAt Rio+20 next month, the world’s elites will meet in Brazil with the aim of holding back human progress.

Forty years ago, two ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural world caught the imagination of the richest and most influential people. The first was that the demands of a growing population were taking more from the planet than could be replaced by natural processes. The second, related idea was that there exist natural “limits to growth.” These two reinventions of Malthusianism became the basis of a new form of global politics, which has sought to contain human industrial and economic development ever since.

Fears about the possibility of global environmental catastrophe and its human consequences, as depicted by neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich - author of the 1968 prophecy, The Population Bomb – and the Club of Rome – a talking shop for high-level politicians, diplomats and researchers – became the ground on which a number of organisations established under the United Nations were formed. In 1972, the UN held its Conference on the Human Environment, and began its environment programme, UNEP. In 1983, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, aka The Brundtland Commission, after its chair, Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland) was formed, leading to the publication of its findings in 1987 in Our Common Future. Also known as the Brundtland Report, it became the bible of “sustainable development.”

Having established sustainable development as an imperative of global politics, more organisations and programmes under the UN were formed to deliver it. In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, the first “Earth Summit,” was held in Rio, leading to the Agenda 21 “blueprint for a sustainable planet,” UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity, and the creation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNSCD). Since then, an entire ecosystem of global, national, governmental and non-governmental organisations has emerged to advocate and implement the closer integration of human productive life with knowledge about the environment: to observe the “limits to growth.” The most notable of these is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions is being sought.

Forty years on and those predictions of doom have not been borne out. The average life expectancy of a human has increased by 10 years, and the number of infants dying before their fifth birthday has fallen from 134 per thousand to 58. Thus, the human population has nearly doubled, and global GDP has risen threefold. There are more of us, we are healthier, wealthier and better fed. There is vast disparity between what the advocates of political environmentalism have claimed and reality. So why are world leaders set to meet next month in Rio at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development?

The conference, known as Rio+20, aims to bring together “world leaders, along with thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, NGOs and other groups” to “shape how we can reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an ever-more crowded planet to get to the future we want”. But these apparently noble ends belie some shameful means. It is not for you or I to decide what “the future we want” will look like by participating in democratic processes. Instead, “world leaders” from governments, businesses and NGOs are to decide it for us.

What happens then, if we do not believe that an emphasis on sustainability is the best way to approach the problems of poverty and inequity? What happens if we think that progress in the world has been achieved, in spite it not being “sustainable”? And what if we do not think that the Great and the Good are doing anything other than serving themselves by this new form of politics?

There is, of course, no opportunity for the expression of such ideas. The Rio+20 conference will be a meeting to extend the reach of supranational institutions that are already beyond democratic control. By design, the meeting precludes public engagement. And any recalcitrant “actors” who do make it to the meeting can expect to be made pariahs. Environmentalism is a form of politics that exists apart from the demos. It superficially aims to resolve the problems that are putatively beyond the reach of normal politics, such as poverty, by promising to meet the merely metabolic needs of the world’s poorest people.

However, this promise comes at a price. The 1972 Stockholm meeting discussed the “need for new concepts of sovereignty, based not on the surrender of national sovereignties but on better means of exercising them collectively, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the common good.” In other words, the world can be fed, clothed and housed at the cost of autonomy.

This surrendering of autonomy is a price worth paying, according to its advocates, whose argument has been reduced to a neat little slogan: global problems need global solutions. For instance, while trying to understand why scepticism of climate-change policies seems to correspond to a conservative persuasion, the Guardian’s Damian Carrington recently opined: “The problem is that global environmental problems require global action, which means cooperation if there are to be no free-riders. That implies international treaties and regulations, which to some on the right equate with communism.”

The claim is ridiculous for many reasons; not least of which is the fact that one does not need to be “on the right’ to be sceptical of international treaties and regulations. One might also object to the creation of powerful political institutions and far-reaching policies simply on the basis that their construction has not been democratic.

Another reason might be that the concepts of “global” and “sustainability” are at best nebulous. To what extent are “global problems” really global? And to what extent can making and doing things “sustainably” really address problems such as poverty and inequality? Poverty is not, in fact, a problem of too much exploitation of natural resources, but too little. And poverty is not a global problem, but a categorically local one, in which a population is isolated from the rest of the world.

We can only account for poverty and inequality in the terms preferred by environmentalists if we accept the limits-to-growth thesis and the zero-sum game that flows from it. In other words, that there are limits on what we can take from the planet and we can only solve poverty if we divide those limited resources more equitably. Such an argument for reducing and redistributing resources has the reactionary consequence of displacing the argument for creating more wealth.

But to date, the arguments that there exist limits to growth, an optimum relationship between people and the planet, and that industrial society is “unsustainable,” have not found support in reality. The neo-Malthusians’ predictions in the Sixties and Seventies were contradicted by growth in population and wealth. And now there is a growing recognition that the phenomenon most emphasised by environmentalists – climate change – has been overstated. The scientist who proposed that life on Earth may function as a self-regulating system, James Lovelock, has distanced himself from the more extreme implications of his hypothesis. Where Lovelock once predicted “Gaia’s revenge,” he has reflected in a short interview for MSNBC.com on his alarmist tome, and criticised others such as Al Gore for their over-emphasis on catastrophic narratives. This is a remarkable volte face in itself, but reflects a broader phenomenon: the coming to fruition of environmentalism’s incoherence.

Issues such as genetically modified foods and nuclear power have caused friction and factions to form within the green movement. Prophecies of doom, such as sea-level rise, melting glaciers and ice caps, wars for resources, mass extinctions and economic and social chaos have been deferred from the imminent – first by decades, then centuries, and now perhaps even millennia, depriving the movement of its urgency and forcing its members to seek (and fail to find) more pragmatic formulations of environmentalism. Meetings to find a global agreement on climate change have ended in disarray and bitter recriminations rather than harmony and a bright green future. So can the Rio+20 meeting buck the trend, and settle on coherent objectives for global environmental politics?

It seems unlikely that it can. Although the meeting intends to deliver “the future we want,” it turns out that what “we” want is more difficult to identify than the UN had hoped. Even when we – hoi polloi – were excluded from preparatory meetings to determine the conference’s agenda, negotiators from 193 countries failed to settle on what they wanted. Just as with the climate negotiations, it turns out that different countries have different interests and want different things. And those other actors – the unaccountable, unelected and undemocratic NGOs – look ready to throw their toys out of the pram. For example, development charity Oxfam whinged that “governments are using or allowing the talks to undermine established human rights and agreed principles such as equity, precaution, and ‘polluter pays.’”

This is no surprise. “Sustainability” is not about delivering “what we want” at all but, on the contrary, mediating our desires, both material and political. Accordingly, the object of the Rio meeting is not as much about finding a “sustainable” relationship between humanity and the natural world as it is about finding a secure basis for the political establishment. The agenda for the Rio +20 conference is the discussion of “decent jobs, energy, sustainable cities, food security and sustainable agriculture, water, oceans and disaster readiness.” Again, noble aims, perhaps. But is the provision of life’s essentials, and the creation of opportunities for jobs and the design of cities, really a job for special forms of politics and supranational organisations?
The idea that there are too many people, or that the natural world is so fragile that these things are too difficult for normal, democratic politics to deliver, flies in the face of facts. It would be easier to take environmentalists and the UN’s environmental programmes more seriously if millions of people were marching under banners calling for “lower living standards” and “less democracy.” Instead, just a tiny elite speaks for the sustainability agenda, and only a small section of that elite is allowed to debate what it even means to be “sustainable.” We are being asked to take at face value their claims to be serving the “common good.” But there is no difference between the constitutions of benevolent dictatorships and tyrannies.

Sustainability is a fickle concept. And its proponents are promiscuous with scientific evidence and ignorant of the context and the development of the sustainability agenda, believing it to be simply a matter of “science” rather than politics. The truth of “sustainability,” and the meeting at Rio next month, is that it is not our relationship with the natural world that it wishes to control, but human desires, autonomy and sovereignty. That is why, in 1993, the Club of Rome published its report, The First Global Revolution, written by the club’s founder and president, Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider. The authors determined that, in order to overcome political failures, it was necessary to locate “a common enemy against whom we can unite.” But in fighting this enemy – “global warming, water shortages, famine and the like” – the authors warned that we must not “mistake symptoms for causes.” ”All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

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* Ben Pile is the convenor of the Oxford Salon. He blogs at Climate Resistance.

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Why Charles Taylor deserves 80 years in prison

Lansana Gberie

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82412

cc UN PhotoAs Charles Taylor awaits sentencing for his conviction for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Lansana Gberie responds to Taylor’s attempt to defend his actions in Sierra Leone.

On 16 May, convicted war criminal, Charles Taylor, delivered a 30-minute speech – part plea for clemency, part lubricious defence of his actions, and part grandstanding – before his trial judges at The Hague as he awaits sentencing on 30 May. Because the address has been seized upon by crypto pro-Revolutionary United Front’s (RUF) activists and supporters to discredit the carefully-deliberated ruling against Taylor, it is important to respond to the key claims made therein. I will be quoting in this article from the summary judgment: the final judgment will be far more detailed, and for that reason far more devastating.

So I’ll begin by reminding readers of the main legal finding against Taylor. The Trial Chamber in its judgment on 26 April found Taylor ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to be ‘criminally responsible’ for aiding and abetting the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The judges wrote that they were satisfied that ‘as of August 1997’ Taylor ‘knew of the atrocities being committed against civilians in Sierra Leone by the RUF/AFRC forces and of their propensity to commit crimes’. Notwithstanding this knowledge, Taylor ‘continued to provide support to the RUF and RUF/AFRC forces during the period that crimes were being committed in Sierra Leone. The Trial Chamber therefore finds beyond reasonable doubt that [Taylor] knew that his support to the RUF/AFRC would provide practical assistance, encouragement or moral support to them in the commission of crimes during the course of their military operations in Sierra Leone’.

The judges found that ‘in addition to planning and advising’ the RUF and rogue soldiers of the so-called Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) ‘on the Kono-Freetown operation’ including with respect to the gruesome invasion of Freetown in January 1999, Taylor ‘provided military and other support’ to make the attacks and subsequent atrocities possible. Taylor ‘facilitated the purchase and transport of a large shipment of arms and ammunition from Burkina Faso in around November 1998 which was used in the attacks on Kono and Kenema in December 1998, where further arms and ammunition were captured. These arms and ammunition were in turn sent to the troops in Freetown in January 1999 and also used by the RUF and AFRC in joint attacks on the outskirts of Freetown’. In addition to this crucial support, Taylor ‘also sent personnel in the form of at least four former Sierra Leone Army (SLA) fighters who participated in the attack on Kono, as well as 20 former NPFL fighters who were part of the forces under the command of Gullit that entered Freetown, and a group of 150 fighters with Abu Keita (a former ULIMO member), known as the Scorpion Unit, who participated in the attack on Kenema’. During the mass atrocities in Freetown in January 1999, Taylor’s ‘subordinates in Liberia also transmitted ‘448 messages’ to RUF forces to warn them of impending ECOMOG jet attacks. These messages originated in both Sierra Leone and Liberia’. Taylor, the judges wrote, ‘held a position of authority amongst the RUF and RUF/AFRC’.

There are other devastating findings by the judges, but these alone from any reasonable point justify the severest of punishments. Those who affect to contrive a hierarchy of guilt wherein ‘aiding and abetting’ is somewhat venial should note that the attacks on Freetown in January 1999 alone led to the murder of about 6,000 people, the crude amputation of hundreds of people (including babies), and the burning down of a large part of the city by the rebels. The verdict in this case concludes that Taylor made that attack happen.

Now to Taylor’s vapid last speech before the judges on 16 May. He said. ‘What I did to bring peace to Sierra Leone was done with honour’, noting that his involvement in Sierra Leone’s war was aimed at bringing peace. This outrageous claim fails even the irony test: at least the hangman in the old morality tale wasn’t speaking to save himself when he told Don Carlos: ‘I shall assassinate you but for your own good!’

Taylor was apparently referring to the events of May 2000, when the RUF abducted hundreds of freshly-arrived Zambian UN troops in northern Sierra Leone and ferried them into Liberia, from where – now posing as a statesman after no doubt helping to orchestrate the kidnapping – Taylor had the Zambians released and flown back to Sierra Leone. Against that public drama let us place the court’s findings around the barbarous attacks against defenceless civilians. ‘In November/December 1998’, the court found, Taylor met with the psychotic RUF commander Sam Bockarie. The two men ‘jointly designed’ – here the judges used the heavily-loaded phrase – the ‘two-pronged attack on Kono, Kenema and Freetown’. That was the beginning of the road to the January 1999 atrocities in Freetown. Taylor ‘emphasised to Bockarie the need to first attack Kono District and told Bockarie to make the operation “fearful” in order to pressure the Government of Sierra Leone into negotiations on the release of Foday Sankoh from prison, as well as to use “all means” to get to Freetown. Subsequently, Bockarie named the operation ‘Operation No Living Thing’, implying that anything that stood in their way should be eliminated’. This is what the judges found. If this is Taylor’s idea of peacemaking, then he really should be removed from the rest of humanity for the rest of his baneful life.

On the atrocities themselves, Taylor was rather dismissive to the judges. Atrocities necessarily happen in war, he said, and then he added an idiosyncratic take on the concept of ‘just war’. He invoked the Roman statesman and orator Cicero, noting that Cicero lost the just war ‘card’. But Cicero, like all writers in the classical world, never worried much about the problem – just as he never worried about the massive institution of slavery in which he gleefully partook – and his understanding of the concept fundamentally differs from ours. For Cicero, the nature of the enemy – if ‘barbarian’ or ‘civilised’ – determined the conduct of war against that enemy. ‘Barbarians’ may be wiped out and their towns and cities razed (as the Roman legions did against rebellious tribes in Gaul and against Carthage), but the Romans should weigh carefully the extent of destruction to be wrought on their ‘civilised’ neighbours, like the ancient Greeks. Over the past few centuries, a just war tradition has developed into natural law which, for example, protects non-combatants, especially women and children. Can Taylor claim ignorance of this development? Let the judges ponder such a claim. Clearly, Issa Sesay – not to mention Allieu Kondewa and Moinina Fofana, the completely illiterate and honourable leaders of the Civil Defence Forces – were not given the benefit of the doubt.

I have reserved the most potent – but also most ridiculous – claim of Taylor for the last response: it is his argument that his prosecution and the verdict against him are the result of an American conspiracy to dispose of an awkward African leader. In the very active mouth of his swashbuckling lawyer, Courtenay Griffiths, the claim merited listening to. But from Taylor? This is a man who was a paid agent of the CIA for many years – and the CIA is a core institution of American imperial power. Here again – as in his claim that he was pursuing peace in Sierra Leone while arming the RUF – Taylor would want to have it both ways. You cannot claim to be revolted by American imperialism while being an enabler for it.

In any case, Taylor’s own peers concluded long before the Americans publicly did that Taylor was supporting the RUF to commit atrocities in Sierra Leone. On 28 December 1998, the leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) met on the crisis in Sierra Leone and issued a communiqué accusing Taylor of supporting the RUF and AFRC rebels destroying Sierra Leone.

The judges, in other words, merely confirmed what has been well known by people in West Africa.
But from this claim, Taylor made by inference the more seductive point: surely both George W. Bush and Tony Blair were also guilty of similar crimes in Iraq for which he has been convicted yet no court has preferred charges against them. Why, he asked, is international humanitarian justice focused only on African leaders that have fallen out of favour with major Western leaders? It is a good and troubling point, to which my friend Abdul Tejan-Cole, the distinguished Sierra Leonean human rights lawyer, has offered a good response in another context. While it is curiously true that mostly African leaders face international justice, Tejan-Cole has argued, it is also decisively true that all those African leaders very much deserve to face that justice. One has to choose one’s side carefully in this emotionally charged debate, and my side is with the many African victims of the depredations of ghastly African leaders who have so far been indicted for such heinous crimes. Indeed, there should be more of such indictments and trials.

On diamonds, I’ll quote the summary judgment without comment. It says (read Taylor for ‘Accused’):

The Trial Chamber finds that there was a continuous supply by the AFRC/RUF of diamonds mined from areas in Sierra Leone to the Accused, often in exchange for arms and ammunition…Following the ECOMOG Intervention, from February 1998 to July 1999, the diamonds delivered to the Accused by Sam Bockarie directly, as well as indirectly through intermediaries such as Eddie Kanneh and Daniel Tamba, were given to him in order to get arms and ammunition from him, or sometimes for ‘safekeeping’ on behalf of the RUF…From February 1998 to July 1999, diamonds were delivered to the Accused by Sam Bockarie directly. These diamonds were delivered to the Accused for the purpose of obtaining arms and ammunitions from him. During this period, diamonds were also delivered through intermediaries such as Eddie Kanneh and Daniel Tamba…From July 1999 to May 2000, Foday Sankoh delivered diamonds to the Accused, and diamonds were delivered to the Accused on his behalf in or before 1999 while he was in detention. In March 2000, Foday Sankoh visited South Africa and travelled through Monrovia on his way back to Sierra Leone, meeting with the Accused in Monrovia. According to one witness, among the diamonds delivered to the Accused during this meeting were a 45 carat diamond and two 25 carat diamonds…From June 2000 until the end of hostilities in 2002, Issa Sesay delivered diamonds to the Accused, including on one occasion a 36 carat diamond. Eddie Kanneh also delivered diamonds to the Accused on Sesay’s behalf. Sometimes the diamonds were delivered to the Accused supposedly for “safekeeping” until Sankoh’s release from detention and, at other times, in exchange for supplies and/or arms and ammunition.

PS: In my last article on the verdict on Taylor (Pambazuka News Issue 583), I noted that his trial reportedly cost $250 million. Peter Andersen, the spokesman for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, wrote me immediately after reading it that that figure represented the entire cost of the court, including all the other trials. I made a quick check of the figures from the court and elsewhere. The Taylor trial cost far less than $250 million, but the entire operation of the court cost far more than that figure.


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* Lansana Gberie is a Sierra Leonean academic and journalist and author of A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone (London, 2005).

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Celebrating the Life of Thomas Sankara

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/82383

Unitary labour and the rest of us: doctors and the poor in Lagos State

Fidelis Allen

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/82405

cc DavidWhat the national executive body of the doctors need to know is the need to constructively explore all available options for resolving the conflict in Lagos State.

If stories about a possible nation-wide strike by medical doctors due to a deadlock in dialogue between medical doctors and the Lagos State government are true, then we need to be warned of a growing unitary labour that works more against the poor and helpless. We have condemned time and again parallel unitary federalism, which has flourished on promptings of increasing importance of oil to ethnic federal politicians. Already, institutions such as the Nigerian Police, Military, Customs, and Defence and so on have had bad and good shares of impact on the structure of so-called federalism in Nigeria. Major policy decisions in these centralised institutions are taken in Abuja even when urgent actions are required to address key pressing needs at state or local levels. For example, in matters of security, while governors are constitutionally recognised as chief security officers of their states, security decisions are not areas in which they call the shots outside the cooperation of state commissioners of police. This practice, which signal what can be described as governmental-unitary federalism now seem to be having a parallel in labour administration and politics—unitary labour (call it a unitary confederacy if you like).

This may be a worse form of a unitary-labour system within supposed Nigerian federal state, at the realm of civil society since members are mainly self-centred. They are mindless about what happens to the poor in so far as their private clinics can be opened for those who can afford their bills.

It would appear that the proposed strike is a noble attempt to show solidarity or resolve the conflict in Lagos State. But the approach signals some form of unitary imposition on the rest of us. It is important to think of the Nigerian Medical Association as a legitimate statutory body. Within the terrain of theoretical federalism is a need to consider the state as a sphere of authority in which civil society can engage. If at all, it should be for an enterprise that has broader benefit for the poor people of Lagos State who are already troubled by several weeks of strike by the doctors. Strikes can only be a last option when all avenues have been explored; especially in these matters that place self at the centre. The national executive will need to be tutored on the rudiments of federalism and values of the noble medical profession to which they belong. Naturally, medical doctors belong to a profession that is more or less charity in orientation, in the sense that they are pro-life, pro-health, pro-public interest and humanistic. The struggle for improved welfare can therefore be expected to wear a human face, such that the lives already lost from weeks of strike by the doctors in Lagos and those that will be lost when the nation-wide strike begins will be taken into account. In any case, leaving the Lagos doctors to fight alone will amount to being callous. So, while energies need to be saved for tackling general issues pertaining to public service delivery and governance that cut across segments of society, the national executives need to tread carefully so as to avoid sending an impression of a group of professionals who lack men with skill to engage the government high-level politics of labour-government relations.

Conflict is inevitable in life, let alone between exploiters and the exploited. What the national executive body of the doctors need to know is a need to constructively explore all available options for resolving the conflict in Lagos State. They need to think through objectively and place before them the interest of the poor, against what is usually seen as selfish demands for increased pay and improved working conditions by labour. At this time, when the poor in Nigeria have been so devastated by corrupt leaders, only strategic engagements with the state officials in matters that transcend selfish desires will suffice. They should consider the legitimacy of their actions with regards to whether such actions help or hinder wider societal struggles for change in Nigeria. It will be shameful to find the people who should be in the streets demanding change in Nigeria all dead from sickness after a possible nation-wide strike by the doctors. Usually, people die, even from minor ailments, during such strikes because they cannot afford private medical bills.

Avoid being used by national and state political elites. Strikes are a means to an end and not the end. Knowing when to apply is part of the wisdom of labour leadership. Public hospitals have not heard good stories to tell. Some of the doctors are callous to patients, whom they often want to hurriedly dismiss in order to attend to their private clinics. Those who do not own one yet, hope to do so shortly, while serving in private practice. Given the fact that this is one profession in need of manpower, only a crop of medical experts-conscious and fighting for their rights with a sense of compassion for the sick- can attract divine and material blessings. Ask anyone in the 36 states of the federation who has been severely sick without money to visit private clinics during the doctors’ strike. And he/she will tell you how horrible it looks.

This plea to the doctors underlies my attention to the government. Politics is not about threats of sack when labour confronts government officials with demands. The rot in governance, oil sector and so on in Nigeria is sufficient to trigger all forms of reaction from the civil society. Conversion of public funds to private funds has turned public hospitals into mortuaries. Most of the hospitals are empty of drugs other than aspirin and homemade malaria tablets that often resist malaria attack. Even the so-called free medical services by some of the state governments, have only a semblance of it. In the case of Rivers State, where the doctors are equally well paid, some of the health centres are manned by doctors who are hostile to patients. Hospitals should be opened 24 hours to the public because of the sick; yet this seems to be a fact yet to be learned by the doctors. The government is simply not providing necessary monitoring and supervision that can keep the doctors at work. Instead, a culture of impunity has matured. This results in decay of the hospitals. Attitudinal issues have risen several times, discrediting Nigerian doctors at home. Ironically, the same doctors who leave the shores of the country to Europe, North America and South Africa have done exceedingly well as they must adjust their behaviours to soothe relevant laws and professional requirements in those settings.

Nigerian politicians have notoriously considered local hospitals death traps by frequently running to foreign hospitals for treatments and check-ups. The same way these politicians have seen local universities as no-go areas for their children, whom they send to Ghana, South Africa, USA, Canada, UK, Russia, Malaysia and so on. At the moment, not up to 2 percent of Nigerian public universities have neither foreign nor prospective foreign students. The original dream of those who conceived the idea of a university, which included a centre of learning and production of knowledge across cultures, is being defeated in Nigeria.

Generally, hospitals in Nigeria deserve better attention from government at all levels of government. The macho –like approach of announcing dismissal of the doctors in Lagos State’s over extended strike, clearly shows the tattered comportment of the state government in handling industrial disputes. The political approach of courting sympathy from a devastated public by demonising the doctors only shows the lack of political wisdom and conflict resolution capacity of the government.

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* Fidelis Allen, Ph.D, is currently at the School of Built Environment and Development Studies Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College Campus, Durban, South Africa.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

CIA rendition database released

Press release

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/82376

MADRID, 22 MAY 2012 - A global repository of information on rendition and secret detention was launched yesterday (21 May) with a collection of records concerning over 1100 victims and 6500 rendition flights. Extensive data on rendition flights collected by Access Info Europe forms a substantial part of the information being launched by The Rendition Project.

The project, led by UK academics and human rights organization [url= Reprieve,]http://www.reprieve.org.uk/]Reprieve[/url],[/url] is the largest of its kind and collates all information about rendition currently in the public domain. All of the flight data released using access to information laws across Europe and North America has been made available on the website in original formats, including information released to Access Info from nine countries in the last six months.

"By bringing all the data into one place, The Rendition Project is uncovering the sheer extent of the global network of secret prisons and torture which grew up after September 2001, and the direct and indirect involvement in this by many countries across the world,” stated Dr Sam Raphael, from Kingston University, UK.

During the next months the teams at Kingston University and Kent University will publish the data in a consolidated data base in an open format, and will be adding further analysis thus enabling researchers and lawyers to link precise flight records and other evidence with the cases of individual victims and countries.

“This investigation includes a crucial information obtained using access to information laws, released to Access Info Europe and other leading human rights organizations. It clearly demonstrates the importance of a strong and functioning right to information for the protection of other human rights,” commented Lydia Medland, Research and Campaigns Coordinator at Access Info Europe.

The launch of this global repository follows the investigative report, Rendition on Record, by Access Info Europe and Reprieve released in December 2011. Since the release of the report, Access Info Europe has received additional flight data from Iceland and Portugal. In both cases the information was released months late and in the case of Portugal it was necessary to turn to the national appeals body before information was finally released.

Access Info Europe and Reprieve are continuing to pursue requests and appeals in a number of countries. For more information on Access Info's civil liberties work, please see [url= our]http://www.access-info.org/en/civil-liberties]our website[/url].

For more information, please contact:
Lydia Medland, Research & Campaigns Coordinator, Access Info Europe
www.access-info.org | email: lydia@access-info.org | +34 667 685 319

Guinea Bissau NGOs joint statement

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/82386

A group of concerned Guinean nongovernmental organizations met on May 9, 2012 to evaluate and anticipate the situation of the most vulnerable communities and to address challenges that have impeded national actors and parts of the international community which seek to lead an effective restoration of peace, security, respect for the civil and political rights of citizens, and the resumption of Constitutional law in Guinea-Bissau.

GUINEAN NGOS CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:


The nonfunctioning state apparatus and its public institutions will provoke a situation of increased levels of poverty and vulnerability in both rural and urban communities. Of particular concern are unpaid public workers’ salaries, difficulties in front of the cashew nut harvest, (which is the principle source of the country’s revenue and the majority source of income for rural communities), the suspension of important international development aid projects with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the near complete decline of economic life.

The paralysis of public schools and other teaching establishments has been aggravated by the coup. This paralysis seriously compromises the current academic year, now facing cancellation.

Because of its timing — at the beginning of the agricultural year and the cashew season, this coup very seriously threatens food security, community health and the economy of rural communities. Moreover, because of the number of people who have fled from the capital to the interior, there will be less nutritious food and well water in reserve and the risk of epidemics will increase. Cholera, for example, is already reported in neighbouring countries.

High inflation on basic staples — due to paralyzed economic circuits, limited supply and circulation of these goods, the shortage of money of the market and the consequent tendency towards price speculation will mean serious deprivation in the most vulnerable families. It will also result in the growth of unrest and revolt in youth groups that are not yet very visible because of the ban on protests (this ban itself acknowledges present seeds of violence and devastating impacts.)

The absence of state power in the whole country invites increased pillaging of our resources. Borders are increasingly permeable, as routine monitoring of our territorial waters has stopped. We are especially concerned about the intensification of drug trafficking and other illegal businesses.

The deprivation of political and civil rights in Guinea Bissau (including the right to information, expression, and demonstration) and ongoing political persecutions are generating a climate of suspicion and fear. These attitudes have hindered efforts to create unity and find effective solutions to the challenges the country faces.

Efforts to build policies both domestically and in the diaspora and the international community delay and circumvent the return to Constitutional law required by Guineans. This will lead to a prolongation of the impasse that effects peace, security and democracy in Guinea-Bissau.

Ferocious special interests disputes risk turning Guinea-Bissau into a battlefield for geo strategy and economic influence which covers and invalidates true national interests and will lead Guinea-Bissau to serve as a no-man’s land where others carry out business that is illegal in their countries

The justifications given for another coup have been baseless, or at least no credible evidence has been made public. Those directly and indirectly involved in the coup d’état are the principal negotiators. They have excluded the actors and bodies legitimated by the law and the ballet box, which expresses the only will that should be sacred to all—the will of the people.

THE NGOS CALL FOR THE FOLLOWING:

To guarantee the restoration of constitutional order and the reinstatement of the democratically elected government and interim President of the Republic.

To resume and safeguard the interrupted presidential electoral process, as recommended by the United Nations Security Council.

To uphold the right to freedom of expression and demonstrations in safe conditions.

To restore the process of dialogue to democratically elected authorities, legitimate state institutions, all involved international organizations, political parties, and civil society.

The undersigned Guinean NGOs commit themselves to the following:

To reinforce the work of local communities, so that they can become the main protagonist in the definition of their positions, in defense of their interest and civil rights, and to strengthen their social and economic productive capacity (which the undersigned NGOs push for).

To promote debate on a local level, especially involving community groups and associations, in order to share better information, awareness and implementation to build social cohesion and to safeguard social peace and the common good.

To reinforce local populations’ capacity to critically analyze and propose solutions with respect to their position in the situation the country is experiencing. (This presumes the legitimate and democratic right to express opinions and demonstrate.)

To advance information and communication campaigns along with our partners and the international community, with particular attention to the closest regional level, to raise concerns, points of view, and ideas from local populations.

To promote a robust national debate on the necessity, and the role of, the Armed Forces in the future of Guinea-Bissau’s legitimate democracy and rule of law.

Bissau
May 10, 2012

Our repudiation of Wits University’s management’s response to our memorandum

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/82385

18 May, 2012

In response to the memorandum which we presented to them on the 16th May 2012, Wits University management has adopted the stance that it cannot intervene in the matter of the dismissal of the Royal Mnandi’s 17 black workers. They arrived at this abstentionist position based on the following:

• According to management it would be inappropriate for the university to “interfere” in the affairs of a company independent of the university.

• To threaten to annul the contract with Royal Mnandi Services on grounds not recognized therein could possibly place the university in breach of its legal duties to the company.

• The procedure embarked upon by the company in order to determine whether the dismissal of the workers was valid has been properly conducted in accordance with labour law.

The university management has failed to refute or even acknowledge the argument, which we made in the memorandum, that the dismissal of the workers was unwarranted and thus unjust; whether or not it is in conformity with the law. Our rationale for maintaining that the dismissal was unfair is as follows:

Through their actions the catering workers were upholding an important tenet of democracy, namely that those who would be adversely affected by a decision should be consulted in the process of formulating such a decision. It is self evidently unethical to dismiss those employing reasonable measures to defend a core principle of fair treatment.

Even if the workers' refusal to comply with an instruction is held to have constituted misconduct worthy of some form of punishment; it was not of a sufficiently serious nature to warrant the severity of the sanction resorted to... The general principle that a punishment should fit the crime has clearly not been adhered to in this instance, thus rendering the dismissal unfair if not in law, then in fact. (Our Memo, 16 May)

The management’s tempestuous insistence that its contractual obligations be given pre-eminence over the unfair treatment of workers proves that its barren commitment to uphold the dignity of all on campus is a sham.

Moreover, the only reason the disciplinary process the workers faced is “outside [the university’s] sphere of operation” is precisely because the management placed it there. A core purpose of outsourcing was in the first instance to insulate the university from the administration of matters pertaining to service workers. This has left workers vulnerable to this kind of abuse of power. The very fact that this is a private company’s “internal matter”, and not ostensibly a university concern, is proof that outsourcing, and by implication those who implemented it, is responsible for the plight of the workers.

Therefore, our demand for the university’s intervention in the matter is merely calling on them to own up to what is in essence their creation. “You must know and own; this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”.

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Sahrawi government condemns Morrocan decision on UN envoy

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/82384

The Polisario Front and the Government of the Saharawi Republic consider unfounded and arbitrary the decision of the Kingdom of Morocco to withdraw their confidence in the envoy of the UN Secretary General Staff, Mr. Christopher Ross, to pursue the mission entrusted by the United Nations Secretary General and Security Council for finding a just and lasting solution to the conflict in Western Sahara by ensuring the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination.

This decision, both serious and unjustified, is an intolerable affront by Morocco against the international community, the Secretary General and the Security Council which, in its resolution 2044 of 24 April 2012, found the status quo to be unacceptable and "reaffirmed its support for the personal envoy of the UN Secretary General for Western Sahara, Christopher Ross, and the action he is undertaking to facilitate negotiations between the parties".

By taking these measures, Morocco is seeking to arrogate without shame the right to dictate to the Secretary General the nature of his relations with the Security Council and to determine the conduct of the Secretary General’s personal Envoy in Western Sahara. It is also trying to destroy the credibility and neutrality of the MINURSO operation, which accuses Morocco, in the latest report of the Secretary General, of blocking the peace process and continuing to violate human rights with impunity in the occupied Sahrawi territories.

The Polisario Front and the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, renewing the will of the Saharawi authorities to support and cooperate sincerely with the efforts of the Secretary General and his envoy, Mr. Christopher Ross, to complete the process of decolonization of Western Sahara, is launching an urgent appeal to the Security Council to take the necessary measures to safeguard and protect the authority of the United Nations and the credibility of its peacekeeping actions in Western Sahara against the threats of mission drift and the consequences of the strategies of avoidance pursued by Morocco.

Bir Lahlou, May 17, 2012

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The “Yes” and “No” of female sexualities

Ng’ang’a wa Muchiri

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/82404

Seven years after the World Health Organisation’s study on “Violence against Women”, how much has changed? Has society succeeded in providing safety for women? War zones across the globe—Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo-DRC—indicate failure. More needs to be done. Lindsay Collen’s The Rape of Sita is a thought-provoking hard read about sexual violence (Collen 1993). Written in the early 1990s, it is still as pertinent today in getting us to think about the corner we’ve pushed our mothers, sisters, wives and nieces into—a tight spot where trauma and abuse reign supreme. Is there a way out of this? Can we imagine a society where a woman’s “no” is respected? I believe so, and the path there involves our acceptance of a woman’s right to say “yes.”

I want to think through Collen’s work by invoking a member of my extended family. Let’s just call her Susan. She was married to my cousin for about five years and in that time they had been “blessed” with two boys. I guess you could call their existence blessed, if you ignore the fact that their dysfunctional relationship was characterized by domestic violence, bouts of heavy drinking and the mistresses my cousin kept. From Monday through Saturday evening Susan’s husband lived in Njiru, 3 hours away. She lived with her in-laws, struggling to get along with a mother-in-law, my aunt, who is often hard to please. Her husband came home every Saturday evening, to rest for a day from his job at the Njiru Kichinjio.

After years of this life Susan decided she’d had enough, I imagine. So one holiday she went to Gikambura, the nearest town with several hangout spots, for a few beers. The exact details of the night are hard to determine but the end result was her becoming intoxicated, and being sexually assaulted by several men. In the reaction to this incident lies Collen’s contribution: identifying society’s knee-jerk reaction to blame the victim.

Susan and my cousin were already having a rocky marriage, but after the rape they separated. He got custody of their two boys. In his words, he had no space for “a woman who went out to drink and ended up violated by a gang of men.” I wonder at the wisdom of this. It was clear from speaking with him that she should not have been out at that time of the night, let alone at a bar. The Rape of Sita describes trespassing laws that society has proscribed for women: there are certain places a woman should not go, at certain times, and certain clothes a woman should not wear; there is a certain vigilance that a woman should always maintain – ever on the look-out for predator men. Collen asks us, ‘Should a woman ever, dear reader, relax her attention … be off her guard? Or should a woman always be vigilant?’ (Collenn 2003). There has to be something wrong with a society where half its members live in perpetual fear of physical harm, like hunted prey forever looking over their shoulders.

Collen does a great job with her rhetorical questions: ‘Should a woman stop an unknown pair of lights at night, when she is in distress, or hide from it?’ That is, where can victims seek help? It comes as no surprise that families and law enforcement officers are not always the best place to go seeking refuge. Globally, the majority of sexual assaults are committed by close male family members or acquaintances. I do not know how Susan’s family reacted to the news of her trauma, but her in-laws were definitely not kind. Nine months later, she had a child, likely from the assault. One of the responses I heard about the new baby was that, “She must now be happy; she was looking for another boy and she got what she was after!” At what point does society shut its eyes to the suffering of others?

The moment a woman’s power of agency is abdicated she holds no potential to decide her fate—obviously. What I love about Collen’s novel is how it connects “normal” male-female relationships to the question of violence. She lays out a dilemma thus: a woman cannot say “yes,” even when she wants to, since doing so turns her into a “bad” woman. As a result, “’no’ has two meanings ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’” We need to free women’s “yes” so that these cannot be confused with “no.” Fairly simple, we all know this. And yet during rape trials, a woman’s sexual history always comes up, always dredged up to represent her promiscuity and absolve her assailant. Patriarchy stifles women’s ability to make decisions about their sexuality and their bodies. Women taking charge of their lives cause deep-seated anxiety about the nation’s welfare and masculinity’s ability to perpetuate its hegemony. I want to celebrate a society where women are empowered to say “yes” and their agency is taken at face-value—“yes” means yes, and “no” means no.

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DRC: I am Congo

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/podcasts/82373

http://bit.ly/Jphdtb

Zimbabwe: MDC-T mounts diplomatic offensive as SADC summit draws near

2012-05-27

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimbabwe/82426

http://bit.ly/KO2Vk3

Zimbabwe: SA facilitators heading to Zimbabwe for election roadmap talks

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimbabwe/82389

http://bit.ly/JXoanS

Zimbabwe: UN Rights chief urges agreement on key reforms

2012-05-27

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimbabwe/82425

http://bit.ly/Klh7pc

Global: Birthing justice, universal health care for all

2012-05-27

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/82424

http://bit.ly/KVwDoQ

Global: Technology related violence against women

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/82419

http://bit.ly/JMQFG3

Global: Women in internet governance

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/82415

http://bit.ly/MvqNMY

Angola: Anti-government rappers attacked

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82388

http://bbc.in/LbaBRK

Burundi: Verdict in activist's killing fails to deliver justice

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82393

http://bit.ly/KcKeuL

Global: Disinvestment campaign gains traction

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82363

http://bit.ly/KxMbxp

Global: The Rendition Project website

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82356

http://bit.ly/MFIM60

Kenya: Survivors of violence seek more than resettlement

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82479

http://bit.ly/KJ5RSU

Nigeria: Tough questions for UK government over Shell court case

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82357

http://bit.ly/JQ4HY6

South Africa: Concern over vigilante killings

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82343

http://bit.ly/KHLjf4

South Africa: Israeli envoy lecture cancelled at UKZN

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82342

http://bit.ly/L095lA

South Sudan: Country jumps in ‘Peoples Under Threat' 2012 ranking

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82476

http://bit.ly/Lv6Qqv

Swaziland: Government wants to veto union visits

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82361

http://bit.ly/JmpTUp

Western Sahara: Opponents to human rights in Western Sahara attack charity web site

2012-05-27

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/82420

http://bit.ly/KVvM7J

Africa: Israelis attack African migrants during protest against refugees

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/82490

http://bit.ly/JPAZMK

Angola: Angola accused of rape, torture in DR Congo expulsions

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/82347

http://bit.ly/K75X5x

DRC: Refused asylum seekers at risk on return to DRC

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/82492

http://bit.ly/L7NaWY

Global: EU told to assist migrants in family reunification

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/82414

Twenty pan-EU networks have called on the EU to ensure implementation of the Family Reunification Directive for all migrants. According to the Family Reunification Directive, all Member States are obliged to guarantee family reunion which signifies ensuring that there are no legal or practical obstacles to this practice. The full statement is available through the web address provided.
http://bit.ly/KXyk5s

Global: Trauma travels too

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/82354

http://bit.ly/Ja78Pu

Kenya: Refugees describe abuse by police

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/82394

http://bit.ly/JKIZnZ

Sudan: Darfurians in South Sudan: negotiating belonging in two Sudans

2012-05-27

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/82423

http://bit.ly/KftT8N

South Africa: Battle lines drawn as municipal wage negotiations begin

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/labour/82348

http://bit.ly/KuSAvb

Swaziland: Government wants to veto union visits

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/labour/82350

http://bit.ly/Jt2lys

Algeria: Islamists boycott new government

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/82475

http://bit.ly/Lv5jkt

Algeria: MPs boycott parliament session

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/82485

http://aje.me/KW2lTE

Angola: Assessing the risks to stability

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/82474

http://bit.ly/KW4Ngd

Egypt: Elections commission to announce full presidential poll result

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/82494

http://bit.ly/MW2LuR

Guinea Bissau: Junta and parties agree roadmap

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/82353

http://bit.ly/KuupuK

Lesotho: Ruling party leads

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/82493

http://bit.ly/LXsvdv

Morocco: Mass anti-government protest

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/82483

http://aje.me/KmBnqp

Côte d'Ivoire: Minister sacked over toxic waste fund scandal

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/corruption/82387

http://bbc.in/KNbxgs

Tunisia: Judiciary purged

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/corruption/82488

http://bit.ly/MVQ1UW

Africa: 'Africa - a place where you will make money, not lose money'

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82395

http://bit.ly/JFkYsw

Africa: China keen to reverse negative image

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82486

http://bit.ly/KW2RAX

Africa: Russia still struggling to gain foothold in Africa

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82396

http://bit.ly/KWf2xn

Ethiopia: World Bank to fund destructive dam through the backdoor?

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82407

http://bit.ly/LimIJB

Global: Europe’s leaders at loggerheads at EU summit as markets tumble

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82391

http://bit.ly/KS5NOl

Global: Financial crisis to drive up debt burden

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82408

http://bit.ly/MJDbLM

Global: Infrastructure for whom?

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82418

http://bit.ly/JqsaOv

Global: The state of the world economy

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82392

http://bit.ly/MrVRgF

Zambia: The neverending borrowing

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/82341

http://bit.ly/JMELNh

Madagascar: A decaying health sector

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/82477

http://bit.ly/JoU74z

Madagascar: Low HIV prevalence has its own challenges

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/82355

http://bit.ly/Ja78Pu

Uganda: Cholera kills 100, more hospitalised

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/82370

http://bit.ly/LnA4al

Uganda: Judiciary apologises over delayed maternal health ruling

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/82372

http://bit.ly/L6o8dn

South Africa: Legal victory for Section 27 in textbook case

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/education/82362

http://bit.ly/MFRy3Y

Global: New report on state-sponsored homophobia

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/82416

http://bit.ly/KD9u8R

Malawi: Moratorium on the homosexuality law

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/82360

http://bit.ly/JwlxLZ

Malawi: President vows to repeal gay ban

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/82340

http://bit.ly/JsXnlw

South Africa: Ikhaya project and exhibition opening

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/82365

http://bit.ly/KMEFAf

South Africa: Media ignore theft of photographer's work documenting the lives of black lesbians

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/82417

http://bit.ly/Lve798

Swaziland: Hate speech columnist suspended

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/82349

http://bit.ly/JkgklI

Nigeria: Negative outcome in UK race case

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/racism/82409

http://bit.ly/JUucrv

South Africa: Farmworker convicted of murdering far-right leader

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/racism/82369

http://bit.ly/JcuIuR

Mozambique: Crisis over deforestation

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/82339

http://bit.ly/KOKuxz

South Sudan: Concern over deforestation

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/82480

http://bit.ly/JoUsnP

Uganda: Heritage Oil malpractice reveals waste management flaws

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/82359

http://bit.ly/LBrqYw

Malawi: Farmer losses land to sugar company in Malawi

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/land/82364

http://bit.ly/LpXgB6

South Africa: State to spend R2,7bn buying farmland to redistribute

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/land/82368

http://bit.ly/Lf69OA

South Africa: Seed systems and the challenges for food sovereignty

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/food/82352

http://bit.ly/JyEOWD

Cote d’Ivoire: Pro-opposition newspaper suspended

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/82366

http://bit.ly/KMFM35

Senegal: Free expression and information key to promoting equal political representation

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/82399

http://bit.ly/Lsd7iC

Sierra Leone: President warns 'reckless journalists'

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/82367

http://bit.ly/Jp15I6

Somalia: Journalist killed in Mogadishu

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/82495

http://bit.ly/JIcGqr

South Africa: ANC court challenge to The Spear

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/82345

http://bit.ly/L0c0KW

Sudan: End harassment of journalist

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/82358

http://bit.ly/JFRiBr

Chad: Unusually high malnutrition rates

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/welfare/82398

http://bit.ly/LszFDs

Mozambique: Malnutrition, the hidden killer

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/welfare/82338

http://bit.ly/KtaJr4

Sahel: Sharp price hikes cause alarm

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/welfare/82478

http://bit.ly/LWMvgn

Africa: Communique of the Global African Diaspora Summit

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/diaspora/82487

http://bit.ly/KmR2pw

DRC: Mutineers killed in DRC clashes

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82344

http://bit.ly/Jkle5x

DRC: Rebels vow to fight to 'last man'

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82481

http://aje.me/L7r2MD

Kenya: Capital hit by large explosion

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82489

http://bit.ly/LXnz8n

Mali: Government rejects north's independence

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82482

http://aje.me/JoUXhT

Mali: UN sounds alarm over attack on Mali's president

2012-05-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82346

http://bit.ly/JyuvBQ

Somalia: Amisom launches key offensive

2012-05-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82371

http://bit.ly/KMUvLf

Somalia: Puntland and Galmudug withdraw participation from Istanbul conference

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82491

http://bit.ly/KWsPri

Tunisia: Salafists clash with security forces

2012-05-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/82484

http://aje.me/JoV50R

Land grabs and food sovereignty in Africa

Codesria Call for Proposals

2012-05-27

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/586/Call for Proposals_MWG_LandGrab_FoodSovereignty_Africa.pdf

Director of Programmes

Saferworld

2012-05-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/82301

Preferably based in London with frequent travel

Saferworld is an independent non-governmental organisation that works to prevent and reduce violent conflict and promote co-operative approaches to security. We work with governments, international organisations and civil society to encourage and support effective policies and practices through advocacy, research and policy development and through supporting the actions of others. We are seeking a senior manager with extensive experience in the areas of conflict prevention, peace- and security- building to help lead Saferworld’s development into the future.

S/he will have overall responsibility for the strategic development of Saferworld’s Sub-Saharan Africa programmes at the country and regional levels, including the development of new areas of work. This will be accomplished by providing support, advice and direction to our existing team of Programme Heads.

The successful candidate will have a minimum of 7 years senior management experience, including in the areas of strategic planning and organisational development. They will also have excellent relevant experience gained in at least one of Saferworld’s priority regions, preferably in Africa.

The salary range for this post is £50,400 - £65,760 gross per annum. For job description please visit http://www.saferworld.org.uk/about/jobs To apply please send full CV and covering letter to Marie Aziz at recruitment@saferworld.org.uk (using Ref DPSSA in subject heading)

For a full job description, please click here.

Deadline for applications: 10 June 2012

It is anticipated that the interviews will be held during the week of 18 June 2012

Researcher – Nigeria

Amnesty International

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/82390

Fixed-term contract of two years in duration
London
£41,124 per annum

The Africa Program at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International is seeking to appoint a dynamic, team oriented person to the role of Researcher.

About the role

As a research-based campaigning organization, investigating and documenting human rights issues is fundamental to our advocacy and lobbying work. Our West Africa team requires a researcher to take the lead in initiating human rights research and action by providing regional and thematic expertise, excellent research skills and sound political judgement. A campaign oriented approach to your work is essential. You will be required to conduct and co-ordinate research activities, monitor, investigate and analyse political, legal and social developments and human rights conditions, give authoritative advice on these areas and prepare human rights action materials.

About you

With experience of working on human rights issues, you must have first-hand in-depth knowledge and experience of Nigeria and experience of working on economic, social and cultural rights issues. You’ll have a background in activism, academia, law or journalism with the ability to identify and thoroughly investigate those issues and ensure our voice has authority. You will need proven research and communication skills, impartial political judgement, coupled with strong strategic thought. Fluency in English is essential, including excellent writing skills.

About us

Our aim is simple: an end to human rights abuses. Independent, international and influential, we campaign for justice, freedom and truth wherever they’re denied. Already our network of over three million members and supporters is making a difference in 150 countries. And whether we’re applying pressure through powerful research or direct lobbying, mass demonstrations, human rights education, or online campaigning, we’re all inspired by hope for a better world. One where human rights are respected and protected by everyone, everywhere.

For more information and to apply, please visit www.amnesty.org/jobs

Closing date: 17th June 2012.

Senior Director – Global Operations

Amnesty International

2012-05-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/82397

£Competitive package
London

For fifty years, we’ve been campaigning for human rights wherever justice, freedom and truth are denied. We’ve reshaped policies, challenged governments and taken corporations to task. And in doing so, we’ve changed thousands of lives for the better. Forging ahead, we’re looking for an exceptional facilitator and leader to support and coordinate Amnesty International’s global operations.

About the role

In this high-profile role as part of the International Secretariat’s Senior Leadership team, you’ll take overall responsibility for the creation and management of Amnesty’s regional hubs around the globe. Reporting to our Secretary General, you’ll oversee the initial recruitment of, and offer ongoing support to, the regional hub directors, as well as directing and coordinating all regional operations – supporting the planning and execution of regional work, motivating staff and management and making sure stakeholders are engaged and delivering to objectives throughout the regions. It also means creating, implementing and enforcing policies and strategies – setting out a clear and cohesive direction to promote effective communication across the regions and ensure our Regional Management Teams take a consistent global approach to their work across all offices. Put simply, you’ll make sure the entire Amnesty International operation is pulling in the same direction.

About you
The scope of this role can’t be underestimated. Which is why we’re seeking a Senior Director with extensive experience of managing cross-functional delivery in a multi-site global organisation; preferably in the area of global justice and human rights. You will have an exceptional record of managing organisational change, integrating activity and influencing business direction; challenging conflict and taking an innovative approach to delivering solutions. Your leadership skills will be second to none – inspiring, motivating and guiding your teams, generating the trust and confidence of managers and staff, and representing the organisation on a global scale. But just as importantly, you’ll have a solid knowledge of the challenges faced by an organisation dedicated to the promotion of an ethical and just civil society, social change and public advocacy. And, of course, you’ll be genuinely passionate about making a difference.

About us
Our aim is simple: an end to human rights abuses. Independent, international and influential, we campaign for justice, freedom and truth wherever they’re denied. Already our network of over three million members and supporters is making a difference in 150 countries. And whether we’re applying pressure through powerful research or direct lobbying, mass demonstrations, human rights education, or online campaigning, we’re all inspired by hope for a better world. One where human rights are respected and protected by everyone, everywhere.

To find out more about this role and to apply online, please visit www.ai-isleadership.com

Closing date: Sunday 3rd June 2012.

Somalia/Somaliland Country Manager

Based in Nairobi

2012-05-27

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/82421

Saferworld is an independent non-governmental organisation that works to prevent and reduce violent conflict and promote co-operative approaches to security. We work with governments, international organisations and civil society to encourage and support effective policies and practices through advocacy, research and policy development and through supporting the actions of others. We are seeking a country manager with experience in the areas of conflict prevention, peace- and security- building to manage Saferworld’s Somalia/Somaliland programme.

S/he will lead the implementation of the programme, managing relationships with programme partners and outreach to Somali stake-holders. The post-holder will also be responsible for managing and monitoring programme delivery against objectives, managing and monitoring programme expenditure and reporting to donors.

The successful candidate will have experience of working in complex politically-sensitive contexts, and of developing and implementing strategies for civil society capacity building. They will also have experience and skills in project and people management.

The salary range for this post is £36,671 - £43,169 gross per annum plus benefits.

For job description please visit http://www.saferworld.org.uk/about/jobs

To apply please send full CV and covering letter to Marie Aziz at recruitment@saferworld.org.uk (using Ref Som PM in subject heading)

Deadline for applications: 11 June 2012

It is anticipated that the interviews will be held during the week of 18 June 2012 in Nairobi

Fahamu