Why Trump's "Shithole" Comments Are Nothing New

Eric Kiraithe, must really be well paid. Being the official spokesman of the Kenyan Government, is, in the words of Jerry Maguire, “an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege” that I’m sure he will never fully tell us about. We got a glimpse of what the job entails when the government sent him out this week to defend the indefensible: US President Donald Trump’s description of Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shithole countries” and his declared preference for immigrants from Northern Europe.

The mental gymnastics Kiraithe had to engage in were a spectacle to behold. No doubt trying to curry favor with the famously petty and vengeful Trump, he declared that Kenya had no problems with African countries being called “shitholes” but nonetheless supported the African Union in condemning the comments whose context, he claimed, the government was still studying “to see whether it is worth the attention”, even though it had already determined that they were not directed at Kenya.

Still, there perhaps was an easier, and perhaps less humiliating, way for Kiraithe and his minders to extricate themselves from the bind. Trump may be an ignorant, racist, pathetic excuse for a human being but if we are honest, his sentiments are not dissimilar to attitudes held by many of the “respectable” people lining up to condemn him in the West and even here in Africa.

As any African applying for visa will tell you, the indignities visited upon us in the process make it plain that we are not exactly welcome. It is humiliating to have to demonstrate to strangers that one is not about to abandon one’s family and nation to live on the streets of Europe or America, to have them stand in judgment over your acceptability as human being. And that is just how the system treats those seeking a legal route for a temporary visit.

The reaction to the so-called European migrant crisis which saw more than a million unwanted migrants and refugees from the middle east and Africa cross into Europe in 2015, shows the extremes that will be considered in order to turn them back. “Europe has decided to cooperate with Libyan authorities, knowing the kind of torture, abuses, detention that migrants and refugees are exposed to in Libya,” Amnesty International’s Maria Serrano told Voice of America last month.

Of course, the idea of a crisis is not extended to the nearly 12.5 million Europeans who are resident in a country not their own within the European Union, even when 95 percent of these are hosted in just six countries. It is only a crisis when they come from “shithole countries”.

And it is not just Europeans. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Kenya in November declaring how he loves Africans, seems to only love them when they stay at home. Back in Israel, he has taken to branding African asylum seekers “infiltrators” is deporting thousands of them. In Libya, slave markets have re-opened with many of the same Africans Europe is turning away being treated as commodities.

But African citizens do not even need to try to leave the continent in order to experience the dehumanization associated with immigration. Kenya’s abysmal treatment of refugees from Somalia -who are crammed into crowded camps, forbidden from seeking work, regularly demonized as terrorists and even illegally forced back into the war zone across the border – is no less humiliating. Neither are the hoops Kenyans themselves – as well as other Africans - are forced to jump through when attempting to visit South Africa, formerly the continent’s largest economy, are no less humiliating.

In fact, Africans don’t even need to try to go outside their countries’ borders to be insulted or have heir humanity questioned. Hollywood as well as Western aid agencies and media regularly does it right in the comfort of our homes with their portrayal of Africa as a troubled, exotic paradise peopled by childishly simple, naïve beings unable to deal with the challenges of life and who need white saviors to rescue them from other white devils or from themselves.

Rounding out the parade of insulters are African elites, especially in the media and in politics, who have become our very own Uncle Toms, loyally regurgitating and fleshing out the worst stereotypes that the West has of us. Having opted not to reform the racist, extractive colonial states they inherited in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these elites have trouble seeing the humanity of the masses of citizens they prey on. So, like the Europeans before them, rather than fix dehumanizing political and economic systems, they try to beat and shame the natives into compliance with them, into accepting the space that the world has allocated to them at the back of the bus - which is the reason so many try to leave in the first place.

This brings us back to Trump and his comments. So should Kenyans be offended by them? You bet they should. But no more so than by the treatment and representations Africans have to endure every day from a world that has decided that they come from “shithole countries” and so must be shitty people.

And the supreme irony of it is, up till less than a century ago, Africans were quite content to stay on the continent. It was shitty people from other places who came here and forced them out.  It was shitty people who took them to places like Haiti, where, after they fought for and won their freedom, more shitty people blockaded and invaded them and created the very conditions today that a shitty American President, blissfully unaware of this, today disparages.

However, it is an irony that is completely lost on Kiraithe and the folks he speaks for.

Why Yahya Jammeh's Ouster Was Not A Triumph For Democracy

In an article published on Aljazeera, Solomon Ayele Dersso, a senior legal scholar and an analyst on Africa and African Union affairs, avers that the lesson from Gambia for African countries is that “not only should [the opposition and citizenry] forge unity during elections, but also prepare to work with regional and international bodies for a negotiated exit guaranteeing peaceful transfer of power”. This may be true but the ouster of Yahya Jammeh also has another lesson for the continent’s despots:  accountability is dead.

The facts speak for themselves. Jammeh lost an election and, after initially accepting his defeat, subsequently chose to contest it. This was a first. In all other cases of disputed elections on the continent, the incumbent has from the very beginning declared himself winner. The Kenyan experience following the 2007 elections as well as that of the Ivory Coast four years later amply illustrates this.

In the respective cases, both Mwai Kibaki and Laurent Gbagbo refused to acknowledge defeat. What ensued was violence, international intervention (military in the case of Gbagbo) and ICC prosecutions. In Jammeh’s case, the avoidance of accountability is now presented as a win for the country.

The deal offered by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union and the United Nations assured the former dictator of “the kind of dignity befitting a citizen, former president and party leader”-shorthand for immunity from prosecution- and allowed him to keep the loot from his 22 years in power (presumably including the $11 million withdrawn from state coffers in his last two weeks in power).

This is the problem with the Gambia transition. It is not a case of the incumbent losing power and gracefully handing over power. Rather, it is the legitimization of the idea that heads of state who lose power can use their incumbency, and the implicit threat of violence, as a bargaining chip to escape accountability for crimes committed during their tenure.

This runs counter to the tenets of democracy. Giving up power once an election is lost should not be perceived as a particularly heroic act. It should rather be an inevitable consequence of the withdrawal of popular consent. There should be no requirement for quid pro quos, negotiations or international interventions.

Transfer of power in a democracy, as former Czech President and playwright, Vaclav Havel noted, should be mundane in a democracy. However, in the case of African countries, it is portrayed as an act of benevolence. When then Kenyan strongman Daniel arap Moi accepted the loss of his chosen successor or “project” (current President Uhuru Kenyatta), he was hailed as a statesman. Yet he should have never had a choice in the matter. Similarly, Yahya Jammeh should not have been allowed to think he somehow “deserved” a dignified exit. That was up to the Gambian people.

As a Kenyan who lived through the 2008 post-election violence and the pain it wrought, I can appreciate the imperative to avoid such eventualities. However, it is incumbent on all of us to consider the lessons that the folks in power draw. If, in fact, power transitions are to be negotiated between incumbents and the international community with immunity from prosecution offered as an incentive to peacefully vacate office, then that is a dilution of democratic norms, not a reinforcement of them.

International interventions in support of democratic norms should not seek to perpetuate the idea that incumbents can negotiate exits from power. Rather, they should simply seek to enforce the choice of the people. Unfortunately, the African Union, which has already committed itself to the profoundly undemocratic ideal of Head of State immunity as evidenced by its stance in the Kenyan cases at the ICC, sees things differently. Incumbency is still perceived as an implicit guarantee of impunity.

With support for Jammeh collapsing, and even his army chief saying he was not willing to fight to defend him from the ECOWAS forces at his doorstep, there was no imperative to cut a deal. By choosing that option, the international community did not secure democracy. Rather it validated the idea that losing despots can use their hapless populations as hostages to barter for a guilt-free departure. As Solomon Dersso puts it, “they can get a dignified exit, if they allow free and fair election.”

During last year’s US election campaigns, Donald Trump was heavily criticized for refusing to state categorically that he would accept the outcome of the election if he did not win. Four years hence, he will be up for re-election. If he loses and rejects the results (not as farfetched as one would think given his continued lying about voter fraud), does anyone imagine he would be offered a cushy retirement package to facilitate a peaceful handover of power?

Why Kenyans Should Rethink Their Hiring Policy

Boniface Mwangi is looking for a job. It may have come as no surprise when, during the launch of his book two weeks ago, he declared he would be running for a Parliamentary seat. But that doesn’t mean we should welcome it with open arms.

Over the last few months we have been treated to similar announcements by journalists, clergy and civil society activists. And it is all depressingly reminiscent of 2002 and the dash for elected positions under the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition banner. And, in the euphoria of giving Daniel Arap Moi the finger, we did not think twice about the future effect of decapitating the organisations that had been instrumental in delivering that moment.

Well, that future was not long in coming. Very soon after the Kibaki administration, packed rafters with “good guys” -the same ones who had told Moi, in the famous words of Kiraitu Murungi, to tend his goats and “watch how a country should be governed” took over the old habits of looting and state-sponsored violence resurfaced. This time, though, the culprits were our former heroes. “Anglo Leasing was ‘us’ – our people”, Mr Murungi would later admit.

The “eating” was all the worse since these were the same people who had formerly stood up to the Nyayo regime and whose rapture into government had hollowed out the civil society and religious organisations that were so critical in holding it to account. So today, as tales of grand corruption fill the headlines, we should reflect upon the experience of 15 years ago and look to keep our “good guys” in the positions where they serve us best and where they can keep government on a short leash.

Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed is also looking for a job. The government has proposed her as the next head of the African Union Commission and is spending millions of our tax shillings to lobby heads of state across the continent to give it to her. But she is already contracted to represent and lobby for our common interests abroad and has instead spent most of her time instead protecting the interests of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto.

Despite the clear stipulation in the constitution that “the President may be prosecuted under any treaty to which Kenya is party and which prohibits such immunity”, which the Treaty of Rome does, Secretary Mohamed racked up frequent flyer miles and staked Kenya’s international prestige and interests on a shameful effort to pressure the International Criminal Court into dropping the crimes against humanity charges facing the duo.

Yet she has been conspicuously quiet on the plight of ordinary Kenyans unfairly banged up abroad. Currently, next door in South Sudan four Kenyans have been sentenced to life imprisonment following sham proceedings in which no specific accusations of wrongdoing were levelled against them. Efforts to get Secretary Mohamed to intervene and raise the issue with the South Sudanese government have borne little fruit, despite her frequent travels to Juba to shore up the peace process there and the clear leverage Kenya has over the Juba elite.

Andrew Franklin is also in search of employment. Along with around 750 Kenyans, the former US marine who has been living and working in Kenya for over three decades, applied for consideration as either Chair or Member of a reconstituted Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Two weeks ago, the selection panel announced it had shortlisted five out of fourteen applicants for Chairperson and another 31 for Members. Mr Franklin did not make either cut. That, in itself, is not troubling. What is worrying is the opaqueness with which the shortlists were developed.

Since last Friday, when the selection panel announced it was suspending the interviews for Chairperson after questions were raised about the suitability of the shortlisted candidates, there has been disturbingly little querying either in the media or by civil society of criteria used to exclude 720 people from the process of public scrutiny. It does not seem to raise eyebrows when the five applicants whose credentials have been put in doubt are still listed among those slated to be interviewed as potential Commissioners beginning this Saturday. That the panel itself has offered no information on this gives rise to suspicions of underhand dealings and political interference in the process. Given our past experience with the consequences of messing with the credibility of electoral bodies, it should give all of us pause for thought.

These three examples evince our dangerously cavalier approach to distributing public positions. Beyond individual desire, the rest of us who get a say in who actually gets hired must think much more strategically about the sort of system we want to govern our affairs. While it is doubtlessly important that we need good people running government, it is perhaps even more so that we have them outside of it. 

And even within government, we have seen the folly of giving one political party all the reins of power. The so-called Tyranny of Numbers today militates against Parliament serving as an effective check on Executive excess. In the prevailing environment, where loyalty to party leaders trumps loyalty to country, and where nominally independent don't act as such, it is better to have divided government with one party controlling the Presidency and the other Parliament. While not guaranteeing good governance, that at least offers the possibility of limiting the damage they can do. 

In similar vein, it is even more critical that we not allow the state to poach our best and brightest from the only other institutions that can hold it to account. For the sake of the country, Boniface Mwangi and others like him should keep doing the jobs they already have. Which is not only to ensure Amina Mohamed and her government colleagues start doing theirs before we spend tax shillings to get them employed elsewhere, but that the likes of Andrew Franklin and 720 Kenyans are accorded a fair hearing for the public jobs they have applied for.

Being African Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

When the prolific columnist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, wrote that the International Criminal Court “had finally made Kenya an African country” he meant that the government’s reaction to the trials had aligned the country more closely with policies in much of the rest of the continent. I think there is another, perhaps more profound, sense in which Kenyans have become Africans.

To begin with, I have always been uncomfortable with the notion of “Africa”. It has not been apparent to me what, apart from an overabundance of pigmentation, I am supposed to possess in common with most of the other billion or so residents of the second-largest continent. And far from simply describing people from a place, the term “African” has come to imply some sort of historical, metaphysical and supra-cultural bond, which is loaded with all sorts of flattering and not-so-flattering stereotypes.

Sadly, many of my fellow Africans have been content to reflect and enact the tropes of Africanness. A favourite one is that of the “African Big Man.” No, I don’t mean of the well-hung variety, but rather the kleptocratic and genocidal tyrant-for-life who nonetheless commands the unquestioning loyalty of his tribal folk because their only goal in life is the extermination of their ethnic rivals.

The African Union has become an unfailing mirror of these reflections. At Its summits, the continent’s Big Men (and few Big Women), regularly get together, it seems, to commit ever more outrages on our common sensibilities. At Kenya’s instigation, last year’s pow-wow in June in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, voted to expand the jurisdiction of the yet-to-be-established African Court of Justice and Human Rights to cover international crimes, with the caveat that the Big Men as well as their senior government pals would be immune from prosecution while they remain in office. The move was meant to deliver Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, from the clutches of the ICC. And it was welcomed by their fellow Big Men who are wont to remain in office for rather longer than their subjects can reasonably expect or tolerate.

Any idea of accountability in this life is an anathema. Kenya today provides an excellent example of the state continually frustrating any attempt to punish either current or former government officials or their misdeeds. The report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which named almost every star in the country’s political firmament, seems to have met its end in the National Assembly where it went to be “improved” by the very people it mentioned adversely.

As a result, Kenya’s two fabulously wealthy and still-breathing ex-presidents, Mwai Kiabaki and Daniel arap Moi continue to live lavishly on the public purse despite widespread reporting, countless commissions of inquiry as well as interminable police investigations concluding that their tenures were characterised by officially sanctioned murder and theft. None of their senior officials have been pursued either. On the contrary, the current administration has simply picked up where they left off. In fact, during the most recent AU summit, the Kenya government maintained its single-minded determination to ensure that African potentates never again have to endure the prospect of facing justice.

And a new crop of leaders is learning just how useful this “Big Man” syndrome can be. Recently, two first-time legislators were caught on camera at a weighbridge trying to throw their weight around and intimidate police. The problem? A truck belonging to one of them had been impounded for not having the necessary paperwork. In less than two years, they have learnt, that in the Big Man tradition, the rules don’t apply to them.

Of course impunity has always been a large part of Kenya’s story. But with our support for the government's exertions at the AU, we appear to have thrown our hat in with that community of nations that defines itself solely in terms of its powerlessness. A site of perpetual victimhood, of constant and exhausting struggle against imperialism and colonisation. A place of contradiction where the foreign-funded AU can, without the slightest appreciation of the irony, declare that the equally foreign-funded ICC, where its members constitute the largest block, with an African prosecutor and judges, is a tool of imperialists.

By becoming Africans, Kenyans have accepted to be faceless, nameless victims. To have a cheap and expendable existence. To live at and for the pleasure of Big Men. To repudiate “foreign” notions of accountability. We have accepted that the continent should first deliver for the powerful, before it delivers for the multitude. If that sounds familiar, it is because it should be. To become an African is to go back to the roots of Africanness. To don the costume of moral and material backwardness spun for the continent by the Big Men from Europe who were determined to subjugate it and who have since been replaced by our home grown varieties. It is, in short, to accept our place at the bottom of the human pile.

Here Comes The HotStepper...

Raising Expectations

Redeemer vs Teacher: Towards the United States of Africa

African Union summits rarely escape a Muammar Gaddafi lecture on his pet project: the United States of Africa. The Libyan leader’s harping on the need for common government is derided by some as a plot for hegemony. The idea of continental unity, though, is not new and neither is the cynicism.

In a sense, Gaddafi is unwittingly summoning us to our etymological roots. The original meaning of the word “Africa” may be unclear, but, in ancient times, it referred only to the north coast of the continent, replacing the Greek word "Libya," to refer to the land of the Berbers.

It only encompassed the whole continent from the end of the first century BC. As it did so, it was slowly divorced from North Africa and soon confined to the region that, in less politically correct times, was also called Black Africa. According to Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the conflation of Africa with sub-Saharan Africa “ultimately offer[ed]a racialised view of Africa as the ‘black’ continent... from which North Africa and especially Egypt [was] excised and attached to Europe.”

“Africa” no longer described a geographical entity, but was imbued with ideas of blackness and a mystical cultural unity. The transatlantic slave trade and the consequent forced immigration of millions of “black” Africans served to spread and cement this association abroad. On the continent, European colonisation had much the same effect. As Mwalimu Julius Nyerere observed, “Africans all over the continent, without a word being spoken either from one individual to another, or from one country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European they were one.”

Slavery and colonialism also gave rise to Pan-Africanism, the idea that black Africans and their descendants belonged to a single "race," and shared both cultural unity and historical fate (a notion rejected by black American actress Whoopi Goldberg in 1998 when she declared: “I dislike this idea that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African. The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American.”)

Refined by the writings of Edward Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey, Pan-Africanism became the orthodoxy among the emerging class of political reformers on the continent. The 5th Pan African Congress, organised in 1945 by Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, was attended by many scholars, intellectuals and political activists who would later become influential leaders in various African independence movements including Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Malawi’s Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and Nigerian leaders Obafemi Awolowo and Jaja Wachuku.

While generally endorsing the Nkrumah’s ideas on cultural and historical unity, the soon-to-be-all-powerful-potentates viewed political unity as a different proposition. In May 1963, many of them were among the 32 heads of state and government meeting in Addis Ababa to sign the Organisation of African Unity Charter, whose preamble prophetically stated 'we the heads of state' rather than 'we the people'. When Nkrumah simultaneously released his book, Africa Must Unite, (undoubtedly thinking it was appropriate for the occasion), the assembled presidents suspected an attempt to dominate the continent and realise Nkrumah’s ambition to become the president of a United States of Africa. As Nyerere later remarked, once “you multiply national anthems, national flags and national passports, seats at the United Nations, and individuals entitled to 21 guns salute, not to speak of a host of ministers, prime ministers, and envoys, you have a whole army of powerful people with vested interests in keeping Africa balkanised.”

The Tanzanian leader was opposed to Nkrumah’s approach. A strong proponent of East African federation, Nyerere regarded regional integration as the more realistic way to achieve continental unity. Nkrumah was implacably opposed to what he called “balkanisation on a grand scale” and deemed Nyerere a rival to his leadership of the continent, one who might eclipse him as the first African leader to successfully unite independent countries, following the failure of Nkrumah’s own Union of African States.
For his part, Nyerere dismissed Nkrumah’s opposition as “attempts to rationalise absurdity.” In fact, so eager was he for regional integration that he repeatedly told Jomo Kenyatta, the least interested of the three East African leaders, Tanzania would renounce its sovereignty right away if Kenya were ready to unite. During the 1965 Commonwealth Conference he declared that “if Mzee Kenyatta today says he is ready, then we will federate tomorrow.”

That, of course, never happened and the search for political unity soon took a back seat to moves towards economic integration. The 1980 Lagos Plan of Action for the Development of Africa and the 1991 treaty to establish the African Economic Community (also known as the Abuja Treaty), proposed the creation of Regional Economic Communities (RECs) as the basis for African integration, with a timetable for regional and continental integration to follow. The AU, established in July 2002 (at Gaddafi’s behest) to replace the toothless OAU, today recognises eight RECs including the East African Community.

Still, the rhetoric of political union remains. A 2006 study adopted by the AU proposed a three-phase, nine-year roadmap to the United States of Africa commencing “immediately after the decision of the Assembly at the next session of the AU summit” in Accra, Ghana. However, at the 2007 summit, the old arguments over regional versus immediate continental unification resurfaced with some (notably Libya) advocating a common government with an AU army; and others (especially the Southern African states) preferring to strengthen AU bodies and make them truly effective.

Following heated debate, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government issued the Accra Declaration, recognising the US of Africa with a Union Government as the ultimate objective of the AU and proposing steps towards this including rationalising the RECs and reviewing their relationship to the Union Government of Africa. All mention of a timetable disappeared. No AU Summits since have taken any firm decisions on the plan, each deferring the issue, for “final” debate to the next meeting.

Meantime, the RECs are pursuing further integration. They are linking up to fulfil the century-old dream of a trade zone spanning the length of the continent. In October 2008 SADC, Comesa and EAC, announced an agreement to create the African Free Trade Zone, grouping 26 countries with a combined GDP of $624 billion.

To quote Prof Zeleza, “‘Africa’ the map and the place is becoming increasingly ‘Africa’ the idea and the consciousness, buttressed by an intricate web of continental institutions.” In the second decade of the 21st century, the continent is “perhaps more ‘African’ than it has ever been… more interconnected through licit and illicit flows of commodities, capital, ideas, and people... more conscious of its collective identity.” As the pressures of globalisation continue to buffet and mould the continent, as they always have, a continental economy and, eventually, government is inevitable — with or without Gaddafi’s harangues.

Bashir vs The AU

Is Zimbabwe Africa's Iraq?

The similarities are uncanny. Two nations, both led by megalomaniacal demagogues with delusions of grandeur, both involved in costly (and ultimately failed) foreign adventures, both considered international pariahs and both subject to debilitating international sanctions. And if Prime Minister Raila Odinga has his way, Robert Mugabe's Zimbawe may soon have something else in common with Saddam Hussein's Iraq: US-style regime change this time delivered by African Union troops.

The proposal, which has received Archbishop Desmond Tutu's blessing, is unlikely to succeed on two counts. First, it is unclear whether the famously spineless AU is up to the task. Its record and that of its predecessor the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) hardly inspires confidence. The deployment of an under-resourced and undrmanned AU peacekeeping force in Darfur in 2004 did little to quell the violence there and the peacekeepers frequently became targets themselves. Even faced with Zimababwe's unpaid and unmotivated army (which resembles its DRC counterpart by the day), it is by no means certain whether the AU could muster enough troops and resources to get the job done. 

Secondly, while Zimbabwe's economic problems have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the undeclared sanctions imposed upon it by the US, it is also accurate to say that it is Mugabe's myopia and greed that led to the crisis in the first place (the economy was in free-fall way before the enactment of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act in December 2001, through which "Zimbabwe’s access to finance and credit facilities was effectively incinerated"). Many of the African countries that would be contributing troops to unseat Mugabe are similarly affleicted, even though the symptoms of economic malaise have not been demonstrated in as dramatic a fashion. It is unlikely that the likes of Meles Zenawi, Yoweri Museveni and Mwai Kibaki (to name but a few) would have anything constructive to add to a discussion on restoration of democracy in Zimbabwe.

Perhaps Africa's rulers should first remove the straw from their own eyes before tackling the log in Mugabe's?

In the meantime, I think the continued denial of international finance and credit facilities to Zimbabwe is abominable. Just like the 12-year Iraqi sanction regime, it hurts the people while doing little to dislodge the regime. While I support continued international pressure to oust Mugabe or at the very least secure a transitional power-sharing agreement, inducing a full-scale collapse of the country's economy is beyond the pale.