Gathara's World

De Fence Strategy

2012-01-28T00:21:00.003+03:00

Operation Linda Handbag

2012-01-07T22:43:00.003+03:00

Lady Justice

Fighting Words

2011-10-08T14:45:00.005+03:00

The recent kidnappings of two disabled Europeans from the Kenyan coastal resort town of Lamu have brought to the fore concerns about the spill-over effects of continued anarchy in neighbouring Somalia. For much of the last 20 years, Kenya has had to contend with huge flows of refugees and illegal arms into its territory as well as conflict along the common border which have rendered the North Eastern province essentially ungovernable. The terrorist attacks of 1998 and 2002 in Nairobi and Kikambala were both planned from within Somalia and, more recently, piracy off the vast Somali coast and now the spate of kidnappings for ransom by Somalia-based bandit gangs are posing significant threats to the Kenyan economy. This raises the question of what the country is doing to address these threats.

Two weeks ago, while addressing a Mini-Summit on Somalia that was held at the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, President Mwai Kibaki called on the international community to expand its support for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which was deployed in Mogadishu in 2007 under a UN mandate to help support the Somali peace process and protect the institutions that the process had generated. However, while thanking “Uganda and Burundi for their continued unwavering commitment in providing the AMISOM troops”,” the President did not explain why Kenya itself has not contributed troops to the mission.

The Kenyan reluctance can be partly explained by the fear that a peaceful, confident and secure Somalia may once more stoke irredentist ambitions among the Kenya’s Somali population as it did in the years immediately before and following independence, leading to the “Shifta War” of 1963-67. However, this fear ignores the fact that in the last 20 years, as Somalia dissolved into chaos, much has been done on the Kenyan side of the border to integrate the Somali population into the rest of the country. The harsh policy of emergency rule by decree was lifted in 1992 and, in a 2005 report, Dr. Ken Menkhaus, Associate Professor of political science at Davidson College and a former special advisor to the U.N. operation in Somalia, noted that “the introduction of competitive elections for Parliament has had the positive effect of opening up political space for debate in the region, and of generating legislative representatives seeking to serve the interests of their home constituencies.” Today, ethnic Somalis hold high positions in the Kenyan political and business landscape. Compare that with the situation 30 years prior, when a British commission of inquiry reported that 87 per cent ot the population in what was then known as the Northern Frontier District, favoured unification with Somalia and subsequently boycotted the 1963 elections in favour of armed insurrection.

While undoubtedly much more remains to be done to extend the benefits of Kenyan citizenship, including government services such as registration, security and infrastructure, as well as investment and economic opportunities to the North Eastern Province, it is clear that the fear of irredentism is a historical relic that should not stand in the way of stabilizing Somalia.

The fact is Kenya has been an instrumental actor in the search for peace in the Horn of Africa. Its facilitation enabled rival Somali groups to negotiate and develop the transitional structures at several conferences hosted in Kenyan towns. In fact, the Transitional Federal Government and Parliament were formed in Nairobi and from there, set out to establish a governmental presence first in Baidoa and then in Mogadishu. Kenya’s involvement was motivated as much by self interest, given the price it was paying for the anarchy, as by good neighbourliness.

Over the past year, the support of AMISOM has been critical in entrenching this peace process. With it, the TFG has achieved significant success in forcing the Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabaab extremists out of Mogadishu, and establishing a measure of relative security in the Somali capital. The confidence this has engendered in the population is evidenced by the fact that many Somalis displaced by the famine ravaging the country are opting to flee to the relative safety of the sea-side city, where international agencies have been providing humanitarian aid. This undoubtedly relieves the pressures that would otherwise be brought to bear on the already overcrowded refugee camps in Daadab in Kenya. In fact, as many refugees were heading north to the capital daily, as were headed south to Daadab, and while the flow into Kenya has somewhat diminished, that into Mogadishu continues unabated.

Further, the relative peace has created room for further negotiations among Somali factions with a view to the eventual conclusion of the transition and the return of permanent government. In his speech to the UN, President Kibaki alluded to the conference held a month ago in Mogadishu, during which a detailed Roadmap to achieving this, complete with benchmarks and timelines, was adopted. It is undeniable that these achievements in the security, humanitarian and political spheres will, if entrenched and expanded, have a lasting beneficial effect on the situation along the Kenyan border.

However, as demonstrated by last week’s horrific suicide bombing in Mogadishu, this is easier said than done. As President Kibaki noted, AMISOM urgently needs to be reinforced so that the city can be secured and the war taken to the extremists in the southern areas, where the famine has hit hardest and where criminal gangs benefit from the al Shabaab’s protection. The AU’s Peace and Security Council has already authorised the deployment of up to 20,000 AMISOM troops, which is what the field commanders say is necessary to secure the whole country. Further, the UN Security Council has committed to review the AU request for expanded support but pegged it to an increase in troops to the already authorised 12000, up from the current 9,000 now in Mogadishu.

It is up to African countries to make up the numbers. While encouraging noises have been heard from Sierra Leone and Djibouti with regards to deployments (the former have promised a battalion by April next year while the latter have also declared their intentions to send troops), nothing in this regard has been heard from the Kenyans. Yet with one of the more advanced and better equipped militaries in the region and the strongest economy to boot, Kenya would be a valuable addition to AMISOM.

The fact is, whether it likes it or not, the Kenyan military is likely to be increasingly drawn into a confrontation with the extremists on its North-Eastern frontier. The question is whether this will take the form of a unilateral, protracted, low-level conflict on the border or whether Kenya will join the AU forces in Mogadishu working for a holistic solution. In the final analysis, a strong Somali state, able to enforce its writ across the whole of the country’s territory, would be a boon to the fight against piracy, terrorism and radicalisation within the region as well as a reliable partner in combating cross-border crime.

In conclusion, just as the fight against piracy cannot be resolved by policing the high seas, so the pacification of the North Eastern border is not to be achieved through creation of buffer entities along the border or declarations of war against small gangs of bandits intent on kidnapping elderly, disabled pensioners in speedboats. The real and lasting solution lies in the pacification of Somalia through support for the peace and reconciliation process and the reconstitution of an effective, representative and democratic administration in Mogadishu. The participation of Kenya in this endeavour, utilising its considerable diplomatic, economic and, yes, military muscle, will not only expedite this outcome, but also ensure that its economic interests as well as the safety of its tourists are secured in the long term.

The King is Dead; Long Live The King

2011-09-27T13:19:00.001+03:00

Contrary to what the African Union would have you believe, it would be fair to say that most people on the continent, including many potentates, were probably glad to see the back of the self-styled King of Kings. By the time of his ouster, Col. Muammar Gaddafi had become something of a sick joke –a veritable madman with grandiose visions of a United States of Africa and himself as its Leader, who had stoked murderous wars and insurrections across the continent. However, following a spate of racially-inspired atrocities committed by rebel forces in the wake of his being deposed, for many of Libya’s black residents, it seems to be a case of: “The King is Dead. Long Live the King!”

The Gaddafi days were hardly a bed of roses for darkies. According to an October 2000 article published in The Economist at the height of another pogrom targeting sub-Saharan immigrants, Libya has had a long history of racism: “Libyans were slave-trading until the 1930s and, under Italian colonial rule, they saw themselves as Mediterranean, calling Africans chocalatinos.”

Despite the rhetoric of pan-Africanism, Libya under Gaddafi remained a staunchly Meditteranean country. Despite indigenous blacks forming 20% of the population, a majority resented his overtures to their southern neighbours, preferring instead to break bread with the Arabs of the Middle East. Being one of the richest on the continent with the 10th-largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world and the 17th-highest petroleum production, they wanted to live in a better neighbourhood.

Unfortunately, Gaddafi had other ideas which would involve the use of millions of dollars of Libyan wealth to curry African favour, including bankrolling the AU itself as well as several armed rebellions and buying himself a Legion. As a result, though in 2009 the country had the fourth highest GDP per capita on the continent, 20.7 percent of her population was unemployed, according to the Oea newspaper, which used to be widely seen as the most influential newspaper in Libya because of its close links to Gaddafi’s youngest son and fellow ICC indictee, Saif al Islam. In more than 16 percent of families, not a single member was earning a stable income.

Faced with such dire straits at home, it is understandable that Gaddafi’s profligacy abroad would rankle and the hundreds of thousands of job-seeking immigrants from the south who flooded into Libya at his invitation would be far from welcome. According to Hein de Haas, a Senior Research Officer at the International Migration Institute of the Department of International Development and the University of Oxford, “since the 1990s, Gaddafi ha[d] actively stimulated immigration from sub-Saharan countries such as Chad and Niger as part of his ‘pan-African’ policies. These immigrants from extremely poor countries were easier to exploit [read cheaper] than Arab workers. From 2000 onwards, violent clashes between Libyans and African workers led to the street killings of dozens of sub-Saharan migrants, who were routinely blamed for rising crime, disease and social tensions.”

In the paper The Myth of Invasion, Haas elaborates on Gaddafi’s motivations. In 1992, the UN Security Council’s imposed an air and arms embargo on Libya after the regime refused to hand over two intelligence agents accused of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing. Feeling abandoned by fellow Arab nations, Gaddafi “embarked upon a radical reorientation of Libyan foreign policy, in which he positioned himself as an African leader.” In a bid to get around the air travel bans and the subsequent international isolation, he opened his land borders to Sudanese, Chadians and Nigeriens, offering them the opportunity to work in Libya “in the spirit of pan-African solidarity.” What was traditionally a destination for Egyptian and Tunisian migrants, now became a major destination for sub-Saharan workers. By 2000 they numbered over a million or nearly a fifth of the total population. And as tensions rose, black-bashing has become a popular afternoon sport for Libya’s unemployed youths. The feared security agencies did little to stop them.

Interestingly, the immigration policy represents a total about-face for Gaddafi in his dealings with the continent. Two decades earlier, in 1973, just three years after taking power, he donned the garb of an Arab cultural supremacist and created what he called the Islamic Legion. Modelled on the French Foreign Legion, it was supposed to be a force for Arabizing the region, and creating the Great Islamic State of the Sahel. Conveniently, Gaddafi's definition of "Arab" was broad, including the Tuareg of Mali and Niger, as well as the Zaghawa of Chad and Sudan. According to Alasdair McKay, a researcher for the UK Defence Forum: “Despite the Arab and Islamic-focused ambitions of the group, the Legion was comprised of individuals from various ethnic origins.” The online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, suggests that the force may even have included thousands of Pakistanis. It quotes a French journalist, speaking of the Legion's forces in Chad, who observed that they were "foreigners, Arabs or Africans, mercenaries in spite of themselves, wretches who had come to Libya hoping for a civilian job, but found themselves signed up more or less by force to go and fight in an unknown desert."

Though the Legion was primarily associated with the 9 year Libyan-Chadian conflict, some legionnaires were sent to Lebanon, Syria, Uganda and Palestine, though to no great effect. In 1980, 7,000 legionnaires took part in the second battle of N'Djamena, the Chadian capital, and distinguished themselves by their ineptitude. Following the humiliating retreat from Chad, Gaddafi disbanded the Legion in 1987.

However, the Legion's dissolution did not necessarily mean the end of his dream to achieve regional Arab supremacy. Soon after, he was sponsoring another ''Arab Gathering'', which many of his former legionnaires joined. “With its racist ethos of Arab supremacy, writes McKay, the Gathering's ideology… evoked a potent and compelling mythology concerning Arabs in the region tracing the origin of the Juhanya Arabs [of the Sudan] back to the Prophet Muhammad.” At the beginning of the 1987 Libyan offensive into Chad, the Legion had maintained a force of 2,000 in Darfur and the nearly continuous cross-border raids that greatly contributed to a separate ethnic conflict within Darfur that killed about 9,000 people between 1985 and 1988. By the turn of the millennium, the world would know the “Arab Gathering” by a more sinister name, Janjaweed, and they would be accused of committing genocide in Darfur. Other legacies of the legion include the bloody Touareg rebellions of 1989 and 1990 in Mali and Niger.

A particularly brutal and ironic legacy of the Legion is to be found in the current persecution of blacks in Tripoli and in other “liberated” Libyan cities. Many have been rounded up and some have even been hung or shot after being accused of being mercenaries fighting for Gaddafi. Others have seen their homes trashed, their earnings stolen and their daughters raped. This despite the fact that initial estimates of tens of thousands of black mercenaries were in Libya have proven to be unfounded. In fact, Amnesty International has accused the National Transitional Council, Libya’s interim government, of “wildly exaggerating” the issue of foreign mercenaries. “They have made matters worse. They have ignited public anger by tapping into an existing xenophobia with very dire consequences for many guest workers,” said Diana El Tahawy, the group’s Libya researcher.

Therefore, having been lied to, conscripted and sent unprepared into war outside Libya, and made the subject of regular pogroms within it, black immigrants to Libya have little reason to support Gaddafi. However, today, they find themselves in the crosshairs of a new revolutionary regime. Killings, rapes, assaults and theft committed against innocents were the hallmarks of the Gaddafi regime. The actions of the thugs now posing as liberators will only erode any confidence that the National Transitional Council is any better than he was.

No Road To Famine

2011-08-01T15:32:00.005+03:00

It feels like we’ve been down this road before, doesn’t it? Once again the world is scrambling to deliver emergency food supplies to alleviate yet another food crisis in eastern Africa. While vulnerability to famine outside the continent has been almost completely eradicated, the Horn has more than earned the moniker, “land of famine.”

Famines have been recorded in the region since 253 BC, but it is not until relatively recently that the two became become synonymous. According to the paper, Famine in the Twentieth Century by Stephen Devereux, a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, it was China and Russia that were the epicentres of famine in much of the last century, accounting for 80% of famine-related deaths. Since the late 1960s, however, the vast majority of recorded famines have occurred in sub-Saharan Africa.

It would perhaps be comforting to blame this on droughts caused by climate change. In 2005, the acclaimed BBC documentary, Horizons, did just that, concluding that “what came out of [European and North American] exhaust pipes and power stations contributed to the deaths of a million people [in the 1984 Ethiopian famine].” Yet research carried out especially since the 80s has effectively debunked the link between drought-related crop failure and famine deaths.

The Horn of Africa experiences terrible droughts every three to four years on average, but rarely do these result in mass mortality. Furthermore, drought is not exclusive to the region. In the developed world, however, its effects are calculated in terms of economic losses, not deaths or starvation. It appears that the most critical factors affecting whether droughts are translated into mass graves are political will and a functioning transport and communications infrastructure. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

In pre-colonial African societies, as Devereux notes, famines were set off by natural events -droughts, floods, locusts- operating in the context of weak local economies and authorities that were either unable or unwilling to intervene. The colonial period was itself initially characterized by similar catastrophes as the European powers used food as a weapon to extinguish violent resistance to their rule. However, as they came to appreciate the need to cultivate political legitimacy, the development of communications and transport infrastructure, together with the initiation of early warning and intervention systems saw the incidences of mass mortality famine diminish.

In fact, between 1917 and 1957, only one major famine was recorded on the continent.
Independence, for many African nations, ushered in an era of military governments, insurgencies and civil war. Such conflicts tend to displace huge numbers in the affected areas, disrupting agricultural and distribution systems. Budgets in the region are eaten up by military expenditures with little left over for development in infrastructure, with what little there is rendered largely unusable by landmines and attacks on vehicles, including relief convoys.

As a result, countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Liberia, which had known no famine previously, have developed a depressing familiarity with it. In the Horn, where drought-triggered famine was never far away, “complex food emergencies” are the norm. It is no accident that the 1984 famine occurred at the height of the Ethiopian civil war and that the 1992 famine in Somalia followed on the demise of the state a year earlier.

When drought pushes the precarious societies over the edge, displaced populations often suffer the most. In Somalia today, for example, IDPs are twice as likely as the general population to suffer acute malnutrition. Seeking help, these crowd into the few existing government centres, placing huge stress on the remaining food and water production and distribution systems, as well as the existing health care systems, as noted by the relief worker who blogs under the pseudonym Global Nomad. When the hygiene and faecal waste management systems fail, the physical proximity of vast numbers of people accelerates disease transmission rates. The fact is famines kill relatively few as a result of outright starvation. The real killer is disease as malnourished refugees with weakened immune systems are crammed into unsanitary camps.

Famines largely became a thing of the past in China and Russia after governments there invested in communications and transport infrastructure. In northern China, for example, the construction of 6000 miles of railway enabled faster interventions, which reduced famine deaths from up to 13 million in 1870 to half a million in the 1920s, despite analogous climactic conditions. According to William A. Dando, Emeriti Professor of Geography at Indiana State University, the conquest of famines since then was partly due to “promising investments in … transport-communication.” Russia also reduced its citizens’ vulnerability by integrating famine prone regions into the national economy through the development of similar infrastructure.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of California have warned that the increased frequency of drought observed in eastern Africa over the last two decades is likely to continue as long as global temperatures continue to rise. The Horn, with its largely non-existent infrastructure and historical absence of government in many parts, is singularly ill-equipped to cope. The heart-breaking stories of malnourished Somalis trekking for up to a month to reach feeding centres, mothers having to abandon emaciated babies by the roadside because they were too weak to make the journey and overflowing refugee camps in Mogadishu where, till now, few medical or aid agencies are working, are illustrative of this. The UN estimates that tens of thousands, mostly children, have already died.

If the world wishes to avoid the spectre of multiple mass mortality famines in the coming decades, the lasting answer is not to be found in the provision of massive amounts of food -sparked by pictures of starving kids- once the catastrophes are underway. Though necessary, such generosity is but a short-term band aid, serving only to prolong lives till the next drought. Resolving conflicts, as the African Union is attempting to do in Somalia, and investing in the region’s infrastructure during the intervening periods, is the best way to guarantee that communities will be ready the next time round.

The Law Is an Ass and MPigs Want Some.

2011-06-26T20:18:00.008+03:00

Wasn't the Political Parties Act 2007 intended to prevent exactly this kind of nonsense? From my reading of the Act, the only thing saving William Ruto and Co. is the inane wording of the Act, which requires an MP to vacate his seat if he publicly advocates for the "formation" of another political party but not if he publicly (though not formally) joins an existing one.

Still, it is undeniable that he and his ilk are contravening the spirit, if not the letter of the act. They are making a farce of the constitutional declaration of Kenya as a multi-party democractic state when they continue to treat political parties as nothing more than vehicles for individual power pursuits, devoid of any ideological content, and easily discarded when inconvenient.

In my honest opinion, our legislators are just proving the truth of Millie Odhiambo's claim that 15 per cent of her colleagues are gay. I mean, what do you expect when MPs have the integrity of Kamiti inmates and the law happens to be ass? In fact, 15% is probably a gross underestimation.

Do I Have Your Loyalty?

2011-06-15T11:46:00.003+03:00

Church, Jury and Executioner

2011-06-12T10:04:00.004+03:00

The nominations of Dr. Willy Mutunga as Chief Justice and Nancy Barasa as his deputy have caused considerable disquiet within the religious community. This week, as Parliament’s Constitution Implementation Oversight Committee (CIOC) started receiving public submissions on the nominations, along with that of Keriako Tobiko for Director of Public Prosecutions, Church representatives were not shy about their reservations.

Bishop Martin Oginde of the Nairobi Pentecostal Church said that though Dr Mutunga was a gentleman, he would be uncomfortable with a Chief Justice who wears a stud. He was appalled by the thought of, as he colourfully put it, “our young men becoming young women” and the prospect of “the highest person in our judicial system expressing themselves in the same way,” by wearing an earring. Mr Peter Waiyaki of the Christian Association took issue with Dr Mutunga’s and Ms Barasa’s support for abortion and same sex relations.

Father Ferdinand Lugonzo, who represented the Kenya Episcopal Conference, perhaps best summarised the church’s position: “We are … raising concerns about the family values that Dr Willy Mutunga stands for. We observed here, that one who has a philosophy that promotes gays and lesbians, aggressive population control, commercial sex work... We emphasize that family principles are not issues of private domain. Marriage and family are ordained by God”

The church’s stand betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature and role of the state in a free and just society. To understand why this is so, we must examine the rationale for government and individual rights.

In their natural condition, all men, just like animals, are absolutely free to do as they wish, guided only by their instincts and conscience. Natural man is a law unto himself, born free and acting free. Sadly the law of the jungle respects only might and does not necessarily foster security or justice. The lamb has no forum to argue its right to life against a hungry lion. In similar manner, the strong, unrestricted by any outside agency, will tend to oppress the weak; the powerful will take from the powerless.

However, by acting together in civil society and binding ourselves to its laws, we pass from the natural state to a civil state, substituting justice for instinct and right for might. Natural independence is given up in favour of civil liberty, the former being guaranteed only by the individual’s might while the latter is guaranteed by the collective power of the community. This arrangement, what 18th century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau referred to as “The Social Contract”, substitutes legal equality for natural inequalities in strength and intelligence evident among men.

We become part of a corporate body politic, a public person made up of the unification of many persons, called the state. The individuals within it are individually known as citizens and they all share equally in the sovereign power and are equally subject to its laws. The state itself is therefore formed for the common good as defined by the general will of the governed. Since the natural, some might say God-given, rights have been relinquished in favour of civil rights, the state now draws its legitimacy not from a higher being, but from its subjects, the people. It is, by definition, secular.

From the above, it is clear that Father Lugonzo is fundamentally wrong when he declares that “family principles are not issues of private domain.” Marriage and family may be ordained by God, but the state does not exist to serve Him. And even when one resorts to the dictum vox populi, vox dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God – there is no relief from having to allow for individual choices that may not be to the liking of the majority. The late US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun said: "A necessary corollary of giving individuals freedom to choose how to conduct their lives is acceptance of the fact that different individuals will make different choices” adding that “we should be especially sensitive to the rights of those whose choices upset the majority”. In this, he was echoing a famous argument by another late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who stated: "If there is any principle … that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."

The common good being common to all, there is no question of sacrificing one person or group in the interest of another. Rather, since the state is the result of a negotiation by different interests, it is the common points of agreement that constitute common good. The contemporary ethicist, John Rawls, defines it as "certain general conditions that are...equally to everyone's advantage". Common good is thus a confluence of interests, not of moral values or traditions. The latter are important only in as much as they influence an individual’s sense of where his interests lie. At the state level, however, the discussion is only informed by interests. Far from enforcing a moral code, the only thing the state is committed to is the pursuit of common interests through the creation of social systems, institutions, and environments which work in a manner that benefits all persons without elevating the interests of one group over those of another.

The clergy should, therefore, not be allowed to impose its views on the rest of society without, at the very least, being required to show how the common interest is otherwise injured. As John Stuart Mill stated in his 1859 essay, On Liberty: "The only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant . . . Over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign." We cannot punish or deny opportunities to individuals for making choices, when those choices have no perceptible harm on the rest of us, without demolishing the façade of justice and individual freedom.

The Butcher of Burundi

2011-06-05T20:13:00.002+03:00

Deflated Egos

2011-06-01T04:40:00.002+03:00

Israel vs POTUS? No Contest!

2011-05-23T16:11:00.006+03:00

It never ceases to amaze me the massive clout that Israel wields within American corridors of power. Remember this? Well, last week, when President Obama needed a reminder of who really runs things, the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was only too willing to oblige. Only he decided to do it in front of the assembled press corps following a tense meeting at the White House.

The trouble started when Obama had the gumption to suggest in a speech that mid-east peace negotiations be based a return to the 1967 "borders" with appropriate land swaps to cater for Israel's illegal "facts on Palestinian ground" more commonly known as settlements. Many would have thought this to be a rather generous offer, one that rewards the Israeli's bad behaviour and disregard for both international law and Palestinian's rights.

Obama was by no means breaking new ground. Ever since the Oslo Accords of 1982, negotiations have proceeded on a framework of land for peace i.e. the return of occupied land for a permanent peace. Occupied land, as described in UN resolution 242 of 1967, comprises territory taken by Israel following the Six Day War, including the West Bank, Gaza, Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai (which was returned following the Camp David agreements).

Obama's "proposal" also enjoyed the immediate support of the Middle-East Quartet which brings together the UN, EU, Russia and the US. Following th speech, the Russian foreign ministry quickly issued a statement saying the grouping agrred that "progress in dealing with borders and security issues could eventually lead to a final resolution of the conflict."

However, Israel evidently didn't get the memo. A fuming Bibi berated the idea as based on illusions and made clear that he expected Obama to renew pledges made to Israel by his predecessor, George W. Bush. He claimed that the 1967 lines, from behind which Israel had conquered 3 Arab armies simultaneously in less than a week, were now "indefensible" and said Obama could not sweep certain facts -presumably settlements- under the carpet.

That set the scene for the post-summit joint appearance before the world's press. Obama went first, making reconciliatory noises about disagreements between friends and his commitment to Israel's security. Bibi however, was in no mood for niceties. He gave Obama what amounted to a public dressing down, lecturing him on the Jews terrible history of persecution -something Obama's African and Irish ancestors presumably knew nothing of.

Then he really got into his groove, saying it was time to tell Palestinian refugees that their much cherished right to return to the homes their parents and grandparents were kicked out of in what is now Israel, a right deemed inalienable by the admittedly non-binding UN General Assembly resolution 3236, was yet another illusion. Just moments prior to invoking the (one can only suppose extraordinarily long-living) Jewish people and their millenia long yearning for a return to Palestine, thus wiping out the area's future as an Arab region, he derided Palestinian's 63 year cry for Israel to "accept the grandchildren, really, and the great grandchildren of ... refugees, thereby wiping out Israel’s future as a Jewish state. It's not going to happen."

A craven Obama listened studiously, only summoning up the courage to correct Netanyahu once -when he referred to the 7 million Israelis as "a much smaller people" in comparison to the 310 million Americans. " A great people," Obama corrected him.

Of course it was not the first time he was being reminded who's boss. He's had plenty of lessons. During his campaign for the presidency, he was criticised for having the temerity to suggest that the US should actually be what it claims to be -an honest broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians. After he made it to the White House, the notional leader of the free world was again reminded of the limits of his power after he attempted to get Israel to stop its illegal settlement activity on occupied Palestinian land. Needless to say, that is now a subject he steers well clear of.

So what are we to conclude? The mightiest nation on earth is not necessarily the brute with the brawn. It's the historically and geographically challenged state that controls the brute's head.

The Necessary Enemy of The People

2011-05-20T20:21:00.011+03:00

Next week's issue of The EastAfrican will feature a glowing profile of Dr. Willy Mutunga and will be full of praise for the decision by the Judicial Service Commission to nominate him for the post of Chief Justice with Nancy Baraza as his deputy. With both the President and Prime Minister endorsing the two nominees, and with opposition from William Ruto's camp seemingly crumbling, Parliamentary approval appears to be a foregone conclusion. In a few weeks time, all things being constant, Dr. Mutunga will take office and change from being the champion of Kenyans' rights to being an instrument for their suppression.

Now, I have absolutely no reason to think that that Dr. Mutunga is anything other than what the EastAfrican piece will say he is: a fearless advocate for social justice. I have no doubt that he is as committed to uplifting the lives of ordinary Kenyans as anyone can be. My reservations have nothing to do with either his qualifications or his integrity. They, however, have everything to do with the nature of power and the propensity of my countrymen to ignore the lessons of history.

Power corrupts. A simple yet unfailingly true phrase. Kenyan's history is replete with fallen icons, former giants of matchless courage and integrity whose reputations did not survive a sojourn into government. In this pantheon you will find the likes of Mwai Kibaki, Raila Odinga, Martha Karua, Kivutha Kibwana, Anyang' Nyongo, Wangari Maathai, Kiraitu Murungi and Mukhisa Kitui, just to name a few of the most recent examples. By the time they were raptured into government, many of these had fought the good fight, risked life and limb, and endured torture, incarceration, beatings and tear gas, all in the name of upholding the rights of ordinary Kenyans. They inspired us, and brought the despotic government of Daniel Arap Moi to its knees, by the sheer force of their beliefs.

Yet all of them eventually turned into the very oppressors they were once fighting after we put them in power. Which brings me to my second point: Kenyans unrelenting and, frankly, psychotic sense of optimism. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we still persist in the illusion that if we just elect or appoint a nice guy, all will be well and we can look forward to living out the rest of our lives in comfort and luxury. We allow our institutions to rot while we wait for the promised Messiah, our very own Mandela or Ghandhi.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" is a line familiar to most. What is perhaps less well known are the words that Wendell Phillips uttered following these:"The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot." Phillips was only too well aware that the intrinsic goodness of the powerful could not be the ultimate guarantor of liberties. Similarly Kenyans should put their faith in their own ability to monitor and control the people in office, and not in candidates' records and words.

Now, I am not saying that qualifications, experience and integrity are unimportant. I hold them to be vital. However, like Phillips, I know they are just proof that the man (or woman) can do the job. They are no guarantee that he (or she) will actually do it. Past performance is fickle surety for future returns. Only "continual oversight" will deliver that and it will require that we treat all office bearers, Dr. Mutunga included, as "the necessary enemy of the people." I hope all the good folks applauding our next chief justice will keep this in mind.

KKK Security

2011-04-01T21:56:00.002+03:00

Big Government, Small Budget?

2011-03-29T12:40:00.001+03:00

Press Release: KPLC Supports Earth Hour

2011-03-26T12:22:00.007+03:00

KPLC Supports Earth Hour

For Immediate Release

Nairobi, March 26, 2011

The Kenya Power & Lighting Company (KPLC) has once again declared that it will join the rest of humanity in celebrating Earth Hour and renewed its commitment to minimising Kenya's contribution to global enviromental change.

Hundreds of landmarks in thousands of cities around the world will go dark at 8:30pm Saturday local time, as hundreds of millions of people take part in the planet’s largest voluntary action for the environment.

"We are proud once again to join with individuals, organisations and governments this year, and pledge that our Earth Hour commitment will, as always, stretch beyond the hour. So there's no telling when the lights in Kenya will come back on," said Eng. Joseph K Njoroge, the company's Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer.

"KPLC has always been proud of its unilateral initiatives in support of the environmental cause," Eng. Njoroge said, listing frequent blackouts, power rationing and poor customer service as part of the company's unique project to reduce electricity consumption and consequent harm to the environment.

"The company understands that there's little the country can do to limit consumption from the demand side of the power equation, considering that electricity is critical to sustainable development. However, there's much that can be done to restrict supply and we are committed to exploring every avenue to do this, including raising costs and introducing further inefficiencies," he added.

Electricity costs in Kenya are already among the highest in the world, quadruple the the price per kilowatt in Egypt and up to 6 times that in India and China, an achievement KPLC can be justifiably proud of.

Come One, Come All!

2011-03-25T14:49:00.002+03:00

You Asked For It!

2011-03-16T19:26:00.004+03:00

Joshua arap Sang, who was on Wednesday served with summons to appear at The Hague on April 7, has told Capital News that he has written to the ICC asking for help in meeting expenses for a ticket, accommodation and meals.

No-Fly Zones

2011-03-15T20:04:00.002+03:00

Careful What You Wish For

2011-02-25T15:35:00.002+03:00

I Quit This Bitch!

2011-02-07T08:47:00.010+03:00

On my way to work today, I had an epiphany. As I sat in one of the unending traffic jams that have become part of the daily ritual of trying to get to work, fuming as matatus "overlapped" the queue, it occurred to me that it wasn't they who were the stupid ones.

The rule of law, whether we're talking about the highway code, commercial law or criminal statutes, assumes a universal application. So, when I accept to religiously abide by it when others consider it only as a guideline, to be discarded whenever it is convenient to do so, then it is I who is refusing to see the reality as it truly is.

This notion was reinforced when I finally got to my office and read in the papers that Rift Valley MPs were planning to ditch the National Accord in a bid to replace Raila Odinga as the Prime Minister with William Ruto. According to The Standard, the plot is an attempt to shield Ruto from potentially facing charges at the International Criminal Court relating to the 2008 post-election violence. "If it means repealing the Accord, then we will act and move with speed to replace the PM, ," the paper quotes the chairman of the Rift Valley Parliamentary Group, Dr. Julius Kones, as saying.

Putting aside for one minute the questionable wisdom of the move (after all, Omar al-Bashir's position as President of Sudan didn't save him from similar indictments), the statements simply emphasize the fact that there is one law for some and another for the rest. Just like the enlightened matatu drivers, our politicians believe that the rules do not apply to them and can be discarded whenever one of them gets into trouble.

Our whole system of governance aids and abets this logic. So when Cabinet Ministers are forced out of office after being caught with their hands in the till, the government creates a new taxonomy in which those who "step aside" are allowed to keep their fat salaries and allowances without actually having to work for them. That, they tell us, is how we will win the war on corruption!

I now believe that it is the ordinary, hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding Kenyan who is stupid. We agree to faithfully pay our taxes, even celebrating when the government exceeds its revenue collection targets, while those who actually pass our tax laws do not feel obliged to live under the same regime. We pay salaries to policemen and civil servants and then agree to supplement these with bribes. We accept that the leaders of the same government supposed to ensure roads are properly built to cater for the booming numbers of vehicles and that traffic rules are obeyed, should not themselves be inconvenienced when they fail to do their jobs. We allow them to provide our children with a failing education system -at our expense, naturally- while they take their kids to private schools and elite universities in the West. We acquiesce when they tell us all is well with our public hospitals but they fly abroad at the slightest sign of illness.

We are the fools when we insist on believing that a new constitution will somehow magically apply the law to them. Our politicians, like our matatu drivers, are not Kenyans. The fact is, Kenya is their creation, not ours. Its policies, rules and laws only apply to Kenyans, the wananchi, not to the wenye nchi. They are designed to perpetuate the power and wealth of the latter, to transfer resources and dignity from the former. It explains why none of our systems work, for the wenye nchi have no interest in us spending our money on ourselves. It is why no one goes to jail when they steal maize while a third of the country is starving, why no one is punished when people are sold contaminated food and when public funds go missing. It is the sole reason that the fate of 6 of them is of more import than the deaths of 1,500 Kenyans.

I, for one, am tired of this charade we call Kenya. I am tired of countless commissions that only produce paper; of a Parliament that only represents itself. I am tired of the cycle of prosecutions that produce no convictions and reforms that generate no change. I am tired of being poor and having to work hard to fund the excesses of a wealthy few. I am tired of carrying a leadership, a state, a country, that is nothing more than a parasitic infection.

I am tired of being a Kenyan. I am tired of being stupid.

In 2008, after being treated like crap for years, Inetta the Mood-Setter, a part-time DJ in the US, refused to take it anymore. Her parting words to the radio station, delivered live on air: "I QUIT THIS BITCH!"

So do I.

Breaking News - Shadowy Party Revealed in Kenya

2011-01-31T08:05:00.002+03:00

As Kenyans are kept engrossed in the never-ending wrangles within the governing coalition, we can authoritatively reveal the existence of a shadowy party which commands the allegiance of the vast majority of politicians and MPs in the country, including almost all in the Grand Coalition.

Known as the Federal Union of Candidates in Kenya (FUCKenya), the party has developed a Strategic Harmonized and Integrated Target List (SHITList) of policies that all members are expected to support. MPs, known within the party as Parliamentary Representatives of Independent Candidates of Kenya (PRICKs), have the duty to translate these policies into law.

The policies cover almost every aspect of the country’s social and economic life. Land reform, for example, is addressed in the Strategy To Enhance Allocation of Land (STEAL) while the youth are offered the Direct Renewal and Urban Growth Strategy (DRUGS).

To ensure the party’s favoured candidates are elected, FUCKenya has devised the Bolstered Regional Integrated Ballot and Election Strategy (BRIBES) which is implemented under the Targeted Regional Integrated Ballot and Election Scheme (TRIBES).

According to informed sources, who cannot be named, the party has urged its members to resist the moves to try the Ocampo Six at the International Criminal Court, threatening to unleash its Counter-Hague Advanced Operation Strategy (CHAOS).

HADAF Somalia International Cartoon Competition

2011-01-28T14:00:00.001+03:00

The Association of East African Cartoonists (KATUNI )invites all cartoonists to participate in the

HADAF Somalia International Cartoon Competition.

Theme: The search for peace in Somalia: Achievements and Challenges

1st Prize: $3000
2nd Prize: $1500
3rd Prize: $750

Competition Rules

The maximum number of entries you may submit is 5.
Deadline for receiving cartoons is Monday 14 March, 2011
All entries should be without any kind of frame and must not be folded
Each entry must be accompanied by a short biography and/or CV as well as the name and contact details of the cartoonist.
Submitted works may be put on exhibition and used in future publications.
The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence shall be entered into it.
Submitted works will not be returned.
By participating, you grant the organizers the rights to publish and use the submitted artworks in any form including:

a) Reproduction and dissemination in printed form for all editions (e.g. study edition, school edition, special edition) and in unlimited print-runs (printing right). The printing right embraces in particular hard-cover editions, paperback editions, reprints, magazines, newspapers, collected works, via all distribution channels such as retail bookshops, other retailers selling books, book clubs, open and closed user groups and in all formats.

b) Electronic/digital storage and making accessible (including in databases) by means of digital or other storage or data transmission technology, with or without intermediate storage, in such a way that users have access from a place and at a time selected individually by them and can download, play back, interactively use and/or pass to third parties this work via PC, eBook, mobile telephone or other wired or wireless appliances, for example via the internet, UMTS, cable, satellite or other transmission paths (online right).

How to Enter:

Digital copies of the cartoons may be sent to katuni@gmail.com and should be in JPEG format with a resolution of at least 300 dpi.

Original artworks or clear prints (no photocopies) should be placed in an envelope marked “Hadaf Somali Cartoon Competition” and either sent to:

Hadaf Somali Cartoon Competition,

P.O. Box 2074

Village Market 00621, Nairobi, Kenya

or dropped off at one of the following venues:

Alliance Francaise de Nairobi, Loita/Monrovia streets, Nairobi

4D Innovative Ltd, 3^rd Floor, Revlon Plaza, Kimathi St., Nairobi.

GoDown Arts Centre, Dunga Rd., Industrial Area, Nairobi.

Kenyan Dumbocracy: A Rant

2011-01-17T20:10:00.007+03:00

"Do not underestimate the predictability of stupidity," warned Vinnie Jones in the British movie, Snatch. Kenyan politics is a monument to the veracity of that statement.

At the height of post-election violence, our politicians were falling over themselves to present cases to the International Criminal Court. Both ODM and PNU sent teams to The Hague, each arguing the case for prosecution of the other for crimes against humanity.

So convinced were they of the remoteness of the possibility of that ever occuring, that they time and again spurned the opportunity to create a credible (read malleable) local tribunal to provide a veneer of juridical respectability to the impunity with which they killed and murdered.

Now that that remote possibility has become a very real probability, the fools are closing ranks and like dogs to the vomit, reviving talk of local trials. In their panic, they are lashing out at anything and everything. The new constitution, the ICC, party leadership. They are not above looting the national treasury to pay their cronies' legal bills.

None of this should come as a surprise. Anyone who has anything more than a passing acquaintance with our politics understands that the average MP or government mandarin has the intelligence of a fencepost, however many university degrees he/she may hold. Blinded by their greed and stupefied by their seeming invicibility, they cannot identify "national interest" if it bit them in the rear.

However, there is one other group of Kenyans that better fits into Vinnie Jones' description. And that is the Kenyan voter, who time and again offers up his body and treasure to these parasites. Every 5 years, he will predictably rotate out 60-70% of idiots in Parliament replacing them with other fools. Always willing to let bygones be bygones, the Kenyan voter will never scrutinise CVs, never demand proof of integrity. To wipe the slate clean, all he demands is a public and superficial show of religiosity and a defection to whatever party catches his fancy at the moment.

The truth is, our politicians are a reflection of ourselves. Instead of continually beating our breasts at their latest affront to common sense, we should be asking ourselves what part we play in this tragicomedy and trying to be little less predictable. To paraphrase another well known Hollywood line, "stupid is as stupid votes."

Rickshaw Economics

2011-01-14T21:26:00.004+03:00

Virtual Reality Imitating Life

2011-01-06T23:23:00.004+03:00

I've Got Woes!

2011-01-05T20:02:00.004+03:00

... In different area codes...

It's His Turn To Eat

2011-01-03T20:41:00.003+03:00

Kibaki's New Year Message

2011-01-03T18:31:00.007+03:00

The other day, I got to thinking about the President's New Year message to the nation and especially his rather oblique references to the indictments expected to be handed down by the ICC. While I do not expect that he will do our MPigs bidding and assent to their ludicrous attempt to pull us out of the Rome Statute, I nonetheless still believe that he shares their ultimate goal: to preserve the culture of impunity by protecting the organizers of the post-election violence. The only difference is that he proposes to do it, not through an unconstitutional Act of Parliament, but through a wholly incredible and implausible local tribunal.

Incredible because no one in their right mind actually believes that there exists the political will to actually dispense justice to the coterie of murderers named by the ICC prosecutor, Louis Moreno Ocampo. Otherwise, arrests would have taken place two years ago and by now their cases would be nearing completion.

Implausible because, as the President put it: "We must all take due care to ensure that the process of seeking justice, does not erode the gains we have made in the direction of national healing and reconciliation." So there we have it. The priority for a local tribunal is not to ensure that criminals get their due but rather to preserve the "gains" secured by the reconciliation process, which gains mainly consist of lucrative positions for the masterminds of the violence.

The truth is Kenyans today find themselves in the modern-day Manor Farm, witnessing what appears to be a row in the farmhouse. Mwai Kibaki and Isaac Ruto are each attempting to play an ace of spades simultaneously. Though voices may be raised, they are all alike. No question, now, what has happened. The citizens may look from MPig to President, and from President to MPig, and from MPig to President again; but already it is impossible to say which is which.

Where Kenya Leads, Others Follow

2010-12-25T12:48:00.009+03:00

Why doesn't Laurent Gbagbo wake up and smell the cocoa? That is the question on the minds of many watching the unfolding events in the Ivory Coast. However, seen through the prism of recent closely fought elections on the continent, Gbagbo's actions are not only rational, but also sadly predictable.

The script was pioneered right here in Kenya: A relatively free and remarkably violence-free campaign -followed by an equally remarkably peaceful election- give way to a delay in announcing the presidential poll results, sparking a dispute over the count. The incumbent is then declared the winner (despite all evidence to the contrary) and hastily organizes an inauguration. A violent stand-off with the opposition quickly ensues followed by internationally mediated talks resulting in the incumbent retaining his position. The erstwhile "real winner" gets a prime-ministership and a share of the government in return for his acquiescence in the robbery.

That, in brief, is how you rig an election nowadays.

Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe was quick to cotton on to the benefits of the plan. Now it's Gbagbo's turn. He probably thinks that all he has to do is tough it out for a few more weeks and the West, anxious that the world might run out of chocolate, will cave in and call for a negotiated settlement of the "dispute." This would, of course, mean that Gbagbo would participate in such talks as de facto head of state ala Mwai Kibaki.

Welcome to African Democracy where we are all winners, even when we lose.

Six Cases Please

2010-12-15T23:05:00.007+03:00

Getting The Cable Guy

2010-12-11T16:52:00.004+03:00

The recent arrest of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, in the UK must be viewed with extreme prejudice, given the shenanigans surrounding the issuing of the arrest warrant against him and the attempts by Western governments, led by the US, to cripple his organisation.

The West has pulled all the stops in its attempt to get Assange and knock out Wikileaks. The fact that he is yet to be accused of violating any laws has not stopped governments trying to find, or perhaps manufacture, a reason to detain him. In his home country, Australia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said that the Australia Federal Police were going through ''thorough processes'' to find any laws Assange may have broken. The Attorney-General has intimated that Assange might not be welcome back if convicted over the leaks, while at the same time declaring that Australia was providing ''every assistance'' to US authorities in their investigation. According to The Age, one of Australia's leading newspapers, government authorities around the world are working overtime to determine whether Assange could be charged with a crime related to the leaks.

Assange’s arrest is based on a warrant issued by a Swedish prosecutor. He is wanted for questioning in Sweden for what his solicitor has called “sex by surprise.” Interestingly, though, at the same time the Swedes were issuing arrest warrants claiming they could not find him, news organisations such as Al Jazeera had no problems locating him for on air interviews.

According to Bjorn Hurtig, Assange's Stockholm-based lawyer, the warrant itself is based on "exaggerated grounds." The accusations, which Assange denies, apparently stem from a malfunctioning condom and a refusal to wear one during a separate encounter. A report on the Reuters website says the two women involved were not initially looking to file charges but rather to track him down and persuade him to get tested for an STD.

Citing several people in contact with Assange's entourage at the time, some of whom have since fallen out with him, the report says that it was only after the women had trouble finding Assange -he had turned off his cellphone out of concern his enemies might trace him- that they turned to the police. An initial arrest warrant on rape and molestation charges issued mid-August by an on-call prosecutor was dropped a day later by another prosecutor and the charges later reinstated by a third, Marianne Ny, who, according to AOL News, has been active in proposed reforms of Swedish rape laws, including a radical redefinition of consent.

The women’s lawyer, Claes Borgstrom confirmed to reporters at the time that his clients' allegations against Assange related to efforts he made to have sex with them without wearing condoms, and his subsequent reluctance to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. In fact, following Assange’s arrest, a lawyer representing the Swedish government laid out for a British judge four specific charges of sexual misconduct but the word "rape" was not part of the charges which cited "unlawful coercion" and Assange's alleged reluctance to use condoms. A spokeswoman for Swedish prosecutors has also affirmed that at the moment Assange is not formally charged in Sweden, but is only wanted for questioning.

The Swedes also seemed determined to make exceptions for Assange. According to the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, which in August hired Assange to contribute bimonthly columns on politics and freedom of expression, last year a couple of Irishmen aboard a sea vessel were caught on tape beating a Swede, Christer Skoog, unconcious and then stomping on his head. However, despite the assault having taken place in Swedish waters, having the surveillance tape, and witnesses recognising and identifying both assailants, Sweden's public prosecutor decided to drop the case. Asked why he had not sought their extradition from Ireland, prosecutor Thomas Holst declared: “If we were to try to go after all the people who committed less serious crimes, we would have a lot to do.”

According to the Reuters report, however, the most serious accusation Swedish prosecutors made against him in a statement on their website is that he committed "rape, less serious crime" -- the least serious of three levels of rape charges that are on the statute books in Sweden. Conviction carries a maximum four year jail sentence and a minimum of less than two years, depending upon the circumstances. According to Assange's London lawyer, Mark Stephens, punishment could also be as light as a fine of 5,000 kronor or about $715. Despite this, it seems, however, that the Swedes have decided the accusations against Assange are of a sufficiently serious nature to justify an international arrest warrant.

Western governments have not been above using dirty tricks get to Assange and to knock out his website. After cyber attacks caused it to be dropped by its server, the US government leaned on US corporations to get them to stop servicing the now rogue site. According to TIME magazine, thanks in part to an effort by the office of Senator Joe Lieberman, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Wikileaks has been pushed off a series of servers in the US. PayPal, the online money transfer service, cut off Wikileaks after being requested to do so by the US State Department. Mastercard and Visa quickly followed, seriously threatening the operations of Wikileaks, which depends on donations from supporters.

In Europe, French Industry Minister Eric Besson called for the site to be banned from French servers and the Swiss postal system shut down Assange's bank account, stripping him of yet another key fundraising tool. Postfinance, the financial arm of Swiss Post, apparently only recently discovered that Assange had “provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process,” because he used his lawyer's address in Switzerland for his correspondence with the bank.

Much of the criticism of Wikileaks revolves around the notion that releasing such information risks lives, exposing or compromising the identities of informants, spies, human rights activists, journalists and dissidents. According to former US House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, “Julian Assange is engaged in warfare,” and his actions are “information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed.” US state department legal adviser Harold Koh has said that Wikileaks' document dump "could place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" as well as "ongoing military operations."

However, following the release of another haul of US defence department documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in August, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told the Washington Post: "We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the Wikileaks documents." The fact is Wikileaks had already redacted names and other information in the Iraq War logs. And though criticized for not redacting names in the Afghanistan files, the site had asked the government for help in doing exactly that but the government declined.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers which detailed US government lies and cover-ups in the Vietnam War, is sceptical of whether the government really believes that lives are at stake. He told the BBC's World Today programme that US officials made that same argument every time there was a potentially embarrassing leak. "The same charges were made against the Pentagon Papers and turned out to be quite invalid."

Ellsberg is now fronting a group of ex-intelligence officers from the CIA, FBI and the British Government that has written an open letter of support for Assange and WikiLeaks. He has previously said that labelling the Pentagon Papers leak as 'good' whilst the Cablegate leaks are 'bad' makes no sense. "That's just a cover for people who don't want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on Wikileaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."

Others are also rallying to Wikileaks’ defence including a clandestine group of internet vigilantes, known only as Anonymous and operating under the banner Operation Payback, which has launched cyber attacks against the websites of the companies that have yanked their support for WikiLeaks, temporarily taking some of them down. “At stake is not just the future of WikiLeaks, the protesters seem to believe, but freedom on the net in general — a principle worth defending by any means possible, however dubious,” writes Ray Singel in an article published by the online tech magazine, Wired.com.

Latest Anti-WikiLeaks Technology

2010-12-10T16:27:00.001+03:00

Pressing Freedoms: Shutting Up WikiLeaks, Shutting Down The Media

2010-12-10T12:26:00.012+03:00

December 7, 2010 is a date which will live in infamy. Not because it marks the anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US Naval base at Pearl Harbor, but because of two events which took place on two continents separated by the Atlantic Ocean but united by shared interests. In the UK, Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks, was arrested on a Swedish warrant and across the Atlantic, the US announced that it would be hosting UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event in May next year.

Under normal circumstances, none of these would merit any attention. However these are not normal circumstances. In the last few weeks, the diplomatic world has been thrown into a tizzy by Wikileaks' release of thousands of the quarter of a million classified cables, containing secret communications from US envoys around the world.

The cables have caused much embarrassment and earned Assange the enmity of government types across the Western world. In the US, Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, has branded him “a high-tech terrorist” and the ever-colourful former vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, compared him to the “editor” of al Qaeda’s new English-language magazine Inspire and demanded that he be hunted down “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”

Western governments have launched a crusade against Wikileaks which has spilled over into the internet and commercial domains. The US government has leaned on American corporations to get them to stop servicing the now rogue site. Wikileaks has been pushed off a series of servers in the US and online money transfer services, such as Pay Pal and Mastercard, have cut it off. In Europe, the Swiss postal system shut down Assange's bank account, stripping him of yet another key fundraising tool.

Despite all this, the US and her allies have yet to come up with a single law that Assange has broken in relation to the leaked documents. The fact is Wikileaks hasn't actually leaked anything. It has simply published material leaked by a young soldier, Private First Class Bradley Manning, who, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, "I was actively involved in something that I was completely against."

“It is simply ridiculous to even think Wikileaks has done anything criminal” says Andreas Fink, CEO of DataCell, an Icelandic online payment company that has kept the channels open to Wikileaks and threatened to sue VISA for stopping payments via DataCell to the site. “If Wikileaks is criminal, then CNN, and BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera and many others would have to be considered criminals too as they have published the same information.”

The only explanation for the unprecedented attack on rights that citizens of the West take for granted is that the ultimate target is the public's right to know what is being done and said in their name by shadowy officers in faraway places.

Much of the criticism of Wikileaks also revolves around the notion that releasing such information risks lives, exposing or compromising the identities of informants, spies, human rights activists, journalists and dissidents. Yet previous Wikileaks’ releases of US defence department documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in no such consequences. Four months later, the US military still has no evidence that anyone has been harmed because of information gleaned from Wikileaks documents.

It is painfully obvious that governments are seeking to protect their own reputations, not lives. The attacks on Wikileaks are part of a global trend towards constricting media freedoms. The Freedom of the Press 2010 report, compiled by Freedom House, which conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom and human rights, reveals that the overall level of press freedom worldwide has been in decline for the last 8 years.

“Both governments and private individuals,” the report says, “continue to restrict media freedom through the broad or disproportionate application of laws that forbid … ‘endangering national security.’” In particular, the report notes that the internet and other new media have become sites of contestation between citizens attempting to provide and access news and governments attempting to maintain control.

The governments have argued that secrecy is essential for the conduct of diplomacy. But as US President Barack Obama noted last year: “The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.” Secrecy is also an important ingredient in the conduct of illegal and immoral activities and it is one that is frequently employed by repressive governments across the globe. It is the duty of a free and responsible press to strive to uncover that which governments would rather hide.

It is, therefore, more than a touch hypocritical for the US to be hosting the World Press Freedom Day 2011 in order to, according to one online report, “prove its commitment to expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.” The theme for the commemoration will be “21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers”. It will perhaps be the perfect opportunity to ponder why the governments of societies which pioneered press freedoms in the last century have become the new barriers to the spread of those same liberties in this one.

The Politics of Identity

2010-12-02T19:41:00.004+03:00

After two decades in power, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni probably needs to update his image in view of next year's election. And he has hit on a new strategy to woo young voters. The 66-year old is reinventing himself as a hip-hop star and his debut rap song has become a sensation on the radio and in the nation's dance clubs. While addressing a huge crowd of youth supporters on last month, Museveni decided to show off his rapping prowess, saying that he had recently learned about "the black African roots of hip hop music." A music producer captured the rhymes and later put them to beats, creating the song "U Want Another Rap?" with Fenon Records. The song features the president rapping in Runyankore about God and family, followed by the chorus "Yes, Sevo!", which was added by the producer. Sevo is a common nickname for Museveni.

Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin is intent on forging a different kind of identity. In a bid to boost his action-man credentials, he strapped on a helmet branded with the Russian flag before climbing into a powerful Renault Formula One race car and tore along an empty road near St Petersburg by himself, reaching speeds of nearly 250 kilometres per hour. It is just the latest in a long list of machismo stunts the 58-year old has pulled off in the recent past. It all started with flying a fighter jet into war-torn Chechnya in 2000. In August this year, he was photographed hunting endangered whales with a cross-bow during a scientific expedition in choppy seas, and later taking the controls of a plane to dump water on a Moscow wildfire. He has also shot a Siberian tiger with a tranquiliser gun and released leopards into a wildlife sanctuary.

It was not only politicians seeking a public makeover. A young Asian male was placed under arrest after he donned a mask and boarded a flight from Hong Kong to Canada. However, at some point during the flight he went to the toilet and emerged without the elaborate disguise, looking like the fresh-faced twenty-something he actually is. In what they described as an "unbelievable case of concealment", authorities in Vancouver, who had been tipped off by the cabin crew, later found a bag containing a Mission Impossible-type head mask of a white man complete with a brown leather cap, glasses and a thin brown cardigan. The young man, who had apparently swapped boarding passes with a US citizen to get on the flight, has now claimed asylum in Canada – presumably using his real identity.

Disguises, however, can have fatal consequences. A 32-year old actor playing the role of a masked gunman in the Philippines was shot dead after he was mistaken for a real assassin. Kirk Abella, was shooting a scene for the movie Going Somewhere when the local security guard, Eddie Cuizon, was called by a concerned citizen saying there was a masked gunman in the area. As the director shouted "action", the actor took off on a motorcycle with another masked rider at the controls. Cuizon later told police he saw two men on a motorcycle but they sped away as he tried to approach them. He then shot Abella fearing they were going to escape. Police said that other witnesses initially thought the shot fired was part of the movie. Cuizon now faces real-life charges of homicide and violation of a gun ban.

Religion is the Opium of the People

2010-10-31T15:54:00.004+03:00

Karl Marx wasn’t kidding. Police in the Parisian suburb of La Verriere failed find a trace of any other hallucinogenic drug after a family of 12 leapt from their second floor balcony claiming to be fleeing Beelzebub. According to police, the incident occurred when a wife awoke to find her husband moving about naked in the room. She began screaming 'It's the devil! It's the devil!' and the man ran into the next room where the others were watching TV. One woman grabbed a knife and stabbed him before others pushed him out through the front door. When he forced his way back in, the terrified lot leapt from the balcony screaming 'Jesus! Jesus!' Inexplicably, the nudist also leapt from the balcony. Detectives are treating it as a case of mistaken identity.

Zimbabwe’s Governor of the Reserve Bank, Gideon Gono, likes to portray himself as very religious. He is apt to quote the Bible in his speeches, sometimes adding a few revelations of his own, such when he divulged God’s advice to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: "My Son, take it like a man …" Last week, however, it was reported that Sabina Mugabe, the younger sister of octagenarian president Robert Mugabe, had had a revelation of her own to make regarding Gono. Shortly before she died three months ago, she reportedly told her brother that Gono and Mugabe’s wife of 14 years, Grace, had been making a cuckold of him. Though the President is said to be "ready to go to war," things might still turn out OK for the former tea-boy. As one intelligence official put it, "once Mugabe hears something like that, I think someone will go and meet God."

Many self-declared religious types abhor any discussion of sex outside the home. In keeping with this, an Australian church has kicked out a woman who dared to act in an impotence treatment ad. Libby Ashby told the Melbourne-based radio station, 3AW, that she had been “disfellowshipped” from her local congregation, following her starring role in a commercial where seems to use her husband’s erect penis as a stepping stone to higher things. In the ad, after she asks for his help to reach a container above the fridge, he opens up his dressing gown to reveal a sight which the viewer can’t see – but which she is clearly happy about. Ashby then steps onto the hidden prop and gets the jar. The single mother said she knew the advert would be controversial with church-goers but a lack of funds left her with little option. “My Visa was calling out for mercy,” she revealed. The church is unlikely to be so charitable. “They have said I will not be reinstated until the advert comes off air,” Ashby said.

In a bid to restore morality and fight the vice of sexual harassment, the mayor of the Italian sea-side town of Castellammare di Stabia, south of Naples, has ordered his police to fine women who wear 'very short' miniskirts or tops that display too much cleavage. Luigi Bobbio, who was elected on Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party ticket, won a council vote to ban anything that doesn’t fully cover underwear. Police, who now have the authority to hand out fines of up to $450, were however cautioned against being too zealous identifying offenders. "They won't need to carry out checks up close. One glance will be enough to judge," said mayor Bobbio, who also wishes to criminalize blasphemy and playing football in public parks.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s sermons about the evils of corruption have a decidedly hollow ring to them. While campaigning for re-election three years ago, he promised to run a clean government. Now, barely a week after he and Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, were forced to suspended William Ruto, a cabinet minister facing graft charges, another, Foreign Affairs Minister Moses Wetangula has resigned (or in the parlance of the day, stepped aside to allow for investigations) after he was named in a parliamentary report looking into shenanigans surrounding the acquisition of property by Kenyan embassies abroad. And that may not be the end of it. Other members of the “clean” cabinet with the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads include Kiraitu Murungi (under whose watch $100 million worth of oil disappeared in the Triton Oil scandal), Prof. Sam Ongeri (in charge when another $100 million in free education funds went missing) and Naomi Shaaban (whose ministry was blamed for the loss of $2.5 million meant of resettling the internally displaced).

Somalia: Mission Possible

2010-10-28T21:27:00.007+03:00

Two weeks ago, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council recommended that the mandated strength of its peacekeeping mission in Somalia (AMISOM) be raised from 8000 to 20,000 troops. It also called on the international community to blockade Somali ports and enforce a no-fly zone over the country to interdict resupply for Islamist rebels fighting to overthrow the internationally recognized government.

As the UN mulls over this proposal, events on the ground continue to give an indication of the effect increased troop numbers can have.

Since 2007, AU peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi have been deployed in Mogadishu under both an AU and UN mandate and at the invitation of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government. Their task is to support the decade-long Somali peace process and the transitional institutions it has generated.

For much of this time, AMISOM has been seriously under-resourced and undermanned. Nonetheless, the troops succeeded in their foremost task of protecting the Transitional Federal Government from Al Qaida liked extremist groups who have foresworn the peace process. In July, however, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development resolved to send a further 2000 troops, bringing the AU mission to its mandated strength of 8000. By mid-August, half of the IGAD troops had been inserted into Mogadishu and the effect have been quick and dramatic.

In June, the TFG controlled just 5 districts in the capital. Now, with the support of the IGAD reinforcements the TFG has managed to gain ground and now controls nearly half of the capital’s 16 districts. The gains are all the more remarkable considering that they were made in the face of a so-called “terminal offensive” launched by the extremist group, Al Shabab during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

These successes have provided a springboard for the TFG to launch its long-awaited offensive to retake the rest of the country. Last week, the TFG and its allies captured Beled-Hawo, a southwestern Somali town near the Kenyan border, deep in the heart of al Shabaab territory - a huge blow to the insurgents’ image of invincibility. Government forces are now at the doorstep of the strategically important town of Beled weyne, Hiiraan’s regional capital, threatening the insurgents’ grip over South and Central Somalia.

The losses suffered by the insurgents have amplified clan divisions and disputes over command, the policy of denying access to humanitarian organizations trying to help the suffering population in Central and South Somalia, and the role of foreign fighters. According to the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank that monitors global security, the failure of the Ramadan offensive, led to “a major rift between Al Shabab’s emir, Sheikh Ahmad Abdi Godane and his deputy, Sheikh Mukhtar Robow.”

This is significant because, as US global security consultancy, Stratfor, says, it represents a split between the group’s nationalist and internationalist elements. According to Stratfor, Godane “is considered the leader of the internationalist elements, coordinating closely with foreign jihadists from al Qaeda who have joined its ranks over the last few years,” and is “responsible for propelling the Somali theater onto the global jihadist radar.”

Stratfor however notes that fighting to bring the global jihad to Somalia and basing such efforts in Somali territory is deeply unpopular, and the group has been at pains to hide their intentions under the guise of nationalism. A split with Robow, one of the more nationalist voices, and who had previously been replaced as the group’s spokesman in 2009 following his opposition to the policy of denying access to humanitarian organizations trying to help the suffering population, would not only significantly weaken Al Shabab, but also rob them of this platform.

Meanwhile, the TFG is exploiting the space created by the AMISOM deployment to deliver some services to people in Mogadishu and beyond. At the end of August, the Independent Federal Constitution Commission produced a draft constitution and submitted it to the people for consultation. The Mayor of Mogadishu, Mohamed Nur, is rehabilitating roads, providing street lighting and rebuilding markets in the capital. He has recently submitted a 4 year plan for regenerating the city to our development partners, the first time this has ever been done.

The people of Mogadishu are voting with their feet, and most of the city’s 2 million people now live in areas controlled by the TFG, many having moved there to escape the ‘reign of terror’ offered by the al Shabab. Even in areas not yet under their control, the TFG is, according to Prof. Abdullahi Sheikh Ali, Minister of State for Planning and International Co-operation, working with community elders and non-governmental organisations to launch projects such as the rehabilitation of canals in Hiiran area and Middle Shabelle.

Much of this progress, though, is sadly undermined by continued political disagreements and wrangling within the government. A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister was deposed and the process of selecting a replacement has been afflicted with delays and held hostage to disputes between the President and the Speaker. However, it is instructive to note that, while regrettable, the conflicts within the TFG are being mediated through political and constitutional processes, a clear break from the past preference for violence and war.

All this has been achieved by the insertion of just 1000 extra soldiers. Imagine the impact of sending twelve times that number.

Chile Rescue Inspires Kenyan Minister

2010-10-13T12:56:00.004+03:00

Diaspora Crucial To Somali Economy

2010-10-05T06:35:00.000+03:00

Somalia has been engulfed in civil war for 20 years, resulting in the collapse of central state institutions, the destruction of social and economic infrastructure and massive internal and external migration. However, despite the absence of a state and its financial, economic and social institutions, combined with other challenges, the traditional Somali spirit of entrepreneurship remains strong and the private sector resilient and robust.

Indeed, the private sector has managed to grow impressively, particularly in the areas of trade, commerce, transport, remittance services and telecommunications, as well as in the primary sectors, notably in livestock, agriculture and fisheries. Aggregate trade data reported by partner countries to the IMF reveal that by 2006, Somalia’s imports had almost doubled, reaching a historical record of $461 million in 2004. In the first six years of the new millennium, exports almost tripled, reaching $266 million in 2004.

This economic activity is powered by remittances from Somalia’s vast Diaspora which, as a proportion of the country’s population, is perhaps the largest in the world. One in every 8 Somalis lives abroad, most of them having either fled the repression of Siad Barre’s military dictatorship or the chaos that followed his ouster and the collapse of the state. They constitute 80% of the country’s skilled manpower and send close to $1 billion every year to relatives in the country.

Without these remittances, the country’s private sector would undoubtedly fold. It already faces significant challenges accessing credit and other financial services. The collapse of the central government in 1991 led to the ultimate collapse of the country’s commercial banking sector, which had previously been plagued by corruption and mismanagement. There are currently no formal financial institutions operating in Somalia nor any fully functioning formal financial sector regulatory bodies, making it impossible to encourage and harness domestic savings. Further, the country is also locked out of international capital markets. Somalia relations with international creditors were frozen in late 1980s due to the economic mismanagement of the Barre regime.

The remittances also dwarf any international aid the country receives as Overseas Development Assistance. Somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world with a per capita income less than half the regional average and, in 2003, it was estimated that nearly three-quarters of the population lived on less than two dollars a day. Per-capita aid to Somalia, had reached $41 in 2003, totaling $272 million. Remittances, at roughly four times that number, clearly show that the major inflow of “aid” comes from Somalis themselves.

Most beneficiaries live in urban areas, with the remittances constituting about 40 percent of the income of urban households. Less than 10 percent of transactions are destined for rural villages. According to a paper prepared for the UN conference on Somalia held in Istanbul in May this year, individual transfers are usually in small amounts averaging $132, sent regularly to cover basic family needs. In fact, household consumption, including expenditure on education and health, accounts for between half and two thirds of remittance spending. However, studies in Somaliland show that remittances are increasingly being used to fund new organizations and development projects, and such transactions usually involve larger sums.

Whether invested or consumed, remittances have important macroeconomic impacts generating positive multiplier effects, while stimulating various sectors of the economy. Studies in Mexico show that for every dollar received from migrants working abroad translates to a $ 2.69 in the Gross National Product. Other studies analyzing links between remittances and poverty in Ghana suggest that raising remittance by 10 percent reduces the share of those in poverty by 3.5 percent and has a negligible impact on income inequality. A study in Hargeisa found that households earning less than $2 a day had no direct access to remittances from abroad and had to rely on gifts from family members or neighbors.

It is not only by sending money that the Somali Diaspora is contributing to the resurgence of Somalia. They are also giving of their time and skills. Many have returned to help the fledgling Transitional Federal Government create lasting institutions while others are undertaking individual initiatives aimed at improving the lives of Somalis. In 1999, a Somali Canadian family returning to Hargeisa identified an unmet demand for English language primary education for the children of families returning from the West. They founded the Blooming Primary School, which by March 2005 had a student population of nearly 600. Fully a quarter of the pupils wee exempted from paying fees, including 60 from the Hargeisa Orphanage.

As Somalis work to rebuild their country from the ashes of the last twenty years, it is certain that those in the Diaspora will continue to play a critical role.

Banking on Somalia: Why Remittance Companies Are Crucial to Rebuilding The Shattered Economy

2010-10-04T20:17:00.003+03:00

Somalia’s crippled financial system faces severe challenges even as the country struggles to emerge from two decades of conflict.

Peacebuilding and reconstruction work will cost billions of dollars. The question of how this is paid for is crucial. Though Somalia potentially has sufficient natural resources, these are yet to be developed and the current level of funding for the Transitional Federal Government does not inspire confidence that the international community is keen to foot the bill.

Further, the country has been suspended from accessing global financial markets, and cannot expect to borrow to finance the cost. Further, rampant borrowing by Somalia's former military regime has left a pending debt crisis and the country has not taken advantage of the many opportunities for debt relief that have presented themselves over the past 20 years. As of 2007, the national debt stood at US$ 3.3 billion, 81 per cent of which is arrears.

Though the private sector is growing the country lacks a strong banking sector able to mobilize domestic savings for investment, providing the fuel for economic growth and the resources for reconstruction. In January 1991, all state institutions that provided services and regulated the economy collapsed, including the Central Bank of Somalia and the entire banking system.
According to a 2004 report by KPMG, the banking sector currently comprises a virtually-non-existent formal sector and an active informal sector. The former includes central banks in Mogadishu, and in the self-governing regions of Puntland and Somaliland. The country has no commercial banks though the central banks in Bosasso and Hargeisa offer limited commercial banking services, creating an undesirable conflict of interest with their role as treasurer of their respective regional governments.

Though the Central Bank of Somalia reopened its offices in Mogadishu and Baidoa in December 2006, it continues to have limited functionality. Despite a draft Central Bank Bill and Banking Bill having been developed, these are yet to become law and the bank operates under Decree Law No 6 of 18 October 1968.

The informal sector, which is dominated by privately-owned remittance companies, offers more promise. What started as a way for Somalis fleeing poverty, repression and, more recently, anarchy to send cash back to their extended families in Somalia has in many cases blossomed into full-blown financial operations. By 2004, the remittances had reached $1 billion and to date remain Somalia’s largest source of foreign exchange. Though a tiny of the global remittance industry, which is estimated at between $ 100 and 300 billion, these transfers account for up to 40 percent of the income of urban households in Somalia. A survey conducted by UNDP estimated that more than a quarter of families in Somalia receive remittances from abroad.

Remittance companies, being the sole international financial institutions operating in Somalia, are a lifeline for many Somali families both in Somalia and in the Horn of Africa. They provide a conduit for hard currency entering and leaving the country, as well as an instrument for trade and commerce in Somalia and abroad.

According to Mohamed Abshir Waldo, founder and director of the Sandi Consulting Group, a political, business and strategic consulting group whose primary focus is the revival and reconstruction of the Somali nation, the system of sending remittances in the first half of the 1990s was highly informal and personalized. It typically relied on trust relations with a known broker based in Nairobi or elsewhere who would insure that funds were delivered (either by carriers who flew to cities with cash on daily khat flights or via local high frequency radio operators) to family members inside Somalia or in refugee camps in the Horn of Africa.

HF radio was at the time the only means of communication available inside Somalia at that time and local private operators thus handled most remittances. They founded the first, small-scale remittance sector and a lack of capital prevented them from expanding the service beyond very modest levels. However, revolutionary advances in the telecommunications sector in the 90s made remittance transfers from great distances much easier. The rise of the remittance companies specializing in global money transfers into and out of Somalia followed the introduction of the first private satellite phone companies in 1994-95. Most of HF radio operators have been absorbed into these larger remittance companies as local agents, giving the companies the ability to reach virtually every community in the country, though some independent operators in small towns and villages continue to play a minor role in remitting money.

It is a misnomer to call these Somali remittance companies. Whilst the owners and origins of these companies are Somali, most of them have operations in the Gulf, United States, Europe and East Africa and almost all are, in fact, owned and managed by citizens of these countries. According to Waldo, Somali nationals own less 15 hawalas while the overseas-owned remittance companies could be in the hundreds. It is the close partnership and networking between the overseas hawalas and the local Somali hawalas that gives the impression that they are one and the same. Typically, the international operators create regional clearing centres or headquarters in key locations worldwide, and decentralize most of the operations at country level through ‘agents’ – either as branches owned by the company or agencies franchised to independent agents.

Major operators include Sahaan, Amal Express, Global, Al-Mustaqbal, Towfiq and Barwaqo Financial Services, all of which are based in Dubai. Others are Cidgal in Djibouti, Kaah Express and Dalsan Nairobi and Salama Money Express operates out of London. The largest is Dahabshiil which is based in Hargeisa, the capital of the autonomous region of Somaliland. According to a report published in The EastAfrican, industry experts estimate it handles up to two-thirds of remittances to Somalia and is fast emerging as the largest money transfer company on the continent.

Growing out of a small store in the tiny town of Burau, Dahabshiil, which also deals in telecommunications, is today a multi-million dollar empire, with bases in over 40 countries including Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Britain. The company maintains offices in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan and Ethiopia.

While the remittance companies rely mainly on the business of migrant money transfers from western economies for family maintenance and investment in Somalia, individuals and businesses within the country use them as crude savings banks, depositing funds for short periods. According to the KWPC report, this quasi-banking role continues to generate the most interest amongst major remittance companies. In fact, Dahabshiil is currently constructing a bank in downtown Hargeisa.

However, most other remittance companies face major constraints in converting themselves into banks, not the least of which is the lack of a centralized government and financial regulatory authority. The lack know-your-customer regulation coupled with the relative simplicity of hawallas creates the possibility of hiding the origin and destination of funds or breaking the audit trail. That has led to unfounded suspicions that these firms were being used by terrorists to transfer funds for terror plots and as a conduit for money laundering. Such accusations can have devastating effects.

In 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, the US government shut down the overseas money remittance channel of the then largest Somali remittance company, al-Barakat, labeling the company "the quartermasters of terror." This was despite numerous investigations turning up nothing linking al-Barakaat to terrorist activities as outlined by the 9/11 Commission, and the fact that the terrorists involved in the attacks received the majority of their funds through the conventional financial system.

Nonetheless, the closure of Al-Barakat significantly dented the confidence of the Somali business community in the remittance companies as a result of losing their deposits. And though other companies were quick to step into the void, the humanitarian impact of money frozen in transit was considerable because Al-Barakat handled half of all remittances to Somalia and was the country's largest private employer.

As Somalia strives to rebuild its shattered economy, a viable commercial banking sector will be indispensable. As noted in a UNDP report prepared by Dr. Abdusalam Omer, “commercial banks provide services that are not currently provided by the remittance companies such as retail banking, corporate banking, and loans for commercial and social development.”

In creating such a sector, the country would do well to take advantage of the remittance companies, most of whom are legally registered or in the process of legalizing their status and pay taxes in every country in which they operate. As the KPMG report says, there is no reason why the existing Somali remittance companies cannot expand to provide commercial banking services in Somalia, or anywhere else. Despite the lack of formal regulatory mechanisms in Somalia, all these companies exercise self-regulation of some kind and at a conference held in Dubai in June 2003, they committed themselves to move towards licensing and to formalize their operations preparing the ground for the expansion of financial services.

Dahabshiil, for example, embarked on a campaign to apply for and register its operations with concerned authorities in all countries where this is required, hired money laundering reporting officers and trained staff on rules and procedures. It incorporated appropriate checks in its IT software allowing for the reporting of suspicious activity and on transactions that exceed a certain amount by agents and published guidelines for its agents on how to detect suspicious transactions and report them.

Still, Somalia does not have much of the legal framework, technical expertise, security, or strong central bank needed to regulate the establishment of any commercial banks. This will only come with the establishment of the state and its institutions. This is what the TFG and the international community must strive to do with utmost haste.

As Dr Afyare Abdi Elmi, professor of international politics at Qatar University and author of the book, Understanding the Conflagration of Somalia: Identity, Islam and Peacebuilding, wrote in an article published by Al Jazeera earlier this year, “economic development is key to a sustainable peace in Somalia…. The time has now come for the international community to stop bypassing or ignoring the already weak Somali government institutions. Reinstituting a legitimate and functioning central authority should be the priority of all interested stakeholders.”

AMISOM Expands Bases as Shabaab Offensive Fizzles

2010-09-19T16:19:00.003+03:00

The view from an Amisom position overlooking a busy intersection at Kilometre 4 in Mogadishu. Civilian lfe is slowly returning to normal in areas under the peacekeepers control

By Patrick Gathara
Nairobi, September 15 2010

The “terminal” Ramadan offensive by Al Shabab, the extremist group fighting to overthrow Somalia’s internationally-recognized Transitional Federal Government and impose an extreme form of Islamic law, seems to have run out of steam. Barely three weeks after declaring they would drive AU peacekeepers out Somalia and erase the TFG presence, the militants top command have reportedly gathered in Baidoa to review their Ramadan operations amid reports of mass desertions and huge complaints from the populace as fighters are returned to their villages scarred, injured or dead. All indications point to complete disarray within the extremists ranks, dwindling public support and an inability to decide on their next course of action.

Unable to dislodge the peacekeepers, the Al Qaida-aligned extremists, under the tutelage of foreign fighters, have turned on the civilian population. On August 24, militants wearing Somali military uniforms stormed Muna hotel in Mogadishu, firing indiscriminately and killing close to 40 people, including six parliamentarians. A day later, a roadside bomb killed 15 people, including several school children. Just last week, a suicide attack on the Aden Ade International Airport claimed the lives of 9.

The militants’ tactics are increasingly alienating them from the local population. A sign of their desperation came this week when a spokesman for the militants reportedly went on radio to appeal for public support, money, food and even blood donations. The call came as reports emerged of a crowd walking out of a Mosque in protest at the Mullah's support for the Shabab. Other reports have pointed to civilians leaving areas under Shabab control and streaming into those under the TFG and AMISOM where they can access medical attention and humanitarian aid. AMISOM already distributes 1.8 million litres of clean drinking water to civilians living near its bases in addition to providing them with free medical services at its hospital and outpatient clinics.

Following the failure of the offensive, sources at AMISOM say, the Shabab are probably at the weakest they have been since 2006, having taken hundreds of casualties while achieving little in terms of strategic gains. However, the AU peacekeepers, hamstrung by a restrictive mandate and a shortage of troops, are unable to capitalize on this to push the extremists out of the city altogether.

The 7000-strong AMISOM force has been in Somalia since 2007 in support of the decade-old peace process and the government generated by it. For most of that time, despite being undermanned and underequipped, they have successfully held of repeated attacks by the Islamist rebels. The troops, drawn from Uganda and Burundi, are only authorized to fire in self-defense and in defense of critical infrastructure and civilians.
During Ramadan, the AU peacekeepers, working closely with Somali government forces, managed to secure key positions and civilian areas in the Somali capital. One company from the Burundi contingent recently deployed to Hoshi, which guards the south-western route into the city, in support of Transitional Federal Government troops there who had come under attack from the Shabab. The location is critical to securing the neighbourhood of Medina, and also serves to extend the defenses of the Mogadishu National University campus where the contingent has its main base.

Col. Aloys Sindayihebura, the Deputy Burundi Contingent Commander, and Col. Agi, a senior TFG commander, accompanied journalists on a tour of the base, which basically comprises two compounds on either side of Kabka road, one of the city’s main arteries and a crucial supply route.

Addressing the reporters, the two officers were candid about the challenges facing the fledgling Somali army and the need for continued AMISOM support. The TFG, said Col. Agi, had problems paying salaries and providing meals to his troops. He acknowledged that this was having an adverse effect on recruitment. “Some of my soldiers have gone nearly 5 months without pay,” he said.

In addition to Hoshi and the University, the Burundi contingent has 4 other bases along Kabka road covering the area between Madina and Gaashandiga, including one at the Siad Barre Military Academy. Burundi soldiers are also deployed in two bases at Al Jazeera, guarding the southern approach to the Aden Ade International Airport, where the main AMISOM Force Headquarters are located.

Kilometre 4, a public square in the city, is now a hive of bustling activity as people go about their business free from the fear of insurgent attack. This followed the opening of a new AMISOM base at Coca Cola village, just a day into the militant’s offensive. Giving journalists a tour of the new position, the commander of the Ugandan contingent, Col. Michael Ondoga, said the base was necessary to reinforce weaker TFG positions and to deny the militants mortar range. Prior to that, al-Shabab attacks had killed 7 people at K4, including 6 at a nearby camp for the displaced.

At another outpost bordering the northern district of Bondere, AMISOM troops are sandwiched between Villa Somalia, the seat of the Transitional Federal Government, and al Shabab positions to the north and east. The hilltop encampment is on territory formerly used by the Shabab to shell the Presidential Palace and surrounding civilian areas. It was taken on July 21 following three days of heavy fighting which cost the lives of 2 AMISOM troops and those of over 70 Shabab fighters.

Kenyan Justice

2010-09-11T03:10:00.002+03:00

Vetting Judges

2010-09-11T02:55:00.001+03:00

Last Word

2010-09-11T02:36:00.003+03:00

You could say South Africa has a problem with AIDS. And not just because the condition kills 1000 South Africans every day. The nation is still working to correct the damage done by years of "Aids denialism" under the leadership of former president Thabo Mbeki, who delayed the roll out of life-saving anti retro-viral drugs, while his health minister suggested a diet of beetroot and garlic could cure the virus. Now a pastor has at the non-denominational Way of Life church in Khayelitsha, near Cape Town, has hit upon a novel way to change attitudes. He recently caused outrage by preaching a sermon entitled "Jesus was HIV positive". Reverend Xola Skosana, who has lost two sisters to the disease, said his sermon was designed to combat the stigma surrounding HIV and Aids. His approach has been praised by Aids campaigners in the country but condemned by some Christians, who accuse him of portraying Jesus as sexually promiscuous. WWJD?

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Ghana on the other hand, has issues with English. Recently the leader of the main opposition National Patriotic Party sparked controversy by calling President Atta Mills "Professor Dolittle". For a week, the full machinery of the state was deployed to counter this. While that controversy raged, an even greater row broke out when the chairman of Mills' National Democratic Congress called for a purge of the judiciary. This in a country where the word "purge" evokes images of nasty medicines for bodily functions. The idea of party officials lining up judges and forcing purgatives down their throats or rectums to empty their stomach contents drove tensions up. Things got worse when he was asked how he intended to do the purging. "There are many ways of killing a cat," declared the NDC chairman, who comes from a region where cats are considered a delicacy. And again, this in a country where independent-minded judges have in the past been abducted and murdered by government goons. Eventually, President Mills calmed the furore by assuring all that he had no intention of interfering with the judiciary and even thanked his opponent for not calling him “Professor Do-nothing”!

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Africans in general have a problem with the weather. Not only do thousands perish every year from the results of droughts and floods, but some have also taken to blaming climate change for the seemingly interminable wars on the continent. Last year, a research paper suggested that climate had been a major driver of armed conflict, and that future warming was likely to increase the number of deaths from war. However, recent study suggests that this is not the case and challenges assumptions that environmental disasters, such as drought and prolonged heat waves, had played a part in triggering unrest. The findings, which have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in the United States, instead blame traditional factors - such as poverty and social tensions - for the outbreak of conflicts. One might also include traditional, melanin-induced, stupidity.

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Chimpanzees in the wild don’t take too kindly to snares. And now the primates are learning to outwit their human hunters. Researchers in the rainforests of Guinea are going ape over the discovery that chimps have not only learnt to recognise snares but, astonishingly, intentionally seek the traps out and deactivate them, setting them off without being harmed. The observation was serendipitously made by primatologists Gaku Ohashi and Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa who were following chimps living in Bossou, Guinea to study the apes' social behaviour. The two, from the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan, observed five male chimps, both juvenile and adult, attempting to break and deactivate snares on at least six separate occasions. On two of them, the traps were successfully deactivated. In all cases, the chimps avoided touching the dangerous part of the snare, the wire loop.

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Jemaine Jackson, brother of the late pop sensation, Michael, obviously has no problem with torture and repression. In May, the pop star, who was attending the birthday celebrations of Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh, declared that the dictator, who is famous for a herbal concoction that he claims can cure AIDS on Thursdays, was “doing a wonderful job, and putting a smile on the faces of the people… He's not just a politician; he's a wonderful, genuine person." It’s enough to make one question whether the President’s birthday fell on a Thursday, and whether he shared his concoction with the guests. At the very least, it is a cautionary tale for those who confuse celebrity with intelligence or wisdom.

Farcebook

2010-09-11T02:02:00.009+03:00

The Fat Lady Sings

2010-08-21T09:02:00.004+03:00

What does Robert Mugabe have in common with 1990’s fake pop stars, Milli Vanilli? “Blame it on the rain” was the duos last number one hit before their lip-synching scandal broke. It also happens to be Uncle Bob’s go-to explanation for Zimbabwe’s food shortages. During his recent visit to the World Expo in Shanghai, China, the octogenarian president said his country’s poor harvests were as a result of “inclement weather.” Many would however blame it on his 20-year reign, citing the disastrous land reform programme which crippled the agricultural sector, the bedrock of Zimbabwe’s economy, and bankrupted the country. Mugabe, though, is not one to dwell on his countrymen’s misfortunes. He was later photographed engaging in some retail therapy in Hong Kong, where he owns a house and his daughter attends university. He reportedly spent the weekend shopping for high-end suits and shoes in the city's Kowloon district.

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"When you're in love with a beautiful woman, you watch your friends" goes a popular 1970s single by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. Africa’s last absolute monarch, King Mswati III of Swaziland, should have been paying heed. While he was attending to State business in Taiwan, his childhood friend, Justice Minister Ndumiso Mamba, was nabbed in bed with the Mswati’s 12th wife, Queen Nothando Dube, a former Miss Teen beauty contestant. The pair were busted by state security agents, who had apparently been following them for weeks, at the lavish Royal Villas Hotel. Though Swazi laws prohibit dishonouring the monarch, this did not stop the agents snapping photos of Mamba emerging head first from underneath the 22-year-old royal's bed where he was attempting to hide. The images later made their way onto the web. Mamba was immediately arrested on the orders of the King, whose mother - the Indlovukazi or Great She-Elephant - has reportedly sent a delegation to Mamba's village to lay charges of "trespassing into another man's home". He could face the death penalty if found guilty, while mother-of-two Dube would be banished from the kingdom.

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In 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks, a Texas based country group, declared: “We don't want this war, this violence." Seven years, and over a million Iraqi civilian casualties later, the last US combat troops have left the devastated country. However, 50,000 are staying behind to, according to their commanding officer, Gen. Ray Odierno, “prevent foreign powers from meddling with the new government.” Apparently the Americans do not consider themselves a foreign power in a country six thousand miles from home.

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The US musical duo, Wilderland, and some top music industry veterans recently released a new song titled “Fragile Day” which was written about two years prior to the BP Gulf oil spill, and features lyrics about fish swimming and dying in an oil-filled ocean. To counter such impressions, US President Barack Obama had a White House photographer take a picture oh him and his daughter, Sasha, swimming in the sea off Florida last weekend. The official picture was intended to provide evidence that the region's beaches are back to normal. However, it soon emerged that the President was actually trying to pull a fast one. The private beach on which it was taken, off Alligator Point in St Andrew Bay, north-west Florida, isn't technically in the gulf.

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South Africa’s journalists may soon be singing the blues following government plans to institute a so-called “media tribunal” as well regulate what can be reported on and what constitutes a state secret. The government claims the law under consideration is necessary to limit the damage caused by media houses and their newspapers which they claim represent only a narrow, predominantly “white” interest. Predictably, the controversial head of ANC’s Youth league, Julius Malema, who has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, declared that the media must be regulated because "they think they are untouchable". The move comes in the wake of news reports that Ebrahim Rasool, who in 2008 was fired as Western Cape premier partly because of allegations that he had bribed journalists to report favourably about him, had been appointed South Africa's ambassador to the United States.

Aid Relief?

2010-08-21T08:48:00.004+03:00

"No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy."
Amartya Sen

Phoney Wars

2010-08-21T08:35:00.000+03:00

Veni, Vidi and all that!

2010-08-19T14:25:00.001+03:00

Cabinet Reshuffle

2010-08-17T20:46:00.002+03:00

Grand Vizier Ruto

2010-08-17T07:31:00.002+03:00

POTUS on Vacation

2010-08-15T19:20:00.004+03:00

Planting Democracy, Pierre?

2010-08-15T08:23:00.001+03:00

The Last Word

2010-08-15T08:15:00.006+03:00

Somalia’s reputation has taken a battering over the past two decades as a result of incessant conflict. However, one of the warring parties has come up with a novel approach to marketing the country as a destination –make getting married there cheap. The Ahlu-Sunna Waljamaa group, which controls the central regions of the war-torn country and is allied to the internationally-backed Transitional Federal Government, has set new rules for weddings taking place in areas under their authority. The strictures include a ban on long vehicle convoys. These can sometimes have as many as 50 cars, which the militants consider to be extravagant and un-Islamic. Consequently, wedding the wedding parties have been limited to a maximum of 3 cars. However, wedding tourists may be put off by the requirement that, according to one Ahlu Sunna commander, there be no celebration after the end of a week long honeymoon “when the couple are over with their whatever.”

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The board of directors at the world’s largest technology firm, HP, is fighting to restore its good name following the less than quiet departure of the firm’s chief executive. Mark Hurd was forced to resign after he failed to tell the board about a personal relationship with a female marketing contractor who was hired by his office. Additionally, he allegedly falsified expense reports for dinners he had with Jodie Fisher, a 50 year-old an actress and businesswoman whom the company was paying up to $5,000 per event to greet people and make introductions at events. In what must serve as a cautionary tale for executives everywhere, the details of Hurd’s malfeasance only came to light after Fisher sued him –get this- for sexual harassment. Now, some of his friends, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, have publicly challenged the decision to remove him, noting that he was getting stick from both ends without benefit of a carrot (the relationship with Fisher was never consummated).

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Marketers will tell you that a Brand Proposition is the bundle of benefits promised by any brand. For example, the slogan for JetBlue Airways, an American low-cost carrier, promises “Happy Jetting.” However, last Monday, this was a promise that the company spectacularly failed to keep on the tarmac at Kennedy International Airport. Following a dispute with a passenger who stood to fetch luggage too soon, career flight attendant Steven Slater got on the public-address intercom and let loose a string of invective before making the most dramatic of exits. Grabbing a beer (or two, no one’s really sure) from the beverage cart not only from the plane, the probably-now-unemployed 38 year old deployed the emergency evacuation chute and slid down. He then ran to the employee parking lot and drove off, the authorities said.

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It might be accurate to say that Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm which recently agreed to pay $550 million to settle charges of selling mortgage securities secretly designed to help a hedge-fund cash in on the housing market's collapse, has soiled it image. Just don’t use a four-letter equivalent. In the wake of embarrassing profanity that came to light in recent Congressional hearings, the company has banned employees from swearing in emails. "[B]oy, that timberwo[l]f was one s****y deal," declared a 2007 email that was repeatedly referred to at the hearing. Now the company has employed screening software to catch naughty words, even those disguised by asterixes. In fact, so effective is the new software that the injunction itself had to be delivered to employees verbally.

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New Delhi is infamous for its unruly motorists who routinely ignore red lights, and other inconvenient traffic rules, to find open routes –much like our matatus. Now, the city’s traffic police have turned to a well known brand for help. Within two months of the cops starting a Facebook page where people could post photographs of traffic violations, digital informants had posted almost 3,000 photographs and dozens of videos. According to Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Satyendra Garg, using the license plate numbers shown in the images to track vehicle owners, Delhi Traffic Police have issued close to 700 tickets. Almost 50 these went to police officers.

Faceless

2010-08-15T07:58:00.001+03:00

We Kenyans never learn!

2010-08-13T08:01:00.002+03:00

Stoneface

2010-08-12T07:27:00.002+03:00

Dictating Democracy?

2010-08-10T08:37:00.000+03:00

Al-Shabaab Score Own Goal

2010-08-09T16:56:00.003+03:00

The soccer-hating Al-Shabaab terror gang has found itself in financial difficulties following the heinous attacks in Kampala. The twin bombings targeted crowds watching the World Cup final and killed 76 people. The militant's benefactors in the Somali Diaspora apparently think that is 76 murders too many. If only they attached the same value to Somali lives...

Another Pakistani Refugee

2010-08-09T09:03:00.002+03:00

The Last Word

2010-08-07T08:53:00.006+03:00

Vox populi, vox Dei is an old Latin proverb which means “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” But don’t tell the Kenyan clergy that. After their campaign to persuade Kenyans to reject a new draft constitution floundered at the ballot box, Church leaders claimed that the Almighty might not have spoken too clearly, citing "malpractices and irregularities" in the referendum process. In a press conference convened after it became plain that the constitution had been approved by an overwhelming majority, the clerics sought to ease the passing by declaring that they had played a prophetic role in warning the nation of dangers posed by contentious issues. Their boss evidently does not agree.

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No news is good news, another saying goes. But apparently not good enough for authorities in Zimbabwe. During an annual safety drill at the Harare International Airport, the country’s Civil Aviation Authority told journalists rushing to the scene following reports of smoke over the runway and ambulances heading towards the airport, that a plane had been involved in an accident. "I can confirm that a 767 plane coming from London has had an accident at Harare airport," said David Chawota, head of the Authority. Later, at a news conference at the airport, he claimed that the information had been given out to make the drill realistic. "Telling the media was part of the exercise. We wanted to see how the media would react." One would assume it obvious that journalists would react by reporting the news.

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“The King is dead. Long live the King!” is a traditional proclamation made following the accession of a new monarch in various countries, such as the United Kingdom. However, it is a phrase that will not be heard when incumbents in six of South Africa's 13 traditional monarchies pass on. The kingdoms have effectively been abolished following a six-year government study which concluded that they were created by the former apartheid administration to divide the people. "We urge all communities to accept the findings in the spirit of correcting the wrongs of the past, and as part of the country's nation-building efforts," said President Jacob Zuma. He probably had in mind the nation-building effect of discounting the annual subsidy that each king receives.

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“Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians,” declared Charles de Gaulle. And it seems that celebrities across the world agree. Last week, hip hop star Wyclef Jean jumped on the bandwagon announcing he would run for presidency of Haiti. The announcement sets the stage for an interfamily election battle between the three-time Grammy Award-winning musician and his uncle, Raymond Joseph, a former ambassador to the United States. In Liberia, former world Footballer of the Year, George Weah, has declared that he will easily defeat President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in next year’s presidential poll since the election will no longer turn on “who knows more book”.

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Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but little power can be just as dangerous, as the masterminds of the Kampala bombings found out. They had planned to detonate a third bomb using explosives attached to a mobile phone. However, despite repeated calls to the number, the device failed to explode because the phone battery was low. Police were then able to track them down using the phone records. Interestingly, days before the bombings, the suspects had apparently made incessant calls to their landlords in Kenya promising to settle outstanding electricity bills.

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Dogs are said to be man’s best friend. The truth of this adage was once again proven in the US State of Michigan when Jerry Douthett's canine companion saved his life by….chewing off his toe. Kiko, a Jack Russell terrier, apparently sensed an infection in Douthett's right big toe and munched on it while his master was passed out after a day of drinking. A trip to the hospital confirmed the dog’s diagnosis which alerted doctors to Douthett's Type 2 diabetes. The infection had reached the bone and the medics completed Kiko’s procedure by amputating what was left of the toe.

Back to School

2010-08-05T07:42:00.002+03:00

Black- Flagged

2010-08-04T17:27:00.003+03:00

Holesome

2010-08-03T18:38:00.002+03:00

Kamangu Gets Last Laugh

2010-08-02T13:03:00.003+03:00

The Last Word

2010-08-01T12:41:00.003+03:00

Kenyans have more reason than most to be cynical given the shenanigans their politicians get up to. However, this week’s row between President Mwai Kibaki and ex-president Daniel Arap Moi over whose reform credentials are worse plumbed new depths. Kibaki, who supports a yes vote in this week’s referendum on a new constitution, started it off with an attack on Moi’s campaign for a rejection of the draft. Obviously forgetting his own track record of broken promises and manipulation, the President sought to remind Kenyans that Moi had spent the better part of his nearly two and a half decades in power fighting off calls for reform. It was an oversight that the ex-President was only too happy to correct. Moi then suffered his own bout of selective amnesia, saying that the 2008 post-election violence would never have occurred under his leadership, though many will recall the so-called “tribal clashes” that accompanied elections in 1992 and 1997. In a quick rejoinder, Kibaki asserted that his reform credentials did not require any defence. Begging your pardon, Mr. President, but they do. In your case, Mr. ex-President, it is plainly (oxy)moronic to even contemplate such credentials.

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This was not a good week to visit the Delmas district of South Africa’s Mpumalanga province. A runaway Bengal tiger named Panjo was on the loose for nearly a day after he escaped from the back of a truck on Tuesday. Prior to his recapture the following day, his owners, who hand-reared the 17-month-old from a cub, had some interesting advise for anyone encountering him. On seeing Panjo, they said, one should point a stick at him and say "No", or toss him a chicken to eat. He apparently prefers Chicken Carry.

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A beast of a different sort was on the loose during the African Union summit in Kampala. There, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's Presidential guards were involved in a tussle with Ugandan Presidential guards at the opening of the summit. It was a rematch of the 2008 fight between the two security units during the inauguration of the Gaddafi National Mosque in Old Kampala. Back then the quarrel was about who should control the entrance, and negotiations were conducted via fist fights and flying kicks. On Sunday, some of Gadaffi’s guards tried to force their way through the Ugandan Presidential Guard Brigade cordon but were firmly resisted. The ensuing grab-and-drag scuffle only died down following the intervention of the Libyan Ambassador to Uganda.

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You may have heard of the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, a fictional sailor from Basrah. While sailing the seas east of Africa and South Asia, Sinbad has fantastic adventures going to magical places, meeting monsters, and encountering supernatural phenomena. Therefore it may surprise you to learn the Sinbad was not only real, but also Chinese. Last week, Chinese archaeologists arrived in Kenya to begin the work of identifying a wreck off the country’s coast which is believed to have belonged to China's 15th century Admiral Zheng He. Some historians believe his seven epic voyages at the head of what was then the world's mightiest fleet, with 300 ships and as many as 30,000 troops, inspired the tales of Sinbad. Zheng's armada made it to south-east Asia, the Middle East, Africa and, according widely disputed accounts, America several decades before Christopher Columbus famously stumbled on the continent.

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The Chinese influence on America is evident from the continuing popularity of acupuncture. However, this is not always a good thing as a certain native of the US state of Washington found out recently. She apparently had to pull needles out of her back and call police after staff forgot about her and went home. The 47-year-old was still on the treatment table when she realised that the acupuncturist had left. When she tried to leave, she found the doors locked.

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New York is sometimes described as the city that never sleeps. And here’s the reason why: bedbugs. Complaints about the blood-sucking insects have increased by 40% in the past three years. No respecters of power and privilege (among those affected were former US President Bill Clinton, who battled an outbreak in his Harlem office), the bugs have woken up city authorities who now plan to spend $500,000 on an information campaign telling the public of how to kill them off (the mites not the mayor) and finally put the issue to bed.

Farcebook

2010-07-31T20:46:00.005+03:00

Unmasking The Terror

2010-07-31T19:54:00.005+03:00

Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (Movement of Warrior Youth), more commonly known as Al Shabaab (The Youth) is an offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, a grassroots community-driven movement inspired by Somali Islamic scholars trained in Saudi Arabia as Wahhabi sect followers.

The group is opposed to the decade-long Somali peace process which produced the TFG and other transitional federal institutions. This process has the backing of the majority of Somalis and the international community, including the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union. It is in support of this process, undertaken by the Somalis themselves, that the AU deployed peacekeepers to Mogadishu in 2007.

Records of its formation are scanty, but it is widely believed that their former commander Aden Hashi Ayro played an integral part. According to a report by the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, Al Shabaab was created as a youth militia of the ICU in the years leading up to 2006. Ayrow wished to wage a violent Jihad against the West and was disappointed by the limited nationalistic goals espoused by some in the ICU, especially the now President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed of the Somali Transitional Federal Government.

According to an Al Shabaab propaganda magazine, “Shaykh Sharif, former chairman of the executive committee of the Islamic Courts… is nothing more than a Somali nationalist, pure and simple. The global jihad means nothing to him — he just wants Somalia to be a democratic Muslim state.” In fact, as the ICU sought to present a more positive international face, a tense relationship developed with Shabaab’s more radical elements. On occasion, the ICU even apologised for the group’s Taliban-like activities.

In May 2007, Ayrow was killed in a US air strike on a house in his central Somalia home town of Dusamareb. A few months later, in December, Al Shabaab named Sheikh Mukhtar Abdirahman (Abu Zubeyr), who hails from the relatively peaceful enclave of Somaliland, as its new leader.
Following the Islamists’ defeat by Somali Transitional Federal Government troops backed by Ethiopian forces, the ICU splintered, with some of the more radical elements, including Al Shabaab, regrouping at the Kenyan border to mount an insurgency. When Ethiopia withdrew its troops, Al Shabaab and their Islamist allies retook much of the former ICU territory but have been unable to topple the TFG in Mogadishu, thanks largely to African Union Peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi.

According to a report by the Critical Threats Projects of the American Enterprises Institute, Al Shabaab, which has acted independently of the now-defunct ICU since early 2007, currently controls much of southern and central Somalia, including large portions of the capital, Mogadishu.
According to Abdisaid M. Ali, a former Cabinet secretary in the TFG, now an independent consultant, Al Shabaab does not have a written or declared programme apart from creating and imposing strictly Islamic Wahhabi doctrine in Somalia, and eventually spreading it to the rest of the African continent. It refers to the territory that it governs as the “Islamic Provinces,” which is one step short of declaring an Islamic state or a Caliphate. In an April 2008 announcement, the group itself declared that “the concept of jihad... does not recognise fanciful boundaries or so-called international legitimacy.”

Like many Islamist movements across the globe, Al Shabaab seeks to sustain jihad by continuously expanding its local community infrastructure and support. It has filled a vacuum in the country by providing the population with essential services and welfare — clearing of roadblocks, repairing roads, organising markets, and re-establishing order and a justice system through the use of Sharia courts — similar to the way the Islamic Courts acted in 2006.

However, these limited gains to the populace are more than offset by the group’s ruthless and uncompromising application of its particularly harsh version of Sharia. In October 2008, in the southern port city of Kismayo, the group condemned 13-year-old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow to death by stoning for the crime of adultery after she was gang-raped by three men. None of men she accused of rape were arrested.

In December 2009, an Al Shabaab suicide bomber killed 19 people, including 4 cabinet ministers as well as reporters, dignitaries, parents, and students from Mogadishu’s Banadir University attending a medical school graduation ceremony at the Shamow hotel.

Since capturing large swathes of southern Somalia, the radical Islamists have been undertaking a programme of destroying mosques and the graves of revered religious leaders from the Sufi branch of Islam, to which most Somalis belong. They have also banned the playing of music on radio and the hiring of women by broadcasting stations.

Prior to the attacks in Kampala, the group banned the playing of football and screening of soccer matches in the areas it controls in Somalia, describing the sport as ''a satanic act'' that corrupts Muslims. In 2006, two people, including a young girl, were killed in Mogadishu when Shabaab gunmen fired their weapons directly into a crowd of demonstrators protesting their attempts to forcibly shut down a cinema theatre screening a World Cup semi-final.

Al Shabaab has loosely co-ordinated levels of leadership that revolve around local villages and religious leaders who rely on radical scholars for interpretations of the meaning of the jihad and the Koran as well as guidance in the armed conflict against the Transitional Federal Government and the African Union peacekeeping troops in Mogadishu. In the past, they used to be in conflict with traditional religious leaders but the radicals seem to have overpowered them through intimidation and assassination.

Though the group is nominally led by Sheikh Mukhtar Abdirahman (Abu Zubeyr), experts say a core group of senior leaders guide its actions. According to a situation report titled Somalia: Understanding Al Shabaab written by Paula Cristina Roque for the Institute for Security Studies, Zubeyr is assisted by a 10-member council, or Shura. In accordance with the general structure of jihadist organisations, this consultative council is comprised of sub-emirs in charge of different areas — military, theology, political information and external relations.

The militia is divided into three geographical units: Bay and Bokool regions, led by Mukhtar Roobow "Abu Mansur," the group's former spokesman; south-central Somalia and Mogadishu; and Puntland and Somaliland. A fourth unit, which controls the Juba Valley, is led by Hassan Abdillahi Hersi "Turki," who is not considered to be a member of Al Shabaab, but is closely aligned with it. These regional units "appear to operate independently of one another, and there is often evidence of friction between them," says a December 2008 UN Monitoring Group report.

Roque writes: “The Shura council and operational autonomy of different cells allows each commander to pursue his own military strategy and administer the areas conquered independently, but this decentralisation also makes the group difficult to monitor and oppose, as the removal of the top leadership would not render the organisation inoperative.”
To further complicate matters, the organisation also has two branches, or sub-units, the military branch Jaysh Al-Usra (the army of hardship), and the branch that maintains law and order, Jaysh Al-Hesbah (the army of morality).

Much of the Shabaab leadership hails from Somaliland and Puntland. While rank and file fighters are recruited from inside and outside Somalia, many come from the southern regions of Kismayo and Baidowa. According to Abdisaid Ali, Shabaab members tend to be men aged between 20 and 30 years, mostly uneducated. There however have been reports of boys as young as 14. After a review of all publicly available ranges, the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research estimates Al Shabaab's strength at approximately 4,000 individuals. The Economist magazine believes 3000 may be closer to the mark. However, as Stephanie Hanson notes in a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, “The number of rank-and-file members is less important than the number of hardcore ideological believers.”

According to Andre le Sage, a senior research fellow for Africa in the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defence University of the US, the most hardline and ideologically motivated Al Shabab militias remain those run by Abu Zubeyr and Fu’ad Shongole (originally from Puntland but holds Swedish citizenship) around Mogadishu, and Ibrahim Haji Jama “al-Afghani” around Kismayo. These individuals are seen as the primary leaders of Al Shabaab’s foreign fighters, the strategists driving Shabaab’s support for global jihadi agendas rather than a narrower focus on controlling Somalia, and those with the deepest ties to Al Qaida.

UN Security Council documents estimate the number of dedicated foreign fighters at about 300, mainly from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan and Yemen. According to the New York Daily News, scores of U.S.-born Somali-Americans have flocked to their ancestral homeland to take up arms with the group. The several hundred Kenyan fighters are not considered particularly dedicated and frequently defect owing to the strict rules against smoking, alcohol, chewing khat and having extra-marital relation with women.

Abdisaid Ali fingers Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states as significant sources of external funds flowing to Al Shabaab and other radical Islamist movements in the Horn of Africa through Dubai. He however believes that terror financing in East Africa “is mainly a ‘local loop’, community based grass-roots support structure that help these elements to prevail… Local mosques, local religious leaders, and local community networks provide the bulk of long term financial support for logistical and operational needs.” Other analysts have disputed this, saying Al Shabaab thrives on taxes imposed on the local population, and especially the trade in charcoal and khat. This may partly account for the group’s about-face on the banning of chewing khat in areas it controls.

Raising Expectations

2010-07-31T19:05:00.003+03:00

Failed State? What Failed State?

2010-07-31T18:35:00.007+03:00

Hussein Abdulkadir, 30, wakes up every morning at 5.30 am. After a quick shower and morning prayer, he has breakfast with his wife and three kids. After making sure they do not miss the school bus, he also gets on a bus to head to the hospital where he works as a nurse. Money is short and like many workers across the globe, he worries about his ability to provide for his family. “I have to pay rent at the end of the month and the kids go to a private school which is very expensive.” What makes Abdulkadir’s mundane story remarkable is he lives in what has been described as the most dangerous city on the planet: Mogadishu.

For many, Somalia epitomises a situation of constant crisis, a ‘black hole’ of death and disaster. For the last three years, the country has occupied the top spot in the Failed States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine. Though there is a paucity of meaningful human development data, available indicators paint a sorry picture.

For example, drought and civil unrest have displaced 1.5 million people and, according to WFP, left 70 percent of the population in central Somalia in need of humanitarian assistance. Overall, a third of Somalis are dependent on food aid and one in six children is acutely malnourished – a total of some 240,000 children – the highest acute malnutrition rates anywhere in the world. Maternal mortality rates are also among the highest in the world with studies showing that as many as 45 women die everyday during pregnancy and childbirth.

However, this image belies the reality of emerging national and sub-national political entities that have ensured a degree of civilian security in particular places at particular times as people have adapted their behaviour and livelihoods to cope with insecurity and even to profit from the opportunities that conflict throws up. “There is life in the midst of all the chaos,” says Abdulkadir. “Not everyone has left. We cannot leave the country to the dogs.”

According to Anna Lindley, formerly a Research Officer at the Refugee Studies Centre and now a Lecturer in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, “on one level, the question of why people have been leaving Mogadishu since 2006 has an obvious answer. But on another level, many of the people find ways to negotiate daily dangers. They are witnesses to the last two decades of insecurity, but their voices are rarely heard. Life does go on, albeit in ways outsiders often find hard to imagine.”

“Four of my children go to school but for the last few weeks their learning was interrupted by the fighting,” says Abdullah Nur, a 55 year old porter at the city’s Aden Ade international airport. “We are used to such clashes and after some time, life goes back to normal.”

The absence of a central government has had a surprisingly limited effect on daily life with ‘local authorities’ largely filling the vacuum. These have provided a surprising degree of stability in some places. "Notwithstanding the general perception of Somalia as anarchic, basic law and order is in fact the norm in most locations… much of the Somali countryside - especially Somaliland, Puntland, and pockets of southern Somalia - is safer for local residents than is the case in neighbouring countries… It is important not to confuse the security problems of international aid agencies with security problems for average residents," says Ken Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College and a specialist on the Horn of Africa.

Under the stewardship of the Transitional Federal Government, which has been in place since October 2004, the country has made major strides. That year, according to the African Executive, enrolment in primary school shot up to 300,000, much higher than what it was prior to the civil war. In addition, to secondary, vocational institutes, and adult education colleges, the country now has up to 10 universities, three of which are ranked among Africa’s top 100. They include Hargeysa University, Mogadishu University, Puntland State University, Amoud University and Banadir University.

Improvements have also been recorded in the health sector. UNICEF country representative Rozanne Chorlton says Somalia is on track to be measles and tetanus-free. It has been polio free since 2007 and in 2009 immunized 1.5 million children – 85 per cent of those under five – as well as 1 million women, 65 per cent of those of child bearing age against tetanus.

Ordinary life is sustained by a vigorous economy based on pastoral and agro-pastoral livelihoods, and on trade. Nomads and semi-pastoralists make up a large portion of the population, are dependent upon livestock for their livelihood. The sector accounts for about 40% of GDP and about 65% of export earnings.

Commercial infrastructure and institutions, World Vision says, are functional and relatively sophisticated. The sprawling Somali diaspora sends home an estimated $1 billion every year and the country has some of the best telecommunications in Africa: a handful of companies are ready to wire home or office and provide crystal-clear service, including international long distance, for about $10 a month." According to the BBC, it takes just three days for a landline to be installed - compared with waiting-lists of many years in neighbouring Kenya.

Prior to 1991, the national airline had only one airplane. Now there are approximately fifteen airlines, with over sixty aircraft plying six international destinations, and many more domestic routes in Somalia. According to a 2005 World Bank report, the "private airline business in Somalia is now thriving." The carriers offer competitively priced tickets and are crucial to Somalis’ booming trade and the delivery of humanitarian assistance by the international community. The international airport in Mogadishu has been renovated and sports a new 3km runway, an 80 feet air traffic control tower, a reorganized baggage system and even a duty free shop and restaurant to serve travelers.

However, the insurgency continues to pose grave problems. Jihadist cells in Mogadishu are increasingly fragmented and answer to no one, and some have targeted national aid workers and civil society leaders. This has infused political violence with a high level of unpredictability and randomness in Mogadishu that has eroded the ability of astute Somali aid workers, businesspeople, and civic figures to take calculated risks in their movements and work.

The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report published in June 2009, noted the widespread use of children in fighting forces in the country. Extremist groups opposed to the TFG, such as the Al Shabaab, conscript and recruit children as young as eight years of age, including girls, to plant bombs, carry out and assassinations. “I have so many friends who were brainwashed by the Al Shabaab to join them. I don’t think we will realize peace at home as long as Al Shabaab exists” says a Somali teenager who only gave his name as Kadhar. The militias also reportedly traffic Somali women and children within the country for sexual exploitation and forced labor.

The diminished capacity of the transitional government also presents huge challenges. The livestock industry, one of the main pillars of the economy, lacks proper regulation, and lacks certificate of origin regimes needed to meet phytosanitary requirements for international trade, affecting access to export markets. Following an outbreak of Rift Valley Fever on the African Horn in 2000, Saudi Arabia banned livestock imports from the country for nine years.

Similarly, the lack of a monetary authority has resulted in the frequent issue of ‘counterfeit’ Somali shillings, triggering inflation. The informal Hawala systems of remittances may be efficient but is unable to demonstrate compliance with international standards and regulations, and has in some cases been subject to legal sanctions.

In addition the absence of macro-economic management leaves the economy at the mercy of businessmen and money traders. Abdallah Hussein, 20, who lives in the capital, says: “Life in Mogadishu is very harsh. There are no jobs, there is nothing at all. I wish the country was a better place where I can go to school, live a better life and shape my future”

The situation is complicated by easy access to firearms. Mogadishu is awash with weapons. There is even an arms bazaar called Cirtogte or “Sky Shooter” within the expansive Bakara market where feuding groups have a ready supply of cheap munitions, guns, grenades and mortars. Says Saado Ahmed, an 18 year old resident of the city: “The biggest challenge facing the youth in Mogadishu is lack of opportunities. Youths have nothing to do, they are all idlers and that is what makes them vulnerable to these armed groups. All the soldiers you see fighting each other are youngsters with no future at all. They just believe in guns.”

Undoing Business in East Africa

2010-06-07T16:42:00.001+03:00

Despite all the self-congratulatory back slapping that greeted the release of the Doing Business in the East African Community 2010 report, the document makes for depressing reading. Though not a total solution or yardstick, the DB reports are increasingly used as a leading measure to gauge the attractiveness of a nation as a place to do business and as a measure of competitiveness. For reform-minded governments, how much their indicators improve matters more than their absolute ranking. On this score, for EAC countries and the region as a whole, it is a case of one step forward and two backwards.

Although Kenya, the region’s economic powerhouse, has instituted comprehensive licensing reforms that have led to annual private sector cost savings of $62 million, and the country is ranked 4th out of 183 nations for “ease of getting credit,” the fact that Kenya’s overall rank, measuring the ease of doing business in the country, dropped from 84 in 2009 to 95 is more significant.

Compared to 2008 when Kenya was cited as one of the world’s top ten reformers in that year’s DB Report, the country’s ranking has actually plummeted 23 places. Similarly Uganda’s overall ranking also fell from 106 in 2009 to 112 this year and Tanzania’s from 126 to 131. Burundi only marginally improved from 177 to 176.

The lone exception was Rwanda which leapt to an overall position of 67 in the 2010 rankings, up from 143 in 2009. The top reforming country in the world, the country’s efforts have paid off as it attracted some $1.1 billion in investment, 41% more than in the previous year and this in the midst of the global economic crisis which saw global FDI inflows slide by up to 44% the first quarter of 2009.

Though there is widespread expectation that integration will lower the cost of doing business, in 2009 EAC secretary general Juma Mwapachu described it as "unnecessarily too high" saying it undermined international competitiveness of the region, This is borne out by the report which observes that if each East African country were to adopt the region’s best practice the region would rank 12th rather than 116th. In other words, if the best of existing East African regulations and procedures were implemented across the board, the business environment in the region would be comparable to that in Thailand which in the first quarter of 2009 alone garnered more than $2 billion dollars in investment, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Developments World Investment Report 2009.

The fact that needed reforms are in place in some but not all EAC countries inevitably calls into question the effectiveness of the regional integration experiment. In fact, though regional integration has long been touted as necessary for economic development in sub-Saharan Africa, the fact is Africa remains one of the most protectionist areas in the world. With 14 landlocked countries, only 10 percent of African exports are intraregional, according to the World Trade Organization. In contrast, intraregional trade in Western Europe, is 68 percent and in Asia hovers around 40%.

Under the EAC, the five countries have officially formed a free trade area and a customs union. The common market protocol, the next step on the route to full economic integration, is set to go into effect in less than a month’s time. It will supposedly allow the free migration of businesses and people across borders as the bloc prepares to move to a common currency by 2015. However, according to the Director General, EAC customs and Trade Directorate, Mr. Peter Kiguta, despite the successful elimination of internal tariffs among Partner States and consequent growth of intra-regional trade, the ratio to total volume of trade in EAC is still a paltry 13%. “We produce what we don’t consume and we consume what we don’t produce,” as President Jakaya M. Kikwete of Tanzania said recently in Dar es Salaam at the World Economic Forum on Africa.

Mutual suspicion between partner states may be to blame for this state of affairs. According to Nation Media Group CEO, Linus Gitahi, “it is much easier for a Chinese company to get licensed to do business in any of the East Africa countries than it is for any local companies moving across the borders. Many in government have what President Yoweri Museveni calls the ‘pygmy syndrome’-the idea that you are bigger than me and by supporting you, you will get bigger and bully me.”

The EAC states may have made strides in improving literacy, fighting AIDS and improving infrastructure but when it comes to governance, the parochial nature of the region’s politics has limited gains. Little is done to curb rampant corruption. Comparing EAC country rankings in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index 2009 to those from the previous year reveals that the problem either worsened or stagnated in all EAC countries except Rwanda, which registered a significant improvement.

Violence, intimidation and disputed results continue to be a feature of elections. In Burundi, whose abysmal ranking in the DB 2010 Report is reflected in a report by the African Development Bank which says the country “investment, production and commerce in the country are hindered by the political and institutional environment,” opposition parties have recently demanded a repeat of communal elections, alleging massive fraud and poll-rigging. Just last week, their candidates announced their withdrawal from this month’s presidential election. Kenya’s decline has been blamed on the post-election violence and creation of a coalition government, which slowed decision-making at a time when over 70% of the countries in the world are actively reforming.

The Global Competitiveness Index identifies 3 stages of economic development, the first driven by primary factors, such as unskilled labor and natural resources, and the others marked by increases in efficiency and innovation. The EAC region is firmly rooted in the baby-stage. To be competitive, EAC states must, in addition to improving infrastructure and creating a healthy and literate workforce, focus on developing well-functioning public institutions and a stable macroeconomic framework.

Somalia's Peace Process

2010-05-26T08:07:00.007+03:00

The backbone of the Djibouti Peace Process is a 2008 peace accord signed in neighboring Djibouti between the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) that is meant to pave the way for the cessation of all armed conflict across the country. The 11-point agreement expanded the parliament to include representatives of the opposition alliance and civil society.

The first phase of the Djibouti talks resulted in agreement on the formation of a new Transitional Federal Government in early 2009. This included the expansion of the Parliament from 275 to 550 members, to bring in ARS parliamentarians and an expanded cabinet. It also requested the UN to deploy an international stabilization force from “countries that are friends of Somalia" excluding the neighboring countries, and the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia.

The Djibouti process, which has the support of the international community, including the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States, is itself just the latest step in the broader process of political settlement and peacemaking in Somalia, which began almost immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. It builds upon the achievements of the earlier efforts. The challenge, as always, is to cement the gains that have been made, and to draw others into a constructive dialogue and out of a cycle of violence.

Following the ouster of Siyad Barre in 1991, the first two international reconciliation meetings aimed at re-establishing a Somali government took place in Djibouti in June and July 1991. Six organizations participated. An agreement endorsing Ali Mahdi as president was immediately rejected by General Muhammad Farah Aidid, and a bloody civil war in Mogadishu and the south ensued.

In March 1993, fifteen parties to the Somali Civil War signed two agreements for national reconciliation and disarmament: an agreement to hold an Informal Preparatory Meeting on National Reconciliation, followed by the 1993 Addis Ababa Agreement made at the Conference on National Reconciliation. Fighting continued, however, and the agreement later fell apart.

From November 1996 to January 1997, a conference on national reconciliation was held in Sodere, Ethiopia. It created a 41-member National Salvation Council (NSC) charged with the responsibility of organising a transitional government. The conference was, however, boycotted by Hussein Farrah Aidid, (now leader of his father’s faction following Gen. Aidid’s death) and by the government of Somaliland. A similar conference in Sana'a, Yemen, did not include all the parties of the conflict, and was rejected by those not attending.

A fourth reconciliation meeting in Cairo, Egypt, in December 1997 saw 28 signatories to the ensuing agreement, including both Ali Mahdi and Hussein Farrah Aidid. The "Cairo Declaration" provided for a 13-person Council of Presidents, a prime minister, and a national assembly but left the country without a national leader.

Officially dubbed the Somalia National Peace Conference (SNPC), and sometimes called the Djibouti conference, this was a series of meetings held in Arta, Djibouti, from 20 April – 5 May 2000. In contrast to previous reconciliation meetings, the Arta conference included extensive participation by unarmed civic leaders – intellectuals, clan and religious leaders and members of the business community. It culminated with the Arta Declaration and the formation of the Transitional National Government (TNG), the first Somali government since 1991 to secure a measure of international recognition, enabling Somalia to reoccupy its seat at the UN and in regional bodies. The TNG was opposed by a rival pan-Somali governmental movement, known as the Somalia Reconciliation and Restoration Council (SRRC), made up of warlords from different regions of the country.

In an effort to reconcile the TNG with its SRRC adversaries, Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in Eastern Africa launched a fresh national reconciliation process before the TNG mandate had ended. This process eventually developed into a sixth major Somali reconciliation meeting, the Somali National Reconciliation Conference, held in Eldoret, Kenya, in October 2002. It produced a ceasefire agreement signed by 24 faction leaders stipulating the need to create a federal structure, reversing the unitary structure established at Arta.

The 15th Somali National Reconciliation Conference (SNRC) was held in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2003. The Initiative to convene the conference was endorsed by the IGAD summit of 2003 and supported by the AU, the Arab League and the UN. At the conference, the TNG and the SRRC were reconciled, and a new united movement subsequently developed, dubbed the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). The Conference was successfully concluded with the formal adoption of a Federal Transitional Charter.

From 9 to 29 January 2004 a conference was held in Nairobi, Kenya, at which the Transitional Federal Government developed further. A document was signed by the major factions, titled Declaration on the Harmonization of Various Issues Proposed by the Somali Delegates at the Somali Consultative Meetings from 9-29 January 2004. The agreement called for the establishment of Transitional Federal Institutions as well as elections. This was followed by the inauguration of a Transitional Federal Parliament in August 2004, election of a President in 2004, and finally the granting of the vote of confidence to a prime minister and the establishment of a Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in early 2005.

Following the defeat of the Islamic Courts Union, more than 3,000 people from all of Somalia's regions and clans as well as the Somali Diaspora participated in a National Reconciliation Conference convened by the TFG in Mogadishu from 15 July - 30 August 2007. Offshoots of the ICU and opposition leaders, however, held a separate meeting in Asmara, Eritrea, where they joined forces to fight the TFG under the banner of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS).

Holier Than Thou?

2010-04-26T17:45:00.006+03:00

Last week, when retired Anglican Archbishop David Gitari warned the Kenyan church that it risked being defeated at the referendum if it maintains the "No" stand at the referendum on the Proposed Constitution, he underlined the fact that the country’s most venerable institution stands at a critical crossroads in its illustrious career.

The church objects to the section of Article 26 that empowers doctors to end a pregnancy if it endangers the woman’s life or she needs emergency treatment. Christian leaders are also opposed to the retention of Kadhis’ courts in the proposed Constitution under Article 169 and 170, which limit their authority to disputes over personal status, marriage, divorce or inheritance, where all the parties are Muslims and agree to take the case to a Kadhi.

However, with most players across the political spectrum, including civil society, rallying behind the draft, the church is being confronted with the awkward possibility of being on the wrong side of history. The situation has also raised fundamental questions regarding the historical role of religion in the country’s political development and whether it has been a force for change or a tool of appeasement.

In his introduction to Religion and Politics in Kenya: Essays in Honour of a Meddlesome Priest, Ben Knighton, who teaches at the Africa Studies Centre in the University of Oxford, notes that Evangelical Lutherans of the Church Missionary Society reached Buganda in 1877 closely followed by Roman Catholic missionary orders. The proposed Uganda Railway led to a host of missions from many denominations targeting the region, but faced with the Anglican–Roman Catholic duopoly in Uganda, they stopped off in the East African Protectorate that became Kenya Colony. In fact “in many localities of Kenya, it was the missionary who took up residence before the district officer.”

A 1998 article penned by Rev Dr Timothy Njoya states: “The first thing Christianity did in Africa was to make people surrender their sovereignty to church hierarchies and governments.” According to John Lonsdale, retired professor of Modern African History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, the missionaries saw colonial rule as good for the natives, who, to them, appeared to be barbarous polygamists, afflicted by famine and disease — a savage and suffering people, for whom British rule was clearly a blessing.

When they did speak out against the heavy taxes and forced labour imposed on Africans for the benefit of white settlers, it was not out of outrage at a perceived injustice. Thinking African men guilty of sinful sloth, they had already concluded that forced labour was indeed a good thing, if properly supervised by a British official. They only proposed that those African men who could prove they had worked for themselves, and their families, for a season, be exempted from conscription. This was meant to protect their African converts, who were deemed to have been redeemed from their laziness.

It is ironic, therefore, that while the church for the most part desisted from openly criticising the injustices of colonialism, it nonetheless sired the leadership of the African nationalist movement. According to Knighton, the Church of Scotland, in Thogoto (Kikuyu for Scot) and the influential Anglican centre and mother church at Kabete between them created the Kiambu elite that became the African political establishment of Kenya, “right at the heart of the new nation, ensconced on the pleasant, greener side of the capital.”

In fact, not only was the future African nationalist leadership educated in mission schools, many of them were religiously inclined. Knighton points out that Bildad Kaggia was an itinerant preacher and both Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga remained deeply devoted their tribal African Instituted Churches to the end of their days.

As the national stature of these leaders grew, so did the profile of the Christian church. A recently released study of religion in sub-Saharan Africa shows a steep rise in the number of Christians between the 1950s and the 1970s accompanied by an equally precipitous drop in adherents to traditional religion. It was in this period that Kenya became a majority Christian country.

After independence, the Africanisation of the economy was mirrored by the ascent of Africans to the leadership of the church. According to Lonsdale, just as an educated political elite, wielding power along ethnic lines was emerging, so a clerical elite was created in the church, also segmented along tribal lines — a result of the colonial policy which permitted different missionary denominations to enjoy separate spheres of territorial, and tribal, influence to stave off religious strife.

With such a confluence of interests, the churches were initially reluctant to criticise the increasingly authoritarian bent of the Kenyatta government. According to Knighton, though the churches had in 1969 belatedly fulminated against Kenyatta’s oathing of the Kikuyu following Tom Mboya’s murder, no individual of the church challenged the nation and “those in authority” in the mass media till David Gitari’s radio sermons following the assassination of J.M. Kariuki in 1975.

When Daniel arap Moi ascended to power following the death of Kenyatta, he too was allowed a long honeymoon period despite the increasingly brutal nature of his dictatorship, especially following the 1982 coup attempt. In fact, when Rev Njoya kicked off the call for the “second independence” with his New Year's Day sermon in 1990, he was vilified even by some church leaders who would later become luminaries in the fight for democracy including the late Archbishop Manasses Kuria, who declared that “the church of the Province of Kenya supports President Moi and the one-party system." Njoya’s own church, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, warned him against confrontational behaviour toward the government, reiterating the PCEA's unreserved support for President Moi and government.

Eventually though, the tide turned and, in the words of Galia Sabar-Friedman, “the church took upon itself the role of advocating democratisation in Kenya.” However, as Lonsdale observes, its motives may have been somewhat mixed. “Kenya’s churches first protested on behalf of their clerics and their flocks against the Moi regime’s abuses of power in the ‘queue-voting election’ of 1988, not on behalf of the Kenyan citizenry at large. In this they followed, if unknowingly, the example of the missionaries on the issue of forced labour 70 years before.”

Following the routing of Kanu in the 2002 elections, the churches again went AWOL. Knighton says they “lost their critical distance from government.” He singles out the general secretary of the National Council of Churches in Kenya and chairman of the Ufungamano Initiative, Mutava Musyimi, who, “having been a resolute opponent of President Moi was anything but with President Kibaki. Musyimi accepted high-level government appointments, such as chairman of the National Anti-Corruption Campaign Steering Committee, and did not resign after the shameful hounding out of John Githongo and the resignation of the director, Jane Kiragu, in February 2004.”

During the run-up to the 2007 general election, and the ensuing violence, the churches found themselves hopelessly split. According to Knighton, when Kofi Annan searched for a senior churchman of integrity and courage to enable a Kenyan solution to the post-election crisis, he couldn’t find one. They were all regarded as too compromised.

Rev Musyimi, who had resigned his church job, was running for parliament along with several other churchmen and women including Bishop Margaret Wanjiru and Pastor Pius Muiru, who also ran for the presidency. As reported in the Nation, some clergymen even admitted to blessing warriors to engage in violence and inviting politicians to disseminate hate messages that incited people against members of various communities.”

Gitari opposed the candidature of both Wanjiru, and Muiru saying, “Bishops and other ordained church leaders should not seek elective political positions.” He would later lament that “the state and the church have gone to bed together… the church has been compromised… the conscience of society has been wounded.”

Following this debacle, it was not till February 2009, at a nationally televised prayer meeting and fundraising for the Sachangwan and Nakumatt fires in which 160 people were burnt to death, that the churches found their voice, launching a blistering attack on both the president and the prime minister in an attempt to recover the high moral ground.

As the above history demonstrates, the Christian churches have not always, nor even often, stood on the side of ordinary Kenyans. While they have been a potent force for much positive change, it is instructive to note that they have accomplished this primarily in pursuit of their own selfish interests, and not the common welfare. When dictatorship has suited them, they have embraced it and kow-towed to its whims. Their current stand on the constitution should be understood in this light.

It's Public Policy, Stupid!

2010-04-19T08:39:00.007+03:00

As the referendum on Kenya’s new constitution draws near, the debate over abortion is taking centre stage and threatening to derail the two-decade old project. Despite the fact that abortion has never been legal in Kenya, and the new draft expressly provides for matters to remain that way, Christian church leaders have vowed to mobilise their followers to reject the document.

The church objects to the section of Article 26 that empowers doctors to end a pregnancy if it endangers the woman’s life or she needs emergency treatment. Christian leaders are also opposed to the retention of Kadhis' courts in the proposed Constitution under Article 169 and 170, which limit their authority to disputes over personal status, marriage, divorce or inheritance, where all the parties are Muslims and agree to take the case to a Kadhi.

The controversy over the termination of pregnancy has pitted the church against pro-choice activists and is largely fought on the battlefields of values and morality. The debate has degenerated into shouting matches over the viability and humanity of foetuses and when exactly life begins. Lost in all this is the fact that, from a public policy perspective, these considerations are largely academic.

Banning abortion, as has been the experience worldwide, does not stop it. A survey of 197 countries carried out by the Guttmacher Institute — a pro-choice reproductive think tank — found that abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is legal and regions where it is highly restricted.

Despite the current prohibition on abortion in Kenya’s laws, it is estimated that fully a fifth of total pregnancies in the country are terminated. Couching the ban in new phraseology is unlikely to alter this fact. This is not to say that the law has no effect. For nearly 300,000 women who seek abortions each year, it has proven to be a millstone around their necks.

The report, In Harm’s Way: The Impact Of Kenya’s Restrictive Abortion Law, compiled by the Centre for Reproductive Rights between June 2009 and February 2010, reveals that over 2,600 women die annually in Kenya and 21,000 are hospitalised each year in public hospitals due to complications arising from incomplete and unsafe abortions. The World Health Organisation thinks these numbers are gross underestimations due to underreporting. Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions every year, and they kill 70,000 women, accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths. The vast majority occur in countries where abortion is illegal.

Why do so many Kenyan women seek abortions? Women’s activists say that women and girls, thrust uninformed and unprepared into a world of sexual politics, and then abandoned and condemned when their naivety predictably bears fruit, have little choice other than to turn to backstreet quacks. Though fertility levels have been halved since the 1970s, they are still double the government’s target. According to a 2003 study, 25 per cent of Kenyan girls and women aged 15 to 19 are either pregnant or have children. The 2003 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey revealed that close to half of all births are either unwanted or mistimed (wanted later). In a 1998 Alan Guttmacher Institute survey entitled Into a New World, 74 per cent of unmarried women aged 15-19 and 47 per cent of the married women reported their current pregnancy unwanted. If one also considers the pregnancies already terminated, it is then likely that significant majority of all conceptions are undesired and unplanned for.

This is compounded by ignorance of, and lack of access to, contraceptive methods. In 2003 70 per cent of all adolescents in the country engaged in unprotected sex and 85 per cent of girls and women aged 15 to 19 and 72 per cent of women aged 20 to 24 did not use contraceptives. A 1998 survey of Kenyan secondary school students found that only a third of males and a quarter of females knew that contraceptive pills had to be taken by the woman and not by the man; and even fewer knew the pills had to be taken daily, not just before sex. A report in the Nation last year revealed that young women used emergency pill far more regularly than recommended and that when it came to choosing emergency contraception, they consulted their schoolmates, the Internet and their boyfriends.

The consequences of pregnancy can be grim. The Nairobi-based Centre for the Study of Adolescence estimates that up to 13,000 Kenyan girls drop out of school every year as a result of pregnancy. These young girls are often treated as outcasts by their families. Many migrate to cities where they face unemployment, health risks and malnutrition. This, combined with the fact that the responsibility to care for a child born out of wedlock is placed squarely on the mother, condemns many to lives of hardship and grinding poverty.

The case of Ruth Njeri, a 20-year old domestic worker, is typical. She had to leave school after getting pregnant and then moved to Nairobi from her village in the Nakuru district in search of work as her father refused to support her or the baby. "I had completed my Form-IV (higher secondary) but after the child was born neither my family nor my school wanted me back. If I had wanted to study further at all, I had to go to a different school," she told the Inter Press Service news agency.

Many women already in informal or casual employment also fear for their jobs as employers are generally unwilling to afford them maternity leave. The social stigma too, can be overwhelming. “My parents would probably kick me out should they find out that I’m sexually active, so I don’t even want to imagine their reaction should I get pregnant today,” Sheila, a 22-year-old who is about to graduate from college, told the Nation last year. A Population Council study indicated that fear of pregnancy outweighs fear of contracting the HIV virus among E-pill (morning after pill) users — 79 per cent cited pregnancy as their biggest fear, while only 45 per cent thought they were at risk of contracting HIV through unprotected sex.

Further, despite the sharp decline in the number of women dying at childbirth over the past decade, Kenya still remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth, ranking 13th out of 181 countries. In 2008, according to a study published in The Lancet, 6,200 Kenyan women died in childbirth, translating into roughly 413 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to a global average of 251 per 100,000 live births.

All this leads to predictable results. Studies in Kenya showed that 47 per cent of all young people below the age of 20 years who got pregnant while in school resorted to abortion. “Young unmarried women would rather seek an abortion than let their parents know that they’re pregnant,” says Wanjiku Gikang’a, a family therapist and university lecturer.

Confronted with these realities, the church prefers to bury its head in the Bible. Apparently caring little for practical concerns, it proposes supposedly eternal and unchanging dictates revealed to a dozen tribes wandering aimlessly in the desert more than 3,000 years ago, as appropriate policy solutions for a globalised world of over 6 billion. In fact, a recent study of religious attitudes in sub-Saharan Africa revealed that 57 per cent of Christians in Kenya favor making Bible the official law of the land. This is similar to Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army's deranged suggestion that a complex and modernising country be governed by the Ten Commandments.

The church continues to oppose sex education in schools and the free provision of contraception in order to “protect” adolescents’ morality. In 1997, the Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups forced the government to shelve a sessional paper on family life education that was to be discussed by parliament. If the paper had been adopted, sex education would have been introduced in schools and integrated with primary health care. The document would have been the basis for making students aware of the dangers of adolescent pregnancy, abortion, drug abuse, HIV/AIDS, and sexually transmitted diseases.

The Catholic Church’s view, that sex education would itself lead to sexual immorality at too early age, resulting in more teenage pregnancy, backstreet abortions and further spread of HIV/AIDS, is contradicted by the findings of Scholasticah Nganda, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic women's order, and a lecturer at Kenyatta University's Department of Psychology. She states that primary school boys and girls are already engaged in sex and they are likely to continue to engage in premarital sex with or without sex education, citing a 2003 study of the policy of the Catholic Church that revealed that 81 per cent of Protestants, and 47 per cent of Catholics as well as 81.8per cent of health workers supported the introduction of sex education in schools.

In addition, while the churches paint a picture of a world where God wills every pregnancy to go to term, this is at odds with the evidence of nature. Spontaneous abortion (sometimes referred to as miscarriage) is a common experience for women. It is estimated that between 25 and 50 per cent of all conceptions spontaneously abort. Researchers do not have an exact figure due to the fact that when this occurs very early on, many women do not even know that they were ever pregnant. Fully a third of all pregnancies are spontaneously terminated by week 10 LMP (Last Menstrual Period), with studies suggesting reasons as morally irrelevant as age (one study found that pregnancies from men younger than 25 are 40 per cent less likely to end in miscarriage than those from men 25-29 years; women over 45 spontaneously abort 75 per cent of the time).

This is not to say that the unborn should be fair game. Each abortion, spontaneous or not, is a tragedy for it involves the death of a human being. The questions for the state — which unlike the church answers to the citizenry and not to God — should be these: What policy would lead to the least number of abortions? Is deterrence achieved by criminalising the act? Does legalising abortion lead to an increase in demand for the procedure?

As the evidence shows, legal restrictions, however severe, do not lead to fewer abortions. And since prohibition does not deter, legalising the procedure will not lead to an increase in the overall number of terminations — it just moves abortions from the backstreet and into proper medical facilities, saving women’s lives.

Indeed, when combined with sex education and the availability of contraception, a legal regime actually lowers demand for abortion. According to the 1998 Guttmacher Institute survey, nearly 46 million abortions were performed worldwide that year. Five years later, in 2003, despite the fact that 19 countries had liberalised their abortion laws over the period, and only three had tightened them, the total number of abortions worldwide had fallen to 41.5 million — amazing when one takes into account population growth. However, the number of unsafe abortions, which are overwhelmingly illegal, remained almost static. Therefore all the reductions happened in countries where the procedure was legal.

Researchers have also noted that while liberalisation was a key element in improving women's access to safer terminations and lowering demand, it was not the only factor. Even in countries where abortion is legal, lack of availability and cost still created a barrier. In India, for example, where terminations are legally allowed for a variety of reasons, some 6 million took place outside the formal health system. Other factors that were seen to be relevant to reducing the number of terminations included effective family planning services — which currently cost four times less than the public bill for sorting out conditions, from sepsis to organ failure, that result from botched abortions.

In much of Eastern Europe, where abortion was treated as a form of birth control, abortion rates dropped by 50 per cent as contraceptives became more widely available while globally, the number of married women of childbearing age with access to contraception had increased from 54 per cent in 1990 to 63 per cent in 2003.

Therefore, if public policy aims at reducing the number of abortions, securing the health of women and girls, and saving money in the process, then criminalising the procedure is not the solution. Legal terminations coupled with sex education, family planning services, and knowledge about as well as availability of contraception, are indisputably the way to go. In fact, addressing the 37th session of the UN's Commission on Population and Development in 2004, the then chief executive officer of the National Co-ordination Agency for Population and Development in the Ministry of Planning and National Development, Dr Richard Muga, affirmed that Kenya upheld the 1994 Cairo Plan of Action, which called for the integration of sexual education into the school curriculum and invited open debate on controversial issues, including abortion.

Even with all these measures in place, unwanted pregnancies, though greatly reduced in number, will continue to occur. To further reduce the instances of these turning into abortion cases, the government, since the early years of this century, has reversed the situation that previously saw pregnant schoolgirls barred from continuing their studies. The church could help out here by teaching its flock to be more accommodating and tolerant of those who have “fallen by the wayside” — those, incidentally, that Christ said were the ones he came to save.

Where There's Smoke...

2010-04-17T21:58:00.002+03:00

War and Peace-keeping

2010-04-15T17:39:00.004+03:00

Si vispacem, para bellum is a well-worn Latin adage that translates as, "If you wish for peace, prepare for war." However to prepare for war, one must have an idea of the likely threats as well as which to prioritise. According to the Kenyan Ministry of Defence, the two-fold mission of the country’s armed forces, as defined by the Constitution, is “to deter aggression and should deterrence fail, defend the Republic; provide support to civil power in the maintenance of order.” But what does it mean to defend the Republic?

Kenya’s National Security Intelligence Services Act defines “a threat to national security” as espionage, sabotage, terrorism or subversion directed against the country’s interests; the destruction or overthrow of the constitutionally established system of the Government; violence promotinga constitutional, political, industrial, social or economic objective or change in Kenya; and “foreign-influenced activity” that is detrimental to the interests of Kenya.

Thus the military’s mandate does not preclude its intervening in internal matters to preserve and defend the state. In fact, the prospect of military intervention is domestic matters is not new in the region. Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda have been host to numerous coups d’etat by the military establishment, in most cases to the detriment of society as the military administrations proved to be much worse than the civilian regimes they deposed. In fact, two of the region’s leaders, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, came to power via military force and thereafter sought to legitimize their rule through elections.

More recently, addressing an East African security meeting in October 2009, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni called for the creation of an East-African defence force to counter threats both from within and outside the region. And during Kenya’s post-election conflagration in 2008, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, drew the wrath of the Kibaki administration when he urged the Kenyan army into action saying that he did not oppose military intervention when “institutions have lost control”. Ironically, according to the Financial Times, President Kibaki had himself considered imposing a state of emergency but the army resisted, fearing a split in their own ranks.Instead the army preferred a low-key role, distributing food and opening up blocked roads, though on at least one occasion it did step in to separate fighting mobs. According to a paper by the Kenya Human Rights Commission Executive Director, Muthoni Wanyeki, Agenda Item One of the mediation processes contemplated the possibility of preventive military deploymentto immediately end the violence.

However, in its interventions, whether internally or facing an external foe the military falls under the same limitations as described by Jakkie Cilliers of the Institute for Defence Politics in the case of the South African Defence Force. “It is part of the executive arm of the Government. It therefore does not have autonomy of action, or unlimited scope in defining its own role in society at large, except in so far as such actions or roles support, and are within the guidelines of national policy and objectives.”

A paper by Carolyne Pumphrey for the US Department of Defence states that while the traditional view of national security is that it is concerned with the preservation of state sovereignty (most especially its monopoly of force) and the protection of national interests, these interests are not confined to countries’ borders. If one compares Kenya’s territory to its ecological footprint- the amount of resources the country needs to maintain itself- the latter is far larger than the former.Therefore a threat to the country’s ability to secure supplies from without its territory, such as that posed by Somali pirates to shipping destined for Mombasa is a threat to its national security.

While the military can be seen as an instrument available to a sovereign government to provide security for its citizens and defend the nation’s vital interests, in the 21st century it may be necessary to modify this traditional approach, for more and more in today’s world protecting a way of life has moved well beyond the use of military power. According to Col. Dan Smith and Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information, “interlocking if not competing political, economic, social, and environmental interests are tying together as never before the fate of sovereign states. In turn the freedoms of citizens in an ever growing number of nations are becoming intertwined in such a way that individual security is becoming increasingly linked to the achievement of security at the international level through the reciprocal implementation of policies driven by national priorities.” To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, insecurity anywhere is a threat to security everywhere.

Therefore, a new paradigm of security has emerged which stands the Westphalian system, and its designation of the nation-state as the focal point of security, on its head. Referred to as “human security,” it decrees that the individual (or the collection of individuals known as the nation) is supreme, and not the institutions of governance. In this conception, the military’s purpose is not the protection of the state but rather the citizen. Within this paradigm, it is easy to understand the Kenya military’s queasiness about the proposed declaration of emergency during the post-election conflict. As one person, at the time described by the Financial Times, as being close to the senior command, put it, “The question the army has been asking is, is this a legally elected government? If not, and they deploy, are they supporting a ‘civilian coup?’”

However, this should not be taken to mean that the army always behaves itself when it comes to civilians. It has been accused of systematic murder, torture and scores of other human rights abuses in its interventions to quell insurgencies in Sabaot and in the country’s restive North Eastern Province. Similarly, Uganda’s military was accused of terrorized the very civilians it was supposedly rescuing from the clutches of the psychopathic LRA.

Such tactics, which breed resentment and anger, do little to further the military objective of pacification, as the US and its allies are discovering in Iraq and Afghanistan. More and more, the talk there has moved from the macho “winning,” with its visions of tidy victories and foes who know when they are beaten, to the softer “winning hearts and minds,” which recognizes that insurgencies are not defeated by capturing cities and bridges, but by embracing the people. It is a lesson the AU is yet to learn in Somalia, where it strives to secure a feckless government instead of the suffering populace. In Iraq, the troop surge, an emphasis on capturing and holding cities instead of withdrawing to the relative safety of green zones, as well as engaging with locals bore fruit. The AU should consider doing the same in Somalia.

This does not mean that insurgencies should not be fought militarily. According to Jane’s Information Group, the terror strikes on US and Israeli targets in Kenya in 1998 and 2002 highlight the fact that the country is at risk of attack by international terrorists. The country's geographical location bordering the conflict zones of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan has also made it vulnerable to infiltration by neighbouring rebel groups for use as a rear base or transit country. Similarly, Rwanda is threatened by former genocidaires who are also causing chaos on the other side of the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The LRA continues to make Northern Uganda and parts of the DRC ungovernable. All these threats need to be met squarely and the countries should not shy away from military confrontation if such is called for.

But, whether it is confronting Al Shebbab on Kenya’s borders or the Interhamwe on Rwanda’s, the focus of policymakers should be to extend the fruits of peace to the populations that breed and host these elements. This might mean working with the more reasonable elements of these groups, or, in the extreme, direct military intervention. It would also require that the military starts to provide security and services to the beleaguered peoples on their side of the borders to prevent them falling under the spell of armed groups.

General Sir David Ramsbotham of the British Army notes that every military operation is, in itself, a man-made disaster because “the use of force is bound to result in damage, not just to life and limb but also to national infrastructures. Having inflicted or received that damage, the military are trained, equipped and accustomed to repairing it. Furthermore, they are accustomed to functioning under the Law of Armed Conflict, so conforming with the dictate of international law is not strange to them either.” Our troops, with the experience of policing war zones on other continents, should prove no less adept at doing it at home.

Snake Mail

2010-04-15T11:26:00.004+03:00

In addition to this email that M has dispatched with deserved contempt, I also received the following FAQs from our churches. My reactions to both underneath.

Kenya Christian Leaders Forum
Frequently Asked Questions on Contentious Issues in the Constitution Review Process

1. Why is a National Constitution important?
The Constitution of a nation is the most important governance document. It is the mother and father of all laws. Any law that is in conflict with the Constitution is null and void. It defines the people, their values and the nation and its destiny. Kenya 's current constitution was written in London with the help of the British colonialist. It is under review to correct past anomalies and ensure justice, fairness and equity for everyone.
2. Why are Christians against Kadhis Courts in the Draft Constitution?
Christians are against the inclusion of Kadhis Courts because it is an outright injustice to other religions. Kenya is a multi-religious society! Christians' objections to the inclusion of Kadhi Courts were ignored by the government, the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission, the BOMAS gathering, the Committee of Experts and most recently the Parliamentary Select Committee. Christians are left with no choice but to vote against the new Constitution unless the Courts are removed.
3. Are Christians against Muslims?
No. Christians are not against Muslims. They are against injustice and unfairness in the draft constitution perpetrated by the Government and the review organs.
4. Why didn't Christians request for Christian Courts?
Christians seek for a just society for all Kenyans, not only the rights of Christians. They advocated for an effective executive with an accountable President, an effective Parliament, an efficient judiciary, and respect for the rights and responsibilities that promote an equitable, just and moral values based society. The Constitution must set up a Judiciary that is good for all Kenyans.
5. How come Kadhis Court was not identified as a contentious issue by the Committee of experts?
Christians submitted thousands of memoranda to the Committee of Experts rejecting the inclusion of Kadhis courts in the constitution. The Committee of Experts deliberately refused to identify Kadhis Courts as a contentious issue. Instead, the Committee of Experts that was supposed to be impartial, was partisan and openly campaigned for inclusion of Kadhis Courts in the constitution. We now think it was deliberate because Muslims have dominated the Committee of Experts and the Parliamentary Select Committee.
6. Are there Christian MPs in Parliament who can speak for Christians the way Muslim MPs do?
There are Christian members of Parliament, but they have been silent. They have not stood for what is right and just. Church leaders are calling on Christian MPs to stand up and be counted. In future, we urge you as a citizen to vote for those people who will not sit by and watch as our country is sold out. Meanwhile, Christians must organize themselves under the Lords guidance and speak the truth even if MPs fail us.
7. So what do Christians want?
It is not what Christians want but rather what Kenyans want. Kenyans want a constitution that defines how society is organized on the basis of justice, truth, fairness, effective checks and balances, and an effective bill of rights for all Kenyans. With regard to religion, it should be one that provides for freedom of worship to people of all faiths under the Bill of Rights. The Constitution of Kenya must remain neutral with regard to religion, in order to offer equal protection to the people of all religions.
8. Why are Christians opposed to Kadhis courts yet they have not harmed any body?
The fact that the Kadhi Courts did not harm non-Muslims does not mean it was right for them to be included in the Constitution. It was wrong and discriminatory against the people of other faiths from the beginning. Kenyans' patience since independence must not be taken for granted. It is time to correct all wrong things. Muslims should by now be an integral part of the Kenyan community not requiring special treatment or protection! The constitution must not divide the people along religious or other lines. Kenyans want one nation, one land, one law that caters for all irrespective of religious affiliation. This is the practice in stable democracies around the world. We should not let a new constitution to perpetuate past injustices. Christ said: "And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins” (Mark 2:22). Inclusion of Kadhis Courts in the new constitution is like pouring new wine into old wineskins. It will burst the skins.
9. Who qualifies to be a Kadhi?
A Kadhi is a Muslim judge or magistrate. While many claim that the Kadhi is a purely judicial officer who serves in a Kadhis Court , they in Kenya they perform religious functions. The Chief Kadhi declares the beginning of Ramadhan a major Muslim religious festival. As an officer of government, it is discriminatory that, to be a Kadhi, one must profess the MUSLIM RELIGION. This means even if a Christian possesses knowledge of the MUSLIM LAW applicable to any SECTS OF MUSLIMS, he cannot serve as a Kadhi, meanwhile Muslims can preside over cases of non Muslims!
10. What law does Kadhis Court enforce?
Kadhis Courts enforce Islamic law commonly referred to as Sharia. Sharia is the Arabic word where our Kiswahili word Sheria is borrowed from. Sharia is the law system based on the the Koran, the Sunna, older Arabic law systems, parallel traditions, and the work of Muslim scholars over the two first centuries of Islam.
11. What are the implications of the inclusion of Kadhis Courts in the Constitution?
The inclusion of Islamic Sharia courts in the constitution divides Kenyans along religious lines. It would reinforce two classes of Kenyans, Muslims and the rest. Kenyans are seeking a constitution that unites.
12. Is the draft constitution Christian?
No. The draft Constitution is a collection of all just and fair laws from any source where they may be found. It draws from Judeo-Christian principles of equality, fairness, justice and equity does not make it Christian! These are values recognized by people from all religions, ethnic communities or professional backgrounds. We as Kenyans do not want a Christian or Muslim or Hindu constitution. We want a Kenyan constitution made by all Kenyans for all Kenyans. Unfortunately, as it is now, the constitution appears to be Islamic! It mentions the word Muslim 6 times, and Kadhis 5 times. It does not mention the word Christian at all!
13. What have Christians proposed?
That the Constitution recognizes every Kenyans freedom of worship. That every Kenyan worships and submits to the religion they choose at their own cost and not government's cost. We appeal that all religious beliefs and practices be left to the Churches, Mosques and Temples where they belong.
14. Did Jomo Kenyatta agree with the Sultan to entrench Kadhis Court in the constitution?
No. Kenyatta undertook to the Sultan of Zanzibar to only preserve the jurisdiction of Kadhis courts. The Kadhi was to operate in the ten mile Coastal strip. While Section 66 of the current constitution provides that the Chief Kadhi and the Kadhis “shall each be empowered to hold a Kadhis court having jurisdiction within the former Protectorate or within such part of the former Protectorate as may be so prescribed”, the government violated the constitution and established Kadhis Courts in areas which are outside the ten mile coastal strip like. Christians filed a case in court to challenge this wanton violation of the constitution of Kenya .
15. If Christians succeed in rejecting the constitution during the referendum, will we not still have Kadhis Courts under the current Constitution any way?
Christians are actively involved in this matter and will not stop at a No vote at the referendum. Christians filed a case in the High Court in 2004 to declare Kadhis Court unconstitutional. The hearing ended in February 2009. It is regrettable that time has lapsed and the High Court is yet to deliver the judgment. Christians will next sponsor a motion in Parliament to amend the current constitution to delete section 66 which provides for Kadhis Court .
16. Should Kenyans reject the draft constitution just because it has Kadhis Courts?
Yes. If you had a soda with a small amount of poison, would you drink it? Let us not be deceived by people who either do not have the interest of Kenya at heart or are unable to see divisiveness of this issue. If they are serious and want us to accept the new constitution, let them delete all references to the Kadhis Court in the constitution.
17. Is it true that the Bill of Rights shall not apply to Muslims?
Yes. Muslims are the only Kenyans who are allowed to violate the Bill of Rights. Kenyans should not allow this to happen. Let every Kenyan be equal before the law of the land and particularly the Bill of Rights.
18. If Christians succeed in rejecting the Kadhis Court, will the Muslims unleash violence?
No. Christians and Kenyans in general should not allow themselves to be manipulated and intimidated by the threat of violence. Kenya is a democracy, Muslims must argue with ideas and the ballot box, not violence. In any case, it is hoped that Muslims in Kenya are peace loving and will respect the decision of Kenyans. The threat by some Muslim leaders to secede from Kenya is a matter that the security forces are able to handle.
19. What about abortion?
Abortion is the willful termination of a woman's pregnancy on the basis that it is unwanted. A woman may herself be under pressure because she desires to hide the fact or may be under pressure from other person(s) for the same reasons
20. When does life begin?
Life begins at Conception. All doctors who claim that life begins at birth are professionally untrustworthy, because the fetus in the mother's womb are usually alive. Whenever a fetus dies, it is always an emergency to operate and to remove it.
21. What do Pro-abortionists want?
Their interest is to make money from vulnerable women. In the course of the abortion process the life of the woman is endangered, their conscience and faith are trashed and they become guilty of murder.
22. What does God say about the life of the unborn?
The unborn babies are complete human beings created in the image of God. Any one who aborts them is a murderer. God called Jeremiah in the mother's womb (Jer. 1:4-5). When Mary after she became pregnant met Elizabeth , John leaped in her womb to rejoice at Jesus. (Lk 1:41-44). God commanded that His people in the sixth commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill.' (Ex 20:13) Abortion is murder, the killing of the unborn innocents.
23. Does anti-abortion law hinder the practice of medicine?
No. The constitution allows a doctor, upon medical examination of a pregnant woman, to terminate a pregnancy if the life of the mother faces a medical condition that leads to the death of both mother and baby.
24. What about Marriage?
The Constitution must state that Marriage in Kenya is between two adults of the opposite sex. It must not allow any type of marriage which God calls an abomination. For us as Kenyans, let us pray that God blesses our men and women to form godly and healthy marriages.
25. What can I do as a Kenyan?
As a citizen of this nation you must make your voice heard on these matters! You also need to do the following:
You must read and understand the draft Constitution personally
Petition your Members of Parliament to delete all the sections referring to Kadhis Courts, or that introduce any unacceptable laws in the Constitution.
Register yourself as a voter, and ensure all your friends register as voters. If Kadhis Courts, pro-abortion laws are included in the constitution ensure that all your friends and yourself vote NO at the referendum.
Photocopy this paper and pass it to at least 10 more people in your area.
Pray that God will defeat all the efforts of the people seeking to perpetrate an injustice against Christians and other religions by entrenching the Kadhis Court in the constitution.
Issued by Christian leaders from all Church Denominations, all Umbrella Organizations and all other Christian Organizations in Kenya . These include all Churches and organizations under the NCCK, the KEC, the EAK, the UCCK, and the FEICCK. For comments or further enquiries, contact: info.kcl2010@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or communications@ncck.org

It is not very Christian to impute improper motives on others especially when you have not bothered to provide a shred of evidence. To suggest that the head of the IIEc is biased simply because he is a Muslim or that abortionists are simply after vulnerable women's money is beyond contempt and unworthy of people that claim to be dedicated to truth. You have every right to disagree with them, but casting aspersions was something the Pharisees, not Jesus did. Outright lies, such as the one that "persons of Somali ethnicity now out number any others in Kenya" are unbecoming of people claiming to be followers of Christ.

On the merits, the draft constitution is clear. Abortion is illegal. I happen to think that this is wrong as a matter of public policy, and causes more harm than good, but this are not considerations the church burdens itself with. Banning abortion, as has been the experience worldwide, will not stop it. The restriction has little to do with protecting babies (which it doesn't) and everything to do with declaring a self-righteous statement of principle at the expense of our women and girls. While they die in their thousands at the hands of quacks, the churches prefer to listen, not to their screams, but to its own voice.

The church opposes sex education in schools and the free provision of contraception under the guise of protecting our adolescents morality, burying its head in the sand when confronted with overwhelming evidence that they (our young ones) are having sex regardless. I would much prefer they did it with the knowledge of how to protect themselves, but churchmen rather like to listen to themselves talk.

Kenyans have striven for a new constitution for 2 decades, shedding a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the process. The document we will be presented with at the referendum will not be perfect; no constitution ever is hence the amendment procedure. But because of Kadhi courts, which the churches themselves admit have not harmed non-Muslims (see no. 8 in the Frequently Asked Questions on Contentious Issues in the Constitution Review Process below), the whole constitution-making project is imperiled. This is narcissism in the extreme. So as we sing out for a new constitutional dispensation, the preachermen are enchanted by their own song.

Finally, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere had a word of advice to his cadres that the churches would do well to heed. "Argue, don't shout!" he told them. The churches may think that they will carry the day because they have the loudest voice, but they are grossly mistaken. For years they have refused to engage in intelligent debate on social issues, preferring instead to shout from their pulpits. This time, their demagoguery will be laid bare.

Of White Elephants and Ivory Towers

2010-04-07T12:57:00.007+03:00

The construction of the Gilgel Gibe III dam on the Omo river in Ethiopia has been condemned by conservationists and indigenous rights campaigners as a white elephant, a monument to government myopia, incompetence and greed. In return, the authorities accuse these “do-gooders” of romanticising rural misery from the comfort of their ivory towers. In between are the people of the region, whose interests both sides claim to be championing.

Such controversy is not new. The World Commission on Dams, which reviewed the effectiveness of large dams, seemed to capture both sides of the issue when it wrote, “There can no longer be any justifiable doubt that dams have made an important and significant contribution to human development, and that in too many cases an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure those benefits, especially in social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers and by the natural environment.”

In the case of the Gilgel Gibe dams (there are five in total, two of which have been completed), the touted benefits to the country and region are compelling. Ethiopia, the continent’s second most populous country, has one of the world’s lowest levels of access to modern energy services. According to the World Bank, only 12 per cent of Ethiopians have access to electricity. Its installed capacity as of 2006 was less than 800 MW, nearly 90 per cent of which was generated by hydropower. By contrast, the country has one of Africa’s highest hydropower potential, estimated at 30,000-45,000 MW. To tap this potential, nearly 300 sites have been identified for possible future development.

Surrounding countries are also hungry for that power. According to Emmanuel Nzabanita of the African Development Bank, which is considering financing Gibe III, the power systems of East Africa are still in their infancy, with insufficient installed capacity to satisfy domestic demand. Overall electrification rates are miniscule (around 10 per cent on average) and per capita energy consumption is one of the lowest in the world. Hydropower from Ethiopia would come at half the cost of that from other plants being built in East Africa; moreover, the planned interconnection between the Ethiopian and Kenyan systems as well those of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo, Tanzania and Zambia will enable the development of the huge hydropower resources in Ethiopia at a considerably lowered cost due to the economies of scale thus realised.

For Ethiopia, ranked 171 out of 182 countries on the United Nations Development Programme's 2009 Human Development Index, and where 39 per cent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, the revenues to be earned from exporting power are not to be sneezed at. The World Commission on Dams report noted, “Groups bearing the social and environmental costs and risks of large dams ... are often not the same groups that receive the water and electricity services, nor the social and economic benefits from these.” In the case of the Gilgel Gibe dams, many of these costs will be borne by the marginalised groups living downstream of the dams and by their equally neglected compatriots on the other side of the border in northwestern Kenya.

These communities, comprising nearly half a million people, are entirely dependent on the Omo River and Lake Turkana, which it feeds. They face the immediate loss of traditional means of survival, such as annual floods that bring fertile silts and allow the growing of crops in an otherwise barren and waterless land. Though desirous of the benefits of modern amenities, many of which are powered by electricity, they are sceptical of promises from governments in faraway capitals that have only been too content to ignore them in the past.

This fear — arising from past experience — is what needs addressing and is why preliminary studies, including environmental and social assessments, are vital. They are not about stopping or curtailing development but enabling it. For development is not about dams and electricity, but about people. Societies should be measured not by the numbers on balance sheets, but by how those numbers translate to a better life for all their people.

A second advantage of doing your due diligence is that it stops good projects from evolving into white elephants. The World Commission on Dams points out that large dams have a tendency to come in late and over budget. Properly done, preliminary studies can help mitigate this; you ignore them at your peril. The Ethiopian dams have proven to be no exception.

Gibe II, the second in the series, is a case in point. Inaugurated in January 2010 after shoddy planning had led to a three-year delay and a total cost of $0.5 billion, it suffered a catastrophic tunnel collapse barely two weeks later, which will cost another $25 million to repair. The Ethiopian embassy in Kenya insists that this collapse was expected and that the contractors, Salini Constrotturi S.p.A, would bear the cost of fixing it. But Salini’s own website ascribes the collapse to “an unforeseen geological event” and International Rivers, a group opposed to the construction of Gilgel Gibe III, suggests that “the dubiously negotiated contract for Gilgel Gibe II exempts Salini from geological risks,” meaning the Ethiopians will get stuck with the tab. As Caterina Amicucci of the Italian group CRBM put it, “Gilgel Gibe demonstrates that cutting corners does not speed up development, but can rather produce costly disasters.”

It is a lesson that governments and funding agencies are loath to learn. For example, during her visit to Kenya in November last year, World Bank vice-president for Africa Obiageli Ezekwesili raised concerns about the manner in which the Ethiopian government was managing the project, in particular the environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) which was not conclusive (a group of scientists calling itself the African Resources Working Group has completely rubbished it) and the award of the contract to Salini without competitive bidding. Three months later, Ken Ohashi, the Bank’s country director for Ethiopia and Sudan, while confirming that the omission of a competitive tender meant the Bank couldn’t loan the Ethiopian government money for the project, nevertheless declared the its willingness, "to help mobilise financing from the private market ... by providing a guarantee."

A document prepared by the Italian embassy in Ethiopia enumerates another lesson from Gibe II. “The Project was defined without a comprehensive sector support strategy,” it says, and lists as possible negative consequences, “limited scope for supporting best practices for (socio) environmental impacts of large infrastructures.” In this regard, the World Bank, the EIB and the AfDB are co-ordinating their activities on Gibe III. The three institutions have fielded at least four major missions together in Ethiopia as part of their due diligence. The AfDB and the European Investment Bank have jointly financed an Economic, Financial and Technical Assessment of the project, which was undertaken in consultation with the World Bank.

Transparency, a feature of successful projects, is missing from Gibe III. When the Kenyan government sent a fact-finding delegation to Ethiopia, they pointedly left out the organisations, such as Friends of Lake Turkana, who had called for it. Their finding that the dam poses no threat to the lake, comes as cold comfort to the communities there.Within Ethiopia itself, people opposed to the dams are afraid to speak up. Those interviewed for this report even feared the identification of their communities. Not surprising in a country considered only “partly free” by Freedom House and which in 2006 was ranked 160 out of 168 in the Reporters Without Borders’ Worldwide Press Freedom Index.While, for this report, the Ethiopian embassy did provide the opportunity for a short interview with Yelibu Lijalem, the deputy head of mission, as well as a statement extolling the virtues of the project, this misses the point. It is not the press that needs convincing.

In the end, the controversy over the Gibe dam revolves around trust. As Terri Hathaway of International Rivers put it, the question is, “How do the governments demonstrate their political will to provide for their citizens, if you've broken promises in the past or you're taking actions to disempower those people, then there's no trust or belief in what's going to go forward.”

For example, according to the 2008 ESIA, authorities managing the dam would be obliged to release moderate amounts of water to create an artificial flood as mitigation for the loss of the natural one. The Ethiopian authorities maintain that the dams are necessary for controlling natural flooding but ignore the dangers the dams themselves present. Thus, when in 2006, heavy rainfall led to serious concerns over the amount of water in the Gilgel Gibe I dam and there were emergency releases, these came at the height of the natural flood downstream, contributing to a deluge that killed over 400 people downstream. Conversely, while authorities are again obliged to release a minimal flow during the dry season to maintain life on the river, according to the activists, they may not do it because they need the water to generate power.

Over the last century, people living downstream of large dams, especially indigenous, tribal, and peasant communities, have suffered disproportionately. Impacts include extreme economic hardship, community disintegration, waterborne diseases and the loss of natural resources upon which livelihoods depended. Unless these people feel that they have been consulted in the conception, design and management of dams, to require that they happily entrust their future to them is the very definition of living in an ivory tower.

KIBAKMENDE

2010-04-01T17:23:00.002+03:00

The Kenyan Anti-Hero

The United States of East Africa

2010-03-22T09:46:00.006+03:00

Like most other currency unions, East African Monetary Union is a political enterprise. That in itself is not a bad thing. London-based economist, Dr Gerard Lyons, observes that politics was the driving force behind European monetary integration —which, despite the problems with Greece, has been fairly successful.

According to Dr Lyons, historically there have been four types of monetary unions. One is where political union has ensured the monetary union's success. Examples include German Unification at the end of the last century; the longer lasting Italian Monetary Union that followed political unification in 1861; and the US Federal Reserve, established in 1913 as a decentralised system.

A second category comprises monetary unions of small countries that survive without political union, provided there has been economic convergence. Two examples are the 1923 Union between Belgium and Luxembourg and the CFA Franc zone in West Africa, which has survived since 1948.

In a third category, the survival of the monetary union is completely dependent on that of the political union. The original East African shilling is a good example of this. Others include the Soviet system, and the 19th century German Monetary Union, which collapsed with World War 1.

A final category is a temporary monetary union that survives for a long time without political union but eventually collapses. The Latin and Scandinavian Monetary Unions from the last century are examples.

So where does East Africa’s Monetary Union project fall? According to Barrack Ndegwa, Director of Economic Affairs at Kenya’s Ministry of East African Community, the EAC is based on an intergovernmental model of regional integration. The process of integration is led and directed by the partner states’ governments, especially their Heads of State through the Summit, the EAC’s highest decision-making organ. There is no supranational body, such as the EU’s Commission, to which some sovereignty is delegated.

The net effect is that political will matters most and personal or political disagreements between leaders threaten both the EAC and the Monetary Union -the same condition described in Dr Lyons’s third category. We have not taken lessons from the failure of the first monetary union. What should we be doing differently?

Well, the book Economics of Monetary Union by Paul de Grauwe recognises that a monetary union must be embedded within a political union to work well. However, in describing what such a political merger should look like, the book emphasises the need for “a certain degree of budgetary union, giving some discretionary power to spend and to tax” to a central executive body, subject to full democratic accountability.

According to Augustine Lotodo, a member of the East African Legislative assembly, proposals to turn the Secretariat into an EU-type Commission, as well as to make the East African Legislative Assembly into a properly representative and elective body along the lines of the European Parliament, are already being discussed. However that does not go far enough.

To fulfill de Grauwe's condition, the Secretariat will need to be endowed with budget-making and tax-levying powers, the EA parliament’s ambit and power expande and a mechanism for the implementation and enforcement of decisions devised.

Currently, Tanzania’s 42 million citizens are represented by 9 MPs in the East African parliament, the same as Rwanda’s 10 million. Burundi, with just 3 per cent of the region’s GDP, makes the same EAC contribution as Kenya, which accounts for 40 per cent. Lotodo says that equal representation in the EALA and contribution to the Secretariat’s budget will have to be replaced by representation and contributions reflecting members’ population and economy. This is bound to create tensions as the bigger countries seek to assert themselves. A mechanism would thus have to be found to cater for the interests of the smaller nations.

The East African Court of Justice will also need to have its jurisdiction similarly extended and partner states stripped of the power to constrict it as they did in 2006 when, after the court granted an interim injunction barring the swearing-in of the Kenyan nominees, the Summit decreed urgent amendments, passed in record time, to the EAC Treaty to clip the courts wings. That must never be allowed to happen again.

More interested in protecting their positions and woolly notions of “sovereignty,” politicians will probably be unwilling to cede power to the Secretariat. However, de Grauwe offers them some comfort. Though the book highlights the need for common institutions to regulate local social policies that may have regional macro-economic consequences, there is no requirement that decision-making in these areas be fully centralised. Even the transfer of budgetary power, for example, “does not have to be spectacular… It would certainly not be wise to aim at a central budget that comes near to the size of typical national budgets.” Nevertheless, it will require an EAC budget that increases significantly from its 2009 level of about $40.1 million or 0.05 per cent of the region’s GDP.

De Grauwe’s most relevant finding for the EAC is the requirement for “a strong national sense of common purpose and an intense feeling of belonging to the same nation.” Analysing the success of German Unification in the 1990s, he declares this to be “the deep variable that made the monetary and political union possible.” Its presence, he asserts, made it “inconceivable” that Germany start with a monetary union without a unified political system. Its weakness among the nations of Europe, he continues, “makes the progress towards political union difficult... [and] explains why Europe started with monetary union.” The same is true of East Africa.

Kenya is a particularly egregious example. Of all the EAC partner states, it is the only one where the ratification of international agreements is done by the Cabinet. This means that neither the people nor their representatives have ever had a voice on the subject of integration. Parliament never got to vote on the EAC Treaty nor on any of the protocols that followed.

Since EAC legislation takes precedence over national laws, it in effect means that Kenyans now find themselves subject to regulations and authorities that are not accountable to either them or their representatives. This may not yet be considered controversial (national consultations in 2007 and 2008 found that despite low levels of awareness, large majorities in all partner states, including Kenya approved of political federation), but it does little to foster a feeling of ownership of the Community and the processes that generate it.

This is not a uniquely Kenyan issue. In fact, a study last year found that one-third of East Africans had only a weak or no sense at all of being “East African.” In 2004, when the Summit instituted the Wako committee on Fasttracking Political Integration, it was the “slow pace of integration” that caused the leadership to remember the people — a tacit admission that popular participation was lacking.

Attitudes, though, are slowly changing. Last year, The EastAfrican reported that the partner states are to establish integration centres at border points to sensitise the citizenry on the benefits of regional assimilation and that Kenya's EAC Ministry will use mobile phones to educate up to 17 million people on the Common Market Protocol. It is also planning to hire a public relations firm as part of what Naim Bilal, Deputy Director of Public Communications, calls a “broad-based and comprehensive strategy” to communicate the benefits of integration to the people.

Welcome as they are, such measures are only of limited benefit. To be sustainable in the long term, the EAC must evolve into a truly independent and powerful union of peoples -a United States of East Africa- rather than a loose association of regional governments. Till that happens, the Monetary Union and the Community it is meant to serve will remain as fragile as the political will that created them.

How Tanzanian Justice Fails to See the Wood for Trees

2010-03-13T23:43:00.005+03:00

The East African Development Bank’s search for justice and self-preservation in the courtrooms of Tanzania has been as trivialised as it has been convoluted. Throughout the litigation, the courts have systematically focused on technicalities and blocked any attempt to interrogate the merits of the $61 million arbitral award that threatens the viability of the bank.

Between March 1990 and June 1992, the Bank provided a total of $2.2 million in loans to Blueline Enterprises Ltd, a Tanzanian transporter, for the purchase of to 10 heavy-duty trucks and other equipment. However, in November 1995, the Bank placed the company under receivership for non-payment. Following a successful arbitration process the Bank’s initial victory was overturned by the courts, which ordered new arbitration proceedings. The award, which some have termed “obscene,” stemmed from this latter process.

The EADB’s numerous attempts to have its day in court have been bogged down in legal minutiae. Not once has it had the opportunity to tell its side of the story. And as it stares bankruptcy in the face, what has been forgotten is that it was the Bank that actually lent money to Blueline, which with interest, would now amount to over $40 million. And since the Bank belongs to the governments of the EAC, it is their citizens who stand to lose this sum.

Below is a timeline of the case:

March 7, 1990: East African Development Bank advances a loan of approximately $1.86 million to Blueline Enterprises Ltd of Tanzania to purchase 10 heavy duty trucks and other equipment.

June 16, 1992: The EADB gives Blueline a supplemental loan of $340,000.

November 24, 1995: The Bank appoints Coopers and Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) as Receiver and Manager of Blueline .

December 4, 1995: Blueline procures an injunction from the High Court restraining the Bank from permitting its Receiver and Manager to “take over and run” Blueline’s business.

February 14, 2001: The Bank and Blueline file a Compromise Order appointing Hon. Francis L. Nyalali (the former Chief Justice of Tanzania) Sole Arbitrator and A. T. H. Mwakyusa as his substitute.

September 30, 2002: Hon. Mr Nyalali finds in favour of Bank and dismisses Blueline’s claim on the basis that it lacked legal merit. Hon. Nyalali dies shortly thereafter and Blueline files a petition challenging the award.

July 30, 2003: Mr Justice Luanda sets aside Hon. Mr Nyalali’s award and orders the Arbitration proceedings to commence afresh before Mr Mwakyusa.

The bank appeals on the grounds that Mr Mwakyusa could only have been appointed if Mr Nyalali had not acted as arbitrator.

November 21, 2003: The Court of Appeal of Tanzania strikes out the appeal because the Bank has failed to obtain Leave to Appeal.

To rectify the error, the Bank files an Application in the High Court seeking an extension of time to file a new Notice of Appeal and an extension of time to seek Leave to Appeal to the Court of Appeal .

July 9, 2004: Mr Justice Mihayo of the High Court refuses to grant the extensions of time.

Following commencement of arbitration before Mr Mwakyusa, the Bank applies afresh to the High Court for the removal of Mr Mwakyusa as the Sole Arbitrator and for the Arbitration proceedings to be stayed pending determination of its petition.

May 11, 2004: The Bank’s Application is dismissed by the Hon. Justice Massati because it has not annexed the Loan Agreement containing the Arbitration clause to the Application.

The Bank files a Notice of its intention to appeal to the Court of Appeal as well as an Application for Leave to Appeal. Simultaneously the Bank files an application to prevent the Arbitration proceedings from continuing pending the determination of its Appeal. The Court of Appeal strikes out the latter application on the ground that the order of the High Court was not capable of execution, and therefore a stay order relating to it could not be issued.

The Bank subsequently appealed to the Arbitrator to remove himself, but he declined to do so.
In light of the dismissal of the application for a stay order, the Bank abandons its intended Appeal against M. Justice Massati’s decision and as a result, Mr Mwakyusa, commences the Arbitration proceedings.

August 31, 2005: Mr Mwakyusa delivers his award awarding Blueline $61,386,853 in relation to Blueline’s claims against the Bank. No award is made in respect of the Bank’s claim for the outstanding loan.

The Bank files a Petition and Application in the High Court seeking to set aside the award; a declaration that Arbitration proceedings have failed and consequently the dispute should be determined by a Court of law; and a stay of execution of the arbitral award pending the final determination of the Bank’s petition.

Mr Justice Shangwa sustains Blueline’s objections that the Bank has omitted to annex a certified copy of the arbitral award even though the original was, at that time, before the High Court, and particularly, before the judge handling the matter, having been sent there directly by the arbitrator.

The Bank files a further Application to the High Court for extension of time in order to file another Petition to set aside the Arbitral award. However on the day fixed for the hearing of the said Application, the Bank withdraws the application upon advice of Counsel that the time limit has not lapsed after all. This advice is based on a previous decision made by the Court of Appeal that implies that the petition, being a “suit,” could be filed up to six years from the date of the award.

Immediately thereafter, the bank files a new petition in the High Court.

Blueline raise a preliminary objection that the petition is time-barred and should be struck out, relying on a 2002 Court of Appeal decision that a petition to set aside an award is an “application” (and not a “suit”) and was therefore still subject to the 60 days limitation.

June 22, 2007: Justice Mandia delivers his ruling noting that there are two conflicting decisions of the Court of Appeal on the matter. He, however, decides to rely upon the earlier decision, that a petition is an “application” and declares it time-barred.

July 5, 2007: EADB files a Notice of Appeal against the ruling of the Court together with an application for Leave to Appeal.

April 11, 2008: The Bank’s application for leave to appeal Justice Mandia’s decision is struck out with costs.

December 17, 2007: EADB files an application seeking an order from the court for extending the limitation period on the grounds that there is reasonable cause for the court to exercise its discretion.

March 26, 2009: Justice Sheikh of the High Court dismisses the Bank’s application because EADB had previously filed and withdrawn a similar application for the same order (for extension of time) without seeking liberty to reinstitute it.

May 12, 2009:Justice Shangwa dismisses the Bank’s application to vacate the garnishee order by way of which Blueline sought execution of the arbitral award declaring that the Bank’s immunity from attachment of its assets did not extend to its cash.

September 22, 2009: Leave is granted to appeal against Justice Shangwa’s ruling. Subsequently, Blueline consents to the grant of leave by the High Court for the appeal against the decision of Justice Sheikh.

March 8, 2010: A three-judge panel dismisses the Bank’s appeal on the grounds that since Justice Mandia had dismissed the petition previously brought by the Bank, it was not open to the Bank to go back before the same Court with an application for enlargement of time.

March 11, 2010: The hearing on the appeal against the decision by Justice Shangwa relating to the Bank’s immunity is adjourned after one of the judges recuses himself.