Limuru County Club members (from right) Martha Vincent, Rose Mambo and Caroline Ngugi who were expelled from the golf club speaking to the press after a meeting with their lawyer Philip Murgor (left) in Nairobi February 14, 2103.
(Photo Billy Mutai/Daily Nation).

Why do male golfers hate women? A few days ago, Kenya’s Limuru Country Club expelled three female golfers for opposing a new a rule denying women a voice and a vote in the general assembly – and then speaking about it to the media!

It doesn’t matter what the status of the three women are, but it makes a point to explain who they are. There is Central Depository and Settlements Corporation Chief Executive Rose Mambo, businesswoman Martha Vincent and molecular epidemiologist, Dr Caroline Ngugi.

In other words, they are among the most educated and professional women in the world. Before you ask in which cave the Men of Power at the Limuru Country Club live, it will do well to note that many golf clubs in the world don’t allow women as members.

It was only last year that the otherwise vaunted Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, in the US voted to allow its first women members. Bear Creek Golf Club in Colorado, like another 20 or so clubs in America, still doesn’t allow women to play.  Some golf clubs in the US are so extreme, they will not even permit a wife to drive into the parking lot and drop off her husband.

In countries like the US, you could almost be sure that golf courses that locked out women, also didn’t allow African-Americans to step there; as Augusta and Bear Creek did.

In the UK, for nearly 170 years the prestigious St Andrews Golf Club did not admit women as members.

Limuru Country Club. This what the boys want to have to themselves (Photo Phil Inglis).

It is understandable that golf clubs did not admit women in the backward past when they were considered second-class citizens. But it is extremely unusual that a sports club can vote in 2013 to roll the clock back 100 years as Limuru has done.

This is particularly galling because in Africa, in the early colonial era, many golf clubs did not allow “natives” to be members or to play – they could only serve at the club bar, mow the green, and be subservient caddies. At a wider level, they were part of the same prejudices that excluded Jews and the Irish from such places in the past.

There is more to this sport-misogyny, I think, than just the old boys wanting to hang out in smoke-filled rooms and cut business and political deals without women nearby hearing them and going to “gossip” about it, as they would say. Nor is it because female golfers wearing low-cut tops could distract them. The women – and men – of golf all play almost fully covered up. Golf is not beach volleyball.

There is the usual discrimination at play here, no doubt. Also, I have heard feminists argue that this anti-women behaviour of men is some kind of castration complex.

My suspicion though is that the fact that golfers walk off beating and looking for a small white ball on fairways with forests and water puddles on the edges, transports men to the Medieval Age when they were hunter-gatherers and the women stayed home waiting for them to return with the day’s kill. Thus golf offers the blokes a sweet connection with their ancient primitive selves.

A history of discrimination: Today, it is women. In the past it was Jews and Blacks. (Dailykos).

However, the progress of women in the world – with very many now richer and out-studying and out-graduating men in many countries – sport is going to be the final battle ground.

Not too many people question the fact men and women play separately in nearly ALL professional sports – in athletics, football, basketball, motorsport, volleyball, tennis (at least it has mixed doubles), swimming, gymnastics, boxing, name it.

One of these days a male “traitor” or some feminist group calling itself the Pussycat Army, will ask that most subversive of questions; “Why?”

So, the feminists say, some of us guys have a castration complex. Imagine then, for example, that you opened up boxing and allowed men and women to fight against each other. And in a famous heavyweight clash, a female boxer knocks out the man in the first round to take the world heavyweight-boxing crown. The blow to the collective masculinity of the men of the world would be devastating.

So I am not surprised that you have a Limuru Country Club voting to kick out women. The boys are closing the stables before the horses bolt. Still, the idea that women can be presidents, lead some of the richest companies in the world, fight in wars, go into outer space, and of course be mothers, but can’t be allowed to hit a little ball with a crooked metal club is preposterous.

What puzzles me is that there isn’t a lot of outrage over the action of the Limuru Country Club. Consider what might happen elsewhere in Kenya. For example, the Nairobi Gymkhana Club is one of the oldest clubs

Can we expect this sign to go up at the entrance of the Limuru Country Club soon?

in the city, and home to one of its most famous cricket grounds. Sixty years ago it was largely an Asian club, and Nairobi was still a city where Africans were locked out of whites-only establishments.

Imagine then that today, the Gymkhana decided that no black Kenyans could be members. Or the Exchange Bar at The Stanley Hotel decided that no “native” should step there. There would riots in Nairobi. But Limuru Country Club can go back to this past, and get away with it. Kenyan women would be right to be very afraid.

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Post-election violence in Kenya in 2008: Are fears that it will happen again next week justified?

Yesterday I tried to buy an Economy class seat for a quick dash to Uganda, and return on Sunday to catch the Election Day action on Monday March 4.

There were no seats on any of the flights. Well, I am still waiting for something to open up. Oh, I was told there were two Business Class seats, but then I would have to fork out an additional $550 for an upgrade and taxes – for a 5o minute flight. As Wahome Mutahi (RIP) would have said, I am neither too clever nor too foolish, so I figured there were better ways to spend my money.

The non-availability of seats is unusual. For as long as I can remember, it has always been possible to fly between Nairobi and Entebbe at a few hours notice.

I dug a little bit, and found out – not surprisingly – that it has to do with the Monday election. Many people are afraid that there will be a repeat of the 2008 post-election violence and are high-tailing it.

I know of two big international organisations that stopped their staff from travelling to Nairobi three weeks ago. Another just closed its offices in Nairobi and gave its people several weeks off. Some multinationals have taken most of their non-Kenyan staff “out of possible harm’s way”.

Glittering Nairobi: But for some of its residents, it loses the shine during elections.

No, they are not all going to wait the election out in Uganda. Thing is that seats to flights to Europe from Nairobi sold out days ago. The next city in the region with the most flights out to Europe is Entebbe, so a large chunk of the traffic to Uganda is actually in transit to get flights to Europe.

Most Kenyans and “budget expatriates” who are taking sanctuary in Uganda have been driving across the border over the last 10 days. Ugandan roads and towns, I am told, are teeming with Kenyan registered cars.

Hotels in cities with cleaner air and more affordable rates like Jinja on the River Nile, are doing a roaring business. Joachim Buwembo, columnist for The East African, has called the many people who  are flooding Uganda in fear of election violence in Kenya “election tourists”.

I do perfectly understand, and even laud a man or woman who would flee a country because they fear for theirs and their families safety.

However, I do take a slightly different view. Living in your own, and other people’s countries, is like a marriage. You cannot be in it only if it is good. You also have some responsibility to hang in when it is bad. You cannot

The serenity of River Nile in Jinja, Uganda: Home to a large number of ‘election tourists’ from Kenya.

think a country is worthy enough for you to work in, make a livelihood there, be sustained by its hospitality, but not have the courage to stand with it in times of trial.

In the end, of course, most of us do run for cover or our lives. The point then is whether Kenya is at a point where one needs to do that run.

Some weeks ago I was talking to a good Kenyan friend, a very pragmatic chap with a sharp nose for business and an equal sense of humour. I had mentioned to him sometime back that I was looking to buy a house in a nice leafy suburb. He told me if I had the money, it was now time to buy.

Some people, he said, were nervous and selling their houses rather cheaply and getting out of Nairobi. I wasn’t ready. If the Monday election ends in a deadlock where no one gets the 50% plus 1 needed to win, we shall go into a run-off that will take place between April 4 and 11^th.

There will be more jitters, I suspect. And maybe there will be a few more panic house sellers. If my limbs are not broken, this time I will be ready. For the right price, this time I hope I can buy a house.

*twitter@cobbo3

In Kibaki’s failures also lay the seeds of his success.

Whether or not a clear winner emerges from Monday’s March 4 Kenya election, thus avoiding a second-round run-off in April, one thing is for sure: In State House, President Mwai Kibaki will be packing his last suitcases, preparing to clear out.

A lot has been said about what Kibaki’s legacy will be; how the disputed December 2007 election and the horrendous violence that followed it will

impinge on it; and the extent to which he managed – or failed – to break away from the clientilist Kenyan politics of the past.

That however is a very local Kenyan story. In wider African terms, for all his failings, Kibaki did two extraordinary things. First, he became the oldest president (possibly in the world) to preside over a technology/innovation mini-revolution. So, first, we must ask how Kenya became touted as the “Silicon Savannah” under a president who is now 82 years old, while elsewhere other leaders who are half his age have failed to.

Secondly, the most consistent criticism of Kibaki is that he was too much of a hands-off, bumbling, and disengaged president.  Part of this was a result of failing health during his first months in office following a car accident in late 2002. Still, how did he manage to dig Kenya from the economic grave in which it was in 2003, and made it one of the continent’s most interesting economies? How was it possible that this supposedly half-asleep president in less than 10 years poured more money into public infrastructure than other presidents since independence in 1963 combined had done; and the Nairobi Stock Exchange equity market capitalisation has grown by a record 1,137 percent.

Kibaki launches the Konza Technology City: It is not always that an 82-year-old African president can spur an innovation wave–but picking people like Bitange Ndemo (exteme left) helped a lot.

My sense is that Kibaki did two things that are rarely done in Africa. First, informed by the difficult years Kenya had in the last 10 years of KANU rule, he took the ruling parties (Narc 2003-2007, PNU 2008-2012) out of government, and consigned them to being largely parliamentary parties.

There were no annual national congresses of Narc or PNU in which they made grand declarations about the economy. Several appointments to government were, to be sure, still informed by patronage considerations, but what Kibaki did was return government to some kind of technocratic management.

Without ruling parties meddling too much in government and policy, it opened up a space that was occupied by all sorts of creative forces; the technology community, telecommunication companies, and modernising bureaucrats like Information permanent secretary Bitange Ndemo.

Secondly, Kibaki introduced the “minimalist presidency”. No one had to sit and wait for what the president would do or say. Observers and analysts were reduced to reading Kibaki’s body language, who sat next to him on a podium, who went with him on the few foreign trips he

Thika Superhighway: In 10 years, Kibaki oversaw more investment in Kenya infrastructure than the country had managed since independence in 1964.

made. Amidst loud national denunciation about how he was a do-nothing president and addicted to fence-sitting, Kibaki most times refused to budge from the sanctuary of State House to speak on TV. He gave only one formal media interview in his presidency, to the Sunday Nation. And even with that, the questions had to be sent ahead. The new political certainty thus came from a strange source; the near-guarantee that Kibaki would keep off.

Kenya had in the past become accustomed to a rungu(club)-wielding Daniel arap Moi, a larger-than-life presence who had his finger in every pie.

Kibaki, we now know, was pulling a few strings behind the scenes. But his reluctance to publicly also be the country’s First Patriarch, forced Kenyan society to begin growing up again and to learn how to find its own way in the dark without being led by an all-knowing Father of the Nation.

I can’t think of an African president who has done that in recent times and got away with it. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela took his hand off government early, but the rule of the African National Congress and his obsessive deputy, Thabo Mbeki, were still overwhelming and ubiquitous.

I must admit that my pathological loathing of overbearing Big Men disqualifies me as an objective commentator on this subject, as I am likely to be “too soft” on a politician I think represents the opposite. I believe though that one day in quieter times, it will be written that Kibaki proved that sometimes the best thing a leader can do for his country is to get out of its face. If I were to write that story, I would call that the Kibaki Paradox.

(Also just published in Daily Nation; http://elections.nation.co.ke/Blogs/Obbo/-/1640520/1706138/-/bm31r8/-/index.html)

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The recent Kenya election was easily the most watched and commented on in East Africa for a long time.Finally, last Saturday the Supreme Court upheld the election of Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee alliance as the next president.

Raila: In the biggest contradictiion, he probably lost because he had been very succcessful as a politician.

After the March 4 poll, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) announced Uhuru winner with 50.07 percent of the vote, with Raila getting 43.28 percent. The IEBC, for sure, fluffed the election and Raila and civil society groups felt there was sufficient ground to go to court to challenge it. After weighing the odds, the Supreme Court said Uhuru had won it fairly.

Uhuru (right) and Ruto (left) celebrate their election victory; the real forces that drove them to the top is more complex than they seem.

Kenya, without doubt, has East Africa’s most open politics – the court proceedings, the election results announcements, the appointment of judges, government officials, name it, all happen on live TV.  Yet, open as it is, it often tells you very little about the real forces driving that politics. Nearly all the opinion polls leading to the election had Raila in the lead. After the December 2012 party primaries that Raila’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) handled badly in many places, the polls started to change in favour of Uhuru.Raila has towered over Kenyan opposition activism, and in the last 15 years, its general politics. It is probably instructive that after the court ruling, the most asked question in newspaper columns was “what next for Raila?” not “how will Uhuru govern?”

In many ways, Raila lost this election because he had won. Son of the father of Kenya’s opposition politics Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Raila finally shot to fame in the failed 1982 coup, and from then on gained a reputation as a brave and fearless campaigner for multiparty democracy. He served his years in jail for his troubles.

Raila almost seemed to have become addicted to anti-establishment activism. He was at his best when taking on the state and men of power. He honed a political style that needed a huge grievance, and he would ride that wave like few other African politicians could.

And therein lay the seeds of his loss. His ODM assumed Raila’s rebellious character, making it difficult to impose central discipline on it.

Thus when in his Nyanza backyard the ODM big wigs sought to impose candidates in the primaries that the rank and file didn’t like, they did as Raila had taught them over the years – they rebelled. Thus in a region where he was once a near-demigod, the unthinkable happened; Raila was booed on some of his campaign stops.

In the 2007 campaign, which Raila ran with remarkable efficiency (as opposed to 2013) he championed two issues. One of them many people thought he was crazy to push; a highly devolved political system. The other was trimming the powers of the president.

Many people were afraid that devolution would break up Kenya. However, the 2007 election ended in a violent dispute, which was resolved with the formation of a grand coalition with Mwai Kibaki as president and Raila as PM.

The shock of the violence that followed the 2007 poll opened the way for the 2010 constitution. The ODM devolution project was adopted; and the powers of the presidency were dramatically reduced.

Lech Walesa: Was brave and inspirational as an opposition figure – much like Raila – but fall by the roadside as president.

As the bible would say, Raila’s work was done. In reality, there was no emotional or big issue to keep him in politics.

Raila started suffering the problem that most charismatic opposition politicians like him have endured when they get into government; they are just not able to remain the angels and heroes that they were before as a recent article in TIME magazine noted. Poland’s trade union leader Lech Welesa was larger than life when he led the opposition to Communism. He won, and when he became president he was a disaster.

The Czech leader, poet, Nobel laureate Vaclav Havel who led the democracy movement was a near-god. When he became leader, he was uncomfortable in the job, and botched it.

Another Nobel laureate, Myanmar’s (Burma’s) Aung San Suu Kyi, according to TIME is also beginning to look fallible, now that she is free and active in politics.

In Raila’s case, while he was PM, some ODM strongholds meanwhile got  infrastructure built, and Kisumu’s ramshackle airport was renovated and expanded and became the best of its type in Kenya. With that an economic boom that is changing the face of the lakeside city started. The deep sense of exclusion that fuelled Raila’s politics in the past faded.

Raila himself seemed often seemed unenthusiastic on the trail. The election machine he built this time was a faint shadow of the one he had in 2007.

Probably it is because he didn’t have any of the grand causes of the past, because he had achieved nearly all of the key ones with crucial victories in the 2010 constitution. Uhuru and his running mate William Ruto, meanwhile, seemed to have all the burning grievances and motivation going for them.

The common view is that because both Uhuru and Ruto face charges at the International Criminal Court at The Hague for their alleged in the post-election violence in 2008 that killed 1,400 – victory was a life or death matter for them, because it would dramatically improve their chances of being acquitted.

But I see something bigger. Some of the people, most of them from Central Kenya, who were displaced in smaller scale election violence in the Rift Valley, Ruto’s realm, in 1992 and 1997 are still unresettled – just like several thousands from 2008.

For the Central Kenya landed elite, it was absolutely critical that there was no violence in the Rift Valley that uprooted any more Kikuyu people who would end up in their homeland as “refugees”. The long-term implications for the credibility of the traditional Central Kenya leadership, and the risk of the Kikuyu countryside becoming an even more lawless expanse were too high. An Uhuru-Ruto ticket reduced that risk dramatically.

Havel: Was a democracy hero, but uncomfortable in office.

For Ruto, an Uhuru ticket meant that he didn’t have to confront the Rift-Valley-Land-For-Kalenjins hardliners. Eager to make peace, Central Kenya Power was not going to press for restitution for the Kikuyu who lost their lands and homes in 2008 – thus allowing the fellows who seized them to keep them for possibly up to 10 years, making any reversals of their “ownership” impossible by the end of that period.

But something else that I referred to already had also made the 2008 attacks on, especially, the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley impractical in 2013.

Unlike 2008, my sense is that Rift Valley leaders were smart enough to realise that violence that chases farmers from their lands and hurts investment in the region would not be Nairobi’s problem. It would hurt “their” county economy.  These new highly devolved counties, as we noted above, were Raila’s big and emotive issue in 2007. If he hadn’t driven the issue, devolution might have taken longer to come – if at all.

In short, while many people see the Uhuru-Ruto victory as a product of a tribal closing of ranks by the numerous Kikuyu and Kalenjin, I see a sophisticated deal knitted together to protect the economic and social of the two communities’ elite.  It was in deep peril. Uhuru and Ruto were not the leaders here; they were merely instruments.

Raila couldn’t pull any dynamics to equal those out of his hat. In addition he became a victim of his success, proving the truth of the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished.

-A shorter version of this article has been published on http://www.monitor.co.ug

 •twitter@cobbo3

So on May 3, World Press Freedom Day,  Freedom House got us to wake up and smell the coffee about the state of media freedom.

The more elections Africa, the more it gets divides over issues like media freedom

It released a report revealing that press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade globally, and only one in six people live in countries with a free press (http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2013). This lousy media freedom picture, it said, “was punctuated by dramatic decline in Mali, deterioration in Greece, and a further tightening of controls in Latin America”.

That said, the outlook was not bad for Africa. In large measure because the Arab spring toppled dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia two years ago, Africa is no longer the predictable hellhole for independent journalism it used to be, although journalists are still murdered in record numbers in Somalia, and places like Eritrea remain a penal colony even for pro-government media workers.

“The trend of overall decline occurred, paradoxically, in a context of increasingly diverse news sources and ever-expanding means of political communication”, Freedom House noted.

And why are media freedoms declining? According to Freedom House: “The growth of these new media has triggered a repressive backlash by authoritarian regimes that have carefully controlled television and other mass media and are now alert to the dangers of unfettered political commentary online”.

Contrary to what it might read like at first glance, Freedom House’s analysis of why things are bad for free media is actually rosy. My sense is that if one looked at the various deeper political and social reasons why media freedoms have declined, the picture is actually very gloomy. This is especially so in developing nations.

I think that there are FOUR far-reaching reasons why media freedoms will deteriorate in places like Africa for many more years before they get better – if at all. One, ironically, is because of the advance of electoral democracy. Secondly, because well-meaning anti-poverty campaigners have  been too successful. Thirdly, because of the globalisation of information that is associated with the growth of the Internet. Fourthly, the ghosts from the 1994 Rwanda genocide – in which party-controlled radio played a key in rallying the murderers – still roam.

In an ideal world, all three factors would have led to more media freedom. So why have they had the opposite effect?

 The “Curse” Of   Elections

These days in Africa, in a year we have more (relatively) competitive elections, than we would have in a period of 10 years in the decade between 1975-1985!

The one-party and military dictatorship phase of African politics, meant that a cross section of elites and civil society were on one side, united by the common experience of oppression. They demanded a free press together with multiparty politics, and free elections as some of the goods that comprised the democratisation basket.

Fast-forward to 2012: Today, we have dozens of political parties, presidential term limits, and both free and rigged elections, “independent” media, websites, blogs, name it.

Political mobilisation, however, has dramatically changed. To win elections, political groups have to woe the support of sections of the elite, the non-elite, the independent media, and civil society. To keep power, they co-opt these groups by rewarding them with access, opportunities, and state largesse. This mobilisation is mostly done along ethnic, religious, regional, or party lines.

Whatever the case, today a government will have a considerable section of the elite, of the media and civil society supporting it. These groups will provide fairly intelligent arguments for the government’s actions, including restricting media freedom. They also give a “respectable face” to governments. The result is that the  1970s-90s consensus about media freedom has fractured.

Because of the way our new democracies mobilise support, and allocate benefits, for every voice and civil society group criticising the government and pushing for more freedom and openness, there is one supporting government abuses and arguing for secrecy and a push back against media freedom. The “democracy game” is no longer lopsided in favour of the democrats—most time it is a draw, and the bad guys are winning it on penalties.

The Anti-Poverty Brigade Was Too Successful For Our Good

For 30 years, from about 1970 to 2000 the biggest policy debates in Africa were not even over democracy, but poverty. Was it “poverty reduction”, “poverty alleviation” or “poverty elimination”? Were the IMF/World Bank policies the right ones? Did markets have a role? Could African states fight poverty? Were NGOs the best vehicles to combat poverty? Should donor support go directly to support anti-poverty projects, or be paid into the central budget? Was debt ruining countries’ possibility to fight poverty? Should debt be forgiven or rescheduled? How much was corruption hampering the fight against poverty? Would the next G7 or G20 Summit do something for Africa’s poor? Where would Bob Geldof’s or Bono’s next anti-poverty gig be? Which Hollywood actress star would be speaking on Africa’s poverty next? What would she be wearing?

A child scavenges for food in a garbage pit near Malanje, Angola. Many good-hearted people in Africa today believe that things like fighting poverty are far more important than media freedom – UMNS Photo.

However, a new constituency also grew from it that considered things like press freedom a “middle class issue”, and the more left-leaning NGOs and intellectuals saw it is a “bourgeois luxury”. That was erroneous, but the pro-freedom folks could only fall back to continuously quoting Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s arguments that democracy is the best way to avoid famines partly because of its ability to use a free press.

Nevertheless, the idea that bread on the tables of the poor, and putting rural children through school was more important than “the right of the press to make money through sensationalism” (as the critics of free media like to put it) had become fairly well established.

Globalisation …And The Desire For Good Things

The Internet, satellite TV, and mobile phones, have opened up the world to everyone. Yet, that means different things to an average Kenyan or Ugandan, than it does to an average American. I think for Africans, there is less acceptance of the poverty in which most of them live, and more and more of them now also want a little bit of the good life people in other parts of the world enjoy.

China is rich…and doesn’t have much of a free press. Many Africans increasingly think there is merit to that approach.

That ultimately is a question of HOW they can get it. Every year hundreds of thousands choose to get it by migrating to live and work in North America, Europe, and these days Asia. But for the millions who can’t do that, they want it here.

In the past the question of HOW we could also grow rich was a debate dominated by a few intellectuals and columnists. It was always about three paths. One, the western freemarket/capitalist path (with its multiparty elections). Second, was the authoritarian-first-then-democracy-later path of South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. Then, third, the African way led by a heavy-handed but magnificent patriarch – e.g. Houphuet Boigny in Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivorie); Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and such characters.

The African way was never quite convincing, because it never really reduced poverty. But articulate and radical pan-Africanists kept it alive until it crumbled when Ivory Coast went to seed; Gaddafi was beset by a rebellion and eventually lynched; and Ben Ali was run out of power and into exile by “social media” revolutionaries.

But even as it fell out of favour, it was replaced by China’s one-party-Communist-state-capitalist model that was creating fabulous wealth, and transforming the red dragon into the world’s second super power after the USA. And, even better, it looks set to overtake America in less than 10 years.

We had seen the “best examples” of free press, the US and European ones, corrupted in their coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, as Europe is battered by the ill winds of its recession, all other aspects of its politics, including its pluralistic media model, are suffering in prestige.

Amidst it all, most middle class Africans want the prosperity of China, Malaysia and Singapore. More and more of them are actually sending their children to study at universities in these countries, rather than the US and Europe. They have “seen with their own eyes” that they can have it without a free press.

 Demons From The Land Of One Thousand Hills

The remains of the victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which state-controlled radio mobilised for murder: We are paying the price today, and continue in the same folly.

I have not heard or read of a single African minister of Information or Security boss who has not justified a measure to restrict media freedom in his or her country over the last 15 years who has not relied on the bad example of Rwanda’s Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines – French for “One Thousand Hills Free Radio and Television” (RTLM).

Radio Milles Collines, as it is more popularly known, was actually a private radio, but was controlled by the family of then president Juvenal Habyarimana and extremist elements in his National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND).

It, and the state-owned Radio Rwanda, whipped up the anti-Tutsi passions that resulted in the genocide of 1994 in which nearly one million people were killed.

The documentary  Shake Hands With The Devil, a companion product of a book of the same title by Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Antonius Dallaire, who headed the hapless UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda during the genocide, has some chilling moments when we hear the audio from Radio Milles  Collines rallying the extremists to hunt down Tutsis. It informs them of the bushes and hamlets where they are hiding, and urges them to go and finish them off.

I think that 19 years later, African journalists and media freedom campaigners have

Many elections in Africa today are a collective trip to very dark places on the Internet: We emerge with a stench that puts many off from the case for a free media.

not fully come to terms with the damage Radio Milles Collines has done to the cause of press freedom on the continent. What makes it worse, as we saw in Kenya during the early-2008 post-election violence, as well as the recent March election, is that nearly every election in Africa today ends with social media and the Internet diving in the dark and murky depths of hate speech. Many countries just just relive Rwanda 1994 every five years.

To compound matters, the partisanship of many mainstream newspapers, FM radio and TV stations just gets worse. So every other one of the many elections on the continent today ends with societies more divided over the value of media freedom, and with fewer and fewer non-partisan supporters for a free press.

We could argue that Radio Milles Collines was so deadly because there were no anti-Radio Milles Collines operating to counter it. That for the voices, however few they are, that talk peace, fairness, and preach against hate to be able to blog freely, the Internet also needs to be free for those who preach hate. The problem is that increasingly we are speaking to an empty-hall. Most people have left, driven out by despair, cynicism, anger, or left to go into trenches to fight their own new parochial and partisan causes. Press freedom, has very few buyers these days. And I fear that market is not about to rebound.

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Kiflu Hussain: Upset with Africa Media Initiative and journalists like this blogger.

My friend Kiflu Hussain,  a decent man and good Ethiopian journalist who lives in exile in the Uganda capital Kampala, is angry with the Africa Media Initiative for holding its next convention in Addis Ababa. Why? Because the Ethiopian regime is a dictatorship that torments journalists.

And he is also unhappy with me, because he thinks I have some wrong-headed views about how journalists and media companies should deal with a government such as Ethiopia’s.

You can read Kiflu’s full blog here (http://ecadforum.com/blog/why-i-am-naming-and-shaming-african-media-initiative-ami). Kiflu’s blog begins with the story of the AMI conference held in Tunis in November 2011:

“On the second day I joined a panel when the forum was divided in different groups to discuss various issues. I followed the panel among which one of the presenters was Charles Onyango-Obbo, a renowned Ugandan journalist and prolific columnist as well as Executive Editor in the Nations Media Group. I was rewarded by his humorous presentation and incisive critic towards the heavy-handedness of his own government against the media. He made the panel discussion, at least to me, interesting through a snide comment he threw against his fellow countryman, Mr. Robert Kabushenga, CEO of the government run, The New Vision who also attended the forum.

“Yet, he nearly disappointed me when he revealed a plan that Nation Media Group chose certain African cities to base permanent branch in a bid to tell the “African story by Africans.” Among the cities chosen for this “honor” was Addis Ababa.

“During discussion time, I raised a question to Charles by reminding him how the Ethiopian regime brooks no space at all for media; how a Nation Media Group correspondent named Argaw Ashine was forced to flee from his own country due to this fact at the time Charles was revealing a plan about Addis; and that Ethiopia is clad with an iron curtain in a way only slightly “better than” Eritrea. And so I sort of asked him on what criteria they chose this city for their project. “

“Acknowledging what I have said, Charles nevertheless said we can’t flee leaving everything to dictators and added the rationalization of NMG or his own that ‘If Coca Cola can do business with these dictators that it’s also possible for media houses to operate as business organizations.’ He included too the fact of Addis being AU headquarters as additional reason.”

I won’t dispute the accuracy of Kiflu’s report, although I have very different recollection of what happened (at least about what I said) or debate him. That is because I do understand where he is coming from.

So I will only give three examples of my very hectic times as Managing Editor of Daily Monitor, in Kampala – where Kiflu has found sanctuary, and what they tells us about the demons that most journalists have to wrestle with in Africa.

The Kampala government was never naturally pro-free press. We fought for it. Some Uganda journalists went into exile under the pressure (just as Kiflu left Ethiopia). Some of us stayed.

The controversial photo of the “Candida Lakony” alleged torture that kicked off one of the biggest storms in Ugandan journalism and got us into deep trouble.

In late 1999 I returned, ironically, from a trip to Addis Ababa. At The Monitor my colleagues had received a photo of alleged Ugandan soldiers in northern Uganda torturing a naked woman who was thought to be one Candida Lakony*. The story later famously came to be known as the “Candida story”, and one of the most controversial any paper had published in Uganda in a long time.

Anyway, after a long internal debate, we published the photograph. Hell broke loose. The managing director (now MP) Wafula Oguttu; the daily Monitor editor David Ouma, and myself were arrested, and eventually charged in court. The Monitor was shut down for a week.

The evening before our arrest, a minister in the Yoweri Museveni, government called me on my cellphone and told me that he and a couple of other “comrades” in government could arrange my escape that night, so that by morning I would be in Kenya.

“Why?”

Because, he said, he had been informed that hardliners in the state were so fed up with the troubles I was giving them, they had decided that this time they were going to torture me, and “I would never come out of prison alive, if ever I did”.

We had gone through so many of these battles, I no longer panicked easily. The following morning I packed a travel bag, put in a change of clothes, anti-malaria tablets, vitamin supplements, said – like many times before – what I thought was my last farewell to my wife, hugged the children, got in the car and drove to the office. The Police came at 10am.

With Andrew Mwenda years late. After a 6-year battle, we scored the biggest legal victory for free journalism in Uganda. (Obbo photo).

There was just one thing I was not going to do – run, or hide. It had paid off. Many people in government disliked us intensely, but they still gave us our respect because we were willing to stand up and be counted. Andrew Mwenda, now the Chief of The Independent magazine, and I had a long battle starting from the Magistrates Court, High Court, Court of Appeal – where we lost at every turn the bid to overturn Uganda’s criminal libel laws. We never gave up. Finally, six years later, we won the most famous legal victory for press freedom in Uganda in the Supreme Court.

Again, in 2002, we ran into trouble with the state in a story alleging that an army gunship had gone down in an area where it was fighting rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. Though the story didn’t specifically say so, the state read it to be suggesting that the helicopter was shot down by the LRA (arguably, it was a reasonable conclusion on their part).

This time it was even worse than the “Candida” story. Police, intelligence, and Military Police police swooped on our offices at around 7pm. They stopped the press, and held the staff. Wafula Oguttu was travelling in North Africa. Again, I got a call. I was at a farm on the outskirts of Kampala talking to then very influential Local Government minister Bidandi Ssali (he has since fallen out with Museveni).

Uganda journalist Bbaale bloodied after he was beaten up by security forces while covering the presidential election in 2011: While media freedoms have improved, risks remain.

I told him what had happened. He asked if I needed any help. I told him I would be fine. I detoured to my house, and found the family was sitting down to dinner. I told my wife (she went through a lot, that fine lady) what had happened and that I was going to the office. The atmosphere in the house was gloomy.

As I approached, I discovered that the street leading to our office had been sealed off and there was a roadblock. I will never forget the sight. There were all these men in uniform, and the lights of my car were just dancing off the barrels of their guns (for a second I thought I was stupid to have returned).

I stopped, and they came and shouted at me, asking whether I couldn’t see that the road was sealed off. I told them I could see that, but that I was Onyango-Obbo, and I believed that it was me they were looking for. They pulled away the barrier without another word and let me through. When I got to the office, the security officers did not know what to do or say. There was a funny moment when the intelligence officer leading the search, a chap whom I knew, said; “Eh, Charles, what are you doing here?”

In other words, they thought I would have taken the opportunity of being out of office when they swooped, to hightail it. The two floors of the editorial building looked like a hurricane had gone through them. I negotiated with the security officers and they let the rest of the staff go, but not before they took everyone’s phones.

I remained at the press, and watched as they carried computers, servers, and boxes of files into trucks away “for investigation”.  We counted the stuff as they did so, and signed for what they had taken. At 2am, I left the office. For the next few days the building was occupied by security officers. Again, The Monitor was closed for 10 days.

Then came the trial. The formal hearing of the case started after I had moved to Nairobi. They let me go because the prosecutors had long ago stopped asking for us to be held in prison or for our passports to be confiscated. As one of the prosecutors said once; “These ones we shall not oppose their bail or ask for their passports. We know they shall never run away”. (Continues in Part II: http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/05/16/the-untold-demons-of-african-journalists-and-living-in-water-with-crocodiles-part-ii/)

*While we were acquitted, the case ended tragically for Ms. Lakony. Lakony had come forward before the trial started and identified herself as the woman in the photo. She was arrested and charged with “giving false information to the Police”. Lakony was brave enough to testify at our trial that she was tortured by her boyfriend as shown in the photograph, although she was in prison. She was found guilty, but fell very ill while still in prison. She was released when she became very ill and died almost immediately after. I am still wracked by guilt over what happened to Lakony.

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This is the second part of this blog, the first, “The Demons That Torment African Journalists; To Run Or Stand And Fight (Part I)” was published earlier: (http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/05/16/the-demons-that-torment-african-journalists-to-run-or-stand-and-fight-part-i/).

Outgoing Monitor managing editor Daniel Kalinaki (R) and editor Henry Ochieng (L) behind bars recently: Every generation must endure its own trials.The Monitor, Uganda’s main independent daily paper, was closed for 10 days over the “helicopter story”.

The Monitor, Uganda’s main independent daily paper, was closed for 10 days over the “helicopter story”.Among other things, we had been charged with “aiding an enemy of the state of Uganda” with the publication of the story. If we had been found guilty, we could have served up to 30 years in prison, and an extreme judge could have sentenced us to death.

Nearly six months, and having moved to Nairobi at the start of 2003, after many trips to attend court, I left again for Kampala the evening before the judgement, not sure I would come back.

I must admit was difficult standing in the dock hearing the Magistrate read that judgement. In the end, we were acquitted.

I had spent nearly 10 years in and out of courts, so I knew the court clerks, magistrates, judges, and Prisons officers well, some on first name basis. It got to a point where there was a magistrate who would frequently turn to me in the dock and ask when he was struggling to find the right word; “Obbo, what is the correct word for that again?”.

One of the security officers at the court was a big, good-natured woman. I tried to carry her presents most times when I went there. One day when I arrived at court from Nairobi she told me: “You are mad. If it was I and I was already in Nairobi, I would not come back here. What if they send you to Luzira (a famous prison on the Victoria lakeside).” But I was not in it alone, and was not our way.

However, it would be misleading to say we survive on courage alone. We also negotiated and made friends in the system. I had never really thought of that as a time-tested strategy until one day when I sat down to lunch with one of Kampala’s rich men, who is a good friend.

One the weekend programme Capital Gang on Capital Radio in Kampala where I used to appear (in cap) with President Museveni (corner right). When he chose to, he debated. When he needed to, he let the dogs out.

He gives money to both the Opposition (quietly), and to the Museveni campaign (publicly) during election campaigns. We got to discuss how one survives in countries like Uganda that are in “transition”.

He explained to me the way he relates to various interests in Kampala.

“When you live in water”, he told me, “you have to learn to make peace with the crocodiles”. It was the first time I heard that expression, and it made a permanent impression. Iron-fist regimes in Africa, and everywhere I guess, are like feral beasts. If you let them smell fear on you, they will chase you down and eat you. We never allowed them to smell our fear; we stood and took the blows without flinching.

However, governments are rarely monolithic. There are hardliners, there are cowards who fence sit, and there are moderates and progressives who are helpful. We had befriended and made peace with the less dangerous crocodiles, and tried as much as we could to send the signal to the powers that be that we were purely journalists. Troublesome ones yes, and we sometimes got things wrong, but we didn’t have any secret political agenda (few of them believed us).

Most Africa is still like a giant crocodile-infested water. It will be a while before liberal democracy and real civil rights are the norm. The risks for journalists and human rights activists vary from country to country, of course. But they have choices. They can stay and join illiberal governments and work “from inside”. They can run away into exile for their safety. They can stay and be killed. They can stay and be imprisoned. Or they can stay and figure out how to share the water with the crocodiles.

My view is that none of these options is more correct, wrong, or nobler than the other. Each of them involves a difficult decision, its own sacrifice, its own humiliations, rewards, and courage. However, not everyone will have the largeness of heart, or will have been humbled enough by hard reality, to see it that way.

I must end by saluting the Nigerian journalists who stuck it out during the Military Dictatorships, especially under the lecherous and murderous Gen. Sani Abachi, in an environment worse than in Ethiopia and, possibly, Eritrea today.

The free media today in Africa owes Nigerian journalists, and others like the South Africans under apartheid, a lot.

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From time to time, NakedChiefs shall post a pithy and “bad-mannered” response to one of my columns published in mainstream media. This one is from Mr MD’s take on my column “MPs And The Kenya Hunt; Who Gets The First Cut – Parliament Or Voters?” (http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/MPs-and-the-Kenya-hunt-who-gets-the-first-cut/-/440808/1853852/-/132iodwz/-/index.html):

In a creative and attention-grabbing protest, activists carried pigs and sprinkled animal blood outside the Kenya Parliament to protest what they as as greed by “Mpigs” who are demanding a salary increase. (Daily Nation photo)

•AS WITH ALL THINGS IN KENYA, THERE IS ALWAYS MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE.  The “Class of 2013” Members of Parliament are largely drawn from those Kenyans born in the 1960s and 1970s. 

By the time they came of age and entered public life, the earlier generations of Kenya had helped themselves to all the juicy prime cuts of the hog.  Today their families are living off the fat they accumulated from that fiesta. So this new generation of leaders is looking around for something to feast on but all the land is gone, all the forests gone, cemeteries gone!  There is nothing left except for the money in the cashbox.

My thinking is that there will be no discussion of service delivery to the voters, until the present generation has had their lunch.

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Kenyatta shakes Museveni’s hand after his inauguration in Nairobi on April 9 (Daily Nation photo).

A FLY ON THE WALL tells me of very interesting conversations  between Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Kenya’s Chief Justice Willy Mutunga at the swearing-in of Uhuru Kenyatta as president.

At the April 9 inauguration held at Kasarani Stadium in Nairobi, CJ Mutunga who was at hand to perform the rituals, sat next to Museveni. To Museveni’s left was Djibouti president Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, and behind him Uganda’s First Lady Janet Museveni.

Museveni and Mutunga were at Dar es Salaam University in the late 1960s and the start of the 1970s when the place was gathering steam as a haven of radical and pan-African scholarship and activism.

Mr Fly On The Wall reports that the president and chief justice took time to renew acquaintances. But then one always has to contend with the African sun. Before long, it was falling on Museveni and Mutunga’s faces where they were seated in the front row of the pavilion.

Mutunga blinked bravely into the sun, but even though Museveni was wearing his trademark wide-rimmed Safari hat, the glare soon became too much for him. He turned and loudly asked Kenyan protocol officials; “What is this? Can someone bring us umbrellas?”

The officials scrambled, and returned with three umbrellas. They gave one to Museveni, the second one to Guelleh, and the third to Janet Museveni.

Mutunga is a stubborn man, so he jokingly chided Museveni; “Eh, you got only for yourself, what about the rest of us?”

Museveni is a master of the comeback, so he chuckled back to Mutunga; “Ah, you, you are dispensable”.

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Monday was not a usual day at the office for Monitor managing editor Don Wanyama (L), New Editor Alex Atuhaire (C) and Executive Editor Simon Freeman (R) – (Monitor photo).

 SO, AGAIN on Monday the Uganda government sent in security forces, ransacked the Daily Monitor, seized its offices, closed down its presses, and switched its affiliated radios – KFM and Dembe FM – off air. The controversial and saucy Red Pepper also got the same treatment. A court order asking the Police to lift the siege was met with scorn. Instead, more heavily armed police and armored personnel carriers were sent into to enforce the blockade.

Counting the 2006 incident when it turned off KFM and blocked the Daily Monitor website to prevent them putting out any news from its independent vote tallying centre in the polls that year, this is the fourth time a partial or full closure has been slapped on Monitor media alone, in the last 15 years.

It is easy – and it would be dead wrong – to see this as just one in a long chain of government harassment of The Monitor. This time, not only did the Red Pepper suffer the same fate as The Monitor, but also the action against it was intriguing because some consider Red Pepper a “friendly force” to President Yoweri  Kaguta Museveni.

However, without even going far back to 1986, it is important to remember that the Museveni government also went after the Buganda

When court ordered the Police to lift the siege on The Daily Monitor, it responded in the manner it has become accustomed   – with defiance and more reinforcements. (Monitor photo)

Kingdom radio CBS in September 2009. In the end it closed down CBS, and three other stations; Radio Two, Suubi FM, and the Catholic Church-owned Radio Sapiensa. It lifted the CBS ban a year later.

While the Museveni government’s anti-free media streak goes way back, it would never muzzle the press merely for the sake of muzzling it. The attacks on the free media are usually part of its wider political scheme, and never the end.

The actions against The Monitor usually serve as a warning against that what might loosely call the Uganda progressive corner and activists. The Monitor got into most serious problem in 1999 after what became known as the “Candida story”, in which a woman called Candida Lakony was shown in a photo published in The Monitor allegedly being tortured by men in UPDF uniform.

However, that was the same year that Gen. David “Tinyefuza” Sejusa, whose letter accusing the Uganda leadership of plotting to install President Museveni’s son Brig. Muhoozi Kainerugaba as his father’s successor and led to the present siege of  The Monitor and Red Pepper, first caused a storm by criticising Museveni’s leadership.

A typical front page of the Red Pepper showcasing its peculiar approach to political – all other – coverage.

It seems the chiefs sensed that dissension was breaking out in the ruling ranks, because a year later, Col. Kizza Besigye caused even a bigger ripple by writing a scathing letter of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party and Museveni. He was ostracised, and was due to be arrested when he did something that was unthinkable in the NRM then – he announced he was going to challenge Museveni in the 2001 election. All hell broke loose. However, because Besigye had declared he was challenging, they could no longer refuse him permission to leave the army or arrest him because Museveni would look like a weakling putting a competitor out of the race by jailing him.

Equally the 2009 closure of CBS was a proxy battle against the Buganda Establishment and its growing criticism of the Museveni government. Radio Sapiensa was beaten to punish the Catholic Church, especially in Buganda, that was increasingly vocal against government excesses.

The shattering of  The Monitor in 2002 was over a story alleging that an army helicopter had been shot down in an area where the government was battling rebels. But it was part of a bigger purge and wave of persecution of groups and people who were, mostly falsely, accused of being part of a rebel group that then exiled-Besigye had allegedly put together to fight the Museveni government.

Today  in 2013 The Monitor and Red Pepper have been caught in the cross-hairs of what threatens to be a nasty fight over the control of the groceries at the Centre; one in which the NRM and NRA veterans and old guard put up the last stand to prevent what they see as a perversion of their “revolution” by turning it leadership into a Kaguta dynasty.

The fact that Red Pepper, which had until now been spared this kind of treatment got caught up this time, only points to how factionalised the king’s court has become.

And so, as in the beginning, so is it at the end: There was only Museveni left standing as Chief.

Thus the question is; if the attacks on the Monitor and its radios and Red Pepper are sideshows, what is the real thing?

We got part of the answer already, when the NRM did something it had sworn never to do; expel the four so-called “rebel” MPs. Now it is pushing to have their seats declared vacant.

This seems extreme. And why, surely, would a party that is so dominant in Parliament want to have a bye-election and, hopefully, return more submissive MPs. Why do just four seats matter?

Well, they do if you consider that we are moving close to an amendment of the Constitution to revert to a parliamentary system, and raise the age limit for president. Why? Because Uganda could be destroyed in a direct presidential race with Museveni on the ticket. It is easier to “engineer” victory for MPs, and thus keep the president’s nose clean. As leader of the majority party in parliament, as in Britain, he would become president.

Secondly, there is the issue of the age limit. Today it is at 75. With Museveni planning to running in 2016 for a 7^th term (two of them unelected), he would be 75 in 2019. This scheme would be too hard a sell unless the party is completely tamed. And since it requires two-thirds of MPs to change the constitution – which has been amended over 120 times in its short 18 years – those four seats held by “rebel” MPs could make the difference.

Thirdly, my sense is that there are indeed family forces pushing for Muhoozi to succeed Museveni, although my view is that Museveni has no immediate plans to install his son (I am probably the only Ugandan who holds this view). For them, if Museveni runs and stands down in only 2021, there is no force in the world that would help a Museveni son – or even wife – rise to power. So, any member of the clan eyeing power would be happy if Museveni stepped down.

On the other hand, the loose alliance of young radical NRM MPs and some party old guard who also want the throne will lose out if he remains in power because the power would be unelectable by 2021. The furore kicked up Tinyefuza therefore really serves one man – Museveni.

I am angry and pained at what is happening to the media, but at the same time I am grown up enough to realise that they are not the prize.  We are all looking at the trees, we need to step back and behold the forest. This skirmish has only allowed the Big Man to play to the gallery. In reality, what it has delivered politically is shown that a Muhoozi succession is too controversial -therefore the Father should continue if the country hates the Son). In addition it has opened the way for Museveni to carry out a purge and remove internal opposition, allowing him to have a seventh bite at the presidential cherry.

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South Africa’s border wire fence: The Swazi school kids can always rely on the soldiers to help them through it.

 IT is again time for LETTER FROM A FRIEND. My weekly column in Daily Nation titled “How Uhuru Can Make Or Spoil The Lunch Of East Africa’s Border People”, noted that in the mornings at the Kenya-Uganda border crossings, one would witness the curious phenomenon of thousands of Ugandan school kids in Kenyan schools uniforms crossing the border to study in Kenya. Equally, there are thousands of Kenyan school kids in Ugandan schools uniforms crossing to study in Uganda.The article examined why this happens. BW wrote to say the phenomenon is not just East African. That one sees it in most of Africa, and in Southern Africa it has an interesting touch:

 “ON the Swazi/South Africa border, the same scenario plays out every morning. It is mostly school kids from the Swazi Kingdom coming to study in South Africa, but there is a twist…it is not uncommon to encounter the South African Defence Forces (SADF), with their guns, helping the kids cross helping kids cross through holes in the razor wire that marks the border.

“On the other hand most motorists on the South African side of the

border cross to Swaziland to fill up their cars because prices in the kingdom are much cheaper.”

 I then replied that the thinking and calculations behind these kinds of actions sometimes makes understanding Africa very difficult for people who don’t live in similar situations, but offer wonderful insights about the continent. That got him started, and before long he was writing about corruption:

Zuma controversial ‘palace’ in the village – courtesy of South Africa’s taxpayers.

“The African politico is an interesting case study when it comes to public contracts. Last year, when there was public outcry over the high amount of tax funds being used to “repair” [South Africa] President Jacob Zuma’s palatial home in Nkandla, the minister for Public Works decided to explain why it was so.

“He blamed the high cost on private contractors. He accused them of inflating the cost, way, way above what they charge private companies and individuals. Instead of taking cover, the contractors shot back, saying that they had to do so because everybody the [ruling] African National Congress (ANC) was angling their snout for a prime position in the ‘feeding trough’. That was the end of government ‘explanation’.

“In the same vein, remember that dentist who tried to score a government tender while fixing the teeth of [former Nigeria president Olusegun] Obasanjo?

“[But back to] Zuma, given his legendary weakness for skirts, a female nurse will score a billion Rand military contract while massaging the backside of the ANC’s chief honcho”.

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AFTER an article in Daily Nation (Kenya) last week, “Kisumu, Where Some Folks Are Eating Well, While Others Are Going Hungry” (http://www.nation.co.ke/blogs/-/445642/1859926/-/51arxlz/-/index.html), I had a discussion with a worthy reader about how President Uhuru Kenyatta’s electoral victory in the March elections could be “razor thin”, given that it was by over 800,000 votes.

Kenyatta: His election suggested that Kenya might have outgrown the double digit victory margin.

 An interesting issue, because why “razor thin”, not “narrow” margin? The general idea though was that in Africa, even in democratic nations like South Africa and Botswana, presidents win elections with 70 percent of the vote. Some still get over 90 percent.

Compared to that, Kenyatta’s 50.03 percent against former premier Raila Odinga’s 43.28 percent is, well, quite thin. In the African context, then, anything less than a 10 percentage

Museveni: Stares down rivals in elections, then rolls them up.

difference can be said to be razor thin – although the 2007 Kenya election in which Mwai Kibaki got 47 percent of the vote and Raila 44 percent (a difference of 225,174 votes) perhaps fits the bill better.

Many have disputed the outcome of both the 2007 and March Kenya elections. However, assume Raila had emerged winner in 2007 and 2013, the one thing that would not have changed is the margin. His victory too would have very narrow.

Which is why the interesting thing here is the margin of victory itself, and less so the winner. Now these kinds of results reveal an important evolution in Africa.

Mahama: Won Ghana’s December election, but nearly lost his shirt.

Even when elections are fiddled, the fact that the politicians who cheat cannot steal enough votes to give them a margin of victory bigger than 10 percent itself tells us that some countries are slowly developing a “rigging ceiling”.

And in the process we are seeing the emergence of “low victory margin” countries. Three of them in particular stand out; Kenya, Ghana, Senegal. In last year’s December election, Ghana’s President John Mahama got 50.7 percent of the vote against Opposition candidate Nana Akufo-Addo’s 47.7 percent. That election too ended in court – but unlike Kenya’s, nearly six months later it is nowhere

Khama: Botswana is a democracy, but flip the coin and the other side looks like a dynasty.

near being resolved.

In Senegal, the February 26, 2012 election ended  in deadlock, with the current President Macky Sall getting 26.5 percent of the vote, and the octogenarian incumbent Abdoulaye Wade coming first with 34.8 percent.

With no candidate getting the more than 50 percent required, they went for a rematch in March.  But the tide had turned against Wade and he was now deeply wounded, as the losers united around Sall.

In the second round, Sall saw off Wade with a hefty 65.8 percent, with the latter managing only 34.2 percent. Equally significant, is that all the last two regime changes in Senegal have been decided in a second round face-off, and the winner both times has been the man who placed second in the first round.

What is different about these countries – and others like Mauritius that have been at it longer –  is that new societies seem to be struggling to emerge out of the old. Which perhaps partly explains why countries like Kenya, Ghana and Senegal are also among the more innovative nations on the continent.

Sall: Kept up an emerging Senegalese tradition of winning in the second round.

So, even when elections end up being divisive as Kenya’s and Ghana’s, they still suggest that there is greater homogenisation and democratisation going on beneath the surface. We often forget that in some parts of Africa, and Asia, people are still not free enough to vote tribally for their own. It is progress, when ethnic voting becomes a fairly low risk activity, even though they tend to lead to deeply divided electorates because they are like losing a cup final on penalties.

Consider then another democracy, Botswana. Since independence in 1966, Botswana has been ruled by one party, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), and essentially by one clan or chieftaincy, the BagammaNgwato.

In the 2009 election President Ian Khama’s BDP won 45 of 57 constituencies, and about 54 percent of the popular vote, against just over 20 percent for the Opposition Botswana National Front. Botswana is a democratic country, yes, but in a contradiction of terms you could argue it is not a free nation.

Likewise, in 2005 Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete won with a whopping 80 percent of the vote. In 2010 he was re-elected with “only” 61 percent, one of the lowest ever for a candidate of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM – or Party of Revolution). Of course, a single party too has ruled Tanzania for the 51 years since independence (from 1964 when the Zanzibar islands joined mainland Tanganyika, Tanganyika African National Union, TANU, morphed into CCM).

Kikwete: They say even if a CCM candidate tried to lose an election, he or she would still win it.

Other countries like Uganda where President Yoweri Museveni also wins with Kikwete-style margins, and Rwanda where at the last election President Paul Kagame got over 90 percent of the vote, are led by revolutionary or liberation parties that came to power through a guerrilla war. Their very military victories mean they rise to office when they are extremely dominant and its takes long, even in the best of conditions, to elbow them out of the way.  They come to elections so sure of victory (for better or worse), that in 1996 Museveni’s camp sent out invitation cards to the swearing-in ceremony before voting day! These nations, I believe, are still in transition so their election cultures can be presumed to be on a much lower on the evolution scale than Senegal’s, for instance.

So those “monolithic” margins, if we might call them that, tell us quite a lot about the countries where they happen. Among many things; that these countries are moving beyond the independence and liberation/revolutionary phases. That they have stared extreme electoral uncertainty, and dangerously cutthroat elections, in the face and lived to tell the story. You can say, then, that Botswana or Tanzania, have not been tested like Ghana or Kenya. They are some kind of democracy virgins, if you will.

-A slightly different version and shorter version of this article is being published in Daily Nation for Thursday, and has just been posted on its website: “Can Any Good Come From Stolen Or Cutthroat Competitive Elections? Yes”, (http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/-/440808/1866268/-/ji65vyz/-/index.html)

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The “dam” at start of construction at the beginning of 2011 – its six times bigger today, and still growing (Charles Obbo photo).

I OWE  you an update. In December 2011 I wrote two blogs on my baby steps on the journey to becoming a dirty-your-hands environmentalist.

In “Christmas Thoughts: One Hole Could Save  My Village – And 7 Billion Africans Too” (http://nakedchiefs.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=54&action=edit), I told of how I was fumbling with constructing a small dam in my ancestral village home, Tororo in Eastern Uganda. And “Christmas Thoughts (Part 2): Why ‘Big Breasts’ And ‘Large Buttocks’ Are Bad For Trees” (http://nakedchiefs.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=70&action=edit), I wrote of some happy and accidental lessons I learnt from pruning wild trees – instead of cutting them.

I have suffered much heartbreak, lost over $10,000 in the last three years experimenting, and come dangerously close to slipping into depression with my green project over the last three years. Trying to oversee it remotely from Nairobi added to the stress and inefficiencies. But, I kept the faith, and finally the green shoots of success, miniscule as they might be, are beginning to sprout.

(LEFT) front part of the green park in April 2011. (RIGHT) section of the same area in May 2014 (Charles Obbo)

The “dam” was very small when I first wrote about it (see picture). Today it is about six times bigger (not in picture, next time), and it will soon be about 10 times bigger. Then, hopefully, I shall find a way of banking the edges and making it a micro lake. It has been raining, so work has stopped because it’s overflowing with rainwater.

Two weeks ago I visited to check on progress. I stood over the edge and felt a wave of satisfaction rising deep in my stomach. Frogs are breeding in the water in record numbers. I don’t remember seeing so many tadpoles in a long time.

“Sir, I think a million frogs could be born here in the next few weeks”, he said.

“Possible”, I replied.

The world is mysterious in its works. I had not seen a frog around the place in years. “Where did they come?” I wondered to myself.

The chap who heads the dig team told me they had struck a water source, so it seems the dam will always be full even in dry seasons. Though he is smart, he is also a bottle-happy guy in the village, and I had never imagined I would get a lesson in ancient history from him.

However, he explained to me that it was not surprising they had struck water, “because more than one hundred years ago, this place was the centre of a pottery making industry that stretched across all of eastern Uganda”, he told me.

I was blown away, because the story I knew was that when our great grandfather settled in the area (he was a dissident in flight from his father’s village where he had been fomenting trouble), “the place was just wilderness”. There is no rewritten record I have seen anywhere that even remotely indicates that was any commercial civilisation in that part of the world.

Now that I knew, I asked them to “save all funny bones, pot scraps, and odd shaped tree branches” they find as they proceeded with the dig. I learnt recently that indeed they had come upon some bones, but it started raining heavily thereafter so they haven’t been able to continue and find out.

My manager started lowering my expectations about an important archeological find when he whispered to me that it seems the bones are from an ordinary grave from decades back. Still, I have not lost hope.

Anyhow, I was excited by the prospect of a million frogs. That is because of another experiment I having been undertaking next to the dam. I made a pilot track/path about 800 metres long (see photo of freshly dug up track in early 2011). On one side I have  been trying to grow a range of trees, many long disappeared from many parts of Uganda except, perhaps, deep in the remaining forests. However, for now I am focusing on trees in which birds like to perch.

Soon, thousands of them will be my good neighbours.

On the other side of the track I have been trying to grow shrubs and flowers that attract birds and bees.

The goal is not just to have a tree and flower park in future, but a living one teeming with birds, and butterflies. If my energies and resources remain at the level they are today, I think in three to five years, the park might be beginning to take on the look of a third-rate Garden of Eden. Then maybe in eight years…boom!

In the goodness of time, I see birds and other creatures that feed on frogs coming to the park. There are many crickets in a nearby green area, and I see that as lunch and dinner for some birds.

One reason I have lost so much money is that I took a very unscientific approach. The soil in the area is tired from early overpopulation and erosion. I would have carried samples of the soil for testing and known what might grow and what might not. But I feared that I would be discouraged, and be constrained to experiment and discover the “impossible”.

So I started with trying to use organic manure to revive the land. I have ferried there about three truck of cow dung, one of chicken droppings (thanks to that wonderful Ugandan, Aga Sekalala Snr of Ugachick in Gayaza), and about 10 trucks of  mineral-rich black soil my team digs from the edge of the Tororo Municipal Council sewerage dump, and used them in different parts. By accident, a friend told me about how fine sawdust can also be good organic manure. We have taken about 15 sacks of that too and poured it around the gardens.

When I first returned to Tororo following an absence of many weeks in early April, I went to the park, and tears welled in my eyes. After the many years of failure and setback, the flowers were just beautiful. Finally, some of the trees that can survive well in the area were beginning to rise. There was life. We try to keep as accurate a record as possible of what we have planted. In three years, we have planted nearly 20,000 tree, flower, and shrub seedlings.

Just about 1,800 of them have been successful – a 9% success rate. I have never been happier with such a small victory. And I have never been more content to lose $10,000. In time the lessons we have learnt shall be spread to wider areas, and a protective fence will be built – although I am conflicted about that, despite its necessity.

(LEFT) middle part of the green park in 2011. (RIGHT) section of the same area in May 2014. (Charles Obbo)

I guess there was a cheaper easier and cheaper way to do this, but my experience so far tells me that reclaiming ravaged lands, recreating lost environments, is far more complicated and expensive than anyone had every told me.

The little process we have recorded, has also made me worry even more deeply about Mother Earth. And if the firms that will be world leaders in the green economy (and make money from it) are the ones that will spend 100,000 times more than I have, then I think we are headed for eco monopolies too.

Oh, and I had forgotten to report something else. I have now started experimenting with all sorts of fruits in the park – the butterflies and birds are fussy feeders, you know. I hauled in a few rocks so that they, and other slippery creatures with which we share this world, may have a place to warm themselves. Stay tuned, I shall report what wins these moves have borne…in April 2014.

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The number of people earning over $1,250 a month in most African countries are few than the fans who show up to watch Manchester United play at Old Trafford.

ACCORDING to the latest Kenya Statistical Abstract, in 2012 the number of Kenyans earning more than KSh100,000 (equivalent to $1,250) a month was 50,224.

To put that in some context, Mr Kwame Owino, who heads the Institute of  Econonomic Affairs (IEA) in Nairobi, said you could fit all those Kenyans in Manchester United’s Old Trafford Stadium, and have more than 25,000 seats empty! Old Trafford has a seating capacity of 75,811.

Now what follows here are misleading comparisons, and ones a self-respecting soul should not make, but I shall just for their special effects value. China had more than 1,020,000 dollar millionaires at the last count, Japan has a few thousand more at 1.53 million, and the US weighs in top with 5.22 million – all more than 20 times our top salary earners.

Kenya is the richest economy in East Africa, so one can imagine that the comparative figures for Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi must be underwhelming. Indeed Kenya is Africa’s biggest non-mineral economy, so we could argue that the picture for the rest of Africa is even more dismal.

Nairobi might have highrises, but the salaries of most workers in those offices doesn’t soar as high.

I suspect, therefore, that if you take all of Eastern Africa, including Ethiopia, DR Congo, The Horn, and Comoros Islands, the number of people who make more than $1,250 a month would not fill the Indianapolis Motor Speedway racing stadium which has a seating capacity of 257,325 people.

One of my humbling moments was a few years ago when we paid a journalist from an African country that shall remain unnamed $250 for an article we commissioned because his nation rarely appeared in the news even on the continent. It turned out that that $250 was not just more than his monthly salary, but also that of his editor.

Yet, this is actually very good news because it shows the headroom to grow is as high as the heavens. Look at the numbers again: The number of Kenyans earning less than $125 is 17,554; those earning between $126 and $188 are 100,168; those earning between $189 and $250 are 208,747; those earning $251 to $312 are 368,697; those earning between $313 and $375 are 439,628; those getting $376 to $625 are 500,335; and the number earning $626 and $1,250 is 442,359.

This data is derived primarily from tax records, and considering that many small to medium business owners dodge tax and we have the vast informal sector that is not captured, the total number of earners in these categories is much higher.

Anyhow, as Kwame noted, it is not a difficult job to double the number of wage earners across the board. If that happens Kenyan farms and industries will not be able to produce enough to meet their demand for food and goods. And if they did, the country would become quite rich.

I read somewhere once that if incomes doubled in Africa, the continent would single-handedly lift the world out of its current economic malaise. Most African homes, for example, don’t have refrigerators. Now imagine a boom that leads to 10 million of them ordering refrigerators—the world would probably have to stop and make fridges for Africa only.

What this says is that the most selfish thing exporting countries in Asia, Europe and North America can do is to invest in Africa and spur growth—so we can buy from them in record numbers.

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By Michael Fairbanks and Stace Lindsday

IN PERU we once gave a presentation to several hundred business and government leaders in a grand hall, darkened except for the raised stage on which we were speaking.  After glumly reporting to the audience on the difficult state of the Peruvian economy, we told the business people they had two choices going forward.

Some things seems not to change in Colombia.

The first choice was to wake up the next morning and take to breakfast whichever minister in the government showed  an interest in their industry, “You know the minister,” we said. “On weekends you give a friendly nod to him across the tennis court at the club or on the golf course.  You can take the minister to breakfast and ask him for a favour. That’s one choice.”

“But there’s another choice,” we said.  And we asked if someone in the audience could articulate it.  From the back of the room a voice shouted, “We can take the minister to lunch”- and the audience laughed in a sublime moment of self-recognition.

Dependence on others, whether it be foreign aid or a benevolent government official, is hard to shake.  More difficult is learning how to compete effectively in an open economy, especially for those whose economies have long been sheltered from the forces of competition.  As consultants, we have been hard at work in the emerging markets of Peru and Colombia, trying to move executives, farmers, and campesinos away from their old mindset of paternalism and protectionism to a new mind-set that includes competition and customer focus.  Progress has been slow.

Take the case of the Colombian leather industry, which was being beaten badly by the Italians and multiple other players.  We were hired to find out why.  Our first visit was to New York City purchasing managers to find out what they thought of handbags from Colombia.  They told us that the quality of the leather was poor.

We returned to Colombia to inform the leather manufacturers that their principal problem was one of quality.  They told us that they agreed but that there was little they could do about it.  “No es nuestra culpa – its not our fault,” they said.  “Es la culpa de los curtiembres – it’s the tanneries’ fault.” They are the source of substandard hides.

Without delay we visited the tanneries.  When we told them about the quality problems in hides leaving their tanneries, they readily agreed with us and added; “But you must understand, no es nuestra culpa.” We do a remarkably good job of curing and tanning the hides – but you should see the state of the hides whey they come to us.  It’s the slaughterhouses’ fault.

By this point in our story, you might imagine the response we got when we visited the slaughterhouses.  “No es nuestra culpa, es laculpa del ranchero” – it’s the ranchers’ fault.  The countryside is full of thieves, so the ranchers must brand the cow 100 times before they are content it will not be stolen.  Imagine what that does to the hide.

By now perplexed, we visited some campos, or ranchers, in the countryside.  They claimed they were not to blame.  The cows constantly rub themselves against the barbed wire, damaging their hides and making it difficult to create a quality product.  “No es nuestra culpa,” they said.  “Es la culpa de la vaca.”  It’s the cow’s fault.

“Stupid” cows like these were blamed for damaging their hides, and making their leather uncompetitive!

So we had come full circle.  The problem with the Colombian leather bags was that Colombian cows were stupid.

Indeed, in the short run, it can seem easier to blame the cow than to accept responsibility for improving the performance of the entire industry.  Sometimes the cow is the supplier, sometimes it is the government, and sometimes it is a foreign government, but there is always a cow to blame.  Other  times there is no one to blame – it is simply the force of inertia that impedes change.

Consider, for example that the only two airlines that fly daily between Lima and Arequipa offer a limited choice of flight times.  The Lima business person needing to get to Arequipa for the day has two equally unattractive choices: fly AeroPeru at 6 a.m. or its rival Faucett at 10 a.m  Leaving at 10 means losing the whole morning, while for most Lima residents leaving at 6 means getting out of bed at 4 a.m. to make the long drive.  When we asked the people at the airline ticket counter why the hours were set that way, they responded: “Asi ha sido siempre. That’s the way it has always been….”

And that, or course, is how it will always be, until the message of change, the slow and grinding assault on the old ways of doing business , gives way to a new world – one in which lunch with the minister is no longer a valid business strategy, you can’t blame the cows, and customer is always right.

- From Across The Board, January 1998

 *I read this wonderful article 15 years ago immediately after it was published. It is as fresh in my mind as it was then, and  is one of the clippings I have kept longest.

A view of part of Naalya: This was bush a few years ago -the bricks have swallowed up revolutionary zeal (Charles Obbo photo)

THIS is a FOUR-part story about the Arab Spring that toppled dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in early 2011, and if/when/how it will arrive in the rest of Africa.

I found I could not begin to get my head around that question until I understood the role bricks, mortar, yams and cellphones are playing in shaping revolution and the advance – and often regression – of democracy in this fast-changing Africa.

So let’s begin with now Nairobi, which I used to visit as a young man many years ago. It was a hip city. But when I finally came from Kampala to live here in 2003 and started travelling around, I was shocked by how  errr… backward, the place had become. I was used to seeing cities go to seed because of war. Nairobi was the first one that went to rot through incompetent rule—by an “elected” government of former president Daniel arap Moi.

The mall at Naalya: Where the money goes, malls follow (Charles Obbo photo).

We used to travel from Kampala to Nairobi for business meetings almost every other week between 2000 and 2002, and most times stayed at The (Sarova) Stanley so we could just walk across to Nation Centre. I was struck by how gloomy the people were. And it was normal to see potholes and rubbish on the streets nearby.

Shortly after I relocated to Nairobi I used to drive home late, and there wasn’t a single streetlight working. It is a sign of how much things have changed that today I can do that same drive home at night without my car lights on if I chose to, and I will not run into a pothole.

The difference between Nairobi that evolved over the last 10 years, and the one of late 2003 is like day and night. There are very few things I can recognise in the suburb where I first lived. The roads, the endless lines of new apartments, malls, and high-rise office blocks are mostly a product of the president Mwai Kibaki years (2003-March 2013).

It is the same with many other African cities. Kigali, for example, was a corpse-strewn city in 1994 after the genocide following which Paul

Kigali City Tower: Seeing the streets strewn with bodies in 1994, it was impossible to imagine this is what would stand there today.

Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front (RPA/F) came to power. Today, the city is probably 10 times bigger and something beyond the wildest dreams of even the most insanely optimistic Rwandan in 1994.

The RPF old hands in Kigali have a joke that captures the situation in Kigali then. The story goes that a battalion of RPA rebels was sent out to go and secure the centre of Kigali.

After a while, they called the rebel command base to say they were probably lost, because they couldn’t find the  city centre.

“What do you mean you can’t find the city centre, did you get your coordinates right?”, command centre shouted at them.

“Sir, we are exactly where the coordinates say we should be”, the battalion commander said.

“Ok, read them back to me”, the guy at command centre said.

And so they did.

“Well, then you are in the city centre”, they were told.

Indeed they were. The problem was that soldiers were expecting imposing buildings and wide streets, not a little worn-out township.

Likewise in the north of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, 20 years ago there used to be a big farm owned by a friend. I would go to visit him on weekends, and we would walk around it for nearly all the morning; touring his sugarcane, then the banana fields, his dairy farm, and gaze at the wild expanses he had not yet tamed because he hadn’t figured out what to do with it.

His farm and the bush are no longer there. They are now part of the Naalya suburb, a vast and swanky middle class neighbourhood with its own malls. It is one of the many new neighbourhoods that have sprung around Kampala with the rise of the middle class.

The extensive outlay of cement, bricks, and tiles explain why a general-cum-half-civilian like President Yoweri Museveni, who in the last 15 years of his rule has presided over an incompetent and corrupt-to-the-core regime, has been able to rule Uganda for 27 years – three years longer all the past eight Big Men who have run the place combined.

There will be Twitter and Facebook insurgents in countries like Uganda, for sure. They will shake things up a little, yes, but they won’t cause the departure of their strongmen or their ruling parties.

The Arab Spring activists ran the Big Men out of town, but they failed in taking power and installing presidents from among their ranks in office. The armies, which had propped up Ben Ali and Mubarak, remain largely intact and, in fact, emerged as heroes. And when elections were held, some obnoxious parties and men, in Egypt for example, won—despite the best efforts of the Twitter rebels to stop them. So what happened?

I think bricks and mortar have done a couple of things. First, they have politically paralysed the new class of African middle class house owners. They want more, but cannot risk losing what they have.

The Maasai straddle the 21st and 20th centuries effortless—a classic case of African duality.

And the more that they want is not radical. They want the lights and streets in their neighourhoods fixed so they are safer and the value of their properties rise. They need the by-passes built to ease traffic congestion and the time it takes them to get to the airports to catch their flights. Corruption is a problem for them, but mostly because if the taxes they pay are stolen, then the potholes will not be repaired. Most of what they want can be fixed with a tweak. They cannot see how a system overhaul, sweeping away the whole political order, will make much of a difference. The compelling reason for them to embrace revolution is gone…except for the youth.

But that is the least of the complications. From that point, things get complicated. From Alexandria to Cape Town, there is something else that happens to us Africans. No matter how far up in the middle class and modern world we move, we always keep one foot in the old world of superstition, tradition, reactionary religion, clan, ethnic community, name it. We hold a smartphone in one hand and a roast yam in the other. The coldly rational, scientific Africans with highly developed democratic sensibilities who have grown out of the progress of the last 20 years are still only a handful (Archbishop and Nobel Peace prize laureate Desmond Tutu is among the very few who had a premature democratic mutation).

In one of the next three articles (http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/06/12/africa-revolution-series-part-2-tribe-religion-and-the-petty-middle-class-dictator/) later in the week we look at WHY we Africans progress in our own peculiar ways.

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Tanzania president Kikwete (L) and South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma shake a leg: It is as much about the dance as it is about the dancer (From wodumedia.com) .

IT IS TIME again for Letter From A Friend. Good Mr EM read the article in The East African “Why Dar Is Hot, And The Rest Of Us Are Not” (http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Why-Dar-is-hot–and-the-rest-of-us-are-not-/-/434750/1875642/-/jc2xrtz/-/index.html), and was particularly tickled by the reference to Tanzania “right now is that girl on the dance floor that every boy wants to dance with.”

EM knows a thing or two not just about Tanzanian politics, but dancing as well. He wrote:

“It is true that things appear to be going so well for Tanzania as far as diplomacy is concerned.

As to whether we are reclaiming our status in regional and continental diplomacy, is debatable though.
Back then (the 1970s and early 1980s), in the heyday of liberation struggles we did set the tone of the agenda in some of the key political events in Africa, but that is no longer the case. We are merely pawns in the larger scheme of things.

“Our levels of patriotism back then were higher. Also these visits from all sorts of powerful world leaders to Tanzania, apart from the reasons highlighted in your piece, must be seen as returning the courtesy of our “globe trotting” president [Jakaya Kikwete].

“The man is rarely in the country. And when he is around, he is busy crisscrossing this vast land.

“The benefits of the president’s economic diplomacy have been hugely mismanaged. We have seen  shoddy economic deals which amount to selling out the country in pieces. In the words of a distinguished legal scholar in Tanzania, it has been a “tool for economic accumulation (by the powerful) and dispossession”, especially of the majority poor.

“So, true we might be “that girl” on the dance floor whom every boy wants to dance, but that is no guarantee we won’t or can’t pick a guy who’ll end up stepping on our toes!”

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Things are a changing in Africa: Even Angola’s president dos Santos finally held elections. (The Guardian)

BY NOW we have all heard enough stories about “Africa Rising”, and how more and more Africans are growing rich and being pulled out of poverty, although the number of very poor is still sinfully too high.

And in “AFRICA REVOLUTION SERIES part 1: What Bricks, Mortar, Yams And Cellphones Have To Do With It”, (http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/06/10/africa-revolution-series-part-1-what-bricks-mortar-yams-and-cellphones-have-to-do-with-it/) we noted a contradiction:  That while the economies of many African countries are improving, and the middle class is surely beginning to expand as evidenced by, among other things, the new suburbs with their fancy bungalows and apartments that are mushrooming everywhere, its politics is lagging behind.

There have been some cosmetic changes, for sure. There are, for instance, hardly any military dictators who eat their opponents’ livers (except perhaps Equatorial Guinea’s ruthless Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo), but critics are still exiled or imprisoned in most of Africa. The “good” thing is that these days they at least get a sham trial.

All Africa’s leaders, including finally Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, hold elections. But in nearly all them, the ruling parties are very entrenched and rig the vote, making it impossible for the Opposition to progress electorally. There are exceptions like Zambia, Ghana, and Senegal, but they are notable for how few they are.

Uganda’s former VP Dr Gilbert Bukenya: He got the job not because he is clever, but because he is Catholic – like VP Speciosa Kazibwe before him, and Edward Sekandi after him.

While there has been economic progress, in a majority of the countries (a handful like Rwanda and Mauritius being the rare odd men out), most of the fruit of this prosperity is stolen by politicians and state officials, and the rest squirreled away by the elite. The poor only hear of this economic growth on FM radios.

And this rising middle class has not changed the texture of societies much, or shifted the political debate. Instead, in many countries the quality of public discourse has declined shamefully. While the mobile phone has sparked an information revolution in Africa, it is common during elections to have Oxford educated Africans sitting in their fancy BMWs, sending out awful text messages insulting people from the ethnic group of the candidates they oppose in a manner that even the most rabid racist European colonialist could not have done with the “natives”.

It is also quite common in Africa for a smart chap who studied at Harvard University, got a job as an intern in a US Congressman’s office, and went around America calling for sanctions against Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, to return home and soon as he is appointed Information minister, starts railing against the press and closing newspapers. And when he is not doing that, he is stealing a quarter of his ministry’s budget.  When he decides to run in the next election, he will visit the witchdoctor to help  him win a constituency seat.

So why isn’t the African middle class, including those in the Diaspora returning from countries with long traditions of democracy, not anywhere

The witchdoctor is the one medium where Africans high and low cross on equal terms – but there is more to than just juju (Photo Ahoy Hanoi).

close to creating liberal democracies and economic systems that support the weak, and are instead caught up in this traditional-modern duality?

For starters, it is a chicken and egg situation. Because clan, religion, region, ethnicity, and blood relations are still the basis on which public office and “development” are distributed in several African countries, the political and economic spaces are not impersonal and meritocratic enough for most people to get ahead purely on the basis of their talent alone. So they keep one leg in the ethnic or religious fold, because it offers greater certainty and protection. An example from Uganda will illustrate this well. Because it is a country where religion most times plays a greater role in distributing patronage than ethnicity, the custom started by Milton Obote after independence is that a Protestant president must have a Catholic vice president.

The military rule of Idi Amin between January 1971 and April 1979 was the only time Uganda didn’t have an executive Prime Minister or President who was not Protestant. Amin was Muslim, as was his long-time Deputy President, the illiterate Idris Mustafa. This despite the fact that Catholics form the majority in Uganda.

There are complex reasons why that are the case, but for now the more relevant fact  is that President Yoweri Museveni, a Protestant, has kept up this tradition. Thus in Uganda today, you are surer to become vice president if you are a candidate of the Catholic Establishment, than if you are technically the best man or woman for the job. As a result, if you are an extremely talented Catholic, have vice-presidential ambitions, would make the best VP Uganda has ever had, but you also are a pragmatist, you won’t get the job by marketing your talents.  No, you sell your standing in the Uganda Catholic community. In other countries it is your ethnicity.

Yet what this proves is actually the opposite from what it seems—it tells us that there is cold method to what appears like Africa’s madness. Nevertheless, the result is that because the elite make these kinds of calculations, the public and state sectors remain largely unreconstructed and unenlightened. Thus the expansion of women’s rights, for example, suffers because as women they are divisible – into Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal women. On other hand Protestants are Protestants, be they men, women, or children. This has a profound effect of advancing new generation rights.

Strange as it might seem, Obama most certainly addressed more political rallies in the last election campaigns than any Africa ever has to do (Photo Xinhua)

That is not all. There is more that hampers middle class Africans from playing the role that the middle classes did in the democratisation of Europe and parts of Asia.

Because several of the sources of growth in Africa today are external – aid, grants, foreign investment, and trade – the main beneficiaries are the elite and urban groups who are best placed to capture it. Consequently, in most of Africa, the middle class is growing in circumstances where most countries still have the majority of their populations mired in poverty.

In this environment an African who has a little money, a nice house, and a second-hand Japanese car has the kind of power that his American counterpart cannot even begin to comprehend. First, he immediately becomes king of his clan, because most of them are poor. When he goes to the village, they basically vote the way he tells them to. If his siblings and cousins are poorer than him, he will dictate to them whom to marry, on which dates their dead should be buried (otherwise he won’t buy the coffin), and so on.

Much of this  will change in coming years, but for now most middle class Africans are likely to be petty tyrants themselves, than champions of free and more open societies. They become just another subset of the central dictatorship.

This has a particularly perverse effect on democracy. During elections, the African Big Man does not need to address as many rallies as US President Barack Obama and his rival Mitt Romney did last year. All he has to do is pay the middle class chaps who have sway over their clans, and he will have most of their clans’ votes in the bag. It explains why during election periods in Africa over the last 15 years, we have witnessed the rise of a  new phenomenon – “professional groups” from different regions of a country who support one candidate or the other.  Therefore rather than being a counterweight to political society, Africa’s middle classes are mostly adjunct to it.

In the next two articles we look at how external factors are shaping the character of African democracy: The different ways China and USA play into it; how the fight against international terrorism, new technologies, and youth politics, are leaving their imprints on how the continent is being governed, and will be governed, in the years to come.

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AHEAD OF THE SUMMIT  of eight of the world’s eleven wealthiest countries, the Group of Eight (G8), which started in Northern Ireland today, Oxfam released a statement urging the Powerful Men to take action to reduce the suffering of the world’s poor.

President Obama and wife Michelle arrive for the G8 Summit: Not everyone is smiling (BBC photo).

The facts Oxfam highlighted are alarming, but they also have far-reaching implications for developing countries, especially in Africa, if you look to how they might play out in the next five to 15 years.

 •During the two days of the G8 Summit, $2.2Bn in illicit flows have been siphoned from developing countries into tax havens. These illicit flows are estimated to have reached $892Bn in 2012.

 •Land one and a half times the size of Manhattan (which is covers an area of 8,750 hectares) will be sold off to foreign investors.  Between 2000 and 2013, concluded land deals by foreign investors (for all purposes) covered a land area of 33 million hectares, or 13,900 hectares every two days. This is equivalent to 1.6 times the area of Manhattan being acquired every two days.

 •The $2.2 billion flowing illicitly into tax havens over these two days could pay the entire education budgets of Kenya and Tanzania, or help 2.5 million farmers in Indonesia provide food for themselves and their families.

•Of the estimated $18.5 trillion now hidden by wealthy individuals in tax havens, 40 percent is in those under the G8’s jurisdiction. This means the G8 is also responsible for 40 percent of the revenue ordinary people around the world are losing as a result – $66 billion in tax revenue is being lost right under the noses of the G8 countries in their tax havens.

Oxfam Ireland’s Executive Director Jim Clarken said:  “In a world of austerity, and where inequality is getting worse and 1.2 billion people remain

British police prepare to deal with the inevitable ahead of the G8 Summit – protest by the masses. That sums it up quite well (Belfast Telegraph photo).

living in extreme poverty the G8 must take action to readdress the balance and ensure that everyone has enough to eat.”

If the hungry people were the only nightmare we had to contend with, then it is a problem that could be overcome – in the goodness of time.

Unfortunately, it is not. As the world’s population grows and climate change takes its toll, land for agriculture is becoming ever more scarce and precious. I take a pragmatic and liberal view of world resources. The big and powerful countries are not going to let their people starve, if there is land than can be used to grow food for them in developing countries. That, generally, is an honourable instinct.

Many arable-land-rich developing countries, especially in Africa, are ruled by corrupt incompetent leaders, and don’t have the technology to farm on a large scale and export food to world markets. If they don’t get their act together, I fully expect that in future they shall be invaded by powerful nations that will seize their lands and grow food on them. I wouldn’t approve of  such “food colonialism”, but would understand why rich powerful nations would do it.

Sadly, precisely because of this growing land market, tin pot dictators might have even less incentive to modernise agriculture because if they did, that would mean more land and water being used by citizens, and less left for them to flog. It is more lucrative for them to keep agriculture backward, so that they can sell or lease land corruptly to foreign investors and pocket millions of dollars. And because they don’t want to be held to account, I see some even clawing back political reforms.

The beauty for these land-for-food deals is that after a while they allow foreign nations and countries to operate totally independent of the “natives”. Take a foreign bank and a Wal-Mart, for example. They need the local people to bank with them or buy from the supermarket. The supermarket would benefit from good roads to ship products to its stores, and would make more profit in countries where there is cheap and stable supply of electricity. A local bank or a Wal-Mart, therefore, has some vested interest in local prosperity.

The story is different if you are a company growing food for export to your food-deficit homeland. You can set up in a vast remote corner of a country, and once you have got your irrigation system and diesel generators to the farm, all you need is a local airfield from which to airlift the produce to Doha or Kuala Lumpur or wherever. Once you have your airfield, you are better off having as little contact with nosy nationals as possible – except perhaps the workers (but you can import those too if you a Chinese firm). All these things you can get by greasing the palms of the president, ministers, and police and military chiefs.

Until now, the price citizens of a corrupt or failed African state was suffering; hunger, imprisonment, disease, and violence. When foreign land deals become a life or death matter, some of them will pay an even higher price – lose their countries.

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Over half of South Africa’s youth are unemployed; though they are not about to turn on the ruling ANC with all their rage.

IN  “AFRICA REVOLUTION SERIES part 2: Tribe, Religion, And The Petty Middle Class”, (http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/06/12/africa-revolution-series-part-2-tribe-religion-and-the-petty-middle-class-dictator/), we held that the African middle class will not be the source of any revolutionary (or better still radical) change of politics on the continent in the near future.

That leaves two possible sources where a new enlightened politics and a moral order that ends corruption, might come from – technology, and the youth.

Indeed the young people and technology seemed to have come together wonderfully in the Arab Spring. But as we noted in “AFRICAN REVOLUTION SERIES part 1: What Bricks, Mortar, Yams And Cellphones Have To Do With It”, (http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/06/10/africa-revolution-series-part-1-what-bricks-mortar-yams-and-cellphones-have-to-do-with-it/), in Egypt and Tunisia there was a regime, not a system, change.

The armies in both countries, which had been the most important source of power for both Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, remained in place. Actually they did much better – they were portrayed as heroes by the protestors, because they stood back.

Now an overwhelming number of young Africans, like their counterparts in many parts of the

East Africa’s young people dream mostly of riches, not leadership (Consumer Insight).

world, are jobless. In many countries youth unemployment is over 50%! According to the Africa Economic Outlook, “Of Africa’s unemployed, 60% are young people and youth unemployment rates are double those of adult unemployment in most African countries”. (http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/en/in-depth/youth_employment/).

That high level of economic alienation of the youth has not properly translated to demands for broader reforms, because young people tend to be mostly programmatic, not structural, in their demands. They tend to focus mainly, and perhaps rightly, on jobs, opportunities and social freedoms.

This allows governments to make programmatic responses, which often are enough to disarm activism. There were quite a few of these bribes, some predating the Arab Spring.

•In Kenya after the 2008, government established “Kazi za Vijana” (Jobs For Youth) and poured in millions of dollars.

•In March 2011, the Morocco government announced a $64M youth innovation fund.

•In April 2011, the Tunisia government started paying unemployment benefits under the “Amal’” programme ($144 a month).

•In June 2011, the interim Tunisia government announced a youth enterprise fund worth billions of dollars in the long-term.

•In Uganda, after the ‘Walk-to-Work’ protests, the government announced a “Job Stimulus Programme” for the youth.

•In Mauritania, the government set up a fund to sponsor profit-making initiatives by young people in sport, culture, and leisure.

•In Angola the regime ramped up its Youth Programme after years of lip service.

•In South Africa, President Jacob Zuma announced a Rand 9Bn ($1.3Bn) kitty for job creation for youth.

Teams like Manchester United are many Africans’ new “tribes” and players like Van Persie the new chiefs.

Then there is something more complex. Today’s young people are coming to the job market in a period of plenty, and lots of glitz everywhere. Part of their needs are shaped by “envy” – they would like to have the nice smartphone, drive a flashy car, or hang out with the pretty girls – or boys – like their peers. A Kenyan firm Consumer Insight does an annual East African youth study it calls Holla. Its 2011 study was particularly striking, coming as it did in the wake of the Arab Spring, and suggested where the hearts of many African youth might actually be.

In one question, youth from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda were asked; “What are your dreams and aspirations in life?” They had to choose between (1) To be rich (2) To be a professional (3) To have a family (4) To be famous (5) To be a leader. In all the countries and across all age groups, to be rich became number one. And, according to Consumer Insight’s Managing Director Ndirangu wa Maina, many of the young people saw becoming a professional and being famous as leading to one place – riches. Except in two cases, being a leader was last in all other instances.

One could argue that the sample for the study was always going to be limited, and that technology and social media are able to aggregate a more diverse audience of both young people and adults.

However, like most elections in Africa have shown in recent years, social media, blogs,

A lot of emotion is invested in following people like Beyonce on social media – at least that is fairly harmless.

text message “retribalise” many people, and can be deadly vehicles for juicing up hate speech and some of the most extreme sectarian mobilisation against opposing groups and their candidates during elections. True, peace groups and crowdsourcing crisis platforms like Ushahidi also leverage technology for more noble purposes. However, usually they are undertakers, picking up the bodies after the hate squads are done, and helping mend broken hearts long after dreams have been shattered.

Fortunately, there are new less deadly “tribes” that technology has spawned. Thousands of Africans are following English Premier League teams on Twitter and Facebook and they are cyber-stalking their favourite musicians, and famous personalities. This is benign. Not one gets killed. However, a million African fans on Beyonce’s Facebook page will still not add to a single vote for a reformist at home. Nor will a similar digital adulation of Manchester United’s Van Persie.

That said, as we shall report in the fourth and final part of these series, it is the surprising ways in which things like international terrorism; the role of countries like Uganda in Somalia peacekeeping; the global financial crisis; and China’s rise as a power that does not wield a big stick; have combined to shift the balance of power in favour of the African state, and away from the reformists, that shall have the most lasting effect on the continent’s democratic landscape.

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