China-Africa relations received unprecedented attention during 2006, both in terms of visibility and attention, writes Daniel Large. China’s involvement is important to consider, he says, because China will continue to need African resources, because of the increased trade and investment in Africa as a result of the relationship and because of an emerging Chinese development agenda on the continent. Unlike early Chinese explorers dating back to 1433, the current Chinese involvement in Africa is here to stay.

China’s Year of Africa in 2006 climaxed with the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (Zhong Fei Luntan, or FOCAC). A friend aptly remarked, ‘Africa has taken over Beijing!’ Beijing mobilised to deliver high standards of Chinese hospitality and red-carpet treatment for 48 African delegations made up of political leaders, businessmen and accompanying journalists.

As the third ministerial and first heads of state conference, this FOCAC, between the 4–5 November 2006, was the most prominent such summit meeting after the first (Beijing, 2000) and the second (Addis Ababa, 2003). In many ways the first FOCAC was a trial run for this more lavish, ambitious and successful summit. It was carefully planned and impressively executed political theatre. Unlike six years ago, not just African but the world media was there to report. The FOCAC was a distinctively bilateral affair, contrasting with the more multilateral celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Bandung conference last year. Its staged choreography, including President Hu Jintao’s reception of individual Africa leaders in the Great Hall of the People, resonated with historical overtones of tribute, a contemporary version of ‘distant people’ arriving in ‘uninterrupted succession’. The extensive symbolic, monetary and political capital invested in FOCAC, its near flawless public execution and modern Beijing spoke of an increasingly self-confident China. Coming at the end of a year which has seen the dramatic irruption of China in Africa as a world media issue, topic of conversation and policy concern for governments, international organisations and civil society groups, it additionally, and very publicly, amounted to a declaration of arrival and positive intent: the Chinese government is serious about developing its African relations, and sought not merely to impress this upon its Africa guests but also the world at large. This forum cemented the official apparatus of cooperation and consolidated the foundations of development. Altogether, it formally marked the end of the beginning of China’s latest engagement with Africa, a process qualitatively different from the past and set to have potentially significant consequences for Africa.

This article briefly reflects on the current juncture of China-Africa relations at the end of an eventful 2006. After pointing to what is different about China’s return under new circumstances to Africa, it addresses key dynamics of current relations before identifying issues that are likely to increasingly come to the fore as the normalisation of relations proceeds and the exceptionalism that China still enjoys in its African relations wears off.

China’s return to Africa

Overall, 2006 was a watershed year for China-Africa relations in terms of the visibility of the subject and attention devoted to it. It featured a number of notable events, starting with the now-traditional tour by Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing (this time to Cape Verde, Liberia, Mali, Senegal, Nigeria and Libya) and the release of China’s Africa policy statement in January.

After visiting the United States, President Hu Jintao toured Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya in April, followed by Premier Wen Jiabao’s June trip to Egypt, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda in June. Besides FOCAC, the wide geographical extent of these high-level tours was reinforced by regional meetings. The second ministerial meeting of the Macau Forum on September 24–25 in Macau featured high-level representation from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, East Timor, Brazil, Macau and China. The Conference of Sino-Arab Friendship, held in Khartoum at the end of November, established a permanent secretariat there under Arab League sponsorship and made a commitment to hold meetings every two years. China has arrived in Africa.

Rather than a sudden explosion into Africa, the Chinese engagement represents a return to the continent in a number of different ways. Strictly speaking, unlike 1433 when the Chinese sea voyages to Africa stopped, China never left Africa in the post-colonial period. The 1980s saw Africa downgraded in China’s foreign relations and China’s involvement in Africa was gradually reoriented into more commercial forms. Current relations should be traced to China’s renewed interest in Africa that was sparked in 1989 and consolidated with Jiang Zemin’s tour to six African countries in May 1996, a process that paved the way for the acceleration of the current phase after 2000.

Today’s unprecedented interest amongst the media, academic quarters, and a range of governments and international organisations evokes but exceeds the last comparable episode of attention, the wave of interest that followed Zhou En Lai’s African political safari in 1963–64. That was a very different context: rather than revolutionary prospects being ‘excellent’, as Zhou infamously declared in Mogadishu, the FOCAC proclaimed this to be the case for China and Africa’s ‘new strategic partnership’ for common prosperity. China’s return is occurring under new circumstances. A more developed China operates under conditions of enhanced interdependence. Gone is the Soviet Union.

Taiwan has lost the diplomatic recognition contest. Ideological disagreements have been superseded by political differences, especially on key concept of sovereignty, as China participates in the global economy and pursues better trade terms rather than an alternative economic socialist vision. Practical Chinese engagement, including Chinese companies, is still facilitated by and anchored within a state framework. The array of Chinese in Africa is more diverse, however, with an increase in entrepreneurial migration including to such locations as Cape Verde.

Why China in Africa Matters

The first reason why China’s return to Africa is important is that it is there to stay. With the addition of India and Asian states, this is part of what has been described as ‘the most dramatic and important factor in the external relations of the continent – perhaps in the development of Africa as a whole – since the end of the Cold War.’

China needs, and will continue to need, African resources more than previously. One commentator wrote in the early 1970s: ‘For the most part strategic minerals do not figure prominently in China’s quest for economic relations with Africa.’ Today a fundamental aspect underpinning relation is modern China’s need for a range of resources to supply its rising domestic and industrial needs. The most important sector by far is oil: some 30 per cent of China’s oil comes from Africa, its top suppliers being Angola (14 per cent), Sudan (7 per cent) and Congo-Brazzaville (4.4 per cent). China’s energy diplomacy (nengyuan waijiao) has mainstreamed as a foreign policy issue in the Hu Jintao period, which has seen an expansion and intensification of diplomacy not merely in Africa. ‘An unprecedented need for resources is now driving China’s foreign policy.’ The Chinese government’s relationship-building diplomacy with oil states is a means to enhance its energy security.

The second area of why China matters relates to increasing trade and investment in Africa, and the impact of this on political economy and for Africa’s international relations. Sub-Saharan trade remains proportionally not as significant as its world trade but has grown rapidly and if sustained, ‘the likely future impacts may be very substantial’. Total trade for 2006, according to official statistics, is expected to be over US450 billion, more than Africa–EU trade. This is spearheaded by the strategic pursuit of resources, around which investment is concentrated, and attempt to protect and enable guaranteed flow of raw materials for China’s energy needs. China’s foreign direct investment for Africa as of mid-2006 of some US$41.18 billion is mostly channelled to resource-rich countries, headed by Sudan and Nigeria.

As such, the thrust of China’s relations can be considered as fundamentally extractive, with other motivating factors, such as Africa as a market or production platform, less important at this stage of relations. The growth in African exports is thus predominantly confined to a growth of major commodity exports to China and India. As a developing power looking to grow within a globalising world, China has distinctive aspects in its African relations.

However, it ‘replicates in key ways developed state policies of disadvantageous terms of trade, exploitation of natural resources, oppressive labor regimes and support for authoritarian rulers. The commonalities of the PRC and Western approaches are therefore fundamental.’

A third area, albeit less significant for now, where China matters is its emerging development agenda in Africa and the considerable interest from different parts of Africa in applying aspects of China’s development experience in their own contexts. China’s legitimacy in questions of development rests in part on its own domestic record. It additionally benefits from a certain popular disillusionment with post-colonial development efforts in Africa, and the promise that China can deliver where ‘the West’ has not.

China’s official development discourse diverges: it is explicitly non-prescriptive, employing a language of ‘no strings attached’, equality and mutual benefit. It emphasises the collective right to development over the rights-based approaches focused on individual rights. It stresses the importance of political stability, internally-driven development appropriate to given conditions and promotes a sovereignty-based order. Finally, its non-intervention approach publicly separates business from politics.

Normalising China-Africa relations

Through experience, familiarity, and the progressive deepening of links, Chinese actors are becoming a more established part of Africa. This process whereby a range of Chinese interests become a more normal part of life is one that must necessarily erode the popular reputation for exceptionalism China has enjoyed, together with such particular cases as Darfur. In the political imaginary in different parts of Africa, projections of China are often made in these terms, especially during and after FOCAC, in keeping with the West’s historic tendency to alternate between seeing China as a great hope or threat.

The first broad area where this process is set to proceed concerns the political implications – internal and international – of China’s approach to political relations with African states and the limits of public adherence to non-interference. Giving a corporate marketing edge to a political position, one Chinese minister asserted: ‘Nonintervention is our brand, like intervention is the Americans’ brand’. However, the idea of separate business and political realms is deeply disingenuous. The Chinese approach business as functional politics. The ‘business, not politics’ approach depends on an ability to navigate political waters, will necessarily be enmeshed in politics and entail a logic of negotiation and conflict of a political (if not always openly so) nature. When it comes to protecting existing investments that have been established on the basis of political non-interference, China’s African involvement is likely to need to evolve once the boundaries of its ‘late-entry’ non-interference mode of engagement are tested and transgressed.

A second point is the need to engage the Chinese side better and to appreciate the evolving challenges China faces domestically and in the international context as it pursues its own development. There are reasons to suggest that ‘linear predictions of a manifest Chinese destiny may be flawed’.

Contextualising Africa within wider Chinese trade, foreign policy and participation in the global trade system, including the indirect impacts of China on Africa’s economic performance, is important. China’s trade with Africa is proportionally a small part (3 per cent) of its international trade and its energy needs are not neatly separable from those of global corporations (some of whom have invested in the Chinese oil majors operating in Africa).

There is the question of international responses. In the longer term China may reconfigure and could even break the monopoly of development concern and activity held by the current set of international organisations if its relations evolve to a deeper structural level of involvement. Ideas mooted about a Chinese Development Bank for Africa raises the question, for example, of how China may affect the international donor landscape of development finance in Africa. However, while keen to promote a range of development concerns, from aid, health, education, and even the environment, Beijing operates within prevailing international standards, including the Millennium Development Goals, and does not seek to challenge these. The competition China represents could catalyse new creative responses from the different layers of existing development architecture in Africa.

The final area concerns how different constituencies in Africa can respond. Can African governments develop appropriate responses and pursue these bilaterally, and also through more coordinated means through common positions via the AU? On the one hand, African governments can attempt to ‘take the opportunity of the competition between China and the West and obtain the best terms for our people.’ On the other hand, many African governments face the challenge of how to maintain good relations with and yet not become economically and politically dependent on China.

Conclusion

China’s return to African is a consequential subject that it is developing rapidly. However, despite wide coverage, not enough is known about concrete dynamics and significant knowledge gaps remain, including those exchanges that are less visible at present—commodity flows, educational, creation of new elites, or African business in China. Singling out an abstract ‘China’ in Africa is, of course, limited headline value and needs to be disaggregated to more properly reflect the dynamics of the Chinese engagement. In such topical countries as Sudan, where Petronas and ONGC-Videsh are important together with CNPC, China is part of what is better approached as an Asian-African axis the cumulative impact of which may be to effect a historic shift in the centre of political and economic gravity. However, as well as contextualising the seemingly meterioric rise of China in Africa, a historical approach would temper such crystal-ball gazing with caution about the limitations of long-term projects. Africa may have taken over Beijing during the 2006 FOCAC, but there is no inevitability about a transformative impact.

China bears a growing responsibility to match practice with its positive approach, to demonstrate it is different, rather than merely assert this with its official discourse which sets high standards and concomitant expectations of its official discourse. The issue of whether China can ‘prosper where others have failed’ could be inverted: can Africa benefit in longer term, more sustainable and more representative ways from China’s enhanced attention and links with Africa in ways that departure from established patterns with external powers? Through a historical lens, China has set the terms of its African engagement up to and largely including the present; ‘the onus rests upon African leaders to push the development agenda to the next level.’

There is thus a need to retain perspective of relations as they currently stand, and not exaggerate the importance of China but at the same time to recognise that this is consequential and not ephemeral. The idea, for example, that ‘“Empire” has begun to die before our very eyes, and Beijing will be written on its heart!’ may be indicative of current stratospheric hopes held in some quarters, but must be tempered. As President Nyrere’s recognised, while ‘equality and mutual benefit’ is a key tenet of relations, Tanzania-China relations was a partnership of ‘most unequal equals’, and this could also be used more generally to capture broader China-Africa relations.

At the end of China’s Year of Africa, as the beginning of its return to African ends, and as it becomes a normal phenomenon throughout the continent, there are good reasons to contemplate a possible Chinese decade of Africa.

China’s re-engagement reprises questions of power, states and constraints on development, including Africa’s unfavourable position in the world market, that are sadly familiar in Africa’s post-colonial history. Those with high hopes that China can benefit Africa as well as itself, for example, have to recognise its current economic involvement must change for broader development to occur.

• Daniel Large is a doctoral research student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and has studied in China and conducted research in Africa. He is co-editing a book on China-Africa relations to be published early in 2007. Email: [email][email protected]

• This is a shortened version of an article by Daniel Large. The full version, including references, will be available in a forthcoming book to be published in January by Fahamu and called ‘African perspectives on China in Africa’. The full articles will also be made available as .PDF files on the Pambazuka News website.

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

Is China a friend or foe to the African continent? Michelle Chan-Fishel writes that while China’s investments do involve socio-economic development, environmental and social problems are emerging ‘with a new face’. Chan-Fishel looks at Chinese interests in Sudan, Angola, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimababwe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Liberia. ‘Chinese companies are quickly generating the same kinds of environmental damage and community opposition that Western companies have spawned around the world.’

Introduction

For many African governments, China's emergence from poverty to becoming an economic powerhouse serves as an inspirational example. From the mid-1980s, China’s pursuit of market economics, with a focus on export-oriented industrialisation and inward foreign direct investment, helped raise GDP and build infrastructure. In many parts of Africa, China is perceived by governments as an ‘economic messiah’, a new investor and ally in a world where there is growing unease over what African governments perceive to be the patronising attitudes of the West.

The president of the African Development Bank Donald Kaberuka has remarked: ‘We can learn from them (China) how to organize our trade policy, to move from low- to middle-income status, to educate our children in skills and areas that pay off in just a couple of years.’ Similarly, Mozambican President Armando Emilio Guebuza has said: ‘When we see China coming up and developing an attitude of support to help our productivity, we Africans say “Welcome”, because these investments and projects, especially in infrastructure, will help reduce our poverty problems.’

There are currently an estimated 750 Chinese companies operating in 50 African countries. But Beijing's African investments are also tied to socio-economic development, including debt relief, grants, soft loans, buyer credits provided by state-owned banks, scholarships, preferential market access, and technical aid in the fields of medicine, agriculture and engineering.

Concerns

The economic foundation of China’s relationship with Africa is obvious: the procurement of natural resources. Beijing’s only political condition for establishing ties between China and African countries is the ‘one China principle’ – refusal to diplomatically recognise Taiwan.

But China's no-strings-attached support has sounded alarm bells in the West. Recently, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz criticised Beijing for undercutting anti-corruption measures, such as requiring revenue transparency for resource extraction projects. Some human rights watchdogs have notably criticised China for weakening democracy and human rights in Africa through its readiness to deal with ¬– and sometimes sell arms to – the Sudanese, Angolan and Zimbabwean governments.

Accusations of ‘neo-colonialism’ have already surfaced, as China’s search for energy and minerals is reminiscent of the ‘scramble for resources’ that characterised Western colonialism. The history of natural resource extraction in Africa has a poor track record, characterised by environmental degradation and increased poverty. As Chinese companies become increasingly involved in the oil and gas, mining, and logging sectors, these environmental and social problems are emerging with a new face.

Sudan

Perhaps the most controversial of China’s oil interests, and one that demonstrates well China’s commitment to secure oil deals is its relationship with Sudan. Beijing is the leading developer of oil reserves in the Sudan, currently importing 60 per cent of the country’s oil output. Today, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is the largest shareholder in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC). What makes China’s involvement in Sudan so controversial are the atrocities occurring in the western region of Darfur region, atrocities which the US and other nations have branded genocide. Numerous human rights groups have accused Sudan of systematically massacring civilians and chasing them from ancestral lands to clear oil-producing areas.

Prior to the conflict in Darfur, China was suspected of financially underwriting Sudan’s 21-year civil war, which ended with the signing of a permanent peace accord in January 2005. In 2000, Sudanese resistance forces were said to be collecting photographs of Chinese-made weapons to prove the increase in Beijing’s support for Khartoum. In July 2000, WorldNetDaily reported that Sudan had acquired 34 new jet fighters from China. In June 2001, the Mideast Newsline reported that Sudan had built three weapons factories with Chinese assistance in order to halt rebel advances. China also reportedly provided arms support to Sudan in exchange for oil. Although it is difficult to determine exactly how much money China has invested in Sudan, one source states that ‘China reportedly invested US$20 billion in Sudan, apart from soft loans, grants and other forms of aid.’ According to a study by PFC Strategic Studies, the Sudanese government could collect as much as US$30 billion or more in total oil revenue by 2012.

Angola

In recent years, Angola has emerged as one of China’s top trading partners. Last year, China was busy securing long-term oil agreements with Angola, and Sonangol (Angola’s state-run petroleum company) committed to provide long-term oil supplies to China’s Sinopec. Sonangol and Sinopec will evaluate Angola’s offshore Block 3, and will also jointly study plans for a new oil refinery. In October 2004, as India was preparing to close a major deal for about US$620 million to buy Shell’s 50 per cent share in Block 18, China made a last minute bid – to win the deal. China’s offer of US$2billion in aid for various projects in Angola made India’s offer of US$200 million for developing railways pale in comparison.

Nigeria

Previously, China had been shut out of Nigeria by Western firms. However, through patience, political prowess and technological contributions, such as promising to build and launch a communication satellite for Nigeria by 2007, Chinese firms are gaining a foothold in the industry. In December 2004, China’s Sinopec and Nigeria’s NNPC signed an agreement to develop oil mining leases 64 and 66, located in the waters of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria. In July 2005, China’s CNOOC signed a contract with NNPC worth US$800 million to guarantee China receives 30,000 barrels per day for one year.

Recently, China and Nigeria signed a deal in which China would provide a US$4 billion infrastructure investment package in exchange for first refusal rights on four oil blocks. In time, it is suspected that China could easily replace some of these Western firms when their drilling licences come up for renewal.

Mining

China is the world’s fastest-growing market for minerals. Africa figures heavily in Beijing’s strategies to secure access to mineral resources.

Copper in Zambia

Copper is Zambia’s leading export commodity, and production is soaring. The Chamber of Mines forecasts production of about 550,000 tonnes in 2005 and more than 600,000 tonnes in 2006. But as miners try to extract more and more copper ore, the accident rate is soaring. According to the Mineworkers Union of Zambia, at least 71 people died in Zambian mining accidents in 2005. ‘We're worried about the accident trends’, said Mavuto Gondwe, a union director with responsibility for health and safety. Indeed, in 2005, an explosion at a BGRIMM mine was the biggest single accident in the history of the Zambian mining industry. BGRIMM is controlled and 60 per cent owned by China Non Ferrous Metal Industries, a Chinese government-owned company.

Coal and platinum in Zimbabwe

Shunned by Western leaders and investors for the government’s human rights practices, Zimbabwe has begun a determined campaign to hitch its plummeting fortunes to China's rising star. Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe calls the policy ‘Look East’, and it has resulted in tremendous growth in trade and economic cooperation between the two countries. Several joint venture companies are being established, and under the Zimbabwe-China Joint Commission, Zimbabwe has benefited through the Chinese government's concessionary and interest free loans and grants.

The Chinese are widely reported to covet a stake in Zimbabwe's platinum mines, which have the world's second largest reserves, and the Mugabe government has hinted that he will accommodate them. The mines' principal operator denies being pressured into dealing with the Chinese, but negotiations are under way to sell a stake to Zimbabweans yet to be identified. The operator has postponed major spending on the mines, citing the cause as political uncertainty.

Cobalt in Congo

According to the Cobalt Development Institute (CDI), China was the world’s leading cobalt producer in 2005. Approximately three-quarters of all cobalt made in China in that year derived from imported concentrates, of which almost 90 per cent came from the DRC.

While the DRC is making slow progress in its transition process after a four-year civil war, the major regional and international mining houses are anticipating stability in the country. In the Katanga area, Chinese companies such as Colec and Feza Mining are initiating copper and cobalt mining and processing projects. Earlier this year, Nanjing Hanrui Cobalt Co Ltd, one of the largest conglomerates in China, purchased three high-grade copper-cobalt mines in Lubumbashi in the DRC. After a decade of growth, this private company has become the leading cobalt powder producer in Asia, ranking among the top three of the world. Because of the firm’s expansion, the international monopoly on cobalt has been broken, and the global cobalt powder prices have been reduced by half. International companies such as Japan’s Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sumitomo, South Korea’s Samsung and LG all buy cobalt powder from Nanjing.

Timber

China is the largest importer of forest products in the world, and its imports of forest products have tripled in less than a decade. In 1998, China placed stringent restrictions on domestic logging, forcing the country to import a high percentage of its total wood consumption. Since then, China climbed six spots to become the world’s top forest products importer, taking 120,000,000m² in 2004. China is now the leading importer of round logs. In 2003, China was second in industrial roundwood imports, second for wood-based panels, pulp, paper and paper boards, and fifth for sawn wood. China imports 40 per cent of its total forest consumption.

Gabon

Today, China is Gabon's largest timber trading partner. In 2003 Gabon supplied 40 per cent of China's log imports from the west/central Africa region, and China imported 46 per cent of Gabon's total forest exports. Gabonese law requires processing before export, yet China's demands are for raw logs.

According to some analysts, China's influence in the sector encourages ‘flagrant disregard for the law’, and taxes are not paid on 60 per cent of the area allocated as forest concessions. National law states that failure to gain ministry approval of a management plan for a forest concession within three years triggers forfeiture of the concession; yet only five of more than 200 companies (representing 30 per cent of concessions) in 2000 had even stated their intention to start writing a plan. Additionally, all five of these companies had already logged their concessions for more than three years. The illegal timber exports to China have been estimated to be as high as 70 per cent of total timber exports.

Equatorial Guinea

China purchases an estimated 60 per cent of the timber exported from Equatorial Guinea, another country with known illegal logging problems. According to the World Wildlife Fund, annual timber extraction in Equatorial Guinea exceeds the maximum legally allowed limit by 40–60 per cent. It is also estimated that up to 90 per cent of the total harvest going to China is illegal. Shimmer International, a subsidiary of the notorious Rimbunan Hijau, has close ties with the minister of forests. Along with its many subsidiaries and associated companies, it is the dominant player in the country’s logging sector. China’s Jilin Forest Industry (Group) is also involved in timber extraction and processing.

Cameroon

Cameroon exports about 11 per cent of its timber to China. The Centre pour l’Environnement et développement estimates that at least 50 per cent of logging is illegal in Cameroon. According to Friends of the Earth, 96 per cent of logging violations in Cameroon between 1992 and 1993 were followed by incomplete judicial procedures, and one in five cases in this time period were dropped after intervention by an ‘influential person'.

Hong Kong-owned Vicwood Pacific acquired the Cameroon subsidiaries of the Thanry Group in 1997. From 2002, Thanry has been one of the principle loggers and international timber traders in the Congo River Basin and had established itself as a major violator of forestry laws and a creator of regional social unrest. Between 2000 and 2002, Thanry was fined over US$1,300,000 for what has been called 'anarchic logging', including cutting undersized trees, logging outside legal boundaries, and logging in unallocated concessions. The World Bank also discovered that the origin of many of Thanry's logs had been falsified so as to avoid Cameroon's export controls.

Liberia

In Liberia, rebel leader-turned President Charles Taylor relied heavily on timber resources to support his own military efforts and to fund mercenaries in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire. Taylor used the revenue gained from the sale of the timber to buy arms for troops, support foreign mercenaries, create enormous personal wealth, and support the personal security forces that were essential to his power. The timber transport vessels were also used to traffic arms throughout the region.

China has rapidly increased its log imports from Liberia. By 2001, it was Liberia's largest buyer of wood products. That year, China imported US$42 million worth of logs (58 per cent of the country's total exports), most of which came from the OTC through Chinese importer Global Star Tradings. A report commissioned by USAID stated: ‘Harvested timber is transported to Liberian ports where it is bartered to Chinese and other trading partners either directly in exchange for weapons and munitions needed by Taylor to carry on his wars, or is sold to raise funds to achieve the same end.’ On 6 May 2003, the UN Security Council imposed an embargo on Liberian timber products. China had imported 365,000m³ of logs from Liberia in 2003 before the sanctions. But log imports plunged to 30,000m³ in the second half of 2003; and China did not appear to have imported Liberian logs during the first half of 2004.

Conclusion

While conventional wisdom posits that Chinese multinationals treat their workers and the environment more poorly than their Western counterparts, not enough research has been done to actually prove this hypothesis. What is clear, however, is that Chinese companies are quickly generating the same kinds of environmental damage and community opposition that Western companies have spawned around the world.

For communities adversely affected by these mega-projects (regardless of the corporate sponsor), the question is: first, do they give their free, prior and informed consent to the investment? If the answer is ‘yes’ then the challenge becomes, ‘How can communities and governments negotiate with the sponsor to receive the best deal possible, in terms of economic benefits sharing, human rights, sustained livelihoods, environmental quality, and cultural and community integrity?’

Evaluated this way it is evident that in some cases, what private companies can provide through ’corporate social responsibility’ – e.g. health clinics that may or may not be furnished with medicines, books for local schools – pales in comparison with the deals that Chinese state-owned companies can offer (e.g. debt relief, concessional lending).

Furthermore, African leaders and policy makers are faced with additional question when it comes to Chinese investment: Is the Chinese model of development, which admittedly has been characterised by spectacular economic growth, worth emulating? Based on the unlimited extraction of natural resources, ultra low-wage manufacturing, and the export of cheap goods (due especially to ‘throwaway’ societies in the West), this paradigm – which is in essence one of corporate globalisation, not of China alone – is simply not sustainable.

This low-price development model actually comes at a very high cost – to societies, both inside and outside China, as well as to the environment. The untold story of China’s rapid economic growth is one characterised by vast levels of income disparity, unfair treatment of workers and lost livelihoods, especially in the rural areas. These problems are so acute that they threaten political stability. Environmental problems are similarly acute: breathing the air in China’s most polluted cities is the equivalent of smoking two packets of cigarettes a day. On an international level, meanwhile, the effects of corporate globalisation (particularly Western consumption) are leading to the destruction of the ecological support systems on which all life depends.

It is tempting for African leaders to simply want to play Western and Chinese extraction companies off against each other in an effort to ’get a better deal’, and doggedly follow China’s path of economic growth. Indeed, it is important for them to carefully conceive extraction projects in order to secure the best possible deal for their people. But ultimately, it will be important to realise that this low-price/high-cost economic model will not work: neither for Africa, nor for China, nor for the rest of the world.

• This is a shortened version of an article by Michelle Chan-Fishel. The full version, including references, will be available in a forthcoming book to be published in January by Fahamu and called ‘African perspectives on China in Africa’. The full articles will also be made available as .PDF files on the Pambazuka News website.

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

Moreblessings Chidaushe tackles the issue of development aid to Africa, comparing the approach of the West and the new player, China. What is significantly different, she states, is that instead of the top-down language used by the West, China has instead used language that speaks of partnership and friendship. The West should not see China as a threat to its hold over Africa. Africa should be left to decide who it wants to engage with, she concludes.

This article interrogates China’s new approach to Africa in the specific context of development aid (grants, loans, technical experts). The rationale is to compare the Chinese approach to the traditional western donor approach and analyze the extent to which Africa may or may not benefit from this new approach. Some of the questions it tries to explore are; is China necessarily offering Africa a better development aid option than the west? Where is the new relationship taking Africa? Will Chinese aid move Africa towards achieving the MDGs? Is China a new friend or a new imperialist? What will be the west’s role in this new paradigm? And most importantly is this engagement not just a case of whose turn it is to colonize a continent up for grabs anyway?

Background/context

Chinese-African relations date back to 50 years ago when in 1956, China first established diplomatic relations with Egypt, since then, China has not looked back in advancing its relationship with the continent. To date, it has established co-corporation with 48 African countries (supporting the One China Policy). Africa and China share common historical experiences which have significantly contributed to cementing of what is now described as an “unshakable friendship”. Fifty years of engagement has borne more than 720 Chinese projects in Africa, huge infrastructural projects (TAZARA railway, major highways, stadiums, mining, energy ventures, oil in Angola and Nigeria) 18,000 governmental scholarships, 800 Chinese enterprises, 15,000 medical personnel and much more. Trade between the two parties has risen from an estimated 4 billion in 1995 to 40 billion in 2005 and still growing, trade agreements brokered during the Nov 2006 Sino- Africa Summit point to $100 billion by 2010.

China’s cooperation with Africa has previously not been particularly outstanding. We however begin to note some significant changes taking place around 2000 with the hosting of the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation – Ministerial Conference in Beijing which received massive participation from the African partners. The Forum principle was based on “carrying out consultation on an equal footing, enhancing understanding, increasing consensus, promoting friendship and furthering cooperation”. China’s gentle and appealing attitude coupled with growing concerns and restlessness about a largely unproductive engagement with the west contributed to a stronger desire by both parties to strengthen the relationship. Furthermore, China’s growing superpower ambitions have resulted in more aggressive efforts to strengthen this relationship especially around the strategic resource endowments in Africa. The climax of these efforts culminated in the development of a policy that was announced in January 2006.

China’s policy on Africa

In January, 2006, China unveiled its new policy on Africa, an all-round, coherent roadmap articulating China’s objectives and strategies in Africa in areas ranging from high-level exchange visits, consultation mechanisms, trade, investment, financial, agricultural, resources, tourism cooperation, infrastructure, debt relief and cooperation in human resources development, science and technology and cultural exchanges and many more.

One of the most striking features of the China-Africa policy document is the language in which it is coined. China uses friendly language and its soft power to appeal to Africa’s hand. The document is coined in a language that provides a gentle, friendly, caring attitude one to which Africa has been wholly enticed. Exploitation, heavy hand top-down relationship has been typical of Africa’s relationship with the west, one approach China has deliberately opted to reverse – presenting itself as a potentially better friend to Africa.

While China has a clear policy to engage with Africa as a block, on its part, Africa’s approach to China still remains largely ad hoc. Although several countries have adopted the “Look East” policies, these are still at individual national levels with each country pursuing maximum benefit for its own best interests and specific needs.

One can’t help wondering if, without a comprehensive and structured policy, African countries are individually smart enough to deal with this growing force of a friend without being shortchanged. Although the relationship is supposedly based on an “equal” partnership – the level of equality in the partnership is questionable given the different contexts of the two parties.

Both simple logic and experience tells that it is impossible to engage on an equal footing as long as the parties are not on the same level. China is coming in as a donor and Africa as a recipient much like it has been with the west. The departure platform is thus already tipped in China’s favor making it difficult for Africa to bargain a genuine partnership – some kind of domination is likely to take place between the two.

A way out would be the development of a comprehensive African policy on China. This would result in more structured, secure and beneficial engagement and indeed potentially create the platform for a win-win situation as is the intention of the relationship.

An African policy on China would have to be developed through a continental body like the African Union with multi-stakeholder collaboration at all levels beginning at grassroots and feeding into regional blocks like SADC, EAC, ECOWAS etc. Such a policy would increase African countries security and benefits in dealing with the superpower wannabe rather than individual approaches easily susceptible to manipulation. Others might argue that different national interests would call for different policies and engagement mechanisms with China. Under such circumstances, individual countries could well be encouraged to develop national policies on China but these should be anchored within the framework of a continental policy, in other words, the various national and the regional policy should be complimentary.

Judging from the African leadership enthusiasm towards the strengthening of Chinese relations, it would seem China is the ultimate solution to the continent’s problems. It is crucial to note that while China might assist Africa to a certain degree, it is not, will not and should not be expected to solve all of Africa’s problems. It remains the responsibility of Africans to craft a way out of their quagmire. A simplistic view of the upcoming Chinese deal reveals that benefit from the Chinese aid is minimal, for example the proposed 100 schools will only translate to 2 schools per country in a continent whose member countries need more than 100 schools each, the same applies for the proposed 100 agricultural experts to be sent to Africa and the 50 clinics.

Thus it is clear that benefits of Chinese aid per individual country is minimal and will not add a significant difference to the achievement of the MDGs in Africa. It is therefore still crucial for Africa to maintain good relations with other partners (west) to compliment efforts towards the achievement of the goals. A huge concern is that currently China and Western relations with Africa are being approached from a competition point of view. A way should be sought to combine these efforts for maximum benefit for Africa.

Development Aid in Africa

A traditionally perceived way out of Africa’s quagmire has been the use of development aid. The crisis of western aid has been that, the more the industry has grown, the more distorted it has become and the more detached from reality it has become. Strategic dynamics have grown to undermine the fundamentals of aid thus it has largely failed to achieve its objectives and thus been rightly criticized. The concern is that there is a rather weak link between the aid intentions, amounts poured into development and the worsening situation on the ground.

China and development aid

Critics and even development practitioners themselves have long made recommendations on how development aid can be improved. They have recommended that Africa needs more grants than loans, less technical aid, cheap loans and aid without conditionalities and they have also called for more trade not aid. This sections examines the extent to which the supposedly better Chinese aid is meeting these recommendations in order to assess the extent to which Chinese aid will be better in addressing Africa’s challenges.

China is itself a developing country but it got freedom earlier and adopted an aggressive approach to its development. Because it has not depended on aid to the same level as Africa, it has since achieved impressive development in the past 50 years. It is no wonder Africa is ready to embrace engagement with China as it considered it as having a crucial experience from which Africa can tap. China chooses to concentrate more on the huge infrastructural investments, production and trade and the turnover from these have proved more beneficial than development aid. Thus, unlike the western approach, China concentrates more on trade and investments and less on charity and social sectors.

While Africa excitedly welcomes China as a better development partner, it is important to be cautious and not go into the relationship blindly, it is critical for Africa to take time to analyze the implications and real benefits of the China policy and engagement with Africa. After all, China has aggressive superpower ambitions which it is advancing and may in the long-term harden its approach/stance to ensure the achievement of its objectives.

The excitement around the “new” Chinese approach brings about the general perception that China is offering Africa a better aid package – but is this necessarily true? Much like the west, China’s development aid to Africa has centered around grants, loans and technical expertise, therefore the two’s departure points are similar. The Chinese approach therefore begs an interrogation to assess any differences between Chinese and traditional western approaches. Currently, the technicalities/dynamics of Chinese aid are not very transparent as the deals are brokered at bilateral (government to government) level. This discussion therefore bases some of its facts on experience on the ground which translates to/implies possible similar existing bilateral agreements between the two parties.

Technical expertise

Technical expertise has remained a major concern of the development industry. As a conditionality, western donors have traditionally attached technical expertise to their development aid.

On technical expertise the Chinese have proved worse than the west. Chinese projects are typically accompanied by droves of Chinese nationals. What has been particularly difficult for locals, is that in many cases the Chinese even import Chinese casual labors, leaving the majority of locals in the cold and yet Africa has an abundance of unskilled labor which could immensely benefit from these projects.

Chinese aid, and especially technical aid should be adjusted to consider such circumstances. While it should be targeted at reducing unemployment in Africa, it is instead targeted at reducing unemployment in China.

Technical aid is thus undoubtedly one of the areas in which Africa will have to battle with in regard to Chinese aid as Chineses labor does not seem to be a negotiable part of Chinese aid. Earlier than later, Africa should draw up its own policy on technical aid/labor to ensure that collaboration with China will assist in reducing the unemployment pandemic typical of the continent.

Trade

Europe has for long been Africa’s largest trading partner – but with the coming in of China, tables are certainly turning. China’s continues to develop insatiable energy needs and Africa is more than ready to plunder its natural resources to satisfy China. The danger of this benefit though is that it is only being calculated in monetary terms at the expense of issues around environmental sustainability and resource depletion, which are crucial to the continent’s future. Both China and Africa should develop policies to safeguard environmental and sustainability concerns of the extraction of resources from the continent. For now, China’s preoccupation is the extraction of Africa’s resources, raising the question of the long-term sustainability of these resources.

The Beijing Consensus

China’s aid commitments as stated in the China-Africa policy were further elaborated/expounded during the Sino-Africa Summit (Nov 2006) where the eastern nation pledged to double aid to Africa to US$5 billion for direct investments ($3 billion in preferential loans, $2 billion in export credits) by 2009 and increasing the number of loans, development projects in health and agriculture and also in debt cancellation. From the above deal, African loyalty in favor of China is set to grow further in the coming years, making the neo-liberal agenda less relevant.

And yet the doubled Chinese aid will come in the form of loans. What is not yet clear to African publics are the conditions under which Africa is acquiring these loans. Admittedly the Chinese loans are cheaper than western loans and come with less political and other conditionalities and penalties unlike the IFI Poverty Reduction Growth Facility (PRGF). Chinese aid has one major political conditionality attached to it – adherence to the “One China” policy. Any country engaging China cannot engage Taiwan. The caveats of this conditionality may however breed other political conditionalities not yet clear to Africans at this stage.

The Chinese loans also have, attached to them, economic conditionalities to allow Chinese firms access to the exploitation of Africa resources, repatriation of profits and labor as discussed above. It is also not yet clear what the implications of these loans will be on the continent’s debt crisis.

The west has often been accused of double counting/discounting aid and one cannot help but wonder too if the Chinese offer for debt relief, technical assistance, scholarships and exchange visits will not be double counted as a part of the aid package. Thus it is a misrepresentation to claim that Chinese aid is free of conditionalities.

Given the above discussion, it is sensible to conclude that Chinese aid may not be significantly different from western aid and therefore may not move Africa towards the achievement of the MDGs. Currently there is more excitement for anticipated benefits overshadowing the analysis of the actual benefits which are in fact minimal. High hopes/expectations should not be confused for actual benefits because what may seem like the oasis in Africa’s development journey may only be a mirage. So far Chinese aid (grants, loans and technical expertise) has not proved itself significantly different from western aid.

Conclusion

For a continent in such a quagmire, anyone offering a generous hand to Africa will always be welcome. Africa’s resource gap has oftentimes subjected it to exploitation by some “partners” and yet due to limited options, the continent has had to bear with these exploitative relationships, subjecting its masses to deeper poverty, humiliation and desperation for the sake of accessing resources. The IFI conditionality regime is a classic example where Africa has had to subject itself to humiliating top-bottom relationships resulting in the IFIs maintaining a perpetual heavy grip on the continent. To date nearly all African countries are still undertaking IFI imposed structural adjustment programs off tangent to the interests of their peoples. The result of these programs has been increased poverty, debt and dependency.

What has made China a seemingly better and easier to embrace friend to Africa has been it’s seemingly softer approach it has used. Thus embracing China has been a walk in the park for Africa. The west has had to be coerced (by years of lobbying and advocacy) into adopting measures like the Paris Declaration in efforts to tip the scales up in favor of the developing world. Even then this agenda has not been fully embraced by all donors as they see themselves loosing their autonomy in the process. Thus compared to China, the west has generally been a difficult partner to deal with.

The west is in the forefront of criticizing China’s stance in Africa. In some circles, China has been branded as irresponsible and reckless mainly due to the non-interference policy. It is however doubtful that this criticism is a result of genuine concern for African welfare or the reality of the failure to block China from grabbing the traditional domain. Thus the Beijing Consensus to solidify relations with Africa and increase trade seems to pose a challenge to the Washington Consensus.

Yet the two parties potentially have something good to offer Africa, thus it is only sensible to combine the two for maximum benefit. The current competing approach is not beneficial to Africa. The west should not see itself as Africa’s savior but its partner - the “savior attitude” is what is bringing about the competition.

The above discussion has shown that as far as aid (grants, loans and technical expertise), Chinese aid is not significantly different from western aid. For China to increase the effectiveness of its aid, it should urgently revisit its technical aid agreements, increase grants as opposed to loans, and find a beneficial non-exploitative way of accessing African resources.

• Moreblessings Chidaushe currently works as a Programme Officer - Lobby & Advocacy for African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD) based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Holds a Masters Degree in International Development from the University of Bath, UK. Dynamic, open-minded person. Follows development aid issues passionately and believes that not until Africa finds a solution to its challenges will there ever be social and economic justice on the continent.

• This is a shortened version of an article by Moreblessings Chidaushe. The full version, including references, will be available in a forthcoming book to be published in January by Fahamu and called ‘African perspectives on China in Africa’. The full articles will also be made available as .PDF files on the Pambazuka News website.

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

The ‘look east’ policy of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe is well documented. But the deeper implications of Zimbabwe’s relationship with China are less well understood. Whether the relationship turns out to be a win-win one will depend much on how effectively Zimbabwe can build institutional and bureaucratic capacity to harness Chinese funds and investment for the benefit of the country, writes John Blessing Karumbidza, who doubts whether this will be the case, raising questions as to whether Mugabe is simply replacing Western colonialism with Chinese imperialism.

‘We have turned east where the sun rises, and given our backs to the west, where the sun sets’ – Robert Mugabe on the occasion of the celebration of 25 years of Zimbabwean independence, May 2005.

That China is a rising global economic player of note in Africa is well established. China’s interest in Africa is part of a calculated plan and policy to ‘go global’. Africa offers a strategic training ground and opportunity for Chinese capital. In an address to the Nigerian Senate in 2005, the Chinese President described China-Africa relations as ‘win-win economic cooperation’. This paper explores what will become of the renewed relationship between China and Zimbabwe, or more appropriately, the Zimbabwe African National Union, Patriotic Front (ZANU PF).

It is arguable that whether the relationship becomes what the Chinese President described as a ‘win-win’ relationship is not entirely dependent on China, rather on whether Zimbabwe has the institutional and bureaucratic capacity to turn Chinese funds and investment to benefit the country. There are reasonable doubts about the possibility of widespread and long term economic benefits to Zimbabwe. Temporary benefits so far include the political preservation of Mugabe reign and personal aggrandizement through corruption and kickbacks by his ZANU PF cronies flowing from Chinese investment.

On the whole, it would not be fair to blame the Chinese for acting to further their interests. It is incumbent upon the government of Zimbabwe and its people (and any other African country for that matter) to put in place a programme and strategy for chanelling funds and direct investment in a way that contributes to growth of its own economy.

Questions about Chinese financing and business involvement in African development programmes include: Are they based on an equal partnership? Are African governments able to negotiate terms of interaction without ‘pawning’ their countries and submitting their people to exploitation?

There is growing concern that China disregards human rights and democracy. It has a reputation for the abuse of workers’ rights, intolerance of political opposition; and dislikes a free press. In the name of non-interference, China justifies doing business with pariah states and dictators – which also means that civil society and the citizenry cannot hold them accountable for flaunting environmental and labour laws.

It is important to note however that this Chinese ‘non-interference’ policy cannot be permanent. The Chinese are well aware of this themselves. Where deals are signed with unpopular dictatorial regimes that could later be revised by a new government, it becomes necessary for the Chinese to protect such regimes. This explains their arming of the ZANU PF government in Zimbabwe. For example, China funded Zimbabwe’s acquisition of military-strength radio jamming equipment to block opposition broadcasts ahead of the 2005 elections.

Liberation ties paying off for China

In seeking to gain a hold on African resources and opportunities for sale of Chinese goods, China should be wary of losing political capital and ‘credibility’ it acquired from supporting African liberation struggles through conniving with dictatorial regimes. Prior to the present day questionable expansion, China had no burden of historical guilt in Africa, unlike the global North. China therefore gives credence to the likes of Mugabe when it claims to be protecting African sovereignty. Whereas British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bono see Africa as a ‘scar on everyone’s conscience’, still troubled by their historical guilt of the slave and colonial era, the Chinese see Africa as a business opportunity.

The earlier 'ideological' phase of Chinese-African relations was part of a global strategy which by the mid 1970s saw some 15,000 doctors and over 10,000 agricultural engineers from China serving all over the Third World. It is common knowledge that many African countries exploited the cold war and the bi-polar world system by claiming to be socialist to gain assistance during liberation and after independence, going first to the West, then the East for development aid.

By 1977 Chinese trade with Africa reached a record US$817,000,000. The new orientation found institutional expression in the first China-Africa Co-operation Forum held in Beijing in 2000 - a mechanism to promote diplomatic relations, trade and investment between China and African countries. In the same year, China-Africa trade passed $10bn for first time. By 2003 it reached US$18.5bn. By 2004, nearly 700 Chinese companies were operating in 49 African countries. According to some estimates US$30 billion will change between Chinese and African hands this year. More recent Chinese estimates claim that it is already approaching US$40billion.

China is using the UN’s five-point proposal to ‘assist’ developing countries accelerate development, including: ‘Granting zero-tariff treatment for some exports from the least developed countries, increasing aid to the heavily-indebted poor countries and least developed countries and cancelling debts contracted by them, providing concessional loans and effective medicine for treating malaria, and training professionals.’

These steps will increase China’s access to the raw materials, energy and food resources it requires to sustain growth as well as feed its population. Observers have pointed to the fact that ‘more recently China's policy has shifted from cold war ideology to a more classical pursuit of economic self-interest in the form of access to raw materials, markets and spheres of influence through investment, trade and military assistance - to the point where China can be suspected of pursuing the goals of any classical imperialist’. Moreover, the heavy militarisation of the Zimbabwean government through Chinese loans and technology raises suspicions of China’s global ambitions to develop strategic military bases in Africa.

A closer look at the nature and character of Chinese investment in Zimbabwe

For Mugabe, who sees democracy and development as mutually exclusive, the fact that China has been able to raise 400 million of its people out of poverty over two decades, without being subjected to democratic elections and a free press serves as a useful example. Mugabe cites the present world order as a source of conflict and war, and calls for a more positive alternative order.

China was ZANU PF’s main supporter in the 1970s in the war against colonial rule. After independence, Zimbabwe declared itself Marxist-Leninist and announced the intention to reorganise society along socialist lines while courting Western aid and and the IMF.

Since 1980, Zimbabwe has revoked the liberation era ties with China to maintain low profile diplomatic ties, which are now upgraded to a development partnership. As a result of the lack of conditionalities on Chinese loans and funding, Chinese loans in the 1980s went into white elephant projects, such as the construction of the National Stadium.

By the end of 2004, Chinese investments in Zimbabwe were estimated at US$600m. To service the increasing Chinese investment and the 9000 Chinese believed to be living and working in Zimbabwe a bi-weekly flight between Harare and Beijing was launched.. Another US$600m was pledged at the June 2005 Asia Summit; and separate deals between Chinese state and private firms were signed with various Zimbabwean corporations. Renewed and increased China-Zimbabwe relations brought about now familiar circumstances: a Zimbabwean state now considered by the global North as a pariah state; an unprecedented economic slump; unemployment above 75 per cent, inflation heading towards 2000 per cent;, and shortages of consumer goods, most importantly fuel.

European and American travel sanctions, the lack of any IMF rating, coupled with the ANC in South Africa’s conditions of political and economic ‘normalisation’ have taken their toll. In August 2005 therefore, snubbing the efforts of Thabo Mbeki, Mugabe turned to China for funding to ‘revive the economy through increased agricultural production’. This led to Chinese promises for increased economic cooperation in many areas of the economy and an immediate US$200,000,000 to finance agricultural production and three MA-60 passenger planes.

Mugabe fought the 2005 elections on the argument that Zimbabwe must not become a colony again. But it is questionable whether he has not in fact simply replaced Western colonialism with Chinese imperialism. Having ceded control of strategic state firms and massive Chinese takeovers, including of railways, the electricity supply, Air Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation makes ‘win-win’ economic cooperation between China and Zimbabwe appears doubtful. Given that Zimbabwe has no comparative advantage over China in any sector, this opening up of the economy is most likely to benefit the Chinese perhaps even at the expense of Zimbabweans.

Zimbabwe lacks the institutional and strategic infrastructure to effect requisite economic transformation, and will have difficulty putting Chinese development loans to good use. The failure to revive the agriculture sector since the 2000 land seizures is a major concern.

It is not surprising therefore that the Chinese signed a contract to farm 386 square miles of land when millions of Zimbabweans are still landless. Recent land seizures saw most of the productive land fall into the hands of the elite, while the rural poor remain mostly landless. The Reserve Bank governor’s monetary policy statement emphasised the need for the agriculture sector to pull its weight in the economic turnaround of the country encouraging the new landowners (mostly urban ‘telephone farmers’) that ‘the battle cry is for all those who hold land to view it as an effective means of economic emancipation rather than a status symbol’.

Beyond the rhetoric of ‘the land being the economy and the economy the land’ there is no apparent strategy for the necessary transformation required for agriculture to release its potential for the economic turnaround needed in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe cannot even benefit from the Chinese Maoist blueprint for rural economic transformation. The joint Chinese ventures in Zimbabwean agriculture amount to nothing more than land renting and typical agri-business relations that turn the land holders and their workers to labour tenants and subject them to exploitation.

There is additional fear that the takeover of strategic national firms by the Chinese companies is a security threat and can be seen as loss of national sovereignty. Most sinister of all is that the Chinese authorities must know that Zimbabwe is more than likely to default on payment of bills; and wishes precisely this, in order to obtain a tighter grip on Zimbabwean assets.

It would be naïve to think that China is motivated by the need to salvage the Zimbabwean economy from its economic abyss; indeed even the government does not itself believe this. It is simply a venture to save political face. For the Chinese, the investment in Zimbabwe is nothing different from Chinese ventures elsewhere on the continent. The current arrangements, simply allows Mugabe to keep the illusion of victory over the West; and enable his cronies in the army, police, government and business to partner with the Chinese in further exploitation of the masses. As in the 1980s, the poor people will be told to tie their stomachs and pull up their socks, and that a revolution is not for ‘cry babies’. For as long as Mugabe reigns over the abyss, the rhetoric of imperialist demons fighting against Zimbabwe will continue to suffice.

In the context of a politicized security system, silenced media and partial judiciary, the Chinese will drain the Zimbabwean economy and future generations will pay for it.

Anti-Chinese xenophobia: Attitudes towards the Chinese in Zimbabwe

When confronted with reports of crime against Chinese nationals (numbering not more than 10 000), Zimbabwe established a Chinese desk at the central police station in Harare. Mugabe has also appointed a Minister for Chinese affairs.

Already, the police officers, the University of Zimbabwe and schools have been asked to offer classes in Mandarin (soon after losing their love of French). Reacting to the new requirement to learn Mandarin, Washington Katema, ZINASU president, snubbed the move as a case of the ‘madness of the Mugabe regime scaling new heights’ and as a political gimmick to lure the Chinese into the country to bankroll the bankrupt regime. These excesses by Mugabe’s regime are likely to fuel xenophobia against the Chinese. Many reports of crime and abuse of women and children, rape and violent crimes against Zimbabwean nationals are yet to receive such a high profile response.

The economic background to the anti-Chinese sentiments is that Zimbabweans are horrified at the prospect of a permanent take-over of strategic state companies in what is generally considered a desperate move to perpetuate the tenure of ZANU PF. Trade unionists are worried that companies are being forced to close having lost their market to cheaper goods imported directly from China, and about the abuse of workers. The Chinese managers are alleged to have a negative attitude towards local people and massive dislike for trade unionists. At will they are known to ‘forget’ to understand English as a means to avoid dialogue with anyone critical of their actions. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) was quoted as saying that a Chinese steel company operating in Willowvale in Harare has unacceptable pollution levels but the government treats them with kid gloves.

Conclusion

In the next half a century if all African countries adopted the shift from colonial languages that create a barrier to cultural unity, China could replace them with one language spoken across the continent. Maybe then, a ‘United States of Africa’ – under Chinese ‘prefectship’ – may become possible. After all, China would gain more advantages from a united Africa than from a balkanised continent. China is in Africa to pursue expansion, consistent with its search for global dominance, and to avoid being out-competed by the US. It therefore requires resources, raw materials, and markets, and space for its surplus population.

As far as Africa is concerned however, as long as poverty remains at the centre of the conflicts and crises in Africa, and there is no African reconstruction and development strategy, conceived and funded from local resources, the giant panda will carry on from where the colonialists and imperialists left.

Mugabe’s looking ‘east where the sun rises’, expecting Chinese loans to develop the beleaguered economy remains a fantasy as long as his politics and economics are wrong. Meantime, with Mugabe fixated on Chinese promises, the people of Zimbabwe, especially the middle class that decide to leave the country at the whims of Mugabe, and Chinese take over, in the pursuit of temporary respite in the diaspora, only have themselves to blame.

• John (Blessing) Karumbidza is an economic historian and researcher in rural sociology based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He is a public intellectual seeking to promote the position that ‘another Afrika is possible’.

• This is a shortened version of an article by John (Blessing) Karumbidza. The full version, including references, will be available in a forthcoming book to be published in January by Fahamu and called ‘African perspectives on China in Africa’. The full articles will also be made available as .PDF files on the Pambazuka News website.

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

Ali Askouri charts the high cost of China’s rising involvement in Sudan, placing emphasis on the lives lost and communities displaced in the Southern Sudan and Darfur. He explains the rapidly growing Chinese demand for oil and the involvement of Chinese companies in huge infrastructure projects. ‘The sad truth is, both the Chinese and their elite partners in the Sudan government want to conceal some terrible facts about their partnership,’ writes Askouri. ‘They are joining hands to uproot poor people, expropriate their land and appropriate their naturaul resources.’

Before Sudan's independence in 1956, the nation's economic relations with China were insignificant. Despite good diplomatic relations, the level of cooperation between the two countries hardly figured on Sudan's foreign-trade sheet. From independence up to the early 1990s, Sudan exported cotton, sesame, and metal scraps to China. In exchange, Sudan received small arms, fabrics and other textiles. At one point, however, in the early 1970s, the Chinese built what they called the ‘Friendship Hall’ – a grand conference hall on the Blue Nile's western bank, a few hundred metres from the confluence of the White and Blue Niles at Khartoum. Available data showed that Sudan’s total debts to China up to 2001 totalled US$67.3 million, of which China wrote off 63 per cent in 2001.

In 1989, however, there was a military coup in Sudan. Led by Islamic officers and widely supported by the National Islamic Front, the junta declared a holy war on the Southern Sudanese rebels who were fighting the central government at the time. The main objectives of the coup were:

• to crush the rebels

• Islamicise and Arabise the southern part of the country

• forcibly unite the South with the rest of the country

• establish an Islamic state.

To achieve its objectives the junta set out to exploit the country's vast oil reserves, discovered by Chevron in 1978. The country was opened up for Islamist investment and many Islamic groups came to the country with huge amounts of money. However, it soon became apparent that these groups lacked the necessary technical expertise required for such ventures. Consequently, not long after they had settled, the junta expelled them under various political pretexts.

As a result of a trade and financial boycott by the donor community and international financial institutions, Sudan was facing bankruptcy. To overcome these economic difficulties, the junta began feverishly looking for an influential business partner who could extract oil and mobilise other natural resources to lubricate its atrophying economic muscles. Given its recent human rights records, the human and material costs of any investment were never issues that the junta was going to care about. Indeed, the junta had shown exceptional cruelty towards the civil and political rights of citizens, even those who did not antagonise the junta. It was therefore expected that violations of rights would become excessive when civil and political rights collided with the junta’s declared agenda.

Following its experience with the Islamists groups, the junta wanted its business partner to have the strength and ability to withstand political pressure from Western ‘imperialist’ countries; the stamina and determination not to be bothered by the protests of human rights groups; and, above all, to be a heavyweight international player that Western imperialist countries would find hard to force out of the country through political pressure.

China's long-term strategy for Africa

Numerous events in different African countries since the beginning of the 21st century have show that there is a long-term Chinese strategy to control and exploit Africa natural resources, particularly oil. The Chinese strategy is propelled by China's growing internal demand for oil as a result of its rapid economic growth. The key African countries targeted by the strategy include, but are not limited to, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Chad, Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Ghana. Although the current economic development status of these countries cries out for development targeted at improving the lot of the impoverished masses, this is not the motivation of Chinese economic assistance. Following a top-down economic development approach, Chinese economic assistance to these African countries has encouraged elitism, deepened social and class divisions and widened corruption. Economic assistance seems targeted to reward or bolster whomever is in power, regardless of how they got there. While many African societies struggle to further democratic values and strengthen respect for human rights, there is no doubt that Chinese economic assistance is encouraging dictatorships and tyranny in Sudan, Chad, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

Chinese leaders keep repeating the misleading statement that China does not interfere in the internal affairs of the countries it deals with. This statement is untrue, provocative and insulting to many Africans who are aspiring to further democratic values. China interferes deeply in the domestic affairs of its partners, but always to the benefit of the ruling group. A recent meeting between the Sudanese president and his Chinese counterpart revealed the extent of China interference in domestic Sudanese affairs in favour of the ruling junta. Addressing his Chinese counterpart, the Sudanese president stated: ‘The relationship with China has been fraternal, brotherly and excellent. Our relation with China is built on mutual benefit. China has always supported the unity of Sudan. When our relations became problematic with the international financial institutions, we turned to China. Relations with China have enabled us to overcome economic difficulties.’ The Chinese president has expressed support for the Sudanese president’s concerns about United Nation troops being sent to the Darfur region: ‘China is sympathetic to Bashir’s objections against peace-keeping forces’.

In Sudan, Chinese support for the government has undoubtedly undermined all the efforts of the opposition to effect change in the government, thereby extending its rule despite the clear political indications that the junta would be unable to rule the country without heavy Chinese economic and military support. It is therefore not surprising that Chinese economic aid to the Sudanese junta has come at an extremely high human cost in Southern Sudan and Darfur, where the number of lives lost and communities displaced has become an internationally recognised tragedy.

History of China-Sudan relations

As early as 1992–94, hundreds of Chinese, allegedly employed by Chinese intelligence, started to appear on Khartoum streets selling cheap consumer products directly to the people. Some of these people became involved in house construction while others set up small commercial companies. The tens of thousands of Chinese workers who were later recruited for the construction of the oil pipeline and other mega-infrastructure projects were gradually moved into Sudan this way. In those days the phenomenon of hundreds upon hundreds of young Chinese (mostly men in their 20s) who neither speak Arabic nor English, crowding the dusty streets of Khartoum selling combs and headscarves to people was the talk of the city. Apparently it was hard for the local people to understand how a young chap could fly in from Shanghai to sell combs and deodorants on Khartoum’s streets in order to make a living!

Inside China, the rapidly growing demand for oil pushed China to venture into Africa looking for opportunities. ‘The reality that China faces is that it will need to become a net importer of oil by the year 2000 if it is going to continue with its modernisation plans,’ wrote Cleophas Lado of the University of the Western Cape.

Indeed, endowed with its vast recoverable oil reserves, Sudan was a great opportunity for China. Equally, for the Sudanese junta, China – given its exceptional ability to condone human rights abuses alongside its heavy-weight ability to develop large-scale projects – represented the ideal partner with whom to strike a deal. ‘It is very much a symbiotic relationship between China and Sudan, where China is in desperate need of a secure source of oil over the long term, while Sudan needs the external credit, investment and market for its oil.’

Lado describes a few of China's investments in Sudan: ‘China has invested heavily in the country. China has initiated $20 billion worth of development and infrastructure projects involving dams, hydroelectric power stations, textile mills and agricultural schemes. China has promised to contribute $750 million in the construction of the new Khartoum International Airport, and another $750 million for a new dam on the Nile near in the Northern Province.

Approximately $100 million has been spent by the Chinese on textile plants, and $500 million on a recently constructed oil refinery. China also provided Sudan with over $12 million in soft loans to fund a fishing project in the Red Sea. Other economic ties have involved arms transfers between Beijing and Khartoum. China has supplied the Khartoum government with arms since 1985, with transfers between 1985 and 1989 totalling $50 million. China became one of the GOS's [government of Sudan’s] principal arms suppliers in 1994 and remains so today.

In addition to Lado’s list of Chinese projects in Sudan, China is upgrading the Khartoum oil refinery from 50,000 barrel/day (b/d) to 70,000 b/d at a cost of US$350 million. As part of the Merowe dam project (also being built by the Chinese, see below), the Chinese won a second contract for power towers that will transport electricity from the dam site to Khartoum and Port Sudan. The contract signed by Harpin-Jilin and CCMD is worth about US$460 millions. This is in addition to a bridge project downriver from the dam site costing US$10 million.

While China claims that it does not interfere in internal politics, the distribution of these projects reveals that China is immersed in the internal politics of Sudan up to its neck. However, Chinese immersion in internal politics is meant to appease the ruling elite, with minimal analysis of the economic, social and environmental feasibility of the proposed projects. For China, whoever happens to be in power is a friend of China as long as they will guarantee China access to resources. Indeed, the opportunistic nature of Chinese policy in Africa is very obvious. It has led, as discussed below, to massive internal displacement and is associated with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives – tantamount to genocide in many parts of Sudan.

Displacement and human rights abuses in oil producing areas

Currently most of Sudan's oil is produced in the Upper Nile area. The Dinka and Nuer people are the main tribes living in the area. To ensure the safety of the oil installations, the government adopted a scorched-earth policy carried out by the army and splinter groups from the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement, used by the government as proxies to carry out its depopulation policy of the area. According to Christian Aid: ‘The inter-tribal warfare that has plagued the south for the last decade has been fomented by strategic arms deliveries from government garrisons. By the middle of last year, hundreds of cases of ammunition had already been delivered to one of the southern factions fighting for control of Western Upper Nile and its vast oil reserves. This is warlordism – as the government and the oil companies call it – but warlordism provoked and encouraged by the government with the express intent of depopulating oil-rich areas.’ The policy was carried out with an intensity that leaves no doubt that the inhabitants must leave or face death and extermination.

The report continues, ‘Since construction of the pipeline to the Red Sea began in 1998, hundreds of thousands of villagers have been terrorised into leaving their homes in Upper Nile. Tens of thousands of homes across Western Upper Nile and Eastern Upper Nile have been burnt to the ground. In some areas, the charred remains of the humble mud huts that got in the way of oil are the only evidence there is that there was ever life in the region.’

Displacement in the Merowe dam project

The Merowe dam (also known as the Hamdab dam) is a massive multipurpose dam project on the fourth cataract of the River Nile in Northern Sudan. The dam, which is expected to cost around US$1.8 billion, is being implemented by a Chinese joint venture between China National Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering and China Water Engineering, known as CCMDJV, according to the dam implementation unit website and other Sudanese and European companies. The CCMDJV contract totalled US$ 60 million. Chinese companies have another contract in the project for power tower networks that extend to Dongola, Atabara, Portsuan and Khartoum. The total amount of the Chinese contract is US$460 millions. The project, according to the dam authority, will displace more than 50,000 small farmers living on the riverbanks.

In February–March 2005, two leading experts on dams and resettlement visited the site and reported: Al Multaga site is located in the desert. The Merowe Dam Project Implementation Unit (MDPIU) is providing support in removing the sand that covers many plots and in irrigating the land. However, two years after resettlement, some 20% of the land has still not been cleared of sand; it is thus unavailable for production. And even with irrigation, the quality of the soil is so poor that farmers cannot sell their products on the market.

In Sudan, it has been the established tradition that major public infrastructure projects are normally guarded by the police force or in exceptional cases by small army units. Staff working on such projects normally live among local people without of any type protection. On the assumption that the Chinese are investing their money to help poor Sudanese, it is odd that they believe the dam site should need security protection 24 hours a day. It is even more puzzling given that in that part of Sudan – where villagers are all connected or related to each other – theft or crime of any sort are unheard of. Villagers still leave their doors unlocked. From what, then, do the Chinese need protection?

The sad truth is, both the Chinese and their elite partners in the Sudan government want to conceal some terrible facts about their partnership. They are joining hands to uproot poor people, expropriate their land and appropriate their natural resources.

Conclusion

Commenting on China’s foreign policy, Lado states: From Sudanese experience it looks that the strategy of China’s foreign policy is not built on initiative and entrepreneurship, it rather exploits the opportunities resulting from the contradictions in the international arena. For China Sudan was the best opportunity that China could dream of given its rising domestic demand for fuel and the growing internal trend among Chinese investors for overseas investment.

The opportunistic nature of Chinese foreign investment, particularly in Sudan, was further exposed when pressures mounted on the Sudanese government to accept peacekeeping forces in Sudan. China failed to veto any United Nation Security Council Resolutions on Darfur, including the referral of Darfur criminals to the International Criminal Court. This has led many Sudanese commentators to question the feasibility of maintaining a strong link with China and whether China is a trustworthy and reliable political ally.

One reason China is the single biggest international player in Sudan is the prolonged boycott by Western countries of the Sudan government. Excluding a vast country endowed with huge natural resources from contemporary international affairs may not be the best strategy. As experience has shown, isolating countries makes them conducive to violence, human rights abuses and civil unrest.

China's huge presence in Sudan needs to be challenged on all fronts. China must be made aware that its opportunistic involvement with dictatorship carries a price for trade and investment inside China. Support for pro-democracy groups needs to be strengthened; investment that observes acceptable international standards on the environment needs to be enhanced. And above all, international justice mechanisms must be made more effective so that perpetrators know that eventually they will face justice.

• Ali Askouri is the director of the London based Piankhi Research Group working in the field of development and human rights.

• This is a shortened version of an article by Ali Askouri. The full version, including references, will be available in a forthcoming book to be published in January by Fahamu and called ‘African perspectives on China in Africa’. The full articles will also be made available as .PDF files on the Pambazuka News website.

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

From the stripping of forest resources in Zambezia province to concerns about the effects a multi-billion dollar dam will have on surrounding communities, Anabela Lemos and Daniel Ribeiro ask whether, after a long history under Portugese colonialism, Mozambique is not at risk of being colonised again under the flag of ‘economic partnerships with China’. They write that concerns in Mozambique centre around China’s weak social and environmental requirements, disregard for human rights protections, lack of transparency and policy of non-interference.

‘Cahora Bassa is ours’ are the first words Mozambique’s president, Armando Guebuza, said after signing an agreement with Portugal’s prime minister to transfer ownership of the 27-year-old hydropower dam on the Zambezi. The last link to Mozambique’s colonisation by Portugal is finally broken, but are Mozambique’s new economic ties following a similar pattern of exploitation and abuse?

Abusive economic interests are not something new in international relations, with extensive examples of the destabilising and crippling affects they can have on developing countries. These negative experiences have given foreign donors like the World Bank a bad reputation, and forced a number of donors to take social and environmental impacts more seriously and develop policies to address transparency, social justice and environmental sustainability. Past experience has shown that such protections are vital requirements in the quest for truly sustainable development.

However, one of the new overseas investors, the giant China, is rivalling the World Bank for honours as the biggest lender to African nations and undermining the lesson learnt of the importance of transparency, social justice and environmental sustainability. China’s expanding demands for new energy and raw material (as well as markets for its own goods) has made Africa a focus point for obtaining these valuable natural resources and many of its nations are increasingly important economic partners. China is the biggest consumer of zinc, nickel, copper and crude oil and the top importer of tropical woods.

China’s weak social and environmental requirements, disregard for human rights protections, lack of transparency and policy of non-interference in internal affairs of the countries they lend to has resulted in some African governments being shored up with funds while allowing them to avoid local and international pressure to clean up corruption. The result has been dictators maintaining power, centralising wealth, and avoiding true development.

Mozambique is one of the African countries that has latched onto China’s funding approach and grabbed the opportunity of non-interference and weak policies with both hands. Below are some recent examples of the negative results of this relationship.

Logging in Zambezia province

Chinese timber buyers are colluding with Mozambican business people and some members of the Mozambique government and their forest services to strip precious slow-growing tropical hardwoods from Mozambique’s semi-arid forests at a rate that could see the resource exhausted in 5-10 years, according to reports of the trade on timber and wood in the Zambezi. The unsustainable logging begins with Chinese support to timber buyers to acquire ‘simple licences’, which allow logging of a relatively small quantity in a specific area. These licences are given to local Mozambicans, in large numbers (146 in 2003 alone), thus starting a deforestation process often referred to as ‘the Chinese takeaway’.

Once an application has been approved, the licence holder pays for the licence (US$10–40 per cubic meter of forest logged depending on the species). Many of the local licence holders get credit from Chinese buyers to pay these expenses. The availability of this credit is the main factor driving the logging boom, attracting unqualified and unskilled people into the sector. Up to one-third of operators do not repay their debts, and this cost is passed on to other operators, in lower prices paid for the timber. On average the income generated by locals linked to the logging industry is below the legal minimum wage of US$30/month.

The quotas and licences give little indication of the quantity and area of logging; under-reporting is systematic and widespread. Inspections are rare, bribes common, and the computer-based control system of licensing and transport is purely cosmetic, according to reports and local experts. There is only one real checkpoint at Nicoadala, were copies of all the licences of all the operators are filed and were all drivers should stop. Anyone looking into the matter who spends time at the checkpoint will notice that the focus is on villagers with small volumes of hand-sawn timber and established industrial operators, while operators well connected to politicians, the Provincial Forests and Wildlife Services of Zambezia (SPFFB) and the timber buyers are allowed to escape. In 2002, the quota was set at 42,000m3 (1,132,000ha total area of concessions) but SPFFB reported only 33,200m3 (+/- 97,600 logs), of which only 28,400 m3 (+/- 83,500 logs) was exported. However, that year 17 bulk carriers and 27 container ships loaded logs in the port, totalling 51,000m3 (+/- 150,000 logs) based on the port authorities' record (also believed to be an underestimate by local experts).

For example in late October 2004, the bulk carrier Chang Ping docked in the port of Quelimane to load 2,000–2,500 tons of logs, according to the head of the company owning the ship. The local exporter (Madeiras Alman), however, officially declared a total weight of only 1,074 tons (4,715 logs with a total volume of 1,602m3). The ship was in port loading for 10 days into three holds simultaneously for 24 hours per day. Even with slow manual loading, at a rate of 20 logs per hour, and accounting for work stoppages, approximately 10,000 logs could have been loaded.

The manipulation does not stop with the statistics and data, but also involves the regulations. Originally, the main commercial species (Class 1) had to be processed prior to export. However, just as the regulations were coming into force, the ministry, under pressure from the logging industry, passed a special regulation (or ‘ministerial diploma’), reclassifying the commercial timbers to permit their export as logs. Now the unprocessed logs are exported to China, undermining local industry and transferring most of the benefits from one of the poorest countries in the world to what is becoming one of the richest. What is happening in Zambezia Province is replicated or even worse in other provinces such as Cabo Delgado, Nampula and Niassa. Rather than combating illegal logging, China, through measures including the manipulation of forest regulations, false technical information and statistics, bribes and indirect involvement in logging, is actually facilitating illegal logging and hindering sustainable development in the sector.

Mpanda Nkuwa dam

The proposed Mphanda Nkuwa dam is a good example of the problems linked to China’s lack of concern for human rights and the environmental impact of the projects they are financing. The US$2.3 billion Mphanda Nkuwa dam proposal has caused considerable debate in Mozambique with civil society and the potentially affected communities raising numerous concerns. The project's weak social and environmental assessment, high economic, environmental, social and technical risks and many other negative impacts, have put Western funders such as the World Bank off the project. In spite of these problems, early this year the China Ex-Im bank, China's overseas lending arm, agreed to back the construction of the dam project.

The Mphanda Nkuwa dam will have a capacity of 1,350 megawatts and will be on one of Africa’s most dammed rivers, the Zambezi. The dam's electricity will be directed primarily towards industry and southern Africa’s regional grid, completely ignoring the fact that less than 5 per cent of Mozambican’s have access to electricity. The production of the power will cause twice daily fluctuations in the river's flow, which will have adversely the people downstream that depend on the river for suitable and acceptable access to water, fishing, river navigation and flood recession farming.

The dam will also undermine years of restoration work in the Zambezi delta(East Africa’s richest wetland and a Ramsar ‘wetland of international importance’ site), which has been damaged by the mismanagement of the Cahora Bassa dam, just over 70km upstream of Mphanda Nkuwa. A daily flow regime and flood simulation is being suggested for Cahora Bassa dam to better support downstream ecology and meet environmental flow requirements. However, the Mphanda Nkuwa dam flow regime has been based on Cahora Bassa’s present destructive one, and the project environmental impact assessment states that if that is changed it could make Mphanda Nkuwa uneconomic. It is likely, therefore, that the years of work to begin restoring the Zambezi downstream of Cahora Bassa will be dropped in favour of getting more hydroelectricity out of the river.

The recent 7.5 earthquake and several aftershocks in Mozambique have justified already existing concerns about the seismic risk linked to the Mphanda Nkuwa project. The country is in the vicinity of the Nubia-Somalia plate boundary and straddles a highly active fault zone called the Shire trough, which runs southward from the southern point of Malawi almost all the way to Maputo. Thus the country is considered to be in a seismically active zone, but poor records in the area severely constrain scientists’ ability to determine the potential for large earthquakes. For example, the recent 7.5 earthquake was nearly 13 times bigger than had been thought possible along that fault.

The Mphanda Nkuwa dam will be in this seismically active area, just 200km from the heart of the Shire trough fault zone. In addition, the shape of the Shire trough means that the dam’s reservoir could increase the surrounding plates’ seismic potential as a result of the increased weight of the water – a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir-induced seismicity’ or RIS. Furthermore, the Estima fault crosses the reservoir 25 metres from the proposed dam wall. It is thought that this fault is active despite there being no activity in the recent geologic record. Mozambique’s lack of experience with and knowledge of large dams and China’s low social and environmental requirements, coupled with the weak data available for the area, increases the risk and creates the potential for a major disaster.

The China Ex-Im Bank's funding is intended to promote the export of Chinese mechanical and electronic products and high- and new-tech products, to support Chinese companies with comparative advantages, to ‘go global’ with offshore construction contracts and overseas investment projects. The bank’s involvement in Mphanda Nkuwa has removed the pressure on the Mozambique government to improve the social and environmental assessments of this project and has enabled the government to avoid addressing its various negative impacts. If the Mphanda Nkuwa dam project goes ahead in its present form, it will be another example of the negative impacts of large dams and will significantly handicap Mozambique’s development.

Other dam projects in Africa have not set an encouraging precedent. There have been serious human rights abuses around the Merowe dam in Sudan, for example (see the article by Ali Askouri). Its resettlement programme has been very poor, there has been no transparency, and it has a bad record on environmental and social assessment. Closer to home, in Zambia, state utility ZESCO is working with the Chinese company Sinohydro on the Lower Kafue gorge project.

It chose a dam site after a balanced assessment of the economic, social and environment factors. However, we have learned from an inside source that Sinohydro told ZESCO that it was not how they did things in China and that they wanted to see a site assessment that focused only on economic factors. In the end, the original ZESCO site was selected, but the role of the Chinese dam builders in trying to focus only on the economics of the project does not bode well.

We also hear allegations from the coastal fishing communities of illegal fishing from Chinese boats, using longliners and gill nets that not only capture turtles and sharks but are also destroying our coastal zone. It was reported that in October 2005 a Chinese ship docked in Maputo harbour with around 4 tons of illegal shark fins. No information was available on the species of the sharks, where they were caught or the method used. The Chinese illegal fishing boats are taking advantage of our government's lack of interest in or means to control and monitor our coastal area, and are destroying it and the livelihoods of the local communities.

The economic link with China is still a young and growing partnership with numerous investments in the pipeline. The few current investments have shown a tendency towards exploration and abuse. The secrecy of the negotiations, whether it is Cahora Bassa or Mphanda Nkuwa, the conditions of the funding and the disregard of the basic building blocks of development such as equality, social justice, a healthy environment and equity make us wonder if we Mozambicans are taking ownership of our country or just changing owners. What are the costs to our people and land? What will be the heritage of future generations? What is ahead of us? After so many years of being colonised by the Portuguese, are we now being colonised again, in the name of development but under the new flag of ‘economic partnerships with China’?

• Anabela A. Lemos is a Mozambican environmental activist and founder member and director of JA! (Justiça Ambiental). Daniel L.Ribeiro is a Mozambican biologist, researcher and environmental activist. He is a founder member of JA! (Justiça Ambiental) and coordinator of the Water Rivers and Development unit in JA!

• This is a shortened version of an article by Anabela Lemos and Daniel Ribeiro. The full version, including references, will be available in a forthcoming book to be published in January by Fahamu and called ‘African perspectives on China in Africa’. The full articles will also be made available as .PDF files on the Pambazuka News website.

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

John Rocha sets out to answer two questions related to China’s role in Africa: To what extent would China’s growing influence in Africa either advance or undermine the African agenda? And what are the challenges and implications that these hold for African governments, the private sector and the international community?

Introduction

China’s burgeoning influence around the globe has captured the attention of governments, the private sector and civil society. With a large population and recent high economic growth rates, estimated at 9.5 per cent, China now comes only second to the United States of America (USA) in its consumption of oil.

Based on current projections, Chinese demand and consumption for mineral resources is expected to grow exponentially in the foreseeable future, so in an attempt to diversify its source of supply, China has set its sight on Africa as a natural partner.

Within Africa towards the beginning of the 21st century, African leaders adopted NEPAD and transformed the erstwhile Organisation of African Unity (OAU) into a more vibrant African Union (AU). The need to end the continued marginalisation of Africa and reverse the development chasm between Africa and the rest of the world was a core objective. From China’s viewpoint, it was adopting the prevailing global strategy aimed at opening opportunities for foreign investment in China as well as creating new markets for Chinese investments abroad. A key feature of both initiatives is an ardent desire to improve South–South relations in order to strengthen the role of developing countries in international affairs.

Notwithstanding the international communities’ commitment to double total overseas development assistance to Africa by an additional US$25 billion by 2010, the composition, scale and slow pace of delivery is generating a certain level of disillusionment with Africa’s traditional development partners.

There is also a growing realisation that traditional relations and partnerships with the West have not helped Africa overcome the structural obstacles to eradicating poverty and reversing its economic marginalisation. Rather than develop, Africa is haemorrhaging while the rest of the world accumulates wealth at its expense through the unbalanced exploitation of its natural resources and the enforcement of a distorted international economic system. Logically, strengthened cooperation with China is seen as a way of addressing some of these structural imbalances.

Current status and trends in China–Africa cooperation

According to the Chinese Ministry of Land and Natural Resources, there were 158 minerals with identified resources and reserves in China in 2004. However, these resources are insufficient to meet an ever-increasing domestic demand and to sustain China’s dramatic economic growth. For instance, based on projections by the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources, by 2010 domestic crude oil production will be able to meet 51–55 per cent of demand and only 34–40 per cent by 2020; while domestic iron production will be able to meet 38 per cent of demand by 2010 and only 29 per cent by 2020. It is estimated that by 2010 and 2020 the shortage of coal will reach 250 million and 700 million tons respectively. So China is looking to Africa to address some of its short- to long-term needs.

Historically, the availability of cheap raw materials and the prospects for huge returns on investments, particularly from the exploitation of natural resources, has always provided an incentive for the expansion and deepening of political and economic ties with Africa. Africa is blessed with an impressive endowment of mineral wealth, including near-global monopolies of platinum, chromium and diamonds; a high proportion of the world’s gold, cobalt and manganese reserves; and extensive reserves of bauxite, coal, uranium, copper and nickel. Of the proved oil reserves currently estimated, Africa accounts for 7 per cent of the global total. New oil discoveries have been made in Madagascar, Zambia and Uganda while extensive exploration is ongoing in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. It is estimated that by 2010, the Gulf of Guinea will contribute at least one out of every five new barrels onto the global market.

Currently, China derives a quarter of its oil imports from Africa through its oil interests in Algeria, Angola, Chad, Sudan and increasing stakes in Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Nigeria. Oil exploration rights were established in Sudan in 1995 by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) through ownership of a 40 per cent stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company where it is pumping over 300,000 barrels per day. Another Chinese firm, Sinopec, is constructing a 1,500-kilometre (932 miles) pipeline to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where China's Petroleum Engineering Construction Group is building a tanker terminal. China has invested more than US$8 billion worth of oil exploration contracts in the Sudan. In Nigeria, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) acquired a 45 per cent working interest in an offshore oil mining licence, OML 130, for US$2.268 billion cash; CNPC invested in the Port Harcourt refinery while Petro-China is interested in the Kaduna refinery. ONGC Mittal Energy Ltd (OMEL), the joint venture between the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation and the L. N. Mittal Group, will invest US$6 billion in railways, oil refining and power in exchange for oil drilling rights.

Similar investments have been made in Gabon by Sinopec and Unipec through a joint venture with Total while Pan-Ocean exploits the Tsiengui on-shore basin and is associated with Shell to explore Awokou-1. Gabon is now selling one-fifth of its annual oil output to China.

While Chinese oil deals have captured the attention of the world, much less is being said about China’s demand for the main base metals such as aluminium, copper, iron ore, nickel, zinc and other minerals. In the DRC, Feza Mining, a joint venture between the Chinese company Wambao Resources Corporation and some Congolese businessmen, is finishing a pyrometallurgic plant which, according to the DRC’s Ministry of Mines, should produce 1,000 tonnes of pure cobalt per year.

Features of Chinese investments in Africa

China’s approach to Africa has several distinct characteristics. For example, a key feature of Chinese cooperation with Africa is the strong links between the Chinese government’s foreign policy objectives and the role played by Chinese enterprises. By the end of June 2003, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce had given approval to 602 Chinese enterprises to invest a total of US$1.173 billion in Africa. This had risen to 715 by the end of 2004. The range of activities that these companies are engaged in varies from trade, processing, manufacture, communication, transportation, roads and agriculture, to resources development.

For example in Angola, the US$2bn deal has lead to the rebuilding of national roads, the building of a new airport in the outskirts of Luanda and other major infrastructure development projects. In addition, a US$69 million agreement was signed between Angola's MundoStartel and China's ZTE Corporation and the Angolan Council of Ministers approved broader ZTE operations. These which will see ZTE invest US$400 million, of which US$300 million will be used to modernise and expand Angola Telekom to develop telephone networks in Angola. According to the Angolan government, the remaining US$100 million is to be invested in military communications, the development of a mobile telephone factory and the creation of a telecommunications training institute for Angolan employees. It is the multifaceted character of Chinese involvement in Africa that seems to be a major draw for African countries.

On a positive note, there is no doubt that Chinese investments in Africa are having and could continue to have some positive impacts. China is helping African countries to rebuild their infrastructure and providing other types of assistance to agriculture, water, health, education and other sectors. This could have very positive spin-offs in lowering transaction costs and assisting African governments to address social calamities such as poor health services, energy crisis, skills development, etc. Increased Chinese demand for raw materials has seen an upsurge in commodity prices, putting extra cash in the coffers of many resource-dependent economies. However, African countries should use this windfall to make provision for the future by investing heavily in education and training, diversifying the economy and strengthening the administrative and governance systems – political, economic and corporate – in order to be better able to maintain and sustain the current economic boom throughout the continent.

On a pessimistic note, the NEPAD framework extols the virtues of African self-reliance, ownership and leadership as well as good economic, political and corporate governance as the bedrock of its development agenda. The emergence of China as a key player in Africa could undermine the NEPAD vision since it could make African countries increasingly reliant on China rather than on their own domestic resources and the resourcefulness of their people. At present, China and not NEPAD or the domestic market is being seen as a more reliable source for resource mobilisation. There are also concerns about Chinese funded projects where in some cases, the ratio of Chinese expatriates (labour and enterprises) to locals contracted is as high as 70 per cent Chinese and 30 per cent local. This practice does not help Africa in addressing the problems of high unemployment and the scourge of poverty. Nor does it assist Africa’s private sector to grow both technically and financially. Instead it could entrench African dependence on external assistance.

The emergence of China has raised fears that China’s non-adherence to the West’s approach of imposing aid conditionalities has the potential to nullify all the progress made in fighting corruption and improving governance in Africa – implying that the problem of corruption in Africa is solely an African problem. There is a one-dimensional focus on Africa as the source of the problem whilst ignoring its global character. This brings us to the broader debate on capital flight. While it is correct that the revenue pilfered from Africa by its elites represents a major challenge to the economic growth and sustainable development of the continent, the haemorrhaging of money away from the continent also takes place in other forms. According to Raymond Baker, a renowned researcher on these matters, mispricing and transfer pricing are some of the tricks used to move money out of developing countries.

In my view, the effective and efficient management of public revenue and assets should not be limited to the public declaration of the proceeds accrued by African governments from the exploitation of natural resources. It should also entail ensuring that these transactions produce optimal benefits to the African people. For instance, there are issues related to the repatriation of profits, mispricing and transfer pricing which include but are not limited to the extractive industries. These practices are major contributors to increased corruption and have served as useful conduits for corrupt practices as well as capital flight. In addition, Africa is not only losing money through corruption and other money laundering activities but it is also the victim of a distorted international economic system.

Raising the stakes and the new scramble for Africa

The emergence of China as a dominant player in Africa raises two critical challenges for Africa and the international community. The first one pertains to Africa’s weak administrative systems (poor revenue generation, management and disbursement capacity), the absence of the rule of law and heavy dependence on natural resources. This situation is compounded by the lack of adequately skilled personnel and technological know-how, all of which are necessary ingredients for translating Africa’s natural resources into the development of the continent and its people. It is these acute weaknesses that make Africa susceptible to what is commonly known as the resources curse.

Second, it is abundantly clear that increased economic development over the next few decades, regardless of regional variations, will have a significant impact on increasing demand for vital resources. Consumption, in Africa as elsewhere, is bound to increase with improved standards of living.

Consequently, the dynamics of increased economic growth and development, growing populations, increasing consumption and dwindling resources will generate intense competition over access and control of natural resources. The impact of these developments will be particularly severe in Africa given the acute weaknesses described above.

The way forward

There is a general agreement that Africa’s wide variety of natural resources could be an essential tool in the fight against poverty, underdevelopment and marginalisation. The recent discovery of oil in Madagascar, Zambia and Uganda also demonstrates that Africa’s potential mineral resources are still a mystery to Africa and the world. Africa is a continent yet to be fully explored and its latent economic potential unleashed. However, there is a need for a paradigm shift on the part of Africa’s leadership both within the public and private sectors. The community at large and civil society organisations are crucial in ensuring that Africa’s natural resources are exploited and managed in a manner that contributes to the eradication of poverty as well as sustainable economic growth and development.

First, there is a need to place the broader national interest above short-term personal gain. In most African countries the state or the head of state are the custodians of natural resources on behalf of the people. The constitution enjoins them to exploit and manage these resources for the benefit of the nation. It is imperative that these constitutional provisions are strictly adhered to and implemented with vigour. The institutional, legislative, regulatory and enforcement capacity of the state must be strengthened so that it serves as a deterrent against unscrupulous and opportunistic behaviour. In order to ensure that Chinese or other multinational enterprises investing in Africa conduct their business in manner that enhances social cohesion and economic growth, the conduct of Africa’s leaders, public institutions, businesses and citizens need to be exemplary and beyond reproach.

Second, there currently seems to be no clear regional or continental strategy to deal effectively with the myriad of actors. This is resulting in a fragmented approach which weakens Africa’s bargaining position. In stark contrast, China and all the other actors are coming into Africa with well thought out and packaged proposals that enable them to maximise the benefits from any relationship with African countries. China, in particular, seems to have a purposeful strategy and is successfully delivering on all its objectives vis-à-vis Africa. The question is what is the driving force behind Africa’s sudden economic interest in China? Is it part of a well-calculated approach to unlock the continent’s true economic potential or is it merely a meek response to an unfolding development. Given Africa’s experience with the West before and after independence, the English saying ‘once bitten, twice shy’ is of particular relevance.

Further, while the super cycle of increasing demand for commodities and high prices is undoubtedly generating enormous benefits for African countries and is set to continue, the continent must guard against the Dutch Disease syndrome. Diversifying its economy and export base should be a key priority for Africa. By developing secondary and tertiary industries Africa would generate additional employment opportunities, bolster revenue for the state and enhance economic growth. Despite its major contribution as a supplier of raw materials, Africa’s development prospects are constrained by its heavy reliance on the primary sector as the dominant element in its economies. This situation is compounded by a distorted international system that facilitates the export of raw materials but inhibits and restricts the trade in processed goods from Africa. So far, China does not show any meaningful deviation from this well entrenched international practice.

However, as mentioned earlier, increasing international demand for commodities has resulted in a shift from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market. This is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, driven principally by the Asian boom under the leadership of China as well as India. Essentially, the emergence of new players provides an opportunity for resource endowed countries since they are now in a position of strength and spoilt for choice in trade negotiations.

This opportunity must be fully exploited and maximised if Africa is to extricate itself from the periphery and take centre stage in the global economy. For example, Africa must diversify its economy by identifying strategic niches and insisting on local beneficiation; negotiating better terms of trade at a bilateral and multilateral level as well as using its natural resources endowment as leverage in political and economic negotiations with international partners. However, for this to be effective Africa needs to adopt a more coordinated and integrated approach in its dealings, whether at bilateral or multilateral level. Unlike the Chinese and other major economies of this world that are backed up by strong political and economic clout, Africa’s ability and capacity to leverage is rather limited.

There is also room for enhanced civil society cooperation across Africa. At present community participation in the exploitation and management of natural resources is rather limited. Where it happens, the conduct and practices employed by communities can sometimes be self-destructive, as with the garimpeiros in Angola or the rebels in the Niger Delta. Another major opportunity for civil society is in the area of research and knowledge management. There is an information vacuum and this is having a negative impact on policy development and implementation.

The bottom-line is to ensure that the dialogue between the international community and Africa becomes more constructive and reinforces the NEPAD principles of partnership, mutual respect and benefit. The overarching objective of such a process should be to ensure that Africa’s natural resources are managed in an effective and sustainable manner for the benefit of the continent and the global economy. In other words, continental and global sustainable peace, security, stability and sustainable development should constitute the pillars for future cooperation in this vital sector.

• John Rocha is a senior analyst within the Peace and Security Programme at SaferAfrica where he is leading a process towards the development of minimum standards for the exploitation and management of natural resources in Africa. Rocha has a BA in human and social studies with specialisation in government, administration and development.

• This is a shortened version of an article by John Rocha . The full version, including references, will be available in a forthcoming book to be published in January by Fahamu and called ‘African perspectives on China in Africa’. The full articles will also be made available as .PDF files on the Pambazuka News website.

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

It is reported that across large areas of Nigeria’s southeastern rainforest belt, hundreds of communities are threatened by erosion because of decades of uncontrolled deforestation and other types of pressure on the land. Joel Bisina explains that whereas both natural and human interventions can result in environment degradation, environmental destruction is a product of peoples’ unhealthy and unfriendly interaction with the environment.

The violence of the last ten years in the Niger Delta has brought to the front burner the issue of the environment, and its implication on regional peace and security. For four decades, ecological devastation on the one hand, and neglect arising from crude oil production on the other hand, have left much of the Niger Delta desolate, uninhabitable, and poor. The unholy contraception, or “joint venture partnership”, fraudulently contrived between the Nigerian state and the oil multinationals to the criminal exclusion of the inhabitants of the region presents a case study for now and the generations unborn.

Ours is a case of the goose that lays the golden egg. The Delta holds the bulk of the economic resources that sustains the public treasury in Nigeria. Yet, years of neglect and ecological devastation have left much of the Niger Delta despoiled and impoverished. This contradiction of riches is a constant refrain in most conflicts in the Delta. I cannot but agree with the summation contained in the UNDP human development report, “a delicate balance exists between the human population in the Niger Delta and its fragile ecosystem. There is a strong feeling in the region that the rate of environmental degradation is pushing the region towards ecological disaster.”

Conflicts in the region have often been blamed on among other things, neglect by government and oil companies, unemployment, military rule, the minority question, and a badly structured Nigerian federalism, especially as it concerns finances. While these factors separately or jointly bear on the conflict dynamics in the region, what has been lacking is their integration into an explanatory system in the addendum called environmental degradation.

I prefer to call it environmental destruction as against degradation. Whereas both natural and human interventions can result in environment degradation, destruction is a product of man’s unhealthy and unfriendly interaction with the environment. Okechukwu Ibeanu questioned if the factors are causal or only mediatory? (Ibeanu, 2000). He went further to query that if they are causal factors, are they principal, secondary, or tertiary, are they triggers, pivotal, mobilizing, or aggravating factors?

I will respond by saying that the environment factor is primary and is pivotal to the Niger Delta regional peace and conflict dynamics.

In attempting to underpin environmental degradation and its implication on peace and conflict dynamics in the Niger Delta, it will be necessary to try to examine the various contextual environments that present themselves and how they singularly or collectively interact to define the peace conflict spiral. Attempt will also be made to examine how this interaction dictates and reorders the peace security dynamics in the Niger Delta.

Natural Environment

Dr Egunjobi Layi in his paper published in Springlink Journal writes that “The relatively under-developed condition of the Delta Area of Nigeria is mainly due to its difficult natural environment. This is with particular reference to the mass, and complex maze, of water which floods the region, causing erosion and pollution, all of which adversely affect agricultural practice, transportation and other human activities.”

While I want to agree with the scholar to some extent, I beg to differ a little and state that attributing the under-development in the delta to a difficult natural environment is just over simplifying the problem. The natural Niger Delta environment we inherited from our forebears was an environment rich in bio diversity, varied species of wild life, dense population of marine and aquatic life, in fresh and salt water bodies, with rich mangrove and fresh water vegetation, flamboyant raffia and shrubs.

However, what we are now bequeathing for future generations is a natural environment whose lushness has disappeared completely, altered and degraded. This is due to canals that have been dredged, rivers and rivulets that have been blocked, streams and ponds that have silted to make way for oil drilling and exploitation. The resulting scenario is mass migration of fish species, destroying traditional livelihood systems. We now have polluted fresh water streams and rivers, fresh water vegetation completely wiped out by salt water encroachment caused by a combination of dredging and high tidal currents resulting from melting ice in the Arctic. The consequences of all these changes in the natural environment are poverty and frustration, resulting in tribes lashing out at one another or at the multi national corporations.

The Physical Environment

Our generation inherited a physical environment that was characterized by natural clean long stretch of sand beaches, fresh and healthy water lettuce that add their beauty and flavor to the environment. It is sad to say that we are bequeathing to our children an environment that is completely eroded or silted in some cases. We are bequeathing communities whose shorelines have been washed away or eroded due to the high volume of deep-sea exploration and exploitation activities. Once hilly and highland environments have been reduced to below sea level. Navigable creeks which once supported socio-economic activities among local dwellers have been silted with dredge dump, washed top surface soil arising from erosion and blocked canal of water ways to make way for oil activities; thus making them difficult for navigation.

We are beginning to find deserts in the delta due to pollution and oil spills, or forests that have been wiped out by bush fires caused by spills of petroleum products from aged or burst pipelines. The situation continues to reduce the land available for farming and infrastructural development. This has created unhealthy competition for available land space, further heightening cases of land related conflicts.

Our skylines are lit up with flares from gas, fumes and smoke associated with gas flare. In some of our communities it is difficult to differentiate between day and night.

Social Environment

The social safety nets of extended family system, communal labour, and communal ownership have broken or been replaced by greedy self-seeking and self-promoting values. I remember growing up as a child in the very strong sense of community that sustained peace and security for the environment.

There was this particular occasion, in 1971 when a stranger passerby pulled into our community in one of the evenings with a very small canoe. The stranger was in the middle of his small canoe, sitting on top of a huge red snapper because he does not want the fish to escape. Immediately when he got to our village he started asking who had set the fishing trap to the south of our community, and my elder sister came out and said, I am the one.

He pulled into our waterfront and said, please come take this fish, I saw it in one of your traps, it was almost escaping so I decided to rescue it and look for the owner. My mother was so moved by the act of courage, honesty and kindness that she told the stranger that he should wait so that they can butcher the fish to enable him to have some portion of the fish. As far as mama was concerned, the fish would have escaped from the trap, but for the resilience of the human spirit of honesty and kindness displayed by the man that rescued the fish. The man simply said, mama thank you for your kind gesture, but let it be next time because my journey is far before I get to my final destination, the portion would have decayed.

In another incident my mother lost her boat with the entire foodstuff she had bought for sale because the boat was not well tied to the shore. The next morning we went out looking for mama’s boat and her foodstuff. If you like, call it going out to search for mama’s shop or stall, because that mobile boat was the shop we had. In every community we got to, we would ask whether they found the boat or not. We finally located mama’s shop at the 8th community from our own. A hunter who had gone out in the night from that community found this strange boat shop and decided to take it to his water front hoping that the owner would show up. When we got there the entire content of mama’s shop boat was intact. The man did not remove a pin. My mother thanked him and we took our shop boat back without paying a dime.

The most exciting aspect of it was that the man even gave a portion from a bush pig he had killed that night, saying that mama’s shop boat brought him good luck that night. He claimed that for the past one week he had been going hunting without success, but that when he saw mama’s floating shop boat, he decided to bring it ashore and tie it firmly to his water front. He then decided to continue his hunting, and that not quite two kilometers away he ran into these bush pigs which by his explanation were mating and he was lucky to kill one of them, but the second one escaped. So not only did we recover our shop boat and its contents, we also had a very fresh portion of bush pig for meal that day.

These were the social settings that existed in our communities then. Communities that were driven by deep values of kindness, honesty and transparency, a communal philosophy of giving and sharing, where the haves have and keep for, on behalf of the whole not self. Societies where you could go to bed with your doors open; houses where there were no doors.

But today caution has been thrown to the wind and people brazenly even appropriate to self that which belongs to all. The social formations now create societies where some live in squalor and abject poverty, while others live in affluence at the expense of the whole. Today words that were alien to our lexicon have started to find their way into dominant pages. We now hear of sea piracy, hostage taking and kidnapping targeted at locals and strangers, highway and sea way robbery, heavily armed criminal gangs in our water ways who wreak all sorts of havoc, all in the name of the Niger Delta struggle. There is no longer trust for one another, not even at the community level.

Religious /Traditional Environment

The clash of traditional and western cultures, religions and belief systems also has opened up sacred shrines and places of worship for drilling and exploration for oil. Ancient landmarks have been pulled down and in some cases destroyed. We are now like a people without a past.

Legal Environment

By decrees, oil and gas became owned by the federal government, and progressively the region’s entitlements by way of derivation-based allocations declined from 50% to a mere 1½% in 1984 and later 3% in 1999 (Augustine Ekelegbe, The Economy of Conflict in the Oil Rich Niger Delta Region, p. 214).

The Northern hegemony taking advantage of military dictatorship began a regime of near total appropriation of the region’s oil resources through an intense over centralization and concentration of power and resources in the federal government. Oil resources were a major target. Various decrees and enactments were made to completely take away control of oil from the locals.

Under the Petroleum Act 1969, the entire ownership and control of all oil and gas in place within any land in Nigeria, under its territorial waters and the continental shelf, is vested in the state of Nigeria. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 further emphasized the state ownership in section 40(3), which provides that "the entire property in and control of all mineral oils and natural gas in, under or upon the territorial waters and the Exclusive Economic Zone of Nigeria shall vest in the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and shall be managed in such manner as may be established by law."

The implication of these laws is that the land available to the locals or people in the Niger Delta is further taken away from them on a daily basis as more oil is found in the land. As the land space gets smaller the struggle for its ownership and control increases and at the same time potential conflict over ownership of land increases.

The Local and International Economic Environment

Nigeria is a major player in the world energy market. It is the seventh largest producer of oil in the world. It supplies a fifth of United States oil imports. It is further becoming an important supplier in the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market. Instability in world oil supplies and the critical link of oil to the international economy has made Nigerian and more generally African oil to be more strategic than ever.

The irony is that the local economic environment is determined and driven by powers and economic forces that transcend beyond our borders - the IMF, the World Bank, Paris Club, Creditors Club, and so on.

We do not have any control over the oil we produce, the quantity to be produced, the price at which to sell, who to sell to and at what price to refine it. Nor do we have the powers to determine at what price we should sell to ourselves.

Other factors at the fore of regional conflicts are strong economic considerations, desperation and the need to amass wealth. Economies of crisis and war in the region have largely been underpinned by greed and high levels of corruption. There is also the profiting from conflicts by youth militias, rebels, armed gangs and even government soldiers. This involves plundering, bunkering, looting, and extortion, imposition of tolls, and robbery of local people, traders and farmers. Most youth militias are driven by the opportunity to acquire properties and riches. The economy underpins an extensive proliferation of arms and the pervasiveness of crime, violence and communal/ethnic conflicts.

The challenges of creating and ensuring access to these benefits have fuelled a deadly struggle among the ethnic and community leaderships, the elites, businessmen and politicians, youths, women and various other groups in the region. It has also fuelled deadly and violent conflicts as each group struggles to prove their relevance and capacity to disrupt the oil economy.

Individuals and groups struggle to control and dominate access and actual opportunities and benefits. The emerging greed, corruption and distributive conflicts underpin numerous incidents of community disturbances and criminal violence in the region.

Ibeanu (2002: 165) describes the situation as a ‘matrix of concentric circles of payoffs and rewards built on blackmail and violence.’ He continues:

The closer a person is to the centre, the greater his/her capacity to blackmail oil companies and therefore the greater his/her payoff. In time, members of the raucous inner circle fade away in a whimper and silence as a new core of vocal community leaders emerge: more blackmail, more payoffs.

Historical / Political Environment

The history of protests and conflicts of acrimony by the Niger Delta peoples against forced union and exploitation dates back to 1957 when testimonies were made in respect thereof before the Willink Commission of Inquiry into Minority Fears. What were those fears? They were fears of marginalization, neglect and the politics of exclusion, by the ethnic majority-based ruling political parties and governments of the then Eastern and Western Regions. Subsequently, several protests and clamors for justice have been registered to no avail.

Characteristically, both military and civilian governments have ignored clamors for equitable remedies, and forcibly smothered protests through use of overwhelming military might and other documented acts of state sanction and political violence.

The prevailing concept of federalism in Nigeria today falls short of expectations in both definition and practice. To the extent that it is being practiced as quasi-federalism, there has been an overly centralized control of resources by the Federal Government. This aberration continues to generate perpetual conflicts with indigenous rights; hence, it has become a major cause of conflicts in the Niger Delta Region, especially from notorious derivation principles for revenue allocation to states in the region.

The Way Forward

• Institutions of government and development interventionist agencies should, as a matter of urgency, fast track the process of environment remediation and ecosystem restoration.
• The issue of transparency and accountability should be taken more seriously.
• Legislations, decrees and enactments that are disempowering should be reviewed and where necessary abrogated as they continue to serve as an impediment to peace and security.
• Development priorities should be set by local communities.
• Local community participation in the resource mobilization, management and allocation should be given the attention it deserves. At least 30% of oil revenue should go directly to oil bearing communities.
• The political process should be made transparent and fair for free entry and exit of those with integrity and men whose vision and values are driven by the desire to serve not to be served.

• This paper was presented at the Niger Delta Environmental Roundtable at the Hotel Presidential Port Harcourt November 16, 2006.

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

Reference:
[1] Augustine Ikelegbe - The Economy of Conflict in the Oil Rich Niger Delta Region
[2] Oke Ibeanu - Oiling the Friction; Environmental Conflict Management in the Niger Delta of Nigeria
[3] CYRIL Obi - Globalised Images of Environmental Security in Africa
[4] Actionaid - Policy Watch (Perspective on Peace Building)
[5] UNDP - Niger Delta Human Development Report
[6] Actionaid - Conflict and Human Security
[7] Joel Bisina - Oil and Corporate Recklessness in Nigeria
[8] Dr. Walter Abeng Mboto - Regional Resources Versus Environmental Conflict in the Niger Delta.
[9] Zak Harmon- World Bank, Big Oil and the Niger Delta.

In most African states, homosexuality is illegal. Juliet Victor Mukasa writes that in Africa, transgender people are punished and ostracised for being who they are. “While still with my parents, I was always beaten by my father for “behaving” like a boy. In school, the same story. While peeing one day my neighbour’s daughter found me peeing while squatting and she screamed like she had seen a monster.”

As a transgender person who is attracted physically and emotionally to other women, issues that African women and trangenders face are of particular concern to me. The one thing that all transgender people have in common is that we do not fit into traditional gender categories.

We’re taught that that a human being must behave, present themselves, dress and so on in only two ways…male or female. There are rules that govern genders, unfortunately. Such gender rules include:

-How a man should dress in order to appear masculine;
-What types of jobs are fitting for a woman
-That a woman must only be in a relationship with another man, not with a woman

These rules to govern our behaviour are socially constructed, meaning that they are not “natural”. They are rules made up by people, sometimes with horrible punishments for not following them.

In Africa, transgender people are seriously punished for being who they are. While still with my parents, I was always beaten by my father for “behaving” like a boy. In school, the same story. While peeing one day my neighbour’s daughter found me peeing while squatting and she screamed like she had seen a monster. I became the laughing stock of the village and I expelled myself because of the humiliation. I could speak the whole day about the discomforts I have suffered in life more because I am a transgender person.

All trans-people that I have interacted with mention such, or even worse, moments in their lives. It can be a very deep violation of our being to be forced to perform our gender differently to who we feel it for ourselves.

Some people, like myself, are born with a sense of ourselves as male in some ways, even though we are biologically female.

As a transgender person, it is constantly demanded of me to explain and justify why I do not fit into other people’s ideas of what a woman or a man should be.

As a Human Rights defender, I am working to protect a space for people to exist freely without facing harassment, threats, or violence for not fitting into traditional gender categories.

I can give specific examples of human rights abuses and violations of transgender people in Africa:

- Raped to prove that you are really a woman
- At school and public assembly - humiliation and beatings
- Thrown out of the family home
- Thrown out of subsequent homes by landlords
- Losing jobs because of feeling violated wearing a skirt
- Psychological Effects of Abuse: Depression, Anger, Drinking, Suicide
- Holding a full bladder for 12-18 hours daily
- Being undressed and humiliated
- Being abused by government when trying to get a passport
- In church – I was once stripped naked before a multitude of people. The pastor ‘saw’ the spirit of a young man inside me and they burnt my clothes and shoes in order to kill the male spirit.
- By Police: humiliation, mocking, mistreatment

However, transgender people have also been successful in overcoming these abuses.

In Uganda there is tremendous energy and anger on the part of activists. Many LGBTs are ready to rise up. For example, some transgender men are dressing up in drag and declaring that they have had enough.

Another victory is the establishment of the first specifically Transgender organization on the continent: Gender DynamiX, located in Cape Town, South Africa.

We are now claiming language and claiming spaces. Sometimes it is even difficult for us to understand ourselves because the world has been constructed to make us completely invisible. But now we are finding words to use for urselves such as He She Che.

As an illustration of why we need your support, I would like to highlight the work of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). SMUG is an organization made up of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Human Rights Defenders. Many of us in leadership in this organization are women and several of us are transgender. We face many challenges such as inUganda, on a weekly basis, gay men are arrested and face detention if they do not pay a bribe to be released. This has become a business from which the police benefit. The basic Human Rights of LGBT people are completely disregarded in this process as the police abuse our rights.

Many of us do not receive protection from the police when we face violations of our rights by the surrounding community. One of SMUG’s primary emphases in our workplan for this year is sensitising the police and creating a better working relationship with them.

By having the support, awareness, and protection of international Human Rights bodies, we will be much more effective in this endeavour.Through our work, we aim to help people realise the ways in which we are all connected, whether straight or LGBT, the societal rules governing what a woman has to be like and what a man has to be like hurt us all.

However, we still have many needs. We are an invisible population when it comes to protection. There is almost NO research to understand transgender people’s lives in Africa.We have an undocumented history and are still invisible.

The secrecy and covert nature of our work in Africa also makes us invisible to the larger gender and human rights sector, and to each other. There is almost NO action in this area to protect people who do not fit into traditional gender categories. At the same time we are highly visible and therefore highly vulnerable to discrimination.

Transgender people have the potential to radically challenge discriminatory practices in a way that helps to free all people from sexism. People who cross gender boundaries make transformation of society more possible, and make gender transgressions more acceptable and enable societal gender transformation. We - the transgender community - have the right to tell our stories and have them heard, and to have our lives protected.

Mainstream Human Rights organizations, for the most part, are not accepting or protecting us on any level. As people from all over the world who are concerned about human rights and gender injustice, we need to work together to protect our most vulnerable Human Rights Defenders.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

1. Research and understand the complex self-identification of transgender people in Africa.

2. More effectively monitor human rights situations abuses and violations against Transgender People (such as systematic rape, intimidation, forced undressing, and economic exclusion).

3. Educate the UN bodies and its partners about transgender concerns.

4. Provide training, support, and protection to transgender Human Rights Defenders and allies.

5. Put pressure on local governments, donors, economic powers and human rights institutions toprovide protection for those who do not fit into traditional gender categories and to recognize the way in which transgender people add to the freedom of expression and quality of life of all people.

• This paper was presented at the World International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) PANEL AT 2ND UNCHR SESSION. Juliet Victor Mukasa is the Chairperson of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). Mukasa is also in the ILGA Board of Representatives
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Cape Town, also known as the ‘Mother City’, is one of the top tourist destinations in the world. The city is also one of the most racially segregated cities in the world, and, further, the city is characterized by inequality. Gael Reagon argues that Cape Town is being “enslaved and stratified according to who has material wealth and who does not. The mother city is motherless.”

"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so." Mahatma Gandhi

On 7 December 2006, the city of Cape Town will vote on a bylaw which, if passed or not, will be an acute measurement of our morality. The By Law Relating to Streets, Public Places and Prevention of Nuisances is a slim invidious document that outlines the strategic management of the central city’s spaces and of its people.

It is the social dimension of the ‘nuisances’ bylaw that concerns me heavily on the reasoning that the one operates in relation to the other – that how we treat each other in the same space (our public and natural resources) will indicate who or perhaps more cogently, what we are. In that a society is measured by its treatment of its least.

A reading of the new proposed consolidated nuisances bylaw reveals a political premise and ethical ethos that regard the poor as social untouchables to be driven legally and economically from the centre to the gods know where, the desolate dustbowl of Happy Valley seems the favoured destination. Having in the last few months been walking at all hours the city streets with a crew of thinking caring people - Nombulelo, Mimi, Buyaphi, Wasefa and Sibusiso - we can attest via personal experience and witnessing, that our city is in anomie, an advanced state of lawlessness that benefits the rich and beleaguers the poor.

Rohinton Maistry, in his astute novel, A Fine Balance, set in the crazed schism of the post- independence India/Pakistan split, intones it succinctly, that ‘when they said they would clean the streets of poverty, they meant clean out the poor’.

Here my children who live on the streets are unlawfully arrested daily and nightly; their takings via hustling, begging or work are taken from them by security forces; they are constantly shoved around by the police who will arrest them on the most fragile of pretences for “loitering” or for “riotous” behaviour; here, one of my children was dropped on the mountain for no reason and broke his leg trying to come down; here the peace officers have become pimps, taking the earnings of sex workers under threat of arrest; here my children are woken by boots and pepper spray at any time of day or night; here my disabled street friend Envor Mac was arrested two weeks ago for taking a duvet and sent to Pollsmoor Prison for 2 years; here the excessive needs of tourists and the native greedy ones are given priority over care, shelter and education for my children.

This blessed piece of the planet, in the embrace of two oceans and Table Mountain, a world heritage site; this mother city, our top tourist destination and earner; this city of hybridity , of all colours and tongues; this city is being enslaved and stratified according to who has material wealth and who does not. The mother city is motherless.

But let’s rewind to the legislative birth of this new proposed bylaw that faces us today. It reared its gorgon head four years ago when it was lopped off with the double-edged sword of NGO-led public resistance coupled with a change of city administration with the installment of Nomaindia Mfeketo as mayor. By all accounts, Mfeketo, who in her 2005/6 budget pledged nearly R18 billion to provide shelter and jobs for all the city’s citizens in the next decade, did not have the courage of her conviction (that the bylaw is inherently prejudiced towards the poor) and simply did nothing – she did not facilitate a vote for or against, instead launching her Smile-A-Child publicity campaign.

This suspended status of the bylaw changed this year when the current incumbent, Helen Zille slipped on the mayoral mantle and chain and inaugurated an aggressive revival of the nuisances bylaw.

In May this year, the bylaw was passed by majority vote in a full sitting of council (the ANC voted against it) whose R900 000 social spending budget allocates a third for street people according to Bantry Bay councillor Jean-Pierre Smith. On its promulgation through the Provincial Gazette on 23 June 2006, street people and civil society organizations, largely under the auspices of a 20-member NGO Task Team again registered their protest on the basis that there had been no public participation. The bylaw was withdrawn 3 days later and a 2-week public participation process, inviting the submission of written comments on the bylaw, instituted in late September. According to the NGO Task Team 115 submissions were sent to the city management: 32 from organizations of which 7 support the proposed bylaw and 25 reject it; the rest are from individuals, 14 of whom are neutral, 19 are against it and 43 are in favour of it.

Now, the city managers are ready to vote. They have also just adopted a draft policy on adult street people, developed by Jean-Pierre Smith and entitled A Foot in the Door, which shows some measure of concern for the city’s nearly 10 000 homeless but locates its concerns in a kind of pathological paternalism that brands street people as insane, as drunkards or as drug addicts. Furthermore this draft policy is pretty much the theory that informs the actions proposed in the bylaw.

I have to let you know that though the bylaw will again be formally voted on Thursday (7 December 2006), it has, in effect been law any way. This new ‘nuisances’ bylaw is actually just a consolidation and refinement of a collection of nearly 30 municipal bylaws in existence from Tygerberg to Fish Hoek to the City that have, in amended and non-amended forms, existed from 1903 to now. The 1917 bylaw for the city, last amended in 1944, for instance, prevents spitting in public spaces. This proscription co-incidentally, is still nestling in the new bylaw, the infringement of which will elicit a fine of R100.

Since there are no substantive changes and reformulations in the new proposed nuisances bylaw as it stands, and since the 115 written submissions - most from individuals living in wealthy suburbs - can hardly be viewed as a vigorous, comprehensive and inclusive public input (with much respect to those who made submissions in the limited time-span); our city managers will be voting on a bylaw which is already law.

That’s the complicated statutory position. The social implication is simple: the city, like all cities claiming the appellation world class through the capitalist discourse of economic development and its concomitant strategy of urban renewal or regeneration, is shaping itself as a home, boardroom and playground for the black-chip empowered and the dollar rich.

Since the document is in the public domain – you can access it via NGO Task Team members Anna Weekes (021 448 7875) or Patric Solomons (021 762 5423) – I am not going to outline its clauses and sub-clauses except to say that Sub-section 2, which deals with prohibited behaviour, is unashamedly targeted at the mother city’s homeless, jobless and youth subculture.

It proposes severe fines or imprisonment for, amongst others, washing and drying clothes in public, aggressive begging, selling goods or washing cars without permission, shouting, touching someone’s property without consent, dancing and drumming without consent, rollerblading or skateboarding, and for sex work. Fines are anything between R50 – R500.

And, since I do not own an SUV, I will propose to be your GPS and finesse some moral calibration in relation to law, and its bona fide, justice.

This post-fascist bylaw is fundamentally and constitutionally unjust. It denies the underclass the rights to work, live and play in the city. Resistance to this legislative and social deprivation is then criminalized and punished.

This is the law of rapacity. My city is being raped by the men and women who manage it and own it via the Cape Town Partnership – a private/public partnership between the City of Cape Town, property owners and business sealed in 1999 – led by Shaun Johnson, the chief executive of the Mandela/Rhodes Foundation.

It’s property namesake, the plush new Mandela/Rhodes Place in St George’s Mall owned by Eurocape, houses apartments that can be bought for anything between R1- R7 million.

The CTP manages the Central City Improvement District (CCID) which employs a private security firm, g4s, to implement its strictures to clean the streets of the homeless in a relentless campaign of low-intensity terror and petty avarice.

On the street and in the parliamentary session Patricia de Lille (Member of Parliament) held last week with street people the word is informed and unambiguous: NO. No, the street people are saying, we will not be treated like non-citizens and non-human beings because a few want too much.

Marwaan Abrahams aka ‘Kakkies’ says that the bylaw is “how they fight us”. “All they see is criminal, but they don’t know what is going on inside. All the wrong things that you did that you went to prison for, when you come out you are hunted and still treated the same. Me, I am on a level. I am transformed, they are not. We are in a war. A total war”.

• This article first appeared in the Cape Argus, and it is republished here with a kind permission of the author. Gael Reagon is a freelance journalist and is based in Cape Town.
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The Supreme Court of the Democratic Republic of Congo has declared Joseph Kabila the winner of a controversial presidential run-off election held on 29 October. After the elections, Jean-Pierre Bemba filed an electoral fraud petition with the Supreme Court and asked it to nullify the vote. After reviewing the petition, the court rejected Bemba's objections, on grounds of insufficient evidence. Peluola Adewale argues that “to avoid a serious post run-off election crisis, foreign diplomats were reportedly trying to persuade both presidential contestants to agree to grant a measure of personal, financial and legal protection to whoever loses. This is to assure the would-be loser and perhaps, his backers, that their share of the looted mineral wealth of the Congo will not be lost.”

Voters in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) went back to the polls on 29 October 2006 for the run-off presidential election. The contest was between Joseph Kabila, the incumbent, installed in 2001 after his father Laurent was murdered by a presidential security aide, and Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former warlord and one of four vice presidents in a power-sharing government that was set up to end a five year war. The 30 July election did not produce a clear winner out of 33 presidential candidates. Kabila got 45%, while Bemba got 20% of the votes on a 70% turnout.

‘The Economist’ magazine (London, October 26, 2006), described the choice the Congo’s voters had to make in the run-off election as choosing between “cholera and the plague”.

The provisional results for the second round of elections, released on 15 November, suggest Kabila has won the election. Kabila won 58.05% and Bemba got 41.95%. Bemba however, alleged there was fraud, with more than one million fake votes for Kabila and filed a complaint at the Supreme Court of Justice. This means that the final results will not be ready until November 30 when the court is expected to give its verdict on the election.

The results, like those in the first round, reflect the sharp division along ethnic lines, between the East of the country, where Kabila has the upper hand, and the West, including the capital, Kinshasa, where Bemba has a big following. This is ominous for the post-election situation.

Many Bemba supporters believe the UN and Western powers financed and organised the elections to establish Kabila as president and to have a ‘legitimate government’. The powers hope this will allow giant corporations to fully exploit the Congo’s natural wealth, as well as allowing EU States a pretext to stop refugees fleeing the Congo from entering Europe.

After the first round of elections in August, 30 people were killed in gun battles. For the second round, UN and EU troops tried to gather weapons in Kinshasa, and used armoured vehicles and helicopters to patrol the city’s streets.

However, the people of the Congo apparently expect the electoral process, the first in more than four decades, to provide relief for a country whose only history is that of rapacious and ruthless colonialism, parasitic dictatorship, official corruption and brutal war. The country, which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe, has only 300 miles of paved roads! Yet, the Congo is potentially one of the richest countries in Africa, due to its enormous natural resources and mineral wealth.

For 32 years (1965 - 1997) the country (formerly known as Zaire) was ruled and ruined by a staunch ally of the West in the Cold War era, Mobutu Sese Seko, who plundered the economy and repressed the people.

Mobutu so personified corruption that it was for his government the term ‘kleptocracy’ – a combination of kleptomaniac (compulsive thief) and autocracy - was originally coined. Mobutu was installed with the support of the US and Western European powers, which earlier supervised the overthrow and killing of Patrice Lumumba, the left-leaning first prime minister of post-colonial Congo after winning independence from Belgium in 1960. As was the practice in the Cold War era, the Western imperialist powers enthroned Mobutu to secure Congo for continued imperialist exploitation and to act as a launching site against “communism” in the region, particularly Angola. The USA provided more than $300 million in arms and $100 million in military training for the dictatorship. Western imperialism also provided Mobutu with loans that plunged the country into a serious debt burden, even when they knew that Mobutu accumulated money for self-enrichment. The dictator amassed a personal fortune estimated at $4 billion and ran up a $12 billion external debt.

The removal of Mobutu from power, in 1997, by Laurent Kabila-led guerrilla insurgents, not only failed to provide a solution to the terrible poverty facing most people in the Congo, but, in reality, set the stage for worse disaster. The 1998 insurrection by rebels linked to Rwanda and Uganda triggered a war involving six other nations. Between 1998 and 2003, the Congo was plunged into what was described as the bloodiest conflict since the Second World War. Over four million people were killed in the conflict, which was termed “Africa’s world war” because it involved six other African countries; Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Kabila has had his own army since the 1990s, while Bemba has had an armed force since the early 2000s, when he ruled parts of northeast Congo.

The war led to the United Nations’ (UN) biggest and most expensive mission, involving an 18,000-strong peace-keeping force and expenditure of $1.1 billion a year. However, a journalist, Aidan Hartley, described ‘Monuc’ (as the UN force in Congo is known), as an ill-equipped ‘Third World’ army, which had to make do with old American and Soviet aircraft dating back to the Vietnam era. He also queried the morality of the UN using contingents from a military dictatorship (Pakistan) and from monarchies (Nepal and Morocco) to ‘help’ Congo become democratic. Hartley wrote that the UN’s approach in the Congo was similar to the disastrous US-led mission in Somalia, in 1993. During that conflict, the imperialist powers sub-contracted the task of stabilising the crises to their allies in African and other developing nations while ensuring their continued exploitation of Africa.

The Congo war was fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth with all sides, including multinational corporations from the West, taking advantage of the anarchy to plunder the natural resources. The resources were also used to finance the conflict. The country is rich in diamonds, water, coltan, copper, timber and other natural resources. A 2001 UN Security Council report on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in the Congo, estimated that Rwanda, alone, might have gained at least $250 million over a period of 18 months from the pillage of coltan. This was said to be substantive enough to finance the war. Burundi and Uganda were also seriously indicted by the report. Coltan is used in high-tech industries as a key component in the manufacture of mobile phones, computers, stereos and VCRs. Its price soared substantially in 1999 and 2000 when the world supply was decreasing and demand was increasing, thereby leading to a large increase in production of coltan in the Congo.

The US, Belgium, Britain and France are also implicated in the Congo conflict. They manipulated the conflict for their economic interests and supplied millions of dollars of weapons to different sides in the conflict. Large quantities of arms were transferred by US and Britain to the Congo, via Eastern European countries.

Perhaps more than any other country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) deserves peace, having known only exploitation and crisis - economic, social and political – since its inception as a state.

The ‘Independent’ newspaper (London, 28 July 2006) described the country as “the most blighted nation on the earth”. But the November election will not bring the peace so yearned for by working people in the Congo, if events since the first election round are anything to go by. The results of the first round elections in August, were greeted by three days of fighting between the armies of Kabila and Bemba. Less than a week before the 29 October election, violent clashes took place daily. Between August and late October over 30 people were killed in street battles. Fighting, which left two people dead, broke out on 13 November, after the second round provisional results put Kabila ahead.

To avoid a serious post run-off election crisis, foreign diplomats were reportedly trying to persuade both presidential contestants to agree to grant a measure of personal, financial and legal protection to whoever loses. This is to assure the would-be loser and perhaps, his backers, that their share of the looted mineral wealth of the Congo will not be lost.

The long-suffering masses of the Congo desperately yearn for an end to war. But ‘peace’ established under the auspices of former warlords and imperialist powers will not end poverty, joblessness and all the other abundant social ills facing working people. Only a policy of transforming the devastated economy, including building adequate infrastructure, and fundamentally improving living standards, could allow the poor masses to expect to see light at the end of the tunnel. But this will not happen as long as the Congo is run on the basis of anti-poor, neo-liberal policies, as dictated by the IMF/World Bank, and for as long as the Congo’s huge mineral wealth is plundered by the multinationals.

To free up resources to guarantee basic needs, like education, health, water, electricity and proper roads, the huge natural resources of the Congo have to be taken into public ownership, under the democratic management and control of working people. Disastrous neo-liberal economic policies have to end.

Transforming the lives of the mass of people in the Congo is impossible under capitalism, which sees it remaining a neo-colonial country under the stranglehold of imperialism.

Whether the presidential election ends conflict or not, and irrespective of whether Kabila or Bemba is in power, under capitalism workers and the poor of the Congo will discover that their living standards cannot be meaningfully improved, despite the enormous resources of the country. This can open up possibilities for the ideas of mass struggle in opposition to the local rulers and imperialism, and the growing support for a socialist alternative. Of course, workers’ organisations are weak, due to years of dictatorship and devastating war, but only by building independent organisations of workers and the poor can the grip of the local looters and imperialists be broken in the DR Congo.

• Peluola Adewale is the editor of the Socialist Democracy, Lagos Nigeria.
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted LRA leader Joseph Kony and four of his lieutenants for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during their 20-year-old rebellion. The government has proposed a traditional form of justice, Mato Oput, to replace the ICC indictments. Dieu-Donné WEDI DJAMBA explores the implications such a move will have for the post-conflict Democratic Republic of Congo, where the national judicial system is in collapse, and the only alternative left for victims of war to seek justice from is the ICC. This article is the last installment of a two-part series. The first article, entitled “The Ugandan Peace Process in Perspective” was published last week.

The ICC determines whether a State’s criminal procedure, including non-party States’ criminal procedures, conforms with the principles of “due process” or not. The standard adopted by the ICC for its determination is “the minimum guarantees” provided by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).[1] And, Mato Oput may not conform to this principle of “due processes”.

Furthermore, there is need to improve Mato Oput for it to be suitable as an alternative to the ICC. This raises the question whether still it remains a possibility to see Kony and his senior commanders standing trial under Mato Oput, because the ICC’s Rome Statute provision article 17(admissibility principle) [2] provides that a case being investigated or prosecuted by a State member can be admissible to ICC(art.17,(1)a and b) but not reversed.

Indeed, there is jurisprudence for the ICC to prosecute Kony and his senior commanders because the Ugandan government itself referred the case to the international criminal court.

It must be noted that in order for the ICC to drop a case already at the investigation, prosecution or trial phase, and for a State to continue with the same case, this will create an judicial unsafe (delay of process). It would also be important to find out what happens if once again the same case became admissible to the ICC under articles 17(1)a and b after being handed over to a concerned State by ICC under the Complementarity principle.

Therefore, if Mato Oput will apply the international law standard, it will be helpful for the future case. Secondly, Acholi people are asking for Kony and his senior commanders to be prosecuted through Mato Oput. [3] But do they (Kony and other) ask for any prosecution by Mato Oput applying an international law standard? The possibility is they may ask for amnesty in order to avoid prosecutions. I am also of the argument that even if the Mato Oput has an international law standard it would not be the best option for Kony and his senior commanders.

The withdrawal of the warrants of arrest

Another threat faced by the ICC in the Ugandan peace process is the demand to withdraw warrants of arrest against the LRA leaders, which could set an unfortunate precedent for other ICC cases.

The wanted LRA leaders want the warrants of arrest withdrawn before they will emerge from the bush to sign the peace agreement. “The ICC warrants of arrest against the LRA leaders should be dropped, so that a peaceful conclusion to talk can be reach”, said the LRA spokesman Obonyo Olweny. [4] Otti Vincent, one of the wanted LRA leaders, said in a call to a Gulu-based radio station that “Kony and I can not attend the peace talks although they wanted one of the top leaders of the LRA to attend. We are afraid of the ICC indictment on us. If you can convince the Uganda government to withdraw the case at the ICC, we are ready to come out of the bush freely”.[5] And he warned “there will be no peace deal unless international indictment for the top rebels are dropped”.[6]

Uganda has offered the five rebels leaders a blanket amnesty if they agree to a peace deal, and hinted at a possible negotiation with the ICC over the indictment. [7] The Uganda peace talks mediator, Dr Riek Machar, has taken a middle position to the LRA’s demand that warrants of arrest be withdrawn, saying “we are not telling the ICC to stop what they are doing….We are just asking them to give the peace process a chance.”[8]

Contrary to Machar’s view, the ICC’s Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo urged that the best way to finally stop the conflict is to arrest the top leaders. And he added that “Kony will eventually face the trial.”[9]

The ICC involvement in northern Uganda is viewed as a complication by all sides. While the ICC prosecutions have been an important factor in bringing the LRA and the government to the table, they now limit the options available to mediation because they and the broad international community are unlikely to accept a deal providing a broad amnesty and lacking strong justice and accountability mechanisms. At the same time, the commanders indicted by the ICC will not be interested in any deal that fails to protect them from ICC prosecution and fails to guarantee their personal safety.[10]

If the warrants of arrest are withdrawn, the question remains: who shall be blamed? Interviewed in February, senior ICC official Phakiso Mochockoko said that “The situation in northern Uganda was referred to the ICC prosecutor (Argentina lawyer Luis Moreno Ocampo) by the government of Uganda. And as a result of that, the ICC is obliged to exercise its mandate in accordance with the statute”.[11] As such it seems that cracks in the Rome Statute would need to be found before any warrants of arrest could be withdrawn.

Under article 53 of the Rome Statute, the prosecutor has the discretion to stop prosecutions that no longer serve ‘the interest of justice’. Article 53 can only be used to end, not suspend, a case. An option of last resort subject to serious constraints, it calls for the prosecutor to consider the ‘interest of justice’, not peace. This is in line with the ICC’s stated purpose articulated in the statute’s preamble, which is to end impunity and ensure prosecution of those most responsible for the gravest crimes. As such, any decision to stop a case prior to prosecution, except on the most compelling grounds, is contrary to the court’s core principles.[12]

Therefore, if for some Ugandan people (including Kony and his senior commanders) the ICC is an obstacle towards peace, the way “to give peace a chance” as Machar says, is to leave any decision to put the prosecutions on hold to the Security Council, as provided by article 16 of the Rome Statute.

This article permits the Security Council to determine that an agreement would be in the interest of peace and to require the ICC by a chapter VII resolution to defer action for renewable one-year periods, thereby suspending and not halting prosecutions.[13]

The time limitation of one year placed on the Security Council by the Rome Statute was both a recognition that article 16 should not become a back door to impunity, and a realization that the threat of not renewing a deferral gives the Security Council a tool for ensuring compliance with an agreement. Thus, even if the Council does intervene, the LRA may not be satisfied.[14]

But the Crisis Group argues that in theory, the Security Council could give de facto amnesty by promising to renew the yearly deferrals for the lives of the indicted, though such a pledge should at least be accompanied by a clear understanding that any violations by the LRA would mean a resumption of prosecutions.[15]

Article 16 of the Rome Statute does not provide any limit in terms of how many times the Security Council should renew a deferral action. This omission is a threat for the ICC as an anti impunity symbol. And any unlimited renewal one-year period in LRA leaders’ case will set a precedent for the future ICC case and for international justice.

The Blanket Amnesty

Tina Rosenberg argues that a country’s decisions about how to deal with its past should depend on many things: the type of dictatorship or war endured, the type of crimes committed, the level of societal complicity, the national political culture and history, the conditions necessary for dictatorship to occur, the abruptness of the transition, and the new democratic government’s power and resources. She added that different countries have chosen widely different strategies to deal with the past.[16]

Among these strategies, is the granting of amnesty. This strategy is used by different countries in order to end conflict or dictatorship regimes. Samuel P. Huntington [17] distinguishes three types of democratization transitions: transformations, replacements and transplacements.

In transformations, those in power in the authoritarian regime take the lead and play the decisive role in ending that regime and changing it into a democratic system. In replacements however, democratization results from the opposition gaining strength and the government losing strength until the government collapses or is overthrown. In transplacements, democratization is produced by the combined actions of government and opposition.

In recent past, many dictatorship regimes used the amnesty strategy during transition to democracy to grant themselves a blanket amnesty such as in Chile with the Pinochet regime.[18] Others used the National Conference Forum such as in Togo with the Etienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma regime [19] , and in the DRC (former Zaire) with the Mobutu regime.[20]

However, in transplacements, the granting of amnesty has also been chosen in many countries. This amnesty could be a broader one, such in Sierra Leone [21] or conditional such as in South Africa.[22]

Thus in order to end a war conflict or a dictatorship and to establish a real democracy, many countries have chosen to grant a amnesty. Uganda is among them.

Indeed, the Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni has offered a blanket amnesty to LRA leaders in order the end the over 19 year long deadly civil war in his country. As noticed the BBC News: “Mr. Museveni clearly feels that for now, the most important thing to achieve is peace. And, in the interest of that peace, the widespread crimes of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army should be put to one side.’’[23]

The ICC at The Hague may disagree. The court was founded on the basis that there can be no durable peace without justice, which to some extent satisfies victims that wrong have been addressed.[24]

At a 2002 meeting to mark the fourth anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nation, said “The date of 17 July 1998 will long be remembered as the world finally united to bring an end to the culture of impunity”.[25] But challenging impunity does not only mean ferreting out former dictators from wherever they may be hiding in order to have them stand trial for the crimes they committed. It also means not extending amnesties to people accused of committing crimes against humanity.[26]

However, this point of view is not shared by all Ugandan people. Indeed, as noted IRIN, Ugandans are “…tired of war, most people want the rebels forgiven”. According to them, maintaining a tough stance against the rebels and fighting them has only prolonged their suffering. “We are in a mood of forgiveness. Let the International Criminal Court not spoil our party preparations”, some Ugandans have said.[27]

The ICC’s aim to close “the gap of impunity” is felt by some Ugandan people to be a threat to the peace in Uganda. Some of them do not hesitate to criticize the presence of the ICC in the Uganda peace process. An internally displaced person, Nikson Owinyi, told Jan Egeland that “The international community should tell the ICC that the Acholi people don’t like ICC in these affairs because it is holding back the peace process.”[28]

Again Peter Onega, has claimed that the decision by the international court has left their work in “total confusion”. He stated further, that “the statute establishing the ICC overrides the national laws and the court may decide to issue other warrants of arrest for people they have even issued amnesty to. …..The warrant would scare away willing rebels and frustrate the commission’s effort to negotiate for ex-rebels return”, he added.[29]

Indeed, in a bid to bring about a cessation of violence, the UAC was set up to offer a blanket amnesty to militia and soldiers. It was hoped that this amnesty would encourage them to lay down their weapons without fear of reprisal. Then in October, 2005, the ICC issued warrants of arrest against five members of the LRA in Uganda and this move effectively undid the work of the UAC.[30]

But Luis Moreno Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor for the ICC, made himself clear on this issue when he told IRIN, “Domestic amnesties are strictly a matter for national authorities and do not act as bar to an investigation by the ICC”. Thus, the message was that at a national level, amnesties may be granted, but they will not be guaranteed at an international level.[31]

The rejection of amnesty for perpetrators of human rights abuses on the basis that such amnesties are incompatible with the principle of international law has been steadily involving the whole world. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia observed in 1998 that amnesties covering certain crimes’ “would not be accorded international legal recognition” despite having legal force in that country. Spanish and French courts have also lent their backing to this interpretation, and the inter-American court of Human Rights in 2001 stated “All amnesty provisions are inadmissible, because they are intended to prevent the investigation and punishment of those responsible for serious human rights violations, which are non-derogable rights recognized by international human rights law.”[32]

The UN holds the understanding that the amnesty provisions of the agreement shall not apply to the “international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law.”[33]

Indeed, the amnesty issue facing the ICC in the Ugandan peace process is an opportunity for the international justice system to show the international community as a whole that the impunity gap is closed.

Far from spoiling the peace process in Uganda, the ICC could boost it. Its deterrent effect is one of the main explanations for the sudden willingness for the LRA leaders to negotiate. They no longer have anywhere to hide. They have lost support - the southern Sudan is no longer a threat for the government of Khartoum, and they are wanted in DRC by the MONUC, the UN mission in DRC after killing eight Guatemalan peacekeepers in Eastern DRC.[34]

Often, people like Kony and other LRA leaders need to be backed against the wall before one can expect any agreement from them for a negotiated solution. Mobutu, the DRC former president accepted negotiations with Laurant Desiré Kabila, the other former DRC President, (then rebel leader) when almost ¾ of the country was controlled by the rebel group in 1997 . ‘The rebels Lords Resistance Army has called for the resumption of peace talks with the Ugandan government’ noted IRIN.[35]

As noted by the Citizens for Global solutions (CGS), Kony is exactly the type of person for whom the ICC was created. [36] Therefore, the blanket amnesty through a peace agreement becomes the last chance for a way out.

The implications of the Ugandan peace process in the Ituri District

As has been said before, DRC is affected by a deadly war which has resulted in over three million deaths and widespread displacement. The killing and other atrocities committed against the population by the national army, foreigners armies, rebel groups, and militias raises the issue of accountability of the perpetrators and reparation for the victims.

But in the DRC, the national judicial system is in collapse. According to Human Rights Watch, the DRC’s national justice system is in a state of disarray. It will likely take years to establish a functioning, independent, impartial and fair judiciary.[37] And the Commission Vérité Reconciliation (CVR) - the Congolese truth commission - established by the Pretoria Agreement with the mandate to address reparation has failed to do its work.[38]

Therefore, the ICC becomes the alternative for the thousands of victims wanting to see justice done by holding their perpetrator accountable and getting reparations owed to them.

Among the most affected by the war is the population of Ituri District in northeast DRC bordering with Uganda. This population expects prosecution of the likes of Combra Matata, leader of the Ituri Patriotic Resistence Front (FRPI), one of the active militia groups and responsible for several atrocities including rape, burning houses and killing.[39]

The Ituri people also expect prosecution of Kawa Mandro of PUSIC, an Ituri militia [40], Peter Karim of Front des nationalistes et Integrationnistes (FNI) and Mathieu Ngudjolo of Mouvement des Révolutionnaires Congolais (MRC) [41]. Already there is a concern among the population in Ituri after the government appointed two ex-militia leaders, Peter Karim (FNI) and Mathieu Ngudjolo (MRC) as colonels in the national army [42], in the name of peace.[43]

But for the victims of war in the DRC, especially in Ituri, ‘peace’ means positive peace, one in which justice is addressed, human rights are respected and people live without any fear (as opposed to a negative peace such as a ceasefire, which is negative because it stops the war but does not address other issues). [44] And this ‘peace’ has to be based on the concept of justice. There is no peace without justice. But this justice has to be taken into the transitional justice perspective.[45]

Indeed, transitional justice offers a deeper, richer and broader vision which seeks to confront perpetrators, address the need of victims and assists in the start of a process of reconciliation and transformation.[46] Therefore, the Uganda peace process is very important for the people of that country.

The ongoing peace process in Uganda is being followed with interest by both the victims and perpetrators in Ituri District. The success or failure of the ICC in the LRA leaders case will have many implications. Successful prosecution will create an expectation for several victims of similar atrocities in Ituri to see their own perpetrators held accountable for their crimes and to expect reparations. It will produce a deterrent effect to other militias who are still active in the same area. [47] Indeed, the arrest of Thomas Lubanga, one of the militia leaders in Ituri by the ICC in April this year produced a strong deterrent effect. “Many here in the East are afraid the court will come…we all now are thinking twice . We do not what this court can and will do”, confessed Xavier Ciribanya, former rebel leader of the RCD-goma and suspected of a range of crimes against civilians in both Kivus and Ituri.[48] Therefore, the ICC remains key in ending the violence and the last hope for the victims to see their perpetrators prosecuted, and to receive reparation after the complete failure of the CVR to address the issue. [49]

But, on other hand, failure will encourage the culture of impunity in Ituri District.

Indeed, the three conditions raised in the Ugandan peace process can be used by the different perpetrators in Ituri: firstly the Mato Oput option will gives people like Combra Matata who still has weapons the opportunity to escape a real trial. Secondly, the withdrawal of the warrants of arrest will give future perpetrators the chance to claim the Ugandan ICC case as jurisprudence. Finally, the blanket amnesty will be an opportunity for those prosecutable in Ituri District to extend the content of the law adopted by the DRC National Assembly which gives the CVR the power to propose amnesty for acts of war, political crimes and crimes of opinion.[50]

Conclusion

The ongoing peace process in Uganda is critical for the Ugandan people. This peace process can finally end the 19 year long deadly war which deeply affected the northern Ugandan people. But at the same time, the peace process in Uganda is critical for the ICC which faces its first test as the symbol to impunity. Furthermore the Ugandan peace process has implications for the Ituri District.

As a symbol for the ending of impunity or the closing of the impunity gap, the ICC has to stand behind its warrants of arrests. Justice has to be done. Not only for the victims in northern Uganda, but for others, including the Ituri.

The ICC is established not only for Uganda and its future will depend on what decision it takes today in order to secure tomorrow in its fight against the impunity. ‘Justice for today’s crimes supplies the legal foundation needed to deter tomorrow’s atrocities. Without justice, there is no peace’.[51]

• Dieu-Donné WEDI DJAMBA is a lawyer (Advocate)at the Lubumbashi Bar association/DRC; Consultant; Assistant lecturer in the College of Law in Lubumbashi/ DRC; Human Rights Activist and Writer. Tel:+243812485222;+27738362921 ; Fax:+18016727206 Email: [email][email protected];[email protected]
• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

References:

[1] Lijun Yang, “On the Principle of Complementarity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”,Chinese Journal of International Law (2005),vol 4,Nº1 (accessed 11October 2006)
[2] Rome Statute, (accessed]http://www.sierra-leone.org/lomeaccord.html>(accessed 23 Octoberd 2006)
[22] Alex Boraine, “A COUNTRY UNMASKED”, Oxford University Press,2000,pp270.
[23] BBC News “Afrca’s mixed amnesty
[24] BBC News,op.cit
[25] IRIN.op.cit.
[26] IRIN.op.cit
[27] News.op.cit
[28] IRIN,op.cit
[29] Joseph Yav Katshung, op.cit
[30] IRIN,op.cit
[31] ibid
[32] ibid
[33] ibid
[34] ibid
[35] ibid
[36] ibid
[37] William W.Burke-White, “International Criminal Court, Complementarity in practice:The International Criminal Court as Part of a System of Multi-level Global Governance in the Democratic Republic of Congo”,Leiden Journal of international Law 18( 2005),pp576
[38] William W.Burke-White,op.cit
[39] IRIN : “DRC: Recently Demobilised militiamen re-arming in volatile Ituri Distict” (accessed 20 September 2006)
[40] Radio Okapi, “George Bush ordonne le blocage des avoirs des seigneurs de guerre de la RD Congo” ,(accessed 1November 2006)
[41] The DRC Defence Minister has publicly stated that the government is determined to work with the ICC to help bring war criminal to book ,after appointing the two ex-mititia, colonel in national army, in IRIN,DRC:Two militia leaders appointed army colonels,(accessed,13 October 2006)
[42] IRIN,op.cit
[43] Dieu-Donné Wedi Djamba,“Congo-Kinshasa:A strategy for Peace And Reconciliation in the DRC?”,in Pambazuka News. http://allafrica.com/stories/200610260875.html >( accessed 26 October 2006)
[44] Professor Jannie Malan used the terms “negative and positive peace” during the course session for the fellowship in Transitional Justice(2006) in Cape town/South Africa
[45] Dieu-Donné Wedi Djamba,op.cit,
[46] Alex Boraine, in: Alex Boraine and Sue Valentine, op.cit,pp25
[47] Alert.net, “More than three million Congolese dead and no one notice,say Is IRC”(accessed 2November 2006)
[48] William W. Burke-White,op.cit.pp588
[49] William W.Burke-White ,op.cit
[50] William W.Burke-White,op.cit
[51] Kathryn Schiele “U.S RATIFICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT”,in Journal of International Relations, James Madison University, Spring 2004,pp59

For an HIV/AIDS breakthrough to happen in Tanzania, a radical approach to tackling HIV/AIDS and its impact is needed, writes Salma Maoulidi, who asks “How can any progress be made in the HIV/AIDS battle if current strategies are superficial and isolated?"

It is over two decades since the first AIDS patient was diagnosed in Tanzania. In response, a number of measures were devised and adopted by the government to respond to the pandemic. These measures reflect the progress in official understanding and attitudes about the disease. Initial responses were comprised mainly of health measures designed to address curative aspects of the disease. Then, denial about HIV/AIDS, even in official quarters, hampered more effective responses to the disease.

The rise of associations of people with or affected by HIV/AIDS, parallel to existing responses, spearheaded psycho-social and policy responses. This brought about two major benefits in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Foremost, it “outed” the disease enabling HIV/AIDS activists to focus more deliberately on addressing stigma, a major barrier in addressing the pandemic at the personal and institutional level. Similarly, concerted advocacy by HIV/AIDS activists brought the disease out of a medical isolation where it was viewed purely in health terms, to the level of considering non-medical dimensions.

The progression from National AIDS Programmes to an AIDS Commission in the late nineties heralded the multi-sectoral approach currently adopted.

For the most part, HIV/AIDS associations have confined their responses to the impact on the individual and community. Overwhelmingly, their response is service oriented e.g. provision of home based care; nutrition programmes; provision of legal services; widow or orphan care; and HIV/AIDS support groups something that hinders their ability to focus on more strategic concerns related to HIV/AIDS. Only a small number of associations mix advocacy with service provision. Accordingly, while Tanzania in the mid nineties declared HIV/AIDS a national calamity, few organizations have built upon this opportunity to advance HIV/AIDS advocacy efforts in a meaningful manner.

Instead, what is new in existing and upcoming HIV/AIDS initiatives is the location; or the gender and youth focus.

HIV/AIDS organizations, mainly veteran associations that have introduced policy advocacy initiatives in their programming, require capacity in translating this in practical policy results and interventions. For example, some HIV/AIDS organizations are pressurizing the government to make ARVs accessible to People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). While the government receives due attention in taking measures to make this a reality, little attention is given to the role of pharmaceuticals in facilitating treatment options. Surely, other than an official commitment in principle to facilitate treatment, there is very little the government can do, in practical terms, to provide ARVs on a mass scale.

This, however, is something local pharmaceuticals can and should be obliged to do. And a few have risen to the challenge, leading discussions with the government under various trade agreements like the East African Community Treaty on Common Markets. Local pharmaceutical companies like the Tanzania Pharmaceutical Industries (TPI), not HIV/AIDS associations, are challenging the monopoly of foreign companies in the production and distribution of ARVs. They capitalize on their geographical location to build a case for ARV production more suited to local populations and at more affordable rates. An added benefit to their proposal is the prospect of creating jobs for local the population. Certainly this development presents an opportunity for partnership between the HIV/AIDS community and the business community that includes aspects of HIV/AIDS advocacy and corporate social responsibility yet to be explored. However, it is a sector HIV/AIDS activist are noticeably absent and silent from.

Equally important is the need for more strategic responses vis á vis the HIV/AIDS pandemic, not only by the government but also by community institutions. The policy and legal framework focuses on “formalized” aspects of discrimination against PLWHA or those affected by HIV/AIDS. Thus due attention is given to the employer-employee relationships; access to health care; and to a smaller extent the question of legal services to PLWHA and their families. These measures, however, fall short of infusing the radical spice to significantly impact PLWHA or their families since they fail to address the primary cause of unhindered HIV/AIDS transmission: the traditional interpretation of the family institution and the unequal relationship between parties in the family union.

Indeed, transmission patterns in Africa, Tanzania included, are largely heterosexual.The majority of those affected or infected with the HIV/AIDS virus are married men and women - not sex workers and not single women or homosexuals. This is important to consider as it dispels a major stereotype of HIV/AIDS victims and transmission of the virus.

It was this breakthrough that enabled HIV/AIDS researchers in the west to begin expanding their investigation of the disease and its transmission beyond the homosexual community or intravenous drug users. The fact that HIV/AIDS in Africa and Asia is transmitted mainly through heterosexual contact debunked the Sodom and Gomorrah theory which confined the problem to a particular group in the society considered immoral to be dispelled.

What is interesting is that in spite of this knowledge, most institutions representative of patriarchal authority lack the will to redress this situation. For example, they fail to focus on the unequal relationship between man and wife that allows the man unfettered sexual access, thereby compromising the health and life of his spouse. Many times this is done with the full endorsement of public and legal institutions under the rubric of preserving the religious or cultural order. In effect, the interest is rather in preserving the status quo rather than guaranteeing equal protection and treatment to both spouses even when this is required by the constitutional order.

Indeed, women the world over, and particularly in Africa, are vulnerable to HIV transmission not only from their partners but also when performing reproductive functions e.g. during childbirth or taking care of family members infected with the disease. Yet, we are yet to have legal mechanisms that address this aspect of their vulnerability. If anything, there is resistance and denial about what is at issue in empowering women in exercising greater control over their bodies and lives.

Additionally, whereas the individual is sanctified under most religions, and cultures recognize ungendered interpretations impose limits to the exercise of individual authority when it relates to the female sex, confirming the continued discrimination against women in public and private spheres: Under the constitutional and civil orders, men and women have equal rights by virtue of their citizenship. In practice, however, women continue to be considered second-class citizens and consistently denied the protection of the law due to any citizen of a nation state. Widows with HIV/AIDS are doubly punished: they are recklessly infected with the virus and then dispossessed of jointly acquired property from the investments made to their families. In most cases, the law requires that they be looked after by their children or in-laws, even those they brought up!

This is a moral aspect that is yet to be addressed.A recent High Court decision on the inheritance status of widows raises serious questions about the willingness of key public sectors to transform our thinking beyond the cultural rubric, one that is parochial and unsuitable to present realities. In the case of Elizabeth Stephen and another vs. the Attorney General (Miscellaneous Civil Cause no. 82 of 2005) High Court Justice Mihayo dismissed an application lodged by the applicants, two widows, requesting the court to uphold their constitutional and civic rights by declaring discriminatory customary laws and provisions that continue to deny women property rights as unconstitutional. The judges declined to do so, fearing opening up a Pandora’s Box of legal challenges to the practices of about 120 tribes following the same path. Interestingly, while Tanzania gained her independence four decades ago, the legal fraternity represented by these justices seems oblivious to this fact. They choose instead to invoke and apply a reasoning based on a colonial reference, one that reflects a narrow appreciation of African culture as being homogenous and static not dynamic.

In my long legal and activist carrier I know of very few families, affected or not with HI/AIDS, being provided for by the “guardian” as required by courts or some religious orders. In fact, cases of maladministration of family property, whether by self appointed guardians or those appointed by the court or clan, abound with many families being impoverished by greedy relatives with no effective recourse to oblige performance or restitution of the plundered property. Importantly, in this day and age, what is the logic of requiring a blood relation who may be a stranger to the family to assume responsibility of family affairs he has little competence in or will to execute? Does the experience of the female spouse who for years looked after the family count for nothing? This is a clear case of de facto discrimination and should be termed as such.

Undeniably, significant progress has been made with in responses to the pandemic. In this respect, the introduction of a policy and legal framework on HIV/AIDS in Tanzania provides a wider focus on addressing existing and potential challenges related to HIV/AIDS, though presently more attention is given to issues of labour discrimination and treatment options reflecting present, not strategic concerns. Until now the war against HIV/AIDS is defined in militaristic terms: strategies to combat HIV/AIDS; bracing for a national calamity; fighting the scourge etc. We are yet to define it in human terms not only in so far as the health or economic implications but also in so far as the political implications to a class that is vulnerable to the infection.

How can concerted efforts against HIV/AIDS succeed if, at its outset and at the most fundamental level, the effort is not collective? How can transmission be curbed when one party is unsuspecting and not empowered to suppress transmission? How can any progress be made in the HIV/AIDS battle if, current strategies are superficial and isolated? Recognizing women’s bodily integrity and full agency in the family are important ingredients in transforming the HIV/AIDS menace. It is in this regard that I call for a radical response in tackling HIV/AIDS and its impact. I believe rather than viewing HIV/AIDS solely in a negative light, it offers us immense possibilities to re-define social relations and values a new, in ways that are more suited to our present realities and experiences.

• Salma Maoulidi, Executive Director of Sahiba?Sisters Foundation, a women’s development network based in Tanzania.
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Recently, the South Africa government hosted the global launch of the UNDP 2006 Human Development Report. Patrick Bond and Greg Ruiters argue that “…South Africa is apparently considered the UN’s ideal-type setting – and maybe deservedly so, for what might be called ‘talk left’ policies accompanied by ‘turn right’ practices: turning the tap off, that is to say.”

A fortnight ago, the global launch of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2006 (HDR) was in Cape Town, an appropriate choice in a diabolical way. South Africa is apparently considered the UN's ideal-type setting - and maybe deservedly so, for what might be called 'talk left' policies accompanied by 'turn right' practices: turning the water tap off for poor people.

The next day the Mail & Guardian newspaper carried an essay, 'Water is a human right', by Kemal Dervis and SA finance minister Trevor Manuel. Dervis served the World Bank from 1977-2001 before moving home to Turkey as minister for economic affairs. In 2005 he won the UN's third-highest job: UNDP chief administrator, taking over from Mark Malloch Brown (now Kofi Annan's chief of staff), whose prior job was public relations vice president at the Bank.

Manuel was chair of the board of governors of the Bank and IMF in 2000 and then ran their important Development Committee from 2001-2005. As SA finance minister he imposed - without consultation - a neoliberal economic policy in 1996, partly designed by World Bank economists using a Bank economic model whose predictions were disastrously off the mark.

The Bank, by the way, advised former SA water minister Kader Asmal in 1995 that he shouldn't provide the free water promised in the Reconstruction and Development Programme and instead needed 'a credible threat of disconnections'. By 2003, 275 000 families faced water cutoffs due to non-payment, according to former water director-general Mike Muller. In 1999 the Bank labeled its 1995 advice as 'instrumental' for the 'radical revision' of water pricing policy here.

But now Dervis and Manuel advocate water as a 'human right'. Are your bullshit detectors turned on, dear reader? As recently as mid-2003, Manuel told City Press that 'free water has not benefited the rural poor and is difficult and costly to implement'.

There are several problems. First, the UNDP's 20 liter per person daily target provides just one and a half flushes of the toilet. At least, recommend Dervis and Manuel, 'those who cannot afford to pay [should] get it for free.' They claim, 'In South Africa, the basic policy framework' along these lines 'is now in place' thanks to 'the adoption of a rights-based approach to water supply'.

In reality, although it did change from a straight neoliberal approach at the time of the 2000 municipal elections, SA's 'basic policy framework' for water pricing is still far from being rights-based. Its roots can be found in these post-apartheid decisions:

• the state drastically increased the price of municipal water since 1994, especially affecting low-income black people - e.g., in the largest 'market', Johannesburg, prices rose far higher than inflation, in part because of the onstruction of obscenely expensive Lesotho mega-dams whose raw water costs five times more than pre-dam water (conservation was not considered a serious option);

• operating subsidies from national to municipal governments were chopped during the 1990s by 85% in real terms, as one agency admitted, with especially large cuts in the national water budget that supported wretched ex-Bantustan towns;

• the much smaller municipal water subsidies together with the doubling of unemployment in the years after apartheid (thanks to Manuel's neoliberal macroeconomic GEAR policies) logically led to much higher non-payment rates for impoverished citizens, and then the disconnection of water supplies to roughly a million people per year, according to several studies;

• to deal with non-payment, the state began installing Ventilated Improved Pitlatrines ('VIPs') for poor people even in urban Johannesburg, as well as pre-paid water meters in low-income, black neighbourhoods, starting in Soweto; and

• meanwhile rural families relying on state-supplied communal water taps witnessed the breakdown of many, if not most, systems, once again because of affordability constraints that prevented the 'full cost recovery' required to keep the taps turned on.

Johannesburg Water adopted the pre-paid meter tactic shortly after the British government's 1998 banning of these same devices on grounds that self-disconnections due to poverty represent a public health threat - especially poignant for South Africa at a time of the HIV/AIDS crisis and in 2000-02 the country's worst-ever cholera outbreak. The matter is now being pursued by the Campaign Against Water Privatisation in the courts.

Then in July 2001, the world-famous 'Free Basic Water' policy was adopted, in an apparent policy U-turn. But even when implemented in the larger municipalities - for regrettably it does not exist in most smaller ones - the policy provides just six kiloliters per household per month no matter the size of the household (or number of HIV+ family members). After that relatively puny amount, the price rises to excruciating levels.

To illustrate this last point, the city where Free Basic Water policy originated, Durban, provided 6 kl/month free yet at the same time more than doubled 7+ kl/month water bills between 1997-2004. The result was the doubling of the average price of water paid by poor people: from R2 to R4/kl over that period.

What was the impact on the poorest one third of the city's water customers? Shockingly, in the city with the most acute AIDS, cholera and other water-related diseases, the poorest third of households lowered their consumption from 22 to 15 kiloliters from 1997-2004 (an extraordinary -0.55 'price elasticity', the measure economists use to study the impact of prices on consumption).

What about Durban's richest third of all households? Their cut-back was only 3 kl/month (from 35 to 32, a -0.10 elasticity). So the price increases did not have a substantial impact on rich households who waste the most water (in swimming pool evaporation or watering English-style gardens).

The HDR compares Durban water prices with four other major Third World cities and notes that from 7-20 kl/month, it is the highest priced, a third more costly than Dakar and seven times more pricey than Bangalore.

But ironically, the HDR then praises Durban in three bizarre and basically inaccurate ways:

• 'in Durban, South Africa, the lifeline tariff results in a progressive distribution of water subsidies because 98% of poor households are connected';

• 'Durban, South Africa, provides 25 litres of water a day free of charge-the lifeline or social tariff-with a steep increase above this level. This is an important part of the legislative framework for acting on the right to water';

• 'As part of a national strategy of water for all, South Africa transferred a water utility in Durban to a concession. Despite concerns about equity, there has been marked improvement in access among poor households.'

First, by no stretch of the imagination are 98% of poor households connected to Durban's water grid. Indeed there are ongoing evictions in still-proliferating shack settlements, which contain probably between 1/5th and 1/3rd of households.

Second, the 25 liters per day free of charge is an overestimate of what Durban provides larger families, for the 6 kl/month works out to those measly two flushes worth only if the family size is below eight. Women-headed households with AIDS orphans and backyard renters or room tenants are not atypical, and disputes over the small amounts of available water can be debilitating, especially at times of funerals or family events when much more water is needed.

Third, as far as a private concession goes, the UNDP HDR probably means not Durban but Dolphin Coast (since the latter is run by a French for-profit firm while Durban's managers are public sector executives who simply have a for-profit orientation). But sources as diverse as the South African government Human Sciences Research Council and New York Times report that the Dolphin Coast experiment is a failure with regard to poor people's access.

To promote 'core strategies for overcoming national inequalities in access to water', the UNDP report advocates 'establishing lifeline tariffs that provide sufficient water for basic needs free of charge or at affordable rates, as in South Africa.' But not only have municipalities sabotaged the African National Congress 2000 election manifesto promise: 'ANC-led local government will provide all residents with a free basic amount of water, electricity and other municipal services, so as to help the poor. Those who use more than the basic amounts will pay for the extra they use.' As noted, the convex shape of municipal water price tariffs negates this promise, a classic example of micro-neoliberalism.

In addition, the SA Treasury, the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the Department of Provincial and Local Government persistently sought for-profit partners - and some NGOs which also have a full-cost recovery mentality - to implement policy. The UNDP, World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation have been pushing water commercialization for years across Africa.

This is why it is amusing to read, from Dervis and Manuel: 'Too much of the policy discussion on water delivery has been dominated by a dead-end debate on privatisation versus state ownership'. They advocate 'some combination of public and private sector involvement.' These are weasel words, in view of the record of water privatisation in Africa: systematic failure.

On cross-border water transfers, the HDR notes 'the potential benefits of cooperation' by arguing that that the Lesotho Highlands Water Project 'is generating revenue for Lesotho and improved water for South Africa'. Unmentioned are the 1998 SA National Defense Force invasion of the Katse Dam site (when two dozen sleeping Basotho soldiers were killed), the massive ecological damage, the tens of thousands of peasants displaced, and the massive increase in water prices caused by this notoriously corrupt, apartheid-era sanctions-busting mega-dam scheme - or the alternative strategy (never attempted) of conservation and less uneven regional development.

In one painfully honest paragraph, however, the UNDP report concedes some problems: 'As the reforms have rolled out, they have generated a political debate over design and implementation. Some argue that the 25-litre threshold for free basic water is too low. Supplies in some areas have been erratic, forcing households to collect water from far away. Moreover, government pricing policies have led to supply cutoffs for nonpayment in some areas, raising concerns about affordability. Progress in sanitation has been less impressive than in water. There are still 16 million people- one in three South Africans-without access to basic sanitation. The absence of a consensus on an acceptable basic level of sanitation, allied to problems in generating demand, has contributed to the failure.' This is a damning indictment of post-apartheid water policy design and implementation mistakes.

It helps explain why SA witnessed nearly 6000 protests in a recent 12-month period (reported by the SA Police Services). South Africa's water wars have become world famous, as citizens' groups illegally reconnect pipes that have been cut off due to nonpayment, or destroy the hated pre-paid water meters, or dump excrement from the apartheid-era 'bucket system' of sanitation at the doors of their elected officials.

In addition, the UNDP report criticizes Johannesburg's controversial contract with Paris-based Suez, 'because delegation-the transfer of operating authority from local government to utility and from utility to third companies-can obscure accountability and delivery' and because Joburg metro is 'both utility shareholder and regulator.' Captive regulators are ubiquitous in SA, and the national government's failure to even 'name and shame' recalcitrant municipalities - as promised by then water minister Ronnie Kasrils in 2003 - is now legendary. The only serious watchdogs of the Joburg Water company have been the AntiPrivatisation Forum activists in several black townships who keep up pressure for human rights. A recent report by the APF notes the persistence of dissatisfaction regarding pre-paid meters in Soweto and Orange Farm, for example.

In its attempt to sanitise Pretoria's modified-neoliberal water policy, the UNDP HDR reports, incorrectly, that 'A minimum amount of water for drinking is now guaranteed as a legally enforceable right.' The UN officials should have made a short side-trip from Cape Town to Wallacedene. Community leader Irene Grootboom won a seminal Constitutional Court battle against government in September 2000 but her 700-member community still lacked the most essential water services years later.

In sum, the UNDP HDR and the Dervis/Manuel water-rights discourse are less absurd than SA health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang's vegetable stall at the recent Toronto AIDS conference. But given the neoliberal devils in the details, water pricing reform is still long overdue in South Africa. Without it, government's 'talk left, turn right' will continue to be met by substantial community resistance.

• Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and Greg Ruiters directs the Municipal Services Project at Rhodes University Institute for Social and Economic Research.
• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The proposition of a traditional form of justice, Mato Oput, as an alternative to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the Ugandan peace process, raises many questions. Dieu-Donné WEDI DJAMBA points out that the use of Mato Oput, the withdrawal of ICC warrants of arrest against the LRA leaders, and the granting of a blanket amnesty to the LRA leaders have been raised as the conditions for peace in Uganda, yet are posing a threat to the existence of this and even the ICC, whose philosophy is: “There is no justification for worse crimes.” This article is the first part of a two-part series.

The international community is very interested in the ongoing peace process in Uganda between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army, (LRA), a rebel group active in northern Uganda for the past 19 years.

This process started in July 2006 in Northern Uganda and Juba in Southern Sudan. One of the key countries observing the peace process is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Having many events in common with Uganda in the past, there are many factors linking the DRC to the ongoing Ugandan peace process, such as the shared Northeastern border between the DRC and Uganda. The LRA has one of its camps in the Karamba forest in Ituri District, northeast DRC, and many Ituri militia groups who have been involved in many human rights violations and other atrocities are still active there, with links with Uganda.

The end of the civil war in Uganda will be beneficial for the DRC as it will end any justification for the Ugandan government to violate the DRC border under the pretence of fighting the LRA rebellion. In particular, the end of the war will impact positively on the Ituri District, which has been deeply affected by the militia groups connected with Uganda.

The DRC is just emerging from a protracted war involving Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Uganda, Rwanda, Chad, during which over three million people were killed, thousands displaced, thousands still becoming refugees, many atrocities committed, and the HIV/AIDS rate increased. Many issues are outstanding, not least the accountability of the perpetrators and the issue of reparation for the victims of those atrocities.

However, the proposition of a traditional form of justice, Mato Oput [1], as an alternative to the International Criminal Court (ICC) trial, the dropping off of the warrant of arrest against the LRA leaders, the blanket amnesty promised to the LRA leaders by the Ugandan government in exchange for a peace agreement despite the warrant of arrest from the ICC pending upon them, are areas of concern for the DRC. Any outcome on these three issues in Uganda - signatory to the Rome Statute as the DRC - will have implications for the DRC, and the Ituri District.

What impact can the Ugandan peace process have in Ituri (DRC) in the perspective of transitional justice? What other issues does the Ugandan peace process raise? These are the questions I will try to respond to through this paper.

The peace process in Uganda.

The current peace process in Uganda between the Ugandan government and the LRA began in July 2006. The peace talks are taking place in Juba in Southern Sudan and led by Dr Riek Machar, the Vice President of Southern Sudan. [2]

The LRA is a rebel group led by Joseph Kony, that has fought in northern Uganda for the past 19 years. Born in the early 1960’s in Odek, a village East of Gulu, Kony is thought to be the cousin of Alice Lakwena who founded the Holy Spirit Movement in 1986. This group represented the Acholi people in northern Uganda who felt excluded from power after the overthrow of the northern leader Milton Obote by Museveni. Lakwena promised her followers immunity from the bullets of the Ugandan army, but Museveni troops defeated her movement in 1988 and she fled to Kenya. After this defeat, Kony founded his own group which has operated through the abduction of thousands of children to become fighters or sex slaves. Kony himself is thought to have at least 60 wives as he and his senior commanders take the pick of the girls they capture. [3]

According to IRIN [4], nineteen years of the conflict has condemned some two million people in northern Uganda to live in appalling conditions in huge camps within their home districts. Thousands have died during this conflict. The Kony rebel group initially claimed to be fighting to topple a government that has “marginalized” the people of the region but they quickly turned against the same people when support was not forthcoming. [5]

Indeed, Kony appears to believe that his role is to cleanse the Acholi people. He uses biblical references to explain why it is necessary to kill his own people since they - in his view - failed to support his cause. “If the Acholi don’t support us, they must be finished”, he told one abducted person.[6]

Death was not the only one punishment that Kony has afflicted on his people. Mutilation, rape, abduction, slavery and burning of houses were also among the arsenal of weapons he employed against his people. [7]

As a leader, Kony sees himself as a spirit medium and he has created an aura of fear and mysticism around himself, thus his rebels follow strict rules and rituals.[8] His LRA movement demands that Uganda be ruled according to the biblical Ten Commandments. IRIN [9] has observed that over the past 19 years, Kony and his rebel group have not controlled any territory and have rarely tried to control strategic government assets. This made fighting and arresting perpetrators a nightmare for the government until the government petitioned the ICC in The Hague to investigate and indict rebel leaders for their crimes against humanity.[10] The ICC responded and last year issued warrants of arrest for five rebel leaders: Joseph Kony, Vince Otti, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen.[11]

However, since these warrants were issued, peace talks between the LRA and Ugandan government began. A major breakthrough was made when the parties signed a ‘cessation of hostilities agreement’ whereby the LRA agreed to assemble within three weeks at designated points. Rebels in Uganda and Sudan were to go to Owiny-Ki-Bulm in Eastern Equatoria, and rebels in Congo to Ri-Kwangban in Western Equatoria.[12] The rebels would be protected by the Southern Sudanese and the Ugandan government undertook not to attack them. [13]

But the mediators who tried to broker negotiations in the war were not amused as they felt that the justice being sought by the ICC was not the immediate requirement, but a luxury that could be put aside for a while until peace was achieved. [14]

The Ugandan peace process versus the I CC

Very often, when a country wishes to move from war to peace, the search for justice may include trials in an national or international court of law as well as other non-punitive approaches. In recent years there has been a growing demand around the world for transitional mechanisms, such as truth commissions.[15] Juan E. Mendez argues that because accountability problems occur within a broad range of contexts, accountability for past abuses must be considered not only in transitions to democracy, but in seeking solutions to armed conflicts as well. [16]

However, after the ICC issued warrants of arrest against the LRA leaders, some analysts expressed concerns that these warrants effectively ended the peace efforts led by former Uganda minister Betty Bigombe. Once officially charged by the ICC with crimes against humanity, the LRA commanders cannot receive amnesty as part of any political settlement of the conflict. Bigombe herself complained that the court had “rushed too much” as a result of which “there is now no hope of getting (the LRA commanders) to surrender’’. The Roman Catholic Church, which had also helped facilitate the mediation effort, expressed fears too that a political settlement has now been made more difficult. [17]

On the other hand, Juan E. Mendez argues that the ICC warrants of arrest arehelpful for the Ugandan peace process. He told IRIN that, “when you have spoilers like the five people who have been indicted who are really not interested in peace, at some point it is important to remove them from the negotiating table so you can bargain with people who are more interested in peace. This removal, by the fact they are now under indictment, may initially be seen as an obstacle to peace, but farther down the road it may be exactly what is need to get a stable peace in northern Uganda”. [18]

History confirms the validity of Mendez’ argument. The indictment of Charles Taylor [19] was beneficial for the peace process in Liberia, and the death of Dr Jonas Savimbi [20], the ex-UNITA rebel leader, allowed the Angola government to embark on a successful peace process with another UNITA leader.

The road towards peace is sometimes very surprising indeed. A further more complicated proposal is that made by some Ugandans of using ‘Mato Oput’, the traditional form of justice, as an alternative to the ICC processes.

Still others are asking for the ICC warrants of arrest to be withdrawn and there are also those who believe the Ugandan Amnesty Commission (UAC) is good enough to deal with the case.

Thus, the three issues posited as the conditions for peace - the use of Mato Oput, the withdrawal of arrest warrants issued against LRA leaders, and the granting of a blanket amnesty to the LRA leaders, - are becoming a threat to the existence even of the ICC for which the philosophy is: “There is no justification for worse crimes.” [21]

Mato Oput

In reference to the principle of complementarity in the preamble of the ICC, which states that “The International Criminal Court shall be complementary to national criminal court jurisdiction” [22], some observers in Uganda are suggesting that the traditional Mato Oput process of reconciliation be implemented in order to deal with Kony and his commanders. [23]

To confirm this trend, one of the elders in the Internally Displaced People’s (IDPs) camp at Opit, Gulu, in northern Uganda said, “the amount of death in Acholi should not be equated to the pursuing of five LRA commanders’. The elder added that “the Acholi people have a system that is capable of delivering justice in region” [24], referring here to Mato Oput.

Indeed, in Acholi, Mato Oput means drinking the herb of the Oput tree, [25] a blinding-bitter tree [26]. The reconciliation process is called Mato Oput because it ends in a significant ceremony of reconciling the parties in conflict. Barney Afako, a Ugandan Human rights lawyer and consultant to the Amnesty Commission, argues that among the Acholi “many offenses including homicides” were traditionally resolved by reconciliation. [27] If one kills a person, the clan of the killer approaches the clan of victim for reconciliatory justice. [28]

Mato Oput is not a happy ceremony. The moods of all present express the seriousness of the occasion. The process involves the guilty acknowledging responsibility, repenting, asking for forgiveness, paying compensation and being reconciled with the victim’s family through sharing the bitter drink -Mato Oput. [29] The victim’s clan must accept the plea for forgiveness for the reconciliation to be complete. [30]

Mato Oput is to be distinguished from other ceremonies, particularly the nyono tong gweno (stepping of the egg) ceremony which is a cleansing ritual that has been adapted for the reintegration of returnees. The latter is not a reconciliation ceremony that involves any measure of accountability or admission of guilt. [31]

The accountability issue that Mato Oput addresses raises a couple of questions such as will Mato Oput apply to types of crimes such as mutilation, burning of houses, abduction, use of children soldiers and slavery, which are crimes against humanity? These are the crimes for which Kony and his senior commanders are wanted by the ICC. Similarly, will Mato Oput be a suitable alternative mechanism to the ICC? Can LRA leaders can be tried by Mato Oput after the ICC already issued warrants of arrest for them, since there is no provision allowing the ICC to drop this case?

From the above arguments, Mato Oput can be described as conciliatory justice dealing with less serious crimesresponsibility. [32]

The gross violations of human rights, such as abduction, slavery, children, and mass killing are out of its jurisdiction as is confirmed by George Omona from Koc Goma in southwestern Gulu. Omona states that “the Mato Oput did not envisage monstrous crimes against a community, like killing of hundreds of people by Kony rebels”. [33] Therefore, Mato Oput will not be appropriate way to deal with Kony and his senior commanders.

Furthermore, to be suitable as an alternative mechanism to the ICC, Mato Oput has to comply with international law standards. Indeed, Joseph Yav Katshung argues that there is a need to ‘test if this Mato Oput mechanism implies good faith. Is this effort designed to generate more truth, more justice, reparation, and genuine institutional reform? If so, it is welcome. If the objective is to evade the state and society’s legal, ethical and political obligations to their people, it should be rejected. If not, someone could say that the purpose of this Mato Oput mechanism is just to shield certain perpetrators (Kony and others). In this hypothesis, the process will violate international law and will not be in the interest of justice and society as whole.” [34]

Indeed, Alex Boraine argues that the rule of law is fundamental to the existence of a free society. It separates us from anarchy. He adds that legal prosecutions have at least three additional advantages: firstly, prosecutions in most case prevent high-ranking perpetrators from returning to positions of authority; secondly, tribunals and special courts aim to punish those who bear the greatest responsibility for human rights violations and thus assist in breaking the cycle of collective reprisals; thirdly, due process avoids summary justice.[35] Charles Villa Vincencio [36] argues that organized systems of justice based on international standards of human rights include the entrenchment of the right of all persons to a legal defense and access to courts that administer the law in an even-handed and efficient manner - even in the face of the most hideous gross violations of human rights and ruthless manifestations of crime.

However, Mato Oput as a court raises similar concerns to those expressed about the Gacaca community courts established on 30 August 1996 by the Rwandese authority in order to deal with the alleged genocidaires.[37] These concerns relate to expertise and competence. The elders in charge of Mato Oput would be expected to understand complex legal issues without the benefit of legal training or legal arguments, and they would be expected to distinguish between genuine and false testimonies. They would have to deal with the problem of evidence and witness statements despite their lack of expertise in legal matters. They would be expected to hand down heavy sentences, including life imprisonment. In addition Mato Oput would be expected to set a framework for prosecuting and sentencing people suspected of having committed crimes against humanity. If Mato Oput could not provide for fair trials, reparations, appeals, witness and victim protection and for theaccused to be allowed to be represented by defence counsel, this system would not conform to international standards of fairness. [38]

Indeed, the Dakar Declaration adopted in September 1999, following the seminar on the Right to Fair Trial in Africa organized by the Africa Commission on Human and People’s Rights stated clearly that ‘it is recognized that traditional courts are capable of playing a role in the achievement of peaceful societies and exercise authority over a significant proportion of African countries. Traditional courts are not exempted from the provisions of the African Charter relating to fair trial. [39] And Mato Oput is not an exception to this statement.

• Dieu-Donné WEDI DJAMBA is a lawyer (Advocate)at the Lubumbashi Bar association/DRC; Consultant; Assistant lecturer in the College of Law in Lubumbashi/ DRC; Human Rights Activist and Writer. Tel:+243812485222;+27738362921 ; Fax:+18016727206 Email: [email][email protected];[email protected]
• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

References:

[1] Birgit brock-Utne, “Indigenous conflict resolution in Africa”, University of Oslo, >( accessed 9 September 2006)
[8] BCC New.ibid
[9] BBC news.op.cit
[10] IRIN.op.cit
[11] ICC, “Situation and Cases: Uganda”, 9(accessed 8 September 2006).
[12] BBC News.op.cit.
[13] International Crisis Group; “Peace in northern Uganda?”, Africa Briefing Nº
[14] Naibi/Brussel,13October 2006, BBC News/Africa/Ugandan rebels assemble in sudan.(accessed 11October 2006).
[15] Joseph Yav Katshung,“Justice At A Glance In Uganda:Mato Oput versus ICC”, African Security Analysis Programme,ISS Pretoria .(acessed 15 September 2006 )
[16] Juan E.Mandez, ‘Accountability for Past Abuses’ in HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY,Vol.19(1997),.pp256
[17] Marlise Simmons, “Court in The Hague issues Arrest Warrant for Uganda Rebels”,in the News york Times(accessed 14 october 2006
[18] IRIN.op.cit.
[19] HUMAN RIGHTS NEWS: “West Africa:Taylor adictment avances justice” ,accessed]http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0901288.html>,accessed 25 October)
[21] News .(accessed 9 September 2006)
[22] Rome Statute.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has just held its first democratic elections since the country’s independence in 1960. On the basis of electoral fraud charges, Jean-Pierre Bemba and his coalition have rejected the run-off presidential election which gave the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, 58.05 percent of the vote and Bemba 41.95 percent. But Professor Wamba dia Wamba argues that it is unlikely that the country will return to war. This is the transcript of the podcast published by Pambazuka News this week.

Prof Ernest Wamba dia Wamba is a Senator, and the vice president of the Senate Permanent Commission on Legal and Administrative Matters of the transitional administration of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Previously, he was Chairman of the Kisangani faction of the rebel group ‘Rally for Congolese Democracy’ during the Second Congo War. He is also a prominent African academic and political theorist.

Pambazuka News: It’s reported that about 25 million people registered for these elections. I believe these are the first democratic elections since the country’s independence in 1960? How important are these elections to the Congolese people?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: Congolese people saw these elections as an opportunity to express their political views, as well as an opportunity to influence the political decision as to which the direction the country should take.

Pambazuka News: It’s often said that the Sun City Agreement that led to these elections favoured the warlords over the people. Is there any element of truth in that?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: The peace negotiation mechanisms encouraged by the UN and other international agencies are structured in such a way that they favour those who have the means to threaten peace over the weak and poor. So, yes during the negotiations the warlords’ demands were given first priority. Peaceful organisations were marginalised and ignored, simply because they were viewed as powerless and therefore not a threat.

Pambazuka News: How do you see the South African role in the DRC?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: In my opinion it is based on a number of mistakes. For example, they approached the DRC situation the same way they approached the apartheid regime. They assumed that, like in apartheid South Africa, there is a mission to be solved and that there is a state. In DRC there is no mission to speak of, and further, the state is fragmented. Another thing is that the South Africans usually talk with those in power, they have no regard for those on the ground.

Pambazuka News: Would it be a fair assessment to describe the DRC as basically a state that is responsible for guaranteeing the basic physical and legal security of investors in the mining sector and other business sectors?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: In South Africa, big businesses like Anglo American impose on the society a type of economy that is based on extraction of country’s resources and of selling those resources on the international markets. The same kind of economy is envisaged for the DRC.

Pambazuka News: Jean-Pierre Bemba has been quoted as saying that he will not return to war if he loses in the elections. President Joseph Kabila has made similar promises, I believe. Do you think these are empty promises?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: Personally, I think the DRC will not go back to war. I do not see either of them going back to war.

Pambazuka News: Could you tell us about Kabila, Bemba and Joseph François Zanga’s politics?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: President Kabila is surrounded by people who are only concerned about enriching themselves. There have been a lot of allegations of corruption against some of these people. For example, there is a parliamentary report revealing that certain contracts give permission to businesses to operate in the DRC for up to 25 years without paying taxes.

Also, Kabila is known for helping himself to money from the national treasury. In addition, he is not well known for respecting the constitution. There are cases where decisions have been taken without any regard for the constitution. For instance, soldiers have been appointed to government positions, whereas the constitution states clearly that soldiers are not to occupy any governmental positions.

Bemba has been the president of the economic and financial commission, whereas he can be linked to the corrupt regime of Mobutu. However, in these elections he has been trying to get all the organisations that are not part of the transition to be included in the process. So, it can be said that he believes in the union which is based on the premise that the unity of the country concerns everybody and not just the majority of the country. This contradicts the presidential majority which views the unity of the country as concerning only the majority of the country with the president at the helm.

Zanga is not known for practical politics. Some people seem to think that his father, Mobutu, was a great statesman. Zanga exploits that and as a result his political camp mainly consists of these individuals. During the campaign, he did not have much to say about what his political plans entailed for the country. He did point out; however, that he was for foreign investments.

Pambazuka News: President Joseph Kabila did not manage to get the 51% vote needed in the first elections to avoid the presidential run-off elections. I believe that Kabila won 44.8% of the vote in first round of the July elections against Bemba’s 20%. How would you interpret these figures?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: Firstly, these figures reveal that 56% percent of the Congolese people did not vote for Kabila and so are opposed to Kabila’s governance. Secondly, most of the people who make up the 44.8% of his vote are from the East where there were lots of reports and allegations of fraud and irregularities. The point here is that the majority of Congolese people voted against Kabila.

Pambazuka News: Do you think the new government will have legitimacy and support? Do you think it will re-negotiate the business agreements it might have made with countries like South Africa?

Prof Wamba dia Wamba: There were a lot of irregularities and not enough transparency around the voting process and the elections generally. And the Congolese people have made it clear that if the new government is based on fraud, they are not going to accept it.

If Kabila wins the elections, the business agreements will remain as they are. However, if Bemba wins the elections, he has said that the business contracts will have to be re-negotiated on the basis of equal partnership and mutual understanding.

• Interview conducted by Mandisi Majavu.

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

How does a post-colonial state embrace diversity without risking perpetuating the racial categories of Apartheid South Africa? How does a post-colonial state undermine oppressive racial categories without unintentionally replacing diversity with homogeneity? Neville Alexander argues that it is not necessary to create racial categories, for ‘sub-national’ identities can be based on many different factors such as religion and linguistics.

Pambazuka News: In an essay you presented at the Human Science Research Council earlier this year, you postulate that language could be used to promote social justice. What do you mean?

Neville Alexander: What I mean is that rather than using race as a means of determining affirmative action, which translates to the danger of perpetuating racial identities, it is better to find other ways of using redress in an organic way. One of these is language.

In the South African context, language communities tend to coincide with those previously classified in certain racial categories. Most African language speaking communities have been disadvantage in one form or the other. And that means if one were to use language to promote social justice, one would give preference to those who can use an African language. That would be an organic way of promoting redress. It would also give market value to African languages and generally raise the status of these languages. In this way people would be rewarded for their linguistic skills.

Pambazuka News: In a country like South Africa, where English is practically the official language, do you think that’s a realistic view?

Neville Alexander: The point is that the political and cultural leadership must have the vision and the political will to make sure that English does not continue to operate as the de facto only official language. We have to begin to use other African languages in powerful ways. The reason for this is not just for some nationalistic nonsense, rather, the reason is that this is the only way we can guarantee and entrench a democratic dispensation. The masses of the people in South Africa are not English speaking, they are not comfortable speaking English.

Further, to promote African languages is not going to be costly at all. We have done research and costing on this, and our research shows that to promote African languages will not be costly at all, but, on the contrary, it would be better in terms of preventing waste through the use of English only or mainly.

Pambazuka News: Is it for this reason that you argue that Affirmative Action unintentionally perpetuates the racial categories of apartheid South Africa?

Neville Alexander: This is a very fundamental issue and it needs to be discussed very carefully so that people do not get the wrong impression. I am not opposed to affirmative action. My view is that affirmative action is essential in the absence of the social revolution.

If we had a social revolution we would not need affirmative action, we would simply expropriate the wealth and resources of the oppressors. However, in the absence of such a revolution affirmative action is essential.

The crucial question, however, is, does one implement affirmative action in a country like South Africa where the majority of the people are black, in the same way that affirmative action is implemented in the United States of America (USA)? To implement affirmative action on the basis of a minority paradigm is not necessary in South Africa. To implement affirmative action in such a way is negative, and it actually perpetuates the racial categories that one wants to undermine and weaken. The point is not to address race but to address social disadvantage, irrespective of colour. Given that the majority of disadvantaged people in this country are black people, we do not have to approach it the way the affirmative action is implemented in the USA, for that model is very negative, even for the USA it is a negative approach.

Further, affirmative action in this country applies only to a very few people. To be eligible for affirmative action one needs to have necessary qualifications and experiences. And so, because of apartheid and colonialism, very few black people have the necessary qualifications to benefit from affirmative action in this country.

Pambazuka News: By wanting to downplay racial and cultural difference are you not necessarily against diversity? There is a difference between cultural/racial differences and cultural/racial oppression. And the fact that there are cultural/racial differences does not necessarily mean that there is oppression going on. Don’t you think the ‘task is to remove oppression, not to obliterate difference’.

Neville Alexander : Firstly, you need to understand that racial identities are the reason we are where we are in this country. Secondly, in the very short term you can’t obliterate “racial” differences. Further, it is not necessary to create racial categories, nor does one have to perpetuate racial categories. Sub-national identities can be based on many different factors such as religion and linguistics.

Pambazuka News: What is the difference between racial and linguistic categories?

Neville Alexander : The difference is that in South African history, languages have not yet been abused in the same manner as “race” for purposes of oppression and social conflict, if one excepts the two critical historical events around the Milnerist suppression and the Verwoerdian imposition of Afrikaans. Secondly, linguistic categories are not permanent. One can get in and out of linguistic categories whereas one can’t do the same with racial categories.

Pambazuka News: One can argue that there is no reason that a society will not find it easy to linguistically oppress those who don’t sound like us, just like it was easy to oppress those who do not look like us.

Neville Alexander: That is why I do not insist on a standard isiXhosa or a standard English. If one is able to decipher a particular text at a certain level, then one should have the same opportunity just like everyone else. To use racial categories, one risks perpetuating the kind of oppression one witnessed in the past.

Pambazuka News: Don’t you think that given the South African social context, racial categories such as ‘Indian’, ‘White’, ‘Coloured’ and ‘Black’ are useful if we do not want to obscure the racial hierarchies and racial privileges that still exist in this country?

Neville Alexander: We can never obscure them for they are terribly obvious. However, what needs to be done is to address them openly, not by perpetuating these racial categories but by questioning racial categories.

Pambazuka News: What is the difference between ‘non-racialism’ and ‘anti-racism’?

Neville Alexander: In my view, ‘non-racialism’ means the non-existence of race as a biological entity to begin with, and the constructedness of race as a social category and therefore the potential to deconstruct race as a social category. Anti-racism is the struggle against racial hierarchies and against the use of racial ideology to exploit people’s labour power. I do not see the concepts as mutually exclusive in any way, but rather as concepts that complement each other.

• Interview conducted by Mandisi Majavu.
* Neville Alexander is the Director of the Project for The Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA). He has done much pioneering work in the field of language policy and planning in South Africa since the early 1980s via organisations such as the National Language Project, PRAESA, as well as the LANGTAG process. He has been influential in respect of language policy development with various government departments, including Education. His most recent work has focused on the tension between multilingualism and the hegemony of English in the public sphere.

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

Poetry is defined differently by different people. How do Africans define poetry? Is it possible to draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in South Africa? asks Mphutlane Wa Bofelo.

The emergence of Slam Poetry as a competitive, theatrical, participative and entertaining presentation of poetry and a social event involving a vibrant interaction between the poets is attributed to construction worker and poet, Mark Smith and the bunch of blue collar eccentric intellectuals who gathered at the Chicago Jazz Club, and the Get Me High Lounge for a series of poetry sessions in 1985. They continued the tradition under the framework of the Uptown Poetry Slam at another Chicago Jazz Club, the Green Mill from July 25,1986 to date. Looking for a way to breathe life into the open mic poetry format, construction worker and poet, Mark Smith (Slampapi) started a poetry reading series in 1985 at a Chicago jazz club, the Get Me High Lounge; which was owned by finger-popping’ hipster, Butchie (James Dukaris) who allowed anything to happen. The series' emphasis on performance laid the groundwork for a style poetry and performance which would eventually be spread across the world.

In 1986, Smith approached Dave Jemilo, the owner of the Green Mill (a Chicago jazz club and former haunt of Al Capone); with a plan to host a weekly poetry cabaret on the club’s slows Sunday nights. Jemilo welcomed him, and on July 25 that year, the Uptown Poetry Slam was born. Smith drew on baseball and bridge terminology for the name, and instituted the show’s basic structure of an open mic, guest performers, and a competition. The Green Mill evolved into the Mecca for performance poets, and the Uptown Poetry Slam still continues 18 years after its inception. Explaining the slam poetry craze and vibe at The Green Mill, the Idiot’s Guide to ? declares: “The experimenters in this new style of poetry presentation gyrated, rotated, spewed, and stepped their words along the bar top, dancing between the bottles, bellowing out the backdoor, standing on the street or on their stools, turning the west side of Chicago into a rainforest of dripping whispers or a blast furnace of fiery elongated syllables, phrases, snatches of scripts, and verse that electrified the night.”

Poetry in the Boxing ring

But in Chicago itself the idea of reading poetry in non-literary settings and in a theatrical and sporting and somewhat eccentric and experimental style often bothering on the break with conventions, could be traced to as early as the late1970s and early 1980s. Sometimes in 1978 (or 1979) Jerome Salla and Elaine Equi got for readings at Facets Multimedia. Elaine Equi recalls, “Jerome was getting bigger audiences, drawing from bars, the Art Institute scene, from clubs such as O'Banyon's, La Mer, artists, and publishers. The people around the Body Politic were one scene. But when Jerome and I would read, it was not really a literary crowd. By 1980 Salla constructed his own poetry competition based on a boxing match and the crowd was rowdy. Elaine Equi explains how this started "My husband was reading at some space in Chicago... His readings were always accompanied by a lot of audience participation. There was one particular musician, named Jimmy Desmond, who got irritated easily when he was drunk. He grabbed a chair and swung at Jerome. There was a fight, but it didn't actually come to blows." Jerome Salla continues, "A couple days later I got call from Al-Simmons. He was involved with the old poetry scene in New York’s lower east side, and in Chicago too, and hung with Ted Berrigan. He said, 'Jimmy Desmond would like to challenge you to a ten-round poetry fight to the death...” (Kurt Heintz, 1996)

Pioneer of the Slam Poetry scene in New York, Bob Holman recalls seeing Ted Berrigan and Ann Waldman in a poetry bout dressed in boxing gear, around 1979 but indicates that he didn't first communicate with Mark Smith until after he visited the Green Mill in person. Elaine Equi proposes that Simmons might have got the idea from professional wrestling, but also adds that Simmons told her that he saw a couple poets in a boxing ring in New York and would love to stage a poetry fight between her and Simmons. The first fight took place in 1980 at a fly-by-night club. Equi has very fresh memories of these ‘poetry fights’: “I read a poem called 'Give Piss a Chance' shortly after the death of John Lennon, and the crowd booed..!" They had a stage like a boxing ring and girls in bikinis, holding up cards for the number of the rounds. They also had and judges... each round Jerome and Jimmy reading one poem. Jerome won." It was not a fluke. They had a rematch and he won again. About two hundred people witnessed the second match. There match was at Tut's on Belmont at Sheffield, now The Avalon. I read in leather boxing shorts, had a robe that said Baby Jerome. Jimmy had a nickname too. We didn’t really hate each other. It was just a funny, kind of weird event we threw to make money," says Salla. "There was little story in the Trib. We were with the punk scene. A lot of forces were converging in Chicago at the same time. Suddenly there was an audience for poetry. There really isn't anything that close to the experience today except in rap music." (Kurt Heintz, 1996)

The philosophies of slam

Equi’s reference to rap in relation to the late 1970’s Chicago poetry phenomenon is interesting given the link that today’s slam poetry has with hip hop, of which rap is one of the components. It is noteworthy that Mark Smith took the name from the game of basketball which is also having some cordial relations with hip hop. Based on this information, one can say with Slam Poetry, Mark Smith and his crew of convention-busting poets and lovers of the spoken continued a tradition that -in Chicago-started in the late 70’s, and gave it a format and name in tune with the times.

Perhaps confirming the communal spirit of slam and the universal nature of its ideal of creating an open space for expression, Mark Smith declares on his website that Slam does not belong to him but to “the thousands of people who have dedicated their time, money, and energy to this Chicago-born, interactive format for presenting poetry to a public that has a zillion other barks and belches and flashes to hold its attention”. However he expresses his wish that the slam phenomenon should grow in accordance with the philosophies that have become what I consider to be the backbone of what we call the "Slam Family". These include:

- The purpose of poetry (and indeed all art) is not to glorify the poet but rather to celebrate the community to which the poet belongs. (This idea is paraphrased from the works of Wendell Berry)
- The performance of poetry is an art -- just as much an art as the art of writing it.
- The Slam should be open to all people and all forms of poetry.
- We must all remember that we are each tied in some way to someone else's efforts. Our individual achievements are only extensions of some previous accomplishment.
- Success for one should translate into success for all.
- The National Slam began as a gift from one city to another. It should remain a gift passed on freely to all newcomers.

Towards an organic South African Slam Movement

These are lofty communal and humanistic ideas that in the dog-eat-dog individualistic and materialistic society might be easily dismissed as too idealistic and utopian indeed! Mark Smith himself confesses that “the idealism and cooperative forces of the Slam are in constant conflict with the competitive and self-serving appetites of its ambitious nature”. He asserts that the struggle between the idealism of slam and its competitive spirit has taught the slam family much but also threatens to obliterate all that has grown to be. And unequivocally and unambiguously declares that he is “on the side of idealism and hope.”

How many of us who have latched on the slam poetry buzz share the idealism and pro-humanism spirit? And to what extent are we able to contextualise the slam movement within the tangible and concrete realities of Azania, and locate it within the particularities and peculiarities of the Azanian\South African situation? How do we relate the slam movement to our own history of using poetry in particular, and literature and theatre in general, to open the space of discourse and critical engagement with prevailing socio-economic, political and cultural conditions? Can we draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in South Africa\Azania?

In South Africa\Azania the idea of doing poetry in a non-literary setting and of moving away from eurocentric conventions in as far as the stylistic concerns of poetry and the manner in which poetry is delivered, is not a new phenomenon. As early as the 1970’s, groups like Dashiki fused poetry with jazz. The Allah Poets, Mihloti, Medupi Writers and others recited their poetry over the beat of the drum and sounds of horns. People like Muthobi Motloatse and Gamakhulu Diniso of Busang Thakaneng used the term Proemdra to refer to a fusion prose, poetry, music and drama, and promoted the notion of participatory theatre. Muthobi Motloatse’s theatre piece, ‘Nkosi –the Healing song’ is a typical example of the fusion of the language of story telling, music, dance and drama. Here the barriers between the audience and the performer were broken, and in the words of a character in ‘Nkosi- the Healing Song’, “myths, legends and facts are interwoven and the story can “begin in the ending and end in the middle.”

The concept of participatory theatre gained ground in the 70’s and 80’s. Participatory theatre was informed not only by ‘the anti-poetry theory’ of the of Bertold Brecht, Jerry Grotowsky’s ‘poor theatre’ and Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed”, but also by pre-colonial African of cultural and artistic forms of expression where there were no rigid borderlines between music, poetry, dance, etc. When groups like Ujamaa (in Sharpeville), Rakgalema Medupi Arts Commune and Arts in Motion (in Sebokeng), (Mafube in the East rand) and Makana Poets (in Zamdela) emerged in the 1980’s and 1990’s, they followed the same trend began by their predecessors. These groups performed poetry at political rallies and social events like wedding ceremonies and birthday parties, at schools, in churches, in beer-halls and in stadiums. Poetry was performed in prisons, hostels, squatter camps, refugee camps, and in the trenches and guerrilla training camps in exile. In the words of Muthobi Motlaotse, this kind of literature and theatre deliberately shit on conventional English-English literary forms.

It mixed languages and genres and knew no holy cows. In as far as its dare-devil, passionate and energetic, genre-crossing, convention-defying multi-media spirit and its efforts to open up the space for self-expression and dialogue between the writer and society are concerned, the slam poetry phenomenon shares stylistic and thematic concerns with the poetry, literary and theatre movement of the 1970’s up to the early 90’s in South Africa\Azania. The efforts of many slam poets\ hip hop activists in Azania today to attune their artistic expressions to the historical-material experiences, politico-economic conditions and the cultural and linguistic heritage of our country is in many ways a continuation of the tradition and legacy of the 1970’s generation that was in the main inspired by the philosophy of Black Consciousness.

Conclusion

What is missing is a conscious and well-coordinated programme to link up the present literary and cultural movement with the past and to educate the current crop of poets and cultural activists about their predecessors. The ignorance of the present-day generation of poets and spoken word activists about the contributions and achievements of their predecessors and ancestors in the literary world is reflected by the scant respect shown to the legendary Mafika Pascal Gwala during his recital at Poetry Africa. The impatient audience heckled when Gwala recited on the opening day of Poetry Africa. The presenter of the programme is to blame for not informing the audience that Gwala was entitled to recite for more than the four minutes allocated to other poets, as he was the featured poet of the day. He also introduced Gwala with just one sentence whereas he went on and on about the other poets. Given proper direction, the poetry movement and the cultural movement in South Africa have a lot to offer to this country. And acknowledging the struggles, contributions and efforts of the ancestors of South African literary and theatre movement and learning from them would be the first step in the right direction.

Names that come to mind are Mirriam Tladi, Fatima Dike, Fikile Magadlela, Nardine Gordimer; Richard Rive, James Mathews, the late Strini Moodley (who founded the first union of Black theatre and upon whose request Gwala wrote the classical piece, ‘The Children of Nonti’), Mafika Gwala, Mazisi Kunene, Farouk Asvat, Benjy Francis, Athol Fugard, John Kani, Lefifi Tladi, Lesego Rampolokeng. The list is endless. The passion of most of these individuals for literature and theatre was fanned by the desire to use the word as an instrument for transformation and social change. Their works were part of the quest for a South Africa and a world with a more humane face. It is this understanding that will motivate the present-day writer, poet and artist to use podiums like the slam poetry\spoken word scene as mediums of self-expression as well as a platform for social dialogue and an instrument for social change. When this happens, the word will not cower to the dictates of capital, but will place the collective dignity and collective interests and aspirations of the people before narrow materialistic individual gains.

• Mphutlane Wa Bofelo is a writer, activist, life-skills facilitator and performance poet who has been published in several journals, websites and anthologies and has performed at various events. He won the Slam Poetry Champion of Championship organized by the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT) in 2003. He also published the booklet, ‘The Journey Within' with Yaseen Islamic Publishers. In 2005, he won the Durban Slamjam at the 9th Poetry Africa held at the BAT Center. In June 2006, Mphutlane performed at the first Cape Town International Bookfair. He co-founded the Makana Poets with Sello Hlasa in the late 80's and is currently a member of the Nowadays Poets, the Live Poets Society (LiPS), the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT), and the Open Stage Society.
• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Sources

1. on 13\11\06)
3.3. www.e-poets.net/library/slam/converge.html (accessed on 13\11\06)

The overall Western attitude towards Africa is that the continent is trapped in a tribal time warp. The Western media plays a vital role in perpetuating this misconception. Milton Allimadi points out that Western journalists and editors still have the same colonial attitude towards Africans. “…Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis,” writes Allimadi.

Africans must insist that Western media stop referring to Africans as “tribesmen” and to conflicts in Africa as “tribal.” Not only is it demeaning and racist, but it clouds many complex issues and exonerates incompetent journalism, with even deadly consequences.

For example, when the Rwandan civil war erupted in genocide, Time magazine and most major Western publications, including The New York Times, referred to the conflict as ‘tribal’. Moreover, the Clinton Administration, as part of its argument against major international intervention to halt the killings, reasoned that ‘tribal’ conflicts could not be halted. Western reporters were then absolved from terrible reporting which ignored the fact that the war had been going on for four years before the genocide; that Uganda had trained and armed Tutsi refugees into a guerrilla army and sent them into Rwanda because it wanted to get rid of them from Uganda; and, that the French had for years armed the Rwandan army, giving its government the false belief that they did not have to seriously negotiate with the refugees who wanted to return home. All these factors were subsumed under the rubric of ‘tribalism’.

When Africans ask another African what tribe he or she is from, it does not have the same meaning or carry any of the racist and demeaning connotations as when the word is used by Westerners, especially by journalists. There is no better way to explain this than to borrow from the late Okot p’Bitek, the Ugandan author. “Western scholarship sees the world as divided into two types of human society,” wrote p’Bitek, in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970), “one, their own, civilized, great, developed; the other the non-Western peoples, uncivilized, simple, undeveloped. One is modern, the other tribal.” P’Bitek added, “And when we read of ‘tribal law,’ ‘tribal economics,’ or ‘tribal religion,’ Western scholars imply that the law, economics or religion under review are those of primitive or barbaric peoples.”

Western journalists and editors, I maintain, still have the same attitude towards Africans. Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis.

Although articles about Africa in newspapers such as The New York Times date back to the 19th Century, it was only after the Independence movement swept across the continent in the 1960s that most Western publications started sending reporters to Africa on a consistent basis. Many lessons can be learned from that early engagement. For example, when The New York Times sent Homer William Bigart to cover decolonization in West Africa, the reporter expressed disdain for Africans in a personal letter to his foreign editor, Emanuel Freedman, back in New York, in early 1960s.

“I'm afraid I cannot work up any enthusiasm for the emerging republics,” Bigart, a respected reporter who had already twice won America’s highest journalistic honour, the Pulitzer Prize, wrote. “The politicians are either crooks or mystics. Dr. Nkrumah is a Henry Wallace in burnt cork…I vastly prefer the primitive bush people. After all, cannibalism may be the logical antidote to this population explosion everyone talks about.” Wallace was a racist Southern politician in the United States at the time.

One might wonder how Freedman, editor at America’s most prestigious newspaper responded to this instance of undiluted racist expression from his correspondent. Was he admonished? Was he recalled from his assignment? Hardly. On the contrary, Freedman chimed in with his own celebration of alleged African barbarity. “This is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your peerless prose from the badlands is continuing to give us and your public,” Freedman wrote to his reporter in a letter dated March 4, 1960. “By now you must be American journalism's leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft, cannibalism and all the other exotic phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa. All this and nationalism too! Where else but in the New York Times can you get all this for a nickel?” The reference to a nickel was to the fact that the Times in those days cost five cents.

These repugnant views towards Africans, held by the reporter and his editor, correlated perfectly with the “articles” published about Africa. The Times’ foreign editor, and his reporter did not take Africa seriously, to say the least, and this attitude, and disposition towards Africa is still very much reflected in much Western writings about the continent.

For example, after Bigart left Ghana and “reported” from Nigeria, an article was published in The New York Times, on January 31, 1960, under the contemptuous headline, “Barbarian Cult Feared in Nigeria.” In the news article, Bigart expressed the same disdain contained in his personal letter: “A pocket of barbarism still exists in eastern Nigeria despite some success by the regional government in extending a crust of civilization over the tribe of the pagan Izi,” he wrote. He further added, “A momentary lapse into cannibalism marked the closing days of 1959, when two men killed in a tribal clash were partly consumed by enemies in the Cross River country below Obubra…”

There were several other articles written by Bigart, and published by The Times, during this period. On the most momentous period in Africa’s history, America’s premier newspaper decided to ridicule and insult the continent, and generate feelings of contempt towards Africans amongst its readers.

This essay will not explore the many reasons that occasioned this so-called ‘journalism’. Suffice it to say that by the time reporters like Bigart arrived on the continent, the Western psyche had been conditioned by centuries of Western writing to accept only the worst from Africa, therefore the ‘journalism’ had to conform to the readers’ expectations of cannibalism, savagery, backwardness, primitiveness, diseases, and all the other negative attributes.

For example, today when we read the ‘journals’ of the so called ‘explorers’ such as H.M. Stanley, Samuel Baker, and others, who chronicled their adventures in Africa, it is clear that many of the accounts and encounters and conquests over African ‘savages’ were concocted - figments of their imagination. Yet, these were the writers whose books are still consulted by ‘modern’ Western reporters today.

So conditioned were writers and editors to expect the ‘backwardness’ that when the ‘savages’ did not cooperate, the ‘journalism’ was simply manufactured to fit. For example, when Lloyd Garrison, a Times reporter and descendant of the famous American abolitionist once filed a story from Nigeria in the late 1960s, he received the shock of his life. By the time his article was published in The Times, editors had taken it upon themselves to insert a scene about “primitive” Nigerians, even though the reporter himself had not encountered them - it was purely imagined and concocted by his editors in New York.

“The reference to ‘small pagan tribes dressed in leaves’ is slightly misleading and could, because of its startling quality, give the reader the impression there are a lot of tribes running around half naked,” Garrison complained, in a letter to the infamous editor, Freedman, dated June 5, 1967.

“Tribesmen connote the grass-leaves image. Plus tribes equals primitive, which in a country like Nigeria just doesn't fit, and is offensive to African readers who know damn well what unwashed American and European readers think when they stumble on the word,” he added.

It is therefore ironically tragic that 40 years later, The New York Times and most other Western publications are yet to take the advice and warning of the then New York Times correspondent. One also wonders how many ‘tribal’ scenarios are still concocted by Western writers who travel to Africa. That is why it is even more important that Africans insist that Westerners stop using the ‘tribalism’ as an excuse for lack of in-depth reporting.

• Allimadi is the publisher of The Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York, and the author of The Hearts Of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa (Black Star Books, 2003).
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Love. That’s the key ingredient of a Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) strategy to unseat the Mugabe regime. Miriam Madziwa reports.

Women in Zimbabwe are taking to the streets to show their frustration with poor governance, lack of basic social services, and unprecedented increases in the cost of education. In the process, police have arrested nearly 1000 women members of the pressure group Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), for their attempts to hold their leaders accountable.

This past October, WOZA members scored three legal victories after the State failed to substantiate its charges against the some of the women arrested while demonstrating, prompting the magistrates to set the women free.

Others have not been as successful. Some women spend months detained in filthy police cells, sometimes with babies on their backs, attending continually postponed hearings while the prosecution teams try to find charges that will stick. Some have gone into labour while in police detention.

Jane Mlambo* is from a low-income suburb in Bulawayo. At 62 years of age, the widow explains how jam has become a luxury, and she cannot even afford to buy bread on which to serve the spread. Her grandchildren are no longer attending class because of prohibitive school fees and costly uniforms demanded before admission.

Thinking about the past and a brighter future for their grandchildren has stirred up strong discontent not just in Mlambo but also in hundreds of other Zimbabwean women who have joined WOZA.

WOZA's mission is to restore the dignity of the country's women by speaking out against social and economic injustices that have eroded the wellbeing of the majority of the country's citizens. Guided by their motto 'The power of love can overcome the love of power' the women peacefully show their displeasure.

WOZA is now known for it's non-violent but highly imaginative demonstrations during which they persistently call for 'tough love' among the country's leaders to resolve the crisis that has made not just women's lives, but all Zimbabweans' lives unbearable.

A major plus for the organisation is that the protests always catch State security agents napping because WOZA does not publicise actions beforehand. By the time security agents catch on, the women have already had their say.

With its street action and frequent visit to 'the garden' (WOZA lingo for police cells), the organisation is slowly chalking up victories against a repressive government.

While in the garden, the women seize the opportunity to share some sisterly love through song and dance. The songs also send a message to the arresting officers to realise that they too are victims of the socio-political environment.

Additionally, the women highlight the fact that Zimbabwe's situation is untenable but things are bound to change if they continue speaking out. So effective has this strategy been that police officers who have heard the women's "tough love songs" now refuse to arrest lead singers within the organisation.

WOZA members say through their homemade, hand written placards and leaflet they are communicating with a government that has cut off communication links with its people.

Listening and watching WOZA members plan and stage their projects, one get the sense that here are women determined to have their voices and opinions heard. Here are women who invest their time and meager material resources to stage protracted protests for their dream of a "socially just future."

These women put passion and conviction into their street actions. These women are serious.

The women's commitment is evident through their style of doing things. Members receive intensive training programmes to maintain the organisation's philosophy of non-violence and to always show love. Now even brutal baton-welding police officers have conceded in court that when they go to break-up WOZA demonstrations, "the women are very co-operative and sit down and allow themselves to be arrested."

The spirit of sisterhood ensures packed courtrooms when WOZA activists appear in court. Members who escape the police dragnet after protests go and offer themselves for arrest so that they can be together with their sisters.

With such an impressive record of accomplishment, maybe it is about time disgruntled Zimbabweans start taking WOZA seriously. Currently debate in opposition political circles and civic society is revolving around the need to a 'united and brave leader to direct a popular revolt."

Maybe it's time to draw helpful lessons from WOZA's experiences. Essentially, it is not about how strong the leadership is but how involved, committed and prepared members are in identifying a cause and planning how they will achieve their stated objectives.
It's about unshakeable belief in what you are doing and love for a brighter tomorrow. Just as the old adage notes, "it's love that makes the world go round.” WOZA is using love to unsettle an oppressive regime.

* Not her real name.

* Miriam Madziwa is a freelance journalist based in Zimbabwe. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.

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