AFRODAD has designed a “Macroeconomic Training course” for civil society organizations in the economic and social justice movement and is inviting applications from interested persons to participate in this week-long exercise. The course will be covered under four different modules whose outline will be sent to candidates expressing interest.

The International Journalists' Network (IJNet) is the world’s premier resource for the media assistance community. It is an online service for journalists, media managers, media assistance professionals, journalism trainers and educators, or anyone else with an interest in news media around the world.

A court in the Gambia freed a reporter on bail this week, more than two months after he was detained by the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), local sources told the Committee to Protect Journalists. Lamin Fatty of the Banjul-based The Independent will go on trial June 22 on charges of publishing "false news," they said.

The Dutch timber merchant Guus van Kouwenhoven has been sentenced to eight years in prison for breaking a United Nations arms embargo on Liberia. A Dutch court found that Kouwenhoven had sold weapons to the former Liberian president Charles Taylor in return for timber rights. But he was acquitted of war crimes charges based on allegations that private militias formed by his two timber companies had carried out atrocities.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), now operational in sixty least-developed countries, open access to debt relief and are the basis for concessional lending by international financial institutions. Most PRSPs stress education and refer to Education for All (EFA) objectives. However, the strategy and the financing required to achieve them are unspecified.

Between April 2005 and March 2006, some 19,000 Rwandan asylum seekers had arrived in Burundi's northern provinces. They were reportedly fleeing persecution under Rwanda's traditional ‘gacaca’ justice system, which the government introduced to expedite trials for thousands of suspects held in connection with the 1994 genocide. Since 12 April, the Burundian government has repatriated 5,206 Rwandans from its northern provinces of Ngozi and Kirundo.

A tiny southern Zambian village has become the focal point of a conflict which pits the poor against a corporation backed by a government determined to roll out economic liberalisation across the country. Over 100 families and 17,000 cattle in the village of Kabanje face eviction from their homes and cattle sheds because Zambia Sugar Plc, a private firm, is claiming ownership of the land.

Stilbaai deputy mayor Lorna Scott, victim of a string of racist attacks, says she is planning to take "legal action" over the harassment. Speaking at a media briefing in Cape Town with members of the African National Congress' Western Cape executive, she said this could include a defamation action against provincial Democratic Alliance leader Theuns Botha for what she said where "attacks on my character".

Almost 30 years have passed since the Soweto uprising on 16 June 1976, that defining day in South Africa's history when thousands of black students rebelled against apartheid. To commemorate the anniversary, pupils at Phefeni Secondary School in Soweto, South Africa and Hesketh Fletcher CofE High School in Wigan, UK shared the school day via a LIVE laptop link-up.

Authorities on Tanzania's semiautonomous island of Zanzibar have intensified efforts to control the importation of chicken in a bid to check the threat of bird flu on the island. The deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu has already been reported in several African countries. The poultry industry in Asia and a number of European countries has been ravaged by the disease, which has also claimed dozens of human lives.

Factions from two Sudanese rebel groups that had refused to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement signed a declaration of commitment to the pact on Thursday, effectively pledging to abide by its terms. The main wing of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), led by Minni Minnawi, and the Sudanese government signed the African Union- brokered agreement on 5 May, but breakaway factions of the rebellion refused to sign it, prompting the international community to set a deadline of 31 May.

Rwanda has been selected to house the headquarters of the multi-million dollar Eastern Africa Submarine Cable Project (EASSy). The project, which has of recent been dogged by controversy over its ownership, has a membership of 23 countries in the region. The EASSy cable system is a 9900km project expected to run from Durban, South Africa to Djibouti and is supported by the African Development Bank, the World Bank and telecommunications operators.

Essential drugs are now available in public health institutions, even those in remote areas, a government agency has said. The Kenya Medical Supplies Agency chairman said it had stocked Kenya's 2,800 dispensaries and other health institutions with enough drugs and medical equipment. He said the agency was taking the drugs directly to the health institutions after doing away with an earlier system "since it is causing artificial shortages of drugs and it is time-consuming".

As the world commemorates World Refugee Day on 20th June, it’s worth noting that the history of Zambia and refugees is a history of the overwhelming hospitality of the Zambian people. Zambia has been a citadel of peace for many. The first occurred in 1943 during the second world war when Northern Rhodesia hosted Polish Refugees. The second was in the 1960s after independence when Zambia opened its newly recognised borders to Angolan refugees fleeing from conflict.

The Art Of Flight is a guerrilla documentary that was shot illegally in Egypt on camcorders and a laptop. The film serves as a back story to the 2006 massacre of Sudanese refugees in Cairo. The filmmaker was nearly arrested three times during the course of shooting. This feature-length film tells the story of three people – a refugee from southern Sudan, a human rights activist from northern Sudan and an American journalist in self-imposed exile – all living in Cairo.

The Civil Society engagement in the Gambia will deliberate on issues affecting Africa's development. The forum will focus on three thematic workshops namely; African integration, Governance, Poverty and Development. These thematic groups will feature issues on Economic Integration, Trade, WTO Processes, EPAs, Debt and Aid, Local Government Reforms and Decentralisation, Political Participation and Development, Youth and Unemployment, Youth and Migration, Youth and HIV/AIDS, Armed Conflict, MDGs and APRM. GCAP Coalition in the Gambia in collaboration with African Youth Coalition against Hunger and delegates from Senegal will be organizing the African youth campaign against EPAs. This is expected to attract a lot of interest and discussions. A communiqué will be submitted to AU Head of States as Civil Society contribution to Banjul Summit. The forum will facilitate interaction among civil society networks and organisations in their quest for a better Africa. The workshops will start on the 19th June, 2006, before the official opening of the AU Summit in the Banjul, The Gambia. Contact Baturu Mboge on [email][email protected] or [email][email protected] for more information.

The Centre for Public Participation (CPP) would like to invite you to a public dialogue to discuss issues around: Regional Governance and public participation. In the context of South Africa's peer review process in terms of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and the preparation of the final report due to be presented in July 2006, the public dialogue will attempt to critically discuss the nature of civil society participation in the review process.

We are seeking a dynamic and committed Advocacy Project Co-ordinator to play a vital and demanding role in co-ordinating all project partners to work together to achieve objectives.

Nigeria called on G8 countries and international financial institutions on Saturday to work to create a unified code of good governance principles applicable to both developing and developed countries. G8 finance ministers meeting in St Petersburg on Saturday acknowledged in their joint communique the importance of responsible management of public finances for achieving stability and growth.

A Canadian company conceived on the principles of corporate responsibility plans to harvest underwater forests. Clark Sustainable Resource Developments is a new venture that plans to secure and operate licences to harvest underwater forests, beginning on Lake Volta, the world's largest reservoir, in Ghana.

Tension is rising in Madagascar ahead of elections scheduled for December, after talks between the government and opposition fizzled out. In a bid to ease the political situation, President Marc Ravalomanana held talks with various parties last month, but the overture was boycotted by the main opposition coalition.

The stench of rotting corpses becomes unbearable. Locals say 75 of their men are buried in shallow graves in this glade on the village's outskirts, killed they say by men on horses, and by their own neighbours. The bodies were hastily buried in mid-May, days after a rag-tag group of men armed with guns, spears, and machetes overran the village in a dawn attack.

What started as a seemingly insignificant skirmish between the army and antigovernment forces in Ouham Prefecture of northwestern Central African Republic (CAR) has spurred a humanitarian crisis in which almost 100,000 people have been displaced.

Somalia's interim parliament is meeting in Baidoa to discuss whether to ask the African Union to send foreign peacekeeping troops into Mogadishu. But the head of the Islamist militia controlling Mogadishu, Sharif Shaikh Ahmed, has rejected any deployment.

Public clinics and hospitals in Harare, are running out of desperately needed drugs to treat tuberculosis as a worsening hard-currency shortage hits state health facilities, it was reported on June 8. Overcrowding and poor hygiene have seen increasing cases of TB surfacing in Harare. The high incidence of HIV/Aids has also led to the spread of the highly infectious disease.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled that two journalists are to go on trial in Uganda, charged with "promoting sectarianism" in an article criticizing government persecution of opposition leader Kizza Besigye. Editor James Tumusiime and reporter Semujju Ibrahim Nganda of the independent Weekly Observer face up to five years in jail if convicted.

Land and land resources in Africa are increasingly governed by modern tenure systems and less by customary systems. Unfortunately, changing land use and land ownership patterns have not always been accompanied by appropriate reforms in policies, laws, and institutions. Africa must ensure that the current wave of land reform initiatives help to establish needed changes in land rights as well as legal and institutional frameworks.

East African countries are leading Africa in the growth of Internet penetration. Tanzania has had a 150% increase in users in the past year while Kenya has increased by 200%, with the number of users having reached 1.5 million. African Internet penetration overall is 4%, up from 2.6% in 2005.

Chadian President Idriss Déby has instructed his government to open a dialogue with the political opposition in a government decree released to journalists. Before the May presidential elections, President Déby had opposed any democratic reforms, causing the opposition to boycott the poll.

The Lesotho government is to improve medical care provided to sexual violence survivors after rape cases reported in the first three months of this year climbed to almost the total number for 2005.

Thousands of genocide survivors, whose school fees should be paid by a solidarity fund, no longer attend school and live in difficult conditions, said six members of the Rwandan Parliament in a report published last week by the New Times.

Soccer has struggled for years to rid itself of racism. For this World Cup the governing body of the world's sport is making harmony a central theme. "Football, like most sports, is combative - you play to win. But it shouldn't have anything to do with racism or violence," said Federico Addiechi, head of a Fifa division which deals with corporate social responsibility.

A new policy of free medical care for Burundian mothers and children was intended to improve their lives; instead it has crippled the nation's health system. Public hospitals in Burundi have recorded double, sometimes triple, the number of patients since a presidential directive for free paediatric and maternal health services was implemented on May 1.

After almost four years of seemingly intractable political crisis that has kept Côte d’Ivoire split in half and some 700,000 IDPs in government-controlled areas, there may at last be room for a small glimmer of optimism about the prospects of peace. Yet formidable challenges remain ahead of presidential elections scheduled for 31 October 2006 under a road map established by the International Working Group on Côte d’Ivoire.

Zimbabwe commercial farmers who accepted an offer to resettle in Shonga, about 100km north of Ilorin, the capital of the central state of Kwara, began farming in June last year. They all fled Zimbabwe after the government of President Robert Mugabe embarked on its controversial land redistribution programme in February 2000, seizing prime farmland owned from 4 000 white farmers and handing it over to the landless black majority.

When U.N. Security Council members visit the Democratic Republic of Congo on June 11 and 12, they should insist that the transitional government protect the rights of journalists and human rights defenders, who have increasingly come under attack ahead of the coming elections, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released on Friday 9 June.

Ministers from across Africa have approved a draft charter on democracy that lays down guidelines on elections and good governance. A two-day meeting concluded with unanimous agreement on the draft document in Congo's capital on Saturday. The draft is to be put to an African Union heads of state meeting in Gambia on July 1 and 2.

Despite claims that the world has entered a new era of human rights and democratic representation, minorities continue to be an endangered lot whenever dominant neighbouring peoples have expanded their territories or settlers from far away have acquired new lands by force

The teacher shortage in SA will reach crisis point by 2008 unless drastic steps are taken to increase the number entering the profession. By 2008, SA will be short of 15,090 educators, according to a study by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). That is with the current learner-to-educator ratios of 40:1 for primary and 35:1 for secondary schools.
Related Link:
* South African Human Rights Commission report on the Right to Basic Education

Catholic schools in Cameroon, a country known for widespread corruption, are piloting a program to teach students to identify and act against dishonesty in their schools and the rest of society. "The natural place for the fight against corruption is in the schools," said Sister Josephine Julie Ntsama, principal of the College de la Retraite, a Catholic secondary school in Yaounde, Cameroon's capital.

It was a close thing. But after six days of arm-twisting, all-night bargaining sessions and closed-door meetings in Hong Kong, an eleventh-hour concession by Europe on farm subsidies saved the December 2005 summit meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) from another embarrassing collapse. The European move kept the troubled global trade liberalization talks, launched at Doha, Qatar, in 2001, alive - but just barely, says this article in Africa Renewal, a UN publication.

This is a great article (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/34532). The history of Africa has been covered up for the most part and individuals that are from the diaspora have not been able to easily learn about their history. When you learn about your history and are able to get in touch with your roots, no matter what your culture, you are able to grow up and walk around with a sense of pride, a sense of ownership, a sense of purpose, inclusion and entitlement that says my ancestors and I have played an important part in this world and that I, my peers and our offspring have an obligation to continue to do so.

I find the articles and news summaries published by Pambazuka News very insightful, informative and educational. I wish an African publishing company could get formed that would tap into the rich African writing/poetry that exists, but doesn't see the light of the day unless it's published by the Macmillan’s and/or Heinmann’s of this world. Why can't Pambazuka News start an African publishing house just as they started this very useful website and/or engage ghost writers to help African writers tell their stories.

Pambazuka News replies: Thanks for your letter and the suggestion. You're right, there is a gap for publishing the work of talented writers. Feel free to send us your work and we'll consider publishing it on our site. Fahamu, the publishers of Pambazuka News, is currently reviewing plans for publishing books and other materials from Africa. Watch this space!

Peace talks between the government of Burundi and the country's remaining rebel group, the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL), which began on 29 May in Tanzania, are still at an informal stage, an official of the rebel movement said on Wednesday.

Last Friday evening, the United Nations adopted a Political Declaration of Commitment on HIV/Aids following a meeting in New York to thrash out a response to the pandemic. While welcomed in some quarters, the declaration has also faced criticism from an African civil society grouping, who described it as an “utter disappointment” and declared a Week of Action - from June 13 to 17 - to mobilize support for previous commitments made by African governments to fighting the pandemic (Please see the HIV/Aids section of Pambazuka News for more details). In the article below, Salma Maoulidi goes beyond showcasing the pandemic in an attempt to “deal with why it is and is allowed to be”.

Tanzania has a national HIV/Aids policy and is in the process of finalizing legislation on HIV/Aids. The expectation is that once the policy and legal framework is set, people living with HIV/Aids and their families will be afforded greater protection. But will a legal framework that solely addresses the public health dimensions of HIV/Aids and not the intimate aspects of personal relationships that maintain the status-quo in power relations between the sexes suffice?

Treating an invisible syndrome

When one reads the alarming statistics explaining the magnitude of HIV/Aids in sub-Saharan Africa one gets an impression that people are dropping down like flies. One would think that as one walks the streets, every other person would be noticeably HIV positive. This, however, is not the case, not because HIV/Aids is not present but because it is rendered invisible - something that makes ongoing efforts to combat HIV/AIDS ineffective, if not difficult.

While HIV/Aids is very much in our midst it remains hidden from many either by choice or by design. It remains hidden by choice because we choose not to see it; or those that are affected by it choose not to divulge their status. It remains hidden by design when those who have it go to extra lengths to conceal their positive status. Also, it remains obscured when the state fails to address the problem at its core, that is confronting the underlying cause contributing to widespread infections rather than its consequence.

I have been following the progression of HIV/Aids since the mid-eighties when the formulation of the first national response against HIV/Aids emerged, but it remained invisible to me until the late nineties. Until then my association with HIV/Aids was based on health statistics and my long association with women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Putting a face to someone living with the virus came much later. But when these live testimonies finally emerged they were persistent in underscoring the pervasiveness of the pandemic. From the outset, it became clear to me that each story of a women who had contracted the virus was peculiar and in most cases did not meet the popular myths around HIV/Aids.

There are many dimensions to the problem that is HIV/Aids, something that is not so clear with prevailing responses against the disease. One can only appreciate the complexity involved in combating the pandemic when one reviews the stories of countless women, men and children infected and affected by HIV/Aids. It is also these stories that inform my political stance on the adequacy of existing HIV/Aids approaches in combating the pandemic.

Protecting the unsuspecting

One of the first cases I came across involved a bright girl, full of life and humour. I met her for the first time when she was ten but looked more like a five year old. She was born HIV positive, a fact that led her father to abandon the family. It was left to her mother and elder sibling to love and provide for her amidst great hardship. Although an innocent child, she was not spared the humiliation meted out on PLWHA’s that resulted from prevalent institutional ignorance about HIV/Aids. Her teachers openly discriminated against her, forcing her to wear a red badge to signify her HIV status.

Fortunately, her mother joined an association of PLWHA which provided her and the family with much needed moral and material support. Her sisters, who were not positive, became peer educators and volunteers for an HIV/Aids community based programme. She thus never saw herself as a victim. She accepted her condition and sought to live to the fullest in spite of the fact that she was positive. Her status was only an issue when it made her too sick to play or attend school. She died before her twelfth birthday, unable to realize her many dreams. Her brave attitude gave us a useful advocacy platform to intensify the campaign for the rights of PLWHA.

Progressively, the reality of HIV/Aids came close to home when a close friend of mine lost her baby girl. Although she had suffered bouts of TB it only became clear that she may be infected with the virus after her very sick daughter was diagnosed with the virus. Indeed it is not exceptional that many women get to know about their positive status in this manner since they do not fit the profile of women who are likely to be infected with the virus in the sense that they are not prostitutes or “loose” women but women who are in stable relationships, the majority having the respectable status of being someone’s wife and, therefore, by local social standards, outside the ambit of the risk category associated with immoral behavior.

Consequently, a significant number of HIV positive women I know contracted the virus as unsuspecting victims. They were brought up to believe that it was enough that they were in a happy, healthy and lasting marriage. The husband’s fidelity was immaterial to complete this equation. On the contrary, the overwhelming perception is that a chaste and faithful wife sufficed to protect the family from ill health and ensure a strong progeny. Increasingly women are finding that an institution that was traditionally meant to provide them with security, stability, health and respect is in fact endangering their lives and livelihoods.

Many of these women are torn between confronting their problem and in so doing drawing attention to themselves, a fact that leaves them vulnerable to public scorn and stigmatization. Importantly, it has the potential to ostracize them from traditional systems of support, especially after their spouse rejects them upon divulging their status. Indeed it is the dilemmas and contradictions women face as the weaker sex that puts them at risk of contracting the virus. Certainly, it is the denial of women’s agency in matters of sexual and reproductive nature that informs women’s social and economic predicament, a situation intensified by the HIV/Aids pandemic.

Are we fighting a disease or a curse?

The contradictory nature of the disease vis a vis women’s wellbeing is most evident in the story of my namesake, now deceased, who I came to know by virtue of my work with Muslim women. She was an only child, begotten late in life. Her elderly mother was anxious about her welfare after she passed on, such that when a widower proposed marriage she hastily agreed, believing that she was marrying her child to a responsible man. She did not know how her future son-in-law lost his wife nor did he oblige the information. It seems that he had two main concerns - either to draw upon the youth and vitality of his young bride to will himself to good health or to have a healthy person to care for him as his health deteriorated. In either case it was not the welfare of his new wife that was paramount to the fatal union nor did he take any measures to minimize the risk of infection to his young wife.

Next my cousin fell ill to recurrent bouts of TB. In his quest to prove that he did not have something more serious, he repeatedly neglected to complete the prescribed dose for treating the disease, creating resistance against TB. His mother and siblings never accepted that he may have contracted HIV, though they knew he was a womanizer. Instead they were more willing to forgive his philandering but content to blame his wife and her mother for bewitching him. In vain my aunt tried to break the marriage as her son’s condition deteriorated, perhaps to minimize the likelihood of her laying any claims to the matrimonial property, but failed. To our dismay my aunt unceremoniously chased the widow out of the house immediately upon completing her iddat (the mourning period) in spite of the fact that she had two young sons.

Then the young woman who helps us around the house was afflicted by a double HIV/Aids tragedy: her brother in law died after a long illness that was explained as diabetes coupled with witchcraft. During her time off she visited her sister and took care of him. There is no knowing what risk she exposed herself to as she only confirmed that he may have died of Aids after her sister succumbed and died soon after. This tragedy ended the working life of this young woman as her mother went into shock, forcing her to take a leave of absence to nurse her until she died. To save her from a predicament like her sister’s, her uncle and brothers planned to marry her off to a man who had been divorced thrice.

While a number of these women were ignorant about their status, a number were in denial not because of arrogance but because they feared the repercussions their status might have. My friend took some time to accept her HIV positive status. A lot of anger was exhibited against her husband’s long love interest and while she came from a religious family she readily invoked witchcraft to explain her errant husband’s behaviour. Perhaps it was more tolerable to accept that her husband was not acting in selfish disregard of her feelings and health were it not for an evil third hand or influence.

My most recent house help must have known for sometime she had the virus but instead of focusing on her condition actively sought out other women suspected to be infected as if in an attempt to deflect attention from her own status. Otherwise she hid her ill health well, substituting it with other debilitating diseases like malaria or typhoid. But when her ten-year old daughter died, she lost her will to live and succumbed almost two months later. The fate of her husband is unknown since he is adamant his daughter was a victim of someone’s bad spell, a view his wife never sought to correct lest she became suspect and was thrown out in the streets.

Interrogating the source of repeated transmissions

The stories serve to underscore certain truths that hardly feature as the key issues in the battle against HIV/Aids. It is more likely for women to admit their HIV status than it is for men. In most cases I have come across, the women were categorical that it was the sexual permissiveness of their partner that put them at risk. In many cases they were unsuspecting victims. In some cases, they suspected infidelity but were helpless to stop it since as opposed to their sexuality being regulated, their husband’s infidelity was given free reign by religious dicta and the legal framework. While society is more preoccupied with the status of the woman during marriage - whether she is a virgin or not; whether she is rebellious or not; whether she is respectable or not - equal consideration is not given to the status of her partner. On the contrary legal and social institutions tend to extol men’s sexual prowess and irresponsibility.

Likewise, while it is common for women who contract the virus to be punished for their condition there is never talk of compensating them for the harm inflicted on them and the ensuring violation of their privacy and property rights. My namesake was disposed of all her property by her in-laws - even her cooking pots - though it was well known that her culinary skills sustained the family during their short married life. She attempted to fight for her rights but died without justice being realized. The sister of my house help was evicted from the house where she lived and nursed her husband and ended up living with a relative before being bundled back to her village to die.

After initial denial my friend is living an open life. She recently lost her husband and is in the middle of a property distribution exercise directed by his family. While the family is keen to expedite her share of inheritance, perhaps in view of her condition, there is no mention of compensating her for the harm her late husband caused her, if not knowingly then by sheer negligence. She dares not bring up the issue lest her in-laws fall short of being generous towards her. It is this attitude of looking at women as creatures to be pitied and helped, instead of full partners in a relationship, that limits their agency and bargaining power in a relationship. Surely, awarding her compensation is not a matter of retribution or her inability to forgive. On the contrary it is her ability to forgive and go on with her life that contributes to her positive and healthy living. But should such chivalry be abused?

The wrong these women have been subjected to goes unrecognized. The contributions they made to families in terms of monetary and non-monetary forms of contributions go unacknowledged. Instead, these women are vilified by relatives and society for their positive status. Their positive status is equal to a death sentence and licenses their dispossession. Their continued existence means they are delaying the process of wealth transfer and if the virus won’t kill them in time, then heart ache and harassment are efficient mechanisms to expedite the sentence!

The unresolved politics of HIV/Aids

Most governments have failed to look at the social impact of HIV/Aids beyond the rhetoric of sharing the burden of looking after those affected by the HIV/Aids scourge. And while the pandemic presents new opportunities for governments to address gender inequalities there is paralysis in taking deliberate action to promote natural and social justice. Certainly the pandemic presents an opportunity to influence reforms in law and attitudes not only towards HIV/Aids but in reforming gender relations. Other than reaffirming state responsibility towards principles of gender equality and justice, it affords states an opportunity to engage in social engineering towards meeting constitutional and civic commitments to its citizens, male and female.

The development sector’s HIV/Aids response fares no better. While it is commonplace to maintain that having HIV/Aids does not amount to having a death sentence, prevailing policies, discourses and practice related to HIV/Aids continuously pass death sentences on those infected by the virus. Though my organization addresses HIV/Aids in the context of reproductive health, I resist working in the field mainly because the overwhelming support to the sector seems to promote welfarism - approaching infected persons as helpless victims thereby subscribing to dominant attitudes that tend to seal the nails on the coffins of those afflicted by the virus. This is an approach to development that we abandoned two decades ago in favour of a more empowering development approach and discourse.

Indeed, whereas we have tried to reclaim the dignity of people who survived gender based physical and sexual violence we are shamelessly victimizing people infected with HIV/Aids. The biggest pastime for people who want to placate their sense of guilt or get a piece of the HIV industry in my country are projects involving HIV/Aids orphans where countless children who are infected or who lost parents to the disease are not allowed to get over their loss and the stigma associated with their loss. The association with HIV/Aids is the brand that sells. Oblivious are we to the message that underlies such projects: Why can’t these children get on with their lives and be assisted by virtue of being orphaned and not because they are orphaned by HIV/Aids?

Also appalling is the wastage of resource poured in by the international community on material purchases and workshops that do very little to actually help communities deal with the HIV pandemic. Indeed, HIV/Aids has become the new development craze diverting much needed income from more sustainable development interventions. Why is overall spending in preventive health and reproductive health falling when they form part of the equation for an effective heath response to the pandemic? I visited Rwanda in 2004 and was appalled to find that each major UN agency and international NGO was into the HIV/Aids sector with very little coordination between them. I found a similar situation in Zanzibar where the bulk of advocacy organizations felt compelled to get into the HIV/Aids sector to secure funding to remain afloat.

I am equally wary of the ongoing politicization of the question of access to anti-retrovirals for PLWHA. Certainly I have no desire to profit pharmaceuticals, who seek to commodify people’s health in the name of a pseudo-cure. I am also hesitant to create dependency on the drugs in the absence of better nutrition and a guarantee that the scientific community is serious in finding a cure or a better drug regiment. The idea is not to create another dependent population, this time not only on food aid or donor aid but on ARVs. The objective should be to empower PLWHA to live healthy and independent lives without fear of incrimination, stigmatization or impoverishment. It should be about giving security and dignity to those infected and affected by HIV/Aids.

Conclusion

Statistics explaining the magnitude of the pandemic are plentiful. It is however not helpful when numbers are considered in a vacuum. I took inspiration from a book a young woman participating in our mentoring program is working on to open dialogue about HIV/Aids. The book is particularly insightful as other than using narratives of women infected and affected by HIV/Aids to expose the human dimension of the pandemic, it does so while charting her personal trajectory with HIV/Aids. She explores myths about the disease; education and prevention strategies; and personal and community responses they invoke. Certainly it is in understanding the interactions that inform individual HIV/Aids experiences that more sustainable prevention options will evolve, options that go beyond showcasing the scourge for what it is but attempt to deal with why it is and is allowed to be.

* Salma Maoulidi is the Executive Director of Sahiba Sisters Foundation, a development network that works with the concerns of Muslim and provincial women. Sahiba’s mission is to build the leadership and organizational skills of women and youth. It has network members in 13 regions of Tanzania.

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

Tuesday marked the launch of Trust Africa, a new foundation based in Dakar, Senegal that will focus on conflict resolution, trade, and increasing democracy in Africa. Trust Africa has been operating for the past five years as part of the Ford Foundation, but will now be run independently from Dakar with an all-African board of directors. In the speech below, given to mark the launch of the foundation, John Githongo discusses democracy and governance on the African continent.

Speech to mark the launch of TrustAfrica in Dakar, Senegal on 6 June 2006

Honourable Minister, trustees and officials of TrustAfrica, friends at the Ford Foundation, Ladies and Gentlemen…

I would like to take this opportunity to thank TrustAfrica for honouring me with the invitation to make this address here today during the auspicious occasion of their formal launch here in their new home in Dakar, Senegal. The Trust arrives at a critical time with an important mandate to address issues that have always been at the forefront of public consiousness but which in today's environment find increasingly articulate and urgent expression. I am doubly honoured to participate in what is clearly a special moment for TrustAfrica and all who have worked so hard to make this special African initiative possible.

I was asked to make a few remarks about the opportunities that exist for improving governance and accountability in Africa and I shall limit my comments to those broad issues.

In truth serious debate about the manner in which Africa was governed only became mainstream after the end of the Cold war. Prior to this human rights, democracy, freedom of expression and other basic freedoms of ordinary citizens often took a back seat to the grand geopolitical struggles that were played out on African soil. It was thus somewhat disconcerting for many of our leaders to find themselves being lectured about good governance in the early 1990s by the very same Western patrons who had previously supported some of the most corrupt and oppressive regimes on the continent.

By the mid-1990s, on the heels of the macro-economic adjustments of the 1980s, governance - the fight against corruption in particular - had become central to the international development agenda as it was expressed in regard to Africa. By the end of the 1990s - 1997 in particular - the multilateral institutions were including governance-related conditionalities in their lending programmes and the bilaterals followed suit.

South African independence in 1994 saw the beginning of African attempts to reclaim the governance agenda. I would argue that the NEPAD initiative - its African Peer Review Mechanism in particular - is the most direct and potentially most successful instrument available for African to truly take ownership of this agenda. This is bolstered by the African Union's gentle slide away from the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign nations especially when those sovereign African nations are led by groups intent on murdering significant numbers of their own populations. In truth we have been interfering quietly in each others affairs for a long time, mainly using our intelligence services. The time has come to interfere face-to-face and above the table to bolster the cause of democracy and good governance and, most importantly, to urgently intervene when situations go berserk and fear consumes populations.

Political accountability in practice

One of the most interesting issues to arise as a result of the spate of peaceful transitions across the continent since the mid-1990s has been that of political accountability. There has been a sense historically that a nation's top leadership were somehow not accountable and impunity attended to decision-making especially with regard to the management of public finances. This has changed. Just as we have had an unprecedented number of retired heads of state since the mid 1990s so to we have seen the establishment of commissions of inquiry into past human rights abuses and economic crimes and other transitional justice mechanisms. There are likely to be more of these in the coming few years and this is perhaps an interesting area for an institution like TrustAfrica to focus, at the very least to ensure that every new regime does not immediately embark on a witch hunt of its predecessors. Still, the key question that will continue to reverberate is to whom does the President answer and how? It is not unlikely that leaders will continue to get caught out by the media; find themselves under increased scrutiny of civil society and caught up by processes aimed at stemming newly urgent problems such as money laundering and terrorist finance. This is especially likely to be true of oil exporting countries.

One of the things that has always impressed me about many public figures in Asia when they are found to have abused the public trust is their public demonstrations of regret, contrition, shame and even tears before cameras. This culture does not yet exist for us here. Attitudes are still quite brazen. Partly as a result public confidence in leaders is low and around the world our leaders are often objects of derision, presented as greedy, corrupt and oppressive. The expectations of Africans with regard to their leaders is also broadly not one that suggests they expect altruism to drive decision-making and therefore opt for the second best of hanging around to see what they can gain directly for themselves and their families. This is changing, partly as a result of demography and a younger population with expectations driven by global imperatives. It also the case that the democratic tradition has truly kicked in across the continent. Despite challenges no one reasonable harks back to the one party state or military rule. Maybe we are yet to see a leader stand up and agree to having looted the public purse and express contrition for it. More importantly perhaps we could be moving to a situation where the leader who gets thus caught out does not enjoy the spontaneous and determined support of his or her people who rally to their cause because they perceive them to be victims of an ethnic witch hunt.

Regional integration as a tool for political accountability

I should like to argue that regional integration may potentially hold out the most important opportunity for improving political accountability across the continent. There is a sense in which some of the internal political contradictions - especially within some of the smaller landlocked countries within Africa - will only be resolved when these nations become integral parts of larger entities. And so one would hope that one day very soon, for example, Rwanda and Burundi will be part of a wider East African political entity. This would also put paid to the backward theories that are sometimes bandied about to the effect that tribalism in some African countries is so acute that we need to create tribally homogenous states.

Similarly, with regard to the dispensation of justice one would hope to see regional higher and supreme courts and other regional judicial instruments and processes coming into being that are perhaps less subject to the vagaries of internal national political challenges that can sometimes be vexatious in the extreme. On the other hand it can also be argued pragmatically that regional institutions will provide us with an opportunity to promote politicians who are sometimes reluctant to let go of national positions and institutions; we can promote retired Presidents to play useful roles at the regional level when they reach the point of diminishing returns nationally.

Development with Equity

But the most interesting and I should like to argue critical issue that TrustAfrica and similar institutions can assist many nations in Africa address is 'development with equity'. There is a sense in which development with equity especially in our highly heterogenous societies become a discredited concept in the mid-1980s when we were all structurally adjusted; it was dismissed as an outmoded socialist concept whose time had ended with the failure of some of the ambitious political and economic experiments of the Cold War years.

The political and economic programmes implemented at independence to promote the redistribution of wealth in light of the structural and institutionalised inequalities of the colonial era had stagnated by the early 1980s and lost credibility as a result of the inefficiency, incompetence and corruption that came with them - state owned enterprises in particular. The ostensible donor designed replacement programmes have been implemented half-heartedly and therefore perhaps less successfully. Indeed, macroeconomic stability has finally come to Africa at the beginning of the 21st century, but the pressing issues of political economy - equity in particular - remain unresolved. More than two decades since adjustment we have democratised but seem to have lost the intellectual will and machinery to grapple with the major equity issues facing the continent - the fact that even where economic growth has been rapid especially as a result of mineral wealth - the distribution of this wealth has been extremely unequal. People are afraid of being called socialists at a time when even in Europe the distinctions between Left and Right in terms of economic policy have become blurred. This is doubly problematic for us in Africa because inequality quickly finds regional, ethnic, tribal and religious expressions that complicate the politics in an extreme way. Most importantly it leads to the perception that closeness to the state creates and sustains elites on the basis of kinship ties and therefore governance is all about my tribe or my group or my family assuming the levers of power so that they can eat.

For a long time the prevailing philosophy said that the tribe had been overtaken by the nation; Gikuyus were overtaken by Kenyans; Yorubas by Nigerians; Hutus by Rwandese etc. In fact this philosophy was taken a step further when single party states were created to save us from the dangers of too many political parties that quickly assumed tribal characters. The detribalisation political experiment seemed to have failed in many places. Despite the national language; national anthem; national schools and of course the national single leaders; the tribe and its baggage refused to go away. In fact it started to become clear that within the single detribalising party those from this or that family or this or that tribe or region seemed to wield a disproportionate amount of power and similarly the economic benefits of development seemed to go to one group more than all the others.

The principle of disadvantaged groups; of affirmative action; of the better off providing for those who don't have so much was never one to be discussed seriously. Instead boils of resentment were allowed to fester and explode into calls for sovereign conferences and rebel groups claiming their rightful share of wealth they consider to be more theirs than anyone else’s. And this is happening at a time when there is an increasing acknowledgment of the stark inequalities of globalisation at least in the short term. The problem for our states that have been independent for around half a century is that globalisation's short term is our long term, and besides that we have watched as the Asians seem to have reduced poverty dramatically within the same time we have managed to deepen it here. So African impatience is not going to go away.

It just so happens that some tribes are richer than others - by mistake of history, access to markets, education, climate or sometimes because they happen to sit on huge deposits of some precious commodity that can be dug up and sold; or - because they wield the levers of power and can control that precious commodity that's dug up and sold. The sharing of resources seems to be discussed with greatest clarity as a result of a crisis - when one group has expressed its dissatisfaction with the status quo in a manner that undermines central authority. Be it oil, gold, diamonds or water - the shape of states will be moulded by these resource issues. One would hope that the principle of equity will inform the outcomes of the debates that are underway and those that are yet to happen upon us. TrustAfrica from its vantage point here in Senegal is uniquely placed to inform and help to shape this debate, to frankly address the equity issues that we have tried to sometimes sweep under the political carpet.

The Durability of Embedded Corruption Networks

Finally, a word about corruption. Too often discussions about governance are overtaken by the corruption debate. In part this is because it is such a vexatious issue in Africa - vexatious because even though it may not be worse than in other parts of the world the starkness of the inequalities in yields in Africa and the fact that those inequalities find ethnic, tribal and regional expression makes it a particularly compelling political reality. It is also the case that a few African leaders have been spectacularly colourful and excessive in their stealing. Embedded corruption networks on the continent consisting of civil servants, politicians, businessmen/brokers and security/defence sector officials have remained influential since the Cold War when most of them were engineered. In my experience with the new increased focus in Africa on the oil sector there is an urgency for accountability with regard to these resources more than ever before.

TrustAfrica will find that in the holding of public officials to account on the continent, especially with regard to the management of resources, the media will be at the cutting edge. Indeed, the media remains the first and most incisive tool of public accountability. The importance of media and information generally in this age of information technology that has democratised access to information between the First and Third Worlds and which has considerably enhanced the capacity of media and civil society cannot be underplayed.

I should like to conclude by pointing to a number of lessons from my experience where corruption is concerned:

1. National security and the procurement processes it derives is the last refuge of the corrupt. Extractive industries and communications are also open to spectacular abuse.

2. Political financing will become an increasingly troubling issue. Who pays for democracy in Africa?

3. Presidential accountability is key and only constitutional reform can make this happen.

4. Failure of the prosecutory authorities led to the creation of anti-graft agencies across Africa at the behest of development partners.

5. It sometimes appears as if in the Third World that the multilaterals are engineered to deal with authoritarian regimes. They are also faced with a glaring contradiction vis-à-vis governance: for them success is measured by the amount of money they lend or donate, the size of the programme they develop for a country. This imperative can sometimes contradict some of the executive measures they would need to encourage with regard to governance issues generally and anti-corruption matters specifically.

6. Restitution is more important than prosecution in the fight against corruption.

Despite some setbacks and bizarre developments across the continent, in Africa we are learning that public service means we serve the people and not an individual; that the public no longer accept that weary excuse of the past that one received orders from above to break the law or abuse public trust in any way. So a culture of political accountability may be beginning to take root. It will lead I believe, in the coming years to increasing calls for greater Presidential accountability in particular which might be expressed in the constitutional reform processes. This will be a positive development with wider implications where despite generally positive developments on the democratisation front ultimate presidential accountability is something we are only starting to learn.

Finally, the setbacks on the democratic front in Africa are not causing a generalised feeling of decline, despondency and failure – the maturing democracy thus far seems able to absorb the shocks. The TrustAfrica launch is yet another demonstration of this maturing. It is an honour to share this special occasion with all of you…

Thank-you.

* Pambazuka News has previously been the recipient of a Trust Africa grant. Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

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