The much awaited and celebrated united front of the two Movement for Democratic Change factions that was sealed last Sunday crumbled in the eleventh hour again presenting President Robert Mugabe with chances to win the March 29 election. Arthur Mutambara leader of one MDC faction told the media contingency that the whole deal had been reversed following an impasse over nomination seats.

Maina Kiai makes an impassioned plea for seriousness and commitment from all actors in the pursuit for a resolution to Kenya's political crisis

Kenya is at a cross-road that will mean either the complete disintegration of Kenya or the beginning of a new, more democratic, sustainable nation suited to the needs and aspirations of the Kenyan people in the 21st Century. In a deeply painful and costly manner–in terms of lives lost and destruction wrought—the crisis in Kenya has given the country a unique opportunity to move forward in a way that we have been advocating for the last 20 years. In a sense, Kenya is at its "civil war" moment that the US was at in 1861. Just as that war was pivotal in establishing and solidifying the democratic credentials of the US, this moment could lead Kenya to much greater heights if properly handled both domestically and internationally.

In this context, the mediation currently going on under the leadership of Kofi Annan, Graca Machel and Ben Mkapa is the last best chance for Kenya to move forward. Whatever can be done to keep the players at the table, and keep them there in good faith, is critical. And efforts that delay, or subvert the talks—whether through insensitive statements and actions or by trying to prolong the talks through acts of filibustering—must be condemned. Consistent regional and international pressure is necessary especially on the hardliners who think that the crisis will blow over. The consequences of the failure of the mediation efforts are too dire to imagine not just for Kenya but for the region.

What is going on in Kenya is a political crisis with ethnic manifestation because politics in Kenya is organized ethnically. Clearly there are cleavages and differences in Kenyan society that have erupted brutally to the surface. But these have erupted due to the failure of peaceful means of resolving and addressing these differences, including the failure of elections and political reforms promised to Kenya in the 2002 elections.

The crisis in Kenya was foreseeable. In March 2007, the KNCHR submitted a memorandum to President Kibaki urging him to maintain the "gentleman's agreement" that had been in place since 1997 whereby all parliamentary parties made nominations for appointment to the Electoral Commission of Kenya. We argued that unilateral abandonment of the agreement would likely invite chaos and instability were the elections disputed. Moreover, since January 2006 we witnessed consistent attempts by the state to reduce democratic space and instil fear in society.

THE EXTENT OF THE CRISIS

Some 1000 people have been killed in the one month since violence erupted on December 30, 2007. Note that 3000 people were killed between 1992 and 1998 in the state instigated clashes in the country. During that same period, more than 300,000 people were internally displaced, most of whom have not returned to their farms and homes. In the month since the elections, an additional 300,000 people have been internally displaced.

Part of the reason why militia—on both sides—have been so potent and dangerous is that they arose from the earlier violence of the 1990s and were never de-mobilized. Nor was there a process to deal with the root causes of that violence, with the Kibaki government choosing to sweep the matter under the carpet, despite campaign promises to the contrary. With grievances bubbling and fermenting close to the surface, it was relatively easy to reactivate the militia using methods similar to those of the 1990s. Most important, the paymasters and planners of the 1990s clashes were never held accountable.

It is estimated that in the month since the crisis started the Kenyan economy has lost about US $3 billion and about 400,000 jobs. Moreover the crisis has severely affected the economies of Uganda, Rwanda, Eastern DR Congo, and Southern Sudan and could bring them to ruin if not checked. All these nations have a history of conflict and violence that could be reawakened by economic collapse.

We have observed 4 forms of violence:

i) Spontaneous uprisings of mobs protesting the flaws in the presidential elections. These mobs looted, raped and burnt down buildings in an anarchical manner.

ii) Violence organized by ODM-supporting militia in the Rift Valley that was aimed at perceived political opponents. The initial militia action attracted organized counter-violence from PNU supporters especially in Nakuru, Naivasha areas of the Rift Valley, and Nairobi.

iii) Excessive use of force by the police in ways suggesting "shoot to kill" orders against unarmed protesters mainly in ODM strongholds including Kisumu, Kakamega, Migori, and the Kibera slum of Nairobi. Policing has been uneven in its implementation. In some strong ODM areas, the police have been shooting to kill, while when confronted with pro-PNU militia, they have opted to negotiate with the groups. However, in the Eldoret area, the police largely stood by and watched as pro-PNU supporters were killed and their houses burnt.

iv) Local militia in pro-PNU areas, on receiving internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the Rift Valley, have mobilized in sympathy and turned on perceived ODM supporters, killing them, and burning their houses.

The violence is neither genocide nor ethnic cleansing: The root of the problem is not that different ethnic groups decided they could no longer live together. The root of the problem is the inability of peaceful means to address grievances. For this to be genocide there would have to be either state complicity or state collapse and the first obligation would be for the state to provide adequate security for those at risk. Instead we have uneven and selective policing with emphasis on preventing Raila Odinga from holding protests in Nairobi rather than protecting IDPs and others at risk across the country. We therefore believe that the quickest and most effective way to reduce the violence is progress in the current talks.

THE ELECTION TRIGGER

It is clear that the flagrant effort to steal the presidential election was the immediate trigger for the violence. All independent observers have said that the tallying process was so flawed that it is impossible to tell who won the presidential election. Since 1992, Kenya's elections have been progressively better and fairer, culminating in the 2002 elections which were the best ever, and the 2005 constitutional referendum. The effect of this progression is that Kenyans finally believed in the power of the vote as a way of peacefully resolving differences, a fact confirmed by voting trends in the recent parliamentary elections that saw almost 70 percent of incumbents lose their seats. When this sense of empowerment was subverted, and peaceful legal spaces for protests were disallowed, it is not surprising that frustrations boiled over and violence ensued.

We have documented some of the facts and analysis that make clear that the flaws in the tallying of presidential votes rendered untenable the conclusion that Mwai Kibaki was validly elected.

With the benefit of hindsight, there were steps taken that paint a picture of a well orchestrated plan to ensure a pre-determined result. These include:

i) President Kibaki's decision to abrogate the agreement of 1997 on the formula for appointments to the Electoral Commission ensuring that all the Commissioners were appointed by him alone; ii) An administrative decision within the ECK to give responsibility to Commissioners for their home regions, something that had never been done before, meaning that they appointed all the election officials in the constituencies in their home regions, in a manner that created conflicts of interest; iii) The rejection of an offer from IFES to install a computer program that would enable election officials in the constituencies to submit results electronically to Nairobi and then on to a giant screen available to the public making it virtually impossible to change results; iv) A decision to abandon the use of ECK staff in the Verification and Tallying Centre in favour of casual staff provided by the Commissioners directly; and v) A refusal to ensure that election officials in areas with large predictable majorities for any of the candidates came from different areas so as to reduce the likelihood of ballot stuffing.

WAY FORWARD AND ROLE OF US CONGRESS AND GOVERNMENT

At this "constitutional moment" that Kenya has reached, we believe the way forward must be centred on truth and justice as the only sustainable road to peace and development. This is the time for Kenya to end the impunity that has been a feature of our history since independence, and also to end the "winner take all" "first past the post" system. Specifically, we call for:

i) An international independent investigation into the 2007 presidential election process in order to come to closure on the elections, find out who did what and why; who ordered it; and promote accountability; ii) An international independent investigation into the post election violence—from citizens and police–so that there is accountability on all sides.

iii) An interim transitional government to be formed with limited powers of governance and for a limited time–between 1 and 2 years—with Kibaki and Odinga exercising equal powers.

iv) The primary duties of this interim government should be to undertake constitutional reform, and especially explore ways of reforming the current Imperial Presidency; motivate electoral reforms, police reforms, judicial reforms, land reforms, civil service reforms, devolution of power; and conduct new elections at the end of its term.

v) The interim government should also be charged with cooling passions and starting the process of reconciliation through a Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission that starts operations immediately after the new elections. It is important that presidential elections be held at the end of the interim government to inspire confidence in Kenya's electoral processes, and as a sign of the new Kenya.

vi) It is also important to note that significant work in all of these areas of reform has already been done in various constitutional drafts and also by Government Commissions and Task Forces so Kenya would not be starting from scratch.

To ensure that there is good faith in the mediation it is imperative that the U.S. Government work with the rest of the international community to maintain pressure on Kenya's leaders to treat the mediation with utmost seriousness. To this end, we welcome U.S .leadership in raising the crisis in Kenya at the UN Security Council, and call for pressure at this level to be maintained and increased.

We also urge Congress to request the release of the exit poll conducted by International Republican Institute (IRI) without delay so as to maintain pressure on all sides to negotiate in good faith. In addition, we urge Congress to work with the EU to have the EU Observation Mission Report released immediately.

In case of continued intransigence from any of the parties we call on Congress to impose travel bans on the hardliners on both sides and especially those implicated in instigating violence whether through militia or through the police. These travel bans should extend to hardliners in the civil service and to their immediate families.

Moreover, assets of the hardliners and those involved in violence should be traced and the assets frozen.

Finally, it is important that U.S. military and security assistance be frozen immediately. All US assistance to Kenya should be channelled through non-governmental sources.

* Maina Kiai is the Chairperson of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), an independent state body charged with protecting and promoting human rights in Kenya. He writes on behalf of the KNCHR, as well as for Kenyans for Peace through Truth and Justice (KPTJ), a coalition bringing together more than 50 human rights, legal and governance groups in Kenya

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The MDC national council, the party’s main decision making body, has endorsed Morgan Tsvangirai as its presidential candidate for next month’s general elections. Party spokesman Nelson Chamisa said primaries to choose parliamentary and council candidates are also almost complete. He said party structures have since Saturday been selecting candidates for all the 210 constituencies up for grabs.

A militant Somali Islamist group linked to al Qaeda claimed responsibility on Thursday for bombings that killed at least 20 Ethiopian immigrants in a northern Somali port earlier this week. Regional officials confirmed that the al Shabaab militant group was responsible for the blasts on Tuesday night in the port of Bosasso in an area where Ethiopian immigrants congregate. Close to 100 people were wounded.

A former Congo warlord was flown to the International Criminal Court in The Hague on Thursday to face war crimes charges including murder, sexual slavery and using child soldiers, a court spokesman said. Mathieu Ngudjolo was the head of the Front of Nationalists and Integrationists (FPI) militia during conflict in northeast Ituri Province that grew out Congo's 1998-2003 war.

The program has now been finalized for the February 21 – 22 protest. The Global Zimbabwe Forum need to contact as many Zimbabweans as we can reach to come to the demonstration. Please contact by email or by phone as many friends as you can reach.
We need to know by Wednesday next week how many people we can expect at the demonstration.

The following have been tasked with coordinating recruitment efforts:

New York.Fungisai and Alice (516) 967 4613/(646) 577 5289
Pennsylvania Nick Mada (610)2469462 [email][email protected] Stan Mukasa (724) 467 0001 [email][email protected]
Ohio/Michigan Zvidzair Ruzvidzo/Allan Banda Phone :614 622 0427 [email][email protected]
Washington DC "Robson Nyereyemhuka"[email protected]
Indiana Alan Bako (317) 345 2368
Accommodation arrangements are being made byMaswela at [email][email protected] (513) 410 9495
Scheduled speakers for the protest are Ralph Black Handel Mlilo Ruzvidzo Zvidzair Nassar Rusike
The Event MC and also in charge of publicity will be Briggs Bomba
The next conference call will be on Thursday, February 14, starting at 9 p.m.
Conference details:
Number to Call ---: 1-605-475-6000 Access Code---- : 875057# Time----------:9.00PM (Eastern Time)

Unwanted or unplanned pregnancy is a significant risk for women with HIV within 18 months of starting antiretroviral therapy, and in Uganda few were being offered family planning methods in order to avoid pregnancy, researchers reported on Tuesday at the Fifteenth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston.

As southern Africa enters its second year of crippling energy shortages as accurately predicted by the Southern African Power Pool about four years ago, massive short-term projects of close to US$8 billion will need to be fast tracked over the next couple of years to get the region out of the present situation. Electricity shortages have in recent weeks severely affected some Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states leading to scheduled and, in some cases, unscheduled power cuts.

The Moroccan government plans a broad expansion of vocational education centres, job agencies and training partnerships with business professionals. The plan addresses the growing number of workers who do not fit the needs of the market and the problem of unemployment in the country.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/broadcasts/bunia-women-patrol.jpgIn this series of interviews, Rwanda’s Contact FM radio talks to women in north Kivu in the forefront of fighting what has been described as “femicide” in eastern DRC.
The recent peace conference in Goma, north Kivu has raised hopes that a durable solution to the almost decade long conflict in eastern DRC will finally be found. But Congolese women of DRC are paying a huge price as each bout of fighting results in ever more women raped and mutilated. Rape is being used as a weapon of war in what increasingly looks like a no win situation for all parties concerned and Congolese women are upping the ante in the fight to break the silence about the atrocities committed against them for too many years.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh reflects on the central role Issa Shivji has played in the development of African revolutionary scholarship.

It is 15th July 2006 at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Issa G. Shivji, at 60, is giving his valedictory lecture. Titled “Lawyers in Neoliberalism: Authority’s Professional Supplicants or Society’s Amateurish Conscience”, the lecture marks the end of a rich and distinguished 36 year career of selfless service that started as a tutorial assistant in May 1970 and was crowned with full professorship in July 1986. The lecture is on a theme that has been at the centre of Shivji’s humanity and scholarship since his student days in East Africa and the United Kingdom. If neoliberalism cultivates corporate greed and reinforces an elitist order that never tires of globalizing a culture of poverty, Shivji as a lawyer and scholar has positioned himself passionately and selfishly at variance with neoliberalism. He uses changing land and labour regimes in Tanzania to criticize the changing concepts of personhood and human agency that have tended to question cultures and socio-political communities underpinned by collective success where greed is not the creed. Drawing on leading labour cases, Shivji convincingly demonstrates how Tanzania and Africa have jumped “from the frying pan of state nationalism into the fire of corporate neoliberalism”, hence his criticism of lawyers who come across more as technicians oiling the wheels of neoliberalism than as saboteurs to the corporate greed and global consumer culture it champions.

As he argues, neoliberalism generates a transnational legal intelligentsia to serve and oil it. The neoliberal elite globalizes the so-called ‘rule of law’, not as embedded in liberal political values of the Enlightenment period, but rather as “firmly rooted in the exigencies of the ‘rule of capital’ in the service of a corporatocracy.” The result is the global “expansion and protection of property relations and private appropriation of surplus value,” to the detriment of multitudes of poor and ordinary citizens simply seeking to get by. In the valedictory lecture, reproduced in the popular pan-African Pambazuka electronic news bulletin: Shivji is scathing in his criticism of African lawyers and intellectuals at the beg and call of neoliberalism, which privileges profit over people and is interested in development and culture only to the extent that these guarantee profitability. Shivji has remained consistent and uncompromisingly critical over the last forty years.

In 1968, he published “The Educated Barbarians”, an article that was passionately critical by the injustices of unequal encounters that had reduced being cultured to emptying oneself of all meaningful cultural difference vis-à-vis neocolonial forces and its harbingers in Africa. In those days, as today, Shivji was committed to Africans old and young passionate about making the world a better place politically, economically and culturally. In his words, “We discussed Fanon while we worked in cashew nut farms around the University, taught literacy classes in Mlalakuwa based on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, built our own shelters, called houses, through self-help.” It was an exercise of making both development and culture in tune with the lives and expectations of those called upon to partake of both.

This passionate commitment to challenging the culture of injustice and greed with the culture of equality of humanity and the celebration of difference seems to diminish in Africa by the day. Shivji is worried, and blames the insidiousness of Neo-liberalism, which “has taken its toll and the language of consultancy has displaced and replaced the language of conscience and commitment.” He argues that “corporatisation of the university is part of the neoliberal ideological attack on critical thinking, on intellectuals who would ‘Speak Truth to Power’. It undermines the university as a critical site of knowledge, as a mirror of society. No doubt, temptations are great and none of us is immune.” This recognition, notwithstanding, Shivji is particularly scandalized by the fact that even the committed progressive scholars of yesteryears “can only agonize and gradually forget even to diagnose the ills of our society.”

Professor Issa Shivji has had a rich career as one of Africa’s leading experts on law and development issues. He retires as director of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Dar es Salaam where he has taught since 1970’s. In Tanzania where he was born in 1946, Shivji has served as advocate of the High Court and the Court of Appeal of Tanzania since 1977 and advocate of High Court in Zanzibar since 1989. He has served as visiting professor in Mexico, Zimbabwe, South Africa, United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong and USA, and has won several awards and distinctions. Shivji’s influence as a lawyer, scholar, professor and public intellectual is global. He has researched, written and published extensively on a broad range of issues including on human rights, land tenure, labour, higher education and the politics of recognition and representation.

He has published 15 books that include his 1989 groundbreaking The Concepts of Human Rights in Africa - a critique of dominant ideologies of human rights that seeks to reconceptualise human rights from the perspective of the working people of Africa, 6 monographs, 33 book chapters, 36 articles in scholarly journals, and over 40 other papers, reports and writings in newspapers, newsletters and bulletins. His most recent book -- Let the People Speak: Tanzania Down the Road to Neoliberalism—published by CODESRIA to coincide with his valedictory lecture, consists of 90 critical and thought-provoking essays selected from over 150 written between 1990 and 2005 in three different newspapers. The book captures the richness of Shivji’s contributions as a public intellectual. It deals with the period when Tanzania under external pressures from donors and financial institutions was forced down the road of neo-liberalism. The local compradorial elites whose economic appetites had been suppressed under Nyerere’s radical nationalism now openly flexed muscles to get a place under the capitalist sun as nationalism, radical or otherwise, was abandoned, and neo-liberalism uncritically embraced.

The essays are on varied subjects ranging from the politics of multi-party, the strains and stresses of the Union with Zanzibar, the deep-seated extra-constitutional behaviour of the ruling elite to the hopes, fears and resistance of the working people. In these essays, contemporary Tanzanian history is recorded in sweeping journalistic strokes without burying the commitment of a critical public intellectual in turgid scholarship. As a warning on the slippery slope that neo-liberalism constitutes, Let the People Speak will echo in many an African country. Hence the salience and relevance of Shivj’s renewed call for the resurrection of a radical, people driven Pan-Africanism. Shivji sees in the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), an institution that epitomizes the Pan-Africanism he would want to resurrect. CODESRIA was created in 1973 with a clear mandate to promote the production and dissemination of multidisciplinary social research by African scholars. It was tasked with the responsibility of doing this simultaneously with an investment of effort in transcending the various barriers of language, geography, discipline, gender and generation that hamper cross-national African networking for the advancement of science.

As a foundation member, Shivji has played important roles in the life of CODESRIA. He has been an authoritative and important voice. His high standing and commitment to intellectual activism have played a pivotal role in CODESRIA’s history. The Social Science community in Africa has benefited enormously from the spread of his ideas and influence, and from the encouragement that he has never relented in giving so many people. Shivji has served CODESRIA in various capacities over the years, including as: Chair person for the Drafting Committee to the 1990 Dar es Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom & Social Responsibility of Academics; Director of CODESRIA Democratic Governance Institute, July – September 1996; Chairperson, CODESRIA Governance Reform Committee, 2000-2002; and Executive Committee member of CODESRIA, 2002-2005. It is this African and global social science community which Shivji has shaped and been shaped by that reacted with outpours of email messages of congratulations and recognition when Shivji made public his retirement through an open invitation to his valedictory lecture.

Without space to do justice to the scores of testimonies in praise of him, let me refer only to a few: Carlos Lopes, a scholar of Guinea Bissau currently Assistant Secretary General at the UNO, writes:

When I was still a teenager I was already reading Issa Shivji, thanks to my mentor's insistence, the late Mário de Andrade, leading Angolan intellectual and founder of the MPLA. When later I wrote my first book, in 1982, quotes from Shivji were prominent. So despite being from a totally different generation I feel I have been in dialogue with Shivji for decades now; and, as a result, consider his enduring influence on my thinking, very important. However what I really would like to mention is the personality of this scholar that always considered himself an agent of change, a revolutionary, committed to the transformation of our beloved continent. From the Dar School to the activism of AAPS, or CODESRIA, Issa has been a reference figure because of his personality. Bonds were established because of his intellectual honesty. We know what he stands for and we know his personal interests matter little for he is a man of convictions, and his convictions are for the good of the collective. At this moment I would like to pay tribute to him and his colleagues that have put the University of Dar es Salaam in the radar of Africa's transformation. We need you!

Dr. Thandika Mkandawire, former Executive Secretary of CODESRIA, author of African Intellectuals, and currently Director of UNRISD in Geneva, writes: Dear Issa, Thanks for the invitation. I really wish I could attend this event to pay tribute to a courageous and inspiring scholar I hope you realise that your retirement at such an early age simply marks a new beginning. I therefore look forward to more of your seminal work. Warm regards

Dr. Jacques Depelchin, a committed intellectual, academic, and activist for peace, democracy, transparency and pro-people politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and author of Silences in African History, writes:

Dear Issa, For your fidelity and commitment to emancipatory politics at all times, we can never thank you enough. However, do not worry, although things might look gloomy, there are unmistakable signs that --to paraphrase Ayi Kwei Armah in his novel KMT-- the people of the Sphere shall prevail over the people of the Pyramid. It is easier to heal than to give into the idea that everything has fallen apart. Do take care

Dr. Jimi Adesina, Professor of Sociology at Rhodes University, South Africa, and co-editor of Africa and Development Challenges in the New Millennium, writes: Mzee: Wished I could be there. Thanks for the years of inspiring intellectual leadership that you given all of us and the space that you continue to provide for the intellectual project at the service of ordinary people, who daily do extraordinary things. I am sure this is only a formal end of employment at UD rather than a retirement. May your cooking place never grow cold!

The President of CODESRIA Teresa Cruz e Silva, a Mozambican Historian, had this, among other things, to say: Professor Issa Shivji is a brother, a friend, and in many ways an inspiration to Africans big and small, an intellectual animated by a passion for freedom, a passion well summed up in the title of his latest book: ‘Let the People Speak’. After such an illustrious academic life rich in contribution to the development of Social Sciences in Africa, Professor Issa Shivji deserves his formal retirement from the University of Dar es Salaam, although I doubt, given his wisdom and generosity of spirit, that he is going to allow himself the rest he needs. On behalf of CODESRIA, also represented today by the eminent Professor Archie Mafeje and two former Presidents of CODESRIA, Professors Zenebeworke Tadesse and Mahmood Mamdani -- all three of them founding members of CODESRIA, allow me Professor Shivji to congratulate you and the University of Dar es Salaam for your outstanding academic production and your contribution to the formation of new generations of African scholars in the last decades. Allow me also, personally, to express my gratitude and my tremendous admiration for your scholarship and integrity, as well as your strong intellectual activism illustrated by your writings on Africa and particularly on contemporary Tanzanian issues, and your consistent and very honest positions concerning world politics.

My first true memory of Issa Shivji´s name come from the mid to the late 70´s, after the independence of my country, Mozambique, when at the very new African Studies Centre at Eduardo Mondlane University and under the leadership of Ruth First and Aquino de Bragança, an uninformed young and enthusiastic group of Mozambicans received all the strong influence of the Dar es Salaam school, particularly the very first contacts with issues related with African development, the new research approaches on African history and for the first time a rare chance to read African authors. For scholars of my generation, Issa Shivji´s name always has been a source of inspiration and an extraordinary example of struggle to build up African universities not only with high standards, but with scholars committed to the development of the continent. The huge range of Issa´s achievements was and is still recognized by successive generations of scholars who have his work and intellectual commitment as a source of inspiration. Today we are here to celebrate a transition from one fruitful stage to another one in the academic life of Professor Issa Shivji. Issa´s energy and commitment have been a vital resource for CODESRIA, and for the social science community in general. We sincerely trust that he will continue to guide the young generations and to give more and more of his commitment to African Development. Which is way I say to him: Issa, for this new phase of your life we wish you happiness and good fortune, but CODESRIA cannot guarantee you the rest you so badly need after working so hard. For we need you even more than ever to mentor the younger generation in whom you have sown the seeds of HOPE in a bright future for Africa.

Professor Issa Shivji has never been a lip service scholar, less still a scholar who pays lip service to social responsibility. He does not thrive in dissemblance, and would state his mind even at the risk of being the only voice who dares to say the king is naked in his new clothes. Not untypical therefore, he found reason to voice his concerns about the the Mo Ibrahim Prize for a retired African president which was awarded to Joachim Chissano of Mozambique. In this commentary titled “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” (see Pambazuka), Shivji argues that “it is naïve, if not mischievous, to award a person – moreover with a cash prize – for bringing peace or democracy to his country.” He questions the reason for the award – “good governance”, the yardsticks by which this is determined, and the derogatory assumptions vis-à-vis Africa, its humanity and dignity that surround the award. He particularly regrets the “uncritical and unqualified celebration” of the award “by scribes and even academics and intellectuals”.

It is too simplistic, he argues, to assume that African problems are created exclusively by Africans, or that the excesses of the world out there has little bearing on the excesses of the world in here. Not to recognize this especially by scholars is dangerous, as it could easily lead to mistaking villains for heroes, mercenaries for savours, dictators for democrats, exploiters for philanthropists, capitalists for socialists. Only such critical understanding can put in perspective the fact that no one who has “made millions of dollars from the sweat and blood of the African people” can be celebrated when instead of returning “a few million to the people through providing badly needed schools, dispensaries, and water wells, proceeds to “add insult to injury by robbing (poor) Peter to pay (rich) Paul.” As Shahida El-Baz remarked in an email to me and others when she read this piece by Issa Shivji, “This is really refreshing. To read/hear such honest, brilliant and committed analysis is like a glowing light in the middle of darkness, where a great number of those, who used to be called progressive intellectuals, enjoy adopting uncritically the fashionable concepts and policies of imperialist globalization. It is also a typical description of what is happening in all our countries. Thank you Issa for holding the torch so high. Keep going…”

The magnitude of Professor Issa Shivji’s scholarly, legal, political and educational contributions to development and culture in Africa and globally, and his humanity, honesty and generosity of spirit constitute a glowing example worth emulating of intellectual and social responsibility in action and in tune with Africa and its predicaments.

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Associate Professor and Head of Publications and Dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Email: [email][email protected], Website: www.nyamnjoh.com

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

Rewrite this sentence as a question:

I should kill you.

Next, correct this split infinitive:

To clearly know what’s wrong.

Reverse the pronouns in this sentence:

You’ll forgive me.

The infinitive of Love is:

Love; To Love; Be Loved; Despise?

Note down five synonyms for Neighbour

and five antonyms for Hate.

Select a word from those in brackets

and insert it in this sentence:

I _______ my fellow humans

(Murder; Rape; Displace; Respect.)

Last: if a Person is the key to peace

determine if it’s I or You or S/He

(tick any one, or two, or three.)

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

De Waal [www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/4587] reminds us that Idriss Deby "dismantled a model World Bank program for control of Chad’s oil revenue, which had been intended to ensure that the funds were used for development, rather than patronage and arms purchases. He fixed the elections. He stays in power through intrigue, intimidation and cash." This is an important reminder about how corrupt African leaders themselves play a central role in the immiseration and marginalization of their own people.

Police in Senegal have arrested several men following the publication of pictures claiming to depict a wedding ceremony between two men. The pictures were published in Icone magazine, whose editor, Mansour Dieng, has since received death threats. Mr Dieng has also been questioned by police over the issue. Homosexuality is illegal in Senegal but it is not clear whether the arrests were in connection with the ceremony or the death threats.

This Thursday, 7th February 2008, eight Joe Slovo residents charged with public violence last year are due to appear in the Cape Town Regional Court in Parow (Court Number 4). The Joe Slovo Task Team is very disturbed that the case has been moved from the Bishop Lavis Magistrates Court to the Regional Court and that it is set down for trial, whereas they do not even have a lawyer.

bilaterals.org, GRAIN and BIOTHAI are launching a collaborative publication, "Fighting FTAs: The growing resistance to bilateral free trade and investment agreements". While global trade talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) stagnate, governments and corporations are busy spinning a complex web of bilateral free trade and investment agreements (FTAs). "Fighting FTAs" looks at what this FTA frenzy is really about, how social movements are fighting back and strategic learnings emerging from these struggles.

In a move calculated to instill fear in students, Bulawayo Polytechnic College has suspended five students following a demonstration staged by ZINASU on 23rd of January 2007. The Principal, Mr. T. P. Ndlovu has vowed to deal amply with all those who involved themselves in the demonstration. The suspended students are Melusi Hlambano, Food and Accommodation Secretary 2006, Tinashe Mhlanga, Bothwell Gwature, Brian Sibanda and Tinashe Chichera.

On 29 March 2008 Zimbabwe will be holding its harmonized presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections. Zimbabweans will again be faced with the opportunity to exercise their democratic right and freedom to choose freely, through the ballot box, leaders with the mandate to securing a prosperous, peaceful and democratic Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) notes the announcement made by the Registrar General’s office concerning the opening of inspection of the voters’ roll from 1 to 7 February 2008. ZESN is seriously concerned that the time allocated for the inspection of the voters’ roll is far too short considering that there are new constituencies and wards countrywide.

The 07-07-07-Campaign to end hate against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Intersexed (LGBTI) persons was launched at the Saartjie Baartman Centre, Heideveld in Cape Town on the 2nd anniversary commemorating the violent and brutal death of 19 year old Zoliswa Nkonyana (04/02/06). The provincial campaign is being spearheaded by Cape Town's Triangle Project, the oldest LGBTI service organisation in the country in partnership with the national Joint Working Group (JWG) and the Western Cape 07-07-07 Alliance partners.

Women'sNet, a feminist NGO based in Johannesburg, which promotes the strategic use of ICTs for social action and women's empowerment is seeking to fill the position of Intern. the deadline for applications is 15 February 2008.

The United Nations Foundation announced today its support for the "Say NO to Violence against Women" campaign. The Foundation will donate $1 for each the first 100,000 signatures to the online campaign that is run by the UN Development Fund for Women, UNIFEM. The contributions will go to the UNIFEM-managed UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women.
People can sign on to the campaign at

Actionaid is happy to announce 10th International Training Course on Disability and Development, scheduled from 11th to 20th March 2008,Bangalore. The ten-day intensive exercise is intended for Programme Managers of organisations and projects involved in development and disability work. The course is designed to equip the participants with appropriate attitudes, necessary knowledge and basic skills to initiate, monitor, develop and strengthen disability and development programmes apart from facilitating information exchange among participants.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to call for proposals for its revamped programme for the publication of text books for use in African universities. The programme was initially introduced as part of a broad set of objectives for achieving greater balance and relevance in curriculum development in African universities by making available to teachers and students, text books that are adapted to the African historical context and the environment of research and learning on the continent.

The Zamdela Arts and Culture Center in conjunction with Ditiro Productions and Icebound Projects host the Zamdela Spoken Word Fest from 29 February to 2 March 2008. The festival is aimed at promoting the culture of reading and writing by improving the writing and performance expertise of budding writers and exposing their works to the broader community, and by building relations between emerging and established writers. Organizers hope that the event would boost the morale of writers and artists and open doors for publishing and recording opportunities for them

I would not call this book a narrative in the conventional sense, but it tells a story nonetheless. It is a story of time, the times we live in. It is also (and this is where then non-narrative part comes in) a story of a man's mind. Charles is this man. His story is an engaging mixture of curiosity, great learning, down-to-earth humour, and social comment. He has left Cameroon for Merrie England to study philosophy, and he compares and contrasts the English society (and to my mind, the entire Western society by extension) with Africa. The hilarity occasioned by some of his observations is alone adequate recompense for buying the book.

Filipino academic and activist Walden Bello has been named the Outstanding Public Scholar of 2008 by the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association (ISA). He will receive the award at the group’s annual convention to be held in San Francisco, California from March 26-29, 2008. Special events honoring Bello include a panel on his work on Thursday March 27, 2008 during the annual meeting. On Friday evening, March 28, Bello will join other scholar activists in speaking at a public event at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, in San Francisco, co-sponsored by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Press.

The Senior Program Officer for Africa will be responsible for shaping and implementing the strategic direction of AJWS’ grantmaking in Africa and directly managing grants in Southern Africa. S/he will represent AJWS’ Africa program at international forums as well as AJWS Board and donor meetings. S/he will manage the work of the two Africa Program Officers and consultants in the field. S/he will also work as part of a closely knit Grants Department and with other AJWS programs including advocacy, volunteer programs, and communications. For immediate consideration, please forward your resume and cover letter to [email][email protected] and indicate your name and "Senior Program Officer, Africa" in the subject line. PLEASE NOTE that candidates need to be authorized to work in the US, as AJWS doesn’t have the capacity do undertake visa procedures right now.

The war for Chad is not over. It is likely to become more bloody and involve a wider humanitarian disaster before any solutions can be grasped. The next week will be critical for the future of the country–and for the wider region, including Darfur, as well.

Last weekend’s battle in the Chadian capital N’djamena came as no surprise. For the last two years, the Sudan government has been trying to overthrow the Chadian president, Idriss Deby, using Chadian rebels as proxy forces. The three armed groups involved in the latest attack were all extensively armed by Sudanese Security, which has the clear intent of cutting off the support that Deby is giving to Darfurian rebels, especially the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), which has recently been on the offensive in Darfur. The timing is no surprise either. In the next few weeks, a European Union protection force (EUFOR) was due to deploy to eastern Chad and north-eastern Central African Republic. While EUFOR’s mandate (given by the UN Security Council) is for impartial civilian protection, it is a substantially French initiative, and seen by all in the region as a military protection for Deby. Khartoum and the rebels wanted to strike first.

The Chadian civil war is often described as a “spillover” from Darfur. That is a simplification. Darfur’s war actually began as a spillover from Chad more than twenty years ago and the two conflicts have been entangled ever since. Many of the Arab militia fighting in Darfur are of Chadian origin, and many of the rebels similarly served in the Chadian army or militia. The current Chadian war is best seen through four different lenses.

First, it is a continuation of the entangled conflicts of Darfur and Chad, which includes competition for power and land.

Second, there is an internal Chadian conflict. After a hopeful broadening of the base of his regime in the late 1990s, accompanied by the growth of civil politics in N’djamena, he has reverted to one-man military rule. Deby relies heavily on a very narrow circle of close kinsmen and on using state finance as his personal property, distributing largesse in return for loyalty. He is also ill and the political vultures have been circling for several years. The most feared scenario now is that Deby will eliminate the civil opposition in Chad, forcing the international community to choose between him and the rebels, whom he depicts as Sudanese mercenaries. Murdering the civilian opposition in this way is not unprecedented in Chad.

Third is Khartoum’s strategy for managing security in its borderlands, which includes treating weak neighboring states as extensions of its internal peripheries. Sudanese security helped bring Deby to power in 1990 as part of a policy that also saw it engage militarily in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic over the subsequent decade. In the same way that Khartoum uses a mixture of reward and force to control its provincial elites, in Darfur, the South and elsewhere, it uses the same tools to influence its trans-border peripheries.

Last is a regional competition for dominance through a vast arc of central Africa that has rarely been governed by state authority. This hinterland includes Chad, CAR and northern DRC, as well as the adjoining areas of Sudan. As well as Khartoum, Tripoli, Kampala, Kinshasa, Kigali and even Asmara are vying for influence across this area.

Darfur and Chad

Deby came to power in 1990 on the basis of a simple deal with Khartoum—each would deny support to the other’s rebels. For twelve years that deal held. When the Darfur rebels began to organize at scale in 2002 and 2003, Deby at first tried to dissociate himself from them. He mediated the first ceasefires in the war (Abeche in September 2003 and N’djamena in April 2004), worked to split and undermine the rebels, and even reportedly cooperated in some military actions against them. But he was unable to control his Zaghawa kinsmen who formed many of the fighters of both SLA and JEM, and by 2005 Chad was sucked into the conflict as a direct supporter of the rebels. The Sudan government responded by backing Chadian rebels, who attacked the border town of Adre in December 2005. At this point, Deby declared that Sudan and Chad were in a state of war. Even while the peace talks continued in Abuja, the Chadian war intensified, reaching its climax with a rebel attack on N’djamena in April 2006. Just weeks before the deadline for concluding the peace talks, Khartoum tried to alter the reality on the ground in its favor. It nearly succeeded. JEM forces helped sway the battle for N’djamena in Deby’s favor.

The entanglement has continued since. Deby’s favored intermediary has been JEM, which he has rearmed with weapons captured in Chadian battles. Meanwhile, Sudan has backed a series of Chadian rebels. Among them are the United Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) of Mahamat Nouri, a Goraan and former ambassador, the Rally of Forces for Change(RFD) of Timan Erdimi, a Bedeyat cousin of Deby and former army chief of staff, and a breakaway group from the UFDD headed by Abdel Wahid Aboud Mackaye, a Salamat Arab. Most of these groupings are transient—the important things to watch are the individual leaders, their ethnic affiliations and their backers.

In recent months, JEM has been on the offensive in western Darfur, broadening its own coalition to include militia from groups such as the Gimir (a group on the Darfur-Chad border that has long valued its autonomy, and which in recent years has been politically identified as ‘Arab’ though it has no Arab lineage) and Missiriya Jebel (a group from nearby Jebel Mun, which has an Arab lineage but lost the Arab language several generations ago). Chadian forces were reportedly engaged in these offensives too—though citizenship is largely meaningless along this border.

As Darfurian rebel forces—both JEM and some SLA—have rushed back to N’djamena to join the battle for the capital, we can expect to see the Sudan army and militia take the offensive against the rebels remaining in West Darfur.

Chad’s Civil War

Idriss Deby is a strongman who gained power through military prowess and external backing. He has stayed in power through the same combination, his position strengthened by oil revenues and French military cooperation. He dismantled a model World Bank program for control of Chad’s oil revenue, which had been intended to ensure that the funds were used for development, rather than patronage and arms purchases. He fixed the elections. He stays in power through intrigue, intimidation and cash.

Since 1986, when France dispatched special forces under Operation Epervier to Chad to support the war against Libya, French troops have been a key factor in Chad’s civil wars. The French have assisted the Chadian army with intelligence, logistics and medical units—the first two turning the tide of battle in Deby’s favor several times in the last three years.

Under Jacques Chirac, France’s policy towards Chad was handled by the military, whose response to the political crisis was to extend military assistance rather than to encourage talks with the opposition. But Deby was careful not to overstep the mark—he knew the friendship was tactical and feared that the French could always stand aside and allow a rival to seize power, just as it had refused to intervene to prop up Deby’s predecessor Hissène Habré in 1990. Until February 3, it looked as though French troops were going to do the same—there were reports that France had offered to evacuate Deby from his besieged presidential palace. Certainly, Deby had offended Paris with provocative remarks on the Zoe’s Ark child abduction case, when he alleged publicly that the children might be about to be taken to have their organs harvested.

But by this morning, it seems that the French government had decided that Chad without Deby was a worse proposition than with him, and swung back behind the beleaguered president. This is only a short-term option—Deby is literally fighting for his life and will do anything that is necessary to stay in power. One thing he may consider ‘necessary’ is eliminating the civil opposition. Already, civilian opposition members and civil society leaders have been rounded up and there are fears that they will be murdered en masse. Habré did the same thing just before he was ousted in 1990. Deby will then present the world with a choice—either him or Sudan’s proxies.

While Deby’s forces have regrouped, so have the armed rebels. Reinforcements have arrived and there may well be another battle for N’djamena in the coming days—a fight to the death for all concerned.

Sudan’s Management of its Borderlands

Khartoum’s strategy for managing the security threats in Darfur is seamless with its strategy for Chad. Sudanese security officers’ favored instrument is cash and they opportunistically buy support among the Darfurian and Chadian elites. They buy Arab and non-Arabs as they can. Inside Darfur, Military Intelligence is the most powerful governmental institution. For the Chad policy, it is the National Security and Intelligence Service.

This is the most recent manifestation of an approach to governing the peripheries that stretches back to the mid-19th century and earlier. Under the Turko-Egyptian rulers of Sudan (1821-83), the territory was divided into ‘metropolitan’ and ‘military’ provinces. Darfur and the South were the latter, where the center established its claim to sovereignty through making deals with local potentates. The Mahdist rulers and the Darfur sultans used much the same practice. For all of these, the border was not a line—it was a territory which extended indefinitely into eastern, central and west Africa, until it met a point at which military resistance was too great or the price of buying influence was too high. Quasi-autonomous agents of Turko-Egyptian rule ranged across central Africa, reaching the Congo river and Nigeria. The British reproduced a similar division of administrative systems within the borders of Sudan—in the peripheries they called it ‘native administration’ in the ‘closed districts’, and differed from their predecessors principally in that they preferred not to distribute weapons. Post-colonial Sudanese governments are acting in exactly the older tradition of a deep and extended borderland, seeking influence, security and profit far both within their own remoter provinces and across their national borders.

Competition for Regional Dominance

Alongside Sudan, Libya sees Chad as part of its sub-Saharan periphery. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi proclaimed the unity of Chad and Libya in 1980 and fought a long war for control of the territory, until defeated by a Chadian army extensively armed and supported by France and the U.S. Recent Libyan policy has tilted towards Deby and against his Sudan-backed adversaries. But Gaddafi was also offended by Deby’s refusal to make political compromises during peace talks in Libya last October. Anticipating the arrival of European soldiers who would act as a military bulwark, Deby took a hard line and caused the talks to fail.

The war for Chad is also a war for Central African Republic, where President Francois Bozize was installed by Chadian troops in 2003, overthrowing his predecessor Ange-Felix Patassé. With Deby endangered, the Zaghawa troops who formed the backbone of Bozize’s army have left to defend N’djamena. This creates a potential vacuum in which Chad’s competitors for influence may once again meddle. Sudan will be interested in securing this outer frontier. So will Libya, which supported Patassé. Kinshasa and Kampala will also be looking for influence there—it was a stronghold for the Congolese leader Jean-Pierre Bemba at the height of the war in DRC. Eritrea, which has its fingers in every troublespot in and around the Horn of Africa, will also be keeping its interests alive. France has a military base in CAR and could well play the role as guardian of stability.

International Policy

In the last two years, international policy towards Chad has become a byproduct of Darfur policy, and specifically the push to bring an international protection force to Darfur. After the election of Nicholas Sarkozy, French policy shifted, focusing on the use of Chad as the launchpad for humanitarian action in Darfur, including military support for a UN protection force. A European protection force for eastern Chad and north-eastern CAR (EUFOR) was authorized by the UN Security Council as a neutral international civilian protection force, distinct from the French soldiers whose mission has always been political. But it was only a substantial French military contingent that could bring EUFOR up to strength. For all the political actors in the region, EUFOR is seen as a non-neutral military protection to Deby—hence the military strike at N’djamena in the days before it was due to be deployed.

The limitations of an international protection-first policy are sharply revealed by the battle for N’djamena. A humanitarian protection mission had political implications that turned out to contribute to an escalation in violence. The Europeans now are faced with the dilemma of whether they send troops into the middle of ongoing hostilities—with the Chadian rebels having declared that EUFOR is an enemy—or whether they revert to a traditional peacekeeping approach, and seek a negotiated settlement first. EUFOR has no ceasefire commission and no formal means of dealing with the rebels, a recipe for disaster. Most likely, EUFOR will simply not deploy in Chad at all. Troop contributors will decide that they don’t do civilian protection in wartime after all.

The implications for the hybrid UN-African Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) are no less far-reaching. This has the mirror-image problem—it deals with Khartoum on a day-to-day basis but there is no ceasefire commission in which the rebels are represented, so its only contact with them is through the mediation team working on the peace talks. This is wholly insufficient should the war intensify—for example if Deby regroups and decides to take the offensive by mounting attacks deep into Darfur. UNAMID runs the risk of being a target of attack or even an unwitting party to a conflict. In such scenarios, international attention will become focused on the integrity and safety of UNAMID and its members, rather than on solving Sudan’s problems.

What Next?

The prospects for Chad in the immediate future are dire indeed. The worst prospect is a massacre of the civilian opposition followed by a battle for N’djamena which causes immense destruction, displacement and bloodshed, and creates a new vortex of instability in Africa.

President Deby may survive and regroup. He might be able to do this with his domestic and Darfurian reinforcements, but France’s role will be crucial. Most probably, Chad and France will try their hardest to portray the war as a Sudanese invasion and bring it to the UN Security Council on those terms. This could be a cover for Deby to eliminate civilian opposition and counter-attack in Darfur.

The rebels may succeed in overrunning N’djamena, leaving a ruined city controlled by factional leaders who distrust one another and cannot form a government, with Sudanese security playing a leading role in brokering whatever agreement is possible. A government formed under these conditions would certainly be an international pariah.

A third scenario, familiar from Chad’s history, is collapse into warlordism. The chances for a fourth—political agreement and the construction of a civilian alternative—is fading by the hour.

* Alex De Waal is the director of Justice Africa (www.justiceafrica.org). This article was posted at by Alex de Waal as part of the Making Sense of Darfur Blog [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

When peace erupted, none of us was ready.
You remember how the sticks above our heads
were gently lowered, how our riot gear
was sloughed-off like a skin? We rubbed our chins.
And yet, the dead, they didn’t rise.

Do you recall the day the grandmas of the Rift
embraced the grandsons of Nyeri,
when the youth were given grants to raise
manyattas they had razed? We rubbed our eyes.
But still, the dead maintained their peace.

Think back: the way the Lake and Ocean rose to kiss Mount Kenya’s
peak?

The glossy adverts in the Nation and the Standard:
We congratulate our leaders for restoring
Peace and Unity, and all is well in Neverland?
The dead began to wake.

Do you remember how they asked us to forget?
In 4-by-4s, Big Men from each and every province
drove a web across the land, their shining
megaphones proclaiming: Back to work!
The dead were spinning.

And the bishops and the diplomats, the councillors
and businessmen, they gathered for a conference
outside the new Grand Regency and told us
It was all a dream, an error, so now nothing needs be done,
some things just die, are best forgotten. No? Come on!!
You must remember how the landless and the jobless dead
erupted from their coffins with a shriek?
You don’t remember?! Let me help you.
Hold this gun. I have a cutting. Take a peek.

*Stephen Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

This is the best analysis of the situation,that I have read so far, and everything Mr. Ong'ayo mentioned, has been what I and my friends have brought up as points during our analysis of the situation in Kenya. I wish you could give a copy of this analysis to Koffi Annan and his team to read as they mediate.
* Noreen is "A Kenyan in the Diaspora".

Africa is a vast continent of about 900 million people in 54 independent countries. It has a total area of over 30 million square kilometers (11.6 million square miles), about three-and-a-half times the size of the United States and 10 times the size of India. It is the second largest continent in the world after Asia. It stretches from the shores of the Mediterranean in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south.

Africa is also rich in mineral and natural resources with large parts of its terrain teeming with wild life and magnificent plant life. It possesses 99 percent of the world's chrome resources, 85 percent of its platinum, 70 percent of its tantalite, 68 percent of its cobalt, and 54 percent of its gold, among other minerals.

In addition, the continent has significant oil and gas reserves. Nigeria and Libya are two of the leading oil producing countries in the world. Further, Africa is the home to timber, diamonds, and bauxite deposits. Revenues from their extraction should be providing funds for badly needed development, but instead have fuelled state corruption, environmental degradation, poverty, and violence. Rather than being a blessing, Africa's natural resources have largely been a curse.

Meanwhile, Africa's enormous agricultural potential is vastly untapped, even as its vast mineral wealth and strategic significance have encouraged foreign powers to intervene in the continent's affairs. During the Cold War era, 1945 to 1990, there was increasing superpower intervention in Africa. The United States and the Soviet Union were major players on the African scene.

The 19th-century scramble for Africa saw the great powers rush to control land so they could exploit natural resources. Today, the scramble continues - the continent still a vital arena of strategic and geopolitical competition among the US, France, Britain, China, and India. The key question for many is: will the exploitation of Africa's vast natural resources benefit anyone other than the continent's elites?

Oil is perhaps the most important lure, with competition between foreign states and companies to secure resources so intense it attracts more than 50 percent of all foreign direct investment. It is noteworthy that in the year 2006, annual foreign direct investment (FDI) rose to a historic high of $38.8 billion, exceeding record levels of 2005 - a growth of 78 percent from 2004. According to the UN World Investment Report, FDI cash was concentrated in a few industries, notably oil, gas, and mining. And six oil-producing countries - Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, and Sudan - consumed about 48 percent of it.

European firms represent roughly two-thirds of the total FDI in Africa. More than half of European investment originates from the UK and France, going mainly to countries with which they have historic ties. French oil companies such as Total - locked out of the Middle East through France's opposition to the Iraq war - have made large investments in Francophone countries such as Cameroon, Chad, and Gabon.

The US is interested in the region as a cheap and reliable alternative to the increasingly volatile Persian Gulf. West Africa already supplies about 12 percent of US crude oil imports, and America's National Intelligence Council predicts this share will rise to 25 percent by 2015. As is often the case with oil, military involvement follows trade. In February 2007, the US set up an Africa command (Africom), which has established bases in, and signed access agreements with: Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Gabon, and Namibia. Africa is becoming strategically important to the US because of its oil production and China's increasing regional influence.

Despite its own considerable "backyard," China is generally resource-poor and Africa offers the natural resources vital to fuel its rapidly-growing economy. China looks to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia for copper and cobalt, to South Africa for iron ore and platinum, and to Gabon, Cameroon, and the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) for timber. For oil, it has been wooing Nigeria, Angola, Sudan, and Equatorial Guinea. China is now the second-largest consumer of crude oil after the US, and was responsible for 40 percent of the global increase in demand between 2001 and 2005. Indeed, it imports 25 percent of its crude oil from Africa.

China has charmed African rulers with a triple whammy of arms sales, cancelled debt, and soft loans. Last year, President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao recently visited 10 African countries, and this increasingly close relationship was cemented at the China-Africa summit in October 2006, when Beijing rolled out the red carpet to almost 50 African heads of state and Ministers.

But while the global demand for natural resources will bring benefits to Africa - increased FDI and, as exports grow, an improving balance of trade figures - there are concerns that such demand is simultaneously fuelling corruption, environmental degradation, and internal dissent. The windfall gains from resource extraction cause more problems in Africa. They reduce a state's incentive to impose a free and just taxation system, and encourage corruption and acquisition of weaponry, in this way, generating the internal conflicts or external wars for which Africa is known.

In the form of "neo-colonization," thus, Africa is being fragmented into many pieces at the will of super-power countries, which are concentrating more on the exploitation of the continent's rich resources than providing it with development aid. For example, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) most recent report indicates that the world's major donors - which make up the 22 member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) - provided $103.9 billion in aid in 2006, down by 5.1 percent from 2005. This figure includes $19.2 billion of debt relief, notably exceptional relief to Iraq and Nigeria. Excluding debt relief, other forms of aid fell by 1.8 percent.

The fall was foreseeable. In 2005, Official Development Assistance (ODA) had been exceptionally high due to large Paris Club debt relief operations (particularly for Iraq and Nigeria), boosting ODA to its highest level ever at $106.8 billion. In 2006, net debt relief grants still represented a substantial share of net ODA, as members implemented further phases of the Paris Club agreements, providing a little over $3 billion for Iraq and nearly $11 billion for Nigeria. Excluding debt relief, ODA fell by 1.8 percent. Preliminary data shows that bilateral net ODA to sub-Saharan Africa rose by 23 percent in real terms, to about $28 billion. However, most of the increase was due to debt relief grants; excluding debt relief for Nigeria, aid to sub-Saharan Africa increased by only 2 percent.

Charities and NGOs working on the issue believe that even governments that are OECD members are reluctant to investigate allegations of corruption or complicity in human rights abuses against Western companies.

In Equatorial Guinea - where US companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron are active - the regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema has been accused of torture, electoral fraud, and corruption. Despite this, President Nguema was welcomed at the US State Department by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in April 2006 and described as a "good friend."

The environmental impact on Africa of such Western development is also alarming. The clearing of forests for timber exports increases vulnerability to erosion, river silting, landslides, flooding, and loss of habitats for plant and animal species. In particular, gas flaring from oil production, where unusable waste emissions are burned off, pumps large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is estimated that flaring in the Niger Delta emits 70 million tonnes (68.8 million tons) of CO2 a year, out of which, in 2004 Sweden emitted 69.9 million tonnes.

The environmental and social impact of extractive industries is already acknowledged as a key factor in conflicts in Sudan and Nigeria. Indeed, non-governmental organizations fear that access to natural resources will fuel the kind of violent conflict seen recently in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia. A number of initiatives have recently been launched in an attempt to deal with Africa's resource curse before the continent is further fragmented and its precious natural wealth more exploited. The developed countries should take heed of the situation and provide development aid and relief to the millions of Africans who are suffering from diseases such as HIV/Aids, as well as wide-ranging poverty, instead of merely exploiting their resources.

* Ravinder Rena is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Eritrea Institute of Technology. His most recent books published by the New Africa Press in December 2006 are A Handbook on the Eritrean Economy: Problems and Prospects for Development and Financial Institutions in Eritrea.

*Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Makau Mutua argues that Kenya's political class has failed to nurture a democratic, rule-of-law state in which meritocracy rather than identity is the most important variable and because of it Kenya is on the brink of collapse.

In December, President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya was controversially declared the winner in a rancorous election against Raila Odinga by a margin of several hundred thousand votes. Odinga has refused to concede defeat, charging that the election was stolen. In the last three weeks, gruesome violence has erupted in Odinga's strongholds, leaving more than 750 dead and 300,000 displaced. Kenya stands at the brink of collapse unless Odinga and Kibaki can accommodate each other.

Kenya, a country regarded in the West as a beacon of hope and stability in a turbulent region, is now gripped by genocidal violence for the first time since independence from Britain in 1964. Although the immediate trigger for the killings and pillage is the contested election results, the violence has deep historical roots. Kenya is an incoherent collection of some 40 ethnic groups that the British coerced into one state in 1896. It is the failure of those groups to forge a common Kenyan national identity that has come back to haunt East Africa's most powerful country.

Successive governments have either been unwilling or unable to imagine how one builds a nation out of disparate, previously independent groups. Kenya's presidents - Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi, and now Kibaki - have been men of limited ability and vision. They preferred to exercise power through ethnic cronyism and tribal manipulation. Each deeply tribalized the state by openly favoring their ethnic elites at the expense of others.

Kenya's political class, which is lazy and opportunistic, has failed to nurture a democratic, rule-of-law state in which meritocracy rather than identity is the most important variable. That is why most Kenyans have not transferred their loyalties from the ethnic group to the state. Kenyan political parties are either personal vehicles for tribal barons or coalitions of ethnic elites. Neither Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement nor President Kibaki's Party of National Unity are driven by ideology or philosophical platforms. Rather, they are receptacles for their respective leaders and the ethnic groups supporting them.

Odinga cobbled the Orange Democratic Movement from the Luo, his ethnic group, the Kalenjin, who dominate the Rift Valley, and the Luhya - three of Kenya's largest five groups. Kibaki's Party of National Unity drew fanatical support from the Kikuyu, his own group, which is also the largest in the country. Historically, there has been bad blood between the Kikuyu and the Luo and the Kalenjin.

The Kalenjin, who have committed many atrocities against the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley, supported Odinga because he promised a quasi-federal government that would have given them control over land and the Kikuyu settlers. The Luo, who have a psychosis of victimization, had widely expected Odinga to be the first among them to lead the country.

These ethnic pathologies burst open in the aftermath of the elections that was conducted by mobilizing tribal anger and deep-seated grievances. Both the Orange Democratic Movement and the Party of National Unity made naked appeals to ethnic passions. The post-election violence has pitted the Kikuyu against the Luo and the Kalenjin, with the Kikuyu bearing the brunt of the casualties.

Some of the attacks - such as the one in which scores of Kikuyu women and children were burned in a church in Eldoret - have taken genocidal dimensions. But ethnicity alone cannot explain Kenya's descent into chaos.

Although New York-based Human Rights Watch says the attacks were planned by ODM leaders, it is the poor, unemployed, and marginalized youth who are most susceptible to the violence. Virtually no one in the middle class is directly carrying out the attacks. Kenya's history of uneven development in which half the country lives on less than a dollar a day has come to haunt the country.

Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan appears to be the last hope for Kenya if the country is to avoid a civil war. Annan must secure from Odinga, Kibaki, and their respective supporters a political settlement to end the violence. They have three options: a recount of the ballots to establish the true winner, a rerun of the election, or a power-sharing agreement in which Odinga becomes the prime minister and Kibaki retains the presidency but cedes substantial powers to the Legislature. Unless the two principals respond to Annan, one of the most beautiful places on earth will be left in the ruins of a biblical catastrophe.

* Makau Mutua is interim dean and SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School. He is author of the forthcoming "Kenya's Quest for Democracy: Taming Leviathan." This article first appeared in the January 30, 2008 Boston Globe.

*Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

A very touching story [http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/editorial/45738]. I posted the article "Ladies and gentlemen gotab kalenjin" at Kalenjin Online(www.kalenjin.net) linking the article to us is misleading since we both cited the same source: Gerald Baraza. Thanks

* The Pambazuka Editors stand corrected - the source of the document was: [http://geraldbaraza.blogspot.com">

The Palestine Solidarity Committee is proud to participate in the fourth consecutive International Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), the key event being a public rally with Azmi Bishara on the 3rd of February at the Careers Centre in Soweto. The rally will be broadcast to the other participants of the global Israeli Apartheid Week in the US, Canada, UK, Palestine amongst other countries and will serve as the international launch pad for their respective IAW campaigns.

An organization defending press freedoms in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the National Union of Professionals of the Press (SNPP), attacked the incarceration of a reporter who has investigated the country's mining industry. Investigative journalist Maurice Kayombo has been behind bars in the Democratic Republic of Congo since January 9 on charges of “blackmail and bringing (the mining) authority into disrepute,” according to Journalists in Danger and the International Federation of Journalists.

Kenyan women have called for an immediate end to inter-ethnic killings, impunity, and gross violations of human rights, especially the increasing cases of sexual crimes and gang rapes. In a communiqué handed over to the mediation team led by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, they demand the proclamation of a national disaster as well as the enhancement of security for the civilian population by the State.

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, calls for stronger commitment to end female genital mutilation/cutting. We call on governments to protect the rights of women and girls. We call on leaders to take action to end female genital mutilation in line with the United Nations resolution adopted last year. In the resolution, governments reiterated that female genital mutilation violates the rights of women and girls. They said the practice constitutes an irreparable, irreversible abuse.

Crude oil exports from Sudan to China more than doubled last year to top 200,000 barrels a day, with official data showing that China now takes 40 percent of the east African producer’s total output. Sudan exported 10.31 million tonnes to China in 2007, or 113 percent above 2006, ranking as Beijing’s sixth-largest crude supplier, with 6 percent of the total crude imports to the world’s second-largest oil user, data from the General Administration of Customs showed.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on Ugandan authorities to put an end to the harassment of journalists in the country after five journalists and editors of the privately-owned Daily Monitor newspaper were charged with defamation after they published stories alleging the government’s Inspector General is involved in a salary scam.

Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford have put together a terrific list of Open Source tools that can be used by activists to spread the message and promote interaction by enewsletters, forums, blogs, wikis and epetitions. They wrote an article for Steven Clift's excellent Democracies Online Newswire.

A new United Nations-backed $19 million project in Burkina Faso will help approximately 20,000 poor rural households bolster their crop production and incomes through improved irrigation. The UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) will provide an $11 loan to the Small-scale Irrigation and Water Management Project, which will be carried out in six provinces in the south-west of the country.

A planned visit by a United Nations human rights expert to Equatorial Guinea has been cancelled after the Central African country's Government postponed it suddenly, citing “urgent activities.” The Special Rapporteur on the question of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Manfred Nowak, issued a statement voicing “strong regret” about the postponement and reminding the “that fact-finding missions are planned long in advance and require extensive research as well as logistical and financial resources.”

According to Humanity.org, these are the top 10 Social Activist Sites: The World Revolution, Ashoka, Changemakers, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Earth Fund, Afribike, Grupa hajdeda da…, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), Youth Against Aids (YAA). The website also provides information on websites related to political, environmental, economic and volunteer sites.

EASSI is an eleven year old sub-regional support initiative for women that boasts of having a hand in the implementation of Government commitments to women and girls’ advancement. This program targets women from the ages of 18 to 35 from any of the eight countries of the sub-region, Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda. Every year we target four women. In 2008, we specifically seek women from Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania.

Thousands of people in Manicaland are expected to participate in freedom marches scheduled for Mutare and Rusape on Friday, according to party officials. Pishai Muchauraya, the spokesman for the MDC in the province said both marches have been given the green light by the police.

The African Union summit taking place in Addis Ababa will provide an opportunity for South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki to brief leaders from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), on the failed Zimbabwe crisis talks that he mediated on their behalf. Reports say Mbeki is still making an effort to save the crucial talks that are supposed to lead to free and fair elections in Zimbabwe. Time is running out though as the polls are currently set for March 29th.