Mandela: Few have towered as high as he did.

WELL-wishers continue to gather, pray, and sing outside the hospital in Pretoria where former President Nelson Mandela remains in critical condition. And the journalists, whom Mandela’s family has called “vultures”, also continue to do the Mandela deathwatch outside.

The world, meanwhile, holds it breath and waits. At 94, and in ill-health the last 10 years, only the most starry-eyed would think that Mandela has not had enough time on Mother Earth—the only wrinkle here being that 27 of them were spent in detention.

This week, it dawned on me that South Africa, Africa, and the world could be more terrified of Mandela’s death than he himself ever was. So why don’t most people want to let Mandela go?

There are some like me, who still want to find answers. For example, in a continent where 90 percent of the leaders try (and most times succeed) to change constitutions so that they can be presidents-for-life, how come Mandela gave it all up after the first term? He was still adored, and could have won a second term without getting out of his bed to campaign for it.

Or why, after Boer racists detained him for 27 years, did he not seek revenge but put out an olive branch instead when he became president? As president, Mandela did not have a single white man, woman, or child, shot. Jeez, I know African presidents who cook and eat opponents’ liver and testicles for less. That is why that Clintwood Eastwood film Invictus, in which Morgan Freeman plays Mandela, messed with my head.

I have written elsewhere that the most plausible reason for this is that Mandela is actually an alien from an outer planet.

The man had his faults, including his inability to hold down a marriage (although clearly in his marriage to Winnie Mandela he was the wronged man). However, that also proved something I have always suspected. That too much love for family often undermines the cold rationality and ruthlessness needed to succeed in the modern world (which is why I don’t seek or expect greatness, because I can’t give up loving my children).

But enough of what we see in and want of Mandela. The unasked question is will Mandela miss us, or this world? Is he really sad to be departing?

I suspect that deep inside, Mandela is not terribly proud of South Africa, and the world as a whole, today. I was in South Africa for a week during the 2010 World Cup, and it was amazing how much the place had been built, rebuilt, scrubbed, and re-imagined for the World Cup. In one of the most innovative urban remakes, many declining and crime-infested parts of Johannesburg were brought back from the dead and are still full of life three years later.

However, the World Cup is really the only thing South Africa has done well in a long time. My suspicion was that World Cup was in some ways South Africa’s attempt to find something greater than Mandela, its best asset.  A story that could be told without referring to Mandela. However, though it was a great tournament, its legacy is mixed.

Today’s South Africa is a xenophobic country. There was that frenzy of  xenophobic killings of African immigrants in 2008. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) shamefully prevaricated in condemning and putting a halt to it quickly. True, many South Africans rallied against it, but they were clearly in the minority.

Mozambican man Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, burns during the 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa: It became the defining image of that shameful affair.

In recent months, the attacks have returned, mostly singling Somalis. The anger of the ordinary South Africans is understandable, but their violence is not excusable. They feel their country is being overrun by hordes from the rest of Africa. However, they wouldn’t be as angry if they had done well from freedom. Instead a corrupt ANC and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) fat cats have stolen their dreams.

There is enough wealth in South Africa, Africa’s richest nation (though not for much longer) to go round, to fix roads, improve its third-rate education system, reduce the misery in its bleak slums, and pay workers a better wage. But the fat cats have squirreled away most of it. And when the workers protest, as the miners did in Marikana last year, Police slaughters them.

The influx of immigrants into South Africans, means that businesses can get by with paying lower wages to these foreigners, because they have fled from countries where they were starving and are grateful for two dollars a day. The old Marxist would say that this in turn weakens the bargain power of the South African workers. On a bigger scale, it also undercuts their democratic bargaining power. This is complicated by the fact that because of apartheid history, most South Africans are trapped into voting for an increasingly incompetent ANC because the next best alternative is, well, a “white” party!

But this generation of South Africans, should be able to rise beyond their anger and not burn other Africans to death. Most of these immigrants come from countries that gave South Africans sanctuary in the terrible years of apartheid. They housed, fed, educated, and shielded them. These nations paid dearly through regular bombings by the apartheid airforce because of their support for South African liberation.

True, Somalia was a bit too far away to help much, but South Africans should still be able understand why people flee their countries, and why being nice to them is good business and politics for the future. No, it is not yet time for South Africa to forget.

After all, it is the land of Steve Biko, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Joe Slovo, Helen Suzman, Oliver Tambo. Today it should not be shooting workers, or lynching African immigrants.

The world too has changed only a little since Mandela left office: The Jews and Palestinians are still feuding. America went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and things got really messy. The terrorists have multiplied. There is still suffering in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is war in Syria. The Chinese still cannot vote freely.

I think Mandela has had enough of it all. The great man just wants to go away. We should set him free.

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Mali military junta leader Capt. Amadou Aya Sanogo: He doesn’t look like a friendly or nice man, but in a sign of the times, even he had to appoint a civilian prime minister to keep up appearances.

IN “AFRICA REVOLUTION SERIES part 3: To Love Beyoncé And Manchester United, Is To Walk Away From The Barricades”, (http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/06/18/africa-revolution-series-part-3-to-love-beyonce-and-manchester-united-is-to-walk-away-from-the-barricades/), we made the case that after the 2011 Arab Spring, most governments in Africa rushed to bribe the continent’s restless young ones with new youth and enterprise programmes.

The soporific effects of these bribes, we reported, shouldn’t be underestimated because youth revolts in Africa are programmatic – limited to jobs, and opportunities. Also, that while social media has been important in mobilising activism, it is also counter-revolutionary in the way in builds new loyalties. Young people in need of a hero can follow hip hopper Kanye West or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. There are new tribes too; like Manchester United football club. None of these paths lead to the trenches or regime change.

This doesn’t mean there will be no change, no expansion of democracy, or agitation. They will be there, but will be mostly incrementalist. Also, they will take forms we have not seen before. But the old way, and even the Arab Spring mutation, will be far from the norm.

For example, the classic military coup, where a young Flight Lieutenant like Jerry Rawlings and his buddies in Ghana seize power, shoot the old generals, suspend the constitution and rule without Parliament, can only be an isolated event in Africa today.

Free primary education programmes, with all their problems, have still changed the outlook for the continent.

That is because over the last 10 to 20 years, thanks in part to western donor money, many African countries have introduced programmes like free universal primary education (UPE). Millions of African children, especially girls, who would never have learnt to read or write, have gone to school.

Now that the people have got used to those mercies, the cost of withdrawing such programmes would be too high even for the most hardened military dictator in Africa. And then, ARVs have saved hundreds of thousands of Africans from certain death from HIV/AIDS.  To keep these things going, donor and World Bank money is still necessary. And the best way to keep the cash flowing is to maintain a semblance of civilian rule. Thus in all the recent military coups in Africa, unlike in by gone years, the juntas have been careful to appoint a (powerless) civilian prime minister – the appearances matter. Ask Mali’s junta leader Captain Amadou Aya Sanogo.

This free education, though, has been a disaster in many countries. The products are sub-standard, and one of the unintended consequences is the largest explosion of private education in Africa ever. Parents, desperate to give their children a chance in a highly competitive world, are digging deeper to take them to private primary and secondary schools and, lately, universities.

In Uganda, for example, at one point the top 10 best-performing schools in the primary school leaving examinations were all private. The sharp rise in students created by the combination of UPE and the boom in private education, has in turn led to the mushrooming of private universities. I checked, and 25 years ago, state-owned universities were the majority in all African countries except South Africa. Today, when I stopped counting, in more than 55 percent of Africa, private universities outnumbered state ones.

If you paid for your primary school, secondary school, high school, and university from your parents’ money and college loan, your priority upon graduating is finding a job – or starting a business – so you can pay back. Staging demonstrations outside the American embassy and burning the Star-Spangled Banner moves low down on your list of priorities. Declining state-funded education, and the meteoritic rise of private schooling, could almost totally deradicalise Africa’s youth in the next 10 years.

The other thing is that while on the outside several African governments look corrupt and clueless, some game-changing institutional changes have happened, although they are not immediately noticeable. And, paradoxically, it is TERRORISM that did it.

The 9/11 terrorists, in the end, led to reforms that stabilised many African regimes.

Until the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C. area,  there were still quite a few African airports that didn’t have scanners. And there was none taking passengers’ biometric data. The only computers were at the airline check-in desks. Immigration was still very old school; the officer’s eye.

I suspect that none of the Immigration officers owned a personal computer. Today, they have all retrained, are computer literate, and take biometrics. Terrorism forced many such process, technology, and security sector reforms that strengthened otherwise rickety African state structures and better enabled them to hold on to power. A lot of these reform pressures came from or were paid for by the US, and without Al Qaeda, America would never have bothered. Africa’s powermen owe American hawks and Al Qaeda terrorists, a lot of gratitude.

Secondly, because the US and its western allies were militarily overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and chasing down terrorists all over the world, a new political market opened up. What do you in places like Somalia where Al Qaeda was regrouping under the Al Shabaab banner? Sub-contract. And so countries like Uganda entered Somalia to kick out the terrorists and try and restore order, because NATO was happily picking up the tab. Now the military could make money without stealing it from the Treasury.

In a poor country like Burundi, an assignment with its contingent in the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, AMISOM, is a much sought after ticket. The allowances the soldiers are paid place them immediately in the Burundi middle class. Many new houses in Burundi today are being built by the country’s officers in AMISOM. The fact that the military could be fed without stealing from the mouths of the poor, changed the political dynamics and risks for governments engaged in peacemaking.

Next, given that US President Barack Obama is travelling in Africa this week, it is the appropriate time to reflect on the role external forces play in political change in Africa. And it starts with how Africa got its independence in the 1960s.

World War II and America had a lot to do with it. Europe was poor, sclerotic, and finally exhausted by World War I and World War II. As Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni argued in respect of Mozambique, the black Africans called to serve in the British forces killed Europeans (Germans, Italians etc.), and with that they lost their fear of the “white man”.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama: In Africa, the contrasting approaches of China and the USA will have a significant impact on how the continent’s political institutions evolve.

When the dust settled, America had emerged as a superpower, and wanted a leveling of the imperialism market so that it could get a piece of the action that the European powers had monopolised. Europe could not say no to America, which had saved it from Fascism. The US was both a generous and vicious power. It dangled the carrot, and wielded the stick.

The coups in Latin America and Africa with America’s name on them can fill many books. It supplied weapons, subversive CIA operatives, name it, to the sides it supported. In short, to get the world to see things your way and play along, you can’t be nice all the time. You also have to be a thug who occasionally breaks legs. It’s just the nature of the beast.

Well, something that challenges that has happened over the last 30 years. China has emerged as the world’s second largest economy, and Africa’s darling. Partly because of its own history of being dominated by foreigners, and also since it is not a multiparty democracy, China is reluctant to bring the American and European model to its relations with Africa. It won’t meddle. It’s happy to turn a blind eye if an African president is murdering his people, as long as he shows up the next day to sign an oil contract with Beijing. In short China is a status quo power.

The Financial crisis then played its devious hand in this equation too. Among the lessons learnt from the financial crisis, and which have populist appeal with voters, is that stricter regulation of banks and businesses is necessary.

However, if these re-regulatory reforms were pushed hard in Africa, all the reforms that reduced governments’ role in their economies, and eventually led to rapid economic growth and the opening up of some democratic space of the last 20 years, would be lost. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Philosophically, though, the financial crisis discredited laissez faire capitalism. So for people seeking change in Africa, the financial crisis was bad – it rehabilitated the role of the state as worthy custodian against greedy CEOs and businessmen.

These factors, and those we explored in the last three series, suggest to me that the conditions for radical political change will be on holiday for the next few years in Africa.

THE END

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Cartoonist Gado’s take on current sentiment toward Kenya media.

KENYA’s mainstream media has got a lot of stick since the March 4, 2013 elections.

The election ended in controversy, with CORD coalition candidate (former Prime Minister) Raila Odinga going to court to allege that the election commission had rigged the vote in favour of (now President) Uhuru Kenyatta. Raila took his complaint to the Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that Kenyatta won fair and square.

Though many criticised the Supreme Court decision and continue to deride the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), these are state bodies that can recover their reputation with a change of leadership or a single future election. However, the media are private entities, and perhaps its the single non-state actor to come out worst from the election.  It might, therefore, yet pay the price in dollar and cents in the long term.

It was, and continues to be, accused of having effectively jumped into bed with election cheats, and failing to be aggressive over the problems that plagued the controversial March election “for the sake of peace”.

Also, that it is sucking up and massaging the belly of the Jubilee government, because of opportunism, fear, and thinly disguised pro-government partisanship.

The recent event where editors had breakfast with President Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto, and some of them openly scouted for jobs, and others fawned over the big men in a televised event brought a flood of scorn from Kenyan blogs and social media.

Boniface Mwangi much talked about exhibition of the 2008 post-election violence photos in Nairobi: There is still little appreciation of how that year deeply scarred journalists.

But could there be more than meets the eye in all this? While on the face of it it might seem like the media and government are exchanging sleepovers, the reality is rather different and paints a more complex picture.

The Kenya media might be having a crisis, but it is not the one most critics think it is. To understand what is happening today, one needs to step back many years. To begin with, there is something very unusual about Kenya media that one needs to go to as far as South Africa in Africa to find — Kenya is the only country in the region with INDEPENDENT and PRIVATE newspapers that are older than 50 years, and also happen to be market leaders.

The Standard newspaper, founded in 1902 as the African Standard, is the oldest continuously published independent newspaper in East and Central Africa. However, The Witness (previously The Natal Witness) in South Africa was founded in 1846. The Cape Times was born in 1876, while the top-selling weekly The Sunday Times followed on the heels of The Standard here in Kenya in 1906.

The Daily Nation was founded in 1960, after the Aga Khan acquired the Kiswahili title Taifa from which the present giant Nation Media Group started life, in 1959.

In the rest of East Africa, newspapers, even state-owned ones like the New Vision in Uganda, were born after regime changes or democratic transitions. All the newspapers on the streets of Uganda today were born after President Yoweri Museveni came to power as a victorious guerrilla leader in 1986.

For nearly six months before the March 2013 poll, there were weekly peace concerts in all corners of Kenya. Such events helped galvanise a consensus around “peace above all else” agenda.

One could argue that Daily News in Tanzania is a state-owned newspaper that is older than 50 years. Wrong. Daily News might trace its roots to 1930 when the Kenya East African Standard first published it, but its current incarnation is a result of a merger that happened in the nationalisation wave of the 1960s.

However, nearly all the independent newspapers in Tanzania were born after one-party rule ended and the country adopted a multiparty system in 1992.

The point here is that it is very difficult for private and independent African newspapers to survive through many political eras, and it is particularly hard in East, Central, and West Africa — and nearly impossible in North Africa. One reason for this is because there is little continuity. Because government changes are frequently violent or contentious,  it is often very difficult for media that existed during the old or overthrown order to find acceptance in the new era because it is viewed of having cohabited with an illegitimate order. And if they survive, unless they undergo dramatic reinventions as the Sunday Times did in South Africa, they become marginal players.

Not in Kenya, where The Nation and The Standard have a stranglehold on the market – although, to prove the point, the younger 20-year-old Nation overtook the 78-year-old Standard in 1980 and has never looked back. That said, the real surprise is that the Nation and The Standard have survived as private media through so many transitions; from colonialism to the modern multiparty-new-constitution era, and are still able to lock down the market.

It  is difficult for media to go through so many periods and still crusade for popular and populist causes, and that seems to be the case in Kenya. In most of Africa, the progressive phase of media lasts about 10 years. After that, especially if it finds commercial success, it  becomes what is popularly referred to as Establishment media — it ceases to aggressively challenge the political system, becomes vested in “stability”, and begins to worry about what will happen if the system breaks down. In many ways it is both a necessary and inevitable development.

In the period between 1990 and 2002 when the big battle against one-party rule, for multipartyism, and for political reform raged in Kenya, the Nation was seen as the leading media champion for those reforms.

That, however, was quite unusual because it was over 30 years old then and had also been the foot soldier for Kenya’s independence. Yet there it was also being involved in a second equally spirited fight for multipartyism and reform. Ordinarily, rich as it already was then, it should have settled down to count its shillings, not take such risks.

The seeming capitulation and soft-pedaling  from mainstream Kenya media  that critics say is happening today, therefore, is a settling down in an Establishment mode that is many years overdue.

If one takes a long-term evolutionary view, this settling in into a fat comfortable zone is a good thing. It creates opportunities for new voices, new media, born out of the concerns of the age, to emerge. If you think of it, much as I may enjoy being a journalist at Nation, I am not blind to the fact that there is something undemocratic in the fact that the Nations have shaped Kenyan politics for nearly 55 years now, and The Standard for 101!

To mark its 50th anniversary in 2010, Nation Media Group held a big conference on the Africa media: The years ahead will pose even tougher challenges.

If they are taking a back seat, one can see why that might be a good thing, and democrats should be glad.

Against this background, I strongly believe that it is too rash to say the timing of, especially, the older Kenya media “softness” has much to do with its alleged capitulation to the flirtations of the Uhuru-Ruto government.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that after Mwai Kibaki became President at the end of 2002 at the head of the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc), the same situation akin to what we are seeing today happened. The media had been part of the pro-democracy crusade, and Kibaki’s election was also its triumph. Many of its allies in civil society became big men and women in the Narc government.

The pressure for the media to cash in its democracy activist chips was very high, as was the distraction of the seductions it faced from its former friends in civil society, who were now in government. Getting beyond that point was very difficult, and I am not sure the media quite succeeded.

But the biggest blow came in the very divisive Kenya election of December 2007, the controversy over Kibaki’s re-election, and the post-election violence that followed.

The role that sections of the media played in fanning ethnic hatred, and framing the political contest in ways that made the post-election slaughter in which nearly 1,500 were killed and 600,000 displaced from their homes almost inevitable, was disgraceful.

Then Kass FM’s Joshua arap Sang was fingered by The Hague and charged with fanning murderous hate. That had another chilling effect.

These experiences shook most Kenyan journalists and shifted mainstream media toward a feeble safe middle position. Some of the most important factors that caused this change were not reported. In many parts of the country, the Nation had to pull out its bureau chiefs – and even close some down temporarily.

Generally, 2007 was very bad for journalists because at almost every rally, they were being attacked, and toward the end, there were many that some media couldn’t cover.

A group of NTV journalists was trapped in the Rift Valley when the post-election violence broke out, and was spirited out in a rescue operation at the last minute when death squads were closing in on them. The Standard had its delivery pick-ups waylaid and torched.

Most editors decided that in 2013 that they would do all they could not to put their journalists in the kind of danger they faced in 2007/2008. None of them wanted to have the blood of hundreds of dead Kenyans – or murdered journalists – on their doorsteps again.

In several ways, the editors succeeded, because for all the grim reviews, very few journalists were chased out of political rallies in 2013, nor did bureau chiefs have to flee hostile regions. In that sense, some lessons were learnt, and correct responses taken.

However, all these developments came at a time when the country demanded a more aggressive reporting that most editors and media managers were not willing to offer.

The media could justify this standing back partly because there were other people doing the hard in-your face story-telling. There was no shortage of websites, blogs, and social media timelines in which the hot stuff that mainstream were reluctant to touch, was not aired or ventilated. The Kenyan blogosphere and social media became like a freewheeling  asylum.

So while those who wanted the sharp attacks, and the  naming and shaming of political scoundrels, could not get it on mainstream media they could still find it in domainstream media.

Will Kenya have a Mail & Guardian-type any day soon?

This shrill Kenyan online space only pushed mainstream media higher up on the fence. My own sense is that if it had behaved as it did in 2007/2008, with the passions that were flowing on social media if the mainstream, Kenya would again have gone up in smoke in March.

That movement to the middle and then up to sit on the fence, represented the point at which the leading Kenya media finally became Establishment media. Even though that is not yet a safe place to be.

Today the Nation still gets stick from some people in the State for alleged “anti-government” reporting. While activists condemn the Nation of being soft, most of the criticisms it hears from government is that it is hostile.

Cartoonists like Gado have to contend with many angry attacks from officialdom. I am sure the good people at The Standard, The Citizen, The Star and so on will tell the same story.

Hopefully there will movement beyond looking at the state of the media in just these lenses, because the real cause of frustration should be that what happened in places like South Africa, Uganda, and Tanzania hasn’t happened in Kenya. The multiparty era and the new Constitution period in Kenya, have failed to produce a new media for the age that reports without being weighed down by the baggage of history.

Old media like the Nation and The Standard have Kenayns who have “grown up” reading them; businesses that have developed long-running advertising relations with them; and these people will keep doing business with such media as long as they maintain a view of Kenya that is close to theirs. That is why, even if  circulation growth has fallen behind the growth of the population and rise of education, the Kenya media are still becoming more and more profitable.

This lucrative status quo is not something the media is going to upset easily.

Kenya needs new newspapers that have greater freedom to go against the grain and break out of such strait jackets. Therefore the crisis today is not that the main media are too comfortable and restrained. It is that Kenya has failed to produce a newspaper that disrupts or reshapes the political and social landscape like The Monitor that arose in Uganda in 1992, or even like the now-defunct Weekly Review in 1975, Kenya’s first news magazine that broke the mould and challenged the post-independence settlement. South Africa had this by way of the Mail & Guardian, started in 1985 by a group of journalists after the closure of two of South Africa’s leading liberal newspapers, the Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Express; The Independent in the UK in 1986, or even USA Today in 1982. The Mail & Guardian was the first South African newspaper to ignore race as a factor in its news reporting.

The fact that no new newspaper has been born that has successfully explored alternative universes in similar ways, is a constraint imposed as much by Kenyan society and its inflexible block political allegiances, as much as it is a failure of the media.

PS:  An abridged version of this article was published in Saturday Nation, Nairobi, at http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Is-it-the-end-or-a-second-life-for-Kenya-media/-/1056/1927960/-/lw6goa/-/index.html

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British comedian Lenny Henry does Comic Relief in Africa: He probably has thousands of children calling him “uncle” – with good reason, though it might perplex him.

SAY YOU ARE COMEDIAN LENNY HENRY, and you visit a primary school in Endaramatishorike near Narok in Kenya to do charity work for Comic Relief. It is your first visit, and you are attending a performance of the school choir. The children will greet you loudly; “Welcome uncle Lenny”.

You go on to Uganda, to another primary school in Nakapiripirit, northern Uganda. As you arrive, the assembled children greet you in unison, “Welcome uncle Lenny”.

Why do total strangers all of a sudden find themselves becoming aunts and uncles in Africa?

Well, it is part of what some people consider a bizarre phenomenon and has been happening in societies like Kenya, Uganda and, indeed, most of Africa over the last 30 years.

Young people now find they have to refer to men and women who are not blood relatives, and are only family friends, as “uncle” and “auntie”. Newspaper columnists and talking heads on TV and FM radios have had a feast making fun of these seemingly senseless habits, and we have all joined in a good laugh.

Auntie Funke of the TV drama “Meet The Adebanjos”: There are aunties and there are aunties in Africa today.

We have been too busy laughing to ask that simplest of questions: “Why are people doing it?”

The people who consider themselves “authentic” Africans like to boast about how one of the most valuable things we still have is our culture. These good people condemn “westernisation” and “cultural imperialism”, which covers anything from wearing mini skirts, make-up, dancing to hip hop, and even wearing business suits.

In that authentic Africa your favourite aunt will spend 10 minutes explaining how the elderly man sitting across from you at the next table is your uncle, because he is the nephew of an uncle’s second wife; that uncle who is an uncle because he is the cousin of the second child of the aunt who is the cousin of your uncle’s cousin’s third wife.

Where real blood relationships are taken so seriously, it is surprising that we didn’t ask why someone who is otherwise a stranger could so easily become an aunt or uncle.

However, this uncle and auntie business is actually serious stuff. It suggests an important social evolution happening right under our noses. I am no social anthropologist, but I have noticed a few things that might help us understand the emergence of this new breed of aunts and uncles.

First, at least in Uganda (and also Kenya) where I have paid a little more attention and documented it, the evidence suggests that it started happening in the late 1970s, grew through the 1980s, and became normalised and widely accepted in the 2000s.

There was a good reason why. The 1970s was when Africa plunged in its first big post-independence crisis. The optimism of independence started to die out. Nearly everywhere on the continent single party dictatorships were rising as opposition politics was banned.

Refugee camps in Africa have been altering the concept of family and friendship (NMG photo)

The continent was also swept by a wave of military coups. The price of oil was skyrocketing, and that of commodities like copper, coffee, cotton, cocoa, from which most African countries earned the bulk of their revenues, were collapsing.

These political and economic difficulties set off Africa’s first wave of exiles and economic refugees. They left behind jails that were filling up with political prisoners.

In the wider East African region, Uganda (under Idi Amin) and Ethiopia (under Mengistu Hailemariam), fell under particularly brutal military regimes that went on to all but destroy the middle classes in these countries.

Bankrupt governments could no longer provide subsidies, and public services like hospitals started to fall apart. In Uganda, the families led by mothers rose sharply as the men were killed or fled into exile.

For the first time since colonialism and independence, in most African countries families that were in trouble (with the male bread winner in prison or exile, and women still not participating in the formal economy the way they do today) found that the support and social safety nets provided by relatives and clan weren’t enough.

These families needed to call on a resource that had never been tapped — family friends.

The Christian churches were the biggest charities, and the NGOs as we know them today — the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations of this world — were not in the picture then. The only other charities were foundations set up by rich Asian-African families like the sugar giants Madhivani in Uganda, who gave hundreds of scholarships to the “natives”.

The experience of getting help from fellow Africans who weren’t relatives was probably a strange one for us, and it seems the only way we could reconcile ourselves to it was to treat these people as family. And the only way we could make it work, beyond the occasional good act of kindness and without guilt, was to impose on them the obligation of relatives — hence aunts or uncles.

In Kenya, a different version of this kind of adaptation can be seen in what happened in the face of the increase of crime, insecurity, corruption and the proliferation of security guards. Security guards had, traditionally, been known as “askaris”.

But there was something belittling in the name “askari” because it connoted a third rate lowly guard who didn’t have the prestige of a real police officer. However, soon, to enter most offices, to be allowed into gated communities so you can beg for a favour from a relative, or to pass safely along deserted streets, Kenyans had to negotiate with askaris, not the police.

That shift in the balance of power meant that the askari needed to be treated with greater respect and made to feel important. Kenyans started by referring to them by a more flattering designation — “soldier”.

But if the need for such coping strategies had stopped there, perhaps the aunt-uncle phenomenon would have eventually withered. However, the political and economic crisis, and social dislocation, soon overturned many aspects of culture that governed our societies.

In Uganda where the military regime targeted men, most men could not sit in the shop. They could not, in some cases, even sit in the front office of businesses they owned. Their wives or daughters took these positions.

But Ugandan women’s greater visibility created by the need for men to hide didn’t come with greater empowerment. It made them vulnerable prey to the new crop of marauding army officers and amoral businessmen who were growing very rich through their connections to the military.

In addition, in the extreme economic deprivation of that period, families were forced to make some “unAfrican” decisions. Thus to get a tender to supply something to a ministry, desperate parents were forced to let their daughters, and their wives, sleep with the major general who had the final say on the tender.

Kenyan soldiers in South Somalia; When the lowly security guards proliferated in Kenya and begun to hold sway, Kenyans bribed them so they can be nice – they called them “soldiers” (NMG photo)

Sometimes it was the only way to ensure that death squads controlled by powerful generals didn’t come round to the house and murder them.

Similar developments have been reported from several African countries during that difficult period. With society turned upside down, soon the predatory sugar daddy and sugar mummy who were not bound by traditional moral codes, emerged.

The sugar daddy’s and mummy’s favourite hunting ground was (and remains) the universities. But some branched off into high and secondary schools. If you were tuned into the grapevine in Kampala, for example, you would hear stories of a rich friend going to a high school and sneaking off with a family’s 16-year-old boy or girl for a holiday in the Seychelles.

If in the past families needed to see friends as relatives to justify seeking support from them and to subtly place on them an obligation to help; now there was a new need. They needed to see them as uncles and aunt in order to erect an “incest barrier” between them and the children.

If your little girl had to ask for help to get a job from a male family friend who is otherwise not related to her by blood, then perhaps he might be ashamed of sexually exploiting her if he was also an “uncle”.

A billboard in Uganda warns of the evils and dangers of cross-generational sex: Everything to shame predatory men.

The ravage of AIDS of the last three decades also did its bit. In latter years it led to rampant cross-generational sex driven partly by the insane calculation that girls are a safer bet because they are less likely to be HIV positive. Maybe as a survival trick, our societies again saw the need to create a use of language that forced predatory men with money in their pockets to view small girls who weren’t family with compassion. Thus in Uganda, we saw the use of uncle or aunt stretched further as a form of respectful address.

In addition to AIDS, the many conflicts in Africa left many people refugees and displaced, and here again it was not their families who came to their rescue. It was relief agencies. My sense is that in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, most people’s experience of “kindness” is from strangers in the form of humanitarian workers and the Red Cross, not real family. It is easy for transference to occur in such circumstances, in which the family that is there for you, the aunt who matters most, is the blonde Nordic woman who runs the UNHCR feeding station at your refugee camp.

So, something quite important has been going on here. It seems like what appears like a loose play with the meanings of aunt and uncle, is an attempt to negotiate new norms and cultures that will rebalance our lives in the towns, cities, and camps, where the good old traditional ways that held African societies together for centuries, no longer apply.

Of course, it will take a while longer before we all stop the jokes, and begin to appreciate that these fake uncles and aunts are not just another piece of modern African urban nonsense; they could very well be the Real Thing.

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A FEW DAYS ago I was involved in a small UN conference somewhere in the Nairobi suburb of Gigiri. There, an expert made an eye-opening presentation on the present global food crisis.

The “Unga Revolution” in Kenya highlighted how hard-hit people were by high food prices, but it avoided awkward questions about their lousy spending priorities (Daily Nation photo).

There was a big global food crisis 50 years ago, he said. “How do 2008 food prices compare to fifty years ago?”, he asked.

The room was stumped. Well, he said, current food prices have risen five times more than they did in 1958.

The combination of international food prices and their local knock-on effects, he said, means the poor – who already spend 75 per cent of their income on food – are spending 26 per cent more. Effectively, they are now spending all their income to feed themselves and their families.

About 2.2m children die annually in poor countries due to malnutrition, he reported. That figure, however  is “good news” because it reflects a considerable reduction over the decades.

There was notable reduction in child malnutrition between 1970 and 1995. Surprise, surprise, it didn’t happen because there was more  food produced. The improvement in women’s education accounted for the highest contribution to the reduction – 43 per cent.  Per capita food availability came in a distant second, it contributed to 26 per cent of the reduction.

Even more startling, health environment improvements contributed only 19 per cent. In fourth place was the improvement in the status of women relative to men. It contributed 12 per cent.

Therefore, you might conclude, educating women and giving them better opportunities in life, and treating them equally, reduced the number of children who died of malnutrition by a whopping 61 per cent.

That, though, will be in the future. For now, the combination of high fuel and food prices are fanning unrests, with East Africa witnessing protests in Mogadishu and Nairobi.

On Tuesday, Kenya’s Agriculture minister William Ruto made one of the scariest comments since the post-election violence ended. He said that this year the growth of  Kenya’s population finally outstripped food production.

Generally, the people who think more deeply about the world argue that if humankind is to avoid catastrophe, it must change the way it is consuming, especially, perishable or limited resources like fossil fuels and land, which have now been joined by water, and food.

We went out to the market and randomly checked prices of some essential good, and sure we found that we have got our values all wrong.

Consider the average prices [at June 2008 exchange rates] of the things that are essential for life and economic survival: (i). Litre of milk – $1.1.  (ii). Litre of fuel – $1.6. (iii) Kilogramme of tomatoes – $1.5 (iv) Kilogramme of sugar – $1.2 (v) Kilo of unga – $1.2 (vi) Loaf of bread – $0.57 (vii) Mineral water 500ml –$0.77 (viii) Half a litre of tap water – $0.007 (ix) Cost of a newspaper –$0.50.

We checked with the list of luxury, leisure, and things that we wouldn’t die if we went without. (i) The alleged average cost of  an “experience” with a prostitute on Koinange Street (popularly known as K Street) in Nairobi – $32. (ii) Cinema ticket –$3 to $7.5 in the upmarket movie theatres. (iii) A litre of good whisky – $16 (iv) Cost of nightclub entrance – $2.5 to $5. (v) Cup of coffee at a fashionable café or restaurant – $1.7.

Prostitutes in Nairobi: Many men will happily spend 2,500 percent more on the services of sex workers, than on milk for their children (Photo monicahnjeri.wordpress.com).

You can see where this is heading. Men will pay $32 for an hour with a K Street prostitute, but they are already complaining that $1.6 for the far more precious  litre of fuel, and just $.007 for tap water are  “too much”. We pay $7.5 for a ticket to watch a movie, but scream when a kilo of  flour for making ugali goes for only 16 per cent of that.

Folks will pay $16 for a litre of whisky, but would cut out the milk for their children if it went to $1.2 a litre. Indeed at $1 a litre, the price of milk is already considered “too much”.

And on this, the working and middle classes are not very different. The poorly-paid chap in Kibera who spends $8 on the illicit gin changaa, would probably not touch sugar if it went to $1.3 a kilo.

If you increased the cost of a litre of tap water to $0.4, most of the fellows who are happily drinking beer at $1.8 a bottle will be out on the streets doing battle with the police.

There are very many poor people who have no expenditure discretion and the choices they make are different, but the world would be a much safer place and our future better secured if, philosophically, we came to accept that fuel and milk deserve to cost more than whisky. And that tap water is more precious than a short frolic with a prostitute, and should cost more.

Until the world makes that mental shift, there will always be food shortages, and fuel prices will continue rising.

 •First published in Daily Nation on June 12, 2008. Seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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That famous 2006 China-Africa Summit: Like the proverbial horse, Beijing took Africa to the well, but could not get all the Big Men to drink the water.

Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta is on a trip that will take him to China and Russia. Arguing that it was part of the growing “look East” wave by Africa, the Washington Post noted; “In snub to Washington, Kenyan president visits China, Russia first”

“Kenyatta’s choice of Beijing as one of the first places outside Africa to pay an official state visit to since his inauguration in April speaks volumes about China’s growing presence in Kenya. It also highlights the United States’ waning influence in a country vital to U.S. interests, say analysts”, reported the Post.

This has been the main line of the reporting in international and African media over the last eight years about China’s rise as the continent’s principal trading partner. The Washington Post also brought up an old storyline; that one reason China is doing well in Africa is because it does not bother about, nor lecture African leaders about human rights or democracy, the way the west does.

Of course, that is not true. Especially during the Cold War period, the west did not prioritise democracy and human rights in Africa; from the support most of it gave to apartheid South Africa, its backing of DR Congo (then Zaire’s) thieving president Mobutu Sese Seko and the murderous RENAMO rebels in Mozambique and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola, because they were “anti-communist”, to name a few cases, the west was rarely on the side of the angels in Africa.

China’s President Xi Jinping arrives in Tanzania and his host Jakaya Kikwete leads to greet the people: If Chinese stardust could rub off, Tanzania would be Africa’s richest nation today–it isn’t.

Many Africans embrace this “East is better” mantra heartily because it’s sweet payback for the west for its sins against the continent at the height of the imperialist era. However, there are two problems with it. One, it perpetuates the view of Africans as simple-minded people who don’t know their own interests, and just followed the West and now the East. But, surely, we have our own horse in this race, don’t we?

Shortly after he came to power, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni spoke to this issue when he was asked whether he was “pro-West or pro-East”. The question irritated him, and he said he didn’t have to be either. He was “pro-Africa, pro-Uganda”.

Secondly, it is encouraging a deadly form of laziness – the idea that all Africa has to do is open its doors to trade and other business with China, and miraculously the continent shall be rich. I sense in this “look East” an attempt to avoid hard work.

The reality is that there is no Chinese stardust that will rub off on us, without we doing some heavy lifting ourselves. China is growing rich, because it is creating jobs for its people. In some African countries youth unemployment is 80 percent.

China has got where it is by investing in education. Education in Africa is a shambles. It isn’t because there is no money. Rather that it is stolen. Even if trade between China and Africa grew 1,000-fold, nothing will come of it we don’t invest in education or the health of our people. Illiterate and sick people don’t make for dynamic economies.

Indeed the other day I was reading a publication by the Society for International Development, “Devolution, Life Sciences And Mobile Apps: Shifting Sands Or Quick Sand?” that, while hopeful about the future of the Greater Horn of East Africa, had some very depressing caveats.

Showtime in Botswana: Well-governed nations like Botswana will flourish doing business with the west or the east because they got the fundamentals right (africanews.com photo)

Citing a World Bank study, it noted that in Tanzania one-third of health workers are absent from medical centres in urban centres, and the number is significantly higher in rural areas.

Also, only 3 percent of the schools in Tanzania have access to basic infrastructure services such as electricity, clean water, and proper sanitation. Tanzania’s school kids have access to less than a book per child on average, and in urban areas they are taught for 2 hours 42 minutes a day – instead of the recommended 5 hours and 12 minutes. It is small wonder then, as we have seen in the last two years, that an average of 60 percent of Tanzania’s students fail primary leaving examinations.

The interesting thing about this is that Tanzania has had easily the longest and most active relationship with China in Africa. During the rule of the venerated Julius Nyerere, the relationship with China was easily the most important for Dar es Salaam. Still, Tanzania then was the largest recipient of western aid—and still gets a lot of it today. However, it is also among the leading recipients of Chinese largesse in Africa today.

Just like western money didn’t make Tanzania rich and leave it with world class (or even East African-leading schools or health system), there is nothing that China can do for Tanzania today either.

Nor indeed, can it be Kenya’s ticket out of poverty. The same SID report, for example, again cited a World Bank that found that for every 100 school public school teachers, only 55 were in class teaching. A public school child in Kenya receives 1 hour 9 minutes less teaching, than her private school counterpart. This adds up to whole 20 days less of teaching for children in Kenya’s part school system.

By the way, Tanzania and Kenya are not the worst in Africa. They are all in the top half of “good” performers.

Off the coast of rich Mauritius:  A reminder that it ain’t how much you’ve got, but what you do with it.

The solutions to these problems that keep Africa mired in poverty and disease, can only come from internal reforms, better government, and an end to corruption, and inclusive politics – things China is not an expert on, really. Otherwise all the money from doing business with China will only end in the pockets of Africa’s small elite, and enable them pay for even better private education for their children at home, and abroad…which is exactly what happened in the heyday of Africa’s love affair with the west.

In less than 140 characters, a friend on Twitter summed up Africa’s challenge with a story about a Congolese guy he knew who “used to play rugby in Mombasa, went to Congo, joined the army, then quit coz of corruption & was killed in his house”.

If we have to look East to end this madness, then we still have a very long wait for economic nirvana. And, of course, the irony is that the countries that will grow rich from trading with China are the ones who did well doing business with the west: like Botswana and Mauritius. If this proves anything, it is that the amount and source of money does not matter for African outcomes. What is critical is the type of African who banks it.

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NEXT: No good deed goes unpunished

IN SEPTEMBER 2011, my very good friend and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Dele Olojede closed NEXT newspaper.

NEXT was not just Nigeria’s, but West Africa’s most ambitiously highbrow newspaper. I had expected it to succeed because, with Africa “happening” and the world ogling the continent, my sense that the time was right for a thinking paper.

Secondly, unlike Southern Africa that has papers like the Mail & Guardian, northern Africa with Egypt’s Al Aharam, and East African with The East African, West Africa has had no ideas-leading media since the demise of West Africa magazine in 2005.  That has left the Paris-published Jeune Afrique as the intellectual publication for West African intellectual.

NEXT’s passing made it more difficult to build a business around its website, one of the best online news platforms ever to be attempted in Africa. We joined Dele in licking his journalistic wounds and hoping that the market will in the future change and come to NEXT.

Then on Wednesday August 14, 2013 Africanews.com, the pan-

ThoughtLeader: Was a trailblazer that would have reaped from lifting its gaze beyond the Limpopo

African news portal, announced that it was closing on September 1 after six years.

 Africanews.com’s digital-only model was to bring together as many African journalists as possible to cover the countries where they lived and worked from “an African perspective”. 

The start was promising, but eventually it was unable to find the investment to sustain the “dream”, as the statement announcing the closure called it.

Today around Africa, even profitable upmarket newspapers are beginning to plateau. And no media house has quite found a way to monetise its news or ratchet up online subscriptions the way the Financial Times has done in the UK. The prospects for sports publications and racy tabloids seem to be better. In East Africa, one interesting story is Tanzania’s  sports newspaper Mwanaspoti, which has become the highest circulation publication in the wider Eastern and Southern African region outside Kenya and South Africa. It is also one of Tanzania’s most successful exports to Kenya.

In the digital space, at one point it seemed that the African blog aggregator Afrigator might just hack it, but it too closed in December 2011.

A typical Maverick i-cover: There is great promise there

So is a very influential and profitable pan-African publication impossible? While we have strong national sites like nation.co.ke (Kenya), www.news24.com/SouthAfrica, Mail & Guardian (South Africa), www.iol.co.za (South Africa), www.vanguardngr.com (Nigeria), to name a few, pure pan-Africa sites that seek to cover either all of Africa or regions of it and ARE EDITED AND MANAGED OUT OF AFRICA, are few. The Nation Media’s www.africareview.com (Disclosure – it is one of the platforms that I work with) is one of the very few. The Maghreb Review, Africa Confidential, Jeune Afrique, are all published out of European capitals.

AllAfrica  has since shifted many of its operations from Washington to Nairobi, but it is an aggregator of news from dozens of African partner media. It too has also not found a cash-rich model either.

However despite its struggles AllAfrica.com does point to where success might lie. Its main drawback is curation, story selection, treatment, and organisation of the site that needs to move away from the strictures placed by traditional aggregation. The Mail & Guardian’s blog ThoughtLeader, which was mind-blowing in its early years, has also contributed to our understanding of where the future lies. It was successful in bringing together a remarkably diverse group of writers and thinkers, but sold itself short by failing to continually develop and pull in voices from South Africa. Also, some of its blogs – while being refreshingly out-of-the-box – sometimes tended to be too cutely Quixotic.

Replicated at pan-African scale ThoughtLeader could have had a lot of possibilities. Daily Maverick (South Africa) now an online-only publication, seems to have learnt a few lessons from ThoughtLeader.com with its blog/Opinionistas section. Though like ThoughtLeader it has a few too many quarrelsome writers, it is different in that the subjects explored tend to be more closely related to the news of the day. And its reporting and commenting on Africa above the Limpopo is easily, thanks in part to the labour of its one-man army Simon Allison, some of the best when it happens.

AfricaReview.com: Hoping the pan-African news dog will eventually hunt

Allison’s output is prodigious, and ability to do the big single wrap up piece is admirable. After Ethiopia’s cerebral strongman Meles Zenawi died last year, Allison’s reporting on the shape of a possible post-Meles Ethiopia was peerless. But he is alone, and Daily Maverick too does not seem to be rolling in the Benjamins. In addition, unlike ThoughtLeader that sat in the Mail & Guardian’s very rich news environment, there is a paucity of hard news on Daily Maverick.

However, from AfricaReview.com which illustrates the importance of being born into a rich family that can support you in lean times; to the chutzpah of NEXT; the ideological and intellectual diversity of ThoughtLeader; the big picture news analysis of Daily Maverick; the mother hen instincts of AllAfrica.com, a path is being beaten.

I see possible salvation in, of all places, the Kenyan-founded Nakumatt Supermarket chain. Though not universally popular, it is now the biggest chain in East Africa, Nakumatt owns rarely more than 60 percent of the stock in its stores. For the other 40-50 percent, it sublets the space to companies and individuals who sell various things from perfumes, detergents, wipes, macaroni, name it. Essentially, it charges these companies for luring customers to their shelves, and is in the enviable position of being able to make money from the traffic even if they buy nothing in the end.

This gives Nakumatt a lot of flexibility (and also made it very rich). It doesn’t get stuck with inventory, and vendors who are not making enough money to pay shelf rent bolt quickly, opening room for a new product to be tried. Meanwhile the ones that do well can grow their shelf space. Sometimes it can drive you crazy when your favourite cereal or vitamin supplement all of a sudden goes missing, but it is always interesting to see how many new alternatives often come up.

Nakumatt MD Atul Shah: Might the “outsourcing” tricks his supermarket chain has perfected be the way for successful a pan-African digital media model?

The Nakumatt model, I think, might just be the best for building a commercially successful pan-African news portal. The media owner would have to do original reporting or aggressive repurposing of content for at least 50 percent of the portal’s furniture. It would then have to find the best bloggers and Simon Allisons from as many African countries as it possible, and given them shelves – a shelf would be a country, or a theme like economics or sports.

The curating of these outsourced content would have to be ruthless, and there should be no mercy shown to a blogger, from say Nigeria, who is not finding traction with readers. He should be thrown out on his ears and another promising Nigerian brought on board. This process of selection would eventually create a competent and unmissable body of contributors from all over Africa. A pan-African Huffingpost with less fluff.

The mother ship site would focus on driving traffic, selling advertising, and keeping just the slice necessary to cover its costs, and giving the writers and bloggers the bulk of the money. But it would pocket all the advertising that comes from the 50 percent share of its site.

So, there you have it. The person who holds the secret that might make the African digital news billionaire is not at Google, Facebook, Twitter or The Financial Times, but could well be Nakumatt Holdings Managing Director Atul Shah.

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I HAVE WRITTEN FOUR BOOKS, well, sort of. They are mostly little books and have not made me rich although, especially  Uganda’s Poorly Kept Secrets, has done quite well.

The last one,  It Never Happened, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, was the most satisfying because, in part, it was based on a very personal experience. It is a simple story of the day before Uganda dictator Idi Amin was ousted by a combined force of Ugandan exiles and the Tanzanian army in April 1979; the day he fell; and the day after.

A cat rests on Wahome Mutahi’s (Whispers) gravestone at Munungaini village in Nyeri (Daily Nation/ JOSEPH KANYI)

I had planned to write it lazily over many years, but all that changed in 2003 when I moved to Nairobi from Kampala. My good friend (the late) humourist and writer Wahome Mutahi, perhaps more famous as Whispers the key character in his humongously successful column in Sunday Nation, was working on a book of the murder of two prominent Ugandans during Amin’s rule.

As it happened, in the 1990s I had had a long conversation with a man who was being held with one of his subjects in a dungeon in Makindye military barracks. He was one of the last people to see him alive the morning he was led away to his death. Like many troubling stories I have collected over the years on Uganda’s painful history, I hadn’t published anything on what I learnt.

In addition, Wahome also wanted to know more what led to the arrest and disappearance of Byron Kawadwa, the legendary director of the Uganda National Theatre. He was seized by Amin’s shadowy security forces never to be seen again. I had researched the Kawadwa case, and written a chapter about it in a manuscript that was still in evolution. I offered to give the manuscript to Wahome so he could get some insights into the events leading to the tragic end of Kawadwa, and to help him understand some of

A frightening gift that keeps giving.

the context in which the killings of the Amin period happened.

As it turned out, Wahome had a friend who was an editor at Oxford University Press, and he thought, as he told me, it was  “criminal” that I hadn’t allowed a publisher to look at the manuscript. Behind my back, he took the liberty to share the manuscript with his friend. Next thing I knew he was dragging me to a lunch with a big kahuna at Oxford University Press. Oxford was doing a young people’s reader, and wanted me to cull the chapter on the fall of Amin and dumb it down for the little ones.

After playing hard to get for a while (most courtships are the same), I eventually agreed to the project. A part of me remained unsure if it was the right thing to do, until one late night when I was rewriting the chapter. I was working in the living and our daughters were asleep.

I left to go to the kitchen to fix myself a snack, and unknown to me one of the girls woke up, came to the table where I was working, sat in the chair to wait for me…and read the text on the computer screen.

It was a harrowing bit about, as a young man, I escaped being executed by Amin’s soldiers on the day the Tanzanians and Ugandan insurgents took over Kampala. I was in a group of students who were making a desperate dash out of the city.

The little girl came running to the kitchen. She was hysterical. I panicked, thinking that maybe there had been a break-in. However she clung to me tightly, crying, “you were doing to die daddy, you were going to die”. At that point I thought the

Nuruddin Farah: Without doubt the most prolific African writer – its trilogies or nothing (kalamu.com photo)

story might work, after all, but I softened it a bit. The result was It Never Happened. The fact that it was a supplementary young people’s reader is one reason even I still struggle to find a copy in a bookshop.

I then span off some of the other chapters from that manuscript into Inside the Soul of a Nation and Its People, which was published by Fountain Publishers in Kampala. So, instead of a “proper” 180-pages book, I ended up with another tiny book. I suspect I have a fear of inflicting long books that takes days to finish on readers; whatever that phobia might be. I know hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words (how ironic), but books?

Nonetheless, I still got started on a long  “serious” book on Africa, but the phobia struck again, and I have been fumbling with doing it as a thoughtful but fun illustrated book instead. Though I want a new form of illustration, exactly what that “new” is I am not sure. This has made for very fruitless attempts to collaborate on the project with several artists – somehow none of them seem to crazy enough for what I want.

Now I met the prize-winning Somali writer Nuruddin Farah when I was a small man just beginning to sprout beards many years ago, and he has been a

We are still there, looking for inspiration…and then again not looking

wonderful friend since. Nuruddin often chastises me for not getting rid of my little obsessions and making enough time away from journalism to do that “proper” book.

So recently when he was in Nairobi, I took him out for dinner and eventually we got round to the subject of the book again. I put to him a question that, strangely, I had never asked him in the 27 years I have known him.

Nuruddin is the most prolific African writer, although his introverted manner and great embarrassment about self-promotion, means that only the true members of the literary church in Africa are aware of that.

“How do you do you do it?”, I asked him as the dessert arrived.

Clearly he was happy that I had finally done.

He started off simply: First, he said, you must have a writing nest, whatever and wherever the nest might be.

Secondly, establish a routine, and write for a minimum number of hours a day; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or even 30 minutes, but write.

Then it got difficult. Have a philosophy or a structure to how you write. What is his? That is when, after all those years, for the first time I learnt from Nuruddin that he writes all his books as trilogies. So a book is never finished until he has written three of them.

Finally, beside the thinking and research, he said it was critical to have an efficient approach or ritual. Nuruddin chose the hard path; he writes all his books in longhand. The fact that he doesn’t have the easy luxury of going back and forth changing and deleting stuff on his laptop, forces him to fully think through ideas, plot lines, and words before he writes them down. Then, of course, when it is done, it is written a second time into a computer, and that constitutes the revision process.

Later, I thought long about the Nuruddin Method, and I think those who say that most journalists are failed writers, might be right after all. Maybe I chose to do my Africa story as a groundbreaking illustrated book, so that I could fail at it. And it is why every day I raise my hat higher to those who do.

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Meles: Are we finally feeling the effects of his departure? (wardheernews.com)

BUCKLE YOUR BELTS  for a roller-coaster ride through the Remaking of Africa. Africa may be changing because it is growing rich (you know that “Africa Rising” mantra), yes, but the truly disruptive development is the reorganisation of power happening both silently and noisily.

The landscape-altering tensions and drama right are, for now, being out in the Central and Eastern African swathe called the Great Lakes region.

There are 15 stories informing things like the bitter recriminations between Tanzania and Rwanda, and the flare-up of the fighting between M23 rebels and allied the Armed Forces Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) and UN Intervention Brigade in DRC.

1. The fall, and eventual lynching, of Libya’s strongman Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011.
2. The death of the influential Ethiopian strongman Meles Zenawi in August 2012.
3. The fall of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, and its ouster by the military in July.
4. The fall-out between the Egyptian and South African governments following Pretoria’s strong criticism of the coup in Egypt.
5. The 2012 sanctions and international condemnation of Rwanda and Uganda over Kigali’s alleged support for DRC’s M23 rebels.
6. The sharp rise in terrorist attacks in Nigeria by the extremist Islamist group Boko Haram.
7. The defeat of Al-Shabaab in Somalia by the African Union intervention force AMISOM.
8. The 2007-2009 global financial crisis.
9. China overtaking the USA as Africa’s leading trading partner.
10. Capture of power in the Central African Republic (CAR) by the Seleka rebels in

    UN forces in DRC; now have permission to shoot and are fighting side-by-side with government troops. That has changed the game

    March and the ouster of Francois Bozize as president.

11. The “disappearance” of top commander of the  Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), General Stanislas Nzeyimana aka General Deogratias Bigaruka Izabayo, from near Tanzania’s Kigoma border point in April.
12. Tanzania’s decision to expel over 20,000 people of Rwandese ancestry and refugees from its northwest region back to Rwanda.
13. The impending trials at the International Criminal Court, The Hague, of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto.
14. The fact that for the last two years, outside of then still-war-ravaged Somalia, no country in the wider Eastern, Central and Southern Africa region has suffered a famine.
15. And what Twitter and Facebook have to do with it.

Beginning next week, we shall explore what these 15 stories have in common, and why if you want to be alive or rich in Africa in the next few years, it is important for you understand what they mean, and why the stage for the drama all these events is the DR Congo.

 •twitter:cobbo3

Kikwete and Kagame in friendlier times.

HOW MUCH worse can the crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) become? And how bad could the present “hostilities” between Rwanda and Tanzania, both members of the East African Community (EAC) get?

In THE BEGINNINGS: 15 Stories That Could Kill Or Make Africa Of The Future we outlined the main factors that might shed some light to the evolving crisis in the Great Lakes region.

The quick answer to both questions above, is that it can get much worse.

If there are any folks in the region who know that, it is the Ugandans who learnt some hard lesson in the DRC some years ago. Small wonder then that Uganda has called an emergency meeting of the 11 member countries of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) on the crisis for Wednesday, September 4, in Kampala.

A statement from Kampala on Sunday pretty much told it all: “Following the deteriorating situation in the eastern DRC, particularly in the recent days resulting in the death and injury of peacekeepers from the Force Intervention Brigade, Uganda as chair of the ICGLR, felt it was very urgent to convene an Extra- Ordinary Summit on September 5, 2013. The UN is also expected to be represented in the summit.”

UruguayanUN troops in DRC. The UN says M23 is the one shelling Rwanda to draw it into the war- Kigali is furious and hears echoes of the past (AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo)

South African and Tanzanians are among the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) troops killed. Rwanda has been accused, and has strenuously denied, that it is behind the M23 rebels who have been fighting allied FIG and the Armed Forces of the Republic of Congo (FARDC) forces near Goma “city”.

We might not have to wait long to see Rwanda’s military openly active in DRC, because in the last few days it has been amassing troops at its border with the DRC.

Their move follows several incidents in which mortar shells and bombs have been fired from inside DRC into Rwanda, killing at least four people and injuring several others. Rwanda blamed the FARDC.

The UN, however, said the shells were from the M23 rebels who were trying to provoke Rwanda into getting directly involved in the conflict. It was a familiar pattern in the Great Lakes Tragedy. When I spoke to a source in Kigali, he couldn’t believe that the UN, which believes that M23 is a puppet of Kigali, was actually suggesting that Rwanda was shelling its own territory. He was livid.

Whatever the truth here is, it was puzzling that the UN was putting itself in the same position as its ill-fated peacekeeping operation in Rwanda in 1994  during the genocide – seeming to find an excuse to do nothing.

Rwanda troops head to the border with the DR Congo. We have been here before, and it didn’t end happily.

For those with a sense of history, Kigali was again being handed the same opportunities that dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s army gave it in 1996 to invade and eventually overrun Kinshasa. Frequently in 1996, rebels whom the Rwanda Patriotic Front  (RPF) government said were among the elements that carried out the genocide in 1994 and killed nearly one million people, kept shelling the northern parts of the country.

Then units of Mobutu’s army crossed and ransacked the border areas of Rwanda. In much the same way as we are seeing today, the Rwanda Patriotic Army (now the Rwanda Defence Forces) rolled out big guns and amassed troops at the border. Then it shelled DRC non-stop for nearly 24 hours…and started the march to Kinshasa. The rest is history.

For the Rwandese former refugees, mostly Tutsis, and those who are known as survivors, these are touchy issues. However, to complicate matters, if one looks at the fine print, for the Rwanda refugees who were in Uganda, the recent decision by Tanzania President Jakaya Kikwete’s government to expel 20,000 Rwandese refugees and people of Rwandese descent from the

Tanzanian troops return from peacekeeping in the Comoros. Until now it had avoided getting its hands dirty in the volatile Great Lakes region. (Photo YOUSSUF IBRAHIM/AFP/Getty Images)

northwest of the country, has some uncanny similarities with the actions of Uganda president Milton Obote’s government in attempting to chase Rwandese from the western part of the country (mainly the Ankole region) from late 1981 to 1982.

While Obote might have been partly trying to appease the powerful Ankole wing of his Uganda People’s Congress (UPC), the blowback was massive. Many Rwandese Tutsi refugees, since they couldn’t return home, joined Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) rebels in droves. It is that movement that brought many Rwandese who are Big Men and women back home today, into the Museveni resistance. And in turn, it ensured that once Museveni won the shooting war and took power in 1986, that they would in turn use their resources and numbers in the Uganda army, to launch their own return-home war – which they did in October 1990. The classic Butterfly Effect.

In 1981, though, as Obote rounded up Rwandese refugees, the Tanzanian army, the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces (TDF) was still in Uganda, having helped an array of Uganda rebel groups, among them Museveni’s Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), topple military dictator Idi Amin in April 1979.

Museveni’s guerrilla war started in February 6, 1981, barely two months after a disputed election on December 10, 1980. The TPDF, especially in securing the city against hit-and-run attacks by Museveni’s rebels, got involved in that war on the side of the Uganda army in the early stages. In June 1982, Uganda and Tanzania announced that the TPDF would begin withdrawing from Uganda.

In any event, by that time the embryonic elements of the Rwandese rebellion, had already had their first clashes with the Tanzanian army in Uganda between late 1981 and 1982 as part of the Museveni insurgency. A clash in DRC between Rwanda forces and Tanzanian troops (in FIB), should it ever come to pass, would there not be so new. It could be said to be a reacquaintance after 31 years.

But this background wouldn’t be complete without another small but significant detail. After the TPDF helped kick out Amin in 1979, the head of its military intelligence operation in Uganda was a go-happy senior officer. Today, he is president of Tanzania – Jakaya Kikwete!

For Kikwete as a TPDF officer, the Uganda campaign must have been personal in ways it wasn’t for president “Mwalimu” Julius Nyerere, and his successors Hassan Mwinyi and Ben Mkapa, who remained fairly indulgent toward Museveni and more accommodating of the RPF after it took power. That is why, in a pique of small-minded anger, when Museveni’s government scrapped April 9 as Liberation Army (which honoured the TPDF’s role in fighting Amin), the Mwinyi and Mkapa government’s could shrug it off, but it soured relations somewhat between Kikwete and Museveni when the former became president in Tanzania in 2005.

GREAT LAKES CRISIS PARTS 2, 3 AND 4 TO BE CONTINUED…

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THE TWISTS AND TURNS  in the story of how Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda have tangled and untangled over the last 35 years to create both the current face-off between Kigali and Dar es Salaam, and the crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo today as reported in CRISIS IN THE GREAT LAKES 1: For Rwanda Its Back To 1996…And For Tanzania Its Back To Uganda 1982 were only beginning.

Presidents Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote, and Jomo Kenyatta during the good days of the EAC (I) in the late 1960s. Today the sins of the Founding Fathers haunt their political children.

We need to look south for a moment. In 1994 Nelson Mandela became president of a free and democratic South Africa, and the African National Congress (ANC) took power.

In the many years before Mozambique gained independence from the Portuguese in 1974 after a long liberation war, the armed wing of ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), like several other Southern African resistance movements, was based in Tanzania. Tanzania paid a dear price in endless raids by the apartheid airforce, which was far superior to anything any African country then could throw at it.

The  apartheid South African raids, many of them in Tanzania’s fertile south, combined with Nyerere’s socialist policies, to keep the country poor. That though, did not diminish Tanzania’s generosity or commitment to southern African liberation.

That long sacrifice forged a blood link with southern Africa (expressed today in Tanzania’s membership of the Southern Africa Development Community [SADC]).

That is why the accusation that Tanzania is more committed to SADC than the five-member East African Community (EAC) is a little naïve and ignores history. Asking it to choose between the two is to demand that it walk away from itself.

Indeed the EAC could be said to a greater source of pain and betrayal to Tanzania than SADC. To appreciate this, it requires that we go back to 1974. At that time, Uganda’s Milton Obote, a close friend of Nyerere, was living in exile in Dar es Salaam. Uganda military dictator Idi Amin’s quarrels with Nyerere was reaching ridiculous levels. Not only did Amin, a former boxing champion, demand that he and Nyerere should enter a ring and fight to sort out their differences, but he also said if Nyerere were a woman, he would have married him!

In addition to Tanzania’s ideological – socialism vs. capitalism – difference with Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya then, the EAC was facing the kind of stresses of the type we are seeing today. Eventually in 1977 it collapsed. Kenya had and kept the lion’s share of the EAC infrastructure, including its chunk of its shared telecommunications and airlines. Uganda got the next largest slice,

An East African Airways plane. When the first EAC broke up in 1977, Kenya kept the lion’s share of its assets like the airline. That continues to fuel resentment.

and Tanzania was left with little else beside the Dar es Salaam port.

Already having to contend with the scarcities of a socialist economy of that period, the break up of the EAC plunged Tanzania into a Dark Age. For a considerable period it had no international telephone connection, and struggled with airline traffic – the East African Airways was already becoming Kenya Airways. To raise money to build a new phone system,  Nyerere slashed public services pay by 25 percent, and sent a struggling middle class into the abyss. The difficulties that followed wired  resentment of the EAC into the DNA of a generation of Tanzanians – including people like Kikwete. Only time, and their passing, will truly heal it.

Poor, isolated, trying to rebuild its infrastructure after the collapse of the first EAC, and trying to take advantage  reduced South African attacks after the independence of Mozambique, Tanzania fell down another economic

hole again. It had to send its army into Uganda to kick out Amin in 1979 after his troops invaded and trashed the Akagera Salient. And President Jakaya Kikwete, who was head of Tanzania’s post-war intelligence operation in Uganda, had to see that mission end in bitterness in 1982—and ingratitude in 1986 when Museveni swept to power.

As we’ve already remarked, perhaps it is because unlike soldiers who take the blows and get more personally touched by war, Tanzania’s president Julius Nyerere, his successors Hassan Mwinyi and Ben Mkapa were able to be pragmatic about relations with Uganda – though perhaps less so with Kenya.

And Museveni did redeem himself considerably with South Africa and Tanzania soon after he came to power. That redemption started with events in 1984, two years before Museveni became president with the signing of the Nkomati Accord, a non-aggression pact, between Mozambique and apartheid South Africa. Under the accord Mozambique agreed to expel the ANC and to dismantle the camps and infrastructure of its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), while South Africa agreed to stop attacks on Mozambique and end its backing of the Mozambican National Resistance, Portuguese, Resistencia Nacional Mocambina, better known by its abbreviation RENAMO. Mozambique kept up its part of the deal, and two years down the road started shipping the ANC out of Mozambique.

Mandela, and later Mbeki, had a lot of time for Kagame – not so Zuma

But where would Umkhonto go, given that it could not relocate to a southern African country? Museveni, then still a revolutionary firebrand, had just become the Big Man in Uganda. He gave them a home.

If there was one man in these myriad of liberation movements whom Kikwete could relate to because they shared the same experience of intelligence chiefs who’ve had to bury their bitterness for the “picture bigger” as their political leaders cut political deals, it was Jacob Zuma.

Zuma was deputy Chief Representative of the ANC in Mozambique until the Mkomati Accords. When Umkhonto shipped out to Uganda, Zuma was forced to leave Mozambique and move to Lusaka. There he became Head of its Underground Structures, and then ANC’s Chief of Intelligence.

But Kikwete’s and Zuma’s moments hadn’t arrived yet. Mandela related to the RPF struggle and was outraged by the Rwanda genocide. He liked Kagame and Museveni. As someone put it, he “treated Kagame and Museveni like they were his sons”.

His successor Thabo Mbeki didn’t get along with Museveni, but was a buddy

Presidents Kikwete and Zuma do a jig: They have brought the sharp end of southern African liberation politics into Great Lakes geopolitics.

of Kagame’s. No one would have guessed that things would change dramatically in South Africa in 2008. Zuma orchestrated a party coup against Mbeki and became president. In Tanzania Kikwete had become president in 2005. For the first time in Tanzania and South Africa, two men who had been at their sharp end reunited the liberation movements of past decades. The securitariat in South Africa and Tanzania, could finally claim their prizes.

How would the Zuma-Kikwete pairing of former intelligence chiefs imprint itself on the wider region? With Mandela ailing, and Mbeki out of the way, Kagame was no longer getting birthday cards from Pretoria.

The breaking point came in February 2010 when Lieutenant General Kayumba Nyamwasa, Rwanda’s former Chief of Staff and also ambassador to India fled to South Africa after Kigali accused him of being involved in terrorist activities.

The Kigali government accused Kayumba of working with Col. Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s former intelligence chief who had fallen out the powers back home and was living in exile in South Africa. In June 2010  Nyamwasa survived an assassination in Johannesburg. His wife, and later himself, accused the Kagame government of being behind the attack. Again, Rwanda denied the accusation, but the situation between Kigali and Pretoria degenerated badly months later when South African officials claimed that their investigations had established the Rwandese suspected to have been part of the hit squad were operative of Rwandan intelligence. The Rwanda government at that point basically asked South Africa to make a choice between it and the exiles. By the looks of it, Zuma chose his security friends (Kayumba and Karegeya).

Thousands of displaced Congolese walk along a road heading north of Goma in 2008: This is not the past, it is likely to be the future for the people in Eastern DR Congo in 2008: This is not just the past, it looks likely to be eastern DR Congo’s future too (AP hhoto)

While the likeable, generally charismatic, but according to his critics undisciplined, Karegeya was intelligence top dog in Rwanda, his closest friend was Kikwete who was Foreign minister then. Without being gossipy, the two men shared an active interest in the “good things of life”. With his friend president in Dar es Salaam, Karegeya soon was able to sojourn between Tanzania and South Africa, and found comfort and succor from the leaders of the two countries.

And so we are where we are today. Kikwete shares both the same intelligence and southern African liberation fellowship with Zuma. History has placed both men on different sides of the fence from Kagame’s Rwanda. But South Africa is far away from Rwanda, so Kigali needn’t have worried that it could do it harm.

That was not to be. Besides the personal relationships explored here, South Africa too changed. Mandela and Mbeki’s South Africa’s were always shy about their relations with the rest of Africa. Though by far the richest nation on the continent, Mandela and Mbeki didn’t want to be seen to be lording it over other African nations because then their South Africa would look like the one from the apartheid era. Also, because many countries had supported them during the anti-apartheid struggle, they were paralysed by gratitude.

Zuma started to change that. And in Tanzania, Kikwete started to shift from Tanzania’s post-1982-Uganda-campaign disdain for military intervention (its short stint in Comoros peacekeeping notwithstanding).

Even when Rwanda dipped its toes in peacekeeping in Darfur, and Uganda and Burundi – and eventually Kenya – plunged into the Somalia madness, Tanzania was the only EAC nation that stayed out on dry land. Yet today it has its troops in the bitter conflict of the DRC.

And that presents us with the first issue fuelling Rwanda and Tanzania tensions: the fact that Rwanda considers Tanzania a Trojan horse for South Africa’s designs against the Kagame government. And, secondly, that the two have chosen a battlefield close to Rwanda, DRC, to fight this proxy war.

 What changed? Why did Zuma abandon the Mandela-Thabo Mbeki era reticence? Is it really true that Kikwete has thrown his geopolitical lot with SADC, and if so why? How come Kenya, a country that has strived to calm the resentment from the break up of the EAC in 1977 by remaining neutral in East African feuds, is in Kagame’s and Museveni’s corner? The questions are endless, and we examine them in the continuation of the series.

GREAT LAKES CRISIS PARTS 3 AND 4 TO BE CONTINUED…

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MANY questions arise from the second part of this series, CRISIS IN THE GREAT LAKES 2: Is Tanzania South Africa’s Trojan Horse? And Why Did Mandela Like Kagame But Zuma Doesn’t?

 You could ask whether:

•In suggesting that the Paul Kagame government talk to the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) DR Congo-based rebels, knowing well Kigali would go ballistic, was Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete baiting Rwanda?

Tanzania’s Brig. Mwakibola, commander of the UN’s intervention force in DRC, with Secretary-Gen Ban Ki Moon in Goma earlier in 2013.

•Did Rwanda play into Tanzania’s hands with its angry rebuke, and thus enable Dar es Salaam to expel Rwandans from its northwest region using the “rift” between the two countries as the perfect cover?

•When Kagame said he would “hit” those who seemed to be siding with the FDLR (most of whose members are blamed for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda) by trying get a place for it at negotiation tables, did he mean he would hammer Tanzania, which together with South Africa, comprises the bulk of the UN’s Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) in the DRC?

•Rwanda has always been critical of the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC MONUSCO, and lately its offshoot FIB. If, as some in Tanzania believe, the M23 rebels are backed heavily by Rwanda, what did it expect would happen to their relations with Kigali when its forces clashed – as they have already done – with rebels?

•And if Tanzania is just a proxy of South Africa in the latter’s “war” against Rwanda, why is it playing along? And what does South Africa expect to gain from bringing down the Kagame government? And why then has it chosen DRC to fight this fight?

President Kikwete at the African Union summit in May where he urged Rwanda and Uganda to talk to their DRC-based rebels

The questions are endless. Some facts, though, do help shed light on the drama that is evolving in the jungles of eastern DRC.

By April, it had been well established that Tanzania would contribute troops to the UN’s FIB, which had been freshly minted and given rare powers, for a UN force, to pursue and shoot back. Tanzania too was to provide the leadership. Veteran Tanzania officer Brigadier James Aloys Mwakibola was appointed to head FIB.

Brig. Mwakibola’s choice was an interesting one. In October 2011 when the East African joint military exercises were held in Rwanda, Brig. Jaques Musemakweli from the Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF) and Brig. Mwakibolwa led the exercises. So while he probably knows the RDF’s methods well and could prove a valuable hand against it, he also has contacts with the Rwandese that can help prevent the worst.

In any event, some time in April something that seems to feeding a significant part of the current bitterness between Rwanda and Tanzania happened.

One of the FDLR’s top commanders Gen. Stanislas Nzeyimana, aka

Regional leaders at the Great Lakes summit in Kampala, September 5: The Tanzanian and Rwandan leaders seemed to have stayed as far away from each other as was possible (Photo Stephen Wandera/Daily Monitor)

Deogratias Bigaruka Izabayo, who had been in Tanzania for some months, entered Burundi from Tanzania at the Kigoma border point so he could head back to his base in eastern DRC.

What is known, and that the FDLR  acknowledges, is that Nzeyimana vanished. One view doing the rounds is that he had been trailed by Rwandan intelligence while he was in Tanzania, and the Rwandese pounced as soon as he crossed the border, grabbed him, and spirited him off to a secret location in Kigali.

While in Tanzania, Nzeyimana met several top political and security leaders including, it is alleged, President Kikwete. It has been difficult to confirm this beyond doubt because, naturally, the Tanzanians are reluctant to admit that they hosted a senior commander of what internationally some consider to be a genocidal group. Be that as it may, Dar es Salaam is said to be “totally pissed off” with Rwanda over the disappearance of Nzeyimana.

But why would Tanzania hobnob with the FDLR? For one, according to informed sources, Tanzania does genuinely believe that there is moderate faction that has emerged within the FDLR, and that it can talk productively with the Kagame government.

Regional leaders at the Great Lakes summit in Kampala, September 5: The Tanzanian and Rwandan leaders seemed to have stayed as far away from each other as was possible (Photo Stephen Wandera/Daily Monitor)

There is also speculation that ahead of sending its troops into FIB, Tanzania was wary of getting buried in the DRC’s notorious political graveyard. So it reached out to the FDLR to ensure, if nothing else, that it doesn’t attack its troops.

It would seem then that when in May at the African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, Kikwete suggested that Rwanda and Uganda talk to their DRC-based rebels, he had reasonable expectations that the moderate faction of the FDLR would come to the table, in Rwanda’s case. Or if it all backfired, as it eventually did, at least when the Tanzanians arrived in eastern DRC, they would be in the good books of the FDLR and Uganda’s Allied Democratic Front (ADF) rebels who would seem them as honest brokers, improving their chances of making a success of the mission.

From Kigali and Kampala, though, the view of Tanzania’s game looks different. In the case of Rwanda, there have been suggestions that Nzeyimana was “squeezed” during interrogation, and he spilled beans that confirm Tanzania has unholy plans against Rwanda. That, sources say, explains why Rwanda’s response to Kikwete’s suggestion for talks with the FDLR was unusually sharp.

Kayumba Nyamwasa: How far is he prepared and ready to go?

Likewise, these same people think that the expulsion of Rwandans from the northwest of Tanzania, is part of a plan by Kikwete and his allies to clear the area and establish bases there for  the National Democratic Congress (NDC), a dissident group affiliated to exiled former Rwanda Army chief Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa and intelligence boss Col. Patrick Karegeya. They reason that because Kikwete’s term is coming to an end in 2015, he is allegedly “in a rush to help his friends [Kayumba and Karegeya] set up shop in East Africa before he retires”. Kayumba and Karegeya are based in South Africa.

Therefore, to these sources, what Tanzania is trying to do is forge a united front between the “Tutsi-led” NDC and the so-called moderate faction of FDLR – a predominantly Hutu group.

However, going by its history, and the record of Tanzania’s ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of Revolution – CCM), though that would be a step too far.

Which is why, some analysts think that Kikwete is more narrowly focused on scoring political points at home. The union between Tanganyika mainland the Zanzibar, which form Tanzania, has been creaking. The tensions between the mainland and Zanzibar have reached their worst during the rule of Kikwete.

Uganda AMISOM troops in Somalia: There can be glory in this business, except that it has been elusive for peacekeepers in central Africa

To avert the perennial violence that plagued elections in Zanzibar, as the 2010 polls approached, Kikwete arm-twisted CCM to do a deal with Zanzibar’s main Opposition party, the Civic United Front (CUF) for a power-sharing arrangement. That helped prevent previous violence and gave CUF a share of the political spoils.

But CCM purists saw it is a subversion of the spirit of the 49-year-union, and said it would give new fuel to old secessionist sentiment on the island.

At the same time, in the 2010 election CCM suffered its worst electoral show against the opposition. In the 1995 election, for example, the main opposition party Chadema won only four of the 269 seats in Parliament. In 2010, that rose to 48 seats. It swept a couple of large urban areas, the northern regions like Arusha, and some of the constituencies in the west around Mbeya.

Then mid this year, Tanzania’s constitution review commission published its report. It proposed a national government for Zanzibar led by a local president, and another one for the mainland (Tanganyika), and then a big man or woman at the top of both, who would be a federal president. It has opened an uncertain future in Tanzania, and as one commentator put it, as decision time closes on the new constitution, the “game could get away from CCM”.

Because of this, there are those who see Kikwete’s plunge into the DRC, and his flap with Rwanda as a ruse to shore up nationalist sentiment in the west (where expulsions of Rwandese might play well among hardline nationalists) and the north of Tanzania where CCM is losing its grip. A prominent role in the UN peace mission in DRC, especially if Tanzania can take the kind of credit that Uganda, Burundi, and Kenya are claiming in defeating Al-Shabaab in Somalia and stabilising the Horn of Africa nation after 20 years of chaos, then CCM would come out of it smelling like roses.

In that sense, Rwanda and DRC would just be pawns on Kikwete’s chessboard. Except that in real life matters rarely turn out so neatly.

 GREAT LAKES CRISIS PARTS 4, 5, AND 6 TO BE CONTINUED…

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Dos Santos and his family: He took to the hog, and what remained of his revolutionary zeal went to the bank with Angola’s new natural resource-fuelled riches.

TANZANIA’S ruling party Cha Cha Mapinduzi (Party of Revolution – CCM) was not the only dominant party fighting the tide of changing times. In South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) under Jacob Zuma’s presidency has all but lost the plot. Its luck is that it has no significant Opposition challenger, although that situation might not last very long.

A historical of Tanzania, President Zuma has sought a more aggressively interventionist foreign policy in what he sees as South Africa’s sphere of influence – the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The DR Congo, whose total mineral wealth is estimated to be worth a dizzying $24 trillion – more than the combined GDP of the US and western Europe – is without doubt the jewel of the SADC crown in resource terms.

With all its economic clout, during the First Congo War between 1996 and 1997 which resulted in the ouster of long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, South Africa was still allergic to intervention and sat it out. It was left to, primarily, Rwanda and also Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, to bring an end to Mobutu’s kleptocracy and install Laurent-Desire Kabila (Snr) as president.

Savimbi and his UNITA had been a menace to Angola and had stunk up the whole Southern African region. His death allowed the Big Men in Luanda to sleep with boys eyes closed and to become more inward-looking.

Having got rid of Mobutu, in 1998 the alliance unravelled, with Kabila falling out big time with Rwanda and Uganda. The latter two retreated to the eastern part of DRC, found rebel groups with a grudge against the Kabila, and the Second Congo War started.  At the start it pitted Rwanda and Uganda (the East African nations) against Zimbabwe and Angola (SADC), who were on Kabila Senior’s side.

In end Uganda and Rwanda fell out in a turf war over the eastern DRC, and fought two mini but bitter battles. The tensions between the Kiswahili-speaking more Eastern African eastern DRC, and its Lingala and mainly-French-speaking west, and the divergent interests between the East African and the Southern African states that led to the 1998 break, that started almost after Kabila Senior became president, forced him to take DRC into SADC in 1997.

He did so partly out of spite, yes, but he was also seeking greater independence from Rwanda and Uganda, who were the “occupiers” calling the most shots in Kinshasa, because they could claim to have played the

As economic crisis took its toll and Zimbabwe became all but a basket case, Harare had to accept a diminished geopolitical role.

bigger role in the war against Mobutu.

South Africa started to extend its influence in DRC more directly in early 2002 when the DRC peace talks that eventually ended in the Second Congo War in 2003 started in the Sun City resort, 138 kilometres from Johannesburg. Angola, Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Uganda all then formally withdrew from DRC, though the war in the eastern part of the long-suffering country didn’t end.

Back in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe continued the white-owned farm seizures, and a widespread violent crackdown on the opposition, leading to western sanctions and a collapse of the economy.

Angola, a country which by then had Sub-Sahara’s most battlehardened army and feared army (thanks to years of war against Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels), started discovering diamonds, gold, gas, or oil whereever it dug a deep oil. One on the biggest drains on its economy for years, ended with the killing of Savimbi, so dos Santos no longer had to lose sleep.

Angola called in more Chinese, and before long there were nearly two million of them in Angola. The Chinese took digging out oil and minerals, building giant factories, and making the country’s steely-fisted dictator Jose Eduardo dos Santos, his family, and inner circle fabulously wealthy.

However dos Santos’ health also started to fail. With poor health and the discovery of seemingly endless pork at home, Dos Santos’ and his ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola’s (MPLA) appetite for external military adventure begun to wither.

Rwanda entered a period of rapid economic expansion that, its enemies and a UN panel alleged, was fuelled by the pillage from DRC – a charge that irritated Kigali to no end. The same UN panel also accused Zimbabwe, Uganda, and an array of European and American companies, of similarly plundering the DRC.

Zimbabwe didn’t have much to show for its loot, and in Uganda wealthy individuals who were active in DRC became very rich – but the numbers didn’t show up in national economic statistics. Uganda’s President Yoweri

In Rwanda, a period of calm and record economic raised optimism.

Museveni, didn’t notch up the economic numbers that his counterpart Kagame was posting in Rwanda. Nor did he enjoy the same period of peace, as the internal opposition grew and corruption started to eat away at his government.

Ethiopia that had contributed mostly gunners to the First Congo War, was also going through an economic boom, though not a political blossoming. Meles Zenawi kept independent media and the opposition firmly repressed with big sticks and American Humvees.

With Zimbabwe too wretched to be a diplomatic player in the region; Angola fat and self-satisfied; Rwanda giggy with a domestic revival and a Kagame enjoying international stardom; a Museveni too distracted by growing

When it pulled off World Cup 2010, South Africa rightly took confidence from it…and developed an appetite for a more muscular regional role.

domestic headaches; and an Ethiopia that was also growing rich and more concerned about the threat of extremists from Somalia, the door was open for South Africa to spread its tentacles at fairly low cost and without contestation from once-powerful neighbours.

South Africa’s investments in Tanzania grew dramatically, it started eyeing the Central African Republic, and to dip into DRC’s mining sector. But in 2008 South Africa wobbled. Its standing in Africa and the world took a body blow after its ugly zenophobic attacks against African immigrants. In 2009 it went through a messy too-Third-Worldish internal party fight, that ended in the ouster of Thabo Mbeki as president, and President Jacob Zuma’s accession to the throne.

In 2010, however, it staged a spectacular comeback with one of the most successful World Cups ever. South Africa’s achievement was Africa’s achievement, and Zuma and the boys seem to have got a new boost of confidence.

Apart from a few hiccups, it looked like a period of calm had finally arrived in the Great Lakes.

All that was shattered in early 2012. Once again, the DRC was at the centre of the fires broke out.

GREAT LAKES CRISIS PARTS  5, 6 & 7 TO BE CONTINUED FROM MONDAY SEPT. 9 AFTER THE WEEKEND BREAK…

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Khulubuse Zuma: He’s The Man, and has a lot of presence in more ways than one

UNLESS you are from Southern Africa, then perhaps you haven’t heard that a young smart businessman called Khulubuse Zuma is engaged to Swazi Princess Fiksiwe.

Fiksiwe is half-sister to Swaziland King Mswati. Mswati’s many extravagant weddings, harem, the Umhlanga (the annual reed where young maidens parade  barechest before the monarch) over which he presides, are perhaps the most famous things about the mountain kingdom.

However, in Khulubuse Swaziland is getting a South African son in-law whose ambitions are impacting Central, Southern Africa, and the Great Lakes more than King Mswati ever could.

 Khulubuse’s South Africa’s self-belief soared again after it pulled off the 2010 World Cup. It did something no other African could have accomplished, so it was understandable that it should feel special and become more assertive in dealings with the rest of the continent in ways that Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki shied away from.

What sets men like Khulubuse apart is that they didn’t wait for the World Cup boost. They moved much earlier. Khulubuse owns two oil prospecting companies that are active in the Central Africa Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) called Caprikat and Foxwhelp.

Not too long ago the companies signed lucrative mining production-sharing agreements with the government of President Joseph Kabila. Kabila pulled his weight to ensure that Khulubuse gets a piece of the DRC minerals action. Khulubuse signed on behalf of Caprikat. A South African gentleman called Michael Hulley, signed for Foxwhelp.

Lindiwe Mazibuko: Wondered why Zuma sent troops to a disastrous mission in CAR

Khulubuse matters partly because he is a favourite nephew of South Africa President Jacob Zuma. And Hulley? Because he is a special adviser to Zuma.

Meanwhile in the Central Africa Republic a South African oil prospecting company, DIG, was snagging a licence to explore for oil. And in 2006 a one Didier Pereira partnered with a South African, Joshua Nxumalo, to secure a diamond export monopoly.

The rich deal was really not a big mystery because Pereira was a special advisor to embattled CAR president Francois Bozize. Hulley, on the other hand, is linked to Chancellor House.

Chancellor House is a South African group of companies with interests in engineering, mining, and energy, among others. It is named after Chancellor House, the building where the law firm of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo was located when it was founded in the 1950s. More importantly, it is the business arm of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). And, it is also worth mentioning, Khulubuse is a board member of DIG.

Maybe the Devil lives in the DRC’s mines (Photo JAMES OATWAY)

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that South African mining is extending its tentancles wide. While the crisis of the industry only made a big splash in international news over the last year with the violent protests and the killing of miners by police, it has been in trouble much longer. Its machinery is aging, and its being outcompeted by nimbler rivals in countries like Australia. It has therefore been diversifying to Angola and Mozambique, but the places where it is has been looking for big kills is CAR and DRC.

After at least 13 South African troops were killed in CAR earlier in the year as they tried to block the Seleka rebels from running Bozize out of town, Zuma came under fire.

Ms Linidwe Mazibuko, Parliamentary leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) wrote a letter asking Zuma why he deployed South African troops in CAR in the first place.

United Democratic Alliance (UDA) leader Bantu Holomisa, was more pointed. In an open letter to Zuma he inquired what South African assets were being protected in the CAR, the suggestion being that he thought the army was being used to defend private interests of the Zuma clan and ruling party’s commercial investments, not those of the country.

Zuma’s defence was quite revealing. He said South Africa had signed a military defence pact with CAR  in 2007 (a year after Nxumalo/Chancellor House bagged the diamond export deal with the Bozize government), and it was renewed in 2012. So it had a duty to act.

With the killing of the South Africans, Pretoria withdrew its troops. Uganda, which has over 3,000 troops in the coutnry hunting down the Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, stayed put. French troops also stayed.

French troops at Bangui: The broke fleeing Bozize’s heart

Bozize fled a bitter man, feeling done in by the French. When he called the French to help fend off the Seleka advance, there was no one at the other end of the line in Paris.

About 300 French troops who were stationed at Bangui Airport to defend the government did nothing to prevent their advance. After the rebels took power, France instead brought in 200 additional soldiers…to  support the new government of Michel Djotodia. Bozize had been suckered.

France, considered a long-term adversary of Paul Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) government from Kigali’s point of view, thus gained an important position on the flank of DRC.

France also scored an important victory, when the Security Council voted a new “force intervention brigade”  (FIB) with a mandate to shoot back, as part of the UN peacekeeping force in DRC, MONUSCO. As coincidence would have it, the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UN/DPKO) is headed by a Frenchman, Herve Ladsous.

Partly to be able to influence events that are critical to its mining interests, and not to lose out on the plum concessions in DRC, South Africa offered men for FIB. Suspicious security elements in Kigali believe that UN/DPKO was eager to help South Africa get on board, because Zuma is not a fan of the hilly nation.

True or not, sources say Rwanda is “feeling encircled” – an unfriendly Tanzania to its southeast, DRC to its east where a UN intervention that it opposes is taking on board “hostiles”, and not too far away in CAR a French-propped regime.

Small Rwanda: Seeks to fight no war at home

Now after the RDF came to power following the 1994 genocide, it concluded that one of the many reasons nearly one million were killed in just 100 days, was because Rwanda is tiny. There is hardly any place to run and hide. But even the genocide, they reasoned that the war would still have been costly in terms of human casualties because, again, there is not enough room to fight away from civilian populations. Thirdly, having taken power, they reasoned that faced with a determined and superior enemy, the country had no strategic depth to allow them to withdraw and reorganise.

What might be called an “RDF War Doctrine” thus evolved; that Rwanda would develop its forces to prevent the enemy from entering its territory, and that if it had to fight, it would fight its wars on foreign soil. The DRC thus became Rwanda’s battleground. Kigali’s foes seem to be granting it its wish. They are gathering to confront the M23 rebels, whom they seen as nothing more than a Rwanda proxy, in the eastern DRC jungles.

As we shall report in the continuation, we have a perfect setting for high drama.

 GREAT LAKES CRISIS PARTS 6 AND 7 TO BE CONTINUED…

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Africa is a chessboard on which the most intricate power games are being played.

ONE OF the biggest mistakes the world has made about Africa over the years, is to work from the position that it is politics is driven by ethnic rage and fear, a simple desire to grab public goodies for one’s family and clan, ignorance, superstition, and an anti-technology culture.

I suspect African leaders like that, because it means they are not held to high world standards and thus are allowed to get away with murder. But African politics is as cold, calculating, cynical, strategic, and interest-driven as America’s, China’s, Western Europe’s or Russia’s.

So we shouldn’t make the mistake of looking at South Africa’s foray into the Great Lakes as nothing more than an attempt to line the pockets of President Jacob Zuma’s relatives and the “hyenas” in his ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. Nor is Tanzania’s new aggressive posture in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or indeed Rwanda’s and Uganda’s “interference” in DRC motivated only by their stomachs and narrow cross-border identity politics. No.

To begin with, over the last 30 years, the colonial-derived idea of “spheres of influence” that prevailed in Africa has been collapsing. Somalia, for example

The anti-globalisation did more than it will ever appreciate in discouraging direct aggressive western intervention in Africa.

long ago seized being an Italian sphere of influence. And French-speaking Africa is no longer French and Belgian. Thus Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Angola, name it, could all stick their noses into the DRC and Paris could do little to stop them.

And English-speaking Africa is no longer British turf. First, the Americans started muscling in from the early 1960s. Eventually over the last decade China has become the camel that is taking over everyone’s tent.

But it was the financial crisis in the west that started in earnest in late 2006, and the growth of the anti-globalisation movement that left Europe and the USA on the ropes, that did it.

Thus when the west got terrified about how much terrorism was incubating in Somalia, we didn’t have a 1992 American-style invasion. The job was eventually sub-contracted to Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, and Kenya as the African Union’s peacekeeping force in Somalia, AMISOM. When US President Barack Obama thought he needed to help Uganda hunt down the dreadful Joseph Kony, leader of the limbs-and-lips-cutting Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), he sent in a paltry 100 Special Forces troops.

There was a time Nigeria was eager to deploy its army to quell regional powers: Today it is a bleeding power.

In Libya, when France, Britain and the US decided to help topple that strange dictator Muammar Gaddafi, they supplied weapons to revolutionaries, and bombed, bombed, and bombed him from the seas and air. They didn’t put boots on the ground, except a few specialist “trainers”. France therefore surprised when it broke this mould, and sent troops to Mali early this year to repel Islamist rebels who were trashing the country – but there is a reason why, as we shall explain.

You could say that with the old superpower cats in decline and absent, the African mice could now play. But something else had to happen.

Even without western superpower cats, with the end of the Cold War Africa, had its own geopolitical order. It was a loose 7-node structure, based on the understanding that that South Africa (before and after apartheid) would look after the Southern African shop.

Nigeria would keep an eye and order in Western Africa. Libya would mind the northwestern end of North Africa, otherwise Egypt would be the cop of the North.

The Horn of Africa, that would be Ethiopia’s territory.

The post-election of 2008 shattered Kenya’s sense that it was the “special one”…but also started a process that made its foreign policy more pan-Africanist!

East Africa was Kenya’s.

Central Africa and the East African hinterland, that was Uganda’s although President Yoweri Museveni has always chosen to himself as an African supremo.

The Maghreb was too fluid, but then most people didn’t think it mattered much anyway – until Chad discovered oil.

Of these, the most muscular and interventionist prefects were Uganda (which dispersed troops to Sudan, helped the Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army in its war, was all over eastern DRC, and had its troops at the border with Chad). Nigeria too was, especially during the rule of the sadistic and corrupt  General Sani Abacha, who sent Nigerian troops to end the madness in Sierra Leone with a big hammer, and later Olusegun Obasanjo, who dealt rather firmly with the Liberian warlord president Charles Taylor.

Then the tide took a bad turn. Nigeria has failed to get a firm hand on the tiller after Obasanjo, and rebels in its Delta region, but more devastatingly the Boko Haram “terrorists”, have bled Nigeria out badly. The country is becoming anaemic in geopolitical terms. That is why France could boldly

Egyptian revolutionaries didn’t just topple Mubarak: They created a power vacuum in North Africa, that was completed by the fall and killing of Gaddafi.

march into Mali, and be received with cheers, as the regional group the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) twiddled its thumbs. Obasanjo would have asked for a piece of the action. Today, Nigeria is paralysed.

Following a disputed December 2007 election, from the first day of 2008, Kenya plunged into its worst violence since the Mau Mau rebellion of the late 1950s. About 1,400 people were killed and 600,000 displaced from their homes. For the first time, there were Kenyan refugees as thousands fled into eastern Uganda.

Kenya’s sense of itself, especially among the jingoistic elements, that it was the “Special One” went up in smoke. When President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto won the election in March, a new shift took place. Both men are battling charges of crimes against humanity – which they deny – at the International Criminal Court at The Hague resulting from their alleged role in orchestrating  he 2008 post-election violence.

The Kenyatta government’s criticism of the ICC as an “imperialistic tool” came at a time when Africa was in revolt against The Hague, with the African Union twice voting not to cooperate with it. This AU support for Kenya’s position,

Rwanda President Kagame at Meles’ funeral: The grief over the passing of Ethiopia’s strongman was real in Africa’s State Houses.

has pushed the Kenyatta’s Kenya into the most pan-African posture any Nairobi government has ever had to take. Historically Kenya had seen itself as some kind of bridge between the west and Africa. That is now water under the bridge.

Because it is important for the Kenyatta government to help keep the growing anti-ICC sentiment on track, it has had to pay a price. Increasingly, it has become a follower, not a leader, on African issues.

Uganda, which pioneered the AMISOM force, and has troops chasing Kony in the forests of eastern Congo, and as many as 3,000 are stationed far away in the Central African Republic, is suffering an African version of “imperial overreach”, although President Yoweri Museveni still talks big.

In Ethiopia, in August 2012, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died. He had many enemies, and they celebrated his demise. But he was also a forceful and cerebral figure, much admired in world politics. He had become the African “representative” at many international forums. Those many African presidents who gathered in Addis Ababa for his funeral were not shedding crocodile tears. Many did understand that the passing of Meles had complicated matters.

Then in February 2011, that cornerstone of North African “stability”, the modern-day Pharoah Hosni Mubarak was toppled in a popular revolution, and the centre but all collapsed. The wave that swept him started in Tunisia, toppling a minor, but still important regional strongman, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January.

The political grim reaper of African politics, then truly raised his act in Libya, where Gaddafi, after 42 years, ended up as a frightened tyrant hiding in the trenches, cornered by an angry revolutionary mob, which lynched him in October 2011.

The only African power that was not in crisis and, as already reported, had found renewed energy and confidence from hosting the 2010 World Cup, was South Africa.

With this big vacuum, South Africa put on its suit, picked up its fat briefcase, and stepped out into the continent. Imperial expeditions have not changed over the ages. They always require that the generals, princelings, and businessmen earn some silver and gold from it, if they are to continue cultivating elite and ruling class support for it back home. Places like the DRC, where there is plenty of silver and gold will therefore always be the logical and rational destination – whether the imperialist is Asian, European, American, or African.

But this state of flux in Africa, also means that all pieces on the chessboard have to be re-arranged. And nowhere will one of the most far-reaching remakes of Africa happen than in the DRC’s north Kivus. There, we shall argue, a new nation that a friend has called Republic of Vulcania (after the volcanic activity in the area) will arise. Or at least it will try to.

GREAT LAKES CRISIS PART 7, WHICH WILL END THIS SERIES, TO BE CONTINUED…

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AWAY from the noisy protests and angry call-ins into FM stations, a Kenyan friend has just found out how the new VAT regime and other “silent” fees introduced by the government are really working.

He ordered a book on Amazon.com a few weeks back for $20 (KSh1,740), and it arrived last week.  The courier company called him to say that, well, there was now that matter of the new 16 percent  VAT – i.e. $3.2 (KSh278.4).

Then there was one that totally blindsided him. He had to also pay a KSh5,000 ($57.4) “inspection fee”, because now there is someone who had to check out the book, and determine whether it is vatable or not.

At $57.4, the inspection fee is nearly three times the cost of the book and shipment from Amazon! He is a law-abiding citizen, and desperate to get his hands on the book because it is an advance copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath.

He joked to the courier that he would be better off foregoing the book, and if the government seized and sold it, it could not sell it for more than KSh3,000 ($34) to any bookshop. That means, the government would make a loss, because that alone is less than the inspection fee.

Now I happen to know someone else in Nairobi who also ordered David and Goliath, but it is being shipped to a friend in London. His friend will give it to someone flying to Kenya who will read it on the plane, and hand it over when he gets to Nairobi. He will pay no VAT or inspection fees.

So, there you have it.

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SO WE ARRIVE at the place where we are today, with eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on fire again.

But I must just tell one seemingly unrelated story. In early May of 2010 I was in Milan for some African brainiac event. I met a good chap who had been a close aide of former South African president Thabo Mbeki. As he sipped his gin and tonic and I my soda water at a cocktail, we got round to talking about then-still African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema.

Malema: Was he a true radical, or an unwitting stooge of the mining industry?

Malema was that time calling for the seizure of white-owned businesses and the nationalisation of the mines. The Mbeki aide, a leftist who had remained an ANC supporter despite the ouster of his boss Mbeki, surprised me when he said Malema was being naïve, and that mine seizures would be a disaster.

I too thought it would be a mistake, but that is because of my unapologetic belief in the usefulness of free markets in Africa. But how could he, a leftist, be against nationalising mines?

He told me that despite his rhetoric, there were many South African progressives who believed that Malema was actually a “stooge” of the mining industry. That South African mines were hobbled by decrepit equipment and were facing a bleak future, so many of them were secretly on their knees praying to be nationalised and compensated.

That way, they would make a profit, as they would walk away with the compensation, and leave the new owners (the South African government, and therefore the taxpayers) with the liabilities.

One of the best future options for South African mining, he said, was for the industry to set up in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where, among other things, labour costs would be much lower than in South Africa – and workers would not be striking half the time. In addition to other political goals, one can see how it became in South Africa’s national security interest to have boots in DRC.

Last year, however, it looked like all hopes that eastern DRC would settle down sufficiently for normal business of any sort, were delusional.

A UN panel of experts issued a report that was notable in its indictment of Rwanda’s, and to a lesser extent Uganda’s, alleged role in backing rebellion in eastern DRC. Two things made that report different from previous ones that made similar accusations. First, it suggested that the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) too had committed genocide against Rwandese refugees in DRC, on a couple of occasions when its forces crossed into the country to suppress the rebels. The core of the RPF sees itself as survivors of the 1994 genocide that killed nearly one million people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, and as the heroes who stopped the slaughter. To be accused of being genocidaires themselves riled them to no end.

Next, after the UN report, an international tsunami of criticism and vilification of the Rwanda government over its backing for the M23 rebels in

broke out. Even the Kigali government’s reputedly savvy international public relations machine was caught on the back foot this time. Then there was a mad rush to punish the Kagame government as donors scrambled to cut or suspend aid: one day it was the British, next the Americans, a day later the Germans, then the Dutch, every day brought grim news.

Foreign minister Mushikiwabo: Argued that Rwanda was sacrificed without a fair hearing.

A darling of western donors, it seems Rwanda was blindsided by the rally against it, and the sight of what it considered  to be “close development partners” running for the hills. Bitterness, and a deep sense of betrayal set in. Kagame himself was to say that Rwanda had the best record of using aid prudently; it had done the most in the sub-region to fight corruption, it had impressive social development numbers, yet it seemed that all that wasn’t enough. And what made it worse, Foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo argued, was that the UN panel had refused to listen to Rwanda’s side of the story.

Now it so happened that the lead researcher the UN panel, Steve Hege, had previously written in defence of the Front for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebels, and argued that the Kagame government should share power with them.

When Kigali pounced on Hege’s allegedly pro-FDLR leaning to paint him as a genocidaire comforter, he didn’t help matters by pulling them down his articles from the websites where they had been—but not before copies had been downloaded.

It is perhaps understandable, though not necessarily excusable, that when Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete proposed that the Rwanda government talk to the FDLR, that Kigali went ballistic – it all sounded too much like a

M23 rebels: They have caused their fair share of controversy and international upheaval (Al Jazeera photo)

continuation of the Hege/UN “conspiracy”.

Why was Kigali knocked off its feet by the criticism over its alleged role in DRC this time? One reason is that in the past, when it was able to successfully push back against such campaigns, social media had not fully matured. Kigali didn’t have a social media war plan. Painted as the villain, it became the bull’s eye for social media, and got beat. Although it eventually got back on its feet and fought back, it was still a little punch-drunk.

The effect of that avalanche, I believe, will have dire and long-lasting consequences for the Great Lakes. Many Tutsi in the region, and indeed other parts of the world, who had come to believe that the resentments of the past were over, and that they would never be targeted again, became terrified. Seeing people and countries they had become to believe were friends, and would never stand by and watch them be slaughtered abandon them, took many Tutsi back to 1994.

Five years ago, I had to work hard to find a Tutsi anywhere who believed that

Victims of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide: Today many Tutsi believe the world can still let this happen again.

another genocide would happen again. By July 2012, I struggled to find one who wasn’t nervous and believed that, as one of them put it to me, “we will be slaughtered again”.

From that point, they went into the trenches. It did not help matters that the UN, and the west for that, seemed to be refusing to listen to one of the main grievances of the M23 rebels – that the DRC government had to accept that the Banyamulenge were Congolese, and not Rwandese. Belatedly, the Americans, and curiously Human Rights Watch, came round and said Kinshasa had to treat the Banyamulenge as Congolese and to take responsibility as a government to protect all citizens. It was probably too late.

WE STARTED WITH “THE BEGINNINGS”, THE END OF THE GREAT LAKES CRISIS TO BE CONTINUED….

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THERE have always whispers about a “Plan B” for the Tutsi in Rwanda, should international events conspire to allow the ex-Interahamwe elements in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), many of whom are in the Front for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), and extreme Hutu nationalists at home, marshal enough forces to overthrow “Tutsi rule” and massacre them again.

The Republic of Vulcania, carved out of the Kivus, would be several times bigger than Rwanda.

Word is that some Tutsi strategists have mooted an “Israeli solution”, a Tutsi homeland, where they can all escape to, and build a wall of security around them to prevent a genocide. That homeland would be the Kivus. Together with the DRC Tutsi, the Banyamulenge, and other people of Tutsi descent in Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and the western Diaspora, they believe they could establish a nation of 10 million plus.

Not only would it be far bigger than Rwanda, richer in farmland, and several times more endowed in mineral wealth,  but it would also be more viable than Rwanda as it would have a big source of fresh water that Rwanda doesn’t have today – Lake Tanganyika.

This new Banyamulenge/Tutsi laager nation is what a friend who studies regional affairs has called a possible Republic of Vulcania, named after the active volcanoes in the Kivus.

Ugandan and Burundi intelligence sources have suggested to me that though there were “movements of people” from Uganda and Burundi in mid-2012, the UN was wrong to say they were M23 rebels.  They were apparently part of thousands of Tutsi from these countries, who were “aroused” and migrated in their numbers to the Kivus to help the Vulcania project.

Meanwhile inside Rwanda, the crisis came as the debate about the Kagame succession heated up. Kagame’s second and final constitutional term ends in 2017. He has been on record as insisting that he would not amend the constitution and give himself a third term. However, one outcome of  the “anti-Tutsi hysteria”, was that the moderate centre in Rwanda politics and within the RPF was weakened, and the hardliners who don’t want Kagame to leave were strengthened.

Among the regular folk, the censure and what they saw as the international ganging up against Rwanda, sent them looking for a “saviour”. That saviour was Kagame, who delivered them from defeat after the first RPA attack from Uganda in October 1990 collapsed in disarray.

Other regional factors played into the Vulcania possibility. After Uganda and Rwanda fell out and their armies fought bitter turf wars in the eastern DRC city of Kisangani in 2001 and 2002, there was a lot of bad blood between Uganda President Yoweri Museveni and Kagame. Uganda took to accusing Rwanda of harbouring anti-Museveni rebels, and Rwanda pointed a finger back, saying Museveni was hobnobbing with Rwanda dissidents and supplying them with passports.

However, Museveni himself was coming under increasing challenge at home within his ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) ruling party and from the Opposition. In power since 1986, he is now the longest-serving East African president ever. Indeed in the whole Great Lakes region, only the venal Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whom Museveni helped topple in 1997, notched up more years – 32. Being in power for long earns you many enemies, especially if you also fiddle the elections that you hold.

Deadly riots broke out in Kampala after Museveni’s government blocked him from touring his kingdom: The rage sent Museveni mending fences with Kigali. friends.

In 2009 there were violent riots in Kampala, after President Museveni blocked the southern Buganda king, Ronnie Mutebi, from travelling to Kayunga, a part of his realm. The monarchists, who had endured many humiliations at the government’s hands, had had enough. Their militant youth took to the streets, and Museveni responded with armoured cars, Police, and the army. Pitched battles were fought, a Police station burnt, and cops killed.

The rioters also picked out people with “long noses” and beat them, killing some. According to man-on-the-street profiling, Museveni’s Bahiima people have long noses (a rather inaccurate picture). More importantly, however, they also happen to be cousins of the Tutsi. Within Uganda, murmurs about the “danger of a Hiima genocide” should Museveni fall from power, started to make the rounds.

Observers have suggested that the 2009 attacks on Ugandans with “long noses”, spooked some people in Museveni’s court, and brought pressure for a mending of the fences with their cousins across the border…just in case they needed a place to run to when the roof came down. Uganda is probably too cynical and politically promiscuous for a genocide; otherwise it would have happened at some point in the last 35 years.

Museveni and Kagame shake hands after exchanging cattle at the latter’s lakeside farm: Their making up meant Rwanda no longer had to worry about its Uganda flank.

Anyway, after the 2011 election, which Museveni won, there was an outbreak of good feeling between him and Kagame. Now they could not have enough of each other, exchanging cattle, visiting, and their families holidaying with each other many times.

One of the developments from this rapprochement was a re-realignment between Uganda and Rwanda on the DRC. So while Kigali seemed to have its back to the wall in 2012, strategically it was in a better place to push back because it no longer had to worry about possible subversion from Uganda – the only country that Rwanda considered to have the capacity to make big trouble for it in the region. It also meant that if Ugandan Tutsi were upping and heading to the Kivus, the authorities were more likely to turn a blind eye.

But as a landlocked country, Rwanda, like Uganda, has to worry about relations with Kenya and Tanzania, their routes to the sea. In the past, Kenya was the bedfellow of the west in the region, and Uganda and Rwanda always worried about provoking western ire in case they leveraged their influence in Kenya and blocked their access to Mombasa.

The 2008 post-election violence in Kenya following the disputed re-election of Mwai Kibaki, begun to change that. In the end, six men, were charged by the

Kenyatta at The Hague in 2012: As president, his ICC case has re-arranged political dynamics in the Great Lakes region.

International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague for allegedly masterminding the violence that killed nearly 1,400 people and displaced 600,000. The charges against three were dropped. Three of them – Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, and journalist Joshua Sang – were indicted.

At the end of 2012 Kenyatta and Ruto formed a political alliance, and riding a nationalist wave against an “imperialist ICC” being used as a tool to “enslave” Africans again, swept to power in March 2013.

The Kenyatta government added fuel to the anti-ICC drift in Africa, climaxing in a vote by the African Union Summit meeting in Addis Ababa in May, urging the ICC to drop the cases against the Kenyan leaders, and withdrawing the AU’s cooperation with the ICC.

Rwanda has been a long-term critic of the ICC, in part because it was extremely dissatisfied with the way the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), which sat in the Tanzania city of Arusha, handled the trial of the people accused of carrying out the 1994 genocide. Rwanda is also not a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC.

Nyiragongo volcano in Goma: Soon a new republic might arise from its fires.

It was probably natural that in the Kenyatta government, Rwanda would find a kindred spirit. Keen to keep Africa united around its opposition, the Kenyatta government has engaged Uganda and Rwanda in ways no other administration in Nairobi has ever done. And the fact that the west’s support has driven the Kenyatta government farther away, has created a new dynamic.

Rwanda, for one, can be sure that should Tanzania, which has now become the favourite son of the west in the region, and through which Kigali transports nearly 68 percent of its imports close it off, Kenyatta’s Kenya will not. At least for as long as Kenyatta and his deputy Ruto have to keep travelling to The Hague for their trial.

Today, therefore, the price that Kigali can pay from supporting the Vulcania project, or supporting rebellion, is actually comparatively lower.

One can expect that the more the UN ups the ante in the DRC, and beefs up its “force intervention brigade”, and the more regional powers like South Africa wade in to further their national security and economic interests, the more the existential threat for the Tutsi in the region increases. And with that, the closer the breakaway of the Kivus draws near.

In a twisted irony, for the Vulcania Republic to become reality, the crisis in the Great Lakes needs to escalate. And since the FDLR will not seek to return and take power in Vulcania but in Rwanda, that will change the complexion of the DRC problem. And it will also totally overturn the dominant view that has prevailed in Africa since just before 1900, about how nations form and break. What shape Africa will take in the next 100 years, will therefore mostly likely be decided in the DRC.

THE END

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Adapted from the “Ear To The Ground” column in The Monitor newspaper, Uganda, April 28, 1999 by my good self, Charles Onyango-Obbo

A party of Ethiopia remained sunny and happy despite the war.

EVEN though the price Ethiopia paid for victory in its recent bloody war with neighbour Eritrea was high, the mood in the capital Addis Ababa is decidedly upbeat.

In an interesting twist of history, the lion, once the symbol of Emperor Haile Selassie (he was called the “Lion of Judah”), is very much in fashion. Selassie was ousted in a bloody military coup by the diminutive and cruel Mengistu Haile Mariam, and murdered by the Dirge (the ruling Ethiopian junta then).

The victorious Ethiopian troops are frequently referred to in the press as the “mighty lions”. It seems nature has also conspired to enrich the tale of Ethiopian military exploits in the battle against Eritrea. By coincidence, in recent weeks the Addis Ababa papers have been abuzz with a bizarre, and apparently true, story about a war for territory between lions and hyenas in some Ethiopian jungle.

The lions won.

The war of the beasts was equal in ferocity to the battles of tanks and mortar that Ethiopia and Eritrea fought.

The Ethiopian media was quick to notice the symbolic value of the lions’

Emperor Selaisse and his pet lion: Ethiopia was presented as the lion, and Eritrea the hyena.

victory and has been inspired to render dramatic accounts of the animal feud.

An outsider who wasn’t aware of the Ethiopia-Eritrea would miss the significance of the story. Not the Ethiopians or, for that the matter, the Eritreans.

The most dramatic rendering was in The Addis Tribune, which wrote:

“After a fierce battle that lasted more than a week in the Gobele jungles in southeastern Ethiopia, a group of lions successfully drove off a predacious army of hyenas.

“The fight, claimed by eyewitnesses to be the ‘rarest and most notorious in recent history’, led to the death of six lions, and 36 hyenas.

“The local police and villagers noted that the two warring animal parties spent the day in their respective dens and emerged at night, howling and fighting with fury. One spectator noted, ‘It was ferocious violence. Quite a few hyenas died in an orgy of fighting…it is the scene of terrible carnage.’

“The [surrounding] rocky desert is currently controlled by the deadly felines

Badme, the slither of land of over ever which thousands died.

[lions], having killed or imposed exile on their rivals.

“According to a villager, ‘now that the hyenas are gone, there are no animals to scavenge for the remains that litter that litter our streets. The stench from these carcasses is terrible.’

“Forty-five years ago, it is rumoured, a single lion from the palace in Harar individually cleared the area of hyenas.

“The hyenas lost the battle yet again, proving yet again that the lion remains king of the beasts. Without even having the chance to howl their funeral tributes to their dead comrades, the hyenas left the area, with their proverbial tails between their legs.

“The Golebe desert”, The Addis Tribune summed up, “has now returned to normal after all the excitement, according to local villagers and the police.”

It is the same Addis Tribune that dumped defeat on Eritrea president Issayas Afeworki, saying “the village dictator” had been bloodied in Sawa.

In Addis Ababa, one hardly notices signs that Ethiopia has just fought a vicious war, and that its troops and the Eritreans are still facing off at the front.

The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia has been described as the “most

The patriotic sections of the Ethiopian press love to hate and call Eritrea’s strongman Aferworki names. Here Tigraionline.com presents himself as cracking up. In 1999 they called him a “village dictator”.

senseless” conflict of recent times. Nonsense. There were serious political and economic disagreements between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and they were well worth a war – if you care for one.

Still one can’t help but be struck by the level of casualties in this war. In just one weekend of fighting in mid-March (1999), the Eritreans claimed they killed over 10,000 Ethiopians. It is believe Eritrea lost up to 15,000 men. In all, about 40,000 fighters have died in just the last six months.

In March when the Ethiopians retook the disputed Badme border strip, they threw thousands and thousands of men, and hundreds of tanks at heavily fortified Eritrean positions, and overwhelmed Afeworki’s army.

The willingness of Addis Ababa to take such high casualties puzzled many observers of war. The Economist of London reports that to this day in Tsorona (an area controlled by Eritreans) the bodies of dead Ethiopians have not been buried.

Why? you may ask. Well, because Eritrean expects that the Ethiopians might press on with the war (toward their capital Asmara, as they eventually did), they would be forced to step over the bodies of their comrades to reach the Eritrean trenches.

Secondly, did Ethiopia have to lose so many men to retake Badme? No, but the casualties were a powerful psychological weapon against the Eritreans.

Eritrea is a small nation of about 3.5 million people. Ethiopia is several times bigger, nearly 60 million. Some analysts reason that Addis Ababa was sending the message to Afeworki that it was not stand for any loss of its territory, and it was ready to throw in 3.5 million Ethiopians, one for every Eritrean. In the end, there wouldn’t be a single Eritrean left, but there would still be Ethiopia and Ethiopians – 55 million of them!

After all, Ethiopia is a country where the dead have a way of showing when they are least expected. The biggest show in Ethiopia today is at its national museum.

A reconstruction of “Lucy”. The fossil inspired colourful story-telling in Ethipia (Chicago Field Museum)

Not too long ago, archeologists were digging around in an Ethiopian desert patch. The lead archeologist was playing was playing The Beatles’ Love Song To Lucy on his Sony Walkman as they ransacked the earth.

Then the team hit a little skeleton. It looked old. But exactly how old, they couldn’t even begin to guess. When they carbon-dated it, they found it was 25 million years old; the oldest human fossil that had ever been found.[1]

The named it Lucy, after the Beatles song that was playing on the Walkman when the team found it.

I didn’t go to view Lucy, but those who have say it’s awe-inspiring…especially if one listens to the guide, who is famous for his colourful style in Addis, tell her story. Seems not only The Addis Tribune has a flair for the dramatic.

[1] In 2009 an older human skeleton was found in Ethiopia.

Kenyatta (L) and his deputy Ruto: They will surprised who their real friends and enemies are – or will they?

UGANDA AND RWANDA asked Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta to stop his Deputy President William Ruto from flying to The Hague to attend his trial on charges of crimes against humanity last week, the regional weekly, The East African, reports in its latest issue.

Kenyatta himself will appear at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in November to have his day in court. He and Ruto were indicted for their alleged role in Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence that killed up to 1,400 people and displaced 600,000. The two have steadfastly held that they are innocent.

According to The East African, the request was presented when Kenyatta met Uganda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sam Kutesa and Rwanda’s Louise Mushikiwabo in Nairobi on September 8, two days before Ruto flew out to The Hague.

The paper said  that Kenyatta insisted on his deputy attending court, because failure to appear before the ICC could trigger an arrest warrant, and “the

Uganda Foreign minister Kutesa: A messenger who bore a poison chalice.

argument of whether they are innocent would be lost.” That was some shrewd thinking.

Meanwhile, The Star in Nairobi reported that other African countries, including Burundi, Tanzania, and Ethiopia – in all 15 of them – have requested to be allowed to respond to a successful appeal by ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that overturned an earlier decision by the Court that would have allowed Ruto not to attend all sessions. Now he is required to present in court throughout.

This ICC matter has really got Africa’s goat – or at least  that of most of its leaders. They consider the court an “imperialist plot against Africa” (meaning, again, African leaders).

For the last two years, the African Union has not had a summit in which Africa’s presidents, prime minister, and king, did not pass a resolution condemning the ICC and vowing not to cooperate with it.

We are getting close to that point where other African leaders will soon be mourning over the Kenyatta and Ruto trials, more than the two Kenyan leaders.

Bensouda: Might well receive secret Christmas cards from two-faced African State Houses.

I don’t think they love Kenyatta and Ruto so dearly. Many observers have argued that many of them are afraid that, given their dodgy human rights records and violent rule, after the Kenyatta and Ruto trials, the ICC will go for their heads next.

That might partly be the case, but I suspect what Africa’s rulers are terrified not the possibility that Kenyatta and Ruto will be convicted, but that they could be found innocent.

After all, given the way witnesses against Kenyatta have been withdrawing or recanting in near-record numbers, one cannot help wonder if there will be any left to take the stand come November.

It is possible that African leaders are crying crocodile tears, and are secretly hoping Kenyatta and Ruto are convicted. If they are, even the most ICC-phile folks have to admit that the backlash against The Hague on the continent will be massive, and it will be all but impossible for it to bring a case even against a small African village chief for many years. In that way, despotic African leaders will be safe.

However, if Kenyatta and Ruto are acquitted then all the arguments and emotions against the ICC could collapse. It will have proved that it was not deadest on nailing the two. Also, Africa will no longer have symbols around

Zimbabwe president Mugabe: When awake, he is vigorous critic of the ICC. But what is really bothering his likes?

which to rally its opposition to the ICC. The result could be that the leaders who are jittery now, would not afford to ever sleep with both eyes closed again. They will keep panicking at every knock on their doors, thinking it is a Bensouda warrant.

Therefore, contrary to appearances, it is likely that Africa’s presidents actually want Kenyatta and Ruto convicted. You can never trust our Big Men.

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