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An African perspective: Is cyber democracy possible?

2008-07-30

Clayton Peel

Wole Soyinka was addressing a conference on the issue of the ‘brain drain’ from African countries. He remarked on how many of the speakers before him had lamented the flight of millions of Africans to the West and how apparently desperate were these speakers, who included African heads of state, to reverse the trend so that the bright young minds and their skills could be retained on the continent. ‘Lucky drainees!’ Soyinka enthused, with a whiff of sarcasm. While they went abroad exploring new frontiers, ‘the brains of their stay-at-home colleagues will be found as grisly sediments on the riverbed of the Nile. Or in the stomach linings of African crocodiles and vultures’ (Olaniyan, 2003).

You will understand then why, at a conference of writers in exile held in Vienna in December 1987, the award-winning Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah, spoke ‘In Praise of Exile.’ He was not disparaging his home country: he was seeking to challenge the perspectives of its leaders. Basically agreeing with Soyinka's opposition of lucky exiles to dead stay-at-homes, Farah said he himself could not have been a writer in Somalia, only a prisoner. Not for him the common idea that the distance of exile kills artistic creativity: ‘For me,’ he wrote, ‘distance distills; ideas become clearer and better worth pursuing’.

Removed from Zimbabwe, many of us have now become, in positive terms, more critical analysts of the situation in our homeland; in negative terms, soppy armchair critics. But the fact is that, we have the liberty of doing so! This armchair critic, for I am one, has become pre-occupied with the segmentation of Zimbabwean transnational website communities. Racially-charged politics, a high rate of HIV-AIDS infection, the complexity of gender relations derived from a country context that mostly is culturally conservative, and settlement in Britain by Zimbabweans and the various sensitivities that surround it, in both countries, are some of the issues that are raised in these website discourses. But difference is an opportunity to negotiate identities and is not inimical to the historical particularities that have shaped a definitive and distinctive ethnic presence in the demographics of Zimbabwe and in its diaspora.

For Diaspora and Communication studies, Zimbabwean electronic fora – the ‘new media’ - and their associations in Britain represent an important interface - a ‘social embedding’ (Aarsaether and Baerenholdt, 2001:49) of Diaspora communities in the homeland agenda that has created of the websites ‘specific communal refuges’ based on networks of family and friends and ethnic associations. In a generation of émigrés witnessing their homeland’s political and economic ruin but possessed of enhanced media technologies, the facility to not just track, but respond to events has led to the emergence first of social networks, and later the source of Internet activism that irked Robert Mugabe (2003) who said it represented ‘the same platforms and technologies through which virulent propaganda and misinformation are peddled to de legitimise our just struggles against vestigial colonialism, indeed to weaken national cohesion and efforts at forging a broad Third World front against what patently is a dangerous imperial world order led by warrior states and kingdoms’.

Compatriots wanting to assuage anxieties and nostalgia created and contributed to a web of electronic activism that contributed meaningfully – and varyingly - to Zimbabwean communities as the discourses and their associations grew vivid, provocative, and productive. Creatively using new technologies to define themselves, the Zimbabwean Diasporic websites raise social and anthropological media properties bound to attract scholarly attention.

Secondly, the fora are a microcosm of Zimbabwean diversity which deconstructs the authoritarian nationalism that has been a signature of Mugabe’s 28-year rule. This study characterizes the Diaspora websites’ ‘production of difference within common, shared and connected spaces’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997:45). It fills a research void acknowledged by Mwangola (2007) regarding smaller Diaspora communities ‘considered by both their host countries and the African world to be insignificant because of their small numbers and lack of political and/or economic capital’. Diverse Zimbabwean identities and their expressions which convey not only data and meaning, but community building through communication, form a transnational public sphere of website communities and associations representing a vibrancy absent from the ‘intolerant’ and ‘dull…intellectual ghetto’ Zimbabwe had become (Nyamfukudza 2005:21, 23) .

Thirdly, there is a general lack of authoritative source material of a qualitative nature on which UK agencies can rely for assessment of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, in the UK and at home. Over a two-year period I have provided assessments for law firms pursuing asylum cases and was given access to not just the claims, but the material on which government agencies drew to make their determinations. The source material nearly always lacked comprehensive detail. In particular, the expectation that all hardship in Zimbabwe must have had a party political dispensation to be worthy of an asylum claim betrayed an insensitivity to other tensions existing in that strangled environment, which UK-based agencies in particular seemed to be uninterested in. My research has the potential to expand the value and the knowledge base of interested parties.

It makes diversity a factor of social research with its emphasis on ‘undigested minorities’ (Nyamnjoh 2006:94; Nyamfukudza, 2005:18). Despite the significance of ethnic and cultural difference to Zimbabwe’s distant and recent history, this has not been a priority area in the research there has been into Zimbabwean transnationalism. The odd scholarly observation in this direction has remarked on the ‘fragmentation’ (Pasura, 2006a), although to view the diverse representations of a country’s multi-ethnic make-up solely in that light is to potentially omit positive aspects which the diverse populations and their plural expressions might bring to the discourse, something the electronic media may have enhanced. Conceptualizing this multi-polar engagement, I use Appadurai (1996), Werbner (1997a), Wise (2006), Moyo (2007) and Habermas’ descriptions of the public sphere as the ‘epistemic dimension’ (2006:411) to the procedures of democratic discourse. The research hopes to demonstrate not only the extension of democratic space, but also the production and reaffirmation of marginalized cultures in the electronic fora. Zaffiro (2002), Raftopolous (2004), Ranger (2005; 2002) and Nyamfukudza (2005), among others, have tracked the Mugabe government’s attempts to forge a corporate Zimbabwean identity and history that either excluded or assimilated minorities, or distorted their historical roles and the entitlements of their Zimbabwean citizenship. The social and economic upheaval which ensued, notwithstanding political arguments in mitigation, were accompanied by a re-ordering of Zimbabwean historiography that replaced even-handed analysis with unbalanced and at times rabidly racist literature (Nyamfukudza, 2005; Ranger, 2005; Raftopolous, 2004). By contrast, the transnational websites may inform an alternative narrative that acknowledges Zimbabwe’s demographics in deconstructing history and re-defining the nation.

As it expands its functions and its properties become progressively more accessible to households and other non-institutional users in Britain (OfCom, 2004), Internet communication is being appropriated by various echelons of the society to serve diverse interests: to ‘encompass the cultural forms of marginal constituencies’ (Ebo, 1998:x) as well as ‘emphasize hierarchical political associations’ (1998:2); to ‘encourage broad participation and emphasize merit over status’ (1998:3) as well as create private media spaces for individual, group and culture aggregations (Burnett and Marshall, 2003:67-68). There is a sense of virtual spaces being freed up to ventilate the previously unventilated: the minorities and the marginalised, their aspirations, their political and social will all being articulated in the relative freedom of a media-savvy Western liberal democracy.

In Ebo’s words, internet technology allows groups ‘traditionally dislocated from mainstream social linkages …to develop communal bonding’ (1998:4) through virtual and real-life associations that ‘fulfil the same traditional essence of associations and bonding, and invariably promote social relationships that are orchestrated by inherent inegalitarian tendencies in society’ (1998:5). He concludes that the stratification in the online associations will continue, for ‘as long as communities on the Internet allow participants to engage freely in the creation of social realities, economic and social classifications rooted in race, class and gender…will invariably influence relationships in virtual communities’ (ibid., p6). Ebo refers to this property of online engagement as the ‘cyberghetto perspective’ (ibid., p5), betraying a fear of negation and inequality being extended to cyberspace. But the facilitation of self-propelled diverse interest groups which use Internet communication to gain leverage in a world of inequalities is the rather more positive intuition behind this research.

CONCLUSION

To foregrounds a plurality of ethnic, political and professional continuities to introduce a study that addresses the democratic deficit and counter-authoritarian discourses that co-exist in an extended public sphere which this thesis seeks to describe. It has introduced plurality as a key element in website production and usage and the real-life associations that are formed based on shared affinities to the respective websites.


*Clayton Peel is the Vice-Chairman, Britain Zimbabwe Society. This paper was presented at the Britain Zimbabwe Society Research Day, 2008.

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

Bibliography:
Aarsaether, N and Baerenholdt, J eds. (2001) The Reflexive North, Copenhagen: Nord

Appadurai, A (1996) Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Burnett, R and Marshall, PD. (2003) Web Theory: An Introduction, London & New York: Routledge

Ebo, B (ed.) (1998) Cyberghetto or Cybertopia? Race, Class and Gender, Westport: Praeger

Gupta, A and Ferguson, J (eds.) (1997) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Habermas, J (2006) ‘Political Communication in Media Theory – Does Democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension?’ IN: Communication Theory. Vol. 16, No 4 , November.pp411-426

Moyo, D (2007) ‘Alternative media, Diasporas and the Mediation of the Zimbabwe Crisis’, IN: Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, Vol. 28(1-2), pp81-105

Mugabe, RG 2003. Address to the World Summit on the Information Society, Geneva, 10 December

Mwangola. SM (2007) ‘Invisible Communities: The African Diaspora Down Under’, Paper presented to a workshop of the Commission for the Development of Scientific Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Milti-national Working Group on African Diasporas, Dakar (Senegal), 10-11 August

Nyamfukudza, S 2003. ‘To Skin a Skunk’: Some Observations on Zimbabwe’s intellectual development, IN: Palmberg, M and Primorac, R (eds.) Skinning the Skunk – Facing Zimbabwean Futures, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, pp16-25

Nyamnjoh, FB (2006) Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa, Dakar: CODESRIA/Zed Books

Olaniyan, T (2003) African Writers, Exile and the Politics of a Global Diaspora, IN: West Africa Review, Vol 4, No 1. Online, available at: http://www.westafricareview.com/vol4.1/olaniyan.pdf

Pasura, D (2006a) ‘Mapping Exercise Zimbabwe’, London:IOM

Pasura, D (2006b) ‘Towards a multi-sited ethnography of Diaspora communities in Britain’, Paper presented at the Britain Zimbabwe Society Research Day, Oxford, 17 June

Raftopolous, B (2004) Keynote address at the Britain Zimbabwe Society Annual Research Day, ‘What History for Which Zimbabwe?’ St Antony’s College, Oxford, 13 June

Ranger, T (2005) ‘The Uses and Abuses of History in Zimbabwe’, IN: Palmberg, M and Primorac, R Skinning the Skunk - Facing Zimbabwean Futures, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet

Ranger, T (2002) The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe, Vol. II, Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications

Werbner, P (1997) ‘Afterword: writing multiculturalism and politics in the new Europe’. In Modood, T and P Werbner (eds.) The Politics of Multiculturalism, London: Zed

Wise, A (2006) Exile and Return Among the East Timorese, Philadelphia: Penn Press

Zaffiro, J (2002) Media and Democracy in Zimbabwe, 1931-2002, Colorado Springs: International Academic Publishers

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Barack, Hilary and the albatross

2008-07-30

Annar Cassam

Ten years ago, in May 1998, I had the pleasure of meeting Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady of the US, for a few minutes in Geneva during the World Health Organisation's 50th Anniversary Assembly. She was one of the VIPs invited to celebrate this event at the WHO which had just passed under the leadership of its first woman Director-General, Dr. Gro Haarlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway.

Mrs. Clinton's presence was in recognition of her unsuccessful, but commendable attempt, during her husband's first presidential term, to convince her country's legislators to introduce some form of medical insurance for American citizens, some 40% of whom had no medical cover then, and still do not, to this day.
During her visit, she was also given a prize at a special ceremony at the Palais des Nations to which I and other colleagues from the UN system were invited; in my case, as representative of UNESCO. And it was on this occasion that I first saw and heard Hillary speak in public. She looked, as she still does, much younger than her age, dressed very attractively in a pale pink Oscar de la Renta trouser suit. She was smaller than expected and carried herself with an easy sense of self-assurance.

The perfect presidential trophy wife, I said to myself as I watched her face the packed Palais audience; until she began to speak. Her voice was the first thing I noticed as being distinctly untrophy-like: it was a voice with presence; it immediately commanded one's attention. This voice was also distinct and deliberate in its delivery, and smooth and even of pitch. Then one noticed the content of her speech, the vocabulary and the structured sentences, all spoken with a perfect command of the English language. My ears, jaded from years of listening to boring UN speeches translated to and from six languages, perked up with relief!

She gave a perfectly appropriate talk about her commitment to the principle of medical insurance for her fellow citizens and about the importance of the work of the WHO, especially in developing countries. She thanked the jury for the prize and ended by saying that she had decided, after careful consideration, to give the prize-money (about 40.000 dollars) to a mother-and-child clinic in a village that she had recently visited in the West Lake Region of Tanzania.

In the evening, at the reception given in her honour, I lined up with the rest of the guests to shake her hand and say congratulations. When my turn came, I also added my sincere thanks on behalf of Tanzania. I said I was very touched that she had chosen this clinic, of all the many she must have visited the world over.

The reaction was immediate and warm; her eyes lit up, her face smiled and, placing her other hand on mine, she told me how much she had enjoyed her visit to Tanzania.

As for the prize, she said it had not been a difficult choice to make and had she had more funds, she would have given them to another such clinic in the country.

I asked her what had so pleased her about Tanzania during her visit; she replied that she and Chelsea, her daughter, had been most impressed by the friendliness of the people, their pride in their country, the peace and stability that was evident in spite of the poverty and of course, she added, the physical beauty of the place. I hoped she would come again on another visit very soon; she replied that she certainly would.

We could have chatted on but there was a long line of guests behind me and so I said goodbye and moved on, with this little exchange and the impression of the woman firmly printed in my memory.

Later on, I thought about her speech of support for the work of the WHO and the UN system, as well as her obvious affection for Tanzania and wondered how she would have explained the Clinton Administration's failure to resume her own country's membership of UNESCO. The US, a founder member of this institution, had withdrawn from it in anger in 1984, during the dark days of the Reagan presidency when the anti-UN agenda of the Heritage Foundation had gripped the minds of policy-makers in Washington.

(As it happened, the US resumed its membership thanks to George W. Bush who, for reasons only known to himself, suddenly announced the news in March 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq.)

I even began dreaming of a trip to Washington to interview her and ask her how she had resolved the contradiction, so evident to me, between her concern for mothers and children in a remote corner of East Africa and her husband's bombing of Iraq which was leading to the death of thousands of very young Iraqi children.

The subject of Iraqi children dying at the staggering rate of more than 700 a week as a result of US-UK bombs and severe economic sanctions (imposed by the West through the UN) could not be avoided by the international community in Geneva during the course of 1998. The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad had given briefings on this horrendous situation and colleagues from some major NGOs were saying the same thing.

On this subject, I would also have asked Mrs. Clinton to explain what her husband was doing in Iraq anyway and why he and Prime Minister Blair were continuing this so-called peacetime bombing of Iraq in 1998, a full seven years AFTER the end of the first Gulf War waged by the Republican George Bush the Father.

And last but not least, I would have asked for her reaction to the words uttered on American TV by Madeleine Albright, herself a mother and grand-mother, when she was US Ambassador to the UN. She was asked (on the programme Sixty Minutes) about the Clinton policy of bombing Iraq in order "to contain" Saddam.

"We have heard that half a million Iraqi children have died…that's more than died at Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?" asked the TV journalist.

Albright's answer should surely be engraved on her tombstone: "This is a very hard choice but yes, we think the price is worth it."

As we all know, President Clinton subsequently appointed Mrs. Albright her country’s first woman Secretary of State.

Needless to say, these questions remained in the realm of my imagination. But later that year, as events moved on for the Clintons in the form of the Lewinsky scandal, my brief contact with Hillary made me follow that story with particular interest.

The President of the world's only super-power became a laughing stock across the globe as that pathetic saga unfolded; poor Hillary looked crushed and humiliated in the little that one saw of her on TV. Then, in December 1998, there followed what must surely be one of the most degrading episodes in recorded presidential history, namely the attempt to organise a vote in the House of Representatives aimed at indicting President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of his relations with this White House intern. For months before that, we had been spared no detail in an epic inquiry carried out with rottweiler-like tenacity and relish by the Special Investigator, the Republican Kenneth Starr.

Watching her husband being excoriated on TV all day and every day must have been an ordeal for Hillary, to put it mildly. Bill Clinton survived the vote but his credibility and reputation disintegrated over the following months as his presidency limped to its close in December 1999.

During the scandal period, many journalists had asked why Hillary had kept silent; why she had not left her husband, nor booted him out for the disgrace he had brought on their marriage and on the highest office of the land.

She did not answer, she did not explain; she stood by her man and she saw it through. And after leaving the White house, she did not get angry or bitter; she got to be US Senator for New York and a very good one at that, by all accounts.

One does not have to be a psycho-analyst to see that the wounds caused by the Lewinsky affair to Hillary's pride as a woman, as the First Lady and as a partner in her and her husband's joint career in politics came to form the main motivation for a new career for herself after leaving Washington.

As Carl Bernstein explains in his biography of Hillary "Woman in Charge" in marrying Bill very soon after university, she gave up the chance of an independent career for herself where her considerable intellectual gifts could have found fulfillment. However, if she chose to hitch her wagon to Bill's political star, it was within a partnership of equals where their combined talents were to be harnessed in order to serve a shared ambition to reach the highest spheres in US politics.

And this strategy worked; for it carried them very swiftly, via the Democratic Party, from the periphery of Arkansas to the White House. It was here where it fell apart, thanks to her husband's reckless behaviour with an intern, leaving Hillary to face humiliation at first and then serious collateral damage when he lied about the episode.

After entering the Senate, she became a politician in her own right with a vengeance and worked hard to redeem herself (and her husband)) through another self-generated ambition, namely to re-enter the Oval Office in 2008. And this time to do so on her own terms, through her own capacities, with her own personal credit intact. And from this source came the driven, single-minded pursuit, within a weakened Democratic party, of a goal designed to re-write the record of the Clinton joint -life -project, so mindlessly trivialised by her partner in its first version.

The joint-project-marriage is an interesting phenomenon to observe as more and more bright, well-educated women face the dilemma of fulfilling their professional ambitions within this type of partnership from the confines of another traditional and emotional one, that of being married to the same man for love.

Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher, explains this dilemma very clearly in her book, "The Second Sex." In a marriage she explains:

"Man is first of all what he does in the world among other men...In certain privileged cases, the wife may succeed in be- coming the husband's true companion, discussing his projects, giving him counsel, collaborating in his works. But she is deluded if she expects in this way to accomplish work she can call her own, for he remains alone the free and responsible agent."

De Beauvoir continues, "Each man readily salutes in the woman who shares his life a colleague and an inspiration, but he nonetheless regards his work as entirely his own..." Consequently, she concludes, "only independent work of her own can assure woman’s genuine independence."

And one might add, genuine self-respect and self-fulfillment.

For the next six years, in a single-minded quest to become President, so absorbed and centred did Hillary become on re-fashioning herself as the perfect, potential, presidential nominee, that she was unable to notice how much the US was changing, mostly because of the Iraq war and its disastrous consequences on the economic, social and psychological state of the country.

During the first months of the campaign, she had no political project to offer, except "to be ready on day one." Her main campaign instruments were money, tough macho-talk in support of the Iraq war (with herself as the Commander-in-Chief), and an absurd presumption of entitlement, all of which evaporated as increasing numbers of Americans from all walks of life turned to Obama, much to her disbelief and Bill's fury.

After Obama's victory at the Democratic primaries, TV pundits started asking where in the campaign “Hillary went wrong”, as though she had taken a wrong turning on the highway by mistake! It could be argued that where she went wrong was in the quest itself.

Her priority was to aim for the top for herself, to re-gain her self-respect and rectify her husband's mess of a legacy, not to heed her fellow,-citizens, hoodwinked, humiliated and impoverished by the policies of one of the most irresponsible and rapacious administrations they have ever produced.

Thanks to this group, the US has become a menace to the well-being of the entire planet, including its own population, which is why Bush's domestic rating has now sunk to 28% and why there is so much anti-US feeling around the globe. And this is surely why Obama's offer of change has sparked such a response; it is a code-word which makes sense to millions of ordinary American citizens, given what they have been going through -and still are-under the Bush regime

Ironically, the man who only narrowly defeated Hillary at the Democratic primaries is the one who has paid her the most serious and sincere compliment of her political life. On May 22, at a massive gathering of his supporters in Ohio, Obama, sensing victory, began his speech by acknowledging Hillary and her achievement.

He told the crowd that together they had all come a long way, that the road had not been smooth, with "some bumps, some mistakes which I have made because I have faced one of the most formidable candidates ever in a presidential campaign."

And he went on, "Whoever wins this race, one thing is clear: the USA that my daughters and yours will grow up in will have been changed forever because of the contribution of Sen. Hillary Clinton."

With these words, Obama has included Hillary in his eventual, probable, victory by identifying her place in the history of their country, not as one who was defeated but as one who, like himself, has indelibly changed the country for future generations.

Obama has repeated these words several times since Ohio and it has taken Hillary many weeks to accept and take ownership of this recognition of her own unique contribution which owes nothing to her husband, given the negative role he has played in her campaign. But even in her speech on unity and her support for Obama’s nomination, she still wanted to give her man a central place in her romantic version of the glories of that "historical" democratic presidency.... under her husband!

Another rather different take on those happy days came from the Washington correspondent of the Financial Times, Edward Luce, who recently wrote that:

"When Bill Clinton told Hillary about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, the First Lady banished him to one of the White House couches for several nights. "I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging her for forgiveness and planning strikes on Al Qaeda", Mr. Clinton recalled. (FT: June 7 2008)"

Leaving aside this extraordinary linkage “recalled” in hindsight by Clinton, between begging for forgiveness and striking Al Qaeda (rather ineffectively)--as though the bombs were an atonement for Lewinsky--it is obvious that Bill seems to suffer from amnesia, for nowhere does he talk about striking Iraq for 8 years!

In fact, on or off the White House couch, Bill indulged in very heavy, systematic “peacetime bombing” of Iraq with his friend PM Blair for the entire period of his presidency. This is what Prof. Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University writes in his book, Good Muslim Bad Muslim:

By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than the US invasion of Viet Nam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the Wall Street Journal they would soon run out of targets: 'We're down to the last outhouse.'

That was two months before President Clinton, bedeviled by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and faced with a vote in the House of Representatives indicting him for perjury and obstruction of justice, decided to unleash round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. This round-the-clock bombing (called Operation Desert Fox) began on December 16 and ended on December 19, 1998. The US Government reported that American and British forces flew more than 650 strike and strike-support sorties, that navy ships and submarines fired 325 cruise-missiles, and that additional cruise-missiles were fired by US Air Force B-52s.

The air strike campaign on a defenceless civilian population in peacetime was only half the story; the other half was the comprehensive regime of economic sanctions imposed through the UN. From 1990, ALL exports from, and ALL imports to Iraq were banned (except for some medical and some food items) and a marine and air-blockade was added for good measure. The consequence on a country already devastated by 10 years of war was the death of infants on a mass scale.

The combined onslaught of air strikes and sanctions amounted to “a vicious low-intensity, high-casualty campaign conducted through the offices of the UN; in reality, this was nothing short of an officially conducted and officially sanctioned genocide, primarily of children mostly under five,” Mamdani writes.

The US-UK policy on Iraq went mainly un-noticed from 1991 to 1998 when pubic knowledge of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Iraq filtered through to the Security Council, thanks to two non-permanent members at the time, Canada and Brazil. Their efforts produced a Security Council resolution asking the UN to assess the humanitarian conditions obtaining in Iraq.

The following year, in 1999,UNICEF presented its demographic survey that tabulated, for the first time, the full extent of the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the sanction regime in Iraq.

UNICEF estimated that infant mortality rates in children under five had more than doubled from the period 1984-1989 to the period 1995-1999, leading to about 5000 deaths a month ABOVE the pre-sanctions rate.

In 2000, the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, meeting at its annual session in Geneva, reported that sanctions against Iraq were "the direct cause of half -a -million to one -and- a -half million deaths, the majority of the dead being children."

As Mamdani comments, "Even the minimum estimate was THREE times the number of Japanese citizens killed during the US atomic-bomb attacks" at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the price that Albright was willing to pay.... down to the last Iraqi infant!

Meanwhile, back on that White House couch, it was Monica not massive death counts that caused so much strife in the First Couple's marriage. And, strangely in the popular mind, not to mention the popular press, it is still the Lewinsky scandal that the Clinton presidency remains tainted with, not the fate of Iraq's children and their mothers.

That was then. For now, as the man from the FT says in his article mentioned above, it is unlikely Obama will have Hillary as his Vice-President because "the Clintons bring with them more baggage than gets lost at Heathrow every week!"

And Hillary and her glass ceiling with its 18 million cracks, in all this?

One could put it this way perhaps: "Standing by your man is one thing; standing by your principles is quite another."


*Annar Cassam is Tanzanian, former Consultant at UNESCO/PEER Nairobi and former Director, UNESCO Office, Geneva.

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

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The case of the severed penis

2008-07-30

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

I was on a flight from Entebbe to Nairobi on June 30 when I read The New Vision's front page story titled "Mother cuts off defiler's penis."By the time I finished the story, my spirits were up and I have been in a great mood ever since.

According to the article, Angelina Kyomugisha was weeding her banana farm in Mbarara when she heard her 10-year old daughter cry out. She went over to have a look, only to find 40-year-old Geoffrey Mugarura defiling her little girl. Kyomugisha did what every mother ought to do in such situation - she pounced on Mugarura and cut off his penis. Then she flung it into the bush.

Neighbours helped search for Mugarura's severed penis till they noticed a dog running off with something in its mouth. They threw a stick at the dog till it dropped what was left of his snack. At this point in the story I had to control my laughter for fear being thrown off the flight. At hospital, a doctor confirmed that they would refashion what was left of Mugarura's penis so that he could at least urinate with it. As for any other business, the dog had taken care of that.
When I got back to Accra, I called Solome Nakaweesi-Kimbugwe of Akina Mama wa Afrika in Kampala. She told me that FIDA-Uganda had sent a delegation to Kyomugisha's village and would be handling her case. The significance of this incident is that if men do not get the message that the bodies of women and girls are not as accessible and disposable as toilet paper, they will learn the hard way.

Kyomugisha probably never attended the UN's Conference on Women inBeijing, 1995. She has probably never heard of the Africa Protocol on Women's Rights or the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa, ratified by the African Union. She might not know that Ugandan women's rights activists have been trying to get a Domestic Relations Bill passed for over 10 years now. Kyomugisha might have known that in Uganda, defilement of children carries the death penalty, but she definitely has never heard of anyone paying such a harsh price for ruining the life of a child. But certainly, she had heard stories of the hundreds of girls raped and even killed by relatives, acquaintances and neighbours. And she might have been familiar with what Toyin Mejuini who runs Women Against Rape, Sexual Harassment and Exploitation (WARSHE) in Nigeria calls the rape and beg phenomenon.

Rape and beg refers to the many powerful delegations sent to intimidate parents, especially mothers of victims of violent sexual abuse. These delegations usually include local elders, traditional rulers, clergy, respected opinion leaders, and even senior members of the family. If the parents still insist on pursuing the matter, they face other obstacles with the legal and law enforcement system till the victims are victimised all over again.

Kyomugisha might not have known much about all the guarantees African governments committed themselves to at the conferences in Vienna,Beijing, Addis Ababa, and other places, and all the promises they made to promote and protect women's human rights and bodily integrity. But she definitely knew about rape and beg. And she was not about to be begged. She was not going to wait for the creaky wheels of justice to slowly crank into action and run out of gas. She was not about to be told how to be a good mother and member of the community, and not wash her dirty linen in public. Kyomugisha took one look at the monster standing over her daughter and decided, 'this will be the last time you do this to any girl.'

Was it right for Kyomugisha to take the law into her own hands? The politically correct answer is no, but permit us to say a resounding yes. Our colleagues at Action Aid have launched an international anti-violence campaign called 'Women Won't Wait.' Kyomugisha has definitely heeded that call. She has decided not to wait. Kyomugisha has sent out a message loud and clear which we hope will be heard way beyond the shores of Lake Victoria, 'Stop abusing and killing our children. Stop violating women. Stop the culture of impunity. Protect women and girls from violence.' Since domestic violence laws, conferences, workshops, rallies, popular theatre and protests have not managed to drive the message home effectively, perhaps the thought of the wretched Mugarura's penis in the mouth of a fleeing dog will do the trick. Enough is enough.

Feminists are not calling for the castration or emasculation of men. Our position is a lot simpler than that. If men decide to use certain parts of their anatomy as weapons of mass destruction to wage wars on the bodies of women and girls, they will be disarmed and demobilised.

To mothers or guardians of young girls, keep something sharp handy. And make sure you take time out to pat a dog over the coming days. One of their brethren in Uganda has done a great job.


*Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi "is a co-founder and the Executive Director of the African Women's Development Fund. This article first appeared in the New Vision, Kampala.

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

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Invoking Mandela: How do we make democracy work for the poor?

2008-07-30

Fazila Farouk

It's just been a few weeks since Nelson Mandela was taken off the United States terrorism watch list. No doubt so that they too could join in the celebrations of this living icon, without the embarrassment of hoisting up a revolutionary.

I gather that a revolutionary in America is, someone, not quite viewed through the same rose-tinted lens worn by us Southerners.

Mandela made the cover of Time Magazine again this week. It's his fourth time on the cover. I couldn't resist picking it up as I walked past the magazine rack at the local store, knowing well that I was going to be presented with yet another romantic glorification of his role as reconciler.

Not that I disagree with the sentiment. I join the rest of the world in praising the power of his peacemaking in our deeply divided nation. But Mandela is my hero for a few different reasons too. There is much more to our beloved leader than the image of the sanitised reconciler we've been fed since his release from prison.
In the early days of the apartheid struggle, Mandela was a stirring political activist. Those are the dark days when the very people who are celebrating him today, had their backs turned to him.

The political activist that I wish to remember is the terrorist that the Americans want to forget. The man, who frustrated by the savage methods of his oppressors, took up arms against them, earning himself the unfair label of terrorist, while it was the apartheid government, run by a bunch of racist bullies, which should have been put on America's terrorist list.

Mandela's journey to the top has been strewn with perils, including the threat of death, which he embraced as a political activist prepared to die for his principles. The sacrifice he offered in the closing remarks of his Rivonia Trial speech continues to inspire a new generation of activists even today. He said:

"I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die" (Nelson Mandela. Rivonia Trial, April 20, 1964).

Forty-four years later, on the eve of Mandela's 90th birthday, listening to a podcast of his Rivonia Trial speech, it occurs to me that many of the things he was prepared to lay his life on the line for, have not changed. His seminal speech was about the appalling socio-economic conditions of black South Africans and the gross inequality between the lives of white and black South Africans.

How tragic and ironic that despite Mandela's sacrifices - with only the difference of political freedom - if the dates were changed in his Rivonia Trial speech, he could easily rerun it as a commentary on modern day South Africa. The downtrodden of South Africa are still stuck in the trenches of a struggle for their socio-economic freedom.

Nevertheless, even as Mandela has become far removed from his people, he continues to be a man of extraordinary character and integrity and even enjoys the love and respect of those who have been betrayed by the democratic transition.

Sbu Zikode, president of Abahlali Basemjondolo, the shack dwellers organisation, says "We take Mandela as a second Jesus Christ, who was jailed for all of us. We really appreciate the sacrifice that he made. We all fought together as brothers and sisters … and it is more hurt(ful) when it is our own brothers … who are now oppressing us."

Through 'anger, hunger and frustration' Abahlali's shack dwellers have taken to the streets to protest the conditions under which they live. They are pained and disappointed by the lack of priority assigned to their plight by the democratically elected government and have, in recent years, been increasingly active in expressing their constitutional right to protest.

When laws don't work for people, civil disobedience is allowed. This is the lesson that we learned from the young Mandela. Not that Abahlali's protest action is unlawful.

Given the history of our leaders, it is surprising to note the crackdown on community activists of today. The story of Jerome Daniels and Ridwaan Isaacs is a case in point. They are both community leaders from the Delft informal settlement, involved in the struggle for decent housing, who have recently been sentenced to a year in jail for their political activism.

In handing down their stiff sentences, the magistrate contended that he was doing so in order to "teach the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign a lesson." This campaign, which both the accused are members of, is a sister organisation of Abahlali.

So as we get caught up in the heady moment of this iconic birthday celebration - and in the rhetoric of reconciliation, it would also serve us well to remember that the struggle is far from over for many South Africans who are enslaved by their socio-economic conditions.

Mandela, the struggle activist of the 60's understood that contestation is an essential part of democratic engagement. We draw on the strength of this knowledge in the South Africa of 2008, where the struggle for social justice is far from over.

*Fazila Farouk is the founder and executive director of the South African Civil Society Information Service.

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

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World’s workshop becomes world’s strike capital

2008-07-30

Stephen Marks

Apparently, January 1 2008 saw a breakthrough in Chinese workers’ rights, and a flight of employers to other lands where labour is cheaper and less protected. At least that is what must have happened if the rosiest [or most alarmist] interpretations of China’s new labour law, which came into force on that date, are to be believed.

But getting at the facts behind the reports is another matter - and of interest to African activists for at least two reasons. First, China’s competitive labour cost advantage is blamed for loss of employment in Africa especially in textiles. Second, Chinese firms in Africa are supposed to conform to local laws or failing that, to Chinese legislation. So if China’s labour laws are now to become a worker’s nirvana, could African workers in future hope to hitch a ride on the apparently greater rights of their Chinese brothers and sisters?
So what does the new law provide? According to the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalisation "The law provides higher wages and greater job security, including a guarantee of lifetime employment for workers with 10 consecutive years of experience." Apparently, business sees the new law as "the twilight of the age of cheap labor in China, undermining one of the country’s prized economic advantages in globalized economy" and prompting a flight of firms to less-protected and lower-wage economies such as Vietnam's.

"Olympus Corporation, the world's fourth largest digital camera manufacturer, and Yue Yuen Industrial, the biggest maker of shoes for brands such as Nike, are among companies shifting some production facilities to Vietnam to cut costs.

"Karen Lin, a senior fund manager at Paradigm Asset Management Co. in Taipei, predicts the law will add roughly 25 percent to the cost of labor in China, which typically accounts for 10 percent of total manufacturing costs. Companies that fail to adjust will start to feel major pressure on their profits within “five to six years,” Lin said.

“China’s biggest advantage in the manufacturing and processing trade is cheap labor,” admitted Chang Han-wen, director of the National Association of Taiwan Businessmen in Dongguan, an industrial hub in southern China. “But now that’s going to change. Hundreds of small and medium-sized Taiwan-invested firms in Pearl River Delta region will be affected.”

Employer alarm centred in particular on an alleged right to ‘permanent employment’ after ten consecutive years or two consecutive contracts. Predictably, there was a rush of dismissals before January 1 2008 as employers sought to rehire employees on new contracts and get round what were believed to be the new provisions.

In one of the most notorious cases Huawei Technologies, a telecoms giant in Shenzhen, offered 7,000 employees with at least eight years service a bonus to resign and reapply for their positions. And French supermarket giant Carrefour was said to have asked its 40,000 employees to resign two-year before the contract deadline.

Other shared the alarmist view. On January, one day after the new law took effect, the Financial Times quoted Willy Lin, the Hong Kong-based managing director of Milo’s Knitwear (International) Group, as estimating that: "added together, labour costs [in mainland China] will be close to 40 per cent higher for this year." However, "Mr Lin says the new labour contract law, which will make it harder to dismiss workers, could increase costs by about 8 per cent this year, with the rest of the increase caused by higher minimum wages, social security payments and the renminbi’s steady appreciation against the US dollar."

So how much of the well-authenticated trend for overseas and especially Taiwanese firms to shift from the Guangzhou region to Vietnam and elsewhere can specifically be attributed to the new labour law, and how much to other inflationary factors - including upward labour market pressures unrelated to the new law and clearly predating it?

To begin to answer that we must first be clear about the new law’s actual provisions. And it does seem that employers have been 'crying wolf’ about what the new law means. According to one independent labour rights consultancy, the Employment Contract Law:

"aims to formalise contractual relations and reinforce stability of employment by strengthening the existing legal requirement for written contracts of employment; shortening the maximum lengths of probationary periods for new employees; and restricting the use of successive fixed-term contracts...while the new law creates two new permitted grounds for summary dismissal, and new grounds for collective dismissals, and restricts termination payments, it also entitles a dismissed employee to claim the remedy of reinstatement or, in its place, double compensation for dismissal. Among a number of other amendments the rules on secondment of employees are tightened up, and the new law decreases maximum part-time working hours."

And as far as the right to collective bargaining is concerned the new law apparently retreats from the provision in the earlier drafts which would have allowed workers to negotiate directly with management, and entrenches the position of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions [ACFTU].

Hardly revolutionary. No wonder that one hard-headed business consultant? was unimpressed by the scares;

"I took a deep breath and listened to the arguments of those who want us to prepare for the worst. What happens next year?

- Employees in China cannot work longer than forty hours per week and if they make overtime, the employer has to pay.

- Employees cannot be sacked at a will, but only for well defined reasons.

- Employees can no longer be forced to sign non-competitive agreements, unless they belong to the senior management.

- Employees can sue you, if you break the law as an employer.

"Shocking isn't it?" He then asks.

But cycnicism about the exaggerated predictions of business organisations should not lead us to ignore the significance of this flurry of legislation. As Han Dongfang of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin points out, the new laws ‘ indicate just how effective workers’ action has been in forcing the government’s hand. These laws have not been introduced because the government is particularly enlightened, but because workers’ strikes and protests against widespread and continued rights violations have left the government with no option but to change the law, as a means of forestalling increased labour conflict.”

In fact the Pearl River Delta, often called the ‘factory floor of the world’, is now in effect also its strike capital, As China Labour Bulletin puts it ‘workers in China do not have the constitutional right to strike. Yet, every day in the Pearl River Delta alone there is at least one major strike involving over a thousand employees and dozens of smaller strikes and stoppages. This continuous wave of industrial action has forced the national and local governments in China to reassess the legal framework of labour relations and introduce new legislation that seeks to address workers’ needs and bring the law into line with social and economic reality’.

And this rising tide of unrest has even made itself felt in the previously moribund channels of the ACFTU. When that body proudly announced that it had signed the first-ever union agreement anywhere in the world with the notoriously anti-union US supermarket chain Walmart many assumed it was merely a sweetheart deal.

And so it may have been. But China’s Walmart workers have been using the official union channels to press the company to respect their legal rights, as the informative China Labour News Translations site reports. http://www.clntranslations.org/article/30/draft

China Labour Bulletin translates a fascinating interview with an ACFTU official in the central city of Luoyang who makes clear that the new legislation needs teeth if employers are to be made to respect the rights it contains, while other union officials and activists are demanding the right to strike. http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100269

And that key right may be on the verge of being conceded in Shenzhen according to another CLB report - as it happens, the same city where local party officials have beenr reported as proposing radical political reforms.

There may even be more labor law reforms on the way, even including, according to one report, ‘a salary reform... requiring pay raises in line with inflation... salary-fixing mechanism whereby companies would negotiate collective agreements with workers' unions; salary distribution in state-owned enterprises; and realizing a minimum wage’.

The implications of all this are still not clear. Wage inflation is not the only upward pressure on Chinese costs, and labour laws are far from the major contributor to Chinese wage inflation. Chinese employers - or more exactly, the employers of Chinese labour wherever they are based - may be looking at parts of Africa as alternative pools of cheap labour. If so African workers may have some useful experiences to exchange with their Chinese counterparts.


*Stephen Marks is the co-ordinator of the Fahamu China in Africa project.

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

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Africa and the fate of MDGs

2008-07-30

Mildred Barya

When I was young and impressionable I had this grand vision of saving the world. It was so easy to dream up a free and fair world where sanity, justice and good health prevailed. It was even easier to engage in activities that could quicken the coming into being of those dreams. Now that I am older, I’ve since learnt that many of us go through such phases until we arrive at a waking place. I have now known the toughest place to be; the here and now. Forget the interval for a moment. And don’t get me wrong, I am not against dreaming. That’s where we all have to start anyway. I cannot imagine how best to survive and change harsh realities without a map of radiant dreams. But we must not stamp our eyes on the map, on the canvas. We are only to look at it for direction, not dwelling. Imagine if we were to focus all our attention on the compass without moving, what would we achieve? And yet it seems to me many of us and a big number of organizational realists are trapped between the dreaming and the coming true, avoiding the here and now. I am writing about all the Millennium Development Goals setters and implementers. They haven’t stirred from the map, the deep sleep and soft dream. Here’s my analysis.

In the area of HIV/AIDS prevention, the United States government has been criticised for increasing funding for abstinence-only strategies, while religious establishments like the Catholic Church continue to question condom use. The current HIV/AIDS prevention campaign urges women especially, to abstain, be faithful, or use condoms (ABC). This is because women and girls comprise the majority of those found to be HIV positive. UNAIDS 2006 report estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, 57% of adults with HIV are women, and young women aged 15 to 24 are more than three times likely to be infected than young men of the same age group. Based upon these statistics is the short-sighted conclusion that women should be the main target in combating HIV/AIDS. Truthfully, they are the majority that turn up to be tested and their results are easily available. In many countries in Africa, the HIV/AIDS statistics for men are hard to find, if they exist at all. Do we then conclude that the HIV/AIDS campaign should focus largely on urging the women to be more vigilant and careful when it comes to prevention or it should all the more be about empowering the men to be loving, respectful and protective towards the women?
The global community’s solutions to HIV/AIDS consistently fail to reflect the reality of women’s lives and the broader social-political forces that increase their risks. For most of Africa, HIV/AIDS prevention is more of a security and peace issue, not just reproductive health. It may have started as a reproductive health issue years back but that is not where it has remained as a big problem.

HIV/AIDS and war have a very symbiotic relationship that cannot be simply brushed aside. In former conflict countries like Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and current conflict zones engulfed in political chaos like Congo, Northern Uganda, Darfur, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, Chad, Central African Republic and others, both armed men and civilians have become predators rather than defenders, unleashing sexual violence and terror and the people who have suffered greatly as deliberate targets for rape, defilement, torture, sexual slavery, trafficking, and forced marriages are the women and young girls. I wonder how much of ABC—abstinence, behavioural change and condom use applies in these situations. Yet we are happy to dream and to clap when an increase in Abstinence funds is announced. I stand to be convinced that in the recent Kenya violence, for instance, any one of the perpetrators and rapists used a condom. Obviously, for both the victims and victimizers, there was no abstinence and behavioural change did not apply either.

If an HIV/AIDS test can be carried out in Kenya now, I am certain it would reflect that the number of those infected is high among women, because women are not the ones who go out to rape, defile and possess forcefully.

While the ABC may be an effective method of preventing HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancy, ABC only works under a huge assumption that situations of equally shared rights and conjugal responsibilities between men and women exist, circumstances where sexual consent between adults is possible and one can say no or in a moment of raging passion bank on a condom. The number that falls in this kind of strata is very small, given the harsh reality of vast, war torn Africa. But we have boxed ourselves into the ABC triangle we can hardly see how incongruous it stands out in most of African countries where politically engineered sexual violence is the order of the day. Countries that have been relatively stable over the years like Senegal, Mauritius, Ghana, and Botswana (if you do not count the mistreatment of the San people,) do not exceed 10 and Africa is comprised of 53 countries. This could mean that 98% of the HIV/AIDS money that is concentrated on ABC campaign is wasted money and so will not achieve the desired goal, reason being that more African countries have active violence going on, or have just come out of conflict while others are sitting on a conflict volcano about to erupt.

The 2007 AIDS epidemic update reports that in a number of African countries, behaviour change seems to be associated with a recent decline in HIV prevalence. The truth is that prevalence has declined in all countries where there has been some semblance of peace for the last ten years or so. The lesson is simple. Promote peace and you have reduced HIV. Have one day of active conflict and the HIV positive statistics will shoot up because of the sexual violence that comes with it. It’s a war package. The sobering question is whether African governments are committed to fighting HIV/AIDS via peace in the country or like most presidents and the first ladies they want cheap fame and will parade as HIV/AIDS crusaders by preaching abstinence and behavioural change.

We do not need the ABC campaign in most of current Africa. The latest addition towards combating HIV/AIDS is even more hilarious—circumcision. Allegedly, it can reduce HIV transmission by up to 60 percent. If we must rank, I think this is slightly better than Zuma’s bubble bath after sex with an HIV positive woman. But circumcision lowering HIV/AIDS risks in the face of conflict and regional insecurity when men are on rampage, I have less faith.

For want of humour, I would like to see cartoonists’ drawings of thousands of women about to be raped, stretching out their hands to the men who are about to rape them and asking: Are you circumcised? Have you a condom? Or, Will you be faithful to me? Can we abstain until further notice? The reality perhaps will sink in then that what we are fighting in Africa is not HIV/AIDS as a public health threat but misrule and bad governments.

The civil war in Sierra Leone alone created a population of nearly one million internally displaced people. The genocide in Rwanda saw about 500,000 Rwandan women displaced, raped, beaten and tortured. The violence did not end when the women arrived at the refugee camps. They reported that men walked into their huts at will and continually raped them. On their way to the latrines and to fetch water the women and girls were still getting raped. Self-appointed guards at the water taps and those giving out relief foods demanded sexual favors from the women. After some time, there was behavioural change in the other direction. Women became sexually active and resorted to more sexual partners in the camps in order to receive their portions of food and other basic needs. In Sudan, the ongoing civil war has created about four million internally displaced persons, while in Angola conflict has displaced 2.5 million people and 1.6 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Currently there is a massive refugee crisis in the Great Lakes region, not to mention other areas like the Horn of Africa, Central and West Africa, then Southern Africa. This large group does not seem to be the composition that is likely to benefit from the United States grand intervention that early this year agreed to triple its spending on combating HIV/AIDS in Africa by pledging $10 billion annually over the next five years. The U.N. estimates it will need more than $3 billion by 2010 for HIV prevention efforts in Africa, categorically ABC.

The malaria fight is even more subtle and therefore more deadly in defying global interventions. In my impressionable days I was part of an ecstatic team parading the slogan: Mosquito nets for all. I volunteered my time and a bit of money, got onto the truck, played some loud music for attention—a trick that all advertising companies and crusaders do, and hit the road. We went to a large village in south-western Uganda to distribute mosquito nets donated by the global fund. Within no time a crowd gathered. We spread the usual message, why the people must use the nets, we gave bits of life assurance after the net, and a brief background of our organisation’s saving mission statement. I did most of the crisp talking, then started dishing out the nets while chanting the slogan: Make Malaria History. If I must be honest, I gloried in the vain moment and shook hands with the people, sure to write a triumphant activity organization report afterwards. Reduced malaria, how nice! All the nets were taken, especially by the women, some taking more than they needed but explaining that they belonged to large households. We wanted entire families to be saved so we indulged them. Before I could get away from the crusade scene, one woman tapped on my arm and asked a puzzling question:

“Madam, you have said we hang the nets above our beds but we don’t have beds.”

In our passionate campaign we had overlooked such a scenario. I swallowed saliva and said the silliest statement that walked out of my mouth: “Wrap the net around yourself in the night when you go to sleep.”

The woman was indefatigable, still holding onto my hand she asked:

“How will I make love with my husband?”

Realising that the situation was no longer under control, I tried an escape route:

“Now I must go but in a few days I’ll get back to you on that one.”

Truth is I’ve never gotten back to her on that one, but the scene gets back to me all the time. Shortly after the crusade, I came to learn about a unique innovation that beats necessity: Many women who took the nets sewed them up and used them as wedding gowns. A brief background into this revealed that their men were refusing to set up wedding dates on account that they did not have money to buy for their women wedding gowns. The women toyed with the problem and saw their answer in the shape of mosquito nets. So they provided the gowns, and even made matching dresses for maids and flower girls. The next thing that happened, both bride and groom were ready for the marriage ceremony. The battle against mosquitoes was lost. I gave up volunteering for health causes, realizing that the problems we aimed to solve were not the problems we ought to solve, but tips of underlying basic and intricate problems. Now I spend my days writing about these failed missions and trying to figure out a more creative way of engaging women, men and children in the here and now.

I change channels and turn the pages when there is news of malaria campaigns, to be followed by massive distribution of mosquito nets. Global fund investments support of bed nets distributed continues to be doubled, reporting progress with a cumulative total of 59 million insecticide-treated bed nets delivered to families at risk of contracting malaria. In mid 2007, 30 million nets were distributed. In December 2007, 46 million nets were distributed and mid 2008, 59 million. Dreaming wildly, the Global Fund is helping to finance 109 million bed nets to protect families from malaria, thus becoming the largest financier of insecticide-treated bed nets in the world. I smile a sad smile because I know there will be many weddings right after these distributions. The gospel hasn’t really changed in spite of the ineffectiveness, and the new science research that has shown that the ingenious mosquito has found a way to stay resistant to such treated nets.

There is too much hype about the millennium development goals, and I wonder why social development nationals and governments do not engage their locals one-on-one, so to speak, to work hand in hand and solve challenges contextually, communally, other than wearing blinds that a global umbrella tool kit will do.

Now I will not even go into the goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, or achieving universal primary education, though I could write a thing or two about value system. Most people that we think are poor in Africa simply operate under a different value system. It takes active involvement and participation to change someone’s value system. I have met parents who can afford school fees but choose not to send their children to school because they are holding on to their own cultural, value system. Others have sent their children to schools miles away not because they value education but because of the free lunch that’s given at the end of the lessons. Local practitioners know this but the UN cohorts are between the dreaming and the coming true, enthusiastically setting targets for achieving the goals, forgetting the here and now.

It is the desire for context-specific, locally designed, creative solutions that make me think of Mo Ibrahim African leadership prize. Ibrahim came under intense criticism for acknowledging Mozambique ex-president Joachim Chissano’s role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy, by awarding him the $5 million prize spread over the course of ten years, plus $200,000 per annum until the end of his life on Earth, subsequently beating the $1.3m Nobel Peace Prize. Truly grand! And more grand was and is Ibrahim’s belief that Africa can. Chissano’s decision not to seek a third, presidential term when he could have clearly set him apart as a wise leader committed to democratic maturity, peace, and clean leadership. In the end it is not Chissano that looked more important and dignified as a personality, but that peaceful and democratic states were more desired, and an individual like Mo Ibrahim was ready to invest in such a, yes, dream. Conventional approaches would have preferred Ibrahim to start with his home country, Sudan. Maybe build a school, a hospital, but that’s not how he sees things and he’s absolutely right. In this continent’s struggles, Africa is home, not a country.

Think of the present presidents and all ex-presidents who are still genuinely working towards changing Africa’s harsh realities. Nelson Mandela aside, ex-president Chissano is the only one so far who has been consistent about building lasting peace and promoting secure environments within the democratic field. If found, good governance seems to be the missing jigsaw puzzle that would hold every other thing in place, that would make the ABC work since there would be no more war, sexual violence and other evils. All the children then would go to school, safe and secure. There would be national development and available social services.

It is against this backdrop of peace and what it can achieve for the people that glancing at the Zimbabwe situation—caught between a rock and a hard place—we should consciously choose Chissano to take on Zimbabwe through the difficult interval, the here and now. The opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is against the re-run, predicting further loss of lives. President Robert Mugabe is unflinching; he wants to stay the president however scandalous and illegitimate. Chissano has his own flaws but by far he seems the only right person who would stay neutral if he became the president and has no personal motives for wanting to be president of Zimbabwe anyway. But the conditions allow and necessitate that he participates and becomes the one to usher in a new era. And pray let us not start that debate on whether Chissano is Zimbabwean or not, if we go that route, what do you think the African Union is for? Right now, we are no longer watching two elephants tearing Zimbabwe apart but our eyes are on SADC and the African Union. They have the mandate to redeem the Africans living in Zimbabwe or to betray them. I think in the pan-African spirit, a former honoured African head of state who stepped down with dignity in his country should be called upon in an emergency to lead in another country if members of the CCC—critical condition country—are caught between a boulder and a mountain.

The only challenge I foresee is that there are not many presidents, later on ex-presidents with an honest track record, competent and transformative enough to lead Africa in the here and now.


*Mildred K Barya is Writer-in-Residence at TrustAfrica (www.trustafrica.org)

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

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AU Summit and G8 Review

2008-07-30

Rotimi Sankore

1. AU MEMBER STATES MUST STRENGTHEN CAPACITY OF THE AU COMMISSION AND ASSEMBLY OF HEADS OF STATES TO COPE SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH LONG-TERM DEVELOPMENT GOALS, AND ‘EMERGENCY’ ISSUES SUCH AS ZIMBABWE:

The dominance of Zimbabwe’s governance and human rights challenges at the recently concluded 2008 African Union midyear summit in Egypt highlights that AU member states urgently need to strengthen their capacity to follow through on details of, and implementation of commitments to key African development issues – alongside other equally important issues that are not summit themes.

Specifically the Commission of the African Union needs to be provided with more resources and capacity to ensure AU ability to maintain 100% focus on long-term key development goals while simultaneously coping with emergencies on governance, human security, and peace and security issues. In addition, the Assembly of Heads of State themselves need to build their own capacity to cope with these ‘emergencies’ at summit level, alongside producing clear decisions and outcomes on summit themes. Issues like Zimbabwe, Darfur or the food crisis could hardly be described as a surprise to any of our Heads of State. They also need to provide the crucial resources for in country summit preparation, and implementation of outcomes between summits by a strengthened AU Commission, the AU Executive Council, relevant line Ministers and the Ambassadors on the Permanent Representatives Council.
Having had the foresight to make meeting the MDGs of “Water and Sanitation” the theme of the 2008 mid year AU Summit, and even earlier establishing the African Ministerial Conference on Water, member states did not visibly deliver on any significant outcomes that African citizens - of the 33 countries where less than 50% of citizens have access to improved sanitation - or the 35 where not up to 80% of citizens have access to improved water sources - can embrace with hope for a better future.

As stated at pre summit briefings by AU Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture Rhoda Peace Tumusiime “Africa is endowed with abundant water resources with over 60 Transboundary River Basins, 17 major rivers and 16 large lakes but these resources are highly underutilized as only 3.8% is developed for water supply, irrigation and hydropower generation, 6% of the cultivated land is irrigated and only about 3% of our hydro potential is developed.”

Based on this glaring underutilisation of water resources, and despite the summits unavoidable attention to events in Zimbabwe, there should have been: pre-summit packs indicating the best performing and least performing countries for the summit themes; tracking of performance trends over the last few years; identification of what gaps need to be bridged continentally - and a summit theme communiqué from the Assembly of Heads of State outlining regional cooperation on transborder water resources, industrial waste and sanitation, also stating financial resources necessary for this; what member states have now committed to do and by when; especially to maximise use of water resources in a sustainable way.

This would not be mere symbolism or an empty naming and shaming game. Access to safe water and [domestic and industrial] sanitation is a prerequisite for good health and sustainable development. Their absence promotes squalor and disease, and disease knows no borders. In its publication on the "Water for Life Decade, 2005-2015", the UN cited "Lack of safe water and adequate sanitation” as “the world's single largest cause of illness," emphasizing that both can facilitate or "spread such diseases as diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, hepatitis, polio, trachoma… malaria and filariasis.” There are also clear linkages between sustainable management of water resources, environment issues and food production. And with reference to the joint theme of sanitation - between domestic and industrial waste management, environmental protection and public health.

It is also little appreciated that the struggle for water, land and other resources is an underlying cause of conflicts including the genocide in Darfur, or that similar conflicts could break out in the future due to lack foresight on sustainable management of water and other resources within or across countries. But more on this later.

For the record [1], the top ten African countries providing best access to improved drinking water are: Mauritius 100%; Egypt 98%; Botswana 96%; Tunisia 94%; Namibia and South Africa jointly at 93%; Djibouti 92%; Gabon and Seychelles jointly at 87%; Gambia 86%; Algeria and Comoros jointly at 85%; and Morocco 83%.

And the bottom ten being: Gabon and Kenya jointly at 57%; Tanzania 55%; Sierra Leone at 53%; Angola 51%; Chad 48%; Madagascar and Nigeria jointly at 47%; DRC 46%; Equatorial Guinea 43%; Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Niger jointly 42; and Somalia 29%.

For Sanitation, the top 10 are: Seychelles 100%; Libya 97%; Algeria 94%; Mauritius 94%; Tunisia 85%; Morocco 72%; Djibouti 67%; Egypt 60%; Malawi 60% and South Africa 59%.

And the bottom 10: Benin and Nigeria jointly at 30%; Cote D’Ivore 24%; Senegal 28%; Rwanda and Somalia jointly 23%; Congo 20%; Guinea 19%; Burkina Faso 13%; Madagascar and Togo jointly at 12%; Ethiopia and Sierra Leone jointly at 11%; Ghana 10%; Chad 9%; Niger 7%; and Eritrea 5%. [These overall figures do not reflect disparities between urban and rural areas].

It is crucial that we note these. Not just because they were not widely provided as summit official information, but also because both African governments and civil society need a global picture to make the linkages between issues, and to note how much work needs to be done on summit themes and related issues - which claim millions of African lives annually.

Unless AU member states provide the recently renewed leadership of the AU Commission with crucial resources and capacity to ensure it can play its catalytic role for wide spread continental awareness and development – and governments provide clear summit outcomes and the resources for implementing them – then AU member states risk reducing the Commission to a conference organising unit instead of being the engine for African development on a rights based basis.

2. AFRICA AT RISK OF WAR, CONFLICT AND FURTHER INSTABILITY OVER ‘WATER SECURITY’:

The apparent lack of AU Summit outcomes or targets on transborder agreements and financial commitments for improved and sustainable utilisation of water resources throws into sharp relief the fact that Africa still has no collective continental response to environmental sustainability issues that can rapidly undermine stability and development. These include the impact of climate change: on water, environmental resources and on health; or the more immediate food crisis that also impacts on social stability, and on health through malnutrition.

As can be seen by recent food riots in several countries, famine in others, and conflict in Darfur that has resulted in genocide - the management and sustainable use of water, land and other environmental resources is both a human security, and peace and security issue.

An examination of the demographics of the impact of climate change on water resources, indicates that It is easy to see a hundred ‘Darfur’s’ exploding across Africa in the next 4 to 5 decades - if there is no continental forward planning to ensure water security for all.

As climate and environmental change impact on rivers, it is also very possible that within our generation - cross border conflicts or civil wars could erupt over the damming of rivers for electricity - between up stream and down stream countries – over control of water resources.

AU member states must note, and act on the fact that - the biggest social and economic development lesson of all history is that allowing, or creating a situation that reduces any society or community to a state of conflict over any kind of resources brings out the worst forms of bestiality in human kind – by creating a pack mentality based on the lowest common denominator whether language, ethnicity, religion, race or criminal interests - and which hyenas would be ashamed off. The shameful events in Sierra Leone and Darfur are arguably in the same reprehensible category of human behaviour, though different in scale, organisation and motivation from the genocides in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, the Balkans or Rwanda that had a more ‘refined’ and codified basis.

African governments must therefore be proactive in identifying and preventing the emergence of conflicts based on poor utilisation or unsustainable use of resources – rather than wait for the conflicts to emerge and then start the agonising search for “Hybrid forces” to contain murderous activities of the successors of the “Janjaweed”.

The MDGs and especially those of access to water, food and health should therefore not be seen as an end in themselves, but as a means to ensuring the march of Africa towards rediscovering and building societies based on the best traditions of human civilisation.

The above also underline three crucial policy issues. Firstly, the lack of proper integration of MDGs into African national development plans. Secondly, the need for more proactive measures including: establishing special directorates for development and sustainable management of water and environmental resources on a cross border basis; the same for food security; and for public health. Thirdly, the urgency for AU member states to immediately implement the Abuja pledge to allocate 15% of national domestic resources to health as a first step towards treatment, prevention and care to reduce disease prevalence worsened by poor provision of water and [domestic and industrial] sanitation. Implementing the Abuja 15% commitment will also ensure financing of the newly adopted Implementation Plan of the Africa Health Strategy presented to the AU summit for approval, and also the health based MDGs [which have been undermined by water and sanitation issues].

There must be clear realisation that for every single percentage of national populations not provided with improved and sustainable access to water [and sanitation], this represents tens of thousands - and depending on country population even millions - exposed to increased risk of death either through disease, or if reduced to conflict over water and land resources - through displacement and genocide as in Darfur.

3. G8, GLOBAL AND AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT, AND THE REAL THREATS TO GLOBAL SECURITY:

Having not set clear African targets and commitments at the AU summit on the water and sanitation MDGs, 7 key African leaders were invited to the G8 summit process in acknowledgement of “G8 concern over Africa’s plight”. Not surprisingly Zimbabwe is also dominating G8 outcomes on African issues.

This must not distract from the fact that even before the Japan G8 summit commenced, there were already reports most notably in the Financial Times that the G8 will not deliver on development promises made at previous summits especially in Germany and the UK. This is not to say that the G8 has not made contributions to global development. However the contributions fall far short of what is needed, and of what is possible for G8 countries to deliver.

“Underlying all of the ambitious sectoral commitments made in 2005 was the commitment to mobilise an additional $25 billion in development assistance for Africa by 2010 and to spend this money effectively. Due to some clarifications, the total committed… is now an increase in official development assistance (ODA) from $15.8 billion in 2004 to $37.6 billion in 2010 – an increase of an additional $21.8 billion. Three years since the commitments were made, only $3 billion of the increase has been delivered… – leaving $18.8 billion still to be delivered [2]."

“In order to be on a straight-line trajectory to delivering the full commitment by 2010, the ‘G7’ would have needed to increase assistance by $5.88 billion between 2006 and 2007 – but with only $837 million in additional assistance in 2007, they have fallen $5.04 billion short of that target [3].”

However in addition to not being met, these G8 commitments do not match the global need. Various estimates from leading global health based institutions alone indicate that funds needed to fight major disease and non-disease conditions globally are: for TB US$56.1 billion over the ten years leading up to 2015 [4]; “To meet the goal of global universal access by 2010, available financial resources for HIV must more than quadruple by 2010 compared to 2007 – up to US$ 42.2 billion…and continue to rise to US$ 54.0 billion by 2015 [5]; For Maternal and Child Health “an additional $US10.2 billion is needed yearly to ensure universal coverage of maternal, newborn and child health interventions to achieve MDGs 4 and 5" [6] by 2015; and for Malaria “a total of US$ 38 billion (optimistic scenario) to US$ 45 billion (pessimistic scenario) will be required from 2006 to 2015 [7]."

In annual terms and in everyday language: The estimated funding gap for TB is [over 10 years US$30.8 billion or] $3.8bn a year [8]. For HIV “there was a gap of US$8.1 billion between resources available from all sources and resources needed in 2007, as estimated by UNAIDS [9]”; Maternal and Child Health US$10billion annually; and for Malaria US$4.5billion annually. Or added up, a gap of an additional US$26.4 billion annually on health MDGs.

For Africa alone, the estimated cost of meeting all the MDGs is USD$72 billion per annum [10].

If this sounds like a lot of money for global development annually or over the 10 years leading to 2015, consider that by contrast the world’s most powerful nation alone - spends US$2billion a week on war according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the public policy arm of the US Congress. Or US$12billion a month according to Joseph Stiglitz Columbia University Professor, and former World Bank Chief Economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.

According to Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes co-authors of the "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict" - and writing in the Washington Post on March 9 this year, “the United States is a rich and strong country, but even rich and strong countries squander trillions of dollars at their peril. Think what a difference $3 trillion could make for so many of the United States' -- or the world's -- problems. We could have had a Marshall Plan to help desperately poor countries, winning the hearts and maybe the minds of Muslim nations now gripped by anti-Americanism. In a world with millions of illiterate children, we could have achieved literacy for all -- for less than the price of a month's combat in Iraq. We worry about China’s growing influence in Africa, but the upfront cost of a month of fighting in Iraq would pay for more than doubling our annual current aid spending on Africa.”

And this snapshot does not take into consideration the possible but not yet forthcoming resources from other G8 countries. In other words the argument of Stilgtz, Blimes and other leading development economists is that the money for global development is there, and for all the money spent on war since the turn of the millennium, global security has not improved and is now probably worse.

On the other hand, more countries in the developing world especially are on the brink of conflict based on water and other life resources. Food riots have started breaking out in some countries, and the global spread of HIV alone from just a few cases first recognised in the US in 1981 to an estimated 32 million people globally demonstrates what can happen if the fight against a communicable disease is under funded. Countries like Lesotho and Swaziland with populations under 2 million are tipping closer daily to half their populations becoming HIV positive – with little or no treatment – and the growing shadow of TB looming behind. Alongside countries like Somalia and DRC locked into a vicious cycle of conflict and poverty, the possibility of more unviable or failed states produced by a combination of human security, and peace and security factors grow by the day. Just how many peacekeeping forces, or ‘wars’ in the name of peace can the world afford, when we can prevent the peace from breaking down, by ensuring sustainable global development for a fraction of the sum.

The message is clear and we must make no mistake about it, failure to ensure collective and rapid global progress towards the MDGs and in particular the water, food and health MDGs is arguably the greater threat to global security.

The global situation could arguably be worse if not for the under acknowledged role played by non G8 countries like Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and others in supporting global development efforts.

4. WE WELCOME GLOBAL SOLIDARITY BUT AFRICAN LEADERS MUST DEMONSTRATE LEADERSHIP:

Without doubt historical injustices, interventions in and exploitation of Africa - especially 500 years of industrial scale slavery and colonialism have had a devastating impact on African development. People that underestimate the impact of this, only need imagine for instance, the chaos in Darfur magnified across much of the continent – not lasting a few years – but hundreds – not facilitated by one government in denial – but promoted by several imperial powers openly grabbing and sharing human and natural resources – and it can be better appreciated why the first manned flight to Mars will not take off from the jungles of DRC or the plains of Somalia.

The challenge for the present generation of Africans born within the last 50 years of African independence is to overcome the obstacles placed before us by injustices over which we had no control.

The more developed countries and especially those where the basis of their initial industrialisation lies in the exploitation of others, owe humanity a debt to ensure the human race can now go forward as one – through collective global development.

But while global development campaigners demonstrate their solidarity and step up efforts to ensure more developed nations contribute their fair share to fighting underdevelopment and poverty which arguably represent greater threats to global security than other alleged causes – African’s also have a fundamental obligation to engage our governments to ensure that they fulfil their obligations to citizens - from whom they derive their legitimacy.

We must therefore as a people impress on our governments that unsatisfactory continental planning and management of water, environmental and food resources is not unacceptable, and that this must change if sustainable African development is to become a reality. The impact of these on health, and absence of the right to healthcare for tens of millions sharply highlights the imminent death of a people in a way that nothing else does.

And while without a shadow of doubt – the absence of the right to health signifies the imminence of death and thereby establishes health as the ultimate human right - because it can also guarantee a healthy, long and productive life for individuals - the right to health is in turn the most fundamental development issue for humanity because every society perishes or flourishes on the health of its people.

This is why it should be of utmost concern to African leaders that with every passing year, not only are an increasing number of African countries becoming permanent features at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index, life expectancy is now so low – and dropping so fast - that for practical purposes there might as well be no government in some countries.

In the 2007 UN HDI, only Seychelles, Libya and Mauritius out of 53 AU member states qualified as High Human Development Nations at numbers 50, 56, and 65 respectively. After these three, only Tunisia comes in under the 100 mark at 91. African countries dominate the bottom 77, and the last 30 are all African except Timor and Yemen [11]. The situation in Liberia and Somalia, alongside countries like Afghanistan are such that at the time of compilation of the report, there was apparently no basis for computation in these countries.

To quote from the report, “the HDI – human development index – is a summary composite index that measures a country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Health is measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio; and standard of living by GDP per capita (PPP US$).”

The introduction to the report therefore emphasises an often understated truth that “People are the real wealth of nations”, and therefore that “Human Development is a development paradigm that is about much more than the rise or fall of national incomes. It is about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests.” For Africa, this means that economic growth without investment in social development is negative growth - because all it ends up doing is widening the abyss between an elite and the mass of citizens.

Nothing – and nothing - reflects the lack of that enabling environment to fulfil potential more than the issue of [healthy] life expectancy. And unless favourable conditions for fulfilling potential are created very quickly, Africa’s development aspirations will suffer even bigger blows from more brain drain when from 2009 the European “blue card” scheme is expected to kick in. EU “Commission officials say the E.U. has… a dearth of skilled workers in sectors like engineering, information technology, pharmaceuticals, health care and teaching” and is “targeting bright young migrants who could fill job categories where Europe could face chronic shortages [12]." The scheme “calls for admission of an additional 20 million Asian, African and Latin American workers in the next two decades [13]; And it should be no surprise where the majority of these will come from. Already hundreds of thousands of Africans forced to migrate to the more developed world are playing key roles - in every field from medicine to space exploration, genetics, diverse technological areas, sports, the arts, business, management and leadership - and in low paid jobs for which many are overqualified.

Basic survival issues played a key role in such migration, but so did many of the past dictatorships encapsulated by the likes of the Mobutu regime that were propped up by cold war politics, and inflicted repression and exodus of intellectuals and potential leaders on such a scale that aspirations of the African generation that reached its prime in the 30 years following Ghana led African independence in 1957 were almost totally destroyed. Nigerian Wordsmith and Nobel Prize Laureate Wole Soyinka famously described these as “the wasted generation”.

Unless African leaders start demonstrating giant steps of visible progress on basic governance, human rights and development issues, the question for the emerging generation of African’s may be - not how well can you live in Africa, but for how long? Millions of Africans are not even getting an opportunity to be a “wasted generation”; they are being wasted at birth, dying under the age of 5 at the rate of an estimated 4.8 million a year.

In the top ten countries on the 2007 UN HDI list, (Iceland, Norway, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Netherlands and France) life expectancy is between 78 and 82 years (with maternal mortality almost at zero), and for the bottom 10 countries (DRC, Ethiopia, Chad, CAR, Mozambique, Mali, Niger, Guinea Bissau, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone, life expectancy based on HDI calculations are between 41 and 55 years. These are also amongst the countries with the worst indicators for Maternal Mortality. In the period between the computation of the 2007 HDI and today, life expectancy has further dropped in these and other countries such that in at least 12 African countries various sources indicate that life expectancy is now between 36 and 39 years.

In development terms, African countries with low and still plummeting life expectancy are loosing the benefit of the equivalent of between 25 years and 40 years per person - of knowledge, experience and capacity. Multiply this lost knowledge and capacity by these countries shares of the over 8 million lives lost annually to preventable, treatable or manageable (PTM) health conditions and the magnitude of Africa’s loss becomes clearer. Easily, some countries have lost 25million years worth of combined social knowledge and intellect. Evidently, the next generation of nano computers, or the genetic regeneration of human organs and limbs will not emerge from the refugee camps of Darfur.

[With due apologies and acknowledgment of their immense contributions – we do not need ‘a task force of Harvard trained Economists’ to tell us that] long-term social and economic development of Africa is impossible with life expectancy sinking to an average of 40 years, child mortality of 4.8 million per annum and Maternal Death [which is almost 100% preventable] of almost 300,000 per annum. By contrast, the most developed nations in the world are also those with the greatest percentage of their populations over 65 years and almost zero Child and Maternal Mortality.

But this does not just happen. For instance, the 10 countries with the best life expectancy have between 198 and 362 doctors per 100,000, while the bottom 10 have between 2 and 11 doctors per 100,000. By comparison a medium income country like Cuba with the one of the best global ratios at 591 per 100,000 has life expectancy of 77 years [14]. So when African governments are called upon to train and retain more health workers and professionals by providing them with a better facilities and improved working conditions – its not simply an argument for the personal aggrandisement of doctors, pharmacists, nurses, mid wives and technicians – its an argument for the survival of whole nations. 8 million lost lives a year to PTM health issues is the numerical equivalent of Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Equatorial Guinea evaporating in one year. Multiplied by 5,10 or 20 years it’s the equivalent of any African country dying out including Nigeria which at an estimated 144 million is the Africa’s most populous nation and the worlds 8th most populous. The question is often asked, of just how many African leaders can entrust their own personal health to the current state of their health systems.

A state only needs go over the tipping point of unviablity for its collapse to become inevitable. That point is determined by multiple factors including but not limited to its overall population and its density, size of its economy, ratio of skilled workers and professionals to population, literacy levels, life expectancy, birth rate, child and maternal mortality, governance and stability, sustainable use and management of water, food, environment and other resources - and crucially if its health systems can withstand a major hit by even just one or a combination of efficient infectious diseases.

Africa has so far been relatively lucky in terms of escaping regular blows from Tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes. But this will not always be the case. Already many countries are suffering the impact of indifference of Tsunami and earthquake proportions. Just think what could happen when the impacts of climate change deliver the real blows – to nations apparently unprepared to deal with even day to day issues.

So, while we hold leaders and governments of more developed nations accountable for commitments to global human security and development - we must also ensure that African leaders and governments meet their primary responsibility of ensuring the good health of their people and overall African development – by meeting their own obligations and commitments.

At the last AU summit, the MDG Africa Steering Group – composed of Secretary-General of the United Nations, President of African Development Bank Group, Chairperson of African Union Commission, President of European Commission, Managing Director of International Monetary Fund, President of Islamic Development Bank Group, Secretary-General of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and President of the World Bank Group – launched a landmark report outlining success, and challenges to meeting the MDGs in Africa.

Despite the heavy weight billing of H.E. Jakaya Kikwete, Chairperson of the African Union, Ms. Asha-Rose Migiro, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, H.E. Mr. Jean Ping, Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Mr. Maxwell Mkwezalamba, African Union Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Mr. Jeffrey Sachs, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-moon - the launch sank almost without a trace under the weight of the media frenzy surrounding Zimbabwe. That report [launched unwisely at the end of the summit] needs to be resurrected from its apparent early grave and examined in detail by African governments and institutions.

We must not forget however that the MDGs are not an end in themselves, but rather a vital measurement of human progress in key areas necessary for us to earn the phrase “human civilisation”. There will be debates about which political, and economic systems and policies will best facilitate them. But there is no debate that leadership and political will are required to ensure that the progress made is not lost.

Nothing will demonstrate leadership better, than an official progress report of African development commitments at AU summit level in 2009 which identifies on a thematic basis and at national, sub regional and continental levels, achievements so far on each of the MDGs - Poverty & Hunger; Education; Gender Equality; Child & Maternal Health; HIV & AIDS, TB and Malaria; Environmental Sustainability; and Global partnerships - including the gaps to be met, resources needed at country level, and most importantly how much of these resources will be provided by African governments themselves, when and by whom. This is the only way we can measure African progress, the implementation of African commitments to development, and the creation of a real basis for a better African future.


*Sankore is Coordinator of the Africa Public Health 15% Now Campaign, which engages African governments, global and African and institutions on implementation of the AU Africa Health Strategy, Health MDGs and fulfilling the AU Abuja pledge to allocate 15% of domestic national resources to health. He is also on the editorial advisory board of Pambazuka.

*The campaign can be contacted at contactus[at]africapublichealth[dot]org, and contactus[at]africa15percentcampaign[dot]org . Reactions and comments on the write up should also be copied to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org.

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

Notes:

1. World Health Organisation, 2008 World Health Statistics Report. [There are disparities between provision of water and sanitation in urban and rural areas not reflected in the combined figures. See full report for break down]

2. Data Report, July 2008

3. Ibid

4. Stop TB Global Plan 2006 to 2015

5. UNAIDS 2007 Report, Financial Resources Required to Achieve Universal Access to HIV Prevention, Treatment, Care and Support

6. PMNCH Global Call to G8 leaders and other donors to champion maternal, newborn and child health, April 2008.

7. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2007; 85:623–630.

8. Stop TB Global Plan 2006 to 2015

9. UNAIDS and Kaiser Foundation July 2008 Report

10. Report by the MDG Africa Steering Group, June 2008

11. United Nations Human Development Index 2007/2008

12. Time Magazine, October 24,2007

13. International Herald Tribune, October 23, 2007

14. United Nations Human Development Index 2007/2008

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Statement on the ICC

2008-07-30

Communist Party of Sudan

Statement of the Communist Party of Sudan

The inclusion of the name of the President of the Republic of the Sudan among those wanted for justice by the International Criminal Court, increases the complications engulfing the crisis prevailing in the Sudan. Despite the fact that such procedures were already in place and expected since the establishment of the Court, and this last step of naming the President of the Sudan was preceded by a similar step indating two prominent figures in the Government in February 2007, the Government of the Sudan was ill- prepared both legally and politically to react to either attempts.

It is well-known, generally accepted and cannot be hidden that what is going on in Darfur is a real tragedy and the human catasrophy. We, the Sudanese Communist Party, reiterate what we have already declared that the Sudanese Government bears full responsibility for it is happening in Darfur, since its own policies have led to the aggraviation of the tragedy. We continue to demand together with others the investigation to the crimes committed in Darfur, and to bring those responsible to justice regardless of their position in the state hierarchy. The Government did not heed two reasons.
We consider that the only way out of this crisis is the implementation of a comprehensive, series of measures including:

Firstly, doubling efforts to reach a comprehensive and just solution to the problem of Darfur. A solution that responds to the demands of the people and pave the way for dealing with the consequences of the problem and its tragic results. This includes the provision of justice to deal with ALL CRIMES committed against the people in Darfur, any serious confrontation to solve this problem must be based on the participation of ALL armed movements of Darfur without exception. Other Darfurien organizations, leaders, representatives of local administrations and representatives of civil organizations should be allowed to participate on equal footing. In addition, all national parties, especially, those of the opposition should participate on equal footing. This initiative should come as a result of collective efforts through a national mechanism that will be responsible for the preparation as well as the holding of the national event. It will be entrusted with full responsibility including to contact the Darfurien movements and neighbouring countries.

Second, to accelerate and speed up the implementation of the details related to the democratic transformation of the country without delay. Also to fully implement all agreements reached between the Government and other parties. This should be done under the supervision of a nation