The 9th Assembly of the African Union Heads of States and Governments will convene from 1-3 July 2007 in Accra, Ghana under the theme, ‘The Grand Debate on the Union Government.’ It is significant that the debate takes place nearly two years since the ratification of the African Union Protocol to the Charter of African Women’s Rights, and three years since the adoption of the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa, which reaffirms the commitment of African States to advance the agenda of gender equality. Both instruments provide a critical framework to address the rights of women and girls in Africa. To date 21countries have ratified the protocol on Women’s Rights, leaving 32 yet to ratify. The delay in ratification of the protocol by member states of the union undermines the universal achievement of continental standards on women’s rights.

In the proposal of the Union Government lies a long held vision to consolidate African unity, and an affirmation of the quest to unite Africa’s peoples across shared values and rights. Unfortunately, across the continent, the status of women continues to deteriorate under war and conflict, deeply rooted economic inequality, repressive undemocratic regimes, domestic violence and trauma, harmful cultural practices and poverty. In spite of the continental instruments for change, women’s rights remain elusive.

At the heart of the union debate must be a commitment to unite Africa’s people across gender by upholding respect for women’s rights and equality of opportunities for both men and women.
Specifically, the African Heads of States and Government meeting in Accra should show commitment to continental unity by embracing the following:

• Incorporation of gender equality in the values underpinning the Proposal of United States of Africa
• Instituting and making public during the next Summit a performance audit of the Directorates of the African Union Commission in terms of the incorporation of gender concerns (2004-2007)
• Prioritization of the rights and entitlements of refugees and displaced populations, particularly women and girls.
• Prioritization of full citizenship status for women in terms of rights, particularly women who marry across nationalities and lose their rights.
• Guarantee to women the freedom to trade and work across states’ borders. Women small traders manage a high degree of non-formal cross border trade
• Conduct analysis into the gendered implications of macroeconomic policy with respect to the ‘convergence criteria’.
• Enable total factor mobility—the free movement of all factors of production (labour as well as capital)—by addressing questions of African citizenship, including African women’s equal citizenship rights and freedom of movement at the continental level.
• Embedding the principle of gender parity in the election and appointment of persons to the continental institutions.
• Ensuring that the principle of appointing 50% women commissioners at the African Union Commission continues to be honored.
• Increasing the minimum threshold for women MPs elected to the African parliament to at least two per country
• Review all recommendations (in the continental government proposal) in light of deficiencies already noted by the African women’s movement with respect to ensuring the equal representation of African women at the AU’s highest decision-making organs—for instance, the Commission’s Chair could also have a Deputy responsible for gender mainstreaming across her/his ‘Cabinet’ and all Commissioners responsible for programs and projects under the strategic focus areas should ensure that gender implications are taken into account in their elaboration and implementation;
• Publicly censuring countries that have yet to ratify the Protocol on the Rights of African Women.
• Honor their commitment to deliver on the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa.
• Demonstrate greater commitment to the normative framework already established by the AU—particularly with respect to the promotion and protection of human rights (including women’s human rights), peace and security.

The debate on the Union Government is timely, but it will only be relevant in as far as it will recognize that the majority of the African people are women and girls; and that to win their confidence African Leaders need to seriously take up their concerns head on.

It is essential to address the African diaspora’s involvement in the process of continental government. As we descend into the next phase of the African Union’s summits in Ghana, critical analysis of the African diaspora’s meaningful contribution must be integrated from here on, writes Selome Araya.

‘An African, therefore…is one who by accident of history and the reality of geography is wedded to the African continent. A leading advocate of this concept was Kwame Nkrumah’ – Professor Godfrey N. Uzoigwe

The current sea of summits and articles about the proposed ‘United States of Africa’ has raised numerous discussions in regards to its challenges and necessity. While these discussions are imperative, it is also essential to continue to address another key element: the African diaspora’s involvement in the process. As we descend into the next phase of the African Union’s (AU) summits in Ghana, critical analysis of the African diaspora’s meaningful contribution must be integrated from here on.

The African diaspora are people of African descent who live outside continental Africa, having been dispersed around the world through colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade or voluntary migration. The AU has defined the African diaspora as '[consisting] of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union‘.

Though the AU proclaims the importance of the African diaspora’s contribution, the minimal presence of the diaspora in the United States of Africa decision making bodies sparks the question: Is the United States of Africa being proposed only for those living in the African states, or does it extend to those in the diaspora as well? Does this unification really include the contribution of all African people who are willing to participate?

The answer to these questions could potentially be the catalyst to revive the once active plea for Pan-Africanism. More than unifying the 54 states of the African continent, it could serve as the mechanism to facilitate unity and solidarity amongst a people who are dispersed throughout the world, yet still connected by their history, ancestry, and bloodlines.

Though it has been adopted and embraced by African state leaders, the notion of a United Africa has always resonated with Africans in the diaspora. The concept of a ‘United States of Africa’ in fact was originated by Jamaican-born leader and activist Marcus Garvey. He first used the phrase in 1924 to call for the unity of Africans collectively fighting for human rights, resisting racism and exploitation in all parts of the world. Garvey’s teachings helped to shape the Pan-African movement, a movement formed in part with the intent to bridge the diaspora with its homeland. The Pan-African movement was also influenced by a United States-born African, W.E.B. Du Bois.

Professor and author Godfrey N Uziokwe defines Pan-Africanism as ‘a political movement initiated by peoples of African descent in the Americas, and later taken over by continental Africans, which aims to liberate all Africans and people of African descent from the shackles of political, economic, cultural, and intellectual domination’ [2]. Ghanaian president and activist, Kwame Nkrumah, and other leaders from the continent later adopted the Pan-African movement, expanding it to include the decolonisation of the African continent politically. At the first Pan-African Congress to occur in Africa in 1958, Dr Nkrumah acknowledged the extraordinary contribution of people of African origin in the diaspora to Pan-Africanism:

‘... Many of them have made no small contribution to the cause of African freedom. Names which spring immediately to mind in this connection are those of Marcus Garvey, and WEB DuBois. Long before many of us were even conscious of our own degradation, these men fought for African national and racial equality.’

The Pan-African movement solidified the need for global solidarity of people of African descent to defend their human rights. Inspired by the Diasporic Pan African Movement, Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, and others, formed the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. However, though the initial Pan-African movement included Africans in the diaspora, the OAU began to focus more on continental concerns and did not develop a specific role for people of the African diaspora. ‘While the OAU helped speed the independence of African nations, it did not reach out to the African diaspora in a meaningful way.’ This was first seen during the early stages of the OAU, where members of the diaspora were largely absent from the Pan-African meetings.

The OAU transitioned into the AU in 2001, and during this time, ’it began the long-awaited outreach to the African diaspora’ [4]. The AU verbally recognised the diaspora as the ‘6th region of Africa’, adding it to the other five geographical regions on the continent. Article 3 (q) of the AU’s Constitutive Act Amendments states that it shall ‘invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our Continent, in the building of the African Union’.

One of these attempts included the creation of the diaspora Initiative within the framework of the OAU, created in 2003 to connect people of spiritual and ancestral kinship to one another through various mechanisms. In 2006, the AU’s 6th Region Education Campaign also partnered with the Western Hemisphere Education Campaign (WHADN) in an initiative to serve as the ‘interface mechanism’ that linked the diaspora with the AU.

However, while the diaspora has been invited to conferences and summits, sometimes to merely ‘observe’, their role in making decisions within the AU appears to still be minimal. The full participation of the diaspora in the development of the United States of Africa has yet to be conceptualised and there is currently no policy to facilitate the involvement of the diaspora in the process. In addition, although the AU’s Constitutive Act states that it will include the diaspora in its processes, there have been no written policy changes. ‘Examination of the Amendment, Article ‘q’ to the Constitutive Act of the African Union reveals, however, that no such ‘significant structural change’ has occurred, stated Professor Maurice Tadadjeu in a recent address to Repatriation News. This is illustrated through the diaspora’s inability to join or take part in an important governmental body in Africa, the Pan-African Parliament (PAP).

The diaspora currently does not take part in any deliberations. The PAP states that it represents all people’s of Africa, yet its objectives focus solely on Africans living on the continent and make no mention of the African diaspora’s inclusion in or benefit from these objectives. Full participation of the diaspora within the AU would mean the diaspora having seats within the PAP. An example of how this could be facilitated is by developing a joint body between the AU and a governmental body in the diaspora. A policy report entitled ‘Building an African Union’ suggests that ‘Existing institutions and organizations in the diaspora should be integrated with the AU. A pan- African parliamentary union between the PAP and the US Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) would be one such Innovation’.

An attempt at including the voice of all African peoples (the diaspora) in the AU’s decision making process was with the creation of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union (ECOSOCC) in 2002. The ECOSOCC is to serve as a consultative body and is working to bring together civil society groups, including some from the diaspora, to work with the AU. In regards to the United States of Africa, this body is intended to serve as a consultancy at assembly deliberations.

Diasporic ‘representation’ and decision making within the ECOSOCC, however, doesn’t equate to the diaspora having decision making power within the AU or its United States of Africa government. However, the ECOSOCC claims that this consultative body will play an active role in partnership with African governments to ‘contribute to the principles, policies and programs of the Union’. Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, General-Secretary of the Pan-African Movement in Kampala Uganda and Co-Director of Justice Africa, however, believes that the diaspora’s role is not quite as active as it appears. He states, ‘Even at the launch of the General Assembly (of the ECOSOCC) the few diaspora persons there were mere observers’.

Mutually beneficial relationship and solidarity

The call for the African diaspora’s full participation in the formation of a United Africa may cause some to wonder, why is the diaspora’s full participation important and who would benefit from such a relationship?

The theme of a proposed global summit in South Africa focusing on the unity of Africa and the diaspora provides an overall response to this inquiry. Entitled ‘Towards the Realization of a United and Integrated Africa and its diaspora’, this summit will aim at producing ‘a shared vision of sustainable development for both the African continent and the millions of people around the world who share an African heritage’. The participants of this summit are calling for a global dialogue regarding regional development and integration, economic co-operation, and historical, socio-cultural and religious commonalities.

There are over 150,000,000 people in the diaspora who not only could play a role in strengthening Africa’s development and attempt at unification, but who could also greatly benefit from a united Africa. In essence, a mutually beneficial relationship would result from the diaspora taking part in the development of a United States of Africa. Revived Pan-African solidarity between Africa and the diaspora would create partnerships needed to address issues of global concern and provide mutual support as both groups are still weaning off the impact that western imperialism had (and still has) on both.

If the diaspora and the African’s living on the continent joined forces with consistent cross-continental relations, support, and inclusion, it could strengthen the entire African presence and power in the world. Empowering Africans both at home and abroad is essential in order to address the inequities and imbalances that continue to bond us by our collective experience of oppression. Through building mutual solidarity, networking, and mobilization, both continental and diasporic Africans would gain strength.

According to the diaspora Initiative within the framework of the AU, the diaspora can be of great benefit to the AU through:

• technical support for programs of the African Union
• public education and sensitization of the wider public in their respective regions
• lobbying
• provision of a domestic political constituency for AU goals and objectives
• advocacy
• fundraising and resource mobilization
• resource support through such measures as creation of Endowments amongst others.

As this initiative reflects, the benefit that Africans in the diaspora could bring to the United States of Africa is multi-layered. Collectively the diaspora possesses an economic power that could greatly assist African economic development initiatives and assist in the continents struggle to break from the shackles of structural adjustment programmes, globalisation, and ‘debts’. The power that the diaspora holds could also knock out the devastating choke-hold that international NGO’s have over continental crises. Due to proportionately more access to resources, there is a wealth of financial, technical and intellectual expertise in the diaspora.

The amount of resources and education that African’s in the diaspora have access to could surely help to strengthen the continental quest at unity, provide support for other concerns affecting Africans on the continent, as well as developing Africa’s human resource capacity. ‘The African diaspora can play a part in enhancing Africa’s role in the world by promoting the development of the continent. A genuine engagement by the AU with the diaspora could enhance Africa’s negotiating and resource mobilization capacity with the international community.’ [2]

However, on the reciprocal end, the AU could also greatly assist in the struggle of African people’s globally. At the Pan-African Congress in 1958, Nkrumah recognised Africa’s unity as being crucial for the human rights of Africans in the diaspora to be respected.

‘Long may the links between Africa and the peoples of African descent continue to hold us together in fraternity. Now that we in Africa are marching towards the complete emancipation of this Continent, our independent status will help in no small measure their efforts to attain full human rights and human dignity as citizens of their country.’ [3]

According to the diaspora Initiative, the AU can offer the diaspora:

• a measure of credible involvement in the policy making processes
• some corresponding level of representation
• symbolic identifications
• requirements of dual or honorary citizenship of some sort
• moral and political support of diaspora initiatives in their respective regions
• preferential treatment in access to African economic undertakings including consultancies, trade preferences and benefits for entrepreneurs, vis a vis non –Africans
• social and political recognition as evident in invitation to Summits and important meetings etc. [9]

The United African governmental body could also show solidarity and provide support for the many injustices being inflicted on people of African descent throughout the diaspora. This includes places like Brazil, the United States of America, Haiti, France and elsewhere, where people of African descent are suffering from human rights violations exponentially by imperialist governments.

Speaking from the experience of an African living in the United States of America, we have repeatedly found ourselves victims of human rights violations and racist oppression by this government since we arrived here. We are not supported, respected, or represented by this government and have been mistreated by the government itself. Examples of this include the continuous unjust murders of African peoples by the state police departments as well as the gross injustices against African people that preceded and followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Although there have been governments and leaders in Africa who have fully acknowledged the injustices that are occurring in America and elsewhere, being a part of an African government would strengthen the diaspora’s continual struggle for justice. If Africans in America were a part of the United States of Africa government, they could possibly have a mechanism of support to hold the United States government accountable for the violations they inflict on people of African descent. Africans throughout the diaspora could have a connection to a universal African government that advocates for drastic changes to be made in regards to the global mistreatment of people of African descent. In other words, Africans in the diaspora would have a government that they feel a part of, instead of one they are in constant combat with.

Just One Struggle

Proclamations about the African diaspora’s right to play a crucial role in the development of a United States of Africa also call for an all-inclusive definition of what it means to be African.

Whether you identify as African, Black, being of African origin or descent, African-American, Caribbean, Afro-Latino, New Afrikan, or an African living abroad, one common trait holds true: we are all bound by our origination from and lasting connection to the same land. The African world is bigger than the territory and borders of the continent. It spans the entire globe, and includes our presence on all seven continents. The linguistic, geographic, and cultural differences amongst us cannot negate the reality that we are brothers and sisters. Separated by force, we have clearly been fragmented in a myriad of ways. But beyond the borders and boundaries, throwing away visas and passports, sidestepping our lack of common languages, combating the cowardly European divide and conquer techniques, and underneath any perceived differences, we are yet roots from the same tree.

This attempted disjointing and cultural destabilisation should not be the excuse for not supporting one another’s struggles for emancipation and freedom. In this case, realised Pan-African unity could be our channel to justice on the continent and abroad.

This common ancestry has made our universal struggles and resistance against oppression one in the same. Human rights activist and Pan-Africanist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) stated in his address at the OAU summit in Cairo, Egypt in 1964, ‘We in America (and elsewhere) are your long-lost brothers and sisters, and I am here only to remind you that our problems are your problems’ [10]. He also added, ‘Since the 22 million of us were originally Africans, who are now in America, not by choice but only by a cruel accident in our history, we strongly believe that African problems are our problems and our problems are African problems’10. More than being bonded by our common African descent, Pan-Africanism was born out of this collective bond to resist these ‘powers’ in solidarity, hoping to strengthen our calls for justice and accountability. Shackled by European states and scrambling for civil rights, the only true difference in our struggle is geographic location.

We (African’s globally) are all continuing to endure various forms of oppression and atrocities inflicted on us directly, indirectly, institutionally, economically, and even under the guise of ‘humanitarian assistance’ and development projects. Whether we live in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa, African peoples have been subjected to imperialist policies that have undermined our worth, dehumanized our souls and attempted to keep us enslaved under capitalism.

The diaspora Initiative also recognises this common African struggle:

‘Indeed, the activities and challenges of both continental Africans and Africans in diaspora continued to impact upon each other, with history as a common reference point. Those transported across the Atlantic began as second-class citizens in their new abode just as the establishment of the colonial order of the African continent relegated their brothers to the same status on the continent. Hence, the quest for freedom and social emancipation became a shared concern. Africans on both sides of the Atlantic divide felt the impact of vestigial discrimination in the aftermath of the abolition of the Slave Trade and the onset of the twentieth century.’

And so, if Africans in the diaspora are truly embraced as being African and if the African struggles globally are acknowledged as being one in the same, their inclusion in the development of a United States of Africa should be automatic, clearly defined, and truly participatory, and move beyond observer status. While there have been attempts over the last six years to include the diaspora in discussions pertaining to the African Union, a stronger presence in the United States of Africa must be actualised and written policy on the reciprocal relationship must be created.

*Selome Araya holds an MPH in Forced Migration and Health from Columbia University. She works with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in New York and is a freelance writer.

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

Before African governments can win the confidence of African women that they will deliver on huge projects like a continental government, they must first come up with a plan for the implementation of the articles of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, argues Faiza Mohamed. African leaders should get rid of all the customary practices that continue to limit women’s potentials as a necessary step for continental government.

Barely two weeks from the time of writing, African heads of state and government will be meeting for their 10th ordinary summit in Accra for a grand debate on the prospects of creating a government of African states. In the build up to this historic debate, civil society organisations have been vigorously consulting and busy in awakening public interest in the matter with a view to maximising the African public’s participation in the discussion about the added value of having one government for Africa. Sadly, time has been short, and African leaders are moving ahead with their debate without greater input from the African peoples that they represent. This brief article is an attempt to bring some of the concerns African women would like their African leaders to consider in their striving for a United African States (UAS).

One of the advantages of a UAS that has been highlighted a lot is the free movement of peoples and goods throughout the continent. While the dismantling of artificial boundaries created by colonial powers long ago would be a great welcome to the peoples of Africa, and especially those who were hindered from freely connecting with their relatives living on the other side of the border, women in the Upper Volta region of Ghana who are held bondage under the traditional practice of Trokosi share no joy in this potential euphoria over free movement in the continent.

For those who do not know of this practice, trokosi in the Ewe language means 'slaves of the gods'. What this tradition entails is that families who have commited crimes have to give away their virgin daughters to priests, so that the gods will be pleased and forgive them of their crimes. There are two categories of trokosi – those who can be released after serving a specified number of years (usually three to five years) and those who are committed for life. If a girl dies or if the priest tires of her, her family has to replace her. For serious crimes, families give up generations of girls in perpetual atonement. In accordance with the tradition, a trokosi who is released can never be married because she is married for life to the god.

Many released trokosi hence remain in concubinage to the priest for the rest of their lives and when he dies his trokosi are passed on to his successor. Women and girls who are victims of this practice know of no freedom of their minds and bodies, let alone freedom to travel in their villages. For them, free movement in Africa, as championed in the continental government proposal, will bring no comfort.

Though Ghana has passed a law in 1998 criminalising the trokosi practice, hundreds of girls and women are believed to be still held in several shrines. It is ironic that discussion on African unity is being discussed in Ghana where women and girls are being held as slaves for life. The African leaders should include seriously looking into and abolishing practices such as trokosi that enslave women and girls and infringe on their dignity and well-being.

Another advantageous point highlighted in the continental proposal is how Africa will be in a stronger position in trade agreements with non-Africans; and how this will bring greater benefits to the peoples of Africa. By and large, women remain the majority of those tilling Africa’s productive lands, and thus are responsible for produces that feed Africa and beyond. Alas they remain the poorest with no control over the lands they till and the crops they harvest.

For the African peoples to prosper, it is necessary that African leaders take the logical action to get rid of all the customary practices that continue to limit women’s potentials to inherit and own land. As they deliberate on serious discussion on ways to realise the United African States, they also need to recognise the need to have a roadmap for placing women’s economic empowerment in the front for actualisation of Africa’s growth and development.

In July 2003, our African leaders adopted the protocol on the rights of women which aims to address the many injustices that African women suffer from, including those discussed here, and which reduce their potentials to effectively contribute to the development and wellbeing of the African population. Four years later, only 21 countries (39 per cent) out of the 53 member states of the African Union have ratified it.

The majority of the member states are lagging behind in their commitment to women to enjoy the rights recognised in the protocol, which stands for the minimum standard of rights that African women would accept and so in their Accra deliberations the African leaders need not only to reaffirm their commitment to uphold the rights provided in the protocol but to also declare that it will be the premise from which African women’s rights will be advanced. For them to win the confidence of African women that they can undertake and deliver on huge projects like a continental government, they must first come out with a plan for the implementation of the articles of the protocol throughout the continent within a one year period. A United African States will be possible ifAfrica’s women are with you!

* Faiza Jama Mohamed is the Africa Regional Director of Equality Now and convener of the Solidarity for African Women’s Rights (SOAWR) coalition.

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

Is it a realistic debate to be having at this time, when the continent is afflicted with so many other problems and challenges? To what extent are the majority of African people aware that this debate is going on? Before we can even begin to grapple with these questions, says Tim Murithi, we need to pose the question: how we have got to the point that we are discussion a Union of Africa Government or the so-called United States of Africa?

It is appropriate to reflect on the debate that has been raging on the prospects for further continental integration and the impending discussions on the Union Government Project. During the 8th Ordinary Session of Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 29 to 30 January 2007, the decision was taken to devote the next meeting of the Assembly to an elaborately titled 'Grand Debate on the Union Government'. From 8 to 9 May 2007, the Executive Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs met in Durban, South Africa to brainstorm on the state of the Union. The groundwork has therefore been laid for discussions to take place in Accra about the direction that the AU should take.

We could question whether it is indeed appropriate and realistic to be debating a Union Government at this time. Have AU member states mastered the art of rudimentary unification? Do they yet speak with a unified voice and act based on a common purpose? To add to this casserole of doubt the continent is still afflicted by so many other problems and challenges from conflict, to underdevelopment and inadequate public health services. Ultimately, by adding a pinch of scepticism about the genuine political will of AU member states to pool their sovereignty, it seems that the Grand Debate may be no more than a storm in a tea cup, much-ado-about-not-very-much. But perhaps this is a bit dismissive!

Is it indeed a realistic debate to be having at this time, when the continent is afflicted with so many other problems and challenges? To what extent are the majority of African people aware that this debate is going on? If they are not aware, who is having this conversation on their behalf? How can a Union Government Project succeed if it does not have the buy-in and the support of the people of Africa?

But before we can even begin to grapple with these questions we do need to pose the question: how we have got to the point that we are discussion a Union of Africa Government or the so-called United States of Africa? Only by tracing the trajectory of the evolution of the notion of Pan-Africanism can we begin to contextualize the impetus behind the impending 'Grand Debate on the Union Government'.

This paper will assess the origins of Pan-Africanism and discuss the norms that animated this movement. It will then assess how Pan-Africanism was institutionalized in the form of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the present day African Union (AU). It will argue that the Grand Debate on the Union Government is only the latest incarnation of an attempt to institutionalise Pan-Africanism. Understanding the reasons why Pan-Africanism gained currency as a movement and liberatory ideology will help us to understand this Grand Debate. The past in this sense is influencing the present and will ultimately inform the future. The paper will assess the role that civil society can play in contributing to the Union Government debate. The paper will also question whether the Union Government of Africa Project will be built on a solid enough foundation to realize the aspirations of Pan-Africanism. It will conclude by assessing the limits of continental integration.

What is Pan-Africanism?

It is often assumed that the process of continental integration begun with an Extra-ordinary Summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) convened in Sirte, Libya, in 1999. In fact, the process begun with the Pan-African movement and its demand for greater solidarity among the peoples of Africa. To understand the emergence of the African Union we need to understand the evolution of the Pan-African movement. A review of the objectives and aspirations of Pan-Africanism provides a foundation to critically assess the creation of the AU and its prospects for promoting the principles and norms of peace and development.

Historically Pan-Africanism, the perception by Africans in the diaspora and on the continent that they share common goals, has been expressed in different forms by various actors. There is no single definition of Pan-Africanism and in fact we can say that there are as many ideas about Pan-Africanism as there are thinkers of Pan-Africanism. Rather than being a unified school of thought, Pan-Africanism is more a movement which has as its common underlying theme the struggle for social and political equality and the freedom from economic exploitation and racial discrimination.

It is interesting to note that it is the global dispersal of peoples of African descent that is partly responsible for the emergence of the Pan-African movement. As Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, observe in their book Pan-African History: Political Figures from African and the Diaspora Since 1787, ‘Pan-Africanism has taken on different forms at different historical moments and geographical locations’. Adi and Sherwood note that, what underpins these different perspectives on Pan-Africanism is ‘the belief in some form of unity or of common purpose among the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.’ One can also detect an emphasis on celebrating ‘Africaness’, resisting the exploitation and oppression of Africans and their kin in the Diaspora as well as a staunch opposition to the ideology of racial superiority in all its overt and covert guises.

Pan-Africanism is an invented notion. It is an invented notion with a purpose. We should therefore pose the question what is the purpose of Pan-Africanism? Essentially, Pan-Africanism is a recognition of the fragmented nature of the existence of African’s, their marginalization and alienation whether in their own continent or in the Diaspora. Pan-Africanism seeks to respond to Africa’s underdevelopment. Africa has been exploited and a culture of dependency on external assistance unfortunately still prevails on the continent. If people become too reliant on getting their support, their nourishment, their safety, from outside sources, then they do not strive find the power within themselves to rely on their own capacities. Pan-Africanism calls upon Africans to drawn from their own strength and capacities and become self-reliant.

Pan-Africanism is a recognition that Africans have been divided among themselves. They are constantly in competition among themselves, deprived of the true ownership of their own resources and inundated by paternalistic external actors with ideas about what it ‘good’. Modern day paternalism is more sophisticated and dresses itself up as a kind and gentle helping hand with benign and benevolent intentions. In reality it seeks to maintain a ‘master-servant’ relationship and does not really want to see the genuine empowerment and independence of thought in Africa.

The net effect of this is to dis-empower Africans from deciding for themselves the best way to deal with the problems and issues they are facing. Pan-Africanism is a recognition that the only way out of this existential, social, political crisis is by promoting greater solidarity amongst Africans. Genuine dialogue and debate in Africa will not always generate consensus, but at least it will be dialogue among Africans about how they might resolve their problems. If ideas are not designed by the African’s, then rarely can they be in the interests of Africans.

Institutionalisation of Pan-Africanism: The OAU

In the twentieth century, the idea of Pan-Africanism took an institutional form. Initially, there were the Pan-African Congress’ which convened in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, under the leadership of activists like the African-American writer and thinker WEB. du Bois; the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams; and inspired often by the ideas of people like the Jamaican-American Marcus Garvey. These ideas were adopted and reformed by continental African leaders in the middle of the twentieth century. Kwame Nkrumah who later became the first president of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Banar Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ali Ben Bella of Algeria took the idea of Pan-Africanism to another level on 25 May 1963 when they co-created the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The principles of the OAU kept the spirit of Pan-Africanism alive. The primary objective of this principle was to continue the tradition of solidarity and cooperation among Africans.

During the era of the OAU the key challenge was colonialism. Since 1885, in what was then known as the 'Scramble for Africa' European colonial powers had colonized African peoples and communities across the entire continent. The Belgians were in the Congo, the British in East, South, West and North Africa. The French in West Africa, Somalia, Algeria and other parts of north Africa. The Italians in Somalia. The Germans, who later lost their colonies following their defeat in the Second World War, had to relinquish Namibia and modern day Tanzania. Africans had successfully fought on the side of the allies in the Second World War and after its conclusion they brought their struggle for independence back home to Africa.

The OAU embraced the principle of Pan-Africanism undertook the challenge of liberating all African countries from the grip of settler colonialism. The main principle that it was trying to promote was to end racial discrimination upon which colonialism with its doctrine of racial superiority was based. In addition, the OAU sought to assert the right of Africans to control their social, economic and political affairs and achieve the freedom necessary to consolidate peace and development. The OAU succeeded in its primary mission, with the help of international actors, in liberating the continent on 27 April 1994, when a new government based on a one-person-one-vote came into being in South Africa under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. The OAU however was not as effective in monitoring and policing the affairs of its own Member States when it came to the issues of violent conflict; political corruption; economic mismanagement; poor governance; lack of human rights; lack of gender equality; and poverty eradication.

The preamble of the OAU Charter of 1963 outlined a commitment by member states collectively establish, maintain and sustain the 'human conditions for peace and security'. However, in parallel, the same OAU Charter contained the provision to 'defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the member states'. This was later translated into the norm of non-intervention. The key organs of the OAU - the council of ministers and the Assembly of heads of state and government - could only intervene in a conflict situation if they were invited by the parties to a dispute. Many intra-state disputes were viewed, at the time, as internal matters and the exclusive preserve of governments is concerned.

The OAU created a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution in Cairo, in June 1993. This instrument was ineffective in resolving disputes on the continent. Tragically, the Rwandan genocide which was initiated in April 1994 happened while this mechanism was operational. It was also during this last decade of the twentieth-century that the conflict in Somalia led to the collapse of the state and the violence in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan led to the death of millions of Africans.

These devastating events illustrated the limitations of the OAU as an institution that could implement the norms and principles that it articulated. Despite the existence of the OAU’s mechanisms for conflict prevention and management, the Rwandan tragedy demonstrated the virtual impotence of the OAU in the face of violent conflict within its member states. The United Nations (UN) did not fare any better as all of its troops, except the Ghanaian contingent, pulled out of the country leaving its people to the fate. Subsequently, both the OAU and the UN issued reports acknowledging their failures. The impetus for the adoption of a new paradigm in the promotion of peace and security in the African continent emerged following the Rwandan tragedy.

Regrettably due to the doctrine of non-intervention, the OAU became a silent observer to the atrocities being committed by some of its member states. Eventually, a culture of impunity and indifference became entrenched in the international relations of African countries during the era of the 'proxy' wars of the Cold War. So in effect the OAU was a toothless talking shop. The OAU was perceived as a club of African Heads of States, most of whom were not legitimately elected representatives of their own citizens but self-appointed dictators and oligarchs. This negative perception informed people’s attitude towards the OAU. It was viewed as an Organization that existed without having a genuine impact on the daily lives of Africans.

The African Union

The African Union came into existence in July 2002, in Durban, South Africa. It was supposed to usher Africa into a new era of continental integration leading to a deeper unity and a resolution of its problems. The evolution of the AU from the Organisation of African Unity was visionary and timely. The OAU had failed to live up to all of its norms and principles. Africa at the time of the demise of the OAU was a continent that was virtually imploding from within due to the pressures of conflict, poverty and underdevelopment and public health crisis like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. The OAU effectively died of a cancer of inefficiency because it basically had not lived up to its original ideals of promoting peace, security and development in Africa. The African Union has emerged as a homegrown initiative to effectively take the destiny of the continent into the hands of the African people. However, there is a long way to go before the AU’s vision and mission is realised.

The AU is composed of 53 member states. It is run by the AU Commission based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Chairperson of the Commission is Alpha Oumar Konare. Its top decision making organ is the Assembly of the Heads of State and Government, its executive decision-making organ is the Executive Council of Ministers, who work closely with the Permanent Representatives Committee of Ambassadors in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The AU has also established range of institutions which will be discussed below.

If we know the ‘purpose’ of Pan-Africanism then the steps to achieve its goals become clearer to understand. It is in this context that we can begin to understand the emergence of the African Union. It would be a mistake to view the African Union as an aberration that just emerged in the last few years. It would be more appropriate to view the AU as only the latest incarnation of the idea of Pan-Africanism. The first phase of the institutionalization of the Pan-Africanism was the Pan-African Congress’ that were held from the end of the nineteenth-century and into the beginning of the twentieth-century. The second phase of the institutionalization of Pan-Africanism was the inauguration of the Organization of African Unity. The third phase of the institutionalization of Pan-Africanism is in effect the creation of the African Union. It will not be the last phase. Subsequent phases and organizations will bring about ever closer political, economic, social and ties among African peoples. African unity is an idea that can be traced back to the nineteenth-century. The African Union is a twenty-first century expression of a nineteenth-century idea. As such it is an imperfect expression, but nevertheless the best expression of Pan-Africanism that can be brought forth at this time.

Towards a Union of Africa?

The agenda to establish a Union Government of Africa or the so-called United States of Africa is well underway. At the core of this debate is the desire to create several ministerial portfolios for the African Union. During the 4th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government, from 30 to 31 January 2005, in Abuja, Nigeria, the AU agreed to the proposals made by the Libyan Government to establish ministerial portfolios for the organisation.

Specifically, in the 6th Ordinary Session of the Executive Council of AU Ministers, Libya proposed the establishment of the posts of Minister of Transport and Communications to unify transportation in Member States to be under the competence of the AU which will include airports and main ports of African capital cities, highways, inter-State railways, State-owned airline companies which are to become the basis for a single African airline company. Ultimately, Libya proposed that this should lead to 'the creation of a post of Minister of Transportation and Communications'.

Similarly, Libya also proposed the creation of the post of Minister of Defence to oversee 'a joint policy on defence and security of the Union and provide for the reinforcement of peace, security and stability on the continent'. This Libyan proposal noted that the provisions of the AU Constitutive Act, of 2000, and the AU Protocol on Peace and Security, 0f 2002, have effectively established a 'Joint Defence Framework'. As a logical step in the implementation of the Protocols and establishment of the institutions of the AU the Libyan proposal emphasised the importance of establishing this post to oversee and 'defend the security of Member States against any foreign aggression and to achieve internal security and stability'. In addition,

Libya also proposed the establishment of the post of an African Union Minister of Foreign Affairs. Central to its argument is that AU countries undermine their own influence when its 53 Foreign Ministers, each individually representing their own governments speak simultaneously and occasionally in contradiction with each other. The Libyan proposal notes that this post is necessary in order to expedite 'the Continent’s political, economic and social integration and to reinforce and defend unified African positions on issues of mutual interest' in the international sphere.

In order to respond to these proposals the AU Assembly decided to 'set up a Committee of Heads of State and Government chaired by the President of the Republic of Uganda and composed of Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia' to liaise with the Chairperson of the AU Commission submit a report by the next summit in July 2005. In November 2005, the Committee convened a conference under the theme 'Desirability of a Union Government of Africa'. This meeting included members of the Committee, representatives of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), technical experts, academics, civil society and Diaspora representatives, as well as the media. The conference came up with three key conclusions including the recognition that the necessity of an AU Government is not in doubt; such a Union must be of the African people and not merely a Union of states and governments; its creation must come about through the principle of gradual incrementalism; and that the role of the RECs should be highlighted as building blocks for the continental framework.

Based on the findings of this conference the Assembly mandated the AU Commission to prepare a consolidated framework document defining the purpose of the Union government, its nature, scope, core values, steps and processes as well as an indicative roadmap for its achievement. The Assembly reaffirmed 'that the ultimate goal of the African Union is full political and economic integration leading to a United States of Africa'. The Assembly further established a Committee of Heads of State and Government to be chaired by President Olusegun Obasanjo, Chairperson of the African Union, and composed of the Heads of State and Government of Algeria, Kenya, Senegal, Gabon, Lesotho and Uganda. More specifically, the Assembly requested the Committee to consider 'the steps that need to be taken for the realization of this objective, the structure, the process, the time frame required for its achievement as well as measures that should be undertaken, in the meantime, to strengthen the ability of the Commission to fulfill its mandate effectively'.

The Chairperson of the Committee of Seven, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, submitted a detailed report entitled: A Study on an African Union Government: Towards the United States of Africa, on July 2006, to the 7th Ordinary Session of the AU Assembly in Banjul, Gambia. Some of the key themes emerging from this report highlighted the fact that Africa is over-dependent on the external world particularly with regards to expatriate technicians and technology.

It also noted that Africa has not fully exploited its potential at national, regional and continental levels with reference to trade, education and health sectors. It notes that 'a United Africa would have the unique potential of producing most types of food and agricultural produce throughout the year'. The study also notes that in the context of globalization 'the challenges of overdependence and under-exploitation of its potentials have increased the marginalisation of the continent in world affairs'. The study further outlines the 16 strategic areas that an African Union Government should focus on including continental integration; education, training, skills development, science and technology; energy; environment; external relations; food, agriculture, and water resources; gender and youth; governance and human rights; health; industry and mineral resources; finance; peace and security; social affairs and solidarity; sport and culture; trade and customs union; infrastructure, Information technology and biotechnology.

The study notes that the 'design and functioning of a Union Government as a tool for integration would have far-reaching implications on the existing institutions and programmes of the African Union'. It further assesses the implications of a Union Government on the organs of the AU. The most notable impact would be the 'need to consider allowing a longer tenure (about 3 years for example) for the President of the Assembly' of the AU. The President of the Assembly would also be the unique spokesperson of the Union at world or other special summits. Therefore the study notes that, 'it would be desirable that the function of President be on a full time basis and could be assigned to a Former Head of State or any distinguished African with the necessary background and track record for the job'. Another notable innovation would be that 'under the Union Government, the AU Commission will be entrusted with the implementation of decisions, programmes and projects in the Strategic focus areas, which will constitute the Community Domain'. This notion of issues falling under the Community Domain would assign the Commission with 'the executive authority and responsibility to effectively implement' policies. The study also recognises that 'the logic of using the RECs as building blocks for the eventual deep, continental integration remains valid. The challenge is in aligning, synchronizing and harmonizing the integration efforts of member states, the RECs themselves, and the AU'.

There are also national implications of the establishment of a Union Government. The study notes that it is vital 'to build the necessary constitutency for advancing political integration'. In this regard, some countries have already set up Ministries in charge of integration and other countries should follow suit. The study notes that 'there is also a need to devise appropriate mechanisms for legislative implications at the national level' and 'the direct involvement of the people in promoting the Union Government could also be in the form of national associations or commissions for the United States of Africa'. In terms of financing the Union Government the study discusses the possibility of establishing indirect taxation schemes particularly with regards to an import levy and an insurance tax. A meeting of ECOSOCC in March 2005 proposed 'imposing a five US dollar tax on each air ticket bought for inter-state travels and 10 US Dollars on each ticket for travelers between Africa and other continents'. Ultimately, the study is positive about the prospects for a Union Government and outlines 3 phases for the transition to a Union Government, including:

1. The initial phase – commencing immediately after the decision of the Assembly at the AU summit in July 2007. It will include all the steps and processes that are necessary for the immediate operationalisation of the Union Government.

2. The second phase – will be devoted to making the Union Government fully operational in all its components and to laying the constitutional ground for the United States of Africa.

3. The third phase – will aim at the facilitation of all required structures of the United States of Africa at the levels of states, the regions and the continent.

The study recommends a 3-year period for each phase which will mean that the United States of Africa will be formed by the year 2015. Elections at continental, regional and national levels would be held, paving the way for the official constitution of the United States of Africa.

The study was considered by the Executive Council at its 9th Extraordinary Session held from 17 to 18 November 2006 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. According to the report of this meeting there was a view that

1) 'all Member States accept the United States of Africa as a common and desirable goal', but differences exist over the modalities and time frame for achieving this goal and the appropriate pace of integration; and

2) there is a common agreement on the need for an audit review of the state of the Union in order to know the areas in which significant improvements have to be made to accelerate the integration process.

The report of the Executive Council was submitted to the AU Assembly in January 2007 which decided to devote the July Summit to a Grand Debate.

The role of civil society in continental integration

It is important to include people and civil society in this Grand Debate. To what extent are the majority of African people aware that this debate is going on? If they are not aware, who is having this conversation on their behalf? How can a Union Government Project succeed if it does not have the by-in and the support of the people of Africa? Can there be an African Union Government without African Citizenship? Where are the African citizens in this debate? More questions than we care to answer. To be fair the AU will convene from 28 to 30 May an all-inclusive continental consultation on the Union Government Project, at its headquarters in Addis Ababa, as part of the preparations towards the Accra meeting.

So civil society will have the opportunity to contribute to this Grand Debate. There is also the issue of the extent to which the AU is consulting with the wider African public on the issue of the Grand Debate. The AU has established a website inviting public contributions on this Grand Debate. However, some civil society activists have argued that an African Union Government is a pipe dream without laying the foundations for genuine African citizenship.

The limits of top-down continental ontegration

Will the establishment of a United States of Africa generate accusations of lack of originality? Some key actors within the AU want to have a US of Africa so that they can rival the power of other global players. There is nothing wrong with such an objective in principle. However, there are limits to a US of Africa. Notably, the USA as it is currently framed is:

1. A top-down approach to continental integration;
2. Governed by the whimsical will of the leaders of African governments;
3. Has a tendency towards un-democratic practices, like lack of consultation;
4. Through its formulation, which largely excluded African civil society, effectively governed by the rule of Heads of State and not the continental rule of law.

The objective behind the US of Africa should not be primary one of increasing the level of global competitiveness of the continent. Rather a primary focus should be on improving the livelihood of African people as a whole. For this to happen further continental integration has to be motivated by the founding principles of Pan-Africanism, namely a commitment to democratic governance, human rights protection and the rule of law. Anti-democratic actors who herald and proclaim the importance of establishing a United States of Africa, should not be allowed to replicate the anti-democratic policies and practices at a continental level.

If Africa is striving for genuine continental integration based on progressive principles, we should perhaps seek to forge a Federal Union of Africa (FUA) rather than a United States of Africa. This will begin to delineate and demarcate and articulate the founding principles of a union of African countries and their societies. A Federal Union of Africa should ideally be at once federal in nature; based on the democratic will of its people; governed through the consent of African people; and governed by the rule of law and the protection of human rights for all African peoples.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the Grand Debate on the Union Government is indeed welcome. The injunction that the great Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah left us with is still valid: 'Africa must Unite, or disintegrate individually'. Somehow the Grand Debate captures this spirit and could be viewed as only the latest incarnation of an attempt to institutionalise Pan-Africanism. Understanding the motivations between Pan-Africanism will help us to understand this Grand Debate. But it is also appropriate to question whether the Union Government of Africa Project will be built on a solid enough foundation to realise the aspirations of Pan-Africanism and improve the well-being of Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora. The past in this sense is influencing the present, it remains to be seen whether it will ultimately inform the future.

* Dr. Tim Murithi, Senior Researcher, Direct Conflict Prevention Programme, Institute for Security Studies (ISS-Addis Ababa Office). This paper was presented on Africa Day, 25 May 2007, at the Department of Political Studies and International Relations, Addis Ababa University and an Oxfam-AfroFlag Vision Seminar, at Axum Hotel, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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

Any serious talk of building a United States of Africa must begin with the need to guarantee full citizenship rights to all Africans, and the complimentary freedoms to move, settle, work and participate in the political processes anywhere they may be, argues Tajudeen Abdul Raheem. This is the only thing that would convince us that our leaders are serious.

I want to begin this in a personal way because the issues we are dealing with are not theoretical or rhetorical. They are about our rights and dignity as a people. They are too important for us not to recognise them as validating ‘the personal is political’ dictum made famous by the women’s movement.

I am blessed with two daughters who are growing up in the United Kingdom. They became British citizens at birth, in spite of the fact that their mother and myself were only British residents when they were born. Both girls enjoy all the rights and entitlements of British children in terms of free and compulsory education from nursery through to secondary education and up to university, if they so choose. They are also entitled to prescription free medicine until they are 16. In some sense the sky may be their limit in terms of individual ambitions. Of course, like every other British child, they will have to deal with racial, religious, class and other prejudices as they grow up, and deal with them as and when necessary, especially racial discrimination.

If they had been born in a majority of our countries the fact of being children of residents does not automatically mean that they qualify for the citizenship of the country in which they were born. The circumstances of their birth, which they did not choose, becomes a disadvantage from which they will never be able to escape for all their lives. At the height of the state sponsored Anti Ban Yarwanda (in practice Anti Tutsi) during the Obote 2 regime in Uganda, one of his xenophobic ministers reportedly declared: 'does the fact that a Sheep was born in a Kraal make it a cow?', continuing that 'a Muyarwanda born in Uganda even if he or she dies and is buried in Uganda remains a Muyarwanda'. In this type of mindset and the legal and political regime constructed on it, identity becomes a prison, from which a person will never escape. There is nothing wrong in a Muyarwanda remaining a Muyarwanda all their lives, but if that identity is now used to justify discrimination against the person, marginalise them and deny the right to full participation in the economic, social and political affairs of the country then it is no longer a question of origin but politics and power.

This is the common practice across this continent. In order to disclaim and disempower people, we first deny them their right to citizenship. It is an affirmation of the negative: 'not belonging' or 'not one of us'. Even those to whom we can not deny those rights, because we cannot prove that their parents or grandparents come from another country, we proceed to the second default position: 'settlers' , i.e. not indigenous/ancestrally to that area, even if they are from other parts of the same country. So the same Ugandans will argue that a Muchiga from Kabale born and brought up in Kabarole or Hoima are settlers, because their ancestors do not originate from Toro or Bunyoro.

Nigerians have perfected this type of discrimination by requiring on official forms declaration of STATE OF RESIDENCE and STATE OF ORIGIN. The former may, given the decades, and in some cases, centuries, of internal migration, not reveal the ethnicity of the person, but the latter certainly will. Origin requires stating your ancestry where your parents or grandparents or even great grandparents come from. It means that third generation or more of Igbo, Kalabari, Hausa, Itsekiri and other non Yoruba Nigerians in Lagos may still be regarded as 'foreigners’, just as several generations of Yorubas or Igbos in northern Nigeria will be branded 'non indigenes' with serious implications for their citizenship rights, access to state resources and political participation.

There is no worse time for these denials of rights to come to the fore than during elections. All British residents from the Commonwealth, including temporary residents like students could vote in British elections, yet Africans born and brought up in different African countries, many of them with no knowledge or experience of the other country, can neither vote nor be voted for in many countries of birth. Elections are supposed to be exclusively 'for indigenes' but even among the so called 'indigenes' the right to participate is often limited to voting for those Nigerians called 'sons of the soil' (and they are always 'sons' because patriachy disempowers women in land and other property). So somebody of Igbo ancestry may vote in Lagos, but he or she will face enormous prejudice if he or she decides to stand for public office because, despite being a melting pot of all kinds of peoples including other West Africans and descendants of freed slaves from Brazil, somehow Lagos is still believed to be a Yoruba place, and has to be represented by 'proper Yoruba' . The ridiculous thing about this narrow indigeneity is that an overwhelming majority of the Yorubas who now claim Lagos as theirs were migrants from other parts of the Yoruba inter-land! Similarly if someone of Yoruba or Igbo origin, no matter how distant, decides to become governor or legislator in Kano (another city built out of free flow of peoples from all corners of the Sahel and Nigeria, and also Arabia due to the trans-Saharan trade), he or she will be reminded that he/she does not belong.

In Kenya, where I now reside, there is by far greater excitement, speculation and confidence among Kenyans about the chances of Barrack Obama winning the Democratic nomination and proceeding to becoming the first Black President of the USA than you will find among American voters themselves. All because his late father was a Kenyan. But ask the same Kenyans about the chances of Raila Odinga, a frontrunner for the presidential candidature of the opposition ODM-Kenya, many of them will declare bluntly: no way, he can't make it, he is Luo. But so was Obama's father, therefore Barrack is, by our immutable patriarchal genealogy, a Luo. Why are we enthusiastic about a Luo man becoming the president of the USA, but give no chance to a fellow Luo who wants to be president of Kenya where majority Luo people reside? It is alright in America, but somehow not kosher here in Kenya. If Obama does not get the nomination many Africans will put it down to racism. So what is it when we discriminate against fellow Africans in countries where the bulk of the population are Africans?

Part of the excuses (not explanations, mark you) you get when discussing the Raila presidential ambitions is that he comes from a minority ethnic group and that there was no way the majority Kikuyu will allow it. In the same breath you will be assured that whoever Raila supports may win. So you get this contradictory position of Raila (and Luos) forever playing the role of kingmakers, never to be kings themselves.

A situation whereby whole groups of fellow citizens are reduced to playing second class roles cannot lead to a viable democratic society. If you ask many Nigerians about the chances of someone from the oil-producing Niger Delta becoming president of the country they will give you all kinds of evasive answers. But behind it all is the unwritten law that the presidency of the country belongs to a certain dominant group, almost in perpetuity, despite the fact that these majority groups are parasites on resources that come predominantly from minority areas.

It is only when talking about oil that many Nigerians become very nationalistic, and accuse anyone who asks for sensitivity towards the people, from whose shores the Black Gold flows, of wanting to break up Nigeria. Some Nigerians even argue that the oil producing states already get more than enough share of the oil resources from the central government and challenged them to show what they have done with it.

The wider question is: what have the governments of Nigeria done with the resources of the country? If the leaders hah used the resources for the benefit of the great majority of the citizens, the issue will not have become as politicised and polarised as it has become. Of what value is being a Nigerian to most of the peoples in the Niger Delta who have continued to harvest death and destruction from the oil resources in their areas. It is dodging the question to accuse them of separatism. No country should be a catholic marriage, in which there cannot be the possibility of divorce.

The possibility of divorce does not mean that all marriages will end in one. What will make people voluntarily show their loyalty and commitment to any political community is their level of security, confidence and identification with it as stakeholders who know that the state will be there for them to protect them and defend their interests.

It is the absence of these that has made many of our states illegitimate in the eyes and practice of many Africans. And that is why every little thing threatens these states.

What can be done? We can not run away from the problems of citizenship on this continent anymore. As we discussed during the launch of the Citizenship Rights in Africa Initiative (CRAI) in Kampala recently, millions of Africans are today victims of the arbitrary denial of citizenship and consequent statelessness.

A situation in which Africans with non-African citizenship can feel more secure and exercise full rights of political participation in their adopted countries than in many of our countries has to be reversed immediately.

To return to the case of my daughters, the prejudices and discrimination they will face In many African countries may not just be because their parents were residents, or settlers. The fact of both of their parents coming from different countries will not be a bonus, but another disadvantage. They may not have automatic right to their mother's citizenship. In fact in some countries their mum may not take them to her home country without their father's 'permission' because the father 'owns' the children!

Many African women married to other Africans from different countries suffer discrimination both ways: punished for not marrying wisely! At home they will foreignise them, and in the country of their husbands, they remain foreigners. Show me any country in Africa where a Sonia Ghandi could be leading even a minor political party, no matter who her husband may have been.

The first thing we need to do is to reconcile our states to the diversity of our peoples by giving African citizenship to all Africans wherever they may be.

I know that a number of questions will be posed, the principal one being 'who is an African?' A simple answer will be any citizen of any African country no matter how that citizenship was acquired including ancestry, indigeneity, settlement, marriage, naturalisation and any other legally recognised means. Another question will be 'where does the African diaspora come in?' They will qualify under ancestry but also voluntary naturalisation.

Some countries have adjusted to granting dual or multiple citizenship, but only for remittance purposes in most cases. Because of the growing role that remittances from Africans abroad play in holding families and communities together, many countries now recognise the right of their citizens to have other citizenship, therefore abandoning the previous ‘either’ ‘or’ exclusion. But even here, there is a catch: dual citizenship is often assumed to be one of African citizenship and a European or north American one. For someone like me who was born Nigerian and have had a Ugandan passport for more than ten years, there were always suspicions among immigration and security officials. Somehow it is alright for an African to hold Western passports but deemed 'odd' to be a dual African citizen. This further goes to prove that we continue to treat ourselves as foreigners.

The granting of African citizenship will not automatically solve all the problems of ethnicity, racism, exclusionism and intolerance. What it will set is a new and more inclusive legal and political framework for us to deal with these problems as equal members of a shared political community without anyone of us feeling superior or inferior, or at the mercy of other citizens. It will be like being members of the same family. No matter how much you may dislike your brother or sister, cousin or uncle, when it comes to family affairs you all have equal right of participation. There is an African saying that no matter how close a friend may be, the day we want to worship our ancestors he or she has to excuse himself or herself.

Whatever problems there may be, we can then resolve them among ourselves. And if we cannot, we will learn to understand and manage them without the threat of opponents being foreignised and declared stateless.

Any serious talk of building a United States of Africa that does not begin from this fundamental reconfiguration of our legal and political status within such a state will be doomed from the start. The continuing challenges to regional and continental integration for the past 50 years since independence from colonialism largely stem from the anomaly of seeking to unite our artificial states while keeping our peoples apart.

In West Africa, which has had free movement for three decades, it is still common to find citizens of other West African countries 'deported' and routinely harassed and victims of extortions by various security, intelligence and immigration officials at various border points and inside West African countries.

The problem is not with the right to move freely but the lack of political will to take further complementary steps to make regional citizenship real for the peoples of the region. These will include faster progress on regional liberalisation and harmonisation of trade, financial and commercial transactions within the region. In spite of free movement market traders, the famous West African market women, who keep their families, communities and the whole region going through their micro enterprises are still subjected to all kinds of extortion at border points in a way that criminalises intra-regional trade. Instead of saluting and encouraging these 'cross border' traders as the Pan Africanist entrepreneurs that they are, we criminalise them as 'smugglers' and euphemistically call their exchanges 'informal sector' , 'second sector' or 'parallel market'.

Yet the truth is that the majority of our peoples survive directly or indirectly in these sectors. Any Pan Africanist economist who is not allowing theory to confuse him or her can easily see that this is the real African economy. It is the state sector that needs to give way to the real thing and find ways of collecting the taxes that are currently going into private pockets at our various corruption extortion posts called borders.

The East Africa Community in its steady march towards the creation of a federation seem to be unlearning some of its own previous effort and learning well from the challenges in the ECOWAS region. It is merging freedom of movement with complimentary whittling down of barriers to trade, finance and commerce and removing all kinds of unnecessary bureaucratic bottle necks. For instance, a visa for non community citizens and residents to one of the countries is now valid for re-entry from all the three countries and very soon Rwanda and Burundi too. It also has a legislative Assembly and regional court that are potentially more powerful than what is available in the ECOWAS and also the Pan African Parliament.

If the leaders of Africa want to be taken seriously and silence the cynicism that has continued to dominate any discussion about the African Union, they need to demonstrate they have the required political will and are ready to use them to deliver a truly people-driven union.

One major area that will affect everybody immediately and transform people's perception is guaranteeing full citizenship rights to all Africans with its complimentary freedom to move, settle, work and participate in the political processes anywhere they may be. This will mean that we cease to require dehumanising visa regimes that make it almost impossible to travel legally across the continent. Pan African trade will no longer be criminalised as 'smuggling'.

It means the Pan African Parliament should be given full legislative powers and its elections can be held on a Pan African adult suffrage. Pan African Affairs will no longer be in Foreign Affairs but become part of the domestic political contestations. Africans will no longer be undesirable 'aliens' across Africa. The humiliation of beings 'others' in Europe and treated as 'others' at home will be ended. And we can all arrive at border posts with pride at the welcoming notices proclaiming 'Africans this way' and 'Others...this way'!

This will put African people at the centre of the 'Grand Debate', instead of them being cynical observers, as many are at the moment, or, worse still, completely unconcerned.

*Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director of the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/308/Rodney_41976.jpgWazir Mohammed reflects on Walter Rodney’s continuing relevance in Guyana and the Caribbean, 27 years after his assassination in Guyana on June 13, 1980.

The stalled Rodney inquiry and the racial dimension of Guyana

It is necessary that the questions are asked: What happened to Walter Rodney, why was he assassinated, and who was responsible? After years of stops, starts, and inaction on this issue, in 2005 it seems as though an international inquiry into Rodney’s assassination was finally on the cards. The Guyanese parliament on June 29, 2005 passed a unanimous resolution authorising the creation of a commission of inquiry, whose terms of reference were to be ironed out among representatives of the government, the Rodney family and others. This year, as we mark 27 years since his passing, we ask, what has happened to this decision for the inquiry?

It is now 27 years since Walter Rodney, 'the prophet of self-emancipation', was murdered in a dark corner, at a dark moment of Guyana’s history. That day in June 1980 is arguably the saddest of modern Guyana. I was 22 years old at that time, but my life was already enmeshed in the struggle, which Walter Rodney defined in terms of a battle for 'people's power – no dictator'. Dictatorial rule was the hallmark of the Burnham presidency which ruled Guyana for more than two decades. Yet, for many years until his death in 1985, Burnham was revered in the corridors of power in the region, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and all the Eastern bloc countries.

My own observations are derived from my political history with Guyana’s working people and the experience of the Walter Rodney period in Guyana. I grew up in the period of anti-colonial nationalist ferment. While still in school, I became an active member of the Progressive Youth Organization (PYO-Youth arm of the ruling party) and later a member of the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP). However, at the end of 1979, I left the PPP to join forces with Walter Rodney and the Working Peoples’ Alliance (WPA), and became one of the young full-time activists in the civil rebellion movement.

The inquiry into his assassination, in my view, cannot skirt around the root of Guyana’s problems – the deep seated racial division in Guyanese society, which Walter identified as the main barrier to forward movement and progress. In his view, Guyana could not embark on any true development unless the issue of ethnic and racial insecurity was resolved. Today, racial healing and multiracial unity remain the prerequisite for democracy and development in Guyana.

Walter did not equate liberation and development with the mere replacement of expatriate rulers with local versions. His determination as a scholar-activist propelled him to argue that transformation and true human development can only be achieved through the common struggle of all peoples to recognise the necessity for a single humanity. In this stead, at the time of his death, he was deeply involved in mobilising to unite the six racial/ethnic groups in Guyana who constitute the Guyanese working people, a period now popularly known as the 'civil rebellion of the 1970s'.

This was a moment of mass mobilisation in a struggle to replace and reshape the neo-colonial state, under the control of Forbes Burnham and his minority PNC government. He was convinced that the racial conflict between African workers (former slaves) and Indian workers (former indentured labourers) was part of a political strategy of divide and rule. Being first contrived by the colonial planter-class and later on by Britain and America to derail the progressive anti-colonial movement headed by the PPP. According to George Lamming, in the foreword to Walter’s History of the Guyanese Working People, 'it was Walter Rodney’s tireless opposition to this betrayal of a people which finally cost him his life'.

While Walter’s assassination may have deep seated implications for the struggles for freedoms everywhere. Its significance must, first and foremost, be understood in the context of the struggle to unify the working people of Guyana. His work with colleagues in the WPA and in the wider Guyanese society between his return to the country in 1974 up until the time of his death was dedicated to nurturing a new political culture, and establishing common grounds for joint action of the people.

While Rodney’s assassination on June 13, 1980 dampened and in many ways silenced the mass movement for people’s power in Guyana. It removed an important voice for a new grassroots politics in the region. This was only a temporary setback in the struggle for people’s power. As current experience shows, similar ideas are now taking root and springing up all over Latin America.

What made Rodney special?

Walter Rodney’s way of life stands as an exceptional example to the international movement. His drive to combine original historical scholarship with involvement in the day-to-day struggles of the oppressed serves as a model to academics and activists the world over. Thus he could switch from researching and writing about the devastation wrought by outside forces on African societies in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, through intervening in the pan-African movement in Tanzania, to discussing with Rastafarians in Jamaica in Grounding With My Brothers.

But Rodney’s later political work in his home country of Guyana was of equal or possibly greater significance. His rejection of racial politics in favour of struggling for unity of all the oppressed was in the finest traditions of Malcolm X. It came not from some abstract theory – Walter was not a prisoner of political orthodoxy - but from the concrete reality in Guyana, where racial politics had been used by the colonialists and imperialists to split the progressive movement and prevent the people from securing their rightful shares. Walter was neither interested in the corruption readily available from the Afro-Guyanese PNC government, nor in joining the Indo-Guyanese embrace of the PPP. Instead, he called for a new kind of politics based on the grassroots, or the 'street force', as he used to call it.

People’s power in Latin America is Walter Rodney’s legacy

Walter anticipated the movements that are now flowering all over Latin America: the fusion of the struggles for collective land rights with the struggle for women’s equality and human rights – represented by the horizontal and unemployed workers' movement in Argentina; the struggles of indigenous and black people, landless workers and trade union movements in Brazil; the indigenous Amerindian and water justice movements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru; the Zapatistas of Mexico; and, of course, Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. These movements, like Rodney’s, are a rejection of traditional party politics, which have failed the peoples of the region. Instead, people are moving to take power into their own hands.

Walter Rodney’s slogan of 'People’s Power' was at the core of his vision for a new Guyana. If he were here today, he would smile to see what is happening across Latin America. Especially in Venezuela where Hugo Chavez is championing the idea of popular power and campaigning for its implementation, not only there, but throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Time for the Caribbean to join the party

So far, the rising tide of democratic action in Latin America has found few echoes in the Caribbean (with the obvious exception of Cuba). No doubt, language and cultural differences are a barrier. But greatly reinforcing this have been the hostility and distortions in the Caribbean media, which is largely a servant of imperial US and European interests, and their multinational news agencies.

This is a disservice to what is happening in our region. The initiatives for continental cooperation that are being announced on a weekly basis are specifically aimed at Latin America and the Caribbean. But a significant number of our countries are not responding in kind.

We in Guyana, have special reasons for developing cooperation with our revolutionary neighbours. For instance, there has never been a better time to make progress on our border dispute with Venezuela. If we Guyanese were to stretch our hands across the border, it is more than likely that we would receive a warm welcome on the Venezuelan side. In this context, we could work towards an amicable understanding about the Guyanese Essequibo region, which is claimed by Venezuela. We could also explore the possibilities for joint development of the region - perhaps Venezuela could provide investment that we do not have towards the environmentally safe development of the rich resources of the area. So too, on the issue of electrification we should be working with our neighbours to link the grid and bring an end to our energy problems, the high cost of which continues to bedevil Guyanese life and industry.

On a wider scale, developing regional programmes for energy integration, industrial and agricultural cooperation, low interest finance, technology transfer and sharing of resources offer us a great chance to finally get out from under the yoke of American and European economic domination. This is our opportunity to leave behind the curse of neoliberal economics and get back on track towards our original hopes of a progressive regional federation so strongly held by C.L.R. James (the self-made working class intellectual and revolutionary from the Caribbean) and others in the anti-colonial movement.

People's power is on the march in our continent and we must get on the wagon without delay. We cannot wait for our governments to start the ball rolling. As C.L.R. always argued, change must start at the grassroots. We could imitate our Latin cousins and develop more grassroots movements like the 'Red Thread' women’s organisation in Guyana, whose leading members include Andaiye, formerly a leader of the WPA.

I conclude with the ever relevant words of Walter Rodney: 'Only the people can make a revolution. And the day has come when the real revolution will begin - the revolution in the economy, the revolution in the society, the revolution to bring us back to a level where we can hold our heads up high. And it is that day that we need the participation of people.'

The above is the first of a two part piece. Part two will be published at a later date.

* Wazir Mohamed is former Co-Leader of the Working Peoples’ Alliance of Guyana, now PhD Candidate in Sociology-Binghamton University, New York.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/authors/Doreen-Lwanga.jpgDoreen Lwanga visits the DeBeers Venetia mine complex in South Africa and comes away impressed by their social programmes for employees.

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of visiting DeBeers Venetia Mine in the Limpopo province at the invitation of a colleague Mr Khathutshelo ('K2') Mapasa, the Ore-Processing Manager at Venetia Mines. K2 and I met in 2005 when we were graduate students in Boston, where he was pursuing the Executive Development Program at Harvard Business School. Since then, we have stayed in touch and exchanged views on the behaviour of corporate entities and corporate social investment/responsibility. Since I was going to South Africa on vacation, K2 proposed that I visit Venetia Mine to get a visual tour of diamond mining, understand DeBeers’ corporate working world and its contribution to the communities where Venetia Mine is located in Musina, and Blouberg, which is also a major labour-sending area to the mine. This visit was a timely follow-up to my previous response to Del Hornbuckle’s review of the film Blood Diamonds in Pambazuka News () which I actually watched on my British Airways flight into Johannesburg.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/308/famous_tiffany_41975.jpgCo… from a social activist/scholarly research background, I must say that the visit to Venetia Mine was an eye opener. I had the opportunity of interacting with K2’s colleagues at Venetia in the Financial Management department, the Public and Corporate Affairs (PCA) and the HIV/Aids programme. I spent most of the day with two ladies, Tebogo Rametse and Nicolette Willemse of the PCA Department at Venetia Mine who took me on a whole day trip into the mine, and to Mapungubwe National Park that DeBeers supports to preserve.

We toured the open–pit mining operations at Venetia Mine, observed the process of extracting kimberlite from the ground, and the entire treatment plant complex where machines crush, re-crush, refine and liberate the diamonds from the kimberlite. Mapungubwe National Park has a wide variety of game including varieties of flora useful to the local inhabitants for medicinal purposes. Within Mapungubwe Park sits the Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape and the Mapungubwe World Heritage Site discovered in 1933, and the royal tombs of the K2 People (no relationship to K2 Mapasa) preserved by the South Africa Department of Arts and Culture.

Apparently, three different groups are claiming rights to the Mapungubwe Archaeological site, including the land on which Venetia Mine is located, allegedly because each of them lived in the area at the same time. The Mapungubwe collection consists of a variety of materials, including the famous golden rhino, gold sceptre, gold bowl, other gold ornaments, copper, iron, ivory, trade glass beads, Chinese celadon and ceramic ware is on permanent exhibit at the Mapungubwe Museum at the main campus of the University of Pretoria. North of Mapungubwe Park is the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers where the southern most tip of Botswana and Zimbabwe meet the North of South Africa at the Limpopo River. Here, many Zimbabwean migrants, afraid of being intercepted by the South African border police, swim across the Limpopo River braving the crocodiles, and traverse Mapungubwe National Park at the risk of being eaten by lions, to enter South Africa.

After our tour of the mines and the National Park, I chatted with Kefilwe Mokgoko, in-charge of the HIV/Aids programme at Venetia Mine to learn about DeBeers HIV/Aids policy, in light of my professional work on HIV/Aids and higher education in African universities. DeBeers has an impressive HIV/Aids and ARV programme, which is perhaps the only comprehensive programme established by any corporate entity for employees and their spouses/life partners. DeBeers began its engagement with HIV/Aids as a 'morally right' thing to do. The programme has since evolved into an economic investment in its employees’ welfare given the impact of consistent sickness and absence from work on mining operations. In 2005, Venetia Mine started its HIV/Aids Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) programme, and 95 per cent of the workforce has since benefitted. All employees that are tested HIV positive including their spouses and life partners are offered free ARV treatment and counselling. The challenges are to monitor adherence to treatment for HIV positive employees and their spouses/life partners, ensure that HIV negative employees remain so, and fight stigma, myths and negative beliefs surrounding HIV/Aids. Steps have been taken to train HIV/Aids peer-educators who then conduct HIV/Aids education sessions during working hours. Ultimately, the team at Venetia Mines plans to roll out the counselling and testing programme as part of the usual medical procedure all Venetia Mine employees undergo.

There is also high emphasis on safety and security of employees, particularly in the operations of the mine, not only because every accident hurts the productivity of the mine but also because it hurts the family fabric that Venetia Mine sees itself. The management team endeavours to plough back financial rewards for high performance with the team instead of banking all of it into shareholders’ pockets. K2 explained to me that in February 2006, the company declared a gainshare or bonus of 94 per cent of annual benefit value income for all employees due to outstanding performance of Venetia Mine in 2005.

Employees testified that there were able to meet those needs they had put off for a long time, and some were able to build or complete their houses. Besides participating in research and preservation of Mapungubwe National Park, Venetia Mine also supports education programs, teacher training and retention in local schools, skills development and community health and welfare. For instance, the company provides matching grants to strengthen learning at Early Childhood Learning Centres in Musina and Blouberg municipalities. There is a concerted effort of recruiting labour from surrounding communities, unlike most mining operations that create 'mining towns' and import labour from far. As one management staff explained to me, not only do most employees come from within the Musina and Blouberg towns, but also for the first time a member of the Venetia Mine Management Executive - the Ore-processing Manager Mr. Mapasa originates from the surrounding region of Venda.

At the end of my trip, I suggested to the Venetia Mine PCA team to increasingly engage the public and social activists with information on DeBeers’ social investments/response. This is particularly important for the diamond industry where we hear less about the 'unbloody' diamonds mining and mostly about the cruel mining conditions, conflict diamonds and corporate greed. To date, DeBeers has kept an internal communication strategy and shied away from making public statements about their social engagements to avoid being seen as bragging about their social investments. Fortunately, this attitude is changing within the company and PCA team is designing more strategies to bring its 'corporate social facts’ to the public. To its credit, Venetia Mine won the National Productivity Award in 2006 from South Africa’s National Productivity Institute. It is ranked the biggest diamond producer in South Africa and the third producer for DeBeers globally after Orapa and Jwaneng in Botswana. As for the intersection of diamonds with my professional work on higher education in Africa, the Oppenheimer Foundation, in partnership with Ford Foundation office in Southern Africa, has ploughed some profits from DeBeers diamonds to create an Endowment Chair for the Centre for Human Origins at the University of Witwatersrand.

* Doreen Lwanga’s writings focus on the intersection of African political, human and economic security and pan-Africanism.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/308/katemost-blackedup_41974.j…, 'the continent of terra incognito was, and continues to be, constructed as "nothing" and corpulent darkness'. Annwen Bates on the visual representations of the spectacle of aid in Africa.

You are a celebrity humanitarian and guest-editor of a well-circulated glossy. The territory is Africa. The topic is staving its demise. In the 1980s this would have been a famine. Today it is poverty and HIV/Aids. Readers will judge your cause by the cover, so select the visuals with care. What will you choose: an outline of an uninhibited continent, an abandoned toddler or a panic-eyed, skeletal mother clutching her dying baby? Do not feel limited by this empty outline of the place and its people, the abandoned children and wilting women. They are quite interchangeable, even mix'n matchable. Just this morning, I read about Bob Geldof’s recent guest-editorial of the German magazine Bild. Online, I found an image of the cover: a skeletal creature that looks more alien than human, crying out, in a silent Munch-like scream, for help. A white outline of the continent frames the child - just in case the reader is at a loss of the child’s origin. Here is the innocent victim, says the ‘chalk’ outline. This is the latest tragic embodiment of Africa’s lack. As I listened to this tale of human woe, I heard the name recur with frightening frequency.

Africa! Africa! Africa! (Thabo Mbeki). Lack has been Africa’s crime for centuries. The continent of terra incognito was, and continues to be, constructed as ‘nothing’ and corpulent darkness. What is of particular interest is the visual representations of this mythology of lack. During the colonial project, Africa's nothingness was the absence of Christianity, science, education, medicine and civility. Today, indeed for the last 30 or 40 years, nothingness is the darkness of disease, civil war, disorganisation, corruption and an inevitable decline into apocalyptic demise. (Africa has been in this state of demise for the last 400 years or thereabouts.)

Visual historian Deborah Kaspin suggests, like many who have studied representations of the continent, that the pervading standardised images of Africa are not fundamentally of Africa at all. Rather they 'arise from a Western bourgeois mythology of any and all wilderness, inhabited by creatures who are, alternatively, innocent and savage, naked and hairy, dark-skinned and ghostlike. The mythology is ubiquitous'.

Consider the child of Geldof's cover. Innocent in its form of child, yet savage as the embodiment of a ravaging disease mixed with poverty. Vulnerable in nakedness, but strangely inhuman. The child is dark-skinned, but also vanishes ghostlike into its own skeleton. Captured for posterity in a photograph, it is saved from its own terra incognito African wilderness to become the poster child of Geldof's cause. 'Postcolonial imagery presents the Third World as spectacle', writes image scholar Jan Nederveen Pieterse.

The Bild magazine cover is an example of a genealogy of the spectacle of Africa, which extends as far back as ethnographic and anthropological photography, as well as the trade and progress exhibitions of the 19th century, such as the Grand Exhibition of 1851 in London. Professor Annie Coombes writes in Reinventing Africa, the live subjects were set up in tableaux with 'authentic' huts, clothes (or lack thereof) and, at set times, performed 'authentic' activities, such as hunting. The German word Bild, means picture, and has an added meaning from theatre, scene. Uncanny that the image is also a scene. The spectacle of Africa is photograph and production still from the tableau of 'authentic' Africa and Africans readying themselves to be played out.

Granted, in this continent of 53 countries there are problems which cannot just be waved away as false naming. Even thinking of the image staves my typing. How dare I write in the sight and deafening appeal of another human being? Problems are the dilemma of our world, not just of Africa. Yet, it is curious that Western myths about their potency and power over Africa's primitive incompetence persist in 2007. Is Africa, the place and the people, concealed by the suggested false delineation?

Perhaps it is helpful to think of false in connection with the word's origin falsus, as related to 'fail'. Africa (I still want to question this blanket geographic label 'Africa' and its use for everything from place to people) is left with a deceitful or unfaithful cartography, portraiture and name. Why? Most of the colonial empires made fat on these myths collapsed, we believe, more than 30 years ago. Much post-colonial theory suggests the condition of Other-ing. Historians, psychologists, psychoanalysts, cultural theorists suggest that to assert self, one must stand in opposition to an Other.

For white, bourgeois, educated European males of late 18th through to the 20th century, this was the black, uneducated African woman who, by virtue of her primitivism, existed in some ahistorical moment, most definitely not that contemporary moment in time. 'The image formation of outsiders is determined primarily by the dynamics of one’s own circle' (Pieterse). Of colonial project representations of Africa and Africans, he observes, '[w]hat was really at stake in all these perspectives on "the savage" was European positions and programmes'.

In 2007, an age filtered by the lenses of post-colonialism, feminism, post-structuralism and the general questioning of white, bourgeois, educated European male supremacy, it is interesting that those who embody their Otherness are once again on all sorts of pages. From women selling chocolate in fair trade advertisements to Aids orphans abandoned in fields, what do these images potentially reveal about European positions and programmes?

Lack, ahistoricity, references in setting an arcadia rendered anarchic hint at a world so different to the wealthy, 21st century, urban world of those on the other side of this paper-thin reality. At the end of his study Pieterse concludes, 'The images of aid to the Third World are variations on this formula; fundamentally patronising, they are ahistorical, preoccupied with symptoms and oblivious to causes, and, not for all their global scope, parochial'. Why is post-independence Africa still newsworthy and cause-worthy to European humanitarian crusaders?

Paula Treichler offers Aids in the Africa (the Third World) as the 'latest incarnation of the "darkly unknowable"'. This is neo-colonialism with intrepid explorers. However instead of searching for the source of the Nile, they seek to bring the universals of health and material justice. For 'Europe is the light of the world, and the ark of knowledge: upon the welfare of Europe hangs the destiny of the most remote and savage (sic) people'. Let us replace 'savage' with words that have more currency in 2007; words like uneducated, oppressed or suffering. The words from the Edinburgh Review seem to belong not in the early 1800s, but could be on Bild page today. Geldof's partner in making poverty history is U2's Bono. He is to guest-edit the July edition of the magazine Vanity Fair (the US edition). It will be interesting to see the 'Africa in 2007' that he covers. It may include articles about cellphone entrepeneurs, print media franchises, tertiary research, but I suspect it is more likely to be yet another programme for the ever continuing show: Africa: the lacking continent.

References
Kaspin, Deborah, 2002, Conclusion: Signifying Power in Africa. In Landau, P.S. And Kaspin, D.D.
Images and Empire: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Mbeki, Thabo., 2002, Africa: Define Yourself. Cape Town, Tafelberg.
Nederveen Pieterse, Jan, 1992, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. London, Yale University Press.
Treichler, P.A., 1999, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicle of AIDS and HIV Infection in the Third World. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press.

Links:
http://www.africacentre.org.uk/+ve-ve.htm
http://tinyurl.com/2d9qkc

* Annwen Bates is a research student at the University of Western Cape.

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

Ochieng M. Khairallah argues that the trend in Kenya and elsewhere to criminalise the poor will lead to the systematic eradication of the poor, if the causes of poverty are not addressed.

Debates have been taking place about the probable causes of world problems. From diseases, violence, wars and corruption, the current world is mired in problems of varying dimensions and intensity. Ardent analyses of recent debates show that they are biased against poverty as the single most important cause of the world's problems. The criminalisation of poverty is increasingly becoming apparent, both in discourse and practice. We see world leaders on a daily basis give speeches, laced with all manner of condemnations against poverty, but with little or no action at all in terms of tangible actions for grappling with the issue.

Kenya is no exception to the debate. Recent experience confirms similar political focus on poverty, especially as a campaign issue in the wake of the forth-coming general elections. It is baffling to see leaders attribute the current spate of insecurity and associated ills in the country with poverty and the attendant widening of the divide line between the haves and the have-nots. While this might be true to an extent, it is not in my humble view the real problem behind current challenges facing the country. More worrying is the gullibility with which the general public has fallen prey to such hollow and simplistic arguments. In essence, it is a veiled way of saying that the poor are the problem. Instructively, attributing global problems to poverty without grappling with the causes of the same, is in my view, tantamount to condemning the poor. We might in the fullness of time witness systematic eradication of the poor in the name of poverty eradication.

The fact that poverty is a problem cannot be denied. But to condemn it without interrogating related problems and issues is, by all measures, escapist and self-defeatist. A comparative appraisal of poverty and unbridled capitalism the world over attest to the foregoing assertion. Hindsight reveals that the insatiable quest and rush for riches and raw money or the primitive pursuit of and accumulation of riches ordinarily associated with unbridled capitalism lies at the root of the myriad problems facing the world today. It must not be lost on us that capitalism per se is not so bad, if capital is geared to the development of the human person, i.e. to the creation and enhancement of human capital.

When capital is solely based on primitive accumulation, especially within an exclusive club at the exclusion of the majority, then it begins to attract prejudices and nuances of varying perspectives. In particular, it begets impunity. The feeling that everything is possible with money begins to assume centrality in public discourse. Money becomes an end in itself. This is particularly so in the so-called Third World countries, where education is anchored in money, and selfish and personal pursuit of happiness, to the detriment or total disregard of the collective good of society. This gives rise to intra-class competition, which entails cutting deals between business and politics. Different classes begin to emerge at various levels with attendant considerations as to what a person owns and comes from, and which party they support.

As a result, both intra-class and inter-class tensions begin to emerge depending on the prevailing prejudices, belief and nuances; usually with tragic consequences. This is where the curse of primitive capital lies. Instead of capital for human development, it becomes capital for human destruction. In the process, fear creeps in and usually it is fear of the unknown. People begin to seek refuge in primitive cocoons and related factors and prejudices emerge, usually tribal, ethnic, class, religion, culture and privileges. Conspiracies begin to emerge ranging from sabotage, elimination of the un-wanted, corruption, discrimination and marginalizsation. The list is endless. Consequently capital begins to oil the wheels of injustice.

Because people must protect themselves, private armies begin to emerge. Capital must therefore be used to procure weapons and related assortment; eventually people must be paid to do dirty work even if it means eliminating others. At times others must either be marginalised or frustrated because of the fear of their abilities or the so-called fear of the unknown. As a result poverty is created where it should not have been, and ironically, it is poverty created by capital. How many understand how capital is creating poverty in Africa? If you doubt this, then justify the concept of bribery especially the buying of votes during elections. Do we not we see democracy become dictatorship by capital? Whoever pays gets the vote, even if nothing other than making money through corruption and related vices is understood.

With time, this trend traverses all sectors with worrying trappings as the rush and stampedes for raw capital dictate the direction of progress. Scientists begin to venture into sophistications of tragic consequences - say advanced weaponry or warfare - do they stop to think for whom the weapons are made and the wars fought? Doctors begin not to research the means of advancing humanity, but rather how to create diseases so as to make money from such diseases. How much money are we making from sale of condoms and retro-virals? Moreover why do we fail to give our people clean water but are quick to build dispensaries to sell drugs to those suffering and dying from water-borne diseases. What kind of research are our public health officers engaged in? Do we need to re-educate the educated sons and daughter of Africa?

Quest for capital or raw money becomes the rule rather than the exception. Lawyers begin to conspire with judges in creating bids for justice as well as to advise clients on how to evade the law. Education begins to be determined by ones ability to pay, as opposed to merit, even if it means paying others to sit examinations for you. As a result we produce professors and graduates who are no more than salesmen of western products, including raw capital. Do you see the danger of such kind of education? Or must we wait to see professionals who are not knowledgeable in their fields? Imagine having doctors who cannot decipher malaria from headache, or stomach ache from heart-burn! Engineers and quantity surveyors who are concerned about how much money they can make from a given contract as opposed to quality of structures being erected. The list is endless. This is what others will soon refer to as the educated fools of Africa.

An effective education must aim at production, not consumerism or brokerage. Education must be anchored on the common good of all, lest the circle continues and eventually we produce a cabbage or an animal farm as a society. These are the reasons why I hold that the woes be-devilling the world currently, and Kenya in particular, are deeply rooted in poor or improper education and primitive quest, pursuit and accumulation of capital, and not poverty. No one would be poor if capital were geared to human development. This is what is referred to as the socialisation of capital. Social imperatives come before capital and not the other way round. Provide clean and drinkable water to all, as opposed to placing it at the behest of private commerce.

The trend continues. First it was privatisation of land, apparently not for maximisation of production but increasingly as collateral for destructive capital. Remember vast land is hoarded land and is not under productive utilisation. Now it is water. What will be next? Imagine a situation where air is poisoned by vagaries of capital, and therefore human beings are forced to buy so-called treated air. I suppose a special commercial devise would have been invented to clean poisoned air and package the same for sale and oxygen for individual consumption and survival. Must we condemn future generations in this manner? Need I say more about un-bridled capitalism?

* Ochieng M. Khairallah is a lawyer and human rights activist.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/307/41847_mob.jpgEverlyne Nairesiae of GROOTS Kenya reviews the recent three-day workshop of pan-African mobile phone activists, held in Nairobi. She explains how GROOTS has applied mobile phone technology in their work on property rights for rural Kenyan women.

Mobile activists across Africa converged in Nairobi Kenya for a three-day workshop facilitated by Fahamu in conjunction with the (known as 'Tactical Tech'). The aim of the workshops was to critically examine existing opportunities to enhance the wide use of mobile phone as media of advocacy, networking and collaboration among activists in Africa.

The workshop was a build up to the 'techie' preparation for a two-day workshop geared towards developing a toolkit especially tailored to suit the African context. The launch of the toolkit, which is anticipated to be ready by October 2007, aims to strengthen and facilitate the use of mobile phones as a tool for advocacy in responding to social development needs in Africa. The workshop culminated in the formation of a steering committee mandated by members to champion the development of the Pan-African Mobile Network (PAMONET).

My participation in the workshop was exiting, since it was characterised by the rich experiences of presenters from Africa and around the word on the application of mobile phones in advocacy work. The use of mobile phone technology stands out as a unique and emerging convenient mode of communication for community development across Africa. African countries including Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Kenya among others have recently started using this technology to resolve community needs, and advocate for human rights, among other cross-cutting issues. This is done mainly through use of short messages (SMS), and/or making direct calls via cell phone. During the workshop, activists reported concrete achievements registered with the use of mobile phone across countries in Africa and that their contribution in addressing social and development issues cannot be under estimated.

GROOTS Kenya regional electronic exchange mentorship strategy to address women and orphans property inheritance rights

GROOTS - is a grassroots organisation operating together in sisterhood is a movement of community based organisations and groups of women in Kenya. GROOTS Kenya is a member of GROOTS International and Huairou Commission. Their work is centred around the lives and needs of grassroots women. It is therefore largely non-thematic as it responds to community needs and priorities. The organisation accomplishes its goals through four main programmes: Community Responses to HIV/Aids, Women and Property Program, Women's Leadership and Governance, and Community Resources and Livelihoods.

GROOTS Kenya has mainly used the mobile phone in advocating and addressing women and orphans rights to own and inherit property in four regions in Kenya which include: Kakamega in western province, Kendubay in Nyanza province, and Limuru and Gatundu in Central province of Kenya. In these communities, GROOTS Kenya facilitated the formation of community watchdog groups, which are led by women to safeguard against the grabbing of property from women and orphans, many of who are infected and affected with HIV/Aids.

The watchdog groups work with relevant NGOs, government institutions, opinion/traditional leaders, FBOs as well as the provincial administrators through the office of the chief and assistant chiefs. It is important to mention that chiefs and assistant chiefs are the lowest government administration unit at the community level and are very crucial in determining and safeguarding the rights of marginalized people in any community in Kenya. Unfortunately most of them have limited knowledge, information and capacity to handle and or support property disinheritance cases of women or orphans brought to their attention.

In the four regions only one assistant chief Mr Peter Mutheru; who is sub-chief in Kiamoria sub-location in Gatundu, had ample knowledge and skills. This necessitated a lot of interaction among the chiefs from the four regions to benefit from his significant understanding of the procedures of courts of law in order to support cases of women and orphans right to property inheritance which were being presented to them by the watchdog groups.

The use of mobile phone became a special tool in facilitating electronic mentoring among the chiefs across the region mainly through communicating via messages and making direct call to each other while seeking guidance and or information on succession law and procedures. In addition, this was complemented by the use of community radio listening strategies which created awareness on the right to property of women and orphans. On the other hand, grassroots women and members of watchdog groups also use mobile phone to report cases of property grabbing to the chiefs, and thereby enhance the communication and follow up of cases as well as provide support to victims of the vice.

Increase in knowledge among the chiefs led to the transformation of both their attitude towards women and orphans property rights and influenced their mode of working which in turn facilitated efficiency at administrative and community levels. The use of regional electronic exchange mentoring strategy by GROOTS Kenya, using the mobile phones have led to the following achievements:

* enhanced knowledge and skills in addressing women and orphans property rights among the chiefs across the four regions through mentoring and networking
* increase in resolved cases of women and orphans who had lost property to relatives
* strengthened the relationship between the provincial administrators and grassroots women in the community through partnership
* enhanced follow up and support of pending cases in the office of the chief and law courts
* facilitated a significant reduction in costs for instance on travelling, accommodation and other logistics since the regions were distance away from each other.

Although the above achievements were realised, the following challenges including high poverty levels which hinders communities and chiefs to purchase airtime; illiteracy mainly among grassroots women hence unable to read messages; a limited number of cell phones in the communities thus rely on those who have cell phones to access information; and a lack of formality in communication which makes it difficult to hold any party accountable.

Most groups tried to have parallel meetings in their own different regions and converse in a form of tele-conferencing through mobiles. Unfortunately the telephone sets used by many communities have no features such as speaker phones which would have enabled more than one person to listen to a call and then pass the information on to the rest of the community.

GROOTS Kenya’s experience coupled up with experiences from other countries in Africa shared during the mobile activism workshop in Nairobi Kenya highlighted a number of factors. It is evident that the use of cell phones facilitate achievement of tremendous results which are cost effective and efficient.

Thanks to Fahamu and Tactical Tech for providing us an opportunity to share and learn from other partners experiences on the use of cell phones in addressing social and development needs. For more information please contact GROOTS Kenya on the address given below.

* Everlyne Nairesiae is Program Coordinator of GROOTS Kenya P.O.Box, 10320-GPO, Nairobi, Kenya. E.mail:[email protected]

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

The right to information underpins and is the cornerstone of all other human rights. Priscilla Nyokabi assesses the newly proposed Freedom of Information Act of Kenya.

The Kenyan section of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the Freedom of Information Network celebrates the dawn of an era in Kenya marked by the introduction of the Freedom of Information Bill, 2007 in parliament yesterday, 17 May 2007, by Hon. Gideon Moi on behalf of Hon. Prof. Anyang’ Nyong’o.

The painstaking efforts of the Freedom of Information Network of drafting and publicising the Freedom of Information Bill have finally come to fruition through the tabling of the bill. This has been an ongoing campaign since the year 2000 spearheaded by ICJ-Kenya in consultation with various stakeholders, members of the Freedom of Information Network, and supported by many Kenyans countrywide. The 9th parliament has brought us to the peak of the Right to Know Campaign by embarking on the legislative process.

We are happy to note that even the government is keenly committed to this cause, as evidenced by the publication of the recent Draft Kenya Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill 2007. Indeed all stakeholders are reading from the same script, the government, the media, the civil society, MPs and all Kenyans of good will. We therefore envisage a smooth passage of the bill long before elections.

The published bill has very progressive provisions. It promises to usher in an era of openness, transparency and accountability in Kenya. Enactment of the FOI Act will confirm Kenya as a leading democracy in Africa, and among the top five countries to have an FOI Law. Only South Africa, Angola and Uganda have access to information regimes.

We are now at the finishing line towards having an FOI Act in Kenya. The clock is ticking and we urge all members of the 9th parliament both in opposition and in government to rise to the occasion and put the interests of this great nation forward by enacting the bill in its entirety.

Why an FOI law?

There are many reasons for having freedom of information legislation: to make government more accountable, increase public participation, promote the involvement of all in public life, including those currently marginalised, like women; to make private companies more accountable, monitor and expose corruption, lead to better decision making, protect privacy, expose human rights violations, and promote workers' rights; and to make the country more secure. Access to information is instrumental to parliament's oversight role.

Access to information makes the government more sensitive and responsive to the needs and demands of the ordinary people. A freedom of information law increases public participation, because the public can regularly engage with government officials and parliamentary representatives.

Freedom of information entails the rights of citizens of a country to access official information held or in the custody of their government. It invokes an obligation on the government to facilitate easy access to information under its docket, and, significantly, to publish important information pro-actively and regularly for the general public.

Good governance, an essential component of any thriving democratic state, is premised on a system of openness, trust and government accountability. This can only be achieved if the public is involved in the process of governance. If the general public knows the functions, policies and decisions made, they can question the government on the basis of the information obtained, and, most importantly, the reasons for the government’s actions. It is thus necessary that the government develops a clear policy on the freedom of information in a bid to ensuring that subsequent legislation – freedom of information laws - are implemented effectively and based on accepted international principles and best practices.

The right to information underpins all other human rights; it is the cornerstone of all other rights. The right is encapsulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) under Article 19. It is similarly enshrined in the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Kenya is a party.

Though the Kenyan constitution does not expressly provide for the freedom of information, section 79 of the constitution makes provision for the freedom of expression which includes among other things: ‘freedom to receive ideas and information without interference, freedom to communicate ideas and information without interference (whether the communication be to the public generally or to any person or class of person)’.

The right to information is enshrined in the section 79 of the constitution, which provides for freedom of expression. The right is however derogated from through various pieces of legislation, chief among them is the Official Secrets Act. This position was sought to be corrected in the draft constitution, article 51 of which expressly provides for the right of access to information, and requires an enabling law be enacted within six months of the coming into force of the new constitution.

As can be reasonably inferred from the constitution, the right to receive ideas and information without interference affords the citizens of Kenya a right to access information, including government information. Similarly Kenya has ratified and adopted the UDHR and the ICCPR; and the government is under an obligation to promote and preserve the right to information. One end of achieving such means is by putting in place the necessary policies to promote the right and the enactment of a freedom of information law to guarantee the said right to the citizenry.

The implementation and operationalisation of both a policy and freedom of information law will be the essential building blocks towards creating an open, free and accountable culture in Kenya and the foundation of a successful democratic state.

International principles and best practices

For the proposed freedom of information policy 2007 to be effective in implementing a FOI regime, they must be premised on international principles and best practices, which have been developed over the years by countries that have adopted FOI laws, borne out of their experiences in respect to operationalising the enjoyment of the right to know. As we are getting into FOI jurisprudence after many other countries, let us learn from them and adopt best practices.

In borrowing international practice for the FOI regime, let us borrow from the most progressive jurisdictions in application of the FOI Law. Australia and United Kingdom are known to be conservative regimes. South Africa and India provide more progressive models. Let us at look at drawing lessons from closer home in South Africa.

There are the minimum standards that any proposed FOI law should adopt in order for a state to fulfil its obligations of promoting and preserving the right to information. These principles are set out below.

Maximum disclosure

This principle provides for a strong presumption in favour of disclosure of information. Simply put, it advocates for the disclosure of all government or public information. It covers the access of information in all public bodies and private bodies that carry out public functions or where their activities affect the public rights or civil liberties.

Under this principle disclosure and access to information is the norm; the exception being non-disclosure. In addition this principle imposes an obligation on the state to pro-actively and regularly publish information in its possession without any prompting from the public. It establishes minimum standards under which public records are to stored and maintained by public bodies. It provides for offences for the obstruction of access of information or the wilful destruction of records.

Minimum exemptions

Closely linked to the principle of maximum disclosure, this principle advocates for limited exceptions of information that should not be disclosed. It provides that exceptions should be precise and narrowly drafted to protect a legitimate interest from harm, often referred to as the ‘harm’ and ‘public’ test. Exceptions should be based on the content rather than on a particular class such as ‘national security’. In short, no blanket exemptions are allowed. A refusal to disclose information must be justified by a public body and should meet a strict three-part test, including:

* information must relate to a legitimate interest/aim listed in the law
* disclosure must threaten to cause substantial harm to that aim
* the harm to that interest must be greater than the public interest in having the information disclosed.

It should be noted that even though the information in question meets the above mentioned three-part test, it might still be disclosed if it is shown that the public interest in disclosing that information is greater than the harm that may befall the protected interest. This is what is referred to as the public override test.

Simple, easy and inexpensive access

Any freedom of information law should provide for a mechanism for simple and cheap access to information. The process of deciding upon requests for information should be defined at three main stages: within the relevant public body; appeals to an independent administrative body; and an appeal method to the courts. Where applicable, the provision should ensure full access to certain disadvantaged groups such as the disabled. The cost of obtaining information should not be dear as to prevent the realisation of the objectives of the law.

Promotion of open government

This principle mainly advocates the promotion of the right to information by the government, and creating a culture of openness within government circles. This entails the provision of public education, dissemination of information relating to FOI to the general public, informing the public about the scope of the information that is covered by the law, information available and the manner in which the public may exercise their rights.

In addition, this principle places an obligation on the government to provide training to their officers on the freedom of information, the scope of the right, procedures for allowing access of information to the public, maintenance and preservation of public documents, information that should be pro-actively disclosed and the scope of whistleblower protection.

Disclosure takes precedence

This international principle simply provides that existing laws, which are in contrast with the principle of maximum disclosure, should be amended or repealed. That other laws relating to the maintenance, publication or dissemination of public information should be construed in a manner consistent with the FOI law. Where inapplicable, such information should be dealt with subject to the principles espoused by the freedom of information legislation.

Whistleblower protection

An effective freedom of information law should make provision for the protection of whistleblowers. Whistle blowers as the name suggest refers to government employees or third parties privy to government functions who disclose information of wrong doing by government officials, information which is the subject of exemption. This people perform the function of early warning and complement investigators roles. Such people should be properly protected from reprisals from government officials or penalisation, as a result of their actions, so long as they act reasonably and in good faith.

Conclusion

The FOI Bill 2007, when enacted into law, promises to usher Kenya into an era of openness, transparency and accountability. Access to information is the key pillar of democracy. It will facilitate public participation in public affairs, as noted by President Mwai Kibaki in 2005:

‘…more importantly, the free flow of news and information is one of the hall marks of a functioning democracy. An informed society is able to better participate in design and execution of public policies. It is also more resourceful and creative in addressing social challenges. Such a society is therefore, better placed to increase productivity and prosperity...my Government is, together with media and other stakeholders, drafting a Freedom of Information Act, to bring the legal framework in line with current realities. These and other initiatives are meant to enhance the ability of the people of Kenya to exchange ideas, question the Government, contribute to national development and be part of a truly democratic state.’

The above is a reflection of the promises we are asking all our leaders to keep in bringing Kenya in line with the current realities. Kenya should join the other 70 countries in the world that have enacted freedom of information laws.

* Priscilla Nyokabi is programme officer for the Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists

* This is an edited version of a longer paper which is available at the Pambazuka News website (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/41846)

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

Black economic empowerment (BEE) continues to cultivate human and natural exploitation for the benefits of few at the expenses of far too many. It turns de-colonisation into a private business for self-enrichment. Henning Melber on the ensuing kleptocracy in Namibia and the possibility of another Zimbabwean style tragedy.

A Namibian parliamentary committee hearing was told in April 2007 by the executive secretary of the state-owned Namibia Development Corporation (NDC) in liquidation (during apartheid days the 'Bantu Investment Corporation'), that the tens of millions of Namibian dollars dished out earlier as credits to black empowerment initiatives will in most cases not be repaid – even though many of the lenders are among the nouveau riche.

Limits to liberation
Ever since independence in 1990, Namibia’s government has blamed the country’s exploitation under settler colonialism for the unabated social disparities. Indeed, the transfer of political power left, as part of a negotiated settlement, the existing socio-economic structures largely untouched. The inequalities were endorsed as status quo in terms of constitutionally protected ownership and property rights. Limited social changes had to be induced inside this legally binding framework guided by a policy of 'national reconciliation' and 'affirmative action'. As a result, the privileged segment of society became racially less exclusive.

But according to the empirical evidence presented by the annual Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Namibia remains among the most unequal societies in the world – despite an average per capita income ranking it as lower middle-income country. A World Bank commissioned report alerted in 2005 that these inequalities 'represent a threat to national cohesion, peace, and political stability'. A UN country assessment warned of an unfolding humanitarian crisis due to the combination of HIV/Aids, food insecurity and the ineffective delivery of critical social services to the most vulnerable groups.

Despite such concerns, the government has refused to introduce a Basic Income Grant (BIG) - demanded for years by a broad church-based alliance - as not feasible in terms of its fiscal constraints. But more than a billion Namibian dollars was spent on a luxurious new high security state house complex. Nonetheless in April 2007 it was justified as a 'pro-poor' measure during the budgetary debate in parliament. A SWAPO MP demanded in all seriousness that posh cars should be exempted from the speed limit on Namibia’s roads.

Power, privilege and poverty
Black economic empowerment (BEE) has so far served the interests of a new political-bureaucratic elite from the ranks of the erstwhile liberation movement. Those who liberated mainly themselves profitably cashed their access to the country’s resources through their political and public service offices.

Corruption and misappropriation of funds nourished a parasitic minority. This had been spectacularly confirmed by several high calibre cases of fraud and self-enrichment schemes looting pension funds and other public finances. Shady business practices illustrated in a textbook way the infamous 'fat-cat syndrome' prevailing. Prime Minister Nahas Angula called the abuse of several hundred million Namibian dollars from the state administered pension funds on get-rich-quick schemes masquerading as BEE 'just asset-stripping'.

In a revelation of self-enrichment schemes, described by the locally published Insight magazine in March 2006 as 'the mother of all empowerment deals'. Since mid-2006 another 'horde of black economic empowerment groups' have come under increased scrutiny. The deal set up between the South African oil giant Sasol and a conglomerate of locally created pseudo-firms without any proper offices, named a former trade union leader and several high-ranking government officials operating within an intricate web of pseudo-enterprises, as its main Namibian beneficiaries. As the former trade unionist declared in defence of the deal, the shareholders were 'just black entrepreneurs who needed the money and took advantage of a given situation'.

A popular school of thought within critical poverty research holds the view that it is the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of narrow privileged groups that creates and perpetuates inequalities. According to such an understanding, the analysis of power is fundamental to any examination of poverty. Privatisation of public resources results in political-administrative power as personalised power; in politics as a kind of business enterprise; and in vertical clientele relationships of a neo-patrimonial nature. The result is an increasingly authoritarian and incompetent state that rarely responds to public pressure.

The (class) struggle continues
Since independence, Namibia has produced a crypto-capitalist, petty-minded self-enriching new black elite, which spends its energy exploiting the public purse. There is an absence of a meaningful, profit-generating industrial sector, where capital would be additionally accumulated through surplus production based on the exploitation of value adding labour - which implies at least employment for a majority of people. The creation of individual wealth relies on the privatisation of natural resources (mainly in the sectors of fishing, mining, agriculture and tourism) or benefits linked to privileges in the public sector and state owned enterprises. Public procurement and other outsourcing activities by those occupying the commanding heights of the state agencies turn 'affirmative action' and BEE into self-rewarding schemes among loyal members of the erstwhile liberation movement.

Such co-optation into the ruling segments within an already existing socio-economic system is far from social transformation. BEE continues to cultivate human and natural exploitation for the benefits of few at the expenses of far too many. It turns de-colonisation largely into a private business for self-enrichment. A result of such kleptocracy is the gradual loss of legitimacy. Zimbabwe-type decay is the writing at the wall. De-colonisation of such kind is not about redistribution of (relative) wealth for the ordinary people. It is self-enrichment for a new elite and business as usual.

* Dr Henning Melber is executive director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden where he was research director at The Nordic Africa Institute, 2000-2006. A son of German immigrants, he joined SWAPO in 1974. Hw was director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek, Namibia between 1992 and 2000.

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

Abdirahman Aw Ali presents the case for African Union acceptance of Somailand into the union.

It was January 28, 2007 as I boarded my plane from New York to London on my way to South Africa. I was reading the Financial Times when I noticed in an article that Kosovo was to declare statehood, and how the European Union (EU) is setting the stage for Kosovo to be an internationally recognised state. I could not help myself asking why the African Union (AU) is not playing the same role with my birth place, Somaliland?

On May 18, 2007, Somaliland Republic (former British Somaliland) celebrates 16 years of self-rule. It has had a thriving democracy since it has decided to re-instate its sovereign independence from Somalia after the fall of Siad Barre regime in 1991.

As a Somalilander myself who ran away from Siad Barre's atrocities as a young man in the late 1980s and settled in the United States, I have mixed feelings as I see my people celebrating the 16th anniversary of Somaliland's birth.

On the one hand, I am extremely proud of the people of Somaliland, and its leaders for what they have been able to achieve over the past 16 years. On the other hand, I am less excited, and amazed by lack of the AU in leading the promotion of Somaliland's cause by sending a strong signal to other African countries that they do care and that they reward peace, stability, and democracy (acknowledging people's choice).

It is very clear why the European Union is serious about the status of Kosovo. The EU is planning to avoid the risk of war and violence that would again destabilise the Balkans region. The million dollar question is why the AU is not farsighted enough to avoid a potential and imminent war between Somalia's southern leaders, and Somaliland that will undermine the stability of the whole region?

Somali's southern leaders are not known to respect the rule of law and the wishes of its citizens. This is the main reason that Somaliland people are fully determined to fight for sovereignity status following the roots of independence from Great Britain on June 26, 1960.

31 UN member states recognised Somaliland as an independent state before uniting with the Italian Somaliland on July 1, 1960 to form what was known as Somali Republic.

Somaliland is only seeking recognition within the borders received at that moment. Somaliland, not officially recognised by any state, has been functioning as constitutional democracy with a President directly elected by the people, added by a parliament and local government also directly elected by the people.

Somaliland did not even have a university for 31 years of union with the southern Somalia. Today they have four universities despite lack of recognition. They have four private owned telephone and mobile operators where they did not have any in the past 31 years of union with the south. And the list goes on.

Some people do not truly understand why the people of Somaliland decided to go alone, and break their partnership with the south. Some people even speculate that the issue of Somaliland is tied with the stability of the southern Somalia, and the union will be back when the rest of the south becomes stable. As a matter of fact, there are many reasons why Somaliland re-took its independence, and broke its partnership. But in my personal view, I would only focus on two important reasons.

Firstly, British Somaliland had voluntarily entered a union with Italian Somaliland in pursuit of irredentist dream of a 'Greater Somalia' (including parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti).

It was clear to everybody in both regions that it was never intended to stop with the union of the two regions, but to pursue the other three remaining regions.

Therefore, that dream effectively died when Djibouti got its independence in 1977, and decided to go alone without joining the existing union. If Djibouti people had that freedom to make that choice, it is only fair that the people of Somaliland can make similar choices to decide on their fate.

The main argument here is that the Somali union in 1960 did not achieve the reason it was formed which was a greater Somalia. Somaliland's voluntary union at that time was based on that formation. If that dream did not materialise, Somaliland could go alone like the other regions did where Somalis live including Djibouti, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

Secondly, another very crucial point that made the people of Somaliland go their separate ways from the South is the suffering and injustices that the people of Somaliland endured for 31 years of marriage. They have suffered at the hands of Southern rule governments particularly during Siad Barre's 21-year rule.

The whole world knows that those governments even bombarded Somaliland cities. Therefore, it is a trust issue. If you had a business partnership with another person and you have suffered and lost everything, and you would have to re-start your business. Would you again trust to create another partnership with that person? It is fair to say that the people of Somaliland have a trust issue with their brothers in the South, and will not join them again within a union despite a lack of recognition by the international community.

It is important to note that the AU sent a fact finding mission to Somaliland in 2005 in order to respond to the concern that Somaliland recognition would create a fragmentation of Somalia, or other AU member states.

The African Union fact finding mission in 2005 concluded 'the case should not be linked to the notion of "opening a Pandora box"', and the report recommended that the AU 'should find a special method of dealing with this outstanding case' as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, AU actions stopped there. Why cannot we Africans decide for ourselves, with Europeans doing so and the EU leading the way? I hope I can one day be proud of our African leaders through the AU leadership when I see that they are taking a far sighted approach like the EU doing on Kosovo.

The more the AU delays dealing with the Somaliland case, the more it makes the situation in East Africa difficult, and increases the risk of war and questions the credibility of the AU.

The Somaliland case is a time bomb for the African Union and the international community cannot really afford to ignore the issue. On the other hand, Somaliland's multi-party democracy system is a rarity in Africa, and the Muslim world.

The African Union needs to seriously consider Somaliland's formal application of AU membership and reward people's choice of democracy. Somaliland is a state where the power truly belongs to the people.

* Abdirahman Aw Ali is is from Somaliland and based in the USA.

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

The threat of climate change is real and potentially horrific. But, as is argued here, the whirring engine of the climate change research buzz seems to pretend that everyday threats to biodiversity in Africa have disappeared into oblivion.

George Berkley, the 18th century Irish philosopher and theologian, is most well known for the conundrum, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?'

Today, this insight on the ‘truth and the existence of things’ is ever relevant to our research institutions and what it is they are doing for nature conservation. If no one perceives or documents the loss of biodiversity, then the tree will not make a sound when it falls. Because the tree did not exist in the first place.

Now the caveat of Berkley’s philosophical meandering is this: he did not claim the existence or non-existence of entities. He claimed that man’s suspicion that things exist actually enlivens the existence, and therefore makes it ‘real’. So, conservationists not only suspect existence of many as yet unnamed gems of biodiversity, but they are quite certain of their bountiful existence.

This matters a lot, because almost 300 years after Linnaeaus gave us the tools to classify and name species, scientists in the 21st century continue to make startling discoveries. Think of the Bornean leopard subspecies now dominating the headlines. In southern Africa, recent discoveries include the Upemba lechwe antelope from the Katanga area in Zambia; the scarabid insect order that was discovered on Namibia’s Brandberg, and the monotypic tree genus, Icuria, from coastal Mozambique.

And yet, the brows of our botanical research institutions are deeply furrowed. It seems they are grappling with the practical ramifications of understanding the effects of climate change on unknown species in unknown landscapes. Is it possible to study climate change effects on things you don’t know even exist and for which you have no information? James Berkley would have thought so.

The threat of climate change is real and potentially horrific. Drier and warmer weather patterns forecast increased hunger of starving bellies and thirst in barren landscapes. Nature will suffer too. And, global warming will also throw its shadow on undocumented virgin territories.

The use of surrogates is a kind of information replacement therapy useful to climate change studies. Frogs, spiders or birds can be used as methodological substitutes. Even the properties of ecosystems can be helpful in filling the void. What it actually amounts to is that nature can be helped without actually knowing for sure that it actually exists. This amazing metaphysical feat that brings together rather elegant ideas on truth and science into the real world appeases most people; except, I would imagine, the pragmatic, gung-ho field practitioner. The one-and-only bush James Bond with the khaki micro-shorts and the steely resolve to protect nature at all costs.

Thus, on how ‘science noire’ is perceived: Our James Bond practitioners work at the coal face. They require precise, unfaltering answers on how to deal with prevailing, every-day threats like poaching, the bushmeat crisis, depleting firewood trees, and the trafficking of tropical timber. Try fleecing them with hypothetical academic grey matter, and they may ridicule the desktop climate change nerds to ‘get real and get with the real programme’.

The whirring engine of the climate change research buzz seems to pretend that Africa’s everyday threats have disappeared into oblivion. But, those involved in the scourge of biopiracy and land rights conflicts, and the violations of oil multinationals thieves are all bastards who are omnipresent in the pillaging of Africa’s natural resources.

Climate change hides all this exploitation and injustice under the carpet. The very threat of the climate change agenda is that its appeal is so earnest that it makes us forgetful of the biodiversity skullduggery. It turns away political focus and public interest. It blinds budget frameworks and it softens the policing of biodiversity regulations. And this is the heart of the problem.

Quite frankly, I am bored hearing that climate change is a new vehicle for getting recalcitrant corporates around the environmental table. Almost as if to say, that, what the biodiversity agenda could not achieve, climate change can.

Climate change can leverage funding from businesses that the biodiversity movement could not. Yes, it is true and that's great. But the one magnificent achievement that makes the biodiversity movement stand head-and-shoulders above the climate change buzz is the fact that it instilled a love and respect for nature. It wooed us with the miracles of nature: rivers and mountains, gorillas in mist forests, polar bears in snowscapes, indigenous tribal groups and cultural rights. It inspired appreciation for exotic travel (think ecotourism) and ardent support of charities (e.g. 'save-the-girl-child-in-Africa'). And, it gave us big, flirtatious hearts, generosity and a sense of diversity in a complex world.

Climate change has instilled a fear of nature - a dark uncertainty and a shared global fate. The passion for nature has been replaced with diplomacy: now it is all clinical thinking, economic elbowing and political stratagems. It even raises suspicion and rivalry at work – who is the culprit who left the lights on? May the person who flew to Paris instead of taking the Eurostar rot in hell. The love affair with nature, it seems, is over.

Everything we had planned, for a sustainable future in Africa in the 1990s, post-Rio epoch, such as the protection of ecologically sensitive habitats, animal migration corridors, CBNRM models – now needs to be fundamentally rejigged. Strategies that have taken so long to devise in Africa need to be modified. Why? Because climate change says so: new objectives should examine how existing strategies must be altered in relation to climate change. This is all good and well.

But, African conservation scientists need to keep banging the drum that the conservation problems of yesterday, are still the problems of today. Instead of nodding in agreement and cosseting the new climate change dogma, scientists need to emulate the classic character of the bush James Bond. We need to be bold. Speak out, and find ways to utilise the climate change ethos to keep Africa’s everyday biodiversity issues mainstream. Needless to say, I have great respect for committed practitioners who keep a beady, slightly sceptical eye on the horizon. Or perhaps its just the fantasy of the khaki shorts that is so alluring.

No matter how one looks at it, it will become increasingly difficult to locate a secure research space for many conservation scientists, taxonomists in particular. Intrepid adventurers who obtain samples of species potentially new to science will get little joy under the new research banner. Herbaria have built their tradition on naming species. Every African country has at least two state-run herbaria. If African conservation scientists do not ‘get with the real programme’ in order to boom, then they are certainly going to bust out and turn into white elephants.

George Berkley’s oft-quoted discourse on the nature of things presents a marvellous revelation. All sorts of stuff that affect named and unnamed forms of biodiversity can take place in nature, of which we are not directly aware, like climate change. Even if we don’t hear the sound of a tree falling, it remains the human responsibility of good virtue to take action. Conservation scientists should not forget the real biodiversity issues in Africa. Cherish nature and keep the love alive.

* Janice Golding is a doctoral candidate from South Africa at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/305/41567_Malawi.jpgAkwete Sande gives an overview of the current political situation in historical context in Malawi in the lead up to the 2009 elections.

Bakili Muluzi was a powerful politician under dictator Hastings Banda, first President of Malawi 1964-1994. As Secretary General of Malawi Congress Party at a younger age, Muluzi was dictator number two to Banda. But like all others before him, he served for a short period and was removed.

Bakili Muluzi went into business, but he resurfaced to lead the United Democratic Front – UDF in 1992 as a pressure group to agitate for political pluralism.

Muluzi, an accomplished orator backed by the faith community alongside the late Chakufwa Chihana, a trade unionist, galvanised Malawians against the one-party state. Through a referendum in 1993, Malawi adopted multi-party democracy.

In 1994 Bakili Muluzi, a Muslim in a Christian dominated country defeated Banda at the polls and began a reform process that included entrenching judicial independence, and freedoms such as press and association.

He closed notorious detention camps where Banda had kept his foes. The country saw the flourishing of non-governmental organisations in restricted areas of human rights. Independent print and electronic media houses included a state television station emerged.

A new constitution that provided for an Ombudsman’s office, an anti-corruptions bureau was adopted. New policies on gender issues, youth development and the largely successful Malawi Social Action Fund (MASAF) were initiated.

Muluzi’s rallying call was poverty reduction. By the end of his first five year term in 1999, despite success on human rights, free basic education which he had successfully introduced, poverty had got worse in a country with only tobacco as a major export.

It was not an easy win for Muluzi in 1999. The UDF, which had attracted all sorts of characters, lost popularity as people moved to other parties. Come elections in May 1999, Muluzi could only manage a bare win.

The second and last constitutional term for Muluzi was a troubled one. Successive droughts left the majority of people starving from 2002–2004. Newspapers were a wash with revelations of official corruption.

The most seriously affected was the ministry of education, where dubious contractors were paid for uncompleted school blocks. The Anti-Corruption Bureau Act, was not strong enough to discipline those with connections in powerful places. The civil service lost professionalism as most senior officials owed allegiance to powerful politicians.

However, the UDF had no clear succession plans because Muluzi himself harboured desire to extend his stay at state house. A slow but steady campaign for constitutional amendments for 'Open Term' and 'Third Term' to do away with two consecutive terms was waged. But parliament rejected the amendments. This campaign alienated Muluzi from most of his senior colleagues, who opted out of the party and government. Here perhaps is the genesis of his desire for return from retirement to contest again.

Muluzi anointed Bingu Wa-Mutharika, the current president and former international servant of the World Bank and COMESA as his successor. He successfully campaigned for Bingu, propping him as an economic 'engineer'. Although Bingu carried the day, it was with a very narrow margin sparking allegations of electoral fraud.

However after a few months the new president complained that the former president wanted to control him. Bingu shunned party functions leading to his being sidelined by party officials, and finally he bowed out.

It had never happened that a president could abandon a party that put him in power, elsewhere perhaps, but certainly not in this part of Africa.

However civil society and the public welcomed the move when he formed his own Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Many people flocked to it and within a short period DPP won six seats in by-elections therefore becoming a ruling party by default. Bingu’s stance on corruption, arresting his former party members and convicting others in the process has further created enemies for the president.

An attempt to impeach Bingu failed due to some gaps in the constitution, which provides for that possibility. But parliament had no procedures to set the impeachment in motion. Bingu was followed by many UDF legislators reducing the former ruling party into as a second rate opposition in parliament.

However vice president Cassim Chilumpha stuck in the UD. On several occasions, he became critical of the government. President Muntharika made an attempt to sack him but the courts restricted him. However, last year the vice president was arrested on treason charges, which he is answering while under house arrest.

The departure of Mutharika from UDF sparked bitter rivalry with Muluzi. Though several attempts have been made by a public watchdog – Public Affairs Committee – PAC, it has failed to reconcile the two. Each side accused the other of sparking political tension, and the race to 2009 elections has been unofficially begun.

What began as mere speculations that the former president intended a come back is now real.

'My job when I left office was to rebuild my party. But a lot of attempts have been made by Bingu to destroy UDF, this has forced me to decide to comeback. If UDF nominates me a candidate, I will contest in 2009', Muluzi told his supporters last month.

The announcement received mixed reactions with government spokesperson Patricia Kaliati declaring that government may reconsider Muluzi’s benefits as a retired president. These include security detail, house, medical and other benefits.

President Mutharika declared that he was at war with the opposition and true to his words made unprecedented moves by deploying the Malawi Defence Force to stop a rally from being addressed by former the president in Mulanje, a place seen as Mutharika’s stronghold and where the majority of his ethnic kinsmen come from.

The vocal civil society condemned the use of the armed forces. But they were not backing the proposed comeback by former President. Some chiefs have formed a coalition to lobby fellow chiefs to deny support to the former president. Prominent journalist – Gedeon Munthali and Chinyeke Tembo have formed a coalition too – Anti-Muluzi Coalition to mobilise people against Muluzi.

Columnists and radio analysts have argued that a Muluzi comeback is uncalled for and is premised on greed. They argue that the country was denied international aid from 2003 due to corruption and over-expenditure. Poverty grew worse during Muluzi’s ten year rule. They believe Muluzi who controls the finances of his party is being used by greedy fellows who want a fortune.

Perhaps such statements will do nothing to stop the populist former president from running for office again. But he has another thing coming. A constitutional reform programme which started last year entered into second phase this month and a conference to review the 1995 constitutional was recently held.

The issues to discussed included abolishing of death penalty, a recall provision for non-performing legislators, amendments on the presidency where a former president after completing five year terms should not come back, a president should have a minimum of an academic degree, are some of the hurdles Muluzi has to contend with.

However, constitutional amendments will have to go to parliament where the combined opposition is capable of upsetting the motions which people see as targeting Muluzi who has no first degree apart from professional diplomas and honorary ones. There have been calls from civil society for a referendum on the proposed changes, which may hold hope for the former president who is still popular.

'We have no trust in our MP’s, they can be forced by their leaders to sabotage the process, and render the whole exercise fruitless', says Billy Mayaya of the Blantyre Synod of the influential Presbyterian Church, explaining the reasons for the referendum.

An analyst from the University of Malawi, wiseman Chijere Chirwa says Muluzi’s comeback is a sign of a leadership crisis in a party-UDF that ruled the country from 1994–2004. He adds that the move will alienate ambitious people, who may decide to opt out.

Muluzi cites arbitrary arrests, and flouting of constitution by Mutharika as his major reasons for comeback. 'He is overlooking the successful ending of chronic farming in the return of donor support; debt relief and eradication of corruption', argues Eric Ning’ang’a, an educationist based in the city of Blantyre.

But Adamson Muula, a popular columnist and medical practiotioner says Muluzi should be allowed to stand. Muula says Muluzi’s comeback will bring challenges because people will be able to judge whether he has any better agenda.

Bakili Muluzi is determined to deflate the tube he inflated but Mutharika will not take it lying down – the use of the armed forces is just a sign of things to come as 2009 draws closer.

* Aaron Akwete Sandie is a freelance journalist based in Botswana.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/305/41566_Fanon.jpgMandisi Majavu draws on Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to encourage an exploration of the interconnections between psychology and society in Africa.

Derek Hook (2004) argues that Frantz Fanon’s greatest source of originality as a postcolonial theorist lay in the fact that he combined psychology and politics in his analysis of colonial problems, national liberation and social revolution.

For Fanon, psychopathology in the colonial society, or any other oppressive society for that matter, can be characterised as a ‘pathology of liberty’. This means that for a psychological intervention to be sincere and relevant, the psychological services offered would have to play their part in restoring freedom in some meaningful capacity to the sufferer (Hooks 2004).

According to Bulhan (1985), for Fanon, oppression in the practice and institutionalisation of violence by the colonial state is not only motivated and perpetuated by economic motives, but also by psychological and cultural interests. The revolutionary response of the oppressed to such violence generates a new language, people and humanity. Such a response has the potential to produce a liberated society (Bulhan 1985).

Concerning violence
Fanon argues that decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon: 'The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it.' Accordingly, decolonisation is a programme of 'complete disorder' which aims to change the social order of the colonial world. It is a meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature: '[their] first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannon'. Colonial society by its very nature is violent.

It does not, however, necessarily follow that decolonisation as a revolutionary programme is violent in nature. It might be true that most countries that have been colonised have achieved freedom through a violent struggle. However, that says more about the arrogance of colonial power than it says about the decolonisation programme itself.

This misconception of decolonisation as violent in nature characterises the false assumptions that underlie Fanon’s thinking about where the decolonisation process ought to begin. Fanon’s understanding of the colonial world is profound. However, some of his assumptions regarding decolonisation hinder how we might relate sensibly to the possibilities of moving forward, beyond pathology, to the liberated, decolonised society.

We could conceive of decolonisation as a fundamental, societal radical change in both the economy, and in social relations such as race and class relations; and that through such a programme, colonised people find their freedom; and not, as Fanon claims, through violence.

Fanon argues that violence for the colonised is therapeutic, a 'cleansing force'. But as Albert (2004) points out, 'violence has horrible effects on its perpetrators, more often than not causing them to devalue human life'. Colonial societies serve as evidence to support this view. There is no evidence to make us believe that violence perpetrated by the other side will not have the same effects.

Fanon argues that violence frees 'the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction...[and] restores his self-respect'. He does not provide evidence to support this perspective, nor does he explain his assumption regarding the ‘native inferiority complex’. He seems to assume that simply because blacks in the colony are subjected to all sorts of racist humiliation, this automatically results in an inferiority complex and self-hatred in blacks (Owusu-Bempah & Howitt 2000).

In his book Shades of Black, William Cross (1991) argues that there are at least four factors that explain why the mental health of blacks, including any propensity toward self-hatred, are not and have never been easily predicted by measures of racial identity:

- the limited generalisability of results of results of racial-preference studies conducted with three and four year old children
- the effects of black biculturalism, acculturation, and assimilation on black monoracial preference trends in racial identity experiments
- the problem of interpreting the meaning and salience of racial preference and racial identity for black adults operating with a multiple reference group orientation
- the historical failure of students and scholars of racial identity to differentiate between concepts and measures of ascriptive RGO [Reference Group Orientation] and concepts and measures of self-defined RGO.

Some of Fanon’s assumptions vis-à-vis the representation of decolonisation - the motivation that inspires natives to violently rebel against a colonial regime and the supposedly rampant inferiority complex - are unfounded. If we are concerned with building a sound postcolonial theory, then that theory ought at least to be based on sound assumptions. A postcolonial theory is needed that explains social events and psychological and political trends and phenomena sufficiently for us to situate ourselves, explain to others and understand the way things are.

The pitfalls of national consciousness
Fanon discusses how the new government of the liberated postcolonial state can betray the revolution. He argues that the middle class of the new postcolonial state is underdeveloped because it is reduced in numbers, has no capital, and is opposed to the revolutionary path. Eventually it falls into deplorable stagnation. For this middle class, nationalisation of the economy simply means the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period. The middle class 'will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoise’s business agent'.

Fanon refers to this middle class as the 'bourgeois dictatorship'. He argues that they are not real bourgeoisie in the true sense of the word, but rather a 'sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it'. Accordingly, after independence this middle class does not hesitate to invest the money it makes out of its native soil in foreign banks.

According to Fanon, the reason it is corrupt is because it has a permanent wish to identify with former colonisers. Consequently, it adopts with enthusiasm their characteristic ways of thinking. It is incapable of generating great ideas to manage and develop the economy, for it remembers what it has read in European textbooks.

The logic that underlies Fanon’s analysis is that the postcolonial government and its new middle class betray the revolution because, among other things, they want to be white, or to occupy the position formerly occupied by the coloniser. For example, he writes that before independence the 'look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possessions – all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible'.

History teaches us, as for example Howard Zinn argues in his People’s History of the United States, that when people are oppressed, they always rebel sooner or later. Furthermore, they do not rebel because of lust or envy, but because they believe in justice, equity and freedom.

In most cases, the revolution is betrayed due to a combination of a lack of vision for the new institutions for a democratic society, and a mixture of internal and external forces such as self-interest and the global economy.

Postcolonial politics from this standpoint is revealing and enables us not only to explain but to predict political and social phenomena. A theory based on flawed assumptions, that compels us to focus on lust, envy and desires to be white, forces us to chase psychologically reductionist dead-ends.

On national culture
Fanon’s basic premise is that native intellectuals respond to colonialism and the cultural hegemony that goes with it by rejecting Western culture and embracing a pre-colonial history and way of life. To escape from the hegemony of the Western culture, Fanon argues that the native intellectual feels the need to turn backwards towards his unknown roots, and as a result, sets a high value on the African customs and traditions: 'The sari becomes sacred, and shoes that come from Paris or Italy are left off in favour of pampooties, while suddenly the language of the ruling power is felt to burn your lips.'

The appreciation of certain Western ideas and the fact that certain postcolonial writers are influenced by Western writers and write in European languages should not be presented as a failure to create an authentic postcolonial cultural work, as Fanon presents it.

To write in an African language, or to quote only African writers, does not necessarily translate into originality. A radical postcolonial vision on culture ought not to be opposed to diverse cultures, including Western cultures, or a reduction diverse cultures to a least common denominator. The point is to enjoy their benefits while transcending prior debits.

As Albert (2006) points out the only real cultural salvation lies in eliminating racist institutions, dispelling colonialist ideologies and changing the colonial environment within which historical communities relate, so that they might maintain and celebrate difference without violating solidarity. A radical post-colonial theory would encourage individuals to choose 'cultural communities they prefer rather than have elders or others of any description define their choice for them' (Albert 2006: 47).

Conclusion
What is needed is a liberated society that is not characterised by cultural hierarchies and the one-way community assault common throughout the colonial history. Liberation postcolonial theory ought to provide us with concepts to describe and explain what it would take to build such a society and what such a society would constitute.

This essay is based on the premise that to have a growth-oriented attitude about one’s ideas, rather than a stability-oriented attitude, is healthy and the antithesis of sectarianism: 'Sectarianism is defensive and preservationist and often obscurantist and unconcerned with truth. We need instead to be self-critical and growth-oriented, and to strive for clarity and seek truth as best we can' (Albert 2004: 190).

References:

Albert, M., 2004, Realising hope: Life beyond capitalism, Canada: Fernwood Publishing.

Albert, M., 2004,. Thought dreams: Radical theory for the 21st century, Canada: Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

Bulhan, H.A., 1985, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression, New York: Plenum Press.

Cross, W.E., 1991, Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American identity, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Fanon, F., 1990, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin Books.

Hook, D., 2004, 'Steve Biko, psychopolitics and critical psychology', in Hook, D., ed., Critical psychology, Cape Town: UCT Press, pp. 84-114.

Owusu-Bempah, K. & Howitt, D., 2000, Psychology beyond western perspectives, UK: British Psychological Society Books.

* Mandisi Majavu, a Stephen Bantu Biko fellow, is currently working on his masters in psychology at the University of Cape Town. [email][email protected]

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/authors/Doreen-Lwanga.jpgAlthough there is much for Africans to celebrate in post apartheid South Africa, Doreen Lwanga is troubled by the 'psychological burden' of having to engage in the profiling of black youth when walking the streets of urban centres such as Johannesburg.

A while ago, I wrote about the psychological trauma that beggars on the New York City subway undergo, as they prepare to ask passengers for a dollar. Here, I would like to explore the psychological burden of profiling young black males in South Africa as a visitor to the country.

I recently travelled to South Africa. I had not been to South Africa since I left in 2001, following a year of working with the Lawyers for Human Rights Refugee Rights Project in Pretoria. I had promised myself never to return to South Africa because of the 'not-so-friendly' welcome I received when I was there. I had gone to South Africa assuming that I would be 'going home', but my inability to speak any of the eleven national languages prohibited me from freely enjoying the social scene.

South Africa provides hope to so many Africans on the continent. Its diversity of culture, landscape, vibrancy, peoples, history, leadership and resilience makes it the most admired and one of the most sought after destinations. It has become a favoured destination for many international Africans students and academics flock to pursue a world-class education, teaching or research experience outside their home countries. It is Africa’s economic capital.

Many Africans like me who visit or live in South Africa want to enjoy a part of it or be a part of it. We expect a 'home welcome' and a pat on the back, yet many of us, particularly from outside Southern African are profiled because we do not speak any of the South African black languages.

Amazingly, both South Africans and foreigners in the country are scared of street life and miss out on the most vibrant experience of any city. We are warned of walking in the city without clinging onto our handbag during the day and scared from enjoying the night life for fear of rape, murder or robbery in the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. The tourists and immigrants claim crime is high in these cities because there are many unemployed young South Africans. While South Africans claim it is due to the high influx of immigrants.

I remember one evening in 2000 while I was walking home from work in Pretoria at about six o’clock, two young black males came running after me. When they approached me, one pulled my bag while the other struggled to break my necklace. As I fought back and yelled for help, none of the passer-bys stopped to rescue me from these attackers. If this had happened on the streets of Kampala, the mob would surely have meted out justice onto these two robbers.

Certainly, it is expected that we all take the necessary precaution while living in big cities. I realise that it is risky to park one’s Pajeros on some streets of Pretoria or Johannesburg in the night without guaranteed security. However, I am bothered that I can safely walk the streets of Kampala or New York without psychological fear of attack, rape or murder from young black males unlike in Johannesburg or Pretoria.

Then I wonder, am I, like many other foreigners and South Africans living in these cities, too paranoid? Are we too impatient with the recently acquired public space that the new South African transition ushered in for free enjoyment of all, including young black males? Is it just young black males clearly restricting our ability to move freely within Johannesburg and Pretoria, and are they all South Africans?

Clearly we have many reasons to celebrate that the new South Africa has extended to many of us from the rest of Africa easier access to its borders without the cruel apartheid system.

However, I do not want to live a stratified lifestyle where those who consider 'to have' live under key and lock from those who supposedly 'do not have'.

I enjoy street life, and the ability to interact with local people and observe the daily lives of ordinary people. I enjoy public transport and do not want to be chauffeured around in private car hire at seven times the cost of public transport.

I hate the fact that walking the streets of Pretoria and Johannesburg makes me paranoid, particularly when as a black person I participate in black-on-black profiling.

As a black person and a self-acclaimed black nationalist, I cannot bear the psychological burden of profiling young black males on the streets of South Africa nor deny myself the opportunity of opening my Luganda or English-speaking mouth for fear of attack from my own people.

* Doreen Lwanga is an Africa Scholar, Researcher and Activist working in the areas of African security, Pan-Africanism and Higher education in Africa.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/304/41480.jpgPastor Wuganaale, of the Ogoni Solidarity Front in Nigeria maintains that the Ogoni people wish to be free of 'indigenous colonisaton' and will not make a deal with Shell.

Barely 48 hours after the 'spiritual cleansing' service that was held in Ogoniland, the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Cape Town hosted Rev. Fr. Mathew Hassan Kukah for a public talk entitled 'Nigerian Election: Is the country no Longer at Ease?'

The news of his visit to Cape Town, ostensibly to polish the image of the Obasanjo government and create a platform of acceptability for the incoming government, filtered into the office of the Ogoni Solidarity Forum about 24 hours before the programme.

Rev. Fr. Kukah summarily said that the Nigerian election is acceptable, considering the history of Nigeria and within the context of its politics, because there had been no credible election in the past. He emphasised that the George Bush election was as much fraud as the Nigerian election. 'But because it is America, things are still moving on' he said.

Kukah said the criticism of Nigeria’s own electoral charade is like describing the poor as thief. The Nigerian election is painted as fraudulent because it is Nigeria. This done to justify the mindset, perception and public opinion held of the country.

He argued that if the elections were as bad as the international observers claimed, 'why is it that there is calm in the country; the military should have taken over by now'.

Kukah went as far as to say that a fraudulent election is not the problem of the average Nigerians: 'what the people are looking for service delivery, no matter who is in power or how such person came to power'.

Kukah contradicted himself, even though he reaffirmed some of the things that are known facts.

For instance, he stated that the National Constitution Reformation Conference was aimed at elongating the period of Obasanjo in power. When it failed Obasanjo has to seek means of remaining relevant by becoming the power behind the power.

He also said that Shehu Musa Yar’Adua is not as clean as he has been portrayed. Stating that it is not practically possible for anybody to contest the position of the presidency in Nigerian without spending as much as 100,000,000 dollars he asked: 'who paid for all the planes that were used for the campaigns of Yar’Adua?'

His extensive presentation ended with the call that the Nigerian incoming government should be accepted, while at the same time he described Olusegun Obasanjo as the main disease that has bedeviled the country.

To his shock, the first person that intervened was an Ogoni, the project coordinator of Ogoni Solidarity Forum, Pastor Barry Wuganaale. He asked Kukah, 'if you know this much of Obasanjo and the fact that he runs a highly centralized state that masquerade as democracy, why have you been working with him to force the Ogoni people back into the failed state you describe Nigeria to be?'

The chairperson of the Anti-War Coalition of Western Cape followed with another question: 'Why is your committee aligning with the imperial force – Shell, that is behind the suffering of the people?'

The hall was dominated by the pro-Ogoni struggle activists. It turned the discussion to focus on Ogoni. Kukah flared in demonstration of his enragement and consequently made a lot of revelations. He was obviously stirred with the number of placards carried up from that moment till the end of the programme.

Some of the placards read:

'Rev. Fr. Kukah, what is your interest in Ogoni oil?'

'Kukah, what happened to the Oputa Panel?'

'If oil was in Kaduna would you allow it to be stolen?'

'Your Committee didn’t respond to the petition of the refugees in Benin!'

'Ogoniland does not need spiritual cleansing” “Ogoniland need environmental cleansing.'

'Don’t force Ogoni people to negotiate with HELL.'

'Kukah! Shell means HELL, what kind of clergy advocate for HELL for a people?'

'Ogonis are not ‘Nigerians.’

'Ogonis want to be free from indigenous colonization.'

'Ogonis are not your slaves.'

'Kukah; the time of slavery is over.'

'If you have no deal with Shell, hands off Ogoniland.'

In responding to the questions on Ogoni, which took over the whole discussion, Kukah said, it was Ledum Mitee that actually initiated the invitation of the United Nation Environmental Programme (UNEP) and that he has never been to Nairobi to have discussion with the UNEP.

On this matter, there seem to be a kernel of truth in Kukah’s statement. During the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Pastor Barry who was in Nairobi narrowly missed Ledum Mitee who left on the day of the opening of the WSF. Legborsi Pyagbara confirmed to Barry that Ledum was in Nairobi solely for a meeting with UNEP. After the WSF, Legborsi stayed behind for almost two weeks to follow up with meetings with the UNEP.

Kukah told the audience under suppressed anger that 'money had been given to your president, Ledum, on several occasion by the governor of Rivers state and he did not utilize them'.

Kukah made a staggering revelation that when Ledum Mitee was asked to say what should be given to the families of the eight other Ogonis that were hanged with Ken, that he 'suggested five hundred thousand or at most one million naira to each family'.

Kukah stated that the 5,000,000 naira that was given to each of the families of the deceased were out of the magnanimity of Peter Odili. From that point, the heat was turned to Mitee, he asserted that if MOSOP is fighting for democracy, why is it that Ledum Mitee has ruled MOSOP for ten years without an election and set outside the constitution of the organisation?

Kukah reiterated that the problem of the Ogoni people is the prominent Ogoni people that collect contract from the back door from Shell and the government, that countless number of opportunities had been given to the Ogoni through their elites but they were squandered by their representatives in government and the MOSOP.

Kukah went on to openly say that even Mitee does not believe that Shell should be driven out of Ogoniland because 'as your president, Ledum, puts it, Shell is not a chicken that can just be driven away like that.'

The most important revelation that Kukah made to the audience is that the Ogoni people are already being antagonised, because, 'other tribes are worried that the Ogoni is cheating them for not allowing Shell to drill from their land, so whose oil would be used to develop your own land?'

Kukah implied that the Ogoni people must allow themselves to be part of the corrupt Nigerian system because the time of carrying placards over. Communism he said is death. 'Placards or guns had never enabled any people to form a government in the world, you have to join to the government because no matter how good your voice is, you can never sing anywhere except in the choir.'

He explained in no uncertain terms that the several Ogonis had been begging for appointment and departing from the Ogoni Bill of Rights. In apparently referring to struggle for resource control by the Ogoni people, he said:

'No ethnic group has ever had control over oil, it is the right of the federal government to mine and control oil and your people cannot achieve that.'

Mathew Kukah concluded by saying that the prayer and dedication of Ogoniland that was organised on 14 May was initiated by the Christian leaders of Ogoniland. 'If the Ogoni people say they want to pray and cleanse their land, l am not an Ogoni man and l cannot oppose it.'

* Pastor Barry Wuganaale is from the Ogoni Solidarity Front, Cape Town, South Africa.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/304/41428.jpgLansana Gberie reviews two books on child soldiers: Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourama and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which is now being sold in Starbucks coffee shops across America.

The most difficult ones to deal with, the earnest UN official told me, are the 'teenage ruffians'. I was talking to him in Monrovia, capital of Liberia in 2004.

A large UN force, 15,000 strong, was desperately trying to disarm the mostly deranged combatants who ravaged the place for over a decade. Many people had thought that the disarmament would be fairly easy because a large number of the Liberian militias have gone through such a process before, some of them twice.

There had been the incomplete process, supervised by ECOMOG (the West African intervention force) just before the shambolic 1997 elections. Some of the Liberian fighters had actually been disarmed as fighters in Sierra Leone during that country’s (earlier) UN-supervised disarmament process.

But the first attempted demobilisation turned chaotic after the militias, desperate for the small cash incentive to hand in their weapons before Christmas, stormed Monrovia. At least eight people were killed in the ensuing violence. In the event, the UN paid 12,000 soldiers but received only 8,000 weapons.

The UN official calmly told me about a two-hour long meeting he had had with '48 Generals'. 'Most of them were children, of course', he added. 'And the trouble is that these bush Generals are absolutely jealous of their ranks! It makes the word ‘feral’ meaningless.'

The official suggested that I go with him to Gbarnga to see for myself. With some reluctance I agreed. Gbarnga was once the headquarters of Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), which started Liberia’s war. It had become an immense ruin. The pathos of its decrepitude was that it had now edged itself, once again, towards the centre of Liberia’s woes: the militias encamped there had become frighteningly restive and violent.

By the time we got there, a long line of them had formed at the cantonment site to hand in old AK 47 rifles and collect their money. Things seemed to be going well when suddenly a scrawny teenage fighter with a bandana around his head jumped ahead of the queue, raised his old rifle and started shouting abuses at the UN officers. 'Mother fucker. Give us our money now or we’ll go to Sierra Leone, to Guinea, to Ivory Coast, and start fighting all over again.' I sneaked quietly away.

I was reminded of this chilly incident recently when I started reading Ahmadou Kourama’s haunting novel Allah is Not Obliged. Its obscenely loquacious central character, Birihima, an ex-child fighter who has seen service in the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, happily describes himself as 'rude as a goat’s beard', and given to swearing 'like a bastard'.

He continues: 'I don’t give two fucks about village custom any more, 'cos I’ve been in Liberia and killed lots of guys with an AK-47 (we called it a ‘kalash’) and got fucked-up on kanif [cannabis] and lots of hard drugs.' He is now, he says, stalked by 'the ghosts of many innocent people I killed'. This is not 'an edifying spectacle'.

The novel was first published in France in 2000. Its Ivorian author died three years later. It was a huge success in France, but its English edition, published by William Heinemann last year got a few respectable mentions and then was quickly forgotten.

The novel’s liberal and somewhat foolish use of the word ‘nigger’ was probably too off-putting. Doubtless it makes the story – a powerful psychological exploration of the terrible phenomenon of child soldiery – less exalted for a reader of the English translation than it actually is.

The narrator says at the outset in the novel that 'the full, final and completely complete title of my bullshit story is Allah is not obliged to be fair about all things he does on earth.' It is an insight of sort, capturing the kind of cynicism that has, until recently, surrounded the phenomenon of child soldiery.

The use of children in armed combat is probably as old as warfare itself. It has never been limited to irregular armies. Even Clauswitz, the great theoretician of conventional warfare, joined the Prussian army at age 13. There were hundreds of thousands of children in all the major armies that fought the two world wars.

After much foot-dragging, in 1989 193 countries signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which sets 15 years as the minimum age for recruitment into armed forces.

Incidentally the US (and Somalia, no doubt because it didn’t have a government) signed, but refused to ratify the convention. The convention was largely ignored even by those who signed it There was no legal instrument to enforce it.

In the 1980s Renamo, a uniquely brutal (and mercenary) rebel group in Mozambique, which anticipated Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in the use of amputations as a war tactic, had made widespread recruitment of children into its militia (also anticipating the RUF) a core part of its insurgency.

Other African rebel groups, also markedly mercenary, followed this pattern. The spectacle of drug-addled children armed with AK 47 rifles and gamely inflicting terror against defenceless civilians became a ubiquitous part of African warfare: a metaphor for the continent’s underdevelopment and mindless brutality.

After an intense campaign – led by Graca Machel, the Mozambican wife of Nelson Mandela, with the active support of then Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy – against this appalling new reality, the UN Security Council in 2000 passed the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which made no distinction between formal militaries and non-state militias, and which defined the recruitment of children under 18 (instead of 15) years of age as a war crime.

Since then, UN-sponsored war crimes trials, like the one in Sierra Leone, have included recruitment of children into armed groups as a crime against humanity.

As I write, however, it is estimated that 300,000 children are serving in various armies or militia groups around the world. During Sierra Leone’s war, the RUF would have its child recruits branded with red-hot bayonets: the figures R-U-F were literally carved on their body, making defection – because RUF fighters caught by government troops and sometimes by civilians were often summarily executed – almost impossible. These children – hysterical, flagellant, and immensely lethal – would then roam the countryside, destroying every living thing they encounter.

Shortly before the Optional Protocol was issued, I attended a conference about child soldiers, organised by Axworthy in the Canadian city of Winnipeg in 2000.

In one of the sessions, I attempted to make a distinction between children kidnapped and inducted into militias (like the RUF did) and those who, orphaned and left homeless by the terror campaigns of insurgents voluntarily join armies or pro-government forces, finding for themselves a home and some kind of security.

The Liberian activist/politician Conmany Wesseh, who was actively engaged with the problem in West Africa, took me aside and remarked: 'This issue does not admit of such a fine distinction. Recruitment of children into any armed group is bad, full stop. You provide a loophole for all kinds of opportunists by fudging: what moral and professional difference is there between some armies and all these rebel groups?' His point was unanswerable, and I kept quiet about the issue henceforth.

Ishmael Beah’s phenomenally successful A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007) makes this same point in another way. Though his pained but fluent account does not exactly resolve the central dilemma.

Beah served as a child soldier in the Sierra Leone army during the country’s decade-long war. His book, which recounts his traumatic experiences during the period, has been on the top of the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks now, and it is being offered by Starbucks in its thousands of coffee shops in North America. It has been a sensation.

While reading my copy on the plane during the short flight from Chicago to New York City recently, a handsome teenage girl leaned over my seat. Giggling, she asked me whether I found it interesting. 'I heard him [Beah] speak yesterday and I bought a copy there and then', she said. 'I am so excited about it!'

It was the most unalloyed compliment that can be made of a recently-released book, pure in its curiosity and innocence. It almost made me – someone who has also written about the war of which Beah’s memoir is concerned – green with envy. I found Beah’s astonishing story both unsettling and hugely satisfying: the author, who is now 27, emerges as a highly intelligent young man with remarkable literary flair. But his account has obvious flaws.

Beah was just ten when the war in Sierra Leone started. He was attending school in a village in southern Sierra Leone, which became one of the key theatres of the bloody conflict. At that age, he had already read Shakespeare. He could quote passages from Julius Caesar from memory. He had also become interested in American hip hop.

The book is a sustained study in such contrasts: high culture versus low, a Shakespeare-loving teenager committing barbarous atrocities, frightened civilians versus red-eyed murderers, a friendly people versus brutal politics, demented cruelty versus pure kindness, poverty-stricken Sierra Leone versus affluent New York.

It is soon clear that the book is aimed, first and last, at an American readership. No problem with that: for Beah tells us early on that he intends to address the curiosity of his former schoolmates who had always suspected that he was not telling them all about his past.

This past, therefore, comes to include his memory of some 'nice summer days' in Sierra Leone – the torrential rains in the country, which should surely form one of the most vivid of experiences for a barefoot straggler in the bush there, is barely mentioned (and when mentioned only perfunctorily).

Hip Hop is evoked throughout – and why not? It can be readily associated with gun violence and drugs in America, core aspects of Beah’s experience as a boy soldier. One should not quibble too much here, even when Beah calls Yele 'a big village with more than ten houses' – it is actually a small town with over a hundred houses.

The area that Beah lived in, somewhere in Moyamba District in southern Sierra Leone, was largely unaffected by the war in its early stages. But then rebels – aided by rogue government troops – attacked the Sierra Leone Rutile Mines, where Beah’s father worked, in 1994.

They killed some of the people, apparently including Beah’s parents, and kidnapped some European ex-patriate workers and Sierra Leonean senior staff.

Beah was then living in a village not far away, and soon his village was also attacked. He fled with a few friends. Then he began a traumatic trek through the bush to virtually nowhere.

Beah devotes a lot of space to this depressing bush trek – the night spent in the forest living bare, grim encounters with the rebels in some places, the death and destruction they encountered along the way, the occasional kindness he and his friends got along the way, the more general fear that people they met had for child stragglers who could well have been rebels, the debilitating hunger and near-collapse into insanity – about three times more space, in fact, than for his actual experience as a child fighter.

The intention is plain. Without this background, without knowledge of the hopelessness of Beah’s situation, one would be far less prepared for this:

'My face, my hands, my shirt and gun were covered with blood. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man. Suddenly, as if someone was shooting them inside my brain, all the massacres I had seen since the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change magazines and saw my two young lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved, until we were ordered to retreat because we needed another strategy.'

Beah is describing his first real battle with the rebels after his recruitment into a contingent of Sierra Leone Army by an officer who, like Beah, would quote Shakespeare for fun. The recruitment, unlike those into the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), was not coerced. But it was not voluntary either.

It was also ad hoc: the new recruits were not registered as government soldiers, and were not paid. They accounted only to the officer, acting on his own whim, who had recruited them.

After the months trekking in the bush, the starving young boys having completely run down to seeds, Beah and his friends really had no choice when, after spending some days in the village where the army had occupied in some comfort, they along with everyone else in the village were asked to help defend the village from the rebels who had started mounting attacks against it. Two of Beah’s very young friends were killed at the first encounter with the rebels. A line had been crossed. Beah becomes a killing machine. He tells us:

'I grabbed [a] man’s head and slit his throat in one fluid motion. His Adam’s apple made way for the sharp knife, and I turned the bayonet on its zigzag edge as I brought it out.'

All this may be true, but what one remembers about one’s past is always a choice – a choice partly conditioned by what one feels one’s audience expects. It is hard not to feel, on reading this, that Beah is keen on playing to all those voyeurs after adolescent terror and mindless African violence.

This may be a curious judgment, but one thinks that Beah is perhaps guilty of a chilling excess of candour. Killing people becomes a way of life, an obligation: in war you have to kill to remain alive. The lieutenant who recruited Beah tells him: 'Visualise the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you.'

He would add: '...[the rebels] have lost everything that makes them human. They do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill every single one of them…It is the highest service you can perform for your country.'

Beah takes the message to heart – so much so in fact that he is made an officer, having command over his own troop of child fighters. W.H Auden’s famous poem, 'September 1, 1939', about that 'low dishonest decade' of 'darkened lands of the earth' comes readily to mind:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return

It was terribly traumatic for Beah, all the same. For months after his rescue from this murderous life by the UN and an NGO dedicated to rehabilitating ex-child soldiers, he suffered from nightmares and frequent bouts of migraine (the side effects of the heavy drugs they fed on daily).

The rehabilitation turns out to be far more difficult than his induction into the army, and there were moments of extreme violence – fights broke out between child soldiers who had served with the Sierra Leone and those who had fought with the RUF, leading to loss of lives.

On arriving at the camp, Beah encounters another ex-child soldier who looked to him like a RUF rebel. Beah, who had hidden a grenade in his pocket, took it, and the boy pulled out a bayonet. Beah asked who the boy was. 'We are from Kono district', the boy replied. 'Ah, the diamond district!', Alhaji, Beah’s friend, responds.

Finally the boy says: 'I fought for the army. The rebels burned my village and killed my parents, and you look like one of them'. A deadly fight was averted. It is a telling moment, but quickly Beah relates another encounter which seems to make another, more profound point. He and his other friend, Mambu, accost another ex-child soldier who looks different in appearance. 'What kind of army person wears civilian clothes?' Mambu asks of the boy. The boy responds: 'We fought for the RUF; the army is the enemy. We fought for freedom, and the army killed my family and destroyed my village.' A nasty fight breaks out immediately, and several people are killed.

It does not really matter, in other words, on what side one fought during the war: all sides had reasonable claims to have been wronged: all the armed groups in the country committed atrocities, and all should be held to account on the same level. There is no difference, this incident seems to suggest, in the methodology of recruitment and induction into the various fighting forces. The problem is that this is not true, and it is clear from Beah’s account overall that this point is absurd: it looks like a sop to the campaigners against child soldiery.

It is a noble campaign, but as I said at the Winnipeg conference, there was a marked difference in how the RUF recruited its child fighters and how the army and the Civil Defence Force (CDF) did. The end result may have been pretty much the same, but I doubt whether any official – UN or NGO – could have ventured in a RUF camp (as they did to many army and CDF camps, including Beah’s) to take away child soldiers for rehabilitation camps. The RUF fighters in the rehabilitation camps were, before the war ended, very few, and they certainly were not handed over by their commanders.

Beah’s book does not provide a history of the war or the background to the conflict. Its singular value is that it gives an insight into the thinking of the child soldiers, and it shows – in the subsequent career of Beah – that rehabilitation is eminently possible.

Beah left Sierra Leone after a bloody in 1997 coup. He had earlier acted as a spokesman at a UN conference in New York on child soldiery. He returned to New York and was adopted by an American woman he had met during his first visit. There he attends college, earns a degree, and has now provided us this valuable memoir. For this reason alone, the book deserves the recognition it has been accorded.

* Lansana Gberie is a writer and journalist from Sierra Leone. He is the author of A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone (Indiana University Press 2006).

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/304/41426.jpgSince the 1990s there has been an emergence of transnational corporations (TNCs) in the developing world. Kavaljit Singh assesses the economic and environmental impact on the both the host countries and the outflows between the South-South multinationals.

The mid-1990s witnessed the dramatic emergence of transnational corporations from the developing world.

Although much of the investment by these corporations is concentrated in other developing countries, South-South, they are increasingly investing heavily in developed countries, South-North, as well.

The South-South and South-North FDI (foreign direct investment) flows are growing much faster than the traditional North-South FDI flows.

However, 87 per cent of the total outward FDI flows in 2004 originated from just ten developing countries.

In terms of foreign assets, the majority of top 50 Southern TNCs are headquartered in Asia (32), followed by Latin America (11) and Africa (7, all of them in South Africa).

What is interesting to note is that the increase in FDI outflows is concentrated in many of the same countries that receive the bulk of FDI inflows to developing countries such as China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Mexico. Outward FDI from China increased from a meagre $400 million in 1980 to $38 billion by the end of 2004.

China is also the second largest investor in Africa, after the US. In the case of India, there were 136 outward investment deals valued at $4.3 billion in 2005. The value of outward foreign investment by Indian firms almost nears the level of inward foreign investment.

With the lifting of international sanctions and the relaxation of capital controls, South African TNCs such as the Anglo American Corporation, De Beers, and SABMiller have become dominant players in the African region. In the words of Graham Mackay, CEO of SABMiller, 'If there was any more of Africa, we would be investing in it. The return on investments here (Africa) has been fantastic.' [1]

The motivations behind cross-border investments by Southern TNCs are not different from others. To a large extent, competition pressures arising from globalisation processes (such as liberalisation of imports and inward FDI) drive Southern corporations to invest abroad.

Like their Northern counterparts, the Southern TNCs are investing abroad to gain access to natural resources, markets, skills, and technology. In some recent cases, acquiring brand names (such as the acquisition of IBM’s personal computer division by China’s Lenovo) seems to be the prime motive.

To a large extent, the expansion of South-South and South-North investment flows reflects the increasing integration of developing countries into the world economy. A number of important factors including regional integration through trade and investment agreements, trade and financial liberalisation, increasing wealth as well as limited market size and resource base at home have encouraged Southern TNCs to invest abroad.

Instead of investing in greenfield projects, however, Southern transnationals are increasingly undertaking investments through acquisitions. Recently announced buyout deals (such as Beijing-based Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s PC business and the acquisition by Mexican company Cemex of the UK’s RMC) suggest that Southern TNCs are more actively engaged in M&A deals.

The bulk of India’s outward FDI is in the form of mergers and acquisitions, mainly in telecommunications, energy and pharmaceuticals. Even though most of the buyouts by Southern TNCs may still be under the billion dollar range, they portray an increasing outward orientation of big business in the developing world.

According to Joseph Battat and Dilek Aykut of the World Bank, South-South FDI increased from $15 billion in 1995 to $46 billion in 2003, accounting for some 35 per cent of total FDI flows in developing countries [2]. Despite their small size, South-South FDI flows are significant to many poor countries such as Lesotho, Mongolia, and Nepal. As far as South-North FDI flows are concerned, OECD countries received $16 billion of FDI in 2001, up from a mere $1 billion in 1995.

The bulk of South-South FDI flows are regional. For instance, nearly two-thirds of FDI into China originates in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. Similarly, transnational corporations from Chile, Brazil, and Argentina operate largely in the Latin American region. Russian investments abroad have primarily been in the countries of the former Soviet Union while South African investments are almost completely located in Southern Africa.

In addition, the majority of South-South FDI flows are concentrated in the infrastructure and extractive sectors such as oil and gas. It is mainly state-owned corporations that dominate investments in these sectors. State-owned oil companies from China and India are rapidly acquiring oil and gas fields in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America. For instance, almost half of China’s outward FDI went to acquire natural resource projects in Latin America in 2004. Similarly, India’s state-owned firm, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, invested heavily in oil and gas fields in the Russian Federation and Angola.

Given that state-owned corporations are a significant source of South-South FDI flows (particularly in extractive industries and infrastructure), such investments may be driven not only by economic but also by political, strategic and diplomatic factors. The billions of dollars worth of investment by China in Africa is a case in point. The Chinese companies are involved in the building of oil refineries, dams, roads, and big infrastructure projects in several African countries including Sudan, Liberia, Angola, Chad, and Central African Republic.

However, China’s investments in Africa are not purely driven by economic factors. To some extent, such big investments also help China in earning international goodwill and securing political support for its own agenda, particularly to isolate Taiwan diplomatically (out of total 26 countries that have full diplomatic relations with Taiwan, seven belong to Africa).

It is interesting to note that outward investments by Southern TNCs are also supported by their respective governments through removal of capital controls, fiscal incentives, and investment protection measures. China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore have created special mechanisms to provide preferential treatment and insurance against risks through credit guarantees schemes.

For instance, the Chinese government adopted a policy ('Go Global') in 2000 to encourage its firms to invest abroad. China’s Export-Import Bank provides loans to firms for outward investments in resource development and infrastructure.

If the investment is undertaken in an aid-recipient country, Chinese firms also receive preferential loans. Fiscal incentives are also provided to firms which bring machinery, plant, and equipment to their overseas ventures.

Some regional arrangements, such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), also provide various incentives (including lower tax and tariff rates) for outward investment within the regions. Apart from fiscal and financial support, bilateral investment treaties and double taxation treaties between developing countries are growing.

To secure access to strategic assets, some Southern TNCs have also invested in developed countries such as Australia and Canada. In addition to the extractive and infrastructure sectors, there are also a few cases of large-scale South-North investments involving M&As (mergers & acquisitions). In particular, Chinese corporations have been active in acquiring several well-known consumer brand names, such as Thompson, RCA, and IBM.

Interestingly, tax havens are favorite destinations for many Southern TNCs as they are for Northern TNCs. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and Cyprus are the main destinations for Brazilian, Indian, and Russian outward FDI. Hong Kong plays an important role for the overseas expansion of Chinese corporations.

However, it needs to be emphasised here that some South-North investment deals have been subjected to intense political backlash in Northern countries. Several recent cross-border investment bids by Southern TNCs (for instance, the proposal by a Chinese company, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) to take over US oil company, Unocal) reflect growing unease among policy makers in the North.

Given the fact that most developing countries are usually capital importers, the rise of Southern TNCs poses new policy dilemmas. The policy makers in the developing world are increasingly finding it difficult to strike a balance between the country’s interest as a host country and its newly-found interests as a home country.

How should the new and growing phenomenon of outward FDI from the South be assessed? Are South-South FDI flows favorable to the host economy? Are the strategies and behaviors of Southern TNCs different from their Northern counterparts? Do Southern TNCs maintain better transparency, environmental, and labor standards than their Northern counterparts? What are the developmental impacts of investments by Southern TNCs? Who benefits from South-South investments? Who loses? Should South-South investment be promoted as an alternative to North-South investment flows?

Unfortunately, the answers to such pertinent questions are hampered by the lack of in-depth studies and reliable data on South-South and South-North FDI flows. Despite such information gaps, one thing is certain: this new and growing phenomenon is going to play an important role in the global economy in the coming years.

Notes:

1. Remarks made by Graham Mackay at Africa Economic Summit 2005, Cape Town, June 1-3, 2005.

2. Joseph Battat and Dilek Aykut, “Southern Multinationals: A Growing Phenomenon,” note prepared for the conference, Southern Multinationals: A Rising Force in the World Economy, Mumbai, November 9-10, 2005.

* Kavaljit Singh is Director of Public Interest Research Centre, a policy research institute, based in New Delhi. He is the author of widely published books, Questioning Globalization (Zed Books, 2005), Taming Global Financial Flows (Zed Books, 2000), and The Globalization of Finance: A Citizen's Guide (Zed Books, 1998). His previous publications on foreign investment include The Reality of Foreign Investments (Madhyam Books, 1997) and TNCs and India (with Jed Greer, PIRG, 1995).

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