The King is Dead; Long Live The King

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

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.

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.