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.

The Language Of Occupation

A version of this article was published in The Star.

“How can Africans not identify with victims when they've gone through the horrors of colonialism?” Horn of Africa analyst and Aljazeera contributor, Abdullahi Boru asked on Twitter recently, as Israel continued its punishing attack on Gaza. He was bemoaning what he described as the “uncritical support” the Jewish state was getting from some on the continent.

 Indeed, one would think that Africans would be among the first to recognize an anti-colonial struggle when they saw one. However it turns that colonialism can be rather easy to disguise when not dressed in the familiar tropes of white versus black. While it was easy to identify in colonial Africa and in apartheid South Africa, in the Middle East it is literally a different story.

When in 2009 Newsweek published a leaked copy of The Israel Project's 2009 Global Language Dictionary, it should have been a seminal moment of understanding of what is frequently, and euphemistically, referred to as the Middle-East conflict and the role that language plays in it. Instead it almost went unnoticed. The dictionary contains what Aljazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara described as “a well-thought, well-orchestrated media strategy to mystify, mislead and even misrepresent the reality.”

It is a strategy meant to influence how the news is reported and how the conflict is portrayed. And it has been most effective. It should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding how the “conflict” has been spun. It is a document that perverts language, emptying common words and phrases of their meaning and infusing them with grotesque implications. For example, to demand the dismantling of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank is equated with support for ethnic cleansing.

The document follows in a tradition of reporting on the Middle East situation that has served to sanitize the violence, obscure its causes and therefore its solution. It has been presented as an age-old intractable conflict, a product of thousands of years’ worth of implacable and impenetrable hatreds. A land soaked in the blood of religious zealots, inspiring the best and the worst in men. In short, it is a conflict that passeth understanding.

However, even a cursory glance at the facts will reveal the fallacy of this. Under the light of truth, the perplexing and ancient conflict turns out to be little more than a savage and all-too-recognizable colonial project. The very term “Middle East conflict” (which I have been struggling to avoid using –it’s harder than you might think), serves to cover up the initially UN sanctioned and continuing dispossession of the Palestinians by the Israelis. During the apartheid era in South Africa, no one referred to that situation as the southern Africa conflict as if we had two sides with equally compelling factual, moral and ethical arguments. In Gaza, where the Israelis have deliberately impoverished the population, there can be no such equivalence between occupier and occupied.

It is the same when one hears land in the West Bank, which is meant to be an integral part of or the territory of a future Palestinian state, described as “disputed”. What does this mean? How is it that someone can come into your home and declare it “disputed territory” simply because he desires it?

Accepting that there is indeed a dispute is necessary to accepting the idea of a “peace process” or “negotiations” to resolve it. After all, no one seeks reconciliation with a thief. One simply demands the return of one’s property and perhaps some form of compensation and punishment for the offender. It is now easier to understand why the late Tanzanian leader, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, opposed the idea of such talks.

Speaking in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, which saw Israel attack and destroy Arab armies and capture the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria, he declared: “attempts to coerce the Arab states into recognizing Israel – whether it be by refusal to relinquish occupied territory, or by an insistence on direct negotiations between the two sides – would only make such acceptance impossible.” Mwalimu Nyerere was very clear about what was at issue. There was no disputed territory or age-old conflict. The insistence on the idea of negotiations was to him a form of coercion. As Bishara more recently put it, “it’s the occupation, stupid”.

The fact is, the so-called peace process has proven to be little more than a cover for the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people. In his book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, former US President, Jimmy Carter, who helped negotiate the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, details how the Israeli government has, at almost every turn, refused to implement agreements reached with the Palestinians while at the same time continuing to grab more land and impose an ever more onerous policy of apartheid on them under the guise of securing its citizens. He writes: "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement... In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements."

One particularly egregious example of Israeli cynicism is its response to the 2003 Roadmap for Peace proposed by the Quartet on the Middle East (US, EU, Russia and the UN) and first outlined by U.S. President George W. Bush in a speech in June 2002. Israel demanded a full prevention and cessation of violence and incitement by the Palestinians, while reserving the right to itself perpetrate the same against them: “The Roadmap will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians”. It also demanded “absolute quiet” which no government on earth can guarantee and rejected any references to the key provisions of UN Resolution 242. According to a recent opinion poll, even a majority of Israeli voters do not believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says he wants to promote a peace agreement with two states for two nations. But more alarming are the signs that the extremist policies of consecutive Israeli governments and the cycle of violence they provoke are radicalizing not just the Palestinians, but their own population as well. Though 56 percent object to a unilateral annexation of territories, nearly a quarter of Israelis are willing to live in an apartheid state where Palestinians are denied full rights.

We can learn much from Mwalimu Nyerere’s stand. He, for example, had little trouble recognizing “the establishment of the state of Israel [as] an act of aggression against the Arab people ... connived at by the international community” while at the same time realistically pointing out that the fact of Israel’s existence was something that would not be undone and that the Arab states would need to accept.

That was, in fact, the real Middle-East conflict: the Arab world’s struggle to come to terms with the imposition of Israel. The Arab states were ultimately successful in doing this (something else few speak of). As Fouad Ajami wrote in 1978, a year after Anwar Sadat's famous trip to Jerusalem to address Israel's Knesset, the issue was "no longer about Israel's existence, but about its boundaries." Ultimate proof of this came with the 2002 Arab League offer of a full peace with and recognition of Israel in return for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 line, establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank and a just solution to the refugee problem -a repudiation of the “Three Nos” of the 1967 Khartoum conference ("no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it").

“Israel has had her victory, at terrible cost in human lives. She must now accept that the United Nations which sanctioned her birth is, and must be, unalterably opposed to territorial aggrandizement by force or threat of force,” said Mwalimu Nyerere in 1967 and those words remain just as true today. The so-called Middle East conflict is neither ancient nor intractable. It is simply a Zionist colonial enterprise whose solution is as simple as the solution to the European colonization of the African continent. Full withdrawal from the occupied territories and independence for the Palestinians.

As an African, Mwalimu knew colonialism when he saw it. And as he said, “we cannot condone aggression on any pretext, nor accept victory in war as a justification for the exploitation of other lands, or government over other peoples.” Neither should the rest of the continent.

Gay Bans in Africa Are About Control, Not Culture

In his famous 1996 speech delivered on the occasion of the passing of the new Constitution of South Africa in Cape Town, Thabo Mbeki, then the country’s vice-president declared: “I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!” If some on the continent had their way, however, then it appears that someone could take him up on that.

Last week, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan signed into law a bill that outlawed gay marriage, public displays of same-sex relationships, and belonging to gay groups. In doing so, he joined a wave of officially sanctioned homophobia that is sweeping the continent. From Angola to Zimbabwe, persecution of gays is on the rise fueled by fundamentalist preachers, intolerant governments and homophobic politicians.

The war on gay rights is waged on the battleground of culture and identity. Its most committed troops regularly declare that theirs is a fight to defend African values from the encroachment of Western attitudes. “It is un-African because it is inconsistent with African values,” declared Ugandan MP David Bahati, who in 2009 introduced legislation to make homosexuality a capital crime. As reported in the Washington Post, Nsaba Butoro, the country’s minister for ethics and integrity said: "You are talking about a clash of cultures. The question is: Which culture is superior, the African one or the Western one?"

But the rhetoric of a culture clash masks an effort to own and define what it means to be a human being in Africa. It posits the existence of a common African Culture, a mystical commonality that supposedly underlies the traditions and practices of the thousands of communities on the continent. This is, of course, fiction. What is supposedly being defended is little more than a figment of the Victorian imagination.

The idea of descent from childishly simple and primitive people, unsoiled by the complexities of modernity and living in harmony with nature on an Edenic paradise, a by-gone society of wizened sagely old men sitting under trees spewing maxims surrounded by overly-sexualized women shaking their well-endowed butts – this is not the creation of the people who inhabit the continent. In fact, the notions of common ancestry and common fates were forged far away from the continent’s shores, in the capitals and classrooms of Europe and America.

This invention has been employed by colonial and post-colonial tyrants across the continent to insist that their subjects are uninterested in concepts of knowledge, truth, justice and human rights, that they need to be protected from the horrors of the female brain and body, and the decadence of love, romance, sex, joy, imagination and fun. After all, the African was created to work, to obey, to conform, to donate his labour and resources for the benefit of his betters.

African Culture is an imposition created to define and therefore dehumanize and enslave the continent, to deny its inhabitants their history and their agency. Thus the historical fact that homosexuality was practiced and tolerated in many traditional African societies is wished away. Particularly revealing in this regard is the practice of justifying strictures against gays by appeals, not to traditional religion or practice, but to Christianity and Islam and the invented “cultures” of artificial nation-states. African Culture is articulated from the pulpits of foreign faiths. (Archbishop Desmond Tutu once joked: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”)

According to Africa Report, the United Nations has warned that Nigeria’s legislation undermines, not just gays’ safety, but also their humanity. They, and others across the continent who refuse to conform to the dictates of African Culture –including human rights workers and pro-democracy activists- are marked as un-African, stripped of their humanity, beaten, jailed, tortured, exiled or murdered without too much fuss.

Their real crime is they dare to challenge the right of a small but powerful elite to define what an African is and in doing so pose a direct threat to the systems of control and privilege that have been built around that right. The refusal to be defined, to be silenced or hidden away, is terrifyingly subversive as it opens up new horizons and new avenues to self-knowledge and, ultimately, generates new centres of power.

As people, especially the youth, on the continent –buoyed by rising incomes and the revolution in communications technology- become increasingly impatient with the one-size-fits-all constriction of humanity, it will become more difficult for the governing elites to continue to exploit the trope of African culture to keep their populations in check. Already, on the internet and in other forums, one can see feminists and gay and governance activists challenging the conceptions that underlie it. Through these conversations, Africans are reimagining themselves in new, refreshing and empowering ways, and creating spaces for authentic cultural expression.

Why Does African Media Get Africa Wrong?

Nanjala Nyabola, Kenyan writer and graduate student at Harvard Law School, recently caused a bit of a stir with her Aljazeera article asking “Why Do Western Media Get Africa Wrong?” Reading through the piece, which was both interesting and informative, I couldn’t help but wonder: Just who does get Africa right? Is there even such a thing as getting Africa right?

From the outset, let me state that I agree with many of Nanjala’s criticisms of media coverage of events on the continent. As she says, much of it is devoid of nuance and context and seems oblivious to what Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes as the “danger of a single story” – the reductio ad absurdum of the tale of a continent of over a billion people and 54 countries, their existence, history and stories compressed into one simple, superficial, easily regurgitated cliché. “The hopeless continent.” “Africa rising.” “Magical Africa.”

However, it is not just Western media (itself a rather obtuse concept) that is guilty of reporting in this manner. African media commits many of the same sins though, given the fact that most only broadcast to discrete home audiences, it is easy for them to escape censure. While Africans in almost every country on the continent have opportunity to be regularly appalled by their portrayal on CNN, Aljazeera and BBC, it is rare that Kenyans will flip the channel to check what Nigerian journalists are reporting about them.

Few African media houses are actually trying to cover the continent for the continent. Many have their hands full reporting (or not reporting) news at home and do not think of Africa so much as a story that needs to be covered, but as part of the rest of the world and take their cue on reporting it from the Western outlets. As South African photojournalist and film maker Greg Marinovich notes, “most African media stories on Africa are from international wires.” Few have bureaus or send reporters outside their home countries, choosing to rely on the same Western reporters they delight in bashing.

Look at the coverage of South Sudan, CAR, DRC or Somalia, for instance. Most media on the continent remains supremely oblivious to happenings there. Even in neighbouring nations such as Kenya, which has paid a huge price for Somalia’s instability, media only seems able to regurgitate the Western tropes about fighting terror and Islamic extremists. Few journalists bother to understand the genesis of the two-decade long anarchy or to explain the reasons and wisdom of Kenya’s intervention. In October 2011, many were too busy beating the patriotic drum of war and most have since lost interest in what Kenyan troops are doing across the border.

Nanjala also points out that most Western reporting of Africa, “the Rest is necessarily set up in opposition to The West” resulting in coverage where “issues or situations are rarely, if ever, analysed for their intrinsic impact or worth. Events or situations are analysed as what the West is not.” But that too cuts both ways. Sometimes, African media will mirror this and set up the Rest in opposition to the perceptions of the Western press.

Another example from Kenya. As the elections last year approached, the country was inundated by Western journalists, many undoubtedly there in anticipation of a repeat of the 2007/8 post-election bloodshed. Most Kenyan media-folk were appalled, having themselves determined to practice something called peace journalism. In any case, their resultant, overly uncritical reporting of the election seemed at least partly motivated by the desire to prove to their Western counterparts that Kenya was not another African basket case.

To be fair, when assessing their performance, one has also to consider the environment that African media operates in. Many operate under severe government restrictions, with limited resources. Shrinking budgets are, however, a worldwide phenomena. Much has been made about the phenomenon of journalists parachuting (not literally) to crisis spots for a few days and filing reports with neither context nor understanding. However, as Suzanne Franks noted nearly a decade ago, “an important gap in the way that Africa is reported is not just the disappearance of regular correspondents, but also of longer more considered television documentaries.”

“As current affairs coverage has declined, the only television outlet left for factual programming about Africa is on the news. So the kind of explanations and background context that would once have been contained in a thirty or forty minute programme, if they happen at all, now have to be compressed into a two or three minute package. It also means that the nature of what is covered will be dictated by news priorities. TV news, which is how most people find out about the world, is an event driven operation. Contemporary news reporting in Africa is invariably of the ‘fire fighting’ tendency. In the absence of resident correspondents, a highly professional reporter - well attuned to the needs and expectations of the various outlets- is flown in when disaster occurs and expected to deliver something within days if not hours.”

Remember that African news outlets are dependent on Western-based international wires to tell Africa’s story. Also recall that they take their cue on what their audiences need to hear from Western news outlets. That means they are in no position to pick up the slack. In fact they are part of the problem, perpetuating and disseminating as they do Western perspectives, biases and stereotypes. (Let me hasten to add that by no means are all Western journalists or all journalists working for Western-based outlets guilty of this.)

Perhaps the answer lies in an approach that does away with the idea of covering Africa. Since, like Chimamanda, most people on the continent do not primarily identify themselves as Africans except in opposition to those that aren’t. As the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere once 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.”

To cover Africa is necessarily to step outside of it, to see it in relation to “the European.” Such a perspective is hardly going to reflect how Africans see themselves. It is not an invalid perspective though. Just, again to borrow from Chimamanda, an incomplete one.

Maybe media, whether Western or African should just cover stories in Africa, as opposed to seeking African stories.

Aid Relief?

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

Where There's Smoke...

According to a 2005 International Air Transportation Association (IATA) report, Africa has a crash rate 9 times the world average. Though the continent accounts for only 4% of global air traffic it is home to more than a quarter of all air crashes. And the situation is worsening. 

Between 1996 and 2005, the number of fatal crashes per million departures, already the worst in the world, rose from 3.6 to 5. In 2006, alarmed by the grim statistics, then African Civil Aviation Commission (AFCAC) president Tshepo Pheege threatened to name and shame airlines operating what he called "flying coffins." "You don't want to fly out as a passenger and come back as cargo," he added. Although African carriers account for more accidents than airlines on any other continent, Ethiopian Airlines, together with South African Airways and Kenya Airways, have air safety records that are similar to those of most European airlines.

However, for most airlines on the continent, maintaining good safety records is so much pie-in-the-sky. Much of the carnage is caused by low investment due to a weak local environment. African carriers transport less than a third of travelers to and from the continent and the intra-Africa aviation network remains weak. The continent has failed to fully implement the Yamoussoukro declaration, which was meant to open the African airspace to African carriers meaning that in some cases one has to connect through Europe in order to fly from one African city to another.

The results are plain to see. A tiny air transport industry which has created a total of 500,000 jobs compared with a global total of 29 million. In 2003, the average fleet age on the continent was 20 years, double the average for the rest of the world. Air navigation and proper management of the continental airspace is hindered by old and obsolete equipment and by the limited ability of some African states to maintain a national safety oversight workforce. International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) safety oversight audits have shown that many African Countries have not established effective oversight systems within the Civil Aviation Authorities. 

All this comes at a time when the number of Africans willing and able to fly is exploding. A 2008 IATA report shows that while the growth in international passenger numbers was a sluggish 0.7%, Africa’s internal passenger growth was 18%. This cocktail of factors is making for a lethal recipe. As the skies get ever more crowded, overwhelmed and understaffed authorities are struggling to cope.

Here are some of the major air accidents involving African carriers in the past decade.

Jan 30, 2000 - Kenya Airways Airbus A-310 crashed in the sea shortly after takeoff from Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, killing 179 passengers and crew (Ten people survived).

Aug 23, 2000 - Gulf Air Airbus A320 crashed in the waters off Bahrain on a flight from Cairo, killing all 143 aboard. Pilot disorientation (the "pitch-up illusion" over the black waters of the Gulf at night).

Nov 1, 2000 - Russian-built passenger plane crashes after exploding in the air in northeastern Angola, killing all 48 people on board. UNITA rebels say they shot it down.

Nov 15, 2000 - An Antonov plane crashes near Angola's capital Luanda, killing all 39 people aboard.

March 17, 2001 - Beechcraft 1900C-1 crashes into mountains near Quilemba, Angola in heavy rain, killing all but one of 17 people on board.

Jan 26, 2002 - Antonov aircraft crashes in Angola's Moxico province. All 30 aboard believed killed.

Feb 08, 2002 - A Ukrainian AN-32 cargo plane crashed high in the Atlas mountains of southern Morocco at 9,900ft and killed all eight crew members, not long after leaving the coastal city of Agadir, 370 miles south of Rabat.

May 4, 2002 - BAC 1-11-500 belonging to Nigeria's EAS Airlines with 105 people on board bound for Lagos crashes and bursts into flames in the northern Nigerian city of Kano.  It plowed into a poor, densely populated suburb shortly after takeoff, killing 148. Dead included all 76 aboard and dozens on the ground.

Jan 24, 2003 - Busia Kenya: G159 Gulfstream carshes on take-off killing one cabinet minister, Ahmed Khalif, and the two pilots, and leaving three ministers and several members of parliament seriously injured.

July 8, 2003 - Port Sudan, Sudan: A Sudan Airways airplane, a Boeing 737, experienced technical difficulties shortly after takeoff and crashed while attempting to return to the Port Sudan airport. One child survived and 116 passengers and crew perished.

Dec. 25, 2003 - Cotonou, Benin: A chartered Boeing 727 jet bound for Beirut, Lebanon, crashed after hitting a building on takeoff, killing at least 140 people.

5 May, 2007 - Kenya Airways Flight KQ 507, a Boeing 737-800, from Douala to Nairobi, crashes in bad weather shortly after take-off killing all 114 on board.

June 10, 2008 - Narok District, Kenya: All four occupants, including Kenyan Roads Minister Kipkalya Kones and an Assistant Minister in the Office of the Vice-President, Lorna Laboso, killed when their Cessna 210E plane crashes in bad weather.

June 30, 2009 - Yemenia Airways Flight 626 crashes while trying to land in the Comoros island killing all but one of the 153 people on board.

The Ugly Canadian

Few issues have generated as much heat in recent African affairs as China’s foray onto the continent. Much has been made of the dragon’s insatiable hunger for the continent’s mineral wealth. The breadth of Chinese involvement has focused minds in the West and provoked much media hyperbole. However, at the same time, the Middle Kingdom’s great rival from North America has been active as well, though her activities seem not to attract as much attention. No, I’m not talking about the USA. Rather the other North American superpower – Canada.

Yes. Canada. Soft, unassuming Canada dominates mining and mineral exploration on the continent. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources Canada (NRC), only South Africa has more mining assets and investments. And while the Rainbow Nation’s interest is concentrated , is just ahead of Canada in the African mining industry. But with South Africa’s gold pot is to be found largely within its borders, by 2007, Canadian companies were active in 35 African countries and Africa represented 17% of the total $85.9 billion in cumulative Canadian mining assets. This year, the total value of Canadian mining assets in Africa is expected to surpass $21 billion compared to just $233 million in 1989.

The Canadian government has actively supported this expansion. Since the 1990s, under the influence of industry associations, the Canadian state has implemented a comprehensive strategy to support the expansion of investments and activities abroad. Fiscal measures designed to attract mining interests include tax deductions for expenditure incurred abroad and exemptions for profits repatriated to Canada. According to its 2007 annual report, Export Development Canada, the government’s export credit agency, has supported projects totalling $22 billion worth of exports and investments in Canadian companies in the extractive sector.
Endowed with both minerals and a long mining tradition, Canadians are not exactly lacking in expertise. As of 2001, the sector accounted for 4% of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with $64 billion in exports and $30 billion in capital expenditure, while employing a total of 400,000 people. The year before, in 2000, there were at least 2,200 Canadian companies related to the mining industry.

So why do they want our minerals? Could it be to power their manufacturing sector? With a modest 2% growth, Canada had been the exception to the trend of manufacturing job loss among developed countries over the last quarter century. But now they are playing catch-up. Between 2004 and 2008, as Canada’s mining investment in Africa has exploded, their manufacturing sector imploded, shedding over 300,000 jobs. Its share of total employment fell by close to one-third and when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released a comparison of average annual growth rates in manufacturing output over the 2000-2007 period in 16 different industrialized countries, Canada was right at the bottom with real output declining at an average rate of 0.3% per year. So, it is not like they have a voracious appetite for raw materials.

How about energy? Perhaps they need some of our oil and natural gas? Not a chance. Canada is a net exporter of oil, natural gas, coal, and electricity. In 2006, she produced 19.3 quadrillion British Thermal Units (Btu) of total energy, the fifth-largest amount in the world. Not only is she the largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world, she also ranks 3rd and 7th in global gas and oil production respectively. Even as Canadian companies are busy signing oil exploration and extraction contracts here, back home oil tycoons have invested more than CAD$30 billion in Alberta’s oil sands and estimates are for that investment to mushroom to CAD$125 billion in the next decade. So no, they don’t need our oil.

Why are they here then? The reasons is actually quite simple. For one, minerals are relatively easy to find in Africa. The continent hosts 30% of planet’s mineral reserves including 40% of Gold, 60% of cobalt, 90% of the worlds PGMs (Platinum Group of Metals) and proven oil reserves of over 117 billion barrels as at the end of 2007. In Canada, the easy-to-find stuff has already been found. Companies are now developing low-grade projects with marginal economics and investors have reached a stage where they assume that mines will not be delivered on time and on budget. A good example is British Columbia’s Galore Creek Project, a partnership between two Canadian mining entites, NovaGold and Teck Cominco, to develop what was supposed to be “one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper-gold deposits, with quality, long-life reserves and excellent geologic potential.” It was halted after costs more than doubled and the estimated long-term copper price raised questions about its economic feasibility. Interestingly, according to Mineweb , an internet-based international mining publication, Teck Cominco President and CEO Don Lindsay speculated that the mine might become more attractive if “problems develop with copper projects in the Congo.”

In some places in Africa, meanwhile, a company like First Quantum Minerals Ltd. can get its Lonshi mine up and running less than a year after a discovery is made and there are highly prospective regions like the Central African copperbelt that have had no serious exploration for decades, or ever. "You're looking at virgin ground that's almost untouched. It's finally being explored properly," says Jean Luc Roy, CEO of the copperbelt exploration company El Nino Ventures Inc. Robert Lavalliere, vice-president of investor relations at Anvil Mining Ltd., the leading copper producer in the DRC with three major projects, notes the productive potential of open pit mines there is “three, four, five times" that of the rest of the world. However, I hasten to add, this is not universally true of the continent. The experience of Tiomin Resources Inc. in Kenya will suffice to illustrate this.

That said, it is abundantly clear that Canadians are not here just for the minerals. They’re here for the money. And with sky high global prices for raw materials, you can bet there’s lots of it to be made. According to CorpWatch.org, 60 percent of all the world’s mining companies are based in Canada, generating $50 billion a year for Canadians. In fact, talk of a scramble for African minerals pitting the West and China is somewhat misleading. Much of it , no matter who mines it, eventually finds its way, via the global markets, to the booming economies of Asia. The scramble is for cash since the Chinese probably figure it would be cheaper (and safer) to mine the products themselves rather than wait for middle-men to deliver it.

As everyone (except the African people, of course) fights for his piece of the pie, moral standards are being thrown to the wind. Around the world, Canadians are generally regarded as a pleasant, soft spoken people. But being home to nearly two-thirds of the world’s mining and exploration companies, it is inevitable that there will be some rotten apples. Each year, a significant number of these are accused of environmental and human rights abuses, often in developing countries where the government is weak or corrupt. Their behaviour is so bad that in some places, according to the Toronto Star, the word "Canada" is so reviled that travelling Canadians mask their citizenship by wearing, of all things, American flags on their caps and backpacks. The Canadian government has struggled for a decade with how to hold mining firms accountable for their actions overseas. So far its attempts have proved inadequate.

It has disregarded repeated calls for an independent investigation into the 1996 Bulyanhulu gold mine incident. In 2001, eyewitness accounts, family testimony, photos and police videotape uncovered by the Lawyer's Environmental Action Team (LEAT) of Tanzania corroborated long-standing allegations that employees of the Canadian owned Kahama Mining Corporation, LTD (KMCL) in conjunction with the Tanzanian police, buried over fifty artisanal miners by bulldozing over the entrances to the shafts in which they worked at the Bulyanhulu gold mine in 1996.

In 2002 it ignored a United Nations report called on it to investigate the actions of seven Canadian companies accused of illegally exploiting resources from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Two years later, 73 people were killed by the Congolese military, which used vehicles, supplies, pilots and drivers from a Canadian-Australian mining company to transport them to the site of the massacre. According to MiningWatch’s Jamie Kneen, Anvil Mining had been forced to shut down production at their Dikulushi Mine when a so-called “rebellion” took place in a nearby village; a rebellion of “10 to 12” villagers that had nothing to do with mining. Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC), of the DRC government, provided with trucks and logistics by Anvil, proceeded to seize the town and then went door-to-door “raping and pillaging.”

As recent revelations from Uganda demonstrate, these companies are not above signing secret agreements or dumping toxic waste into rivers as they did in Tanzania. Denis Tougas, director of the L'Entraide missionnaire (L'EMI) in Montréal, notes that “it’s a safe bet that Canada’s image as a moderate country and disinterested development partner in Africa is now thoroughly outdated.”

The Great Migration

Over Their Dead Bodies?

The Insults of the Earth

“I call on all Ministers and Assistant Ministers and every other person to sing like parrots. During Mzee Kenyatta’s period, I persistently sang the Kenyatta tune. [When] people said ‘This fellow has nothing to say except sing for Kenyatta,’ I said I did not have ideas of my own. Who was I to have my own ideas? I was in Kenyatta’s shoes and therefore I had to sing whatever Kenyatta wanted. If I had sung another song, do you think Kenyatta would have left me alone? Therefore you ought to sing the song I sing. If I put a full stop, you should put a full stop. This is how the country will move forward. The day you become a big person, you will have the liberty to sing your own song and everybody will sing it”.

Thus spake the then Kenyan President, Daniel Arap Moi, in what has to be the most eloquent exposition of the intent of sedition law ever uttered.

Historically, sedition is the crime of speaking words against the state. Its basic premise, that it is wrong to criticise the leadership, fundamentally flies in the face of the tenets of democracy which demand the ability to criticise leaders as a sina qua non for informed choice. In its modern meaning, the charge of sedition first appeared in the Elizabethan Era (c. 1590) as the "notion of inciting by words or writings disaffection towards the state or constituted authority". According to Curtis C. Breight, author of Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, sedition complemented treason and martial law: while treason controlled primarily the privileged and ecclesiastical opponents, and martial law frightened commoners, sedition was meant to cow intellectuals. Under English common law, a statement is seditious if it "brings into hatred or contempt" the Queen or her heirs, or the government and constitution, or either House of Parliament, or the administration of justice, or if it incites people to attempt to change any matter of Church or State established by law (except by lawful means), or if it promotes discontent among or hostility between British subjects. A person is only guilty of the offence if they intend any of the above outcomes and, interestingly, proving that the statement is true is not a defence. It is punishable with life imprisonment.

Thin-skinned African despots have recurrently deployed sedition legislation that derives from their UK and French colonial heritage to deal with dissent and to contain bothersome journalists. According to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) , laws on insulting leaders are in force in 48 out of 53 African countries, and are "the greatest scourge" of press freedom on the continent. In the first five months of 2007, "insult" laws led to the harassment, arrest or imprisonment of 103 journalists in 26 African countries.

Last week’s brutal abduction and torture of Uganda's Radio One talk show host and The East African contributor Robert Kalundi Serumaga, and his release on bail after being charged with six counts of sedition, is only the latest incident. Serumaga who spent four days in police custody was accused by the state of “intention to bring into hatred, contempt and to excite disaffection against the person of the President” during a television show on September 11. Less than a month ago, 3 executives on the Ugandan bimonthly magazine The Independent were interrogated by police for four hours because they published an allegedly seditious cartoon that was critical of the president, Yoweri Museveni. One of three, managing editor Andrew Mwenda, is already facing a sedition charge from 2005, one of 21 criminal counts that he is fighting in the courts.

In 2005, Mwenda was arrested and charged with “sedition” and his employer, KFM Radio, was briefly banned after he commented on a possible Ugandan government role in the death of southern Sudanese leader John Garang while hosting a phone-in radio show. Among other things, Mwenda blamed President Yoweri Museveni and the Ugandan government for the mismanagement of Garang’s security after he died in a helicopter crash.

In Kenya, sedition laws (Section 56, 57 and 58 of the Penal Code) were repealed by the IPPG reforms of 1997. Prior to that, they were used to curtail any form of discontent, their enforcement sometimes verging on the ridiculous. For example, in 1990 Rev. Lawford Ndege Imunde was sentenced to 6 years imprisonment for “printing and possessing seditious publications exciting disaffection against the President or the Government of Kenya” after he noted in his desk diary that Robert Ouko was murdered with the connivance of the government.

Though Article 18 of the Tanzanian Constitution guarantees every Tanzanian the right to freedom of opinion and expression, the Newspaper Act of 1976 allows authorities within the government—including the president—the power to prohibit publications that might be deemed to not be in the nation's best interest. It defines an act, speech or publication as seditious if it aims to bring lawful authority into hatred or contempt, or excites disaffection against the same, or promotes feelings of ill-will and hostility between different categories of the population. Anyone printing or publishing a newspaper which contravenes these provisions is liable to face a fine or a maximum sentence of 3 years. In October 2008, the radical tabloid, Mwanahalisi, was banned for 3 months for allegedly publishing seditious articles. Information Minister George Mkuchika explained the rationale behind the ban thus: "The newspaper is fond of publishing articles that ridicule senior government leaders including president Jakaya Kikwete and the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM)."

Matters are not much better in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Nsimba Embete Ponte, editor of the biweekly L'Interprète, was last year handed a 10-month prison sentence for "insulting" President Joseph Kabila by referring to rumours about Kabila’s health in a series of articles. Arrested on 7 March 2008 in Kinshasa by members of the National Intelligence Agency (ANR), Ponte was held incommunicado for three months before being transferred to the main Kinshasa penitentiary.

In Burundi, Anaias Havyarimana and Honoré Misago were arrested in September 2008 on charges of insulting President Pierre Nkurunziza after they were overheard criticizing his education policy in a private conversation. They were both remanded in custody until their acquittal in December. In November , well-known former radio journalist and political activist, Alexis Sinduhije, was charged with “insulting the President,” based on a document found in his possession following an illegal police search during which a search warrant for different premises altogether was delivered two hours late, referring to a judicial file that did not yet exist. The recovered document purpotedly stated that “the responsibility for the corruption scandals and the assassinations ordered by the party CNDD-FDD lie with the man who passes his time in prayer meetings,” and, according to the prosecution, referred to and insulted President Nkurunziza, a born-again Christian.

Gambian law intimidates independent press through prison terms for reporters found guilty of sedition - broadly defined - or libel, and a requirement that newspaper proprietors must sign a US$16,600 bond (with their houses as guarantees) to be allowed to publish. In 2008 UK missionaries David and Fiona Fulton were sentenced to a year's hard labour over "seditious" email to friends in London in which they describe the Gambian President, Yahya Jammeh, a man who believes he can cure AIDS on Thursdays using herbs and bananas, as a “madman”. They were also fined £6,250 each. They pleaded guilty to charges of "printing, publishing or reproducing publications with intent to bring hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the president or the government".

In 2007, 5 journalists and a teacher were convicted of insulting Mali President Amadou Toumani Toure, and given suspended sentences over a school essay. Teacher Bassirou Kassim Minta had asked his final-year secondary school class to write a humorous essay about the mistress of a fictional African leader. He was arrested, along with Seydina Oumar Diarra, a journalist who wrote an article in the Info-Matin newspaper criticising the teacher for assignment. Following the detentions, the article was reprinted in other newspapers, leading to the arrest of the other journalists.

Côte d'Ivoire journalist Nanankoua Gnamanteh was brought before an Abidjan court in March this year on a charge of insulting President Laurent Gbagbo in an article that appeared in Le Repère under the headline "Ali Baba and his 40 thieves" together with a photo of the president and several of his close associates and referring to Gbagbo's period as president as "nine years of political fraud... outright theft, embezzlement and kleptomania at the summit of the state." The prosecutor requested a two-year prison sentence and asked the court to suspend Le Repère for eight months and to fine its publisher, Eddy Péhé, 10 million CFA francs (15,200 euros), despite the fact, as noted by Reporters Without Borders, that the country had decriminalized press offences. Gnamanteh and Péhé were fined 20 millions CFA francs (30,000 euros) each, and the newspaper was suspended for eight weeks.

Though Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has pledged to amend the 1996 Press Law and abolish prison sentences for press offenses, that did not save Ibrahim Issa and Sahar Zaki, editor and journalist, respectively, of the opposition weekly Al-Dustur, who were each sentenced to one year in prison in June 2006 for "insulting the President" and "spreading false or tendentious rumours." The charges were brought by the so-called "ordinary people of al-Warrak," who were reportedly offended by an April 2005 article which reported on a lawsuit brought by a man from the village who accused President Mubarak of unconstitutional conduct and ‘wasting foreign aid’ during the privatisation of state-owned companies.

In Zimbabwe, even musicians have not been spared. Happison Mabika, and Patience Takaona, have been in hiding since last year when they failed to attend a court to answer charges of singing songs ‘too sensitive and insulting’ President Robert Mugabe. Their lawyer Charles Kwaramba later claimed that the duo were in fear for their lives. Although the country now has a coalition government, Dread Reckless and Sister Fearless, as they are better known by their fans, have not emerged. If convicted, the two face a two-year stint in jail.

In many jurisdictions across the globe, sedition is either formally or effectively a dead letter. Recognising that criminal sanctions for criticism of leaders should never be imposed, the British government has not charged anyone with sedition in over 30 years and has announced its intention to repeal the law. It is time African governments cottoned on to this. For too long, governments on the continent have used these laws "ruthlessly, to prevent critical appraisal of their performance and to deprive the public from information about their misdemeanours", as WAN put it. Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda succinctly captured the irony of the situation, explaining that “in a country that is a democracy (or pretends to be) and not a monarchy, it is my right to cause public disaffection against the person of the President or the government so that at the next election people can vote against both.”

Live G8

I'm reposting the article below only because it was published in The East African:

The Black Man’s Burden: How Africa Subsidises The West

Last week Kenya’s prime Minister Raila Odinga was cheered when he declared that we in Africa do not need any lectures from the West. He was speaking in advance of US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s arrival for the AGOA summit and, of course, lectures are exactly what the African leadership got. Perhaps the greatest favour that Clinton’s visit would do us is if it led our potentates and their hapless subjects to ask one question. Why is Africa poor?

Our continent's penury has been proclaimed far and wide. Governments, NGOs, the media and celebrities alike have taken to the rooftops to weave their sorry tale of Africa's woe. We've all heard the statistics. To quote just a few: More than 300 million people south of the Sahara have to survive on less than a dollar a day. Two thirds of the poorest countries in the world are in Africa, as are 34 of the 35 states with the lowest life expectancy. However this is at best a misrepresentation of the true story and at worst a deliberate attempt to mask the real and fundamental cause of the continent’s underdevelopment.

Africa is possibly the largest producer of raw materials in the world. Our mineral and agricultural resources are what keep the rest of the world churning. Many of the world's largest corporations make their money on the backs of African peasants who receive little in return for their labour. For example, according to the Global Policy Forum, we (together with our brothers-in-alms in Asia and Latin America) grow the coffee that drives a $70 billion global business and accept only $6 billion for our troubles. African countries harvest about two-thirds of the world's cocoa (the main ingredient for the $75 billion chocolate industry), mine 21 percent of it's gold, control nearly 17% of its oil reserves. Kenya alone is home to fully 10% of the world’s unexploited titanium reserves which some have valued at $11 billion. Yet only 1 percent of the world's wealth is created in the region between the Sahara and the Cape of Good Hope.

How do we explain this seeming paradox? First, let us disabuse ourselves of this notion that Africa is poor. Africa is not poor. We lack because what we have is freely given away to the developed world. For example, in what was then described as “an unprecedented act of generosity”, the Government Kenya in 2006 gifted the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company Ltd (CNOOC) exclusive rights over a total of six out of 11 available oil exploration blocks, after which the Chinese held an auction in London and sold off the concessions. In the case of the titanium find, Kenya’s colonial-era Mining Act stipulates that mining companies pay only 5% of the value of the minerals to the government. According to Haroun Ndubi of Kituo cha Sheria, "a developed country… would be talking about a third of the value of the mineral deposits.” (I should also add that it is doubtful that any developed country would allow $11 billion to sit in the ground for 15 years while its citizens starved.)

In these and other ways, Africa effectively subsidise the industrialized world’s economies to a scale that dwarfs any of the agricultural subsidies paid to farmers or any amount of aid that they would favour us with. And it doesn't stop there. We spend our money training countless doctors, nurses and other professionals only to freely send them to work in the West. We receive "aid", promptly return it in payments to the "donor" nation's companies, and then are paradoxically still left with a debt whose interest payments are mind-boggling. Between 1970 and 2002 the countries south of the Sahara received a total of $294 billion in loans. In the same period of time they paid back $268 billion, and accumulated, after interest, a mountain of debt amounting to $210 billion.

Who is responsible for this state of affairs. Not the perennial scapegoats, the West. The truth is that the blame lies squarely with us Africans because we tolerate the situation and accept the rationalizations that support it. We agree to sell our raw materials on the cheap and cough up to buy back the processed stuff. We accept that the major international commodity exchanges be in the Western capitals that don't produce any commodity. We faithfully obey the dictates of a patently skewed market; we take the aid that is no aid at all but a form of internationally sanctioned loan-sharking; we buy the weapons that slaughter millions in pointless wars while at the same time we are busy sending peacekeepers to police the war zones of Europe. We rip off our brethren then stash their hard-earned money away in foreign banks, boosting foreign economies. This is the real Black Man's Burden - our largess.

The West, though, has no interest in solving our root problem because as we have seen, it benefits a great deal from it. So they foist on us all sorts of agenda and after a lot of soul-searching and wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, they also provide us with the solutions. More aid (specifically 0.7% of their GDPs- that's 7 cents out of every $10). Some debt cancellation. More talk on market access and subsidies. Anything to avoid dealing with the central inconsistency of an entire continent sitting on a mountain of wealth and living off a pittance. In spite of the obvious contradiction, our governments and NGOs fall over themselves to implement the latest proposals, gratefully accepting crumbs as their benefactors in the West continue to feast on bread made from our wheat.

In defining the agenda, the West succeeds in owning the problem. It never ceases to amaze me that any show on Africa by the TV networks always ends up interviewing some white guy from the West. According to the Washington Post, "when the foreign media descend on the latest crisis, the person they look to interview is invariably the foreign savior, an aid worker from the United States or Europe. African saviors are everywhere, delivering aid on the ground. But they don't seem to be in [the West's] cultural belief system." Anti-poverty shows always feature plenty of rich whites bemoaning the open sore that is Africa and a token black (probably an "enlightened" Aids victim or a survivor of some horrible famine) representative of the redemption a donation a few dollars can buy.

Bob Geldof's Live 8 provides this telling scene as related by Margo Kingston. "Geldof introduced a young Ethiopian woman whose photo we saw from 20 years earlier when she was ten minutes away from death. But the moment was quickly lost; not even here could the audience be trusted with time for memory and reflection. ‘Live’ overruled Life. The young woman was led onstage to stand by as a prop to Madonna’s Like a Prayer. There was no Miriam Makeba on hand to embrace this African sister. A life ‘saved’ but now ready to aspire to the West’s idealized image."

Like the poor Ethiopian, we have become props to the West's struggle with its conscience. Africa is the stage where they seek absolution for their past misadventures as Parsaselo Kantai amply demonstrates in his insightful article, Death of a Kenyan Dream. They do so, not to relieve our suffering, but theirs. In this drama, the African has been assigned his stock role of "the noble savage" needing to be rescued from himself while the West is cast as the heroic, self-sacrificing (the whole 7 cents) harbinger of civilisation.

Having accepted our role and donned the costume of moral and material bankruptcy, we have come to rely on them for answers to everything. When a parastatal is insolvent, bring in some Westerner and hey presto! Problem solved. Endemic corruption? Why, let’s get some Western “experts” to advice us. Famines and disease? Here come the white messiahs riding on their standard issue luxury 4X4s (and receiving hefty allowances to compensate them for the hardship of exchanging a council house in London for a palatial residence in Muthaiga with several servants thrown in). Faltering economies? Blame the whole thing on slavery and colonialism. Claim reparations. Sue their imperialist asses. Wait for the handout. Thus Western guilt and greed conspires with African naiveté, incompetence and thievery.

Africa needs to wake up and wrest back the problem. It is our problem, not the West’s. The solutions will come from us, not them. "Fair trade", debt relief, removal of subsidies and "aid" cannot be anything other than a band-aid on a gaping wound. We need to extract ourselves from a global trade system that is bleeding us dry. Africa needs to be run for the benefit of Africans, not modern-day imperialists. The Virginia Center for the Teaching of International Studies whose central purpose is to enhance the teaching of international studies in Virginia's middle and high schools, thinks that Grade 8 kids in the US should be able to "identify minerals in Sub-Sahara Africa, explain how man uses these minerals and how developed nations need these minerals, identify minerals that are strategically important and examine factors that limit Sub-Sahara Africa from becoming more industrialized and using these mineral resources themselves (italics mine). I would recommend the same course to Raila and his fellow heads of governments.

Obama Comes To Africa

Not On His Watch?

This from Rosa Whitaker, former Assistant US Trade Representative to Africa, serving under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and now President and CEO of The Whitaker Group (TWG), a Washington, DC-based consultancy specializing in trade and investment in Africa. As the trade advisor to Congressman Charles Rangel, she was a prime architect of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and continues to play a lead role in advocating for its enhancement and continued relevance. (Hat Tip: The East African)

As the Obama Administration develops its Africa and trade policies, it is critical that it resists pressure from some special interests and members of Congress to support legislation that extends the duty-free access to the US market enjoyed by African nations under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) to all Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

While the sentiment is commendable, the result of such a broad-brush trade policy would be disastrous for Africa, particularly those countries that have used AGOA to grow their apparel and textile industries and, in so doing, created more than 300,000 jobs across the continent. In 2008, apparel constituted Kenya’s top export sector to the United States, accounting for $247 million in export earnings.

Last year, the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa represented only 1.2% of the $95 billion US apparel import market. Bangladesh alone captured 3.8% – more than triple the trade of AGOA’s African beneficiary countries combined - and Cambodia accounted for 2.5% of the US apparel market, exporting over twice as much as African exports.

Yes, Bangladesh and Cambodia both suffer the scourge of poverty, but the difference is one of economic trajectory and divergence. Africa continues to be the only region of the world getting poorer and not converging with developed economies. AGOA offers hope and has demonstrated progress in reversing these trends. Apparel has been the entry point into manufacturing for all countries including the US and China. To cut Africa off as it is entering this labor-intensive sector is homicidal for the region.

Extending AGOA benefits to other LDCs, like Bangladesh and Cambodia, would almost certainly be the death knell for Africa’s very promising, but still nascent, apparel sector. Already, the continent’s clothing exporters, faced with the global recession as well as super-competitive, low wage producers in Asia, are under severe stress.

Last year, apparel exports from Africa to the US dropped by over 10%, a decline over three times greater than the contraction in the overall US textile and apparel market. When you consider countries like Bangladesh, whose apparel and textile exports in 2008 grew by 11% to about $3.5 billion; or Cambodia, which exported over $2 billion in apparel and textiles to the US, it is easy to understand the necessity of maintaining AGOA’s special benefits for African countries.

As Paul Collier points out in his "Bottom Billion" book, Bangladesh and Cambodia have created hypercompetitive garment industries and trade preferences are clearly not needed for the "hypercompetitive" but for the most vulnerable and fragile. If one believes trade policies should have a developmental impact, as I do, then trade preferences have to be targeted.

When Asia broke into these markets it did not have to compete with established low-cost producers, because it was the first on the block," Collier writes. "For [Africa] to break into these markets they need temporary protection from Asia."

With a new Administration and a new Congress in Washington, it is a good time to open up the discussion of how the US can develop a trade policy that serves our both economic and development objectives. It is critical that we don't succumb to superficial, feel-good policies that could have devastating consequences for the very people we mean to help.

AGOA was enacted by President Bill Clinton and enhanced three times under President Bush with consistently strong bi-partisan support. This key pillar of US policy towards Africa—which was endorsed by all 48 sub-Saharan African countries and the Africa Union must not be diluted or destroyed under the Administration of America's first African-American President.

I have always believed in and worked for more certainty and clarity in our trade preferences programs. Certainly there is room for improvement in our trade relationship with all LDCs, but as Washington's retail interests try to dilute AGOA's apparel benefits under the banner of lifting all of the world's poor to prosperity – and in the process sacrificing 300,000 African workers and their families – I hope that President Obama will simply reply: "Not on my watch."

The Absurdity of Hopelessness

First we were the only country in the world to declare a public holiday to honour the election of a foreign head of state. That was bad enough. But our national obsession with Barack Obama knows no bounds. 

Our MPs have declared their intention to hold a thanksgiving prayer meeting at Uhuru Park, Obama's grandmother has netted an international job as Ambassador-at-large for some algae and newspapers are full of reports of an expected economic bonanza heading our way. Prime Minister Raila Odinga and his pet poodle Otieno Kajwang' are both claiming to have played "crucial" roles helping secure Obama's victory in the expectation, I wager, of invitations to visit with the future First Family in the White House or Cabinet posts in the new Administration. I wonder how many kids unlucky enough to be born this year will forever carry monickers such as Kogelo, Whitehouse, Election etc.

And when the party is over, when all euphoria has dissipated, we will be the same divided Kenya. After celebrating another peoples' milestone on the road towards true unity, we will ourselves retreat from the call of History and head back into our tribal cocoons, sharpening our pangas in readiness for the next round of bloodletting masquerading as election campaigns.

Or, perhaps, just perhaps, we can change?

Yes we can! But we won't.

Queries on Tribes

Over the weekend I had an interesting discussion with my Dad regarding the achievements (or lack thereof) of the Kibaki administration. As the discussion inevitably turned to NARC-K and ODM, the temperature heated up and voices became shrill. It suddenly dawned upon me that almost all Kenyans on both sides of the political divide were motivated by something less than ideology, something less than the objective assessment of a government's or politician's merit. It is the big gorilla in the room no one wants to discuss. No, I am not referring to Fred Gumo, but to the tribe -supposedly the basic unit of the African polity.

The questions that bedevil me are these. What is a tribe? If the tribe is so central to our identity, why has the concept been so systematically demonized? Why is it absent in our current and proposed governing structures?

What is a tribe? According to Wikipedia, a tribe "consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states...The term is often loosely used to refer to any non-Western or indigenous society." This definition is remarkable because it doesn't tell us what a tribe is, but what it is not. It is not a state and it is not Western. Tribes lack the moral, cultural, administrative and material refinement associated with statehood. And the moniker is uniquely applied to non-Westerners. (This, strictly speaking, is not true. The "savage" hordes that ravaged the outer reaches of the Roman empire in Europe were grouped into tribes.) I think the notion the word is meant to portray is uncivilised. The penchant for equating civilisation with Westernisation then leads us to the absurd situation where the Irish, Scots, English and Welsh are not the tribes of Britain but the Ibos, Fulani and Hausa are tribes in Nigeria (nothing to do with population, by the way, since the Ibos easily outnumber the Welsh and Scots combined.) Europe has ethnicities, the rest have tribes. The difference is in the connotation. In the reality show "Survivor", participants are grouped into tribes because "ethnic groups" somehow does not quite convey the idea of uncivilization that the show thrives on.

Now, it is obvious that we are dealing with a loaded word here and need to be careful (I wouldn't wish to find myself in the position of arguing that a lack of civilisation is central to African identity!). Why is allegiance to one's tribe so demonised? Let me be the first to state that some of the most heinous crimes have been committed in the name of the tribe. Just look at Rwanda. However, many more massacres have been committed in the name of ethnicity, race, religion and state but these are not demonised to the same degree. Do the "tribal" aspirations of the Luos really differ from the "ethnic" aspirations of the Serbs, Albanians, Chechens, Scots, Irish or French? The latter's railings against "Anglo-Saxon" domination sound very like the rants we hear about Kikuyu domination in Kenya. Was the Holocaust (and the many pogroms that preceded it) really not a tribal genocide same as the wholesale killing of Tutsis in Rwanda or the ongoing "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur? Is it more "civilised" to pack human beings into cattle boxes and transport them to gas chambers where their deaths are meticulously recorded, rather than to pick up machetes and hack them at random?

In Kenya, our response to the political challenges posed by tribe has been wacha ukabila! We have been banging our heads against that particular brick wall for the last 40 years. (Today, our political parties are little more than vehicles for tribal ambitions and accommodations. In the 60s, KANU was a Kikuyu-Luo Affair and KADU a coalition of the smaller tribes. In the new millenium, we are still struggling with the consequences of the Kikuyu-Luo falling out, only we try disguise it in ideological terms. There was a brief rapproachment in 2002, but the rift opened up again.) Why are we afraid to accept the tribal basis of our politics? Why is it considered a liability? If democracy springs from the people, and the people are a tribal lot, then should that not be reflected and accommodated in our national institutions? Take the US example. In the drafting of their constitution, they acknowledged that the basic political unit was the state. Small states feared domination by big states. They did not resolve this by shouting wacha ustate! Instead they accommodated the reality of it in the institutions they created. Should we not be looking to accommodate the reality of the tribe in our constitutional arrangements?

Answers anyone?