In this part of the world, news of riots in London are surprising and shocking. It is inconceivable that the first world and the godfathers of democracy can turn to riots, violence, looting and hooliganism for any reason at all.
One cannot even imagine that the London metropolitan police is somewhat overwhelmed (and the prison cells full) by the hundreds of young people turning up for the riots.
We are almost getting self-righteous about the whole fiasco. At least we riot for a cause. The Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans and Syrians are out on the street for a noble cause. What about the London youth? From the international press coverage, one may be fooled to think that the London youth are just in it for the DVD players and 'HD ready, 42" plasma TVs.
However, on digging deeper, the London youth are probably in it for a higher cause. Sample this from Penny Red, a London blogger;
".....
Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news.
.....
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night.
People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
...
Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.
...."
The Kenyan government and leaders should be very worried at this time. In our villages and town estates, there are hordes of young people, idle, jobless, angry, hungry and with nothing to lose. They have pent up anger with everyone and everything. This is our Kenyan time bomb. It is ticking and as political tensions and temperature begins to build up towards 2012 general elections it is bound to blow up if it is mishandled.
Ukiona cha mwenzio cha nyolewa, chako tia maji so says a Swahili proverb (If you see your friend's hair being cut, prepare yours for you are next). With the first world burning, what chances are there for the third world to escape this wealth inequality and leaders callousness judgement?
Showing posts with label Africa Politics and Governance Issues. Show all posts
London is burning, will Kenyan leaders learn?
Gwvnne Dyer: Africans May Soon Openly Discuss Sex: The Star
It was ostensibly about obscenity, but it was really about corruption and censorship — and in the end, justice prevailed.
On Monday a Zambian court found journalist Chansa Kabwela not guilty of "distributing obscene material with intent to corrupt public morals."
What obscene material?
She had sent photographs of a woman giving birth in a hospital parking lot during a nurses' strike to senior government officials.
President Rupiah Banda called a press conference and declared the photographs "pornographic."
Soon after, Kabwela was arrested on obscenity charges. She faced a five-year jail sentence if she were found guilty — but Banda's real motive was probably the fact that the newspaper Kabwela works for, the Post, constantly accuses him of corruption.
The Post is probably right. Banda succeeded Levy Mwanawasa, a President of unquestioned integrity, after the latter died of a stroke last year.
But unlike Mwanawasa, he has failed to pursue the previous President, Frederick Chiluba, a monumentally corrupt man. An unsympathetic observer might wonder if some of Chiluba's stolen millions have bought Banda's complicity.
The Post wonders that out loud, so Banda went after its news editor, Kabwela. The pictures she sent out were not pornographic. Rather, they were horrific: images of a woman in the midst of a breech birth, the baby's legs dangling out between her own while its head was still inside her.
It all happened in a hospital parking lot (she had already been turned away from two clinics), but nobody would help her because of the strike, and the baby suffocated.
Her appalled and furious relatives brought pictures of the scene to the Post. Kabwela did not publish them because they were so upsetting, but she sent copies to senior officials together with a letter urging them to intervene and settle the strike. That's when Banda declared the images pornographic and had her arrested.
The courts are still independent in Zambia, and in the end Kabwela was found not guilty — but many of the witnesses were genuinely more shocked by photographs of a woman naked from the waist down than by the horror of what was actually happening.
As one witness said: "We are all Zambians here. We all know this is not allowed in our culture."
The word you're looking for is "prudish," and it applies to a lot of African popular culture.
Never mind what's actually happening. We don't want to hear about it, and we certainly don't want to see it. The Zambian elite has been devastated by HIV/Aids — the higher the social class, the worse the death rate — and yet nobody wants to talk about sex, let alone about the links between sex, power and violence.
Go a thousand kilometres (miles) south to South Africa, and the gulf between appearances and reality is even wider.
Last June the country's Medical Research Council published a study about rape and HIV which reported that 28 per cent of South African men admitted to having raped a woman or a girl. (A further 3 per cent said they had raped a man or boy.)
Almost half the rapists said they had raped more than one person, and three-quarters of them said they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20. They didn't use condoms, and they were twice as likely to be HIV-positive than non-rapists.
This is a national calamity that is killing more people than a middle-sized war, and causing a huge amount of pain and grief. Yet few South Africans are even willing to talk about it.
Many Africans will be feeling very defensive at this point, but a lot of this reminds me of where I grew up. There was an amazing amount of low-level violence around — you saw it literally every day — and there was also a huge amount of sexual predation.
In the boys' school I went to, the male teachers molested the boarders on an industrial scale, although day-boys like me were fairly safe. And none of it was ever admitted or discussed in public.
Now I live in a culture where we are no longer prudes. Everything is out in the open, including trivialised, commercialised sex.
Around half of all marriages end in divorce, but gays, once persecuted and forced to hide, can also get married if they want to. You can still mugged in the street, but the level of casual violence — usually men beating up on women or kids — is sharply down. I bet that the real figures for rape are down a lot too.
I like the transformed culture I live in now a lot better — and it occurs to me that what we are seeing in Africa now may be as transitional as what I grew up with in Newfoundland.
In which case the moral and cultural changes that socially conservative Africans see as a descent into darkness may actually be a move towards the light.
Dyer is a UK-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
On Monday a Zambian court found journalist Chansa Kabwela not guilty of "distributing obscene material with intent to corrupt public morals."
What obscene material?
She had sent photographs of a woman giving birth in a hospital parking lot during a nurses' strike to senior government officials.
President Rupiah Banda called a press conference and declared the photographs "pornographic."
Soon after, Kabwela was arrested on obscenity charges. She faced a five-year jail sentence if she were found guilty — but Banda's real motive was probably the fact that the newspaper Kabwela works for, the Post, constantly accuses him of corruption.
The Post is probably right. Banda succeeded Levy Mwanawasa, a President of unquestioned integrity, after the latter died of a stroke last year.
But unlike Mwanawasa, he has failed to pursue the previous President, Frederick Chiluba, a monumentally corrupt man. An unsympathetic observer might wonder if some of Chiluba's stolen millions have bought Banda's complicity.
The Post wonders that out loud, so Banda went after its news editor, Kabwela. The pictures she sent out were not pornographic. Rather, they were horrific: images of a woman in the midst of a breech birth, the baby's legs dangling out between her own while its head was still inside her.
It all happened in a hospital parking lot (she had already been turned away from two clinics), but nobody would help her because of the strike, and the baby suffocated.
Her appalled and furious relatives brought pictures of the scene to the Post. Kabwela did not publish them because they were so upsetting, but she sent copies to senior officials together with a letter urging them to intervene and settle the strike. That's when Banda declared the images pornographic and had her arrested.
The courts are still independent in Zambia, and in the end Kabwela was found not guilty — but many of the witnesses were genuinely more shocked by photographs of a woman naked from the waist down than by the horror of what was actually happening.
As one witness said: "We are all Zambians here. We all know this is not allowed in our culture."
The word you're looking for is "prudish," and it applies to a lot of African popular culture.
Never mind what's actually happening. We don't want to hear about it, and we certainly don't want to see it. The Zambian elite has been devastated by HIV/Aids — the higher the social class, the worse the death rate — and yet nobody wants to talk about sex, let alone about the links between sex, power and violence.
Go a thousand kilometres (miles) south to South Africa, and the gulf between appearances and reality is even wider.
Last June the country's Medical Research Council published a study about rape and HIV which reported that 28 per cent of South African men admitted to having raped a woman or a girl. (A further 3 per cent said they had raped a man or boy.)
Almost half the rapists said they had raped more than one person, and three-quarters of them said they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20. They didn't use condoms, and they were twice as likely to be HIV-positive than non-rapists.
This is a national calamity that is killing more people than a middle-sized war, and causing a huge amount of pain and grief. Yet few South Africans are even willing to talk about it.
Many Africans will be feeling very defensive at this point, but a lot of this reminds me of where I grew up. There was an amazing amount of low-level violence around — you saw it literally every day — and there was also a huge amount of sexual predation.
In the boys' school I went to, the male teachers molested the boarders on an industrial scale, although day-boys like me were fairly safe. And none of it was ever admitted or discussed in public.
Now I live in a culture where we are no longer prudes. Everything is out in the open, including trivialised, commercialised sex.
Around half of all marriages end in divorce, but gays, once persecuted and forced to hide, can also get married if they want to. You can still mugged in the street, but the level of casual violence — usually men beating up on women or kids — is sharply down. I bet that the real figures for rape are down a lot too.
I like the transformed culture I live in now a lot better — and it occurs to me that what we are seeing in Africa now may be as transitional as what I grew up with in Newfoundland.
In which case the moral and cultural changes that socially conservative Africans see as a descent into darkness may actually be a move towards the light.
Dyer is a UK-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Jerry Okungu: Why Mo did not Give out his Prize - The Star
It is now official. This time round, no African former Head of State was good enough to earn Mo Ibrahim's annual prize bounty of US $ 5 million plus a lifetime cheque of another $ 200,000 a year, the most attractive prize anyone can earn in the world today.
Never mind that between 2007 and 2009, Africa has retired some of its highflying heads of state. Ghana's John Kufuor, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and South Africa's Thabo Mbeki were so central to African politics that any AU Summit without them was unthinkable.
More importantly, the G8 found it prudent to invite them to this exclusive club of the richest nations on earth.
They were hailed as the new visionaries of Africa when — together with Abdulahi Wade of Senegal and Abdelazziz Bouteflika of Algeria — they co-founded Nepad and APRM and sold the concepts as the panacea for solving Africa's infrastructure and governance problems.
It was difficult at that time to imagine that whatever they touched could go wrong. Mbeki hosted Nepad in South Africa and provided it with the legal infrastructure to operate as Obasanjo chaired its summits.
As years progressed, Abdulahi Wade fell by the wayside claiming that Nepad had abandoned the goals for which it was formed. He thought the AU was spending too much time and resources concentrating on governance issues at the expense of infrastructure development.
Like Muammar Gaddafi, he was keener on fast-tracking Africa's unification than going along with his colleagues on a gradual approach to Africa's integration.
For John Kufuor, he put his energy into making sure Ghana became the first African country to be reviewed under the African Peer Review Mechanism as early as 2005.
Once he succeeded, he used the platform to market his country as a model of democracy and good governance in Africa and Europe.
Kufuor basked in this glory for at least two years before Kenya and Rwanda joined the club of Africa's reviewed nations. And for their efforts, the three countries did a lot of work helping others that were waiting in line for the process.
For some reason, Obasanjo's Nigeria could not get its act together for review while he was in office. After so many false starts, Obasanjo was forced to quit without being reviewed following his attempt to amend his country's constitution to allow him to rule for a third term.
When Mbeki's South Africa was reviewed, it was a disaster of sorts. Official interference with the process forced the first scheduled report in January 2007 to be postponed at the last minute in Addis Ababa. This was after the acrimonious exchanges between Mbeki's administration, the civil society and the media.
On the day South Africa was to be reviewed, Mbeki was adamant that only Heads of State would sit in the hall. He forced the forum chairman to clear the house of all media, observers, UN staff and international development partners, very much unlike the case when Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda were reviewed.
He behaved that way because the media had exposed the flawed process that he intended to present at the summit.
For some reason, Abdelazziz Bouteflika's review went on without a hitch with glowing tributes.
Having said that, why did the Mo Ibrahim Panel of Experts conclude that none of the three top contenders, Kufuor, Mbeki or Obasanjo deserved to win?
There are many varied theories and the jury is still out there. However, Obasanjo's bid to extend his term and his rigging of the elections in favour of his preferred successor could have played a role in influencing the Mo Ibrahim jury against him.
Mbeki was thrown out of office prematurely after being accused of abuse of office.
Kufuor would have been the best option. Seemingly he had done well in good governance and even steered the transition successfully after the December 2008 elections.
However, his conduct and activities just before he left office confounded many of his believers.
Apparently he concluded lucrative deals on his personal retirement package that left Ghanaians baffled.
Now the talk in the streets of Accra and even in some Ghanaian embassies abroad is that the President "dished out" the suburbs and Central Business District of Accra to his friends, relatives and cronies.
With his private home renovated at approximately US $ 40million, it would have been difficult for Ghanaians to give him the kind of glorious send-off Tanzanians gave Mwalimu Nyerere in 1985.
Jerry Okungu is a media consultant.
Never mind that between 2007 and 2009, Africa has retired some of its highflying heads of state. Ghana's John Kufuor, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and South Africa's Thabo Mbeki were so central to African politics that any AU Summit without them was unthinkable.
More importantly, the G8 found it prudent to invite them to this exclusive club of the richest nations on earth.
They were hailed as the new visionaries of Africa when — together with Abdulahi Wade of Senegal and Abdelazziz Bouteflika of Algeria — they co-founded Nepad and APRM and sold the concepts as the panacea for solving Africa's infrastructure and governance problems.
It was difficult at that time to imagine that whatever they touched could go wrong. Mbeki hosted Nepad in South Africa and provided it with the legal infrastructure to operate as Obasanjo chaired its summits.
As years progressed, Abdulahi Wade fell by the wayside claiming that Nepad had abandoned the goals for which it was formed. He thought the AU was spending too much time and resources concentrating on governance issues at the expense of infrastructure development.
Like Muammar Gaddafi, he was keener on fast-tracking Africa's unification than going along with his colleagues on a gradual approach to Africa's integration.
For John Kufuor, he put his energy into making sure Ghana became the first African country to be reviewed under the African Peer Review Mechanism as early as 2005.
Once he succeeded, he used the platform to market his country as a model of democracy and good governance in Africa and Europe.
Kufuor basked in this glory for at least two years before Kenya and Rwanda joined the club of Africa's reviewed nations. And for their efforts, the three countries did a lot of work helping others that were waiting in line for the process.
For some reason, Obasanjo's Nigeria could not get its act together for review while he was in office. After so many false starts, Obasanjo was forced to quit without being reviewed following his attempt to amend his country's constitution to allow him to rule for a third term.
When Mbeki's South Africa was reviewed, it was a disaster of sorts. Official interference with the process forced the first scheduled report in January 2007 to be postponed at the last minute in Addis Ababa. This was after the acrimonious exchanges between Mbeki's administration, the civil society and the media.
On the day South Africa was to be reviewed, Mbeki was adamant that only Heads of State would sit in the hall. He forced the forum chairman to clear the house of all media, observers, UN staff and international development partners, very much unlike the case when Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda were reviewed.
He behaved that way because the media had exposed the flawed process that he intended to present at the summit.
For some reason, Abdelazziz Bouteflika's review went on without a hitch with glowing tributes.
Having said that, why did the Mo Ibrahim Panel of Experts conclude that none of the three top contenders, Kufuor, Mbeki or Obasanjo deserved to win?
There are many varied theories and the jury is still out there. However, Obasanjo's bid to extend his term and his rigging of the elections in favour of his preferred successor could have played a role in influencing the Mo Ibrahim jury against him.
Mbeki was thrown out of office prematurely after being accused of abuse of office.
Kufuor would have been the best option. Seemingly he had done well in good governance and even steered the transition successfully after the December 2008 elections.
However, his conduct and activities just before he left office confounded many of his believers.
Apparently he concluded lucrative deals on his personal retirement package that left Ghanaians baffled.
Now the talk in the streets of Accra and even in some Ghanaian embassies abroad is that the President "dished out" the suburbs and Central Business District of Accra to his friends, relatives and cronies.
With his private home renovated at approximately US $ 40million, it would have been difficult for Ghanaians to give him the kind of glorious send-off Tanzanians gave Mwalimu Nyerere in 1985.
Jerry Okungu is a media consultant.