The Polisario Front on Saturday (August 30th) said it was prepared to enter into "serious and intensive" negotiations with Morocco over Western Sahara, two days after the United Nations confirmed that a new mediator will replace special envoy Peter van Walsum, whose mandate expired last week. The Polisario said it would resume dialogue "on the basis of international legality on decolonisation, through holding a free and fair referendum overseen by the United Nations".

When Khadra's* husband fell sick, she became the sole breadwinner in her family. As an internally displaced person (IDP) who fled Mogadishu a year ago, work opportunities were few and she had to resort to the risky occupation of collecting firewood."I had to walk 10 kilometres out of town every day with my two young daughters. We would collect firewood and sell it for 30,000 Somali shillings (about $US1)," she told UNHCR in Baidoa, some 230 kilometres north-west of the Somali capital of Mogadishu, adding that this income was not enough to provide for the family.

Climate change threatens to cause the largest refugee crisis in human history. More than 200 million people, largely in Africa and Asia, might be forced to leave their homes to seek refuge in other places or countries over the course of the century.This paper argues that current institutions, organisations and funding mechanisms are not sufficiently equipped to deal with this looming crisis and advocates a blueprint for global governance for the protection of climate refugees.

Persons with disabilities remain among the most hidden, neglected and socially excluded of all displaced people today. People with disabilities are often literally and programmatically “invisible” in refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) assistance programs [adapted from author]. This resource kit provides practical ideas on how to improve services and protection for people with disabilities and enhance their inclusion and participation in community affairs.

Hatua, a cutting edge talk show on Kenya’s Citizen Channel, unraveled a topic of homosexuality for the first time on Saturday 23 August. With the topic, Hatua, a project of the Mohamed Amin Foundation, supported by a grant from the Open Society Initiative for East Africa (OSIEA), aimed to highlight human rights issues surrounding the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community in Kenya and to open a dialogue around homosexuality.

South Africa is one of only seven countries in the world that grants refugee status on the basis of sexual orientation. But people seeking that relief are battling as much as other refugees in the country. In Uganda, homosexual acts are punishable with life imprisonment; in Mozambique with three years’ imprisonment, and with seven years in Botswana.

Reporters Without Borders has learned the good news that Amare Aregawi, the editor of the privately-owned Amharic-language weekly Reporter, was released on 27 August. The press freedom organisation calls on the Ethiopian government to amend the newly-adopted media law in order to eliminate prison sentences for press offences. It also urges the Ethiopian courts to ensure that the law is strictly respected, and thereby guarantee the rights of citizens.

It was bad enough for web publishing when the challenge was to persuade marketers to move money from 'old fashioned' magazines and radio to the 'new and trendy' Internet. Now there's something newer and trendier! The success of MXit has been phenomenal. The instant messaging service available via cellphones has more than three million subscribers in South Africa.

On the eve of the Accra High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF) being held on 2-4 September in Ghana, Transparency International (TI) warned that corruption would continue to undermine poverty reduction efforts without immediate action on transparency, accountability and citizen participation by aid recipient and donor countries.

Zimbabwe's main opposition party has lost faith in power-sharing talks with President Robert Mugabe and will leave him to form a government alone rather than be forced into a deal, a party official has said. The official, who asked not to be named, said the Movement for Democratic Change no longer had confidence in the mediation of South African President Thabo Mbeki and wanted the United Nations and African Union to rescue the process.

Environmental experts warn gas flaring by the Nigerian oil industry in the southern Delta region causes acid rain, respiratory infections, skins diseases and land degradation in dozens of local communities, but some environmentalists defend the country’s right to continue flaring.

The Zimbabwe Union of Journalists (ZUJ), which represents journalists in the country, has launched a programme to provide life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drugs to its HIV-positive members.

A Chadian court on Friday sentenced a former president and 11 rebels to death for crimes against the state, an official said. Former president Hissene Habre is currently awaiting trial in Senegal for torture and murder. A Chadian commission of inquiry concluded Habre killed tens of thousands of political opponents during his eight years in power until he was ousted by rebels in 1990.

Thanks for your insight - . These are truly historic times in which we find ourselves. Obama and the constituency will have its hands full working towards the wave of change we still too crucially need in this nation. Obama's revolutionary change is more than skin deep and it will take more than just a victory in Washington. We must all see ourselves in the solution for a new nation to arise from this opportunity.

This loose talk about AIDS can kill people - .

It is very dangerous to say without data that bed nets, circumcision, or other AIDS prevention methods don't work. That they might not work in very extreme situations is no reason to spread the false impression that they don't work.

Both DO reduce transmission when backed up by proper health care systems - and most AIDS cases are in peaceful countries like South Africa where prevention saves lives. Yes, work to settle and prevent war.

Yes, strengthen the networks which back up women's rights. Yes, criticize abstinence only strategies. But NO, don't undercut strategies which are saving lives every day.

The exclamatory commentary that has accompanied Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the presumed nomination of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate has excited, beneath it, the question of what the nomination itself, and a possible Obama presidency, might mean for the Pan-Africanist world as well as the Third World. While much of the commentary has been laudatory, there have also been cautionary tones, not to mention ambivalent ones. Beyond the excitement, caution and ambivalence of what a possible Obama presidency might entail for Pan-Africa and the Third World, what Obama himself has said in his writing, and has not said, might prove to be revelatory in attempting to explore the discussion that has exercised many minds around the world. We take this exploration by examining some of the issues that have been raised by editorialists and columnists, bloggers and other commentators in Africa and beyond. We also delve into what Obama himself has said in his two best-belling books, as we ponder how the significance of a possible Obama presidency may be realized more in the symbolic transformation of perceptions of race, racism and racial identity in the US and in the world, than in what the office of the US presidency itself is capable or incapable of achieving.

First, a word about my use of the terms “Pan-Africa” and “Pan-Africanism.” The Pan-Africa I am referring to here is the one that builds on the ideological consciousness of the global historical experiences and identities of people of African descent, and others who share that ideology for political and solidarity purposes. It is a Pan-Africanist consciousness that draws from DuBois’s hope, back in 1897, that if Africans were to be a factor in the history of the world, it would have to be through a Pan-African movement. Thus when Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, Du Bois, unable to attend the epochal occasion due to his passport being impounded by the US government, handed over the mantle of the Pan-Africanist movement to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, through a letter that he wrote and had delivered to Nkrumah.

The 1966 military coup that overthrew Nkrumah as Ghana’s president dealt a big blow to a Pan-Africanist movement that had achieved a great deal for people of African descent, especially in Africa. The shared African identity and global consciousness spawned by Pan-Africanist ideology played a key role in mobilizing support amongst African and Third World regions in overthrowing colonialism. In the United States, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both looked up to the Pan-African world for solidarity in overcoming American racism. With Nkrumah gone, the ideals of Pan-Africanism began atrophying, to the extent that in the 21st century today there is no discernible movement that concerns itself with the problems that afflict Africa and people of African descent around the world. But there is no question that such a movement is as necessary today as it was in the 1950s and 60s.

In his autobiography Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama has demonstrated his awareness of both a Pan-Africanist and Third World consciousness, but for the nationalist demands of American politics today, he has not made that awareness a part of his campaign platform. But those who know Obama’s autobiographical instincts in guiding his best judgments know that his upbringing and struggle to identify himself are a core part of who he is. And it is his autobiographical narrative that has appealed to people around the globe. Thus while heeding the call to be cautious in speculating what a possible Obama presidency might do for the Pan-African world, it is worth discussing the extent to which Obama’s narrative in itself has the potential to influence new visions and energies in the study of the Pan-African world and its future prospects. Those energies have been on display in many places around the world, not least in Kenya, where Obama’s father came from.

A June 5th editorial in The Daily Nation of Kenya, where Obama’s father, a Harvard Ph.D., hailed from, offered three reasons as to why Africans were celebrating Obama’s victory. The first reason had to do with Obama being “the first African American ever to win nomination to vie for the presidency of the world’s sole super-power.” Second, Obama was considered “a son of Africa” who has excelled in the world. And thirdly, Obama was “a son of Kenya,” since Obama traced “his roots” back to his fatherland, Kenya, in “the present-day Siaya District.” The three reasons culminated into one huge hope: Africans were hopeful that “with this win, ‘their son’ will implement Africa-friendly policies that could uplift the continent from poverty.”

In the June 8th edition of The Sunday Times of Rwanda, columnist Frank Kagabo also reflected Obama’s blood connection to Africa, observing that Obama had “relatives living in third world poverty,” a fact which would help African people feel “good and know that nothing is impossible no matter where you come from.” In the Malawian parliament, The Daily Times quoted opposition Malawi Congress Party member of parliament , paraphrasing the parliamentarian as saying Malawi was “likely to benefit if he wins the presidential election this August” [sic]. Hon. Kadzamira was also quoted offering a snippet of how Obama’s foreign policy might look like “He says he is likely to move away from the policies of sanctions, which has hurt countries like Zimbabwe, to negotiation. He says he will have tough aid conditions and will move away from the weapons of mass destruction to mass reconstruction”.

The Harvard University-based blog aggregating project, Global Voices Online, housed in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has been culling blog commentary on the American elections from outside the United States, on a website called Voices Without Votes. Amongst the blogs the website is aggregating is The World Wants Obama Coalition, from where a link to the Global Mania, sported the self-description, “Because the world believes in real change, too.” A round up of Kenyan bloggers by Global Voices author Rebecca Wanjiku was titled “Kenyan bloggers on Kenya’s most famous son, Barack Obama”.

But even amidst the hopes, adulations and expectations for what a “son of Africa” in the American White House could do for the continent, there have also been voices cautioning the hyped praise, and posing some searching questions. The Daily Nation’s editorial mentioned above asked: “But what is there for Africa in the American elections?” It went further still, asking: would Obama manage to “overcome the strong lobby groups that control American foreign policy and that have very little time for Africa?” More unflattering commentary came from Rasna Warah, writing in the June 9th edition of The Daily Nation, who wielded a sharp knife over the blood ties everyone was happy to evoke. Warah’s title was upfront and blunt: “. Warah went on to state: “What everyone seems to be forgetting is that Barack Obama is an American, not a Kenyan. His roots may lie in Kenya, but he was born and raised in the United States, and his loyalty lies with that nation, not with ours.”

As evidence for her argument, Warah cited Obama’s own words spoken when he visited Kenya as a United States Senator, in August of 2006. She quoted Obama as saying: “As a US Senator, my country and other nations have an obligation and self-interest in being full partners with Kenya and Africa. And I will do my part to shape an intelligent foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity.” As for Obama’s autobiography Dreams From my Father, which Obama wrote after returning from Kenya and going to Harvard Law School, Warah suggested that “curiosity about his roots” was the real reason Obama visited his fatherland for the first time ever, in the summer of 1988. It was “not deep love for this country,” said Warah.

By far the most authoritative statement of caution if not negation came from Dr. Makau Mutua, Dean and University Distinguished Professor of Law at State University of New York at Buffalo, and chair of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. Writing in the the personal importance of Africa to Barack Obama is not only evident in the book, it is profound to Obama’s own identity. The way Obama treats Kenya in Dreams From My Father leaves us in no doubt about this. In the book, Obama takes 450 pages to offer an intimate look into his life, from early days in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, to an epochal homecoming in Kenya. The amount of detail Obama dedicates to his life in the United States and Indonesia, where he lived all his life hitherto, contrasts sharply with the one third of the book that he devotes to Kenya, where he only spent three months. His days at Harvard Law School are given a mere two sentences (p. 437).

Contrary to Rasna Warah’s suggestion that Obama went to Kenya more out of curiosity than love of the country, the answer to Obama’s deep search for identity is finally consummated and revealed in Kenya, right from the moment he steps foot on the soil. It is worth reproducing, again, the paragraph that puts Obama’s quest for identity to rest, when somebody recognizes his name in an instant:

“That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so’s son.’ No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand” (p. 305).

However the reasons for caution in imagining what an Obama presidency may do for Africa and the Third World are equally sobering. By the time we get to the US senate and to his next book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), Africa has pretty much disappeared from Obama’s narrative, replaced by distant references that characterize much of mainstream Western attitudes about Africa. Missing even from the Index, Africa is mentioned only perfunctorily, no longer as the place Obama spent a lifetime yearning for, but rather as the known poster child for the world’s worst maladies and disorder. “There are times when considering the plight of Africa—the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s—I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair” (p. 319). But Obama is also aware of the progress Africa has made, citing Uganda’s success with the AIDS pandemic, and the end of civil war in countries like Mozambique. He observes that “there are positive trends in Africa often hidden in the news of despair, while at the same time clinging to an Afropessimism that warns: “We should not expect to help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help itself” (ibid.).

Obama is also able to go beyond the average politician in his candidness about the ravages brought on Indonesia and other parts of the world by the ideological juggernaut of US foreign policy. In a chapter titled “The World Beyond Our Borders,” Obama dwells on how Indonesians find it puzzling that “most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map,” given the role that US foreign policy has played in the fate of Indonesia “for the past 60 years” (p. 272). Providing a brief historical account of this role, Obama describes how the CIA provided “covert support to various insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with Indonesia’s military officers, many of whom had been trained in the United States” (p. 273). The military then went ahead and “began a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers,” leading somewhere between 500,000 and one million deaths, “with 750,000 others imprisoned or forced into exile” (ibid.).

Obama’s candor continues throughout the chapter, noting that “our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the world” (p. 280). He calls American foreign policy “a jumble of warring impulses,” at times farsighted and serving the mutual interests of both the United States and other nations, and at other times making “for a more dangerous world” (ibid.). His take on Iran ought to be enlightening in light of the current saber-rattling and familiar drum beat toward another a possible military strike: “Occasionally, U.S. covert operations would engineer the removal of democratically elected leaders in countries like—with seismic repercussions that haunt us to this day” (p. 286). Yet Obama is no dogmatic ideologue, finding himself “in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview” in debates with friends on the left. He charges that progressives were eager to indict US complicity in the brutalities that took place in Chile, yet were less so in criticizing oppression in the communist bloc. Nor was he persuaded that US corporations and global trade “were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people” (p. 289).

Needless to say, such candor is as rare amongst US politicians as is knowledge of what US foreign policy has been up to around the world, in the general populace, according to several writers and thinkers, including John Perkins, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Carl Mirra, Stephen Hiatt, amongst others. Many of these thinkers have also pointed out how while some Third World leaders are indeed corrupt, Western multinational corporations, backed by a deliberate, strategic foreign policy, create the very infrastructure that facilitates the corruption, and are actually corrupt themselves. According to Perkins, Hiatt, Patrick Bond, John Christiansen, Amit Basole, Leonce Ndikumana, James Boyce, among others, this is done through debt ensnaring, off-shore tax havens, trade mispricing, and dubious advice from the IMF and the World Bank, whose complicity with foreign policy and multinational corporate interests has led to trillions of dollars being emptied out of Third World countries and poured into Western economies. This is the corruption and the looting of the Third World that has best been captured by John Perkins’ term “corporatocracy” in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Stephen Hiatt’s 2007 edited collection of essays, A Game As Old As Empire shows how pervasive the nexus of economic hitmen has become, and how closely aligned the system is between foreign policy and corporate interests.

In the final analysis, the significance of an Obama presidency for Pan-Africa and the Third World will lie less in what Barack Obama may or may not be able to do for people of African descent than in the symbolic message that his ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world will do in changing black people’s perceptions of who they are in the world, and how others view them. That has been the underlying, implicit cause of the renewed hope in what has been said by the Kenyans, the Malawians, the South Africans, the Nigerians, Caribbean commentators, and in fact every one else around the world who has joined in the celebration. While the office of the US presidency may limit Obama’s actual impact on Pan-Africa and the Third World, as Dr. Mutua warns, the symbolic importance of the achievement is what has the potential to go much further in offering a paradigm shift in the self-perception of a people whose destiny, according to Frantz Fanon, represents the possibility to refashion a new vision for the world, one beyond the limits set by European rationality and the consequences, both good and bad, that the Third World has reaped there from.

For that to happen, Obama’s own notion of what race and racism still mean in today’s America and how some minorities are overcoming it could shine some light on the path this transformation might take. Obama devotes a chapter in The Audacity of Hope to the topic of race, in which he offers both a stinging and sensitive portrayal of the bane of America’s ethnic identity, as well as the prospects of what can be achieved in breaking down racial barriers. Obama’s philosophy of race indict residual and institutional racism, but also celebrate white people and black people alike who are able to overcome the vice and chart a new path for society. Those lessons ought to apply not only to America, but to the rest of the world as well, in the apt description of the global face of Obama’s extended family as a miniature portrait of the world:

“As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and a niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe” (p. 231).

*Steve Sharra is a visiting assistant professor, Peace and Justice Studies, Dept. of Philosophy, Michigan State University. This essay was first prepared for the "The Meaning and Implications of the Obama Phenomenon symposium" held by the Zeleza Post (www.zeleza.com).

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

We, Palestinians, are aspiring to any glimpse of hope to establishing our promising country of Palestine. Originally, that glimpse of hope grew when Israelis realized in the nineties that a real peace will not be achieved apart from an Independent Palestinian state. That time, the world agreed on that concept and peace deal (Oslo) was held in Washington D.C, after the first Bush had left office.

Regardless of Oslo and its disadvantages we started the self governing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip awaiting the transitional period in the next stages. But as many expected things went deep down after Israel approved that, it was unconcerned in any peace agreement that relied on giving us land in exchange for peace.

With the second Bush administration and his first speech at the White House, our aspirations smashed into a barrier of Zioamerican arrogance! The hope raised back momentously and excessively when the caucuses of American elections started in 2007. Followed by the appearance of Barack Husain Obama, our hope reached a peak once more. We reckoned that by this heroic Black-American we would be able to get our Independent State of Palestine.

I am finding it very difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.

I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.

If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.

Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he had remained ours, with us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him to death.

It was August 7, 1998. Suicide bombers exploded 700 kilos of TNT in a truck outside of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The bomb blast ended the lives of 257 people, injured 6,000, and destroyed a fragile peace in a bustling city. At the same time, another explosion rocked the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A little-known terrorist network named al Qaeda organized the attacks, led by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.

Ten years later, the survivors and the victims’ families continue to mourn and to seek justice. Last Thursday, Kenyans from all walks of life gathered at the site of the blast in Nairobi, to remember the dead and to call for greater vigilance. The site has been transformed into the “August 7 Memorial Park” with monuments and gardens and trees. Once called “Ground Zero,” a site of terror and pain, it is now a place of respite, a green corner in a busy city. A granite memorial wall bears the names of the 257 dead, including 12 Americans.

A comment on . Any attempt to cover a very complex subject in the space of a few pages must inevitably be somewhat superficial in its analysis. Walter Bello’s ‘The ‘destruction of African agriculture’ is a good attempt to do so but suffers from a number of analytical shortfalls. While the article starts with biofuel production it does not argue against the disastrous impact that biofuels has had on the global food crisis, and glosses over the fact that it is one of the major contributing factors at the present time. But I do not want to dwell on this and must myself be subject to the same criticism of trying to say too much in too little words.

The conflation in this article of structural adjustment, state failure and the more recent policies of global institutions in which privatisation has been mandatory for the developing world (together with the deforestation for, and use of, food crops for biofuel production) does little to clarify our current food crisis or the destruction of Africa’s agriculture. Furthermore the fact that African governments do little to promote agriculture either by investing a higher proportion of their national budget in this sector, or by enacting policies that link agricultural production to environmental and biodiversity conservation, raises some important issues of governance and accountability to their poorer citizens. But all this is old news. The point that we wish to emphasise is that the rather predictable outcome of a privatisation process should not detract from the fact that business as usual, the industrial model of agriculture, is no solution – to repeat the findings of the latest IAASTAD Report - to the current food crisis.

In this regard we want to refer to the Malawi success story promoted in the article, one that is dependent on continued donor support, affordability in the face of growing fertiliser prices, and state patronage. In attributing the success of the scheme to farming inputs, insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that rainfall in Malawi over the past two agricultural seasons has been optimal. We are delighted that Malawi farmers were able to grow more food and our wish is for this to continue. At risk of being harbingers of doom, it is clear that it cannot and will not continue – the sad fact is that Africa is susceptible to floods and droughts. The droughts will return, if not next year, then the year after, or the year after that. And at this point of time the crops will again fail. In any event donors will most probably have changed their priorities by then, but farmers’ reliance on an unsustainable model of agriculture will remain.

So what about sustainability? Part of the food crisis is the high costs of an agricultural model dependent on monocultures and fossil fuels at the expense of the environment. The threat of global warming tells us that we need to reduce risk and diversify agricultural production away from a reliance on single crops towards a diversified agriculture that is more in keeping with agricultural systems which have served Africa for millennia and more closely mimic the natural ecosystems. Hence the use of readily available local resources using farmers own skills and knowledge – in other words a range of technologies, practices and systems that require few external inputs. The article shows little concern for the environment, while even the Malawi Government is recognising the unsustainbility of highly subsidised input packages in the current economic crisis. It is for this reason that it has asked us, through the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, to launch a national composting programme, to reduce reliance on an intervention that it cannot afford and neither can the farmers which it is designed to benefit.

So the World Bank, with regard to subsidies in this case, is right, even if it is not for the correct reasons. And while we must recognise the mistakes of the rather short-sighted policies of the past – of which structural adjustment provides us with a devastating example – we should look forwards not backwards. The positive role that the state must play should be re-emphasised in a policy context which recognises farmers as custodians of the environment and plays an affirming role in setting the policies that empower them while making them responsible for conserving the agricultural and biological diversity on which posterity depends. This is real agency for farmers as citizens and one in which they will no longer be subject to the fads and fashions of donor policies or the edicts of global multilateral institutions.

Sokari Ekine reviews a selection of African blogs:

Mostly Maurice
Black Looks

The Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project of the Open Society network of foundations in Africa (AfriMAP) wishes to announce the publication of three papers considering the relevance to Africa of recent constitutional reform proposals from Britain, France and Canada. They are available at: .

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) invites applications from suitably qualified nationals of African countries to fill the vacant position of Director of Administration, Finance and Membership Services in its pan-African Secretariat located in Dakar, Senegal. This position is categorised as one of the senior posts in the Council and the successful candidate will join a team of staff members functioning under the direct supervision of the Executive Secretary of the Council. All applications must be received by 15 October 2008. Any application received after this date will not be considered.

Africa Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA), a UK-based refugee rights organization and the leading refugee legal aid program in Egypt, is seeking to fill an opening for a legal officer to work as an advisor and advocate for refugees in Egypt. We are looking for an intelligent, hard-working person with a commitment to human rights and service to vulnerable people. We prefer to hire lawyers, but will consider non-lawyers with applicable skills. Application deadline: 8 September 2008.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) invites applications from suitably qualified African professionals to fill the vacant position of Director of Publications in its pan-African Secretariat located in Dakar, Senegal. The position is a senior one and the successful candidate will work as a member of the Secretariat management team under the overall supervision of the Executive Secretary of the Council. All applications must be received by 31 October, 2008. Any application received after this date will not be considered.

Robert Mugabe stood defiant on Monday in the face of mounting pressure to relinquish the executive power he has held for 28 years. As regional trade unions met in South Africa to discuss a boycott of goods bound for his country, Zimbabwe’s president emerged from marathon talks with Morgan Tsvangirai, his arch-rival, to address a rally honouring fighters killed in the country’s liberation war.

The Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT) is pleased to announce its new guide, Torture in International Law: A guide to jurisprudence - published jointly with the Center for Justice and International Law. The publication is available now on the APT website, and also in print form.

The 6th Pan-African Reading for All Conference will be held August 10–14, 2009 in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. This conference is held every two years in a different African country and involves educators from all levels and from at least two dozen African nations. International participants are encouraged to take part in this powerful experience both to meet and learn from African educators and to develop partnerships which benefit both Africans and non-Africans, and which can lead to breakthroughs in education. Program proposals are being accepted until December 31, 2008.

"In 1979, under Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam, the Ethiopian government sent thousands of Ethiopian children to Cuba to be educated. Cuba, an ally of Ethiopia in the Ethio-Somali war, offered housing and education for war orphans. The Cuban government accepted 2,400 Ethiopian students, aged seven to fourteen, to study at Escuelas Secundarias Basicas en el Campo (basic rural secondary schools) - on the small island of Isla de la Juventud. This is an interview from our archive with photographer Aida Muluneh, who is filming a documentary about their lives in Cuba:

August 12 2008 is the one year anniversary of the disappearance of Haitian human rights activist, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine. His wife, Michelle has sent an open letter to the Haitian authorities expressing her and her family's resolve and calling for the truth to be revealed and her shock at calling his mobile and someone answering the phone.

Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness is an organization that was started at the peak of the post-election violence that rocked our country early this year, after the disputed presidential votes. Kibera was one of the worst-hit areas, this being the constituency led by the current Kenyan Prime Minister, Hon. Raila Odinga. On August 16th, there will be a special activity called "The Slum Woman's Voice Day", to unite women in Kibera and to make us more visible to the world.

The Kenyan government has banned extra holiday tuition for students in private and public schools. Education Permanent Secretary Karega said children need to rest during holidays and not do extra work. Concerns were raised about the strain students are under after more than 300 secondary schools experienced riots.

The UN has found that its peacekeeping troops from India may have engaged in abuse and exploitation while serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was deeply troubled by the findings. The Indian authorities say they are investigating the allegations and the vice chief of the Indian army had visited Congo in May to look into them. India has said it will take strict action against the perpetrators if the allegations are proved.

I am wondering how much more evidence on the pre-structural adjustment era and on structural adjustment needs to be created before our friends from the NGO community stop telling this misconceived story-line that everything was just fine in African agriculture, until the bad World Bank and IMF pressured the poor African governments into dismantling their “elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs and cooperative organization.” (quote from the article).

If these systems were working so well and reached the smallholders with all these services, then why didn’t Africa have a small-holder based Green Revolution prior to structural adjustment? Why did agriculture fail to even keep pace with population growth? There is ample evidence that many of these “elaborate systems” the article refers to mainly served elites who appropriated large rents rather than reaching smallholders. To name just one source, the book by Djurfeld et al. (2005) on “The African Food Crisis - Lessons from the Asian Green Revolution” provides ample evidence on the large-farmer bias and the rent-seeking by bureaucrats that characterized agricultural policies on the continent. Independent “cooperative organization” of farmers, for example, was destroyed by authoritarian governments long before structural adjustment (as in the case of coffee farmers in Ghana).

So yes, agricultural spending has been reduced under structural adjustment, but why is the author not asking in whose pockets most of that expenditure had ended up the first place? It is also important to consider what governments actually did--as compared what they were portraying to do--under structural adjustment. As Jayne et al. (2002:1967) show for Eastern and Southern Africa, “many of the most fundamental elements of the reform programs either remain unimplemented, were reversed within several years, or were implemented in such a way as to negate private sector investment incentives.”

Other authors (Cooksey, Pletcher) also provide evidence on the same point. And van de Walle shows that many African governments and elites were quite well able to protect their own interests under structural adjustment. I would be the last one to defend the Bank’s role under structural adjustment or thereafter, and I think it is very important that NGOs criticize the Bank and IFPRI for whatever goes wrong. For example, I think it took the Bank far too long to move away from the position that “all subsidies are bad” to considering “market-smart subsidies.” And one can certainly criticize IFPRI for starting to research this topic only now. However, I wonder when the NGO community will finally start to acknowledge that one can’t blame international organizations alone - African governments themselves—especially those who were not accountable to their own people--have played an important role in the destruction of African agriculture, as well.

* Regina Birner is Senior Research Fellow International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
(for references, see below)

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