Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has amended the Constitution to allow for multi-party elections in September. Mubarak’s firm grip on power, however, means that he is unlikely to face a serious challenge. Rather, writes Joel Beinin, the future of Egyptian politics will depend on whether popular political initiatives are capable of building a social movement for change.

President Husni Mubarak’s unexpected announcement that Article 76 of the Egyptian constitution will be amended to permit a direct and competitive vote in the September presidential election has captured the attention of the international and local media and political classes. The substance of the proposed constitutional amendment, announced on February 26, remains undetermined. While the president will not run unopposed in a single-party referendum, as he has done on four previous occasions, a multi-party contest might not end his 24-year rule. Past multi-party elections for the parliament have been plagued by voter intimidation, fraud and other dirty tricks intended to pad the ruling National Democratic Party’s majority.

It is far from clear that Mubarak’s decision heralds the birth of genuine electoral democracy on the Nile. Moreover, focusing on top-level political maneuvering misses the pressure from below that has played a significant role in forcing this concession from the regime.

For the last several months, a disparate collection of burgeoning movements among several sectors of Egyptian society has converged upon one message: opposition to the status quo. Since December 11, 2004, the Kifaya (Enough) movement has organized three demonstrations demanding that Mubarak step down and that he refrain from handing off the presidency to his son, as happened in Syria and in the “democratic” US-allied monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. Kifaya activists have collected well over 1,000 signatures of public figures on a petition calling for a direct and contested presidential election. Members and supporters of the Ghad (Tomorrow) Party have loudly protested the incarceration of their leader Ayman Nur. Human rights activists have continued to criticize the regime’s arbitrary roundups of Islamists in response to the October 7, 2004 terrorist bombings in the Sinai resort of Taba. Workers have engaged in long strikes protesting the business-friendly policies favored by Mubarak -- and, even more so, his son Gamal. In covering these developments, the non-governmental media have gone well beyond previous limits on freedom of the press.

Since 1952, no Egyptian head of state has been targeted directly in this manner. A taboo has been broken, and there is no telling where these popular movements may lead.

A strike against privatization

Some 12 miles north of Cairo, 400 textile workers at the Qalyub Spinning Company, a branch of the ESCO conglomerate, have been conducting a sit-in strike since February 13. They are protesting the government’s sale of their mill to a private investor because they believe private-sector management will not maintain the levels of wages and benefits they have achieved since ESCO, like most other significant Egyptian manufacturing firms, was nationalized in the early 1960s. The strike began because the government and company management failed to deliver on promises to provide an adequate early retirement package in response to a shorter ten-day strike in October 2004.
Privatization of the public sector has long been strongly supported by Washington, as well as Egypt’s creditors at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Fearing social unrest, the Mubarak regime delayed the recommended privatization measures for years before moving with relative vigor to sell off state-owned enterprises in 1993. Despite several bitter wildcat strikes and indications that privatization was contributing to a greatly widened gap between rich and poor, that state passed over 100 factories into private hands between 1993 and 1999. In May of 1999, the International Monetary Fund declared itself satisfied that Egypt was finally heeding its advice. But the selloffs stalled as the economy stagnated. The sale of the Qalyub Spinning Company is part of a renewed wave of privatization. Textiles, one of the largest and perhaps the most storied of Egyptian industries, have been targeted because the sector has been in crisis since the 1970s due to competition from east and southeast Asia.

The first step in preparing firms for privatization is reduction of the labor force. The six ESCO mills employed some 24,000 workers in 1980; they have been reduced to 3,500 by a combination of attrition, a hiring freeze since 1987 and five waves of early retirement packages, the last in 2000. At ESCO’s Bahtim facility, the administrative offices, garage and spinning mill were all sold to a private investor without any obligation on his part to employ the workers who previously worked there. The striking ESCO workers believe that the long years they have worked in the mill -- many have 20 to 30 years seniority -- entitle them to continue working there rather than being replaced by new workers who will undoubtedly receive lower wages and benefits. Basic monthly wages now range from 250 Egyptian pounds ($43) to 600 pounds ($103) a month -- below the poverty line at the lower end of the scale.

The Qalyub Spinning Company workers believe the state is divesting itself of valuable assets without due process -- and at bargain-basement prices. Gamal Shaaban, a skilled worker with 23 years seniority, asked, “With what right was the sale [of this mill] conducted?” The workers own 10 percent of the firm, but they were not consulted about the sale. “Muhsin Abd al-Wahhab al-Gilani [the CEO of the public-sector holding company that owns the mill] agreed to the sale. Was the company his property or the property of the people?”

Muhammad Gabr Abdallah, a night supervisor with 28 years seniority at ESCO and a spokesperson for the workers, led a tour of the mill and explained that in 1999 the company was valued at 60 million pounds. In 2003 the government invested 7 million pounds in capital improvements, including computerized spindles. It then concluded a three-year lease agreement for 2.5 million pounds a year with a businessman named Hashim al-Daghri, expecting that he would buy the mill. Before the lease expired, the mill was sold to al-Daghri at the steeply discounted price of 4 million pounds.

The ESCO workers are highly conscious that their strike questions the fundamental direction of Egypt’s economic strategy. Not only are Gamal Mubarak and his entourage of US-educated economists and business tycoons intent on introducing more free-market policies, but in December Egypt also concluded a trade agreement with the US creating seven Qualifying Industrial Zones where foreign and domestic factory owners will be free to pay structurally lower wages. Rashid Muhammad Rashid, the new minister of industry who is associated with the younger Mubarak, attempted to parry nationalist criticisms of the agreement by claiming that the zones would revitalize the struggling textile sector. Indeed, the Qalyub facility is not the only mill on the auction block. Gilani announced on February 25 that the Delta Spinning and Weaving Company is up for sale.

“Ask the government”

Because of the political importance of the Qalyub strike, activists from the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services in Helwan have supported the workers. Journalists from al-Ahali, the weekly of the legal left National Progressive Union Party, and the open-minded English-language al-Ahram Weekly have written sympathetic accounts. The new English-language weekly, Cairo, published an equivocating report that nonetheless contained more information than is commonly available in Arabic.

In contrast, Ibrahim Nafie, chief editor of al-Ahram, made it known that he was not enthusiastic about covering the strike in the quasi-official, Arabic-language daily. The workers have received no support from the state-sponsored Federation of Spinning and Weaving Unions. Federation spokesman Ali Muhammad Mansour agrees, however, that ESCO cannot pay the workers an adequate retirement package. Early retirement packages have been an integral but controversial component of Egypt’s privatization schemes. The downsized workers first receive a lump sum, which the state encourages them to invest in a small business, and then a monthly stipend that is often much less than the pension they would have received had their factory remained state-owned. Workers have long complained that the stipends are too low to meet the rising costs of living. In the severe downturn that has afflicted Egypt’s economy since 1999, the limited appeal of the lump sum payment has also diminished. The ESCO trade union representative resigned because he did not want to bear any responsibility for the packages on offer to the Qalyub Spinning Company employees.

ESCO’s management is equally aware of the import of the strike. Sitting at his desk below a poster of the shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca, the manager of the mill, Sayyid Abd al-Fattah, an ostentatiously pious Muslim with a large prayer scar on his forehead, evaded direct answers to questions put to him by a group of journalists. He complained that the workers were “pressuring” him and the private investors to accede to their demands. To buttress his claim that the current strike and the one in October 2004, for which three days’ wages were deducted from workers’ pay checks, were illegal, he pulled the text of the New Labor Law (Number 12 of 2003) out of his desk drawer and quoted the appropriate sections. It is almost impossible to conduct a legal strike in Egypt, as this requires the approval of the government-controlled trade union federation.

The striking workers have proposed three options to the ESCO management and the government. They want their mill to remain in the public sector. If that is impossible (as is likely since the contract of sale has already been signed), they want the workers to be permitted to transfer to other mills of the Egyptian Holding Company for Spinning and Weaving, which manages all textiles firms in the public sector. If they cannot be transferred, they want to receive “reasonable” early retirement packages. The third option is the sticking point, because while 10 percent of workers’ monthly wages are deducted for retirement benefits, the company has not paid its matching 20 percent share into the retirement fund since 1992. Consequently, the retirement fund is not able to pay out an adequate retirement package. Abd al-Fattah was asked if the company’s failure to prime the fund was not as illegal as he asserts the strike to be. He responded, “Ask the government.”

Political Islamists

The 287 workers at the Egyptian-Spanish Asbestos Products Company (Ora Misr) in Tenth of Ramadan City, one of six satellite communities built by the state to ease population pressure in greater Cairo, have been on strike since November 20, 2004. The owner of the factory, Ahmad Abd al-Azim Luqma, is known as a member of the Muslim Brothers -- an illegal but semi-tolerated Islamist party widely considered the largest and most organized opposition force in Egypt. The workers assert that he arbitrarily fired 52 workers after the Ministry of Labor Power closed the factory because of health code violations. Luqma has also refused to pay the workers’ wages since September. They claim he intends to sell the plant’s stock of raw materials and to evade paying the fine the government has imposed on him and the compensation due workers for health damages.

The Muslim Brothers have a long history of breaking strikes and opposing militant trade union activity going back to the 1940s, when they clashed with communists in the textile center of Shubra al-Khayma, north of Cairo. The Brothers continued to oppose the left during the 1980s and 1990s. But in this period the Brothers-Labor Party alliance adopted a more pro-labor stance, though this did not necessarily lead to pro-labor practices. Since the 2001 death of Adil Husayn, a former communist who became an Islamist and a leader of the Labor Party, the Brothers have returned to their traditionally pro-business stance.

At Ora Misr, the workers’ factory-level trade union committee is supporting their strike, although their trade union federation is not. The government, although it is no friend of the factory owner, has not acted decisively to break the impasse.

Some suspect that the government is highly strategic about when it chooses to confront the Muslim Brothers. The regime knows the extent of the Brothers’ popular support, and, for that reason, its leaders are periodically arrested. But an all-out assault on the Brothers carries many political risks in an already unstable political situation.

Muhammad Mahdi Akif, who assumed the mantle of general guide of the Society of Muslim Brothers just over a year ago, has announced that the Brothers will support a fifth term for Husni Mubarak on the grounds that the Qur’an says that Muslims should obey their leader. This is a political maneuver designed to persuade the government to legalize the society -- a long-sought goal. Liberal-minded leaders of the Muslim Brothers -- those now in their fifties who joined during the Islamic upsurge of the 1970s -- objected vociferously and publicly to Akif’s statement. The organization is deeply split, and it is unclear if it can maintain its historically tight discipline.

A different face of Islamism was evident at the February 22 press conference called by Human Rights Watch to publicize its report on the mass arrests and torture of at least 800 residents of the northern Sinai town of al-Arish following the Taba terrorist bombings. Eight women from al-Arish -- wives, mothers and sisters of those incarcerated -- attended the event. They call themselves salafis -- a reference to the era of the Prophet Muhammad and the first four caliphs. Salafis believe that Islamic faith and legal practice should be derived solely from the example of this first period in Islamic history. One woman, speaking in a polished Cairene accent, announced her name and related the tales of several of her imprisoned male relatives. She said that her brother, who has been in jail for 18 years, urged her to speak out strongly against the regime. Otherwise her husband, who was arrested without a warrant or a judicial order after the Taba bombings, and is being held without charge, would remain in jail for 18 years as well. She then sharply and directly attacked Husni Mubarak using language rarely heard in public.

According to Human Rights Watch, Egyptian authorities are holding as many as 2,400 people without charge following the sweep in the coastal town, despite having identified only nine people as having a hand in the Taba attacks. On March 4, some 50 women in al-Arish demonstrated against the continuing detention of their male relatives and shouted anti-government slogans. Police intervened and closed off the area.

American-style opposition

Members of the Ghad Party, which embraces pro-US, pro-free market policies, have shouted slogans and hung banners out the windows of their headquarters in Talaat Harb Square, a major Cairo intersection, on numerous occasions since their leader was arrested on January 29. Nur, a wealthy, aristocratic lawyer, was arrested on the rather ridiculous charge that he forged signatures on the petition to found the party. Some believe Nur was jailed because he published a draft of a new constitution with far more substantial changes than Mubarak and his acolytes are now discussing.

The Ghad Party proposed abolition of the emergency laws in force since 1981, limits on the nearly dictatorial powers of the president, and a limit on the number of presidential terms in office. These demands echo those of other parties and influential individuals. In other words, in contrast to the largely formalistic “national political dialogue” that convened at the end of January, Nur and the Ghad Party put some of the substantive political issues facing Egypt on the public agenda. Although still incarcerated, Nur has announced he will run for the presidency. He is the most credible candidate who can be put forward by the legal parties. One of the apparent devils in the details of Mubarak’s “bombshell” is that parties the regime does not recognize -- like the Muslim Brothers -- will not be allowed to field a candidate.

There is little doubt that Husni Mubarak will win even a relatively free election, assuming that he runs, because the political, media and educational infrastructure for a viable democratic political system does not exist and cannot be installed by September. A similar scenario would likely apply if the father contrived magnanimously to withdraw his name from the race in favor of the son. Consequently, the future of Egyptian politics will not be determined by the amendment of the constitution.

Rather, it will depend on whether these popular political initiatives are capable of building a social movement for change. While such a movement has not yet coalesced, challenges to the regime by human rights activists, workers and other marginalized strata show no sign of abating and are becoming increasingly sharp. Ahmad Sayf al-Islam, the director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, assisted Human Rights Watch in its investigation of the al-Arish detentions. At the HRW press conference he accused the government of breaking into his home and stealing his laptop computer for a second time two days earlier. Sayf al-Islam’s exceptionally bold public statement addressed itself to “tyrants, pharaohs of Egypt” and concluded, “the fish starts rotting from the head. Don’t you smell the rot of our fish?”

* Joel Beinin is a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University and an editor of Middle East Report. This article was originally published in Middle East Report Online (http://www.merip.org/). It is reproduced in Pambazuka News with permission.

* Please send comments to

Over 70 representatives of African Civil Society Organisations drawn from over 20 countries meeting in Nairobi to consult on the Global Call Against Poverty (GCAP) have issued an ultimatum to the G8 and will organize simultaneous demonstrations of solidarity and protest across Africa on July 1 if significant movement on Africa's debt is not made at the World Bank and IMF spring meetings in April.

This ultimatum comes ahead of the meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington DC on 16th and 17th April. The G8, the group of the world's richest and most powerful nations, holds more than half the votes in the World Bank and IMF. Campaigners are demanding that they seize the opportunity at the spring meetings to cancel Africa's debt.

"Africa demands immediate action, not further procrastination. Decisive action on debt, aid and trade in 2005 is critical in reversing the continent's decline," warns Kumi Naidoo, Secretary General of Johannesburg-based CIVICUS.

The African civil society groups have also demanded trade justice to reform unfair trade rules, a major increase in the quantity and quality of aid, national efforts to eradicate poverty and achieve the Millennium goals be implemented in a way that is democratic, transparent and accountable.

The 70 representatives from international, continental and national organizations and coalitions working in over twenty-six countries from all the regions of Africa met in Nairobi to review global, regional and national progress on GCAP mobilization over 2005 and collectively plan for the global days of white band mobilization (June 16th, July 1st, September 10th and 10th December).

The meeting shared experiences of organising people-centred advocacy and campaigning and plans for holding national governments and international institutions accountable to poverty eradication, public participation and human rights. Delegations also met with community leaders in Korogocho, a neighbouring urban informal settlement and lobbied Kenyan based G8 Ambassadors and Kenyan Ministries on April 1st in line with the global G8 action.

For the full press release issued after the meeting, a copy of a letter sent to G8 ambassadors and a list of organisations involved in the meeting, please click on the link below.

Zimbabwe is not the only country in Africa where the issue of land is of crucial importance. Across Africa, conflicts over land have been at the heart of centuries-old political struggles. In Kenya, resistance against colonial rule was crystallised through struggles over land, writes Odenda Lumumba. The Giriama, the Maasai, the Kikuyu, the Nandi and the Luhya and Pokot reacted violently to colonial land dispossessions and the struggle over land continues to this day.

The manner in which individuals or groups in Kenya hold, use, occupy, possess or have access to land since colonial rule to the present is a history of how land lies at the heart of many potential and violent conflicts. This assertion is based on the fact that the word conflict as used in this paper is very fluid: referring to debate, contest, disagreement, argument, dispute or quarrel; a struggle, battle or confrontation; a state of unrest, turmoil or chaos over land. Going by this definition I submit that land related conflicts in Kenya are a common, everyday occurrence. Indeed, land-related conflicts in Kenya stem from colonialism, which not only imposed alien land tenure relations in Kenya, but also introduced conceptual, legal and sociological confusion in the traditional tenure systems then prevailing in traditional Kenyan society before the advent of colonialism.

The colonial regime in Kenya proceeded from a land-related conflict assumption that customary land tenure systems were inimical to modern imperatives of agricultural development or indeed to the then colonial settler economy. Henceforth, colonialism embarked on three events i.e. expropriation of land through a process of alienating large tracts of land and dispossessing indigenous people of their land, imposition of English common property law and transformation of customary land law and tenure. These three processes are the beginning of the land-related conflicts that Kenya has experienced to date.

Precisely, the land-related conflicts became prominent when Kenyans of African origin were crammed into native reserves from 1926 and were exacerbated when the process of individualization of tenure in the reserves in the mid-1950s started with a deliberate aim to completely transform African communal tenure relations into individualized land holdings. When the colonial regime realized that individualization alone could not solve the land-related conflicts, it enacted the Registered Lands Act, whose purpose was to provide the legal framework for the extinction of claims to individualized land based on African customary land law. The land-related conflicts in Kenya continue to be pronounced because both the economic and legal frameworks upon which the relegation or intended extinction of customary land rights was based have failed the test of time. Land relations in many parts of the country are still actualized on the basis of customary law, even where such land is registered under Registered Land Act. Communal tenure systems are still very much part and parcel of the social and economic fabric between and within ethnic societies in Kenya.

Thus, the land-related conflicts are prevalent due to the fact that the instrumentality of English/Common law has failed to socially engineer an irreversible movement from communal tenure to individual tenure. Neither has the jurisprudence developed by the courts of law succeeded in extinguishing customary land rights. The bottom line, therefore, is that land-related conflicts in Kenya are a persistent issue that must be comprehensively addressed by the ongoing National Land Policy Formulation Process. For there are many problematic aspects to it that require clear discussion from a policy point of view. The land policy will, however need to address practical aspects of the nature and effects of land-related conflicts as opposed to purely theoretical or academic perspectives.

The land policy shall have to clarify the many legal questions that have gone begging in this regard. And in so doing the wide structural inequities between the 'land-haves' and the 'land-have-nots' as a major cause of land-related conflicts shall have to be addressed. This aspect is paramount as long as agriculture remains Kenya's economic mainstay. Especially remembering that, of the total land area of 587,900 square kilometres that comprise Kenya's landmass, 17.2 per cent is of high and medium potential while the remaining over 80 per cent is arid and semi-arid.

Land and conflict: actors and processes involved

The land developments discussed above were to have far-reaching implications for the African natives in Kenya. Land being at the centre of Africans' survival and a major force of production to white colonial settler economy, it sparked off sharp social, economic and political inequalities, which in turn led to numerous land-related conflicts, of which the Mau Mau independence struggle was the main one.

Many Kenyan communities starting with the Giriama at the Coast, the Maasai in the sprawling savanna land of Kenya, the Kikuyu in the Central highlands, the Nandi in the Nandi escarpment and the Luhya and Pokot in the western highlands reacted violently to the colonial land dispossessions. Underlying alienation of land was a policy of exploitation and oppression against the colonized communities who were 'herded' in reserves to create room for intensification of agriculture by the settlers using forced native labour. These policies generated land-related conflicts that have an indelible mark on the future of Kenya.

The result of 'herding' African communities in the reserves was massive landlessness, especially in those parts of the country that were in settler agricultural and other allied economic activities. Landlessness, quite understandably, led to poverty, discontent and eventually open land-related conflict. That is how organized political dissent by Africans against whites and white rule started to loom. The essence of this dissension was the deterioration of life due to mounting land pressure, overstocking and soil degradation in the reserves, which spurred the whole country into the liberation struggle (the land and freedom struggle).

At independence, the government was faced with the land-related conflict of how to settle the landless and displaced people. Obviously, people wanted the land for which they fought; yet the government was faced with the need to sustain the economic development then, which was a predominantly settler economy. The conflict situation was exacerbated by the fact that the government did not abrogate the colonial legacy but instead retained policies and laws inherited from the colonial regime with regard to land ownership and use. The land settlement schemes further generated land related conflicts in Kenya because most communities did not get back their land, given that in granting independence, the British government made sure that the rights and interests of the settlers who opted to stay in Kenya were safeguarded.

Secondly, even the lands that were availed for redistribution to the landless Africans were at the market place under the policy of "willing buyer, willing seller." This arrangement only aggravated land-related conflicts because those communities who lost their land under the then communal/customary tenure further witnessed their customary land at independence being individualized to those who could afford it at the market place. This was a further entrenchment of land-related conflicts which forty years after independence still manifest in the form of land clashes of 1990s and the current simmering land-related conflicts in form of historical land claims throughout the country.

Resettling the landless through settlement schemes or process has further generated land-related conflicts because since the 1970s the government reverted to a system of Settlement Fund Trustees, which due to corruption and mismanagement has generated further conflicts in settlement schemes where the squatter problem has been used to settle the politically correct individuals leaving squatters conflicting over the very lands that was meant for their settlement. Since the settlement schemes were not sufficiently addressing the landless problem the government encouraged purchase of land through the land-buying companies and farming cooperatives by the landless pooling resources together. The land-buying companies and farming cooperatives have increasingly contributed to land-related conflicts because they have been badly abused by politicians as a means of swindling land-hungry peasants. This process was supposed to facilitate the subdivision of the purchased land among the members in accordance with their respective shares. But more often than not the contributors towards the intended purchase have been cheated out of their money, hence massive land-related conflicts. The government intervention to cause subdivision of land among members and the issuance of title deeds has dragged on, leading to further land conflicts.

The land-related conflicts have involved all manner of actors at different times, at around independence and immediately after independence in the 1960s the land issues activated the ethno-regional conflicts that saw the polarization of politics between Kenya African National Union (KANU) and Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) and later Kenya Peoples Union (KPU). These land-related conflicts reemerged in the early 1990s as Kenyans pushed for multi-partyism and continue to simmer during the constitutional debate. Indeed land-related conflicts and the stalemate over concluding the constitutional review process is a conspicuous feature of the country's failure to address the land question, which lingers on in the executive and devolution provisions in the new draft constitution.

The other important link to land-related conflicts is the mortgage institution and how it relates to rights of access to land. In Kenya individualization of land was and is meant to enable the registered proprietor to offer his title to a financial institution in return for credit. Thus, lenders stretching from banks, finance houses, and building societies have been forced into land-related conflicts with defaulters in the effort of realizing their security upon default. The rural people are engaged in protracted land related conflicts with financial institutions resisting being disinherited because they argue that the policy of the mortgage institutions was ill-conceived from the very outset in that the peasants whose land was offered as security did not have any entrepreneurial skills or experience in credit management to guarantee the possibility of the mortgage institution realizing their security upon default. So serious is the land-related conflicts out of the land mortgages that the state has been forced to intervene to stem the obvious effects on social order, but up to now the state legislative and administrative actions have failed to resolve the problem.

The other land-related conflicts in Kenya manifest themselves through what is commonly known as the human-wildlife conflicts. Kenya adopted an ambitious wildlife management and conservation arrangement through gazettement of large tracts of community lands as national parks, national game reserves and conservancy sanctuaries. In the process. communities are excluded from such lands, which are managed as public trust lands under the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). But given that most of these lands have eaten into grazing rangelands of pastoralist communities and agricultural lands of crop agricultural communities, permanent and potential land related conflicts occur between communities contingent to wildlife areas and the KWS as an agent and directly between human beings and wildlife. The use of ecologically sensitive areas such as forests and riparian reserves is emerging as another major cause of land-related conflicts between conservationists and beneficiaries of illegal and irregular allocation of such lands for political patronage.

The other land-related conflicts arise and concern the extraction and mining of mineral resources in varied areas of the country the major ones being experienced are from the coast - the salt mining, titanium mining, ruby mining and further inland the gold mining, sapphire mining, fluorspar mining, and limestone mining up in the hinterland. The conflicts are mainly because the government has excluded legislatively mineral resources from land rights of communities contingent to mining areas. This deplorable scenario does not answer the concerns of sharing of benefits from mining and mineral resources.

Away from natural resource utilization and benefit sharing land-related conflicts there are also numerous land-related conflicts arising from land dispute resolution mechanisms. In Kenya our courts are clogged by land conflict related cases, which have held back development endeavours. Land Dispute Tribunals are also clogged up with land-related conflicts, which are waiting arbitration.

The latest land-related conflicts arise from the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land ('Ndung'u Commission'). The commission in question was set up to inquire into corruption surrounding public land dealings from I962 as a cut-off date selected by the Commission up to December 31, 2002 when the appointing NARC government came to power. The Commission, which took nine months to investigate into the scams, inquired into protected lands for environmental, conservancy and security reasons i.e. covering forestlands, national parks, national game reserves, sanctuaries, wetlands, marine parks, protect security lands for police, prison, military and state houses and lodges; public lands for settlement schemes; public lands in townships, municipalities and cities; and public lands held and set aside for use and carrying out the mandates of State Statutory Bodies (Parastatals) ranging from provision of all manner of infrastructure, research and development public purposes. The land-related conflicts arising from the exercise of this Commission are first and foremost the government's belated release of the Commission report under suspicion of an effort to doctor the report.

In a nutshell the actors in the land-related conflicts in Kenya are the public sector, private sector, civil society and the community sector. Thus in a number of highlighted land-related conflicts all interface as victims and perpetrators. In terms of processes they range from legal, policy and institutional frameworks put in place for economic, political and social development, which appear to have failed the test of time.

The conclusion flowing from this discussion of land and conflicts in Kenya are that:
- The land tenure regimes inherited from colonial rule are still a major source of land-related conflicts which need to be revisited in order to address cases of historical injustices that manifest themselves in the form of squatters, absentee landlordism, land clashes and all manner of lingering land claims.
- Building capitalism on the basis of disputed land rights in Kenya is a major drawback because while we have succeeded in integrating 10% of Kenya economic and political elites into western type of ownership of property we have failed to address the plight of the majority Kenyans who live below poverty in an assumed pool of labour, both actual and reserve labour. The Kenyan example of going through land conflicts occasioned by individualization of land ownership is a pointer to other African countries that individualization of tenure per se does not produce miracles to development and eradication of poverty. So much reflection is required to overcome this quandary of spurring economic growth and development.
- Vesting land rights through the law does not resolve land-related conflicts or historical injustices and obstacles to development simply because the law is in place to protect what was unfairly and illegally taken away from Africans by colonialists and even fellow Africans at independence.
- Customary land rights cannot be transformed into individual land rights successfully by simple adjudication of land rights as a legal and political process without appraisal of ecological and traditional land use system in varied areas of the country.
- New land dispute resolution mechanisms need to be thought-out to address too many land disputes to ameliorate future land-related conflicts, without resorting to multiplicity of land law systems that are in themselves an obstacle to development.

* Odenda Lumumba is National Co-ordinator for the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA)

* This is an extract from a paper 'Land-related conflicts in Kenya: policy and legal implications', presented at a conference in December 2004. The African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) has just released proceedings of the conference on "Land Tenure & Conflict in Africa: Prevention, Mitigation, and Reconstruction", held in December 2004 which is available on the web at It includes papers on Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, as well as overview papers on customary land tenure, Oxfam GB's work on land rights in Africa, human security-centred approaches, and the work of UN-Habitat and UNEP.

Tajudeen Abdul Raheem says the appointment of Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathai to the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) of the African Union represents a dangerous conflict of interest as she is already a Kenyan government minister. Wangari should either quit as a government minister or reject the ECOSOCC position, he argues.

Many of us who are optimistic about the African Union do so not because of some naïve utopianism that ignores both the objective and subjective realities of Africa that may militate against the realisation of the renewal of faith in the noble ideals of Pan Africanism. We also do so not just as a defensive impulse against the more fashionable industry of Afro-pessimism. Our optimism is based on the concrete reality of our lived experiences and the brutal reality of the condition of many Africans today, both on the continent and in the Diaspora. These have made Pan-Africanism a precondition for our survival instead of it just being a dream. And some of us will even go further to assert that we need our dreams and we need to accelerate the process of their realisation because those who have no dreams to live for and work towards will suffer nightmares. And Africa has suffered enough nightmares!

The African Union did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the result of a critique and audit of our performance or lack of it in the four decades of the existence of the Organisation of African Union (OAU). The organisation was useful in building African consensus and mobilising our peoples against colonialism all over Africa and also in fighting Apartheid and settler colonialism in Southern Africa. Sometimes our frustrations at the way colonialism metamorphosed into neo-colonialism and dictatorships in many countries make us forget some of the positive contributions of the OAU towards our collective good, including it being the single most important diplomatic and political forum for all of Africa. Only Morocco has ever left it.

The Constitutive Act of the AU sought to correct some of the mistakes of the OAU charter in order to make the new Union more responsive to the needs and challenges of our time. It is different from the OAU in many important respects. It is potentially a more people-friendly Union. The OAU was an organisation of leaders and operated as such for most of its existence even when the leaders no longer represented anybody but themselves and their yes men or women.

The AU now seeks to be people driven and it has institutions to guarantee that. For instance, the Commission of the African Union is unique among all Multi-lateral institutions today in not only guaranteeing full participation of both men and women but in enforcing it. It has gender parity of five women and five men as its members. Of course the battle will not stop there because this practice is yet to percolate the whole of the emerging institutions of the AU. However since the principle is guaranteed and enforced at the highest level, hopefully it will only be a matter of time before this good example spreads downwards.

By far the most potentially democratic and democratising institutions of the Union are the Pan African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC). The Parliament offers an historic opportunity for Pan-Africanism to stop being the exclusive preserve of the Presidents but a matter for all of us with a prospect for popular accountability through elected representatives. Unfortunately for the first five years it will only operate as an advisory body. The hope is that after this interim period the need to have a more permanent and powerful parliament with real overseeing powers and an effective check on the executive will recommend itself. One important area of reform when the protocol comes up for review could be the way in which the MPs are chosen. They should not be elected by indirect elections in national parliaments but should be elected directly by all Africans in all the countries they may be. This may transform all Africans into effective political players and no longer 'aliens', as is the practice at the moment.

The other institution which should be complementary to the Parliament in guaranteeing people power in the AU, with even bigger potential, is the ECOSOCC. In the past it was difficult for civil society organisations, NGOs, private sector groups, professional associations, etc to have access to the OAU. But the ECOSOCC envisages that most organisations and even individuals will have equal access to the AU and contribute their quota to the development of Africa. Like the Parliament it is also advisory for the time being.

The interim General Assembly of the ECOSOCC was launched in Addis Ababa last week. The Nobel Laureate, Wangari Mathai, was elected as the President of the Assembly along with other officials. She is a very popular person with an unflinching commitment to democracy and the ordinary peoples of Africa.

As an admirer of Mama Wangari I should be jubilating at her appointment but I am not because there is a potential for conflict of interest in her appointment that will undermine the credibility of the ECOSOCC. She is a minister in the NARC government of Kenya. It is not correct that a serving minister is put at the head of an institution that is supposed to be a people's forum. I can see the argument of visibility, clout and personal influence that may have weighed heavily on the minds of those who orchestrated her nomination, in absentia. But it is a wrong precedence. It sends wrong signals about the readiness of the AU to embrace civil society as an independent partner. We should not keep quiet because she is a much-loved 'one of us'.

Tomorrow it could be any other minister or government person and what would we say then? When governments manipulate elections, public opinion, and so on, we rightly shout and we should not maintain culpable silences because some of our own friends and colleagues are the direct or indirect perpetrators.

The AU bureaucrats have had an undue influence on the process of establishing the ECOSOCC, which risks making the institution a mere adjunct to the AU.

Another issue that shows the unwillingness of the AU to deal straight has to do with the role of the diaspora. The mission, vision, and strategic plan of the AU recognises the diaspora as the 6th region of Africa in addition to the five regions on the continent itself.

The Chairperson, Alpha Konare, is particularly focused on this yet in the ECOSOCC process the Diaspora has been represented by those chosen by the whim of the AU officials. Even at the launch of the General Assembly the few diaspora persons there were mere observers. This is partly due to the unresolved political intrigues around an acceptable definition of 'diaspora'. Some people want it to mean the historically dispersed Africans across the world especially North America, the Caribbean and Europe. Others focus on the more contemporary dispora of Africans directly from the continent, relative new immigrants in the diaspora. A sensible compromise should not be an either or debate but an inclusive arrangement that recognises the claims of all Africans and people of African origin wherever they may be. The AU should not dictate to Africans whether in Africa or in the diaspora.

Self organisation is the hallmark of civil society. A situation whereby the AU decides who the leaders of ECOSOC will be through manipulation of delegates and representation does not augur well for a union that wants the people to be involved as legitimate stakeholders. The Shenanigans at the launch of the ECOSOCC General Assembly would have made the former Stalinist countries very proudly nostalgic that their methods of 'democracy from above' continues to have appeal even without the need for a political party and cadres!

If the AU and its collaborators, co-conspirators and power worshippers in civil society who have brought about this unnecessary situation cannot see their opportunism one hopes that personal integrity and political consistency would dictate to Mama Wangari to either quit her government post or reject the ECOSOCC position. I have no doubt that she truly wants to help galvanise support for the fledgling ECOSOCC and the AU but all things considered I do not see how She can do both with good conscience.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

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The Geneva Phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) produced a political declaration and action plan which was adopted by all governments and intended to guide the Tunis 'implementation' phase of the WSIS. However, governments were unable to reach consensus on two issues - both controversial, both complex and highly political, both finding governments from developed and developing countries positioned roughly, in opposing camps - the issues of 'financing mechanisms' (to put it bluntly, who pays) and 'internet governance' (who controls or sets the rules). Governments found a way through this deadlock by requesting the UN Secretary General form task forces that would grapple further with these two issues and produce final reports for consideration by governments during PrepCom 2, February 2005 (financing mechanisms) and PrepCom 3, September 2005 (internet governance). Read this report on internet governance on the website of the Association for Progressive Communications.