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The War against Women in Africa

2008-02-20

Ann Jones

Ann Jones looks at the various ways in which the war against women continues long after the peace deals have been signed

INTRODUCTION

Greetings from a war zone that's not Iraq. And not Afghanistan either. I'm checking in from West Africa, where I've been working with women in three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire. The Iraq debacle has monopolized attention and obscured these "lesser" wars -- now officially "over" -- but millions of West African women are struggling to recover. For them, the war isn't really over at all, not by a long shot. This is the war story that's never truly told. Let me explain.

Liberia's war came in three successive waves lasting 14 years altogether, from 1989 to 2003. Sierra Leone's war started in 1991 when guerillas of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, trained in Liberia, invaded their own country. The war drew many players and lasted until January 2002, a decade in all. In Côte d'Ivoire, a civil war started in 2002 when northern rebels attempted a coup to oust President Laurent Gbagbo, but by that time the international community had decided to act to prevent any further destabilization of the region. French, African, and later UN peacekeepers stepped in and a treaty was signed in 2003.

Officially, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire are now designated "post-conflict zones," but they are so fractured, so traumatized, and -- especially in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone -- so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said to be securely at peace either. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as the poorest country on the planet and, like Afghanistan, it is a nation of widows. Visit one of these countries and you'll see for yourself that, at best, real peace will take a long, slow time to come. The destruction in Sierra Leone's Kailahun District, for instance, is as shocking as anything I ever saw in the devastated Afghan capital, Kabul. UN officials and an array of international aid organizations like to use the term "post-conflict" for such places in such moments. It sounds vaguely hopeful, even if it designates a desperate place embarked on a difficult period of "recovery" that may or may not be recognizable after a decade or two, or even a generation or two, as peace.

Just last month, the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague resumed proceedings begun last June against Charles Taylor, the charming American-educated sociopath and former president of Liberia. Taylor faces 11 charges for war crimes related to matters including terrorizing civilians, murder, rape, sexual slavery, amputations, and enslavement. These atrocities were committed not against his own country but against his neighbor. It was Taylor who backed RUF rebels as they terrorized the populace and augmented their numbers by abducting civilians.

Both Taylor and RUF leader Foday Sankoh reportedly received tactical training in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, who aimed to disrupt the West African region. Yet these wars were largely not about ideology or even politics. They were about greed, about the power to control and exploit the natural resources of the region -- Liberia's primal rain forests and especially Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds." Political scientists and military historians may eventually advance other theories to explain these wars -- though they'll be hard pressed to find any redeeming features, any "just cause" -- but West Africans will tell you that they took place simply because a few "bad, bad men" craved power and wealth. When Foday Sankoh's RUF forces invaded Sierra Leone, they numbered no more than 150 men, but what they started laid waste to a promising country.


Here's what I want to remind you of, though: When you think about these men who start wars, remember what they've done not to soldiers on either side, but to civilian populations -- especially to women. Today, it is civilians who are by far the most numerous casualties of war. Each successive conflict of recent times has recorded a greater proportion of civilians displaced, exiled, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed, killed, or disappeared. In every modern war, most of the suffering civilians are women and children.

In many wars, maimed and dead civilians are counted (if at all) merely as "collateral damage" -- like the estimated 3,000 innocent citizens who died in the initial American bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. In the West African wars, civilians became the designated targets. Foday Sankoh intended to conquer Sierra Leone, but having only 150 fighters, he resorted to forcible recruitment. Like Charles Taylor's forces in Liberia, Sankoh's destroyed whole villages, murdering most of the residents and taking away only those who might serve them as soldiers, porters, cooks, or "wives." Again, many of the dead and most of the abducted were women and children.


And here's a little-known reality: When any conflict of this sort officially ends, violence against women continues and often actually grows worse. Not surprisingly, murderous aggression cannot be turned off overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be convenient targets. Here in West Africa, as in so many other places where rape was used as a weapon of war, it has become a habit carried seamlessly into the "post-conflict" era. Where normal structures of law enforcement and justice have been disabled by war, male soldiers and civilians alike can prey upon women and children with impunity. And they do.

So I'm writing to you, here in "post-conflict" West Africa, from an active war zone. I'm writing from the heart of the war against women and children.

COUNTING CASUALTIES

Listen to this report from Amnesty International. It describes the least of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Côte d'Ivoire:

"The scale of rape and sexual violence in Côte d'Ivoire in the course of the armed conflict has been largely underestimated. Many women have been gang-raped or have been abducted and reduced to sexual slavery by fighters. Rape has often been accompanied by the beating or torture (including torture of a sexual nature) of the victim... All armed factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence with impunity."

Human Rights Watch points out that "cases of sexual abuse may be significantly underreported," because women fear "the possibility of reprisals by perpetrators... ostracism by families and communities, and cultural taboos."

The Amnesty report documents case after case of girls and women, aged "under 12" to 63, assaulted by armed men. The more recent and thoroughgoing report by Human Rights Watch records the rape of children as young as three years-old. During the civil war, women and girls were seized in their village homes or at military roadblocks, or were discovered hiding in the bush. Some were raped in public. Some were raped in front of their husbands and children. Some were forced to witness the murder of husbands or parents. Then they were taken away to soldiers' camps to be held along with many other women. They were forced to cook for the soldiers during the day and every night they were gang-raped, in some cases by 30 to 40 men. They were also beaten and tortured. They saw women who resisted being beaten or killed by a simple slicing of the throat.

Many women were raped so incessantly and so brutally -- with sticks, knives, gun barrels, burning coals -- that they died. Many others were left with injuries and pain that still linger long after the war. Many who had been scarred as girls by "excision" or FMG (female genital mutilation) were literally ripped apart.

The Amnesty report coolly says: "The brutality of rape frequently causes serious physical injuries that require long-term and complex treatment including uterine prolapses (the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond)" -- one has to wonder what lies "beyond" the vagina -- "vesico-vaginal or recto-vaginal fistulas and other injuries to the reproductive system or rectum, often accompanied by internal and external bleeding or discharge." It notes that such women usually can't "access the medical care they need." Some still find it hard to sit down, or stand up, or walk. Some still spit up blood. Some have lost their eyesight or their memories. Some miscarried. Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. No one knows how many of them died, or are dying, as a result.

And many are still missing, perhaps dragged across borders when rogue militias from a neighboring country went home. Perhaps slaughtered along the way.

WAR AND ITS SEQUEL

Historically, women have long been counted among "the spoils of war," free for the taking; but, in our own time, women in large numbers have also been pawns in deliberate military and political strategies intended to humiliate the men to whom they "belong" and to exterminate their ethnic groups. (Think of Bosnia.) The Amnesty report traces the wholesale violence against women in Côte d'Ivoire to December 2000 when a number of women were arrested, raped, and tortured at the government's Police Training School in Dioula -- because their presumed ethnicity and political affiliation allied them with the opposition. According to Human Rights Watch, this was but one of many such cases incited by government-sponsored propaganda before the civil war even began.

No man responsible for any of these crimes has ever been brought to justice.

Next door in Liberia, by the time fighting ended in 2002, 1.4 million Liberians had been displaced within the country. Almost a million others had fled. In a country of three million people, that's one in three citizens gone. At least 270,000 people died. That's nearly 10% of the population. And here again the easy targets were women. A World Health Organization study in 2005 estimated that a staggering 90% of Liberian women had suffered physical or sexual violence; three out of four had been raped.

Typically, ending the war did not end the violence against women. A study in preparation by the International Rescue Committee -- the organization for which I currently work as a volunteer -- and Columbia University's School of Public Health concludes, "While the war officially ended in 2003, the war on women continued."

Well over half the women interviewed in two Liberian counties, including the capital city, Monrovia, had survived at least one violent physical attack during an 18- month period in 2006-2007, years after the conflict had officially ended. Well over half the women reported at least one violent sexual assault in the same period. Seventy-two percent said their husbands had forced them to have sex against their will. A 2003 IRC study among Liberian refugees in Sierra Leone found that 75% of the women had been sexually violated before they fled their country; after they fled, 55% were sexually assaulted again.

WOMEN LIKE ME

Countless women will never recover from the assaults they suffered during the war. I met many such women in Liberia.

On a visit I made to Kolahun, in Lofa County, where fighting had been heavy, one showed me her scars: a series of parallel horizontal ridges starting just below one ear and moving toward the throat. Some guerilla in Charles Taylor's army had locked this whisper of a woman against his chest and slowly, inch by inch, laid open the flesh of her neck in ribbons of blood. But that wasn't all. Taylor's men had broken all the fingers of her left hand so that they now point backwards at seemingly impossible angles. They slammed her back so forcefully with rifle butts that one leg and one arm (the one with the useless hand) are now paralyzed. She can still walk, leaning on a homemade wooden crutch; but that leaves her without a good arm, and she can't carry anything on her head, having lost the ability to balance. She has five children, some of them fathered by rape. The soldiers held her a long time. How many raped her she cannot say.

In the tiny village of Dougoumai I met a woman people refer to only as "the sick lady." She lay on a bed in a one-room mud-brick house. As I came in, she managed to sit up with great difficulty, using her twisted hands to move her swollen, useless legs. Her sister says she was captured by a militia fighting against Charles Taylor and gang-raped repeatedly by ten men. Nobody can say how long they kept her. They rammed their gun butts into her back -- evidently a common technique -- paralyzing her legs. She cannot walk. They smashed her hands. She cannot hold anything or feed herself or comb her hair. Her mother and two sisters, who luckily survived the war, feed her by hand, their lives too now dominated by the consequences of the violence done to this woman.

Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) surveyed surviving women in Lofa County, the center of Charles Taylor's operations. More than 98% said that, during his war (1999-2003), they lost their homes; more than 90%, their livelihoods; more than 72%, at least one family member. Nearly 90% of them survived at least one violent physical assault; more than half, at least one violent sexual assault. No one inquired about the number of women now caring for the permanently disabled.

In Sierra Leone, where terrorizing the civilian population was the main tactic of war, the violence against women and children was, as Human Rights Watch has reported, even more brutal. All parties to the conflict committed countless atrocities. Official reports document appalling crimes: fathers forced to rape their own daughters; brothers forced to rape their sisters; boy soldiers gang-raping old women, then chopping off their arms; pregnant women eviscerated alive and the living fetus snatched from the womb to satisfy soldiers betting on its sex. A brother is hacked to death and eviscerated; his heart and liver are placed in the hands of his 18-year-old sister who is commanded to eat them. She refuses. She is taken to a place where other women are being held. Among them is her sister. She sees her sister and other women murdered. Their heads are placed in her lap. These crimes, which violate primal taboos, aim to destroy not just individual victims but a whole culture as well; yet the individual victims are important in their own right, and in most cases they are women and children.

Perhaps the worst crime of the bad, bad men has been turning children -- mostly boys -- into armed guerillas as bad as themselves. In his bestselling autobiography A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah vividly describes his life as a boy soldier. Separated from his family by the war, he was captured by soldiers in the army of Sierra Leone, trained to fight, kept high on drugs (as all soldiers were), and forced to kill. When boy soldiers begin to rape and murder girls and women willingly at the instigation of men, civilization has collapsed.

CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN

In recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group -- Albanians, let's say, or Tutsis -- or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we could recognize what goes on as a kind of "gender cleansing" or mass femicide. But we don't speak of crimes against women in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of "crimes against women" at all?

Interviewed for a TV documentary on mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a smiling guerrilla says he's "made love" to many women. The interviewer asks if all the women were willing, and he laughs. He admits that many fight him, and he says -- still grinning -- "If they are strong, I call my friends to help me." Despite his use of euphemisms, he knows just what he's doing. When the interviewer labels his love-making "rape," he typically insists that rape happens in wartime and that when the war is over, he won't do it anymore. The state of war excuses men's crimes against women because rape -- so the claim goes -- is something that just naturally occurs in war.

The war against women in West Africa and elsewhere is different from other wars -- whether driven by ideology, politics, greed, or personal ambition -- in that every faction, every side, makes war on women. They all abduct and rape and force women to labor. They all murder women. In West Africa, only the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) in Sierra Leone refrained for a considerable time from rape. They were traditional hunters, recruited by the government to defend their own areas from the rebels. Their customs kept them from sexual intercourse, believed to deplete a warrior's power, and they operated close to home, where they were known; but, as the war went on, they, too, began to act like all the other fighters. Their initial restraint was important, however, offering evidence that rape does not have to be something that "just happens" in war, but is instead an elective, wildly popular choice.

After war, in the "post-conflict" era, even some international peacekeepers have joined the war against women. Human Rights Watch and others have documented cases of rape by peacekeeping soldiers in West Africa, but none have been prosecuted. Perpetrators are simply repatriated or moved to a new post. Human Rights Watch also reports on the widespread practice among peacekeepers of using children who have turned to prostitution to survive. (There are few other options for girls who have been orphaned or rejected by their families, and many of these child prostitutes had already been used as sex slaves during wartime.) But apparently the peacekeepers recruit many girls themselves.

Here in Kailahun District, the place where the Sierra Leone war started and ended, women are upset and angry about the sexual exploitation of their adolescent daughters. Parents in this part of the country -- many of them war widows -- take seriously the advice to send their daughters to school, which costs more than most can easily afford. If a girl student becomes pregnant, she is required by law to drop out. (Consider the impact on a small village struggling to recover from war of the loss of even a few prospective teachers, nurses, or social workers.) If the father of the expected child is a fellow student, he can continue his studies, denying all responsibility. Often, however, it's not the boys who are to blame. Many still-virginal girls drop out of school early to escape predatory teachers, and women report that the incidence of teen pregnancy drops when peacekeeping forces leave town.

Even then, however, rape and child rape continue, largely unabated. It's hard to tell with certainty just how high this is, because raped women and girls are normally too shamed by the crime to report it. In war time, it was somewhat easier because they had so clearly been forced by armed men; with the war "over," rape once again becomes a woman's own fault. Nonetheless, angry parents in this region of Sierra Leone, increasingly report child rape to authorities. Here in Kailahun District, women mobilized to force the local magistrate to hear the case of a 7-year-old rape victim. The magistrate, apparently related to the admitted perpetrator, had prevented prosecution by postponing his trial, again and again.

Domestic violence -- wife-beating, marital rape, emotional abuse, torture, economic deprivation, and the like -- is common. Impoverished women with many children to feed have no choice but to endure "normal" levels of violence. But as in wartime, habitual violence invites the thrill of excess. Just the other day, a man in Moyamba District killed his wife and cut off her head.

BAD MEN MAKE GOOD

For bad, bad men, terrorizing civilians holds advantages -- beyond the immediate gratification of the rush of power. Such acts can land them important posts in government. When atrocities become sufficiently conspicuous and horrific -- such as the notorious amputations of arms and legs in Sierra Leone -- the international community steps in to initiate a peace process. Usually they bring to the negotiating table all the bad, bad men who have been causing so much trouble and buy them off with positions of power in a new "interim" or "transitional" government. Witness, in another part of the world where women are notoriously badly treated, all those well-known warlords the Afghan people wanted tried for war crimes who somehow wound up in President Hamid Karzai's cabinet, or -- after elections advertised as democratic -- in parliament.

Foday Sankoh had been condemned to death for treason when he was summoned to just such peace negotiations. From them, he emerged as the head of the government commission in charge of managing Sierra Leone's natural resources, including the diamonds that financed his war. Charles Taylor, while committing mayhem and rape in refugee camps for displaced persons, was elected president of Liberia. Voters seemed to figure, as battered women often do, that the best way to stop the man's violence was to let him have his way, though this is a path to certain disaster.

Bad, bad men are quick to learn from the rapid advancement of their brothers elsewhere. Laurent Kunda in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), widely recognized as a prime candidate for trial before a war crimes tribunal, is now said to be jockeying for a high position in the government of the DRC in exchange for laying down his arms. The current rapid descent of Kenya into "tribal warfare" owes much to the same theory. Raila Odingo, having lost a clearly suspect presidential election, exploits genocidal violence with good reason to hope that international intervention will usher him into office by the back door.

Although UN Security Council Resolution 1325 calls for women to be included in all peace processes, they are rarely invited to the table. With men in charge of governments almost everywhere, the fearful fascination with bad, bad men continues and the perverse preference for predators trickles down. In Sierra Leone, ex-combatants were rewarded with motorcycles. The theory was that violent young men would be less dangerous if they could serve a useful purpose and make some money carrying passengers on brand new highly-chromed bikes in a country where most cars had been torched. The result? Every public square in the dodgiest districts of Sierra Leone is now dominated by a motorcycle gang consisting mainly of young men already surely skilled in the sexual exploitation of girls. Perhaps in the end, the transport scheme will work out; but in Sierra Leone most women and girls still walk.

Here in Kailahun District, women tell the story -- possibly apocryphal -- of an old woman who was huddled over her cook fire when RUF rebels entered her village. She was frying some tasty frogs. Rebels surrounded her, peering into the pot to see what she was cooking, and one of them said: "We are freedom fighters of the Revolutionary United Front. We have come to save you from the government." The old woman -- unafraid -- replied: "Then you must go to the capital. The government is not in my pot." Women in Kailahun District tell that story over and over, and they laugh every time. They are so proud of that lone, bold, old woman who told those rebel men off. That's the spirit of survival, still alive in them, though they must know that the rebels probably shot the woman and ate her frogs.

*Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on a special project for their Gender-Based Violence unit called "A Global Crescendo: Women's Voices from Conflict Zones." Her blogs about the project can be found here http://www.theirc.org This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute.

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

***Note on sources: A number of the reports discussed in this piece, all PDF files, can be read on-line: Amnesty International, "Targeting Women"; Human Rights Watch, "'My Heart Is Cut': Sexual Violence by Rebels and Pro-Government Forces in Côte d'Ivoire; The World Health Organization; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the UN Fund for Population Activities, "Women's Reproductive Health in Liberia, The Lofa County Reproductive Health Survey"; Human Rights Watch, "'We'll Kill You If You Cry': Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict"; UN Resolution 1325.]

Is Zimbabwe's Simba Makoni old wine in a new bottle?

2008-02-26

Sehlare Makgetlaneng

Former finance minister and member of the Zanu PF politburo, Simba Makoni is challenging Robert Mugabe later this month for the leadership of Zimbabwe. Sehlare Makgetlanen tackles the question of whether he represents a break from the past or more of the same.

Zimbabwe under the leadership of Mugabe is facing fundamental governance, democracy and development challenges. It has failed to ‘‘legitimately exercise power and authority over the control and management of the country’s affairs in the interest of the people and in accordance with the principles of justice, equity, accountability and transparency.” Mugabe has prevented some members of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) from expressing their governance, democracy and development policy preferences through democratic means to be the president of ZANU-PF and the country. He regards himself as the only leading judge of what best serves the national interests of Zimbabwe which include governance, democracy and development demands, needs and interests of the country and its people.

Mugabe has threatened to be the stumbling block for ZANU-PF to win free and fair elections and for the resolution of Zimbabwe’s governance, democracy and development problems. Processes and issues leading to true national self-determination should not be left into the hands of one leader irrespective of the unquestionable content of his or her commitment to the liberation cause and that the political leadership including the leadership in the political administration of the society is the collective process in which no individual is indispensable. He has in the process mobilised some members of ZANU-PF to implement their decision to use their strength and resources in challenging him not only as the president of the party but also as the president of the country. Those theirs is hostility to the new leadership of the party and the country as required by the present situation – the struggle fought for under the pretext of defending the unity of the party – must be democratically fought against. It is not in the interest of the country and its people in defending the unity of the party if its president is against the popular national interests – the governance, democracy and development demands, needs and interests of the country and its people.

Whether they will use this development to have collective leadership and the democratic means capable of adequately appropriating Zimbabwe’s problems for their confrontation and resolution remains to be seen. These problems have intensified. This development led Simba Makoni to challenge Mugabe in the 29 March 2008 presidential elections. What is the present state of Zimbabwe’s national situation? “The Zimbabwe of today,” according to Makoni at the launch of his election manifesto in Harare on 13 February 2008, “is a nation full of fear, a nation in deep stress, a tense and polarised nation, a nation also characterised by disease and extreme poverty.” It is a nation in which “immediate and urgent tasks to resolve the food, power and fuel, water and sanitation problems, resolve health and educational services” should be undertaken.

Highlighting the gravity of Zimbabwe’s socio-political and economic situation, Makoni in his 5 February 2008 announcement that he would challenge Mugabe in the 29 March 2008 presidential elections as candidate pointed out that he shares “the agony and anguish of all citizens over the extreme hardships we have all endured for nearly 10 years.” Admitting the role played by the national leaders on the development of the national situation, he told reporters that he also shares “the widely held view that these hardships are a result of failure of national leadership and that change at that level is a prerequisite for change at other levels of national endeavour.” He was denied opportunity to a “renewal of the leadership in the ZANU-PF and country” to end economic crisis and “national despair.” It is for this reason, among others, that what he is “offering is the chance for hope” to rid Zimbabwe of fear and poverty. The point is that “we believe that solving these problems will not be intractable, once we remove the barriers and impediments that bar the expression and pursuit of our common interest and common purpose.” If elected, he promises that he would “address national issues that separate and divide us as a nation and institute a process of national healing and reconciliation.” Having been expelled from ZANU-PF, he is standing as an independent presidential candidate in the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 29 March 2008. He calls upon Zimbabweans particularly members of the party to join him in his struggle to prevent Mugabe from winning a sixth term in office. “I particularly invite those compatriots who have been pushed into despair and despondency, but have the qualities of leadership, to please enter the race. I also invite those in ZANU-PF who share our yearning for renewal to contest the election as independent candidates under our banner.” He is contesting elections under the banner of the movement called Dawn (Mavambo/Kusile), whose logo features a rising sun. “The time for decision has come. Jump off the fence, climb out of the false comfort zones.” Contrary to Makoni’s position, members of the ruling alliance are not in “the false comfort zones.” Theirs are structures of wealth and privileges.

There is essentially nothing new Makoni has pointed out since announcing his decision to challenge Mugabe in the elections. He has repeated statements opposition political parties and their critics have been saying about the country’s problems and how to resolve them. On the atrocious abuse of power and public resources and use of violent measures to deal with dissent and opposition including within the ruling party, he maintains: “Zimbabweans are experiencing stress and tension because of the siege mentality in the state, with the state resorting to violence to suppress dissent, a lack of respect for the law and gross abuse of state resources.” He continues: “National institutions have been corrupted, privatised and politicised. We are seeing a scourge of the politics of patronage and gross abuse of power and a culture of chiefdom.” He has served as a senior participant in creating and sustaining this democracy practice. He continues stating what has been attributed not only to the ruling party, but also to two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “There is lack of a national vision and agenda on the basis which all Zimbabweans could be mobilised for national reconciliation and revival.” What is his vision and agenda on the basis which Zimbabweans could be mobilised to serve as social agents for development and progress of their country is the strategic question which he has so far failed to answer. Predicting a landslide victory in the elections, he is basing his campaign platform on the revival of the economy and the restoration of political freedoms and property rights. He claims that this strategy will “restore our people’s independence, dignity and confidence.” This strategy will continue, if he wins elections, in managing the inequality of power relations between the rulers and the ruled of the country.

As it happened in the past, members of ZANU-PF were denied their democratic rights and opportunity to fight for nomination during its December 2007 congress so as to stand as the party’s candidate in the 29 March 2008 presidential elections. It endorsed Mugabe as its sole candidate. This decision ensured that he should not be challenged within the ruling party in his attempt to be re-elected as the president of the country. Makoni was defying this decision in announcing that he would challenge him as the ruling party’s candidate in the elections. He maintains that at the December 2007 congress, some party members including himself were prevented from seeking nomination as its presidential candidate. In his words: “I would have very much wished to stand as (ZANU-PF) official candidate. Unfortunately, as we all know, that opportunity was denied to other cadre who would have offered themselves to serve the party and country.”

While Makoni’s announcement is viewed by some individuals as a substantial and welcome addition in the arsenal against Mugabe, the MDC faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai and civil society organisations aligned to it regard him as the ruling party agent deployed to divide the opposition vote in the elections. Tsvangirai dismissed him as “nothing more than old wine in a new bottle.” Lovemore Madhuku was more harsh and brutal. He dismissed him as the part of the ZANU-PF-state institutional machinery and its project guilty of many years of its rule. As usual, the ruling party viewed him as the traitor and agent of imperialist interests. Questions are raised as to whether he is honest and sincere in his declared challenge to Mugabe. Is he the intelligence project by supporters of Mugabe designed to identify senior members of the ruling party who are Mugabe’s opponents he maintains support his campaign? Some are of the view that his aim is to split the opposition vote – most importantly urban voters who have supported the MDC in the previous elections.

Why did Makoni decide to challenge Mugabe? At what time did he seriously convince himself that he should summon his courage to challenge Mugabe? Why did he announce his decision so late? Is it because his wish to be the ruling party’s official candidate was rejected? Was he forced to make his decision? If he was forced, who forced him, for what strategic and tactical reasons? The announcement of his decision raises the key question as to whether he is a shrewd politician capable of effectively challenging Mugabe. What are his strategy and tactics to win elections and to effect the democratic transformation of the state and society? Is his campaign individual or collective effort? Can the majority of Zimbabweans regard it as their proud national product? Who within the ruling party are supporting his campaign? Have they participated in the creation and sustenance of the current situation? Are they now convinced that Mugabe is threatening their interests and therefore he should be replaced as the country’s president for their interests to continue being protected? Why they have not publicly articulated what they stand for – particularly how and for what strategic and tactical ends Zimbabwe should be governed? He initially stated that he was standing as an independent presidential candidate within the ruling party challenging Mugabe. He refused, given his loyalty to the party, to end his relationship with it. He was embracing leaderless illusion that the party will not end its relationship with him. As the party correctly pointed out, he expelled himself from it by making his announcement. He continues, after expulsion from the party, refusing to provide a critical analysis of the party and how it ruled the society and articulating this to Zimbabweans so as to with their support for him to solve problems they have been facing as he claims to be his key reason why he decided to contest elections. He continues refusing also to use opportunity to substantiate in practice that he is independent from the ruling party.

Makoni has so far failed to provide failed to provide alternative vision and agenda of the future Zimbabwe to that offered by ZANU-PF and two MDC factions. Despite acute problems confronted by the masses on the daily basis, his strategy and tactics have failed to meet their demands and needs. The consequence is that they do not recognise them as expressions of their own experience. Briefly, they failed to capture their imaginations. Is he for the authentic national popular democratisation of the society and the state for the masses of the Zimbabwean people to be the main authority in achieving, maintaining and expanding their interests? Unless the power to determine the form and content as well as the timetable of the change is in the hands of the masses of the people through the leadership of those who have surrendered their being their representatives to their cause, unilateral declaration of independence of leaders from the people will always be the negation of the popular principle, “we are our own liberators.”

The strategic tasks confronting the masses of Zimbabweans are political. Who should be their national president and why? How should be their national problems be resolved? What should be the nature of the future Zimbabwe’s relations with its regional and continental African countries and the rest of the world particularly developed countries? How best and effectively to improve the material conditions of the millions of Zimbabweans? These are some of the questions which should be answered to the satisfaction of the majority of Zimbabweans.

*Sehlare Makgetlaneng is the head of Southern African and SADC Desk at the Africa Institute of South Africa.

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

Education Commercialization in Nigeria: Continuation Of The Ruinous Past

2008-02-20

Kola Ibrahim

Kola Ibrahim argues that unless the Nigerian students and workers take on the government and make it rescind its commercialization of education, it will be become exclusive to rich.

For those who still nurse the illusion that the present Yar'Adua's government will be different from the past should be having a rethink as the current capitalist government is bent on continuing the neo-liberal economic policies of the past especially as it concerns the education sector. Just few weeks ago, the minister of education, Igwe Ajah Nwachukwu was quoted in two forums reiterating the government's decision to hike fees in all Nigerian universities. The new policy will see already impoverished students coughing out tens of thousands in a country where over sixty percent are officially recognized as living in penury; and where government find it a onerous task to pay N11, 000 minimum wage for workers.

This new policy is to say the least anti-poor and incoherent. It is anti-poor because it will definitely deny thousands of youth access to university education while placing the burden of funding education on parents and students many of whom are from poor working class, peasant and wounded middle class background. It is incoherent because it failed to justify the logic of government’s so-called increased budgetary allocation. If the federal government claimed to have increased budgetary allocation - which in the real sense is a ruse - why then is the need to further place burden of education funding on poor parents and students since the increased (?) budgetary allocation is meant to, at least, lessen the burden of parents and students, and to improve standard. The new regime of fees to be introduced could hardly resolve a single of the problems confronting the education sector. The hypocrisy of the government is further shown by the fact that no public probe has been made into billions being squeezed out of the pockets of parents and students, and the huge billions being budgeted for education yearly but looted through crooked means making most of the facilities in our schools at all levels continue to rot despite increased charges.

The real reason why the government cannot undertake a serious and holistic probe of the education fund is because the budget itself, drawn up in the boardrooms of IMF/World Bank officials are built on the sandy foundation of neo-liberalism which means acute cut in social spending vis-à-vis education, health, etc and concentration on policies that will enhance the profit of the business community and the international moneybags in Nigeria, that is through budgetary allocation for bailing out big private businesses – who have been engaging in rapacious exploitation of the resources of the country especially the human labour – after they might have run into competition crisis. The rest of the budget is used to invite the foreign experts through consultancy projects that have little on no impacts on the lives of ordinary Nigerian. This is why a huge chunk of the education budget is allocated to seminars and lectures on issues such as AIDS/HIV when in actual facts many young ladies are taking to prostitution as a result of the failed education sector.

As against the so-called much lauded thirteen percent of the budget being allocated to education, the real education budget is less than 8.8 percent. The thirteen percent that has received unprecedented applause from our "respected" public analysts and the media is only for the recurrent/over head cost which does not cover the developmental projects such as expansion of facilities. To further show the hypocrisy of this government, the 13 percent does not include increase salaries especially for teachers (majority of whom are living in abject poverty), reduction in fees paid by poor students, etc. already the university lecturers are already bemoaning the stagnation in university special grants. In the real sense, the increase in recurrent budget is meant for consultancy service. Even, the highly anti-poor Obasanjo government budgeted about 11 percent for education at its inception. The capital budget that could have expanded the facilities in schools received little or no increase.

Therefore, the budget is a continuation of the old ruinous policy of cut in education budget in a bid to maintain fiscal balance for non-existent investors. Coupled with this is the continuous commercialization of education especially in order to lay the basis for its total privatization which has been achieved in the primary education sub-sector. Is it not instructive that all governments, especially state and federal government have laid the basis for private takeover of secondary schools as this sub-sector has witness unprecedented rot with mushrooms of private secondary schools – mostly owned by public officials and their acolytes –growing of the rot. In the University sub-sector, the same process is going on with public universities being under funded while private ones charging hundreds of thousands continue to increase. The new agenda is to commercialize public education to a point where public education will be totally unattractive to the people and thus lay the basis for their eventual privatization. This is what is being planned for the Law Schools and the Unity Schools. While the law school fees was hiked 100 percent to N230,000, which has denied hundreds of law students access to this year's law school programme, new generations of students are not allowed into the unity schools so as to justify their rottenness and thus eventual privatization. Already less than ten percent of university-aged youth are currently in schools or have graduated. Nigerian resources if judiciously used could fund free and qualitative education but the neo-liberal, pro-rich, anti-poor market-oriented policies which subsequent Nigerian governments have committed themselves to will not allow this.

Between 1999 and now, Nigeria has accrued nothing less than over N10 trillion naira with practically nothing to show for it than opulence for the few. This money is enough to lay the basis for massive development of the country economically and politically but the neo-liberal ideology teaches Nigerian leaders to subject provision of social service such as functional education, affordable healthcare, massive transportation development (road, rail, water), job creation, food and energy supply, etc to market forces, that is the law of the survival of the fittest which gives the service to the highest bidder. These policies have meant that it is the rich that will be buying up the country’s resources at token while majority will not be able to afford the huge cost needed to access social service. This is in addition to the mindless looting of the nation’s wealth by the unproductive Nigerian ruling class and their private collaborators, both local and foreign which itself is facilitated by the market idea that deify the ruthless private sector. All societies that have developed does so based on government massive intervention in the provision of basic facilities for the industrialization of the country including social services. Even the much glorified Asian Tigers were massively supported by the US as a counterweight against the fast developing ‘communist’ China. Also in Nigeria, the little development, universities, research institutes, health institutions, road and rail constructions, etc that we have had was products of the massive investment in developmental projects by past governments of the 1970’s and ‘80’s. in fact, introduction of top up fees contributed to the early and inglorious exit of Tony Blair in Britain.

Unless the NIGERIAN students and workers are ready to take on this government and make it rescind its anti-students education commercialization, education will be made the exclusive preserve of the rich. It is unfortunate that no students' union or NANS structure in the country has taken any step to stop this policy not even on the law school fee hike, yet students' unions are being destroyed in preparation by university administrators for the introduction of this policy while various state governments have already begun the process, for instance Lautech (N6,000 to N40,000), UniOSun (Between N160,000 to N300,000), Tai Solarin University (N50,000), etc. Crisis are already brewing in many campuses where education are being or are going to be commercialized – UniAbuja, ABU, OAU. Those institutions which have destroyed students’ unionism such as UI and UNILAG have turned the campuses to ghost of themselves with students being in serious insecurity and living under unfavourable living and studying conditions with no students' body to agitate for them.

It is funny that a government that wants to create an industrialized economy by 2020 is not ready to dedicate not even 20 percent of its budget to education when UNESCO prescribed 26percent for a developing economy. It is unfortunate that many students' unions have turned themselves to the extension of their various managements. Notwithstanding this, students across the country must pressure their local students’ union leaderships and NANS leaders to declare “days of actions” to include press campaign, rallies, lecture boycott, protest marches to demand for proper funding of education by at least 26 percent of the budget as prescribed by UNESCO for developing economies coupled with DEMOCRATIC running of the education sector to include education workers’ unions and students' movements. If the NANS leadership fails, genuine radical students’ unions and organizations must build a radical pan-Nigerian students’ platform to lead this campaign. They must reach out to workers’ movements and link their demands with that of other oppressed strata in Nigeria as a basis of building supports.

The current ruling class is ready to defend its class interest through neo-liberalism, unless the workers, students, peasants and the oppressed through their organizations such as NLC and TUC, students’ unions, ASUU, market men and women organizations, community movements, etc must resist this by fighting for their own class interests through the struggle for an egalitarian society which can only be achieved through nationalization of the commanding height of the Nigerian economy under the democratic control of the working and toiling people themselves. This raises the need for a radical, socialist-oriented, working people’s political party that will fight for powering order to enthrone the working people’s government which will develop the vast resources of the country.

*Kola Ibrahim Activist from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife Member, Education Rights Campaign (ERC).

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

Ethnicity: Releasing Africa’s “Suppressed Rage”

2008-02-20

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong argues that the key challenge for African leaders to work with states created by Europe in a way that they are able to appropriate the various ethnic groups’ histories and traditional values that form their nation-states, for peace and progress.

"We have met the enemy and he is us," Pogo

The December, 2007 presidential elections troubles in Kenya that saw over 1,000 people killed reveals the unresolved “rage” of Africa’s ethnicity, as the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad will tell you in his famous “suppressed rage” phrase that fits some of Africa’s deadly ethnic conflicts. Despite attracting charges of racism and paternalism in the “Heart of Darkness,” Conrad’s observation of Africa mired in something primal and savage may be as relevant as practicable in certain ways as some African ethnic conflicts and bad governments show.

Some of the ethnic conflicts and some of the bad governments tell Africans that the central issue of genuine consolidation of their nation-states isn’t well formed and that it isn’t whether the African nation-states weren’t created by Africans or in the ensuing creation by the Europeans some ethnic groups are thought to be incompatible as some Nigerians will tell you of some of the 250 ethnic groups that form their country. The key challenge is how African elites can work with their European creation in such a way that they are able to appropriate the various ethnic groups’ histories and traditional values that form their nation-states for peace and progress. For scholarship and research, as Daniel Tettey Osabu-Kle makes clear in “Compatible Cultural Democracy: The Key to Development in Africa,” part of the solutions of resolving some of the perennial African ethnic tensions and conflicts lies in “using modified, indigenous political structures and ideologies.”

In Ghana, the Konkomba and Bimoba, among some few groups, have been having on-again, off-again bloody conflicts. Still, in Ghana the Ewe ethnic group of the Volta Region, some of which groups have suffered some bloody chieftaincy conflicts recently, feel hated within the nation-state and one of their traditional rulers, Agbogbomefia of the Asogli, Togbe Afede XIV, has observed that not only the ideals of good governance can cure long simmering tribalism and ethnicity. In eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the story is as fearful and bloody today as Conrad’s 1902 “Heart of Darkness,” which was set in the DRC.

In Central African Republic, the ethnic conflict is so bad that it appears it has become a "forgotten emergency," country suffering from “more than a decade of political instability.” In Chad, in mixture ethnic conflicts, family feud and oil windfall over 100 people have been killed in the past weeks. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with 250 ethnic groups and over 800 dialects, ethnic conflicts in some of the regions has become a daily diet and some Nigerians think their country is ungovernable. With nearly two million displaced people living in squalid camps and thousand killed, Sudan’s ethnic conflict ridden Darfur region is as true as Conrad’s character.

Once again, Kenya’s election-influence ethnic conflict reveals the weak foundation of the African nation-state. Despite its pretensions, as Robert Calderisi, author of “The Trouble With Africa: Why Foreign Aid isn’t Working,” recalls, from start, Kenya, if its troubles are viewed from the bigger picture, hasn’t been as cool as the uninformed thinks - its foundational ethnic structures weak. In the 1950s, in the land war among the Kikuyu ethnic group called the Mau Mau Rebellion, some 50,000 people were killed. In an assassination that traumatized Africa, Tom Mboya, a rising politician of his age group was killed. For fear of ethnic conflict, Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, was virtually shut down for three days when President Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978.

Still, to avoid ethnic conflict between the Kikuyu, who have ruled Kenya since independence in 1963, and the Luo, their main rival, as Calderisi argues, the ruling party, KANU (Kenya African National Union), chose an interim leader from a small group, the Kalenjin, Daniel Arap Moi, who ruled for 24 years. In a pattern where watchers argue reveal Kenyan leaders brewing ethnic conflicts during election periods to suit their political whims and caprices, in 1992 and 1997, in the western Rift Valley and along the coast, bloody conflicts were common feature, disrupting one of Kenya’s sources of income, tourism.

The Kenyan ethnic conflict also shows that for the past 50 years Africans have suffered from bad leaders who either have weak grasp of the traditional values wheeling their nation-states or do not understand their nation-states, from within their foundational traditional values, or do not care about their people’s peace despite their long-suffering and fatalism. But how durable is African peoples’ peace? Calderisi argues that in the 1990s as some of Africa’s states such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia and Zaire (DRC) smoulder, “eight in ten Africans were still living in peace. But it was false peace.”

Africans’ false peace emanates from the fact that their traditional values do not technically drive their nation-states’ progress but rather their ex-colonial ones, and in the ensuing confusion, creating false development processes among the over 2,000 ethnic groups with their over 3,000 dialects that form Africa – and creating all sorts of conflicts, some of which tension dates back to pre-colonial times, with the slightest mishap as the recurring ethnic conflicts in some parts of northern Ghana show. The false peace and deadly conflicts also show an Africa which two solitudes – the traditional and the ex-colonial neo-liberal/Western – not reconciled enough to harmonize the two Africas for peace and progress, as George B. N. Ayittey argues in “Africa in Chaos.”

In most of the 1980s, and good part of the 1990s, as African nation-states face severe crises and appear to be crumbling because of the rupture between ex-colonial legacies and African indigenous values, the London, UK-based African Confidential newsletter (January 6, 1995) explains that “There are signs everywhere that the era of the nation-state is fading and nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where its roots are shallowest. The awkward marriage of the ‘nation’ in the sense of an ethnic coalition and the ‘state’ as the principal source of political authority is coming under pressure from above and below.” The fact is, the roots of African nation-state are not shallow, for it stands firmly in African traditional values. What is shallowest is the “state,” as ex-colonial creation, not skillfully and properly weaved into the “nation” as a development project.

How incompatible is the African state and the African nation, structurally and developmentally, is captured in Joshua B. Forrest’s investigative work “Subnationalism in Africa: Ethnicity, Alliances, and Politics.” Forest makes the case that the emergence of Africa’s subnationalism movements today, despite the near-commonality of African cultures, aim to rally political power as a way of seeking territorial autonomy within a particular nation-state because of either power issues as is seen in Kenya or natural resource problems as was seen in Sierra Leone or developmental inadequacies as Sudan show.

In a way, as Jeffrey Herbst analyses in “States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control,” the problem of state consolidation from the pre-colonial phase, through the short but intense interlude of European colonialism, to the modern era of independent states, is riddled with misunderstanding and many unresolved issues by African elites. As Kenya, Sudan’s Darfur, Central African Republic, the Niger Delta of Nigeria, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, among others, show, Herbst's makes bold analytical case that the conditions now facing African state-builders is to work to resolve what had existed long before the European colonialists came to Africa.

While former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, the African Union and the international community may work to douse off the Kenya election-fueled ethnic conflicts, the underlying challenge is how to stem off the country’s self-destruction in the long haul. That may involve not only Annan and the international community, whose work will soon end, but the appropriation of Kenyan/African traditional values and institutions, as George Ayittey argues in “Indigenous African Institutions,” into resolving the long-running tensions and conflicts that pre-dates Kenya that will make the over 70 distinct ethnic groups that form the Kenyan nation-state feel good.

The idea isn’t only to avoid “ethnic rage” disguised under false peace but also as Pogo, the Walt Disney cartoon character, says, "We have met the enemy and he is us" – that’s the understanding that Africa’s troubles, as George Ayittey explains in “Africa Betrayed,” should start from its elites’ bad behaviour and their inability to understand the continent from within its traditional institutions and values. And that makes the African’s so-called enemy himself/herself first and any other second. The hard reality is that either in the Kenyan elections or the Togolese elections in 2005 that saw over 800 people killed, as Thomas Spears argues in “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” Africa’s ethnic conflict has much to do with Africans’ pre-colonial conditions as much as its colonial and post-colonial circumstances.

*By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong is a journalist with the Expo Times Independent Sierra Leone.

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

Call to action against Europe's aggressive agenda in Africa

2008-02-25

We, civil society organisations, including farmers, workers, women's, faith-based and students' groups and organisations, call on our people to redouble their efforts to stop the self-serving free trade agreements, misleading designated as 'Economic Partnership Agreements' that Europe seeks to impose on African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, and which will destroy the economies of these countries.

At our meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, from 20-23 February 2008, under the umbrella of the Africa Trade Network, to review the latest developments in the EPA negotiations, we reaffirm our unequivocal opposition these agreements

When the EPA negotiations were launched, civil society organisations from all over Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific and Europe warned that the EPAs were profoundly anti-developmental. We pointed out that the EPAs posed a threat not only specifically to government revenue, local producers and industries, food sovereignty, essential public services, and the regional integration of African countries; but also to the right and capacity in general of African countries to develop their economies according to the needs of their people and their own national, regional and continental priorities.

The latest developments in these negotiations have exposed even more sharply the fundamental outrage represented by the EPAs.

At the end of 2007, Europe deployed manipulative and heavy-handed tactics in an attempt to force African governments into so-called 'interim' agreements. When it became clear that no African regional bloc would agree to its demands, the European Commission, with the active support of its member states, resorted to blatant divide-and-rule tactics. Europe capitalised on the fact that, for historical reasons, a few export sectors in Africa are largely dependent on the European market. By threatening to close access to these markets and throw export sectors into chaos, Europe rode roughshod over the regional negotiating processes and instigated bilateral deals with individual countries.

The more vulnerable African governments were forced to concede to Europe's demand for 'interim' trade deals, and in the process, completely undermined regional negotiating positions.

These Interim Economic Partnership Agreements reveal Europe's true face. The deals are classical free trade agreements that clearly serve Europe's commercial and geo-economic interests. All the claims about supporting Africa's development and regional integration have been exposed as false.

Merely to secure a level of market access that is remarkably similar to previous levels, ACP countries involved in the interim agreements have had to concede to opening up their economies to historically unprecedented levels even beyond the commitments required at the multilateral level.

In addition, Europe took advantage of the circumstances to insert clauses in the interim agreements that were not even part of earlier negotiations. These include the 'most favoured nation' clause, a standstill clause that forbids countries from ever raising tariffs on imports from Europe, and restrictions and even outright prohibitions on export taxes. These provisions only serve to lock in further these countries into Europe's agenda, and prevent them from exploring other options and relations within the changing global order. This will take away their space for autonomous policy to create jobs, secure livelihoods and pursue equitable economic development and regional integration.

Throughout the negotiating process, aid has been used as a bait to lure African governments into long and protracted debates, which have diverted attention from the fundamental economic issues at stake and misled them into taking on onerous commitments. As the 'Interim' deals make abundantly clear, promises of additional financing are illusory.

The negotiating agenda for 2008 aims to deepen the above processes. Europe intends to lock in the 'interim' agreements with all their outrageous provisions as quickly as possible. This is a clear breach of the understanding on which they were provisionally initialled - namely that the deals were merely a means to avoid possible retaliation at the WTO and that any contentious elements would be renegotiated.

In addition, Europe is exerting high levels of pressure on African governments to expand the negotiations to open up the services sector and to include binding rules on investment, competition policy, and government procurement. Such rules will take away the right of African governments to manage investment and investors in ways that serve Africa's own development. The inclusion of such issues is not necessary at the multilateral level and against the expressed wishes and declarations of Africa's governments and peoples.

Today it is clear more than ever, that the EPAs are Europe's means of locking-in the fundamentally unequal relationships between Africa and Europe. Viewed from Africa, this is nothing less than re-colonisation.

It is more urgent now, than ever, that Africa's people and their allies unite in action to defeat this agenda.

To this end,We demand that:

- The 'interim' agreements that have been entered into are nullified; and, to avoid threats of trade disruption, options such as enhanced GSP Plus and Everything But Arms are utilised;
- There must be no negotiations on services, investment, intellectual property, competition, government procurement and any other new issues in order to ensure that all sovereignty on these issues is retained at the national and regional levels;
- There must be a return to our own development agendas based on national priorities within consolidated regional communities in Africa;
- Any relationship between Africa and Europe must be based on our development agenda and recognise the principles of non-reciprocity, the right to protect our domestic and regional markets, and our economic sovereignty.

We salute the majority of African Governments that have so far-resisted any form of agreement with Europe. We call on these governments to work with the more vulnerable countries in order to reverse the 'interim' arrangements. We further call on the governments that have initialled agreements not to sign and for parliaments to refuse to ratify them in case they are signed.

We commit ourselves to work with our governments in the quest to achieve more equitable relationships with Europe that protect our sovereignty and autonomous developmental options.

We call on civil society organisations and other citizens groups in Europe and other parts of the world who are also resisting European free trade agreements to strengthen their active solidarity with our campaign to Stop the EPAs.

Stop EPAs!

Stop the re-colonisation of Africa!

Zambia and The Chitala Affair

2008-02-20

Neo Simutanyi and Owen Sichone

Neo Simutanyi and Owen Sichone argue that Zambia's Ambassador to Libya, Mbita Chitala was fired for calling on African leaders to consider the immediate establishment of an AU government as opposed to the gradualist approach favored by the Zambian government.

On 31st January 2008 President Levy Mwanawasa dismissed Zambia's ambassador to Libya Mbita Chitala for having written an article entitled "The Federal Union of African States Must be Established Now" published by The Tripoli Post. The article written in a private and personal capacity is alleged to have caused 'untold embarrassment' to President Mwanawasa as it contradicted Zambia's position on the African Union (AU) government. It was further alleged that Chitala's article effectively undermined the candidature of Ambassador Inonge Lewanika who was vying for the post of Chairperson of the AU Commission.

On 7th February, 2008 Foreign Affairs minister Kabinga Pande said that the Zambian government was not opposed to the establishment of a United African States of Africa, but advocated a 'gradual and incremental approach' as opposed to the immediate establishment of an AU government. Further, Pande described Chitala's article as having been 'ill-informed, blatantly mischievous and very undiplomatic'.

It is important to look at Mbita Chitala's ideas on their own merit. People should not be cowed into silence by the fear of being dismissed from their positions by politicians. While it is understandable that President Mwanawasa has the right to hire and fire those he appoints, every human being has the right to think and express their views freely and there is no doubt as to which is the more important human right. It is surprising that Chitala is being forsaken even by some of his close friends who have distanced themselves from him. Some over-zealous ones, such as MMD spokesperson Benny Tetamashimba, have even called for his expulsion from the party. Is that how to treat our free and independent thinkers?

Chitala was fired for calling on African leaders to consider the immediate establishment of an AU government. But there was nothing dramatically new in his argument, it was first made by Kwame Nkrumah and other Pan Africanists long before Africans attained their independence. However, Chitala's article had an angry sense of urgency which many Africans frustrated by the inertia and lack of progress on the continent must be feeling. Indeed when one looks at the crises in Chad, Sudan, Kenya, Somalia and Zimbabwe and reads the critical audit of the AU by Professor Adebayo Adedeji's independent audit review panel one cannot help but feel that African leaders do not take the lives of their fellow citizens seriously enough.

It appears that President Mwanawasa did not accept that Chitala was writing in his own personal capacity and did not hesitate to sack him just as he did with former foreign minister Vernon Mwaanga and former Vice President Nevers Mumba for embarrassing him over foreign policy matters. Since the days of President Kenneth Kaunda, Zambian presidents have jealously monopolized foreign policy matters for fear of provoking hostility from neighbours, foreign powers and to protect their image abroad. It is not surprising therefore that no minister of foreign affairs has ever been allowed to become an authority in international relations, let alone an influential voice. It should be recalled that just before his dismissal Zambia was celebrating Chitala's successful mobilization of over $400 million of direct Libyan investment, in agriculture, tourism and manufacturing. We wonder what is more important to President Mwanawasa, obtaining direct foreign investment from Libya to serve the interest of Zambians or pleasing other heads of state. We are not sure whether Chitala's dismissal enhanced Inonge's chances of election or undermined them. Given the low number of votes Zambia received, it would appear that the country lacks sufficient clout to lobby support across the continent. What is clear is that President Mwanawasa demonstrated that he lacks the spine to defend individual rights of his citizens when they express personal opinions on intellectual issues and can easily be swayed by external forces.

Whatever Chitala's errors in diplomacy, we must not throw away the Pan-African baby with the ceremonial bathwater and we must not let the desire for African unity be championed only by Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, who now appears to be reverting to Arab nationalism in his frustration with Africa. The issue of an African Union Government was agreed in principle at the July 2007 AU Accra Conference. What now divides African states is the speed of the implementation of this idea. At least seven countries, including Libya, Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Ethiopia and Chad advocate for the immediate establishment of the AU Government. While the rest of African states led by South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are for a gradual or snails pace approach. But what is wrong with the immediate establishment of African Union government by those who are ready and willing?

Why should African leaders be content with producing oil for America, copper for China and flowers for Europe? Why is it so difficult to imagine that Zambia might import oil from Angola instead of Kuwait or that Zambian copper can be used to make cables, pipes and sheets for the rest of Africa? African people are tired of being asked to produce visas each time they visit relatives across the colonial border. Does anyone seriously believe countries such as Nigeria can compete against India and China on their own?

Attempting to achieve economic integration before political unity is unsustainable and unworkable because the battle against neocolonialism is above all a political one. Whenever African states form a common market, European powers will always sponsor a competing development community causing duplication of effort and bureaucratic rivalries which do no serve the interests the African people. As it is, the continent is grouped into a myriad of regional economic communities with overlapping memberships and, in some cases, conflicting agendas. It is clear that the limited progress on economic integration in all but a handful of countries reveals the gulf between rhetoric and reality espoused by African leaders. We do not wholly agree with Chitala's proposition when he states in his article that the reasons for some countries, such as South Africa's opposition to political integration was based on the false assumption that they would 'on they their own develop to be sub- imperialist powers.' South Africa, for example, has not succumbed to European pressure on the war against Iraq and regime change in Zimbabwe. But it is true that instead of Africa having one permanent seat in the UN Security Council, we now have Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and others wanting to be the special ones.

The call for the immediate establishment of the AU Government needs to be supported by all those who want to see African advancement. The argument for a 'gradual and incremental approach' only masks the real reasons for the opposition to the AU Government, which is the desire for personal glory and fame using the excuse of national sovereignty. It cannot be denied that an Africa divided will always play second fiddle, to Europe, America, India and China. Political unity is the only guarantee to Africa's economic success and this will require a political decision.

African leaders' self-interest and narrow nationalism and tribalism has largely been responsible for poverty, hunger and violence in many parts of the continent. We do not agree with Foreign Affairs minister Kabinga Pande's argument that African states, including Zambia, should first 'consult and popularize the concept'. This is an excuse meant to buy time as African leaders are not known to consult their people on any important matter, let alone foreign affairs.

The dismissal and public humiliation of Mbita Chitala despite his efforts to woo direct foreign investment to Zambia demonstrates a lack of appreciation of free and independent thinkers. Having expressed a personal opinion, Chitala did not deserve to be sacked in that manner for simply expressing an intellectual opinion on a matter of continental interest. His views did not affect the country to which he was accredited neither did they undermine Zambia's national interest.

In a democracy one should be free to argue one's case in a logical manner by using intellectual means of persuasion. To dismiss a public official for expressing a personal opinion condemns our public servants to silence and sycophancy and is an affront on the right to think and freedom of conscience. African leaders will need to develop a better appreciation of free and critical thinkers for the good of democracy.

*Neo Simutanyi is based at the Institute of Economic and Social Research, University of Zambia.
**Owen Sichone is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
***Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Africom and oil

2008-03-04

Alanna Hartzok

http://www.earthrights.net

A very important and astute analysis by NCBL on Africom (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/45604#comments). Along with the clarity we also need to put forth solutions - such as state, national, continental and global resource authorities to capture the surplus profits (resource rent) from oil and other natural resources, including surface land, and distribute these funds equitably.

On the documentary - 'Dear Mandela'

2008-03-04

Annette Fatti

Thank you for the interview Dear Mandela (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/46432).

The topic of the documentary-in-making hits a very painful nerve: the tragic social crisis in post-Apartheid South Africa. It is indeed the poorest of the poor who do not get real opportunities to change their lifestyle. They are so often denied adequate access to safe and healthy living space or proper official representation, despite the apparent window dressing orchestrated by the ruling government. I hope this project, Dear Mandela, is completed soon. May the full length documentary be shown to many viewers so that its message can disseminate an unpleasant truth about our country's poor. Hopefully it will open the eyes of many to the sad state of poverty of too many of my country's men and women and awaken a national conscience to act against the suffering of many like those reflected in this film. We need to redress past wrongs in my country, not repeat them!

Politicians with sticky fingers

2008-03-04

Ben Laauwen

I enjoyed reading the article (Raila Odinga and his Nigerian Forty Thieves - http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/46447 for the use of language. I felt sad to feel that the future of South African politics looks to move into the same direction. Mr Zuma has taken over the leadership of the ANC, the majority and ruling party. Mr Zuma is most likely standing trial for corruption in August this year. His NEC (National Executive Committee) houses a number of convicted criminals. President Thabo Mbeki and some of his more prominent colleagues have consistnely been fingered for corruptive behaviour in the famous arms deal. Some 100 members of Parliament (mostly ANC) have been named as beneficiaries from fraudulent claims in the Travelgate scandal. They still hold their seats.

The only disturbing comment was that Mr Eugene Terreblanche was mentioned in this context. He seemed to have disappeared from the political stage and gone back to farming. SA sent Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa to Kenya, but he was sent home. He does have a reputation of being straight, honest and effective. He was considered to be a little one sided in his support and thus did not qualify as an unbiased advisor.

Other than the observations by Mr. Adesanmi, I would like to hear how Africa can get rid of these clowns with sticky fingers. Is it belated colonialism that keep these character in power?

Offering

2008-03-01

Shailja Patel

you wake in the night
lips shaped
around a word that has not
yet
arrived

you close your eyes
wait
for it to grow into a poem

a poem that might breathe itself
into heat, form
into a body merged with yours

and if you entered that body
with every sense
ferocious, tender
nothing witheld

it would become a doorway
you could walk through
clear-eyed
find your country

see it truly
for the first time

and if you stood
in the sticky churning
red mud of your country
naked to the wind
the carrion

refused to shut
your eyes refused
to shut
your eyes

the word would arrive
cymbal in your mouth

sing history
back onto itself, sing tearing
whole again, sing altered
tally sheets clean, blood
back into bodies, blades
back to the forge

sing women
unviolated, infernos
downward to soil, crops
greenly skyward, sing it all
back to the beginning

in a language
none of us
has ever heard

have you ever woken
in the night? Reached
for the body beside you
as if its living warmth
could teach your hands
a new language?

in the dark
it is your own bare skin
the holy innocence of belly
unslashed
the fearless softness of breast
unraped
that whispers back to you

beloved

history is a million terrors
tides that have engulfed your country
you were never going to arrive
in time

it began before you
will not suck itself
back through the doorway
of your longing

and a doorway
is not a body
to wrap you
in the night

a body
is not a poem
that will teach
the language you yearn for

the poem you seek
will never
fit
grape-round, grape-sweet
into the shape your mouth makes
when you wake in the night
lips open, crying
for all we once believed
we knew

all we once imagined
our struggles had made safe

crying
for all those
choked, drowned
in the quicksands of history
the history we did not arrive
in time to drain

beloved

what remains
blossoms out of the skin
of your belly
nudges into your palm
on your breast
a pulse you fit words to
one by one

breathe
see
choose

truth
work
love

you will wake with your fingers
wrapped around them
breathe     see      choose

wake with them salty
under your tongue
truth       work        love

they hold your right of return
to the country of childhood
they map where you will stand
in the scorched erupting soil

breathe   see   choose

they are your passport
to morning

*COPYRIGHT SHAILJA PATEL, 2008, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

**Kenyan poet, playwright, theatre artist, Shailja Patel, is a member of Kenyans for Peace With Truth and Justice. Visit her at www.shailja.com

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

Fahamu