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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alejandro Bendaña argues that for every dollar of aid given to developing countries, ten dollars is lost as capital flight. He uses Venezuela to speak to this imbalance and offer an alternative.

If the goal is development—best defined as the sovereign democratic social transformation--then we must not speak of making the present “aid” modalities more effective, but of substituting present day aid and the system in which it unfolds. One begins by questioning the very nature of the larger international financial architecture, what it stands for, and who benefits primarily from it. “Development aid” as practiced by the North is part of a system that generates deepening inequality and dependence across and within countries. In this context, it is question of making aid less not more effective, of ending aid altogether, because on the whole it does more harm that good.

Think Outflows not Inflows. South to North. For every dollar of aid that goes into developing countries, ten dollars comes out as capital flight. Yet this is an issue which regularly gets sidelined in discussions on development. It is much more important to focus on how to stop the 9 going out than to keep the 1 coming in. It has been estimated that developing countries lose more than $500 billion every year in illegal outflows which are not reported to the authorities and on which no tax gets paid. In Latin America amounts extracted over the past 30 years may have reached some 950 billion dollars, according to figures provided by James Petras.

No amount of aid, foreign direct investment or even remittances is going to change the structural equation over the long run. If one is to speak of new inflows then we should conceive in the form of the payment of the real historical debt owed by the North to the South—not “aid” or charity or private philanthropy but reparations, restitutions, compensations, payment of the ecological debt to the people and environments of the South. There is a need to escape from a discourse and vision tightly linked to the preserverence of contemporary power structures, including the one upheld and practiced by governmental “aid” agencies. Of course there is a need for developing countries to retain much more of their own domestic resources, but we must also recognize that it is not simply a question of the often inexistent will of domestic financial elites but of internationally generated impediments that are upheld by so called free trade agreements, investment protection regimes, IMF conditionalities and the like that demand ever greater liberalization of the flow to capital and goods. Aid and loans are minuscule compared to the profits made at our expense through unfair trade, exploitation of our labor, appropriation of our resources, interests on loans, domination of our markets, privileges and incentives granted to multinational corporations. Add to that the cost of reparations and restitution.

How do you build an Alternative National and International Justice and Development Order?

First you must conceive it. If you believe there can be no alternative then there will be no alternative. This is difficult because it entails a paradigm shift.

Second reconceptualize and change the role of the market. Markets must take their subordinated space in the organization of a political economy. Markets and big capital cannot dictate engagement. Markets have to be embedded in society and therefore in relations of solidarity, not competition. A political approach to economics. As the President of the Constituent Assembly of Ecuador, Alberto Acosta stated Queremos un país en donde funcionen los mercados, entendidos como espacios de construcción social organizada en función de las necesidades del ser humano de hoy y de mañana. Queremos desbloquear el falso dilema entre mercado y Estado. No queremos un mercado descarnado que genera procesos de acumulación de riqueza en pocas manos, pero tampoco queremos un Estado ineficiente, que otorga prebendas y que transfiere recursos de todos y todas a los grupos de poder,
You must be clear about your indicators. If there is no improvement in the life conditions and dignity of people 50 miles outside Maputo, Managua or Manila, then it is no alternative. We can already report that thousands are benefitting from the new Venezuelan-led development support schemes outside of Managua in the form of clinics and eye operations.

That the alternative is constructed in changes, by the interplay of idea and politics. Ideas challenge the dominate paradigm and introduce the alternative but the goal is for the alternative paradigm to become hegemonic.

A New Dawn for the Americas.

The combination of ideas and political shifts is being witnessed today in Venezuelan led international collaboration scheme known as ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas).

In 2004, the government of Venezuela took a political decision to use its massive oil reserves and earnings to assist other countries in the world with the clearly stated objective lessen their dependence on the dominant trading and financial international order. According to statistics from Chavez opposition sources who feel that he is giving away national wealth, 18 cooperation agreements signed by Venezuela last year alone total some 4.747 billion chiefly oil and refineries, but also infrastructure, health, agriculture, housing, debt cancellation, aluminum plants, and others. And it is mostly Latin America, but also Iran, the UK, China and even Burkina Fasso[i].

ALBA’s premise is that a new form of regional integration and indeed greater political unity is necessary for independent development to take place. It was born as an alternative to the USG’s Free Trade Agreement of the America—integration to reinforce sovereignty and just social relations, as opposed to liberalization and denationalization. Venezuela and Cuba signed the first series of bilateral agreements and in 2007 Nicaragua and Bolivia joined ALBA. “A new political and strategic project for a new world” said Chavez comprising cooperation in the fields of health, industry, food production and energy security, with more of a social criteria and than a mercantile one. Its founding charter calls for the establishment of Council of Ministers but also a Council of Social Movements to help inform decision-making.

In early 2008, the ALBA heads of State, now including the small island state of Dominica, announced the creation of the ALBA Bank with a capital of 1 billion dollars. Its stated aim was to boost industrial and agricultural production among its members, support social projects as well as multilateral cooperation agreements among its members, particularly in the energy field. The objective was to tackle natural counter the negative effects that neoliberal globalization, including finance and trade, was having on its members. It constitutes yet another piece in the construction of an alternative international economic order but unlike its predecessor, the Bank of the South composed by South American nations, the ALBA Bank is less influenced the by the interests of conservative Brazilian megacapitalists who play wield strong influence in the Bank of the South. One must however await the publishing of the constituent documents and the actual project financing procedures before rendering a final verdict.

Of greater importance to the Caribbean and Central American nations was the formation of Petrocaribe in 2007. 14 countries, chiefly of the Caribbean, along with Nicaragua and Honduras, have joined the scheme whereby Venezuela, through its oil company PDVSA, agrees to guarantee 100% of member country energy requirements, principally oil and derivatives, at market prices (Venezuela as a member of OPEC cannot do otherwise), with 40 to 50% payable within 90 days (terms vary slightly in the different bilateral accords) and the remainder at an average of 25 years with 2% interest and 2 to 3 years grace. Proceeds of the later, presumably accumulated by the respective state energy companies or a designated governmental agency, are to form part of a development fund for social and infrastructure spending. As in the case of the ALBA Bank, procedures are being worked out in practice by way of bilateral negotiations.

What are some of the Concerns around ALBA?

Obviously given the sheer novelty of ALBA, its Bank and Petrocaribe, along with the dozens of bilateral cooperation in various fields, including the cultural, makes it difficult to comprehensively asses the process underway. Nonetheless, as with the Bank of the South, Latin America’s social movements and regional networks are monitoring closely, and some concerns can, should and have been expressed but within a framework of general support for the initiative and its anti-imperialist dynamic. These concerns revolve around:

A predilection for Megaprojects, particularly the construction of refineries, pipe lines and transport infrastructure that are of concern to environmental groupings Insufficient attention to the need to contest the dominant oil-centered energy, possibly perpetuating dependence and consumption of oil
The fact that it PDVSA is the Venezuelan counterpart and apparently in charge of the key facets of the cooperation including financial and technical oversight
The difficulty encountered by civil society organizations in obtaining information about the specific bilateral agreements with corresponding transparency concerns

The stated decision of at least one government (Nicaragua) to privatize the cooperation handling it as a private commercial debt and therefore not subject to legislative budget scrutiny and reporting, prompting suspicions of partisan use of the funds escaping accountability

A lack of appreciation for the autonomy and working dynamics of movements and their regional networks who, as a matter of principle, reject the notion of being “convened” by any government or of allowing the governments to select which movements should form part of the Council
The absence of credibility of the Ortega government in Nicaragua which continues to pursue neoliberal and confessional policies and is opposed by the Nicaraguan and Latin American social movements, particularly its women’s contingents

What does this all mean in terms of the 2008 Aid Effectiveness Debate (Accra Conference) sponsored by OECD and the UN’s Financing for Development (Doha)?
From a social movement standpoint, including Jubilee South, the “Aid Effectiveness” debate is a non-starter. A contradiction in terms unless the effectiveness works to the benefit of finance capital and is an instrument for domination, a lubricant for corporate capital penetration. Nor can there be talk of effectiveness in the context of aid increasingly becoming an open instrument of security and foreign policy goals, including the so called War on Terror or simply tied to the acceptance of trade and financial liberalization (current EU Partnership Association schemes). Entering the aid debate in preparation for Accra can only be justified if the objective is to utilize that debate to explain and denounce how the institutional and historical foundations of the international aid regime, and that the emphasis should be on stopping the inflows of capital and wealth from the countries of the South.

Finance for Development is a more straightforward proposition. The objective should be to better identify and challenge the international impediments (including so called aid) that stand in the way of domestic accumulation and its domestic mobilization, including the behavior of domestic capitalists in shipping national wealth abroad, including its citizens expelled by the impoverishment that is linked to the enrichment of global elites. Finance for development should take the form of reparations and restitution due from the North to the South—the only real, legitimate debt—on account of centuries of looting and exploitation, including the wrecking of the environment. Under no circumstance should we be under the illusion that “aid” and “loans” by “donors”—the discourse needs to be rejected—are intended to “help” the people of the South. To actually believe that is either “tragic ignorance or unforgivable arrogance”, states Lidy Nacpil, International Coordinator of Jubilee South

Which way forward--? The Shift in Power is underway, but it is not complete by any means.

The first point to stress is that the way forward for development cannot be separated, and indeed forms part towards of the construction of emancipatory democracy.

Second to build critical consciousness, North and South, about the centuries old extraction of wealth from the South to the North, from poor to rich, within and among countries—and not as a policy or technical issue but a moral and political one: to address not simply poverty as a contemporary reality but as a process of historical process of enrichment.

Third to restate the importance of solidarity and international mobilization of that consciousness. To put the heat on the street. Without resistance there can be no alternative—resistance is alternatives in the making. To support for the right of a people and region to exercise the right of economic self-determination, part and parcel of real democracy—in the face of what will be the unremitting hostility of the USG and its allies. Cuba continues to build its alternative, Venezuela its own, and Bolivia too—and all are the objectives of USG led destabilization campaigns.

Fourth, to engage critically. While we support the greater emphasis on the State now being emphasized in ALBA and the Bank of the South, we do not wish to substitute the rule of one group of Northern capitalists by a group of Southern ones. Banks are problematic and as REDES and Jubilee South America have made public those concerns. Hopefully at least some of those concerns will be addressed in the new ALBA Bank configuration. But one should always keep in mind Bertold Brecht’s’ belief that it is a greater crime to create a Bank than to rob one.

Fifth, not to lose sight of the goal of shifting power—and that is as much a product to be attained in the future as a process that requires practice in the future. Not simply away from Bretton Woods and corporate capital’s domination to State-led ones, which must be coupled with a greater democratic shift, to transform the international reality we have to transform our national ones. We welcome Venezuela’s decisive leadership in breaking some rules of the game—this historically unprecedented mobilizing of one country’s resources for the benefit of the others—this sovereign debt to solidarity debt--but this is not an end but the beginning, whether the governments like it or not. Aid, banks and debt are instruments of social and political control.

The shift of power as a shift away from capitalist mentalities and paradigms, where
· People are considered not as consumers but as citizens
· Countries are not seen as markets but as nations
· Capital and governments serve people and not the other way around

Forging a new development model and development solidarity architecture is fundamentally a political and a social task. It is one expression of the larger big struggle for human rights and sovereignty, and that struggle must increasingly be more led by women and youth and less by white men. By social movements, by uncivil society, in our continent by the indigenous and the environmental and debt movements who demand –not aid effectiveness—but historical justice in the form of the payment of the social and ecological debt that has accumulated over the past 5 centuries.

Support for alternative development path means support for the right and ability of the poor to build their own independent movements and bring sustained political pressure from below. Advancing toward of “non-reformist reform” coalitions that can push state power to implement real development policies that are justice based. Support for and participation of movements that will struggle for solidarity economies, for national democratic governance and for changes in financial and economic policies, structures and systems that can allow alternatives to be built.

We need to bring more movements into the picture, as this struggle is certainly not technical but political and therefore alliances must be constructed. At this conference we could have benefitted from the presence of leaders of the native aboriginal communities in Canada who no doubt would have key things to say about development assistance. With your environmentalists and their fight against tar sands exploitation which is making the world poorer. With peace and justice advocates that contest the notion that Canadian troops are bringing development and peace to Afghanistan. Without the involvement of movements and their perspectives on alternatives the Accra and Doha will simply mean two more boring male-dominated meetings

In 1933, John Manyard Keynes wrote [Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.

Well in much of Latin America people are no longer perplexed and are beginning to put something in its place as did the Cubans some 50 years ago. Socialism or better stated socialisms in the plural for the 21st century are back on the drawing board—not following any model or purporting to invent any one model, but as a set of principles to guide human interaction in all its diversity and in its relation to nature.

Progress is being made although we don’t know where we will be at the end of the day, but in Latin America we are convinced that there is a new political dawn of certainty and decision that must be supported and extended.

*Presentation by Alejandro Bendaña at the Conference on “The Changing Face of Global Development Finance—Impacts and implications for aid, development, the South and the Bretton Woods Institutions,” Halifax Initiative, Ottawa, Canada, February 1-2, 2008.

[i] “Ayuda de Hugo Chávez en crisis”, La Prensa, (Managua), January 15, 2008. Figures by the opposition Centro de Investigaciones Económicas de Venezuela (CIECA)

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

February 7th 2008
Nairobi

The Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ) coalition and the National Civil Society congress (NCSC) wish to reiterate their unequivocal support for the Kofi Annan-led AU and internationally backed mediation process in Kenya. Kenyans are desperate to see an end to the nightmare that the current crisis represents: this process represents an important, and perhaps the only remaining, opportunity to resolve the Kenya crisis. KPTJ and NCSC also wish to restate that real, lasting peace will only be achieved through both truth and justice with regard to the Kenya Presidential Election of 2007, and the violence that followed it.

The mediation process has achieved some success as well as raising significant concerns. It deserves applause that the two major combating political antagonists in this crisis have been brought to the negotiating table. It is also deserving of mention that these two groups have remained at the negotiation table despite the very challenging and sometimes outright traumatic environment they are dialoguing under. We will shortly be addressing the content of some of the interim agreements arrived at including the proposed Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission announced on February 4, 2008.

There are, however, deep concerns that remain and have been further deepened by unfolding events. The state of insecurity and incalculable losses of life, limb and livelihood in the country is a tragic derogation of all universally accepted norms and standards of human rights. The KPTJ and NCSC support the call contained in the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation documents for the immediate restoration of the fundamental rights and freedoms of Kenyans, including the right of peaceful assembly.

We note that, in the past week or so, two Members of Parliament from one side of the political divide have been murdered in suspicious circumstances and demand the speedy and conclusive clarification of these crimes. Further there have been highly inflammatory and unacceptable statements made by Mediation Parties that trespass on the mediation agenda and undermine the prospects of successful mediation with truth and justice. The pattern of disrespect towards and slighting of international partners- including the African Union and President John Kuffuor -which manifested itself again recently with the rejection of Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa cannot go uncondemned. In this regard, the KPTJ and NCSC express their concern over reports that the hotel room of His Excellency Kofi Annan was bugged. The situation should be investigated and, if the reports are true, those responsible be identified and punished.

Let it be known that ordinary Kenyans reject any slide towards a status as a pariah nation and are pained at the cavalier treatment of those who have tried to assist us out of our present predicament. Kenya must both see and project itself as an accountable and responsible member of the community of nations, in Africa and worldwide. We therefore call on all partners, regional and international, to desist from doing “business as usual” with Kenya: the protagonists must be forced to focus on the mediation process as the most urgent order of business. With regard to this, we reject the presence of IGAD foreign ministers in Kenya at this time and the planned holding of the EAC Summit as detracting from our national focus on the Panel of Eminent Africans (Annan) mediation process.

On the mediation agenda, we note as ordinary Kenyans that both this agenda and the participating parties seem to rotate around the dispute between two contending political sides. This fails to account for the voting and non-voting citizen who will ultimately be affected by the process and resolutions arising. Kenyans are emerging from a history of numerous experiences of failed involvement by competing political protagonists from independence to the IPPG and subsequent attempts at Constitutional Reform. While confidentiality of certain aspects of mediation may be temporarily necessary, the Kenyan people must have ownership of the process and it must be accountable to them. To this end, a mechanism that encourages transparency and includes the views of Kenyans on the process is necessary.

Having benefited from an examination and analysis of the agenda and initial statement as well as the emerging reports from the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Process, the KPTJ and NCSC wish to recommend as follows:

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES: That the foundational principles of the Mediation Process be clarified as the acceptance of universally accepted human rights, the protection and promotion of democracy and the rule of law, accountability, transparency, and the achievement of justice for all.
TRANSPARENT GROUND RULES: That the Mediation Process transparently spells out binding rules of engagement as well as attending sanctions in cases where parties are determined to be in violation of those rules. It is important that such rules bind parties to the process to conduct themselves in a manner that builds confidence, cultivates good faith and imposes sanctionable obligations;

LEGITIMACY & ENFORCEABILITY: That the Mediation Process and its outcomes be constitutionally embedded to ensure that it is binding, enforceable and does not suffer from interference from the competing political interests or challenges to its legality or legitimacy; the Mediation outcomes should be reduced to an instrument or instruments that can be deposited in the Parliament of Kenya;

OWNERSHIP & ACCOUNTABILITY: That the Mediation Process be open to receive the views of Kenyans and be bound to give feedback to them promptly. A mechanism should be established that encourages and consolidates the views of Kenyans. This could be in the form of a timely and periodic two-way feedback mechanism into which views of Kenyans are fed and there is dissemination of concrete information to wananchi on how the issues raised are being addressed. KPTJ and NCSC appreciate initial efforts to disseminate information and strongly encourage the mediation team to be proactive and continue to circulate this information more widely so many more Kenyans can be aware of the progress made;

TRIGGERS AND ROOT CAUSES: That the Mediation Process address itself to, and deal with, the context which has precipitated this crisis and in particular the underlying issues of electoral, institutional and constitutional failure, impunity, political corruption and the ethnicization of politics in order to lay the framework for finding a lasting resolution to the Kenya crisis;

ADDRESSING VIOLENCE: That the Mediation Process address all forms of violence that have manifested themselves through this crisis, while appreciating its evolving nature and the real capacity problems inherent in the task of ending widespread violence against Kenyan citizens. KPTJ believes that violence has evolved from the spontaneous post-election protests and organised militia action, to vigilante entrenchment and general banditry and crime. Responses must recognize that resolving violence is no longer just political but must encompass a range of urgent measures such as the enhancement of police capacity, restoring confidence of Kenyans in their security apparatus, and the creation of social safety nets;

TREATMENT OF INTERNALLY DISPLACED KENYAN CITIZENS: That due attention be paid to the safety and rights of the 350- 500,000 Internally Displaced Kenyan citizens so that their freedom to independently choose whether they should move or evacuate from their respective locations is not fettered but rather honored and facilitated. It is callous to compel people to live in places where they feel insecure without providing credible guarantees for their security;

TRUTH JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION: That discussions on Truth, Justice and Reconciliation must address independent, impartial, effective and expeditious mechanisms of restorative justice for all victims in order to address the self-negating cycles of revenge and violence. Such a process must draw a distinction between historical or communal grievances and contemporary crimes which should be investigated and prosecuted, lest violence end up being rewarded under the guise of addressing historical grievances or exacting revenge for perceived victimisation;

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM: That Constitutional reform must be fast-tracked into a short-term and medium-term time-frame so as to make it practicable. A comprehensive constitution-making process should be entrenched in the current constitution through a constitutional amendment. Priority should be given to electoral reform, transitional government arrangements, top-level public service reforms, judicial reform and police reform. Immediately thereafter the comprehensive constitutional reforms should be completed.

ADDRESS CAPACITY DEFICITS: That any capacity deficits of the parties to reach and assure agreement be addressed and facilitated by the Parliament of Kenya and if need be the AU and the international community. That the international community continue to take such measures as are necessary to ensure that the Mediation Parties and their respective supporters are held accountable to the Kenyan people and to the principles of truth with justice.

KPTJ and the NCSC salute all Kenyans, such as those in civil society and the business community, who have resolved to work for lasting peace through truth and justice and call on non-violence to achieve these objectives. KPTJ and NCSC also applaud and express full solidarity with the Kofi Annan-led AU mediation process for beginning to craft a way out of this cataclysmic crisis in Kenya. KPTJ and NCSC appreciate the positive contributions of those such as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon and the African Union Summit. Given the historical failure of many national processes to resolve Kenya’s problems, it behoves all to ensure that there are concerted efforts to work towards the ultimate success of the AU Mediation Process in Kenya.

God/Allah Bless Kenya.

Signed:

The National Civil Society Congress
Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG)
Awaaz
Bunge la Mwananchi
Centre for Law and Research International (CLARION)
Centre for Multiparty Democracy (CMD)
Centre for Rights, Education and Awareness for Women (CREAW)
The Cradle-the Childrens Foundation
Constitution and Reform Education Consortium (CRECO)
East African Law Society (EALS)
Fahamu
Haki Focus
Hema la Katiba
Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU)
Innovative Lawyering
Institute for Education in Democracy (IED)
International Commission of Jurists (ICJ-Kenya)
International Centre for Policy and Conflict
Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC)
Kenya Leadership Institute (KLI)
Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR)
Kituo cha Sheria
RECESSPA
Law Society of Kenya (LSK)
MARS Group Kenya
Muslim Human Rights Forum
National Convention Executive Council (NCEC)
Society for International Development (SID)
The 4 Cs
Urgent Action Fund (UAF)-Africa
Youth Agenda

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

For Philip Kiarie it has been 45 years too long waiting for justice.

In the run-up to the 2007 General Elections I came across a ghastly hate email against the ODM leader, written and undersigned by the son of a (re-elected) hardline minister. The same minister is widely seen as being associated with Mungiki. This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the inferiority of leadership in Kenya is concerned.

Deep inside, many Kenyans are aware of the repulsive character of their leaders. The high turnover of ministers and MPs at the just concluded General Election is a pointer. However, devoid of much choice, Kenyans have become used to, and have all along been hoodwinked by a class of leaders – not only political figures, but also religious, cultural, and some intellectual leaders, who insist they have an inalienable right to their positions and to the shameless self-allocated perks and mheshimiwa culture that come along. Their obsessive interests are limited to positions, wealth and the preferably frantic support from ethnic constituencies.

Many of these leaders have managed to hang on since independence. Others, who joined later (and I would love to name them all), have seamlessly fitted themselves into these mafia networks and completely belied past civic engagements and relatively sober reputations. Thirty years ago, I was convinced that the country had the ingredients and potential to emulate the Asian Tiger economies. This was before I had understood the Moi regime and the dismal characters that hovered around him and managed to survive until today, now glued to the Kibaki regime and sometimes also sitting tight in ODM. These people have never walked their talk.

They had 45 years to address the burning land question in the country, but all they did was to steal and acquire huge tracts of land for themselves.

They had 45 years to find innovative and affordable housing solutions for the majority of poor Kenyans, but all they did was building preposterous and huge mansions for themselves in mashambani and in town and becoming greedy landlords for dozens if not hundreds of tenants.

They had 45 years to address safe, affordable and reliable public transport, but all they did was showing off their fleets of latest models of Mercedes and four-wheel drives. While the country burns, more than 50 new MPs had nothing better to do than converting their fat car loans into luxury cars at various outlets in Industrial Area.

They had 45 years to establish effective, efficient, independent and robust institutions, but all they did was running them down, stealing from them, and using them for job nepotism and for political expediency.

They had 45 years to devise pro-active anti-poverty programmes, but all they did was show-time strategies, sweet-talk, playing with donors, and despising the poor as if they were rats in the garbage.

They had 45 years to establish a competent, impartial and reliable Police Force, but all they did was corrupting the Force as an armed wing of the ruling party and promoting gangs-for-hire, which they turn into ethnic militias when they feel embattled.

They had 45 years to produce good infrastructure and services – roads, water, electricity, and communications -, and all they did was fraternising with cowboy contractors, and grossly mismanaging the sector to their own narrow benefits.

They had 45 years to establish a world-class education system in Kenya, but all they did was giving Kenyans sub-standard free primary school after 40 years of waiting, while their own offspring study in expensive private establishments, preferably overseas.

They had 45 years to establish inclusive primary health care and preventive measures, but all they did was relying on churches and NGOs and let people die if they could not pay, while enjoying first class services by ‘private’ doctors and hospitals for themselves.

They had 45 years to prove to Kenyans that they are all equal in their aspirations, opportunities, human rights and cultural traditions, but all they did was to protect – at any cost as we now see – a resented Kikuyu-dominated hegemony and the selected rich from other tribes they need to spread their tentacles all over the country, while regional disparities and abject poverty (including among ordinary Kikuyus) continue to pester.

They had 45 years to respect and promote freedom and democratic rights, but all they did was keeping their flocks in bondage in order to control them in the pursuit of selfish interests and to issue death threats to heroes like Githongo, Maina Kiai, Muthoni Wanyeki, David Ndii and others.

They had 45 years to make Kenya a prosperous, proud and peaceful nation, but all they did was giving Kenyans the breadcrumbs from their tables – a classroom here, a dispensary there, a water-point, a piece of road, a sack of maize…and piga makofi.

They had 45 years to live the way they pretend in Sunday church, but all they did was to throw ethics, humility, compassion, and justice over board. With the second MP having been killed within a week, we can now take it as confirmed that since 1963 the Kenya leadership has never excluded outright liars and killers.

The assassinations of Pio Gama Pinto, Tom Mboya, G.M. Kariuki, Alexander Muge, Robert Ouko and many others were all based on the same script: To defend an entrenched Mafia hegemony. They are those, who right now do not want the Kofi Annan mediation to succeed and sit tight in and around State House, those, who don’t mind burning more of their flock, those who cling to their extremist stands and allow hate messages to circulate and protect their vernacular ‘Mille Collines’ radios, those who allow parochialism to erase better judgement, those who have completely lost semblance of human beings.

It is time for the still sober but shocked Kenyan citizens to stop their helpless praying or gently laying flowers at freedom corner. They should in their millions march to State House and stay there peacefully until the mayhem ends and the culprits are brought to The Hague. The tragedy is that this won’t happen.

*Philip Kiarie initially wrote this as a letter to the editor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among the Third World solidarity posters adorning the walls of the Valley Peace Center in Amherst, Massachusetts in the early 1970s was one particularly striking photo of a handsome, heroic Mozambican Frelimo guerilla. Above him the text read: Stop The Cabora Bassa Dam! I had no idea why we should stop it, but if the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique said so, that was good enough for me.

The dam sits astride the fourth-largest floodplain in Africa, and dam officials must decide whether to hold back or release water. In either case, it’s not helping. “There are 250,000 people living downstream of the [Cahora Bassa] dam, “ said ActionAid’s Mozambique director Alberto Silva, “This is the second year they will lose everything.”

Mozambique's control of the dam may eventually work out if purchasers like Zimbabwe are able to make payments – a very big if. Nevertheless Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, has to figure out how to control not only the Zambezi, but also the Cahora Bassa and the volatile 500 million cubic meters of water churning behind it.

If only they had stuck to their original plan and stopped the dam. Among the Third World solidarity posters adorning the walls of the Valley Peace Center in Amherst, Massachusetts in the early 1970s was one particularly striking photo of a handsome, heroic Mozambican Frelimo guerilla. Above him the text read: Stop The Cabora Bassa Dam! I had no idea why we should stop it, but if the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique said so, that was good enough for me.

Fast forward to November 27, 2007. In the dam city of Songo on the Zambezi River, Mozambique took over complete control of Africa’s second-largest dam from Portugal. In a formal ceremony attended by neighboring heads of state – including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi – Mozambican President Armando Guebuza declared, “The last mark of 500 years of foreign domination in our country has finally been removed.”

Maybe. In the 1970s, Frelimo had made the Cahora Bassa (as it’s now spelled) a high-priority target. Not only was the dam a project of the Portuguese colonial government, but it linked the Zambezi River to white Rhodesia, and was supported by apartheid South Africa and financed by transnational firms like General Electric and Siemens.

In 1975, the Portuguese relinquished political control over Mozambique but not over the dam. Nominally, Hidroelectrica de Cahora Bassa owned the dam , but Portugal retained 82% of the equity of the company. Nevertheless, South Africa encouraged the right-wing U.S.-backed Renamo guerillas to continue attacking the dam in hopes of overthrowing the leftist Frelimo government. Now, in an ironic switch, Frelimo had to defend the dam.

According to researchers Allen Isaacman and Chris Sneddon, the revolutionary movement never wanted it, but “sought to domesticate the ‘white elephant’ of Cahora Bassa for its own developmental purposes.” Said Isaacman and Sneddon, “Stuck with the dam, the newly installed FRELIMO government had little alternative but to discard its long-term opposition to the hydroelectric project. In a radical departure from its previous stance, it hailed Cahora Bassa as a symbol of liberation which would help the people of Mozambique achieve economic prosperity, transform the strategic Zambezi valley and bring the impoverished nation a new source of hard currency by exporting energy to markets throughout the region, not just to South Africa.”

The Cahora Bassa does bring in money, but it’s extremely costly environmentally, and it’s uncertain whether the country will actually make money on the operation. According to Agence France Presse, “Control of the dam is expected to fetch the African nation more than $150 million annually.” But, noted Mozambican Energy Minister Salvador Namburete, “From these $150 million a year, we are going to pay over 15 years a loan of $700 million (471 million Euros) from a Franco-Portugal Calyon/BPI bank consortium taken to buy the part of capital held by Portugal.”

In any case, it may not be worth it. Right now, the East African country is, according to Reuters, being hit by “the worst flooding to hit the country since 2000-2001, when 700 people died and half a million were driven from their homes.” As the United Nations World Food Program begins airlifting emergency supplies to flood victims, the Cahora Bassa is providing little in the way of flood control.

The dam sits astride the fourth-largest floodplain in Africa, and dam officials must decide whether to hold back or release water. In either case, it’s not helping. “There are 250,000 people living downstream of the [Cahora Bassa] dam, “ said ActionAid’s Mozambique director Alberto Silva, “This is the second year they will lose everything.”

Mozambique's control of the dam may eventually work out if purchasers like Zimbabwe are able to make payments – a very big if. Nevertheless Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, has to figure out how to control not only the Zambezi, but also the Cahora Bassa and the volatile 500 million cubic meters of water churning behind it.

If only they had stuck to their original plan and stopped the dam.

*Alec Dubro, creator of The Washington Pox, is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article first appeared.

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

A leading human rights advocacy group in Nigeria has declared that the reoccurring violence in Rivers State, South South of Nigeria is a culmination of years of unlawful patronage of cult groups by past governments and politicians in the state and called on President Umaru Yar’Adua to take urgent measures to arrest the situation by arresting and prosecuting the sponsors of the violence.

In a 36 -page report on the violence titled: NIGER DELTA: DECIMATED BY VIOLENCE: REPORT ON PORT HARCOUT VIOLENCE released on January, 29th in Lagos, The Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) asserted that the violence in Port Harcourt in August 2007 which claimed over a hundred lives was primarily occasioned by a bitter power struggle between two cult groups, the Outlaws led by Soboma George and the Icelanders led by Tom Ateke (both armed by past governments) over territorial control, government patronage and several lucrative extortion rackets in Port Harcourt city. Underlying the violence were several key issues including government patronage of Soboma George, a one time second in command to Ateke Tom, the struggle for power among Rivers State politicians and the widespread availability of weapons and small arms in the entire Niger Delta.

The report concludes that “So long as the federal government neglects to take drastic measures to curb the unhindered flow of arms in the Niger Delta to ensure that politicians no longer use armed groups to rig election, as security guards, and to ensure accountability for past violence in the region, the chance of renewed violence will continue to be high”.

Established in 1987, the CLO is one of Nigeria’s leading human rights organizations with over 4,000 members and zonal structures and offices in the six geo political zones.

The violence in Port Harcourt has become intractable with thousands of people killed, maimed or displaced since 2004. There are over 100 armed cult groups operating in Rivers State with some of the groups sponsored and funded by politicians including government functionaries. In the run up to the 2003 and 2007 general elections, politicians in Rivers state armed several cult groups to help rig the elections. Large sums of money were also distributed to these groups while their leaders were given government contracts. The aim was to win the elections at all cost.

According to the report, despite the enactment of a law in Rivers State by the State House of Assembly in 2003 banning cultism, the cult groups have continued to multiply and at the same time become more violent and daring due to the support of politicians. No prominent leader of the cult groups including their sponsors has been prosecuted. The Report singled out the former governor of Rivers State Chief Peter Odili as being responsible for arming cult groups in the state which he effectively used to rig elections and intimidate political opponents during his eight years reign.

CLO also reports that “an unprecedented wave of human rights violations was unleashed on the city of Port Harcourt and its environs by members of the Joint Task Force (JTF) and the police who were brought in to manage the violence”. Scores of people including women and girls have been arrested, tortured and killed extra judicially by the members of the security force in the guise of fighting armed groups. A young man who challenged police men extorting money from motorists in Agip Road, Port Harcourt city was told in clear terms to count himself lucky.” If you mess up, I will shoot you and tag you a militant and that will be the end of it’.

Elsewhere around the city, members of the JTF set up ubiquitous road blocks where citizens are regularly harassed and brutalized.

Titus Mann, CLO’s President said: “Violence in Rivers State and indeed in the whole of Niger Delta has reached an unacceptable level. This is the time to address the root cause of the problem.”

On assumption of office last year, President Yar’Adua pledged to accord priority to the Niger Delta problems. The government subsequently sent the Vice President, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, a former governor of Bayelsa State, one of the component states of the region on a fence mending mission. However the dialogue initiated by the government has since broken down due to perceived government insincerity.

The report includes recommendation to the Federal and Rivers State governments. To end violence and human rights violations in Rivers state, CLO urge Governor Amechi of Rivers state to:

1. Stop further dealings with militant and cult groups in the state, except for the purpose of facilitating the ongoing dialogue or for disarmament purposes. The use of cult groups for such purposes as rigging election or to provide security duties should be discouraged at all times.
2. Investigate all human rights abuse committed by law enforcement agencies during peace keeping in the state and prosecute any officer indicted or found to have committed any abuse.
3. Take step to implement the various poverty reduction strategies outlined in the State development plan.
4. Publicly condemn the excessive use of force, torture and extra judicial killings by the security forces during the crises.
5. Create employment opportunities in Rivers State as a first step to tackle unemployment, youth restiveness and gangsterism in the state.
6. Ensure that all victims of the violence including those who lost their houses, means of livelihood or families are adequately compensated.

The report also called on the Federal Government to bring all those responsible for the violence including highly placed Nigerians who have armed and encouraged the cult groups to perpetrate violence.

Damian Ugwu, CLO head of Advocacy Unit said; “So long as the federal government neglects to take drastic measures to curb the unhindered flow of arms in the Niger Delta to ensure that politicians no longer use armed groups to rig election, as security guards, and to ensure accountability for past violence in the region, the chance of renewed violence will continue to be high”.

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

*For the full report, please contact the Pambazuka News Editors at

With Africa getting so little out of the commonwealth and the legacies of colonialism, Ronald Elly Wanda suggests Africans should rethink their commitment to this institution.

Since the statute of Westminster that stipulated the formation of the Commonwealth in 1931, the purposes; benefits, representations and agency as well as the so called ‘rewards’ of the union have remained issues of contestations. This year’s Commonwealth’s Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be held in Kampala, East Africa, rekindles this interest. In this edition, Wanda revisits the old debates and concludes that Africa needs to rethink its membership.

Every two years, fifty three heads of states belonging to a voluntary union known as the Commonwealth, (that lacks an official charter or a written constitution) gather at lavish hotels- that money can buy, in former and current British colonies, with the aim of discussing “common interests,” which often do not feature or entertain the needs of the most important person of all – the ‘common man’. As a Commonwealth citizen, the common man, (petty bourgeoisies’ and political elites asides), accounts for almost 30 percent of the total global population. Of the 1.8 billion Commonwealth residents, almost half continue to live below the poverty line, which the UN defines as living on less than a dollar a day. While at the same time, two thirds of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases and maternal deaths take place in countries subscribed to the Commonwealth, where it is also noted that more than half of the world’s 115 million children without education are to be found.

Last year, Uganda, according to the country’s foreign affairs minister, Sam Kutesa, was “blessed to be hosting the CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) and in particular, welcoming her majesty Queen Elizabeth of England”, who is also head of the union.

In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s ruling party, the National Resistance Organisation (NRMO) since coming to power in 1986 has devised a strategy to distance itself explicitly from pro-mwanainchi (citizen) policies that promote social and economically redistributive justice, each and every time it has been made aware of capital mobility. The government’s handling of CHOGM preparations is a case in illustration. NRMO leaders have reoriented party policies towards the interests of any ‘real’ or imagined mobile fraction of capital, yet again at the expense of the hardworking Ugandan mwanainchi. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sam Kutesa said that 65 billion Uganda shillings were allocated for CHOGM activities for this financial year in addition to Ush37b for completion of State House. The meeting, according the government, is expected to attract around 3,000 to 5,000 visitors to Uganda and is expected to cost the poor Ugandan tax payer around Ush102b.

It is abundantly clear, especially for those who live in Uganda that times are increasingly hard for wanainchi (the common man) in today’s Uganda which exist on the periphery of an international economy that is staggering under the afflictions of a prolonged recession- recently demonstrated by the ongoing collapse of the American mortgage industry.

Is it not surely time for us to start questioning the viability of the Commonwealth? Given the negative historical facts that it represents? The union is an amalgamation of former as well as present British colonies, and as such is representative of the British Empire. As Africans are or ought to be too aware, we suffered and continue to suffer a great deal of pain caused by the plights of; slavery, then imperialism, colonialism, globalization and now commonwealthisation. All of these planks were dedicated to the sole objective of the brutal extraction of Africa’s wealth to Britain and at the same time the erosion of the African human dignity.

So, as today’s local imperial agents -President Museveni and his regiment entertain her majesty and “friends of Uganda” to the best of what the pearl of Africa has to offer, isn’t it high time we questioned the essence and representation of this imperialist institution? We need to look with suspicion at imperialist agents such as Museveni- the so called “darling of the west” for their real motivation in promoting anti-wanainchi and neo-liberal agenda at the expense of the common man in Uganda under the auspices of privatization, structural adjustment, market liberalization and foreign direct investment. All of which have harmed and continue to subject the common man in Uganda in abject poverty, whilst the Ugandan government posits its fictitious and impact-less 6.4 percent economic growth.

Uganda is capable of attracting foreign direct investment that has no colonial strings attached to it, China et al is one such example. That said, the rapid integration and enlargement of the East African Community ought to be a lauded affair not only for the countries concerned but for the whole of Africa, because it is the hard but necessary beginning for the unification of a sustainable Africa. From this connection, it is thus foreseeable that cultural imperialism perpetuated by Britain and culminated by its agents through its pet project the Commonwealth will be a thing of the past. For, the commonwealth has served only one primary purpose, that of presenting Britain as structurally superior and continuing the exploitation and extraction of the common man’s wealth to Britain. It is high time we valued the real common man by doing away with this demeaning institution.

*The writer is a political scientist based in London

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

Karambu Ringera, one of the few women to run for electoral office in the Kenya elections, gives a powerful vivid eye-witness account of the violence and the displacement.

Issues

When I left Nairobi for Nakuru to visit the internally displaced people's (IDP) camp, my aim was to be there for 2 days only. I arrived there on Wednesday January 23, little knowing that the events of that night would lock me in Nakuru for five days! On the night of January 23, all hell broke loose in Nakuru town. It was sad, scary and out of this world. I hardly recognized my country anymore. For three days, Kikuyus living in the Rift Valley were being evicted from their homes. The Nakuru violence was a spill over from Eldoret where many Kikuyus amng other ethnic groups had been evicted from their homes and their homes and property burnt. The week before, there had been similar clashes in Kisumu, once again targeting people from the Mount Kenya Region. The violence spread to Kericho, Burnt Forest, Elburgon, and areas surrounding Nakuru town. It was believed that Kalejins were in the forefront of these latter (Rift Valley) evictions and so, when loadfuls of Kikuyus landed into the Nakuru Show Ground (NSG) where these IDP were settled and attended to by the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS), Kikuyus in Nakuru felt they needed to do something about it. To see lorry after lorry of people being dropped at the NSG left many angry.

What was more devastating were the stories of anarchy – burnt homes, slaughtered loved family members, raped mothers and daughters, as destroyed property. The Kikuyus organized themselves and on the night of 23rd they struck at Ponda Mali a few blocks from where I spent that first night. In the morning, a few dead bodies were found but more fundamentally, houses were burnt – this time mainly Luo and Kalejin houses. By Thursday, these attacks were spread to more residential areas around Nakuru town such as Ronda, Mwariki, Kaptembwa, Githima, Freearea, Lakeview, Lanet, Karatina, Kiti, pangani, Flamingo, and Mawanga) – a second IDP's camp was opened at the Nakuru Stadium for Luos and Kalejins. A 7pm to 7am curfew was also set up – the speed with which this curfew was set up saved Nakuru from more blood shed than had already been spilt. On Friday, a friend and I walked to the areas surrounded Langalanga residential area to see what had transpired the night before because we heard was a lot of gunshot sounds. We hardly slept that night because we did not want to be attacked or for the block to be set a fire while we were asleep. The newspapers said that 5 people had been killed but that day we found at least 12 bodies lying uncollected – some had been eaten by dogs overnight. Most bodies had deep cuts – some on the head, some with throats slashed, others with cut off limbs – it was ghastly!! Later in the day, a police Landrover was loaded full of bodies of dead people.

It came for a second round – we estimated over 40 people killed in just…… On Saturday, Nakuru town was a no go zone both day and night. Police and army personnel were all over the town. A helicopter was being use to comb the area and spot trouble points and dispatch soldiers there speedily. The roads were blocked and some people were attacking certain groups of people as early as 5pm. We all were advised to stay indoors. Sunday was more calm were I was although we kept hearing gunshots in the surrounding estates. I had to do what I had initially set out to do in Nakuru – visit the IDP's camp at the Nakuru Show Ground. I went there on Wednesday to arrange to go and hold peace talks with the people at the camp. I intended to work with the counseling groups as my entry point. When the coordinator of the counseling program asked me to explain my approach, I explained that I used a participatory approach where people speak from their experiences. I planned on using the circle model and three statements guide the dialogue. The three statements are: Peace for me is; Peace for me would be; and In the name of peace I commit to… (participants state a concrete action they will undertake) .

The women were asked to use these statements to guide their sharing. We used a talking piece (a piece of stick). Initially I had asked for about 20-25 people. I got 30 women. However about 15 of them had come the day before and had not been debriefed – so they had to leave the circle. Women who had not been debriefed were required to do so before doing any other form of talking to people about their experiences. We held the circle with the 15 or so women left. The main concerns for the women were their children's education; lack of enough food; and where they would go since they did not want to go back to their old places.

The camp

While waiting for the women to gather, I heard a child crying outside. He was crying with a lot of emotion – a child of about 6 years old. I walked over to him and started coaxing him to stop crying while at the same time asking him why he was crying. He was standing alone and I thought he had lost his mother or whoever was with him. After some time, he stopped crying – almost – and then I was approached by a pregnant woman who had stood at a distance watching us. She told me that she had pinched the child for running away from school. The school was across the main road outside the camp. The mother was angry with the boy for crossing the dangerous road (cars were driving by all the time) alone. She also wanted him to stay in school because other kids were there. I told the mother to be patient with the child for after all he had seen, he may have been afraid that when he comes from school he might fond the mother gone. The kid never told us why he ran away for school, even though I tried to ask him. All he did was cry. We tried to get his older brother to take him to school and stay with him there the rest of the day. I do not know whether the mother was able to enforce this because soon after, a KRCS personnel came and took away the mother and the child to talk to them.

The women we visited with started telling us what life was like at the camp. They said that they had a mug of porridge in the morning, no lunch, and very little dinner. The food at dinner was so little – "it is meant to keep the soul alive" – one old lady told me. The food is so little that even children do not get satisfied – so mothers normally shared out their own food to the children. Girls were known to exchange food for sex too. There was lots of sexual activity as evidenced by the number of used condoms found lying around the camp every morning – the KRCS medical team dishes out condoms at the camps. The disturbing part was the rapes that were happening at the camps. The women told us that at night men would scream to make people start running away in panic. Then they would time women and girls, catch them and rape them. So, women were being told to watch over their girls. Women were also being advised not to go to the toilets at night.

On Friday we were sitting in circle sharing when we heard gunshots. The women panicked and one of them worriedly asked "have they come for us here?" This made me realize how scared these people really were. Their fear was deep. I was sad that I could not be of any help in trying to alleviate it. We ourselves from the outside were sitting on edge not knowing whether we would be safe or not going back home. All I could do was encourage them, hope with them that things would change, and assure them that they were safe in the camp because it was guarded. This sense of security was short lived. On Saturday afternoon there was a panic stampede that took place because a run-away prisoner jumped in to the camp in white underwear, the dress code of the attackers of the people in their farms. The IDP thought the attackers had come for them right in the camp. The person who was the man screamed that the attackers had followed them into the camp and there was a stampede that caused the breaking of the NSG periphery fence – fracturing the delicate sense of security they may have felt in this place.

A lot of food and clothes had been donated to the KRCS for these IDP in the camps around Kenya. We saw many lorries loaded with stuff come to the camp. The KRCS also had an office in Nakuru town where they stored these things. The surprising thing was that the people told us they never received any good clothes. They got third rate stuff – the KRCS staff in the store selected clothes for themselves before letting the IDP get into the store to select – the women informed us.

The people also said that the store people let about 30 people to get into the small store and they gave the people only few minutes to select clothes. This meant that one had no time to select good stuff – so they ended up with old t-shirts and skirts. One woman who had brought in a selection of very good clothes found someone selling one of her dresses in the local market! In view of this, when the women told me that they need underwear and pads, I decided not to hand these to the KRCS office as I had done on Wednesday when I first went to the camp. Counseling is being done in the camps by many people. However when I asked whether there were any people talking about peacebuilding I was told "no one had thought of that."

I found my niche. So, I set up to come on Thursday January 24 to start the peace dialogue. Lack of information on where women can get help for educational needs of their children or for material needs is alarmingly much in the camp. At Nakuru many women came to ask me for assistance – where to take their kids for schooling; how they can leave the camp and reach their relatives; how they could earn a living – several girls were looking for househelp jobs (to be employed in people's homes) – and so on. One man approached me with a letter which had a female handwriting seeking assistance for relocation. Since I am from far (Meru – Nakuru is about 9 hours by car from Meru) and did not have the capacity to help, I told the women that they have to speak with the KRCS personnel in their camp so they can ask the questions they were putting to me. I know that the organization is meant to assist people the camps in various ways. So, I insisted that they talk to these people.

The Peace Circle Dialogue

We sat in a circle and I introduced myself, asked someone to open with prayers, after which I asked everyone to introduce themselves and say where they were from. We started off with 30 women, 15 eventually went for debriefing (they had arrived at the camp the night before), two of 15 were called to go to the hospital to check on one of them who had given birth to a baby (they said to me smiling: "we have been blessed with a new life even here"), and two others left for other business. In the end, we had about 10 women who stayed throughout the 2 and a half hour session. I introduced the peace dialogue idea and why we were doing it. I gave the three statements that were going to guide our dialogue, looked for a talking piece and then I began the process.

What emerged was very interesting. Each woman gave her story – most spoke about their history. Some gave incidents before the clashes (current displacement) as what gave them no peace, incidents that were exacerbated by the violence. Most were painful family issues – including wives being told to go where they came from because they were from a different ethnic group – being forced to leave with ones children because the children had the blood of the unwanted ethnic group. On the second day, the women were less personal and our discussions were more on what others had suffered. I was told of an elderly lady who was gang raped and then ripped open because the gangsters wanted to "see where they had been." The woman died. One woman came to me for assistance for her son who is beginning high school. She said to me, "one of the children has been taken to an orphanage. Now I need a place for my son who is attending a day school, but see where he is coming back every end of day. Please take him with you and help him get into a boarding school." At that moment I wished the community home we are building for AIDS orphans and other children in crisis was complete.

I would have taken this boy to stay there while we looked for a boarding school for him. I took the lady's contact so that when I got a school for the boy, I would call them. I have already asked the IPI Program Director to check out a school for this child whose name is Isaac Geita. His mom's name is Margaret Wambui. The women who followed the three statements guiding our peace dialogue had this to say about their view of peaceful being or otherwise and what they committed to do for peace. (i) I have peace when: Peaceful moments cited by these women included when they pray, read the Bible, and when they are able to provide food, shelter and health to their families, including being able to educate their children. (ii) Peace for me is: Some of the answers I got include: End of conflict and violence; all the children in this camp going back to school. Help for those infected by HIV/AIDS, widows, single mothers, and orphans. The women said that education is the only hope for their children considering all their property was gone and the parents were in no position to support them now that they had lost everything. (iii) In the name of peace I commit to: The women committed to praying for peace; supporting those who were in need like orphans; encourages each other to keep hope in God. The women felt that if they kept their hope in God, He would deliver them and prosper them wherever they are.

Conclusion

Before people massacre others, they dehumanize and demonize the enemy. While walking around Ponda Mali, area in Nakuru to see the results of the violence, we came across many bodies of dead people that lay all over the place. Two young people were walking past one body and they said "it is fat!!" They did not see this as a person – he had become an object, hence "IT.". Down the path we found another body and this time, a woman sold her tomatoes unbothered by the presence of a dead body near where she was selling. I wondered at this lack of … fear, respect… what did I expect them to feel for these departed ones – perceived as 'the enemy' by them?

It was sad to witness the disgrace we have come to as a nation – we have become so removed from our humanity – we have failed to see we were the 'other' we were butchering. To fail to 'see' that our humanity is inescapably intertwined with that of those whose lives we have cut short, is to fail to 'recognize' how inhuman we have become. I desire to participate in healing the broken cord that joins me to my sister and brother, no matter their ethnic origin; reconcile the severed human spirit broken by our fractured humanity.

Way Forward

Part of my reason for being in Kenya is to work for peace in Africa. Little did I know I would be doing this for my beloved country. I have already put in place a peace training program under Institute for Nonviolence and Peace (INPEACE) (INPEACE was launched in 2005 at the Women's Congress held in Nairobi that year). I intend to continue the peace dialogues in the IDP's camps that I started in Nakuru. I also intend to do a training for leaders, who will hopefully share what they learn with their constituents. Then I will start systematic trainings for civil society, with a focus to women and youth. I am already meeting with people and organizations willing to partner with IPI's INPEACE to run the trainings. The plan is to begin with trainings for women and youth in the camps and leaders and follow up with longer term programs for civil society and learning institutions. I also hope to continue helping with material and informational assistance to women and young girls in camps.

For those interested in supporting women and girls materially, IPI has been collecting clothes and food stuffs and taking to various collection points in Meru. However, from the experience of what the women in Nakuru told me, IPI will be distributing the stuff directly to women in their tents within the camps like we did the last time we donated underwear and pads to women and girls at Nakuru.

*Dr. Karambu Ringera was one of the few women who ran for elected office. She was the North Imenti Parliamentary Aspirant.

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

Thank you for having me on your show this morning.

I have been following the situation in Kenya closely, and I am deeply concerned by the news and photographs I have seen. I want you to know that my thoughts and prayers - and those of my family - are with all of the victims of the violence, and with all Kenyans who have been displaced from their homes.

Urgent action must be taken to stop this spiral of violence, and to help resolve the current political crisis. Kenya has long been known as a multi-ethnic society. The steps you have taken toward multi-party democracy in recent years have set a proud example for east Africa.

I have personally been touched by your generous, democratic spirit through my ties to my own family, and during my travels to Kenya -most recently as a United States Senator in 2006. This Kenyan spirit rises above ethnic groups or political parties, and was on display in Kenya's recent election, when you turned out to vote in record numbers, and in a peaceful and orderly way.

But recent troubling events in Kenya bear no resemblance to the Kenya I know and carry with me. The senseless and tragic violence poses an urgent and dangerous threat to Kenyans, Kenyan democracy, and stability and economic development in a vital region.

Most troubling are new indications that the violence is being organized, planned and coordinated.

Clearly, Kenya has reached a defining moment. There is no doubt that there were serious flaws in the vote tabulation. There is also no doubt that actions taken by both sides in the aftermath of the election have deepened the political impasse.

Now is not the time to throw Kenyan democracy and national unity away. Now is the time for all parties to renounce violence.

Now is the time for Kenya's leaders to rise above party affiliation and past divisions for the sake of peace. President Kibaki, Raila Odinga, and all of Kenya's leaders - political, civic, business, and religious -- have a responsibility to calm tensions, to come together unconditionally, and to pursue a political process to address peacefully the controversies that divide them.

This crisis and terrible violence must end. A negotiated solution must be peaceful and political, and should take account of past failures and prevent future conflict.

The rule of law and the rights of the Kenyan people - including freedom of the media and the freedom of peaceful assembly - must be restored.

Recent efforts by African Eminent Persons, like Kofi Annan, have yielded very modest progress, and there is no reason President Kibaki and Mr. Odinga should refuse to sit down unconditionally. To refuse to do so ignores the will of Kenyans and the urging of the united international community. While only Kenyans can resolve this crisis, I urge you to welcome the assistance of your concerned friends in working through this difficult time.

The deep frustrations that are felt on allsides of the Kenyan divide are understandable. There is no doubt that much more work remains to be done for Kenya to become a more equitable and democratic society.

But Kenya has come too far to throw away decades of progress in a storm of violence and political unrest. We must not look back years from now and wonder how and why things were permitted to go so horribly wrong. Kenya, its African friends, and the United States must now be determined pursuers of peace - and this determined pursuit must start today with individual Kenyans refusing to resort to violence, and Kenyan leaders accepting thei responsibility to turn away from confrontation by coming together.

Kenya's long democratic journey has at times been difficult. But at critical moments, Kenyans have chosen unity and progress over division and disaster. The way forward is not through violence. To all of Kenya's people, I urge you to renounce the violence that is tearing your great country apart and deepening suffering. I urge you to follow a path of peace.

* Sen. Barack Obama delivered this statement on Capital-FM at 7:45 a.m. January 29, 2008

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

Reflections arising from the report on the AACC solidarity visit led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Introduction

Following the post election violence that rocked the Republic of Kenya after President Kibaki was declared the winner of the December 2007 elections, the All Africa Conference of Churches, with headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, sought to contribute to the calming of the situation and the resolution of the problem by inviting a team of eminent African Church leaders led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to come and offer solidarity to the people of Kenya and help profile the cause of peace to the nation. The Archbishop was accompanied by the President of the All Africa Conference of Churches the Rt. Rev. Nyansako ni Nku, the Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa and former General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches Dr. Brigalia H. Bam and the General Secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches, the Rev. Dr. H. Mvume Dandala.

The information gathered during this visit indicated something of the complexity of the problem, as well as the fact that finding a solution, both on a short term and on a long term basis will need to take into consideration a number of factors such as:
- The Historical background
- The tension defined
- The expressions of the violence
- The Role of the Church
- The Role of the media
- Possible Ways forward

It is with these in mind that the AACC offers the reflections contained herein.

Background

Whilst the visit was short, the AACC heard clearly the voices of many to the effect that only Kenyans could intervene in this situation. Any form of ‘international mediation or intervention’ was looked at askance. Whilst the National Council of Churches of Kenya opened its welcoming arms to the visit, the delegation sensed that not all the churches were fully convinced of the merits of the solidarity visit of the Archbishop even though these were expressed in respectful ways. On the other hand messages of appreciation from ordinary Kenyans were frequently received by the AACC, often couched with expressions of hope that the visit would help bring peace. The sense of the AACC
is that these doubts about the efficacy of the visit were driven either by
- the sense of patriotic pride that hurts from anything that may be perceived as suggesting that the Kenyans are not able to resolve this problem on their own;
- the uncertainty of what an even handed approach might lead to, or
- the firm belief that there are indeed Kenyans who can be able to facilitate an adequate response to the crisis.

Most disturbing is the often mutely expressed statement by some Kenyans that “this is not the first time that Kenyans have experienced this kind of crisis, and just as they have resolved the past similar crises, so will they resolve this one as well”. This attitude feels indifferent to the loss of life of even one Kenyan. It is not worthy of any nation that values the lives of all its citizens.

On the other hand it is possible that the conviction that it will take a Kenyan mediator to intervene effectively may be born of recognition that the communities at conflict have historical, long standing voiced and unvoiced and often nuanced concerns that an outsider may not easily be sensitive to. Participation in an ecumenical prayer service for church leaders at All Saints Anglican Cathedral on Sunday January 6th, 2007 gave one a glimpse of such concerns. The issues at stake may range from perceived unfair resource sharing, ethnic distrust and many other such issues that may have compounded themselves into modern Kenyan politics. What is obvious is that these stretch from beyond colonial times to modern Kenyan governance with all the complications that were subsequent to colonial domination. The regularity with which these issues are referred to by the Kenyan community should make it possible for the Kenyan society to overcome them. But the question is whether these are confronted with such honesty in the corridors of power where they should be dealt with.

The AACC is of the mind that there is therefore need for such historical facts to be understood as part of the process to the resolution of the impasse, both on a short and on a long term basis. Whether this is done by an international or local mediation body is a moot point. The critical factor is the independence of the mediation body, together with the rigour and sense of fairness that such a body would bring. Such a body must assist the country to find speedily a workable resolution to the immediate impasse, thus creating space for a longer term solution that will lay the foundations for the healing of the country and the strengthening of the overall sense of common nationhood among all the peoples of Kenya.

But for now the question is what is it that the AACC team heard as to the nature of the reigning crisis?

The tension defined

While the conflict erupted as a consequence of disputed presidential electoral results, the communities at conflict have a historical and long standing and often unvoiced concerns, dating back to independence days when many Kenyans felt that their expectations were not met. The independent government inherited colonial structures and failed to address the injustices and inequalities that had characterised the nation because people had different persuasions. And therefore, over the years, it has appeared that the president of the day brings his community closer to power to benefit from national resources more than other communities.

Violence

The various parties have differing views as to the nature of the violence that has been evident. Some see it as a political tool, pre-meditated and deliberately unleashed with an element of ethnic cleansing in its make up. Claims were made that some of the perpetrators of the violence were paid to do so.

Others see it as a spontaneous and unorganised natural reaction to what they see as vicious day light robbery at the polls which the voters could not stomach.

The delegation wondered if there was adequate political will to stop the violence and find a solution that is acceptable to all. The PNU and the ODM both appear unshaken in their conviction that the other party is responsible and has the capacity to stop the violence. If preventing the deaths and the destruction of property was paramount in the thinking of all the parties, it must be obvious that the leaders of all the parties should have come out together at least to denounce the violence in full view of the nation and offer assurance that an equitable solution was being sought. Such a joint condemnation of violence should have been made regardless of the cause, whether pre-meditated, spontaneous, ethnic or otherwise. This agenda item is still outstanding.

The Role of the Church

Reports from the church leaders spoken to indicate that the church is appalled by the violence, and had in fact, at the time of the arrival of the delegation, already started to take steps to respond to the crisis. But the church leaders did not try to hide the fact that there was a lot of division even amongst themselves. Some church leaders, if not most, were perceived to have aligned themselves with specific party positions, thus robbing the church of an authoritative, collective and independent moral voice that could champion the cause of peace and unity for the nation in spite of the different political views. The churches, according to the NCCK, are clear in that the healing of the nation must go hand in hand with the healing of the church.
The initiatives of the church had not yet gained a high media profile at the time of the solidarity visit. But a common front for an effective ministry to the nation through the National Alliance of Churches had been forged. The Alliance has four major task forces, viz:

1. The political
2. The humanitarian
3. Communication, and
4. The Spiritual.

Through these the church is poised for a significant ministry impact to the nation. The church leaders have a responsibility to:
- Encourage and enable the political leaders to come together to call for the end to violence and speak for the preservation of life.
- Encourage the leaders to ensure that there is space for alternative voices to be heard without this descending into a conflagration of violence.
- Impress strongly on the political leaders to embrace alternative ways of resolving conflict to violence.

While the question of the source of violence cannot be ignored for an effective response to be developed, it is essential that this should not be allowed to create a stalemate as it is likely to. The churches themselves are not of one view on this matter. As the visit report indicates the gulf is big between the parties as to the causes of the violence. The church can and should assist for common positions to counter and forestall violence to be developed and embraced by all.

The delegation noted that there is suspicion of the usage of church language among the various parties. The ODM alleged that some of their leaders have been referred to as “devil worshippers” and that in spite of the fact that those leaders are Christians their churches did not assist them to clear their names before the nation. On the other hand it may be inferred that in expressing concern that ‘the churches must support a constitutionally elected government’ the government (PNU) was calling for the public support of the church in this crisis. It simply is essential that the church does not try to hedge its bets but instead clarify its message. Such a message has to be based on that which will heal the nation and purify the institutions of national governance so that the faith of the people in these is restored. This in itself will go a long way in redeeming the church thus restoring its moral authority which this situation has sought to compromise.

The role of the Media

At the time of the solidarity visit some measures were in place to limit the work of the media. This is regrettable. The churches cannot afford to overlook it. The role of the media in this crisis may need reflection with the view that the confidence of the populace on the media should be nurtured as an essential element in the work of healing the nation. Questions were raised with the delegation as to whether the media may have fuelled (wittingly or unwittingly) the crisis during the period preceding the elections.

The role of the media in the formation of national attitudes can never be overemphasised. The media’s role is more than merely reporting what is happening. It has to stimulate creative thinking in the nation about the values that the nation cherishes and raise questions where any section of society seeks to undermine or demonstrates disregard of the common good and the institutions that seek to serve the common good.

- The media must be used to bring people together instead of inflaming them.
- It should use history to heal and build people instead of dividing them.
- It must demystify myths about ethnic practices instead of perpetuating them

It is in this light that the role of the media in this crisis should be examined. Reasons behind the limitations that were imposed on the media in the course of this crisis could either be that the media used its freedom irresponsibly, or that those with authority did not like what they saw of themselves in the mirror that is the media. Since the media is a prime catalyst for exchanging ideas in a free society it is essential that its freedom is guaranteed with instruments of protest against it in place where its objectivity is suspect. The alternative is a perception that totalitarian seeds are being sown. The Republic of Kenya, a bastion of peace and developing democracy in Africa, cannot afford to lower its guard on this score.

Possible Resolution Scenarios for consideration by the Church

The AACC believes that there is an important role for the churches of Kenya to play in helping towards the resolution of this impasse. Primarily the church should assist the key leaders of the various parties to accept joint responsibility for diffusing the crisis.

1. Top in the process should be agreed strategies to stop the violence. The political leaders must mobilise all their people to desist from violent activities and in fact declare violence the enemy of the nation.
2. The leaders must reinforce the right to freedom of expression. Police and rally marshals should be deployed under the command of the police to protect demonstrators, passers by and property. They must seek to ensure that no one abuses the right to freedom of speech as a licence to kill, injure or loot property.
3. The Kenyan Law and Order Enforcement agencies, especially the police, should be encouraged to desist from using excessive force during such demonstrations.
4. Church leaders must help engender a spirit of cooperation among the opposing political parties that will allow a structure that is accommodative to lead the administration of the country.
5. Church leaders must accompany such a structure with processes that will limit the chances of reneging on positions agreed to. They must help create and nurture space for mistrust to be reduced.
6. On a longer term basis Church leaders should help both the political leaders and the general population to identify those institutional structural deficiencies that made this crisis possible, such as the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) in order to pave the way for the strengthening of such structures, thus laying the foundations for a more secure and dependable electoral system.
7. On a long term basis Church leaders have to assist put in place processes that will contribute towards the enhancement of a common sense of Nationhood that transcends ethnicity so that the sharing of resources and access to justice is not only equitable, but seen to be so by the nation at large.
8. Church leaders must prioritise the healing of the church as they themselves have acknowledged this need.

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

In a question and answer letter, Ali Mazrui and David Ohito grapple with the question of whether Kenya is heading toward a civil war.

Dear Prof Mazrui,

The latest wave of violence is threatening the country. In Nakuru the problem of ethic violence has emerged. Kikuyus are being attacked over land issues as historical injustices become the new phase of protest.

Kibaki insists he was duly elected and sworn in and any election dispute should go to court as spelled out in the Constitution.

Raila Odinga insists he is not going to a court full of Kibaki's appointees. The formula to a peaceful resolution remains elusive. what is your take on this?

I agree with your predictions that many African Heads of States may have saved their countries from civil war.

In Your opinion how far do you think will the International community wait before serious intervention other than mere statements? Is it good to impose sanctions economic, travel bans to Kenya?

Are there any options the West, US, EU, UK, and even Asia can take to help save Kenya from being a failed state?

Kofi Annan watched and acted too little too late as Rwanda degenerated into genocide. There was little international intervention. He himself later said he acted too slow too late while he was UN Secretary General. Is history repeating itself here? Can Kofi Annan recommend faster options to salvage Kenya?

Would you consider giving your proposals to Kofi Annan for a way forward and what would those options for a solution be?

Give any remarks that would help hold Kenya together without degenerating into genocide or civil strife.

Thank you.

David Ohito

Dear Ndugu Ohito:

In answer to your questions, I have lived long enough to know how civil wars begin in developing countries. I never expected there would be a civil war in Northern Uganda which would last twenty years, and unleash untold suffering and brutality. It has still not fully ended.

When the Sudanese civil war was ending in the South, who would have predicted another civil war in Darfur? Ethiopia has had a variety of civil conflicts, the latest involving ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden. The brutalities of the Sierra Leonean civil war took everybody by surprise.

Can such a bloody breakdown happen in Kenya? I am beginning to be truly fearful. What was once unthinkable is no longer inconceivable. While north of the Sahara the triggers of conflict are often religious, south of the Sahara they tend to combine ethnicity, power rivalry and economic deprivation.

As soon as casualties of a conflict reach a thousand dead, several thousand injured and at least a hundred thousand displaced, speedy action is needed to contain the explosion. A mini-civil war could be in the making. Kenyans and the international community cannot afford to be complacent.

Representatives of the African Union, the European Union, the United States, religious bodies, former African Heads of State, and Kofi Annan have approached the two sides of the Kenya conflict in terms of persuasion and the quest for a compromise. We now need more pressure and threats from the international community.

Initially the threats should be targeted at the elite, rather than the general population. Withholding economic aid would hurt the wider population, but suspending Kenya's membership of the African Union and the Commonwealth would deprive us of credentials to sit at the summit meetings, or meetings of foreign ministers, of such international organizations. Specific members of both the government and the opposition could be deprived of Visas to the western world if they are identified as extremists against the search for solutions.

Many members of the Kenyan elite also have Bank accounts abroad. The international community could threaten to freeze such bank accounts if there is no effort to solve the Kenya crisis.

Normally, the international community does not try to intervene in Africa until the problem is truly catastrophic. That has been the situation in Congo-Kinshasa, in Rwanda, Darfur and in Somalia. Kenya is a situation of trying to prevent a crisis from becoming a catastrophe. There is still time - but not a lot of time to avert an explosion.

Kofi Annan is trying his best, but he needs help in the form of massive political pressure on both sides. If mediation is not working, it may be time to threaten specific international sanctions, beginning with elite-focused threats of consequences.

What is at stake is not just the political stability of Kenya. It is also the economic viability of Eastern Africa as a whole. Kenya's economy has vibrations of region-wide consequences. How can we avert a region-wide catastrophe?

We are still far from a civil war. But our leaders should start discussing how to secure our borders against gun-running and importation of weapons. The border with Somalia especially needs to be secured, but without keeping out Somali refugees. Our leaders may also have to consider whether or not it is time to seek international help for peacekeeping in the Rift Valley. The situation is grave. Have we declared a state of emergency in the Rift Valley?

Yours sincerely,
Ali A. Mazrui

* Ali Mazrui is Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, Binghamton University, State University of New York at Binghamton, New York, USA and Chancellor, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Thika and Nairobi Kenya.

* David Ohito? is a Senior Reporter?THE STANDARD?Nairobi, Kenya

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

Tapera Kapuya draws parallels between Kenya's post-elections crisis and the political struggles in Zimbabwe, and stresses the need for sound democratic structures

Since its December 27th General Election, Kenya has been experiencing a wave of political conflicts that should serve as a lesson to Zimbabwe’s pro-democracy movement, as these problems are rooted in the same democratic deficit. Much of the media coverage on Kenya seems to have been consumed by a focus on the ensuing violence with very marginal efforts to investigate issues at the centre of this conflict: absence of democratic institutions and the shortfalls of ‘executive’ fundamentalism. With Zimbabwe facing a potential election in March, a look into the Kenyan scenario would be helpful in avoiding a worse repeat. This is necessary in order to build agency, around a proper constitutional reform process, whose outcome will insulate Zimbabwe from the problems those in Kenya are going through and those experienced in past elections. Since the Kenyan election, over a thousand people have since lost their lives and 250 000 more have been displaced. As in most post-colonial conflicts, much of these tensions have taken an ugly ethno-tribal character.

According to observers, the elections themselves were held in a manner that can be deemed ‘free and fair’. In the run-up to the vote, all political parties had relative space to organize and campaign. Kenya has a growing free media, and unlike Zimbabwe does not have such notorious legislations as the Public Order and Security Act or the Access to Information and Protection of Publicity Act. The Election Day itself was rather peaceful.

The opposition, Orange Democratic Movement, won majority of the parliamentary seats. The ruling party would be announced as having won the Presidential vote. Problems were then reported in the tallying of the vote, throwing the Mwai Kibaki’s victory into dispute. The Chairperson of the Kenya Electoral Commission has since acknowledged that there was manipulation of the vote.

Independent observers have suggested that the Election was too close. The US Ambassador to Kenya, Michael Rannesberger, is quoted saying whoever won the Election, did so by a margin between 23 000 to 100 000 votes. And that is where part of the problem and why building Constitutional frameworks that harness the spirit of nation building lie.

Kenya like Zimbabwe, has its Lancaster House Constitution, drawn in 1963 as a settlement document when the British colonists were withdrawing from the territory to allow for Kenya’s independence. Consequently, this Constitution, now with its fair share of amendments, has not abhorred well for a transformational state, therefore allowing for dictatorship tendencies to set in. The Daniel Moi regime, would master repression under the shoulder of Constitutional righteousness. As it relates to Elections, state administration and governance, Kenya has a winner-takes-all/loser-leaves-all system. This system is what we have in Zimbabwe. What this means is that, even if one wins an election by one vote, the opinions of the section of the voters who would have lost will not find political representation or expression. It is a system that excludes ‘losers’ and, as we are learning from Kenya, this provides a base for fuelling other deep seated tensions. It questions the legitimacy of the winner as a representative of all interest groups.

As with Zimbabwe, Kenya’s Presidential parliamentary system places more power in the executive, including power to legislate. The executive has a monopoly over national resource distribution, with the legislature being reduced to a powerless club of sessional critics or patronage driven loyalists. With a Constitution that bestows enormous powers on the executive, and because there are no constitutional provisions to ensure equitable distribution of the country’s resources, perceived loss of the vote carries a heavy meaning for those who lose. In regions and amongst groups perceived to be less prioritized by the victors, this arrangement fuels anger. It means another five years of being isolated, another five years of exclusion, another five years of poverty.

The disproportionate powers the executive have compromises the others arms of government. The legislature and judiciary become overly dependent on the executive, undermining their role to provide for checks and balances. Executive accountability erodes. Corruption and its attendant defense systems set in: with regionalism and identity cleavages taking centre stage in national determination. Regions or communities without a ‘representative’ in power suffer. Democratic transformation in Kenya, as in Zimbabwe, gained its momentum in the demands for Constitutional reform, with Kibaki defeating Moi on the banner of ‘a people driven Constitution’. Kenyans are yet to see it, two Presidential terms down the line. Most of those in civil society would be absorbed into the luxurious benefits of the State and soon forget the principled demands of institutionalizing democracy, and facilitating the writing down by the people of a framework under which they want to be governed – a Constitution. The disasters are what we are seeing today: those who feel excluded and watching their vote becoming meaningless are resorting to ‘all means necessary’ to reclaim the vote from the gutters. The death toll keeps rising as neighbor turns against neighbor, and identity replaces values in deciding who is a friend or foe.

The primacy of identity politics becomes breeding ground for the most deprived tendencies. It fosters an identity based nationalism which regresses democratic values necessary for nation building. As we have seen in Kenya, the electoral loss/victory soon takes the form of one identity grouping having defeated the other and the nation dividing along ethno-tribal lines. Ethnic identity is now equated with political identity.

Is Zimbabwe the next Kenya?
A similar threat confronts Zimbabwe, risking the negation of genuine national debate on democratic transformation. Given our history, and the need to foster a common identity in our diversity, a political system and Constitutional framework which allows for this is critical. The incumbent regime has set the country back into the socio-psychology of identity in determining who can participate or not in national discourse. Our white population has been effectively wiped out from being Zimbabwean. Even in the most liberal of opposition spaces, they are regarded with suspicion and are politely censored from making public representation. Zimbabweans of Indian descend or Mixed-race have been purged from public political participation. Amongst the black population, it has begun to matter whether one is Zezuru, Karanga or Ndebele. As if this is not enough, gender, even within these clusters of divisions, has been so entrenched to qualify exclusion, with our women compatriots having to endure structural abuse to assert the mere fact that they too are citizens. Human character is secondary in the estimation of man and women. These identities inform people’s perceptions of who is excluded or included in the economic, social or political benefit – be they in the patronage of the State, or in civil society and opposition or business.

The violence that is manifest in Kenya, though based on identity, is reflective of failures in the country’s Constitution and institutions to be responsive to the crises of nation building. Many Kenyans have doubts about the validity of country’s Constitution, especially the process under which it was written. This is of relevance to Zimbabwe, where sadly, the Kenyan case history could be vengefully repeating itself.

The MDC has consistently argued that a new Constitution must be put in place before the elections. Yet it seems to be doing everything to confirm its participation in the electoral process before this key demand has been met. Gabriel Chaibva, spokesperson of one faction of the MDC, in an interview with VOA is categorical about participating in the March elections. Nelson Chamisa, the spokesperson for the other faction, suggested the same in his widely condemned rally speech where he threatens Kenyan style protests should Mugabe do what he knows best: manipulate the vote.

Despite this grandstanding and pontification about a new Constitution, the MDC – in itself a product of the Constitutional movement – does not seem to place value in the importance of a democratic, public participatory process of Constitution making. The Constitution it is fighting for in the talks is a product of ‘four wise men’, determining the permanent fate of 13million of their fellow citizens! The Constitution they are proposing has not been seen or shared by Zimbabweans. Speaking during a visit to the US end last year, leader of one of the factions, Morgan Tsvangirai is quoted in an interview suggesting that ‘we have graduated from process’, in deviation from the principles. Welshman Ncube, the Secretary General of the other faction and himself a professor at law, in his speech to Parliament in support of the widely condemned 18th Constitutional Amendment to the Constitution of Zimbabwe went to depth to explain that the principles of an ‘open, transparent and participatory manner’ in Constitution making were not a ‘fundamentalist decree’. On the 3rd of January, Morgan Tsvangirai published an opinion piece suggesting that a Transitional Constitution had been finalized, with the sticking point being that of implementation. The nation or even members of the MDC are yet to see it. Our experience has been a bitter one: reforms made in the dark, excluding national dialogue are partly the reason why we are where we are today: a reason for us to be very afraid of the Kenyan ‘demons’ visitation or better still of being ‘Kibakised’. But what is even more frightening, if it is to be believed, is the revelation by Nathaniel Manheru a columnist for government controlled Herald who wrote in last Saturday’s edition that the so called ‘transition’ constitution agreed by Zanu PF and the MDC is nothing more than the 2000 government draft that lost the referenda.

The South African Model Model countries such as South Africa do offer learning curves on national reconstruction. Emerging from its brutal past, as the rest of post-colonial Africa, South Africa underwent a process of Constitutional building that pitched public participation at the centre of Constitutional development. Public opinion and debate would take place, with its Constitutional Assembly, civil society and political parties opening the nation to dialogue with itself. What resulted was amongst other things, an electoral and political system that is modestly inclusive, guaranteeing proportional representation, and allowing all views brought to an electoral contest and receiving electoral support, to find a measure of expression.

Greater devolution of power in provinces and local municipalities has created a system of greater accountability and service delivery. There is freedom of electoral contest and democratic expression. The result has been limited violent contestation of election results and a harmonious existence of political formations and civic groups despite their competing ideologies or perspectives. Those who lose an election will still salvage their proportional representation of the vote.

The National Constitutional Assembly has advocated for a similar system of Constitution making based primarily on the principles of ‘public participation, openness and transparency’. Its 2001 draft addresses some of the key issues of proportional representation and institutions that safe-guard democracy: Electoral Commission, Human Right Commission, Gender Commission etc. The draft also argues for a strong legislature and judiciary and the effective separation of powers between the varying arms of the State. Parliament, elected through a mixed system of constituency based and party-proportional representation would elect the leader of government who would account to it. This system was drawn out of the views gathered from ordinary Zimbabweans, by both the NCA and the government’s own Constitutional Commission. The government draft presented to the referendum in 2000 ignored all these views, and was wisely rejected. In arguing that elections should be deferred until such a time as there is a Constitutional and electoral framework, the NCA aims to pre-empt the possibility of national degeneration.

The Kenyan scenario points to the things we can avoid and toward the importance of working on developing and putting in place structural systems that ensure barbarism and exclusion are not part of our politics and national life. The democracy movement must learn that short-cuts to freedom lead to spurious regimes and the entrenchment of anti-democratic practices. The MDC, carrying with it the mantle of the nation’s hope for change, must rethink its options. The current opportunism and intellectual laziness that is becoming so pervasive should be stopped and give way to the principled call for a just and free nation.

* Tapera Kapuya is with the National Constitutional Assembly. He writes in his personal capacity. He can be reached on [email][email protected]

John Lonsdale argues that key to the post-election crisis in Kenya lies in the changing role of the post-colonial state in relation to the country's ethnic terms of political trade

The extensive commentary on Kenya's troubles has tended to blame ancient tribal rivalry, cynical political calculation, or a combination of the two; with the corrupted electoral process seen as providing the unintended catalyst - or worse, the deliberate instigator that awakens latent tribal hostility. British imperialism has also received its expected share of criticism, for inventing the now-indigenous Kenyan practice of divide and rule (see Caroline Elkins, "What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing", Washington Post, 6 January 2008).

While all such explanations have some merit they may also mislead the unwary, since they underplay the always slippery relations between ethnicity as a universal human attribute, politicised tribalism as a contingent process, and the state - any state, colonial or otherwise - as a cockpit of variously contested but always unequal power. How, then, can a focus on such factors illuminate Kenya's continuing turmoil?

A colonial formation

In the 19th century the area that became "Kenya" was stateless. Its peoples' civility, their ethnicity, was shaped by their subsistence: farming or herding, or some mixture of both. Such ethnic groups were not teams, not "tribes". Loyalties and rivalries were smaller than that - patriarchal lineages, marriage alliances, age-groups, trading partnerships, client-clusters, and the like. Ethnic groups were constituted more by internal debate over how to achieve honour in the unequal lives of patron or client, than by solidarity against strangers. Ethnic economies indeed were as often complementary as competitive, with different specialisms. But such inter-ethnicity - which was not without its frictions - was facilitated by the absence of any central power that might arrange groups in hierarchical relations. Sustained "tribal rivalry" could not exist under such decentralised, underpopulated, conditions.

It was European rivalry that imported that modern Leviathan, the state, in the late 19th century. It was, like all states, assembled by force and driven by self-interest. Its British officials allied with African leaders too weak to be rivals; and occasionally did a little to rein in the otherwise self-destructive excesses of those potentially overmighty subjects, the white settlers. The colonial state, responsible to Westminster and at the same time nervous of India's viceroy and then (at independence) the country's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru - since British Indians far outnumbered white Britons in Kenya - stood to some extent athwart both Africans and settlers, trying to mediate the contradictions between them. Both settlers and Africans colonised the state and the facilities it provided. What had previously been a multi-polar mosaic of scattered nodes of socially productive energy became, within Kenya's new borders, a layered pyramid of profit and power, unequally divided between two key centres - one "white", one black - and many marginalised peripheries.

White settlers got 20% of Kenya's high-potential farmland. As these settlers failed to provide enough state revenue and blocked African opportunity, the British increasingly encouraged African farming on the other 80%. So the second economic centre became Kikuyu-land: home of 20% of the population; close to the capital, Nairobi; cool and attractive to missionaries, with more schools than elsewhere. By geographical accident, then, Kikuyu had a head start in making money (essential to advance political ambitions) and in acquiring modern managerial skill.

Most nationalisms start among those subjects who do best out of, and are most useful to, an ancien regime; their frustrations are keenest, their opportunity greatest. Yet while that may explain Kikuyu leadership of Kenya's anti-colonial nationalism, it does not account for their involvement in Mau Mau, its secretive, violent, offshoot. To that point I will return, as it is a key to understanding the present.

A social transformation

In the new circumstances, other and not-so-well-placed ethnic groups made the most of what they had. They were often driven by a local patriotism inspired by vernacular, mission-translated, Bibles that told of an enslaved people who became a tribal nation. They embarked, in combinations of hope and desperation, on chain-migrations out of pauper peripheries (not unlike the Scots or Irish in comparable circumstances) to colonise particular niches of employment: on the railway; on white farms and plantations; in domestic service; or in the police and army. Yet others came to dominate the livestock trade.

Officials and employers exploited these various tendencies and stereotyped the supposed ethnic qualities of the group concerned. The British helped to harden ethnic divisions made greater by differing potentials for social mobility. Britain did not simply divide in order to rule.

The emergence of ethnic consciousness also arose from local debates about how the genders, generations, rich and poor should relate, as older inequalities were transformed into new differentiations less sensitive to existing moral audits of honour.

Nowhere was such differentiation so sharp as among Kikuyu. Its effects became politically acute after 1945 when settler employers in the Rift Valley's "white highlands" mechanised production, and the extensive Kikuyu diaspora of tenant-workers in the region refused the worsening conditions they were offered. These "ex-squatters", failing to recover a home in their increasingly populated, and property-protective, "reserves", had to make shift in Nairobi's slums. The insistent question, "how then can I live as an honourable Kikuyu?" was what separated the militants of Mau Mau from the politically conservative, propertied, patrons - led by Jomo Kenyatta - who first inspired them.

A political competition

The horrors of the Mau Mau "emergency" war of the 1950s that ensued proved the repressive potential of a colonial state too closely allied to the settlers, its strongest clients. But the relative calmness of decolonisation in 1963 similarly proved the advantages of an outgoing state power that was not solely dependent upon its local roots - a clear contrast with Rhodesia's fiery end. The post-colonial state - rooted in a competitive society, for good historical reasons - is once more different. For the state has been the sole agency by which Africans could aspire to climb the commanding heights of the economy against racially entrenched interests - in land, commerce and finance. In recent years it has continued this role by ever more devious means, to meet external demands for "liberalisation". Access to its power matters. It is concentrated in an executive presidency, now directly elected, capable of manipulating all public institutions, including a parliament elected from single-member constituencies that either singly or in contiguous groups coincide with what have become tribal territories.

In consequence, the competition for a share in this power became governed by internal ethnic accountability and tribal rivalry. President Kenyatta and his Kikuyu elite soothed the frustrated honour of their Kikuyu poor with settlement schemes in the former "white highlands" (of which the bulk, historically, had belonged to less favoured Maasai and Kalenjin groups). His successor Daniel arap Moi, finding less room for the poor of own Kalenjin, did more to create for them an ethnic elite.

Politicians generally justify their privilege by carving ethnic benefits from state largesse. But (in Kenya as elsewhere) this extractive approach faced increasing pressures. The ferocity of competition for a share of state power rose over time - as population has grown, as the fertilising rains of the post-colonial Africanisation of opportunity long ago dried up, as the terms of trade for primary commodities turned sour. It was fairly easy for Kenyatta to ensure that all, more or less, enjoyed a turn "to eat" in the ethnic coalitions on which a parliamentary majority relied. It was more difficult for Moi. As the political stakes rose, so it became more tempting to attract and reward one's ethnic followers with officially-deniable opportunities for thuggery at the expense of those who were now tribal rivals in land, urban property, or petty trade. With every "bought" election, popular anger grew among Kenyan citizens - to an extent that they created pressure for a constitutional change which would strengthen parliament at the expense of the presidency.

A national transition?

A new president, Mwai Kibaki, was elected in 2002 to clean the Aegean stables. But in that effort he has disappointed all but his Kikuyu cronies. Now, in the presidential election of 27 December 2007, he appears to many to have broken the tacit rules of national competition - the last straw. That the opposition was, it seems, merely less successful in rigging the ballot will not make reconciliation any easier. Some of the subsequent opposition violence is politically directed. But the worst, by Kalenjin "warriors" against Kikuyu "immigrants" into the Rift Valley, may have outrun such elite-engineered tribalism to become an eerie echo of Mau Mau - in being an internal, generational, ethnic revolt against the compromises by which its own recently-manufactured Kalenjin elite came to terms with the "old wealth" of Kenyatta's Kikuyu.

There are, then, two very different dynamics currently at work in Kenya: internal ethnic dissidence and external tribal rivalry. Neither can be disarmed without rewriting the rules of political competition for the power of a rather different ("post-post-colonial") state. It would have to be less closely allied to its strongest clients, and offer its services more disinterestedly to all Kenyans. These might in consequence come to think of themselves more as citizens, less as ethnically-defined clients. It is a very great deal to ask.

Kenya faces two possible futures. On the one hand, the normal inter-ethnicity of most daily lives may have been poisoned by the recent violence, forecasting a broken state. On the other, the shock may have persuaded Kenyan elites of the old, Burkean, truth that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. There is perhaps a glimmer of hope in the opposition's success in getting its man elected as the speaker of the new parliament.

* John Lonsdale is emeritus professor of modern African history and fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. This article was first published in OpenDemocracy

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

Emma Mawdsley examines the coverage of China's growing influence in Africa by the British print media

The words and images we use do not describe ‘reality’, they create it. Language (terms, metaphors, and analogies) and images (such as films, news photos, maps and cartoons) are caught up in struggles over interpretation – which means that the language and images of the powerful are important tools in creating and maintaining particular points of view amongst politicians, policy-makers and the public. This paper explores the way in which six British broadsheet newspapers have covered China’s growing role in Africa over the past seven years. China’s impacts in Africa are complex and varied by country, sector and context, and most of the newspaper articles reflect that. Whether more critical or approving in tone, the articles invariably point to both benefits and problems associated with China’s rise. Even those which focus on specific issues or countries, tend to open or conclude with at least a sentence or two outlining a broader assessment of the prospects and problems associated with the growing relationship. Even so, a detailed analysis led us to identify five narrative tropes that recurred consistently and frequently, which tended to systematically endorse images of African weakness, Western trusteeship and Chinese ruthlessness:

1) a tendency to refer to ‘the Chinese’ or ‘China’, as if the various Chinese actors all shared the same interests;
2) a tendency to focus excessively on China’s interests in oil over other commodities;
3) a decided preference for focussing on China’s negative impacts on the continent, and within that, on issues and places of violence, disorder and corruption (e.g. Zimbabwe, Sudan, Angola) over other negative issues (e.g. trade imbalances, undermining domestic manufacturing sectors);
4) a tendency to portray Africans as victims or villains; and
5) a frequently complacent account of the role and interest of different western actors in Africa. Representations of Africa, China and the West First, most press reports tend to refer simply to “the Chinese”, often overlooking the fact that Chinese communities and actors in Africa are diverse in origins, roles and interests. The Chinese in Africa include longer standing and more recent diasporic communities, often engaged in small and medium business, but with a range of histories and relations with China and with their adopted African homes. Media accounts tend to focus much more strongly on Chinese state firms and agencies, as well as the more recent wave of large private enterprises (although the distinction can be blurred). But interests differ – longer term Chinese diasporic populations, the managers of Chinese companies, Chinese labourers employed by those companies, and different elements of the Chinese Government may have very different views on, for example, political stability, corporate transparency or democratic accountability. Different Chinese firms may have competing interests over what constitute desirable conditions for import/export trade or commodity extraction/manufactures. The following quote indicates competing interests that are otherwise rarely reflected in the media accounts that were analysed: “Venturing into Africa is a superficially attractive option for Chinese enterprises with limited global experience, as they can avoid the kind of competition and rules they face in markets such as the US or the European Union. But Chinese companies are also under great pressure to invest in Africa to fulfil political commitments made by China’s leaders, who provide financial incentives, including cheap loans, for them to go overseas. “First we must listen to what the country says, but we have our own company considerations” says Mr Wang of Chico, an enterprise controlled by the provincial government of Henan …[Mr Wang says] they “get criticism” from officials back home if they miss business targets, which often involve expanding overseas investment” (Financial Times, 20 June 2006: “China ventures on rocky roads to trade with Africa”).

Allied to this is a tendency to isolate Chinese firms as nationally discrete entities. In fact, joint enterprises with both African and western firms are becoming more common.

The second theme identified is the focus on oil and, to a lesser extent, natural gas and ores, over other commodities. This reflects a wider focus on the geopolitics of oil, a subject that the Iraq war and massive oil price rises have brought to the fore of western public attention. Although oil is undeniably an important issue, and a major component of Sino-Africa trade and economic growth, this is concentrated in Angola, Sudan, Nigeria, Gabon and Guinea. For many African countries, exports of fish, timber and grain, or imports of relatively cheap manufactured goods are just as important. The focus on oil lends itself to a discourse of resource competition rather than the recognition that China and the West have a range of interests and relations in Africa, including potentially complementary ones. Third is a very uneven focus on China's interests and impacts in different African nations. More positive elements tend to get less attention (debt cancellation, investment, lower commodity prices for consumers, support for a greater international voice etc), with a preferred focus on problem issues. Moreover, we find that there is a preferred focus on zones and subjects of violent conflict, corruption, genocide and authoritarian leadership, rather than, say, the less gripping images of China’s impacts on trade imbalances or under-cutting of African manufacturing sectors. The overwhelming balance of articles is on Sudan, Zimbabwe and Angola, with far less attention paid to, for example, Lesotho, which is experiencing immense hardship competing with China in textile production; or Kenya which is struggling to compete with China in the manufactured goods sector.

Fourth, within these accounts, Africans, tend to be reduced to villains (Mugabe, the Sudanese government) and victims (African populations, Darfur, the poor), an observation that fits with the findings of many other critical evaluations of the media. African agency, as leaders or ordinary citizens, workers and consumers, is rarely emphasised. Allusions to adolescence or childhood are common. Thus, discussing China’s effects on Chad:

“Chad was supposed to establish a model of good practice. But, as a western observer in the country puts it: “The risk is [following China’s oil deals] it will become an example for the worst [African] pupils” [emphasis added]. (Financial Times, 23 January 2006: “The ‘resource curse’ anew”.)

The paternalistic line that the West needs to save Africa from China’ depredations is something reflected elsewhere in the media. An extended Channel Four news report which was widely circulated and repeated, started: “To Tony Blair, Africa is somewhere which needs healing or saving and Sierra Leone gets a lot of British aid. But the Chinese are looking at the continent through different eyes. They see it as a source of raw materials, especially oil, which they need for their own development. And somewhere like Sierra Leone, fresh out of war – they think it’s ripe for trade and investment” (Lindsey Hillsum, Channel Four, 4 July 2005)

Finally, Western actors – businesses, governments, national and international development NGOs – are typically portrayed as benign within the majority of these articles and accounts. Many articles imply or state that while the West did in the past have supported authoritarian leaders, or were party to corrupt business practices, it has learnt its lesson and reformed. While colonialism was economically exploitative and morally wrong, according to many of the articles exploring China’s ‘new African safari’ or ‘new scramble for Africa’, western colonialism is claimed to at least have had a paternalistic/developmental dimension and well-intentioned elements - an attitude that has translated into an ethical concern for Africa in the postcolonial period.

Thus, in the contemporary setting, Western companies supposedly operate under a different ethical regime because of their own high convictions; labour laws; voluntary agreements as part of wider government and third sector pressure to improve business with Africa; consumer demands for more ethical production and trading; and/or shareholder pressure. None of these are said to apply to state-run or private Chinese companies. Above all, the dominant (although by no means universal, narrative) that runs through many of the articles is that the mistakes of the past have been addressed, and the West is now the architect and energiser of a new drive towards good governance and development, with aid now accompanied by ethical conditionalities, while reformed commercial practices promise investment, extraction and trade that will enhance development rather than line the pockets of kleptocratic elites. These faltering steps forward, which will be of mutual benefit to western companies and ordinary African people, are under threat from the unscrupulous Chinese. A few quotes give a flavour of these arguments: “But while the meeting [2006 FOCAC] is intended to fuel China’s global drive for resources, raw materials and markets, concerns are growing that the boosters of Beijing do not have Africa’s best interests at heart and that western countries will be cut out of future business”. (The Guardian, 1 November 2006: “Beijing’s Race for Africa”)

“There are concerns too about soft loans leading to unsustainable debt and generous aid programmes that undermine efforts to improve governance, transparency and accountability. If the World Bank and IMF say no or attach conditions, Beijing always says yes…. The [2006] Beijing Summit is a big deal for China, a deliberately showy monument to its value-free strategy. It would be absurd to claim that western greed and interest did not do enormous damage in an earlier scramble for Africa. But the age of colonialism is over. It should be accepted today that global power brings global responsibilities. Tyranny, inequality and corruption offend universal values. In the countries where it now has the ability to make a difference, China should think twice about offering its help with no strings attached”. (The Guardian, 4 November 2006: “Scrambling to Beijing: China and Africa”)

“That virtuous circle of increased assistance and better governance has been the hall mark of the approach taken, with varying degrees of success, by the West and Japan since the end of the Cold War. China now threatens to blow apart that consensus”. (The Telegraph, 26 April 2006: “The dragon in Africa”)

“Soft Chinese loans to vulnerable and corrupt African regimes, arranged outside the painstakingly agreed Equator Principles for responsible lending, risk reversing progress towards extricating such regimes from debt. … And misconceived or badly executed civil engineering projects risk irreversible environmental damage … Such a critique is valid. Coming from the West it also has a hint of the hypocritical. China’s current scramble for African energy and resources is modest compared with Europe’s scramble for African territory a century and a half ago. And China’s sometimes reckless spending only mirrors gambles by Western banks and governments in the postwar era. But now Beijing risks repeating the West’s mistakes … when it allowed massive increases in overseas aid and investment with no commensurate adjustments to its foreign policy”. (The Times, 2 November 2006: “China and Africa”)

There are undeniably elements of truth in some of this – some western companies are indeed bound by their charters, public pressure and voluntary agreements to abide by standards that can reduce their competitiveness with companies not thus circumscribed. Bilateral and multilateral initiatives on debt, trade and aid have made some advances towards greater equity and reparation of injustices. These efforts and advances should not be belittled. However, there are three main sets of problems with the imagery of a benign west being undermined by a ruthless and unscrupulous China. The first is that, despite advances, many western companies remain mired in corrupt and exploitative business practices. Without losing sight of the importance and achievements of incremental improvements in western accountability and transparency, they remain inadequate. The second problem is that of scope and scale – the West’s impact on Africa cannot be reduced to the efforts of NGOs, aid agencies or companies. We must look beyond these limited horizons to debt, unjust trade regulations, uneven power in the institutions of global governance, the ‘war on terror’, and increasingly, perhaps, climate change, to develop a better understanding of the West’s impacts on Africa. Third, ‘development’ is almost invariably coded as apolitical and positive in these articles – although interestingly such partiality and complacency tended to be situational, apparent when framed within the specific China-Africa story. Newspapers and even individual journalists who in other reports may be very critical of, for example, the halting, late and inadequate provision of medical supplies, or debt, or trade inequalities, appear to become less critical when the West is framed in the same article as China. Thus, while the Australian, French and South African companies may also be condemned for working in Zimbabwe, in none of the articles analysed were these framed in the same space as a critique of China’s business interests.

Running throughout, we can identify recurring words and phrases which are indicative of the images outlined above: China is ‘guzzling’, ‘aggressive’, an ‘economic juggernaut’, ‘insatiably’ ‘thirsty’ for oils and minerals, and ‘voraciously’ capitalist. “China is prowling the globe in search of energy sources” (Declan Walsh, 9 Nov. 2005, The Guardian, emphasis added)

“As a voracious China scours the world for minerals, no regime is off limits” (Financial Times, 12 Jan 2006: “Insatiable Beijing scours the world for profit and power”)

“[China] is ravenous for raw materials”. (The Telegraph, 26 April 2006: “The dragon in Africa”)

In an article headlined “China’s goldmine: Tony Blair and Bono see Africa as a moral cause; China sees it as a business opportunity. But is Beijing’s interest based on economic partnership – or ruthless exploitation?”, we find:

“The resurrection of Chambishi [a major Zambian copper mine] is just one small example of China’s explosion into Africa. From the barest foothold a decade ago an army of diplomats, technicians and entrepreneurs has kicked the continent’s door wide open, making Beijing a heavyweight investor and political player” (The Guardian, 28 March 2006: “China’s goldmine”, emphasis added)

This position and language stands in contrast to accounts of western FDI, which is only presented as an unambiguously positive flow. Unlike the West, the Chinese have ‘insinuated’ their way into the continent. For example:

“Quietly, while the attention of the world has been elsewhere, China has become a major player in Africa”. (The Independent, 7 September 2006: “The benefits and dangers of those gifts from the east”)

“China, which now foresees annual trade with the world’s poorest continent totalling $100 billion (£50 billion) by 2010, began stepping up its presence stealthily in Africa in the early 1990s” (The Times, 25 April 2007: “From favoured patron to target of dissenters”, emphasis added)

Dan Large, at SOAS, argues that these images are indicative of western defensiveness about ‘it’s backyard’, and can be seen as part of a wider reaction to an emerging power. The language of red dragons in the continent takes us back to the geopolitical discourses that characterised the Cold War.

Conclusions To retiterate, amongst the database of articles reviewed there were alternative perspectives and stories, critical accounts of western roles and histories, and a recognition of the complex but also positive possibilities of greater Sino-African relations. However, the themes identified above emerged as strong and pervasive scripts in British reporting on the contemporary relationships between Africa, China and the West. Africa is one place in which China and western nations, notably the US, are likely to find themselves in a position of competition, and these images and languages, both popular and policy, are significant. In a recent analysis, Andrew Still (2005) urges the importance of maintaining moderate, pragmatic and respectful language and diplomatic ‘signals’ on both sides, if we are to avoid hardening ideological dividing lines between China and the US in particular – Still talks in terms of a potential degeneration of relations that could usher in the next Cold War. He suggests that:

“ … some of the most difficult issues [between China and the US/West] lie in the realm of ideas and identity rather than the narrow economic and political interests, making them far less tractable. Not least of these will be the way in which the debate over ‘the rise of China’ is conducted in the public sphere. The limited repertoire of historical analogies on which it currently draws … creates a distorting prism through which the issue is viewed and provides a thin basis for more thoughtful analysis of how to ensure a peaceful power transition” (Still, 2005, p.3-4)

In the context of what is certain to be growing economic and political competition between China and the US (with the UK and other nations playing bit parts), including over Africa, media images and representations will play an important role in shaping public understandings, debates and political pressures. These in turn will have consequences – however negotiated or contested – for different countries, actors and interests in Africa.

* Dr. Emma Mawdsley is a lecturer in geography and Cambridge University. This article is a short version of a paper to be published in Political Geography in 2008. For a copy of the longer version, please refer to the journal, or contact the author on: [email][email protected]

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

While the whole world is aware of the crisis is in Kenya, thanks to the international and local media, most of their reporting is accurate, however, there is need for an honest analysis of the situation in Kenya

The media

It is sad at this moment in time to apply outdated tactics of muzzling the people who are expressing a democratic right. In the case of Kenya, gagging the media would not help Kibaki and his cohorts, since the level of awareness and resolve among Kenyans not to return to the dark days of dictatorship is so high. The courage of the Kenyan media and journalists despite setbacks initiated by Internal security Minster (Michuki) is worth noting, but more so the way in which they reported events during the campaigns and eventful day of vote counting. However, there are problems with headlines (both local and international) that have appeared since the outbreak of post elections violence.

The ethnic dimension is appearing to be the main focus of international press and they are also reporting that it is a Kikuyu-Luo issue but that is not true. Besides the fighting in the slums in Nairobi, Nakuru and Mombasa whose inhabitants are from all backgrounds though dominated by communities from western Kenya, Killings taking pace in the Rift Valley; Coast provinces are not perpetrated by the Luos. The fact that Raila is a Luo is not a justification enough to tag a whole community, just because one of them is a leading personality in the current stalemate.

Such bias will direct attention in the wrong direction, and could be used to gang up against other communities, as has been the case in the past. There is no mention of killings taking place in Nyanza province especially in the Lake Town of Kisumu where Police has been shooting protesters at the orders of the internal Security Minister (Michuki).

Condemnation of violence should be applied across the board. Victims of the violence are from all over especially in the slums, but where it is perpetrated by the state in a selective manner, condemnation should be focused on security forces and those who give such orders) These kinds of statements misinform the world of the actual facts on the ground and hinder insights that could help get Kenya out of the situation.

Secondly reducing the current post election conflict to a Kikuyu-Luo affair is cheap analysis that is devoid of facts and reflections of what happens on the ground. Most of the current Western media analyses do not taken into account the underlying factors such as the failure of institutions of the state, such as the electoral commission of Kenya whose mediocre performance has plunged the country into bloodshed, a draconian constitutional framework that has been at the service of ethnic chauvinists and jingoist in power since 1963, the centralised power and networks that benefit from it, whose abuse and actions have led to marginalisation of certain groups from national resources, equitable public appointments, and the grand scheme involving local and international elites who exploit Kenya under the “old order”, interests/forces that want to keep the status quo and their role in the current problem.

Bias and partisan analyses are also observed in the local media especially the media owners association, Kenya broadcasting corporation, Kenyan citizens in the diaspora through various blog sites and debaters in the local Newspapers where intellectuals, opinion and church leaders have taken sides, instead of guiding the debate in a more honest way so that all Kenyans can identify where the problem lies (draconian laws, out-dated political system, poverty, inequality, corruption, unequal distribution of resources countrywide and lack of access to essential services among others). Kenyans suffer under these conditions regardless of their tribe, and that is why those who live in the slums are from all tribes, even though previously marginalized by earlier regimes such as the Luo, Luhya and other minority groups make up the majority in those dwellings.

Leadership and national interest

The question that people need to ask is why did Kibaki sought to be Kenya’s president, in 1992, 1997, and finally became one in 2002? Was it because he lacked money? Was he someone with an agenda for the “whole “ nation?

And if he had one, what was the agenda? Was that agenda realised between 2003 and 2007? Why are Kenyans having a problem with his agenda presented during the campaigns and the people around him majority of whom have been rejected in their own backyards? Why did most Kenyans have a problem with giving him another mandate? Why would someone who is a billionaire and aged 76, not want to leave a legacy that would be remembered in positive terms? What is so painful to forego that Kibaki would not want a clean election? More important to ask is why the current “elite” and morons around Kibaki are afraid of change of the current system and/or leadership to go into the hands of “lesser” communities? And lastly, why was the current regime rejected by majority of provinces and communities? Even though there are arguments that Kenya’s economy has grown at 6% over the past two years, the gap between the rich and poor has widened, with more people falling below the poverty line. The slums did not get smaller, nor did North Eastern and North-Eastern provinces get piped water from lake Victoria, the Samburus did not receive hospitals and tarmac roads, no fish industry was built along Lake Victoria and loans given to fishermen. 40 years is a long time for the Samburu, Turkana, Rendile and Somalis to wait for basic and essential services to reach them, it is a long time for Kamba people to wait for water and receive food hand outs during starvation, it is a long time before the fishermen along Lake Victoria receive funding through a fishing Board to take care of their interests in agriculture as done to coffee, tea, pyrethrum and dairy farmers; it is along time to wait for any major industry in Western Kenya; it too long time for Mijikenda to have resources from Coastal investments recycled back to alleviate their poverty, thirst for water, better schools and hospitals.

Obstacle to dialogue

In my view Kibaki is hostage to a number of factors that seems to contradict his call for putting the nation first. First and foremost are the networks of buddies and business comrades and elite form Mt Kenya who have been on the Gravy train since 2003. For what explains the refusal to find a middle ground while knowing so well that the outcome of the elections are not acceptable to everyone including their own people? The people holding Kibaki hostage are the ones Kenyans need to address in their quest for finding a peaceful solution to the current crisis. These people have a lot to loose if the man goes, thus the reason they are against recount, judicial review or re-run of presidential elections. Kenyans regardless of their ethnic background come distant in their priority of needs and actions. The opposition also has a role to play in the process and that will depend on the kind of proposal they put on table, which should be scrutinised by Kenyans since the issue at hand is about how Kenyans are governed and therefore Kibaki or Raila are just but people they expect to govern them through their mandate which includes listening to their views and respecting their will as expressed through the social contract via the vote and representative democracy.

A Government of National Unity, or a recount of ballots papers will not solve any problem. It is a well-known fact that ballot papers especially those used for tallying presidential votes were already tampered with and might mot be traced. Secondly Keep never keeps any promise. He did not keep his promise to Kenyans after he made promises upon election in 2002; he never honoured agreements with his comrades upon enthronement, he renegade on the fight against corruption, poverty and tribalism. He does not have the will to keep his promises therefore arrangements such as a government of national unity will just be a soft landing for him, it will be a process that legitimises his hold onto power at the expense of democracy and the will of Kenyans who came out to vote on the 27^th December 2007. Kibaki and his handlers, do not care about democracy, it is a word they use at their convenience. The best arbitrator in this case is the voter. All mediators coming to Kenya should not let Kenyans down by proposing frameworks that will maintain the status quo. It will be a mockery to democracy and great betrayal to the many Kenyans who have lots their lives since the 50s, to liberate the country from colonial yokes but also from the yokes of fellow Kenyans such as Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki.

The Killings

Kenyans should stop Killing each other. The culprits are few people who are out busy with self-aggrandisement at the expense of a whole nation.

Although the current killings are unacceptable since they are an outcome of a stupidity of failure by Kenyan politicians to grasp the communality interest, Kenyans and more so those who abuse the political system and state institutions and resources should know that "Kenya belongs to all who belong in it" and all should be given equal treatment. There is no justification for the minister of internal security to use outdated and counterproductive tactics of targeting specific ethnic groups with paramilitary force and orders to kill. The images on television screens, shows that most of these people could be apprehended and taken to court.

Senseless beating and shooting based on orders of a politician with colonial hangovers will exacerbate acts of revenge instead of resorting to the rule of law to settle disputes or address acts pf violence that are currently being perpetrated by some Kenyans who exploit the chaotic situation. The paramilitary police used by Michuki on the Luo (historical tactic, used by Kenyatta, in the 60s and early seventies) is selective and directed in one direction towards a group of people but that too will create more anger and feelings for revenge.

Struggles in the Rift Valley are also about past wrongs against the minority communities like Ogieks who were chased out of the forest and the places given to the central province groups. Maasai and Kalenjin whose prime land were taken by the British, and later by the elite around Kenyatta. These grievances have never been addressed and due to the complex nature of ethnic blend in those regions, Moi for instance exploited this mix to cause chaos in order to vilify the onset of multiparty in Kenya. Ethnic clashes in 1992 and 1997, produced suffering and anger which have been kept low, but now fully exploited in the face of a dashed hope for change. These people thought there could be some equity with change of government but that hope is gone, so we expect anger, but also revenge as result of past clashes that were instigated by Moi prior to 1992, and 97 elections.

Democratic test What I fear most is that if Kibaki is allowed to rule, Kenya will return to the dark ages, all the democratic gains will be lost. They will know that they can always rig elections and get away with it no matter what people do including protest, they don’t mind whether people die or not, since they will be able to get away with it.

Kibaki’s behaviour in relation to vote tallying and results in the 2007 elections makes democracy look sick in Africa. It brings to mind the question whether there are free and fair elections? Or whether franchise or high voter turn out as witnessed in Kenya can turn a regime out of office? What about the role of institutions to support such a process like an independent police, electoral commission, judiciary and a parliament that is sensitive to the needs of the country, free and non-partisan media, respect for the rule of law by all parties involved in the electoral process? Even though democracy has never been perfect although being adopted by nations and peoples, its institutionalisation depend more on local history, culture and geography and not analyses and prescription as it is applied in other contexts. In the case of Kenya, the political, economic and social systems are complex and full of nuances, combined with other forces/vested interests/pressure groups that exert more power, thus making the ordinary voter appear to be a pawn rather than a "king" maker.

Therefore if Kenya is to build on the already made gains on the democratic front, a solution to the current crisis must be found in tandem with the reality on the ground. The reality that the “presidential election was rigged” and the incumbent is hell-bent on hanging to power no mater what cost, but also the reality that the opposition is making claims which have been proved right by the electoral commission itself and the various poll observers that Kibaki did not win the elections”. Although, calling for peace or on the major players to urge their supporters to clam down is a first step, but the call for peace should not water down the main cause of the problem which is “rigged elections” which is a threat to democratic gains. Being soft on this point would embolden the antagonists especially the “winners” and based on their history of arrogance and lack of decorum in addressing national issues, they will brush aside the issue at stake and this will fuel anger which is not only expressed by the opposition, but the very people the winners want to “rule” at all cost.

Way out

Asking Raila or Kenyans to forget this and forge ahead, and wait for another 5 years by many partisan authors in various local dailies and international blogs is not sincere and honest since such calls are directed at one party and not the other two. Why are people not asking Kibaki to resign? Why not ask for recount and audit of the votes? If the Electoral commission is not honest, how sure can we be of the courts in Kenya? Kenyans know that the system is rotten thus the overwhelming vote and a clear message that they want something different. They should not be denied this difference by hiding behind discourses that keeps on mystifying the problem. If Kibaki goes on without the approval of Kenyans, he is not making it better for those already hurt in one way or the other through killings and destruction seen in the past days. These things will haunt the nation after he is long gone and people around him or groups supporting him will not escape blame and demands to be held accountable. Peace can only come when the two parties agree to talk, engage and get into a process that will heal wounds on both sides of the divide (the people, the Opposition and PNU politicians). Allowing Kibaki to go ahead and bury his head as if nothing serious has happened will only exacerbate the arrogance of the group around him as witnessed during a recent press conference and the exchange between PNU Ministers and the press. Such one sided approach and attack on the opposition will only help strengthen the status quo, the exploitation, discrimination and inequality along tribal lines, which will exacerbate problems even if calmness would return today.

What is urgently needed are; Curfew in Opposition areas to be lifted and regular police patrols with a humane face be initiated in hot spots to give people confidence in the state institutions for their safety. The general service unit has no role in the process since it is a catalyst instead of providing safety.
The Kenya Pipeline Corporation should immediately resume pumping oil to western Kenya and Uganda. Cutting this supply is not different from scorched earth policy and if someone in the government has ordered such action, which was observed already before the election days then he/she or they are fueling the crisis instead of solving it. This should apply to other services like electricity, food items among others Kenyan civil society organisations, Law Society, The Kenya National Human Rights Commission and invited institutions to help in the process of reconciliation and putting in place a framework that would bring back the credibility of the electoral process and an acceptable conclusion A re-run of presidential election supervised by a team of independent observers and representatives of the two parties (ODM and PNU) within an agreed time frame. It is now clear from ECK that they did not know who won. The ECK had put aside funds for a run off, and that money can be used to SAVE KENYA.

* Antony Otieno Ong'ayo is a Researcher in the New Politics Programme at the Transnational Institute

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

Many people now say Kenya needs a few good men who want to serve without applause. Do we have them? Given the post-election violence in Kenya, it takes a sober, courageous person to look into the eye and the camera to say:

“I am sorry…we are sorry, we made a mistake…”

And yet, most times, these are the only words that those who have been wronged need to hear in order to return to the humane. The Kenyan situation during and after the elections warranted such words from the leaders. Instead, hollow-sounding words were spoken and we all know what followed: Loss. Death. Devastation. Shame. Greed for power, not service, did it. It destroyed the pride of the people and the humility within individuals. How can we gather the broken pieces to run a connecting thread through them? How can Kenya be whole, again? And perhaps the bigger question is, was there a ‘whole’ in the first place or it has always been splinters seemingly presented as one whole? A few African writers, in their own words, have something to say about Kenya’s elections and Africa’s political structures.

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AYI KWEI ARMAH

The sort of thing happening in Kenya happened in Cote d'Ivoire, Togo, and will happen again in Cameroon, in fact, every time there's an election under the present system. The problem is structural, not circumstantial. This is not only about elections: as long as we wish to remain within colonial political structures, the source of government legitimacy will remain what it was at the Berlin conference: force plus fraud. We shed blood during elections because we serve deities made in Berlin, and they have always needed human sacrifice. Part of the Berlin political deal was that massacres of the population were routine whenever they demanded democratic rights. If we want to end the bloodshed surrounding elections, we'll have to shift to a different organizational system. It is possible, but structurally, it cannot be Ugandan or Ghanaian or Kenyan. These are Berlin constructs, even if we pretend they are African. They are not. An African system is possible and feasible. It will cost nothing in human blood, and be less expensive to maintain than the present "state" system that drinks so much blood.

BRIAN CHIKWAVA

Politicians ought to see themselves as the midwives of people's hopes and aspirations. Sadly by far their greatest crime must be their compulsive disorder to take the new baby, throw it down the pit latrine and then stand around poking each other's faces: I declare it a boy and not a girl! No it was a girl I saw it! No it was a boy! So why did you throw it away? No I didn't, you did. Ok let’s hear it from the mother? No, I will punch her face if she gets involved in matters that are beyond her grasp! And so on and so on. Hopefully, among Kenya's political elite there is someone who is brave enough to go wade through all the crap, recover the baby, reunite it with its mother and restore faith in our politics.

CHIKA UNIGWE

In 2004, I travelled to Kenya for a writing workshop and stopped off for a few days in Kisumu to visit with my sister-in-law and her family. I loved Kisumu at first glance. I remember describing it to a friend as serene. Like the sea. It reminded me of Enugu, the city where I grew up in Nigeria. Not too big. Not too small. Just the right size. The people I saw seemed to exude the same sort of calmness the city itself gave. I felt if I could live anywhere else in the world, Kisumu would be it.

I carrried that image of Kisumu in my mind until towards the end of December 2007 when the civil unrests which followed the "landslide victory" of Kibaki began. Kisumu became unearthed from its sweet calm to inhabit front-page news all over the world. Kenyans became split, not along party lines, but along cultural groups. Neighbours began to call up hatred for each other. Everyday I switch on the radio to listen to the news, there are more people, ordinary people being killed. Police dispersing protesters with machine guns. People hiding in their homes, too scared to get out.

Like Ngugi Wa Thiongo pointed out recently, this has gone beyond the rigging of elections. That is not fixed by burning churches with people in them. It is not fixed by killing children hardly old enough to vote. This has mutated into ethnic cleansing. And if we are not careful this could escalate into something more monstrous, more odious than the genocide that decimated Rwanda in 1994 and from which the nation still trills.

NURUDDIN FARAH

Total abuse of the Kenyan people's confidence in themselves; distortion of the African people's faith in their future; blind daylight robbery of our trust, our self-worth. This is criminal.

CHUMA NWOKOLO

Kenya snatched the baton of electoral violence. Today, she flees with that old dog, Tribalism, snapping at her heels. Escalating deaths, fractured lives and a gloomy déjà vu: we have seen this race for life a dozen times before. It is a case of ‘two fighting’; except that the main pugilists will not draw their own blood, they draw the blood of pawns. Presently one combatant will blink and the other will cart away the prize. Then (relative) ‘peace and stability’ will return to allow the venal dogs (far preferable to these blood-thirsty hounds) to return to their haunts at the Kenyan trough.

Yet, ethnic nations (tribes if you prefer) are not the core problem any more than can be a problem to be Kenyan/Tanzanian/Ugandan. It takes a leader of Hitler’s persuasion to convert German/Aryan/Jewish identities into issues of life and death, of genocide. Across the board in Africa it is past time to criminalize recidivist leadership with the potential for genocide. Across the continent, a new fad, the ‘Blanding of Africa’ is gaining currency: the effacement of ethnic nations (Kikuyu, Nupe…) in favour of nation-states (Mali, Sudan…). It would be another signal mistake in a long sequence. Rather than erase the ancient personalities, languages and cultures of our ethnic nations, I’d far rather erase the Kenyan, Nigerian, South African borders and spill their nations and peoples into their geographic envelope…

So much for dreams!

Yet, we do have a problem when armed zombies take to the streets, seeking innocents from other tribes. Without for one moment exculpating those monsters, we need to ask who sustains, channels, manipulates, and benefits from tribalism? Those masterminds behind the machetes are the focal enemy. It is well and good to crisis-manage Kenya by seeking which of two should rule, or how the twain may share power. But the larger issue—beyond election rigging—is: which leaders are worthy of the seat of power.

In these days of geometric escalations from tribal tension to genocide, truth is, beating the tribal drum is much more inimical to the national fabric than the crime of stuffing more ballot boxes than the other chap. The first thing a national leader does, on the day after he ‘wins’ 51% of the vote, is to make a speech wooing the 49% who campaigned and voted against him. How on earth does a ‘leader’ bring on board the survivors of people he has vicariously run through with a spear?

Leaders who have blood on their hands should simply walk away. Leaders who have pounded the tribal drum should not mount the National stage. Kenya—Africa—deserves far better.

For their part, opposition leaders, like many an incumbent, often fail the Solomon Test. (When King Solomon ordered that a disputed baby be cut in two and a bloody half given to each of the contesting mothers, one of them relinquished her claim to the baby in order to save its life. The other insisted that the baby be divided. Instantly, Solomon knew the real mother.) Too many African leaders would rather burn their countries to the ground than walk away. They would rather blow up nations with the dynamite of tribal tension than articulate the policies, and invest the truly hard work of building national consensus. We should put them out of business. It is not an act of courage to fight incumbent dictators by appealing to a tribal caucus. It is an act of moral cowardice; it says: ‘I cannot win this nation, and I have no ideas, no clue, as to how to wrest power, so I’ll just knock over the barrow.’ The tribal rhetoric is now quite passé, the hallmark of leaders bereft of ideas.

Unfortunately, once a party plays the ethnic card it becomes quite hard for others to avoid getting sucked in. Tribalism is the ultimate slippery slope, greased with tragic history. Even today, it peppers European war and politics. We need leaders with a new language, a new vision and a new toolkit for power. Kenya should stop in its track right now, turn around, and stare down that dog, Tribalism, and its sundry demons. This circuit she is running is a loop that descends into hell.

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From the writer’s perspectives, it is clear no party is going to govern peacefully anywhere in Africa in old wineskins. Sagging wineskins. It would be like characters playing parts that do not suit them in a drama. Would they go on forcefully to play or they would have to stop, question the fitness, and write their own script? This is where we are. Why in this century would we be condemning our brothers and sisters to cheap deaths? We need to re-invent ourselves and redefine where we live but first, we must put aside fat egos and lust for power before we can design and embrace an all-inclusive newness.

* Mildred K Barya is Writer-in-Residence at TrustAfrica (www.trustafrica.org)

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

Kola Ibrahim argues that the new economic partnership agreements that are being proposed by the EU are driven by the old unequal economic relationships.

The new plan of the European Union to have economic agreements with her former colonies has not received much attention in terms of critical analysis especially by the civil society groups and trade union movements. However, those who have spoken on it have given some explanations on why it must be rejected. The issue is what alternative is available if the agreement is rejected. It should also be stated that as the negotiation of the agreement is going on, the WTO is also renegotiating with African countries in order to force the pill of economic enslavement that was earlier rejected at the Cancun Round in 2005. According to the letters of the agreement, African countries are to be given "preferential treatment" to European market for some of their agricultural products without restriction while the third world countries will also have to "gradually" open up their market for European business. Definitely, this market includes education, health and public utilities. Many African leaders have vaguely complained about the agreements but there is a consensus that the agreement will represent an advantage for the third world countries.

The agreement represents another way of rapaciously and legally exploiting the resources of the third world countries especially Africa where most of the population are living in absolute poverty. In the first place, the goods to be exported to European countries are mostly agricultural produce with little local content and market value while European countries will bring in finished goods which are high valued. This definitely means the continuous underdevelopment of the third world countries. Therefore, there will continuously be wide technology gap, increased trade imbalance and capital flight from the countries.

Secondly, most poor African farmers lack the infrastructure facilities to produce agricultural goods at cheaper cost as the transport system are archaic, modern storage system unavailable, farm equipments inaccessible while credit facilities are rare for tens of millions of poor farmers. This will mean that African countries will receive little pie of the market while local farms in Europe will massively and cheaply produce as a result of favourable technological and economic situations thus lowering prices in the market which will only benefit the big farmers who produce at cheap prices. Thirdly, as against what is being portrayed, the European countries will continue to subsidize their local farmers, especially the big business farms, which will mean economic disaster for the African countries most of whom depend on agricultural export for revenue.

Furthermore, the agreement gives right of access to European business in African countries. This means that there will not special treatments or consideration for government owned firms while social services should be open to competition without any special spending. It implies that state-owned firms will be under funded thus leading to their being bought over at the stock market or through wholesale privatization (that is to the European multinationals) while education, health, water, electricity, transportation will be totally commercialized and privatized for the market to have access. All this is meant to make labour cheap and flexible for exploitation. This process will result in retrenchment, high cost of accessing social services, rotting away of social services as a result of under funding and fall in living standards. It is a return to full scale neo-liberalism. All this is meant to give European firms a preferential access to African market at token as against the threat from other economic centres especially China, South East Asia and US. This is the real kernel of the agreement.

However, it is the rich big business of Europe that will enjoy this plan to rapaciously exploit the working poor of Africa. For instance, it is the rich farms (mostly owned by big multinationals in beverage industries) that are enjoying the subsidies being given by the European governments from the state resources that should have been used to provide better living for the poor in their countries. According to a 2005 report from Seattle to Brussels Network, titled "the European Corporate Trade Agenda", 15 percent of French farms (that is big business farms) received 60 percent of the European Commission's subsidies to France while 70 percent of small farmers received just 17 percent of the subsidies. It goes further to show that 70 percents of the EU subsidies goes to just 20 percent largest farms in Europe. These subsidies are in the final analysis going to the pockets of the big multinational firms such as beer and beverage companies that have big farms. These companies are also extensions of the world capitalist business with links to bigger firms through stock trading, bank loans and credits, etc. In fact, Oxfam reported that "farm income in UK has declined by more than 40 percent while France has lost half of its (small) farmers over the past 20 years".

Therefore, the so-called subsidies and economic agreements being negotiated by the European countries are basically on behalf of big business and not in the interest of the whole European working class. In fact, the movement of European big farms and industrial production to some third world countries is being used to drive down wages in developed countries as European working class are threatened with retrenchment employment movement and industrial relocation. Therefore, the imbalance trade agreement that favours privatization, commercialization and trade liberalization will neither favour the European working class as much as the poor people of Africa. Two third of the world trade is concentrated in just 500 big multinationals while the top 200 companies that account for one quarter of the world economic activities employ just 1 percent of the global workforce meaning that the rest are employed mostly by governments. Therefore, further attempt at handing over the economy to the big business through trade liberalization will lead to retrenchment and further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich few.

On the other hands, the African leaders are not much enthusiastic to confront this imperialist agenda because they depend on them for survival. For instance, most African leaders are sustained in power by big business in their various countries through political support and provision of liquidity from which most of these leaders get their “rents" through direct looting of the treasury or promotion of policies that will favour their personal economic interests. In fact, most African leaders have been integrated into big business with most of them coming from the private sector while most of their advisers and legislators are either businessmen or IMF/World Bank trained intellectuals who are seconded to the African leaders to give prescriptions of neo-liberal policies that will favour the multinational vampires that are the backbones of these multilateral financial institutions. Through shares, stock trading, merger, "strategic partnership", etc, local businessmen and politicians are linked to the world business; therefore, the local leaders cannot challenge it.

Also, career advancement for these IMF/WB advisers depends on how much they are able to ensure the implementation of these policies. For instance, the multilateral institutions have promoted the former ministers of finance and education in Nigeria, Okonjo Iweala and Oby Ezekwesili, after they have ensured the implementation of the neo-liberal economic pills of privatization, deregulation, commercialization and debt buyback fraud. Moreover, these leaders have practically nothing to lose in the agreement. For instance, most of the government subsidies to farmers through bank loans and fertilizers only go to the big farms that are owned for instance in Nigeria by ex-generals and politicians in power. With a smooth connection to the local and international markets they definitely have a lot to gain as they will have increased access to the European market at the expense of millions of local farmers and working people who will bear the brunt of economic enslavement and neo-liberal exchange for big business profits.

Therefore, the Economic Partnership Agreement is nothing but another attempt to colonize the African countries and indeed the third world countries in close collaboration with the local leaders and businessmen. A genuine agreement to help Africa and her poor people will mean massive development of infrastructures, technology and industrial capacities of the African countries by Europe with no strings attached. This will help Africa to develop its massive human, natural and materials potentials while the trade between various countries will be dictated by mutual interest to provide basic needs for the working poor. Capitalist businessmen, multinational vampires and their local collaborators cannot carry out this task who are ready to milk the poor dry in search of maximum profit; it lies in the hands of the working people of Africa, third world and indeed Europe by building a radical working people's party that will struggle for power and create a socialist economic planning where the massive resources of the society will be nationalized under the democratic control of the working and poor people themselves which will provide the resources for the massive development of the third world countries while laying the basis for a genuine trade and aid among nations. Leaving the fate of the working and poor people in the hands of the rich moneybag politicians is the tragedy of all time.

Many free trade agreements have been signed and enacted into law by capitalist governments at the back of the working people. This is because the working people in Africa and other third world countries do not have political platform of their own. This is why a radical, working class party is needed to champion the interests of the poor working people. The first task in this direction is to build a left alliance among labour activists, radical organizations, civil societies against this ruinous capitalist onslaught and demand for abrogation of all imperialist free trade agreements. This will mean building struggle movements at the grass root, local national and international levels against this agreement as a basis for the formation of a working class political platform. It is unfortunate that many official trade unions bureaucrats in many third world countries have accepted neo-liberal ideology. They only raise fingers when pressures from the rank-and-file workers threaten their positions. This places heavy duties on genuine working class activists to build a genuine alternative - through day to day interventions in the struggle of the working people for better deal - firstly within the trade union movements as a basis for building working class political platforms.

* Kola Ibrahim is a student activist from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, email: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Anene Ejikeme underscores the need for African women to be seen as an integral part of the solution.

In 1929 women in southeast Nigeria mounted a war against the forces of British colonial rule. The women targeted all the symbols of the new political order – the offices and homes of colonial officialdom, as well as its representatives. The "disturbances" and the demands made by the women at the Commission of Inquiry set up by the colonial government to investigate surprised the British. The women who testified before the Commission consistently demanded that women be represented in the new institutions which had been set up by the colonial government. More than 50 women lost their lives, but colonial authorities failed to appreciate the extent to which women felt aggrieved by colonial policies which rendered them invisible. Although the women organized and carried out this rebellion, it did not stop colonial authorities and missionaries from continuing to insist that African women were "no better than cattle and sheep" and completely lacking in agency.

"The assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the prevailing view."

Almost eighty years later, the assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the prevailing view about them. This impression is so often at variance with what I see, for example, when I am at home in Nigeria where, every day, I meet women who struggle to feed their families and to send their children to school, daily making decisions that help sustain their families.

The role of "Tradition"

Researchers and development workers appear eager always to point to "Tradition" as the reason for African women's lack of agency. Take, for example, the statement issued by a recent international summit convened to address the economic crisis in Africa.

"In Africa, the gender gap is even wider and the situation is more complex due to the cultural and traditional context which is anchored in beliefs, norms and practices which breed discrimination and feminised poverty. There is growing evidence that the number of women in Africa living in poverty has increased disproportionately to that of men."

This was the conclusion of the 8th Meeting of the African Partnership Forum (APF) in Germany in May 2007. The APF was founded in 2003 as a forum designed "to facilitate Africa's economic growth." The members of the APF are Western donor countries which give more than $100 million in aid, multilateral institutions such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, African regional institutions such as ECOWAS, SADC, ADB, as well as the pan-African NEPAD and AU.

There is no doubt that there are many traditions in Africa that hamper women's ability to lead economically prosperous lives, but to point to "Tradition" as the root cause of African women's poverty obscures reality more than it clarifies it. First of all, there is no single "Tradition" which exists all over Africa. Secondly, what is considered "traditional" in African communities is often of relatively recent vintage and was colonially-generated. Foreign aid workers and African men are too eager to point to "Tradition" when excluding women from development projects. For example, in Kenya, local men – and "development officers" – are often quick to insist that it is "untraditional" for women to own land. The truth is, of course, that individual land ownership is not "traditional" for anyone in Kenya; individual land ownership was usefully introduced by British colonial authorities keen to claim the most fertile lands for Europeans.1 "What is considered "traditional" in African communities is often of relatively recent vintage and was colonially-generated. Foreign aid workers and African men are too eager to point to "Tradition" when excluding women from development projects."

The idea conveyed when "Tradition" is blamed for African women's economic predicament is that African beliefs and practices constitute part of an ancient, unchanging way of life, not easily amenable to change. The reality too often is that aid and development workers assume that the existence of "Tradition" makes African women incapable of acting as authors of their own lives. Numerous studies now exist which point to the unwillingness or incapacity of development workers to engage African women in dialogue as a fundamental obstacle to the success of many so-called aid programs.2 Fundamental to any task of understanding Africa is the acknowledgment of the continent's diversity. Not even within a single country do sweeping generalizations hold. An absolute priority to ending poverty in Africa is to listen to the experiences and wisdom of poor African women.

As we acknowledge that "Tradition" cannot be the beginning and the end of any analysis of African women's economic realities, we must also acknowledge that the facts of African women's lives do not make for happy reading. The statistics, while they do not capture the reality of women's lives in all the different contexts in which they live, give an overall picture.

Of all the continents, Africa has the largest percentage of people living in poverty, with signs that ever larger numbers will be threatened by poverty in the future. HIV/AIDS, for example, is leaving millions of African children as AIDS orphans. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is recognized to be of significant consequence for development, affects women in notably higher numbers than men in some African countries. In Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya and Malawi, this has resulted in a lower life expectancy for women than men, a reversal of what typically obtains.3 Although African women work longer hours, they own disproportionately less than African men. African women receive only 1 percent of credit facilities extended to agricultural producers. Yet, at least 70 percent of African women are involved in agriculture. A disproportionate percentage of African babies are of low birth weight, a factor closely related to maternal poverty.

"African women receive only 1 percent of credit facilities extended to agricultural producers. Yet, at least 70 percent of African women are involved in agriculture."

Ending Poverty?

How to end poverty in Africa? This question has become a staple of discussion for commentators from pop stars to world-renowned economists. For decades, the image of Africa in the world has been as the poor neighbor, always receiving charity yet remaining forever destitute and helpless. Despite numerous pop concerts, organizations with a plethora of acronyms, roundtables, meetings and conferences, poverty in Africa remains.

The most ambitious poverty-eradication effort to date is the Millennium Development Project, which was ratified by all the UN member nations as well as major donor and aid institutions in September 2000. Its goal is to eradicate poverty all over the world, especially in Africa. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) explicitly recognize the centrality of women's economic empowerment to any serious poverty reduction program: the third of the eight goals is "to promote gender equality and empower women."

While it is clear that Africa will not meet any of Millennium Development Goals by the 2015 deadline, 4 it is important that the MDG acknowledge that development cannot take place in a vacuum. In 2005, five years after the MDG were passed and ten years before their due date, the UN issued a major report assessing achievements so far and delineating what needs to be done. According to the UN 2005 MDG Report, in 1990 44.6 percent of Africans were living on less than a dollar a day; by 2001 the percentage of Africans living on less than a dollar a day had actually increased to 46.4 percent, a goal even further removed from the Millennium Development Goal of about 25 percent by 2015 (MDG
2005 Report). Since 1990, millions more people are chronically hungry in sub-Saharan Africa, where half the children under the age of five are malnourished. (MDG Report 2005)

Despite these disheartening statistics, aid is certainly not the panacea. In the first place, "aid assistance" and "development programs" have typically discriminated against women. In the second place, attempts to incorporate women into development programs may be tempted to "bring women up to men's standards." The economic situation of African men is no model! But the strongest argument against aid is the fact that 30 years of ODA have produced little beyond huge amounts of crushing debt. In 2000, African external debt accounted for over 51 percent of GDP; by 2003 it had fallen to 49 percent of GDP. Such global figures obscure the particularly harsh reality for individual countries: for Malawi external debt was almost 200 percent of its GDP in 2006; for Sao Tome & Principe it was 350 percent!5 "Aid is certainly not the panacea... the strongest argument against aid is the fact that 30 years of ODA have produced little beyond huge amounts of crushing debt."

Fortunately, in 2006 debt was about 25 percent of GDP for Africa as a whole. There are other signs for cautious optimism. For example, several African countries have reported economic growth rate of 5 percent or more for the last two years.6 A stronger economy is the only path poor countries have to get out of poverty. In 1980 Africa contributed 5 percent to global trade. By 1995 the figure was 2.2 percent. In the 1990s Africa was attracting 3 percent FDI. Compare this with 20 percent for Latin America and 50 percent for East Asia.7 On practically every indicator used to measure poverty, and in contrast to Africa's continued weak position, Latin America and East Asia have made positive gains, and this is no doubt a direct result of the positive gains in their position in the global marketplace.

Rather than idealistic slogans about making poverty history, we need to attend more closely to practical ways to increase Africa's share of the world market. Here, the role of African governments is paramount. Clearly, investors will invest only in places where profit seems likely and stability can be guaranteed. For too long, African regimes have failed to provide a climate attractive to investors.

"Rather than idealistic slogans about making poverty history, we need to attend more closely to practical ways to increase Africa's share of the world market."

Related to economic development must be the question of arms sales.
Africa is awash in arms, from small ones to massive missiles. Armed conflict makes agriculture impossible and does not allow for the kind of stability that investors want. The number of Africans affected by armed conflicts is staggering. Between 1994 and 2003 more than 9 million Africans, mostly women and children, perished as a result of armed conflict. That's the entire population of Sweden. Much more than the population of Switzerland. No region in the world comes close to such statistics. In Southern Asia, the region next in terms of casualties from armed conflict, the figure was under 2 million. War produces not only casualties in terms of deaths, but also refugees and other displaced peoples. It will come as no surprise that Africa far exceeds any other region in the world in its refugee and displaced populations.

People cannot farm or run factories if they are dodging bullets or coerced to fight wars. Governments cannot invest in infrastructure if they use their country's wealth to buy military equipment. It is almost impossible to imagine a world in which the arms producing nations of the world agreed not to sell to impoverished countries. Impossible to imagine, but what a world of difference it would make!

Women and Economic Development For Africans, women and men, to become economically more prosperous, African economies have to be radically restructured. Most of the economies in Africa remain monocultures. There can be no prosperity for the majority of its citizens if a country relies on the exportation of low-value raw materials that are sent to other countries where they are processed and then returned to the world market with a much increased price-tag. Exporting copper or coffee will only make a few individuals or a multinational rich; copper and coffee alone will not a country enrich.

Greater diversification of African economies has to incorporate a more inclusive and empowered role for women. Today, individual experts and agencies all claim to acknowledge that African countries can move significant proportions of their populations out of poverty only if women are able to improve their economic lot. "Women in Development", from its start in Western feminist circles, is now a staple concept in all multilateral agencies. Yet the success of Women in Development programs has not been much better than that of development tout court. This is because too often a paternalistic approach persists and projects are designed without any consultation with the target women who are seen only as recipients.

"Greater diversification of African economies has to incorporate a more inclusive and empowered role for women."

It is critically important not to make assumptions or to behave as if categories from Western societies can be uncritically used to analyze African ones. We have to be vigilant not to be careless in our thinking: too often, for example, education is treated by experts as a fetish. Because people are poor or "uneducated" does not mean they are stupid.

The success of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh provides one example that poor, uneducated women know what they want and will successfully implement it if they have the opportunity (via credit, for example). In my own research on Onitsha, Nigeria, an important center of trade where women controlled the marketplace in the nineteenth century, I found that lack of literacy was no bar to the ability of women to accumulate enormous wealth. Students of West African history are very familiar with self-help microfinance groups organized by women; such groups have a deep history, long predating the current "discovery" of microfinance in the West, due in large part to the award of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.

The kind of aid with which we are most familiar, involving "experts"
going from the global north to tell people in the global south what to do, especially in the form of government to government monetary packages, cannot bring poor people permanently out of poverty. On the other hand, assistance which is conceived as a partnership and actually involves the "recipients" in the planning as well as implementation, can succeed. And there are examples of such successes. The Canadian organization, Match International, was founded on just such principles.

According to the organization's mission statement, "Match supports initiatives identified by women in the global South, led and implemented by the women, and innovative in their context. This approach is based on Match's belief that women's development must be considered within their own context, and for strategies to succeed, women's views and agendas must be taken into consideration." In Nigeria, the organization Baobab for Women's Human Rights, has achieved notable successes. It is worth noting that, in one campaign, Baobab was forced to expend much energy and resources in asking women's groups in the global north to scale back their activities as these were negating their own local initiatives, threatening to derail the goal on which all were agreed. Baobab's activities have focused in the primarily Muslim parts of Nigeria, and under the rubric of "women's human rights" the organization has been able to address a wide range of issues, including women's economic empowerment.

A work that remains - unfortunately – very relevant is Barbara Brown's book The Domestication of Women which shows just how expensive can be well-intentioned but ill-conceived projects devised by men and women who "go to help" without ever bothering to listen or even consult with those whose lives are supposed to be impacted by their projects. Her book is a catalogue of failures spearheaded by various branches of the United Nations and other multilateral organizations. One tragicomic scenario involving the building of wells comes readily to mind: exasperated, "aid" workers abandon the building of wells because, despite all their efforts, local men do not maintain the wells as instructed. The fact that it is women who fetch water had never been taken into consideration by the "aid" workers. The poverty eradication programs which have been shown to produce significant and lasting results tend to be smaller in scale and always involve the active participation of the so-called "target women". The point is not that large organizations are doomed to failure but that they must learn to listen as well as to acknowledge that poor people are not only students but also can be teachers. Women at the so-called grassroots level must be heard because only they have the intimate knowledge of their lives and needs.

"Women at the so-called grassroots level must be heard because only they have the intimate knowledge of their lives and needs."

Conclusion Who should speak for African women? Too often it is either African men or Western women. We need to hear more from the African women themselves whose lives we all claim we wish to improve. Also, we must incorporate the important critiques by African women scholars of the flawed categories that continue to be used to describe African women's lives and African societies. Scholars such as Felicia Ekejiuba, Achola Pala, Nkiru Nzegwu and Oyeronke Oyewumi have written about how the categories used to describe African women's lives often are derived from very different realities in other parts of the world and end up doing more violence to the women whose lives the activists/scholars claim they seek to ameliorate.

In the context of the discussion here, it is important to note that the UN Commission on the Status of Women has declared its theme for 2008 as "Financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women". In February 2007 the Commission convened an informal expert panel to discuss how to move forward on this agenda. It is disheartening – but, unfortunately, not surprising – that no African women were amongst the list of panelists; indeed the only African – the Minister of Finance for Zambia – was also the only man.

* Dr. Anene Ejikem is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University. This article was first published in the AtIssue ezine

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

* Please click on the link for the article notes